The End Has Come (30 page)

His name was Abraham, the boy says, and pauses for Isaac to say something, but Isaac only waits.

He survived what you call the skyfall, the boy says. He was driving south, toward the ocean, and he almost drowned when the tidal waves came, but he didn’t, and when so many people died but he lived, he decided to be a better man. He fell in love. He married my grandmother, and they had my father, and then my father had me, except he died before I was born. My mother right after. Plague year. I don’t know if you had that here.

He didn’t tell me any of this ’til later, the boy says. I didn’t ask. We didn’t talk much about what came before. Like you people, I guess.

I was still a kid when he died, the boy says. When he was getting toward the end, that’s when he told me where he came from. Who he was before. That he was a liar, that he’d made up one last lie and it came true, and maybe that was okay, because he’d saved a bunch of people — his Children, he called them, which confused the hell out of me at first. He said he didn’t feel so guilty about lying to them, because it made them happy, and he guessed it pretty much kept them alive — they thought the end was coming and they prepared for it, and then it actually
did
come and they must have lived, but he felt guilty about the other thing, about his son. Lying to him. Leaving him behind. Letting him believe God told him to do it.

I asked him why he never went back to this kid, since he knew where to find him, if he didn’t want to see whether the kid had survived, maybe apologize for being such a shit, not that I said that to his face, but we both knew that’s what he was. And he told me he guessed being a good man was harder than it looked, and he’d used all his goodness up on me and my dad and my grandma. She’s dead, too. Long time ago. That’s not important.

Before he died, he gave me the picture, and I figured it would be a picture of the son, but he said he didn’t have one of those. Barely knew the kid. This was a picture of the kid’s mother, and maybe it would come in handy someday, if I wanted it to. He didn’t tell me how. He wasn’t big on telling people what to do. That made more sense to me after he told me about the Children. A lot of things made more sense.

What are you looking for, Isaac asks him, like he doesn’t know, and the kid says,
You.

• • • •

The boy’s name is Kyle, as his dead father was named Kyle, and that in itself gives the lie to his tall tale, because what kind of name is
Kyle
for a child of Abraham?

Kyle would have Isaac believe that his father was a fraud. That the miracle of prophecy that saved the Children from extinction, was a coincidence. That God had never spoken to him, never spoken to Isaac, that Abraham had spoon-fed his son the same bullshit he’d dumped on his Children, that he locked them into and himself out of the doomsday compound not because God refused him access to the promised land, but because he was a fraud who’d abandoned his son to responsibility, packed a suitcase of cash, and got the hell out of dodge. That he had survived, had married, had bred, had regretted, but had never returned. Could have returned, but never did.

And the father duped the son, and made him believe.

And the son wasted his life on a fantasy, and taught his Children to worship his father, who was a piece of shit, and the LORD laughed and laughed.

It makes for a ridiculous story.

A
story that doesn’t explain the miracle.

Maybe, Isaac thinks, Abraham mistook God’s warning for coincidence, or maybe he lied to this new child about lying to the old one.

Kyle doesn’t know anything about Isaac’s mother, or where she went. This is fine. Isaac has already solved the puzzle of his mother: By leaving him, she saved him, which meant God must have intended — commanded — her to do it, just as He did Abraham.

Isaac doesn’t believe the boy, cannot and
will
not
believe him, tells the boy not to speak of it again and certainly not to anyone else, and the boy agrees, so that in the morning, when Isaac is awoken by the screech of birds and his own insistent bladder, he’s left to wonder whether the story was a dream.

The story cannot be true and the boy cannot be what he claims, but Isaac lets him stay, even gives him a bed in Thomas’s home.

“What do you want from me?” Isaac asked him, in the middle of the night, or maybe imagined it.

“I don’t want anything,” Kyle said, sounding as if he’d never considered desire.

“Then why are you here?”

Kyle shrugged. “I had to go somewhere. Figured this would be interesting. An adventure, you know?”

Isaac doesn’t know, because Isaac’s life hasn’t allowed for the luxury of adventure. It’s things like this, children seeking danger for danger’s sake, that prove to him the end of the world has come and gone. Sometimes he misses it.

He thinks he told Thomas to invite Kyle to stay with him.

But maybe Thomas decided for himself, told Isaac after the fact. He can’t remember.

Joseph doesn’t like it either way, Isaac knows that. Neither do Thomas’s wives, not the young pretty one nor the old cranky one, but the children, despite being booted from their bed and forced now to sleep on the floor by the kitchen, delight in Kyle, requesting that he take over Three Questions duty and tuck them into bed.

“I got to ask three questions every night when I was a kid, too,” Kyle tells them. “Weird coincidence, yeah?”

“Everybody gets to ask three questions,” the youngest one, Jeremiah, says solemnly. “It’s the law.”

“What are you, dumb? Everyone knows that,” says Eli. He takes after his uncle Joseph.

Isaac watches from the doorway, but leaves before the children put forth their questions. This nightly ritual is his decree, but he’s never liked to watch. “Stop it with the fucking questions,” his mother had said to him, over and over. “What’s wrong with you?” she’d asked him, when he couldn’t stop, because how did you stop wanting to know? Three questions was the compromise they made, a daily dessert, three questions only once he was safely tucked into his sheets, three questions saved up for the dark before bed, never to be wasted; this was how Isaac learned of the world, how he thinks all children should learn of the world, in the dark, in threes. But he prefers not to see it, because he prefers not to remember. With Joseph and Thomas and the girls, he left the duty to their mothers.

Their mothers are dead now, not that it matters. As Kyle would say, that’s not the story.

Days pass. Thomas embraces the stranger. Joseph ignores him. Isaac thinks too much about the past. In daylight hours, he maneuvers himself out of being alone with the boy, but at night, too often, the boy comes to him. The boy, his nephew. Isaac answers his questions about the Children’s earlier, harder days, locked up in the compound, waiting for the sky to clear and the land to welcome them home, but asks none of his own. One night Kyle slips into the house and sits beside his bed, says, “Three questions, I really like that. What would yours be?”

In Isaac’s dreams, now, he is a child again. A child for real, not the wise man in the boy’s body that he had to play after the skyfall, not the boy wonder who received his father’s prophecy as if it were a bolt of lightning and, electrified, became someone new. He dreams of the fuzzy time before, when he lived with his mother in a small room over a store, a room that smelled of raw fish and skittered with roaches — the real ones that escaped from couch cushions and through the hole in the toe of a favorite sneaker, and the imaginary ones that crawled over him as he curled up on the futon and tried to sleep. He dreams of his mother’s hand pulling out of his, of her whispered promise that she would be back.

“I save my questions for God,” Isaac tells Kyle. “I expect I’ll get my chance to ask, sooner or later.”

“Wait. Isaac —”

Kyle doesn’t call him Father, and this is a relief. Once, he tried to call Isaac by the name he had before, the name his mother gave him and the only one his father ever knew. That boy, Isaac told Kyle, is dead. There is precedent: God gave Jacob a new name, too. Every father of a nation deserves a name of his own.

Still, Kyle knew the name.

Kyle knew the name, had the photograph; Isaac is forced to believe the boy is who he says he is, and he grows impatient waiting for God to reveal what the hell Isaac is supposed to do about it.

“Okay, I’ve got to ask you,” Kyle says. “You don’t really
believe
all this junk?”

“What junk?”

“You know, this. The miracle. God. That your father prophesied a fucking meteor strike.”

“Didn’t he?”

“Well, I guess, but it’s like they always say about the monkeys and the typewriters, you know. Hamlet.”

“What? What about monkeys?”

“You know, because they — never mind. I just want to be clear: You think God saved you? Like, you, specifically.”

“I
know
He did,” Isaac says, choosing the verb with purpose. This isn’t like the time before, where men were resigned to faith. This is the age of miracles. He knows God loves him because God saved him, and he knows God saved him because there is no other explanation. His father taught him this, before Kyle was born, and the years since have proven it. “This surprises you?”

Kyle is frozen. Isaac remembers this expression from Saturday morning cartoons, the coyote who chased his prey straight off a cliff, only falling once he looked down to see no ground beneath his feet. “I figured you just picked up where grandpa left off.”

“I did,” Isaac says, and will say no more.

• • • •

Isaac blows out candles; Isaac eats cake; Isaac sits in the front row and watches his life play out on a makeshift stage. This is the birthday pageant, performed every year for the last ten, inside the compound that has become a museum. One of Isaac’s grandsons play Isaac. Joseph plays Abraham. Some of the women play other women.

Kyle sits beside him, and together they watch the past enacted for the present.

“Not for me, the promised land,” Joseph-as-Abraham tells the child playing his son. “You shall lead our Children to salvation.”

“I shall,” the boy says, and the man marches off the stage, his role finished.

The Children are all played by children.

“God has decreed that we marry,” the boy playing Isaac tells the pretty girl playing Heather, and Heather drops to her knees and says, “I will never leave you.”

“Lies!” the children shout, as is the tradition.

“I promise,” the girl playing Heather says, then the lights fall and the boy playing Isaac closes his eyes into sleep, and Heather steals herself away.

“Treason!” the children shout and boo. This is their favorite part.

The pageant speeds through the ten years of confinement, and ends as the Children step through the door of their compound into the new world that awaits them, their skin pale, their faces gaunt, their newborns cradled in their arms, their gratitude to God on their lips and in their hearts.

“Father Abraham had many sons,” the children sing. “Many sons had Father Abraham. I am one of them, and so are you.”

The first time Isaac saw the pageant, he cried. These days he fights to stay awake, to keep his mind from wandering into the past. He doesn’t like coming back to this place, remembering the time when he thought they might never leave it. He doesn’t like to watch himself left behind, once and again. He doesn’t like to imagine this pageant playing out year after year, even when he’s gone.

Sometimes, inside these walls made of old shipping containers and scavenged steel, he imagines this as the tomb it almost was. To seal himself in with his Children by his side, bound to him for all eternity — this was the way death should be. This was the wisdom Moses should have carried from Egypt, along with his people. Isaac has sacrificed his entire life for his Children. How is it just that they should live on while he dies alone?

The Children sing happy birthday, and Isaac senses a curtain about to fall.

“Are you all right?” Kyle says, turning toward him, very close and at the same time shrinking further and further away.

Isaac wants to tell him that he’s more than all right, that if Kyle could feel what he feels, the imminence, the
immanence,
of the fog and that certainty, when he’s inside its white hot haze, that he’s not there alone, then there would be no more need for faith and doubt. Isaac wants to say that the decades he’s spent waiting for the Lord to reveal himself, to turn Isaac’s decades of bullshit into retroactive truth, have finally given way to revelation, and that Kyle should shut up, everyone should shut up, so that Isaac can fall into the sunblind silence and hear.

• • • •

He wakes in Thomas’s house.

Isaac has always hated waking alone.

The bedroom is the children’s bedroom, the one that Kyle has now claimed for his own, except Isaac can tell from the sound of the dark that the room is empty.

He finds Kyle in the family room.

He finds Kyle on top of Thomas’s pretty young wife.

They lie together in the dark, lie together in the biblical sense, and then, when that’s finished, lie together still, Kyle’s fingers tangled in the pretty young wife’s pretty hair.

Isaac watches.

Isaac thinks that he has never smiled like that, after. For him, every time is somehow still the first time, and beneath the pleasure there is pain and something else, less bearable. The emptiness left behind at the moment of release, the sense that he has given something essential away; the anticipation, lying together, sticky and hot and wet, of the inevitable, that she will leave and take it with her.

“It doesn’t bother you, brainwashing these kids?” Kyle is murmuring to the pretty young wife. “I mean, they think there’s nothing outside this valley. They think the world ended and they’re all that’s left. They don’t want to hear different.”

“They’re children,” she says. “We know what’s best for children.”

“But
you
know this is all bullshit, right?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it fucking matters,” Kyle says, but he says it gently, with a finger tracing the curve of her cheek, like he’s telling her that she’s beautiful. “It’s all lies. And the old man —”