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You will doubt.
You’ll hate yourself for it, but you will.
Not at first. When you meet him again, the man who will become Adam, only hours after stepping through the doorway into a new world, and you see something in his eyes that you’re too young to understand but you are old enough to know you can use, and you hold his gun to your chest, free and powerful and divine in the knowledge that he could never kill you, even if he wanted to, which the tears in his eyes are telling you he doesn’t – you’ll never have been more sure of your purpose.
He tends to have that effect on you.
But you’ll begin to doubt not long after that. It’s not even the end of this new world that will do it; you were warned, after all, that that would happen, and as far as you’re concerned, your world ended the moment you left it. Or maybe it ended earlier, with the swing of a pickaxe, or earlier than that, when a stranger came to the inn and cast a shadow in a shape you recognized, or earlier still, when your mother died. Whatever this place is, you’ll think, it’s really more of a beginning, and even the ash that turns the sun into a pool of dim angry red above you will not shake you. It will just make you feel like you really are saving the world from something.
You’ll start to doubt when you arrive at the cave and find it closed. You’ll doubt for just one moment and then you’ll tell yourself it makes sense, doesn’t it, that you would still be here, that this would still be your task, tearing this stone apart until it resembles if not a boat then a path cut through the darkness, and at the end, you tell yourself, there will be light. And after that you’ll believe again for a long time.
You’ll believe when you see her again, Elisabeth, standing behind her father, looking at you like she knows you even though you’ve barely shared four words between you, all of those on paper and in the faltering sign language that you once eagerly learned but, at that point, barely remember. She’ll forgive you your ignorance. She’ll forgive you for a lot of things. And the things she wouldn’t forgive you for, you’ll never tell her anyway.
You won’t see her for long at that point, but you will be content to wait and know that she was promised to you, and when she comes to you again in the cave, she will be scared and you will hold her and try not to think about how she’s almost as small as Agnes was when you last saw her. You will have been trying not to think about Agnes for a long time at that point, or wonder how she’s doing, with no mother and now no father or brother, either. You’ll tell yourself as you hold Elisabeth that that world has ended and the new world has been born, just as Adam promised, and it’s here in your arms and there’s no need to remember everything before, because there’s only the future now. It’ll take a while before you learn that trying not to think about something is really the same thing as thinking about it. Then you’ll learn better ways to forget.
You and Elisabeth will spend nearly every moment together for two years after that. You’ll come to know her well, her wit acerbic even at that age, and although Adam told you she needed you you’ll also learn that you need her, to teach you about the ways in which this new world is still so different from yours. And when she kisses you for the first time in the middle of another night awake, crying about her father, you will kiss back and pretend that it’s just to make her feel better, it’s the nice thing to do, really, and anyway, Adam promised that she would be yours so all is happening as it should. Soon after, when you go farther than that, you’ll tell yourself you’re giving her a gift and you will believe it and she won’t tell you otherwise. But later, decades later, a lifetime later, when you really start to doubt, you’ll think about how young she was then, and though you weren’t much older when compared to the whole arc of a life, you were old enough, and you should have known -
But there are a lot of things you should have known. And Elisabeth wasn’t the only thing that Adam promised you.
You will meet him again. Jonas. The Savior. The first second you see him, you will think that he’s dead, and doubt will pierce your chest like a bullet until you cut him down and hear him gasping, brought back to life like a true Savior, and you the miracle worker. He will not like you at first; he’ll resent you for saving him, and you’ll resent him, for not understanding his role, for not understanding that he was promised to you, for insisting upon being – just a man. Just human.
Soon enough you’ll let go of resenting him. Instead, after meditating and reading and thinking often of the sadness around his eyes, you’ll decide that it’s your calling to shape him into what he needs to become. You’ll think you have finally understood why Adam sent you – Jonas needs you, to become more than human, just as the world will become more than itself when Adam brings about Paradise. When Jonas shows you the God Particle, still nascent but bright as the sun itself, which you have not seen for more than a few days at a time since leaving your world behind, you will be sure that this is right. That all is happening as it should. That you and Jonas will fix everything, together. And you will forget about the doubt, for a time.
Elisabeth will be angry with you for a while, because you will so obviously be thinking of Jonas nearly every waking hour – how to fix him, how to shape him, how to have him – until you can make her understand that your heart has room for both of them. This will not be a lie. But Jonas won’t want his place in your heart for a long time, and until then you will privately and somewhat blasphemously imagine that this is the betrayal that Adam spoke of, not an ultimate lack of faith but an ultimate lack of interest.
You will learn that your Savior is stubborn, and irritating, and painfully sad, but also – funny, and driven, and kind. And still, puzzlingly, so human. Nothing like Adam at all, except in moments when you catch him staring at the God Particle and its cold light reflects back in his eyes and casts an empty desperate hunger across his face; then he will look exactly like Adam. In those moments you will want nothing more than for him to want you half as much as you both want what the God Particle could give you.
The first time he touches you you’ll know it’s just because he’s lonely, but you won’t care at all. What does it matter if he thinks of someone else when he kisses you, says her name when he comes apart – it’s still your body he seeks out; you are still of use. And it means you get to touch him, which you have wanted since you first saw him, your hope and purpose made flesh – every sound that you can draw from him proof that you are on the right track, that your faith is true.
And eventually you will be rewarded for it. When he finally says your name, raw and desperate, with his skin on your skin, it will feel like being made new all over again. When he finally allows that he wants something from you, you will know that you’re doing just what Adam wanted you to: showing Jonas the breadth of his own power, making him new in turn.
Almost without your noticing, the three of you will make a life together that is nearly…mundane. You will settle into routines. Questions of doubt and faith will recede into the minutia of the day to day. You will be happy.
For a while.
Until the God Particle finally changes, and Elisabeth announces that she is pregnant.
Then you will be weighed down with doubt so strong that you can barely move. For the first time in your life, something will have happened that no one told you about. You will have no guide, no reassurance, no prophecy that tells you how you should be a father. You’ll just have memories of what it was like to be a son. Something will shift in you and the blinding light of your dogged faith will falter and dim, eclipsed by fear. You will hide this from Elisabeth because she herself is deeply concerned about what it will be like to raise a child in this world that seems now to be on the verge of a paradigm shift. You will try to hide it from yourself like you’ve hidden other things before but you will fail. You will confess to Jonas like he could absolve you of anything and he’ll take your face in his hands and become for you what you always were for him: a beacon of faith and reassurance that all will fall into place.
It will, but not in the way that you want.
First everything will fall apart. One day you will enter the cabin that you and Elisabeth and Jonas built together with your own hands, where you left your child because you thought she was safe, you believed that the three of you could keep her safe, your child, Elisabeth’s child, the only real miracle you will ever witness, and she —
She won’t —
You’ll feel in that moment like you betrayed her somehow, and then you’ll remember that there was, at one time, someone who you knew would betray you. Someone you had been warned about.
If he could die, his throat would have collapsed beneath your hands when you caught him.
He will look at you like you’re the one betraying him.
You won’t even see Elisabeth before you leave.
You won’t know what you’re doing, only that something will be pounding in your blood. A ball of light turning and turning endlessly in the back of your mind. The God Particle. It will call you like it is creating you and wants to consume you. It will say your name in your head and it will sound like him.
It will take you back to a place that isn’t your home anymore. You’ll go looking for him, Adam, while still feeling Jonas’s throat collapsing beneath your palms. You’ll see him and wonder how he and Jonas could possibly be the same person; the distance between them is the size of your entire life. But you will be perfectly transparent to him, like you always were. He’ll know exactly what to say to you. He’ll know how to make you sure again.
He’ll tell you that Jonas was naive to what happened. He’ll tell you that he can bring her back. Your fear will turn endlessly in the back of your mind, but you’ll believe him. Savior. Miracle worker. You’ve been faithful, you’ll think, forgetting that just days ago faith paled in comparison to the human work of living.
Adam will give you a white collar and turn you back into someone you think you recognize, but at his behest you will do things that you did not imagine you could do. You’ll doubt but you’ll replace it with anger. Anger at Jonas for being human and fallible and foolish. Anger at the people who sit at your Sunday services for swallowing your lies about God so readily. Anger at the man you recruited to help you for daring to look at you the way you used to look at Jonas; for daring to remind you that that is the way you still look at Adam.
The way I used to look at him. Until I killed Claudia and found the rest of her journal.
You should have been angry at Adam all along. He was the betrayer; he made you the betrayer in turn. You betrayed Elisabeth by leaving her when she needed you to be with her. You betrayed Jonas by believing he was capable of harming your daughter. Your betrayal played no small part in making him into the thing that took her.
This is what I would tell you, if I were able to. If warning you wouldn’t destroy me. And I - you - we still have a purpose, one that I finally understand. You can be the Savior instead. You can set it all right again. I will set it all right again. I will.
But I wish I could tell you:
You will doubt.
And you’ll be right to do so.