The End Has Come

Kyle would have Isaac believe that his father was a fraud. That the miracle of prophecy that saved the Children from extinction, was a coincidence. That God had never spoken to him, never spoken to Isaac, that Abraham had spoon-fed his son the same bullshit he’d dumped on his Children, that he locked them into and himself out of the doomsday compound not because God refused him access to the promised land, but because he was a fraud who’d abandoned his son to responsibility, packed a suitcase of cash, and got the hell out of dodge. That he had survived, had married, had bred, had regretted, but had never returned. Could have returned, but never did.

And the father duped the son, and made him believe.

And the son wasted his life on a fantasy, and taught his Children to worship his father, who was a piece of shit, and the LORD laughed and laughed.

It makes for a ridiculous story.

A story that doesn’t explain the miracle.

Maybe, Isaac thinks, Abraham mistook God’s warning for coincidence, or maybe he lied to this new child about lying to the old one.

Kyle doesn’t know anything about Isaac’s mother, or where she went. This is fine. Isaac has already solved the puzzle of his mother: By leaving him, she saved him, which meant God must have intended — commanded — her to do it, just as He did Abraham.

Isaac doesn’t believe the boy, cannot and will not believe him, tells the boy not to speak of it again and certainly not to anyone else, and the boy agrees, so that in the morning, when Isaac is awoken by the screech of birds and his own insistent bladder, he’s left to wonder whether the story was a dream.

The story cannot be true and the boy cannot be what he claims, but Isaac lets him stay, even gives him a bed in Thomas’s home.

“What do you want from me?” Isaac asked him, in the middle of the night, or maybe imagined it.

“I don’t want anything,” Kyle said, sounding as if he’d never considered desire.

“Then why are you here?”

Kyle shrugged. “I had to go somewhere. Figured this would be interesting. An adventure, you know?”

Isaac doesn’t know, because Isaac’s life hasn’t allowed for the luxury of adventure. It’s things like this, children seeking danger for danger’s sake, that prove to him the end of the world has come and gone. Sometimes he misses it.

He thinks he told Thomas to invite Kyle to stay with him.

But maybe Thomas decided for himself, told Isaac after the fact. He can’t remember.

Joseph doesn’t like it either way, Isaac knows that. Neither do Thomas’s wives, not the young pretty one nor the old cranky one, but the children, despite being booted from their bed and forced now to sleep on the floor by the kitchen, delight in Kyle, requesting that he take over Three Questions duty and tuck them into bed.

“I got to ask three questions every night when I was a kid, too,” Kyle tells them. “Weird coincidence, yeah?”

“Everybody gets to ask three questions,” the youngest one, Jeremiah, says solemnly. “It’s the law.”

“What are you, dumb? Everyone knows that,” says Eli. He takes after his uncle Joseph.

Isaac watches from the doorway, but leaves before the children put forth their questions. This nightly ritual is his decree, but he’s never liked to watch. “Stop it with the fucking questions,” his mother had said to him, over and over. “What’s wrong with you?” she’d asked him, when he couldn’t stop, because how did you stop wanting to know? Three questions was the compromise they made, a daily dessert, three questions only once he was safely tucked into his sheets, three questions saved up for the dark before bed, never to be wasted; this was how Isaac learned of the world, how he thinks all children should learn of the world, in the dark, in threes. But he prefers not to see it, because he prefers not to remember. With Joseph and Thomas and the girls, he left the duty to their mothers.

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?”