Rapture

Noah’s sons stand before him. “Dad,” they whisper. “Dad. Dad.” Noah lies on his side, a pillow beneath his head, a pillow between his knees, the duvet clutched to his chin. He looks at his two sons, sideways. He sees them. Their faces full of relief.

“It’s Sunday. Dad. Are you okay?”

Noah pulls the duvet over his nose. “Tomorrow,” he murmurs. “I’ll get up tomorrow.”

The boys nod. They are good boys. Gabe, firstborn, puts his hand on Elliot’s head and steers him out of the room. He closes the bedroom door so gently that Noah could weep. Noah lies in the dark, breathing his own warm breath under the duvet.

Surely it was just a slight miscalculation. Surely the end will come.

The light fades and returns. Noah rises, as promised, and snaps the blinds up. He squints, stunned, into the brightness. The sky is blue, with fluffy white clouds of the sort favored by his nine-year-old son in Crayola drawings. Birds sing in the ash trees that shade his expansive backyard. It is unbelievable. He walks into the bathroom, braces himself against the toilet, and vomits.

When Noah was a child, his father taught him to swim by encouraging Noah to paddle through the water toward him; once Noah had nearly reached him, his father would take two steps back. They traversed the entire tricky pool this way. Noah feels, this morning, as though he has been flailing in an infinite swimming pool. Child-Noah had fought and wept and kept moving. But now Noah’s limbs are heavy and slow, the fight in him gone cold. His whole body hurts, the pain emanating from his bowels, deeper than nausea. He has not slept. Instead he prayed, with all of his might, for the world to end. He wraps himself in his maroon velour robe, which is technically his ex-wife’s maroon velour robe, or it was her robe until she abandoned their family, at which point ownership of the robe defaulted to Noah. For a while he wore the robe because he was sad, and then he wore the robe because he liked the maroon, and the velour. Today he wears the robe because he must go outside and retrieve the newspapers, and he is far from emotionally prepared to put on pants.

Outside are two newspapers: today’s and yesterday’s. The earth still spins, time moves forward, Noah tucks the newspapers under his left armpit and reaches down to remove the yard signs in front of his azaleas. Blow the Trumpet . . . Warn the People. The End of the World Is Almost Here! His neighbor looks up from his lawnmower. He smiles at Noah. His smile is hard to read. Noah hurries back inside.

At the kitchen table Noah spreads out the papers, ready for God’s work in the world to be revealed to him. He wants to understand. But then he glances up from the newsprint to see two cereal bowls, the dregs of milk, the spoons at rest. He listens for Elliot and Gabe, but the house is still. Seized by terror, he stumbles to their bedrooms. Their sheets are rumpled; the boys are gone. Abducted, he thinks wildly. He finds his cell phone on the kitchen counter: sixteen missed calls and seven new messages. He speed-dials Gabe. It rings and rings and goes to voicemail. He calls again. No answer. He calls a third time, knowing he will next have to call his ex-wife in California, to report their lost children. Or maybe: how did he not think of it first? His sons have been taken, and Noah has been left behind.

“Dad,” whispers Gabe.

“Hello?” Noah shouts into the phone. “Gabe?”

“What’s wrong?”

“Son, where are you?”

Gabe’s voice takes a hard edge. “I’m at school,” he hisses. “It’s Monday.”

“Oh, praise God,” Noah says, to no one, resting his forehead on the refrigerator. The phone’s gone dead.

The boys have left the box of cereal open on the counter. Noah sniffs at its contents. He hasn’t eaten...