Prospero's Half-Life (18 page)

There was a
soft, sliding sound that seemed shockingly loud in the abandoned
silence. His eyes flew open just in time to see a panel in the wall
opposite him slide fully open, revealing a patch of complete
darkness on the other side. The complete lack of light that
appeared beyond the panel gave him cause to briefly wonder where
the light in his own cage was coming from. This was quickly
subsumed by a deep, nearly religious dread. Things were changing;
something might come through that uncovered patch of blackness. Was
this the moment that the judge of his soul would come through,
weigh his life on a scale like some ancient Egyptian deity, and set
him to one path or another? Richard very suddenly wanted to crawl
into the corner and hide, although this was perhaps the most futile
thing he could possibly think of doing. He closed his eyes, feeling
as though he had regressed into childhood. If he didn’t see
anything, it couldn’t effect him.

Nothing
happened and he eventually forced himself to pry his eyes open. He
went slowly and so when he first caught a glimpse of the figure in
black in front of him his mind perceived it as the classic
appearance of the Grim Reaper. He let out a despairing wail and
threw himself into the wall, trying desperately to dig through it
with his own bare hands. The wall that his hands struck was too
smooth to get any sort of grip in, and although he battered at the
wall mightily he only received a bent-backward fingernail for his
troubles. He whirled around, ready to plead an endless flood of
language for his life and soul, and stopped abruptly. The figure in
the room with him was not what he had thought it to be.

The figure was
a woman, to start with. She seemed a little tall, although Richard
thought that this might just be because he was in a sitting
position. She had short, golden blonde hair that came to just above
her earlobes. The line of it was uneven, as though it had be cut
roughly with rude implements. She was swathed in a black robe; by
the slight shine of whatever light caused him to be able to see
her, the material seemed to be silk. There were no designs or
symbols on it. Her wide, even face was looking off to the left of
him. She seemed serene enough, if a little uncomfortable. He stared
at her openly, unable to look away.

She wouldn’t
meet his gaze. It became very apparent that she was refusing to
meet his eyes on purpose. He waited for her to say something; had
she been sent to bring him somewhere? Was this the emissary of
whatever awaited him after this room? He thought feverishly about
being brought before God; in his mind, God always appeared as a
massive, faceless bureaucratic panel, listening, analyzing,
judging. He had never been a particularly religious man, but he
felt the sudden, urgent need to begin praying and repenting. He
wasn’t sure to which deity he needed to be praying to, but he was
willing to pray to anything that was put in front of him. His lips
began to tremble, forming phantom prayers to phantom ideals.

He silently
implored her with his intense stare and she finally looked him full
in the face. She was pretty, albeit in a vaguely plain way. Her
face was unsmiling, making her look severe. Her expression did not
change, and for a very brief moment he thought that she was about
to unveil some terrible, destructive news. Instead, she brought her
hands to the front of her black silk robe and ran a finger down the
front of it. It fell to either side of her, pooling on the floor as
though it melted from her. She was nude beneath, spectacularly so.
Richard gaped at her and continued to stare, shocked beyond all
recognition of a sane existence.

She stood straight, her shoulders back, her chest thrust out.
Her back and neck were straight, and she looked proudly into the
middle distance above Richard’s head. He ran his eyes over her,
more from fascination than from lust. She was quite curvy, in a way
that Richard would normally find alluring; he could not, under the
present circumstances, entertain any thoughts of sexuality. He
could appreciate her form on an intellectual level, however; she
was built like a fertility statue. She had wide hips, and large,
low-slung breasts, as well as broad shoulders and powerful-looking
thighs.
Three thousand years ago I would
have fallen before you in worship
he
thought, amazed. He frowned, trying to work out the possibilities
behind that idea. Was she real, he wondered? Was she just a
projection of some ancient, hard-coded ideal that had been dug out
of his subconscious? His heart pounded, fear blossoming within him
and then running wild. He wished desperately that she would just
get on with whatever she had come for.

That wish was
never granted. She stood before him, seemingly too proud to deign
to look down at him. She seemed very real, more real than he would
have expected from an emissary of the eternal. He could see the
slight goose pimples forming on her skin now that it was exposed to
the air. The frayed ends of her hair did not seem like the sort of
thing an otherworldly being would allow to be a part of her
appearance. There was a faint bruise on her upper arm, an oval
discolouration amongst otherwise fair, smooth skin. He looked
closely at her hands and saw that many of her fingernails looked
chewed.

He sat up and
peered at her with more scrutiny, suddenly confused. She seemed
tantalizingly human. Would God send a human to bring him along to
the next stage of his existence? He wondered if there were some
vast, completely obscure joke occurring here that he was
missing.

The woman
stood still for ten minutes, and at the end of those ten minutes
she knelt demurely and gathered her robe up around her. Covered
once again, she stole a last glance at Richard and tapped lightly
on the wall. Within a few seconds, the wall panel slid open and the
woman disappeared back into the darkness beyond the wall. The panel
slid closed and Richard was alone in purgatory once again.

He considered
this encounter for hours, playing what had happened over in his
mind like some infernal ferris wheel. She had appeared, and then
had disappeared just as abruptly. What, then, had been her purpose?
Had she been an invitation? A warning? Was he supposed to have said
something to her? Was a transaction supposed to have taken place?
Nothing that he could imagine could account for what had taken
place.

He grew bored
with batting it around; in lieu of further information, he’d
reached the point where he could not add anything more meaningful
to the situation. He closed his eyes and tried to sleep, but it was
hard to sleep with the constant light. It seemed to exist just
outside of his head, hovering on the other side of his eyelids. It
was ready to invade his consciousness at any moment, waiting for a
slight crack amongst his eyelashes to flood into his brain. He
writhed against the wall, trying to get comfortable with his head
resting awkwardly on his arm. He despaired for a long time about
falling asleep, and then he finally did. To his timeline, there
seemed to be no sleep at all; he drifted out and drifted in to the
exact same set of stimuli. He rubbed his eyes blearily and stared
into nothing, his eyes feeling heavy, irritated, and dull.

He blinked at
the wall for an hour without really thinking. Eventually the woman
crept back into his thoughts, and he let his mind’s eye crawl over
his fresh memory of her. He thought his way down her straight neck
and down her strong shoulders, and let himself wander down the
fertile slope of her breast and down to the lush curve of her hips.
He felt as though he were doing something taboo; his palms became
clammy and he began to glance about furtively. He felt as though
they had shared something profoundly intimate, even though they had
never come near to each other and she had only glanced at him in a
very brief fashion. He began to compare her to other women that he
had been intimate with, semi-consciously adding her to his internal
pantheon. In terms of pure physicality (all he had to go on,
really) she most strongly resembled his first girlfriend, a plump
curly-haired girl that he had loved with an intensity approaching
flashpoint when they had both been sixteen. Others flitted through
the feverish theatre of his mind: the statuesque blonde goddess
that he had done things with in high school that shocked him now;
the overripe, borderline alcoholic that he’d hooked up with several
times in his first year at university; the strange little artist
with the yappy white dog that he had dated for several months
before realizing that he was far too staid for that sort of thing;
the dental hygienist he had been seeing off and on before the
plague hit. He rabidly consumed all of them inside of his head, his
hands running over all of their flesh in the various snapshots that
he had built up in his guilty internal vault. A light sheen of
sweat broke out over his skin and he felt himself harden as blood
rushed into his groin. He felt an urgent need to masturbate, but
stopped himself at the last minute. There was nothing to clean
himself up with, and with a surge of willpower he refused to act
like an animal. He closed his eyes, thought about baseball, and got
his breathing under control. He screwed his eyes shut and tried to
replay old television show episodes in his head. It worked for a
time.

Later, much
later, he heard the secret slide of the panel in the wall again,
and when he opened his eyes he saw the woman again, standing just
as she had stood the first time, proudly erect and staring slightly
off to the side. She had her black silk robe around herself, but
after she saw that Richard had opened his eyes she wasted no time
in divesting herself of it. She was just as curvy and enticing as
the day before, and just as human – he noticed a birthmark on the
inner curve of her right thigh this time, and wondered again if an
emissary of whatever faceless bureaucracy stood in for a god would
have such imperfections. He stared at her just as much as he had
the day before, except that this time, in conjunction with his
previous thoughts, he felt a tug of lust pull through him. He felt
his member begin to stiffen again and immediately moved to cover
it; his hands felt sweaty and the heat of them tormented him.

She glanced at
him, then, and saw that he had moved to cover himself. She pursed
her lips, almost in a grimace, and sank down onto her knees. She
was staring at him now as well, and she moved her hands to cup the
bottoms of her large breasts. She held them up like an offering,
and began to brush the tips of her middle fingers against her
nipples. The nipples rose out of her spread, brownish areola and
hardened. Richard was very suddenly as hard as he had ever been in
his entire life; the throbbing in his groin was approaching pain.
He screwed his eyes tight, trying to avoid looking at her entirely.
He counted rapidly to one hundred in his head, trying to replay an
old episode of The Simpsons in his mind’s eye while firmly pushing
any thoughts of the utterly desirable woman in front of him
away.

This has to be a test
, he thought to
himself.
There’s no other
rationale.
He ran through what little he
knew of various theologies; most of them looked down on sex, he
remembered, as a distasteful tie back to the animal world. If this
was purgatory, as he surmised it was, then he reasoned that this
must be a choice: the animal world, or the spiritual. He very much
wanted to succumb to the animal world, to leap across and take her
with force and abandon, but he fought to control himself. The ball
of lust burning inside of him chanted that she was offering
herself, that she was willing, but the cold, logical part of him
denied this.
People don’t just randomly
wander into the middle of nowhere and offer themselves up
he thought, shouting in his head to drown out the
slavering, drooling voice.
She’s human, a
person just like you, and look at her. She doesn’t even want to
look at you. Do you really think she wants you to leap on top of
her and ravage her, like some primeval gorilla
?

It helped,
incrementally, and he felt himself begin to recede, flaccid once
more. He heard the soft rasp of the panel and when he opened his
eyes she was gone again.

“
WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?” he screamed into the white
nothingness surrounding him. He curled up into the corner of two
walls and began to weep so hard that he shook.

She returned
the next day, and the day after that. Each time she seemed to try a
little harder to tempt him into sexual union. The first day she
started with rubbing her breasts and then sat for fifteen minutes
against the opposite wall, her legs spread apart to invite him in.
He sat against his wall and refused to look at her. She had brought
in a glass of water that day and placed in inches in front of her,
directly between her spread-apart knees. He tried to ignore that as
well, but his powerful thirst won out in the end. He hadn’t had any
food or water for some time at that point, and he knew from his
parched lips and throat that if he didn’t drink the water he would
not be alive much longer; the waiting room of eternity did not seem
to cancel out his human survival needs. He crawled slowly toward
the glass, keeping a close eye on her to ward off any sudden
movements that she might be planning to make. When he curled his
fingers around the glass (cool, with perspiring condensation beaded
on it) she moved her hand down to her cleft and began to move her
fingers around, masturbating for him. He grabbed the glass tightly
and moved back with an unconscious hiss. He drank his water (so
cool, so affirmatively beautiful) and watched her play with
herself. He found that he could observe her without a sexual urge
getting in the way, this time, and saw that her cheeks had flushed
slightly, and that she still seemed uncomfortable. She wasn’t
enjoying herself, then. It was enough to wilt any response that he
might have had to the show she was putting on. She was being forced
to do this, he concluded. To what end, he did not know.