The End Has Come

IN THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF THE PROMISED LAND Robin Wasserman

“So it was, and so it is written:

Isaac had really thought writing the bible would be easier.

The scribe falls silent, waiting; Isaac keeps his eyes closed, lets the words echo. Steeples his gnarled hands, draws a rasping breath, hocks up the phlegm.

Life is phlegm, now. Most likely death will be, too, a slow drowning in his own bed, gurgling and frothing. A death unfit for a patriarch. A voice, now, unfit for a patriarch, this phlegmy croak, but the scribe is of no use either, his thin warble that of a boy still proud of the peach fuzz on his balls, trying to prove himself to the sovereign Father. Failing.

“Again,” Isaac snaps, and the boy, with his stuttering rhythm, reads back the morning’s work.

Isaac likes the sound of these words, the roll and crest of them. He likes the tense of them, the tide sweeping the children’s struggles into the past, smoothing its edges, blurring its sharp, painful lines. Between each verse, the fine-grained memories: brighter, for Isaac, than the details of his breakfast meal or his great-grandchildren’s names. The burn of frostbitten fingertips in an ashen winter, the paperwhite crinkle of skin preserved too long from the sun. No room, in this new bible, for the names of the traitors who chose death over the Lord’s command, the whores who stole away with their soft curves and gentle voices, the plump breasts and fertile wombs meant to belong to Isaac, leaving him to women like Julia and Ellen and Shirley and Kate, too fat or too old or too angry. Abandoning him to Kate’s womb, all dried up, and Shirley’s tongue so sharp no one could blame her hands for tying the noose, silencing it for good. Julia’s inability, for so many years and so many daughters, to finally give Isaac a deserved son.

Isaac took Julia and begat Joseph. He appreciates the tidiness of it. The act of taking, his spindly thirteen-year-old limbs crushed against Julia’s bulk, her meaty fingers on his spurting organ as he finally became a man — third try’s the charm, her tears and his, their murmurs overlapping, God’s will God’s will God’s will, let it be done, please God let it be done, and eventually, fifteen seconds later, seven years later, three daughters later, it was.

Isaac still thought, then, that the woman he’d loved would return from the wilderness, to save him as he had once saved her. He assumed the Lord would return her to the fold, because Isaac desired it.

It never happened. Isaac never found anyone worthy of replacing her, and the voice he’d once heard so clearly never spoke to him again. In body and spirit, Isaac was left alone.

Here is another bible he could write, testament of Isaac, son of Abraham.

He will die soon, and his truth will die with him. His children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, all those born after the skyfall, too young to mourn electricity or indoor plumbing, too trusting to question his version of the past, these are the ones who will build a future Isaac will never see. This week he will mark his birthday, and his Children will mark it for him, with pageants and jubilation, and Isaac will pretend to enjoy it, but he knows holidays are the present’s way of embalming the past. This celebration of the birth of their savior doubles as an invitation to the grave; it would perhaps be less embarrassing for all if Isaac did as his forefathers had done and recede into ink and memory.

He will not begrudge them for it. Every man is ultimately a Moses, denied access to the future’s promised land. Still: when the scribe finishes his reading, Isaac tells the bright-eyed young man that he’s done an abominable job, that he’s no longer of use in this task, that God has determined his place is in the pastures, where his back will knot and his skin will burn and the stink of cowshit will flavor every breath and bite, and once the boy has slunk away, pretending, pathetically, at gratitude for God’s will, Isaac allows himself a smile.

“Well?” The strange man broadcasts impatience like a bad actor, stubby fingers tapping at tree trunk leg, lips pursed ducklike around rotting teeth. “What’s it going to be?”

“Give me a minute, I’m thinking,” Isaac says, hocking his phlegm, and Isaac is thinking, thinking who and where and well what?

Isaac is thinking that it’s happening ever more often now, the amnesiac fogs that settle over him, shrouding the passage from present to future.

Isaac is thinking that God has finally returned to him, that in these sunblind spaces, God is speaking to him once again, and Isaac need only learn to hear.

He has his tricks. He knows how to observe, where to find the clues. This room is his room, the main living space of the small cabin in which he’s dwelled ever since the children ventured out of their compound and back to the land. As they spread down the mountain, the children of Abraham reclaimed the homes left behind by a generation of dead. They buried rotting bodies in vegetable gardens and claimed brick split levels and ranch houses for their own. It was a temporary solution. The old world was tainted, Isaac taught them that. Living among its luxuries risked too much, and so as decades passed, they felled trees and cut beams and erected homes of their own.

Isaac sits in a chair taken from the compound, modest wood frame and fraying cushion, the chair that’s suited him for sixty years. The stranger with the bald spot and the bulbous nose spills over the edges of his own narrow chair and grunts, “Yes or no, Dad?” and like that, his features resolve themselves into sorry familiarity. Isaac nods at his eldest son, guessing at yes. Judging from the subsequent scowl on Joseph’s face, he has answered well.

Joseph is Isaac’s eldest son and presumptive successor. He is also, unfortunately, a moron.

To be fair, dullness proliferates in the newer generations. These children of the skyfall are hardened to the laws of nature but softened to everything else, shaped by the slow, singular pace of their lives. However dimly, Isaac remembers the speed of the world before: fingers skimming across a keyboard, eyes lighting from one window to the next. He remembers tiny people skipping back and forth across a screen with rocket launchers and grenades, pocket universes born and extinguished behind the glass. He remembers that nothing ever seemed as important as the next thing, that there always was a next thing, on screen and off, that even the longest hours of boredom were crowded with claims on his attention. These new children — always children no matter how prematurely aged by sun and fieldwork — they can be absorbed entirely by the slow creep of clouds across the sky or the nut-cracking of an earnest squirrel. Isaac once watched a girl, already old enough to be married off, lose an hour to the study of a single blackbird as it flitted from branch to branch and, eventually, massacred a nest of worms. They’re undemanding, these children of the new world. Isaac leads, but will never understand.

Joseph, on the other hand, is ravenously demanding, born with the entitlement of the eldest son and groomed for such by his mother, both of them too thickheaded to notice how thickheaded they were.

“I still say we just toss ’em to the wolves,” he says now, “or have a little fun with them,” which is how Isaac is able to reconstruct out the question that has been lost to the fog, Joseph no doubt referring to the pen where they keep the pilgrims who stumble across their borders. Their fate is left to Isaac’s whim. Depending on mood, he will grant them an audience and perhaps a refuge or summarily return them to the wilderness from whence they came. Joseph hates outsiders on general principle. In his youth — before Isaac caught wind and shut it down — the boy played a gladiatorial game that pitted one pilgrim against another in mortal combat, this in the early days when survivors straggled in starving and half-dead, tear-stained at the sight of other human faces. He’s not simply a dullard, Isaac’s oldest son. He’s a brute.

Isaac tries to love him, as he tries to love Thomas, younger and craftier, but sometimes he worries he’s expended his lifetime quantity of love on the original generation of Children, loving them enough to save them or loving them because he saved them, loving most the ones who left him by death or by choice, because if the end of the world has taught him anything, it’s that the most precious things are those most easily lost, and vice versa.

He tries to love his sons, but mostly he loves how little they love each other, the Jacob and Esau of it all, the spectacle of their scrabbling for the Father’s finite affections. All that happens, has happened before; God ensures that and Isaac avails himself of its comforts and certainties. He has been Noah and Abraham and even Isaac, and endured all. Survival and success depend on little more than recognizing the nature of one’s story and following the script. And in this story, in the story of sons, love is beyond the point; the point is fatherhood and leadership, the point is the obligations of blood and filial obedience, the point is he is the Father and they are his sons, and someday his Children will be their Children. Someday, he will be gone, and though the blame for that sits squarely with God, it’s hard not to hold it against the sons who will remain.

He gives very little thought to his daughters.

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.

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?

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.

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?”

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.

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.”

“Uh huh. Yeah. The firstborn. That’s something. He was a good dad to my dad, I think, but I get the sense he never liked the guy very much. I guess I always wondered . . . I don’t fucking know what I wondered, okay? I thought you’d be more like him, or you’d be more like me, or we could be, like I said, brothers. Family’s more than blood, that’s what your dad always said. Maybe he was trying to tell me about ‘the Children,’ or whatever without actually telling me, I don’t know. Maybe he was trying to warn me not to come find you. I’m glad I did, though, Isaac. Maybe I needed to know you. Who knows, maybe your God brought me here, wanted you to know me, right?” He holds out his hand. “Brothers?”

All this time, Isaac has been trying to figure out what story he’s in, how events are meant to unfold. All this time, he’s had it wrong, distracted by the tangle of fathers and sons, nephews and wives.

Brothers.

Two brothers, one favored by his God, the other wandering in cold wilderness, envious and lost. One brother who was a shepherd of his flock and one who was rejected, and dreamed of usurping all his brother possessed: life and land and legacy. One who spoke the truth and one who used deception to gain the advantage, who said walk with me in the field and disguised love as its opposite. Both born to the father of all men, neither his brother’s keeper.

He feels foolish that he hasn’t seen it before now, and thanks God for this chance to put the ancient story right. This time, in this new world, the righteous brother is not so easily led to the slaughter. This time, the right brother will live.

Isaac’s bible, like its predecessors, is part history and part law. Such are the edicts of Isaac’s God:

Isaac’s God is a practical God.

Isaac’s house has many rooms, and in each room, Isaac has a gun. He keeps one in this compound, too, one the Children know nothing about, cached beneath his old cot, that sacred artifact none of the Children would dare touch.

He hears Kyle saying things like no and wait and what are you doing and again, more than once, no, but the voice is a stranger’s and the words easily swatted away.

Over them, he hears instead, finally, the word of the Lord.

He can sense the fog descending again, and recognizes it now as his reward for long service and one final, righteous act, and he raises the weapon and prepares for God to welcome him home.

Thomas and Joseph are the first to find the body. They’ve been keeping an eye on their father; they’ve been keeping an eye on the stranger; they know where and when to look.

They were hoping things would turn in this direction, though they were hoping the turn would be tidier.

“Now what?” Joseph asks Thomas. Joseph is older, but Thomas is smarter, and they’ve both come to terms with this.

“Now we deal with dear old Dad,” Thomas says. The old man has always liked him better, and they’ve come to terms with that, too. Once they did, it made everything easier. As long as they played the roles Isaac set for them, the old man believed he knew his sons.

The stranger who’s been fucking Thomas’s wife is gutshot and, from the look of things, took a good while to die. Thomas wishes that Isaac had shot him in the groin, and considers doing it now, for good measure.

Joseph, the firstborn, who actually loves his father, wishes the old man hadn’t pissed his pants. It’s an undignified way for him to go.

“Where am I?” the old man says, kneeling in the puddle of blood.

He got old fast, their father. Or maybe they were just so used to seeing him as he began, too young, that they didn’t notice the change until it was too late.

He got old fast, but not fast enough. Thomas feels like he’s been waiting for this moment forever.

The old man holds out the gun, flat on open palms. “Who are you?” he says.

Finally, and too late, Thomas thinks: The right question. He’s never known them, or wanted to, so certain was he that because they were his sons and his blood, they were whatever he imagined them to be. That as his creation, they were his to shape to his whim. Thomas remembers being small, stumbling up the hill after his father, Joseph following behind, kicking his brother’s shins when he thought no one was looking, because Joseph was dumb enough to think people ever stopped looking. Their mothers down in the valley, having abandoned them to a rare moment alone with their father, who wanted to show them their legacy. “This is where we lived, before God gave us the promised land,” Isaac told them, then pushed them inside one of the compound’s small rooms and locked them into the dark. “Can you imagine it?” he shouted through the door. “Closed behind these walls for a decade, wondering if the Lord had left us enough world to return to.” Their father left them in the dark for a day and a night: A lesson in captivity and faith. Joseph screamed and kicked the walls and wet his pants. Thomas abided, quiet and calm, retreating to an even darker room in his mind. He’s always been good at waiting. By the time their father finally let them out — “Breathe deep, boys! Now you understand how grateful you should be for fresh air, for sky!” — Joseph was a wild creature, and stayed that way. Thomas knew enough to smile and thank his father for the field trip, and has been the favorite ever since.

That the old man thought a few hours in a dark room could do the job, allow the children of the new generation to see through the eyes of the one that came before — that he thought this necessary? His father, Thomas thought then, and thinks now, is a fool. He can’t see his own stain. The Earth has been purified, and its people along with it, but Isaac still bears the taint of the world before, and the years between. There was a reason Moses and his people spent forty years wandering the desert — it gave the old ones, the ones warped by an unholy life of servitude and false idols, the chance to die. Thomas has always thought it was gracious of Moses, at least, to do so on schedule.

“We should get this done before he snaps out of it,” Thomas says.

“Maybe this time he won’t?”

“All the more reason.”

The brothers don’t agree on everything. Joseph wants to see the world beyond the valley, wants his children’s and his grandchildren’s futures uncircumscribed by the duties of blood and power. Thomas wants to rule.

They agree, however, on this.

“Do we make it look like he did it to himself?” Joseph asks.

The idea is tempting, but Thomas needs his father’s legacy to loom. He shakes his head. “He did it,” he says, stepping on the stranger’s chest, bearing down like the man can still feel pain, and if only it were possible. “Assassination. Self-defense. A good story.”

They’ll need to adjust the pageant next year, write a new closing act. Joseph will write it. He’s always liked a good story.

The old man is peeing again. Joseph looks away. Thomas laughs.

“I don’t know about this,” Joseph says, nervous now that the time has come, nervous despite how long they’ve been waiting. At least the old man won’t die alone. He knows his father would have hated that. “What about God?”

“God loves killing,” Thomas points out.

Brother killing brother, Joseph thinks. Yes. Fathers killing sons, husbands killing wives, gods killing soldiers, generations, cities — yes, all of that. But sons killing fathers? “I had to read that fucking bible as much as you did,” Joseph says. “Patricide is a no.”

“What does the old man always say? We’re writing a new bible now. Correcting the mistakes of the old one. Brave new world.”

The old man is crying.

“This is fucking embarrassing,” Thomas says.

Joseph wishes he could have heard the stranger’s story. Thomas knows, but refuses, as usual, to share. Joseph stole the stranger’s photograph from his father’s bedside. He likes the look of the woman in it, the smile that can’t imagine the world could end. She looks innocent, the way his father looks now, even though he had imagined it best of all.

“I loved you best,” their father says, talking to neither of them. Talking to me, Joseph imagines, but lacks the will to make himself believe. Talking to his father or his lost whore, Thomas thinks, someone he loved before he forgot how. Maybe to his Lord, that monster in the sky to whom they’re all supposed to be grateful. Gratitude and fear, this is the old man’s recipe for love. Thomas has no talent for either, and when he looks to the sky, he’s never seen the beauty his father goes on about, never appreciated its capacious blue. The sky is where death comes from, everyone knows that. The sky fell once, can fall again, and because of that, Thomas owes it obedience. But not gratitude, and not love. He owes no one that.

The old man blinks rapidly, spittle frothing at weathered lips, then says, “What?”

“Third question,” Thomas tells him, and takes the gun from his father’s willing hands. “That’s enough.”