Authors: Alden Bell
See, God is a slick god. He makes it so you don’t miss out on nothing you’re supposed to witness firsthand.
*
She sleeps in an abandoned lighthouse at the top of a bluff.
At the base there’s a circular room with a fireplace where she cooks fish in a blackened iron pot. The first
night she discovered the hatch in the floor that opens into a dank storage room. There she found candles, fishhooks, a first-aid kit and a flare gun with a box of oxidized rounds. She tried one,
but it was dead.
In the mornings she digs for pignuts in the underbrush and checks her
nets for fish. She leaves her sneakers in the lighthouse; she likes the feel of the hot sand on the soles of her feet, the
Florida beach grass between her toes. The palm trees are like bushes in the air, their brittle, dead fronds like a skirt of bones around the tall trunks, rattling in the breeze.
At noon every day, she climbs the spiral stairs to the top of the signal tower, pausing at
the middle landing to catch her breath and feel the sun on her face from the grimy window. At the top,
she walks the catwalk once around, gazing out over the illimitable sea, and then, towards the mainland coast, the rocky cusp of the blight continent. Sometimes she stops to look at the inverted
hemisphere of the light itself, that blind glass optic, like a cauldron turned on its side and covered
with a thousand square mirrors.
She can see her reflection there, clear and multifarious. An army of her.
Afternoons, she looks through the unrotted magazines she found lining some boxes of kerosene. The words mean nothing to her, but the pictures she likes. They evoke places she has never been
– crowds of the sharply dressed hailing the arrival of someone in a long black car, people
in white suits reclining on couches in homes where there’s no blood crusted on the walls,
women in undergarments on backdrops of seamless white. Abstract heaven, that white – where could such a white exist? If she had all the white paint left in the world, what would go untouched
by her brush? She closes her eyes and thinks about it.
It can be cold at night. She keeps the fire going and
pulls her army jacket tighter around her torso and listens to the ocean wind whistling loud through the hollow flute of her tall home.
*
Miracle, or augury maybe – because the morning after the glowing fish, she finds the body on the beach. She sees it during her morning walk around the island to check the
nets; she finds it on the north point of the teardrop land mass, near
the shoal.
At first it is a black shape against the white sand, and she studies it from a distance, measures it with her fingers up to her eye.
Too small to be a person, unless it’s folded double or half buried. Which it could be.
She looks around. The wind blowing through the grass above the shore makes a peaceful sound.
She sits and studies the thing and waits for movement.
The shoal is bigger today. It keeps getting bigger. When she first came the island seemed like a long way off from the mainland. She swam to it, using an empty red and white cooler to help keep
her afloat in the currents. That was months ago. Since then the island has got bigger, the season pulling the water out further and further every night, drawing the island closer to the mainland.
There is a spit of reefy rock extending out from the shore of the mainland and pointing towards the island, and there are large fragments of jutting coral reaching in the other direction from the
island. Like the fingers of God and Adam, and each day they come closer to touching as the water retreats and gets shallower along the shoal.
But it still seems safe. The breakers on the reef are
violent and thunderous. You wouldn’t be able to get across the shoal without busting yourself to pieces on the rock. Not yet at
least.
The shape doesn’t move, so she stands and approaches it carefully.
It’s a man, buried face down in the sand, the tail of his flannel shirt whipping back and forth in the wind. There’s something about the way his legs are arranged, one knee up by the
small of his back, that tells her his back is broken. There’s sand in his hair, and his fingernails are torn and blue.
She looks around again. Then she raises her foot and pokes the man’s back with her toe. Nothing happens so she pokes him again, harder.
That’s when he starts squirming.
There are muffled sounds coming from his throat, strained grunts and growls – frustration and pathos
rather than suffering or pain. His arms begin to sweep the sand as if to make an angel.
And there’s a writhing, rippling movement that goes through the muscles of his body, as of a broken toy twitching with mechanical repetition, unable to right itself.
Meatskin, she says aloud.
One of the hands catches at her ankle, but she kicks it off.
She sits down beside him, leans back on her
hands and braces her feet up against the torso and pushes so that the body flips over face up, leaving a crooked, wet indentation in the sand.
One arm is still flailing, but the other is caught under his back so she stays on that side of him and kneels over his exposed face.
The jaw is missing altogether, along with one of the eyes. The face is blistered black and torn. A flap of skin
on the cheekbone is pulled back and pasted with wet sand, revealing the
yellow-white of bone and cartilage underneath. The place where the eye was is now a mushy soup of thick, clear fluid mixed with blood, like ketchup eggs. There’s a string of kelp sticking out
of the nose that makes him look almost comical – as though someone has played a practical joke on him.
But the rightness of
his face is distorted by the missing mandible. Even revolting things can be made to look whole if there is a symmetry to them but with the jaw gone, the face looks squat and
the neck looks absurdly equine.
She moves her fingers back and forth before his one good eye, and the eye rolls around in its socket trying to follow the movement but stuttering in its focus. Then she puts her fingers
down
where the mouth would be. He has a set of upper teeth, cracked and brittle, but nothing beneath to bite down against. When she puts her fingers there, she can see the tendons tucked in behind his
teeth clicking away in a radial pattern. There are milky white bones jutting out where the mandible would be attached and yellow ligaments like rubber bands stretching and relaxing, stretching
and
relaxing, with the ghost motion of chewing.
What you gonna do? she says. Bite me? I think your biting days are gone away, mister.
She takes her hand away from his face and sits back, looking at him.
He gets his head shifted in her direction and keeps squirming.
Stop fightin against yourself, she says. Your back’s broke. You ain’t going nowhere. This is just about the end
of your days.
She sighs and casts a gaze over the rocky shoal in the distance, the wide flat mainland beyond.
What’d you come here for anyway, meatskin? she says. Did you smell some girlblood carried on the wind? Did you just have to have some? I know you didn’t swim here. Too slow and
stupid for that.
There is a gurgle in his throat and a blue crab bursts out from the sandy exposed
end of the windpipe and scurries away.
You know what I think? she says. I think you tried to climb across those rocks. And I think you got picked up by those waves and got bust apart pretty good. That’s what I think. What do
you say about that?
He has worked the arm free from underneath him and reaches towards her. But the fingers fall short by inches and dig furrows in the sand.
Well, she says, you shoulda been here last night. There was a moon so big you could just about reach up and pluck it out of the sky. And these fish, all electric like, buzzing in circles round
my ankles. It was something else, mister. I’m telling you, a miracle if ever there was one.
She looks at the rolling eye and the shuddering torso.
Maybe you ain’t so interested in miracles. But
still and all, you can cherish a miracle without
deserving
one. We’re all of us beholden to the beauty of the world, even the
bad ones of us. Maybe the bad ones most of all.
She sighs, deep and long.
Anyway, she says, I guess you heard enough of my palaver. Listen to me, I’m doin enough jawing for the both of us. Enough
jawing
for the both of us – get it?
She laughs at her joke,
and her laughter trails off as she stands and brushes the sand off her palms and looks out over the water to the mainland. Then she walks up to a stand of palm trees
above the beach and looks in the grassy undergrowth, stomping around with her feet until she finds what she’s looking for. It’s a big rock, bigger than a football. It takes her half an
hour to dig around it with a stick and extract
it from the earth. Nature doesn’t like to be tinkered with.
Then she carries the rock back down to the beach where the man is lying mostly still.
When he sees her, he comes to life again and begins squirming and shuddering and guggling his throat.
Anyway, she says to him, you’re the first one that got here. That counts, I guess. It makes you like Christopher Columbus or something.
But this tide and all – you wanna bet
there’s more of you coming? You wanna bet there’s all your slug friends on their way? That’s a pretty safe bet, I’d say.
She nods and looks out over the shoal again.
Okay then, she says, lifting the rock up over her head and bringing it down on his face with a thick wet crunch.
The arms are still moving, but she knows that happens for a while
afterwards sometimes. She lifts the rock again and brings it down on the head twice more just to make sure.
Then she leaves the rock where it is, like a headstone, and goes down to her fishing net and finds a mediumsized fish in it and takes the fish back up to the lighthouse where she cooks it over a
fire and eats it with salt and pepper.
Then she climbs the steps to the top of the
tower and goes out on the catwalk and looks far off towards the mainland.
She kneels down and puts her chin against the cold metal railing and says:
I reckon it’s time to move along again.
Q and A with Alden Bell
Exit Kingdom
is a prequel to your last book,
The Reapers Are The Angels
. How did you come up with the idea for
The Reapers Are The Angels
? What was your
inspiration?
Reapers
came about because of my lifelong love of zombie movies. But many post-apocalyptic stories are too nostalgic for my taste. They are origin stories that concern
themselves with how
the world came to this sorry state – focusing on characters who are driven by grief and nostalgia over the lives they have lost. Instead, I’ve always been fascinated
by what post-apocalyptia would look like once it has been around long enough to become
normalized
(like, perhaps,
Road Warrior
or
The Book of Eli
or the video game series
Fallout
). So I wanted my main character to have grown up
in this new world – to have no memories whatsoever of the pre-apocalypse. I wanted her to be
comfortable
in all the
situations we would find so devastating and horrific. She sees beauty where we wouldn’t even think to look. I like that tension between beauty and horror – so, in
Reapers
, it was
my idea to exploit it as much as possible.
Had you always planned to write a prequel to
The Reapers Are The Angels
?
No.
Reapers
was meant to be a stand-alone book. But, after I had spent some time away from it, I discovered I had a little more to say about that world. Also, I was
intrigued by the idea of approaching the same landscape from a different perspective – taking a secondary character from
Reapers
and turning him into the primary character of
Exit
Kingdom
. If
I were to write a third book, I think I would do the same – maybe telling a story from the Vestal’s perspective.
Do you miss Temple, the protagonist from
The Reapers Are The Angels
?
Definitely. But I don’t believe in returning to a character or place or story just because I liked it a lot the first time around. I would imagine it’s difficult for
writers to do a book series without
it becoming a dog and pony show, without falling back on old tricks. I would be afraid of attenuating Temple. Sometimes the best way to show respect for a
character is to leave her alone.
Your characters have a very distinct style of speaking. Why was language important in
Reapers
and
Exit Kingdom
?
Both books reflect a great deal on the inspiration of southern gothic writers
like William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, Tom Franklin and Daniel Woodrell – all of whom
celebrate the epic potential of language in their writing. My characters speak in a rather hyperbolic way; they use language that’s almost too big for their frames, biblical in tone,
oratorical in performance – even, let’s admit it, unrealistic (though realism has never really been my aim). Stories are powerful
not just because of the characters they contain or the
plots they outline but also because of the language used to convey them. In Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
, the protagonist Marlow tells a story that engrosses his listeners precisely
because of the impossibly over-inflated language he uses. He captures his audience with oratory, and he uses language to give immense authority to his perspective.
Marlow was in the back of my head
the whole time I was writing Moses’ campfire tale. And language is particularly important to people who are disenfranchised by the world at large. Words become not just a way to communicate
but rather actions in themselves. A certain combination of words can be like an incantation: it can declare (and by declaring, create) an identity, it can be an attack
more brutal than any physical
assault, it can function as a gambit in a game of romance or loyalty. The characters in these books are desperately serious about language because, for them, words are all that are left to create
meaning, purpose and order.