Darwinia

She tried never to ask herself the ultimate question: What if he finds out who I am? It was an old, abiding fear. Crane could be a charming man. But she knew he would never be merciful.

Alone in his office, Matthew Crane took off his jacket, stretched his arm across the lacquered desk top, and rolled up the sleeve of his shirt. He put a blotter under his elbow to soak up the blood that continued to flow.

He had stumbled against the water fountain in the lobby and somehow lacerated the skin of his left forearm. The arm was bleeding. That was an unwelcome novelty. It had been a long time since Crane had seen more than a dram of his own blood.

If this was his own blood. It seemed not quite right. It was the wrong shade of red, for one thing. A muddy brick red, almost brown. Something in it sparkled like flecks of mica. And the blood was viscous, like honey; and it smelled faintly (perhaps more than faintly) of ammonia.

Blood, Matthew Crane thought feverishly, should not do these things.

The wound itself was minor, more an abrasion than a cut, quite superficial, really, except that it didn’t rush to heal itself, and the underflesh revealed by the wound was peculiarly structured, not like honest human meat, more like the hemorrhaging honeycomb of a wasp’s nest.

He buzzed Lily on the interoffice line and asked her to have some cotton and a bandage sent up from the infirmary. “And please don’t make a crisis of it — I’ve only scratched myself.”

A moment’s silence. “Yes, sir,” she said.

Crane replaced the phone. A drop of blood dribbled onto his pants. The smell was stronger now. Like something the janitor might use to clean a toilet.

He took several calming breaths and examined his hands. His fingers looked like an infant’s fingers, pink and unformed. The last of the nails had come off during the night. He had searched for them, childishly, petulantly, but hadn’t been able to find them among the pink-stained bedclothes.

He still had his toenails, however. They were trapped in his shoes. He could feel them, loose and tangled in the webbing of his Argyll socks.

Lily arrived a few moments later with cotton pads and a bottle of disinfectant. He had neglected to cover his arm, and she gaped at the wound. She would be hysterical, Crane thought, if she got a closer look. He thanked her and told her to get out.

He poured iodine over the cut and mopped up the excess with a copy of the Congressional Proceedings. Then he tied loose cotton around his arm with a shoelace and rolled his tattered and blood-brown sleeve down over the mess.

He would need a new jacket, but what was he supposed to do? Send Lily out to a men’s shop?

Something had gone wrong, and it was more than the loss of his nails, more than the wound, more than the unnerving silence of his indwelling god. Crane felt the wrongness in his bones, literally. He ached all over. He imagined he could feel an upheaval in the mantle of the Earth, a clashing of the gears that operated the material world.

Battle is at hand, he thought, the moment of ascendancy, the dawning of a new age; the gods would erupt from their hidden valley in Europe, would build their palaces with the bones of the truculent masses, and Crane would live forever, would rule forever his barony of the conquered Earth…

His god had told him so.

What had gone wrong?

Maybe nothing. But he was falling apart.

He held up his nailless fingers, ten pudgy pink sausages.

He saw from the litter on the desk that his hair had begun to fall out, too.

Matthew Crane didn’t leave his office during the morning, and he canceled the day’s appointments. For all Lily knew he might had died of exsanguination, except that he rang periodically with demands for more bandages, a mop and bucket, a bag of surgical cotton. (“Quickly,” on this last request. “And for Christ’s sake be discreet.”)

Hard to be discreet, Lily thought, when you’re begging bottles of Pine-Sol from the building’s janitor.

Crane accepted these offerings through a door barely ajar; Lily was forbidden to come in.

But even through this chary aperture she could smell the bitter tang of ammonia, bleach, and something more pungent, sharp as nail polish remover. Barb and Carol wrinkled their noses, stared at their typewriters, said nothing.

They left promptly at four-thirty. The interoffice line buzzed just as Lily was tidying her own desk. She was alone in the spacious outer office, echoes muted by carpeting, the tiled ceiling, the banks of recessed lighting. Outside the office’s single window, daylight was already waning. Her ficus, she observed, had begun to wilt.

Don’t pick up the phone, Lily thought. Just take your purse and leave.