Exit Kingdom

by Alden Bell

  We could trace our path back, Abraham says. To look for her, the Vestal, you know.

  We could do that.

  Abraham does not seem to be aware that this is exactly what they are already doing.

  What happened, Mose? Between the two of you, I mean.

  I just lost her is all.

  So it’s guilty feelins that’ve got you all puckered up about it?

  I ain’t puckered. I just lost her. She was lookin to be lost anyway – you and me, we were just fightin it from the very beginning. Nature takes its course is what happens.

  They drive. Abraham sleeps in the passenger seat. Moses keeps his eyes wide, his fingers clenched on the wheel.

  On another occasion, Abraham raises the topic again but only indirectly. He asks Moses if he thinks much any more about his wife who went missing. He liked Moses’ wife, he says. She was an okay woman. Women for the most part, he says, are a dodgy bunch – but he guesses he can’t blame them what with all the men taking aim at them.

  Moses says nothing. He agrees that women are dodgy, but his mind is so full of lost ones now that he wishes his memories could take refuge elsewhere than in his sleepless head. He looks deep into the tree trunks, hoping to see there another vision of the naked girl darting back and forth behind them.

  But there is nothing, and they drive on. At night, when they stop to rest, Moses hears his brother’s snoring and hopes he is dreaming among his dolphins.

  *

  They return to the town of Dolores where the whorehouse is, but the inhabitants have not seen hide nor hair of the Vestal.

  They drive south, out of the snow, over the mountains and down into the valley, where the arid desert lays claim to the land.

  It is just after dawn when they arrive at the Mission San Xavier del Bac and ring the bell at the gate. The mute woman who opens the door recognizes the brothers from the last time they were here, and she ushers them inside. The monk Ignatius greets them in the chapel and feeds them eggs gathered from their own coops in the rear of the community.

  The brothers know they must not speak, not here among the parishioners, and so they eat silently. Moses and Ignatius gaze at each other, and Moses tries to tell the man the entire story with his eyes – for maybe that mode of communication is less treacherous. But soon Moses realizes there are untruths even in looks, so he stops trying and sits meditatively at the table.

  Later, while Abraham plays some version of soccer with the children of the place, the children trying to teach him without words, making wide explanatory gestures with their hands – Moses and the monk leave through the front gate and climb the hill behind the mission and sit on an outcropping of stones, squinting their eyes against the desert sun.

  Did you make it to the citadel? Ignatius asks.

  We did. We got her there.

  Did they examine her?

  They did. You ain’t gonna like it, friar.

  My liking it is beside the point.

  She’s got a disease. A hereditary one. It’s in her blood. That’s why the slugs don’t bother with her. She’s already half dead.

  Ignatius nods and smiles benignly at the horizon.

  So what’s bestowed on her, Moses continues, it ain’t a blessing.

  Ignatius shrugs.

  Disease or blessing, who can say? he asks. If a disease helps you survive in the world, then it’s no longer a disease but an adaptation. Evolution would tell you as much.

  But it’s more than that, friar. The girl, she ain’t a holy woman. She put on pretences.

  I know that, too. I never saw her other pretences – but the one she put on here was a righteous one, so I pretended along with her. Sometimes a thing becomes true through enacting it. Sometimes you perform faith in order to gain faith. Do you believe that?

  I don’t know. I don’t believe in nothin right now.

  See, now there’s a pretence you just uttered. Do you say it because you wish it were true? Because you would try to incant it?

  I won’t spar with you, says Moses as he raises his hands in surrender and smiles gently, on the field of philosophy.

  I would be a fool, my friend, to spar with you on any other.

  They are quiet for a time. Then sun is low on the horizon now, the sky lit up all shock red and streaky white.

  Then Moses speaks, this time very quiet, as though his words were really meant for the wind to carry them away.

  She sacrificed herself, friar. Not her life, but in another way. She said it was for me.

  Do you believe her?

  I didn’t, not when she told me.

  And now?

  Now I think I do. We got separated. I thought – I thought she might be here. Now I don’t know what . . .

  You suspect she was in love with you?

  Moses does not respond. His eyes are gone far out over the horizon.

  You suspect, maybe, you are in love with her?

  I’m lost, friar, Moses says, his eyes gone suddenly wet. I can’t – I can’t see the colours of anything any more. It used to be I was a man, but what am I now? I lost my way somewhere.

  Moses Todd looks into the face of the monk Ignatius, and the holy man smiles back. It is a smile full of blustery optimism.

  Look, he says to Moses and points to the sunset. Look out there. What do you see?

  The desert, Moses says.

  No, you have to look wider. Open your eyes more. Do you see that? It’s America. No one’s ever lost in America. It’s all destination. Every corner of it. Even right here, on this rock, with me. You’ve arrived. Do you see it?

  And then, suddenly, Moses can see it. America. The fertile fields of the republic stretched taut from ocean to ocean, populated with ambling souls, dead or alive, it makes no difference as long as they are moving, as long as their hands still work to grasp and pull and reach and tear. A destiny manifest in every rock and ruin, a loamy soil of faith where God’s work is done one way or the other – because every creation winds its way towards destruction and every destruction wipes clean a canvas for creation.

  A place, indeed, poxed by calamitous treasures like Abraham’s blue-roofed pancake houses – gigging itself forward in a frenzy of speed (yes, this is what Moses hasn’t seen before – the country, not stopped dead, but spinning in such mazy motion the blur might be taken for stasis), galloping ahead of life and ahead of death too, and back into life, the two masquerading as each other, unable to keep up, as though time were a circuit rather than a line.

  And if time is a circuit – if our paths only bring us back to where we begun, well then proclaim it holy, holy, because the friar is right – ain’t nothing is ever lost but it’s just on a different road, and it’s all of it, the whole country, just one big road attached to itself in different ways – and so are all travellers kin, and so are all people travellers through life.

  And, yes, he can see her dancing again, naked, that white body on the sunset plain, a vision if ever there was one, holy woman and whore, never lost but she dances America to its sleep every night – and you can hear her laughter, that voice both tricksy and true, clamouring America in all its broken bells. And you are glad.

  *

  Was her name really Mattie? Moses says now to the caravaners, those who remain awake.

  Now, in the distance, the sky is empurpled by dawn. The stars have dimmed against the lightening void, and the horizon becomes invisible as a sharp-cut silhouette – something you might trace with pencil and compass.

  I like to believe Mattie was her name – that she told me it true, even if just that one time. It’s passed my lips enough times, maybe more like a prayer than a rightful name. Mattie. Mattie, you out there somewhere? Mattie – where’d you get to, girl? It’s just a word is all it is, a word spoke to the darkness. But so are all words. Goodness, purity, truth, God. You build somethin with your eyes closed. You speak it to life. Then you open your eyes – and what kind of tower? Where’s it reach to? Maybe nowhere. Maybe all the way to heaven.

/>   He pauses. There is rustling movement among the listeners. Perhaps some of them are waking to his voice, the same voice they fell asleep to, and are now wondering what a thing is a story with just a beginning and an end. Perhaps some of them are just antic against the dawn.

  We searched her out for a long time, Moses continues, Abraham and me. Sometimes we’d hear stories that sounded like they could of been her – but we never saw her again. Ten years now. Could be I’m cursed to tail women my whole life. My wife and daughter – they got away from me. Mattie the Vestal – who ran when I sent her runnin.

  He stops again and seems to consider how long he has been chasing people who refuse to be found.

  It was only one girl I had any talent for huntin, he says. She – well, she cost me my eye, and the price of my brother, finally, in exchange for Maury there.

  He gestures with a nod of his chin to the large mute sleeping at the perimeter of the group.

  Just a young girl, that one. I bear her no grudge. One thing you could say about her, she balanced the log books like a true accountant of life. She – yeah, she got away from me too.

  He pauses one last time – and this time the silence feels like a bottomless chasm everyone, all the listeners and the teller too, stands on the precipice of.

  But that’s a different story altogether, Moses Todd says finally. I guess this story here’s found its finish.

  He and his companion travel with the caravan one more day. When the night falls again, he is silent – as though his story of the previous night has exhausted him in a profound way. One of the children, a toddler, approaches him sleepily. The one-eyed man reaches out his hand as if to tousle the child’s blond hair, but at the last moment he pulls his arm back – as though afraid his touch could never be light enough to keep the youngster from shattering harm.

  In the morning, both men are gone.

  The caravan continues its slow progress over the plain in the direction of many Americas – more than can be counted. Three days later, it is attacked by marauders. The caravaners manage finally to repel the attack, but not without significant losses. Half the travellers are killed, but half survive.

  The Reapers Are The Angels

  Set in the same bleak world as Exit Kingdom, but at a different time, there was The Reapers Are The Angels . . .

  Older than her years and completely alone, Temple is just trying to live one day at a time in a post-apocalyptic world, where the undead roam endlessly, and the remnants of mankind who have survived seem, at times, to retain little humanity themselves.

  Temple has known nothing else. This is the world she was born into. Her journey takes her to far-flung places, to people struggling to maintain some semblance of civilization – and to those who have created a new world order for themselves.

  When she comes across the helpless Maury, she attempts to set one thing right. If she can just get him back to his family then maybe it will bring forgiveness for some of the terrible things she’s done in her past. Because Temple has had to fight to survive; along the road she’s made enemies – and one vengeful man is determined that, in a world gone mad, killing her is the only thing that makes sense . . .

  Read on for an extract

  One

  GOD IS a slick god. Temple knows. She knows because of all the crackerjack miracles still to be seen on this ruined globe.

  Like those fish all disco-lit in the shallows. That was something, a marvel with no compare that she’s been witness to. It was deep night when she saw it, but the moon was so bright it cast hard shadows everywhere on the island. So bright it was almost brighter than daytime because she could see things clearer, as if the sun were criminal to the truth, as if her eyes were eyes of night. She left the lighthouse and went down to the beach to look at the moon pure and straight, and she stood in the shallows and let her feet sink into the sand as the patterwaves tickled her ankles. And that’s when she saw it, a school of tiny fish, all darting around like marbles in a chalk circle, and they were lit up electric, mostly silver but some gold and pink too. They came and danced around her ankles, and she could feel their little electric fish bodies, and it was like she was standing under the moon and in the moon at the same time. And that was something she hadn’t seen before. A decade and a half, thereabouts, roaming the planet earth, and she’s never seen that before.

  And you could say the world has gone to black damnation, and you could say the children of Cain are holding sway over the good and the righteous – but here’s what Temple knows: she knows that whatever hell the world went to, and whatever evil she’s perpetrated her own self, and whatever series of cursed misfortunes brought her down here to this island to be harboured away from the order of mankind, well, all those things are what put her there that night to stand amid the Daylight Moon and the Miracle of the Fish, which she wouldn’t of got to see otherwise.

  See, God is a slick god. He makes it so you don’t miss out on nothing you’re supposed to witness firsthand.

  *

  She sleeps in an abandoned lighthouse at the top of a bluff. At the base there’s a circular room with a fireplace where she cooks fish in a blackened iron pot. The first night she discovered the hatch in the floor that opens into a dank storage room. There she found candles, fishhooks, a first-aid kit and a flare gun with a box of oxidized rounds. She tried one, but it was dead.

  In the mornings she digs for pignuts in the underbrush and checks her nets for fish. She leaves her sneakers in the lighthouse; she likes the feel of the hot sand on the soles of her feet, the Florida beach grass between her toes. The palm trees are like bushes in the air, their brittle, dead fronds like a skirt of bones around the tall trunks, rattling in the breeze.

  At noon every day, she climbs the spiral stairs to the top of the signal tower, pausing at the middle landing to catch her breath and feel the sun on her face from the grimy window. At the top, she walks the catwalk once around, gazing out over the illimitable sea, and then, towards the mainland coast, the rocky cusp of the blight continent. Sometimes she stops to look at the inverted hemisphere of the light itself, that blind glass optic, like a cauldron turned on its side and covered with a thousand square mirrors.

  She can see her reflection there, clear and multifarious. An army of her.

  Afternoons, she looks through the unrotted magazines she found lining some boxes of kerosene. The words mean nothing to her, but the pictures she likes. They evoke places she has never been – crowds of the sharply dressed hailing the arrival of someone in a long black car, people in white suits reclining on couches in homes where there’s no blood crusted on the walls, women in undergarments on backdrops of seamless white. Abstract heaven, that white – where could such a white exist? If she had all the white paint left in the world, what would go untouched by her brush? She closes her eyes and thinks about it.

  It can be cold at night. She keeps the fire going and pulls her army jacket tighter around her torso and listens to the ocean wind whistling loud through the hollow flute of her tall home.

  *

  Miracle, or augury maybe – because the morning after the glowing fish, she finds the body on the beach. She sees it during her morning walk around the island to check the nets; she finds it on the north point of the teardrop land mass, near the shoal.

  At first it is a black shape against the white sand, and she studies it from a distance, measures it with her fingers up to her eye.

  Too small to be a person, unless it’s folded double or half buried. Which it could be.

  She looks around. The wind blowing through the grass above the shore makes a peaceful sound.

  She sits and studies the thing and waits for movement.

  The shoal is bigger today. It keeps getting bigger. When she first came the island seemed like a long way off from the mainland. She swam to it, using an empty red and white cooler to help keep her afloat in the currents. That was months ago. Since then the island has got bigger, the season pulling the water out further and furth
er every night, drawing the island closer to the mainland. There is a spit of reefy rock extending out from the shore of the mainland and pointing towards the island, and there are large fragments of jutting coral reaching in the other direction from the island. Like the fingers of God and Adam, and each day they come closer to touching as the water retreats and gets shallower along the shoal.

  But it still seems safe. The breakers on the reef are violent and thunderous. You wouldn’t be able to get across the shoal without busting yourself to pieces on the rock. Not yet at least.

  The shape doesn’t move, so she stands and approaches it carefully.

  It’s a man, buried face down in the sand, the tail of his flannel shirt whipping back and forth in the wind. There’s something about the way his legs are arranged, one knee up by the small of his back, that tells her his back is broken. There’s sand in his hair, and his fingernails are torn and blue.

  She looks around again. Then she raises her foot and pokes the man’s back with her toe. Nothing happens so she pokes him again, harder.

  That’s when he starts squirming.

  There are muffled sounds coming from his throat, strained grunts and growls – frustration and pathos rather than suffering or pain. His arms begin to sweep the sand as if to make an angel. And there’s a writhing, rippling movement that goes through the muscles of his body, as of a broken toy twitching with mechanical repetition, unable to right itself.

  Meatskin, she says aloud.

  One of the hands catches at her ankle, but she kicks it off.

  She sits down beside him, leans back on her hands and braces her feet up against the torso and pushes so that the body flips over face up, leaving a crooked, wet indentation in the sand.

  One arm is still flailing, but the other is caught under his back so she stays on that side of him and kneels over his exposed face.

  The jaw is missing altogether, along with one of the eyes. The face is blistered black and torn. A flap of skin on the cheekbone is pulled back and pasted with wet sand, revealing the yellow-white of bone and cartilage underneath. The place where the eye was is now a mushy soup of thick, clear fluid mixed with blood, like ketchup eggs. There’s a string of kelp sticking out of the nose that makes him look almost comical – as though someone has played a practical joke on him.