The Book of Jonas (2 page)

On the station platform, they stand under a broad roof, which is supported by riveted metal beams, and the engine whistles out a last burst of steam. When the fog clears, a man stands as though he has been waiting since the station was built. He is dressed strangely, in Western clothes, jeans and a starched button-down shirt. His face is freshly shaven, and he carries a backpack made of rough canvas. He takes something
from one of the pockets, a little square parcel, carefully wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine, and hands it to Younis’s mother, who tucks it quickly away into her shift. It is this he remembers, this package, this passing of something important between them. He has so many questions—Why is he dressed this way? Why has he shaved off his beard?—but when he turns back to ask, the man has gone, disappeared into the throng outside the station gates.

Other things must have happened. They may have stayed a time in the capital, he and his mother, lodging in a cousin’s whitewashed spare room near the bazaar. Maybe they bought figs and lamb for their supper, and sipped sweet tea purchased from a vendor’s cart. Perhaps, when they heard the call to prayer in the evening, they wandered over to the turreted mosque, washed their feet, and knelt down on the worn rugs. Surely at some point they took the train back home, up the river and into the low hills. But if they did any of these things, as they must have done, he can remember none of them.

And it is this that makes him suspicious, makes him wonder: Maybe it didn’t really happen. His inability to remember large parts of the experience makes him question all of it: the carefully wrapped parcel, the riveted beams on the platform, the clean-shaven man who should have worn a beard. Maybe it is all just something he heard about or read much later, his imagination filling in the details and making it his own, something he saw one time, something from a film.

He changes his name on the airplane. Somewhere over the Atlantic he assumes his new identity. The flight attendant hands out white-and-blue landing cards, and he borrows a ballpoint pen from the woman sitting next to him to write out his new name—J-O-N-A-S—in the space provided, right next to the space that gives his age: fifteen. Thus named and dated, he signs the card underneath the paragraph explaining that he waives all his legal rights by doing so—his right to counsel, his right to privacy, his right to oppose deportation. He suspects this will cause trouble; he does it anyway. At customs he will be interrogated for hours, kept in a white room with a veneer-top table and steel folding chairs until someone from the Friends International Assistance Society shows up to bail him out. Or later, at his new school, he will explain to anyone who asks—the math teacher, the English teacher, the assistant principal, the head principal—that legally his new name is a direct translation of his old name, even though he feels intuitively that this is not quite true. He knows that the law and the truth are rarely the same thing.

The plane’s motion nauseates him, and in an effort to relieve it, he looks out the Plexiglas oval at the blue void below, the gently curving skyline. Occasionally, he spots an island riding the dark sea, marked by a puff of white cumulus. In the plane, he finds it easy to imagine himself floating between two worlds,
two existences, each of them true, but does not yet realize that this is a feeling that will never completely leave him.

The female flight attendant has been joined by a skinny, dark-haired man, and together they wheel the clanking metal food cart down the aisle, passing out foil-covered trays, plastic utensils, and plastic, foil-covered cups of distilled water. The action is polite and efficient. Jonas’s meal is chicken and some sort of yellowed rice, which he eats with a voraciousness that seems to embarrass his seatmate, an elderly woman with large eyes and an open face.

The airplane lavatory smells of disinfectant and dry air, and seems to aggravate the ringing in his right ear. A sign on the wall warns him that he may be fined three thousand dollars and sent to jail for damaging or disabling the smoke detector. The notion that a smoke detector might exist in the bathroom of an airplane, much less the impulse to damage or disable it, had not previously entered his mind, but now that it has, he wonders how punishment might be exacted, were he so inclined. He has fifty dollars in his pocket, and a small duffel of clothes in the hold, both of which have been given to him by the society, the combination of which constitutes the entirety of his worldly possessions.

Back in his seat, he looks again at his name, written in block capitals in the demarcated spaces on the landing card, and he underlines it with the borrowed pen. The woman, who is sitting on his left, near his good ear, has fallen asleep. He puts the pen down on the tray table and looks at the long, pale scar running up the dark skin on the back of his arm and under his rolled-up shirtsleeve.

“Where did you get that,” the woman beside him had asked.

“I fell off a mountain,” he had said.

He is beginning to feel claustrophobic in the sealed, pressurized tube. He is tall, constantly mistaken for being older than he is, and his knees knock into the back of the seat in front of him. He can’t get comfortable, can’t stretch out, and for a moment he fights off a wave of panic. He is surrounded by plastic and metal, which confine him to a predetermined form, a standard that does not comfortably fit him. He pushes his knees again into the back of the seat in front of him, and its occupant shifts, pushing back against him in a kind of warning.

Eventually, a bell dings, and he feels a sinking sensation in his stomach and legs as the plane begins its descent. He fights off another wave of nausea as he folds up his tray table and is told by two different flight attendants to incline his seat. He explains, in nearly panicky tones, that it is broken and that it will not incline, and after this explanation he is left alone.

The ground rises up to meet him, and he feels himself jolted forward, pushes himself into the back of his chair as the plane slows forcefully. When the plane turns from the runway, the gently rolling landscape scrolls past his window like a diorama. How lush, how green it looks! Ivy climbing the massive, broad-leafed trees, the atmosphere so thick with humidity that he can see it. And then before he realizes, the plane has rolled up to the gate, and there is a rush for the overhead luggage, and a wafting of heavy, wet air as the door is opened, and they are in the aisles, pushing forward, and he has trouble getting his feet underneath him, trips on a blanket someone has left on
the floor, grabs a seat back for support, and it is happening so fast he can’t believe it, and he stumbles off the plane and into his new world.

The last time he saw his village he was five thousand feet above it.

Sometimes it comes back to him at a word, or a sound, or a scent, and he can see the faint trace of smoke rising toward him like a prayer. From this height he can see the village’s broken shell, its careful, jigsaw delineations—yards and orchards and streets—scratched and blurred like a sand castle set upon by a toddler.

Paul tells him that he tends to dissociate.

Jonas goes to see Paul once a week, as he has done since the high school became concerned that he might have been suffering from the results of something traumatic, something they couldn’t handle. They suggested that he go see Paul because Paul was someone who knew about these things. Paul had experience. Paul could help him.

Actually, it was slightly more than a suggestion. “We can get a court order,” they said, “but we prefer you go voluntarily.”

They have been meeting regularly ever since.

During these meetings, they talk about the state of his mental health, which Paul has called, on more than one occasion, “pretty good.” Paul has bushy hair and a goatee, and he looks
a little bit like a young Karl Marx, an effect amplified by his tendency to explain things in the somewhat dry tones of an economics professor.

“Dissociation is a normal reaction,” says Paul. “It’s a defense mechanism. And given the circumstances, a certain amount of mental decompensation is probably also to be expected.” Paul doesn’t seem to understand that this is gibberish until that fact is pointed out to him, and when it is, he tries to make a simplified explanation.

“I know it can feel like touching a hot stove,” he says. “Your reflex is to pull your hand away. Your psyche is trying to stem the pain. But to deal with it, to get past it, eventually you are going to have to leave your hand on the stove awhile.”

On his desk, Paul has a little silver statue on a marble base. It has sort of a funny shape which is hard to describe, like a wave or an ellipse. Paul tells Jonas that this statue may be used as a focal point, a device to bring him back to the present. It doesn’t have to be the statue, he says. It could be anything: a candle, a piece of wood, a lamp, a ball or knickknack, anything, really, but he likes to use this statue because its shape is open to interpretation.

“You are here now,” says Paul. “The past is gone, done. Your memories can’t physically hurt you. But we need to explore them. We need to understand what happened.”

And then they talk.

He remembers a conversation, a lecture, voices mixing with the flycatcher’s song in the bright courtyard, and his father’s friend, the imam, standing tall over him while the early morning sun casts their shadows long over the grass-lined path.

“Now you say it, Younis: ‘There is no god but God, and Muhammad is His messenger.”

“There is no god but…”

“Yes. But God, and…”

“But why must I say it?”

“Because this is how you become one of the people. A believer.”

“Oh. All right. There is no god but…”

“Yes.”

“But why must I become one of the people?”

“You must become a believer. We are all believers. Your mother, your father. You come from a long line of believers. Now say it, and when you do so, say it earnestly.”

“There is no god but…”

“Yes, Younis, you may continue. But God. Please.”

“But is it really necessary to say it? Can I not be a believer without doing so? Can I simply think it?”

“It is absolutely necessary. You cannot be a believer without reciting the Kalimah. Now please, Younis, continue.”

“There is no god but…”

“Yes, Younis, please continue.”

“But what if I were mute?”

He lives with a host family in a large subdivision outside the city. The Martins. Mr. and Mrs. Martin and their two children, whose names Jonas has trouble pronouncing. The girl is called Courtney, although much to her annoyance Jonas usually drops out the
n
and compresses the vowel sounds, pronouncing her name so that it sounds much like “Cutie.” The boy is Addison, which Jonas pronounces “Ad-son.”

The evening Jonas arrives in America, he and the Martins eat dinner together. Mrs. Martin has prepared a pair of large roast chickens, each bigger than any chicken Jonas has ever seen, with light brown gravy and golden roasted potatoes and green beans (which have been steamed, she explains, not boiled, because steaming keeps in more of the vitamins) and glazed carrots and warm bread. The five of them sit around the long table in the dining room stacked with crystal and china and silver on what Mrs. Martin calls a “propitious occasion.” Cutie and Ad-son sit across from Jonas, and Mr. and Mrs. Martin sit at either end of the table. Mr. Martin says grace.

“Bless this food to our use,” he says. While he continues with the prayer, Jonas glances up anxiously to see that Cutie,
her head bowed, is snickering, and then Ad-son flinches as though he has been punched or kicked under the table. Mrs. Martin glares at her children, who hastily compose themselves into a picture of reverence.

“And us to thine service,” says Mr. Martin.

After grace, Mrs. Martin tells Jonas that they try to eat dinner as a family every night, but that it’s difficult, with the children’s after-school activities and other interests, and Mr. Martin’s frequent need to stay late at the office. She says that they are making a renewed effort to gather together at the end of each day. She says that this is one of the problems confronting American society, the breakdown of the family, the lack of time families spend together, and that they are trying to counter that trend, but that it’s difficult, because they are all so busy with other things. She tells Jonas that, aside from their meals in the evenings, the only thing they do consistently as a family is attend church on Sunday mornings, after which, during the season, they try to get back home in time to watch football on television.

“Do you like football?” asks Ad-son, trying to make eye contact with Jonas over the table.

But Jonas is barely aware of it. His mouth had begun watering almost as soon as he walked in the Martins’ front door, and the smell of the roasting meat has tortured him for hours, first as they showed him around the massive house, explaining where his bathroom was and how the taps in the shower worked, because they were new and a little bit tricky, and then when they left him alone in his room, a clean, spare room with a single bed, for nearly an hour, where he was supposed to, he
didn’t know, unpack his meager duffel or make himself comfortable or something. But all he could think about was the food being prepared downstairs.

And so it is some time before he realizes that he has been asked a question.

Jonas becomes aware that the dining room is silent save for his own snuffles and grunts. He has ripped off a large chunk of bread and, together with a slab of chicken breast and half a potato, grasps it all together in his hand, the silver cutlery lying untouched on either side of his dinner plate. His mouth is stuffed full and he wipes a dribble of juice from his chin with the back of his hand. As he becomes aware of the silence, he glances up to see that the Martins have not yet begun eating, but that they are instead all looking at him, staring at him with expressions that range from fascination to pity to disgust, staring at him as though they have just discovered that they are sharing their table with some fierce and alien creature.