The End Has Come

Isaac’s father once told him, during their months together, that all stories are the same two stories. “Either someone goes on a journey,” Abraham said, “or a stranger comes to town. And trust me, people, fucking lazy as they are, like the second one a lot better. Why do you think the New Testament’s so much more popular than the old one?”

“What about my story?” Isaac asked him. “My story is both stories.”

Isaac was the stranger who came to town, small hand tucked inside his mother’s, left practically on the doorstep of a man he’d never seen by the woman he’d never see again. Because of Isaac, they’d all gone on a journey, the father, the son, and the Children. God had warned Abraham of the end of the world, but Isaac was the one who understood how to survive it. Because of Isaac they dispensed with their worldly belongings, they learned to shoot and trap and hoard, they built themselves a modern-day ark, and when the sky fell, and Abraham followed God’s command to venture alone into the wilderness — the stranger, no longer so strange, takes a journey — Isaac and the Children were safe, and saved.

In this new world, there is only one story.

The Children take no journeys. They live here, in the valley of the shadow of the promised land. Those who choose to leave cease to exist. When a stranger comes to town, he learns quickly to leave his stories of the world, and his journey, behind.

This stranger is Isaac’s younger son. He kneels, as he’s been warned to do, at the old man’s bunioned feet, and says, “I’ve come a long way to find you.”

Isaac coughs. “I don’t need to hear about it.” He’s too tired and too busy to be wasting time on etiquette lessons, and wonders whether perhaps Joseph didn’t have the right idea after all.

The stranger has scrappy red hair and a raking scar on his forearm, claw marks from some brush with the angry wild. He looks familiar to Isaac, but then, these days, everyone looks either familiar or strange, faces of his blood dissolving into inchoate shape and line, faces like this one pretending at being known. Like the fogs, this is God’s hand at work. God showing him who to trust.

His younger son, his favored son, stands at the stranger’s side. Unlike Joseph, Thomas enjoys the company of newcomers. He collects their stories, and Isaac allows it: Stories need a repository, and better one son than all the Children.

Thomas nudges the young man. “Show him.”

The man reaches into a shapeless coat, pulls out something tattered that Isaac recognizes as a photograph.

Isaac had all the photographs burned long ago.

He takes this one in his hands, rests it flat against his palms, lets himself remember photographs, their laminate paper, their lie of permanence, that time can be fixed and people too, and then he takes in the faded face smiling up at him, and should know better than to believe this trick of the eye, whether it be divine message or practical joke, but how can he help but believe, because resting in his palms is the face of his mother.

* * *

“What?” Isaac says.

He’s horizontal.

“Dad?”

“Dad, are you okay?”

These two boys — men now but boys forever — stand over him. These two boys must be his sons, and he must love them, but it’s the third face that Isaac fixes on, the stranger come to town, and Isaac remembers that often, in the old bible, the stranger come to town was an angel, a divine flunky sent to test the righteous. Then Isaac remembers what this stranger has brought him.

“What?” he says again.

“Dad, you faded out on us again.”

“Should we get the doctor?”

Isaac remembers hospitals. White robes bustling with self-importance across a TV screen. He remembers medicine, and clean sheets, and anti-bacterial soap, and old men, men much older than he is now but looked so much younger, and will not let himself curse God, who allowed his own son only thirty-three years upon the Earth.

He wants to say: Leave me.

He wants to say: Take this burden from my shoulders. It’s your turn to save yourselves.

“What?” he says, and hates the sound of his voice and the spittle that lands on his chin.

“Rest, Dad.” Thomas puts an arm around the stranger and ushers him away. Joseph sits by the bed, takes Isaac’s hand in his hairy fingers. They are alone.

Thomas and Joseph hate each other, always have. Isaac prefers it that way.

“Who was that woman in the picture, Dad?”

The Children call him Father; his sons and daughters call him Dad. No one calls him Isaac anymore, and sometimes Isaac can almost remember the days before he gave himself the name, can almost remember the boy he was before he was chosen.

“Hannah found an extra store of chocolate. She’s making a cake for your birthday. Your favorite. Isn’t that great, Dad?”

Hannah is either one of Isaac’s daughters or one of Joseph’s wives, he can’t be bothered to remember.

“Great,” he manages.

“You remember it’s your birthday coming up, right?”

The irony of it, the way Joseph treats him like a simpleton.