The End Has Come

He has his tricks. He knows how to observe, where to find the clues. This room is his room, the main living space of the small cabin in which he’s dwelled ever since the children ventured out of their compound and back to the land. As they spread down the mountain, the children of Abraham reclaimed the homes left behind by a generation of dead. They buried rotting bodies in vegetable gardens and claimed brick split levels and ranch houses for their own. It was a temporary solution. The old world was tainted, Isaac taught them that. Living among its luxuries risked too much, and so as decades passed, they felled trees and cut beams and erected homes of their own.

Isaac sits in a chair taken from the compound, modest wood frame and fraying cushion, the chair that’s suited him for sixty years. The stranger with the bald spot and the bulbous nose spills over the edges of his own narrow chair and grunts, “Yes or no, Dad?” and like that, his features resolve themselves into sorry familiarity. Isaac nods at his eldest son, guessing at yes. Judging from the subsequent scowl on Joseph’s face, he has answered well.

Joseph is Isaac’s eldest son and presumptive successor. He is also, unfortunately, a moron.

To be fair, dullness proliferates in the newer generations. These children of the skyfall are hardened to the laws of nature but softened to everything else, shaped by the slow, singular pace of their lives. However dimly, Isaac remembers the speed of the world before: fingers skimming across a keyboard, eyes lighting from one window to the next. He remembers tiny people skipping back and forth across a screen with rocket launchers and grenades, pocket universes born and extinguished behind the glass. He remembers that nothing ever seemed as important as the next thing, that there always was a next thing, on screen and off, that even the longest hours of boredom were crowded with claims on his attention. These new children — always children no matter how prematurely aged by sun and fieldwork — they can be absorbed entirely by the slow creep of clouds across the sky or the nut-cracking of an earnest squirrel. Isaac once watched a girl, already old enough to be married off, lose an hour to the study of a single blackbird as it flitted from branch to branch and, eventually, massacred a nest of worms. They’re undemanding, these children of the new world. Isaac leads, but will never understand.

Joseph, on the other hand, is ravenously demanding, born with the entitlement of the eldest son and groomed for such by his mother, both of them too thickheaded to notice how thickheaded they were.

“I still say we just toss ’em to the wolves,” he says now, “or have a little fun with them,” which is how Isaac is able to reconstruct out the question that has been lost to the fog, Joseph no doubt referring to the pen where they keep the pilgrims who stumble across their borders. Their fate is left to Isaac’s whim. Depending on mood, he will grant them an audience and perhaps a refuge or summarily return them to the wilderness from whence they came. Joseph hates outsiders on general principle. In his youth — before Isaac caught wind and shut it down — the boy played a gladiatorial game that pitted one pilgrim against another in mortal combat, this in the early days when survivors straggled in starving and half-dead, tear-stained at the sight of other human faces. He’s not simply a dullard, Isaac’s oldest son. He’s a brute.

Isaac tries to love him, as he tries to love Thomas, younger and craftier, but sometimes he worries he’s expended his lifetime quantity of love on the original generation of Children, loving them enough to save them or loving them because he saved them, loving most the ones who left him by death or by choice, because if the end of the world has taught him anything, it’s that the most precious things are those most easily lost, and vice versa.

He tries to love his sons, but mostly he loves how little they love each other, the Jacob and Esau of it all, the spectacle of their scrabbling for the Father’s finite affections. All that happens, has happened before; God ensures that and Isaac avails himself of its comforts and certainties. He has been Noah and Abraham and even Isaac, and endured all. Survival and success depend on little more than recognizing the nature of one’s story and following the script. And in this story, in the story of sons, love is beyond the point; the point is fatherhood and leadership, the point is the obligations of blood and filial obedience, the point is he is the Father and they are his sons, and someday his Children will be their Children. Someday, he will be gone, and though the blame for that sits squarely with God, it’s hard not to hold it against the sons who will remain.

He gives very little thought to his daughters.

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