Prospero's Half-Life (17 page)

He passed
another church, and this one had smashed windows as well. The walls
were free of scrawled accusations of “BLASPHEMY”, but the sign that
would have named the denomination of the church was muted like
everything else. Across the street from the church was a park and
walked alongside it. He felt exposed with the wide expanse of land
next to him, but he preferred it to the cheap-looking, shoddily
boarded buildings that were on the other side of the street. They
had an abandoned look to them that Richard found to be too eerie to
be near.

He walked
alongside more churches, and more buildings that had the weary look
of abandonment to them. He saw taller buildings rising in the
distance; not skyscrapers by any stretch of the imagination, but
definitely taller than any of the buildings in the part of town he
was walking through. His surroundings seem to go by him in a haze
of repetition: store-fronts abandoned long ago, store-fronts
painted over with an incommunicative white, and wrecked churches.
Even the traffic lights became monotonous, their garbage-bag
coverings flittering endlessly in the brisk, chill wind. He began
to think that he might have died in the basement of the
yellow-brick house, and that what he was experiencing was simply a
season in purgatory.

The buildings rose around him as the sun started to sink into
the horizon. He began to feel everything closing in on him again.
Ever since he had passed the church he had felt as though he were
being followed. He never heard footsteps, but from time to time he
could
feel
movement behind him; whenever he turned to look there was
nothing but the empty stretch of the street behind him.
This was a mistake
, he
thought continuously, but he knew that he couldn’t turn back. He
would have to seek shelter in the unknown that lay ahead of him –
his own paranoia would let him do nothing less.

Many of the
store fronts began to sport two levels of apartment buildings on
top of them; they seemed to loom over him and curve inward, peering
down at him with blank-eyed intent. He kept to the line of the
buildings on the right hand side of the street, fearing to walk too
openly in the middle. He was certain that someone was following him
by this point, and he wanted to avoid their sight as much as
possible. He gritted his teeth and hoped that he would be able to
lose them soon.

Ten minutes
later the street opened up into a sort of square. To the right, a
small, stylish mall rose cleanly out of the end of what had been a
long, monolithic brick building. He looked inside of it but the
interior seemed torn to shreds, and littered with shards of busted
glass. Across the street was a building that he thought might have
been a library at some point. There was no sign to name it, but
there were bookshelves inside, as he saw when he gingerly crossed
the street and looked in. There were no books to prove this,
however; all of the shelves were empty, seeming pathetic in the
deep shadows.

Next to the
library was a long, glass-covered tunnel that seemed to lead toward
a tall parking garage. Beside this tunnel was a square plaza,
adorned only by tall lamps, out of which grew a building that
seemed to be made, on the front side at least, of glittering,
reflective green glass. He looked up, and saw another set of
traffic lights bound in tight black bags. He stared around at the
painted-over signs, hiding the keys to understanding the city as it
had been. On a whim, he decided to take shelter in the building.
The rifle on his back felt reassuring; if his pursuers tried to
come after him, they would find him to be no easy meat.

The doors into
the building were unlocked but the main way up to the other floors
seemed to be an elevator. After retrieving his flashlight from his
knapsack and peeking around for some time, he discovered a narrow
emergency stairwell that led up through the building. He took it,
shining his flashlight cautiously up the stairs and taking each
step as carefully and as quietly as he could. Finally, after
climbing for what seemed like hours, he arrived at a floor that had
no stairs leading up from it. Instead, there was a hatch that
seemed like it might lead up on to the roof. He decided to eschew
this path and try his luck on the top floor instead.

After
exploring the floor for some time he came to the realization that
the building had to be a student residence of some sort. The rooms
were more opulent than any residence that he’d ever been a part of,
but there were any number of clues to point towards its usage as
such. The preponderance of canned goods and boxes of Kraft Dinner
were unmistakable, and also a boon from his perspective. After
raiding the third room he stopped to give thanks to a horde of
faceless dead parents. Another sign were the textbooks, of course,
as well as the littered remains of paper, writing instruments, and
the sheer number of laptop computers everywhere – at least two or
three in every suite. He smiled at them, ruefully; once upon a time
he’d sold them, used golden speech techniques and basic-level
psychology to push them onto everyone who’d come into his store.
Now they were so much useless dead plastic.

It reminded
him suddenly of Samantha’s tablet, still pressed up into the side
of the knapsack, nudging against his ribs from time to time. He
came to the last room on the right before a bend in the hallway and
decided to use that room to shelter in. Once he entered and
ascertained that the suite was empty (checking carefully in the
bathroom and in each bedroom) he sat on the spare, tartan-covered
couch and tried to turn Samantha’s laptop on. He held the power
button down several times, lengthening the attempt each time, but
it would not turn on. The battery was likely dead, and he had no
way of charging it. He thought about tossing it away and kept it at
the last moment. He could not have explained why he felt compelled
to keep the darkened, useless hunk of plastic and circuit board,
but he felt that he needed to. It didn’t take up much room, in any
event.

He ate a
mixture of tuna and crackers, applauding the former inhabitants of
the suite for their good taste. The suite was smaller than many of
the others, seemingly designed for two people, and was shockingly
messy. Unlike many of the buildings he’d come through on his
journey, this particular room seemed like it had been trashed well
before the plague, and almost on purpose. There were food
containers all over the coffee table, dirty, moulded dishes in the
sink, and a dirty, cigarette-laden stink to the air that Richard
felt vaguely nauseated by. He forced himself to accept it, at least
for the time being; he was becoming exhausted, and it was now
nearly dark outside.

He began
rooting through the left-behind items and found some old porno
magazines. One of them seemed focused on enormous breasts and he
took it back to the couch with him. He flipped through it; it was
the first female flesh he’d seen in months, but he had none of the
normal reactions to it. He tried to stimulate himself while
checking out the ample, perfectly formed curves of some brunette
British breast model, but there was nothing. He finally gave up in
disgust and took to staring out of the window. There was no
movement out on the street below, not that he had strictly expected
any. Whomever his followers were, they would not let him see them.
Of this he was bleakly certain.

He had no idea
as to when he fell asleep but he was quite certain of when he
awoke. There had been a loud knock that had reverberated through
his subconscious, reaching down even into the unremembered jumble
of dreams that ran through his sleep like a swift river. His eyes
flew open and he found himself on the couch, staring up into the
bland, boring ceiling. He almost dismissed the noise as a product
of his dream when it came again, and louder. It was the door.
Someone was pounding on the door.

He went cold
all over and his mouth suddenly became very dry. He crept over to
where he’d placed his gear and grabbed the hunting rifle from
beside his knapsack. He very quietly checked to make sure that
there was a shell in the chamber and thumbed the safety off. He
crouched beside the couch, trying to keep his aim steady despite
his befuddled, rudely-awoken state.

Let these bastards come
he screamed
inside of his head, his voice triumphant. At that moment the door
burst open and something flew in through the door. It landed in the
kitchen and then rolled into the living room. Richard had just
enough time to stare at it (it looked like a white can with a
strange brass spigot on top) before it erupted with an acrid,
cloudly gas. It filled his nose and eyes with a burning, stinging
sensation that was completely impossible to escape. He began to
choke and gag, and when the legs rushed into the room and the arms
wrestled him down to the floor he struggled for only the briefest
instant before giving in to rapidly blossoming
unconsciousness.

THREE:

Richard awoke
into purgatory – at least, this was what Richard had to assume.
With all the data that he had at hand, it seemed at the time to be
the only logical conclusion. Later, when his data set expanded, he
concluded the same thing, except for the caveat that it was
completely intentional.

When he opened
his eyes there was only white. At first he thought that he was
falling and he threw his arms up in a panic to cover his face. In
that raw burst of animal flight reaction, he could not bear to face
his own demise. It was something that had been haunting him for
some time; he often thought that he was simply lagging behind in
the great eventual fate of the human race. When faced with the
final moment, however, he quailed, clamouring for his own weak
flesh.

After a
moment, his heart pounding, he realized that if he were in fact
falling, it felt a great deal like sitting down. He reached his
hands out and realized that he was sitting on a floor. Some
further, tentative exploration confirmed that the floor was
bordered on all sides by walls. He lay on the white floor, nude,
surrounded by white walls, and stared up at what he assumed must be
a white ceiling. If there was a ceiling up there, he had discovered
that it was too far up to reach even through jumping. His hands
felt the firmness of the floor, but his eyes still refused to
believe, continuing to report the existence of the illusion of
nothingness.

If this was
purgatory, as he thought that it might be, he was sorely
disappointed in it. Wasn’t there supposed to be some sort of
eternal waiting room, the antechamber where he would wait with the
souls of others waiting for whatever process would occur after this
way station? Some sort of sign to indicate that his turn would come
eventually? He tried to glean some information from the texture of
the floor and walls, but the most that he could decipher was that
they were flat, smooth concrete. Would the waiting room of the
afterlife be made of concrete, he wondered? He thought about this
and decided that he had no reason to assume that it would not.

The novelty of
being in a cage that seemed suspended in the void only lasted a
short time. Within an hour or so he was startlingly bored. His mind
crawled across any thought that would rise up out of his
subconscious. He spent several hours singing any song that came
into his head. He rarely remembered a full song; he sang bits and
pieces that formed themselves into a chaotic, staggered medley.
When his voice finally grew silent he returned to contemplation of
the white void he hung suspended in. He wondered how long it would
be before the situation changed. Surely this couldn’t be the
afterlife, he reasoned. It couldn’t possibly be the fate of every
sentient thing to sit in a cage in the middle of nothingness for
the rest of eternity. Could it? His mind shuddered back from the
idea; he’d often tossed around words like ‘forever’, ‘always’,
‘eternal’ with a glib casualness. He felt himself inching towards a
real of understanding about the yawning gape that lay behind those
symbolic bits of language, however, and he began to choke on how
big the concept could actually be.

To stave off
thinking about it he desperately clutched onto a narrative in his
mind, something to distract his treacherous mental state from
contemplating his ultimate situation. He thought back to his job,
managing the floor of an electronics store. Already his memories of
that time were beginning to fade; it had only taken place a few
months prior, but it was taking on the sunspotted Technicolor tone
of dying photographs. He tried to remember his co-workers; he could
picture Samantha, of course, although he moved on hurriedly from
her and onto others. He could picture Mark, the scrawny no-good son
of a bitch. He remembered having to write the man up for showing up
late to work several times in the same week. He thought of Mark
taking out a gun and holding it to his head, ready to put a round
through Richard’s brain in order to protect what he perceived as
his. He tried to reconcile the two images in his head and could
not.

He thought
about Mohammed and it saddened him. He leaned his head back against
the cool, bland wall and closed his eyes. He wondered if Mohammed
was still sitting in his office, surrounded by the obsolete objects
of the past. Was his skeleton slumped down in his opulent leather
chair, spending its own eternity in a familiar and normal position?
Was Mohammed himself in one of these very places, surrounded by
nothingness and confused beyond all measure by what it all meant?
He tried to form up an image of a naked Mohammed slumped against
his own invisible wall, eyes closed just as resignedly as Richard’s
own, and found that it didn’t want to complete itself. Something
was wrong with it. Richard wondered with some amusement if it were
the man’s nudity that prevented him from accepting the picture.