Game Control (32 page)

  Calvin smote the evil eye on Eleanor that Malthus had so scurrilously abandoned. It was all her fault. Calvin had originally intended, damn it, that he would temper Eleanor from the floppy mesh of loosely thought-out idealism into a solid ramrod of realism. Didn't she stand gun-barrel straight, no longer ashamed of being tall? Hadn't he cured her of excusing African plug-uglies who threw their own people to crocodiles with that culturally relativist pi-jaw once and for all? Hadn't he trained her to let Solastina make her morning coffee instead of rushing to the kitchen at 7.30 because that's what the man was paid for? Didn't she enjoy a little black humour now and again instead of taking Calvin to task for it, liberal-killjoy, and didn't she slip in the odd crack herself? Why, 'Enry 'Iggins hadn't a patch on Calvin Piper, he should burst into song! So how was it possible that Eleanor Merritt was corrupting
him
? For when Eleanor finished with Malthus and put a hand on Calvin's shoulder while he scrumpled through his post the palm felt so good on his collar bone that he was outraged, and when she took it away again he felt so bereft and wanted it returned to his neck so badly that he could have kicked the lady in the shin.

  'Anything interesting?' asked Eleanor of his mail.

  'A valentine from Threadgill.' Calvin tossed the envelope on the table with the concern he would expend on the Win KS1,000 CocaCola lotto.

  'I thought your clipping service went out of business.'

  'It did, which I rather regret. Threadgill sent me some bloody good articles. I miss them.'

  'So what's he say?'

  'I haven't gotten many, so I'm not sure,' said Calvin nonchalantly, 'but I think it's a death threat.'

  '
What
?' Eleanor grabbed the letter and read it through. 'Is this bluster?'

  'I doubt it. I can easily picture Threadgill advancing on this house with a machete gleaming with the light of the Lord.

Wallace is on a
jihad
. He's capable of anything. So am I. We're both murderous bounders.'

  'Nonsense,' said Eleanor with a chary dismissal she could only have picked up from Panga. 'You're a sweet, abstracted, overly detached man, and you're a little depressed. Murderous? Don't make me laugh.'

  'I had hoped,' said Calvin through his teeth, 'the NFD to make more of an impression.'

  'It made an impression,' said Eleanor lightly. 'A lot of little boys playing scientist.'

  'So was Los Alamos.'

  'Should you do anything about this?' She waved the letter. 'Take precautions?'

  'Like what?'

  'Just—' The hand returned to his neck, for which Calvin was despicably grateful. 'Take care.'

  As they prepared for bed, Calvin noted with an aggravation that characterized the evening that she really was quite fetching, more so than she struck you at first. And was it his imagination or had she in the past few months grown prettier still? He couldn't pin the change on her new wardrobe, his banishing of schoolgirl plaids and the morose droop of sale-rack jumpers, because it was naked she seemed to have transformed into a creature more lithe, winsome, graceful. As she lay in bed reading, her long body in a half-twist, her hip arced in a line that traced a continuous S around the opposite breast, and he couldn't take his eyes off that letter: S for sleep, surcease, for sneaky shameful slipping—
S for sentimentality.

  'It rankles me,' said Calvin, 'how much time I waste sleeping. Buckminster Fuller got his down to two hours a day. Think how much more work I'd get done. Twenty years of useless slumber at the end of the average seventy-five.'

  Eleanor smiled and pulled him to the sheets. 'You poor dear. Those are probably the best years of your life.'

  Calvin lay beside her, reluctant. During the day he droned over this landscape thousands of feet high, great gum trees shrivelled to tufts of weed, city centres squashed to children's blocks, people apparent only as dark shifting roach nests, but sleep was, whether he liked it or not, underwater, and he'd given up scuba for good. Calvin didn't like dreams. They were

not logical. He didn't like it when his old office at USAID in DC suddenly turned into Tsavo East without warning, and he really didn't like it when mid-vision Panga would switch to Eleanor and back again. He found it an invasion of privacy when his frog-like, gin-pickled mother barged in on his late nights when she had not been invited. As a man who savoured the relaxing misty pallor of farmland under his plane, Calvin was uncomfortable with the luridly vivid colours of elephant carcasses that stacked the back of his brain. He was impatient with the too personal clutter of school mates he'd finished with, secretaries he'd fired, wrestling matches with Panga on afternoons whose memory he had ejected in favour of tables and statistics and computer screens that were after all so much more important. He resented that while mornings he could smooth into the carpeted posh of the QUIETUS office in Nyayo House as the respected leader of a daring international conspiracy, once his head hit the pillow he would linger outside the door of the Population Council Conference at the KICC and this time the guard would not let him in. His dreams reduced a brilliant, controversial intellect in the flutter of an eyelid to a boy wandering public school corridors in his undershorts.

  When Calvin shifted towards Eleanor as she put aside her book, his fingers touched her waist with a little shock, his first impulse to withdraw them again. Merely sleeping with this woman may have been toe in the water, but it was water all the same, and not the thin aeronautic air at an altitude to which his lungs had grown accustomed. As he slid his arm around her until he cupped one of her breasts so small it could not fill his hand, he felt himself slip more deeply into the bath of her skin, that soft maternal temperature of the Indian Ocean which he had not so much as splashed on his face since Panga dandered there longer than was wise. Hadn't the Kamba taught him the dangers of drowning? As he pulled Eleanor's back to his chest Calvin kept his chin above the surface while his arms breast-stroked.

  In the early days he'd been scrupulous not to excite her. He never touched between her legs except with his thigh (and it fitted so nicely there). He didn't want to give the impression that if she were simply more seductive she would drag him

all the way under. He was loathe to re-enact rejection after rejection, for under such an assault he would have no choice but to send her home. However, Eleanor was easily rebuffed, and after his first refusal had made one or two deft inquiries with her fingertips and quit. She, too, never made sorties into regions that were no-go, and when her hand grazed his penis by accident she quickly pulled away as if she had touched a hot panhandle on the stove. It was sad, really; she would accept so little.

  
Parameters
: by now these were well established, so that within set limits the two could clutch one another without misunderstandings. Their congress was sufficiently routine that neither seemed conscious of anything they were not doing, save an uncanny inability to get close enough, as if there were always some thin but tough diaphragm between their two bodies that would stretch but not tear. There were evenings, with his thigh between her legs, he suspected Eleanor came, but even orgasm didn't penetrate the prophylactic shield. A contraceptive slicked between them and whatever squirmed in him towards her met the barrier and died. He supposed that for Eleanor their union constituted a disheartening professional success.

  Some evenings Panga would perch on the edge of their mattress in her fatigues and at first Calvin had pulled guiltily away. But Panga would watch, coolly paring her nails with her
kukri
, and sometimes, bored, would drawl to the window and eye the moon. He was a little hurt she didn't seem to care, though as a result less self-conscious, consoling himself with a loyalty that had grown increasingly legalistic.

  Tonight, however, after Calvin and Eleanor had settled down Panga must have imagined him asleep. Through the slits of his eyes he watched the mercenary creep up on the bed with the stealth of guerrilla warfare. Glancing from side to side, checking for witnesses, as if even ghosts had ghosts, she smoothed his hair.

  'Do that again,' begged Eleanor in a whisper, awake as well.

  But Panga, who of the three was the most terrified of deep sea, took back her hand and rubbed it as if stung by coral; eyes wide, she waded away backwards and vanished to her shore.

After the startlingly solid wrap of her knuckles against the walls of Pachyderm, Eleanor seized on her assignment to research the demographic implications of the AIDS epidemic. If the scenario of unchecked natural contagion was sufficiently dire, Calvin might be convinced to bury QUIETUS—the smug suite in Nyayo House, the Frankenstein play-acting of Pachyderm—back into the muddy black cotton soil of his brain from which it emerged.

  From the very start of her assignment, they fought. Eleanor would fling at him the most hysterical figures she could find—30.3 per cent sero-positivity in Kigali! Calvin would counter that Rwanda had the highest total fertility rate in Africa at 8.3, that only 6 per cent of the population lived in Kigali, and the rural sero-positivity was only

1.7 per cent—
work that out
. Rwandans were hardly about to sink without a trace, now were they? Eleanor had never tried lancing with Calvin number for number, and the duel was sweaty. He was too good at it. Maddeningly, rural sero-positivity in Rwanda was

1.7 per cent exactly.

  Though they may have fronted for tuberculosis, Karposi's Sarcoma and pneumonia, Eleanor enjoyed hunting her statistics. The numbers themselves were arranged in neat columns, the studies clean and white. Data did not smell. Data did not ask for water. Data did not have dysentery on your desk. Like her comfortable chair, none of these numbers tugged plaintively at her sleeve, but would wait patiently for her attention. In school she'd loved maths, for even as a girl she was terminally sympathetic, befriending class rejects because she felt sorry for them, and maths was one subject with no emotional content whatsoever. Calculus was a resting place, where right and wrong were certifiable, in contrast to the word problems of politics, where an answer was right or wrong depending on how you looked at it, or perhaps there was no answer at all.

  However, Eleanor's original exhilaration at concrete questions with concrete answers soon evaporated. Output is only as reliable as input, and the input was putty: hodge-podge testing of pregnant women in this and that city. On a continent where most of the population scattered in tiny villages with few paved roads, it dawned on Eleanor that no one really knew how many unlucky Africans had HIV. The towering edifice of results made from soft figures had a bedtime sag, and if she poked its walls they gave—'1.7 per cent seropositivity for rural Rwanda' was Oldenburg.

  Eleanor's first intimate experience with the deceptive precision of information grain-of-salted all the other nicely produced booklets peppering her office. She looked askance at the PRB's 'World Population Data Sheet', and finally questioned, How did they know that Cameroon contained 11.1 million people, since African censuses were infamously shoddy? Over her morning
Guardian
, she acknowledged that the authoritative report on the civil war in Liberia was written by a single beleaguered journalist buying unreliable sources drinks at the bar but otherwise too frightened to leave his hotel.

  It was so much more relaxing to believe everything.

  Basengi collaborated with Eleanor on this fax and phone fest. Even more than Calvin he took refuge in paper, housing himself in printout and hard disks the way squatters in Mathare assembled shacks from magazines and bits of tin. He was ill at ease in her company or anyone else's. After their third nervous conference, Eleanor suggested a beer at the New Stanley after work.

  'Calvin mentioned,' she ventured, while Basengi ripped the label off his White Cap and tore it into obsessively smaller shreds, 'you had some story or—past. I—don't mean to pry.'

  'Oh, that, it is not a story at all really.' He rolled the scraps into tiny tubes and laid them out evenly in a row like cigarettes for mice. 'It is only a sound.'

  'Of what?'

  'It wakes me up. I recognize it in kitchens. A surprisingly dull sound.'

  'I'm sure if Calvin finds it interesting, I would.'

  'No, not tedious. Blunt. It is the sound of my mother and father being hacked to pieces.'

  Eleanor paled. Calvin had set her up for this.

  'It was the time of partition,' he continued, though the way Basengi said the word, he seemed to mean less the partition between tracts of land—India and Pakistan—than periods of time: before and after. Before, when he was a child with a child's life, with a sweetness of which no child is aware until it is gone; and after, when he was a midget adult, in only a night advanced to that state where there is no one to turn to and the back yard is not the garden you once thought. 'In Peshawar. The Indian Army was being dismantled, so they could not protect us. It was not their fault.'

  'Protect you from whom?' asked Eleanor, frantically scanning her college history courses and turning up nothing on Pakistan.

  'My family were Hindu,' he said, as if that explained everything. 'The Pathans went on a frenzy of revenge. They were Muslim and it was at last their country. But this I only understood later. I was a small boy. There had been shooting and I was told to stay inside. I stayed inside. I wonder,' he supposed, 'if I have stayed inside ever since.

  'So my parents left me to save their shop from looters. But they did not get further than our gate. The sound I remember was of
kirpans
.'

  'Which are?'

  'Swords, like
pangas
. I was on the other side of the door. I saw nothing. But the sound was like meat—
chunk, chunk
—and sometimes a crack. The Pathans did this to many Hindus that day. I stayed in the house. I wouldn't look out. And inside the house was untouched—my mother's mending on the chair; a goat's head in a pot in the kitchen, and the second day it began to smell. On the third day, some relatives came to get me out. By then I had heard soldiers take some objects