Prospero's Half-Life (19 page)

From then on,
with that knowledge kept firmly in mind, he managed to sit and
watch her without feeling the urge to indulge in animalistic urges.
The next day she brought another glass of water and got onto her
hands and knees facing away from him. She ran her hand around her
vulva until it was soaked, but her actions were stiff and awkward.
The day after that, she brought water and played with herself,
facing him while miming fellatio. The mime action was forced and
Richard did not find anything particularly appealing about it. When
she left that day, he realized how ravenously hungry he was. The
shakes had descended upon him, and he found himself wishing for
anything in front of him, even another can of tomato pasta. He
found that he was increasingly unable to get even a rudimentary
amount of sleep; the pangs in his stomach would jolt him awake if
he managed to slip below consciousness for even a second.

He awoke on the next day and she was already there, watching
him intently. When she saw that he was awake she slid a bowl of
porridge out from behind her sitting position and placed it upon
the white floor between them. He could only stare at it, drool
already falling from his weak lips. He put out a shaking hand and
grabbed it, snatched it really, as though she were going to take it
away from him. There was a beaten metal spoon sticking out of the
porridge and he used it to shovel the tasteless stuff mechanically
into his mouth. As he did so, she crawled across the floor, her
breasts brushing against it, and forced her head into his lap. He
felt her hot breath on his member, and then the soft, wet
sensuality of her tongue. His heart stopped briefly and his breath
came in ragged.
Test, this is a
test
he jabbered internally but the
response from his physical body was immediate. He grew hard quickly
enough for it to be near-painful, and nearly lost it when she
rubbed her lips against the vein that ran down the shaft of
himself. He threw the bowl against the wall to his right and it
shattered; the porridge had been mostly eaten, so there was only a
small, brownish stain on the wall where it had struck. It ruined
the illusion for his mind, finally, and he saw himself as being in
a room like any other, comprised of four white walls.

She rose up
from her near-fellatio and put her hands against the wall, so that
her breasts brushed up against his face. They were soft, and
smelled faintly of an expensive perfume; he very much wanted to
bury his face between them and abandon all thought. He steeled
himself, though, and tried to concentrate on what she was doing. He
shook his head and she climbed off of him. She sat down in front of
him and then laid herself out on the floor, her legs spread and
held up in the air.

“
Fuck me, now,” she said, and the effect was jarring. It was
the first words that he’d ever heard her say, and her voice was low
and alluring. It was the sort of voice that had always caused his
ears to perk up, and it was not helping with the strength of his
resolve. He found himself getting up to his feet, his hard member
standing straight out from him, ready to lower himself down on to
her and have his way. He looked down into her face and stopped. Her
eyes bored up at him, and they held an obvious pleading to not do
what he was about to do. Her face was screwed up in misery. He
backed away and stood with his back to his wall. He felt his
erection begin to wilt once again.

“
No,” he said, his voice shaking. “I don’t want to and neither
do you”.

There was
silence for a moment, and she got back up to her feet. She stole a
quick glance at him and the look confused him. Was that pity he saw
in her eyes? A strange species of compassion? He suddenly found
himself more unsure than ever about what was happening to him. She
gathered up her silk robe, placed it once more around herself, and
again tapped on the wall. The panel slid across the wall and she
disappeared behind it.

His hands
clutched at his hair and he felt like tearing it out. He felt
himself losing what few shreds of reality he had left, and his
internal monologue had begun to gibber in a way that he found
distinctively unpleasant. He began to think about crawling over to
the remains of his oatmeal bowl and trying to scoop up the last few
bits when he heard the panel slid across once again.

Not again
he found himself begging
silently and was cut off when two figures in much plainer, rougher
black robes came through the panel. They were both male, bald, and
stern-looking. They stared at him as though he were a child, or an
animal, and after a moment of reflection Richard realized that he
may as well be as such. He stared at them, frightened and shaking,
wondering what their appearance meant, and whether it was for good
or for ill.

They stood for
a long time, not moving. Just as Richard was about to throw himself
at their feet and cry out for whatever mercy there might be in the
universe, the man on the left held out his hand, one massive, lined
palm facing upwards. Shaking, uncomprehending, Richard took the
hand with his own and allowed himself to be brought up to his feet.
The two men then turned around so that their backs faced him.

“
This way,” one of them intoned, and they left through the
panel in the wall. Richard followed them after a moment, his mind
quailing away from any idea that it threw up about what was to
come.

FOUR

He was lead
out of the white room into pitch blackness. It was hallway, in as
much as it had a floor. He could infer the walls and ceiling from
the echo of the footsteps of the two men leading him onwards, but
from visual information alone he could not be certain. Those
footsteps were all that he had to guide himself; there was no light
to see the men in front of him.

He ran into
the back of one of them and realized that they had stopped. There
was a sound of fumbling, as if with a doorknob, and then light
flooded into Richard’s world. He covered his eyes with his hands,
wincing while his eyes adjusted to the change in light. One of the
robed men grabbed his elbow and pulled him along; he stumbled a bit
but was able to keep up with them.

As his eyes
adjusted he saw that he was in some sort of utility basement. The
ceiling was low and the walls were shelved with as assortment of
spare parts, cans of lubricants, and tools. Light came in the form
of lanterns that the men picked up from the floor and carried with
them. They did not stop for anything and Richard was unable to
observe much of his new, strange surroundings. It was cramped,
dark, and dirty, that was as much as he could ascertain. He stumped
along dully like a cow, his mind as blank as the walls he had just
left.

They exited
this basement level by a series of clanging metal steps. The robed
men threw open the door at the top of the stairs, not bothering to
stop to close it afterwards. The temperature dropped a few degrees
once they entered this new area and Richard was painfully reminded
of the fact that he was naked. His skin immediately prickled, and
he began to shiver. The men did not notice his discomfort, or did
not care; they did not stop to find him anything to cover himself.
He thought fleetingly that he was being brought into hell, but
dismissed this almost immediately. The entire situation was too
real, he felt, to be something supernatural.

The men led
him down a hallway lined with lockers and Richard saw with some
sour amusement that he was being marched through a high school.
That sealed everything in his mind: he was still alive. Dust
covered everything and there was still that faint scent of decaying
flesh hanging thinly in the air. This was the world he had left, or
rather had never really left at all. He felt the metallic tang of
fear spike upon his tongue. He thought back to the time before the
white room, to his life after leaving Samantha. He had been certain
that he had been followed out of a church he’d passed; he’d gone
into a green glass building and made camp in a room on the top
floor. They’d found him, though, and then...he tried to force his
mind back to his last memory in that vein. There was gas, he
thought with the relieving burst of the broken dam. He had been
gassed, and then he had woken up in the white room.

These were the
people who’d been following him, then. He could not imagine what
their intentions might be; in his half-starved, wild-eyed state he
could not focus his attention on his current situation long enough
to make much sense of anything. The men took him up a set of stairs
and they passed along a balcony that looked out over the lower
level of the school. He noticed a few other people, dressed in grey
robes, walking through the lower area. He was marched along too
quickly to make out much in the way of details on them.

He was taken
down another set of stairs and through another, similarly
locker-lined hallway. They approached an opulent, glass-walled
administrative office and were met by a man in a resplendent white
robe. He had slate-grey hair, cut close to his scalp, and bore a
wide, accepting smile that did not touch his eyes. He greeted the
three of them with his hands out to either side.

“
Jameson,” he said amiably, “Alexander. Please, stand relieved.
I will take the young penitent from here”.

Jameson and
Alexander nodded there heads efficiently and walked away. Richard
was still shivering from the cold that was settling deeper in now
that walking had ceased. The man in the white robe took his measure
with a glance and held his hand out towards the door to the glass
office.

“
Please, this way,” he said, his voice brisk. He opened the
door and Richard followed him inside. They crossed to the back,
brick wall of the office where there was a heavy-looking blue door.
The man in the white robe knocked on the blue door in curious
fashion:
rap raprap raprapraprap rap
rap
. There was a pause, and then the man in
white turned the doorknob slowly. They entered with smooth and
fluid grace.

Inside the
door was another, smaller office. It was nearly empty, and painted
the same endless white as the room that Richard had been kept in.
The difference lay in the plain, heavy mahogany desk in the center
of the room, and the tall, severe old man who sat behind it. This
man was dressed in a white robe like the one that adorned the man
behind Richard, except that this robe was silk. He had a long,
disapproving face and sunken, bruised-looking eyes. He was sitting
with his hands folded on his desk and looked up as they
entered.

“
Paul,” he said. “Thank you. Leave us”. Paul nodded firmly and
left, shutting the door behind him. Richard looked around for
something to sit on but did not see anything. He stood
uncomfortably in front of the door, his hands twitching at his
side. He felt parched and nervous. The severe man in the silk robe
stared at him, his dark eyes seeming to tunnel directly beneath his
flesh. Richard put his hands in front of himself and then forced
himself to put them back at his side.

“
Please, young penitent,” he said, “approach me. Kneel before
the desk”. Richard did as he was ordered; he was unable to stop
himself from outright shaking, now. He sank to his knees in front
of the desk and within seconds his chin was on his chest and he was
weeping piteously. The man in the silk robe watched him wail
uncontrollably into himself, his expression unchanging. After
several minutes of concentrated weeping, he began to calm down. He
looked up to the man in silk, his eyes red and wet.

“
Please,” he croaked, “what do you want of me?” The man arose
from his seat forcefully, slamming his fists into the desk and
seeming to jump into a standing position. He glared down at Richard
with all the fury of noon in August.

“
What I want, young penitent, is to lift up your immortal soul.
I would think that your continued existence is worth nothing
less”.

Richard gaped
at him, unable to understand what it was that the man was saying.
The man did not wait for an answer; he walked around his desk and
began to pace in a wide circle around Richard’s place of
kneeling.

“
I think you are worth it, young penitent,” the man proclaimed.
“You have already shown admirable restraint in the face of
temptation and a willingness to eschew the needs of your weak flesh
for a consideration of the spiritual realm”.

Richard
thought, in a dazed way, about how close to his own thought process
this was. He shuddered and hung his head again. The man
continued.

“
You are one of the ones that God has seen fit to save from the
great smiting that he laid upon the world. He leaned over the world
and blew His fetid breath upon the lands, and o’er the length and
breadth of those lands men died. Like he did to the sinners of
Sodom, to the lost souls of Gomorrah. To the prideful, sinful
heathens of Egypt. To the Romans who caused their own Saviour to
die like a common thief. The whole world had become a pit of
vipers, a den of sinners and beasts. God’s holy breath swept the
land and cut these degenerate mockeries of his infinite love down
where they stood. Where they lay, slothlike. Where they
fornicated
”. He said the
word with a seething hatred that Richard suddenly remembered quite
well. The man’s voice had been faintly familiar, and he figured out
why. It was the voice of the man that he and Samantha had caught on
the radio, ranting about these same things before a studio
audience. He was suddenly very afraid.

“
Most of those that lived were deemed unworthy,” the man
continued, “and were crushed when God’s breath crushed the soul
from their flesh. Their souls are awaiting final judgement, in a
place much like the one you just left”. Richard felt his breath
coming much more quickly. “Those left behind are slowly being
separated, like the proverbial wheat from the chaff. The liars. The
thieves. The
fuckers
. They will be eliminated as the wretched, slattern animals
they are. Others, however, such as yourself, will be worthy of a
second chance. Do you feel worthy of a second chance, young
penitent?” The man’s heavy hand fell on Richard’s shoulder and he
felt driven down under the weight of it. A sobbing gasp escaped him
and he stammered uncontrollably before he was able to
speak.