Who or what is the antagonist in Robert Kloss’s novella, How The Days Of Love & Diptheria?

Or is there an antagonist to speak of?

The book is written in the second person; it is about “you”, a vague yet powerful individual or force that seems intent on bringing the apocalypse. I say “seems” because it’s possible that the violence that comprises this “apocalypse” is merely a consequence of a different mission, one that involves the pursuit of a nameless boy whose parents “you” have already slain. Across the countryside, and through the years, this boy hides and persists, desperate at first, terrified of “your black masks and long teeth”, living under the soil as “your horses thundered the hillsides”.  Later, by his wits, and through a little violence of his own, the boy returns to civilization (which has already been decimated by that diptheria of the title); he lives among people, falls in love, procreates, only to see his son killed in an onrush of light and noise that he and his wife somehow survive. An explanation or motive for any of this isn’t given.  Animals fall from the sky.

This is the plot of the book as best I can describe it. It is a beautiful and original piece of writing, though strange and contradictory. We are told that this is the story “of what you did and what the boy intended to do…the story of how the boy followed you and yours.” But while we are witness to the first part - what you did - we never quite see the second part - where the boy follows you. Or, though we do see him follow you, we see that he lacks urgency, so that he appears to not be following you. He becomes distracted. Love happens to him. He moves from place to place in a way that might be aimless. And toward the end, when he thinks to himself, “I should have killed them,” it seems that he means “you”, though he never appeared to have a chance to kill you.

But the contradictions, if that is what they are, are less a problem than a part of the story’s structure. The very first paragraph includes the caveat, “Few stories so conflicted as who was found and how they were found,” and goes on to describe the opposing ways the parents may have been slain. This is followed by one of the story’s central images - a house that burns without being consumed. Evoking the story of Moses, who hears the voice of Yahweh rising from a bush that “was alight, yet did not burn”, the episode lends the story a prophetic or holy tenor. We recognize that the world of the story is not a world we entirely know. Things can happen that ‘can’t’ happen. And because the house in question had belonged to the boy’s parents, we are now prepared to witness the events of the boy’s life in similar terms, as paradoxical.