Exit Kingdom Read Online Free PDF Page A

bycastaway isolation.
    Eventually, the harlequin turns to the right and passes through a smaller corridor to a door marked VIP Lounge.
    Very important person, ain’t I?
    Then he opens the door and they enter the little man’s sanctum. It is no longer recognizable as a lounge, having more in common, instead, with an elf’s workshop. Along all the walls
are tables covered with bits of detritusfrom all over the airport. Pieces of planes, unrecognizable splinters of metal bent 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