“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.