Prospero's Half-Life

by Trevor Zaple

  To stave off thinking about it he desperately clutched onto a narrative in his mind, something to distract his treacherous mental state from contemplating his ultimate situation. He thought back to his job, managing the floor of an electronics store. Already his memories of that time were beginning to fade; it had only taken place a few months prior, but it was taking on the sunspotted Technicolor tone of dying photographs. He tried to remember his co-workers; he could picture Samantha, of course, although he moved on hurriedly from her and onto others. He could picture Mark, the scrawny no-good son of a bitch. He remembered having to write the man up for showing up late to work several times in the same week. He thought of Mark taking out a gun and holding it to his head, ready to put a round through Richard’s brain in order to protect what he perceived as his. He tried to reconcile the two images in his head and could not.

  He thought about Mohammed and it saddened him. He leaned his head back against the cool, bland wall and closed his eyes. He wondered if Mohammed was still sitting in his office, surrounded by the obsolete objects of the past. Was his skeleton slumped down in his opulent leather chair, spending its own eternity in a familiar and normal position? Was Mohammed himself in one of these very places, surrounded by nothingness and confused beyond all measure by what it all meant? He tried to form up an image of a naked Mohammed slumped against his own invisible wall, eyes closed just as resignedly as Richard’s own, and found that it didn’t want to complete itself. Something was wrong with it. Richard wondered with some amusement if it were the man’s nudity that prevented him from accepting the picture.

  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 abou
t 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.

  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.