Triptych (14 page)

Kalp licks his lips, ears twitching sideways.

“Truly?” he asks softly. He wheezes for air and his throat loosens. “As I like?”

“As you like,” Gwen says. “Our status in this room is equal. Your rank matches ours.”

Kalp lets forth a shaking breath of relief. Suddenly his lungs feel twice as large. The hot twisting winds down and sinks away, and the trembles in his ears and fingers cease. He shakes himself once, all over, to resettle the jagged lay of his fur, and proffers a wide, silly-feeling smile to indicate his relief at this statement.

“I will remove the shoes,” he says.

Gwen smiles to match Kalp’s, and he feels absurdly pleased that he is learning how to provoke a pleasure response from his co-workers. His head is light from the abrupt upswing in his mood.

“Oi, what did you mean about asphyxiating?” Basil asks, and he is speaking slowly and clearly once again. Now he remembers to enunciate, once the distress is passed. One buttock is perched on the edge of his desk. He already has a small tool and an electronic component back in his hands.

Kalp reaches down to untie the laces that hold the shoes onto his foot. He says, “You trilled. It sounded painful, like you could not get enough air.”

“Trilled?” Gwen asks, lifting herself to her own feet. “What, you mean, laughing?”

“Laughing,” Kalp repeats. “Yes, I have heard of laughter. You were laughing?”

“Yes,” Gwen says, and makes a sort of small aborted trilling noise in illustration. “We were amused by your mistake.”

“For which I am deeply, deeply sorry,” Kalp says, kicking off the shoes and scrambling upright. He moves to bow his neck in the Apology, but Gwen’s hand on his shoulder — still fat and fragile, but warm — stops him.

“Don’t apologize,” she says. “If one of us apologizes every time we make a cultural error, we’ll be doing the Apology for hours a day. Let’s just laugh at our errors together, okay?”

Kalp feels his mouth stretch again, but this time it is involuntary.

Smiling.

“Okay,” he agrees. “And now, I must purchase coffee and a…fancy?”

Basil snorts at the machine in his hands, and Gwen pats Kalp’s elbow, the same tender guiding gesture he’s seen Basil use on her, and turns him towards the door. “We’ll go to the cafeteria together.”

Her palm is still oily, but Kalp appreciates the acceptance inherent in the gesture, even if Gwen is not aware that she has done it. Perhaps, Kalp thinks, he does not mind being scent-marked by Gwen, after all.

Not if it means she worries for him like this.

***

Kalp has a sore neck.

It is left over from lying on the cot, surely, but it also comes from stooping low to bend over Basil’s blueprints. Kalp longs for a taller table, but would not presume to ask for one. How then could Gwen and Basil read from it, if it was tall enough for Kalp?

Attempting to be subtle, Kalp raises his fingers slowly and presses the back of his own skull, applying pressure to two little knobs. Right below the skin are knots of nerve endings and hormone centres that help regulate the flow of chemicals that keep his body functioning correctly. Though he knows it will not last much beyond a few moments, he feels temporary relief from the release of the enzymes produced by the pocket of chemicals there. He lets out a long breath.

“Whatcher sighingova?” Basil asks, forgetting to be articulate, to scrub out his argot.

Kalp snaps his eyes open. “I beg your pardon?” he asks, careful to use the politest form of requesting clarification he knows.

“You sighed,” Basil repeats, conscientious this time of his speed and word use. He is leaning on the brace of his hands, elbows locked backwards in a pose that makes Kalp’s arms sore just witnessing it. These humans seem so stiff and angular, until he witnesses them doing things like this, turning their arms around in their sockets, or the way they pivot on the balls of their feet when they wish to move fast, seeming to ignore the existence of their own toes. He has seen contortionists performing on television.

Kalp does not know this word, “sigh,” and pulls his eyebrows down to indicate so. That, at least, is one facial expression their species share.

Basil huffs out a breath, repeating what Kalp did earlier. “That’s called a ‘sigh.’” He does it again and clarity washes through the air. Then Basil touches the back of his own neck in the same place Kalp had touched his. “Why?” he asks.

Gwen, who is leaning over a pad of paper upon which she had been scribbling translations as Kalp made them, looks up in interest.

“I have pain,” Kalp says, deciding not to lie. If he explains what the problem is, perhaps they can correct it. At the least, conversing will allow for the excuse of the momentary drop in productivity. Breaks are often very informative in this office, even the unofficial ones where they must stay inside and cannot venture forth for refreshment.

Kalp has learned — and taught — more about their differing cultures during these small conversations than in all the classes he has attended. At least, it feels that way.

“Pain?” Gwen repeats. “Your neck is sore? Or is it a headache?”

“Both,” Kalp admits.

She sets down her writing instrument. It threatens to roll off the table’s surface, but stops at the edge. “Is it from doing the translations? We can take a break. Or are you thirsty? I always get a headache when I’m dehydrated.”

“The translations do not pain me,” Kalp says, trying to explain carefully that it is not work that is hurting him. He wants to be clear on that. He does not want work taken away from him; it is the last thing that is keeping him sane, from dwelling too long and too often on the tormenting past. From the loneliness. “Though I will require water soon.”

“Could use a cuppa myself,” Basil says with a bob of his head that indicates affirmation, though his words are once again puzzling and Kalp is unsure with what Basil is agreeing. Kalp decides that it will take especially long to learn how to communicate with this particular human.

“You can
always
go for a cuppa,” Gwen chides, and this is humour Kalp knows, has seen before on the television. She is being derogatory but with a smile and a pleasant tone — teasing. “So what’s causing the pain, Kalp?” Gwen asks, using his name directly.

Kalp likes the way his name feels across his skin when she says it.

“These arrangements…” Kalp hesitates. Would admitting the truth about the work environment be considered impolite? Gwen and Basil are both waiting, faces open and patient. Kalp once again decides on truth over safe words, over the mask of politesse; it has not failed him thus far. “They are not comfortable.”

Basil’s eyes narrow, and run up and down Kalp’s body once, then flick to run similarly over the table, the note pads, the blueprints; assessing with his engineer’s mind. He grins suddenly and presses the thumb and the middle finger of his left hand together and then draws the middle finger down swiftly into his palm, producing a sharp fleshy clicking sound that makes Kalp’s whole scalp shiver.

“Ah ha,” Basil says. “Table’s too low.”

“Oh crap,” Gwen adds, consternation crossing her features. “I should have thought of that. I’m sorry, Kalp.”

“Do not trouble yourself — ” Kalp starts, falling back unconsciously into humble speech, ears folding. But Basil is already across the room, snatching the chair on wheels out from under his own desk.

He flicks a catch on the side and the spindle under the seat hisses out air and rises until it is as high as it will go, which is still low enough to fit under the drafting table.

“There you are,” Basil says with a flourish. “Should be the right height now.”

Kalp hesitates. It is an extremely generous offer, to share one’s stature-seat with a co-worker. A true gesture of equality. He wonders if Basil is aware of how awed Kalp feels.

“Sit, sit!” Basil says, flapping his hands impatiently.

Kalp makes another smile of pleasure, toes curling as he feels the breeze from Basil’s impatient gesture ruffle the fur on his face. Kalp sits. Basil touches the catch again and the spindle sinks a bit under Kalp’s weight. Basil reaches under the seat, playing with the handle and tugging and adjusting the altitude until it becomes the perfect height for Kalp to tuck his legs under the draft table, yet still see the documents without having to hunch over. Basil’s fingers slide against the nape of Kalp’s neck in passing as he makes adjustments, wonderfully hot, and Kalp resists the urge to lean back into the touch.

The continual and steady stream of consideration and generosity coming from Kalp’s partners is truly overwhelming, and Kalp sees now why Earth took them in so readily. They seem to see these acts as natural, obvious. Here, kindness is a right, not a privilege to be earned.

Perhaps there is something to be said for loose hierarchies.

Basil smacks his palms together, making the same sharp fleshy sound the clicking fingers did, only on a larger scale. “So, tea for me, coffee for Gwen — requests, Kalp?”

The snap of flesh on flesh makes Kalp shiver once more, and he likes the way his name sounds when Basil says it, too.

“Water, please,” Kalp says.

Basil snorts. “Just water? You’ll see — I give it a week before you’re a tea drinker.” He waves at the air, sketching a form of salutation, and walks out the door. The wooden cylinders in the curtain click together soothingly as they settle back into place.

“We can take a break now,” Gwen says, walking over to her own desk and writing something down on a different piece of paper.

“What do you write?” Kalp asks, taking her comment as an invitation to conversation. He has not had the opportunity, really, to have a free and open-ended dialogue with a human yet, and this is the part of his work that he is most looking forward to. He arches his back in an effort to relieve the ache from hunching forward, revelling in the muscle-releasing click his spine makes in response.

“Hm? Oh, memo. Uh — a reminder to myself,” she clarifies when he makes the face of confusion to indicate his puzzlement at yet another new piece of vocabulary. She clicks the end of her writing utensil repeatedly, making the tip from which the ink emerges vanish and reappear at a constant rate. Kalp has noticed that Gwen almost always has something in her hands — a pen she flips through her fingers, a cup whose handle she strokes. She taps her chin, picks at her lips, runs her fingers through her hair. He hears every movement, and it is constant, a throbbing wash over his body, and she feels just so alive. Alive and active in ways that none of his kind have been in what feels like lifetimes. “I have to remember to order you your own desk and chair at the right height.”

“You would — ” Kalp begins but Gwen stops him with a smile and a wagging finger.

“Equal status, Kalp,” she says. A soft reminder, but seriously delivered.

He does not finish his sentence. Instead he basks in the warmth of this feeling of…welcome. He moves his head to the side to look at the door, to see if Basil has returned yet, and a sharp pain slices up the side of his neck. He grimaces.

“You okay?” Gwen asks.

Kalp knows that “okay” is universal Earth jargon for everything from “feeling well” to “pleasant,” “delicious” to “good.”

“I am not okay,” he admits, still fighting the impulsive urge to be polite and tell smart words instead of the truth.

“Your neck, still?”

“Yes.”

Gwen moves back to his side. “What brought this on?”

She is close and the rhythmic patter of her heart is soothing. “Where I sleep, it is very hard,” Kalp says.

“Ah — bed cramps,” Gwen says with another one of those affirmative head bobs that she and Basil seem fond of. “And what does pressing your fingers there do?”

“There is a chemical,” Kalp explains, turning his head and shoulders together, carefully, to look up at her so as to avoid another sharp pain. “It is in our bodies. It makes us feel good. Over stimulating the painful area forces the body to release the chemical to counteract the pain. It also helps to work the tension from the muscles affected.”

“Endorphins,” Gwen says. “We have them too. May I?”

Before Kalp can ascertain what Gwen is asking permission for now, her fingers are on the back of his neck, warm and moist and pressing carefully in the same spot he had been. Then she moves her strong thumbs in small circles along the connective tissues of his neck, and Kalp nearly weeps with relief.

He slumps forward, giving her hands better access to the back of his neck, not caring that this means that she could easily slit his throat or strangle him in this pose. She is his teammate and she is showing great caring and trust in providing this relief. It is only fair that he shows the same.

Besides, it feels fantastic.

Basil comes in then, his hands full of containers of liquid, and stops just past the wood curtain. “Oi!” he says, sounding very annoyed. Kalp flinches away from Gwen’s wonderful hands and cowers, ears flat back.

Kalp has already deduced that Basil is, if not currently, planning to be mated with Gwen. Kalp fears that the therapeutic touching has damaged his fledgling camaraderie with the human man. Basil has been touching Gwen a lot, and to catch Gwen touching Kalp in a similar manner…will Basil take this as a challenge? Kalp knows so little about human mating rituals; will he and Basil have to fight?

“I apologize — ” he starts, but Gwen is trilling again. Laughing.

Basil’s anger, it seems, is not real. This is another joke.

Kalp “sighs” in relief.

“If Kalp gets a massage, I want one, too,” Basil says, coming forward to divest himself of the beverages. Two are in paper cylinders, and he hands one to Gwen and keeps one for himself. Kalp assumes the clear plastic cylinder filled with water is for him.

“Later,” Gwen promises and blinks, somehow, with only one eye.

It is some sort of communication method, a physical gesture that Kalp does not understand. There is more silent conversation that occurs with meaningful muscle spasms in the face, but it is a conversation with a code that Kalp is not privy to. Feeling as if they have forgotten his presence entirely, Kalp decides not to interrupt.