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.