Prospero's Half-Life (20 page)

“
I...I don’t know!” he wailed. “I don’t know! I don’t
know!”

The man
squeezed his hand on Richard’s shoulder and the flow of his
admission was cut off. He looked up into the man’s carefully hewn
face dumbly. The man smiled, slightly, and it seemed to spread
light. Richard’s mouth fell open.

“
My son,” he said kindly. “Of course you do not. It says in the
Book that there are none righteous, not one. All clear-thinking men
must know only that they do not know; they are no more confident of
their worthiness than they are of the worthiness of any other. We
may only know are under a constant state of testing. You are being
tested now, as we speak. You and I can never know when we might be
called upon to be judged, and we must face that judgement with as
clean a soul as we can manage”. He cupped Richard’s chin in his
hand and drew his face upwards to look into his eyes. “I believe my
soul to be clean enough to pass muster,” he confided. “How does
yours feel?”

He let this
pass without waiting for Richard to answer. He released Richard’s
chin and paced away, stopping to regard the door with his hands
clasped behind his back. Presently he turned back to regard
Richard.

“
It is information,” he spat, “information that keeps you from
healing the corruption within you. You are born into corruption,
and it is allowed to fester because you are allowed to know that it
exists. Is it not evident, right from the beginning? Adam and Eve
were brought into being by God, innocent of sin as befits the hand
of the Maker. They were corrupted by that Tree of Knowledge, the
one that God Himself warned them of. They let the Serpent slither
its way into their hearts and it was the knowledge that they gained
from the fruit of that tree that made them depraved. What’s
ignorant is blessed, that is the lesson that God wishes you to take
away from this. There is none so accursed as he whom
knows
he is accursed.
There is none so free of sin as the one to whom such sin has never
occurred to in the first place. Think about this, young penitent,
let it truly sink in”. The man returned to the other side of his
desk and slowly sat down. He returned to folding his hands upon the
desk and waited. Richard stared at him, his vision blurred and his
mind reeling.

“
So then,” the man continued, his voice shocking Richard back
into semi-awareness. “It is information that is the culprit.
Information serves as a distraction to the immortal soul; it drowns
out the sweet, flat hum that is the Voice of the Almighty. The
history of the increasing depravity of the world is the history of
the growth and expansion of networks of information. Look to the
Romans! Their empire grew, and in doing so the amount of
information that they could produce to pass along grew along with
it. It is no coincidence that the more knowledge they gained, the
more intricate their lives became, the more depraved they became.
Think upon it. The orgies. The licentiousness. The callous, useless
bloodthirst. As the empire expanded, the evil grew within them.
They were cast down by rude animals who rode out of the fornicating
wilds of Europe and burned their pretty, godless cities to the
ground”.

He rose to his
feet with a sudden flourish, ecstasy shining now from his deep
black eyes.

“
Our world was the most depraved of all!” he shouted. “The
endless orgy of bloody-minded violence and cheap, degrading
fucking. All aided and carried along by a flood of symbols that has
drowned us all as surely as the waters of God drowned the world
before Noah set sail. The amount of information being passed around
at any given minute – any given
second
– was staggering. The secrets
of everything were laid out upon a platter that anyone could take
from!
Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole
Of The Law
they chanted, and went about
their business as though it were the most important work of
all”.

He slammed his
fists down on the table and shouted into the ceiling. Richard cast
his eyes upon the floor and could not keep his shivers at bay. He
felt perilously close to breaking down into another storm of
weeping.

“
THEY WERE SHOWN! They were told the error of their ways but
did not turn aside from leaking out their own damnation into the
world! God warned them that their endless quest to gorge themselves
upon the fruit of that Tree would have so many unhappy returns! For
the Serpent of Old was wrapped around that tree, as she has been
since God brought life to the swirl of dust that He came upon! To
eat of that fruit is death! As is commanded!”

The man
subsided for a moment and then continued in a low, almost casual
voice. He gazed down at Richard, the kindly expression
returning.

“
Now it is no more. The masses denied their Maker and were
swept from their places on the Earth. Those left behind will tend
the Garden and make it grow again, as it was before Adam and Eve
ate and fucked in the shadow of the anger of the Lord. We begin
here, in the least of His Places, covering up the sins of the dead
and beginning anew the work of Man upon Earth. We test those whom
come along, for their worthiness in the eyes of the Almighty”. He
smiled down at Richard and Richard felt as though his heart might
burst asunder.

“
You are one such, young penitent. Tell me, child. What was the
name you were given when you passed through the veil of corruption
into this stinking world?”

Richard
swallowed, his throat feeling hot and choked. He struggled to get
out his words through the film of coarse phlegm.

“
My name is Richard,” he croaked. The man brought his hands
together.

“
You may keep that name for a little longer, Richard,” he said,
his voice proclaiming how generous he was. “You will be given a new
one, in time, but you must earn it first”.

Now Richard
began to weep again, but it was not as wild and bitter as it had
been before. It felt cleansing, like the rain that bursts from the
sky after a torridly humid day to cut through the sticky heat and
bring refreshing coolness to the land. He felt glad – of what, he
could not correctly say. The emotion was enough, in that
moment.

“
I am Brother Bentley,” the man offered patiently. “I am the
shepherd of the flock that seeks to restore the tabula rasa. In
time, this will become your mission as well”. He expanded his hands
to encompass the entire room. “You have been brought unto the work
of God Himself, and you will be rewarded through the pristine
nature of your reborn soul”. He put his hands together and smiled
beatifically. “You will be given a robe, some food, and a place to
sleep. I suspect that you could use all three of these things
rather badly, yes?”

Richard could
only nod, numb with cold and hunger, a strange, eerie feeling of
deep gratitude bubbling up from within him.

“
Good,” Brother Bentley replied, “very good. We will speak
again, when you are in a more serene state of mind”. He suddenly
clapped his powerful hands; the sound was very loud in the close
confines of the room and Richard jumped, startled. The door opened
and the man in the rougher white robe opened the door, a careful
expression on his face.

“
Brother Anderson,” Brother Bentley said swiftly. “Please bring
our young penitent Richard to where he may be fed and clothed”.
Brother Anderson nodded efficiently, and entered the room to stand
next to Richard. Within a second, Richard was hauled to his feet
and lead away by the gentle, firm grip of Brother Anderson. He
stole a last glance at Brother Bentley before leaving the room and
saw that he had returned to his original position, sitting at his
desk with his hands folded, staring into the middle distance of
nothing.

FIVE

True to
Brother Bentley’s word, Richard was lead away to a place where he
was given more porridge, as much water as he could drink, and a
warm, thick grey robe. After eating and getting warm, he found
himself to be impossibly tired. He was taken to a room that must
have been a science lab before the plague; now there were bunks set
up with thin mattresses atop them. He climbed into one of these
bunks and was asleep at roughly the same moment that his cheek made
contact with the firm, new pillow.

Over the next
few days he was left more or less to his own devices. He was only
allowed into certain rooms in the old high school; the place to
eat, the place to sleep, and the place to exercise. The place to
eat was the first place he had been taken to after leaving the
company of Brother Bentley. By the looks of it, it had been the
cafeteria before the plague and was serving the same basic function
now. He was given nothing more than porridge, and although he grew
steadily sick of the bland nothingness it offered in terms of taste
he appreciated it as food, on its own merit. He had spent three
days without it and was of the opinion that he would never take
food for granted again, even canned tomato pasta.

The place that
he was taken to for exercise was the old gymnasium, only barely
repurposed. For the first few days he was in a small group of
perhaps fifteen others, and they were coaxed into basic
calisthenics. These first few days were exhausting for Richard; he
had been in fairly decent shape even after his blindly drunk
wanderings, but three days on enforced starvation and enclosure had
sapped him of his energy. After a time he grew used to it again,
and felt the strength grow back within him. Once he was able to
perform basic exercises without getting winded and tired, he was
switched into a more intensive regimen. This involved weights,
timed running, and more complicated calisthenics routines. This was
how he spent his first couple of months after being released from
the white room: eating, sleeping, and exercising.

During this
time he met very few people that he could mentally refer to on a
name-basis. He was able to ascertain that there were three tiers to
the social strata of the people that lived in the high school.
Those who wore the white robes seemed to be the ones that were in
charge of various activities. From an overheard conversation
between two black-robed men, he gathered that there were thirteen
white-robes, all of them men. The men in black robes were the
muscle of the operation; they were the ones who escorted him from
the cafeteria and the gymnasium to the science lab where he and a
few others slept. He saw others walking purposefully through the
hallways between these areas, seemingly on patrol. He did not see
any women in this group, either. The lower tier seemed to be those
who wore the grey robes that Richard himself wore. They comprised
the bulk of the people in the high school, and they seemed to be
the group that did the vast majority of whatever tasks needed to be
accomplished. The few others that slept in the science lab with him
wore grey robes, as did those that performed the exercises with him
in the gymnasium. He saw quite a few milling about in the hallways
as well, on their way to or from some task or another. There were
women in the group in grey, he saw, although for the most part
their hair was hacked as short as that of the men.

There was one
man who was in his exercise group and whom slept in the science lab
with him. Eventually Richard got over his poleaxed bout of shyness
and introduced himself. The man’s name was Chris; he was a thin,
sour-faced man with deep black skin. Despite looking taciturn, he
was, once the surface was breached, quite a talkative man, and
Richard learned quite a bit about his new situation from him.

The entire
operation was as Brother Bentley had intimated. The bulk of the
work was in undertaking expeditions into the city with buckets of
white paint in order to cover over every last bit of information
that was on display. Chris had been doing that for several months
when he had injured himself falling through a rotted floor in the
upper level of a townhouse. He had been sent back to the high
school (known as the Brother’s Keep to the group) to engage in a
rudimentary form of rest and physiotherapy. When Richard asked
about what sort of sign or information they had been searching for
in a dilapidated townhouse, Chris replied that books were high up
on Brother Bentley’s hit list. When they were found, he said with a
fierceness to his voice, the pages were to be ripped from their
spine and then piled for the black robes to burn later.

When not
tramping around the city erasing all indicators of the past, they
were expected to work at maintaining the great gardens that Brother
Bentley had ordered planted, both indoors and outdoors. Now that
the winter had descended upon them, the outdoor gardens were lying
fallow under the snow, but the indoor gardens still flourished with
herbs under the careful tending of people whom had become experts
since surviving the plague. In addition to this, there was a
storeroom in the basement that was heavily stocked with preserved
oats and canned food; black robes were also expected to journey out
for days at a time to hunt fresh meat on the hoof as well.

In time
Richard relayed his story to Chris. The man took it in, thought for
some time, and nodded soberly. It was a familiar tale, he said, one
that many of the grey robes would relate to. The majority of the
population of the city had been wiped out in the plague, of course;
many of the people who wound up tending the plans of Brother
Bentley were travellers from other places who had wandered through
the city and become caught up in everything. After several weeks of
talking with Chris, Richard began to catch subtle clues of
discontent within the man; he avoided using any sort of language to
indicate a bias, very carefully so in fact. Richard, however, was
trained as a salesman to analyze certain cues, verbal as well as
physical; he could tell that there was something deep down that
bothered Chris about everything that they were a part of. There was
never any chance to bring it up, however, as they only had the
chance to talk in a state of semi-privacy. The black robes stood
watch over everything.