Prospero's Half-Life (16 page)

Nearing
collapse, he put his arms out to try to steady himself and ran into
something large and hard. Unable to see, he ran his hands along the
wet, numbing snow and tried to make sense of what he was feeling.
He came to a framed piece of glass and realized that it was a car.
He excitedly cleared it off as best he could without really being
able to see; the snow obscured all light. He found a door handle
and pulled at it mightily. He despaired that it was locked and then
wrenched it open with a massive pull. Cackling to himself, he dove
into the car and pulled the door shut behind him. Safe from the
ravages of the blizzard blowing it’s deadly chill around outside,
he curled up into his belongings and went to sleep.

He awoke in
the morning and saw that he had spent the night with someone; a
dead body slumped in the driver’s seat, mercifully hidden from
view. The corpses arm sprawled out across the center console, grey
and bloated, which was enough for Richard. He scrambled out of the
car and into the bright, hot morning light. The snow was melting
quickly, caught under the hot glare of a resurgent sun, and Richard
was finally able to look around and get his bearings. He was at a
four-way intersection, surrounded by mostly empty fields. Directly
ahead there was a low building jutting out of an old farmhouse.
Beyond it, heading further along the road directly in front of
Richard, there appeared to be increasingly heavier growth in
buildings. He clapped his hands and danced in glee.

He looked at
the old farmhouse and saw that the short extension (that looked
very much like a country market building) was painted a faded
yellow, except for a wide patch that was painted in very
fresh-looking pure white paint. He considered this for a while, and
then realized something else that was odd about the intersection.
There were street lights strung up here, although it had taken
Richard a while to recognize it, since each one of the lights was
covered tightly with a black garbage bag. He tried to decipher the
meaning of this and failed. Shrugging, he put a jaunt into his step
and walked on into the city.

TWO

The sights he
took in did not get any more normal as he traversed further into
the little city. If anything, they became decisively odder.

As he walked
down the street into the town proper, he saw that the fresh white
paint and the trash bags were not an outlier. The very next
building on his left, after the maybe-maybe not farmer’s market was
what looked for all the world like a U-Haul depot; the trucks
looked exactly like U-Haul trucks, but the logos and lettering had
been painted over with that pure, industrial white paint. He
regarded it for some time, trying to catch ahold of his wandering,
circular thoughts, but in the end he couldn’t figure it out. On the
other side of the street were well-appointed, middle class houses
with large yards, set well back from the road. They imparted no
information at all.

When he came
to the next set of buildings, a motel and a gas station by the
looks of them, he realized that everything was treated in the same
fashion. The building was obviously a motel – it was a long, single
story plaza with a row of identical doors – but the sign at the
entrance to the plaza’s parking lot was painted over in white.
Peering into the plaza, he saw that the numbers had been removed
from the doors. The gas station was an Esso branded one; he could
tell by the colour scheme, with that red roof and those blue pumps.
The name of the brand had been obscured, though, as had the digital
display (although it would have been dark anyway) and the wording
on the signs on and around the pump had been obscured as well.

He walked down
the road for an hour and found that things were the same. Every
building, every street sign, every free-standing billboard were
covered over with obliterating white. By the time he saw the water
tower rise up ahead of him he had gotten over the novelty of it. It
was strange – creepy even – but he found that he couldn’t marvel
over every instance of it past a certain point. Once he walked far
enough that he could clearly see the water tower, he saw without
surprise that the logo that had been painted on it (Brantford – The
Telephone City) had been done away with as well.

The street stretched along in a semi-rural fashion for much
longer than Richard had originally thought that it would. If not
for the fact that it was
slightly
denser, he would have sworn that he was still
passing through one of the nameless small towns he’d stumbled
through in the course of his wild, drunken ramble. The grey clouds
were gathering overhead again, the sweet morning respite already
over. He eyed them nervously, knowing that he would have to find
shelter before too long. He was loathe to settle into any of the
buildings that lined the wide spaces on either side of the road.
The paint that covered every sign, notice, and number had not yet
gathered the streaks of dirt that were carried on the wanton wind.
To Richard, this meant that they would have had to have been
applied rather recently, which meant that the people that had done
it were likely still around, somewhere. The thought filled him with
a strange mixture of excitement and trepidation, but in the end he
had no wish to meet anyone. He had never been a shy man – a career
in retail would never have worked otherwise – but after shaking off
his need to be constantly drunk he had begun to feel intensely
shy.

He came to a
major intersection at last, the first in an hour of walking that
had street lights. Rather, the first that he assumed had street
lights; these ones, like the ones before them, were tightly covered
with wind-whipped garbage bags. Just past this intersection was a
small sign that Richard was sure would have at one time told him
the distance to the city. Now it told him nothing. Beyond the sign,
to the right of the road, a demolished store lay dusted with snow.
Strange, kitschy sculptures and plain wooden furniture were strewn
in the parking lot in front of it, and littered amongst them were
the splintered remnants of what appeared to be children’s
playground equipment. A sense of frustration began to well up from
within him. He watched the clouds and the need to find shelter
intensified within him. There were long shadows creeping across the
road.

An hour later
the temperature had dropped significantly and he was beginning to
grown fearful of being caught outdoors in the inclement weather. He
felt as though he had been walking for years and he still had not
found anywhere that he considered suitable. The buildings that he
had passed had been industrial in nature; small factories, outlet
stores, and material depots. There had been houses, but for some
reason that he could not quite decipher he had been unwilling to
take up residence in any of them. He felt oppressed, closed in
upon; the oncoming storm in conjunction with the weird, oddly
frightening lack of signs and symbols combined to cause a sharp
rise in panic within him. He sped up the further he walked, hoping
that his feet would carry him to safety faster if he eased into a
run.

On his right
there appeared what looked like a church. There were two jagged
metal stumps in front of it; he reasoned that there must have been
a sign there at one point. The church-like building itself had all
of its front windows smashed out. Scrawled across the front in
wide, jittery black lettering was the word “BLASPHEMY”. Looking at
it, he realized that it was the first word he’d seen in hours. It
did not do anything to alleviate his mood.

The sky began
to spit flakes as the houses bunched closer together; here and
there rows of townhouses began to appear. He kept up his rapid
pace, berating himself for not stopping for shelter in any of these
houses but unwilling to stop just then. There had to be more
suitable places. Surely if he went further into the city there
would be an end to the baffling visual muteness. He crossed his
fingers and tried to ignore the increasing complaints from his
thighs.

He began to
see apartment buildings and more motels on his right; to his left
seemed to be a wide, unending tangle of wilderness, lost in the
increasing gloom. It began to snow more heavily and he turned into
a small collection of new-looking houses next to a building that
looked suspiciously like a Dairy Queen. His need to get out of the
storm that was gathering overwhelmed his eerie, superstitious fear
of this place.

The first house he tried was unlocked; he let himself in and
proceeded to sneak through the ground floor, checking each room
with a pounding heart for signs of life. When he satisfied himself
that no one was sharing the space with him, he unrolled his
sleeping bag and dug a can of tomato pasta from out of his
knapsack. He ate in silence, sitting in the living room where the
former owners had placed a rather comfortable overstuffed couch
against a wall opposite a big picture window. He watched the snow
fall softly outside for an hour and then decided to explore the
house, hoping to find something to entertain himself with for the
night in an effort to avoid his own tortured imagination. He ended
up finding a stash of books in a room that looked like it had been
inhabited by a particularly messy adolescent. He picked through
them listlessly and chose
On The
Beach
.

He spent that
night and the next day hibernating inside of the house, eating
sparingly, watching the snow trickle off and stop, and reading
through the book. By the time the sun had come out on the morning
of the third day to melt the wave of snow, he was sick of tomato
pasta and thoroughly depressed. He left the house in a dark funk,
keeping his travels to the middle of the road and trying to ignore
the wordless existence the outside world continued to revel in.

He walked
through the east side of the city during the rest of the morning,
watching the houses wash by him in a slow blur. None of them had
numbers to indicate their address; this blended into a lack of any
words written on signs, walls, or doors to become just another part
of the background of his life. He stopped wondering about it by the
time he stopped in front of what looked like a large academic
building, a high school of some sort. He ate lunch in a run-down
plaza across the street; the sign out front that identified it was
blank, but the building he broke into had been a bar at one point.
The pool tables had been shredded; it looked as though they had
been cut up with dully serrated knives. He checked the place
thoroughly, peeking through the bathrooms and the kitchen to make
sure that no one was hiding in wait for him.

He’d had some apprehension about staying in a bar but it was a
moot point anyway; someone had taken all of the booze out of the
place at some point anyway. He pulled another wretched can of
tomato pasta out of his knapsack and ate it morosely. He would have
to replenish his stocks at some point, especially to get some
variety. He felt that he might well as well just kill himself if he
had to eat much more of the stuff. He threw the empty can against
the juke box mounted to the wall beside the bar. It hit with a
sullen
clunk
and
rattled to the floor.
All the music you
can expect out of the thing, you know?
he
thought with unexpected sadness. He hadn’t thought about music in a
long time, but he would give anything just to hear some at that
moment. He would even have accepted some of the junk-pop he’d been
forced to endure during his days at work. He felt himself slipping
down a black hole in the earth; his mood seemed to get
progressively worse as the days went on.

He slept
curled up behind the bar, entering a REM state in only a very
superficial way. The wind rattled against the front windows all
night, making Richard think that there was a crowd standing outside
the bar pounding their fists on the glass in a chaotic non-rhythm.
When he ‘awoke’, it was just past dawn. The morning had come, cold
but dry. It had not snowed during the night, and Richard counted
his blessings in this matter. He was beginning to wonder what he
would do when winter descended upon him and forced him inside for
months. If the earliness of the snowfall could be counted for
something, he thought that it might be a hard, cruel sort of
winter. He pushed it out of his mind and kept walking. He would
come across something, or someone, eventually.

He stopped
near noon to stare into another deserted plaza. There was a
building that was unmistakably a Canadian Tire at some point dating
back to well before the plague. The place seemed forlorn, covered
in a dust that predated all other. The glass on the windows was
untouched; no one, even in the final, looting throes of the plague,
had bothered to break into the place. He considered being the
first, but dismissed the idea after a while. He would still need to
find a food supply, and at any rate breaking into such a pristine
place would ensure that anyone passing by would see that someone
was inside. With a heavy heart, he kept walking.

By the time
the sun had set halfway through the sky directly ahead of him, he
was passing through an area that was all stores. The idea of not
knowing what kind of stores they were seemed unnerving to him. He
could make some educated guesses, of course. One of the stores, its
windows as pristine as that long-abandoned plaza, had white bridal
gowns hanging in display. He looked at them, entranced by their
lacy designs. Across the street, another store was obviously a
music store; it was only obvious because someone had broken in,
carefully extracted all of the musical instruments, and had just as
carefully smashed them all into small, jagged pieces. He walked
into the middle of it and tried to make sense of the scene. The
sign that named the store had of course been painted over. He
stepped through the splintered hole in the glass of the front
window of the store and looked inside. Whomever had vandalized the
store had ripped everything from the walls and piled it up in the
center of the front room. He stepped back outside, unable to find
anything of any real worth.