Exit Kingdom

the man. The two clobber at each other, and Moses watches. He watches while the tall man beats his brother to the ground and then kicks him twice in the stomach.
That’s when he stepsin, pushing the man back.
    That’s enough, Moses says.
    The man puts up his hands and begins to back away.
    Like I said, that’s payment I’ve given you.
    Like I said, Moses counters and tosses the bottle back to the man, we already been paid.
    When the man has driven away, Moses carries his brother to a spot away from the fire where the cool desert breezes can succour his wounds.One eye is bruised shut, and his upper lip is busted
open. Bruises cover his torso, but Moses can feel that no ribs are broken. Abraham will mend.
    He coughs once, painfully, and takes deep breaths, his one good eye cast up at the sprent of stars overhead.
    Hey, brother, Abraham says. Is that the divine justice you were lookin for?
    That was it, Moses nods.
    Was it enough?
    Mosesuses his fingers to brush away the dirt from his brother’s cheek. It is a light touch, delicate and studied. Then he says:
    Get some sleep.

Three
    The Airport in Tucson » A Meditation » Terminal » A Guessing of Names » A Massacre » Harlequin, Tinkerer » A Discussion of Philosophy
» Gifts » A Mission
    The next day they come across a massive derelict airport.
    Where are we? Abraham asks.
    Tucson, says Moses. The international airport.
    Let’s hop us a jetliner to gay Paree.
    Moses wanders the runways and the hangars,admiring the monolithic machines. The fences are mostly intact so there are almost no slugs to interrupt his constitutional, and he wonders at what a
vast museum the world has become.
    The paint on most of the planes has been bleached to dull fade by the desert sun. Many are docked at their gates, long hollow gantries connecting them to the body of the terminal itself. Others
are abandonedat random places on the tarmac, their doors gaped wide, some with their deflated yellow emergency slides spilled flaccidly on the ground. Moses raises his palms and feels the long,
smooth underbellies of the aircraft.
    When he was young, and the world was not as it is today, there was a great deal he took for granted. He was a young man when things went sour, only two decades old – and forall the seeing
he did, he might as well have been blind. He does not allow himself to think frequently of those times – and not out of fear or cheap lament, but rather because that gone world exists for him
in faint outline like a childhood storybook that remains in memory as patches of colour, or deceptive fragments of images that are shuffled so by time you can’t seem to reassemble them intoany coherent picture.
    There were people everywhere you looked. So many of them – you wouldn’t believe how many. And all full to stinking of life and sin. Boundaries were murky, borders were crossed
willy-nilly, the abundance of riches and luck so overflowing that parsing it out was a fool’s game.
    Even the dead seemed not quite so dead. People died, and they were hidden away from theeyes of man – enclosed in boxes or burned to subtle ash, kept present in the form of photographs on
mantelpieces, home videos that denied death, counteracted it. Technology a contraindication of death. To swim in radiant pools of life, death made abstract and commercial. A notion of the mind,
Moses recalls. A pretty little idea spawned in goddamn kid dreams.
    But now the dead are everywhereas the living were before – and now can be observed all the fleshly moods of death, the tearing skin, the bluish hue of rot, the muddy eyes, the crustiness
of dried sputum, the salty white of chancre and peel, the acrid, biting smell of organic decay. Now, even though the dead walk as the living do, the lines are clearer between death and life. You
may know little, you may know next to goddamnnothing, but at least now you can see what you are and what you are most definitely not. Moses is intimate with death – he lives in its company
every day, and what he knows is that death ain’t a floating up to cloudy heaven, no angel wings and toiletpaper-soft robes and dulcet harp-playing. No, instead it’s a slow crawl of
atrophied muscle and the vestigial instincts of our most piss-poorappetites. That’s the face of death.
    But still and all – now there is meaning in the goodness of things. Now does order signify, because now it matters. Now you can see with clear vision the difference between good and bad,