The End Has Come

In Isaac’s dreams, now, he is a child again. A child for real, not the wise man in the boy’s body that he had to play after the skyfall, not the boy wonder who received his father’s prophecy as if it were a bolt of lightning and, electrified, became someone new. He dreams of the fuzzy time before, when he lived with his mother in a small room over a store, a room that smelled of raw fish and skittered with roaches — the real ones that escaped from couch cushions and through the hole in the toe of a favorite sneaker, and the imaginary ones that crawled over him as he curled up on the futon and tried to sleep. He dreams of his mother’s hand pulling out of his, of her whispered promise that she would be back.

“I save my questions for God,” Isaac tells Kyle. “I expect I’ll get my chance to ask, sooner or later.”

“Wait. Isaac —”

Kyle doesn’t call him Father, and this is a relief. Once, he tried to call Isaac by the name he had before, the name his mother gave him and the only one his father ever knew. That boy, Isaac told Kyle, is dead. There is precedent: God gave Jacob a new name, too. Every father of a nation deserves a name of his own.

Still, Kyle knew the name.

Kyle knew the name, had the photograph; Isaac is forced to believe the boy is who he says he is, and he grows impatient waiting for God to reveal what the hell Isaac is supposed to do about it.

“Okay, I’ve got to ask you,” Kyle says. “You don’t really believe all this junk?”

“What junk?”

“You know, this. The miracle. God. That your father prophesied a fucking meteor strike.”

“Didn’t he?”

“Well, I guess, but it’s like they always say about the monkeys and the typewriters, you know. Hamlet.”

“What? What about monkeys?”

“You know, because they — never mind. I just want to be clear: You think God saved you? Like, you, specifically.”

“I know He did,” Isaac says, choosing the verb with purpose. This isn’t like the time before, where men were resigned to faith. This is the age of miracles. He knows God loves him because God saved him, and he knows God saved him because there is no other explanation. His father taught him this, before Kyle was born, and the years since have proven it. “This surprises you?”

Kyle is frozen. Isaac remembers this expression from Saturday morning cartoons, the coyote who chased his prey straight off a cliff, only falling once he looked down to see no ground beneath his feet. “I figured you just picked up where grandpa left off.”

“I did,” Isaac says, and will say no more.

* * *

Isaac blows out candles; Isaac eats cake; Isaac sits in the front row and watches his life play out on a makeshift stage. This is the birthday pageant, performed every year for the last ten, inside the compound that has become a museum. One of Isaac’s grandsons play Isaac. Joseph plays Abraham. Some of the women play other women.

Kyle sits beside him, and together they watch the past enacted for the present.

“Not for me, the promised land,” Joseph-as-Abraham tells the child playing his son. “You shall lead our Children to salvation.”

“I shall,” the boy says, and the man marches off the stage, his role finished.

The Children are all played by children.

“God has decreed that we marry,” the boy playing Isaac tells the pretty girl playing Heather, and Heather drops to her knees and says, “I will never leave you.”

“Lies!” the children shout, as is the tradition.

“I promise,” the girl playing Heather says, then the lights fall and the boy playing Isaac closes his eyes into sleep, and Heather steals herself away.

“Treason!” the children shout and boo. This is their favorite part.

The pageant speeds through the ten years of confinement, and ends as the Children step through the door of their compound into the new world that awaits them, their skin pale, their faces gaunt, their newborns cradled in their arms, their gratitude to God on their lips and in their hearts.

“Father Abraham had many sons,” the children sing. “Many sons had Father Abraham. I am one of them, and so are you.”

The first time Isaac saw the pageant, he cried. These days he fights to stay awake, to keep his mind from wandering into the past. He doesn’t like coming back to this place, remembering the time when he thought they might never leave it. He doesn’t like to watch himself left behind, once and again. He doesn’t like to imagine this pageant playing out year after year, even when he’s gone.

Sometimes, inside these walls made of old shipping containers and scavenged steel, he imagines this as the tomb it almost was. To seal himself in with his Children by his side, bound to him for all eternity — this was the way death should be. This was the wisdom Moses should have carried from Egypt, along with his people. Isaac has sacrificed his entire life for his Children. How is it just that they should live on while he dies alone?

The Children sing happy birthday, and Isaac senses a curtain about to fall.

“Are you all right?” Kyle says, turning toward him, very close and at the same time shrinking further and further away.