Exit Kingdom

by Alden Bell

  Where does it go? Moses wonders. All that motion, all that force. It must be released, invisible, into the world. If you could only catch it – then we would be as a civilization again instead of lost, lonely children wandering a wreckage of man.

  He takes care of the other two slugs, first an old man with spectacles and then the one without teeth.

  There is no grace in his motions, he knows. No elegance. It is not a dance. It is a labour, a hewing of wood, a digging of stone. He is a labourer, has always been. His hands have no delicacy. They are rough from use, prone to clumsiness, but also forceful. There are sniper hands and shotgun hands, and his are shotgun hands. If you give them an approximate mark, they are bound to do big and unsubtle damage.

  Across the way, he sees his brother Abraham rising from a pile of inanimate corpses. They have survived again – and it is no victory.

  There is one remaining slug, a man in overalls, stumbling to and fro, choking on a fistful of plastic knives jammed into the back of his throat. As Moses watches, Abraham moves slowly, as though exhausted, to where the last slug stands. With a thoughtfully tilted head, Abraham considers the dead man for an extended space of seconds, pushing aside the slug’s grasping fingers. Then he seems to glance around him, searching for a tool to finish the job.

  Moses steps over the pile of slugs before him and walks to where his brother is. He reaches out and offers Abraham the adze. His brother takes it, looks wearily once more at the slug with the mouthful of plastic, and then uses the adze to get shut of the business.

  Then the world comes back, the sound of their own deafening heartbeats fading into the background. And above them they hear the cackle of the man.

  Couple of gladiators, ain’t they? his voice says, half through the megaphone and half not as he is distracted from its use. It’s my own personal coliseum. You could get to be a rich man in the wasteland, couldn’t you? Games of chance – you ante up your life. So it goes, ain’t it?

  That way, Moses says to his brother, pointing to the collection of debris piled on the escalator to the mezzanine. Abraham goes first, delicately beginning the climb upwards, balancing against the shifting objects on the escalator. It is a slow climb, one they could not have accomplished with a passel of the dead behind them. But they will make it.

  Hey, says the little man on the balcony. Hey! It is not permitted! You ain’t guessed my name yet!

  They ignore him and continue to climb. Moses, a heavy bull of a man, makes a misstep and sends a deckful of chairs crashing down below, and for a second the whole assemblage threatens to collapse beneath them. But it holds, and they continue up. When Abraham gets to the top, he reaches a hand for his brother and helps him the rest of the way.

  Then they see the man himself. He is dressed like a harlequin in an outfit of patches sewn together from a hundred different items of clothing. It is a wonder to behold because of its purposeless grandeur. There are clothes everywhere – the world full of clothes to be had whole and for free to anyone who wants to claim them. There is no need to construct new ones – sewing a science for times of luxury that are long past. But here, on this man, is an outfit of loving craftsmanship – a bricolage of textiles in a spectrum of colours. He wears a hat, too, stitched together in the same way – a triangular cap with a brim that comes to a point in front and makes him look like a degraded Robin Hood.

  The little man does not retreat as they move towards him, so distracted is he by the intrusion into his kingdom. He drops the megaphone to the ground and shakes his fists at the brothers, stomping his feet against the hard tile.

  I gave no permission! he cries. It is mine, ain’t it? All of it is mine. Rounded them up, I did, and set them as a trap for those who would assail me. It ain’t yours to take. You ain’t guessed my name yet!

  Rumple fuckin stiltskin, Moses says to the little man and uses one big hand to push him backwards.

  The little man goes flying as though he has no weight at all, collapsing to the ground and rising instantly to a seated position, supporting his upper body on one hand and using the other to wipe the spittle from his mouth. Suddenly he is quiet and looks at Moses askance as though reconsidering the nature of his adversary. Then he smiles and cackles again, picking himself up and raising his hands to show he is no combatant worthy of beating. Then he says:

  Man of erudition, ain’t he? Man of book learning or just memories of mama stories? Who can tell? Bear with the voice of a man, at least. The sideshow’s come to town.

  *

  Where do you domicile? Moses asks. Tell us, or it’ll go hard with you.

  The little harlequin raises his hands again.

  I’ll tell, won’t I? Take you there myself. Spoils to the victor. No harm done. Nothing that can’t be rebuilt.

  Then the little man turns and walks down the long wide corridor of the terminal without turning to see if the brothers follow. Moses and Abraham look briefly at each other and then go after him. The sun comes through the tall windows to their left, and it is a majestical fortress indeed. Fortress of glass and silence. Plenty of space to feel your aloneness, Moses thinks. Plenty of room for madness to seed itself and grow. A stadium of space, he knows from experience, invites grief to fill it in every corner and niche. This little man has been here on his own for five years, according to his own word. And alone who knows how long before that. As Moses walks through the terminal, his heels resounding echoes to the vast ceilings above, he feels like he is wandering through the caverns of a mind dizzied by castaway isolation.

  Eventually, the harlequin turns to the right and passes through a smaller corridor to a door marked VIP Lounge.

  Very important person, ain’t I?

  Then he opens the door and they enter the little man’s sanctum. It is no longer recognizable as a lounge, having more in common, instead, with an elf’s workshop. Along all the walls are tables covered with bits of detritus from all over the airport. Pieces of planes, unrecognizable splinters of metal bent and repurposed to some other function, motors from vacuum cleaners, computer circuit boards, aluminium chair legs, kitchen utensils, monitor screens unseated from their plastic shells, fasteners of all sorts culled from a world falling to pieces anyway.

  In one small corner of the room there is a bare mattress and an oil lamp sitting on the floor – as though sleep were the least worthy of the projects that take place here.

  The harlequin, seeming no longer bothered by the presence of his visitors, marches purposefully over to a stool, sits down, takes up an object that looks like a mechanical spider and begins to tinker with it, gazing at it every now and then through a big magnifying glass suspended on a metal arm over the workbench.

  Moses looks from table to table. There are things here they can use, including ammunition.

  You tried to kill us, Moses says. We mean to take your property as forfeit, leaving you your hide – and you should count yourself lucky.

  Take what you want, replies the harlequin, for anyway the value’s in the building of a thing, not in the possessing of what’s been built.

  Maybe we’ll stay the night, Moses goes on. Save us the work of a campsite for once.

  He’s a proclaimer, ain’t he? Do what you want.

  So the brothers bed down in the terminal for the night.

  Well after midnight Moses is unable to sleep, and he can hear his brother’s snores echoing through the wide corridors of the terminal. He rises and goes to the harlequin’s workshop, where he finds the little man still diligently at work by the light of an oil lamp.

  You don’t sleep much, Moses says.

  Sleep’s a fool’s game, ain’t it? The more you take it, the more you gotta have it.

  Fair enough. I never took to it much anyway.

  So they talk, the two men. The harlequin speaks mostly to himself – which is how, Moses guesses, he has kept his voice alive for so many years. Moses himself is simply the incident – an accidental audience for the man’s soliloquy. But there is something to admir
e in the harlequin’s speech. He employs big notions everywhere, a tinkerer of ideas as well as machines. The world to him is a world of toys. He must have been something back before everything happened. A genius of something – maybe a scientist or an artist or a philosopher.

  They talk, and the terminal sleeps around them, and the harlequin’s hands are always moving. Moses lights a cigar and tells of the places he has been, the things he has seen.

  The world’s a wide place, he says. Wider than you think. Even tiny places have got wide histories. Do you believe it?

  Oh I believe it, says the harlequin, tapping his ear as though that is where his belief were contained.

  Then Moses goes on to talk about his brother, Abraham, and the evil things he has done. The man goes on tinkering as Moses speaks, and Moses is grateful for not having to meet his eyes. And he is pleased to see that craft and creation can continue even in the hearing of such monstrous deeds. He is no good man himself, he explains to the little artisan hunched over the workbench, but he does believe in certain things: order and obligation, conduct and code. There has to be a logic to such things. There’s got to be. Because otherwise everything is a goddamn shambles – and the dead getting up and walking’ll be the least of it. Life comes and goes, and what it’s contingent upon is a mystery even to the wisest man – but order, that’s something else altogether. Maybe just a creation of man, but still and all maybe his most beautiful one.

  Moses explains to the harlequin that it is his contract – his duty – to protect his brother, but that it ain’t the world’s duty to do so. The world has been, Moses says, a pretty fair arbiter of things so far as he can tell. So how come it goes so light on Abraham Todd?

  The mind’s a puny machine, ain’t it? the harlequin says. Most of em are rust and fissure all through. What’s the oil that keeps em running smooth? Anyone’s guess. Some people think machines are built to follow expectation, that a machine not performing to expectation ain’t no machine at all. Me, I think different, ain’t I? Every machine its own miniature god circling its own miniature earth.

  Meanin what?

  Meaning, the harlequin says and turns on his stool to look Moses in the eye for the first time in the conversation, your code is your soul – don’t expect em all to look alike.

  They talk more, and the insomniac night wears on. You would think the world could get no emptier – but in the hours before dawn, you might as well be alone on the earth. Even over the palaver by the oil lamp, the two consorting figures are only accidental and temporary mates. They speak, truth be told, not to each other but to some haunted version of themselves.

  *

  In the morning, Moses wakes his brother and tells him it’s time to go. They gather what ammo and supplies they can carry from the harlequin’s room.

  You tried to kill us, Moses explains.

  You’ve got a right to it, ain’t you? So take it. People abide.

  What they take isn’t much, since they are accustomed to travelling light. When they have zipped up their satchels, the harlequin stands gazing at them with a sly smile.

  There’s what you took, and then there’s what you should of taken, he says. You overlooked the biggest prizes.

  What prizes? Abraham asks petulantly.

  Something for each of you, the harlequin says and moves to the opposite side of the room where he shoves aside piles of blueprints and diagrams to reveal a massive metal chest. Moses recognizes it as a deep freeze, like a refrigerator toppled over onto its back – but since there is no electricity, the thing has become simple storage.

  The harlequin lifts the lid and shuffles around in the contents of the chest until he finds what he’s looking for. He tugs at it for a moment until he manages to pull it free with both hands. He has trouble lifting it, and as soon as it clears the edge of the chest, he lets it fall with a heavy clank to the ground.

  Made it with my own hands, the harlequin says, but I weren’t mighty enough to lift it, were I? He’s a big one, though.

  He indicates with a nod of the head that he is referring to Moses, so Moses goes and takes the object from him.

  It is a brutal-looking weapon – a twisted and carnivalesque instrument of destruction. Constructed on the base of an iron pipe about the length of a great sword, there are blades welded on every which way. Dagger blades and hatchet blades. Kitchen-knife blades bent at spidery angles. There are blades all the way up and down the shaft of the iron pipe, but an increasing number towards the end, where a vicious iron spike protrudes from the tip. The grip is simple and inelegant – layers of duct tape wrapped around the base of the pipe.

  It can be used to swipe or cudgel or pierce. But any way it moves, Moses can tell, it will whistle sticky death through its path. He lifts it, feels the tremendous heft of it. A slow weapon, graceless and nasty. It’s not surprising that the harlequin cannot use it – Moses is barely able to hold it aloft comfortably with all the strength of both arms.

  But he looks closely at it – the colours of the welded metal where the blades come together, the elemental blues and blacks and greens and browns. The distilling of metal into liquid and then the cohering of liquid into strength.

  There is an awesome ugliness to the thing, and Moses admires it.

  He does not thank the harlequin, for such a gift is beyond the formalities of words. Instead, he accepts it in silence.

  Then the little man is digging around again in the chest and comes up with a smaller object – a cigar box. He places the box on the workbench near by, lifts the lid and sifts through the objects until he finds what he’s looking for. This he hands to Abraham.

  What is it? Abraham asks. He holds the thing up to the light. Moses recognizes the object, dimly. He has never been one for computers, neither in the new world nor in the old, but this thing he recognizes as a something you plug into a computer port. It looks like nothing to speak of – a rectangle of plastic, smaller than a matchbox, with a sliver of metal poking out of it.

  It’s magic, ain’t it? the harlequin says in response to Abraham’s question. Here there ain’t no grid, no spark, no electric. So it ain’t no use to me. But find you a working machine to plug that doohickey into, and it’ll journey you whole new places, won’t it?

  Uh-huh, Abraham says, unenthused. Hey, you don’t happen to have another of them killer swords, do you?

  This strikes the harlequin as funny, and he laughs his cackling laugh, shaking his head and waving his finger in the air as though to indicate that he needs a moment.

  Killer swords, he says under his breath, smiling.

  Hey, buddy, Abraham says, slipping the plastic object into his pocket, you’re all right, you know that? What’s your proper name anyway?

  The harlequin straightens up and puffs out his chest, announcing himself with military seriousness.

  My name is Albert Wilson Jacks, ain’t it?

  Moses observes the expression on his brother’s face collapse.

  Albert? Abraham says. Albert? Your name’s Albert?

  Albert Wilson Jacks, the little man repeats.

  I guessed that name. Albert – that’s one of the goddamn names I guessed back there.

  Is it? says Albert Wilson Jacks with a bashful smile.

  It goddamn well is, Abraham confirms.

  That’s a lesson to you, ain’t it? Justice and hearts – they’re naught but busted machines.

  *

  So Moses and Abraham Todd leave Albert Wilson Jacks the harlequin there in his solitary fortress – and when they will think of him in the future, they will think of his hands that never stop tinkering and of his words that are spoken only to himself and to the myriad crevices of madness that mark any lost space.

  Back outside in the desert sun they cross the vast runways between the rusted corpses of the massive airplanes. If technology has a life, and from what they’ve seen of the harlequin’s workshop the brothers believe now that it has, then this is a place of lost souls. A graveyard of machine corpses. Their
stillness is a beautiful betrayal.

  They arrive at the car and climb in. They roll down the windows to release the hot air baked stale and stifling by the sun. But Moses does not turn the key in the ignition. He keeps his hands, unmoving, on the wheel.

  What is it? Abraham asks.

  Where are we goin?

  What do you mean? We’re goin west.

  That ain’t what I meant.

  What’d you mean then?

  I mean what are we doin just wanderin hither and thither across the globe?

  We’re surviving. We’re warrioring our way through life. We’re doin the best we can. Doin better than most if you ask me.

  It ain’t enough, Moses says and looks grimly through the windshield. In front of them is a road that leads only two directions: the nowhere they came from and the nowhere they haven’t yet been.

  Well, what’re you lookin for then? Abraham asks his brother.

  I don’t know. How bout a direction? A destination. How bout a purpose? It ain’t quite livin without a purpose to shape the action. Even the slugs’ve got that.

  Abraham considers for a moment. He is fifteen years Moses’ junior. An accidental birth given way to an accidental life. Five years old when everything went to hell, he only barely remembers the time before. He grew wrong somehow – Moses doesn’t know how. But the only thing he seems to respect in this world is his fraternal bond with Moses. And that’s worth something. It counts.

  Okay, Abraham says finally.

  Okay what?

  Okay, then, let’s find ourselves a purpose.