Triptych (29 page)

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.

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.