Game Control

by Lionel Shriver

  Calvin kissed her. ‘Aren’t you afraid of me now?’

  ‘I’ve always been afraid of you, Calvin.’ She moved her knee between his thighs.

  Breakfast, however, was both warm and wary. Neither had an appetite. They sat on opposite sides of the table. Calvin didn’t say much, drumming his fingers.

  ‘I want the disks back,’ he said at last.

  ‘Disks?’

  ‘What can you possibly do with those files? Send them to the WHO

  and demand they rescind my funding for having

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  drawn it on false pretenses? They can’t be authenticated. I could always claim I was writing a science fiction novel.’

  ‘I don’t have any disks.’

  ‘You might try the Kenyan government,’ he recommended. ‘Moi would credit any Western skulduggery. Put the story in the Nation, it wouldn’t even stand out. “American Population Expert Apprehen-ded in Genocidal Subterfuge”.’ He flipped the paper on the table.

  ‘Look here, we could fit it side by side with “USA, Shop-Window of the Earth’s Evils”.’

  ‘I did walk into your office yesterday, I admit. You left it open. I read a few book titles and looked at your disgusting photographs.

  The room gave me the creeps. I left. I took nothing. I read no papers, no screens. Everything I learned about your unhinged confederacy you told me last night.’

  ‘You mean, you didn’t—’

  ‘You wanted to tell me, Calvin. Keeping it to yourself was making you lonely. And now we can discuss it, and it’s all you want to talk about.’

  ‘When you came here yesterday, was the front door locked?’

  ‘Come to think of it—no.’

  ‘I thought I locked my office. I was sure I had.’

  ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘A box of floppies has been lifted.’

  ‘You didn’t lose them?’

  ‘You’ve seen my office. Does it look like the kind of room where important files would get mislaid?’

  She remembered the methodical stacking of every print-out, each pen in its place. ‘Well, no. But who on earth—’

  ‘Threadgill.’

  ‘But why—?’

  Calvin was inaccessible for a minute or two.

  ‘You said I couldn’t do anything with those files; QUIETUS is too preposterous. Threadgill would confront the same incredulity.’

  ‘I am not concerned with Mr Jolly-hockey-sticks turning to an authority. But he could be a force to be reckoned with in his own right.’

  ‘I got the impression he was an eccentric, hermetic guru in a tent.

  A bit of a fruit—like you. I don’t see why he’d worry you.’

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  ‘Wallace is a tit, but he keeps a hand in. These fluffernutters, they club together and agree how everything is pink and how very, very much pinker the whole world is going to be next year. And they have a hit list; they have it in for Garret Hardin, Paul Ehrlich and Calvin Piper. Threadgill’s convinced it’s his job to save the race from the anti-Christ. Don’t let the kikoi and the campfire fool you. He’s certainly an idiot. But he could be a problem.’

  ‘What do you think he’ll do?’

  ‘Get underfoot. I was worried he’d more or less twigged. But it doesn’t help he has the parameters in print…Where are you going?’

  ‘It’s Thursday. I’m going to work.’

  ‘Maybe you shouldn’t.’

  ‘Maybe I should.’ Eleanor stood up. Calvin stood up. ‘Calvin Piper.

  If I went around the office gibbering about what you told me last night, I’d be laced in a strait-jacket by lunchtime. And you’re not going to strap me here, like Malthus, on a leash for ten years. I’m going to the office.’

  Calvin looked helpless. He was actually a mild-mannered man who could decimate throngs with his delete key, but couldn’t lay a hand on a single underfed young lady. ‘Oh, go on,’ he said feebly.

  ‘Only, come back here, would you? We may pay a call on His Ebullience tonight.’

  ‘What good would that do? Even if he did swipe the disks, he’s scanned them by now and he’s unlikely to bow his head and say he’s sorry, he knows it’s wrong to play with other children’s toys without permission. And look at you: you can’t even strong-arm a family planning worker. What are you going to do to Wallace? Magic Marker his teddy bear?’

  ‘A skip down the yellow brick road would give me a little exercise.

  I feel like a spar, and you won’t put your mits up. And he’s browned me off frankly. Burglary is hardly above board.’

  Eleanor choked. ‘Above board! You’re playing video games with life and death and then you get peevish when your opponent cheats?

  Is this a conspiracy or checkers?’

  ‘The game,’ said Calvin coldly, ‘is the highest form of civilization.

  Life is sport.’

  Eleanor rolled her eyes. ‘Pardon me, but the normal person 144

  has to go to work. I hope the two of you have a delightful day wreaking international havoc on paper. Goodbye, my darling psychopath.’ She kissed him and shouted behind her, ‘So long, Panga!’

  Once Eleanor left, Calvin felt petulant. Panga ignored him, endlessly sharpening her kukri the way some women filed their nails. He told himself to be grateful. Eleanor’s arch relation to QUIETUS was convenient. If she dismissed his enterprise as a fanciful, fatuous delusion, she was less likely to squeal. Calvin was offended all the same. He felt obliged to prove to Eleanor he was not a crackpot. She should have been aghast. ‘But she laughed!’ he smarted out loud.

  ‘I tell you before,’ said Panga, scrish-scrash. ‘This girl is not how you see. Eleanor and Panga, I think we get to be msuri rafiki.’

  ‘Just what I need,’ said Calvin. ‘Both you birds ganging up on me.’

  ‘We think you are funny,’ she announced, inspecting the blade in the morning light, and pressing the feather-edge on Calvin’s coffee table—damn it, she would leave marks.

  Reaching for one ally in this household, Calvin retrieved Malthus, who clung to his neck and hissed at the poltergeist. Malthus was none too keen on Panga. Malthus was none too keen on anyone, discernment Calvin could only applaud.

  ‘You’ll see,’ he grumbled at the ghost. ‘You think it’s a lark, a jest; you think I’m all micro-floppy—’ He realized he sounded childish.

  ‘Calvin is like ugali with too much water,’ she goaded, testing the steel by running the calloused whorls of her thumb over the edge so the knife sang. ‘He cannot stand upon his plate. Calvin, you have to eat with a spoon.’

  ‘What makes you think I won’t go through with this?’

  ‘Easy.’ She tossed the kukri on the table so the femur rattled. ‘You make all these—palavermers—’

  ‘Parameters.’

  ‘Rules,’ she shrugged. ‘You have to be so candy. Why does Calvin’s poison have to taste pretty?’

  ‘Clean shot,’ said Calvin.

  ‘Clean shot: that is only professional.’

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  ‘I, too, am trying to be professional.’

  ‘A real warrior would borrow my kukri and take off their heads.’

  ‘Do you have any idea how many two billion is?’ Calvin had a feeling he didn’t have any idea himself. ‘Be practical.’ He reached for his calculator and stabbed at it—all his aggression seemed destined to be vented on keys. ‘If you filleted one unwanted ragamuffin per second with that kukri of yours, it would take you 66.59 years to dispatch two billion. In the meantime three-quarters would live to reproduce, so you’d have to chop closer to three or four…Mathematically, you’d never finish.’

  ‘So we would never be out of a job.’

  ‘I’m telling you, we need Pachyderm.’

  ‘As always, you hide behind your machines, your numbers. Your pictures on the wall with the lines that go up and down. How much does Calvin know about killing?’

  ‘A fair lot, by now.’

  Panga snorted
. ‘Potions. Books. Admit it, has Calvin ever killed one person? Moja toto kidogo?’

  ‘Elephants.’

  Panga shook her head. ‘You see why Eleanor is not frighten. You see why she laughs.’

  ‘I dare say a good number of defence contractors, presidents, even generals have never killed anyone hand to hand. There are other methods. You may not find them admirable, but they work.’

  ‘These generals, then, they are women. Do you not see? That you make so many perambulators—’

  ‘Parameters!’

  ‘ So you do not succeed? It is like saying, I will only do what I say and say I will do when the moon falls out of the sky and I can bounce it like a ball. Like saying, I will be a terrifying warrior when my trees grow hair and bark like dogs.’

  Calvin slumped. ‘It has to be the right organism, Panga. Otherwise the whole operation could dribble into a few more rows of stinking pits. Say we only manage to nix a few million and the virus peters out. What good would that do? We’d have no long-term demographic impact. No, Pachyderm has to be a clean shot. I know you think I’m a coward. OK, I’ll

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  suffer that. I don’t think, sometimes, you understand me at all.’

  ‘I understand. There is a Kikuyu word, karamindo. A man of much wealth, from rich parents, who has lost it and tries to get it back.

  This karamindo, he is angry and will do anything.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter what my motives are, so long as my research is sound. If I’m secretly getting even with short-sighted USAID quis-lings, or even with my fat, sotted mother, so what? I’m no purist. I dispensed with the right-things-wrong-reasons hair-tear ages ago.

  So long as you do the right things, I don’t care if your mind is as warped as a ten-cent violin. Why I’m doing this is my business. And the fact is, things have gone badly for me for years. You’re dead, which irks me no end—I have to listen to your knives rasp all day, when we used to go to bed, remember?’

  ‘Tsss,’ she hissed. ‘Calvin. You do not remember. Not any more.’

  ‘And they kicked me out of Washington. Now I’ve finally got something to live for. It’s in the long-term interests of the race—’

  Panga yawned.

  ‘It is theoretically possible,’ he levelled, in that voice which had taken Eleanor aback but which Panga adored, ‘to revenge yourself on an entire universe.’

  ‘Do you,’ she studied, ‘think your life is so special sad? More than the others?’

  ‘Not at all. It’s been cushy, I dare say, by comparison. But I take offence. Everyone else slings and arrows their way through eighty years, shauri ya Mungu. I personally get hacked off.’

  ‘You are spoil.’

  ‘I am spoil. The idea of fifteen billion grubby, thieving degenerates on this planet curdles my stomach. I can’t bear five.’

  Panga sighed and holstered her knife. ‘Calvin does not know Calvin so well. And you remember: if you say you do nothing and you do nothing, sawa-sawa. If you say you do something and you do nothing, you make me shame. You understand, bwana? You stay in that room and go tap, tap, tap for years until you die, I go haunt somewhere else. I think it

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  start to look mzuri sana in Liberia.’ She sauntered through the back wall.

  Calvin was in a mood, so he gunned his Land Cruiser down Magadi Road, where most wazungu would aim to Euro-gaga over the escarp-ment to the daunting sweep of the Rift Valley and take snaps.

  Calvin sought the Rift to annoy himself. Oh, at a distance the land looked deserted, but that was like standing a mile from a house and observing it didn’t look infested with termites. Because up close the whole valley was shambling with degraded Masai, no longer draped in their dignified russet blankets but flapping in strawberry polyester blends, wrists flashing digital watches. They poked ratty herds of starved cattle, ribs like rumble strips, to DANIDA water projects that invited over-grazing for miles around, cows stubbling the grass to five o’clock shadow.

  He slowed the car and studied the herdsmen, the wizened women parked with garish bead-work in wait for tourists when it wasn’t the season. Why was everything getting uglier? Had we always been so vulgar? He tried to recall cathedrals, the Taj Mahal, while grinding past Bob’s Save-Life Bar, girls wrapped in clashing paisley and polka-dot, scuffing in vinyl loafers under flaking adverts for Vermoflas Fluke and Worm Drench. Why did modern man jangle against the landscape so? All the other animals mutated for eons to fade against mottled trees—zebra, giraffe; why did people wear Day-glo pink Bermuda shorts? Even the contemporary poor had lost their dusty camouflage, but slapped in electric-blue plastic sandals, failing to obey the ordinary biological edict that as potential prey you lurked in the shade and didn’t call attention to yourself. His species had grown so alienated from the planet that they were determined to look as if they didn’t belong here.

  Now, possibly they didn’t wear Day-glo pink Bermuda shorts in the Middle Ages because no one could make the dye. Maybe his people had never been constrained by good taste but by the inability to accomplish bad taste, a technical problem we have overcome.

  Maybe we have always yearned for ugliness, our streets hoarded with our own image, and at last we have found the means to display our jarring, trashy interior on an international scale.

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  Calvin did not think of himself as nostalgic, but he did wonder if he’d been born in the wrong time. He tried to imagine the Rift only a hundred years ago, when crossing the valley with thirsty donkeys would have been an achievement—no DANIDA water projects. A time, not so long ago, when you didn’t have to hunt down the odd gazelle in parks to gawk from the car you were not allowed to leave, but had to duck behind bluffs to keep from getting trampled by thousands of them. Or even earlier, when humans, too, were an endangered species—not from their own suffocating fecundity, their smutty use of the earth as a giant commode, but from wolves, lions, buffalo. Calvin seemed like a man so hostile to children, but in an earlier era he might have been fiercely protective of them. He dreamt of the days when every child successfully reared against the unlikely odds of tsetse fly and leopard was a prize of survival, a strange, upright, sparsely haired creature with exotic long fingers and dextrous opposable thumbs—quick, laughing, with too many questions.

  How he would have relished being prehistoric. How many twee dinners at the Horseman he would have sacrificed for one rabbit, roasted on an open fire, that he’d stabbed with a stick because he was quick and the clan was hungry. He craved a country where a glimpse of your own kind was a shaft of light, serendipity, instead of one more prat to keep from running into on the footpath. For as much as he thrived on over-population he resented it. Calvin himself would like to be rare. Instead he was stuck in a world that replicated him at every turn, trapping him in a fun-house of the slightly fatter or shorter. He was not incapable, he supposed, of joy or even gratitude in the face of company so long as there was not so much of it.

  To waylay depression, Calvin entertained notions of a far less populated vista, not of the past but of the future, thanks to the dire designs of the dastardly Dr Piper. Since he would never be allowed to see the day, it was up to Calvin to imagine the forthcoming paperback exposés: Cropped!; sensationalist biographies: The Baby Slayer; or maybe someone in the future would have a sense of humour: The Population Bum. Photographic inserts: Calvin in his stetson before the heaped grey carcasses; a few winsome black and whites of Eleanor Merritt,

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  a name every schoolchild would know, in some histories an unwitting dupe, blinded by love, in others a conniving, sex-crazed accom-plice to worldwide pogrom. Documentaries: Show-on, nine solid hours of survival footage everyone in New York would have to watch in one sitting and pretend to like. Perhaps a comic book: Dr Demo. Children’s rhymes! Calvin Piper pricked a pack of knackered peckers…

  Calvin arrived at Lake Magadi, a bizarre natural soda deposit where he must have felt comfortable because it looked so entirely extraterrestrial.
For miles the lake was covered in a pinkish scab.

  Insects fled before his bumper in ashen waves. The alkaline water was toxic; if you waded the shore it would slough your skin. Calvin idled on a spit. Below the chalky crust, from an algae that thrived in so perverse a liquid, the stagnant water was scarlet, as if the nearby plant was not a soda factory but an abattoir. He had to resist the temptation to dip his hand in the red sea and taste it: salty and thick, the pool of Lake Magadi was murderous.

  Magadi lapping sluggishly at his tyres, Calvin careered its bloody shore picturing the post-Pachyderm century—when in yearly ceremonies all over the world (pleasantly diminished) crowds would pass the peace and close their eyes in minutes of memorial silence.

  Dark marble monuments would wall Washington, the big stone commissions splayed across two-page spreads in Sunday magazine sections. Scholars would paw through his flawless primary school reports and uneventful childhood diaries for confirmation of obscure developmental theories; university libraries would battle for original files. Despite his public execution, tabloids would headline that Calvin Piper was still alive, toil and troubling in Argentina and dining with Elvis Presley. Meanwhile Interpol would be following the faint beige make-up trail of the bedraggled Bunny Morton, who, still grieving over the only man she ever loved, would betray herself to undercover agents because she craved celebrity and couldn’t keep her mouth shut.

  In his own field, even the most brown-nosing Ehrlich-ers would be falling all over themselves to disown him, and anything that smacked of population control or even family planning would get its budget nuked. Yet every once in a great while a brave biologist would suggest that, really, the

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  race had been awfully fortunate to suffer a cutback right before the species would have burgeoned to destabilizing size, hinting that maybe QUIETUS was not so barmy after all. The poor sod would get shot down as a fascist. So no one would observe that economies were booming, jobs plentiful, hunger and disease rare; that by the time the population returned to six billion its growth rate had safely levelled off; that after the disappearance of a third of their citizens overnight most countries had had enough war for the time being.