Chapter 12 Narod
NAROD
The word barbaric sits in the air above Priya's wine glass like a thing with weight and edges, and I conduct a very rapid internal assessment.
The statistical probability that she meant genuine harm is low.
I have enough experience with humans, with their loosened social inhibitions and their pattern of categorising the unfamiliar, to recognise the tone.
Curiosity without cruelty. The kind of thoughtless comment that arrives through a gap in one's filters rather than through any particular malice.
My actuarial brain builds the model in approximately four seconds flat, assigns probabilities, weighs variables.
Priya, thirty-one, a physiotherapist, on her third glass of something that smells like dark cherry and tannins, operating at roughly sixty-five percent of her usual social awareness.
Probability of deliberate offence, seventeen percent.
Probability of genuine cultural ignorance, seventy-eight percent.
The model doesn't help the way I wish it would.
I pick my fork back up. This is a conscious decision, picking it back up, because it had started to bend slightly under my grip and I do not want to damage Livia's silverware.
I set it against the plate instead, properly, tines down, the way a civilised person does, the way I have practised, and I look at Priya's expectant face, still slightly flushed, still waiting for an answer, and I construct the most precise and neutral smile in my available repertoire.
"It is not a cultural practice," I say. My voice comes out exactly the register I intended.
Measured. Polite. The voice I use in client-facing meetings when a portfolio has significantly underperformed and no one in the room wants to hear the numbers.
"Orc tusks are simply physiological. Analogous to wisdom teeth in humans, structurally, though the developmental function is. " I pause. "Somewhat different."
Priya nods, looking vaguely satisfied, vaguely like she might ask a follow-up question, and I have already decided that I am going to give her the complete biological overview if she does, very calmly, very thoroughly, until the conversation naturally redirects itself toward something that requires her to refill her wine glass.
Under the table, Livia's hand finds my knee.
It is a small thing. A quiet thing. The pressure of five human fingers through the fabric of my dress trousers, and the specific, overwhelming acuity I have noticed is unique to her, this woman who is not large enough to reach my shoulder without standing on her toes but who has occupied more square footage of my waking thoughts in the last three weeks than any variable I have ever tried to model.
The pressure says I know and I'm sorry and you don't have to perform anything right now in a vocabulary that requires no words, and I experience the deeply inconvenient sensation of wanting very badly to leave this table and take her with me.
I do not do that. I lift my fork again and I eat the lamb, which is extraordinary, genuinely extraordinary, she slow-cooked it with rosemary and something else I couldn't identify and the flavour is precise and complex and I have been rationing my portions all evening to avoid consuming the majority of the serving dish, which is a genuine ongoing effort.
Dev asks me something about actuarial tables.
I answer it. Maya asks about whether I enjoy living in the city.
I answer that too, the whole truth of it, the particular, specific pleasure I take in the organised noise of it, the logistical density of millions of humans operating in close proximity according to a thousand overlapping sets of rules.
James makes a decent joke about the oyster card system failing at rush hour.
I laugh. The laugh is real. The conversation rebuilds itself around us, tentative at first and then more confident, and Greta says something to Livia that makes Livia throw her head back and I notice the clean line of her throat from the corner of my eye and think, with the quiet certainty I have been accumulating for three weeks, that I am absolutely in enormous trouble.
Priya, to her credit, spends the remainder of dinner being perfectly pleasant and refilling everyone's glasses with the democratic generosity of someone making unspoken amends.
I excuse myself to use the bathroom at approximately nine forty-five.
This is partially true. I do need a moment of vertical space that does not require me to angle my shoulders around a dining chair designed for a physiology approximately three-quarters the mass of mine.
But I also stand in the narrow hallway outside the bathroom for ninety seconds with my back against the wall and my eyes closed and I do the breathing exercise my GP recommended, the one I have never actually admitted to anyone I use, slow counts and deliberate exhales and the mental exercise of listing measurable, concrete things in my immediate environment.
Coat rack. Six hooks. One large coat, olive green.
Three smaller coats including a scarf that smells like Livia's perfume, the vanilla one she wears on occasions that matter to her.
I open my eyes and look at myself in the mirror above the hallway table.
Wire-rimmed glasses. Broad, heavy jaw. Tusks that I have filed and polished with a meticulous monthly maintenance routine specifically so that they look less like what they are, which is a residual evolutionary feature of a species that humanity has, throughout history, found comprehensively threatening.
Sage skin under the warm yellow of her hallway light.
A shirt that fits my arms reasonably well but pulls noticeably across my chest regardless of what size I purchase, which I have resolved as a problem through the tactical deployment of blazers.
The blazer is on the back of the dining chair right now.
Without it I look, someone once said in the background of a conversation they didn't realise I could hear, like something escaped from a mythology textbook.
Barbaric, Priya said. With the breezy, unguarded ease of someone stating a thing that to them is simply a shared cultural understanding. A given. The category she reached for first, with no awareness that I could hear it land.
I have been calculating something all evening and I have been avoiding the result.
The result is this: Livia is extraordinary.
She is precise and funny and unexpectedly fierce and she came to my office three weeks ago with the energy of a woman who had decided to conduct a forensic emotional audit and was not leaving until she had the results she required, and she is also entirely human, embedded entirely in a social world that functions on human assumptions and human categories, and I am, permanently and without any corrective possible, not that.
I can wear the sweater vests. I can file the tusks.
I can research the correct fork for the salad course and make the decent joke about pension fund risk and listen attentively to her friends' careers and opinions and I can do all of this indefinitely, and there will still be a moment, every single time, in every single room, when the conversation goes quiet and someone reaches for the word that arrives most naturally, and the word is not interesting or impressive or even intimidating.
The word is barbaric. The word is monster. The word is the gap in the record where I don't fit, no matter the argyle vest.
And Livia will be sitting next to that gap at every dinner table for as long as she is with me, absorbing the silence and the dropped forks and the Priyas of every future gathering, and she will hold my knee under the table and say nothing because she is loyal and fierce and she has decided, for reasons I cannot fully model, that I am worth the expenditure.
But I can model the cost. I am, professionally, exceptionally good at modelling long-term costs.
I straighten my glasses. I go back to the table.
I insist on paying for dinner.
This requires a brief negotiation because Livia has already reached for her card and she argues with the energy of someone who has opinions about financial equity in relationships, which I find deeply endearing and which I win anyway by the simple method of making eye contact with the server across the room before she can intercept the transaction.
The server, to their credit, processes it with the professional efficiency of someone who has decided not to get involved in whatever dynamic is currently operating between the very large Orc and the very determined small woman in the glasses.
"Narod. I had a budget for this."
"Your budget can remain intact for another occasion."
"That is not the point."
"I know." I help her into her chair as people begin collecting coats and bags, and she twists around to look at me. "The lamb was extraordinary," I tell her, honestly. "You should make it again sometime."
She looks at me for another three seconds before Greta says something that requires her attention, and I put on my blazer.
Priya, in the small corridor where coats are being retrieved, touches my arm. Her hand barely reaches it. She looks up at me with the slightly rueful expression of someone whose filter has reassembled itself and is providing a full retrospective assessment of the evening's lapses.
"Narod. About the thing I said earlier. At dinner."
"It's quite all right."
"No, it was." She exhales. "It was a stupid thing to say. I don't actually think that. You're. You've been really lovely tonight and I said a stupid thing."
I look at her. She is sincere. She is holding her coat against her chest and she is looking up at me with the discomfort of someone confronting their own thoughtlessness, and she is sincere, and I believe her, and it doesn't change the model I've been running all evening.
"Genuinely," I say, "don't worry about it. Thank you for a lovely evening."
I wait until the goodbyes have finished and the group begins moving toward the door. Livia is mid-sentence with Maya, something about a work situation, and she has her hand on Maya's arm.
Then I zip my coat and slip out the door.
The city at ten o'clock on a Sunday is its own particular organism.
It rains, which I notice has become something of a recurring motif in my life over the past three weeks, and I walk with my hands in my pockets and my shoulders hunched against the cold, though hunching is also simply a default posture, an accommodation so deeply habitual I am no longer always aware of it.
I take the long route, away from the main street, into the quieter roads where the restaurants are closed and the windows of the residential buildings glow amber and I am, out here, simply a large shape moving along a wet pavement.
No one to file the tusks for out here.
I think about Livia at seven years old, probably, with a bookshelf and a set of coloured pens for her organisational system, building the infrastructure of the precise and careful person she became.
I think about her apartment, which I have learned over three weeks, the particular geography of her shelves and her kitchen and the small chaos she maintains on her desk which she defends vigorously as a filing system that works for her.
I think about the way she laughs, the full one, not the polite one, which involves her entire face and occasionally her shoulder and which she sometimes redirects into her cardigan sleeve when she's in public and doesn't want to be loud.
I think about what it costs her to have me in those spaces.
The rain finds the gap between my collar and my neck. I pull the coat tighter and keep walking, which is not a solution to anything but is an available action, and available actions are sometimes the best the model can offer.
I should call her. I know I should call her.
I know that leaving without saying anything is precisely the behavioural pattern that resulted in her appearing in my office three weeks ago with the energy of someone prepared to conduct a hostile takeover, and I know that she will be concerned, and I know that the correct, considerate, non-avoidant action is to call her.
I reach into my pocket and hold the phone.
I put it back.
The problem with calling her is that I do not currently have a version of the conversation that doesn't arrive at the same model output, and I have not yet identified the variable that changes it, and I am better at this when I have the variable.
When I can say here is the risk, here is the mitigation, here is the revised probability.
I need to find the revised probability before I can have the conversation, or I will say something clumsy and she will hold my knee again and look at me with the expression that means she has already decided I am worth the expenditure, and I will believe her, and the cost will still be what it is.
I turn up a road I don't know particularly well and walk until I find a low concrete wall outside a closed pharmacy and sit on it, which takes a degree of structural confidence in the wall's loadbearing capacity that I don't technically have the data to support.
The rain comes steadily. The city makes its organism sounds around me, distant traffic and voices from the pub down the road and the specific percussion of water through the drainage system, and I sit with my hands on my knees and my glasses getting rained on and I think about spreadsheets and probability and the word barbaric and the way Livia's hand felt on my knee under the table like a coordinate that meant you are here, this is where you are, and I think about how very much I do not want to be a cost she has to absorb indefinitely, how very much I would rather be something else, something that fits cleanly in her life without requiring her to hold the gap shut every single time.
I think about this for a long time.
My phone vibrates. I look at the screen.
Livia calling.
I watch it ring. The screen pulse with her name and goes to voicemail, and the small notification appears, and I put the phone back in my pocket, and I sit on the wall outside the closed pharmacy, and I attempt to locate the variable.