Prospero's Half-Life

by Trevor Zaple

  “No, not gay. Just…haven’t been in this situation much”.

  “What situation? Oh!” she exclaimed, putting a finger to her lips in a maddeningly adorable gesture. “You mean you haven’t had a lot of sex?”

  “Yes! No, I mean, I’ve had sex, but…”

  “I thought men that didn’t get a lot of sex were, like, more the opposite. Like, you’d fly off the handle, you know?”

  Richard put this particular line of questioning to sleep by swiftly kissing her, deep and hard, taking her by surprise. After a split second where she seemed unsure, she leaned back and Richard felt her tongue dart between his lips, a sharp dart flickering in. Then he was on top of her, her body warm, curvy and distressingly female beneath his.

  Now there was a response. Higher brain function ceased and the genetic instincts of a million or so years of evolutionary development took over. What followed was as automatic as electricity through a circuit.

  FIVE

  The next morning dawned bright and hot; Richard imagined it did, anyway, judging it by the amount of sunlight filtering through the tightly shut Venetian blinds in Samantha’s somewhat chaotic bedroom. Samantha herself was asleep beside him, as nude as the day she was born and so warm to the touch that Richard wanted nothing more than to curl himself up beside her and sleep the rest of the day away. Perhaps even the rest of their lives away.

  Awareness gradually filled him, however, and he was soon staring up at the rough bedroom ceiling. He felt restless; he had never been one to laze about in bed for the day. Samantha’s tantalizing heat was a hard thing to give up, for sure, but his legs were beginning to get uncomfortably twitchy. He compromised by telling himself that he would find out if Samantha had coffee, and bring the coffee back for them to drink in bed. He slipped out of the sleek, cool sheets and tiptoed away into the stillness of the main hallway. His footfalls were the only sound he heard; everything else could have vanished into a dream.

  He rummaged briefly through the kitchen cupboards and found a canister of pre-ground coffee. There was a percolator on the counter next to the fridge and he went through the thoughtless ritual of making coffee. The water gushed out of the tap as he filled the carafe, and he wondered for an instant about how much longer that would continue to happen. It struck an odd note in him, a jangly and angular chord, and suddenly the morning did not seem as relaxed and carefree as it had upon his awakening.

  When he returned to the bedroom carrying two piping hot cups of coffee Samantha was sitting up. She had the sheet pulled up to just below her collarbone but it was slipping down in a way that seemed to designed to madden him. He set the cups of coffee down onto the nightstand beside her bed and climbed in. His hands found her hair and his lips found hers; they fell into it for an hour, making love greedily. Later, when they were spent, Samantha slid off of him and took one of the cups with obvious relish.

  “Now this is the best way to start a morning,” she remarked, blowing across the jittery surface of the mocha-coloured coffee. “It almost makes me feel like life is normal again”.

  “Almost,” Richard agreed, sipping at his own cup. “Except that if this was normal life, we probably wouldn’t be sitting here like this”.

  Samantha smiled mysteriously.

  “I don’t know about that,” she whispered huskily. “I’ve seen the way you looked at me at work. They way your eyes sort of linger on me at certain times”.

  Richard blushed and choked a little. He covered it by taking a gulp of the coffee, which was still too hot to really do anything with it except to sip at it. It burned uncomfortably as it went down and he grimaced.

  “Well, uh,” he stammered. “I mean, I would never have done anything about it. They frown on that sort of thing, you know. Managers and employees sleeping together. Too much opportunity for corruption and allegations there”.

  Samantha rolled her eyes and shook her head at him.

  “You don’t have to go around telling everyone about what you’re doing,” she replied smoothly. “In a way, there’s something even hotter about being illicit about the whole thing. Like we could only get together when we were sure no one was watching. Or something scandalous like that”.

  Richard laughed nervously. “I suppose,” he said doubtfully, and she laughed.

  “Richard, you’re right, you never would have acted on it. You’re such a company man”.

  Richard immediately felt offended by this but the feeling faded out as quickly as it had come. She was right, after all. He would never have considered acting on anything that might have happened between them, before everything happened. There were rules, after all.

  “I suppose so,” he admitted tentatively. “At any rate, this is a different situation”.

  “Much different,” she agreed readily. She took a drink of her coffee and closed her eyes. “I am not going to be happy when the last of this is used up,” she said heavily. Richard thought about it for a moment. It seemed to connect too well to his earlier dark thoughts in the kitchen.

  “There must be a completely ridiculous amount of coffee floating around North America,” he mused, trying to find some sort of upbeat counter to the way the conversation was going. “I bet that we could bury a major city in coffee grounds if we put it all together”.

  “Maybe,” Samantha replied doubtfully.

  “A lot of it is vacuum-sealed, too, so it’ll last for a while. We could be drinking coffee for years yet”.

  “That would be nice,” she said, brightening slightly. “It might make the whole thing a bit easier to bear”.

  Richard decided to keep going. “This might even prove to be a really good thing, after all. For us, anyway. Think about it”. He gestured outward, expansively. “How many people did you run into on a daily basis that you just wanted to strangle? To slap them in the face and ask them how goddamned stupid they could actually be? Think about the customers we’ve both had to deal with, just by themselves. Rude, arrogant, thoughtless jerks who, in any sane and loving universe, would have been the first against the wall when the revolution came”.

  “I don’t think they were all that bad,” Samantha countered playfully, and Richard snorted.

  “Please, we’ve all got horror stories. I thought often about writing them into a book – can you imagine? The amount of sheer idiocy that would have been dripping out of the pages would have been astounding. Like the one who called the cops on Mary because she wouldn’t honour his expired coupon?”

  “Oh my god, yes,” Samantha replied, sounding amazed. “I was there that night, that was...I can’t even describe it, that’s how ridiculous it was. He just shrugged, turned around, whipped out his cell phone, and called the police. Then he turned back around and just started screaming. I didn’t even understand half of what he was saying. Just screams”.

  “It was pretty bad,” he agreed, nodding emphatically. “Imagine, though – those people are gone”.

  Samantha’s face clouded and she shook her head.

  “Lots of people have died, Richard,” she admonished him. “People that were close to both of us. Human beings. Remember that”.

  He held up his hands in defence. “I know, I know. They’re all people and there are lots of them that I’m going to miss. But there are a lot that I’m not going to miss, at the same time. People that I think we’ll all be much better off without”.

  Samantha whipped her head around and stared at him incredulously.

  “That’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard anyone say,” she said, her voice chilled, and she abruptly got out of bed. Richard watched her walk out of the room, unable to stop himself from admiring the form of her hips even when he vaguely knew that he’d done something wrong. He put his head back against the headboard of her bed and sighed heavily.

  After a moment or so he got out of bed and followed her out into the hall. It was silent there, so he walked into the kitchen. When he found this to be empty as well, he began to worry. The morning had been so bright and warm;
that dischordant instrument chiming moronically away in the background was getting louder, now, and irritation welled up to take it’s place beside the quicksilver slip of fear. He went out of the kitchen by the opposite door, which lead into a little mudroom that stood as antechamber to the outside world. There were a few pairs of boots in there, and a couple of them were man-sized; Samantha’s dead boyfriend, he realized. He started to feel a little guilty, looking at those imposing black boots with their thick, muddy laces and their roughly scuffed toes.

  The door to the outside was open and Richard peeked his head around the corner. Samantha was leaning against the hard steel railing that lined the wide balcony jutting off of the back of the building. The sky was blue and blameless; a fresh wind whipped cyclically through the cul-de-sac formed by the buildings centered around the parking lot below. There were a few cars in the lot, their exteriors twinkling here and there where the sun could strike through the layer of dust on them.

  Richard moved beside Samantha but refrained from putting his arm around her. He leaned against the rail in a similar fashion and stared out into the lot, wanting to be near her but unsure of what to say. They stood like that, silent in the hot summer sun, for what seemed like hours but was probably only five minutes.

  “He used to say this would be the best place to be,” Samantha said. The sudden break of silence was jarring for Richard, and he had to carefully restrain himself from looking too shocked. He grit his teeth and waited for her to finish with this particular thought. The dead boyfriend again, risen from the grave to haunt their conversation. He felt suddenly restless.

  “This would be the perfect place to ride out a zombie movie scenario,” she mused in a deeper voice, mimicking that vanished man she’d shared a life with until just recently. “Break down the stairs leading up and you’ve taken out the only entrance to the apartment. Zombies could wander around down there and they’d never get up at you”. She smiled, bitterly. “Well, it wasn’t a zombie thing we had to worry about, was it?”

  Richard opened his mouth to reply but swiftly realized that the question was rhetorical. She was looking up into the sky now, and from her tone she could very well have been simply talking to herself.

  “Now he’s dead, and everyone else is dead, but none of them are rising up. They’re just lying there, rotting and becoming food for the raccoons, and the maggots. They’re not getting up to bite us, or grab us, they’re not doing anything”. She turned her head to look at Richard and her eyes were agate-hard, and rimmed with tears. “They’re dead, but they’re still here. Their memory is still here. They were people. They meant something. So if you want to dance on everyone’s grave, do it somewhere else”.

  Richard felt bad and battered down the flare of irritation he felt about the emotion. Let her finish, he thought. Let her get it all out.

  “I miss everyone,” she said, and her voice shook. “Except for you, and Mark I guess, every single person I know is dead. I’ve watched them die, in their homes, on the street. I...” she trailed off for a moment, blinking into the hot sun. “I don’t know. I don’t know when I stopped noticing. When it all became business as usual. Last week? I can’t even remember. I remember calling my father and getting no answer. I remember that he’d said my mom was really sick, and that I should come see them as soon as possible. That was before everything went crazy, before...anyway, I went over there a week later, when the papers were all delirious and no one was talking about anything else. I had to, at that point. I couldn’t avoid it anymore. I’d been putting my father off by telling him that I was busy working, that I couldn’t get any time off. It was true too, which made it even worse”.

  “You could have gotten all sorts of time off,” Richard bristled. “It’s not like you were enslaved”.

  Samantha sneered at him, and the quickness of it made him recoil a little.

  “Right. I’m sure I could have had a few days off – and then I would have lost my apartment, or starved for two weeks, or worse. You guys didn’t exactly pay a living wage, you know”.

  “It was competitive to the marketplace,” Richard replied stiffly, feeling put-upon. “What did you expect us to do, suddenly pay double what everyone else was paying?”

  “Oh, fuck you,” she seethed, and Richard’s shoulders slumped.

  “Sorry,” he apologized contritely, or at least as contritely as he could manage. He wanted to dampen down that anger; he had no desire to be completely alone in this world, and the look in Samantha’s eyes made him think that she might be considering throwing him down the stairs. “You’re right, it wasn’t a job you could really live on. What about your boyfriend, though?” He asked carefully, not wanting to set her off into a spiral of anger again.

  “Doug?” she asked dully. “He’d lost his job three months ago. He installed cabinets, but there was no work anymore. People couldn’t afford the extravagances like they used to be able to. All the good jobs were drying up, and he had to sign on to one of those manpower agencies, the ones that find you temp work doing something a monkey could do. In Doug’s case it was manual labour, but there still wasn’t much out there. We were one stumble away from finding a flophouse”. She snorted, caught up in a storm. “I guess you’re right, Richard. Maybe it is all a good thing. At least I don’t have to work my ass off to starve, anymore”.

  Richard let this pass and tried to think of something soothing to say. Nothing was coming to mind, however, so he simply said the first thing that came to his mind.

  “What do we do next?” he asked. She shook her head slowly, and Richard thought that her anger might be dissipating.

  “We could stay here, there’s food. I don’t feel safe with that hospital full of shooters on the other side. Sometimes when I’m walking around, I think that at any second a bullet will come whizzing through the window and I’ll just be another dead body to litter up everything. Even though the drapes and blinds are closed tightly, I feel this constantly. I don’t think that it’s a healthy way to live”.

  She put a long-nailed hand to her face to wipe away the sweat. “I need to get out of here. It’s not just the hospital, either. Everywhere I go in here I see Doug. If I stay here, I’ll just end up crying in the corners all the time. I need to go somewhere else. Anywhere else”.

  Doug, he thought morosely, you may not have been able to hold a job but she sure has a problem with letting you go. He wondered sourly if the smug cheer he felt over Doug’s lack of employment was a mark against his character.

  Instead of voicing his inner debate, he asked her if there was anywhere in particular she wanted to go. She appeared to think about this for a while, and then finally shrugged her shoulders.

  “I don’t care,” she said, and in the finality of her tone it seemed that she meant it. Richard let it hang in the heated air for a moment before scrambling for a place to go. A suggestion to make, anyway.

  “Well, let’s go downtown, then,” he said blindly. “We should probably go find other people, before they find us, I mean. Maybe someone knows what’s going on”.

  “We already know what’s going on,” she replied sullenly, “and that’s the problem”. He let that go.

  “We can at least find a safer place to sleep in further away from here. We may as well head downtown, anyway”.

  “Sure,” she shrugged again, and she seemed deflated. “Let’s pack up and go downtown. Someone must be down there”. From the other side of the building, muffled by the mass of brick, there was the dry, brittle snap of a rifle shot. Richard jumped a little and his heart raced away. Samantha nodded, continuing to stare off into the parking lot. The sun shone through her fair hair and the sight of the rich yellow light filtering through her golden strands and the way it shone on her bare, smooth skin made him stir.

  “Maybe before we go...” he whispered, advancing on her, but she spun around and held him off.

  “No,” she said, and Richard thought he heard a note of contempt in her voice. He stepped back, wilting. He put h
is hands behind him, on his buttocks, to show that he wasn’t going to try anything. She looked him up and down, lingering here and there. “Maybe,” she amended, although she still seemed doubtful. She walked by him into the apartment, not waiting for a reply. Richard watched her go and let out an explosive breath.

  SIX

  They ended up leaving the apartment a short half-hour later. There ended up being no time for any sort of physical interlude, as once inside Samantha began a whirlwind of gathering and packing. She laid out a messenger bag and a tattered old denim knapsack. She packed the canned portion of her cupboards into the knapsack, as well as four bottles of water. On top of this she packed a towel, and two changes of clothes – casual wear, jeans, t-shirts, sturdy textiles.

  “I don’t really have anything for you,” she semi-apologized. “Doug was a bit bigger than you, so nothing would really fit”. Richard shrugged and said that it was alright, he would survive, but he bristled inside at the perceived dig.

  Into the messenger bag she packed a map of the city and a couple of her sharper kitchen knives. She fished her plastic identification cards out of her purse and placed them inside the bag as well, along with her battered old blue birth certificate. Richard nodded approvingly at this but balked when she retrieved her tablet from the bedroom.

  “Do you really think that’s even necessary?” he asked. She eyed him coolly and slipped the thin, oddly heavy device into the bag.

  “Do you have any idea how much I had to pay for that?” she asked levelly. “Maybe it doesn’t mean anything to you, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t mean anything to me”.

  “I just think it seems like a waste of space”

  “You’re a waste of space,”

  “That’s not very nice,” he recoiled, stung. “I just don’t think we should pack things we won’t have a use for”.