Prospero's Half-Life

by Trevor Zaple

  As the plague wound down, the community’s numbers had been bolstered by the large numbers of refugees going to and from various areas, trying to find safe lands free from lawlessness, disaster, and death. A great number of those fleeing other places were caught up in Brantford, rounded up by Bentley’s black robed soldiers and given the choice between joining up and dying. Everyone would inevitably choose joining up, although death was still the outcome for some of them. The unlucky ones were chosen at random, and put to death as a warning to the others.

  “They made everyone watch, too,” a middle-aged man named Jack commented. He was broad of shoulder and face, although he appeared as though he had lost a fair amount of weight not all that long ago. “Brought us all to Victoria Park and hung them in front of the broken rock where the statue used to stand. We were told that they were sinners, blasphemers. What were we going to say to that?”

  You could have tried something, Richard thought. You didn’t have to just watch as they died. He felt angry and then stopped as the import of what he had just thought was driven home. He swallowed slowly and said nothing.

  After a while the flood of refugees had slowed to a trickle, and then to only one or two in a given week. It was then that Bentley had decided to set up his test for people who passed through the city. Chris had been caught in it first, as it turned out, and Richard was only the latest in a line that stretched back over a dozen people.

  “It seems like a great trick to convert people,” Chris observed. “Kidnap them, throw them in a weird, supernatural cage, and then tempt them with company and sex. If they pass the test, drag them out and convince them that God has chosen them for some greater work”.

  Carolyn spoke up then, adding in details about that particular trap. She had been chosen by four of the white robes; Bentley had outlined his vision for the “Test of Self-Denial” (as he had called it) and had left the details of the implementation up to them. They had chosen her out of a list of ten other women who had been culled from the general population through a number of filtering criteria, most of which had revolved around the physical qualities that they had held that would be attractive to the broadest spectrum of men. She had been the winner, although it had seemed like anything but at the time.

  “I was invited into the basement to meet in spiritual seclusion with them,” she related dully. “They held me down and gang-raped me, and when they were done they offered me the choice: they would either denounce me to the community as a faithless whore, meaning I would be put to death, or I would work for them as their temptress. I chose being the Jezebel. How could I refuse?”

  Richard nodded thoughtfully. He looked at her and imagined how it might have been for her, and then shook his head.

  “That must have been awful,” he said gently. “I would think that Bentley’s hand-picked apostles wouldn’t have acted like that”.

  Carolyn spat disgustedly. “They’re all hypocrites, every one of them. They drink like fishes, and all of the women in the community have been through their personal sleeping room at some point. They have them brought there by the black robes, and tell them that anything they say about it will mean their death. They don’t care at all for the morality that Bentley goes on about. They keep a secret cache of books in their room, and sequester all the best food stores for themselves”.

  “They’re like any other group in power throughout history,” James grumbled. “They get a little taste of authority and it goes right to their head. We all have to slave and starve so that we can maintain the illusion with Bentley that keeps them in charge”.

  “Which brings us to why you’re here,” Chris said, cutting off any further discussion authoritatively. “Which means explaining what this is”. He swept his hands around the apartment, taking in the mass of forbidden materials.

  James and Chris had gone out on a number of expeditions; they’d gotten to talking and had discovered that neither of them believed in the slightest in what they were doing. Neither of them had any use for God, especially the sort of God that Bentley seemed to think was appropriate for general worship. At first that was all it had been – hastily whispered denouncing, vague affirmations that they needed to do something. Then, a few more had fallen into their orbit – other squad mates whose dams of silence had burst at the opportunity to rail against their lives. With additional members joining in, the hushed conversations began to take on the tone of a more fleshed-out conspiracy. They took to meeting in out-of-the-way places, and only when they could manage to draw a squad that was comprised entirely of conspirators. This would sometimes take a very long time to accomplish, but it became easier with the addition of Jacob, a whippet-thin Jamaican man who had sat by the window during the entire story, keeping a careful and constant watch on the outside. Jacob was a black robe, a position that had proved to be invaluable on any number of occasions. Jacob had been brought into the conspiracy when he had stumbled upon three of the others holding a secret, impromptu meeting in a little-used study room on the top floor of the Keep. The three conspirators had braced themselves to be denounced and put to death; instead, Jacob had uttered the bitterest, crudest condemnation of the state of affairs that any of them had ever heard. It seemed that it was not just the grey robes who would mouth words of piety to maintain their lives.

  Jacob, as a black robe, had influence over the scheduling and formation of the destruction squads; consequently, arranging meetings in far-off areas of the city became quite a bit easier. He was also able to alert them to times when the black robes seemed more alert than normal; the conspirators would disperse for several days until Jacob gave the all-clear. The real coup de grace, however, was the addition of Carolyn. It had been Chris that had managed that.

  Chris had discovered Carolyn several weeks after his own naming ceremony; like Richard, he had been shocked to discover his temptress in the flesh outside of that endless purgatory. He’d made a concerted effort to track her down, becoming nearly obsessed with it at one point. Finally he had cornered her in the basement and convinced her to try to figure out a way to come to one of the meetings. To accomplish this, she had picked a group of women that she knew would be amenable to plotting against the white robes. This was, Carolyn related, a very easy task; there were virtually no women whom thought that the current state of affairs was tenable. After picking her squadron, Jacob had quietly put them onto the expedition schedule, at the same time as two squadrons of the men. They’d settled on the apartment tower for several reasons; amongst them, it was central to a number of other locations that were slated for purging, and it had a rather excellent view of the bridge and the approach from the downtown area. Once they all met for the first time, their conspiracy became much more intense.

  Carolyn had a unique position, in that she was confidant to many of the white robes. She served them as their temptress and much more often as their servant and whore. To avoid arousing the suspicions of Bentley they made her live, much of the time, like the other grey robes (which was how she was able to get away for meetings of the conspiracy) but the rest of the time she was expected to wait on them and service any desire they might have. While this was degrading and sometimes painful, it also afforded a great wealth of information. Like all powerful men in history, they had an inflated sense of their own worth and a need to share it; after the relaxing post-coital glow set in, they would often share it with her. She was privy to a shocking amount of information, not the least of which was that once the ground thawed the grey robes would be forced en masse into farming the areas that Bentley had ordered torn up.

  “They’re quite belligerent about this,” she said, her voice tight. “They fully expect that many people will be worked to the point of exhaustion and then left where they dropped. They don’t think that they’ll be able to harvest enough to feed everyone, and they want to keep as much of the canned food hidden away as they can. They don’t need all of us, and their more than willing to just let us starve if it comes down to it”.

  R
ichard turned this over in his head, several times. Finally he looked to Chris.

  “What can be done?” he asked, his voice level and grim. Chris grinned.

  “I was hoping you would say that,” Chris replied. “Carolyn said that you were ready for some real, serious rebellion, but I was hoping to hear it from you. You’re a very important piece in this puzzle”.

  “Bentley has quite the thing for you,” Carolyn said. “He seems to think you are a highly spiritual person whose soul is, if not quite the equivalent of his, very close to it. The white robes fall in with what he says on everything – even they’re scared of him – and he makes all of the final decisions on everything”.

  “What does that have to do with me?” Richard asked. “What influence could I have over Bentley that the white robes wouldn’t be able to negate?”

  Chris and James shared a look that Richard was unable to read. The look lingered and when Chris looked back at Richard there was a wary expression in his eyes.

  “Let’s just say that things can change,” he said carefully. Richard threw his hands in the air.

  “This is some conspiracy,” he complained sourly. “You can’t even tell me how I’m important to you”. James chuckled gloomily but Chris simply shook his head.

  “It’s easier to actually be surprised than it is to fake it. When you see what we’re talking about, it’s imperative that you look as though you are seeing what they want you to think is happening. Just trust us on this”.

  “Can I?” Richard asked softly. Chris seemed hurt by this.

  “We’ve brought you this far, haven’t we?” he asked, impatience and anger rising up in his voice. “We’ve bared almost everything for you. All we’re asking is for you to be patient”.

  “Sorry,” Richard apologized quickly. “It’s hard to adjust to trusting people again”.

  “I hear that,” Jacob said from across the room, and they all turned to stare at him, shocked at his sudden entrance into the conversation. Then, everyone laughed. It seemed to radically lower the tension in the room.

  “We should get some rest,” James said. “We’ll talk more tomorrow, and we should also actually destroy some things. We have to keep up the appearance, if nothing else”.

  “Yes,” Chris said, rising. “we should all get some rest”. He turned to Richard. “Feel free to browse the collection if you aren’t tired. We have some real classics in here. Also some stuff that people probably would have considered absolute crap before the plague. Now, it’s the greatest stuff you’ll ever read”.

  Richard laughed, and then felt a tug on his arm. He looked to his left and saw Carolyn looking down on him, a salacious grin on her face.

  “I can think of something more interesting for you to be doing,” she whispered, and nodded her head towards one of the bedrooms. “Perhaps you could join me for a more, er, private discussion?”

  The grin on Richard’s face matched Carolyn’s to a tee. He found that he was up for more discussion, after all.

  EIGHT

  They stayed at the tower for three days, just long enough to have been plausibly on a expedition. During that time Richard read voraciously; he discovered any number of books that people had recommended to him over the years that he had set aside from lack of time. Chris mentioned at one point on the second day that Richard reminded him of the man from the old episode of the Twilight Zone, where the end of the world meant that he finally had the time to read everything he wanted.

  “Except that, instead of losing your glasses, you could be formally hung from a nearby tree,” Chris delivered with a straight face. Richard wasn’t sure what to think about that.

  He made his way through three Vonnegut novels in a row before he even realized what he was doing, and his combo was only broken by virtue of Carolyn putting an omnibus of Philip K Dick in his hands. That particularly thick, unnaturally heavy book had paper that felt slicker and glossier than the others, and it left him feeling like he needed to touch solid objects to prove their veracity. One of the other women, a weathered old social worker named Veronica, pointed out the Bret Easton Ellis novels; Richard read through The Rules of Attraction and wound up feeling sorry for everyone in the novel.

  When he wasn’t reading he was talking with Carolyn. Sometimes this was just a euphemism, and they would be rutting behind closed doors, feeding off of each other in positions of increasing complexity. Most of the time, however, they were actually talking; as it turned out, she was an absolute joy to talk to. He was able to see past her simple indicators of bravery and sexuality and see an actual, complicated human. He felt a connection to her that he had rarely felt with friends and lovers.

  She had been a corporate trainer, in that long ago time before the plague. She had worked for a telecommunications company and had split her time between their head office in Toronto and upper-scale hotels in Edmonton, Vancouver, Calgary, and Halifax. She had an excellent sense of timing and could make dry subject matter come alive with the spark she had in her voice. She conceded that the fact that she looked stunning in business wear might have helped quite a bit as well. The job had had its pros and cons, although she weighted it more towards pros. She liked travelling, especially the feeling that she got when staying in nice rooms in glitzy urban centers. Some nights she would go out, see the town, have some drinks; on a lot of another nights, she would curl up into those cool, fresh sheets, sip at something light and watch old movies on demand.

  “Really?” Richard asked upon learning this. “I love older cinema. What’s your favourite, quick. No stopping to think”.

  “The Apartment,” she said without hesitation. “Jack Lemmon. Something about him just gets me, every time”.

  “I know exactly what you mean,” Richard replied, and meant it.

  Her father had been a civil engineer and her mother had been a professional student, working towards a doctorate in medieval history. She’d grown up in the suburbs ringing Toronto, popular and well-liked but bored. Staying in one place had never been something she’d been keen on. As soon as she was able to she left home and gave university a try. She lasted two years before she got bored and applied to work at a call center. After a few years she had managed to rise up through a series of promotions to her job as a trainer. As she reminisced about it she grew more passionate; Richard, for his part, could only muster the barest sort of enthusiasm for describing his former job. He’d dredged up some humorous old stories about crazy customers, the kind he saved for when someone wanted to know what working in retail was really like. At the end, he threw in the story of Troy, the last customer he’d ever served.

  “What an odd idea,” Carolyn remarked once he finished. “I wonder if he ever managed to do it?”

  “I don’t know,” Richard mused. “It wouldn’t do him much good now, without any electricity to access it”.

  “I suppose not,” Carolyn said, and then reached for him with fierce need.

  They would talk about movies, childhood stories, anything that came to mind. They would talk so long that by the time they finally drifted off to sleep the sun would be starting to peek through the horizon. Eventually, of course, they were forced to part; those three days together seemed magical, but they would soon seem like a brief, dreamlike interlude in grim drudgery. The group in the tower split back into their three component squadrons and made their separate, staggered way back to the Brother’s Keep. The ruse seemed to work, as it had every previous time they had attempted it.

  Shortly after life resumed its regular, dreary routine, an edict had gone out that every squadron was to have a personal escort of a black robe. The official reasoning was that some squads had come under attack from lawless elements drifting through the area. It was true to the extent that one or two squads had simply vanished; they had left on an expedition and failed to return after a few days. Richard was privately undecided as to whether they had been assaulted and killed by ‘lawless elements’ or by someone much closer to home. Jacob and Carolyn reported th
at the real reason for the enforced escort was that the white robes were getting paranoid; they believed that some of the expeditioners were plotting against them, and that there was a silent rebellion mounting.

  “They’re right, of course,” Chris had replied to this news, “but the question is, how do they know about it? Someone must have seen something that didn’t sit right with them. Maybe some person who we haven’t taken into account has been putting things together”.

  “It’s hard to say,” James had said to him, “but I can say for certainty that we need to be more careful. Less people at the base. Maybe take a much more roundabout route to get there”. They had all nodded and agreed. They continued to have meetings, once a month and only when the schedule worked out that the five squad members were in on the conspiracy and that Jacob was the escort. There was no way a female squad could meet them there; the eyes of Bentley’s men were on the women much more so than the men, and the close watch that was kept on them ensured that any participation in their conspiracy, no matter how seemingly minor, had a high percentage chance of a painful death. Richard ached to be with Carolyn, to lie with her and talk in relaxed, loving whispers, but there was nothing that could be done. She was the creature of the white robes, and the white robes were turning insular.

  Three weeks passed and without any warning James disappeared. It took Richard a further two weeks to realize that he had disappeared; he only found out the timeline of it afterwards, in urgent warnings from Chris. He was supposed to have been on an expedition with Chris, but when the time came to leave the squad was one man short. Chris had looked at the schedule and realized that it was James that was missing. Chilled, he had inquired into the matter with the black robe that was to have escorted them; the black robe had replied that James would not be accompanying them, and that had been the end of the conversation. The conspirators found out in piecemeal fashion; here and there, as safety and scheduling permitted.