I know this because I have been staring at it for forty-seven minutes and the numbers are exactly where I left them, in precisely the columns I assigned them, doing absolutely nothing wrong, which is more than I can say for myself. Column G is correctly summed. The conditional formatting is flawless. The projected mortality risk for the Hendricks account is accurate to four decimal places. None of this helps me. I have read the same row of figures so many times that the numbers have stopped meaning anything and become a purely aesthetic arrangement of shapes, which is catastrophic, because the numbers are supposed to mean something, the numbers are supposed to be the thing I understand, the reliable and predictable territory I retreat to when everything else becomes overwhelming.
Everything else is overwhelming.
I close the spreadsheet. I open it again. The numbers remain unchanged. Column G, still correct.
Outside my office window, the Guumstrop and Varik Actuarial Associates floor is its usual morning configuration: four Orcs the size of heavy furniture working in focused,companionable silence, the air carrying the particular mix of old paper and strong coffee that I have always found settling, the kind of environment I specifically sought when the prospect of sharing office space with humans who flinched every time I stood up became professionally untenable. Drekka Varik, my business partner, is annotating a report with a pen she has whittled down to approximately two centimetres. Horvath, our senior analyst, is eating what appears to be his third breakfast pastry. Everything on this floor is correctly scaled. The chairs do not creak in alarm when I sit in them. The door frames are generous. The teacups are actual cups.
I left Livia's flat at four seventeen in the morning.
I know the exact time because I stood outside her building in the remaining rain for eleven minutes before my leg muscles accepted the instruction to move, and I checked my phone at four twenty-eight, and the maths is not complicated. I walked home. It takes forty minutes at a normal pace, longer when you are walking slowly because walking slowly means arriving home later and arriving home later means a delayed reckoning, and I was genuinely interested in delaying the reckoning for as long as structurally possible.
The reckoning arrived anyway, because reckonings are not subject to negotiation.
Here is what I know about myself with the precision of someone who has spent thirty-one years gathering data. I am not a human man. This is not a revelation. I have been not a human man for the entirety of my existence and I have developed, through considerable effort and a substantial amount of professional development literature, a set of behaviours designed to make this fact as unobtrusive as possible in human social contexts. I speak carefully. I move deliberately. I have filed down every physical and psychological sharp edge I can locate. I have been, in every meaningful respect, the leastOrcish Orc I know how to be, because the alternative is watching humans arrange their faces into expressions they believe are polite neutrality but are in fact extremely legible fear, and I find that particular experience nearly unbearable.
Last night, in Livia Chordas's living room, on her sofa that barely accommodated one of my thighs, with the rain against her window and her hands in my hair, I was not the least Orcish Orc I know how to be. I was, in terms of behavioural data, quite significantly Orcish. The restraint I maintain, which I think of as a kind of structural load-bearing wall in my personality, developed over years and maintained with active, continuous effort, simply ceased to function. Not degraded. Not compromised. Ceased. The wall was there and then it was not there and in its absence I was something considerably more primal and considerably less careful than I have any business being with a human woman who is roughly sixty percent of my height and whose entire wrist fits inside my hand with room remaining.
She said she was fine. She said it several times, with notable conviction, in contexts that suggested sincerity rather than politeness. I believed her in the moment, because the moment was not a context in which my risk assessment faculties were operating at full capacity. The moment was a context in which my risk assessment faculties had evacuated the building and left a note that just saidgood luck.
In the cold and the quiet of four seventeen in the morning, watching her sleep with her face tipped into the sofa cushion and every blanket I could locate piled around her, the risk assessment faculties returned, assessed, and delivered their verdict without mercy. I had been too much. Too large, too loud, too fundamentally non-human, and she had been gracious about it in the way that a very kind person is gracious about something distressing because she is constitutionally incapable of beingunkind, and the kindest thing I could do was not be there when she woke up and had to find polite words for wanting me gone.
So I washed the teacup. I folded the towel. I tucked the blankets with as much structural care as I could manage with hands that were not entirely cooperative. And I left.
And now I am here, in my correctly-scaled office, staring at Column G, and I need to send an apology email.
I open a new message. I address it to the address she gave me when I texted after our first drink, the address I stored in my phone under "Livia Chordas (date)" because I was trying to be organised about this and organisation is another word for hope, apparently. The cursor blinks in the subject line and I type, delete, and retype several variations before landing on what I consider the least catastrophic option.
Subject: Follow-up re: Last Night / Formal Apology and Risk Assessment Summary
I look at it. I look at it for a long time. I delete "Risk Assessment Summary" and replace it with "Explanation", then delete "Explanation" and replace it with "Apology Itemised", then delete the entire subject line and sit with the blinking cursor for another four minutes.
Subject: Apology
I begin the body of the email.
Dear Livia,
I am writing to formally apologise for my conduct last night, which I have reviewed extensively and identified as falling significantly below the behavioural standards I hold myself to in human social contexts. I want to be transparent about the specific areas of concern.
I stop. I read it back. The words are correct and precise and entirely wrong in a way I cannot quantify. I continue.
First, I should acknowledge that my departure this morning, without prior notice or discussion, was a significantfailure of social protocol. I want to clarify that this decision was not a reflection of any dissatisfaction with the evening. It was, rather, a risk-mitigation strategy, in that I calculated that my continued presence upon your waking would create an awkward social obligation on your part to?—
I stop again.
I am describing her as a social obligation. She is not a social obligation. She is a woman who laughed so suddenly at something I said about variance analysis that she inhaled part of her martini, and who touched my scars with the kind of careful curiosity that suggested she found them interesting rather than alarming, and who told me to stop apologising approximately nine times over the course of the evening, with decreasing patience and increasing warmth, and who grabbed my wrist in a bar because I was an actuary and she wanted to know.
She is not a social obligation.
I delete the second paragraph and try again.
I want to be clear that the failure here is entirely mine. I know my physical presence in intimate contexts is, statistically speaking, a significant variable. The probability that I caused you discomfort, either physically or psychologically, without adequate?—
The office intercom buzzes.
"Narod." Grukka's voice, which has the particular quality of gravel being processed through a cement mixer, has been the sound of my front desk for six years. Grukka is sixty-four, covered in more scar tissue than any single Orc requires, and regards all non-Orc visitors to our office with profound scepticism that I have been unable to train her out of because it is, she maintains, simply her face. "There is a very small, very angry human woman here demanding to audit you."
I look at the unfinished email on my screen.
