Exit Kingdom

requiring effort to form
itself out of that drear material. Then he does speak.
    More’n a half-century old, he says. For the hire and salary of a few hearers, I could remember you some things on the topic of God.
    No one saysa word, and their silence is a contract, an acquiescence.
    And then are they all mute, and all slow. And then are they all his companions in journey.
    And this is the story he tells.

Two
    Brothers » Las Cruces » A Contract and Its Fulfilment » Two Beatings
    It is a time of vision, a time before the loss of his other eye. Any cyclopean will tell you: there is a clarity even in broken things – the way things fall is governed
by laws so immutable they could be inscribed on the earth by the ink of rivers and streams. So too the way people fall.
    It is a time tenyears before this telling of it, twenty years since society itself fell down, forty years after the birth of the bear-like man himself. These measures of time, they eddy and
flow, capricious. In truth, there are only two states: before and after – and even those only relative to arbitrary points. Pick one point and call it zero – you might as well count the
motes of dust in an abandoned room.

    Moses Todd, for that is his name, has a travelling companion. Not the mute – who he doesn’t yet know and won’t even meet until five years later – but his younger brother,
Abraham, his only remaining family, runted and greasy and dangerous of appetite. They travel the wide open spaces, and though they are brothers, they seek very different things.
    They move during the day and hole up afterthe sun sets. In whatever bastions of civilization they come across they remain strangers, sometimes welcomed, sometimes suspicioned, sometimes
reviled.
    Moses Todd has been many things in his life – father, warrior, thief, wastrel. Abraham Todd has been one thing only: degenerate. Moses watches his brother as a man who keeps a rabid dog
penned in his own backyard.
    *
    Oncein the course of their vagabondage they stop at a small gated community in Las Cruces. The struggling residents are in need of supplies, and they speak to the brothers of
employment. If the brothers bring food, medical items, guns, ammunition, then they will be compensated with a feast and comfortable beds for as long as they would like to remain.
    Sure is difficult, Abraham Todd says andshakes his head, to settle on coin of value these days. But there’s other specie than food and lodging.
    And his eyes cross a low-lit room to a girl in a blue nightdress.
    Moses Todd walks out. His brother emerges soon after, having agreed on terms.
    We’re in business, Abraham says.
    It don’t have to be that way, Moses says. You don’t always have to take the most they’re willin togive.
    They agreed to it, didn’t they?
    So they collect the supplies for the community and return. The people are pleased, and the brothers are fed. Moses watches as the girl in the blue nightdress is instructed by three older men to
go and sit by Abraham. She does so, and Abraham puts an arm around her shoulders as though to reassure her. He takes a slice of tomato from the table andtries to feed it to her, but when she
doesn’t open her mouth he slides it across her lips as though he were applying a stick of lip rouge.
    You and me, Abraham says to her, we got time to kill.
    A highball of whiskey is brought for Moses, and when he gulps it down they fill it back up again. He drinks and smokes his cigar down to an ugly stump and feels all his muscles go slack. Theyare gathered in one of those big cardboard mansions built in clusters on culde- sac roads, and there is a blazing fire on the hearth that casts lovely shadows on the thin eggshell walls.
    He sits on the couch and drinks more and talks to the elder men about all the places of the country they have been, and he can hear his brother’s hyena laugh behind him but he can’t
bear to cast his eyesbackwards. Instead, he lets his eyes fall closed and is soon asleep.
    It is still before dawn when he is awoken, though the fire has burned down to embers. All is quiet, and he is quiet in himself, when a sudden shrill cry sounds through the mansion. He is up,
quick, a blade readied in his hand, despite the woozy, thunderous tides going back and forth in his head.
    A figure bounds downthe stairs, a frail white shape. The girl from the night before who was wearing the blue nightdress, except now she’s naked. She notices Moses at once, screams