Game Control

“I’ve given up population work rather.”

“Well, I don’t blame you. It must be so discouraging. Everyone giving food aid to those poor Ethiopians, who just keep having more babies. And frankly …” Her voice had dropped.

“Sorry?”

“This AIDS palaver. I’ve heard it said, you know, that it’s Nature’s way. Of keeping the balance. Do you think me just too monstrous?”

Wallace was about to say “Yes” when a cold draught raised the hairs on his neck. Even facing away from the door he could feel the room tingle. The girl who didn’t really care if she was a monster clapped delightedly. “Calvin!” she cried, and scampered off.

Wallace forced himself to turn slowly, by which time Evil Incarnate, Inc. had already set up shop at the big round table on the opposite side of the room. Too insecure to arrive without a protective claque, Piper had gathered his dwarfs around him, commanding the whole table so that no one could get at the food, and annexing most of the available chairs in one swoop. Arms extended languidly on either side, he took an audience as his due. That ghastly simian was always a draw, though gurgling fans got their comeuppance soon enough—already, from the sound of a yelp and covering titter, the hateful beast had managed to bite a hand that fed it. Shortly, standing room behind the circle filled up, while energy bled from other corners. Alternative conversations grew lack-lustre while trickles of prima donna pessimism drizzled to Threadgill’s ear: “You realize there are actually some people who believe that human population can expand infinitely?”

Wallace smiled. So Piper had noticed he was here.

Calvin was the prime of a type. They saw only mayhem and degradation, for you can only see what you are, and squalor was what these deformities were made of. Piper would never perceive the canniness of the planet or the ingenuity of his own race, for his vista was smeared with greenhouse gases and acid rain. Would Calvin ever bother to read articles about new high-yield hybrid crops? Or Simon’s irrefutable evidence that far from being a drag on a poor country’s economy, population growth was its greatest asset?

For as often as nihilists concocted “solutions”, they raised the prospect of any salvation to prove it wouldn’t work. All progress was palliative, and their favourite phrase was “too little, too late”. Some were content with keening, others with debauchery. Clubs of Rome lived high, having already consigned their people to the trash heap. There was money in fear, but you had to move quick—Famine! 1975 didn’t sell well in 1976. How many copies of The Limits to Growth and The Population Bomb now yellowed in Oxfam outlets? These gremlins had squealed that civilization was finished ever since it had started. They were a waste and an irritant, but they were decorative.

Should they remain in self-important think-tanks competing over who could concoct the most gruesome scenario for the year 2000, Wallace was content to let them hand-wring their lives away. Another sort of dread merchant, however, he could not conscionably ignore.

Because Calvin Piper had never been all talk. To give credit where due, the man was bright, effective and fantastically well connected. He was a seducer. His ideas, in their extremity, had a sensual thrill. He would never be satisfied with predicting disaster—he would help make it happen.

Wallace might have relaxed when Calvin was fired, reduced back to the Bacon spoiling on the walls of his Karen lair, unemployed. Wallace knew better. The very appearance of inactivity over at that cottage gave him chills. Calvin could not bear to be still; he did not have the spiritual sophistication. Released from the constraints of bureaucracy, Calvin was less demoted than unleashed. Why, that scoundrel had had no visible means of support for the last six years. But look at him: his slacks were linen, his shoes kid and outside the A-frame undoubtedly sat his new four-wheel-drive. What, pray, was he living on? Wallace may have dwelt in the realms of the ancestors for most of the day, but he was still aware that it was on the detail level that you found people out.

It was late enough for Wallace, who liked to be in bed by nine o’clock, to make his exit, but he did not want to appear to be fleeing because Calvin had arrived. Wallace might be repelled but he certainly wasn’t frightened. And there was one woman creeping over to his side of the house who stood out from the rest, if only because of her outfit. Long hem, high neck: she was hiding. Brown hair sloped either side of her face as she tiptoed towards the veranda, hoping to make it the distance of the living room without being caught. When he looked closely, he thought her rather prettier than much of the Lycra-nippled competition, but she did not have the conviction to match. That was half the game with beauty, keeping your head high, and she stared at her sensible shoes. Beauty was deception, and you had to have the shyster’s smooth sleight of hand to pull it off. This one thought of herself as ordinary; consequently, she was. Wallace didn’t think about these things any more, though as the theory fell to hand like the drop of an apple there must have been a time when he thought of little else.

He almost left her alone, so apparent was her desperation to be overlooked, but were she allowed to achieve what she thought she wanted—solitude—she would be miserable. More, he couldn’t resist a woman whose instinct with Calvin Piper on stage was to sneak in the opposite direction.

“Pardon—” At his hand on her sleeve, she jumped. “Have you a clue where I might get a spot of tea?”

She stumbled through something about the kitchen, leaving him in no doubt that contact with another human being was the most fearsome thing that had ever happened to her.

He returned with his cup to find her on the veranda as if they had an assignation. “Astonishing sky, isn’t it?” A moan of assent. About her frantic desire that he should go away he had no illusion. But winning her from a bogus trip to the loo was a snap. “Sorry,” he introduced, after an unencouraging but obligatory exchange about where she was from and where she lived. “I’m Wallace Threadgill. And yourself?”

That was all it took. She stopped leaning over the railing and gaping dolefully at the Jasper Johns Equatorial skyscape and faced him with keen reassessment. “Eleanor Merritt.” Though she needn’t, she shook hands, and he was struck by the fact that now, far from wishing he would disappear, she was suddenly worried he might leave.

“And what brings you to this blithe bacchanalia?”

She laughed, dry. “Awful, aren’t they. I always promise myself I won’t go. And then the alternative is staying home …”

“What’s wrong with home?”

“Malicious furniture.” Her eyes kept darting to his face, then back over the rail.

“I’m surprised you’re not attending to our charming ersatz host. Funny, you’d never know, would you, that this wasn’t his house? And how high are the chances that he and his whole band of cronies weren’t even invited?”

“Some people are very—comfortable, socially.” A diplomat. “I’m not. I like to think I’ve improved, but I doubt it. Every time I walk into a party I feel thirteen: dressed like a ninny, terrified of dancing and wishing I’d brought a book.”

“How does such a shy creature come to be in Africa?”

“Family planning,” she groaned.

“Ah.” That explained the shift.

“And you—you’re the heretic.”

He smiled. “Quite. And how long have you—?”

“Nearly twenty years. I was with the UNFPA before Pathfinder, and the Peace Corps before that.”

“Peace Corps I could have predicted.”

She stood more upright. “Everyone finds the Peace Corps so hilarious. That we’re a sad little sort. But it’s done some fine—”

“Look at you. You’re already getting kali.”

“I just don’t think it’s fair—”

“Perhaps you and I are such natural enemies that we should acknowledge irreconcilable differences and skip the fisticuffs.” He made a motion as if to part.

“No, please—” She touched his arm. “I have always wanted to talk to you. More than ever now.”

“Why? Are you questioning your faith?”

“Let’s say my convictions have been challenged. They are not bearing up well.”

“But you have a life’s work to defend. No doubt you believe in its merit and conduct it conscientiously. But in my experience, your kind find my message unsettling. They listen only just so long as it takes to invent all the reasons I’m a hairbrain. They march off with their fences built even higher than before, having learned nothing. I’m a little tired of wasting my time. It’s more than likely we have little to say to one another.”

“I’m not afraid of information.”

“Then you are a brave young lady. The entire population industry is mortified by information. That’s why they make it up. So they can live safely in their fairy-tale future, where we are all balancing tiptoe on one leg in the remaining three square inches apportioned to us, packed on all sides by the seething, copulating ruck, fallen angels on the head of a pin. But look around you.” He waved his hand at the Ngong Hills as a voluptuous breeze ruffled her soft brown hair; indeed, from here there was not a glimmer of human habitation in sight.

“My confidence in what I do has been shaken,” she admitted. “We’ve had so little effect.”

“Large families will persist. But you can make people ashamed of their children, just as Jesuits made women ashamed of their breasts. You see, I don’t simply believe that population programmes are inadequate; I believe they are evil.”

“That’s going a bit far.”

“Let me tell you a story,” Threadgill intoned, leading her to a porch chair and seating himself at an instructive angle.

“I was Kenyan-born,” he began, “but educated in Britain. It was the late sixties, when horrors were foretold for the land that I still cared for very much. You may remember, in those days it was to be thirty-three billion by the turn of the next century—and isn’t it intriguing that twenty years later the same prophets are now saying fourteen? So I enrolled in Oxford’s new Population Studies programme, and went from there to work for the Population Reference Bureau in DC. My life was numbers. We ran the profession’s first computer simulations, and when the zeros trilled off perforated sheets my blood would pound. Money pumped into the field and I could travel. Reports with their daunting digits stacked my desk. At night my colleagues and I would gather at exclusive clubs and loudly compare the multiple nightmares sponsored by our competing organizations. Everywhere we went, our lapels flashed ZPG.

“My work was going well and I was important. Yet the better it went, the more my soul was sick. I drank heavily. My relations with women were frantic and short-lived, and I was careful not to beget children. I began to develop health problems—I was pre-ulcerous and probably an alcoholic. Inside I was heavy, and though I was free to see the sights of the world the earth was a bleak and hopeless coal to me, and showed itself in dark pieces. Every new country appeared distraught and degraded, perched on a precipice, about to fall apart.

“One day I was walking out of the Kenyatta Centre, during one of those costly conferences we were so fond of. I ran into a young Luhya I did not know, with his small son. He was angry and accosted me. ‘You are the enemy of the smile on this child’s face!’ he cried. The boy looked at me, and he had supernatural eyes. I realized the man was right, that my work was all about preventing his son’s conception. I was relieved that his parents had prevailed over my reports. I wasn’t sure of myself then, as you are not now, and until I was sure again I would cast my ZPG pin in the gutter.

“I entered into a different sort of research, the kind where you are not given the answers before you begin. I was astonished at what I found. Most of all, I was amazed that the facts I uncovered were easily available to everyone, and I became appalled by a conspiracy of despair, a pact of gloom to which I had signed my own name.

“Because the holocaust of the population explosion is a myth. That we are all dropping into a fetid cesspool is a myth. Life on earth, historically, has done nothing but improve. And the profusion of our species is not a horror but a triumph. We are a thriving biological success story. There is no crisis of ‘carrying capacity’—since the Second World War, the species has only been better fed. Per capita calorie production continues to rise. Incidence of famine over the last few hundred years has plummeted. Arable land is on the increase. Pollution levels are declining. Resources are getting cheaper. The only over-population I uncovered was in organizations like the one I worked for, which were a scandal.

“Yet when I attempted to publish these findings, I was turned away from every journal and publisher I approached. I finally found one feisty university press. But that spelt the end of me. Once word was out I had parted with orthodox demography, I lost my funding. I became a clown for my 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, tobacco 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 hand. “Self-hatred. Copious quantities of people are therefore intrinsically 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 urbanization 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 illogical, 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 self-loathing, 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-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 peopled 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.”

“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 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 superannuated layabout.

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 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.