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.
And Isaac saved the children of Abraham.
And the children of Abraham filled the land.
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.
And then the father abandoned the son, charged him to be a man before his time and lead his people through the dark times.
And then the son was left by those he loved, the father and the whore and the LORD his God.
And then the son led his people, and pretended at a voice he could no longer hear.
And the people were sheep and the son was a liar and they were fruitful and multiplied.
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. Stilclass="underline" 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.