Prospero's Half-Life (21 page)

Nevertheless,
Richard could sense unease within his new friend. When Richard told
him about the time he had spent in the strange white cage, and
about the woman who had been sent to tempt him, he saw a brief
flare of anger rise up in Chris. It was mostly an instant flare of
nostrils, a minute widening of the eyes; a normal person would
likely have missed such tells, but Richard was a professional
manipulator of the human mind. He could tell, and it brought up a
great number of questions within him that he could not answer. The
tip-offs vanished as quickly as they appeared, however, and Chris
related that most of the men’s stories were similar.

“
They had me in that white room, too,” he said, his voice a
little amused. He lowered his voice to a whisper. “Lucky for me,
I’m gay, but I can’t let
them
know that. They’d throw me to the wolves for
sure”.

This was the first thing that Chris had confided in Richard,
and it made Richard feel especially glad for the company. As the
weeks wore on he felt that Chris was dropping more and more hints
of this nature, leading towards
something
, but with the ever-present
black robes there was no chance of him ever coming right out and
saying it.

Richard, for
his part, did not need it spelled out for him to see that there was
something wrong with the entire situation. There was little smiling
amongst any of the people in the former high school, and virtually
no joy to any of their voices. The men in the white robes, when
Richard heard them speak, seemed amiable enough, but when anyone
wearing grey spoke, they did so in a monotone. At first he had
assumed that the people speaking were as tired as he was, but he
came to slowly realize that everyone in grey spoke that way,
whether they were fully awake or near the brink of sleep. Richard
wanted to ask Chris about this but there did not seem to be any way
of bringing it up. Frustrated, he decided to copy their intonation;
he did not want to be caught out on a rule of which he had been
ignorant.

Another thing
that Richard noticed was that he never saw men and women lingering
together. If they were both going to the same place, he would see
them walking together briefly, but that was the extent of it. They
did not eat together, they did not stand next to each other during
exercise, and he never saw them talking to each other for any
longer than it took to offer the most desultory of greetings.
Richard had a good general idea of why that was – after being
informed that his rejection of sex had allowed him to pass his
test, it seemed fairly obvious- but Chris filled him in on the
details in short bursts over the course of several days. If men and
women were seen talking to each other for more than was strictly
necessary, they were forcibly separated and punished. Expedition
teams were same-gender, always – even after passing the initial
test, Brother Bentley and his twelve fellows did not trust the
animal instinct to lie dormant.

“
Brother Bentley is the hardest of all of them” Chris whispered
to him one night as they lay pretending to sleep near each other,
“but none of them, to my knowledge, tolerates sexual contact
amongst any of us. To attempt it, and have the black robes find you
or the grey robes snitch on you, would mean your death. There is a
grave that they keep somewhere in this city to throw the bodies of
the unworthy in. Had you failed your test, you would have in all
likelihood ended up there”.

“
That’s awful,” Richard whispered, shuddering away from the
idea.

“
Brantford is no stranger to mass graves,” Chris replied
mysteriously, and refused to say anything more on the
subject.

After a month
Richard was brought before Brother Bentley once more; this time,
six of his fellow white robes joined him. They sat in the
glassed-in former administrative office behind a long wooden desk,
their hands folded in front of them in imitation of Brother
Bentley.

“
You have been brought back to strength,” Brother Bentley
observed, his deep voice laden with an importance that Richard
could only barely begin to understand. “You have passed through the
private torture of your own purgatory, and have passed through into
the gracious arms of those whom serve God with their hearts as well
as their souls. You have learned that you must submit to supreme
suffering in order to discover the completion of joy. Am I correct
in this, Penitent Richard?”

Richard did
not know what to say. He merely nodded dumbly, and attempted to
keep his face carefully neutral. Brother Bentley observed this with
a disapproving set to his face.

“
It is not enough to merely mouth the words that you believe
God wishes to here,” he admonished Richard. “Is it faith to
understand nothing? To merely submit your convictions implicitly?
Tell me of your struggle, Penitent Richard. Leave out no detail, no
matter how humble”.

Richard
shivered, and then began to improvise. He spoke of spiritual
conversions, of finding faith in the empty nothingness that had
been his surroundings. He drew on everything he could remember of
Christian theology – the dark parts of it, anyway. He spoke of his
temptation, and of how he forced himself to deny his animalistic
nature and achieve true spiritual connection with the path that God
had planned out for him. He stumbled over his words at first but
within moments he was speaking fluidly; he felt like he was on the
sales floor once again, convincing a skeptic that they really
needed the more expensive computer model through subtle verbal cues
and appeals to the person’s own self-worth. When he finally ground
his tale to a halt, he realized that he had been speaking for
twenty minutes. His mouth was exceedingly dry. Brother Bentley
regarded him silently and then turned to each side to observe the
reaction of his fellows. Finally he turned his attention back to
Richard and nodded curtly.

Two bald men in black robes – one of them being Brother
Alexander, he noticed – came into the room a half-second after
Brother Bentley nodded.
They were waiting
for that cue
Richard thought, his mind
grasping at details. They bent and picked Richard up by the elbows,
and then led him out of the room. He was frogmarched down the
hallways of the school, past the science lab and then the
cafeteria, and taken up to the second floor of the school. They led
him to what seemed like the furthest corner of the building, where
they took him into a very small, nondescript room and left him.
They slammed the door shut behind them and locked it.

Frightened, he
tried to take his mind off of his new, unstable situation by
observing the room. There was unfortunately not much to observe. It
had obviously been a classroom, before, but the desks and chairs
had been taken out of the room at some point. There were marks on
the wall that denoted where posters had hung, before they had been
ripped down. The blackboard at the front of the classroom had been
smashed into small fragments that littered the floor in front of
where it had been mounted to the wall. There was a single window in
the room, and it seemed to have been painted shut with white paint.
From that vantage point he could only see a flat snowy field that
stretched out a ways from the school before running into a series
of low, darkened houses.

The sun set
and he watched it indirectly, as light receded from vision and was
replaced by covering darkness. The moon arose and unlike the sun he
could see it, shining it’s waxing thumbnail down upon the minimal
scene before him. He watched it for some time, hoping that it would
show him something of use, but he then grew bored of it and found a
place on the opposite wall to seat himself against. Time passed,
drawn out like warm taffy, and he watched idly as the moon began to
set in the sky. About an hour after it passed below his line of
sight, there was the sound of a key being turned in the lock of the
door. He turned his head to watch the door open. He did not get up;
he was convinced that his death was imminent, and had some time ago
decided to maintain his strength in case it was necessary.

Brother Bentley came through the door, alone.
Came to finish the job himself
Richard thought sourly,
can’t say I blame him
. The man must
have known that Richard was making all of that drivel about his
religious experience up out of whole cloth.
He probably thought I was making fun of him
he remarked silently.
I’m
surprised that he didn’t just rise up where we were and kill me
there
.

Brother
Bentley crossed the room and stood before Richard. He held out his
thick, powerful hand as though he were ready to help Richard to his
feet. Richard stared at the offered hand as though it were some new
species of likely poisonous snake. Brother Bentley did not seem to
notice Richard’s expression.

“
Penitent Richard,” he intoned, and it had the sound of a
formal address. “You have been sequestered here to face yourself
before your unveiling. Do you now feel worthy to take up your more
spiritual name now?”

Richard
blinked, and then realized that he probably knew the answer to this
question. He felt a great, nauseating wave of relief wash over him.
He would not die that night after all.

“
No,” he replied sternly. “I am flawed and am therefore
unworthy to accept a name more pleasing to the eye of
God”.

This seemed to
be the correct statement to make. Brother Bentley put on his
beatific smile once more and laid his hands upon Richard’s head.
Richard’s scalp crawled from the man’s touch, but he kept himself
as still as possible.

“
All are unworthy in the eyes of God, Penitent Richard. He has
separated all of humanity into those that he cannot stand within
his sight, and those that he can tolerate to gaze upon. You,
Richard, are one whom God’s gaze can tolerate. You are, therefore,
worthy enough to take on a name more pleasing unto His ears”.
Brother Bentley dug his fingers into Richard’s scalp and he winced.
“From now on, the name of Richard shall be swept from you. You will
now be known, before God and your fellow labourers in His garden,
as Brother Isaiah”. He removed his hands from Richard’s head. “For
God so truly is the path to salvation. Arise, Brother
Isaiah”.

Richard did as
he was bid to do. He arose and looked Brother Bentley in the face.
The man’s smiling face seemed utterly serene, but the black eyes
that stared out of it danced in a mad sort of glee. Richard forced
a smile onto his face.

“
Thank you, Brother Bentley,” he said, keeping his voice
properly inundated with praise. “I hope to serve His glory with
competence”.

“
I’m sure you shall,” Brother Bentley replied, and there was
something dark and joyful in the man’s voice that Richard could not
put his finger on. “I know that you shall serve in faithfulness
until the end of your days”.

SIX

Once Richard
was bestowed with his new name, the routine course of his day
altered dramatically. He was now trusted to join in with the tasks
with which the rest of his grey-robed brethren were employed. For
him, this meant that he was sent out into the city in a squad with
four other people. Each of them carried a can of white paint with
them, and a knapsack that contained a wind-up emergency flashlight,
several cans of food, and five wide brushes. They wrapped
themselves in thick winter coats and wore stiff new hiking boots.
These outfits were finished off by balaclavas, which, with the
relatively mild weather at the beginning of December, were warm
enough to be somewhat uncomfortable.

The men
comprising his squad changed on every expedition. There was a
finite number of men allowed to go out into the city, however, and
so Richard began to become familiar with the other grey robes with
which he shared his new life. He never really learned enough to
consider himself friends with any of them, except Chris; the
outwardly dour man would share his squad from time to time. The
others he knew to the extent that he could match their names to
their faces without error. Beyond that, he could not have said much
about them. There was very little conversation on any of the
expeditions, at least between Richard and any of the others. Some
of the men seemed to know each other well, and would banter or
converse from time to time along the way. Others, newer men like
Richard, were kept out of these dialogues. Richard did not mind;
since it was expected that a faithful servant of God would report
the sins of his fellow (“so that they may be corrected” the white
robes said, with sober faces) he reasoned that the less he knew,
the less he would have to report.

Chris, for his
part, kept their conversations to light banter and other very
neutral topics. He would mostly make observations on the scenes
that they came upon: mostly-decayed bodies piled up in an
apartment; a park fountain where two skeletons (one tall, the other
small and child-like) held hands on a snow-covered bench; a house
near the church where Richard had begun to be tracked wherein they
had found enough powder cocaine to have made them all very rich
men, once upon a time. His comments always hewed close to the line
demanded by watchful men, with references to God and to salvation,
but Richard thought that he detected a hint of a more sardonic tone
here and there throughout his speech. His inability to delve into
Chris’ seeming unorthodoxy had not changed, however, since their
days in exercise and their nights in the science lab.