Exit Kingdom

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 mattressand 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 suspendedon 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’sbeen 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 somany years. Moses himself is simply the incident –
an accidental audience for the man’s soliloquy. But there is something to admire 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 werecontained.
    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 justa 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 harlequinsays. 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 saysand 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