Prospero's Half-Life (22 page)

He slept in an
old classroom now; the science lab bunks, it seemed, were just for
new recruits and recovering patients. The classroom contained many
more bunks than the science lab had; since Richard was only in
there to sleep, he barely noticed. Most of his time asleep was
spent out in the city, huddled inside a decaying building and
trying to keep the encroaching winter cold at bay. Similarly, his
diet now consisted of canned food eaten dully wherever was handy;
he had never before considered that he might miss porridge. The
only hint of flavour in his day was the swallow of lime juice they
all took during one of the meals.

His life, upon
reflection, was miserable; as December wound on and New Year’s Day
approached he began putting thought into trying to escape. He came
up with any number of scenarios: overpower the guards at one of the
high school’s entrances; slip away from squad when the opportunity
arose; sneak out one of the windows at night and scale down the
wall. In the end, all of them circled back to the same problem. It
would soon be time for the deep freeze of winter, and it would be
ultimately foolish to wander out into southwestern Ontario in the
midst of it. No matter how exhausting and trivial his life was at
the moment, it was infinitely better than dying of exposure in the
middle of an overgrown farmer’s field in the middle of a white-out.
He resolved to wait until spring and see if his situation improved
any.

One day, near
the end of January, Richard was returning from a four-day jaunt to
the northern edge of the city. They’d cleared out a group of very
opulent houses, which had been a veritable orgy of destruction. The
sound of paper being ripped from it’s glued position on a book’s
spine was something that Richard did not believe would ever forget.
They had done it so many times in the past few months that it
seemed as natural as anything else in their lives: the crunch of
boots on snow, the call of birds, the booming echo of the wind.
They had saved everything to pile up in the middle of a cul-de-sac;
it had taken most of box of waterproof matches, but they’d created
a bonfire from the destroyed books that had warmed them for hours
as they rested.

He was replaying a particularly unsettling scene in his head
when he returned to the high school, not paying attention as he
walked into the marginally warmer confines of the building. He had
found a beautiful, hardcover copy of
Ringworld
in one of the homes, in a
bedroom that looked, when they first entered, as though it had once
belonged to a particularly messy adolescent girl. He had held it
for more time that was strictly safe, staring at it as his memories
washed over him. He remembered seeing it in the bookstore back in
the other city, remembered Samantha sitting on it, lifting her
hips, beckoning him. The recollection had caused much consternation
inside of him and he’d spent nearly the entire return journey not
speaking to any of his other squad mates.

The memory of seeing it and then having to hand it off to the
man to his left – he’d held a knife brought along for the express
purpose of destroying hardcover books – made it so that he was
staring at his feet as he turned a corner. Another person had been
busy turning the corner from the other direction, and the two of
them collided with no small amount of force. Richard looked up,
startled, and as he stumbled backwards he saw that he had run into
a woman. A half-second later, he realized that it was the woman
whom had been sent to tempt him in that infinite white cage.
The shock of recognition is like a heart
attack
he thought, and the pounding within
his rib cage certainly bore this out. He gaped at her, unable to
think of anything orthodox to say as greeting or apology. The woman
eyed him with some distrust, dusted herself off, and went about her
business.

After that he kept an eye over his shoulder to see if she
would appear again; he found himself desperately curious about her.
Eventually she did show up in his line of vision; he saw her
standing by an open row of lockers, paused in whatever activity she
was engaged in, staring at him. She had been staring at him when he
had looked over, so she had been looking at him for some time
before he had noticed. After she saw him looking, she looked away
rapidly and hurried along her way. From then on, he saw her nearly
everywhere he went. He would look out of the corner of his eye and
she would be there, lurking in a corner, chewing her nails or
pretending to be engaged in something other than the act of spying
on him. He began to grow paranoid about her, wondering if she
really
was
spying
on him, or testing him in some way.

He asked Chris
about her on the next trip they took out as squad mates. They were
hunkered down near a row of darkened fast food restaurants, eating
robotically from cans and trying to keep the cold of the day from
effecting them too much. Richard had taken up a lunch squat near
Chris and had begun whispering to him as they were halfway through
their cans.

“
I’ve seen the woman around,” he told Chris. “The one who was
sent to tempt me. She’s been all over the Keep. I think she’s
following me”.

Chris turned
his head and stared at him blankly without speaking. Richard began
to grow uncomfortable and he considered getting up and walking away
without saying another word. Before he could do this, however,
Chris spoke.

“
Put her out of your head,” was all he said, and there was a
note of uncharacteristically stern warning in his voice. He
finished up his can and rose to his feet. “Let’s get out of here,”
he said loudly, to the group, and walked away without another
glance back at Richard.

Richard found
that he could not keep the woman out of his head, however,
especially since she continued to lurk at the edge of his vision.
He found himself drawing his mind back to the last time they had
been near to each other, when she had straddled him, nude and
appealing, her breasts brushing against him with a feeling like an
electric charge. He began to torment himself with fantasies of her,
imagined sexual theatre that he could not even culminate since
masturbation was nearly as deadly a sin as fornication was. His
life, already an exercise in drudgery, became something akin to a
living hell.

He was
considering escaping again; he had nearly convinced himself that
even the near-certainty of freezing to death in the trackless rural
snow fields was better than slowly going mad from unrequited
desire. He was running several increasingly plausible scenarios
through his head when he passed by an old supply closet. As he
passed, the closet opened quickly and a hand darted out to grab
him. Startled, he gave some small resistance but was eventually
pulled forcefully inside.

The door shut firmly as soon as he was inside the closet. Warm
hands encircled his neck and soft, salty lips pressed into his with
urgent longing. He was shocked to his very core but recovered
quickly, pressing back with a kiss that relayed all of his pent-up
desire. There was very little light in the closet but he knew
without even needing confirmation that it was
her
. He brought his hands up to her
robe and parted it quickly; he cupped her large, low-slung breasts
in his hands. Her hips bucked against his, and her tongue darted
violently past his lips.

He pushed away
and spun her around so that her hands had to brace against the
wall. She let the robe fall into a pile at her feet and he undid
his own; within moments he was inside her, sliding in with no
resistance. There was little in the way of love-making in this;
instead, he grabbed onto her shoulders and fucked her with force
from behind. Within seconds he came reflexively; she cried out
softly but bit her lip and ground herself against him, refusing to
let him go until he eventually wilted out of her. She then picked
up her robe, put it back on, grabbed something random from one of
the shelves, and left without saying anything or even looking back.
Richard, stunned, waited for a long moment before doing the same.
He took a ream of paper, which would be used to create kindling for
fires. It was a useful thing to take, and a useful thing to use as
cover.

He thought
that their rough, furtive encounter in the dark would be the end of
it; his loins ached for more, but he knew the danger of attempting
to seek out a similar seduction. The woman, however, either did not
know of the danger (not likely) or did not care. She continued to
seek him out in lonely areas, draw him aside, and offer herself up
for him. Each time gave him greater and greater pause; he was sure
that, the next time, they would be discovered by others and find
themselves thrown on top of a soon-covered mass grave. He grew
tormented by this idea, but did not reject her advances even once.
He swore each time that it would be the last, but each time she
reached for him and he lost himself in her.

She only spoke
once, just after they had finished up in one of the creaking
portable trailers that were at the back of the school’s property.
She had gone even wilder than normal, demanding that he pull her
hair, slap her on the ass, and spurt his orgasm down her back. As
she had wiped his seed off of where it had pooled on the rise of
her buttocks, she had leaned in close and whispered “my real name
is Carolyn”. By the time another month had passed, he had learned
only her name; the only other things that he knew about her were
coarse, carnal things.

Early March
melted into the Ides; the warm weather meant that some of the men
would be diverted to the hardy task of tilling the fields that
Brother Bentley had ordered torn up in the dying days of the
summer. The pool of available men for the expeditions shrank and
Richard began to see the same faces much more often than he had
before. Chris, thankfully, was one of these, although he continued
his careful regimen of meaningless chatter and meaningful glances.
As April approached Richard found his life getting incrementally
better; the warm weather combined with the release for his sexual
urges made for a better standard for comparison. He worried
endlessly about being caught with Carolyn, but also found himself
enjoying their sneaking around immensely.

In early April
he was out on squad work with Chris and a few others that he knew
on a name-basis. They crossed over the road bridge that spanned the
Grand River, heading southwest. They were supposed to be heading
for some of the working class houses near the highway, but all of a
sudden Chris gave some sort of hand signal and they turned quickly
into the parking lot of a tall, grey apartment tower. Each of his
squad mates glanced at him purposefully as they walked towards the
building and Richard felt his pulse pick up. As they entered the
dark, trashed interior he felt himself growing clammy and numb.
They had caught him, he thought. Someone had seen them, and
reported them to the brothers in white. They’d given him some rope,
and now they were going to hang him with it.

Each step they
took within the apartment tower seemed to confirm it for him. They
had no purpose for being there. The place had been partially
cleared out, and was not on the schedule to be finished for at
least another month. They marched along the hallways and up the
stairs of the building in silence, refusing to look at him. He
looked at each of them in turn, silently pleading with them for
mercy, forgiveness, or compassion. He could catch none of their
eyes, however; their gazes were fluid in escaping his.

After climbing
up the auxiliary staircase for fifteen minutes they reached the top
floor. Richard wanted to stop and catch his breath (the long climb
in the dark had badly winded him) but none of the others seemed
willing to wait for him. Two of the men prodded him along from
behind and he grumbled forward, staggering and losing his step on
some littered debris. They walked down the main hallway of the top
floor, passing apartments with monolithic doors and apartments
whose doors lay open to reveal the dark, eerie remnants of the old
life. They stopped at one of the closed doors, seemingly at random,
and Chris knocked in an odd, polyrhythmic fashion that teased at
Richard’s memory. There was a brief pause and the door swung open,
creaking on its hinges with a sharp note of complaint.

The apartment inside was littered with things that Richard had
spent months destroying. The walls were lined with posters, and
books covered every conceivable surface. Some were battered,
expanded paperbacks with lurid covers and generic titles. Others
were thick, ponderous tomes with titles that marked them as
textbooks: he saw books on physics, computer programming,
psychology, and chemistry. Here and there were books that Richard
had heard others call classics:
War and
Peace
,
The Great
Gatsby, Cannery Row, On The Road
. He was
shocked by the sheer amount of them piled up around the apartment.
There were five other men in the room, as well as three women, and
none of them were moving to destroy or even touch the offensive
material. He blinked, trying to establish some reason for all of
this, and saw that one of the women in the room was
Carolyn.

The door
slammed shut behind him and he was suddenly very aware of the
situation. The strength went out of his legs and he found himself
on his knees, feeling faint and nauseous. He looked around at the
semi-familiar faces, and found Chris. He held his hands out
imploringly to his friend, and tried to keep the worst of the
shaking from his voice.

“
Please,” he began, “in the name of the powerful and
compassionate God, I am just a penitent man, a sinner in a world of
sinners, begging for the forgiveness of...”