The End Has Come

Isaac wants to tell him that he’s more than all right, that if Kyle could feel what he feels, the imminence, the immanence, of the fog and that certainty, when he’s inside its white hot haze, that he’s not there alone, then there would be no more need for faith and doubt. Isaac wants to say that the decades he’s spent waiting for the Lord to reveal himself, to turn Isaac’s decades of bullshit into retroactive truth, have finally given way to revelation, and that Kyle should shut up, everyone should shut up, so that Isaac can fall into the sunblind silence and hear.

* * *

He wakes in Thomas’s house.

Isaac has always hated waking alone.

The bedroom is the children’s bedroom, the one that Kyle has now claimed for his own, except Isaac can tell from the sound of the dark that the room is empty.

He finds Kyle in the family room.

He finds Kyle on top of Thomas’s pretty young wife.

They lie together in the dark, lie together in the biblical sense, and then, when that’s finished, lie together still, Kyle’s fingers tangled in the pretty young wife’s pretty hair.

Isaac watches.

Isaac thinks that he has never smiled like that, after. For him, every time is somehow still the first time, and beneath the pleasure there is pain and something else, less bearable. The emptiness left behind at the moment of release, the sense that he has given something essential away; the anticipation, lying together, sticky and hot and wet, of the inevitable, that she will leave and take it with her.

“It doesn’t bother you, brainwashing these kids?” Kyle is murmuring to the pretty young wife. “I mean, they think there’s nothing outside this valley. They think the world ended and they’re all that’s left. They don’t want to hear different.”

“They’re children,” she says. “We know what’s best for children.”

“But you know this is all bullshit, right?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it fucking matters,” Kyle says, but he says it gently, with a finger tracing the curve of her cheek, like he’s telling her that she’s beautiful. “It’s all lies. And the old man —”

She stops his lips with her hand.

“Father knows best,” she says, and looks confused when he starts to laugh.

* * *

Maybe, Isaac thinks in the morning, it was a dream, the way his dreams of stabbing his sons, letting their blood run red over his hands, have always been dreams, the way his dreams of his mother and his father returning have always been dreams — the way he sometimes thinks the entire world before was a dream, video games and frozen yogurt machines and skateboards and homework all a collective fantasy that they’ve dreamed up together.

But if it is a dream, it’s one given to him for a reason.

Kyle wants to take a walk with him. But Isaac is an old man, tired and frail — he says. Come sit with me, he says, in the sleeping room of the old compound, where your grandfather and I once slept side by side.

The cots are still there, preserved for posterity, and Kyle perches on one while Isaac takes the other. Isaac remembers museums from before, trooping with his schoolmates through absurdly still rooms, adults frantically shushing them. He remembers a water fight in a bathroom with a cross-eyed boy; he remembers the glory of a dessert cart in the cafeteria, all you can eat; he doesn’t remember, has never been able to remember, what was encased behind all those panes of glass, and what was the point. He supposes that this museum will be its own kind of bible someday, telling its story after the storytellers are gone.

“I’m leaving,” Kyle says.

Isaac is too old to pretend at surprise. Does anyone ever do anything else?

He is an old man, but a cagey one, and he says to Kyle no, don’t.

“You’re my nephew,” Isaac says. “You have family here.”

Kyle shakes his head. “I don’t know what I was looking for, Isaac, but . . . this isn’t it.”

“What, then?”

“I miss him, I guess,” Kyle says. “My grandpa. Your dad. It’s funny, if you think about it. He raised us both. I guess I always thought of us as kind of like brothers, you and me. And maybe I thought — it’s stupid.”

“What?” Isaac prods, though he is hardly listening, his mind fixed on the word, brothers, the shape of things coming clear.

“You came first, you know? I’ve always been kind of jealous of that. You knew this whole different part of him. Maybe the real him? And he loved you first. Maybe he loved you best, even if he was a total shit to you, leaving you like that.”

“As he had to.”