Triptych (2 page)

“Let me go,” Basil snarled. “That’s my
wife
.”

Gwen descended the stairs, one hand curled over the butt of her gun in its thigh holster, and stopped a good few feet away. He reached out to her.

“There’s blood on your hands,” she said. “Come on, we’re going to the Institute.”

“No!” Basil said, jerking his hands back and folding them against his chest, tucking his knuckles under his armpits. This was it, this was all he was ever going to get of Kalp ever again. He couldn’t  —  he couldn’t just
wash it off.
Like it was dirt.

Like it was
filth.

Gwen grabbed his sleeve, nodded to the soldier, and together they herded Basil into the first SUV like a mulish child. More neighbours had their faces pressed to glass, had their hands over their children’s eyes as they stood together on front steps and by driveways. Basil resisted getting into the SUV, locking his arms at the elbows, refusing to let them whisk him away, to make him leave behind…

But Basil wasn’t exactly the most stunning example of male physicality, and it was three against one. Between the soldiers and Gwen they got him stuffed into the back. The driver hastily engaged the child lock. Gwen zipped around and nipped in the other door before Basil had even registered that she was getting in with him.

He pounded at the window, scrabbling at the latch, and screamed, “No, no, Gwen, they killed him, we can’t, we can’t just go with them, we can’t just
let them…!”

“Shut up, Basil,” Gwen hissed from beside him. She raised her fists and Basil shied back. She caught herself, eyes popping wide, showing white all around. She swallowed heavily once, twice. She looked like she was about to be sick. She dropped her hands to her hips, forced the fingers into a fanned flex. “Just…shut up,” she whispered, and turned her body away, firmly directed her face out the window.

The SUV began moving. The quiet rowhouse suburb rolled by the windows. Basil wasn’t sure he was ever going to see it again.

He folded over on himself, felt the burn and the fury and the too-hot surge of more tears crawl up his throat, then push at the back of his eyes. He clenched his fingers into his hair and wailed, and screamed, and sobbed until every muscle in his back throbbed with the effort of remembering to breathe. Until the back of his throat felt shredded. He swallowed and tasted blood.

When Basil’s cries wound down to soft, fat hitches and the continual roll of tears down already soaked cheeks, the slow slide of snot across his upper lip, he felt Gwen reach out. She reached over, slid her damp palm down his neck, across his collarbone, igniting the ache there; then down his bicep, over his elbow. She twined her fingers around his.

He grabbed back, held on, held on, held on.

Kalp’s blood was itchy between their palms.

****

The debriefing cell was cold and grey. Basil stared at the painted floor between his knees. Gwen was there with him, he could see her out of the corner of his eye, noted more than registered. But he couldn’t seem to lift his head. Not for her words, not for the cup of now-stone-cold tea she’d brought in for him, not for anything.

He was angry enough to throw something  —  the chairs and table, maybe, only they were metal and bolted to the floor. At any rate, he was too exhausted to move, to put furious thought into violent action.

His throat was killing him. He wanted water, or something, he wasn’t sure. Maybe orange juice. That would make the pain worse, wouldn’t it? Fill the small cuts in the soft tissue of his throat with an acidic bite. Yeah, that could be good; make the pain on the outside match what was eating him to pieces on the inside.

Gwen had suggested they “talk about it” well into their first hour. How long ago that was now, Basil didn’t know. He hadn’t replied. It hurt to reply. He just sat there with his forehead on the edge of the table, hunched over his own brown-purple hands, staring at the painted floor.

Who the hell paints a concrete floor, anyway?

His brain said:
seals in dust lessens airflow deadens echo and the travel of sound easier to clean
, and he shook his head. All the little fragments of thoughts scattered out of his ears like pepper from a mill. He went back to being empty.

Alone.

Basil shifted his eyes to his hands. Palm up on his thighs, curled slightly. He looked like he was trying to catch words, the same strange non-verbal gesture that Kalp did to indicate that he was listening, paying attention, focussed. The same way Kalp
used
to.

Hell.

Basil quickly turned his hands over.

Some of his own blood was mingled with…with
his
. Basil had cut himself with his own fingernails while making a fist, impotent in the black void that was the back of the SUV. Yesterday he would have been worried about cross contamination, his blood mingling with another species’, but now all he could think was
yes, inside me, he’s safe there, yes.

Gwen sat down beside him. He knew it was Gwen, would know even if he was deaf and blindfolded. Even if he’d had all his senses deprived, taken, he’d know Gwen. The skin on his face tried to crawl away from her, goosebumping painfully.

“Basil,” she said softly, and then her fingers were curled into his palm, soft and surprisingly cool. She clucked her tongue once, the tip of her own nails tracing the punctures his had made. “Oh, Basil,” she said again, and this time it sounded like a pet name, like a soft and meaningful “sweetie” or “baby.” But Gwen had never really indulged in pet names, and Basil had felt stupid calling her “pumpkin” when the most she ever called him was “Baz.” So, no pet names for them. Sometimes he called her “colonialist,” but that was when they were teasing.

Now she made his name sound…what? Like it was the name of a moping child, or a pouting lover. Like he was foolish. Condescending.

Basil straightened and yanked his hands out of her grip. He turned his face away. He didn’t want her to see how chapped his upper lip was, how swollen his eyes were. He could see how miserable he looked in the speciality glass that made up an entire wall.

Stuck on the mirror side for once
, Basil thought. Self-pity turned to anger.
I didn’t do anything wrong! It wasn’t me!

Something soft and wet and warm touched the side of one of Basil’s knuckles, and he looked down. Gwen had one of her hands in his palm, a wet washcloth cutting a peach slash through the rusty burgundy that was flaking off of his skin.

He wanted to pull back, scream
no!
and push Gwen away.

But even Basil knew that he’d have to wash off Kalp’s blood sometime. Logically.

 Gwen turned his hand over and Basil let her, slow and reverent and ritualistic as she scraped at the clots that had gathered in the wrinkles of his joints, the small turquoise hairs that were caught under his nails. She had a shallow bucket of warm water. Basil wasn’t certain when it had arrived, but then it wasn’t exactly like he’d been paying attention, was it?

The water grew progressively more violet as Basil’s hands turned white with scrubbing. He watched morosely, eyes dry and sore, the tip of his nose throbbing. Gwen slowly, gently ran the cloth across the backs of his hands, along the tender thin skin under his wrist, between his knuckles and along the fine webbing of his fingers, across the intimate mound that was the base of his thumb.

Gwen took her time with his nail beds, chasing after every speck before turning his hand over and slowly and just as carefully cleaning out the fingernail wounds. When she was finished, she left the limp rag draped over the side of the white bucket, dripping watered-down blood onto the grey table top.

Basil had to turn his head away to keep from retching.

Gwen pulled a small tube from her tactical vest. It was the liquid band-aid that all Special Ops personnel were assigned in their field med kits, the one enhanced with alien technology. Basil hissed as the antiseptic in the opaque jelly went to work first. Gwen smoothed a small amount over each cut with the small brush and Basil refused to whimper. He bit his bottom lip until the sting on the cuts gave way to the warm tingle that meant the epidermis repair nodules had gone into effect. In a few hours, no one would even be able to tell that he had harmed himself at all.

Make the cuts again
, he thought rebelliously,
make the pain on the outside match!

But no, Basil didn’t like pain. Especially the self-inflicted kind. And he hurt so much right now that it seemed redundant to just add more…

Gwen reached out and took up the cloth again, turned it over, folded the dirty side in, and wiped gently at the salt water dried onto Basil’s cheeks, the leftover snot at the sides of his nostrils.

She leaned forward and pressed a kiss to the tip of his abused nose.

“Kalp’s dead,” Basil said softly.

Gwen paused, lips still touching his skin. Basil felt them stiffen along with the rest of her posture. She pulled back, eyes down, not meeting his desperate gaze. Desperate, yes, for confirmation, for sympathy, for grief,
fuck,
for some sign that Gwen was hurting as much as Basil was, that she was hurting
at all.

Gwen turned away and dropped the cloth into the bucket. She stood and went over to the door and left it by the corner of the jamb, on the floor. Basil couldn’t help but notice that it was in such a place that made it easy for someone to fetch it and slam the door back closed without opening the door too wide or for too long.

At first Basil thought that Gwen hadn’t heard him, but then, with her eyes on the door handle, shoulders slumped, she said, “Yes.”

Basil took this for a good sign, that Gwen had come out of whatever weird stoic shock she had thrown up like a shield, that she was going to start crying soon. Just, any proof that she was grieving, too.

Basil stood and went over to her, ready for her to turn her face against his neck and weep. He held his arms out slightly, and tried not to think of the last time they’d clung to each other like that, in the graveyard on the night they’d buried Gareth.

God, Gareth. Kalp would have to go into the plot beside Gareth.

Wrong
, Basil’s mind screamed.
It was supposed to be me next!

What Basil’s tongue tripped out was: “We should…organize…oh God, I don’t know what to do, for the Ceremony of Mourning, we have to…”

“No.”

She didn’t turn to face him. She didn’t even
sound
sad.

Basil wrapped his fingers around Gwen’s hands, squeezing hard. “Of course we…why not?”

“No,” Gwen repeated, and pulled her hands away, slowly but firmly. Detaching. “Not for traitors.”

“Gwen!” Basil gasped, so surprised as to be scandalized. “You can’t really think  —  ”

“Don’t tell
me
what I really think!” Fire lit her eyes, flamed her cheeks for half a second and Basil hoped that now was the time when she’d finally start to react…but no. She shut down again, went cold and constrained.

Basil felt like an MP3 player left on loop. “Gwen!”

“No.” She moved to the other side of the room, put the table between them. She folded her hands over her stomach and bent her head.

Gwen stared at him, long and hard, and Basil was startled to see the white lines wrinkling the skin around her eyes, the corner of her mouth. There was silver streaking her temples, the little inlet of hair that peaked around her scar. Basil was sure, so sure that it hadn’t been there at all this morning. Gwen looked weary. Old.

“He was my husband, too,” she whispered.

“Then…then c’mere,” Basil whispered. He held out his hand. Gwen slowly, as if she feared what the touch of his skin might do, reached out, up. Their fingertips touched.

She didn’t step into him, didn’t fold her sweet soft arms around him or pillow her cheek against his chest, but for now that little bit of contact was enough. It was better than nothing.

Basil closed his eyes and wished that he could start this day all over again. What he needed was a cosmic reset. A big red button that he could press or a trigger that he could pull that would let him go back in time and…and…

Basil gasped.

“The thingy!” he shouted and clicked his fingers. “Someone get me that metal component thingy from my dining room table!”

PART I: BACK

The day dawned crisp and (too early) sweet.

September light dropped heavily over the stretching acreage of the farm, drenching the quiet world in the warm sepia of all the best nostalgia. The sky was the sort of open blue that prompted content, indulgent thoughts of a step-ladder and a spoon, just to see if it tasted as ripe as it looked. For a breathless second, even the birds and the insects seemed to share in the gentle glory of the early autumn sunrise, too awed to break the hush with the busy matter of attracting a mate.

It was, of course, promptly shattered by Gwennie’s shrill demand for breakfast. She was always better when someone else did the waking, lazy-eyed and pillowy and pliable.

“S’comin’, s’comin’,” Mark mumbled into the comforter. He heaved himself upright. His wife cracked a sandy eyelid in sympathy as he poked sleep-warmed feet into the chill morning air. Dawn feedings were Mark’s responsibility. He had to get up to do the milking, anyway. He hinged upwards like a rusty door, legs crooked and then holding him up as if gravity was some sort of recent miracle and he hadn’t quite gotten the hang of moving with it just yet.

Safe from the comfort of her down duvet, Evvie winced as Mark ricocheted off the corner of the solid wood dresser  —  an heirloom from his own grandfather’s farm, if you could call such a battered and scuffed piece of sturdy wood an “heirloom”  —  as he struggled to pull on a pair of jeans that he’d left crumpled on the foot of the bed the night before. A year ago, Evvie would have appreciated the flex of his biceps, the fact that he’d neglected to put on anything else under the denim; that meant he was feeling frisky and nothing but good things would come of it when he got back in from the chores. Now it meant that he was too bleary to remember anything as banal as underwear.