Exit Kingdom

by Alden Bell

  His words stumble over each other, and he has no control of them any more. They are spilling out of him, and he is embarrassed. But then the Vestal stops him, perhaps in an act of glorious pity – rises suddenly and climbs onto his lap and closes his mouth with her own so that the words stop coming. Because it is the words that are most treacherous, the words that spread like ripe contagion, the utterance that makes things true – calamitously and inexorably true.

  Wait, he says, because the words keep coming – out of spite they keep coming.

  Wait for what? she asks.

  Just a thing I got to know, he says. How come you ran away? There’s somethin in you. You could help people. How come you don’t want to go to that citadel?

  She shrugs and shifts on top of him, her loins pushing down on his lap.

  I don’t know, she says. Everybody’s lookin for answers. I don’t want to be anybody’s answer.

  She moves to kiss him again, but he pushes her away a second time.

  And this? he says. Ain’t this an answer?

  You big dope, she says and takes his face in her hands. This ain’t even a question.

  Then she kisses him again, stops the words dead. Dams up the unceasing stream of language. Moses takes her little body in his hands, such a small powerful thing.

  And the Vestal, her red hair falling around his shoulders – she stops the words, stops his mouth, both their bodies caught in a sudden seizure, gripped to blissful stillness, swaddled and safe in the cool, hard limits of human contact. He sees again the pendant she wears between her pale breasts, the small wooden cross – and it is a sign for him of something true, some honest faith in this wild thing of a woman. They are together, and what they create in their union is not a new something but rather a whole and complete nothing, a void that sits quiet and calm on his heart, that makes his breathing shallow and at peace, that gives erasure to many scripts of tragedy that have palimpsested themselves over the vellum of his greying mind.

  To stop. To cease, just for a moment. To turn your back on the world, to close your eyes – to see the nothing that is not rather than the nothing that is everywhere around you. To just be quiet in your mind for a little minute.

  There are paradises even yet on the abandoned plains of the earth – and they are not filled with fecund flowering Edens but rather just with sweet unerring silences.

  The Vestal’s flesh is white as a lily, but she is un breakable – even for hands as worn and brute as his. He is safe in his inability to hurt her. She is empty, and beautiful as one of those ancient urns that tell stories – and she is unblemishable.

  *

  That’s right, Moses says to the caravaners. I had a wife once. You heard it true enough. You’ll ask how come I ain’t mentioned it yet – so cardinal it is to the understanding of who I was, who I am still.

  It is full dark now, the fire down to mere embers. It is no longer possible to tell who is listening and who has been taken by sleep. No other person has said anything for a great while. They are caught in the sickly dark hours between late night and dawn. The great one-eyed man continues to speak without recourse to the number who either hear or don’t hear him – as though his story were a fated thing, a toy machine that, once wound, must keep spinning wild on its metal wheels until it finds its own still end.

  You’ll say, maybe, that I’ve misled, Moses goes on. If so, I apologize. To you. To her. It ain’t nothing, an apology. Just a notion, like any other. You can utter it like an incantation, but if it brings somethin to bear you’ve got more out of it than I ever have. I’m sorry. I declare it with every step I take on this earth. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I had a wife once. And a kid, too, a daughter. It was a long time ago – half a life ago. My wife, well she was a beauty too, don’t doubt it – but in a different way. She wasn’t fancy – not spectacular with herself or nothin like that. She was just pretty in a plain way. And nice. She was pretty and nice. You miss things like that now – you, me, the whole world. She – my wife – she wore her hair tied up in a ribbon. It was a pink ribbon, if you want to know. Simple, pink. It was nice.

  The silence draws itself out, a breath held in anticipation of falling.

  The truth is, he goes on, I don’t like to think about it. You try to let dead things lie – try to look things in the face for the present fact of what they are. You try.

  He pauses again.

  And for the redhead, too, he continues. The Vestal. I had no business messing with her. But you ain’t always able to see. Sometimes you bumble around in the dark. Sometimes you reach out and there’s someone there, and you grab them. It may be instinct, but it ain’t pure – it don’t bear on goodness. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

  He shakes his head, gazes into the dying embers.

  She smelled salty, he says. Like oceans.

  *

  But she is practised in the ways of witchery – a transmogrifant who in the light of morning wears a face different from the one you see by the moon and stars. She is so many things. She is an impossibility with an unperturbed face.

  She is not beside Moses when he wakes in the morning. He goes hunting for her and finds her in the kitchen, sitting at the linoleum table and cackling like a hag. She has found a pair of kitchen shears and she is in the process of cutting off her long locks of red hair. They fall to the ground around her as though she were an autumn tree shedding its riotous leaves. And her laugh – it is not hysterical but cruel, diabolical rather than panicky.

  Now you’re soul-split too, she says and points the shears at him. If I’m broke, then so are you. If I’m dead and empty, then so are you. Whatever hell I’ve got boiling inside me, you loved it – and that makes it part of you too.

  She laughs again.

  Who do you think you are? she continues. Your soul ain’t better than mine. You ain’t lookin at me from some high tower. You’re down here in the muck with the rest of us. You want order? You can play at order and righteousness all you want, but the world ain’t got any obligation to conform to your notions.

  He looks at the nest of red in which she sits.

  Your hair, is all he can utter.

  Time for a new look, she says. Sometimes you got to wear your ugliness on the outside of you. The amber tresses ain’t me any more. Haven’t you heard? I’m the walkin dead – just a slug that’s been trained to talk and fuck.

  He turns and walks out of the kitchen. He goes outside and sits with his duffel on the front porch. He finds a cigar he’s been saving and smokes it while he waits.

  There is not a person in sight, living or dead. Sometimes it can be this way – just quiet and still. The sound of a breeze through the high grasses, the creak of an unoiled barn door, the sandy brush of dust blown across an abandoned macadam road. Sometimes there is nothing for miles and miles around to remind you of the way things used to be. The world is so big – the amount of empty space is deafening. Who could of learned to live on this vast and poisonous air? What kind of man?

  To end up in this place. Moses has gone wrong somewhere. The woman in the house behind him – she shouldn’t of been his burden. He’s the wrong man to bear such a trial. It ain’t that he’s a good man – not by any measurement – but he’s got to believe there are laws. He’s got to believe there are things you’re supposed to do and things you ain’t – or else what’s it all for anyway? There are everywhere you look forks in the road. If there weren’t some purpose to choosing one or the other, then – then what? Then he and the world would be paralysed with quandariness.

  So maybe that’s what’s happened after all. The whole world at a crossroads – and no reason to go either one way or the other.

  Finally, she emerges from the house. Her hair is chopped short and ragged. Uneven patches stick out every which way, and she looks more like a child than ever. A ferocious and feral child – all spit and hiss and gnashing teeth.

  You ready? he asks, looking away from her.

  I’m ready.

  Okay then, he sa
ys and rises. Let’s get it done with.

  *

  In the next town, Gunnison, an hour’s walk away, they find a car lot and search until they locate a vehicle that still runs. They do not speak. Moses glances down the road behind them and wonders what he would do if Fletcher caught up to them right now and wanted to take the redhead away. He imagines handing her over with an old-timey bow and flourish. He imagines it, and it gives him pleasure – and he checks himself for he does not want to become someone who lives exclusively in the mind.

  They drive east. The roads rise in twists and turns over another mountain range. They see snow on the ground again. Moses thinks of his brother waiting for him to return, his leg festering.

  Again they pass out of the mountains, and again through wide plains of farmland all gone fallow. They stop and look at the maps Moses carries in his satchel. They continue.

  In a place called Penrose they turn onto a new road and follow it north. There is nothing for miles. A big blank, the whole world unravelled – gone back to immensities of stone and sky.

  But half a day after they find the car, they arrive at Colorado Springs. It is thick with the slow dead. The city holds warmth enough to keep the dead animated, but they move with painful slowness across the icy streets. The faces of the slugs here all wear the same blue pallor, and frost settles glistening in their hair and eyelashes. They reach out their arms at the car passing through, but there is nothing to be done. In some cases, their clothes have frozen into the ice on the ground, and the slugs are leashed there, trying fruitlessly to rise. They will not be able to do so until the spring thaw. Until then, they close their eyes against the snow that falls peacefully on their upturned faces.

  The place they are looking for is north of the town itself, so they drive through. They turn up another road, and the Vestal Amata points to the road.

  Look, she says. Tyre tracks. Cars have been through here. A lot of them it looks like.

  Moses nods.

  It’s a good place to hole up, he says. The dead ain’t much of a threat – at least half of the year.

  They begin to see skeletons of old fighter jets parked on concrete platforms, landing strips and radio towers every which way.

  Where is this citadel we’re going to? asks the Vestal.

  It’s military. The friar said it was part of the Air Force Academy.

  The Vestal shakes her head.

  Goddamn army men, she says. They’re the worst for surviving ugly.

  What’s that mean?

  It means I don’t trust em.

  Maybe it ain’t for you to trust them – but for them to trust you.

  God and the army – two things that ain’t ever worked so well for me.

  What about that pendant you wear on your neck?

  What about it? she says, placing a palm against her chest. It was a gift, that’s all. The symbol of it’s neither here nor there.

  They round a bend and come to a large gate in a fence that runs out of sight in either direction over the snowy foothills.

  Moses stops the car before the gate, and two soldiers emerge from a guardhouse. One stands at a watchful distance while the other comes to the window of the car.

  Are you hurt? asks the soldier.

  Not to speak of, says Moses.

  Are you seeking shelter?

  Huh-uh, Moses says and shakes his head. We got business. I was sent by a friar in Tucson. He said to bring her to the cathedral here. She’s a vestal canoness.

  A what?

  I don’t know what it means either. I was just told to bring her, so here she is. You’ll like her, she does tricks.

  The soldier leans down to look at the Vestal Amata, who glares at him. Then he stands and goes to the guardhouse while the other soldier stands watch.

  I ain’t a pet to do tricks, she says in a low voice to Moses as they wait.

  Ain’t you?

  Look, Mose, she says and turns to him. I don’t like it here.

  Her voice has a quiver of nervousness to it, but he doesn’t know how far he should believe her.

  It ain’t exactly my vision of home either, he says.

  We don’t have to do this, you know. We could turn around right here.

  Moses tightens his hands on the steering wheel. He looks grimly forward through the grey clouds that have settled over the landscape.

  You got to finish things in life, he says finally. It’s important.

  The gate before them rolls open and the soldier returns to the car window.

  You can proceed inside, he says and points not with a finger but with his full open hand. Take your second right and then your first left after that. The chapel’s ahead. You’ll see it. Pastor Whitfield will be waiting for you.

  Moses pulls the car slowly through the gates, and the Vestal Amata begins a quiet and breathless plea.

  Moses, Moses, she says. I ain’t dirty, Moses. Really, I’m not. I ain’t a holy woman either. I ain’t clean nor dirty either one. Moses, I’m just me. I don’t want to be anybody’s solution. I don’t want to be anybody at all. Moses. Moses, please. I know I’ve been a burden on you.

  She is frightened. He has not seen her as a frightened girl before, and he has seen her as many things.

  We’re just findin out is all, he says and looks straight ahead. You could be of help to people. We’re just findin out why it is you’re different.

  I don’t want to know, she says in a voice that’s almost a whisper. I don’t want to know. I don’t. I really don’t.

  The snow has started to come down now, drab grey and inhospitable. It whips around in flurries and gusts. It fills in all niche and nuance of the world. It blocks out the sky.

  Eight

  Seventeen Spires » Whitfield » Tests and Judgements » A Farewell » The Whole Horrible Gravity of Darkness » A Collision » A Surprise » ‘The Man Laughed’ » Keeper and Caliper » Interlude » Alone » Ambush

  The citadel is a thing to behold.

  They get out of the car and block their faces from the windblown snow. They can see figures, living men and women, walking to and fro unhurriedly across a courtyard. These are people who have grown accustomed to safety. They have lived behind these barriers for who knows how long – and they no longer have the wilderness inside them. The courtyard is a wide square expanse around which the low buildings of the compound are situated. It might be grass under the ice, or concrete, or something else entirely – but right now it is simply a plain of colourless drifting snow. So too the distant foothills – so too the sky. The features of the world grow indistinct inside this spitting cloud. It is a place that loses its absolutes – a lightless murk neither of earth nor air, a suffocating desolation where people roam like ghosts grown used to the purgatory they inhabit.

  One man wrapped up in a parka walks by them. Moses stops him.

  The citadel, he says to the man. Where is it?

  The chapel? says the man. He points across the courtyard and continues on his way.

  Then, in the distance, they see the spires of the structure. There are seventeen of them lined up in a row, grey spears standing ten storeys tall against the grey sky. It is unlike anything Moses has ever seen before. Dangerous is what it looks like, a structure of sharp steel edges and spikes – looking so like a weapon that Moses imagines it swung by one vicious giant against the jugular of another. Or a row of monstrous teeth, calcified to pale white – the petrified jaw bone of some ancient dragon.

  Jesus, Moses says. That don’t look like any cathedral I’ve ever been in.

  Moses, please, says the Vestal Amata and takes his arm at the shoulder. The snow is collected on her choppy red hair – as though the winter itself would make her disappear.

  Come on, he says. I been around a long time, and if there’s one thing I learned it’s that the things that look most dangerous usually ain’t. It’s the ridiculous-lookin things you got to watch out for.

  So they cross the courtyard, holding their arms before their faces to b
lock the wind and snow. They are not dressed for this weather, and Moses can feel his beard icing up.

  They go around the side of the chapel. A ramp leads up to the glowing doors like the protruded tongue of a sleeping beast, and they climb it. They enter through the wide double doors and find themselves in a huge hall lined with pews – the buttresses of the seventeen spires creating a row of triangular ribs inside that gives you the impression of having fallen into the belly of a beast. But there is an odd violet glow in the place, a perverse warmth that does not seem to jibe with the bitter grey outside.

  Then an old man approaches them. He wears a suit and tie and moves with surprising alacrity from some alcove in the side of the place across a line of pews and up the aisle towards them. It is the Pastor Whitfield, and he introduces himself with a smile.

  You are seeking sanctuary, maybe? the old man asks. We welcome all.

  That’s nice, Pastor, says Moses. But I’m just carryin her for a friend. A monk who goes by Ignatius.

  The old man smiles widely and claps his hands together.

  Ignatius! he says. A dear old friend of mine. I’m so pleased to hear he is still with us. Are you part of his congregation?

  Us? Moses says. No. Well, I ain’t at least. He told me to bring you her. She’s a Vestal.

  The old man looks at the girl with the cropped hair and smiles benignantly.

  A Vestal, he says. I’m not sure I understand. She’s . . .

  She’s special, Moses says.

  We’re all of us special in one way or another. I’m sure this young woman—

  Special as in the slugs don’t want her, Moses blurts out. The man’s kindness makes him nervous – along with the purple glow of the place, the sense of peace, the downright civilized tone of it all. He is unused to the niceties that come along with comfort and safety.

  They don’t— the old man begins, but stutters. They don’t—

  That’s right, Moses confirms. They don’t want her. It could be she’s an angel or somethin. At least that’s what the friar speculated.