“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.
And the father duped the son, and made him believe.
And the son wasted his life on a fantasy, and taught his Children to worship his father, who was a piece of shit, and the LORD laughed and laughed.
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.