Prospero's Half-Life

by Trevor Zaple

  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.

  Nevertheless, Richard could sense unease within his new friend. When Richard told him about the time he had spent in the strange white cage, and about the woman who had been sent to tempt him, he saw a brief flare of anger rise up in Chris. It was mostly an instant flare of nostrils, a minute widening of the eyes; a normal person would likely have missed such tells, but Richard was a professional manipulator of the human mind. He could tell, and it brought up a great number of questions within him that he could not answer. The tip-offs vanished as quickly as they appeared, however, and Chris related that most of the men’s stories were similar.

  “They had me in that white room, too,” he said, his voice a little amused. He lowered his voice to a whisper. “Lucky for me, I’m gay, but I can’t let them know that. They’d throw me to the wolves for sure”.

  This was the first thing that Chris had confided in Richard, and it made Richard feel especially glad for the company. As the weeks wore on he felt that Chris was dropping more and more hints of this nature, leading towards something, but with the ever-present black robes there was no chance of him ever coming right out and saying it.

  Richard, for his part, did not need it spelled out for him to see that there was something wrong with the entire situation. There was little smiling amongst any of the people in the former high school, and virtually no joy to any of their voices. The men in the white robes, when Richard heard them speak, seemed amiable enough, but when anyone wearing grey spoke, they did so in a monotone. At first he had assumed that the people speaking were as tired as he was, but he came to slowly realize that everyone in grey spoke that way, whether they were fully awake or near the brink of sleep. Richard wanted to ask Chris about this but there did not seem to be any way of bringing it up. Frustrated, he decided to copy their intonation; he did not want to be caught out on a rule of which he had been ignorant.

  Another thing that Richard noticed was that he never saw men and women lingering together. If they were both going to the same place, he would see them walking together briefly, but that was the extent of it. They did not eat together, they did not stand next to each other during exercise, and he never saw them talking to each other for any longer than it took to offer the most desultory of greetings. Richard had a good general idea of why that was – after being informed that his rejection of sex had allowed him to pass his test, it seemed fairly obvious- but Chris filled him in on the details in short bursts over the course of several days. If men and women were seen talking to each other for more than was strictly necessary, they were forcibly separated and punished. Expedition teams were same-gender, always – even after passing the initial test, Brother Bentley and his twelve fellows did not trust the animal instinct to lie dormant.

  “Brother Bentley is the hardest of all of them” Chris whispered to him one night as they lay pretending to sleep near each other, “but none of them, to my knowledge, tolerates sexual contact amongst any of us. To attempt it, and have the black robes find you or the grey robes snitch on you, would mean your death. There is a grave that they keep somewhere in this city to throw the bodies of the unworthy in. Had you failed your test, you would have in all likelihood ended up there”.

  “That’s awful,” Richard whispered, shuddering away from the idea.

  “Brantford is no stranger to mass graves,�
� Chris replied mysteriously, and refused to say anything more on the subject.

  After a month Richard was brought before Brother Bentley once more; this time, six of his fellow white robes joined him. They sat in the glassed-in former administrative office behind a long wooden desk, their hands folded in front of them in imitation of Brother Bentley.

  “You have been brought back to strength,” Brother Bentley observed, his deep voice laden with an importance that Richard could only barely begin to understand. “You have passed through the private torture of your own purgatory, and have passed through into the gracious arms of those whom serve God with their hearts as well as their souls. You have learned that you must submit to supreme suffering in order to discover the completion of joy. Am I correct in this, Penitent Richard?”

  Richard did not know what to say. He merely nodded dumbly, and attempted to keep his face carefully neutral. Brother Bentley observed this with a disapproving set to his face.

  “It is not enough to merely mouth the words that you believe God wishes to here,” he admonished Richard. “Is it faith to understand nothing? To merely submit your convictions implicitly? Tell me of your struggle, Penitent Richard. Leave out no detail, no matter how humble”.

  Richard shivered, and then began to improvise. He spoke of spiritual conversions, of finding faith in the empty nothingness that had been his surroundings. He drew on everything he could remember of Christian theology – the dark parts of it, anyway. He spoke of his temptation, and of how he forced himself to deny his animalistic nature and achieve true spiritual connection with the path that God had planned out for him. He stumbled over his words at first but within moments he was speaking fluidly; he felt like he was on the sales floor once again, convincing a skeptic that they really needed the more expensive computer model through subtle verbal cues and appeals to the person’s own self-worth. When he finally ground his tale to a halt, he realized that he had been speaking for twenty minutes. His mouth was exceedingly dry. Brother Bentley regarded him silently and then turned to each side to observe the reaction of his fellows. Finally he turned his attention back to Richard and nodded curtly.

  Two bald men in black robes – one of them being Brother Alexander, he noticed – came into the room a half-second after Brother Bentley nodded. They were waiting for that cue Richard thought, his mind grasping at details. They bent and picked Richard up by the elbows, and then led him out of the room. He was frogmarched down the hallways of the school, past the science lab and then the cafeteria, and taken up to the second floor of the school. They led him to what seemed like the furthest corner of the building, where they took him into a very small, nondescript room and left him. They slammed the door shut behind them and locked it.

  Frightened, he tried to take his mind off of his new, unstable situation by observing the room. There was unfortunately not much to observe. It had obviously been a classroom, before, but the desks and chairs had been taken out of the room at some point. There were marks on the wall that denoted where posters had hung, before they had been ripped down. The blackboard at the front of the classroom had been smashed into small fragments that littered the floor in front of where it had been mounted to the wall. There was a single window in the room, and it seemed to have been painted shut with white paint. From that vantage point he could only see a flat snowy field that stretched out a ways from the school before running into a series of low, darkened houses.

  The sun set and he watched it indirectly, as light receded from vision and was replaced by covering darkness. The moon arose and unlike the sun he could see it, shining it’s waxing thumbnail down upon the minimal scene before him. He watched it for some time, hoping that it would show him something of use, but he then grew bored of it and found a place on the opposite wall to seat himself against. Time passed, drawn out like warm taffy, and he watched idly as the moon began to set in the sky. About an hour after it passed below his line of sight, there was the sound of a key being turned in the lock of the door. He turned his head to watch the door open. He did not get up; he was convinced that his death was imminent, and had some time ago decided to maintain his strength in case it was necessary.

  Brother Bentley came through the door, alone. Came to finish the job himself Richard thought sourly, can’t say I blame him. The man must have known that Richard was making all of that drivel about his religious experience up out of whole cloth. He probably thought I was making fun of him he remarked silently. I’m surprised that he didn’t just rise up where we were and kill me there.

  Brother Bentley crossed the room and stood before Richard. He held out his thick, powerful hand as though he were ready to help Richard to his feet. Richard stared at the offered hand as though it were some new species of likely poisonous snake. Brother Bentley did not seem to notice Richard’s expression.

  “Penitent Richard,” he intoned, and it had the sound of a formal address. “You have been sequestered here to face yourself before your unveiling. Do you now feel worthy to take up your more spiritual name now?”

  Richard blinked, and then realized that he probably knew the answer to this question. He felt a great, nauseating wave of relief wash over him. He would not die that night after all.

  “No,” he replied sternly. “I am flawed and am therefore unworthy to accept a name more pleasing to the eye of God”.

  This seemed to be the correct statement to make. Brother Bentley put on his beatific smile once more and laid his hands upon Richard’s head. Richard’s scalp crawled from the man’s touch, but he kept himself as still as possible.

  “All are unworthy in the eyes of God, Penitent Richard. He has separated all of humanity into those that he cannot stand within his sight, and those that he can tolerate to gaze upon. You, Richard, are one whom God’s gaze can tolerate. You are, therefore, worthy enough to take on a name more pleasing unto His ears”. Brother Bentley dug his fingers into Richard’s scalp and he winced. “From now on, the name of Richard shall be swept from you. You will now be known, before God and your fellow labourers in His garden, as Brother Isaiah”. He removed his hands from Richard’s head. “For God so truly is the path to salvation. Arise, Brother Isaiah”.

  Richard did as he was bid to do. He arose and looked Brother Bentley in the face. The man’s smiling face seemed utterly serene, but the black eyes that stared out of it danced in a mad sort of glee. Richard forced a smile onto his face.

  “Thank you, Brother Bentley,” he said, keeping his voice properly inundated with praise. “I hope to serve His glory with competence”.

  “I’m sure you shall,” Brother Bentley replied, and there was something dark and joyful in the man’s voice that Richard could not put his finger on. “I know that you shall serve in faithfulness until the end of your days”.

  SIX

  Once Richard was bestowed with his new name, the routine course of his day altered dramatically. He was now trusted to join in with the tasks with which the rest of his grey-robed brethren were employed. For him, this meant that he was sent out into the city in a squad with four other people. Each of them carried a can of white paint with them, and a knapsack that contained a wind-up emergency flashlight, several cans of food, and five wide brushes. They wrapped themselves in thick winter coats and wore stiff new hiking boots. These outfits were finished off by balaclavas, which, with the relatively mild weather at the beginning of December, were warm enough to be somewhat uncomfortable.

  The men comprising his squad changed on every expedition. There was a finite number of men allowed to go out into the city, however, and so Richard began to become familiar with the other grey robes with which he shared his new life. He never really learned enough to consider himself friends with any of them, except Chris; the outwardly dour man would share his squad from time to time. The others he knew to the extent that he could match their names to their faces without error. Beyond that, he could not have said much about them. There was very little conversation on any of the expeditions, at least betwe
en Richard and any of the others. Some of the men seemed to know each other well, and would banter or converse from time to time along the way. Others, newer men like Richard, were kept out of these dialogues. Richard did not mind; since it was expected that a faithful servant of God would report the sins of his fellow (“so that they may be corrected” the white robes said, with sober faces) he reasoned that the less he knew, the less he would have to report.

  Chris, for his part, kept their conversations to light banter and other very neutral topics. He would mostly make observations on the scenes that they came upon: mostly-decayed bodies piled up in an apartment; a park fountain where two skeletons (one tall, the other small and child-like) held hands on a snow-covered bench; a house near the church where Richard had begun to be tracked wherein they had found enough powder cocaine to have made them all very rich men, once upon a time. His comments always hewed close to the line demanded by watchful men, with references to God and to salvation, but Richard thought that he detected a hint of a more sardonic tone here and there throughout his speech. His inability to delve into Chris’ seeming unorthodoxy had not changed, however, since their days in exercise and their nights in the science lab.

  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.