Prospero's Half-Life Page 16

  His life, upon reflection, was miserable; as December wound on and New Year’s Day approached he began putting thought into trying to escape. He came up with any number of scenarios: overpower the guards at one of the high school’s entrances; slip away from squad when the opportunity arose; sneak out one of the windows at night and scale down the wall. In the end, all of them circled back to the same problem. It would soon be time for the deep freeze of winter, and it would be ultimately foolish to wander out into southwestern Ontario in the midst of it. No matter how exhausting and trivial his life was at the moment, it was infinitely better than dying of exposure in the middle of an overgrown farmer’s field in the middle of a white-out. He resolved to wait until spring and see if his situation improved any.

  One day, near the end of January, Richard was returning from a four-day jaunt to the northern edge of the city. They’d cleared out a group of very opulent houses, which had been a veritable orgy of destruction. The sound of paper being ripped from it’s glued position on a book’s spine was something that Richard did not believe would ever forget. They had done it so many times in the past few months that it seemed as natural as anything else in their lives: the crunch of boots on snow, the call of birds, the booming echo of the wind. They had saved everything to pile up in the middle of a cul-de-sac; it had taken most of box of waterproof matches, but they’d created a bonfire from the destroyed books that had warmed them for hours as they rested.

  He was replaying a particularly unsettling scene in his head when he returned to the high school, not paying attention as he walked into the marginally warmer confines of the building. He had found a beautiful, hardcover copy of Ringworld in one of the homes, in a bedroom that looked, when they first entered, as though it had once belonged to a particularly messy adolescent girl. He had held it for more time that was strictly safe, staring at it as his memories washed over him. He remembered seeing it in the bookstore back in the other city, remembered Samantha sitting on it, lifting her hips, beckoning him. The recollection had caused much consternation inside of him and he’d spent nearly the entire return journey not speaking to any of his other squad mates.

  The memory of seeing it and then having to hand it off to the man to his left – he’d held a knife brought along for the express purpose of destroying hardcover books – made it so that he was staring at his feet as he turned a corner. Another person had been busy turning the corner from the other direction, and the two of them collided with no small amount of force. Richard looked up, startled, and as he stumbled backwards he saw that he had run into a woman. A half-second later, he realized that it was the woman whom had been sent to tempt him in that infinite white cage. The shock of recognition is like a heart attack he thought, and the pounding within his rib cage certainly bore this out. He gaped at her, unable to think of anything orthodox to say as greeting or apology. The woman eyed him with some distrust, dusted herself off, and went about her business.

  After that he kept an eye over his shoulder to see if she would appear again; he found himself desperately curious about her. Eventually she did show up in his line of vision; he saw her standing by an open row of lockers, paused in whatever activity she was engaged in, staring at him. She had been staring at him when he had looked over, so she had been looking at him for some time before he had noticed. After she saw him looking, she looked away rapidly and hurried along her way. From then on, he saw her nearly everywhere he went. He would look out of the corner of his eye and she would be there, lurking in a corner, chewing her nails or pretending to be engaged in something other than the act of spying on him. He began to grow paranoid about her, wondering if she really was spying on him, or testing him in some way.

  He asked Chris about her on the next trip they took out as squad mates. They were hunkered down near a row of darkened fast food restaurants, eating robotically from cans and trying to keep the cold of the day from effecting them too much. Richard had taken up a lunch squat near Chris and had begun whispering to him as they were halfway through their cans.

  “I’ve seen the woman around,” he told Chris. “The one who was sent to tempt me. She’s been all over the Keep. I think she’s following me”.

  Chris turned his head and stared at him blankly without speaking. Richard began to grow uncomfortable and he considered getting up and walking away without saying another word. Before he could do this, however, Chris spoke.

  “Put her out of your head,” was all he said, and there was a note of uncharacteristically stern warning in his voice. He finished up his can and rose to his feet. “Let’s get out of here,” he said loudly, to the group, and walked away without another glance back at Richard.

  Richard found that he could not keep the woman out of his head, however, especially since she continued to lurk at the edge of his vision. He found himself drawing his mind back to the last time they had been near to each other, when she had straddled him, nude and appealing, her breasts brushing against him with a feeling like an electric charge. He began to torment himself with fantasies of her, imagined sexual theatre that he could not even culminate since masturbation was nearly as deadly a sin as fornication was. His life, already an exercise in drudgery, became something akin to a living hell.

  He was considering escaping again; he had nearly convinced himself that even the near-certainty of freezing to death in the trackless rural snow fields was better than slowly going mad from unrequited desire. He was running several increasingly plausible scenarios through his head when he passed by an old supply closet. As he passed, the closet opened quickly and a hand darted out to grab him. Startled, he gave some small resistance but was eventually pulled forcefully inside.

  The door shut firmly as soon as he was inside the closet. Warm hands encircled his neck and soft, salty lips pressed into his with urgent longing. He was shocked to his very core but recovered quickly, pressing back with a kiss that relayed all of his pent-up desire. There was very little light in the closet but he knew without even needing confirmation that it was her. He brought his hands up to her robe and parted it quickly; he cupped her large, low-slung breasts in his hands. Her hips bucked against his, and her tongue darted violently past his lips.

  He pushed away and spun her around so that her hands had to brace against the wall. She let the robe fall into a pile at her feet and he undid his own; within moments he was inside her, sliding in with no resistance. There was little in the way of love-making in this; instead, he grabbed onto her shoulders and fucked her with force from behind. Within seconds he came reflexively; she cried out softly but bit her lip and ground herself against him, refusing to let him go until he eventually wilted out of her. She then picked up her robe, put it back on, grabbed something random from one of the shelves, and left without saying anything or even looking back. Richard, stunned, waited for a long moment before doing the same. He took a ream of paper, which would be used to create kindling for fires. It was a useful thing to take, and a useful thing to use as cover.

  He thought that their rough, furtive encounter in the dark would be the end of it; his loins ached for more, but he knew the danger of attempting to seek out a similar seduction. The woman, however, either did not know of the danger (not likely) or did not care. She continued to seek him out in lonely areas, draw him aside, and offer herself up for him. Each time gave him greater and greater pause; he was sure that, the next time, they would be discovered by others and find themselves thrown on top of a soon-covered mass grave. He grew tormented by this idea, but did not reject her advances even once. He swore each time that it would be the last, but each time she reached for him and he lost himself in her.

  She only spoke once, just after they had finished up in one of the creaking portable trailers that were at the back of the school’s property. She had gone even wilder than normal, demanding that he pull her hair, slap her on the ass, and spurt his orgasm down her back. As she had wiped his seed off of where it had pooled on the rise of her buttocks, she had leaned in close and
whispered “my real name is Carolyn”. By the time another month had passed, he had learned only her name; the only other things that he knew about her were coarse, carnal things.

  Early March melted into the Ides; the warm weather meant that some of the men would be diverted to the hardy task of tilling the fields that Brother Bentley had ordered torn up in the dying days of the summer. The pool of available men for the expeditions shrank and Richard began to see the same faces much more often than he had before. Chris, thankfully, was one of these, although he continued his careful regimen of meaningless chatter and meaningful glances. As April approached Richard found his life getting incrementally better; the warm weather combined with the release for his sexual urges made for a better standard for comparison. He worried endlessly about being caught with Carolyn, but also found himself enjoying their sneaking around immensely.

  In early April he was out on squad work with Chris and a few others that he knew on a name-basis. They crossed over the road bridge that spanned the Grand River, heading southwest. They were supposed to be heading for some of the working class houses near the highway, but all of a sudden Chris gave some sort of hand signal and they turned quickly into the parking lot of a tall, grey apartment tower. Each of his squad mates glanced at him purposefully as they walked towards the building and Richard felt his pulse pick up. As they entered the dark, trashed interior he felt himself growing clammy and numb. They had caught him, he thought. Someone had seen them, and reported them to the brothers in white. They’d given him some rope, and now they were going to hang him with it.

  Each step they took within the apartment tower seemed to confirm it for him. They had no purpose for being there. The place had been partially cleared out, and was not on the schedule to be finished for at least another month. They marched along the hallways and up the stairs of the building in silence, refusing to look at him. He looked at each of them in turn, silently pleading with them for mercy, forgiveness, or compassion. He could catch none of their eyes, however; their gazes were fluid in escaping his.

  After climbing up the auxiliary staircase for fifteen minutes they reached the top floor. Richard wanted to stop and catch his breath (the long climb in the dark had badly winded him) but none of the others seemed willing to wait for him. Two of the men prodded him along from behind and he grumbled forward, staggering and losing his step on some littered debris. They walked down the main hallway of the top floor, passing apartments with monolithic doors and apartments whose doors lay open to reveal the dark, eerie remnants of the old life. They stopped at one of the closed doors, seemingly at random, and Chris knocked in an odd, polyrhythmic fashion that teased at Richard’s memory. There was a brief pause and the door swung open, creaking on its hinges with a sharp note of complaint.

  The apartment inside was littered with things that Richard had spent months destroying. The walls were lined with posters, and books covered every conceivable surface. Some were battered, expanded paperbacks with lurid covers and generic titles. Others were thick, ponderous tomes with titles that marked them as textbooks: he saw books on physics, computer programming, psychology, and chemistry. Here and there were books that Richard had heard others call classics: War and Peace, The Great Gatsby, Cannery Row, On The Road. He was shocked by the sheer amount of them piled up around the apartment. There were five other men in the room, as well as three women, and none of them were moving to destroy or even touch the offensive material. He blinked, trying to establish some reason for all of this, and saw that one of the women in the room was Carolyn.

  The door slammed shut behind him and he was suddenly very aware of the situation. The strength went out of his legs and he found himself on his knees, feeling faint and nauseous. He looked around at the semi-familiar faces, and found Chris. He held his hands out imploringly to his friend, and tried to keep the worst of the shaking from his voice.

  “Please,” he began, “in the name of the powerful and compassionate God, I am just a penitent man, a sinner in a world of sinners, begging for the forgiveness of...”

  Chris cut him off with a gesture, his expression unchanging, and he went deeply cold with fear.

  “Cut the God shit, man,” Chris said, and all at once Richard was very confused. A wide grin split the man’s dusky black face. “You’re here because we know damn well you don’t think like that. Now would you like to know what’s going on, or would you like to spend the rest of your life on your knees?”

  Richard began to speak, realized that he had no idea of what he was about to say, and then shut his mouth. He rose slowly, carefully to his feet. The choice, it seemed, was obvious.

  SEVEN

  It was Chris that did most of the talking; Chris, who had known all along that Richard was nowhere near as devout as he espoused. As he listened to Chris tell him, he realized that he had not been as careful as he thought he had been.

  Brother Bentley, it turned out, had been plain old Reverend Michael Bentley once upon a time. When the plague had fallen on the world, Bentley had opened the doors of his church, First Methodist, and welcomed in all who needed aid. As the disease had progressed, it had become increasingly clear that this was not the sort of epidemic that would sweep through and leave a slightly reduced population grateful to be alive. As more people had died, Reverend Bentley had begun to grow strange. One of the men in the apartment, a grizzled old ex-firefighter named James, had spat at that.

  “Old Bentley lost his fuckin’ mind, is what,” James growled. Chris nodded, accepting it without comment.

  Bentley had begun preaching with much more fire and brimstone than he had ever used in the past. He had gathered his flock around him and had drilled into them, for hours at a time, the idea that the outside world, drowning in sin and dripping with decay, was responsible for the mass deaths haunting the world.

  “He used to go on worsen’ a politician,” James remarked, his voice flat. “God this and hell that and the modern world is responsible for it’s own demise”.

  There had been several voices in the community that had objected to the things that Bentley had been preaching, mainly from the students at the university. Near the end, as the few remaining survivors wandered the haunted streets in shock, someone had firebombed First Methodist. That had been the tipping point; after that, Bentley had taken the fanatical core of his flock and had rounded up the remaining people of Brantford. He had gathered them in the broad courtyard of the university and delivered a three-hour sermon that had culminated in a warning that deviance from the word of God would not be tolerated. To prove his seriousness in this matter, he had taken five of the survivors from the university and had crucified them in the courtyard. Their crucifixes had been made out of the burned wooden beams that had been pulled from the wreckage of Bentley’s church.

  “They’re still there, too,” one of the women said, breaking in with a jarring suddenness. “At least, they were. No one’s been allowed there in a while. But he had them there. They’d hammered them in pretty deeply, they’d stand there for a while”. Richard swallowed thickly and tried not to think about what a lingering, agonizing death that would have been.

  After that, Bentley had taken the entire group of survivors in Brantford and had brought them to the downtown high school. He had ordered them to clear every last book, poster, computer, etc. out of the building, and had burned all of them in a bonfire which had smouldered on the school’s front lawn for a week. After that, he had chosen twelve men from within the community and imposed the hierarchy of robes upon them. Bentley and his chosen rulers would wear pure white, to set themselves apart from the others. The fanatics were robed in black and used as a disciplinary stick against the rest of the community, who were robed in grey.

  Life had turned into a living hell for most of the survivors of Brantford after that. Bentley had insisted upon a course of destroying every bit of the old world, by covering up, breaking, or burning anything that would have held information. The signs were painted over, sculptures were
pulled down and smashed, books were torn apart and burned. At first, Bentley and his cohorts had joined in the orgy of destruction, but every week they pulled back a little more. Finally, they had entrusted the day-to-day supervision of the survivors to the black robes, and had retreated into secret councils in lonely areas of the building.

  The black robes, for their part, had ensured the pacification of the community in two ways: first, through direct threat of physical violence; second, through the encouragement of the concept of neighbour spying upon neighbour.

  “For a bunch of crazy fanatics,” James noted, “they would have done the Stasi proud”.

  Such a culture of paranoia had become entrenched over the months largely due to the second strategy. The survivors, shell-shocked by the plague and then cowed by the crucifixions, had been all too eager to report each other for perceived crimes of morality. Most of these crimes, it seemed, had a sexual nature. This person had been harbouring sexual thoughts of that person. This person had been caught in flagrante with that person. It was the same sort of tiresome, petty moralising that they had engaged in before the plague, only now there was serious consequences at the end. Many people, however, seemed to be perfectly alright with this as long as the crimes of another meant that their own would be concealed.

  “People got scared,” Carolyn said quietly. “They didn’t want to die. We knew it would happen. People disappeared. There were – are – rumours of mass graves on the edge of town. I’m sure you’ve heard them”. Richard nodded, remembering the discussion he’d had in sharp whispers with Chris. “Well, they’re true. Dozens of us have been killed over the last few months, and they’re getting buried out by the old Mohawk church. People get reported, tortured, murdered. It happens every day”.