Prospero's Half-Life (3 page)

“
Richard”, he heard that dark, cultured voice say again. “Come
in quickly, and shut the door behind you”. Richard shivered. There
was a cold, sepulchural tone to his voice now.

The office of
Mohammed Malani was just as neatly put-together as it had always
been. The desk in the middle of the room was tightly organized; no
paper out of it’s place, no debris of eating or drinking. The walls
were lined with perfectly square frames. Some were pictures of
family: two bored-looking, physically attractive children and a
knockout of a raven-haired wife. Others were pictures of staff from
days gone by: Christmas parties, summer picnics, important staff
meetings. Richard was in more than a few of these, smiling and
silently glad-handing for all that it was worth. Yet more were
certificates and awards, for sales volume and community service.
Stepping in and seeing it, Richard felt almost normal. At least,
until he saw Mohammed.

He was as pale
as his South Asian skin would permit, with blood-flecked lips and
those tell-tale crimson eyes. They looked as though someone had
taken his rich, expressive dark eyes and filled them to the brim
with blood. His hands lay palm-down on the surface of his desk, as
pale as his face but (as far as Richard could tell) unshaken.
Mohammed looked at him steadily, his bloodied eyes unwavering.
Richard felt awkward under that gaze, and felt a pang for days gone
past. Before this sickness, this Emergency, such a steady, silent
stare would have indicated that the recipient of the stare was in
some fairly serious trouble. Richard himself had been on the
receiving end of that stare a couple of times before, and even
under these radically different circumstances he felt as though he
were a child of ten again, called to task for breaking something
important.

“
Richard,” Mohammed spoke. “I trust that everything is well?”
Richard blinked, unsure of what his superior meant. There wasn’t
very much of his life that he could honestly characterize as “well”
nowadays.

“
The store, Richard,” Mohammed continued when he saw Richard’s
confusion. “How is business?”

“
We actually had some traffic today”, Richard replied brightly.
“It was quite the sale”.

“
Give me numbers”, Mohammed replied impatiently, twirling his
hand in the classic
get on with it
gesture.

“
Oh, uh, let’s see”, Richard stammered. “It was, er, somewhere
around nine thousand dollars, give or take a few hundred, I
think”.

“
Did you print out a duplicate receipt?”

“
Ah, no”

“
What is the standard procedure in cases like this?”

Richard
hesitated, and licked his lips. “Ah, print a duplicate so that the
numbers can be submitted quickly”.

“
So what’s wrong with this situation?”

Richard gaped,
disbelief rising through him. He spoke before he could process it
fully.

“
What is
right
about this situation?”

Mohammed
smiled quickly, revealing formerly bright-white teeth now heavily
stained with ejected blood. It was a ghastly grin, a death’s-head,
and Richard recoiled slightly.

“
Not much, my friend, not much” he replied, his underlying
laugh bubbling under with thick, choking blood. “I’m afraid that
this is the last day that we’ll be open for business”.

Richard
nodded, having already come to much the same conclusion.

“
You’ve given me a lot of good service over the years, you
know”, Mohammed. “I couldn’t have run this store without
you”.

Richard nodded
mutely once again. There was nothing that he could think of to say
that would add anything useful.

“
What’s going on out there?” Mohammed asked, leaning forward
slightly. His bloody eyes widened intently. “The news sites haven’t
updated in days. There’s nothing but babbling on the radio, crazy
people and idiots shouting about nothing into the mic”.

“
I don’t listen to the radio”, Richard said automatically, and
Mohammed twirled his finger again.

“
There’s nobody out there”, Richard stammered along. “On the
streets, I mean. I saw a car earlier, a little way off, but nothing
else”.

“
But someone came into the store?”

“
Yes sir. Also, Samantha and Mark came into work today. I had
to fire Mark”.

“
With cause, I hope”.

Richard’s
mouth twitched. “Job abandonment, sir. He made a scene and then
walked out”.

Mohammed
nodded gravely. “No great loss, there. What about Samantha?”

“
She’s still out at the front of the store. I told her to stay
away from the windows and page immediately if anything
happens”.

“
She’s been a good worker, too”. Mohammed paused and stared at
his desk. He didn’t speak quite a while, and Richard wondered with
growing discomfort whether he had died or not.

“
Tell her she’s been excellent, and that I appreciate
everything she’s done” he said finally, his head flying up and
bloody spittle catapulting off his lower lip. It hit the desk and
Richard stared at it, slowly realizing after half a minute that he
was unable to look away. It quivered noxiously, ropy spit and dark
blood smeared on mahogany.
That stringy
spit
he thought distractedly,
that’s what you cough up right before you
go
. He did not remember where he had
learned that.

“
Is…is there anything I need to do for you, sir? Ah,
religiously I mean?”

Mohammed waved
his hand. “I’m not religious, Richard. I think I’ll just stay here.
At least I’m more or less comfortable”.

“
Oh, ah, I just thought, er, since you were named,”

“
Oh, the only reason that I’m named Mohammed is to pull my
great-aunt’s nose. She was a very devout Christian and hated the
fact that my mother’s family was Muslim. They were secular of
course, and that’s where the joke is”.

Richard
nodded, only partially understanding. “So you just want to be left
here?”

“
JUST
, he says. “I will sit here,
Richard, surrounded by the only things left that let me remember
better times. My wife is dead, died two weeks ago. I didn’t tell
you”, he said, noting Richard’s shock, “because it served no
purpose for you to know. You would have worried needlessly about
me, instead of concentrating on business. My children died both
slightly before and slightly after that. Dying at home would be
unbearably depressing, and dying here would at least let me die
with success in my mind. Do you remember that book about thinking
your way to success?”

“
The Secret
, sir?”

“
That’s it. Absolute bullshit from beginning to end, written
for middle management types just like me. It’s only real valid
point was that it was important to deal with crisis by visualizing
positive things. Which is exactly what I’m doing right
know”.

Richard felt
his eyes growing wet. He blinked it away. “I’ll lock up before I
leave” he said roughly, wanting very badly to leave as quickly as
possible.

“
Lock it up tight, Richard”, Mohammed replied, chuckling that
clotted chortle again. “Lock it so tight that it’ll take men a
hundred years to break back in. I want them to have to work to find
me, and when they do find me I want them to wonder hard about what
it all means”.

Richard fought
to stop from sketching a salute. He had no idea how to end it, what
the protocol on this was. He didn’t want to shake the man’s hand;
even though there was an immense amount of respect present the idea
made his skin crawl. Fortunately it was Mohammed who initiated it.
He waved his hand curtly, dismissively.

“
Go along, Richard,” he said, his voice low and tired. “I need
to rest, very badly, and you need to lock up and move along with
your life”.

“
Yes sir,” Richard replied, very much relieved. “Lights on or
off?”.

“
Off. Take care of Samantha, Richard”.

“
Ah, I will sir”.

Richard left,
gently closing the door behind him. He fished his keys out of his
pocket, and locked the door. The tumblers shifted home with a heavy
finality, and he hurried out of Manager’s Row and back towards the
front of the store. Samantha was sitting on the counter behind the
service desk, several feet to the right of the nearest window.

“
Everything OK?” she asked when he reached the counter. He
nodded sharply and quickly changed the subject.

“
Are you ready to lock up and go?”

“
Yeah, sure,” Samantha replied, giving him an unreadable look.
“Let’s do it”.

It took them
fifteen minutes or so to shut the window-gates and prime the alarm.
Richard knew that the alarm would be useless, ultimately, but it
was all part of the routine, and he couldn’t escape it. As he keyed
the lock on the outer front door, the sun peaked overhead at high
noon. It was warm and bright, belying the scenes that Richard knew
were playing out all around but refused to mentally acknowledge. He
escorted her closely to the car, and kept a lightning-fast watch as
she climbed into the car.

“
Point the way”, he invited her, as he twisted the ignition
into sudden roaring life.

FOUR

They had to
take the back route to get to Samantha’s apartment. As they drove
closer to downtown, on the other side of which she lived, cars
began to choke up the street. Their owners had parked them
mid-street and fled; some had simply parked their cars at unnatural
angles and died in the driver’s seat. After a certain point it
became impassable. Acutely conscious of the buildings on either
side of them, and the blank, staring windows located on them,
Richard had carefully backed up and turned around, opting instead
to weave through the intricate side streets. Samantha directed him
listlessly from the seat beside him, spending much of the time
playing silently with the little plastic nametag on her green
uniform.

Finally he had pulled around a blue Neon with broken windows
and followed Samantha’s sudden exhortations to
turn right, turn right
. They’d found
themselves in the large back parking lot of Samantha’s two-storey
apartment building, one of three cars.

“
My neighbours” Samantha had explained without much interest
evident in her voice. “They’re dead”.

Now they were
sitting in her small living room, silently awkward. Her apartment
was brief, really the smallest that he’d seen since his student
days. Her living room was bare, by what he was used to. Her couch
and loveseat were both beat-up and dingy, upholstered in a pattern
that had been popular at roughly the same time a Georgia peanut
farmer had been getting elected to the White House. Her coffee
table was being propped up by a compressed stack of magazines, and
it’s sole decoration was an ashtray that was half full and
surrounded by a halo of cigarette ash. She had a nice enough
television, which they had off since there was nothing of any
relevant use on anyway. Her front window was covered by thick
yellow curtains, slathered with a nicotine residue that had to have
been contributed to by more than one owner. Richard had attempted
to draw back the curtains, so that he could see the purported
hospital-cum-fortress, but Samantha had forced him to stop.

“
Wait until nightfall”, she told him, her voice coming alive
with an intensity that made him obey automatically.

Eventually
Samantha got up from the loveseat where she’d been sitting huddled
with her arms liked around her knees. She turned on the TV and
began flipping through the stations until she got to the radio
stations embedded at the bottom of the list. She dialled through
the frequencies, stopping on each one and listening for a moment.
Many were just tantalizing blasts of static, atmospheric
interference and cosmic background ra//diation. A couple featured
voices talking, but faint and with a lot of crackle, as though they
were receiving the signal from a very great distance. Then she
stopped on a station in the early hundreds, and the urgent,
seething voice leaped out of the television speakers with such
force that both Richard and Samantha were momentarily stunned.

“
Brothers and sisters!” the voice declared powerfully.
“Brothers and sisters! Are you still alive out there? We need to
have ourselves a chat, if you are. My phone line is still working,
and yours is too, as long as your area isn’t
too
bad off”. The voice paused to
chuckle, and their was an unpleasant note to the laughter, a
suggestion that there was no mirth to be found in it, no matter how
deep one dug. “My brothers in Detroit, if you’re still listening,
may I suggest getting out of the barbeque”.

Richard looked
over at Samantha, but she simply shrugged her shoulders.

“
Brothers and Sisters, listen carefully to the words that I
will be saying to you. They are words that may not save your life,
no my Brothers, my sisters, but they may save something even more
important”. The voice paused, and radio crackle was all that they
heard.

“
I’m talking, of course, about your soul”, the voice continued,
“your immortal spiritual contract with the Almighty Lord God of
Hosts. Your shepherd in the darkness of the world, your bright and
brilliant Saviour, He Who Walks Beside Unseen”.