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  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 ir-responsibility, 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

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  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 H-bomb 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 162

  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.’

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  12

  Maggots in the Breezes of Opah Sanders’s

  Fan

  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

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  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 re-morse 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 165

  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 twenty-four 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

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  me as vile, Wallace, and we only agree. The trouble with all you Jesus people is you trap yourselves with your own throat-slitting inclusion.

  If we are all so God-chosen, if humanity is so bunnies and chickies according to you, then you’re stuck with me, aren’t you? I am one of your little lost lambs. I, on the other hand, regard myself as a maggot and reserve the right to act like one. I’ve given up fighting.

  I’ve joined with open arms.’

  ‘Oh, tripe, Calvin, I’m sorry, but I’ve listened to this long enough.

  You don’t think you’re a maggot, you think you’re a hero.’ It was Calvin’s own fault if, after months of reeducation, Eleanor interrupted from time to time.

  ‘She’s right,’ said Threadgill. ‘I’ve read your parameters. You think you’re a saviour. You believe you’ll do your victims a favour.’

  ‘I will. The dead are a contented lot. They don’t complain, they don’t suffer, and they don’t get up to bad business either.’

  ‘What if I decided you were better off dead, Piper?’

  ‘I’d take you up on your kind offer, sport, but I’ve some work to do before I indulge myself a vacation.’

  ‘I’m warning you, bwana—’ Threadgill picked up Calvin’s White Horse and threw his remaining whisky on the fire. ‘Virtue as well as vice can be violent.’ The flames shot three feet high.

  ‘People who think they’re virtuous are almost always violent,’

  Calvin purred. ‘How the concept gets turned on its ear.’

  ‘Listen to you!’ Eleanor exploded. ‘Talk about turning virtue on its ear!’

  ‘I have never claimed to be virtuous, my dear.’

  ‘Nonsense. You’re the most self-righteous jingo I’ve met in my life.’

  ‘All that matters,’ he turned from her coolly, ‘is my research is accurate. Humanity is headed for extinction without a little help from its friends.’

  ‘You’re a music lover,’ said Wallace. ‘Do you ever wonder how many Bachs and Bucherini’s you will exterminate? Or Frank Lloyd Wrights, Rembrandts, Einsteins?’

  ‘How many Mussolinis and Caligulas? How many petty, tiny-eyed coke addicts with a knife in your back? How many Hindu mothers who cut off their children’s feet to make them 167

  better beggars? How many fat nurses who leave geriatrics dozing in their own faeces and have another cigarette? More, Threadgill. A lot more. Einstein, at his most exacting, regretted himself. For that matter, once Mathare Valley spreads the globe like ringworm, what are the chances that if Mozart were born in a fetid slum with two potatoes a day some aid agency would float down from the sky and give the kid a piano? What would Dickens be worth growing to premature old age with a whore mother, never learning to spell his name? What would Frank Lloyd Wright build with mud and corrugated iron?’

  ‘Does he build,’ Wallace corrected. ‘Frank Lloyd Wright knocks up shacks out of cooking-oil tins. Mozart hums kwasa-kwasa in Mathare. Dickens cannot write his name.’

  ‘Right. And Christ is selling badly carved elephants on Kenyatta Avenue. So what good is he? No one will bother to crucify the bastard.’

  ‘I’m disconcerted. If we are all “maggots”, and you truly believe we are over-populating ourselves into oblivion, high growth rates should drive you to the violin. Why fiddle with viruses? Have dozens of children instead, to hurry us toward the Armageddon that will put us all out of our misery. Why, Dr Piper, try to save a race you hate?’

  Calvin shrugged. ‘I’m sentimental.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  Calvin stood up. It seemed time to go. Collecting to depart, they shuffled. Presenting his case did not seem to have refreshed Calvin as much as he might have hoped.

  Before his guests ducked in the car, Threadgill placed a ministerial hand on Piper’s shoulder. ‘I don’t know why it is,’ he began, ‘but for some reason everything we have and everything we make is gradually taken away from us. Your life is a leaky vessel; no matter how much you pour, your cup will never overflow, because there is a hole in it. The universe has a hole in it. Your lovers die or betray you; your professional successes are diluted by failure o
r by simply being past; the summer homes where you spent the idyllic holidays of your childhood are bought by strangers and painted a garish green. So you can never stop making; maybe that’s the reason for the hole. I don’t know where these things go; I 168

  don’t believe they vanish. I wonder if there isn’t a magnificent junk heap in the next dimension of favourite train sets before they were broken and golden afternoons before the last terrible thing was said that parted two friends for ever. Whyever, the hole is there. It will suck from you everything you love. You have stopped pouring, Piper, and your cup is bone dry. No wonder you’re dying.’

  ‘I have my work,’ said Calvin.

  ‘You’d have done better to start a pottery.’ He turned to Eleanor.

  ‘You can still save him. Though you might do better to save yourself.’

  Eleanor held Calvin’s hand defiantly. ‘I’m very happy.’

  ‘That’s what I was afraid of. Piper,’ he charged, ‘it isn’t too late.

  Forswear demography. Study a whole new field. Go back to university and read archaeology. Marry her. Make something.’

  ‘Not on your life. Population is all I know and all I care about.’

  ‘Then take the consequences. You think you’re so ruthless. You haven’t seen ruthless. Now, get off my property.’

  ‘Why didn’t you take the disks back?’ asked Eleanor in the car.

  ‘He made copies. I have copies. What’s the point?’

  Even were they one of a kind, she couldn’t imagine Calvin physically retrieving them, having to hit Wallace on the head. She couldn’t penetrate this man—so rancorous over newspapers, while with Eleanor he was considerate: he met her for dinner on time, tendered wine or flowers in bursts of uncalculated affection, and always noticed when she was tired or sad. It grieved him to see her cry. She couldn’t picture Calvin lifting up one of those logs and clumping Wallace on the temple if the fate of six years’ work or, as he saw it, the survival of civilization depended on it.