Helen left work earlier than usual. It was still almost eight, and would be dark outside, when she left. She wandered through the corridors, abstractedly, not knowing what it was she chased until she saw Alex, sitting on a bench. It was stuffed and covered in plastic, and there were slits of use in it, and the stuffing was coming out, noxious and webby. He was sitting on a bench, and he was looking better—or floating and faraway, which was as better as he ever looked. But it was a false illusion, and when she sat beside him, he turned to her with a soft presence in his eyes. He was here. He was more here, perhaps, than any of them; and perhaps that was the problem. No one was meant to live in a maze indefinitely.
"Helen," he said, which was all. He never called her Miss Abberline. None of them did; with the others she understood, for it was part of the strangeness that was this job, and the jocular over-familiarity it engendered, and the way they erased the name with most presence of past or future or family so as to create the impression to everyone that nothing mattered but the job. It was a lie and everyone knew it, but they played the same game; Alex, though. Alex, Helen thought, was not playing the same game, and never had been. She wondered what he was playing, and what benefits he could ever get that could make up for a work that disgusted him.
"Alex," she said. "How are you?"
"As well as anyone is," Alex said.
She smiled grimly.
"Yes," she said. "Me, too."
He smiled at her, a bare wisp of a thing, and she had the sudden distinct impression that if he were the sort to touch he would have taken her hand. He did not touch anyone, she recalled. Not overtly, but he used none of the casual gestures of comradery and power that the other men did; and no one dared to touch him because of his aloofness, or perhaps that sense that something was off about him, which was undeniable. No, but he had walked into Philip's office and she had not seen him leave again, and she wondered.
His hand: his hand was fine-boned, like the rest of him, and frail, like an old man's hand, though he was young. The skin was stretched, and his nails were painted. She had never noticed. Painted like a woman might, to look natural, if her nails were bad. It reminded her of something; that empty milk skin; something natural, in a way that felt unnatural, for she rarely left the city and yet with Alex, all she could think of to describe him was everything that should be outside this box.
Something that hides, quietly, in forests, delicate and forbidding.
That was what it reminded her of, Helen thought: that soft sickly color; it was corpse plant by the path, that one afternoon when she was very small, playing with her cousins in America. He was corpse plant; that strange unwavering creature that bent its head down like tears, taking its nutrients from decay.
And from that moment on she wondered what would happen if he were touched, the way no one else quite seemed to dare; wondered if his skin would shake and bruise just from that single touch and unfurl a truer dark that had been waiting, underneath.
.
.
.