Triptych

by J. M. Frey

  On the second day, there is no news on the killer, but only the humans are allowed to come into work, for fear of someone else being shot. Basil and Gwen leave reluctantly, and Kalp passes the day feeding his chickens and trying to beat his own high score on the video game machine and emailing answers to the questions Basil asks via his BlackBerry. They are strange questions, questions that are far more theoretical than Basil has ever asked before, and Kalp isn’t sure how to answer many of them.

  Kalp is only an engineer, not a quantum physicist.

  Basil comes home with a thick, glossy black briefcase with a no-nonsense lock under the handle, and when Kalp asks if this is what Basil was asking him about all day, and could he see it, Basil turns pale and shakes his head and goes to put the thing away in the safe under his desk.

  They are informed that night that an Earth-style funeral is being planned for Derx, once the coroner has completed his investigation. A more formal Ceremony of Mourning will follow, and Kalp mentally prepares himself, writes notes about what he has to teach Gwen and Basil, what they must do and say. They have to be there. As his Aglunates, it’s only proper. Then maybe they will go to the other cemetery, to the other grave, and repeat it there, a private circle for just three. Three pairs of arms can make a circle easily around a little grave.

  On the third day of Kalp’s confinement — and he realizes now that this is what it is — a fox steals into the garden and attacks his chickens. Two flee into the hen house safely, but the third’s wing is broken and one of its legs chewed and there is a series of long gashes that bleed freely from its head to its ribs. Kalp chases away the fox with an angry snarl, and a flash of bigger, sharper fangs, but it is too late. The chicken is dying.

  Kalp is distraught. He does not know what to do. He cannot seem to contain his anguish. It is just a chicken, Kalp knows, and it is ridiculous to wail so and carry on for a mere chicken. But he cannot help it. He tugs at his ears and makes the high keening sound of sorrow until the security guard that is staying with him in the house calls Gwen in a panic. She and Basil leave work early and come home. Basil speeds illegally, because they get to the house much faster than they ought to, and Gwen tells Kalp that there is nothing to be done for his feathered pet. There are only two choices — it dies slowly, suffering, or she can break its neck and kill it quickly.

  Kalp agrees to let her end its suffering, and covers his face with his hands. The revolting snap makes Kalp retch, and the texture of the little death makes his skin feel dirty. Would Gwen break his neck, he wonders, if he asked? He hurts so much he can hardly stand it.

  He needs a distraction, so together he and Gwen strip the chicken’s carcass, removing the few still-beautiful wing feathers (which Kalp wants to keep as mementos), taking out its innards. Gwen says they should eat the chicken, it would be a waste not to, and besides, it may help Kalp come to terms with its death. She admits that this is the same thing her father told her when her pet piglet got snared in a barbed wire fence when she was a child. There is a discussion about accepting the death of a beloved pet. Kalp tentatively broaches the topic of her family again, but she will not say anything more.

  Basil resolutely stays in the dining room with his paperwork and the mysterious contents of the locked black briefcase until the chicken no longer resembles a chicken, and instead looks like food.

  Since Gareth, Basil can no longer look at a mass of raw flesh without vomiting violently.

  They eat the chicken dinner in silence, and retire to their now-shared bed. They only sleep, everyone too emotionally wrought to do anything more than lay in the dark and clutch each other’s hands.

  On the fourth day, Barnowski dies in hospital. He succumbs to the wounds he sustained trying to get between Derx and the sniper. The coroner must process his body too, and they push back the funeral to bury the lovers together. Edgar, understandably, quits the Institute.

  So do seven others.

  On the fifth day, Kalp receives a small package in the post addressed to himself.

  Who on Earth, quite literally, would send Kalp a package?

  Kalp sets it on the top of his chest of drawers, too agitated to open it now. He cannot quite decipher the words that the letters spell out on the box; he sees the address at which he lives, and the address from which it came, but it is just a string of numbers – RR#3, Cnty. Rd. 1475, ON., and the word CA-NA-DA. He says it out loud: “Sanada.” He does not know what a canada is or where it may be, or why all those numbers are ‘ON’ it, and in a pique of annoyance at his own meagre abilities, even after so many months of study and immersion, he abandons the package.

  He is too fraught with frustration and curling worry to deal with what probably amounts to hate mail from someone who did enough research, read enough newspaper articles, watched enough special interest television programs, to find him. Whatever is inside the slim paper-wrapped box, he is fairly certain that he will not like it.

  He should discard it immediately, he knows. Possibly it is even dangerous, a threat. But there is something powerful about finally receiving mail of his very own, and so he will keep the package —  just, never open it. It seems an overly emotional choice, but Kalp is as satisfied with this compromise as he ever will be, and he puts it from his mind.

  He tries to calm down in a hot bath. It works for a little while, but then the lack of emotion-distracting sound gives his mind too much time to wander, and he imagines Basil and Gwen at the restaurant where Barnowski and Derx…

  He goes down to the basement of the house to howl, so as not to startle the security guard who is in the garden, hand-feeding the remaining two chickens. They seem sad to have lost their companion and will not eat unless it is from the palm of someone’s hand.

  By the time his Unit returns home, he has succeeded in forgetting about the package entirely. The three of them do not sleep in his nest as often anymore, so he rarely has occasion to enter his own room. When he does, it is with a purpose distracting his mind: to fetch clothing or towels, or drop more paperwork onto the top of the dresser. Gwen and Basil rarely sleep at the same time, trading off turns in their old bed. Kalp, unable to face the thought of a nest devoid of his loves, often naps during the day on the sofa or in their bed.

  There is one horrible argument, shouted and glared across the dining room table, between Gwen and Basil about the hours Basil has started to keep, about how he is never home, that all he does is work on the accursed thing that is in the locked black case — and Kalp curls his ears down and says nothing and just watches the way their shoulders shake and their chins wobble, listens to the way they deliberately prick at one another with hurtful accusations, and wishes he could do something, that he could just say something to fix it all, to make it all the way it was before the concert.

  For the next week, Gwen and Basil are told that they must attend work early. They are not allowed to inform Kalp why, and return home pale and drawn, sore and miserable. They begin to wear earpieces every day, even at night, in bed. The pieces are quiet. They only chirp occasionally. When they do, Basil or Gwen, whoever was signalled, excuses themselves from the room that everyone is in — kitchen, living room, basement — and goes outside to speak, where the wall and the wires and the world keep Kalp from overhearing. Kalp knows that he should not be hurt that they are not allowed to have their conversations where he can hear, but he does not blame them.

  He blames the Institute.

  He blames them for the poor food in their cafeteria that drove Barnowski, Edgar and Derx to seek a meal elsewhere. He blames them for driving up hype about “the aliens” with their secrecy and military alliances. He blames them for not handling his own marriage more gracefully in the face of the press. He blames them for not stifling the growing flames of anger and hatred among the protesting humans. He blames them for driving this wedge of silence and growing mistrust between him and his Aglunates.

  Sometimes, when he is feeling the most abandoned, he blames the Institute
for ever introducing him to Gwen and Basil at all.

  He blames himself for volunteering.

  He blames himself for not going to attend the medic with Trus, for not going shopping in the market with Maru.

  He blames himself for sleeping late the day the sky turned black.

  ***

  The double funeral is on Friday morning.

  Kalp sits in the pews of Barnowski’s Catholic church and holds his weeping Aglunates, and wishes that he could cry to alleviate the burning pressure in his own eyes. The weather is unfairly pleasant when they, as a congregation, move into the adjacent cemetery. They deposit the caskets in their places, Derx’s name on the headstone beside Barnowski’s, under the selfish, unblinking eyes of the paparazzi cameras kept at a distance by the low cemetery walls.

  All of the Aglunated Units move to the basement of the church, graciously offered by the priest. Kalp learns that this is rare, that the religious leaders of this world do not often tend to allow other rituals of other cultures to occur in their own basements, and Kalp is grateful for the exception. For all their talk of tolerance and peace, the humans have a disturbing habit of being segregated and opinionated. It is an unfair assessment, for there was racism and exclusionary behaviour on his planet, too, just as Kalp assumes there is among the less-sentient fauna of this planet or any other. But he cannot seem to recall the bad through the haze of nostalgia any more.

  The Aglunates sit in a circle big enough to metaphorically accommodate the corpses of the deceased, if they had been there, and perform the Ceremony of Mourning.

  It is the first one Kalp has attended in the last two years, since the disaster. He had very much hoped to be done with this rite forever.

  Kalp knows full well that he should have been performing the Ceremony of Welcoming today, instead.

  He should have been celebrating the birth of his child.

  They return to their house at sunset, weary and weak. Kalp falls into his unconscious phase on the sofa while watching the chickens, and wakes in the dark to the sound of a chirruping ear piece. Basil answers and turns even whiter as he listens. Kalp can hear every word from the other end, and this time he does not bother to be polite and tune it out: “Lalonde tried to push Pias out of the way and…the bullet went straight through. We lost both of them. I’m sorry, Doctor Grey, I know you and Lalonde were close.”

  “I haven’t worked with her in years,” Basil says softly. “Not since we finished the Array.” But there are already tears dotting his eyelashes. He scrubs at his eyes and pulls his fingers away wet, staring at the moisture as if startled to learn that he still has any tears left to cry. Humans are sometimes bizarrely unaware of their own bodily functions.

  “We need you to come in, Doctor.”

  “I can’t. Gwen will need — ”

  “This is not a request, Doctor Grey,” the voice says sternly. “We found another one of the…devices. We think it was the shooter’s. We’re still not sure what it does and…well, you need to come in.”

  Basil sighs, every bone weary, his posture drooped and his forehead pressed against the wall. He scrubs his face with his hands.

  “Fine,” he says. “Yes. I’ll leave in an hour.”

  “Now, Doctor.”

  Basil screws up his mouth, frowns and says, “Yes, yes. Now.”

  He clicks off.

  Kalp is sitting up on the sofa, and Basil turns to look right at him. Like he knew the whole time that Kalp was awake. And is not sorry Kalp listened in on a clearly top secret conversation. But Basil does not tell Kalp that Pias is dead, either.

  Kalp did not know Pias, but he feels that he deserves the right to be told all the same.

  “When Gwen gets back from the chippy, tell her I’m sorry, I got called in.”

  “Yes,” Kalp says. Does Basil know that Kalp heard everything, and that’s why he’s not bothering to relay anything about Lalonde and Pias? Or is he flatly not allowed? Is this Basil’s way of getting around the rules?

  Maybe.

  Kalp’s still not sure whether he should be hurt by this, or not.

  “Tell Gwen I…” he trails off and stares at his hands. “I’ll be back when I’m back.”

  “Yes,” Kalp says softly. He lies back down and pretends to go back into unconsciousness while Basil gathers up his briefcase and BlackBerry, and walks out the front door.

  Kalp desperately hopes that Basil will walk back in it.

  The package.

  It is only now, brought on by the thin-strung silence that permeates the dark, strained atmosphere of the house, that Kalp remembers that someone sent him a package. He feels immediately guilty. What if it had been a warning about Pias?

  He goes upstairs and retrieves it from the back of the top of his chest of drawers. It has almost fallen down the crack in the back, covered in the very beginnings of a thin layer of dust and several magazines which Kalp has read from cover to cover to alleviate boredom during his confinement.

  He sits in his nest, noting that the sheets smell stale and need to be washed — maybe he will do it tomorrow — and tears the paper wrapping open carefully with his nails.

  There is a single sheet of paper inside the box, folded many times over to fit inside and inscribed in even, machine-generated hand to disguise its origin. It is indeed addressed to him. It reads:

  Dearest Kalp;

  You do not yet know me, but you are known to me.

  You must listen very seriously to what I say. Your future depends on it. You will be next to be killed otherwise.

  Do not go to the Institute. Go into hiding. Depart.

  If you wish to live, you will do these things immediately. There will be more assassinations. You are involved.

  There are those who watch you constantly. Things will be changed. There can be no mixing, now.

  I will call you here when you have fled.

  --E

  There is an address under the signature, and Kalp doesn’t recognize it any more than he had the sender’s address. He knows it is in London, for it says as much, but nothing else. Kalp sets down the letter, hands shaking. Then he turns to the box. It is stuffed with fluffy white fibers which cradle a small lump of burnt metal. Kalp does not recognize it, but he pulls it from its nest all the same. He revises his assessment — it is not a single lump but some sort of electronic or mechanical component that has been fused together by the heat of what appears to have been some sort of flash explosion. Kalp turns on his drafter’s mind, and can find the wiring and nodes in the mess of what’s left. Possibly it is even still workable, though what it is meant to do or how he is supposed to use it, Kalp cannot guess.

  It is mostly triangular, with melted pockmarks and holes burned straight through it. It is made from an alloy from his world, and it looks vaguely like a gun, a piece of some wire sticking out to resemble a trigger, a cylindrical intake that could double as a barrel, but Kalp knows that it is not. They did not have guns on his world; at least, not like the kind that the humans carry.

  It is, for all intents and purposes, useless.

  He sets it back into its nest of protective fiber, and wonders what the intended message of the lump of metal is. The letter is a threat — could this be a piece of a symbolic object from Kalp’s world, one that was destroyed to provoke a reaction? Maybe it is meant to be an illustrative example of what they are going to do to Kalp if he doesn’t depart as ordered.

  Kalp suddenly wishes he’d paid better attention to the attacks in Moscow, the riots in Dallas, the protests in Toronto and Washington.

  Then he wishes that it really was a gun, because he feels so vulnerable here. Alone with only Aitken to protect him. Just one human against…this. All of this.

  Next, the letter said.

  He is next.

  He will die next, and everyone in the world knows where Kalp lives now.

  Depart, the letter says.

  No mixing. End your relationship and go. Or die.

  The fr
ont door opens and shuts, and Kalp huddles down into his nest, terrified. The assassin has found him already. He has lost a week, by failing to open the package. He debates the merits of trying to go out the window, but the security guard is still watching the house, and Kalp is not stupid. He knows the guard woman is there to keep Kalp in as much as she is there to keep others out.

  Footsteps come towards Kalp, and if he was not so terrified, he would be able to make out the heartbeat over the sound of his own pattering system. When the door opens, it is just Gwen carrying greasy newspaper cones filled with fish and chips.

  Kalp sighs.

  Then he feels ridiculous.

  He shoves the letter and the package under his mattress and goes to relieve her of her burden. He tells her that Basil has departed and does not know when he will return. Basil has taken the black briefcase with him. It is locked, but Kalp knows at least a little bit about what Basil is hiding within it. He can hear the electricity, the whine of the dying batteries, the yelping jump of the poorly repaired circuits of some device inside the box.

  Kalp and Gwen watch a film on the television and eat their fish and chips. Basil’s goes cold on the coffee table.

  Kalp thinks he will return to his own nest tonight. He needs time alone to contemplate what he should do next, to whom he should speak. But before he gets up to depart, there is another chirrup from Gwen’s ear piece.

  Before Gwen can even turn it on, Kalp knows.

  This time it is Ogilvy and Vius. Ogilvy had a child from her first union, and the little girl is in the hospital, being treated for severe shock. She saw it happen. They are calling around to everyone who worked on the same floor, trying to decipher who the child’s father is, so they might locate him. Gwen was not close with Ogilvy, so she has no answers for the caller. The caller bids her good night, and then tells her to stay with Kalp and keep a wary eye.