Exit Kingdom

the unceasing streamof language. Moses takes her little body in his hands, such a small powerful thing.
    And the Vestal, her red hair falling around his shoulders – she stops the words, stops his mouth, both their bodies caught in a sudden seizure, gripped to blissful stillness, swaddled and
safe in the cool, hard limits of human contact. He sees again the pendant she wears between her pale breasts, the smallwooden cross – and it is a sign for him of something true, some honest
faith in this wild thing of a woman. They are together, and what they create in their union is not a new something but rather a whole and complete nothing, a void that sits quiet and calm on his
heart, that makes his breathing shallow and at peace, that gives erasure to many scripts of tragedy that have palimpsested themselvesover the vellum of his greying mind.
    To stop. To cease, just for a moment. To turn your back on the world, to close your eyes – to see the nothing that is
not
rather than the nothing that
is
everywhere around
you. To just be quiet in your mind for a little minute.
    There are paradises even yet on the abandoned plains of the earth – and they are not filled with fecund flowering Edens butrather just with sweet unerring silences.
    The Vestal’s flesh is white as a lily, but she is un breakable – even for hands as worn and brute as his. He is safe in his inability to hurt her. She is empty, and beautiful as one
of those ancient urns that tell stories – and she is unblemishable.
    *
    That’s right, Moses says to the caravaners. I had a wife once. You heard it trueenough. You’ll ask how come I ain’t mentioned it yet – so cardinal it
is to the understanding of who I was, who I am still.
    It is full dark now, the fire down to mere embers. It is no longer possible to tell who is listening and who has been taken by sleep. No other person has said anything for a
great while. They are caught in the sickly dark hours between late night and dawn. The greatone-eyed man continues to speak without recourse to the number who either hear or don’t hear him
– as though his story were a fated thing, a toy machine that, once wound, must keep spinning wild on its metal wheels until it finds its own still end.
    You’ll say, maybe, that I’ve misled, Moses goes on. If so, I apologize. To you. To her. It ain’t nothing, an apology. Just a notion, like anyother. You can utter it like an
incantation, but if it brings somethin to bear you’ve got more out of it than I ever have. I’m sorry. I declare it with every step I take on this earth. I’m sorry. I’m
sorry. I had a wife once. And a kid, too, a daughter. It was a long time ago – half a life ago. My wife, well she was a beauty too, don’t doubt it – but in a different way. She
wasn’t fancy – notspectacular with herself or nothin like that. She was just pretty in a plain way. And nice. She was pretty and nice. You miss things like that now – you, me,
the whole world. She – my wife – she wore her hair tied up in a ribbon. It was a pink ribbon, if you want to know. Simple, pink. It was nice.
    The silence draws itself out, a breath held in anticipation of falling.
    The truth is,he goes on, I don’t like to think about it. You try to let dead things lie – try to look things in the face for the present fact of what they are. You try.
    He pauses again.
    And for the redhead, too, he continues. The Vestal. I had no business messing with her. But you ain’t always able to see. Sometimes you bumble around in the dark. Sometimes you reach
out and there’s someone there,and you grab them. It may be instinct, but it ain’t pure – it don’t bear on goodness. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
    He shakes his head, gazes into the dying embers.
    She smelled salty, he says. Like oceans.
    *
    But she is practised in the ways of witchery – a transmogrifant who in the light of morning wears a face different from the one you see by the moon and stars. She is somany things. She is an impossibility with an unperturbed face.
    She is not beside Moses when he wakes in the morning. He goes hunting for her and finds her in the kitchen, sitting at the linoleum table and cackling like a hag. She has found a pair of kitchen
shears and she is in the process of cutting off her long locks of red hair. They fall to the ground around her as though she were anautumn tree shedding its riotous leaves. And her laugh –
it is not hysterical but cruel, diabolical rather than