The Year's Best Horror Stories 21

A FATHER’S GIFT by W. M. Shockley

Life was nearly perfect for Joshua Benjamin Yosevs until the summer of his thirty-fourth year. He had his wife, Socorro, and the two boys, Kevin and Harlow. Both his parents were still alive, although he hadn’t spoken to his father in ten years.

And then, during one hot Saturday in August, a small pogrom from seventeenth century Poland invaded his mind. The cavalry rampaged, raped, and murdered seventeen Jews. The next year, his thirty-fifth, in August a nineteenth century Russian pogrom attacked him. There were more, at shortening intervals, with skips in the chronology. But always the butcheries came from the past and moved ever closer to the present.

Again it was August. Joshua was thirty-six when things took a violent lurch toward the worst.

In his backyard, Joshua rocked slowly in the hammock listening to Kevin teasing Harlow with a frisbee. The boys could get along together for all of three minutes before Harlow cried. Joshua had scolded Kevin countless times, but Kevin always teased and teased until Harlow cried. It was building now.

“Get it, boy,” Kevin said.

Harlow yipped like a dog, his yelps fading as he ran from the arching sycamores which held the hammock. The world’s best kids—Joshua knew they would learn to get along some day. It would just take them some time.

Time to get up and stop the teasing, Joshua decided, but Socorro responded first, shouted, “Don’t get him too hot, Kevin.” She wasn’t going to wait for Kevin to make Harlow cry.

Joshua turned his head and started the hammock swinging. A blur in the distance had to be Harlow, wobbling. He was funny to watch as he ran. He was getting the knack. He had learned to run before he walked, taking short, fast trips before falling. As he learned to slow down, though, he forgot how to run. Only now was it coming back to him.

Socorro was wearing shorts in the heat, and Joshua noticed the map pattern of the varicose veins near her knee. The faint blue barely showed under the nut-brown tone. Why, when they made love, or when he stroked her legs, did the veins not ruffle the surface? The wonderful surface. Her legs, when shaven, were smooth. Perfectly smooth and yet offering the perfect degree of resistance. Even with the varicose veins, her legs were something to behold. To hold. One, dangling over the table, bounced slowly against the bench. Later, he thought. When the boys are asleep. Saturday night. He’d been too tired last night. Thirty-six and too tired!

“Kevin!” Socorro shouted. “Let him have it.” Wrong choice of words, Joshua corrected silently.

“Oh, Mom,” Kevin said. “He’s better than a dog.”

“No fleas,” Joshua offered. As usual, Socorro ignored Joshua’s attempt at humor. She had talked to him about joking when she was trying to discipline. Lectured him.

“That’s enough, Kevin. When he gets that one, that’s it. I don’t want him too hot.”

“Can I call Jeremy to play?” Kevin asked.

“Ask your father.”

Joshua kept his eyes closed, not wanting to have to say “no” to his son. He heard Kevin approaching.

“He’s resting his eyes,” Kevin said.

Uncle Morry, Joshua thought, the family tradition, “rested his eyes” after dinner in the recliner. He never slept there, only rested his eyes, snoring like a steam radiator. Uncle Morry who always brought candy bars when he visited. The candy bars made Mother mad. But Joshua’s father would defend his brother Morry, not his wife.

What kind of man was he who would take his brother’s side in preference to his wife? Joshua knew what kind of a father he had. Now, he knew. He’s in the synagogue right now, no time for children, no time for Mother. I’ll never, he vowed for the thousandth time, treat my kids like that. Kids were far more important.

“Yes,” Joshua said, “go call Jeremy. He can come over here and you can both play with Harlow.” The wisdom of Solomon: make it so Kevin didn’t want to go.

Kevin started to complain, but when Joshua opened his eyes, he saw Kevin running toward the back door. He ran better than Harlow by a long shot. Of course, Harlow would do as well when he was nine, too. They’d get older, learn more things, marry, but Joshua would always know them, love them. He’d never disown them, pretend they were dead, cease to love them.

The patterns of the leaves and branches overhead shifted slightly. Everything seemed to move sideways as if an earthquake had hit the hammock. After an initial queasiness, Joshua recognized the warmth as it crept up from his toes.

Oh, shit, he thought. Why me? He knew another “vision” was coming. Another pogrom, another massacre. Why? he wondered. Why now? He didn’t want another vision. At all. Ever. There was too much blood and too much gore in them. But he had no choice. Dr. Veille told him they were some sort of seizures that might be controlled by phenobarbital. Phenobarb—he had spent many a college night trying to get phenobarb. Probably the phenobarb would not work anyway—these were not normal seizures, he knew that instinctively.

Black uniforms—goddamned Nazis in S.S. uniforms, and locals in black uniforms with gray sleeves—formed a line. Inside the line, the Jews’ faces were packed tightly, some screaming, some crying, some oddly silent, dull with resignation. One woman’s nose was flattened against the hair of the man in front of her. She sobbed silently. Like some monstrous, multilimbed insect, the naked people inside the line of guards moved. Slowly, lashed and taunted by the guards. Joshua glimpsed a single female breast forced out from the crowd. A large cowhide whip slashed across it.

He could not move to help. He could only witness. As always. He wanted to scream. He could not. He watched through tightly closed eyes as the line was whipped relentlessly forward. A woman of sixty fell to the ground. She smiled as she was crushed. The rest pressed forward, surged forward, were beaten forward. A machine gun fired tiny holes which spouted red into ten naked men and seven naked women who were lined up against a rock cliff. The bodies fell into a very large pit where others—some writhing, most still—awaited them.

Eight men and seven women took their places against the cliff face, and the red spouted again. And again.

“Joshua!”

The machine gun fired again.

“Joshua!!”

And again.

Joshua opened his eyes. He saw Socorro’s concerned black eyes staring down at him.

“What’s the matter?”

“I…” He had to clear his throat before he could speak. “I had another…”

“Poor baby,” she said. “Okay now?”

“No. It was… No. Yeah. It was—”

Harlow interrupted. “Can I ride on rocking Daddy?”

Socorro laughed, rubbed the boy’s head. “No, Daddy’s done rocking the hammock,” she said. She picked him up onto her hip. God, Joshua thought, I wish I could hug them as easily as she does. It didn’t feel right to him. Thanks again to Father. But there was more to love than the physical.

Joshua reached out and stroked the back of Socorro’s leg. The contact soothed him. The vision was past, receding. And Socorro was here, present. The sexiest part of a female body, he thought, the back of the leg. He squeezed her his desire.

“Later,” she winked. She put Harlow down, kissed him on the head, and sent him into the house. “This was bad?”

“This was bad,” he echoed. “It looked like World War II. They’re moving closer and closer to the present.”

“Are you ready to see Dr. Veille again?”

“No, drugs won’t help. I know that.”

“How?” she had asked him several times, “how do you know that?” He didn’t know how he knew. He just knew this wasn’t a problem that doctors or drugs could treat. This was not merely an abnormal form of epilepsy. It wasn’t that simple.

“We’ve got to do something.”

Joshua turned and sat awkwardly, his feet barely touching the ground. He tried to stand, but his legs gave way and he fell to the ground.

“Klutz,” Socorro laughed quietly, but Joshua could feel the concern behind the voice. How many words like klutz did she use now? How many words like miho did he?

Joshua laughed his agreement, yes—it always was tricky getting out of a hammock, wasn’t it—not admitting that it was a lack of strength in his knees which had made him fall, not wanting to add to her worry. This vision had taken a lot out of him, more than any of the others.

At first the visions come only rarely. Now they were occurring more and more frequently. All were murder and butchery, blood and brutality. From the seventeenth century until World War II. All the victims were Jews.

Jews. All the victims had been Jews. Joshua had been brought up as a practicing Jew. At thirteen he had stood before the Torah next to his adoring father. His first public speaking—he remembered the terror. And the money which put him through college. When it came to Judaism, his father was adoring. When it came to atheism, the crime Joshua committed in his fourteenth year, his father had turned his face away. Shocked. Scandalized. Unforgiving. His father became cold and distant—if he won’t talk to God, he won’t talk to me! the old man had bellowed. The phrase became an incantation. He spoke only to correct his son. Mealtimes became a deadly chore. God, how Joshua had hated dinner!

Religion, Joshua understood early, meant more to his father than blood, God more than love. If Joshua would not have the Lord, then neither would he have his father’s love.

Three days out of Princeton’s M.B.A. program, two weeks before he started his job he married Socorro. That was it, the final blow. “He married an Indian!” became the new refrain. Socorro was not kosher. Beautiful, but not Jewish, not even white. Trayfe. Not even mentioned in Scripture. Central America was not in the Scriptures. (But then, neither was North America, South America, most of Asia, etc.)

Socorro was love and joy and freedom. She reveled in the fact that she was four months’ pregnant with Kevin at the wedding. The contest between honoring his father and mother and cleaving unto his wife had been no contest at all: Socorro won. She would always win. The boys would always win. Who needed the old man, anyway? For ten years he had not come to look at his grandchildren, had not spoken to his son. His God must be a cold comfort.

After the boys had been told for the final time to stay in bed, Socorro and Joshua lay together. The television flickered a pale blue light and droned in the background. Joshua liked making love with some light in the room. He could see all the fine smoothness that he felt.

“I called your father today,” Socorro said.

“You what?” Joshua was aware that he had spoken too loudly.

“I explained about your dreams.”

He sat up against the scrolled headboard. “They’re not dreams.”

“I know that. You know that. I was in a hurry to get his attention before he hung up on me.”

“You called him!” She nodded her head. “Really?” He found it impossible to believe.

“He wants to talk to you. He’s coming tomorrow night for dinner.”

Joshua stood up. “Dinner? He’s coming here?” He started pacing around the bed. “For dinner?” My mother will be in trouble, he thought. Harlow will blow her cover. “Hi, Gramma,” he’ll say and Father will know that she’s been sneaking visits.

“I’m making a kosher ham.” Socorro said keeping a straight face for a long moment before breaking up. Reluctantly, Joshua laughed, too. “I really should—but Mother is bringing her own food.”

And her own dishes, Joshua added silently. But her joke had broken Joshua’s mood.

“I already told Kevin to pretend he doesn’t know Grandma.” She was so smart. Nothing to do about Harlow, though. He couldn’t keep a secret, not at three.

But then, his father would ignore his grandchildren as he had ignored his own children, so he probably wouldn’t notice. What could children know? What could children offer? They weren’t old enough to talk seriously about God.

“Why? Why did you call him?”

“We’ve got to do something.”

“I know just the something, too,” he offered as he returned to the bed.

Joshua helped the frail, old, so suddenly old, man out of the front seat of the car. He felt so light, so brittle. He might break if dropped. Certainly, this wraith could not hold much power over him anymore.

“You see,” the old man said—the same voice, pitched slightly higher, squeaked, “what it is to throw over your God.” No “Hello, Son,”—he hadn’t spoken Joshua’s name in twenty-two years—no hello of any kind, nothing but God first, and the lecture.

“Oh, Pop.” Joshua hated himself for reverting to a phrase he hadn’t used in years. Still, he could not hold onto the anger he had held for years. The old man was too pitiful a sight.

“You have heard, of course, the stories!” The old man walked on his own, but Joshua’s mother walked close by, with one hand ready to reach out and steady him.

“This must be Socorro,” she said. Always the diplomat, always willing to step into the fray, even when her husband would side with Uncle Morry. “And Kevin and Harlow.”

Kevin said a simple, “Hello,” smiled obviously behind his hand, and tried not to laugh. Harlow chirruped his glad welcome in a language which the old man would not grasp, would not try to understand. His father, the redoubtable Benjamin Yosevs, simply did not listen to children. His own or people’s.

“We brought our own food,” Benjamin informed Joshua, pointedly ignoring Socorro. Socorro shrugged a smile at Joshua. Her body told him, “It’s what I expected.”

Joshua was not happy to have to endure the rituals before eating. Kevin kept asking questions with his eyes and body. But his father was a guest and would not have eaten otherwise. The meal itself was anticlimactic. His father ate in stolid silence. Just like dinner at home, the same, the same slow torture.

After dinner, Joshua helped his father to the sofa in the living room while Socorro and his mother stayed in the kitchen with the boys. Joshua sat in his own chair, but he did not recline it.

“The visions—you have them, too?” The old man looked at Joshua with a puzzled expression.

“Too?”

“What did you see?” his father asked.

“See. Hear. Smell. Everything. Massacres, pogroms, murders, mass executions.”

“Names?” the old man asked quietly. “Did you receive names?”

“No. What do you mean, names?”

His father smiled painfully. “You may receive names. You will. You must act when you do. You must.” He was as serious in this as in anything Joshua could remember. He slumped back into the sofa when he finished speaking. Old, Joshua thought. He was so old. In the ten years he had aged, gone from a vigorous seventy to this.

“Why? What did you see?”

His father grimaced noticeably, took a deep breath. “It is very distressing. I was no Joseph. I could not tell a true dream.”

“I know.” Joshua did know what the old man meant. He wished that he wouldn’t couch it in such Biblical terms. Everything had to come from the Bible. His own visions had seemed real—in certain ones he had verified certain facts. But still, he could not, would not say they were “true.”

“Tell me of the last one,” his father said, leaning forward again, “the first one and the last one.”

Joshua told his father about the early pogrom. His father nodded his head but kept silent as Joshua struggled with the words. He told him of the machine-gunning in the ravine. When Joshua finished speaking, his father sat back onto the couch to think. He closed his eyes and tipped his head forward onto his steepled fingers. A gesture which had not changed in ten years. Except for the exceptional thinness of the fingers and the liver spots on his hands. His father did not speak for many moments. This also had not changed. Joshua remembered having to tiptoe around the house while his father thought with his eyes closed. He didn’t rest his eyes, like Uncle Morry, just thought with them closed.

“The first one I recognize,” his father said, leaning forward. “It is the same as the first one I had. In Poland. The last, I did not see. It sounds like Babi Yar. In the Ukraine.”

“Could be,” Joshua said.

“And the others?” his father asked. “Are they sequential? Do they follow a pattern?”

“A pattern through time, yes, but there are gaps. Do you still have them?” Joshua asked.

The old man leaned back in the chair. “Like David, I have been denied the way to God.”

The simple statement brought chills to Joshua’s neck. The way to God. He had not thought of God at all in any of this. Jew, yes, he had been forced to think of Jews, but not of God. He had not thought seriously of God since—he did not know how long. The God of the Old Testament. The Old Testament—his father would have gone through the ceiling if he heard Joshua say that. The Holy Scriptures! They are not Testaments—an old implies a new. That, and “B.C.” “B.C.E.” was all right—before the common era. The old man had his little ways.

The Old Testament God. The God of Vengeance. Was he suffering the Wrath of God? Bruce Silverstein in Hebrew class used to mock: there is no God and Jesus is his son, there is no God and Mohammed is his prophet. With no God how could there be a Wrath of God?

Benjamin huddled into himself and wept quietly. The way to God. Denied the way to God. This was enough to make his father cry. Joshua felt the distance between himself and his father as if it were a solid object. A solid, brick wall. His father had sought the way to God ever since Joshua could remember. And he had been denied. While Joshua, the apostate, had been rewarded. What kind of God was it that would do that to His believers?

Joshua did not know how to react to his father’s tears. He wanted to console the old man but knew the resentment that would follow.

“In 1916,” the old man said without raising his head, “in a vision of awful clarity, I was given the name of the little Austrian.” Hitler—his father never called him anything but “the little Austrian.”

“What?”

“I did nothing about it. At the end of the vision I was told what to do—where to find him during the Great War, and how to kill him. But I did nothing.”

“You were only thirteen at the time,” Joshua said.

“It was my first vision of the future, of atrocities that could have been prevented, and I did nothing. Thirteen was old enough.” He stared at the ground. “Old enough. Thirteen is old enough to be a man. And later, that chance was gone. The little Austrian lived—and six million Jews died. Six million.”

“You couldn’t have done anything,” Joshua said.

Benjamin looked up at Joshua. “Yes, I could have. I could have changed everything.”

Everything. Changed everything. The words reverberated in Joshua’s head. Everything. He had seen—and done nothing.

“Did you ever change the future?” he asked his father bluntly.

“Ah,” the old man replied, raising his finger stiffly to make his point, “the import sinks in.” This was the same gesture he had seen his father use in making a thousand points. The Talmudic finger.

“Yes,” Joshua said. Getting information from his father was a tiresome, trying thing. “The import sinks in! Did you?” His father nodded. “How do you know it worked?”

“You never heard of the Fairfax Massacre—1958? And why not? Because I prevented it. I took the blueprint that God gave me, and I prevented it. Fairfax Massacre, Bronx Butchery of 1977, Tel Aviv Crater, the Rio River of Blood—none of them took place. Because I acted.” The effort of the speech caused Benjamin to sit back in the sofa, to rest again.

“How did you do it?”

“God showed me a way. In every case, God showed me a way.” Now Joshua was uneasy. God showed him a way. Of course. If he were not himself having the visions, he would suspect that his father was crazy. He would know it. Maybe they both were crazy.

“You were seeing into the future in 1916?”

“Yes, since 1916 when I could have done so much. So much.”

Benjamin said he couldn’t speak anymore. He was obviously worn out by his efforts. Joshua helped him back to his car, rediscovering the frailness. Harlow went unbidden to the old man and kissed him good-bye. Kevin remained in the house watching a rerun of “Three’s Company” on television.

Standing naked in the bathroom with the light and fan on, Joshua was brushing his teeth. He was trying to figure out what his visions meant. Before, they had just been, but now he wondered if there was some meaning to them, some purpose behind them. And what had his father told him—if he had told him anything? The old man was so oblique. All he knew for certain was that he had visions and his father had them.

Socorro said something from the bedroom. Joshua stuck his head around the corner. “What?”

“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Socorro said. She was reading another Harlequin Romance, leaning against a pillow propped against the headboard of the bed. Her summer nightgown had slipped high up her legs. Her right leg was bent. The shadows beneath and between the legs, as always, beckoned. Promised. Her breasts flattened comfortably in the shiny blue material.

Joshua removed the toothbrush and said, “I’ll make you talk with your mouth full.”

“Ain’t never that full, white boy!”

Joshua returned the toothbrush to the cabinet and rinsed his mouth.

Socorro had not moved. She didn’t have to move. The blue nightgown rested lightly on her brown legs. Joshua moved, slid onto the bed.

“My father says he sees into the future. God is giving him orders, and he’s changing the future. Sort of.”

“You didn’t put on your pajamas,” Socorro noticed.

“Wasted effort.”

“Kevin’s still up.”

Sometimes kids were more trouble than—no, that was not the case. But there were times they should be asleep. He walked to the hallway. “Lights out!” he yelled into the hall before closing the door. Back to bed.

“He’s getting pretty old,” Socorro said as Joshua bounced onto the bed. It took him a second to realize she was talking about his father.

“He’s talking about the same kind of visions I have. He says they’re from God. And mine are getting closer to the present.”

“You’ve got to get up early tomorrow, so if you want to, now’s the time.” Her fingers tripped down his stomach. Joshua snapped off the light and rolled to meet Socorro.

At 2:26 in the morning Joshua awoke to a startling revelation, a startling remembrance.

“Like David,” he remembered his father saying. “Like David, I have been denied the way to God.” Did that mean that the visions had deserted Benjamin? Joshua got out of bed without disturbing Socorro, who slept like the dead, put on his pajama bottoms from the closet, and walked around the quiet house.

The nightlight from the boys’ room was enough to illuminate the hallway. In the kitchen he flipped on the overhead light. His eyes stung from the brightness. No cockroaches—the exterminator must have gotten them all the last time. Joshua sat at the kitchen table after taking a drink of water from the sink to wash away the stale taste of Socorro. The clock over the sink told him the time was 2:31.

Things became warm. The dull brown and gray pattern on the table cloth changed to a flat white of building bricks. Joshua stood on the balcony of an enormous block wall dormitory building. The air was heavy and hot. August, he thought, or September. Pennants and flags blew in the distance. People in police and army uniforms spread out below him, but aside from the faint snapping of the flags, an extraordinary quiet damped everything.

Joshua noticed the semiautomatic weapon as a hooded figure darted out from and then behind a curtain. A dull, muffled pop was followed by a series of screams, weapons fire, and the crashes of breaking glass. An athlete’s tote-all flew incongruously onto the balcony and landed at Joshua’s feet. Joshua looked into the apartment to discover what he knew he would find: the littered remains of a bleeding and broken body.

1972, he realized. Munich, the Olympics.

With scarcely a break for him to recoup his strength, Joshua was pushed into a vision of three machine-gun-wielding Japanese firing on a helpless airport crowd.

A bus bomb in Israel, a synagogue bombing in Vienna.

Undisturbed by Socorro, Joshua suffered through to the end of these visions. The short, lucid interval between made them more and more terrible. Another began. They were coming more closely together, approaching the present day quickly. Maybe when they arrived, they would stop. His father’s had not, had gone into the future, but he could hope.

At 4:04 Joshua noticed the clock again. His pajama bottoms were soaked in sweat. He could barely move. He forced himself to go to the drawer under the telephone where he took out a pencil and paper and returned to the table. He wrote two pages of notes before putting his head on the table.

He awoke once around noon in his bed and was fed a bowl of chicken soup by Socorro. He couldn’t speak and fell asleep again. Around four in the afternoon Socorro tapped on his shoulder. “Your father’s here,” she said.

Joshua opened his eyes. Socorro kissed him on the forehead. “My father,” Joshua said. “How did I get here?”

“I put you to bed. Called you in sick at work, and then called your father again. I’m scared, Josh.”

“Just a couple of minutes,” Joshua said. He was feeling better, more awake at least. He threw back the blanket and sat up to get out of the bed. Dizziness drove him back. The tops and bottoms of his pajamas didn’t match. His father was here. Maybe he was, in fact, going crazy. Already gone.

Joshua heard Benjamin speaking to Socorro in the hallway outside the bedroom. They were speaking—that was something.

His father said, “Certainly it’s a mental thing. It is all in his head.”

Socorro said something that Joshua couldn’t hear.

“Just as mine were in my head,” his father continued. “There are no physical manifestations. That doesn’t mean he’s insane. Jeremiah wasn’t insane.”

Joshua expected Socorro to ask, “Jeremiah who?” Instead she said, “Not a breakdown, then?”

“No, not a breakdown. It might get worse, too. The past is one thing. There’s nothing we can do about the past, but when it turns to the future…”

The door opened and Socorro, with her back turned, said, “I think I understand.” She faced Joshua and winked a smile. “He’s awake.”

The old man took his time in moving the chair from the vanity table and placing it next to the bed. Joshua felt more feeble than his father looked.

“Giving up your religion is no easy thing,” his father said as he inched his way into the chair.

“Do you want a pillow for that?” Joshua asked. His father waved the suggestion away. Joshua sat awkwardly up on his arms and answered his father’s comment. “I gave up my belief in God. The religion part seemed to follow logically.”

Joshua recognized the patronizing flicker of smile on his father’s lips. Yes, it said, I know it all. You might find out about it—and you are. These visions are the proof.

“Your wife called me again. We have things to discuss.” Benjamin held the notes which Joshua had made during the night. Running his finger down the pages he said, “Of these I saw only the Austrian bomb. And I would not travel to Austria. Jews who remain in Austria after the little Austrian…” Joshua had agreed with his father on this point, until he heard one of the few remaining Viennese Jews explain that he remained because to leave would have been a final victory for Hitler.

“Are you still having them?”

“Like David—”

“In plain English.”

“No.” His father looked away, fidgeted with his beard. “No. Not for two years this month. I had… I refused to…”

“Two years? Mine started two years ago this month.” Joshua wondered if his father’s ability, gift or curse, had been passed to him. And if so, why? Was his father too old to carry on? Would it go to Kevin, or Harlow, or both?

The last of the first, or the first of the last visions came in a dream later that night. It did not seem very important after the onslaught of the previous monstrosities. Two families in Elkhart, Indiana, were threatened and beaten by a gang in white sheets. When he woke, Joshua remembered the names of the victims and the K.K.K. members. As they were the first names he had received, he wrote them down. There were no instructions, merely the names. After witnessing death camps and various massacres, two families’ suffering did not impress Joshua. Three days later, they electrified him.

The story appeared in the local paper, on the National Page as a sidebar. The authorities had no clues as to who had done the beatings. Joshua sent an anonymous fax to the Elkhart police, listing the names he had written down. Nine days later, a series of arrests swept through the revivifying Ku Klux Klan of Northern Indiana.

Joshua had, he realized, seen two days into the future.

Had he acted more quickly, he might have prevented the attacks altogether.

Like it or not, the future was here. From the progressive pattern of the visions, there could be no turning back.

Joshua was still in bed recovering when the next vision vaulted him firmly into the future. It was a near-future, too, not more than a year or two away. As Joshua watched, in his vision, people began to die, strange, horrible deaths. People all over the nation, all over the world. Thousands, hundreds of thousands of them. Not every person. Only certain people, people with the “Jew gene.” Genocide had been genetically engineered, using a retrovirus which only became viable if a certain gene had a certain chromosome with certain characteristics. Joshua didn’t know enough about genetics to understand how it worked. It didn’t matter.

At the end of the vision, a smiling man in a white lab coat. On the lab coat a nametag which said in German, “Hauss, Assistant Geneticist, State Research & Development, Cologne.” After that came the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles during a concert featuring Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, on September the fourth. In the audience on an aisle seat in the high balcony sat Hauss. Behind him sat Joshua. While Te Kanawa sang “Glitter and Be Gay,” Joshua—

Joshua called his father and told him of the vision.

“This,” his father said over the telephone, “is a true vision.”

“So?”

“Fulfill God’s will. Go to Los Angeles.”

There must be another way, Joshua knew. There must be. What kind of God would demand a blood sacrifice? An Old Testament God! The same God he had turned from when he was old enough to think for himself: why would a God evolve, change when people changed? The God of Vengeance, the God of Wrath.

There must be a way to change this Hauss, to talk to him, to change his mind, to change his life. “There must be,” he told his father.

“There is no other way. You do it God’s way, or the vision comes true. I know! Don’t you think I tried to kill the little Austrian after 1933? After Czechoslovakia? After Kristallnacht? I know.”

“I can wait,” Joshua protested, knowing that September was too close to allow him.

“You cannot wait. You have been given the place. This man might be minutes away from his discovery, from publishing something which somebody else could use. Maybe he figures it out while listening to this woman sing.” There was no arguing with his father’s remorseless logic.

“Thou shalt not kill,” Joshua muttered wanly. A feeble argument.

“Remember Saul and what happened when he disobeyed the Lord.” Another Biblical reference. Surely his father could quote more and more of them, burying Joshua’s sickly objections. The Old Testament God did not relish being crossed. The Old Testament God. Magnified and Sanctified be the Great Name. Amen! Magnified and Exalted. Even the Arabs said that Allah was Merciful. A strange sort of mercy.

Knowing the outcome, Joshua made his plans to go to Los Angeles.

Harlow stood at the front door stamping his feet in a three-year-old’s anger. He was whining, “Don’t go.” Socorro stood behind him with her hands on his tiny shoulders. It was, Joshua knew, Socorro using the boy to express her own feelings. She did not want Joshua to go. Joshua did not want to go. She did not understand and had told him as much. How could she understand what Joshua himself could not understand? I’m going to do the bidding of a God that doesn’t exist. I’m going to murder someone I’ve never met. No, he could not explain matters to her. It was better to say nothing. So he had told her nothing of his plans. He withdrew the money from the savings account—the money they had saved for a trip to Lake Tahoe.

Love went only so far. He had always thought that in a conflict between love and duty, he would choose love. Every time. But this was different.

As for Harlow, there was no point in trying to reason with him. He kissed the boy first, Socorro second, and left. Kevin waved from the front yard and went back to spraying the garden hose on the driveway once Joshua was in the car.

Joshua arrived in Los Angeles on the morning of the third. His travel agent had arranged for the flight, the hotel, but not for the concert ticket. He wanted no record of that. He took a cab to Music Center, bought a ticket at the box office, pointing out the seat he wanted on the chart, paying cash, and stopped on the way back at a hardware store and bought twenty feet of 20 mil wire. He was surprised when he figured out how expensive the concert ticket was. Dame Kiri received as much as many rock stars. The wire was cheap.

In the Times he read about the Symposium on Human Genetics at U.C.L.A. This, he figured, was why Hauss was in the country. In the schedule he noted that a Theodor Alban Hauss was to give a talk in the morning. Open to the public.

The lecture hall was small compared to some he had seen in Princeton: Biology 101 had a seating capacity of over 200. This one would hold half that number. And only about half the seats were filled when Theodor Alban Hauss made his way to the lectern. Outside the door, in the little display box was a notice of the lecture. It was called, “Gene 14, Chromosomes 9 and 11—Breaking the Code.” The audience was mostly students with a few professors in the back. Joshua sat in the back.

When Hauss spoke it was in a heavily accented English.

Joshua didn’t understand what he was talking about, numbers and flags and computer outputs, references to works he’d never heard about. It was Greek to him with a German accent. Joshua did not stay to the end. He left with a pair of professors. One of them said, “Sounds like the same eugenics cant from the 30s.”

He’d see Theodor Alban Hauss tomorrow night.

The fourth of September was pure hell. Joshua could not concentrate on anything. The weather was hot and smoggy. He couldn’t see forty yards out his hotel window. He refused to go outside into air that was so foul—just a first stage smog alert, he heard, and then found out that there were two stages beyond that, that were worse. How could people live like that? All he could do was wait in the air-conditioned hotel. He went down to one of the shops under the hotel and bought a pair of leather gloves. Waiting for fifteen hours was too much. He tested the strength of the wire over and over. The gloves saved him from cutting his hands. He hated waiting. Especially as he knew what was at the end of the wait. Hauss, another Nazi, might deserve to die for what he would do, but Joshua didn’t want to be the instrument of his death. Joshua didn’t believe in the death penalty, had marched in protest of the Vietnam War. But here he was, across the country waiting for a concert to begin so he could kill someone he didn’t even know.

Finally, the time dragged around. Joshua took another cab to the Music Center. He walked up the outdoor steps like a man going to his own execution. The bright glare of the lights in the water fountains didn’t brighten his mood. The laughter of people meeting on the stairs and hugging in the foyer—he felt none of it. He bought a program. As he climbed the stairs under the fabulous chandeliers, he looked at the infinity of reflections in the mirrors lining the stairs—what did all of those grim-faced Joshua Ben Josevses mean? In the coat pocket of each one was an instrument of death.

The Bernstein “Glitter And Be Gay” was scheduled third, after a song by Peter Warlock and another by Samuel Barber.

Joshua scanned the crowd, the furs, the jewelry until he spotted Hauss. Hauss was with a woman, a blonde. They came and sat on the aisle in the row in front of Joshua. Just like in the vision. He tried to remember the woman from the vision, but she wasn’t there. They chatted—the woman spoke with an English accent. They had a good deal of trouble trying to understand each other. Language-wise, anyway. The woman was very impressed that Hauss had spoken at U.C.L.A. the day before. Hauss seemed impressed with the woman. Just before the orchestra tuned up, he patted her knee in a fatherly fashion, left his hand there when she didn’t object.

The Warlock song—Joshua heard it in snatches. What kind of a name was Peter Warlock, anyway? The Barber was tranquil. The audience applauded both loudly. And then the “Glitter And Be Gay” began. Joshua reached into his pocket for the wire. He wrapped one end around his left glove. He slipped out two and a half feet of wire and grabbed the remaining loop in his right hand. He tested the strength of the wire again.

Everybody watched the singer. Even Hauss did not seem to notice as the wire went in front of his face.

And then Joshua jerked the wire tight. Through the wire, through the gloves, he felt the neck give, the skin cut.

He heard a gurgle abruptly cut off.

He heard a scream.

He got away without anyone following him, before anyone except the blonde knew anything was wrong. And she probably thought that Hauss was having a heart attack. It had happened so fast that Joshua was gone before anyone could react. In a cab on the way back to his hotel, he felt relief—relief!—spreading through his soul like a warm syrup, followed, surprisingly, by jubilation. He had done it! And it hadn’t been so bad. It had been easy. Surprisingly easy.

Back in his hotel room he realized the scream he had heard had come from his own throat. It had made his own throat sore.

But not as sore as Hauss’ throat.

He had done it!

When he arrived home, Joshua was relieved to find that Kevin was down the street playing with Jeremy and that Harlow was taking a nap. Joshua was unlocking the door when Socorro came to see who was there.

“How was your little trip?” Socorro asked coldly. She did not move out of the way. She was still pissed to the gills. As she had a right to be. But there was nothing Joshua could do about it. Later tonight, maybe, he could soften her. He would certainly need her help. This was the most vile thing he had ever done. And he had done it. God, he had actually done it without trying to find another way. He should not have listened to his father. Something else would have worked. The neck giving, the skin cutting—Joshua could feel them still.

But now that it was over, now that he was safely home, the relief he felt was even greater. Relief for not getting caught, yes. But, he had to admit there was another relief also: relief at having been able to do the most vile thing. Not a trace of remorse as he’d expected. Relief! He might be able to carry on these missions. The first had to be the worst.

When he didn’t answer, Socorro asked, “Was it worth it?”

“I won’t know for about ten years,” he answered.

“Well,” she said, finally backing away from the door, “come on in.”

“I’ll never know,” he said flatly, the words coming of their own volition. That was true, wasn’t it? And just so, his relief crumbled. What was he doing? What was he becoming? He would have to try and stop. His father had been able: he’d been preventing tragedies for over fifty years, and he’d been able to stop.

But the visions would not allow him to stop. They came, unannounced, with terrible moments of suffering.

His father helped him with money when he had to go to Cologne, Germany, on his second trip, a trip to prevent Wildmar Grun from planting and detonating a series of neutron bombs in the major cities of Israel. Twenty-seven years in the future that would be—if Joshua did nothing.

Money, of course, was not the issue with Socorro. She wanted to know why, despite the fact that she already knew why. Joshua refused to give her any details. Not only for sound legal reasons did he want her to know nothing.

In Cologne, with the aid of a telephone book and a friendly, English-speaking operator, he managed to find Wildmar Grun. He was fourteen years old and had the purest blonde hair a boy could manage. The hair blew lightly in the breeze as he rode up and down the street on a skateboard in front of his house. Kevin would admire this boy’s skateboarding.

He could see Wildmar’s mother through one of the open windows of the house. She was an unremarkable looking woman—a peasant from the fifteenth century. Curtains billowed serenely. Her grief would be real enough. Joshua could imagine nothing worse than losing a child. No—he could not think thoughts like that. The boy did a trick on the skateboard, flipping it into the air as he stepped off. Joshua walked to him and dropped his map. The boy bent to help, and Joshua, according to his instructions, jabbed Wildmar in the back of the neck with a small syringe. He took the map from the boy’s hand and hurried away. He heard no screams.

The next day he left after verifying that Wildmar had died.

Again, he had done it. It had not been so difficult. Just following orders. Only in retrospect did his actions attack him.

After three more trips, Joshua had to stop, had to find a way to stop. Each of the victims had been younger than the one before: a ten-year-old in Paraguay, a girl from Canada who was Harlow’s age, and finally, Raymo Scoth from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In each case, the vision of destruction to Jews and to the world had been worse and the method of execution prescribed in a secondary vision.

Raymo Scoth had been three weeks old. Forty-five years in the future, he would set off a series of controlled explosions along a small, as yet undiscovered fault in the Mediterranean. The resulting earthquakes would shake Israel , and a large part of the Middle East and Europe into a destruction of Biblical proportions.

By this time, Joshua wondered if the destruction of Israel and all the Jews would be such a bad thing.

Raymo Scoth weighed three pounds and five ounces after having clung to life for three weeks. He had been the premature issue of a heroine addicted mother and no one knew who else.

According to the instructions of the secondary vision, Joshua managed to unplug the respirator in the nursery without drawing attention to himself. All the babies were asleep, and the attending nurse slept also, perched precariously on a padded chair by the door.

Somehow, Raymo Scoth had learned to breathe on his own. Not in the vision. The vision showed only the unplugging of the respirator, a brief struggle, then nothing.

Joshua picked up the sickly infant—feeling at the moment of contact how frail and infantlike his own father had become—felt the residual warmth from the incubator, and ran. He was gone before the nurse stirred in her chair. To get past the front desk, he jammed the soft infant into his jacket pocket—ignoring the sounds and tiny breakings as he twisted Raymo into the jacket. In the underground parking structure, he pulled Raymo from his pocket—such a little thing. Without thought, he threw him as hard as he could against the wall. Raymo hit slightly below the “e” in the “PARK HEADING IN” notice painted on the wall.

There was no blood. No blood that he could see. Only a quiet thud.

Only a quiet thud.

Thud.

Joshua ran. If Raymo was not dead, Jews would have to take care of themselves. This time it was over for Joshua. Nothing could induce him, no vision no matter how horrible could make him do this again.

And worse—this vision had been wrong in a detail! The infant had breathed on its own. The secondary vision had not shown that. Had been wrong! Factually wrong. What if it had been wrong in other respects? What if there were another way? His father had told him that there was no other way, but his father had been wrong before.

Thud.

Joshua returned to the house of his youth to speak to his father. He had not been home in over ten years. The house looked small and dark. The trees in the yard had grown, and one, a peach had died. The crack in the entryway tile had spread an inch or so.

A week had passed since his “trip” to Philadelphia. The quiet thud had only increased in volume. He heard it more frequently, wondered if he would ever be free of it. The tell-tale thud.

In the living room, his father sat in his favorite chair. This chair was a replacement for one which Joshua remembered. The chair Joshua sat in was old. He remembered dropping a lit match in it when he was eight. If he turned over the cushion, he knew, the burned spot would be there, a scorched hole the size of a walnut and shaped like the big island of Hawaii.

“So?” his father asked.

“How did you stop?”

“Stop? The visions? I see.” He steepled his fingers and closed his eyes.

Joshua waited for his father to continue. He looked over the knickknacks in the room. None had changed, not even in location. This room was a fossil, a museum. Just as his father was, a fossil of faith gone by. The past had been so comfortable and safe, so calm and innocent. His problems were with and in the future.

“God,” his father abruptly said, “when He discovers a good trick, He uses it over and over.”

If this comment was meant to illuminate, it failed. “And?” Joshua prodded.

“Why do you do these things?” Benjamin asked.

These things. These things? This neck yielding to a wire—the quiet thud! “What things?” Joshua asked.

“Let us not play word games. Why do you frustrate these visions?”

“Frustrate these visions?” Talk about playing word games. Let’s call a spade a spade here. “You mean why do I fly around and kill babies?”

His father was surprised or shocked by the brutality of the question. Maybe he hadn’t been prepared for not playing word games.

“No need to shout,” he replied. “Your mother… But yes, why did you… kill babies?”

“Because you told me I must,” Joshua said. Obey your father. He knew it was not true, even as he said it. He wanted to hurt the old man, blame him for what he himself had done.

“But why?” his father asked, nonplussed. “You could have sat on your hands and done nothing.”

Why is he doing this to me? Joshua asked himself. He’s the one who told me I couldn’t do nothing.

“Let me tell you,” his father said. “You do it to protect your own children.”

Without having to think about it, Joshua knew this was true. If not his children, then his children’s children. Unto the fourth generation. His children’s future. His own children, not the Jews of the world.

His father continued, “You remember the story of Abraham and Isaac in the land of Moriah?”

More Biblical cant, Joshua thought. But what other explanation could there be. Insanity? “Yes, when God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son. So?”

The finger rose into the air, the point was about to be made. “It is well that you remember your boyhood lessons. That was a good trick.”

There was nothing more his father would tell him, nothing about how to stop. Which meant that Joshua would have to continue. To find the strength to go on. Or the strength to stop without help. Where, he wondered, could he find the strength. In a belief in God? Did he believe in God now? Only God could make him do what he had done.

But did he believe?

Joshua’s last vision came when he was about to take a shower. He reached for the shower handles and stopped before turning them.

“Are you sure, sir?” a very young lieutenant asked. His voice was shaky.

“Yes. Input your code and turn the key!” It was an older man speaking. Joshua could only see the gray of the man’s hair and the general’s stars on his shoulders. When the lieutenant did nothing, the voice said, “This is a direct order from a superior officer.”

The lieutenant chewed his lip as he typed his code into the launch computer.

“Bear up, Lt. Mollar.”

“Yes, sir,” Mollar replied. He was unable to turn the key.

“Let me help you.”

“I’m sorry, General Yosevs, it’s mated to my fingerprint. I’ll be able in a moment.”

“Take your time, soldier. We can wait another thirty seconds.”

The young lieutenant waited another moment, sweat beading on his face. Then he turned the key.

Horrified, Joshua looked at the shower head and saw a mushroom cloud. He backed away and soon mushroom clouds filled the shower. Buildings on the tile melted. Cities crumbled. Forests burned away in seconds. Oceans evaporated. People disappeared in flashes of light. Not only Jews, but everyone, the entire future itself. Gone, Joshua knew without question, because of the madness of one man. A man who had managed to hide his insanity until it was too late.

Joshua had clearly heard the general’s name.

General Yosevs. “I’m sorry, General Yosevs, it’s mated to my fingerprint.”

Yosevs. I’m sorry, General Yosevs. Yosevs, the last name of Joshua’s father who was too old to be the general in the vision.

Naked, Joshua walked to the bedroom and dialed his father. He tried to think as the phone rang.

Yosevs was Joshua’s own last name. Joshua would never be a general.

“Hello,” his father answered the telephone cheerfully.

Yosevs was the name of perhaps one hundred others in the country. Maybe fewer.

Joshua did not know what to say. He held the phone and listened as his father asked, “Yes, who is there, please?”

Yosevs was the last name of Harlow and Kevin, both of whom, either of whom would be the proper age at the proper time. Another of God’s good tricks. Abraham asked to sacrifice his son.

“Which of my boys did you see?” Joshua managed to ask finally. To the silence which met his question he added, “In your last vision. Which of my boys did you see destroy the world?”

Still the silence from his father.

“Joshua, I am sorry,” the old man said painfully. “It has come to you, too. This final dilemma. I am so sorry.”

“Which one?” Joshua asked. The less time this took…

“I,” his father said. After another pause he said, “I saw only you, Joshua. Only you. You were the only one I saw. Not your boys, neither of them. And the vision that it would be the end of everything if I did not…”

“Kill me,” Joshua muttered. More loudly he said, “The end of everything, and you didn’t kill me.”

“I was not Abraham. I could not give up what he was asked to give up. I loved my son too much. Even though you had given up the faith, Joshua, you were still my son.” Even though he had married Socorro and his father hadn’t spoken to him in ten years, still he was his father’s son.

Harlow and Kevin—they were both his sons.

“What can I do?” Joshua knew what he could not do, but not what he could.

“Trust in God. Trust in love.” The two were mutually exclusive.

“Help me,” Joshua begged.

“I can’t,” his father answered.

Joshua put the telephone down on his bed. Yosevs was the last name of Kevin and Harlow, both of whom would be of the proper age at the proper time. Since his father had seen Joshua as the nexus, it must be either Kevin or Harlow. Either. Both.

Which? Joshua had no way of knowing. If the visions went to one of the boys, would they be the force that drove him insane? He could not know. Better dead than insane.

Socorro came to check on Joshua after he had been in the shower for more than an hour.

“Another vision?” she asked from outside the door.

He didn’t answer. He couldn’t speak. The water ran off Joshua, not cleaning what could never be cleaned. It was appropriate that he was in the shower. Many a good Jew had died in the shower.

Gas.

She helped him to dry, dress, and to bed.

“You know I love you and the boys,” he said, helplessly from the bed.

Socorro turned off the lights by the beds. “We’ll talk about it in the morning. Now, go to sleep.”

He slept.

When he woke, Kevin was standing at the foot of the bed. Harlow ran in and said, “Good morning, Dad,” with his usual chirrup, bounced up onto the bed.

“Mom went to the doctor,” Kevin said. “She’ll be back for lunch, she said, so don’t eat anything. She wants to go out.”

“McDonalds!” Harlow added.

Joshua wondered which doctor she was arranging for him to see. A psychiatrist, no doubt, who wanted to talk to her first. A psychiatrist couldn’t help him now.

Gas, he thought as he got dressed. Not Zyklon-B, like the Nazis had used in the camps. Carbon monoxide—they had used that, too, in early experiments.

“Come on, boys,” he said when he found his sons watching television. It was the last week before Kevin had to go back to school, his last week of Superheroes during the day.

“Where?” Harlow asked.

“The mall,” Joshua said. “The toy store.”

Kevin didn’t want to miss the show, but the toy store was too much for him to resist. “What about Mom?” he asked.

“We’ll be here when she gets back.”

Yes, they would be there when she got back. Poor Socorro. Pity poor Socorro finding them. Socorro who was innocent of all this.

“Can I get a model rocket,” Kevin asked. He turned off the television.

“And a shopping cart? They were out of them before,” Harlow said.

“We’ll see,” Joshua answered.

“That means ‘no,’ ” Kevin said to Harlow.

Joshua closed the door to the garage. He didn’t push the automatic door opener. “Get in and buckle up,” he said. How many times had he said that. He got into the car and started the motor.

“You better open the door,” Kevin said.

“In a minute.” Joshua got out of the car and opened Harlow’s door. He adjusted the car-seat belt, kissed Harlow on the cheek.

“You dumb-head,” Harlow said.

He didn’t know how long it would take. He could smell the supposedly odorless gas. Or maybe the car needed a tune-up. Probably did, hadn’t been tuned up in…

He got back in his seat.

“Dad.”

Socorro didn’t mind the rabbi talking over the boys. Joshua might have minded, but she didn’t know anymore. He had changed so much in the last months.

The old man, Joshua’s father, had arranged everything. If it had been left to Socorro, they would still be—

She didn’t mind the rabbi talking. She listened to his words, the rolling murmur of them, but didn’t understand, even when he spoke English. It didn’t matter. What could words do? What could anything do?

The old man, Joshua’s father, sat next to Socorro, and next to him was his wife. They had grown gray together. To lose a son was their grief. But she had lost two. And a husband.

The old man held his prayer book so tightly his knuckles showed white. More words.

She didn’t mind the rabbi and his words. What did he understand? The music was strange, and he never mentioned death.

Life. All he talked about was life. Those who go on, not those who have left. Those who have chosen to leave.

Life… she never had the chance to tell Joshua…

How could he have done such a thing? To his own sons? She knew it was no accident.

She was almost glad she hadn’t been able to tell him the news from the doctor. Two children were enough for him to take. She would protect the third, the one in her womb. Yes, for the good man that Joshua had been, for the man she had loved and married—not for the monster he had become—she would protect their child. She would give Joshua someone to carry his name, Yosevs, down through the years. She would protect his heir. Their child.

She placed her hands on her belly.

Their son.