Triptych (23 page)

The signal seems to work on Basil. In the middle of the night, Basil wakes in the room next to Kalp’s and his motion, as it always does, wakes Kalp too. Kalp waits for Basil to climb from his bed, relieve himself, and return to sleep, but Basil does not. He makes a noise and then Gwen wakes and makes a similar noise and Kalp realizes that they are staying true to their word and only having intercourse when they think he is asleep.

Only, the frenetic motion of their bodies and blood would have wakened him anyway, even if he had not already been conscious. Intercourse cannot be performed while laying still. He cannot help but find the wash of tender motion arousing and this time when his genitals distend and slide into the open, he does not work to hold them back. He feels guilty for using his friends in this manner, in featuring them in his own private pornographic imaginings, but he feels such an aching fondness for both — their squishy skin, their oblivious generosity, their acceptance — that he cannot help but want to be a part of their intimacies as well.

He masturbates to the sound of them entangled together and finishes with them. Satisfied and perhaps less tense than he has been in months, Kalp cleans himself off and drops back down into his unconscious phase.

It is only when he wakes the next morning, still feeling the positive effects of last night’s release, that he realizes how very on edge he’s been for so long. He comes downstairs and participates in breakfast and is surprised to find that without his input whatsoever, his mouth has seemed to mould itself into the shape of a smile, and it cannot be undone.

On Thursday they fight.

It is an inane domestic quibble, the likes of which he has had many times over with Maru and Trus, and it is comforting to discover that sexual partners all over the galaxy still get angry at each other for little habits that they cannot control. Gwen is at both of them for urinating with the commode seat up and then leaving it there after they have finished. Instead of being abashed, Kalp takes this as one more sign that he is being pulled ever more closely into the radius of this relationship, and resolves to remember to return the seat to its proper position when he has finished, even though the males now outnumber the females in the household and it seems an exercise in futility.

On Friday, Kalp receives his first pay packet. He divides it up carefully and pays Gwen and Basil back for the food and clothing they have purchased for him, and adds twice that again to pay for the electricity, water, and heat he has used in the house. They protest that they are not charging him rent and he agrees — he is only paying for what he has consumed. They grumble good-naturedly and take the tender. Units share.

Kalp requests that they return to the outdoor market so that he might speak to the vendor girl as promised and gather ingredients for another meal of his own making. Rudy the bigot averts his eyes when they arrive and Rudy’s lips turn white, he is pressing them together so hard to prevent unwelcome words. Kalp does not wish another confrontation, so he copies the man’s expression and passes by in silence. Basil is excited about the
osap
and this time they buy a whole tray from the cart. Kalp buys the required produce for dinner and speaks to the girl and they arrange a farm tour for the weekend after next, and then all three return home to prepare for the evening’s repast.

For several weeks, they work this way. Kalp makes dinner on Fridays and they go sightseeing on Saturdays, and in between they work and clean the house, eat and do the dishes, sleep and, in the case of Gwen and Basil, have intercourse. Sometimes Kalp watches television all day Sunday, and sometimes he plays video games with Basil. Sometimes Gwen lets him help her paint her toenails, and one memorable occasion, they paint his.

On the news, there are reports of large gatherings of people who object to Kalp’s kind interacting with the humans. Gwen calls it “stuff and nonsense” and Basil calls it “tosh,” but Kalp notices that on the days that these people are out in the major cities, including London, the three of them stay in and play board games. One night, Kalp accompanies Basil only to a sports themed pub and Basil’s friends, all male, challenge Kalp to a game of billiards. Kalp is an engineer, is familiar with force and angle and trajectory, and he repays the men for all the money he has won in their wager by buying them Strawberry Daiquiris, his favoured alcoholic beverage.

The first week of the month of October is far more chilly than Kalp expects. He has been warned that the tilt of the Earth’s axis renders the seasons extreme on the poles away from the equator, but the temperature never varied as hugely on his world as it does here, so he assumed Basil was using hyperbole in his descriptions again. Now he is not so sure.

Once more, Kalp marvels that these fragile humans have survived long enough to become the dominant species on this planet, when they must struggle against such a varied climate and yet never evolved any particular physical traits in order to help fend off cold beyond the useful opposable thumb. There also seems to be very little in the way of physical traits that differentiate between cold-climate dwellers and warm-climate dwellers — as one travels further north the humans become squatter, rounder in order retain more body heat, and grow more and more colourless. Beyond that, they are exactly the same as their southerly neighbours.

On the crisp mornings, Kalp crawls reluctantly out of his nest, thinking that perhaps he will have to “suck it up” as Gwen puts it, and begin to wear socks and shoes just for the sake of keeping the chill off. He is reaching for a sweater when he hears an ugly, retching sound coming from the bathroom.

This is the fourth morning in a row that Gwen has been ill, and Kalp has already expressed his concern. She has refused to attend a medic, so there is little Kalp can do. He merely walks into the bathroom as she flushes the commode, and fetches a glass of water from the tap for her, as he has done every day since the first morning.

“Cheers,” she says, and swishes her mouth out, and spits into the sink. Kalp takes the empty glass from her hand and sets it on the counter. She reaches up and clutches his fingers. “Don’t tell Basil,” she begs. “Let me figure this out first.”

Kalp agrees to keep her secret, though he cannot understand why she wants him to. Basil must surely know that she is ill. If he does not, then he should be informed as he is sleeping next to Gwen and would be the next to catch the virus. She must see a doctor.

Kalp knows it is irrational, of course, but as much as he thinks that Gwen is foolish for not seeking medical attention, he cannot help the tight grip of fear and remembered agony at the thought of Trus, alone, in a medical office. Without him.

It is ridiculous — there is no danger to Earth approaching on the horizon, but then, Kalp thought there was no danger in letting Trus go to the clinic alone on that day.

Gwen sits on the edge of the tub and puts her head in her hands and cries, and Kalp, though he does not want to catch the sickness, does want to comfort her. He weighs the risk and considers it worth it. Besides, if he catches the illness too, then at least Gwen would not be at the doctor’s clinic alone, and that thought motivates him to lift his arms. He wraps her in his embrace. She leaks hot water onto his neck and that seems to make her feel better, at least, so he does not mind that he is going to have to change his shirt when they are done.

Over the next few days, Kalp dutifully says nothing about the illness, even though it persists. Neither he nor Basil, thankfully, seem to have caught it, though. In an effort to lighten the damp mood in the house caused by Gwen’s exhaustion and Kalp’s worry, Kalp suggests that they obtain a pet. It would be amusing, he explains, to add another being to the mix, and he has not yet had the opportunity to experience a domesticated animal personally.

Gwen smiles ruefully at his description about adding another, and rubs her stomach.

In the end they agree and leave Kalp with an entire zoology encyclopaedia, pulled dusty and forgotten from the back of some tall shelf, to choose from.

It is Gwen who is surprised that Kalp wants chickens. Basil seems to think there is nothing strange about it at all. Kalp likes birds, but he wants ones that cannot fly away from him. “They stink,” Gwen protests.

“But, fresh eggs!” Basil rebuts.

Gwen mutters something about Basil and the shine of being a real farmer rubbing off quickly, but concedes as long as the little beasts stay outside. Kalp and Basil build a tiny shed for them to winter in safety, and they paint it blue and add the words “Police Box” to the outside in order to render it similar to the spacecraft in their mutually favourite children’s television program. They have yet to perfect a sensor system so that when a chicken enters, or exits, it makes the recognizable “vrop vrop” sound, but they are working on it.

They get three birds. They start out small and fuzzy and yellow, and grow very quickly. In weeks they are nearly adults. On Sundays Kalp sits in the sofa beside the fireplace and stares out at them as they peck in jerky staccato. When the weather is nice he sits outside beside them on the fold down stool, and the rhythm of their tapping is like hail on his face.

The chickens like him, he is convinced. He dutifully cleans out their blue box daily to keep the stink of their refuse from bothering the neighbours. It is not suitable for spreading on his potted plants, he learns through research, so it is instead put in its own refuse bin on the kerb. The chickens are very accustomed to his physical presence as a result; they stand on his foot if he puts seed there. They allow him to touch their necks gently. Even though their feathery flapping sometimes keeps him from dropping into his unconscious phase (still carefully regulated to the 31.76 Earth hour cycle), they soothe him in other ways.

 He likes the way they do not move smoothly, still for a long moment as if they are thinking about it, before stabbing down and back up. That reminds him strongly of Basil, chewing on the stylus of his BlackBerry, working out a problem. There would be no sound for the longest time, until suddenly Basil reaches out, and tweaks precisely the right thing. No hesitation.

The black chicken catches the swing of Kalp’s arm through the window as he moves to sit closer and settles in to watch them. She jumps, looking as though she might bolt, staring at him warily through the glass, all alert and round, glassy eyes. With a twitch, she is cocking her head, realizing he is no threat, and with that comes curiosity. She cocks her head to the other side, pauses for a beat, then goes back to her methodical pecking.

They make low, constant noises, like the neighbour’s TV when she tries to hide the silence made by the non-presence of her dead family.

By late November, Gwen’s illness fades and Kalp is sore with relief. She still begs Kalp to say nothing of its existence to Basil and still he complies, wondering if this will cause a rift when the truth does emerge, as it inevitably must do. Kalp quashes the urge to lean down and kiss her when she begs up into his face, and it is harder to do every time.

Her lips look very soft.

***

The day that the frozen precipitation first falls, they move the chickens into the basement where it will be warmer for them. Again Gwen protests, and again Basil puts his engineering abilities to work, and devises a sort of ventilation system that keeps the air upstairs fresh and chicken-scent free, and the birds downstairs warm and well-aired. The chickens are put into a pen beside the laundry machine with old paper on the floor to make it easy to clean up their droppings. Gwen avoids the basement now, because she fears getting ill again from the chickens. Kalp is unsure how a chicken could cause human illness — he has heard of the avian flu of the decade previous, but everyone is inoculated against that now.

Basil must learn to do the clothes washing, and on one memorable occasion, turns everyone’s white garments bright pink by dint of a stray red pair of panties.

That night there is a party. It is the first one that Kalp is actively looking forward to. The others after his Earth-fall were miserable, tight affairs. He is anticipating this party because it is the first that he will be attending not as a pitied refugee, but as a valued co-worker. Basil helps Kalp purchase a suitable suit, and they spend hours in the store to make certain to match the tie very carefully to the shade of Kalp’s eyes.

Basil helps him wrangle the material into the correct form of knot, looking frankly stunning in his own suit. Kalp’s touches have been growing more steadily intimate, and he has been going slowly, as one does when taming a wild creature. As he has, carefully and patiently, tamed the chickens; he is making sure Basil is comfortable with one level of intimacy before moving onto the next. It is a slow dance, but Kalp is enjoying the leisurely pace of the seduction.

He has not made as much progress with Gwen, due to her illness and now her strange new irritability. Basil says that she is “bitchy” because she dislikes the winter holiday season. It reminds her of the chasm between herself and her parents. Kalp thinks that Basil is being ridiculously oblivious — it is clear that it is the illness that has made Gwen unhappy. She seems, however, to be content to let Kalp sit very close to her on the sofa and rest his head against hers when she falls asleep against him. Once she pulled his long padded fingers across her stomach. He felt a flutter there, like bird’s wings, but inside. He does not know what it was — her bowels or her stomach or her heart skipping a beat because his touch was warm — but he hopes she will let him do it again.

Kalp reaches out and boldly ruffles Basil’s hair. Before he finishes tying the necktie knot, Basil closes his eyes and leans his cheek into Kalp’s touch.

For a moment he stays very still, breathing softly through his nose. Kalp leans down and brushes the side of one velvety ear against Basil’s forehead.

Basil starts backwards, and his eyes are wide and blue and confused. “I — ” he says, and stops, licks his lips, and huffs out the rest of the breath he had taken for speaking, unsure what to say.