“But I thought you said there was no work for them in the countryside.”
“I mean real home. The big, happy, careless world of nonexistence. Where the rent is low and the corn grows high.”
Eleanor never knew what to say when he talked this way.
“Nothing,” Calvin growled on, “rankles me like these pink-spectacled tulip-tiptoers who claim technological advance is going to sort everything out pretty. You should hear Wallace Threadgill gibber about hybrid crops and the exciting future of intensive agriculture: multiple storeys of artificially lit fields like high-rise car-parks. How likely is that, in a country where just a dial tone is an act of God? I assure you, Africans are not the only ones who believe in magic.”
They were passing Wilson Airport, where several dozen Kenyans gripped the chain-link, transfixed by take-offs. Later she’d discover they could gawk at banking two-seaters all day. She admired their sense of wonder, but how many of those men on the wrong side of the fence would ever board an aeroplane?
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
