The End Has Come

He shoulders himself upright, leans against the wall, fixes Joseph with a gaze that, years before, might have frozen the boy’s blood. He will tell Joseph to keep his brutish hands off the stranger, and while he’s at it, keep his brutish organ in his pants because there are enough little dolts running wild, everyone pretending not to notice their green eyes and Joseph-like cowlick in stubbornly curly Joseph-like hair. Joseph will hear that Isaac is not dead yet, nor his infant to mother and manage, that Isaac knows what his son is trying to do: rally support among the Children, make decisions for them without consulting Isaac, decisions that he speaks of as “distracting trifles” and a “waste of your time.” He will tell Joseph that when the time does come, it will be Thomas who takes the mantle of leadership and Joseph’s birthright, and he will do so with his father’s blessing — and once that’s settled, Isaac will summon Thomas and tell him that his softhearted, muddle-headed ways and unhealthy obsession with the past are slow-acting poison and that unless he toughens up, Joseph has Isaac’s blessing to send him into the wilderness. He’ll set brother against brother, just the way the Lord likes it. This is a good plan, he thinks. Smart.

“Joseph,” he says. “Son.”

“Yeah, Dad?” Joseph squeezes his hand.

“Where am I?” Isaac says. “Who are you?”

* * *

The dark of night.

Isaac remembers when stars were blotted out by the lights of man. The Children know this from history lessons, and shudder to think of it.

Isaac misses his nightlight, and the warm glow of a screen.

The stranger is in his cabin, and Isaac wonders if he invited the young man in and forgot. Just in case, he acts hospitable, offering the stranger a cup of tea.

“It’s the middle of the night,” the boy says.

Isaac shrugs.

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be in here,” the boy says, “I know that, but . . .” and Isaac thinks now perhaps he hasn’t been invited in, and Isaac should act accordingly, but then there’s the matter of the photograph.

In the dark, he feels young again.

“I need to tell you a story,” the boy says.

“I guess you do,” Isaac says.

* * *

My grandfather raised me, the boy says. Until he died, at least. Then no one raised me. But that’s not the story. I mean, not this story.

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?