Exit Kingdom

Mattie.

Do you believe me? she asks.

Is it true? he replies.

Goodbye, Moses, she says.

She goes through the door, leaving it open wide. The light reflected from the snow outside makes a portal through which it looks as though angels might spill. She said she would see him in heaven, and it was a joke. But this is something he knows deeper than all things: there are doors to heaven everywhere.

*

Outside there is no sign of the Vestal. He scans, momentarily, the tree line at the hill, but there is no trace of her. It is as if she has stepped out into the light and been spirited up – a recalled angel in gaudy ribbons.

But something is happening on the grounds of the gasworks. The uniformed men, the soldiers, seem to be retreating. They take stances behind dense stands of machinery, fire off a few shots and then fall back to other locations. They are receding from the valley with slow deliberation. It is not that they are overwhelmed – their movements are strategic.

Explosives, the Vestal said. They would bring hell down, she said.

Moses looks at the line of low buildings. There is no time. He will not be able to search them all for his brother. Something grips him, and he wonders, stilled as a philosopher in contemplation of a lakeside, if he is willing to die here for the sake of Abraham. It is a quiet, unpanicked thought, and he wishes he had more time to discover the answer, because the answer is of some vague but definite interest to him. The answer, he feels, might tell him a great deal about himself and his place in the world. His little codes, as the Vestal called them.

But there is no time for such thoughts and speculations.

He rushes forward, unsure how he will proceed. And that’s when he sees Fletcher. The man in the sombrero emerges from one of the wide buildings, poking his head around the corner as if looking for an opportune moment to run. A rodent, twitchy and slick.

Moses grips the bladed cudgel tight in his hand and walks slowly to the place where Fletcher peeks around the corner. The man in the sombrero isn’t aware of Moses’ presence until the very last moment. Then he leaps back against the corrugated wall of the building and knocks his sombrero askew.

You, he says.

Where’s my brother, says Moses.

Your brother?

Fletcher looks confused for a moment. Then he narrows his eyes at Moses.

What is it now – some kinda negotiation? You gonna spare my life if I fess up and tell you where he’s hid?

No, I ain’t. You brought too much abomination into the world. More than your share. You threw things off balance. I’m gonna kill you no matter what.

Then why should I tell you?

Cause it’d be one good thing you done just prior to the final reckoning of your account.

Fletcher’s hand reaches up to his scabrous face and begins to pick instinctively at the little nodules of hardened skin.

You’re a f**kin relic, he says in his snivelling way to Moses.

Fletcher is not looking at him when he says this. Instead, he looks down at the icy mud on the ground – as though he would like to dig himself into the very earth with his little rat nose.

Did she purchase him? Moses asks now.

Fletcher looks at him, his eyes narrowing again in the scabbed flesh of his face

Did she? Moses says again. The Vestal, did she purchase his release on her body?

Is that what she said? She told you that, eh? And now you don’t know whether to believe her or not.

Did she or did she not?

Fletcher doesn’t answer. Instead a smile creeps across his greasy face like slow poison. Then the smile turns into a chuckle, and the chuckle into a full-blown laugh. He laughs and laughs, Fletcher does, doubling over and slapping his thighs – as though it weren’t the end of the world at this very moment. Or as though it were.

It’s a goddamn shame, Fletcher says, coughing between fits of laughter, when the business of men and God is brought low by womanly wiles. Ain’t it? Ain’t it a goddamn shame?

Fletcher laughs and laughs.

Far as I been able to tell, he goes on, a cunt is a cunt is a cunt. But you’re a romantic, ain’t you?

The little man begins to do a short, hopping dance, laughing and clapping his hands, teetering as if he is on all the terrible dizzying precipices of the world.

Romantic, romantic, romantic! he cries, laughing and dancing. Romantic, romantic, ro—

Moses raises the pistol and, in the very same gesture, as though a liquid movement with no real beginning and no end, fires.

The bullet goes wide, whistles by Fletcher’s ear. Fletcher, frozen in expectation, waits to see if he’s dead yet. Then, a moment later, he reaches up and feels the wholeness of his intact face.

You missed, he says simply to Moses. Looks like you ain’t such a good—

Moses fires again, and this time the bullet flies true and hits Fletcher in the forehead with a tiny wet crack.

Fletcher collapses in a heap on the ground, the sombrero falling and rolling a few feet before it drops like a tired top into the muck.

So quick, how some fall – so narrow the border between life and death. You could trip and stumble over it. The way Fletcher lies there in the mud, his head leaking onto the ground, as if he were simply a broken milk jug, you would never have thought such a fragile object could cause so much distress.

Moses is studying the body in the sudden quiet of the battlefield when a concussion of air knocks him backwards into the mud. It is only afterwards that he hears the raucous thunder of the explosion itself – as though sound were not a herald but an afterthought.

*

Black smoke engulfs the building at the end of the row.

Moses, his ears ringing, clambers to his feet just as the second building goes and he is knocked down once more.

And now the world is muffled near to deafness. What he can hear is his own heart beating, his teeth clacking against one another. The dead, who have no concept of self-protection, remain immobile, turning their heads slowly towards the fire to gaze with mild wonder upon the shifting colours. They will stand, mesmerized, until the flame has engulfed them – Moses has seen it. And so it happens now to one dead woman standing near the second building. She catches fire, her dress melting to her flesh as a single cinder, stumbling forward, surprised, mewling, not trying to put herself out. She collapses to a sitting position, mystified finally by the abomination of her own skin fluid with flame, raising her own arm to see the way the fire enrobes it – until at last the heat boils her brain and she falls, stinking, to the ground.

Abraham, Moses says. It could be a whisper or a shout – he does not know, because he cannot hear his own words.