The Book of Jonas (15 page)

She went bowling with the league twice, but couldn’t muster the energy for a third outing. It required, she felt, too much.

So she stayed in bed for days. She lay in her room with the curtains drawn. And when the sun dared to filter through them, to brighten the room, she pulled the covers over her head, cursing its audacity for shining on a world in which Christopher wasn’t even there to see it.

At some point, Jonas passes out. The next morning he wakes up and has no idea where he is. He does not remember the previous night, cannot recall leaving Wilson’s, nor what he did afterward.

He sits up with a start, and finds that he is in his own bed, his own room. Rain rattles against the windowpanes. He does not remember finding his way back to his apartment, does not know how he even managed to dig out his house keys and get in the door. His head roars.

Through the fog in his head, he realizes that the phone has been ringing.

He decides he will try something, something he has not tried since he was very young, since he used to go to the mosque, since he happened one day as a child to meet a strange monk in red robes, who taught him how.

He takes the blanket off the bed, folds it into quarters, and places it on the floor. He remembers that he used to stay in the mosque after prayers, sitting on the prayer rugs. He kneels down on the folded blanket, sits back on his calves, closes his eyes. Everyone else was so eager to leave after prayers that they practically ran to put on their shoes, find a football, or run down the narrow streets. But he sat, waiting.

He straightens his back, breathes in, breathes out. He concentrates on his breath. But his head throbs with each
heartbeat, and before long his legs have fallen asleep and gone numb, and his stomach rumbles.

Frustrated, he stands up, goes into the bathroom, and takes a shower. He is filled with good intentions. Today will be the day, he thinks. It will be different. He will get some breakfast, and then he will go to the library. There are midterm exams coming up. He will call Shakri, tell her he is all right, tell her where he has been, explain his newfound focus, share with her his determination.

Out of the shower, he sits down on the edge of the bed. His initial burst of energy has worn off. He is tired. His headache has transformed into a dull weakness in his neck and shoulders. The rain beats against the windows, and he is disheartened at the thought of going out into it. He yawns. Perhaps he will rest his eyes, just for a moment. A short nap, and then he will be able to think clearly.

He lies down on the bed, and within minutes, he is fast asleep.

Friday, October 7 (AP)—U.S. officials announced today what they called a “highly successful” raid against insurgent targets. The action
, which officials say occurred last night, resulted in the deaths of at least fourteen enemy fighters and the capture of ten others, as well as the acquisition of “valuable intelligence information.” News on American casualties was not immediately available, although at
least two American soldiers are thought to be among those injured. A military spokesman promised that further information would be released in the coming days.

And then Rose was angry. The support group was begun out of anger as much as anything. It felt unjust. Something had been taken from her, and she had not been compensated. She felt as though she had been robbed. She wondered almost seriously whether she could sue.

It started by accident, when she saw an interview on a local public-access television show with the father of a boy who had gone off to war and been killed. Friendly fire, it had been called. He said he was unable to get the whole story, and was frustrated. He seemed angry, but calm, focused, pointed. When a caller to the program questioned his patriotism, told him that he was denigrating the memory of his son by questioning his mission, he carefully, calmly pointed out that when the caller had sacrificed one of her own loved ones, she would perhaps be entitled to that opinion, although he doubted very much that she would still feel that way, and that, in the meantime, she could go to hell.

Rose got in touch with him, contacting him through the TV station. They had coffee. He had been trying to organize other families, apply some pressure and learn the truth, and Rose admired that he had given his pain a focus. Roy seemed
to want to pretend that it had never happened, that the hole in their lives could be papered over with work and silence. Here was someone who not only faced tragedy, but used it to reach out to others.

Over dinner, the man explained that he was trying to build a critical mass. “They only respond to pressure,” he said. “If they think there is going to be a big stink about it, if they fear for their careers, they will talk. But if they think you are on your own, they try to dismiss you as unstable, or damaged.”

Rose made the decision almost without realizing it. It started with a visit to a neighbor, a few blocks over, who had lost a son. The next day she described the visit to the man she had met through the TV show. She described the grief that had filled the room, the overwhelming pain, but also her own sense of pride, of exhilaration at finally doing something.

Before she knew it, she was writing letters to families in other parts of the state, then to her congressman, her senator, the Defense Department, the White House. Soon she was hosting groups in her home. Soon she had a purpose.

A few nights later Jonas blacks out again, and when he wakes up he is kneeling on the floor in the hallway outside his apartment, unable to find his keys.

Another time, he blacks out and wakes up in the park by the river, next to the Fourteenth Street bridge, waves gently
lapping the shore under a pink dawn. He wakes up in the back of a strange car, parked outside a blue clapboard house, and he gets out of the car and starts walking. He wakes up in the end zone of a football field. Often, relieved, he wakes up in his own bed. To his mild amazement, he never wakes up in a gutter. Once, he wakes up in the crook of a thick tree, his legs straddling the branches, the pattern of the bark imprinted on his cheek. He wakes up in the firm grasp of a large bouncer, moments before being hurtled out through the back door.

These awakenings are enumerated, transformed into stories, to be told and retold, as they all sit around a table somewhere, and raise their glasses, and laugh.

And then maybe they plop you down somewhere, give you a mission, like a bite-size chunk, something you can digest. Patrol this area. Or take over that house. Search this ravine. Something you can get your head around, something that sounds simple. Protect this convoy. For that period of time, all of reality is supposed to fit into that mission; those three or five or ten words sum up the entirety of your existence. Recon that village. And it almost always goes pretty well. Not perfect. Never perfect. But usually, you go out and you do your mission and everyone comes home and then you’re eating a burger in the food hall.

But let’s say one time it doesn’t go well. Not well at all. Let’s say one time you let your guard down, or your CO gets distracted.
Or maybe nobody screws up. Maybe everyone does exactly what they’re supposed to do, exactly the way they’re supposed to do it, but you just get outsmarted this time. They lay a perfect trap. Maybe you’re in a village and everyone’s doing their job the way they’re supposed to, and there are women and children around. (Which is supposed to be a good sign, by the way. They tell you to always look to see what the women and children are doing. They’re smarter than you, and if they suddenly disappear, you know something’s up.)

But maybe they just get the better of you that day. Maybe there are women and children all over the place and despite that, all of a sudden maybe your point man is lying on the ground bleeding from the neck. And maybe you hear those little snaps, like a million tiny flags cracking in the wind, only you know they’re not flags. They’re bullets breaking the sound barrier as they pass by your head. And then maybe Jacobs goes down, like he’s decided to take a nap. And then all of a sudden you are certain of only two things: that you are not invincible, and that you would rather be anywhere in the world except here.

The phone rings, and reluctantly Jonas picks it up.

“Hello?” he says.

“Hello, Jonas?” Her voice is eager, nervous, but tries to cover itself with a tranquil veneer.

“Yes,” says Jonas.

“It’s Rose. Rose Henderson. I just wanted to call and say hi, you know, and to, you know, find out if you might have had a chance to think a little bit more. If you can remember.”

“Hi, Mrs. Henderson, hello. Well, I am not really sure what to tell you, ma’am, that I have not already said.”

“Oh, well, anything really. Anything. I would be interested in hearing anything.”

“Yes, ma’am, I know. You have said that before. And I absolutely promise you, again, that I would call you. If there’s anything, I mean.”

“I know you will. And I’m really sorry to keep, you know. I don’t mean to pester you. It’s just, if there’s anything.”

“I know, ma’am. And believe me, I will. I absolutely will. I promise.”

“I know, I know. And really, I want you to know that it could be just anything, you see. It might be something that you don’t think means a thing, that maybe doesn’t seem very important. And to you maybe it isn’t; maybe to you it’s just some silly little detail that you wouldn’t normally even acknowledge. But to me. Well, it would just mean the whole world to me.”

He remembers the ruins of a stone fortress on the road outside the village, a caravanserai. They play there, he and his younger sister, Miriam. Miriam the delicate, he remembers, the graceful, transformed in his memories into a glowing presence that
trailed him around through childhood. Sometimes, he remembers, his elder brother, Sirhan, came along as well, but not very often.

Later, he will read about them in
The New Book of Knowledge
encyclopedia, the string of inns or rest stations that were built beside roads branching out along the vast network of the Silk Road, stretching from Shanghai to Colombo to Cairo to Vienna.

But as yet he is ignorant of the stone fort’s original purpose, and so they are free to turn it into whatever they want it to be: a manor house on a plantation or the royal court in Xianyang, or the Palace of Versailles, or an Aztec pyramid. The pile of rocks is anything they want it to be.

And so it is that one day they find themselves touring the Taj Mahal, or scaling Mount Everest, or climbing the turrets of King Arthur’s castle, and they round a corner and there they are, crouched against a low wall, a group of young men, bearded, with long guns slung casually over their shoulders. Sirhan is among them. They smoke something from scraps of rolled-up newsprint, and they stand suddenly when they notice that they have been seen.

Sirhan strides over to them. He stands nearly two heads taller than Younis, and his eyes are deeply bloodshot, the pupils contracted to pinpoints.

“You should not be here,” he says, his voice gravelly and low.

Younis is about to say something in response, tease him, or challenge his right to tell them what to do. But then he sees that this person before him, looking like his brother and sounding like his brother, has been replaced by someone else, someone with eager eyes and a hard voice.

Younis reaches down and grabs Miriam’s wrist. “Let’s go,” he says, backing away, unwilling to turn his face from the group of men, unwilling to allow them out of his sight. But Miriam pays no attention, and crouches down to pick up another colored stone she has spotted in the dust.

“I said let’s go,” says Younis, and yanks her arm, pulling her up to her feet. She cries out, but Younis refuses to let go, moves her so that she stands behind him, and backs them both away from the group of men, some of whom now smile in a way that makes him wish he could move much more quickly.

And then it’s early November, the first truly cold night of the season, the smell of snow on the air, their breath turning to pale smoke under the street lamps, the welcome warmth of Shakri’s apartment, and Jonas punches the wall in her living room.

Her first reaction is to laugh.

He had been out drinking with Hakma at Wilson’s, and Shakri met him there and walked with him to her apartment. He had been eager to see her.

During the walk, under bare, shadowed trees half-lit by street lamps, maples and oaks stripped of all but their most tenacious leaves, both of them cold despite walking briskly, because until then the day had been warm and they wore only light jackets, she starts in on him again.

“How much time do you think you spend drinking with
Hakma?” she says. Her face wears the blank and open expression she uses when she is trying to make a point. It is an expression with which he has become familiar.

“Oh, please, just do not start.”

“No, really, I want to know.”

“Not so much.”

“Really? Because I make it to be every night this week.”

“I had literature class on Monday night.”

“So what are we, Thursday? That’s four out of five nights, Jonas. How much money do you think you spend?”

“But Wilson’s is cheap.”

“You have this tremendous opportunity. Look at what you have been given. You’ve got—”

“What I’ve been
given
?”

“You’ve got the chance to do something amazing, to be an amazing person, and you piss it away in a bar with that angry Kurd.”

By this time they have arrived at her apartment. Shakri fumbles through her purse for her keys and finally gets the door open. But the whole time she keeps at him, reminding him of all he is throwing away.

“Look,” she says as they walk into her living room. “I know you’ve had a rough time.”

“A rough time?”

She starts to say something else, but Jonas cuts her off.

“What would you know of a rough time? You’ve had everything handed to you.”

“That’s not true and you know it! And you also know you can’t wallow like this.”