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 —”
She stops his lips with her hand.
“Father knows best
,” she says, and looks confused when he starts to laugh.
• • • •
Maybe, Isaac thinks in the morning, it was a dream, the way his dreams of stabbing his sons, letting their blood run red over his hands, have always been dreams, the way his dreams of his mother and his father returning have always been dreams — the way he sometimes thinks the entire world before was a dream, video games and frozen yogurt machines and skateboards and homework all a collective fantasy that they’ve dreamed up together.
But if it is a dream, it’s one given to him for a reason.
Kyle wants to take a walk with him. But Isaac is an old man, tired and frail — he says. Come sit with me, he says, in the sleeping room of the old compound, where your grandfather and I once slept side by side.
The cots are still there, preserved for posterity, and Kyle perches on one while Isaac takes the other. Isaac remembers museums from before, trooping with his schoolmates through absurdly still rooms, adults frantically shushing them. He remembers a water fight in a bathroom with a cross-eyed boy; he remembers the glory of a dessert cart in the cafeteria, all you can eat; he doesn’t remember, has never been able to remember, what was encased behind all those panes of glass, and what was the point. He supposes that this museum will be its own kind of bible someday, telling its story after the storytellers are gone.
“I’m leaving,” Kyle says.
Isaac is too old to pretend at surprise. Does anyone ever do anything else?
He is an old man, but a cagey one, and he says to Kyle no, don’t.
“You’re my nephew,” Isaac says. “You have family here.”
Kyle shakes his head. “I don’t know what I was looking for, Isaac, but . . . this isn’t it.”
“What, then?”
“I miss him, I guess,” Kyle says. “My grandpa. Your dad. It’s funny, if you think about it. He raised us both. I guess I always thought of us as kind of like brothers, you and me. And maybe I thought — it’s stupid.”
“What?” Isaac prods, though he is hardly listening, his mind fixed on the word, brothers, the shape of things coming clear.
“You came first, you know? I’ve always been kind of jealous of that. You knew this whole different part of him. Maybe the real him? And he loved you first. Maybe he loved you best, even if he was a total shit to you, leaving you like that.”
“As he had to.”
“Uh huh. Yeah. The firstborn. That’s something. He was a good dad to my dad, I think, but I get the sense he never liked the guy very much. I guess I always wondered . . . I don’t fucking know what I wondered, okay? I thought you’d be more like him, or you’d be more like me, or we could be, like I said, brothers. Family’s more than blood, that’s what your dad always said. Maybe he was trying to tell me about ‘the Children,’ or whatever without actually telling me, I don’t know. Maybe he was trying to warn me not to come find you. I’m glad I did, though, Isaac. Maybe I needed to know you. Who knows, maybe your God brought me here, wanted you to know me, right?” He holds out his hand. “Brothers?”
All this time, Isaac has been trying to figure out what story he’s in, how events are meant to unfold. All this time, he’s had it wrong, distracted by the tangle of fathers and sons, nephews and wives.
Brothers.
Two brothers, one favored by his God, the other wandering in cold wilderness, envious and lost. One brother who was a shepherd of his flock and one who was rejected, and dreamed of usurping all his brother possessed: life and land and legacy. One who spoke the truth and one who used deception to gain the advantage, who said walk with me in the field and disguised love as its opposite. Both born to the father of all men, neither his brother’s keeper.
He feels foolish that he hasn’t seen it before now, and thanks God for this chance to put the ancient story right. This time, in this new world, the righteous brother is not so easily led to the slaughter. This time, the right brother will live.
• • • •
Isaac’s bible, like its predecessors, is part history and part law. Such are the edicts of Isaac’s God:
Children shall ask questions, but only three at a time, and only these three shall be answered.
Man shall join with woman as determined by the will of the Father, and these pairings shall not be put asunder.
Honor thy Father.
Know thy edible mushrooms and berries, for they will sustain you in the wilderness.
Isaac’s God is a practical God.
Keep a store of six months’ worth of food, dried and canned and preserved from damp.
Keep herds separated, in case of plague.
Keep your weapon in working order and in reach.
Isaac’s house has many rooms, and in each room, Isaac has a gun. He keeps one in this compound, too, one the Children know nothing about, cached beneath his old cot, that sacred artifact none of the Children would dare touch.
He hears Kyle saying things like no and wait and what are you doing and again, more than once, no, but the voice is a stranger’s and the words easily swatted away.
Over them, he hears instead, finally, the word of the Lord.
He can sense the fog descending again, and recognizes it now as his reward for long service and one final, righteous act, and he raises the weapon and prepares for God to welcome him home.
• • • •
Thomas and Joseph are the first to find the body. They’ve been keeping an eye on their father; they’ve been keeping an eye on the stranger; they know where and when to look.
They were hoping things would turn in this direction, though they were hoping the turn would be tidier.
“Now what?” Joseph asks Thomas. Joseph is older, but Thomas is smarter, and they’ve both come to terms with this.
“Now we deal with dear old Dad,” Thomas says. The old man has always liked him better, and they’ve come to terms with that, too. Once they did, it made everything easier. As long as they played the roles Isaac set for them, the old man believed he knew his sons.
The stranger who’s been fucking Thomas’s wife is gutshot and, from the look of things, took a good while to die. Thomas wishes that Isaac had shot him in the groin, and considers doing it now, for good measure.
Joseph, the firstborn, who actually loves his father, wishes the old man hadn’t pissed his pants. It’s an undignified way for him to go.
“Where am I?” the old man says, kneeling in the puddle of blood.
He got old fast, their father. Or maybe they were just so used to seeing him as he began, too young, that they didn’t notice the change until it was too late.
He got old fast, but not fast enough. Thomas feels like he’s been waiting for this moment forever.
The old man holds out the gun, flat on open palms. “Who are you?” he says.
Finally, and too late, Thomas thinks: The right question. He’s never known them, or wanted to, so certain was he that because they were his sons and his blood, they were whatever he imagined them to be. That as his creation, they were his to shape to his whim. Thomas remembers being small, stumbling up the hill after his father, Joseph following behind, kicking his brother’s shins when he thought no one was looking, because Joseph was dumb enough to think people ever stopped looking. Their mothers down in the valley, having abandoned them to a rare moment alone with their father, who wanted to show them their legacy. “This is where we lived, before God gave us the promised land,” Isaac told them, then pushed them inside one of the compound’s small rooms and locked them into the dark. “Can you imagine it?” he shouted through the door. “Closed behind these walls for a decade, wondering if the Lord had left us enough world to return to.” Their father left them in the dark for a day and a night: A lesson in captivity and faith. Joseph screamed and kicked the walls and wet his pants. Thomas abided, quiet and calm, retreating to an even darker room in his mind. He’s always been good at waiting. By the time their father finally let them out — “Breathe deep, boys! Now you understand how grateful y
ou should be for fresh air, for sky!” — Joseph was a wild creature, and stayed that way. Thomas knew enough to smile and thank his father for the field trip, and has been the favorite ever since.
That the old man thought a few hours in a dark room could do the job, allow the children of the new generation to see through the eyes of the one that came before — that he thought this necessary? His father, Thomas thought then, and thinks now, is a fool. He can’t see his own stain. The Earth has been purified, and its people along with it, but Isaac still bears the taint of the world before, and the years between. There was a reason Moses and his people spent forty years wandering the desert — it gave the old ones, the ones warped by an unholy life of servitude and false idols, the chance to die. Thomas has always thought it was gracious of Moses, at least, to do so on schedule.
“We should get this done before he snaps out of it,” Thomas says.
“Maybe this time he won’t?”
“All the more reason.”
The brothers don’t agree on everything. Joseph wants to see the world beyond the valley, wants his children’s and his grandchildren’s futures uncircumscribed by the duties of blood and power. Thomas wants to rule.
They agree, however, on this.
“Do we make it look like he did it to himself?” Joseph asks.
The idea is tempting, but Thomas needs his father’s legacy to loom. He shakes his head. “He did it,” he says, stepping on the stranger’s chest, bearing down like the man can still feel pain, and if only it were possible. “Assassination. Self-defense. A good story.”
They’ll need to adjust the pageant next year, write a new closing act. Joseph will write it. He’s always liked a good story.
The old man is peeing again. Joseph looks away. Thomas laughs.
“I don’t know about this,” Joseph says, nervous now that the time has come, nervous despite how long they’ve been waiting. At least the old man won’t die alone. He knows his father would have hated that. “What about God?”
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