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.