Standing naked in the bathroom with the light and fan on, Joshua was brushing his teeth. He was trying to figure out what his visions meant. Before, they had just been, but now he wondered if there was some meaning to them, some purpose behind them. And what had his father told him—if he had told him anything? The old man was so oblique. All he knew for certain was that he had visions and his father had them.
Socorro said something from the bedroom. Joshua stuck his head around the corner. “What?”
“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Socorro said. She was reading another Harlequin Romance, leaning against a pillow propped against the headboard of the bed. Her summer nightgown had slipped high up her legs. Her right leg was bent. The shadows beneath and between the legs, as always, beckoned. Promised. Her breasts flattened comfortably in the shiny blue material.
Joshua removed the toothbrush and said, “I’ll make you talk with your mouth full.”
“Ain’t never that full, white boy!”
Joshua returned the toothbrush to the cabinet and rinsed his mouth.
Socorro had not moved. She didn’t have to move. The blue nightgown rested lightly on her brown legs. Joshua moved, slid onto the bed.
“My father says he sees into the future. God is giving him orders, and he’s changing the future. Sort of.”
“You didn’t put on your pajamas,” Socorro noticed.
“Wasted effort.”
“Kevin’s still up.”
Sometimes kids were more trouble than—no, that was not the case. But there were times they should be asleep. He walked to the hallway. “Lights out!” he yelled into the hall before closing the door. Back to bed.
“He’s getting pretty old,” Socorro said as Joshua bounced onto the bed. It took him a second to realize she was talking about his father.
“He’s talking about the same kind of visions I have. He says they’re from God. And mine are getting closer to the present.”
“You’ve got to get up early tomorrow, so if you want to, now’s the time.” Her fingers tripped down his stomach. Joshua snapped off the light and rolled to meet Socorro.
At 2:26 in the morning Joshua awoke to a startling revelation, a startling remembrance.
“Like David,” he remembered his father saying. “Like David, I have been denied the way to God.” Did that mean that the visions had deserted Benjamin? Joshua got out of bed without disturbing Socorro, who slept like the dead, put on his pajama bottoms from the closet, and walked around the quiet house.
The nightlight from the boys’ room was enough to illuminate the hallway. In the kitchen he flipped on the overhead light. His eyes stung from the brightness. No cockroaches—the exterminator must have gotten them all the last time. Joshua sat at the kitchen table after taking a drink of water from the sink to wash away the stale taste of Socorro. The clock over the sink told him the time was 2:31.
Things became warm. The dull brown and gray pattern on the table cloth changed to a flat white of building bricks. Joshua stood on the balcony of an enormous block wall dormitory building. The air was heavy and hot. August, he thought, or September. Pennants and flags blew in the distance. People in police and army uniforms spread out below him, but aside from the faint snapping of the flags, an extraordinary quiet damped everything.
Joshua noticed the semiautomatic weapon as a hooded figure darted out from and then behind a curtain. A dull, muffled pop was followed by a series of screams, weapons fire, and the crashes of breaking glass. An athlete’s tote-all flew incongruously onto the balcony and landed at Joshua’s feet. Joshua looked into the apartment to discover what he knew he would find: the littered remains of a bleeding and broken body.
1972, he realized. Munich, the Olympics.
With scarcely a break for him to recoup his strength, Joshua was pushed into a vision of three machine-gun-wielding Japanese firing on a helpless airport crowd.
A bus bomb in Israel, a synagogue bombing in Vienna.
Undisturbed by Socorro, Joshua suffered through to the end of these visions. The short, lucid interval between made them more and more terrible. Another began. They were coming more closely together, approaching the present day quickly. Maybe when they arrived, they would stop. His father’s had not, had gone into the future, but he could hope.
At 4:04 Joshua noticed the clock again. His pajama bottoms were soaked in sweat. He could barely move. He forced himself to go to the drawer under the telephone where he took out a pencil and paper and returned to the table. He wrote two pages of notes before putting his head on the table.
He awoke once around noon in his bed and was fed a bowl of chicken soup by Socorro. He couldn’t speak and fell asleep again. Around four in the afternoon Socorro tapped on his shoulder. “Your father’s here,” she said.
Joshua opened his eyes. Socorro kissed him on the forehead. “My father,” Joshua said. “How did I get here?”
“I put you to bed. Called you in sick at work, and then called your father again. I’m scared, Josh.”
“Just a couple of minutes,” Joshua said. He was feeling better, more awake at least. He threw back the blanket and sat up to get out of the bed. Dizziness drove him back. The tops and bottoms of his pajamas didn’t match. His father was here. Maybe he was, in fact, going crazy. Already gone.
Joshua heard Benjamin speaking to Socorro in the hallway outside the bedroom. They were speaking—that was something.
His father said, “Certainly it’s a mental thing. It is all in his head.”
Socorro said something that Joshua couldn’t hear.
“Just as mine were in my head,” his father continued. “There are no physical manifestations. That doesn’t mean he’s insane. Jeremiah wasn’t insane.”
Joshua expected Socorro to ask, “Jeremiah who?” Instead she said, “Not a breakdown, then?”
“No, not a breakdown. It might get worse, too. The past is one thing. There’s nothing we can do about the past, but when it turns to the future ...”
The door opened and Socorro, with her back turned, said, “I think I understand.” She faced Joshua and winked a smile. “He’s awake.”
The old man took his time in moving the chair from the vanity table and placing it next to the bed. Joshua felt more feeble than his father looked.
“Giving up your religion is no easy thing,” his father said as he inched his way into the chair.
“Do you want a pillow for that?” Joshua asked. His father waved the suggestion away. Joshua sat awkwardly up on his arms and answered his father’s comment. “I gave up my belief in God. The religion part seemed to follow logically.”
Joshua recognized the patronizing flicker of smile on his father’s lips. Yes, it said, I know it all. You might find out about it—and you are. These visions are the proof.
“Your wife called me again. We have things to discuss.” Benjamin held the notes which Joshua had made during the night. Running his finger down the pages he said, “Of these I saw only the Austrian bomb. And I would not travel to Austria. Jews who remain in Austria after the little Austrian ...” Joshua had agreed with his father on this point, until he heard one of the few remaining Viennese Jews explain that he remained because to leave would have been a final victory for Hitler.
“Are you still having them?”
“Like David—”
“In plain English.”
“No.” His father looked away, fidgeted with his beard. “No. Not for two years this month. I had ... I refused to ...”
“Two years? Mine started two years ago this month.” Joshua wondered if his father’s ability, gift or curse, had been passed to him. And if so, why? Was his father too old to carry on? Would it go to Kevin, or Harlow, or both?
The last of the first, or the first of the last visions came in a dream later that night. It did not seem very important after the onslaught of the previous monstrosities. Two families in Elkhart, Indiana, were threatened and beaten by a gang in white sheets. When he woke, Joshua remembere
d the names of the victims and the K.K.K. members. As they were the first names he had received, he wrote them down. There were no instructions, merely the names. After witnessing death camps and various massacres, two families’ suffering did not impress Joshua. Three days later, they electrified him.
The story appeared in the local paper, on the National Page as a sidebar. The authorities had no clues as to who had done the beatings. Joshua sent an anonymous fax to the Elkhart police, listing the names he had written down. Nine days later, a series of arrests swept through the revivifying Ku Klux Klan of Northern Indiana.
Joshua had, he realized, seen two days into the future.
Had he acted more quickly, he might have prevented the attacks altogether.
Like it or not, the future was here. From the progressive pattern of the visions, there could be no turning back.
Joshua was still in bed recovering when the next vision vaulted him firmly into the future. It was a near-future, too, not more than a year or two away. As Joshua watched, in his vision, people began to die, strange, horrible deaths. People all over the nation, all over the world. Thousands, hundreds of thousands of them. Not every person. Only certain people, people with the “Jew gene.” Genocide had been genetically engineered, using a retrovirus which only became viable if a certain gene had a certain chromosome with certain characteristics. Joshua didn’t know enough about genetics to understand how it worked. It didn’t matter.
At the end of the vision, a smiling man in a white lab coat. On the lab coat a nametag which said in German, “Hauss, Assistant Geneticist, State Research & Development, Cologne.” After that came the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles during a concert featuring Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, on September the fourth. In the audience on an aisle seat in the high balcony sat Hauss. Behind him sat Joshua. While Te Kanawa sang “Glitter and Be Gay,” Joshua—
Joshua called his father and told him of the vision.
“This,” his father said over the telephone, “is a true vision.”
“So?”
“Fulfill God’s will. Go to Los Angeles.”
There must be another way, Joshua knew. There must be. What kind of God would demand a blood sacrifice? An Old Testament God! The same God he had turned from when he was old enough to think for himself: why would a God evolve, change when people changed? The God of Vengeance, the God of Wrath.
There must be a way to change this Hauss, to talk to him, to change his mind, to change his life. “There must be,” he told his father.
“There is no other way. You do it God’s way, or the vision comes true. I know! Don’t you think I tried to kill the little Austrian after 1933? After Czechoslovakia? After Kristallnacht? I know.”
“I can wait,” Joshua protested, knowing that September was too close to allow him.
“You cannot wait. You have been given the place. This man might be minutes away from his discovery, from publishing something which somebody else could use. Maybe he figures it out while listening to this woman sing.” There was no arguing with his father’s remorseless logic.
“Thou shalt not kill,” Joshua muttered wanly. A feeble argument.
“Remember Saul and what happened when he disobeyed the Lord.” Another Biblical reference. Surely his father could quote more and more of them, burying Joshua’s sickly objections. The Old Testament God did not relish being crossed. The Old Testament God. Magnified and Sanctified be the Great Name. Amen! Magnified and Exalted. Even the Arabs said that Allah was Merciful. A strange sort of mercy.
Knowing the outcome, Joshua made his plans to go to Los Angeles.
Harlow stood at the front door stamping his feet in a three-year-old’s anger. He was whining, “Don’t go.” Socorro stood behind him with her hands on his tiny shoulders. It was, Joshua knew, Socorro using the boy to express her own feelings. She did not want Joshua to go. Joshua did not want to go. She did not understand and had told him as much. How could she understand what Joshua himself could not understand? I’m going to do the bidding of a God that doesn’t exist. I’m going to murder someone I’ve never met. No, he could not explain matters to her. It was better to say nothing. So he had told her nothing of his plans. He withdrew the money from the savings account—the money they had saved for a trip to Lake Tahoe.
Love went only so far. He had always thought that in a conflict between love and duty, he would choose love. Every time. But this was different.
As for Harlow, there was no point in trying to reason with him. He kissed the boy first, Socorro second, and left. Kevin waved from the front yard and went back to spraying the garden hose on the driveway once Joshua was in the car.
Joshua arrived in Los Angeles on the morning of the third. His travel agent had arranged for the flight, the hotel, but not for the concert ticket. He wanted no record of that. He took a cab to Music Center, bought a ticket at the box office, pointing out the seat he wanted on the chart, paying cash, and stopped on the way back at a hardware store and bought twenty feet of 20 mil wire. He was surprised when he figured out how expensive the concert ticket was. Dame Kiri received as much as many rock stars. The wire was cheap.
In the Times he read about the Symposium on Human Genetics at U.C.L.A. This, he figured, was why Hauss was in the country. In the schedule he noted that a Theodor Alban Hauss was to give a talk in the morning. Open to the public.
The lecture hall was small compared to some he had seen in Princeton: Biology 101 had a seating capacity of over 200. This one would hold half that number. And only about half the seats were filled when Theodor Alban Hauss made his way to the lectern. Outside the door, in the little display box was a notice of the lecture. It was called, “Gene 14, Chromosomes 9 and 11—Breaking the Code.” The audience was mostly students with a few professors in the back. Joshua sat in the back.
When Hauss spoke it was in a heavily accented English.
Joshua didn’t understand what he was talking about, numbers and flags and computer outputs, references to works he’d never heard about. It was Greek to him with a German accent. Joshua did not stay to the end. He left with a pair of professors. One of them said, “Sounds like the same eugenics cant from the 30s.”
He’d see Theodor Alban Hauss tomorrow night.
The fourth of September was pure hell. Joshua could not concentrate on anything. The weather was hot and smoggy. He couldn’t see forty yards out his hotel window. He refused to go outside into air that was so foul—just a first stage smog alert, he heard, and then found out that there were two stages beyond that, that were worse. How could people live like that? All he could do was wait in the air-conditioned hotel. He went down to one of the shops under the hotel and bought a pair of leather gloves. Waiting for fifteen hours was too much. He tested the strength of the wire over and over. The gloves saved him from cutting his hands. He hated waiting. Especially as he knew what was at the end of the wait. Hauss, another Nazi, might deserve to die for what he would do, but Joshua didn’t want to be the instrument of his death. Joshua didn’t believe in the death penalty, had marched in protest of the Vietnam War. But here he was, across the country waiting for a concert to begin so he could kill someone he didn’t even know.
Finally, the time dragged around. Joshua took another cab to the Music Center. He walked up the outdoor steps like a man going to his own execution. The bright glare of the lights in the water fountains didn’t brighten his mood. The laughter of people meeting on the stairs and hugging in the foyer—he felt none of it. He bought a program. As he climbed the stairs under the fabulous chandeliers, he looked at the infinity of reflections in the mirrors lining the stairs—what did all of those grim-faced Joshua Ben Josevses mean? In the coat pocket of each one was an instrument of death.
The Bernstein “Glitter And Be Gay” was scheduled third, after a song by Peter Warlock and another by Samuel Barber.
Joshua scanned the crowd, the furs, the jewelry until he spotted Hauss. Hauss was with a woman, a blonde. They came and sat on the aisle in the r
ow in front of Joshua. Just like in the vision. He tried to remember the woman from the vision, but she wasn’t there. They chatted—the woman spoke with an English accent. They had a good deal of trouble trying to understand each other. Language-wise, anyway. The woman was very impressed that Hauss had spoken at U.C.L.A. the day before. Hauss seemed impressed with the woman. Just before the orchestra tuned up, he patted her knee in a fatherly fashion, left his hand there when she didn’t object.
The Warlock song—Joshua heard it in snatches. What kind of a name was Peter Warlock, anyway? The Barber was tranquil. The audience applauded both loudly. And then the “Glitter And Be Gay” began. Joshua reached into his pocket for the wire. He wrapped one end around his left glove. He slipped out two and a half feet of wire and grabbed the remaining loop in his right hand. He tested the strength of the wire again.
Everybody watched the singer. Even Hauss did not seem to notice as the wire went in front of his face.
And then Joshua jerked the wire tight. Through the wire, through the gloves, he felt the neck give, the skin cut.
He heard a gurgle abruptly cut off.
He heard a scream.
He got away without anyone following him, before anyone except the blonde knew anything was wrong. And she probably thought that Hauss was having a heart attack. It had happened so fast that Joshua was gone before anyone could react. In a cab on the way back to his hotel, he felt relief—relief!—spreading through his soul like a warm syrup, followed, surprisingly, by jubilation. He had done it! And it hadn’t been so bad. It had been easy. Surprisingly easy.
Back in his hotel room he realized the scream he had heard had come from his own throat. It had made his own throat sore.
But not as sore as Hauss’ throat.
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