Triptych

by J. M. Frey

  Kalp cannot hear anything but the painful screech of the throbbing bass line, the grinding wail of the syncopated counter rhythm. He tries to stand, to flee. He feels his feet go out from under him, the gratefully familiar throb of Basil’s hands under his armpits, hauling him up the aisle towards the doors and away from the massive speakers. He wraps his fingers around Basil’s arm and squeezes too tight. Gwen is right beside him, trying to use her body to get between Kalp and the speakers, shrieking at the humans who have surged into the aisles to dance. She yells at them to move, to get out of the way. The concert goers are impeding their progress.

  When they finally reach the parking lot, Basil and Kalp collapse onto a median mounded with soft, wet grass. Cold ground water seeps into Kalp’s pants and stains them. Basil wraps his body around Kalp’s, his chest against Kalp’s, his arms heavy, his thigh thrown over Kalp’s hip a familiar, grounding weight against the agony that rips through him. Gwen fumbles herself to her knees, rubbing her hands down Kalp’s over-sensitized skin on his head and ears and neck over and over, trying to smooth out his fur, to soothe his jarring discomfort.

  Had he the ocular glands for it, Kalp is sure he would be crying.

  Oh, it hurts.

  And then, suddenly, it hurts a different way. There is a sharp pain in the back of his head. Basil’s body is suddenly ripped away and he can just barely hear Basil shouting over the ringing after-pain that still ripples all over his body. He reaches blindly for Gwen, but she is gone, too.

  There is another sharp pain in Kalp’s stomach, and then his face. He feels one of his teeth break and slam into the back of his mouth.

  Someone is kicking Kalp.

  “Fucking freak!” a voice shouts, right beside his ear and Kalp howls when the hard heel of a boot grinds into his fingers.

  Now he can hear Basil shouting, threats and promises and horrible, horrible swear words.

  Then he grunts, and there is a slapping sound and the cracking of breaking bones and someone is shouting “Fucking faggot, fucking faggot!” over and over again.

  And Gwen…Gwen is begging. “No, please,” she says, and Kalp cannot see for the dark blood that is now running into his eyes, but he can hear her sobbing, her own yelps as she too is struck. Kalp is appalled. Who would strike an expectant mother? It is inhumane, monstrous! “It’s Basil’s, it’s not his, please!”

  “Get her!” screams the same harsh voice that called Kalp names. “Get the freak baby!”

  And Gwen screams, so high and so desperate that Kalp balls his hands up and bares his fangs and throws himself in the direction of the sound. He meets a body, hard and male and not Unit, he can tell by the smell and feel, and he rears back, snarling and snapping his teeth as the punk tries to kick Kalp off.

  “You will not harm her!” Kalp says and sinks his sharp teeth into the tender skin under the punk’s ear and rips.

  Something hard — a baseball bat, perhaps, Kalp thinks — strikes him repeatedly in the back of the head, but Kalp does not let go. Consciousness slips away, and Gwen is still screaming.

  Kalp still does not let go.

  ***

  When Kalp wakes, he knows much time has passed. He is slightly surprised to have awakened at all. His hand aches, and he looks down to see it encased in bandages. His head aches too, a spinning nauseous pain in the back, where it is supported carefully by a stirrup that is keeping it from touching anything. A quick probe with his tongue reveals a broken gap where his front tooth used to be, and there is a sharp discomfort in his stomach. Even his skin is still tender from the horrible music.

  He does not remember a lot past the first screeching wail of the guitar, but he does remember the taste of blood in his mouth, the surging fury, and Gwen’s screams.

  Gwen!

  Kalp tries to sit up. The agony brought on by the movement rips a soft cry from his throat.

  “Kalp?”

  It is Basil’s voice. The restraint on Kalp’s head, pushing his ears flat, keeps him from being able to turn to the side to find the man from which the voice originates. Kalp tries not to panic, but he wants to see his husband. Thankfully, Basil limps into Kalp’s field of view, leaning heavily on a cane. Perhaps Basil is just as desperate to look into Kalp’s eyes as he is into Basil’s. The skin around one eye is florid and swollen, the same colours as Kalp’s favourite Hawaiian shirt. The eye itself is flooded with blood, all the white gone that entirely human, too-vibrant red. There are stitches sprinkled beside his eyebrow. Kalp doubts that the resulting scar would be very visible, not like Gwen’s.

  Basil smiles and it is thin, like it hurts too much to mobilize so many muscles in his face.

  “Where…?” Kalp tries, but it hurts too much to get much more breath than that, and his mouth is gummy and dry.

  “Don’t talk,” Basil says. He hobbles around the foot of the bed to the side. He pulls a chair up beside the metal rail, just inside Kalp’s field of vision, and drops himself carefully into it. He lays aside the cane so it does not clatter, and picks up a small cup of water from the bedside and holds it to Kalp’s lips.

  Grateful, Kalp sips softly, knows that if he imbibes too fast it will only make him ill in this condition. The fuzzy, gummy feeling is washed away.

  “We’re in the hospital,” Basil says, answering Kalp’s question as he sips. “The cops came, someone called them on their mobile, thank God, but not before…” He stops and tips the glass again.

  When Kalp has had enough water, he says, “Gwen?”

  Basil goes white.

  Kalp swallows heavily and feels his stomach roil despite how much care he took with the water.

  No.

  No, Kalp does not believe it. He will not be widowed a third time. He refuses.

  Basil hisses out between his teeth. “She’s…alive,” he says, as if the term is something he needs to debate. “She’s still asleep but they think she’ll wake up…soon. She’s, I mean…she’s pretty much fine —  there’s some bad bruises, some, um, road burn, but they really only went after, uh…there was some surgery, to fix all the damage they caused inside, and Gwen’s fine…ex-except for…but not…” His eyes get wet and he reaches out blindly, wrapping his fingers around Kalp’s arm. Kalp bends his good fingers back and grasps Basil’s hand, as comforting as he can be when he is this immobile.

  “The baby?” Kalp asks. Not because he wants to, but because he has to; he has to know…

  Basil shakes his head once, slowly.

  Kalp’s eyes burn.

  Basil buries his face in the hospital sheets covering Kalp’s side, hands threaded in utter despair on the back of his head. Kalp wraps his good arm around Basil’s shoulders and rubs in small circles. Basil cries so hard it sounds as if his soul is being wrung out into each tear.

  ***

  When Gwen wakes two days later, the hospital staff moves the three of them into a private room. They do this to keep the grieving family together, and safe from the press. It also allows them to use fewer security guards.

  Gwen is inconsolable. The damage inside of her is irreparable, the doctors explain. It is a wonder that she did not bleed out on the asphalt.

  For Gwen, there will be no second child.

  Basil weeps and Kalp holds him, his eyes burning, and Gwen…stares at the wall and says nothing.

  She only responds to the touches of her Aglunates, communicates in curt head gestures, and refuses food until the nurses threaten to strap her to the bed and force sustenance on her via intravenous tubes. Gwen is not best pleased by the threat, so she eats her Jell-o morosely and drinks the orange juice. That satisfies the nurses for now.

  Gwen might not take being held down again very well, and everyone knows it.

  Kalp is relieved that it does not come to strong measures, though he is worried for the state of Gwen’s mind. She has not, he thinks, cried for her dead child yet, and that scares him more than her silence and fasting.

  Worry burns like a hot stone in the bottom of Ka
lp’s stomach, in the back of his throat, and he spends every moment of every day fairly sure that he is about to puke.

  Three days pass in this manner, and every time Kalp awakens from his unconscious phase he is more exhausted than he was going into it.

  Every time Gwen turns down food, the nurses tell her that she’s lost a lot of blood and that she needs to get up her strength, and it makes Basil flinch. Kalp thinks it is utterly cruel of them to keep reminding Gwen of what she has lost, and finally says so in a very loud and perhaps less than civil manner. The nurses, who up until now have treated him like some sort of exotic teddy bear, get round-eyed in horror and flee. When they return to bring the required meal a few hours later, they look ashamed.

  Good.

  The nurses seem to have forgotten that his kind come equipped with a mouth full of very sharp teeth and fingers tipped with dark, strong nails. He has reminded them.

  Kalp thinks, uncharitably, very early one sleepless morning, that if his kind had come in their full force, they could have just taken the Earth as their new home, instead of begging for a place among its cruel multitudes. Their weapons had not been particularly advanced, but they had been different enough to perhaps have afforded them the advantage.

  Kalp regrets the thought instantly. He loves his Aglunates and would not have seen these fragile, wet creatures burst like a ripe fruit under the cruel heels of his world’s ruthless dictators. No, there are some things that Kalp is glad have passed away.

  More days and nights blur together, and Kalp is unsure how many have passed, how many sunrises and sunsets he has missed, how many times he has looked at Gwen or Basil and looked away only to find that the quality of light outside of the window has shifted dramatically.

  The police come and go and come and go. They take fingerprints and statements and more statements and more fingerprints. They take DNA samples, and fibers, and hairs. There is security footage, they explain, of the inside of the concert hall and of the parking lot. The same someone who called the police on their mobile then began to film it with the phone’s camera. It is a very clear video and the evidence is obvious.

  What Kalp cannot understand is why this person chose to hold up a phone instead of choosing to try to save a child’s life.

  Basil calls it Genovese Syndrome, and the Bystander Effect.

  Kalp calls it cowardice.

  No charges are being laid against Kalp’s family, even though the man that Kalp bit did not survive his wounds. It was self defence, the police say. The others have been incarcerated and will stay in jail for the rest of their natural lives. They are charged with willful first degree murder in the case of the baby, and attempted murder for the rest of them. The crime is so well known, so closely followed, and the evidence so clear cut, that it bypasses the usual tedious waits of the legal system and goes almost immediately before a judge. Out of deference for their horrible loss, none of the Unit are forced to attend the circus of a trial, and Kalp and Basil are able to give their accounts via webcamera from the hospital room. Gwen still is not speaking.

  But the press are not so forgiving.

  Kalp has committed murder, they say. He ripped out the throat of a boy high from a concert. He is dangerous. He is an animal. None of them deign to mention that he was attacked first, that he was protecting his wife and their child. There is such a backlash that the Institute has to tighten security protocols and a police escort is required to accompany Kalp’s Unit home when they are all well enough to take care of themselves, and each other.

  Things in the house are quiet. The atmosphere is damp with sorrow.

  Gwen spends a very long time saying nothing. Basil talks for hours on the phone with his mother. Kalp lies in his nest and wishes he could cry. All three of them sit together in a small huddle on the sofa and watch the chickens in the garden through the patio glass door.

  ***

  When Gwen finally speaks, it is a week later, and the first word she says is “Gareth.”

  She is sitting on the sofa, staring out the window.

  Basil drops the teacup he was clutching and rushes to sit on the edge of the hearth and clasp Gwen’s hands between his own. Kalp comes inside from where he had been sweeping out the chicken coop.

  “Gareth?” Basil repeats, clearly begging for more, for explanation.

  Kalp fears that this word will be the only one that Gwen speaks, but no, she takes a breath and goes on.

  “My Uncle Gareth — I wanted to name the — ” she stops speaking abruptly, throat closing up, and she sucks in a hitching, shuddering breath. Tears, fat and hot, drop over her eyelashes and roll down white cheeks, and Kalp slips over the back of the sofa to cradle and rock her against his chest.

  Basil climbs up onto the other side and kisses up her scar and down her cheeks and over her lips, hands around her arms, her shoulders, her waist, murmuring, “Yes, yes, Gareth, it’s a good name. We’ll name him that.”

  Kalp wonders how you can name the dead.

  ***

  It is only later, when Basil calls the hospital to tell the doctor their deceased son’s name — Gareth Trus Grey — that Kalp understands the symbolic ritual of naming the child. Doing so makes it — him — a person. With its status so altered, the survivors are free to finally mourn the boy properly.

  Fifteen generations of Greys have been buried in the same cemetery in Salisbury Chipping, so they journey under the cover of night to evade the press. The drive into the city is long and wearisome. Dressed in matching sombre black, they meet the tiny white casket in the garden of ended lives, and lay to rest the body of their baby.

  Kalp wants desperately to howl up at the moon, to fall to his knees and perform the Ceremony of Mourning, but they are trying to avoid attention. He must be silent and calm, and he thinks that Gwen’s pain is still too raw to be able to witness his own breakdown.

  For Gwen, Kalp must be strong. For Basil, he must retain his composure.

  He will perform the Ceremony alone, later, in the closed safety of his own nest.

  They cover the too-small box with fresh soil, lay a strip of verdant sod down to erase the ugly scour in the turf, and two large-muscled men with tears dotting their lashes struggle a stately grey stone into place above where the baby’s head would be.

  Side by side by side, the stones along the row read name after name, date after date, Grey after Grey, ending with “Gareth Trus Grey; never born.”

  “It’s supposed to be me, next,” Basil says, patting the top of the stone, the sharp slap of his palm ringing out across the still night, startling some birds out of sleep and into the sky. “That’s my grandpa, my da, and I’m supposed to be the one here. Not…not him.”

  Gwen turns in his arms and howls.

  The sound is muffled in Basil’s neck.

  ***

  Several weeks pass, and slowly the reporters slink back into the shadows. There is no story to be got out of such deep mourning, and even the most ruthless of paparazzi seem to have misgivings about mining the death of an infant.

  Eventually, Gwen and Basil have to return to work.

  Kalp is asked by the Institute to stay home. It is not an order, not exactly, but it might as well be. They fear it will not be safe enough for him to come out, not yet, and a security guard who is much better at Guitar Hero VI than Kalp is — especially with his new hand injury — stays to keep him company. The guard is Agent Aitken, the quiet, intimidating woman with enthusiastically curling hair and a stern mouth with which she alternately smiles or glowers. Kalp makes a pact with himself to never anger her.

  It is also the day that Derx is shot between the eyes.

  Kalp learns about it from the news first: a fatal shooting at the favoured restaurant of the employees who shun the canteen of the Institute. High powered bullets came through the plate glass window, sprinkling the diners around the tragic trio with shrapnel that sent nine more to the hospital. The reporters announce that there were two shot. One
is dead, and one is en route to the hospital, in dangerous condition. A third bullet is furrowed in the back of one of the stoves, having travelled miraculously through the back wall of the dining room and into the kitchen without hitting a single body.

  Kalp imagines it to be Gwen and Basil for an hour, before the news releases Barnowski’s and Derx’s names. Oh! If only Derx had not been such a snob, or if he had not been so against simple cafeteria fare…

  Everyone from the Institute is sent home early, and Kalp is waiting at the door to usher Gwen and Basil in when they manage to force their car past the knot of reporters that has sprouted on the street outside of their house. Aitken shoves people away and yells things until the crowd disperses.

  They lock the doors and draw the blinds.

  Kalp feels like his life is spiralling down, slipping through his control, and he cannot quite get a grip on it, no matter how hard he squeezes. That night they perform intercourse again for the first time since the concert — they mark the date by the concert and not by whatever else happened the same evening — and it is frantic, desperate, clinging and gasping into mouths and holding each other tight enough to leave lurid marks behind; tight enough to prove that they are all still alive.

  Nobody leaves the house the next morning, and the Institute does not call them to demand that they attend work. The whole building is shut down for the day, out of respect for Derx’s death. Every section, except the secret police brigade. They are out searching for the murderer.

  This time, Kalp does puke. He spends all morning by the toilet and for an absurd second fears that he might be pregnant. But it is just fear and horror and too much loss for a body to handle, too much shock to go through. He drinks ginger tea after ginger tea, brought to him by a worried Basil, until his stomach is settled but his hands are shaking. Gwen stands in the shower with him, helps get the sick out of his fur, and off his snout, and he kisses her scar, kneels down and kisses her flaccid belly over and over and over.