Exit Kingdom

believe in nothin right now.
    See, now there’s a pretence you just uttered. Do you say it because you wish it were true? Because you would try to incant it?
    I won’t spar with you, says Moses as he raises his hands in surrender and smiles gently, on the fieldof philosophy.
    I would be a fool, my friend, to spar with you on any other.
    They are quiet for a time. Then sun is low on the horizon now, the sky lit up all shock red and streaky white.
    Then Moses speaks, this time very quiet, as though his words were really meant for the wind to carry them away.
    She sacrificed herself, friar. Not her life, but in another way. She said it wasfor me.
    Do you believe her?
    I didn’t, not when she told me.
    And now?
    Now I think I do. We got separated. I thought – I thought she might be here. Now I don’t know what . . .
    You suspect she was in love with you?
    Moses does not respond. His eyes are gone far out over the horizon.
    You suspect, maybe, you are in love with her?
    I’m lost, friar, Moses says, his eyesgone suddenly wet. I can’t – I can’t see the colours of anything any more. It used to be I was a man, but what am I now? I lost my
way somewhere.
    Moses Todd looks into the face of the monk Ignatius, and the holy man smiles back. It is a smile full of blustery optimism.
    Look, he says to Moses and points to the sunset. Look out there. What do you see?
    The desert, Moses says.
    No,you have to look wider. Open your eyes more. Do you see that? It’s America. No one’s ever lost in America. It’s all destination. Every corner of it. Even right here, on
this rock, with me. You’ve arrived. Do you see it?
    And then, suddenly, Moses
can
see it. America. The fertile fields of the republic stretched taut from ocean to ocean, populated with ambling souls, dead or alive, it makesno difference
as long as they are moving, as long as their hands still work to grasp and pull and reach and tear. A destiny manifest in every rock and ruin, a loamy soil of faith where God’s work is done
one way or the other – because every creation winds its way towards destruction and every destruction wipes clean a canvas for creation.
    A place, indeed, poxed by calamitous treasureslike Abraham’s blue-roofed pancake houses – gigging itself forward in a frenzy of speed (yes, this is what Moses hasn’t seen
before – the country, not stopped dead, but spinning in such mazy motion the blur might be taken for stasis), galloping ahead of life and ahead of death too, and back into life, the two
masquerading as each other, unable to keep up, as though time were a circuit rather thana line.
    And if time is a circuit – if our paths only bring us back to where we begun, well then proclaim it holy, holy, because the friar is right – ain’t nothing is ever lost but
it’s just on a different road, and it’s all of it, the whole country, just one big road attached to itself in different ways – and so are all travellers kin, and so are all people
travellers through life.
    And, yes, he can see her dancing again, naked, that white body on the sunset plain, a vision if ever there was one, holy woman and whore, never lost but she dances America to its sleep every
night – and you can hear her laughter, that voice both tricksy and true, clamouring America in all its broken bells. And you are glad.
    *
    Was her name really Mattie? Moses says now to thecaravaners, those who remain awake.
    Now, in the distance, the sky is empurpled by dawn. The stars have dimmed against the lightening void, and the horizon becomes invisible as a sharp-cut silhouette – something you might
trace with pencil and compass.
    I like to believe Mattie was her name – that she told me it true, even if just that one time. It’s passed my lips enough times, maybemore like a prayer than a rightful name.
Mattie. Mattie, you out there somewhere? Mattie – where’d you get to, girl? It’s just a word is all it is, a word spoke to the darkness. But so are all words. Goodness, purity,
truth, God. You build somethin with your eyes closed. You speak it to life. Then you open your eyes – and what kind of tower? Where’s it reach to? Maybe nowhere. Maybe all the wayto
heaven.
    He pauses. There is rustling movement among the listeners. Perhaps some of them are waking to his voice, the same voice they fell asleep to, and are now wondering what a thing is a story with
just a beginning and an end. Perhaps some of them are just antic against the dawn.
    We