Prospero's Half-Life (15 page)

Sometimes
there were farmhouses that weren’t boarded up, and Richard was
always very careful around these places. Many of them were simply
places where the family had fallen sick and died before they could
board the house up and flee. These were bad, especially when they
were the houses belonging to animal farming operations. The houses
would stink of human shit and death; the barn complexes would hold
an unholy stench of masses of rotting animals mixed with their
impacted feces. Out of a sort of black curiosity he had decided, at
one of these farms, to investigate. He’d gotten to within six feet
of the entry doors before he’d fallen to his knees and vomited for
two minutes straight. The smell was worse than anything he could
have ever imagined existing.

Strung along
his chaotic walking route were small towns, most of which looked
similar to the point of deeply confusing Richard’s sense of
direction. These sad gatherings of houses and businesses seemed as
though they’d been empty for decades, rather than weeks. On the
streets of these towns decorum still held; those who counted
amongst the dead (whom, it seemed to Richard, must number all of
them) had hidden themselves before the final, bloody seizures. Any
survivors must have blown town long before, or had hidden
themselves when they had heard his cracked, soupy ramblings echoing
through the empty streets. In each of these towns he would stand in
a central intersection, sometimes the only part of town with street
lights, and scream. He would weep, and plead with the unseen that
he knew lurked just out of eye sight. He would cry out for them,
curse their continued silence, and beg them to consider him
rationally. He wasn’t such a bad guy, he stated over and over
again. He didn’t murder people, didn’t rob them and then leave them
for dead. He just looked out for himself. Was that so wrong, he
pleaded before that invisible crowd of long-departed judges? The
wind, when it deigned to blow, was his only response.

He vaguely
noticed the beginning of overgrowth, especially amongst the weeds
along the sides of the roads. With no road crews to maintain
anything, the purple loosestrife was running riot, choking out
competitive life with a brutal efficiency that humans could only
dream of. In the towns, gardens planted in the spring were now
growing out into the lawns; those lawns, where not in
life-and-death warfare with the garden weeds, were nearing two feet
in height. Richard would blearily eye these wild growths of grass,
convinced that there were things lurking in them with malicious
intent. Somewhere along the line he had uncovered a hunting rifle
and it was now slung over his shoulder; the butt of the rifle often
interfered with the side of his knapsack but he was quite often too
drunk to care. Once he started carrying the rifle he had begun to
feel better. There was little chance of him ever hitting anything
with it (he was too gone to aim properly, for one) but the very
fact of its existence served as a kind of balm to his paranoia.

The wind would
rustle through these sprawling growths and shuffle the stalks of
grass and weeds together in a strange, sibilant speech; Richard’s
soaked brain would interpret it as speech and he would often direct
his off-kilter rants at it. Sometimes it seemed to him as though
that rushing, whispering wind were telling the most profound jokes
he’d ever encountered, and he would collapse into the dirt and dust
and laugh until he was hoarse. At other times he would almost catch
a sort of deep philosophical meaning to it, and he would crouch
near a tree to see if the wind would see fit to coalesce itself
into a sermon. It never would, although he sometimes would wait
until he fell asleep from sheer exhaustion.

As he walked
he began to forget, and in this the constant drinking did not help.
He would go days without thinking of the precise names of things:
the names of roads, towns, places in the greater world, people he
had known. He remembered his mother, elderly and infirm, but only
as a pattern of sense impressions and mental tonal recordings. His
coworkers were shadows to him, except for Samantha. Her body
haunted his nights and her sharp accusations haunted the parts of
the day that he could not drink away. He would sometimes retrieve
the letter she had written from the front pocket of the knapsack
and read it, the deep creases that had been folded into it
threatening to tear the whole thing into tiny pieces. He would
mouth the words as he read them, each recrimination dancing on his
tongue and lips and then leaping down the throat to be swallowed.
After a time he did not even need the letter; he knew what was
written on that fading scrap of note paper better than he knew his
own name. He continued to take it out though; in a world as
meaningless as then one in which he dwelled, his distressed mental
process would cling to as many traditions as it could.

He followed a
general path heading west, although the direction he took on any
given day would vary. By the time he wandered north enough to be in
the outskirts of Hamilton, it was mid-September. The temperature
had dropped considerably from the convection oven that had been the
late summer, and Richard had been forced to scavenge a heavy winter
coat from a nameless outdoor supply store; it was not quite cold
enough for the thickness of coat he had chosen, and so he found
himself dragging along during the high parts of the afternoon,
panting and sweating by the end of his daily exertions. As the days
wore on and the nights grew colder, he would feel the chill prickle
his skin when he peeled the coat off. It did not matter what sort
of shelter he chose, he could feel the sweat drying into a clammy
sheen against his skin, and the cold would seem to seep right into
his bone marrow. It would only take several nips of his now
half-empty vodka bottle to ward the chill off each night, however.
By that time, the wine was strictly a daytime fuel, and the gin
bottle had been discarded long ago. His nights, as he skirted
around Hamilton’s southern edge, belonged to a fermented potato
mistress whose touch was as acrid as Samantha’s tongue.

In early
October, in a town whose broken blue sign denoted it as Alberton,
he caught a cold. At first he believed that sleeping warm would
help him get over it quickly. He found a sleeping bag in the
basement of an old yellow house and drank extra rations of vodka to
enhance the warmness. It didn’t help, of course, and within two
days he was running a potent fever complete with wracking chills
and a delirium that his alcohol-soaked fantasies bowed away from.
In one feverish dream, slumbering deep in the basement of that
dirt-washed yellow-brick house, he found himself walking through
the streets of a city somewhat similar to the one he’d fled from.
This dream city was boarded up: every single building that he
passed was covered in hastily mounted plywood and particle board.
There was something eerie, foreboding about it, but in Richard’s
unkempt dreams he could not make any sense of it. It felt somewhat
like the plague, but he saw no corpses; he in fact saw no bodies of
any sort, living or dead, until he came to a small, bleak parkette
across the street from a gas station.

The parkette
was simply a cement patch with two basketball nets growing out of
it, the kind that Richard had seen in countless videos where the
intent was to denote a deep-urban setting. This square of tarmac
was occupied by four adolescent males in clothing that Richard
would have labelled as “skater” if he were in his right mind. They
were certainly in possession of skateboards; their decks lay
propped up against a stretch of chain-link fence. They were busy
bouncing a small ball, whose rebounding force seemed greater than
was physically possible. It would bounce nearly a mile into the sky
and then come plummeting back, and the teens would gabble and make
bets on who the incoming ball would strike.

Richard looked
across the street to the gas station and saw that one of the pumps
was on fire. Alarmed, he turned back to the teens and discovered
that they had discovered his presence. They were standing in a
line, observing him with sly, creepy grins quivering on their
faces. One of them, a sharp-faced whippet of perhaps seventeen,
stepped forward and cocked his arm back behind his head.

“
Hey, man!” the kid shouted. “Look out!”

“
The gas station’s on fire!” Richard shouted, trying to warn
them. There was some fear of exploding gasoline in his dream,
something he couldn’t quite grasp, but it seemed imperative to warn
them.

“
You better duck, then!” the kid screamed and shot his arm
forward. The ball flew out of the kid’s hand at an air-searing
speed and narrowly missed Richard’s head by an inch. Richard spun
around to try to avoid it and fell. He watched the ball slam into
the burning gas pump, saw the white flare burst out from it, and
then he woke up.

He awoke to a
clear head and a raging case of the DTs. He reached for his vodka
bottle and realized that it was empty. He cursed and threw it
against the basement wall; it shattered and he winced back from the
volume of the sound. He writhed in his sleeping bag, feeling tiny
inch worms mill about just beneath his skin. He itched abominably,
both from the alcohol withdrawl and from three months of enforced
filthiness. He checked his pack frantically and discovered that he
had drunk the last of his wine as well.

He tried to
explore the house, to see if there were any hidden bottles of
hootch that he could guzzle to relieve his tremors. His body was
weak, still overly warm, and stuffed with mucous, and he gave up
after searching through the living room and the kitchen. Crawling
back into his sleeping bag, he tried to sleep away as much of the
tremors as he could. When he could not sleep he writhed, feeling
like a human twister. He randomly remembered a junkie he had seen
kicking unconsciously against the wall of an indoor ATM once in
Toronto; the association his mind made was quite apt.

When he did
sleep, his sleep was broken, uneasy, and full of grim dreams. He
would never remember any of the details of the dreams upon waking,
but he would remember the deep sense of distrust they instilled in
him. He would twist and mutter in his sleep, bouncing in and out of
REM sleep like a heart attack. The dreams exhausted him more than
the alcohol withdrawal did, he decided after two mostly sleepless
nights.

A week passed
and the tremors grew less. He found himself able to get out of his
sleeping bag for extended periods, and eat more than a bare can of
tuna during the day. The basement was no longer his jail, although
he felt that the house was trying to trap him in at times. The
great autumn storms buffeted the house in mid-October and he
watched them smash against the window with apprehension. If one of
the windows broke, he would have had no way of fixing it, but it
proved to be a meaningless concern. The windows had been built to a
quality standard, and the driving rains of the spasms preceding
winter were of no concern to them. By the end of the storm he was
feeling better than he had since the plague hit the world.

He entered the
upstairs bathroom (a neat, tidy little room designed with a classy
country décor in mind) and looked himself in the mirror. He hadn’t
seen a reflection of himself in months, and he was shocked by what
stared back at him from the glass. He was gaunt, his cheekbones
beginning to sink in. His eyes were ringed in black and looked like
sunken holes. They burned with a weird light that Richard found
himself not caring for. His beard was bushy and knotted, and caked
with food and filth. The exposed skin of his face was slathered
with road dust and assorted dirts.

He cleaned
himself up as best he could. The power had gone out at some point
since he’d left the burning city, but there was still water in the
toilet tank and he found a razor in one of the bathroom’s drawers.
He trimmed his beard back with a pair of kitchen scissors and then
use the razor to cut the rest down to the skin. His face was
littered with small, bloody cuts, but he felt cleaner, and clearer,
than he had since he’d begun drinking. He smiled shakily to himself
in the mirror, still remarking at how generally unhealthy he
looked.

He considered
staying for the winter in the yellow house but decided not to when
he did a quick calculation on his food stores. He would need to
scavenge many of the nearby farms throughout the winter in order to
stave off starvation, and he decided that it was something he would
rather not do. He found a road map of the province in a room that
seemed to be an office. After some deliberation as to how far he’d
come from his starting place, he reckoned that he was only a day’s
travel or so from the city of Brantford. He could make it, find
good shelter, and be settled in with a large store of food before
the snow buried him in. He packed his belongings that night and in
the morning set out on the road again.

By
mid-afternoon of that day he began to see dark clouds gathering
quickly overhead. He cursed at his luck but he was already too far
along to go back. As night fell he was nowhere near anything that
resembled a city and a snap blizzard was setting in overhead. He
tried to remember if he’d ever seen it snow hard near the end of
October and decided that it had been a few years. He found shelter
in a (thankfully empty) barn and in the morning set out again, his
feet crunching against the thin layer of snow that had stayed
behind from the previous night’s storm. He trudged along through it
and had still not found anything urban by the time the sun began to
dip down into the west again. The snow kicked up again around
twilight, and the storm became a full raging blast before Richard
realized that the only houses along this stretch of rural road had
collapsed in on themselves at some point. Bereft of shelter, he
bundled his coat around him, suddenly glad for its thickness, and
powered on through the strengthening snow. He stumbled along for
three hours, putting up a heroic effort against the travails of the
whipping, stinging wind.