I became a clown for my
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fellows. There is nothing so absurd to a Western academic as an optimist.
‘I lost my livelihood, but I inherited the earth. The illness with which I had been afflicted lifted. I felt no more need for alcohol, to-bacco or the flesh of dead animals. When I went abroad, even poor countries appeared lush, whole and at peace. Their people were fruitful. It was my society that had sickened me. My society that hated its own children. And now I have recovered and know boundless joy.
‘So I returned to Kenya. Since then I have been working with game parks to encourage their utilization by the Masai, for I believe setting man’s persistence against Nature’s to be a mistake. It was pointless, you understand, to pursue a position with university population programmes or family planning donors when my purpose would be their destruction. Recently, I have been offered a contract by the World Health Organization, helping with their sero-prevalence research. A dreadful disease stalks the land. These doctors need Swahili speakers who know the people and the country well. I know little of medicine, but I am grateful to be of any assistance I can.’
‘Mmm.’ Eleanor seemed to nudge herself out of a queasy trance.
‘There’s a lot of money in AIDS right now.’
‘You have lived far too long in the company of those who profit from suffering.’
‘I didn’t mean that’s why you—’
‘Please. This issue is grave to me. The money is quite irrelevant.’
Eleanor picked flakes of varnish pensively off the arm of her chair.
He could see she disagreed with everything he said. ‘If “orthodox demography” is a lie,’ she said at last, ‘why do most people believe that population growth is a threat, except you and a straggle of your disciples?’
‘If I were to use your way of thinking, I would say money. The population conspiracy is based entirely around this “explosion”
hypothesis, and without its ranks of whole organizations are unemployed. But the idea preceded its institutions. And “over-population”
has taken hold on the common man, who has no apparent vested interest in these unwieldly “charities”. Why?’ He leaned forward and fisted his
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hand. ‘Self-hatred. Copious quantities of people are therefore intrins-ically repellent. Have you noticed the metaphors that population biologists enjoy? Oh, the politic will say humans breed “like rabbits”, but give them a few drinks and the bunnies turn to rats. The literature is strewn with allusions to flies, maggots, cancers.’
‘Why, if Westerners find one another’s company grotesque, would they choose to live in New York City?’
‘Density is in the interests of the species. It promotes competition, which begets invention. The more of us there are, the cleverer we get. And if crowding does become as desperate as the Cassandras predict, you can bet the solutions will be nothing short of spectacular.
We are magnificent creatures. Why, the rise of population and urb-anization in Europe made the Industrial Revolution possible. How can you proceed from a history like that to claiming that population growth is economically oppressive?’
She twirled her empty wine glass. ‘If the field’s reasoning is so il-logical, what motivates the US to pour so much money into Third World fertility decline?’
‘Because there is only one thing an American hates more than himself and that is anyone else. You remember the early days, when African governments were convinced that family planning programmes were racist?’
‘The genocide superstition.’
‘That was no superstition. Those programmes are racist. I don’t mean to suggest that diligent women like yourself are not well meaning. But there are siroccos in the air by which you have been swept. We’ve a demographic transition afoot, all right, and the population moguls are trying their pathetic best to forestall the inevitable. In their moribund, corrupt selfloathing, Europe, America and Russia are under-reproducing themselves into extinction.’
‘Wattenberg,’ provided Eleanor.
‘Quite. But Wattenberg mourns the collapse of the world of pallor, where I see the demise of “developed countries” as a blessing.
Riddled with homosexuality, over-indulgence and spiritual poverty, the West has lost its love of its own children, and so of humanity itself. The very myth of “over-population” is a symptom of our disease. It is a sign of universal self-
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correction that a people grown so selfish they will no longer bear children because they want Bermuda vacations will naturally die out. The sallow empire is falling. In its place will rise a new people.
A hundred years hence the planet will be lushly poppled by richer colours of skin, the hoary old order long before withered and blown to ash.’
‘I’m beginning to understand why every press in DC wasn’t leaping to publish you.’
‘Africans have an ancient, wise civilization and they will survive us all. For consultants to arrive on this continent to convince its governments that Africans are on the brink of extinction at the very point in history when their tribes are expanding over the earth—well—I find it humorous. What I do not find humorous is when African leaders believe the tall tales they are told. That the Kenyan government now promotes contraception is the product of mind control.’
‘Do you have any children?’
‘No. I am celibate. I am trying to make up for my former blindness, but very likely I, too, am beyond salvation, and truncating my lineage is part of my destiny. However, I have come to believe that I will be called to a final purpose before I die.’
‘AIDS?’
‘Perhaps. Or even grander than that. I see before us a great light, but before we break into the new aurora we have a war to fight.
Have you ever watched a wounded animal charge? It is dying, but from damnation the more dangerous—desperate and with nothing to lose. That is the West, shot but standing, and its death throes will shake the earth.’
Eleanor stood and gazed listlessly through the glass doors at Calvin’s table. ‘I don’t suppose you listen to a lot of Mozart?’
In the blessed peace between CDs, Wallace extended his hand to the whispering trees, where crickets churned. ‘I have no need. The forest is my symphony.’
‘Right,’ said Eleanor.
He followed her off the porch, but stopped at the door as she drifted towards the black hole at the far end, like everyone else. ‘You are in peril,’ he cautioned her, ‘and allied with misanthropes. Have you ever had a baby?’
‘No.’
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‘Perhaps you should. You might change your profession.’
‘According to your vows, you’re hardly volunteering to help.’
‘That was not a proposition.’
‘Well, Dr Threadgill, no one else is volunteering either. Besides, I’d just have one more of those selfish little Americans who demand big plastic tricycles for Christmas and make wheedly noises on aeroplanes with hand-held hockey games.’
‘You are terribly unhappy.’
‘So everyone seems intent on telling me.’
‘Stop by sometime. We’ll talk again.’
‘The tented camp on Mukoma, right? I might at that.’
The poor woman was then sucked into orbit around the cold dark centre like the rest, another innocent particle lured by the inevitable gravity of super-dense nothingness. Wallace turned back to the healthy fresh air of the veranda because he couldn’t bear to watch.
As Eleanor left Wallace to his porch she wondered how a man of such unbounded elation could be so depressing. His eyes were ringed as if he had trouble sleeping. His cheeks sagged and his body was sunken. Worst of all was the smile, which curled up as if someone had to lift strings. It was a marionette smile, mechanical, macabre.
She might dismiss him as a kook, but in his time Threadgill had been widely published. Further, since he’d left the field revisionism had gained a respectable foothold. It was no
longer considered laughable to debate the effects of population growth on the poor.
As a result, the discipline was divided and disturbed. The hard-liners like Calvin were more rabid than ever, driven to a corner. The born-again optimists, being novelties, got spotlights on MacNeil-Leher.
In the middle, the majority of the population profession was increasingly cautious. No one was quite sure whether demographers were brave pioneers who, diaphragms in hand, would change the face of history and shoulder the greatest challenge of our time, taking on the root cause of environmental decay and poverty, or were instead gnome-like recorders, accountants of births and deaths who, when they ventured beyond their role of registrar with bungling programmes of redress, were ridiculed
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by their own forecasts in ten years’ time. The population community was no longer confident of its calling, and the last thing Eleanor Merritt required was to feel less needed or more unsure.
Leaving Wallace Threadgill’s morbid euphoria for Calvin Piper’s genial despair reminded Eleanor of plane trips, Dar to DC, entering a tiny compartment and promptly changing hemispheres. In thirty feet she got jet lag. Seriously entertaining contrary positions felt dangerous. If she could accept every creed for a kind of truth and call any man a friend, then she could also be anyone; arbitrary, she disappeared. It was possible to be too understanding. Eleanor wondered if it was preferable to keep the same insufferable, obdurate opinions your whole life, piggishly, even if they were wrong, since they are bound to be, because once you opened the emergency exit to the wide white expanse of all it was plausible to believe you broke the seal on your neat pressurized world and got sucked into space.
Lurching from Threadgill to Piper made her airsick.
Eleanor had come to the party on her own, having arranged to join Calvin’s coterie here once they were through with ‘a meeting’.
The way he’d announced he was occupied for the early evening reminded Eleanor of the cryptic explanations for why her stepfather would not be home yet one more night. Ray would be at ‘a meeting’, no of-what or about-what for a twelve-year-old child. At thirty-eight, Eleanor resented don’t-worry-your-pretty-head-about-it from a su-perannuated lay-about.
As soon as Calvin had established himself at the table, they closed in around their—leader, she was tempted to say, though what was there to lead? When all the chairs were scrabbled up, Eleanor had shrugged and drifted to the porch, where she had hung on through that interminable recitation on the off-chance she might get up the nerve to ask one truly interesting question. She never did. It was too potty. Why in heaven’s name would Wallace think Calvin Piper invented HIV?
She retrieved a straight-back from the kitchen and wedged between Calvin and the ageing shrew in pink. The woman pretended not to notice and refused to move the extra three inches that would have allowed Eleanor in. She was stuck, then, slightly behind the two, not quite in the circle and not
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quite out, which was destined to be Eleanor’s relation to this crowd for the indefinite future.
Malthus gargoyled on Calvin’s shoulder, daring Eleanor to tickle his chin. Nothing would make Malthus happier than to take off her middle finger to the second knuckle.
The woman’s name, incredibly, was Bunny.
‘The whole race is lemming off the cliff,’ she despaired, ‘while demographers fuddle over fertility in Popua in 1762.’
‘Lemmings,’ Eleanor intruded bravely, ‘did you know they throw themselves off a precipice in response to population pressure? They crowd off cliffs. When Walt Disney filmed the rodents, the crew trapped hundreds and then had to drive them over the edge, beating sticks.’
‘It must be terribly frustrating if subjects won’t obligingly commit suicide when your camera is rolling.’
That was Wallace, passing comment on his way for more tea. Only Wallace heard Eleanor at all. It was a perfectly serviceable party anecdote, but when Eleanor told stories that worked for everyone else they dropped, lemming-like, to sea.
Eleanor took being ignored as an opportunity to study the round-table. Bunny showed all the signs of having once been quite an item, and would still qualify as well kept—thin and stylishly coiffed, with unpersuasive blonde hair tightly drawn from a face once striking, now sharp. But she had retained the mannerisms of beauty. Sitting at an angle with her cigarette coiling from an extended arm, she spread a calf on her other knee as if posed perpetually for a shutter she had failed to hear click twenty years ago. Such miracles of taxi-dermy might have cautioned Eleanor to age with more grace, but she herself had never felt dazzling, and perhaps this was the compensation: that in later years, at least she would not delude herself she had retained powers she never thought she wielded in the first place.
Eleanor conceived few dislikes, being more inclined to give strangers a break, and another after that, as if beginning a set of tennis with first serve in. When company repeatedly made remarks that were out of bounds, she would promptly provide them with incestuous childhoods, crippling racial discrimination or tragic falls down the stairs to explain the viper, the thief, the moron. But Eleanor’s distaste for Bunny was
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instantaneous. British, the woman only turned to Eleanor once, to translate that ‘nick’ meant steal. Eleanor suggested, ‘Be sure to tell Calvin. He’s American, too, you know.’
‘Only half,’ said Bunny coolly.
Bunny was loud and over-animated, but Eleanor was convinced that as soon as Bunny strode out of earshot of Calvin Piper all that environmental indignation would fall by the wayside like paper wrapping.
The rigid man to Calvin’s right was the only guest in a suit and tie. Every once in a while his mouth would quirk with annoyance.
He gave the impression that he disapproved of their contingent’s retirement to some petty Nairobi social fritter; he’d have preferred to continue meeting. His surface was metallic. His name was Grant.
Tall, grave and grey, he was one of those people, she supposed, who had been told the fate of the world rested on his shoulders and actually believed it. He reminded her of the men you found in Washington shuttle lounges, furrowed over computers, using their oh-so-precious five minutes before take-off to write that crucial report on sales of soap. You would never catch them out with a mere magazine, though Eleanor was always convinced that behind their PCs they were secretly weaving sexual fantasies and the screen was blank.
On the other side of the table, a small, nervous Pakistani and a corpulent Kikuyu were exchanging stories about murderous eight-year-olds in Natal. The Pakistani, Basengi, could not sit back in his chair or keep his hands still. He would pick up his glass and put it down again without taking a sip, and his place was rubbled with a shrapnel of potato crisps. His eyes worried about the room as if, should his glance not pin every object down to its appointed place, all of their host’s possessions would run away. He perpetually wiped his palms on his trousers. ‘Louis, you hear so often “innocent children”,’ he said. ‘I never meet innocent children. They are like us.
They are little barbarians.’
‘A woman’s view, Eleanor?’ asked Louis. ‘Do you believe we are all born saints? Do we only learn to slit throats from watching grown-ups butcher each other first or does the idea pop up of its own accord?’
‘I suppose it’s some of both,’ Eleanor stuttered, flattered to 59
be brought in finally. ‘Of course I’ve seen malicious children. Horrid children. But I’ve also seen children that, yes, were pure. Generous, affectionate and utterly without guile. Some children are innocent.
Then, so are some adults.’
The African chuckled. His laugh was splendid, booming and amoral, and from it Eleanor could picture this prankster as a boy—a plotter, a snitcher of sweets. ‘Name one.’
‘Eleanor Merritt.’
She turned to Calvin, surprised. ‘From you,’ she considered, ‘I wonder if that isn’t an insult.’
‘Ray Bradbury, Louis,’ Cal
vin commended. ‘All the kids in his stories are holy terrors. For Bradbury, the question isn’t whether children have the capacity for evil. It’s whether they have a special capacity.
‘Yet if we concede that kids have roughly the same proportion of treachery, dishonesty and cussedness as the rancorous adults they become, why do the little nippers occupy an exalted moral position?
Why in war is it especially appalling to kill women and children? Why is it so much more tragic when the roof falls in on a kindergarten than on a shoe factory?’
‘Maybe it’s all that life unlived,’ said Eleanor.
‘Well, doesn’t that make them lucky? And won’t there be plenty more drooling, farting, upchucking runts to replace them? No, it’s this myth of innocence, which is maudlin tripe. Why, you have to kill ten adults to get the same size headline in the States that you can score with one dead toddler.’
‘These days,’ said Bunny, ‘you’ll earn far better coverage with cruelty to rats.’
‘Mice!’ cried Calvin. ‘She’s right! There’s a lab where I started my density experiments in DC. I had to move operations, because you would not believe the restrictions. The mice eat better than the staff.
They have clean little beds made for them every night. They have their own vet, their own surgeon, and if you’re caught so much as pricking a paw without due cause, the approval of the Animal Care Committee or adequate anaesthesia, you’re out on your ear. Humid-ity and temperature control, vitamins—those mice are pampered brats. I began to detest them personally. Noses in the air, they swaggered across their gilded cages, pugnacious in their confidence that they couldn’t be made to suffer without your 60
funding going to hell. I wasn’t a scientist. I was a mouse-sitter.
‘However,’ he continued, and no one would interrupt, ‘some of the Little Lord Fauntleroys have since escaped. I gather there’s a huge population of pests in the basement. The janitors kill them mercilessly by the dozen every night. None of the scuttling hoards in the basement is protected by the Animal Care Committee. They’re exactly the same species, but slaughtered with impunity and no one cares. No vitamins. No fluffed pillows. Just the usual desperate for-aging and sticky traps.’