Game Control

At last they arrived at Eleanor’s new home, a two-storey terraced-house, what Africans think an American would like. The rooms were square and white, and there was too much furniture, cheap veneer and brand-new. The kitchen was stacked with matching heat-proof dishware and matching enamel cooking pots with nasty little orange daisies.

“Imagine,” sighed Eleanor, “coming all the way to Africa for this.”

“Early New Jersey,” he conceded.

“I’d rather they’d put me down in a slum.”

“Not these slums. Stroll through Mathare enough afternoons and you will come to love your Corningware coffee cups. You will return home to take deep, delighted lungfuls of the faintly chemical, deodorized air wafting off your plastic curtains. You will never forget, after the first few days, to lock your door, and you will sleep with the particular dreamless peace of a woman without ten other people in the same bed.”

Eleanor collapsed into a vinyl recliner, which stuck to her thighs. “I’m supposed to be grateful? I’m supposed to run about merrily flushing the toilet and being amazed?”

Calvin turned towards the door, and Eleanor’s imagination panicked through her evening. It was now late afternoon. The light would soon be effervescent, although Eleanor would be immune to it, and in the way of the Equator would die like a snapped overhead. Supposing she found a shop, she would return to New Jersey with white bread, an overripe pineapple, a warm bottle of beer. She wouldn’t be hungry; she’d nothing to read; and she hadn’t seen a phone. So she’d haggle with the pineapple, dig the spines out and leave the detritus to collect fruit flies by morning. Back in the recliner, she would quickly kill the beer with syrupy fingers, staring at her noise-proof ceiling tiles, listening to the hum of neon—she should have bought a second beer but now it was too late; she wasn’t sleepy and it was only eight o’clock—the time of tar.

Hand on the doorknob, Calvin laughed. “Don’t worry,” he said, finally raising his sun-glasses, “I won’t abandon you here.” He lifted her lovingly as the chair sucked at her skin with its promise of evenings to come, already imprinted with the sweaty impression of a Good Person and her too-effective family planning, lying in wait for tomorrow night and another tacky expanse of brown vinyl hell.

When he drove her out she didn’t ask where they were going since she didn’t care, so long as it was away from that chair.

“The driving here,” Calvin ventured mildly, “now that is population control.”

For some time they were stuck behind a lorry full of granite, with a boy splayed on the rocks, craning over the exhaust pipe to take deep lungfuls of black smoke. Eleanor shuddered.

“It gets them high,” Calvin explained.

“It’s carbon monoxide!”

The sun had barely begun to set when Calvin pulled into the Nairobi Game Park, which suited her. She hated safaris, but did enjoy animals, especially tommies and hartebeests, the timid step and frightened eyes with which she identified. The park, so close to the centre of town, was an achievement of preservation in its extent. Yet after an hour of teeming the criss-crossed dirt tracks, they had seen: one bird. Not a very big bird. Not a very colourful bird. A bird.

Calvin parked on a hill, with a view of the plains, and nothing moved. “Had enough?”

“How strange.”

“The sprawl of Ongata Rongai has cut off migrations. All that granite in the backs of lorries, it’s for more squat grey eye-sores up the road. Happy homes for the little nation builders. The animals can’t get back in the park.”

However, as the horizon bled, the plain rippled with shadow like the ghosts of vanquished herds galloping towards the car, the air cooling with every wave as their one bird did its orchestral best. The hair rose on Eleanor’s arms. “It’s gorgeous, Dr. Piper. Sorry.”

Defeated, he reversed out to reach the gate before it closed.

I’ve worked in India,” Calvin resumed with a more contemplative voice in the sudden dark. “There’s something attractive about reincarnation—with a basis in physics—that energy is neither created nor destroyed. But when you’ve a worldwide population that doubles in forty years, the theory has some simple arithmetic problems: where do you get all those extra souls? So I reason the species started out with, say, a hundred whole, possibly even noble spirits. When we exceeded our pool of a hundred, these great souls had to start subdividing. Every time a generation doubles, it halves the interior content of the individual. As we’ve multiplied, the whole race has become spiritually dilute. Like it? I’m a science fiction fan.”

“Is that how you feel? Like a tiny piece of a person?”

“Perhaps. But from the zombies I’ve seen walking this town, there must be a goodly number of folk who didn’t get a single sliver of soul at all.”

“You’ve an egregious reputation, Calvin. But that’s the first time I’ve heard you say something truly dangerous.”

“Stick around.”

He pulled into a drive, and she guessed they were near Karen again.

Calvin’s home was modestly sized, and in daylight she would find it a surprisingly sweet brick cottage creepered with bougainvillaea, when she pictured the lair of a famous doomsayer more like the flaming red caves of Apocalypse Now. In fact, most of the conservation Jeremiahs with which this neighbourhood was poxed lived in pristine, lush, spacious estates that made you wonder where they got their ideas from. Inside, too, Eleanor was struck by how normal his rooms looked, though he did not go in for the carvings and buffalo bronzes that commonly littered the white African household. Instead she found the room towered with journals and mountainous tatters of clippings. The bookshelves were lined in science fiction, with a smattering of wider interests: Chaos,Eichmann in Jerusalem, The Executioner’s Song and a biography of Napoleon. All the records and CDs were classical save a recording of Sweeney Todd. There was a touch of the morbid in his Francis Bacon prints, their faces of hung meat, and in the one outsized bone on his coffee table that could only have come from an elephant, but the femur had blanched in the sun until porous like driftwood. It was not deathly, merely sculptural, suggesting that anything killed long enough ago retires from tragedy to knick-knack.

She inspected two framed photos on the wall. The first was of a black diver in a wet suit, her hood down and short hair beaded. The face itself was small, the chin sharp and narrow; but the eyes were enormous and at this angle showing an alarming amount of white. The girl had great buck teeth which were somehow, in their startling, unapologetic dominance of the thin lower lip, attractive. The smile was carnivorous, and she was clutching a diving knife—“what little good it did her”, Calvin would remark later. Though the young woman was beautiful in some inexplicable way, the face was haunting and a little fearsome, all eyeball and grin, and the contours of cheek or chin, the tiny body they guarded, would always seep away in Eleanor’s memory however many times she’d study the photo when Calvin wasn’t in. It was a face you wouldn’t want to come upon in the dark, though that is exactly when it would float before her, gloating with all that underworldly power that Eleanor herself felt cheated of.

The second photo was of Calvin, posed in a cocky stetson and muddy safari gear, one hand akimbo and the other on a blunderbuss, with a rumpled grey mountain range behind him. Calvin, too, was grinning here. He did not have the girl’s enormous teeth, but both sinister smiles and sidelong glances alluded to the same unsaid. They seemed to be looking at each other. Eleanor felt excluded.

In the safari photo Calvin could not have been more than twenty-five, and the image challenged her original assessment from across the conference hall that he had not changed. Oh, he’d lost some hair, which lengthened his forehead and made him look more intelligent; and the weather had leathered him, for here he was seamless and by the time she met him he had already slipped into that indeterminate somewhere between thirty-five and sixty that certain men seem able to maintain until they’re ninety-two and of which women, who have no such timeless equivalent, are understandably jealous. Yet none of this transformation was interesting. In the picture his stare was searing; now Calvin’s eyes had gone cold. They no longer glinted like sapphire but glared like marble.

She did a double take. The mountain range was a stack of dead elephants.

“In the early sixties I culled for the Ugandan game authorities,” Calvin explained. “They were the first on the continent to realize they had a population problem. Despite a two-year gestation, elephants multiply like fury. And they devastate the land—tear trees up by the roots, trample the undergrowth. By the time we arrived the vegetation was stripped, and other species were dying out. Left to their own devices, elephants eliminate their own food supply. In earlier times, they’d migrate to wreck some other hapless bush, and slowly the fauna they plundered would grow back. Now, of course, there’s nowhere for them to go. Once they’ve ruined their habitat, they starve, by the tens of thousands. In short order the species is in danger of extinction. So we were brought in to crop. We took out seven elephants a day for two years.”

“That sounds horrendous.”

“Those were the best years of my life. And the work was a great cure for sentimentality. In culling, you have to shoot whole families. Orphans get peckish.”

“No wonder you have no feeling for infant mortality.”

“That’s right,” he agreed affably. “And it was a professional operation, with full utilization: we’d cut out the tusks, carve up the carcasses and fly the meat back to Kampala. Not bad, elephant meat. A little tough.”

“I’m confused—I thought the problem with elephants was poaching.” She fingered one of the stacks of clippings: deforestation, ozone holes, global warming—fifteen solid inches of disaster, teetering from constant additions on the edge of his end table, like the world itself on the brink.

“It is now,” he carried on. “But as soon as you clean up the poaching, over-population sets in again. Why, in Tsavo—Starvo, as it is better known—the Game Department insisted for years their elephants were dying off because of poaching, but that yarn was a front for their own mismanagement. You got game wardens carving out the tusks of emaciated carcasses to make it look as if the animals had been poached; but the real story was the monsters had over-reproduced and torn the place apart until there wasn’t a leaf in the park. It was grotesque. I begged David Sheldrick to let me in there to cull, but no-no.” It was hard to imagine Calvin Piper imploring anyone. “He hated me.”

“Lots of people seem to hate you.”

“Flattering, isn’t it? As usual in issues of any importance, the conflict degenerated to petty vendetta. I said the problem was population; Sheldrick said it was poaching; and the lousy animals got lost in the shuffle. All that mattered to Sheldrick was being right.”

“What mattered to you?”

“Being right, what do you think?”

“Over-population—I thought elephants were endangered.”

“Oh, they are,” he said lightly. “Then, so are we.”

“What’s happening in Starvo now?”

“A few sad little herds left. Now the problem’s poaching, all right. While the elephant community spends its time firing furious, bitchy articles at each other, I’ve retired from the fight. The absurdity of the poaching-population controversy is that they are both problems. If you successfully control poaching but restrict migration, the ungainly pachyderms maraud through the park and then they starve. If you fail to control poaching, they’re simply slaughtered. The larger problem is that humans and elephants cannot coexist. The Africans despise them, and if you’d ever let one of those adorable babies loose in your vegetable patch you’d see why. The only answer, as much as there is one, is stiff patrolling and a regular cull—what they do in South Africa.”

“They would.”

Calvin smiled. “South Africans aren’t squeamish. But here culling has become unpopular. The bunny-huggers have decided that it traumatizes the poor dears; that we create whole parks full of holocaust survivors. And you would like this, Eleanor: they’re now trying to develop elephant contraceptives.”

“Do they work?”

He laughed. “Do they work with people? You should know.”

“I suppose the acceptance rate is rather low.”