Game Control (24 page)

  'We are certainly doomed,' said Wallace, turning to Eleanor with an expression of parental disappointment, 'if everyone thinks like you.'

  Meanwhile Calvin's overkill of wood was smothering the fire. Fussing with the logs, he nearly managed to put it out altogether. Wallace quipped, 'You are a genius of destruction.'

  Though Calvin had guessed she'd stay home, Panga drawled from the shadows, shaking her head in disgust. With a single nudge from her calloused foot, the whole stack burst into flame. She strolled off, eye-rolling. Wallace stared after her.

  Calvin knocked back a tot of whisky. 'Eleanor's right, but it doesn't matter. In twenty years, even if we're equably issued with maize meal chits, none of us will make it through the day without feeling light-headed.'

  'On the contrary, we have tripled world food production in the last forty years—'

  'And
only
doubled the population—'

  '—Proving once and for all the folly of Malthus's unfounded assumption that agriculture could only grow arithmetically whereas population grows geometrically.'

  'Of course that theory was drivel. Malthus was a reasonable economist but sorry biologist. I'm impatient with the assumption that if you discredit Malthus you undermine modern demography. He was right about one thing: that unchecked population growth is deadly, and that sooner or later population will outstrip resources.'

  'It hasn't yet.'

  'The Green Revolution can't loaves and fishes for ever. You're spot on, Wallace, food production isn't arithmetic. It increases in fits and starts, and
sometimes it goes down
.'

  Eleanor rubbed her arms and huddled on her stool. Her head swivelled as the rally rapidly degenerated into a volley of mathematics. There was no point now in trying to intervene; she felt irrelevant, the Girlfriend, without the common compensations of the role when they went home. She was torn between malicious, aggressive boredom and admiration. For Calvin was a seamster with data, and could weave the loops of zeros in and out until he knit a dazzling tapestry of dread, so densely sewn it would take a sharp eye to find the holes. This was a particularly meticulous performance, and Wallace couldn't quite keep up. Though Calvin's position came down to the view that the world was a terrible place and only getting more hideous still, she compulsively hoped that he would win. That was what Girlfriends did.

  As a visual aid when Calvin began to get the upper hand, first one, then another Kenyan trudged through Wallace's camp, swinging bags of groceries, slinging infants on their backs, toddlers in tow. The parade—the invasion, even Wallace must admit—grew steadily more insistent as the sun set. Since Wallace's love for people was as abstract as Calvin's commensurate disdain for them, Threadgill's eyes darted to the singing, murmuring string of locals through his land with noticeable irritation.

  Getting desperate, Wallace attacked. 'Are you not embarrassed by being a type? One more over-excited Chicken Little that every generation spawns, indulges and deserts? Why, there's one of your sort on every corner. Have you ever been in New York City on New Years? Crowds in Harlem walkups stay up holding vigil for the end of the world, all waiting for Jesus to foreclose. I've sometimes liked to imagine the sleepy gatherings the next morning: bleary-eyed at the light, annoyed to find no one arranged for breakfast because there was never supposed to be breakfast again. You encourage irresponsibility, Piper. You advise your flock that the sky is falling so fast there is nothing to do but sigh. But humanity will be propelled by those who continue to plan for breakfast. Only the optimists will still have corn flakes.'

  '
Type
?' asked Calvin. 'Better Jeremiah than one more lying whitewasher. Ibsen's baths are not poisoned; there is no cholera in Venice. The sky is not falling; it just looks brown because it's so full of pie. Now, I'll grant you I encourage paralysis. I believe environmentalism is too late, and I'm not getting the neighbours to put bricks in their toilet tanks. But to advise the rabble instead, never fear, you'll be all right dears, is just as irresponsible. In either case, the lot do nothing.'

  'The forces of unity and joy are anything but paralysed, Piper. Have you stopped reading the paper because miracles depress you? All over the world, countries are throwing off weary and oppressive ideologies. It's uncomfortable to remember, isn't it, how recently your crew were gorging on fantasies of nuclear inferno? That's a loss for you gloom

grubbers, the close of the cold war. Perestroika must be breaking your heart.'

  'Hardly.' Calvin clasped his hands, for he had worked this daunting spree of dancing in the streets until it represented—that's right—more calamity. Eleanor had watched him scowl over the front page as East Germans made confetti of Stasi files and playwrights rose to presidencies. He was crushed at the fall of the Berlin Wall—he liked that wall, he said; it was
interesting
. 'Eastern Europe is already shattering into petty ethnic dispute—that's improvement? Nuclear war is more likely than ever. Bi-polarity was at least stable; now we just have polarity, and any rinky-dink Qadaffi can pick up an Hbomb at his local souk. You're not seeing the rise of
unity and joy,
Threadgill. More mayhem in sheep's clothing.'

  Following their ritual dismissal of one another, Eleanor tentatively wished to propose that maybe some things had got better and some things worse, without pattern; and so human affairs had always proceeded, lumbering through regardless of the labels its commentators laid on arbitrary eras of their own creation. She wanted to explore if maybe mankind was less streaking towards the firmament or hurtling to purgatory than toodling in an unremarkable limbo, with the occasional improvement and occasional lapse. However, this point of view was not sexy, and she could not think of a way of expressing it that was moving or eloquent. So she kept quiet, though with an inkling that there were multitudes out there who thought exactly this way and who couldn't get published or appear on TV because such a frumpy perspective was both dull and frightening. Eleanor's shabby vision of humanity infinitely shambling on had its own hopeless horror as well as hometown appeal.

  As the fire towered and Eleanor had to move her stool back from the heat, the circle of light increased to include a stump, on top of which, fanned defiantly in the open, were ten micro-floppy disks.

  'Why, Wallace,' said Calvin, 'you don't have electricity. What do you do with micro-floppies? Are you so spiritually advanced that you can Ouija board them on your knees and scan the files with your fingertips?'

  'Laptop batteries. Computers only get lighter, cheaper and more efficient every year. One of those many upswings of which you must despair.'

  'Enjoy the toy while you can. After the Collapse, there won't be power in Nairobi, and you'll have exactly eight hours of light, cheap, efficient amusement to last through your old age.'

  'Dr Piper, such humility. I thought that is a collapse you personally intend to avert. I thought we might all rest easy now.' Wallace paused. 'Or two-thirds of us.'

  'The other third will rest easiest of all.'

  Wallace leaned on to his walking stick so it sunk in the dirt. 'I weary of this banter. I need to know:
are you serious
?'

  Calvin sighed. 'I'm tired of that question.'

  'Why did you come here? And drag this poor, enslaved dwarf with you?'

  'I misplaced some of my work. I thought you might have come across it.'

  'You knew I had. That's not why you came by.'

  'I'm not interested in discussing my designs with you, Threadgill. I'm interested in what you're going to do about them.'

  'Were I to move against you, I should hardly warn you how. No, you came here to explain yourself. That's pathetic, but go ahead.'

  'I'm aware you find me despicable. But I was concerned that you may also consider me insane.'

  'I don't think you're insane,' said Threadgill unexpectedly. 'I rather wish you were. But for some inscrutable reason you still want to tell me something. I wish you'd get it off your chest.'

Calvin clipped newspapers, labelling and filing away just those snippets that most people were happiest to see twined safely away for recycling. Recycled they would be, the same vicious page-eleven stories returning on resurrected manila, as if not only the paper but the news itself were wetted down, mashed and rolled out again for tomorrow's edition.

  'In the Bronx this summer,' Calvin began, bedtime story, 'there lived a couple, 32 and 34, happily if frugally on social security. They had been released from a program called The Bridge only a year before, which helped young adults like themselves adapt to living on their own. You see, Opah Sanders and her boyfriend Freddie were both mentally retarded. Opah had a younger sister, who had lived off and on in their apartment. One day Opah's sister knocked on the door. No sooner was the sister let in than she had visitors—two boys and a girl, her friends, all teenagers. Children,' Calvin smiled, 'really.

  'Well, one of the boys had a gun, with which he hit Freddie over the head. Between them, they taped Freddie's nose and mouth over with duct tape, and bound his hands with telephone wire. They put him in the closet. In the next room, the second boy hit Opah over the head, tied her up, and put her in a second closet.

  'Then the foursome took Freddie's TV, stereo and VCR outside and sold them on the street. With the proceeds, they bought beer, potato chips, and a padlock for Freddie's closet. Sometimes the kiddies got too loud and the neighbours complained. The only trouble was, Freddie's mouth and nose had

been taped pretty tight, and after two days he'd begun to smell. So they wrapped him in a shower curtain, twist-tied him in a garbage bag, moved him into the bedroom, and turned on the fan.

  'After six days, I guess the fun began to pall. They untied Opah, whom they'd been feeding a bit of orange juice and even a cigarette from time to time, and said their goodbyes.

  'Oh, and let's not forget. "None of the suspects showed any remorse for the crime, investigators said,"' he recited. 'The usual.'

  Their own small party suffered a prolonged and inept silence. Calvin poured another shot. Eleanor measured the bottle's demise sidelong, reconsidering his capacity for handling his liquor. Wallace, in so far as he allowed any emotion to pass his face besides that stolid, funereal cheerfulness, looked annoyed.

  'I could tell you more,' Calvin assured them, as if they were nervous he might run out of dismal clippings while the evening was yet young. 'Last week Renamo in Mozambique gang-raped a woman in front of her husband and then forced her at gunpoint to cut him to pieces.'

  'Calvin, I really don't see—' said Eleanor.

  '—Or how about Richard Ramirez in LA? More of the same, really; these fables get repetitive, I'm afraid. Richard raped a Thai woman in bed as she lay next to the husband he'd just shot, then sodomized her eight-year-old son. Ramirez was convicted, you know—'

  'Enough.' The angle at which Eleanor's hand protected her face from the heat also sheltered her from their narrator.

  'What,' said Threadgill, unfazed, 'what is the point?'

  Calvin stretched. 'Ramirez has become a folk hero. He has women writing into him on death row, star-struck.
Maybe I'll have to shoot
the President to prove I love you
. I understand these serial killers have a competition going, whose life story sells the most paperbacks. To Americans, they're sex symbols. Think I've got it in me, Eleanor?'

  'No.'

  'Or I could tell you about little girls settling over farmers' fields from hijacked aeroplanes. But I, personally, am fondest

of our mentally challenged couple in the Bronx. I'm a detail man…I liked the fan.'

  Oh, yes, he loved the fan. For the first time Eleanor coloured with a tinge of the repulsion she had tried to rouse from herself for twentyfour hours.
He loved the fan
. When Calvin found that article, he wasn't upset, he was delighted. He had saved it and folded it and dated it and memorized the part about the orange juice and no doubt Opah Sanders was her correct name. That he remembered the story so well was almost as repugnant as the story itself.

  'Presumably,' said Wallace, tolerantly tapping his cane, 'this viscous wade through the cesspool of your brain you regard as connected with
population
.'

  'None of these party anecdotes occurred in my
brain
. Still you are correct. The earth is over-populated, all right.
But with what
?'

  'The only over-population self-evident to me is that there is one too many of you.'

  Calvin's eyes glowed, foot in the door. It was not easy to tempt Threadgill the all-merciful into vitriol. 'Come now, are we not, each of us, perfect marvels? Me, Ramirez and Opah Sanders's loving sister? Every one of those Renamo insurgents holds a whole spangling universe in his spattered hands.'

  'You see your own reflection. You find what you seek.'

  'I find what's
there
.'

  'But your response to "what's there" is to imitate it. You choose to become what you claim to revile.'

  'I choose nothing.' Calvin knocked back the rest of his glass. He leaned towards Wallace, who recoiled from the reek of his breath. 'I am what I am, and what I am is like everyone else. And what we are isn't even reprehensible, Threadgill. We're animals. We're not important. Look at me, Wallace. You don't like me very much, do you?'

  'I pity you,' said Threadgill.

  'You hate my guts, Wallace. So I rest my case. There's a lot more where I came from. At least I've stopped pretending to be any different from the rest of this over-active fungal rot. We are blight, Wallace. We leave nothing in our wake but stench and destruction. So all right, I am blight. I have no redeeming qualities. Don't imagine insults upset me. Decry