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
