The Book of Jonas (18 page)

Other than the steel benches, the room is empty, spinning a little in his vision, filled with only the memory of former residents, the marked-up walls implying carelessness and violence.

“Slow night,” says the guard.

For a time he sits on the steel bench and stares at the back of the door. He notices that something is written there, roughly printed at an angle in small, pale letters, written using a blue marker evidently down to its last gasp of ink. Unable to read it from where he is seated, he crosses the room to get a better look. It says, “Jezus died for you’re sinz.”

Jonas goes back and sits down. The bench is just wide enough to lie down upon, which he does, his head against the hard steel and already starting to ache, and he falls asleep.

Rose gathers them together in ones and twos, writing letters and making phone calls, and even, occasionally, despite her unfamiliarity with technology, sending an e-mail. She will act as a facilitator. When they meet her, they will usually be impressed by how big she seems, her personality filling the room, this little woman with the shock of red hair and the booming voice, and the hugs she gives out like Halloween candy.

She is deft in her ability to not allow the conversation
to come around to her own loss. It is not about her, she always says, even though they know that, at least to some degree, it is.

He remembers that they came to see him while he was still in the hospital. When they asked him whether he wanted to come to America, he was surprised. He would have to think about it, he said. And he did. He thought about it for days.

He does not remember making the decision. For a moment after he told them yes, he thought that maybe there was a disconnection between his brain and his mouth. He didn’t remember actually making the decision, only the act of telling them about it, and he remembers being a little surprised to hear himself saying it. He pictured his mouth making the decision, and the thought made him smile almost imperceptibly, an expression mistaken, at the time, for happiness.

He thinks about it often. Two words, “I’ll go,” that mark the difference between two paths, two entirely different lives. Words that set in motion a chain of events stretching to fill years. Sometimes he wonders what it would have been like had he said no, as he almost did, balancing on that sharp edge of time in the moment before he opened his mouth, that split second that grows in his mind, stretching as surely as the subsequent events to fill another, different lifetime. Perhaps he’d
still be back there, a refugee and not part of a diaspora. Perhaps he’d be dead, left to starve in the street, or left to sell himself, or sell others, or steal and kill.

Or maybe not. Maybe it all would have turned out the same, but by different means. Maybe it all would have happened, the plane ride, the suburban adolescence, the university, Shakri, everything, right up until he was where he found himself right then, as he thought about it, in his present reality, sitting on a steel bench in a jail cell, somewhere in western Pennsylvania.

Thursday, October 14 (AP)—U.S. military officials today acknowledged a raid that occurred last week and claimed the lives of two American soldiers. A third U.S. soldier is listed as missing in action. Army spokeswoman Emily C. Walters declined to identify the soldiers pending notification of their families.

One official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that the early-morning raid had resulted in the killing of twelve suspected high-level insurgent fighters and the capture of ten others.

Details of the raid were not yet available. Officials estimate that an additional ten to fifteen civilians may also have been killed or injured during the fighting.

The area in which the raid occurred has been described as a lawless border region and a source of consternation to U.S.
military officials because of the insurgents’ ability to blend in with the local population and the relative absence of national governing structures.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her go down. I don’t know who shot her. Everybody was popping off like crazy. We were shooting. They were shooting. We were trying to knock out their vehicles before they made it into the village. But we didn’t even manage to succeed at that.

I don’t know who hit her. I’m pretty sure it was one of ours. Funny thing is, it didn’t even look violent. She just fell over. I remember her hair puffed out a little, right before she went down, but that might be my imagination. I don’t think I misremember it, though. Not something like that.

It was nothing, really. A blip. At the time. Nothing. For a while, I thought she was going to make it. I thought maybe she had simply had the good sense to get out of the way. It happened so fast. She just fell down. Like she was tired. Like she wanted to take a nap.

Like his past, Jonas’s future comes to him as a series of images, half dreams that flicker, one to another, as though lit by a strobe. In one, he is married, a hazy female form who may or may not be Shakri, and a child tugs at his pant leg. Then he is walking down a path through the woods, when suddenly he is blocked by a precipitous gorge. Then he is being awarded some kind of prize, or medal, on a podium above a cheering throng. Then he walks down a street in a large city, car horns blaring and a sheen of dirt on his skin. He must cross the canyon, but no obvious method presents itself. He is carried over the heads of the crowd, his name (which name?) chanted as he floats on a tide of hands. A tree has fallen across the gorge, and looks to be a way across. He climbs onto the fallen log and takes a step forward. A wooden ladder appears in the middle of the street, fixed to the ground and stretching so high that he cannot see the top of it, which disappears into clouds above the tall buildings. He is halfway across the fallen tree when he looks down. He grasps the ladder and places his foot on the first rung. Halfway up the ladder he can no longer see the ground. Neither, standing on the fallen tree, can he see the bottom of the chasm. He looks out to see that he is balanced on the rim of a pint glass, beer lapping at its edge like a frothy, golden sea. Vertigo overcomes him, and he cannot take another step. He imagines falling backward into the glass, cleansing himself in
it, the pleasant numbing sensation in his limbs and the bubbles tickling his skin. He feels the heady, airy feeling of knowing he could fall, the release of doing so. But although he could do so at any moment, he has not yet fallen. So there he stands, hovering over everything, unable to fall and unable to cross, unable to make the decision to do either.

Sometimes Younis wakes on the mountain to a scratching sound. At first, still asleep, he thinks it’s a rat clawing at the earth beside his head, searching for morsels. But then, alert, he realizes that it is the sound of pencil on paper. Outside, the wind whistles up the slope past the cave’s shallow mouth, and he is surprised he can hear anything above it. But the scratching sound is distinctive, sandpapering his consciousness, dotted by sharp points of punctuation. Younis keeps his eyes closed, listens as the scratching sound fills the cave. Then he opens one eye, just enough to see. Across the fire, Christopher’s attention seems entirely occupied by the page before him.

Another time, Younis wakes to a different scratching, this time a longer and sharper sound with a pronounced metallic ring at the end of it, and he looks up to see Christopher hunched next to the fire, a whetstone balanced in one hand, moving his other hand back and forth from the wrist, the long blade of his combat knife flashing occasionally in the flickering light.

Younis notices that when Christopher sharpens his knife, he sits facing him across the fire, the book lying shut next to him on the ground with the pencil tucked inside. But when Christopher writes in his book, everything is reversed. He sits facing away from Younis, the knife either lying on the ground beside him or stuck, hilt up, in the rocky ground.

Younis finds being woken by either of these sounds unnerving. Both actions, the sharpening of the knife and the writing in the book, are obsessive. At one point, Christopher sees that Younis is awake, stops what he is doing, looks over with a half smile, and offers him something to drink, asks about his pain, tells him he has only one dose of morphine remaining.

Younis begins to wonder what is going on. Having arrived, having set up camp, Christopher seems inclined to stay forever. Younis tries to determine how long they have been on the mountain, he drifting in and out of consciousness, Christopher scratching out his defenses. He wonders why Christopher seems so unconcerned about getting back to his unit. He wonders why he has made no effort to get in touch with his comrades. He wonders why Christopher seems not to care whether they ever leave.

And the more he ponders these questions, the less he likes any of the answers he can find.

A photograph: Three soldiers stand tall in rising dust that has probably been kicked up by a helicopter’s rotor wash. They are covered in Kevlar and strapped with equipment, and they wear dark sunglasses that make them unknowable, showing only their stern mouths. They carry their weapons pointed at the ground, and behind them sits a pile of boxes and large bundles covered by a tightly wrapped tarpaulin. They are waiting for something. Something important, something urgent. They are invincible, human only in the way that robots look human, as if they have been created to look that way, and could easily have been created to look another way if that had suited the purpose of their creator.

Another soldier, a local soldier, sits on a crate in the dust beside them. If the standing soldiers are approximately human, this soldier sitting in the dust is entirely so. He does not wear sunglasses or Kevlar or a stern mouth. He wears a mustache, and his helmet looks to be fifty years old. His face shows clearly under the helmet’s broad brim, the bags under his eyes, the wrinkles on his face, and he looks to be wiping from his brow an accumulation of dust and sweat. He seems to be tired. So tired. He seems to just want this whole thing to be over.

Rose does not need to raise her voice very much in order to be heard over the murmur of conversation that fills the recreation center. Her distinctive contralto reverberates from the steel folding chairs, the laminated tabletops, the worn Formica tiles, all of it lit from above by hanging fluorescent tubes. She tells those assembled that Pastor McConnell will lead a prayer group later in the afternoon, or that the most recent funding drive has raised a significant amount, or that she has received a letter from Senator So-and-so.

Some of them are already turning gray at their temples, she thinks. Some are losing their hair, like cancer patients. Some are talking continuously, as though trying to expel pent-up emotion in controlled bursts, while others remain mostly silent. A few seem to be totally unaffected.

She will gather them together, first at the church near her home in the Pennsylvania hills, then regionally, renting out moderately sized meeting halls for the occasion, then nationally, in convention centers, as the need for the organization grows in direct proportion to the nation’s grief.

She is careful not to talk much about herself at these meetings. If forced, she says only that she has lost her son, biting her lower lip, nodding her head slightly, commiserating fully with someone else she knows has lost at least that much. She feels no need to talk about it, does not want to burden others with
her story, but gains strength from their presence, from being connected to them.

Some of the meetings take on an Irish-wake quality, boisterous and laughing back tears. Others are somber. They share in common an underlying stream of activism, of information sharing, of tips about veterans’ benefits and job training and education funding, and a subtle segregation between the veterans themselves and those who love them, the former finding one another out and talking in slightly rougher language and at lower registers.

And they also share the events’ organizer, a little woman with red hair and a booming voice who calls them together for a moment of silence, or an item of housekeeping, or just to tell them that dinner is being served in the dining hall.

He remembers waking up in the firelight. He remembers the dull ache covering the length of his arm. He remembers coughing on woodsmoke. He remembers his legs tingling and numb. He remembers the pain sharpening as he came to. He remembers the figure hunched on the other side of the fire. He remembers hearing one of two noises: the metallic ring of steel on a whetstone, or the rough scratch of pencil on paper. He remembers not knowing which of the two noises he preferred.

She was not supposed to be there.

She appeared, gently, across the dusty field. She was not a mirage. We were dug in where we were supposed to be, just like we were supposed to be, two kilometers to the west of the village. But there she was. Poor planning.

Skeets called it out first. “Two hundred meters,” he said.

She was rolling a stone around in the palm of her hand. Then she was walking toward us, her long white dress billowing behind her as she walked, reflecting the sun. Then the trucks were on the road, kicking up dust. Then she bent down again and picked up another stone, which she threw off to the side with a laugh.

And then she was a hundred meters out. And then she was fifty.

She was not supposed to be there.

I wished she would turn around and walk back to the village, prayed that I would close my eyes and then open them, and that she would be gone. Instead, she smiled and walked straight toward us.

“I need the order, Chris,” whispered Skeets.

I saw that his trigger hand was shaking, almost imperceptibly, and that he was breathing too fast, taking in great gulps of air.

It didn’t matter, though.

“Light ‘em up,” I said.