A Man Melting

by Craig Cliff

  ‘So what of you, David Leon, assistant VP of new revenue, MBA, BBS, esq.? What of your kind, 50,000 years from now? Have you thought of this? There are fish that have evolved their eyes to oblivion because they live in darkness. Will office workers become ‘h’-shaped so they are better suited to deskwork? The woodpecker’s tongue is as long as its body. Will office workers have telescopic arms to enable them to collect printouts without leaving their workstation? Whales can communicate across vast oceans. Will office workers find a way of communicating across continents without the aid of machines; that is, organically?

  ‘Have you thought about this at all?’

  Tuesday

  Last night I dreamt of work, which is not unusual in itself. Maxine has been known to nudge me and say, ‘You’re talking about variances again,’ or, ‘Darling, you’re pretending to shuffle paper.’ But in this dream the office was different. There was a goldfish in the water cooler. A donkey nudged the mail cart up the corridor with its nose. The floor in Meeting Room 3 was covered in sand.

  I related this dream to Charles Darwin in an email when I got in this morning.

  His reply: ‘Uninspired.’

  Me: ‘I didn’t make it up.’

  Him: ‘Yes, you did.’

  I wasn’t in a position to debate the difference between conscious and unconscious creations, having already spent twenty minutes emailing a famous deceased scientist. I hadn’t even finished shortlisting candidates for the junior analyst position. Once I had that monkey off my back, I paid Lib Drury a visit.

  Pinned above her desk is a bumper sticker that reads: In case of emergency, break gas

  I placed the applications down on a clear spot on her desk.

  ‘Have you had a chance —’

  ‘Dave, how are you?’

  ‘Fine. And you?’

  ‘Splitting headache, got worse the minute you came in. Just kidding. I’m fighting fit.’ She put up her fists, which she has referred to as dukes on more than one occasion.

  ‘These applications,’ I said.

  ‘Lottery?’ she said cryptically and bent, as best she could, to open the bottom drawer of her desk.

  ‘I guess paper applications aren’t the best way to separate the wheat from the —’

  She pulled a black pork pie hat from the drawer. I recognised it as the one she had worn to the ‘Golden Age of Hollywood’-themed Christmas party two years ago, though I have no idea which movie star she was supposed to be.

  ‘Do we have a list of names?’ she asked.

  ‘You’re not suggesting we draw their names out of a hat, literally?’

  ‘Do you have a better idea?’

  ‘This breaks countless procedures, Lib.’

  ‘Are you the same pedant at home that you are at work, David Leon?’

  I didn’t know what to say, so I picked up my pile of applications and left her office.

  Back at my desk I couldn’t shake the thought that Lib Drury was the one pretending to be Charles Darwin. When two people call you a pedant, in so many words, you’re bound to draw a link.

  ‘Why would she do something like that?’ I asked Maxine over dinner.

  ‘What makes you so sure it’s Lib Drury?’ she replied.

  ‘Who else could it be?’

  ‘But why would she have anything against you, David?’

  She reached across the table for the plum sauce, and we dropped the subject.

  Wednesday

  This morning I asked Sian to deliver a document to Lib Drury, her being my PA and all. Sometimes I feel compelled to remind her what PA stands for.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked, despite the fact the page was perfectly legible through the plastic sleeve.

  ‘A merit list of the applicants we should interview.’

  ‘You’re scared of Lib, aren’t you?’

  I tried explaining my conflict-management approach — by delivering the list in a non-threatening way, Lib would be more likely to follow procedure — but Sian was not convinced.

  It was a relief to see a new email from Charles Darwin when I returned to my desk.

  ‘Dear David Leon,

  ‘When Adam Rainer of Austria celebrated his 21st birthday in 1920, he was classified as a dwarf, standing just 3 feet 10½ inches tall. But in his early twenties something triggered a “growth spurt”, a release of growth hormone which had so cruelly been withheld earlier in his life. By the age of 32, Adam Rainer of Austria stood 7 feet 1¾ inches tall, a giant, but he was unable to stand, worn out by a decade of unprecedented growth.

  ‘There are many more examples of dwarves and midgets growing significantly — though not as profoundly as Adam Rainer of Austria, it has to be said — well after adolescence.

  ‘What causes the pituitary gland to act after years of indolence? Some say the growth is stimulated by the physical labours of adulthood, of earning a crust. Others claim psychological stimuli. In many cases: shame. A painful emotion resulting from an awareness of inadequacy.

  ‘What I say is this: any life form, but especially the human life form, is a complex system for which one solution is never enough.

  ‘If I told you to grow three inches this year, David Leon, could you? No. Most likely not. Perhaps if you read all the literature, visited experts, thought of nothing else, behaved like you would grow three inches, well, who knows?

  ‘But of course there is probably a drug around today …

  ‘A magic flute …’

  After reading this, I knew deep down it could not have been Lib Drury — Ms ‘In Emergency Break Gas’ — writing to me. But that only made the mystery press harder against my forehead. I re-read Darwin’s emails, thinking like Maxine:

  Who has a vested interest in sending me these messages?

  Who might want to distract me?

  Who might want to get me fired?

  I wondered if Sian was playing me for a fool. I looked out of my office at her freshly blonded hair, her skin a deeper shade of orange with every passing day as she packs in the sunbed sessions before her boyfriend returns from the Solomon Islands. It occurred to me that she is evolving. Turning herself into the creature she thinks will best meet her boyfriend’s needs. But when I tried to talk to her about evolution, her eyes clouded over, just like they do whenever I explain the difference between cc-ing and bcc-ing (discretion is not her strong suit).

  Thursday

  I have decided the fact Charles Darwin is emailing my work address is a red herring. My guess is he/she/they really do want me to change. To grow.

  But why?

  I’m still working on why.

  What keeps replaying in my head are Maxine’s words from two nights ago, though a more sinister tone may have crept into her voice, I’m not sure.

  What makes you so sure it’s Lib Drury?

  What makes you so sure it’s Lib Drury?

  Just to be safe, I’ve begun monitoring Maxine’s behaviour. To my knowledge there is no link between her bedtime reading (The Clan of the Cave Bear for the hundredth time) and the subject matter of Darwin’s latest email (the Huxley–Wilberforce debate of 1860: ‘Shouldn’t the question of whether or not Lady Brewster really fainted be at the heart of all enquiries?’). I’ve also checked the history of our internet browser, the activity on her library card … tomorrow I’ll give one of her colleagues a call. Just in case.

  Friday

  Charles Darwin’s latest email, all sixteen words of it:

  ‘Did you know I spent eleven days in New Zealand? We were all glad to leave.’

  My confrontation with Maxine:

  ‘Is it you, Maxine?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Is it you?’

  ‘This has really gotten under your skin, hasn’t it?’

  I stared at her, compelling her to answer.

  Finally, she said, ‘You shouldn’t have to ask, David. You shouldn’t.’

  ‘Is that because you are him, or you aren’t? If you want a holiday, just come out and say i
t!’

  ‘Stop it!’ she said. It was the end-of-her-tether voice she’d use with our misbehaving children, if we had any.

  ‘Is it you?’ I asked, softly, hardly any air in my lungs. ‘I need to know.’

  She shook her head and I spent the night on the couch.

  Monday

  ‘I was taught at school’, Charles Darwin began today’s email, ‘that the Earth was only six thousand years old. During my prime I held that it was in fact hundreds of millions of years old. Nowadays the consensus is that this fair planet is four billion years old. I sometimes wonder if it gets any older whether science might start looking as ridiculous as religion.

  ‘Personal confession time, David Leon. I believed once. When I was young I desired to lead an easy life as a country parson. I grew out of it. (When will you?) But when I stepped aboard HMS Beagle for the first time as a twenty-two year old, I still believed.

  ‘What happened?

  ‘I saw the world!’

  This afternoon we had the first batch of junior analyst interviews. Our competency-based questions (‘Describe a time you had to make a hard decision, and how you went about making that decision.’ ‘Give an example of a situation where you solved a problem in a creative way’ …) seemed to invite monologues about individual growth. All these kids — I call them that because that’s what they are, being almost half my age — had been ‘enriched’ and ‘improved’ by their unscrupulous paper-round bosses and battles with glandular fever. When the last candidate, a fresh-faced international business graduate called Olivia, said she had ‘evolved as a person’ after backpacking through China, it was too much.

  ‘So you’re familiar with On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life?’

  Olivia stared at me. Lib Drury grunted.

  ‘Charles Darwin emails me,’ I said. ‘I know it’s not really him, and I don’t think it’s you, Olivia, or you anymore, Lib, but it’s not in my head, either.’

  ‘Maybe you should take a breather, Dave,’ Lib suggested.

  ‘I should take a breather,’ I said, and stood up. ‘It’s not in my head, honest. Someone really wants me to … evolve.’

  I spent fifteen minutes downstairs, in the small park between my building and the next. Mostly I stared at the exposed roots of a tree, species unknown. When I got back to my desk, there was another email from my pal, Charles.

  ‘I’m not perfect, David Leon. When I was in the Galapagos archipelago, my shipmates and I ate forty-eight tortoises (especially delicious roasted in their shells) without bothering to bring a single adult specimen back to England. We tossed the shells overboard, would you believe?

  ‘But those islands would remain with me. It is where I chose to return, back on the 19th of April, 1882.

  ‘Death, it turns out, is a lot like life: full of choices.’

  In a moment of clarity, I forwarded this email to my friend Abram down in IT, asking if he could trace its origin. He replied that all they could tell me was the location of the sender’s ISP.

  ‘Whatever you can find,’ I told him.

  Tuesday

  Things are slowly coming around at Casa Leon. Tonight I found Maxine had beaten me home. She was sitting at the kitchen table sorting through shoeboxes full of photos.

  ‘Searching for a reason to forgive me?’ I asked.

  ‘Look at this.’ She held out a photo taken with my old Minolta: the two of us in Bali on our honeymoon.

  ‘That was a good wee camera,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t we look so young?’

  ‘I guess.’ I picked up another, more recent, shot. Me and Maxine at the Christmas party two years ago — dressed as Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire — taken with my first digital camera, a Canon A70. It was one of the last photos we’d had printed. ‘The evolution of photography,’ I said.

  She snatched the photo from me.

  ‘About the other night,’ I said. ‘About the last few days. I’m sorry.’

  She waved it off. ‘Most men, it’s cars or secretaries. I’m lucky your midlife crisis only involves a bit of paranoia and a dead scientist.’

  ‘Midlife crisis?’

  ‘You’re a prime candidate, David. Your age, your job, your family status …’

  She picked up the photo of Bali again and sighed.

  Wednesday

  There was an email from Abram and one from Charles Darwin waiting for me when I got to work this morning. I read Abram’s first:

  ‘Sorry to keep you hanging, David. Kinda crazy down here today.

  ‘Anyway, it seems you have a fan in the Galapagos Islands. The domain name was a hint, but our trace concurs. I didn’t know there was anything there but tortoises.’

  I kicked myself for not checking this out two weeks ago — it would have saved a lot of strife at home and work. It was a stranger emailing me, I knew that now. Someone who, like Maxine, thought I was primed for a midlife crisis. But I still couldn’t figure out why.

  I opened Charles Darwin’s email.

  ‘Many people still believe the Galapagos are as untouched as when I arrived the first time. Despite there being no indigenous human population, the islands are now home to over forty thousand inhabitants. Not bad for a few lumps of basalt in the middle of the Pacific. Not that I am trying to discourage you from paying a visit, far from it. But it would be remiss of me not to mention the Earth’s enforced evolution at the hands of human beings. Many would say devolution, but has this planet ever looked like this before? We’re still moving forwards, even if our destination is oblivion.

  ‘There is now a 370 mile long man-made lake in China where once there were 153 towns and 4500 villages and a landscape that inspired old po-face himself, Mao Zedong, to write a poem. Siberian crane, Yangtze River dolphin, Yangtze sturgeon, thanks for playing, remember to return your balls and leave your shoes at the desk (that’s a ten-pin bowling reference, David. I know you don’t get out much).

  ‘But it’s not all tidal waves and swallowed atolls.

  ‘Madagascar’s central highland plateau has been reduced to desert due to slash-and-burn farming. The Sahara is expanding south at a rate of 30 miles per year. In 2002, sandstorms caused by erosion buried 124 villages in Iran.

  ‘I could go on. I really could. What about the disappearing mountains (open-top mining)? Or genetic swamping of indigenous species?

  ‘The world might not end in your lifetime, David Leon, but it won’t ever be as diverse and vibrant and unique as it is right now.

  ‘Sad fact. Inescapable fact.

  ‘Can you tell I’m in one of my moods today?’

  Thursday

  I bunked worked today. I was in my suit and tie, eating my Weet-Bix as usual. Maxine gave me a peck on the cheek and said, ‘I’ll be off then,’ as usual. I said, ‘See you this evening,’ as usual. But I didn’t fish my keys out of the bowl by the telephone and drive to work. I sat at the kitchen table, reading the back of the Weet-Bix box. Did you know Daniel Carter received a full-size set of goal posts on his eighth birthday and says practice is the secret of his success?

  At nine I rang Sian.

  ‘I won’t be coming in to work today,’ I said.

  ‘Does that mean I can leave early?’

  ‘Enjoy the sunbed.’

  I spent the day on the internet.

  Friday

  This morning Maxine gave me a peck on the cheek and said, ‘I’ll be off then.’

  I looked up from my Weet-Bix and said, ‘I’m proud of you.’

  ‘I’m proud of you too, honey.’ She pulled my earlobe. ‘Now, I gotta run. See you tonight.’

  ‘No, Maxine. I’m not just saying it. I’m proud that you’re successful. I’m proud of the long hours you put in at work and the big pay cheque you bring home. And I’m sorry it’s harder to be proud of me. I’m sorry you have to say it without meaning it.’

  ‘David? What’s gotten into you?’ Her hand ruffled the short ha
irs on the back of my head.

  I straightened the knot of my tie. ‘No matter what happens, I want you to know I don’t resent your success. I don’t resent you in the least. I have nothing but esteem for you, Maxine. Esteem and undying love.’

  She looked at the clock on her Blackberry. She smiled, as one might smile at a kitten in the window of a pet store.

  ‘Go,’ I told her. ‘You’ll be late.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Okay, but we’ll talk more tonight.’

  ‘Go,’ I said cheerfully.

  Monday

  Dear Maxine,

  I am in Guayaquil. I didn’t know until I was checking in for my flight from Santiago (Chile) to Guayaquil (Ecuador) that the city is actually pronounced Why-a-kill. Sounds ominous, but don’t worry. You’ll read a lot of warnings on the internet about crime in the city, but it appears things have been cleaned up in recent years. The promenade along the river (Malecón 2000) looks like something you’d find on the Gold Coast, except with people selling exotic fruit from wooden carts. Not a knife to be seen. I haven’t even been offered cocaine yet.

  Why am I in Why-a-kill?

  Short answer: It’s the gateway to the Galapagos Islands.

  Long answer: I’m sure you can piece it together. You are the perceptive one, after all.

  I’m due to fly to the Galapagos tomorrow. Already seen plenty of iguanas here. I’ve seen one crawl out of a drain, another fall from a tree. They walk around like stray dogs, though they have those too.

  I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch sooner, but with all the flights and crossing the dateline and the language barrier …

  I should have brought a phrase book with me. You would have insisted on bringing one.

  Did you know the Panama hat actually originated in Ecuador? You probably did. I remember vaguely hearing that myself once. What surprised me was the fact the women here still wear them. Standard dress for females over forty is brightly coloured skirt over brightly coloured skirt over brightly coloured skirt (…), nondescript blouse under black shawl and white, drug baronesque Panama hat.