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slaughter a third of the world’s population, using altruism as a cover for revenge. What’s more, in my personal life I co-opt my lover into my own back-breaking employ, and give her not an ounce of affection in return. Doesn’t that sound like evil to you?’ He walked to the bathroom to brush his teeth.
‘You called me your lover.’ She trailed after him.
‘My mistake.’
‘If most people are evil, who’s in the minority?’
‘You are,’ he mumbled through fluoride. ‘You’re compassionate.
I may never have encountered this quality before. Then, you’re unlikely to have children, and there goes the mutation—an intriguing Darwinian experiment, if failed.’
‘I wonder why your compliments always make me pale.’
‘But, Eleanor,’ he continued, spitting and wiping his mouth, ‘ I do not like people. If you still don’t believe that, you’ve seen nothing of me at all.’
They squared in the awful neon of the tiny loo. ‘You did like Panga.’
‘I loved Panga. That’s different.’
‘Do you—like me?’ Such a mild question, it seemed so brave.
Calvin ambled back by the dresser, considering that hotel rooms were pretty wretched places at 9.30 when you didn’t indulge in the only real entertainment they could afford. ‘You—please me, sometimes, you do not often get on my nerves, I—do not dislike you, Eleanor, and this is—extreme, from me. I feel—gently towards you.
And you press me,’ he added vigorously. ‘I like very much to be pressed.’
Eleanor shook her head in incredulity, as if suddenly seeing this scene from afar: I cannot believe this is my life. Perhaps she was imagining the sweet Virginia duplex with a man who kissed her on the cheek when he came home, and sometimes they went to the movies, or any other of the multitude of credible, pleasant, if unimportant futures she might have drafted for herself that would have precluded conversations like this one. ‘So you’re evil, and everyone else is evil, except me. Is this what’s known as being put on a pedestal? It’s overrated.’
‘I said you were compassionate, not beyond rebuke.’ He turned his back to the mirror, so she would have to face every 241
side of him. ‘Why is Eleanor Merritt not evil? Perhaps you’ve missed the opportunity—one I may provide you. More likely, you merely lack the nerve. You’re childlike in a manner not entirely to your credit. Isn’t much of goodness cowardice? You won’t steal biscuits because Jane would send you back to your loopy mother. You’re only good because you’re scared, and you treat people well because you want them to like you. You have a sycophantic streak. After all, don’t you ever imagine you’re being tested? Here a man you rather fancy turns out to be a psychopathic killer. What do you do?’
‘Humour him. You haven’t so much as flayed a frog.’
‘But I shall. Come on. Do you think you’re so righteous? Here’s Charles Manson II, and you’re actually doing his research for him because you think if you’re ever so helpful you’ll persuade him at long last to have intercourse. Is that a pedestal? You tell me.’
Eleanor’s face turned white, and he could tell by the checkmated look in her eye that he had just waylaid her main agenda for the evening: sex.
Her voice was low. ‘I can see why you find compassion such an extraordinary discovery, since you glimpse it so rarely in your shaving mirror. I have listened until it’s coming out of my ears about humanity having exceeded the carrying capacity of the land. Carrying capacity? Well, what about yours?’
‘Please keep your voice down, these walls are thin. You may be weary of my work, but I am exhausted by these petulant scenes of yours, demanding that I come clean and confess my undying ardour for you. I am sorry, but I warned you long ago that my only ardour is for over-population—’
‘ Over-population!’ she shouted. ‘There is no one on your planet but you! I cannot understand how you could possibly feel crowded!’
‘I’ve had visitors from time to time.’
‘Panga, I suppose? Because I’m sick to death of hearing about Panga—’
‘On the contrary, you bring her up all the time. I hardly ever mention the woman.’
‘You don’t have to. She sleeps with us—or you. She’s the only one who sleeps with you.’
‘Watch what you say. I think she’s in the loo.’
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‘Come on, neither of us could hurt that Kamba with a meat axe.’
She pursued him around the bed, until he was cornered up against the coffee machine. ‘How about worrying over the feelings of people in this room who are still alive? There are times that that romance seems a handy contrivance. She proves you’re not a racist and keeps me at arms’ length, and meanwhile you can act obnoxious and congratulate yourself on being evil and still feel sorry for yourself.
The whole picaresque is too convenient. I wonder if you ever loved her at all—’
‘You have no right—’
‘I have every right to think of your sorry excuses as I please.’
‘Behind my back you may tinkertoy your tawdry American psy-chotheories, but you will hold your tongue with me.’ He had grabbed her arm; the gesture was out of character.
‘I will say what I wish to you. You’re my lover, you said so yourself; whether we copulate or not is a technicality. And your celibacy is insulting, it’s bitter, manipulative and cruel. You keep yourself back on purpose—you’re hurting me!’
‘You have noticed I sleep on my stomach to hide my throbbing desire for you?’ He didn’t let go.
‘Go ahead, why not slap me around a bit? You want to murder two billion people, what’s one tired family planning worker with a black eye?’
He released her and walked to the window.
‘Isn’t anything possible now?’ she said to his back. ‘Couldn’t you take shots at strays, torch the homeless, lock your retarded sister in a closet—you say there’s no good and evil, why not put it to the test?
You abuse me enough, that’s a start.’
‘I have never meant to abuse you.’ His voice had quieted. ‘I’m sorry I grabbed your arm. And I take back that remark about—I mean you are a lovely woman. I have never wished to make you feel unattractive. I would say the problem is mine, but I do not consider it a problem. I prefer chastity. Sex has become foreign to me.
I would even have to say repugnant. I suggest if intercourse remains so important to you that you find another liaison.’
‘Is that what you want?’
He sighed. ‘Want? I want nothing but to reduce the population of human beings on this planet. That is the only reason 243
I keep living. I would enlist your support. You are supremely effective, a good researcher, and to my knowledge you have been discreet.
I value both your assistance and your companionship.’ His tenderness was leaden and drained his cheeks. ‘I admire you. I am impressed with you. You are useful to me. I even enjoy you.’
‘My.’ The word he refused filled the room. ‘But you don’t—’
‘I no longer know how. Which is the only reason I can execute this project. No one else is sufficiently inhuman. I am perfect. I have no more feelings.’
‘That’s a damn lie.’
‘Either I am lying or you are lying to yourself. Choose the more likely. Beware the convenient on your own account, Eleanor.’
He could see it in her face: she had exhausted herself for months now maintaining that Calvin was entirely other than he appeared, that he was ‘repressed’, that his callousness capped a well of secret passion, that really he adored life and women and most of all her, but suddenly she was spent and for a moment, no longer able to generate her nutritious myth, could briefly permit: this was Calvin.
He was not necessarily any other than as he claimed. Maybe Calvin was a cold, terrifying man.
They slept that night separately. Calvin laid his metacarpus against her wrist, but could not even bring himself to hold her ha
nd.
Eleanor sank into a deep, angry sleep. Panga took the chair by the bed table, her long legs extended. No matter how foreign the locale, she laid herself out widely, a possessor.
‘Am I being quite horrible?’ whispered Calvin at last.
‘You say you do not know what horrible means.’
He sighed. ‘I must. So this is wickedness.’
‘Why do you not make love with her?’
‘I refrained for you, at first; and eleven years ago I met little temptation. But now the whole idea’s gone strange. Do you realize I can’t even do it by myself now? I don’t see pictures, women; all I see is me over the toilet and I can’t finish, I don’t bother. I read articles about how sex explains every little thing you do and I don’t know what they’re talking about.’
‘What are you afraid of?’
‘Nothing. I talk to the dead, don’t I?’
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‘The dead are easy company. A cheat…You think she has this small animal inside her?’
‘I expect she has an enormous animal inside her.’
‘No. The witchcraft you say is not strong.’
‘HIV? Not a chance. She’s a regular contraceptive dispensary, isn’t she? Why, she might be more appealing to me if she were rash.’
‘Are you afraid it would be not same? As with Panga?’
He laughed. ‘Maybe I’m afraid it might be.’
Funny, he thought. Calvin commonly felt victorious in his restraint, but just now he recalled being thirteen years old, when his cow mother would note the bathroom had been occupied an awfully long time. Presumptive, she would try the knob, find it locked, and rap-rap-rap. ‘Calvin,’ she would drawl, American.
‘What?’ he’d squeak.
Rap-rap-rap. ‘Calvin!’ No rebuke, just his name, as if that said everything.
Now that he’d all the privacy in the world and the door to his loo was never locked for twenty suspicious minutes, he couldn’t help but wonder if in the end not he but his mother had won.
Panga played listlessly with Calvin’s Swiss Army knife, for which she had contempt; it was too small. At length she said, ‘You say you are part dead; this could be why we can talk. But in our time you were a man. Maybe we killed the wrong half.’ Calvin was asleep.
He had drifted off in time to escape the notion that the dead, rather hurtfully, were never jealous; and that he too often had these conversations with Panga that might better have been conducted with Eleanor instead.
Their morning was stiff, but Calvin had previously agreed to accompany Eleanor and Basengi to the closing address that afternoon.
Outside the Mascone Center, placards—GREED = DEATH; STOP AIDS
PROFITEERING—jabbed over the heads of police lines, while gaunt homosexuals in pink-triangled T-shirts accosted delegates to be allowed inside.
The population espionage team burrowed into the audience and took its place near the back. Eleanor sat pointedly with Basengi between herself and Calvin. From the beginning it 245
was difficult to hear as demonstrators cat-called from the gallery.
Once the Secretary of Health rose to the dais, the din was overpower-ing:
PEOPLE ARE DYING, UNDER ATTACK!
WHAT DO WE DO? ACT UP! FIGHT BACK!
Basengi turned around once to look at the hecklers behind him.
The first to detect anything amiss was the woman sitting in front of him, who reached behind her to find a wet, sticky substance on her dress. She may have imagined the protesters had reduced themselves to throwing tomatoes, for she turned to the gallery with the black look of someone already determined to sue for dry-cleaning bills.
Because he’d twisted backwards, Basengi’s arm was thrown in Calvin’s lap. The hand extended in a weak gesture of supplica-tion— baksheesh. He might have been asking for money, but in that half-hearted, habitual beseeching of a beggar resigned to a bad day.
Calvin turned to his economist to discover a circle in the middle of his forehead, Hindu. The adornment was neat and dark, with a trim black halo, and its centre seemed to tunnel on for ever. At the least it did proceed to the back of Basengi’s head, which had gone curiously indefinite. Calvin kept trying to focus properly. Why, the back of the Pakistani’s head wasn’t malformed; it was missing. Calvin was actually staring at the floor.
He had to look away. The eyes were still open, and directed unquestionably at Calvin, fixed in the conventional devotion that while Basengi was alive Calvin has basked in blithely enough, but now made him queasy.
Finally the surrounding audience began to scream. The demonstrators—THEIR SYSTEM! THEIR PROFITS! OUR LIVES!—overrode the hysteria until a neighbouring delegate shouted, ‘Bring the police!
Someone’s been shot!’ Panic curdled in a circular wake from Basengi’s seat. Someone called for a doctor, a little ridiculous under the circumstances, since the hall was packed with nearly nothing but. And shouting for one doctor or several thousand with half of someone’s head missing was a cinematic formality.
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As word spread, the audience rushed towards the doors. The Secretary of Health implored for calm, while security dragged him from the microphone. Delegates in their row ducked off with hands over their heads in a cringing that never saved anyone from an automatic but does slow you down.
Before they were swept along with the rest, Calvin met Eleanor’s wide eyes over the body, and shook his head in a tight, stern motion he hoped would not be too subtle to escape her.
‘Did you know him?’ asked an adjacent conferee as they crushed the exit.
‘No,’ said Eleanor. She’d got the message.
As they made their way from Mascone to the Marriott with the short, sharp steps that substituted for a headlong run, Eleanor only noticed Calvin had been clutching her hand because it was beginning to hurt. As murder disinclines one to be long-winded, they also used short, sharp words, and subsequently got a great deal accomplished in two blocks.
‘Why Basengi? Could it have been anyone?’
‘No.’
‘Did it have to do with the conference, or—’
‘It has to do with us.’
‘So they were aiming for—?’
‘They got their man.’
‘Who did?’
‘You know who.’
‘Why not you?’
‘He wants to frighten me first. I don’t think a cadaver would satisfy. He wants a convert.’
‘It could have been me, then.’
‘You could easily be next.’
‘It must be a relief not to care,’ she noted. ‘Whether anyone dies, I mean.’ She might have sounded acerbic, but she felt simple envy.
‘Can they trace—?’
‘No.’
‘What do you want to do now?’
‘I want to go into my room and shut the door.’
‘Will the police—?’
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‘We are two of 12,000 delegates. We know nothing.’
‘Calvin, have you ever seen—in your life—?’
‘No.’
‘You’re shaking.’
‘I know.’
When they were asking for their key, Calvin told the desk clerk,
‘I would like to take an extra room.’
‘We’ve had a few check-outs already, sir. I’ll see what I can do.’
The receptionist looked alarmed.
‘Thank you.’
Eleanor was so numb, she was surprised to feel her heart fall as he filled out the forms. Of course he had every right and reason to want to be alone. And it was logical, Calvin being Calvin, that his reaction would be isolation. But Eleanor didn’t want to be alone for a milli-second and she chastised herself for one more time choosing the wrong man. This is where it got you: a friend of yours is shot before your very eyes and you spend the night in a big double bed by yourself.
‘Are you thinking you’ll go to sleep?’ Her voice was controlled.
‘I don’t know that I can.
’
‘I was wondering if you wanted me to wake you.’
Calvin finished signing the VISA form with his right hand, but still had Eleanor’s squeezed in his left. He couldn’t tear off the card-member’s copy with only one hand, so left the receipt behind. What would he do with her hand at the door of his new room? Ask to borrow it?
‘Do you wish me to call a doctor, sir?’
‘Certainly not.’
She realized the lobby’s excited guests were staring at Calvin’s chest. He was covered in blood. For the first time he looked down and noticed. ‘Demonstrators,’ he explained to the receptionist.
The clerk took a full step backwards and moved the VISA coupon off the counter with a pen. Eleanor twigged: he was afraid the blood was sero-positive.
‘Do you want to stay the night?’ asked Eleanor.
‘Yes.’
‘So should I meet you in the morning?’ She was trying to seem stalwart.
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They stepped into the elevator. ‘What are you talking about?’
Eleanor was confused, and they rode up in silence. They arrived at the door of the new room, and Calvin unlocked it. He had still not let her go. He pushed the door wide open and stepped aside.
‘Would you like me to take this one?’ asked Eleanor. ‘Because I want my toothbrush. And a book. I don’t think I can read, but I could use the prop.’
‘Don’t talk bollocks,’ said Calvin. ‘You don’t want to be by yourself, do you?’
‘No,’ she admitted. ‘Then why—?’
‘It’s for Panga, you nit. Who did you think?’
Just then who should come sauntering down the hall but Herself.
Panga leaned on the doorframe and those great buck teeth shone in the side-lighting. She touched Calvin’s shirt, not yet dried, then licked her finger. ‘So,’ she said. ‘At last.’
‘Satisfied?’ he asked. ‘Impressed?’
She laughed. ‘You didn’t even do it yourself.’
‘Should I have? Basengi was on my side.’
‘You could use some practice. Even Norman says so. But you seem cross.’
‘I am cross. He was a nice little man. He didn’t deserve it.’
Panga laughed again, and the peal was clear—too clear; metallic.