Triptych

by J. M. Frey

  PRAISE FOR

  TRIPTYCH

  “A beautiful and moving exploration into the human soul... An outstanding debut novel and a welcome and refreshing addition to the genre of Canadian science fiction.”

  — Dr. Jennifer Brayton, associate professor in Sociology at Ryerson University, and scholar in Canadian popular culture studies

  “Frey delivers gloriously unpretentious science fiction, with enough fun and romantic intrigue to make you forget that something smart is going on until the closing pages.”

  —Liana K., Co-Host, Writer & Producer for Ed The Sock

  TRIPTYCH

  A NOVEL BY J.M. FREY

  Triptych

  Copyright © 2010 J.M. Frey

  Cover Art © 2011 Charles Bernard

  Edited by Gabrielle Harbowy

  All rights reserved. Reproduction or utilization of this work in any form, by any means now known or hereinafter invented, including, but not limited to, xerography, photocopying and recording, and in any known storage and retrieval system, is forbidden without permission from the copyright holder.

  www.dragonmoonpress.com

  www.jmfrey.net

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  TRIPTYCH

  J.M. FREY

  www.dragonmoonpress.com

  BEFORE

  A body collapsing with no muscular control onto plush carpeting makes a kind of muffled thudding, all raw meat and cut strings. Doctor Basil Grey had heard other, more terrifying sounds in his thirty-three years. He’d heard screams more gorge-raising, had felt more threatened by the piercing shriek of experimental components as their structural integrity began to fail in close proximity to, well, his very valuable self. He’d heard the grating whines of undergrads, the sobs of grad students over the latest drafts of their theses, and the heated yelling matches between colleagues with differing grasps of a theory.

  They were all horrendous sounds, and he had ranked them, once, by order of how much they made his teeth ache. But now he quickly reevaluated his internal top-ten list.

  This particular sound was above and beyond the worst he’d ever heard in his life.

  Something in his gut burned, like a punch had landed solidly to his solar plexus, and Basil doubled over, breath forced from his lungs.

  For a ridiculous, dissonant second, he thought he was the one who had been shot.

  “No,” he moaned, and only realized after the fact that it was he who’d made the soft, wounded animal sound. It was unnaturally loud in the aftermath of the flat, empty crack of a bullet leaving a barrel.

  Already partway down, he let gravity pull him the rest of the way to the floor. He reached out before he could stop himself, scrabbing, shaking, and forced his hand into Kalp’s, laid a palm across Kalp’s cheek. His throat closed up and he struggled to fight against the revulsion from the limpness of the fingers wrapped around his hand; from the already waxy feel of the skin under the bristles on Kalp’s jaw.

  Kalp blinked, just once, and turned his head towards Basil. And then, somehow, he was gone. There was no death rattle, no dramatic final breath, just…life in his eyes, and then…none.

  Kalp was dead.

  Kalp was dead on the living room floor.

  Basil jerked backwards, away from the thing that he now touched, the thing that wasn’t…that was still so warm, and dead bodies weren’t supposed to be warm. They were never warm in the movies. But Kalp radiated heat like a little rain forest. Had radiated, no longer in the present…goddamnit all to hell and goddamn the tenses too. Then Basil’s other instinct, the desperate need to deny, jumped to the fore and he surged forward to try to shake Kalp back into breathing. The purple-red blood was still oozing out of a fist-sized wound, growing ever more sluggish as the seconds ticked by, becoming sharply chilly in the still air. Basil jammed his hand over the blooming injury, pushed in his fist in a desperate, futile effort to stop the flow. Limp blue fur tickled his knuckles. Dark skin cooled irrationally rapidly, making goose pimples burst upwards along his arms.

  Basil called to Kalp, kept calling long after it was obvious that Kalp could never respond, because no, this couldn’t be it, this couldn’t be all. Not after everything else, not after all they’d lost, he couldn’t accept it, he couldn’t just let Kalp die in their own house, in the one place that the Institute had promised they would be safe, goddamn it.

  He looked up. Standing in the fore of the tightly packed group of three Special Ops soldiers from the Institute, a veritable phalanx of Kevlar and scowls, Agent Aitken had gone ashen and grim. Her gun was pointed at the ceiling now, but her finger was still on the trigger, her knuckles white around the grip. Basil imagined that he could see smoke curling out of the barrel.

  “Why?” Basil shouted, and everyone in the room jumped at the sudden submachine spray of words that shot out of him. “What the fuck did you do that for!”

  Aitken swallowed and her grim composure cracked for half a second. “The hostile was  —  ”

  “My husband was  —  ”

  “No, you don’t understand. He had to be  — ”

  “Shut up. Shut up!” Basil shrieked, forgetting about staunching the blood flow. It was so cold against the backs of his fingers, the beds of his nails  — cold already, too late. He lunged up to wrap clawed fingers, purple as Kalp’s blood dried, around Aitken’s neck. She dodged back, and the two other soldiers from the corps surged forward and dragged him bodily away from her. Basil kicked out, furious, his face hot and his head burning.

  Kalp, God, no, Kalp…

  “Gwen! Where are you?” Basil screamed. “Call an ambulance, fuck, someone arrest that crazy woman! She killed Kalp!”

  Aitken stepped back, into the kitchen and out of the way. She holstered her gun and lifted her hand to probe around her neck, then the other hand went to her ear-mounted transmitter and clicked it on. She whispered urgently and softly into the microphone, expression twisted into a sneer even though her lips were dead white. Basil saw the words “backup” and “meatwagon” fall like cannonballs from her mouth. Nobody made a move to stop her.

  Basil looked around at the faces of his fellow agents in disbelief. Some averted their eyes. The rest just frowned. Behind them, Basil’s living room suddenly looked surreal and wrong. A teacup was resting on its side on the coffee table, and beside it, stacked neatly, there was a small bundle of files. They looked like some review work someone had left for half a second, just to nip up to the loo, and meant to return to. On the dining room table sat a torn piece of paper and some strange lump of twisted metal that Basil only half saw but couldn’t force his shocky brain to recognize. It all seemed too…domestic for what was lying on the floor.

  Basil lunged at Aitken again.

  At least, he tried, but a matched set of agonizing grips on the insides of his elbows wrenched him back. A fleeting thought ran across his mind  —  a complaint about whiplash, pulled muscles, maybe something particularly snippy about manhandling  —  but Basil couldn’t spare the brainpower for his habitual bitchiness just now. He bent his knees, trying to regain forward momentum, trying to pull with his center of gravity.

  “Calm down, Dr. Grey!” one of the grunts shouted in his ear, yanking him back so hard something in his shoulder twisted and popped and began to burn.

  Basil yelped, feet skidding out from under him in his surprised pain, and they wrestled him towards the front door.

  He thrashed from side to side, ignoring  —  no, revelling in  —  the biting needles that were broa
dcasting out of his shoulder socket, concentric circles of throbbing agony and clarity. The pain made everything clearer. It made the truth too true to bear.

  He jabbed out with his elbows, but he only succeeded in getting himself all the more tangled in the soldiers’ unforgiving grip. The soles of his boots slipped and skidded against the polished hardwood floors, along the white tile of the house entryway. They caught the corner of the dirt-dull shoe carpet, dragging it across the threshold along with the three struggling men, out onto the cement stoop.

  But he could not make them stop.

  “Kalp! Gwen!” he screamed, and he felt something rip in his throat, the hot burn of anger and grief and pain.

  Kalp couldn’t, he just…it just…no.

  “He’s dead, Dr. Grey,” the same grunt said, and he didn’t even try to say it nicely, didn’t even try to soften the blow.

  “You don’t, you don’t know that,” Basil insisted, digging heels ineffectually into the concrete of the stairs, trying to haul himself and his captors bodily back through the gaping front door. He could see, see the slow spread of browning purple, the ghastly streak of turquoise lying still, motionless in the pool. “You don’t know about them, maybe, we don’t know anything about their physiology, maybe he’s in a coma, or, or his breathing is irregular, he could be fine, God, just let me, let me!”

  “No, doc. He’s gone.”

  “No!” Basil screamed, and suddenly his knees went out from under him, like they couldn’t stand the thought of functioning anymore, not when Kalp was…

  One of the soldiers let go, and the other guided him to the softer scrubby turf of the postage-sized front lawn. Basil’s whole body felt heavy and shaky, like it wasn’t his. It was too hot, too shivery, too much by far right now to have ever been something that Basil lived in.

  He put his face in his hands and sobbed.

  And Gwen, where was Gwen?

  He called out her name, looked up, around. She wasn’t there. Across the street, Mrs. Baldwin stuck her nose out of the door, blanched, and darted it back in.

  Basil wept. Alone.

  There were no sirens when the Institute arrived. There were only big, square black SUVs coming up the side road, pulling up in front of the house, a cube van behind. All the windows were black, black. A man in a coroner’s tee-shirt climbed out of the van’s cab. It was Doctor Zhang, mortician.

  “No!” Basil said again and surged to his feet. He turned back to the house, but his way was blocked by one of the soldiers.

  Gwen appeared in the doorway then, finally, and Basil took a step towards her before he registered the look on her face, and stopped; grim, closed down, nothing. She was dressed in full swat gear like a doll of a soldier: eyes empty, every new strap unfrayed, every buckle still blindingly factory-issue shiny. Her mouth was painted in a flat line, her lips held so tightly together that they had taken on the same shade of pale as the rest of her vacant face.

  She was not angry. She was not sad. She was…nothing.

  The coroner and men in suits piled out of the SUVs and she let them into the house. They shut the door behind them. She stood on the stoop.

  “Gwen!” Basil shouted.

  He shoved at the soldier and the man still would not let him by.

  “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 a
bout 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?