Triptych Read online

  Triptych

  by David Castlewitz

  Copyright 2016 David Castlewitz

  All Rights Reserved

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to people, places and events, of the past or present, is purely coincidental.

  Cover art by LLPix Designs

  www.LLPix.com

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Part One : Outside

  Chapter One

  Weeders clogged the corridor, their backs to the wall, legs extended, making it hard for anyone to pass. They sucked on waxed tubes of kick weed, inhaling the intoxicating aroma and falling deeper into whatever version of ecstasy or dread suited them.

  Paul Barrington turned to Dell. "I'll carry you."

  "I'm not going that way." She pushed him off.

  "Then back across the room," Barrington said, but he knew Dell wouldn't want to go in that direction either. They'd spotted her parents and, though they wouldn't object to their 20-year-old daughter being in Chicago's Grand Bazaar with her live-in boyfriend, they'd be appalled to find the young couple so deep in the underground marketplace, in the caverns three levels down from the street, where kick weed and other drugs were sold openly; where rooms were rented for fantasy encounters; and people gambled on absurd games like Monkey-in-the-Barrel.

  "This way," Dell said, pulling on his sleeve. She back-stepped into a dark hallway. They encountered no one. They went to the very end, to a door covered by a wire grate with padlocks top and bottom.

  Barrington slumped beside Dell and held her close. They kissed. They fumbled with one another's clothes, but she resisted taking off her blouse and didn't respond when he loosened his belt so she could more easily pull down his trousers.

  "I'm not rutting in the hallway like two dogs on the loose."

  "Next time, we'll get one of those rooms," Barrington said.

  "I'm not wasting money on some fantasy trip. We'll need all we've got when we get married."

  When? Barrington wondered. She'd finish high school soon, but then she had two years of tech-school. A technical degree in any discipline meant she'd find a job. They'd earn points together and qualify for an apartment of their own.

  They both, Barrington admitted, wanted to move out of her parents' place where they shared half a bedroom, with a thin sheet of wallboard running the length of the room from floor to ceiling. No one had any privacy. Which, to Barrington, made the fantasy room even more attractive. There, with holographic partners and a large, cushy bed, they could be as noisy as they pleased, as wild as they wished, for a full forty minutes of fun.

  Before he met Dell, when he had to pay a front-man to get access to a room because of his age, Barrington took a girl from class to a fantasy room where they had sex with holographic tigers as well as one another. It was a wild night, one of the best of his life. For the past year he'd been trying to get Dell to go with him to a room like that, any room, even one of the less frightening ones where virtual slaves attended to the lovers in a setting supposedly like ancient times.

  Dell O'Hara balked at the idea. Her resistance made her even more attractive than her physical attributes. Barrington had met many brown-haired girls with fleshy lips and inquisitive dark eyes; but Dell intrigued him because of what she said and what she thought and what she would and would not do with him.

  "Go check," she whispered. He knew what she meant. He walked to the end of the dark hallway, stepped into the bright lights of the main room, and scanned the crowd for any sign of Sam and Kitty O'Hara. He caught a glimpse of a dark-skinned man with a head of wiry black hair, and ducked his head and backed out of sight. When he looked again, he saw Sam O'Hara with an arm across a woman's hefty shoulders, her long blonde hair falling in shimmering waves to the middle of her back. Kitty O'Hara looked formidable as well as attractive, like a daring pick-up from some corner bar.

  Barrington reported back to Dell. They joked about her parents being too old for those rooms. But it was only a joke. Some nights, Kitty and Sam were as wild and as noisy as kids; Barrington often heard neighbors talking about the O'Hara couple. He knew they talked about him, too. And about Dell.

  "It's safe," he said, and pulled Dell to her feet. Her eyes shone in the dark. Holding hands, they shuffled out of the hallway, into the main room, past the gaming tables and the barkers on raised platforms enticing passers-by into arcades and holographic encounter cubicles, the closed-off and enticing parts of this section of the Grand Bazaar, which was do deep underground that only those who wanted to be there could find it. Casual visitors stayed upstairs.

  They trudged up the main stairwell, Barrington leading the way and Dell following. He pulled on the steel banister and bumped shoulders with the downward stream of people. Once they reached street level, he took Dell by the hand and led her outside. Street lamps cast a dull glow across a block long collection of kiosks, pushcarts, and narrow storefronts.

  "Hungry?" Barrington nodded at a short pillar set back from the curb. Decorated with a colorful array of sprites and demons and mythical animals, the kiosk tantalized passers-by with the aroma of beans and rice frying in fragrant oil. An old man sat near the open window, arms crossed on the sill, knobby nose and close-set eyes poking outside his enclosure. Shadowy figures moved behind him. Barrington marveled at how the vendor made such good use of his tiny space.

  Prices chalked on an irregular slab of slate glued to the kiosk wall quoted prices in V-Rings, the official and ubiquitous currency, as well as Bitters, the municipal legal tender, and ogres, the off-grid rings (OGR) common in the Grand Bazaar.

  "I'm not," Dell said, and steered away from the man in the window.

  Barrington glanced at his All-Pod. He never had a healthy balance, even when he got piece-work pay from Jake Stern's repair shop, where he put his technical talents to good use rewiring lamps, fixing small appliances, making minor repairs to handheld devices of various stripe, and cleaning and refurbishing computers -- laptops, old-fashioned desktop machines, and notepads.

  "Put your pod away," Dell urged, and hugged his arm. They swayed, walking in the street together. Barriers at each end of the block kept vehicles from entering. Guards hired for the night enforced the rules. No drivers; no scooters or pedal-bikes; and no fighting or impromptu demonstrations or flash mobs. The Grand Bazaar -- this permanent incarnation as well as the pop-up stalls and kiosks on side streets -- was sacrosanct.

  All around them, forty-story tall brick buildings reached to the sky, obscuring the sliver of a moon, the city lights spoiling any view of the stars. But, here and there, pinpoints of white light stood out. Looking up, Barrington searched for the New Habitat, a space colony being built in orbit around the Earth.

  Dell squeezed his arm. He touched her soft hand. He'd passed all the academic tests for Habitat school. He just didn't win in the lottery. Two years in a row and his number didn't come up. Now, at 22, he'd aged out. He'd never be admitted to the academy, neither to the local school nor to the national one. He'd be stuck on Earth, scratching out a living as best he could, struggling to keep his all-important job, collecting points to apply to housing benefits, competing against robots that worked harder and faster. If it weren't for the municipal code, there'd be no humans at all at any of the factories or motor pools or anywhere else that depended on manual – even skilled – labor.

  He didn't share his thoughts with Dell. She also looked skyward.

  "Are you going to try
on your own?" he asked. The Habitat had been a dream they once shared.

  She shrugged. "Dad says I should. Mom, too. My birth mother tells me I should just go ahead and apply."

  Barrington wanted to say, "Then do it. Maybe you'll get enough credits to bring me along." Instead, he took hold of her hand and walked with her to the end of the long block, with the tall brick buildings looming on either side.

  "Let's get home before Mom and Dad," Dell said. She pulled free and ran ahead. He followed at a loping pace. They had to take advantage of when Kitty and Sam O'Hara went out for the evening.

  #

  Barrington tried to be first in line at Stern's Repair, intent on getting piece-work. His municipal motor pool job, now reduced to four hours a week from the original eight, barely paid him enough to take Dell out to eat once a week, considering what he gave her parents for rent. The motor pool had acquired two more robots to pull and test circuit boards, but even with the official three humans to one robot ratio, the number of new applicants for city jobs meant everyone, not just Barrington, suffered a cut in hours. Only the robots labored 24 x 7.

  The line at the steel grate across Stern's storefront swayed and, as usual, broke apart. It was no line at all. Four technicians stood patiently waiting on the old man when Barrington got there. Minutes later, the total jumped to ten, and that's when the orderly queue disintegrated. Barrington sat on the curb, elbows on his knobby knees and his chin in his hands. For all he knew, this could be the day when Jake Stern turned up dead.

  Like most everyone else, Barrington disliked the old man. At the age of ninety, Stern had held his own in the community for more than seventy years. According to legend, even when he was a twenty-year-old student he'd been active in street politics. Back then, people demonstrated for more police protection from the gangs preying on the packed tenements. Once the police stepped up patrols, men like Stern banded together to fight official oppression. The street gangs vanished; armed men in uniform took over.

  Compared to the turbulent past, the endless blocks of brick high-rises that defined the city neighborhoods were peaceful. Community leaders like Stern controlled the gambling, the entertainment at the arcades, the small stores offering goods and services that the Municipal Shopping District couldn't and wouldn't. At the city center mall, anyone could buy margarine for the breakfast table. At the Grand Bazaar, there were always two or three stalls that popped up here and there where butter could be found. Along with tobacco and marijuana and exotic spices.

  Dell's parents abhorred these luxuries. The butter, according to Sam O'Hara, didn't have the right texture, or the right taste. He doubted it was made from cow's milk. Where in Chicago would anyone keep cows? Outside the walls? Along Lake Michigan? Most likely, some chemist engineered the product, which made it no better than the Municipal margarine.

  Barrington never commented on the O'Hara's frugality. Sam, with his one-day-a-week spot as a lecturer at the local college, where he'd once been a tenured professor in the American Literature department, always seemed on the brink of losing even that minimal job. Luckily, Kitty, his wife, had a steady, four-days-a-week stint at the community daycare center. A bubbly personality and, Barrington assumed, a love for children, served her well. A transgendered female, her thick blonde hair and wide face, with her massive body that hinted at the heavyset man she'd once been, often seemed at odds with the motherly cadence in her voice when Barrington heard her with her three-to-five-years-old charges.

  The thought of Kitty made Barrington shudder as he sat waiting for Jake Stern. Dell wanted to take him to meet her surrogate birth-mother, whom she visited on an irregular basis. Not for her approval, Dell cautioned, adding that she didn't need anyone's approval. But out of courtesy, because her birth parent deserved to be in on her future plans.

  Jake Stern strode up to the store and the crowd, which had grown to include a few residents with broken lamps and small appliances in need of repair. The old man's two bodyguards stood alongside him, hands clasped at their belt buckles, suit coats snug across their massive frames.

  Like most everyone, Barrington held no love for the old man. But he didn't wish him dead. Whoever took over after Stern might be an even worse taskmaster. Perhaps the old man was too bossy, too ornery, too impatient; but he paid fairly for work done, always in ogres, the off-the-grid currency Barrington could use anywhere in the Bazaar and which Sam O'Hara accepted for rent. Which let his Municipal salary in V-Rings grow into a hefty nest egg. As Sam often said, "If you want to marry my daughter, better save your money. Wives can be expensive."

  Jake Stern stood with his wrinkled hands on his fat hips. Short and heavyset, he always seemed much taller when he stood on the top step into his repair shop and surveyed the technicians gathered before him. His bodyguards constantly scanned the crowd, especially any newcomers.

  A few older men stepped close to Stern, extended hands in greeting, called to him. He nodded his acknowledgements, took hold of one man's outstretched fingers, and then moved closer to another and hugged him. A few people cheered. Stern shook more hands, oblivious of his bodyguards' wary looks, their eyes shifting, shifting.

  "I need three," Stern said. The crowd moved, younger men and women surging forward a bit, the technicians lining up as though on command. A light breeze ruffled the old man's gray curls. A chill in the air reminded Barrington that this early May cold meant summer would have a hard time taking hold. Looking at the other technicians alongside him, he knew that a few wouldn't survive the coming summer. Somewhere -- sometime -- they'd be stopped by the police, their identity assessed, and found to be without official employment. That meant exile from Chicago-proper; they'd be sent Outside, to the hinterland. They'd be homeless and without city citizenship.

  Barrington often wondered where he'd go if banished. To the lakefront? To the farming communities south and west of the city? Or try to smuggle himself back in and live as long as possible without being detected by a roving city border patrol.

  "I need some work, Jake," someone in line shouted. The cry, with various epithets attached, rumbled through the assembled technicians, everyone repeating the same plea.

  Barrington stepped forward when Stern pointed at him. Two more men did the same. None of the four women in the crowd were picked. They jeered and hissed. The bodyguards dispersed the assembly, pushing those who'd brought items for repair to the side and making the unlucky applicants leave the front of the store.

  Stern unlocked the grating with a look into the eye-scanner. The steel mesh rumbled and creaked on its wheels as it rose to the top of the storefront. Once inside, Barrington took his usual place at the workbench and flexed his fingers. Pliers of various sizes, along with screwdrivers and awls and clips for holding small parts sat arrayed before him. He liked the look and feel of these manual tools. They reminded him of when he was young and his father sat with him at a small wooden desk and taught him the rudiments of electrical wiring, took the magic out of tiny circuits and close-set boards and made everything seem practical and approachable.

  Some things, Barrington learned from his father, would never change. There'd always be a need for technicians.

  #

  The tram stopped short of the last station on its route and then lurched. Barrington pictured imperfect gearing, worn pinions, and pitted ball bearings. After a moment, the light-rail train again moved forward into the covered station, and the doors along the platform opened with a single loud swoosh.

  "Got your All-Pod?" Dell said, brandishing the purple framed unit she dug from her pants pocket."I always worry they're going to let me out and then not let me back in."

  Barrington tapped his left front pocket. His electronic palm-sized computer sat snugly against his thigh. He rarely ventured out of the city. As a child he'd gone to camp, and as a student he went on field trips to far-off farms, but these were sponsored forays to the other side of the wall, and there was never any danger of not being allowed back in.

  Everybody knew a
bout the errors, the data glitches and human oversights that condemned people to a night outside the wall, spent at a barren shelter or with a homeless family able and willing to house a stray for a price, or stuck alongside a highway or in an open field, perhaps banding together with others facing the same mishap. Usually, the mistakes were discovered, the residents let back in the next morning, and sometimes the city paid compensation to the hapless victims. There were, however, rare instances of weeks Outside for individuals who couldn't prove residency because of some snarly data problem over which they had no control.

  "Don't worry," Barrington said as he led Dell off the tram platform and into the queue for a taxi that would take them to the suburbs. "Your birth mom's a lawyer. Any problems and she'll fix it. Like that." He snapped his fingers.

  "We don't have to go."

  Barrington pushed her forward, his grip tightening around her slim upper arm. She smelled of lavender. All over. Hair. Skin. In the fabric of her flower-print blouse with the brocade of dancing ladybugs across the low-cut front. She dragged her feet as she walked, her scuffed shoes in stark contrast to the pressed and clean trousers she'd prepared that morning, taking pains to iron them precisely to eliminate the wrinkles in the cotton-blend material.

  "You look great," Barrington told her when they left the apartment. He repeated the sentiment now.

  Dell responded by patting the curls at the back of her head. "She's always so critical. She'll be critical of you. So be ready and don't let anything she says get to you."

  Barrington grinned, though he didn't feel as confident as he pretended. Dell's parents had accepted him so easily, as though he'd always been in their lives. As educators, he assumed, they came across all types and had learned to welcome everyone into their fold. Perhaps, he sometimes thought, they expected him to flit through Dell's life the same way Kitty O'Hara's preschoolers wandered in and out of hers, with a new batch of youngsters every few months. So why not be warm and nice to this transient?