The Book of Jonas (5 page)

He remembers staying after class to read it, volume by volume, turning the pages right to left as the late-afternoon sunlight slanted through the school window. New York was founded by the Dutch; Gutenberg invented the printing press; the American Civil War was fought to end slavery.

But he is nagged by the suspicion that his brain space is limited, that his mind must toss some things over into the current so that others might be accommodated. It is as though he has exchanged memories for facts, as though whole periods
of his childhood have been replaced by lists of questionably useful trivia.

The California gold rush began in 1848; Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat; William the Conquerer conquered England; the Mormons founded Utah.

The school day begins with a half-hour period known as “homeroom.”

It is the period Jonas dreads.

He sits at one corner of the large, desk-filled classroom, as far from the other students as he can get, and prays not to be called upon or otherwise prompted to interact. In the space of only weeks, he has come to fear this half hour more than any other time of the day, an aimless gathering of teenagers that can turn predatory in an instant. The homeroom teacher is an old woman who can barely control her hormone-fueled students. She frequently leaves the room on one ill-timed errand or another, and when she comes back, she seems not to register the hurriedly hushed chaos that has descended in her absence.

Already, Jonas has become a target. He barely comprehends how it happened. The quizzical looks he receives when he says anything, his unusual phrases, his dark complexion, his worn clothes, and then, one morning, the wet splat of a spitball that sticks to his cheek, a hollow ballpoint pen hurriedly tucked out of sight, the muffled snickers of all who witnessed it, and
suddenly he has become the outlet for all of homeroom’s pent-up aggression.

One day someone invents a game, the object being to see who can hit Jonas with the most spitballs during the brief time the teacher is absent from the room.

Every morning, he sits at his corner desk and remains quiet. He tries to blend into the wall, the Formica desktop, the floor. He attempts to render himself invisible.

And then the old teacher steps out of the room again, and almost instantly Jonas is grabbed from behind, his arms pinned to his sides. A boy’s face appears in front of his, freckled and smiling, puckers his lips, and for a horrified instant, Jonas fears he is about to be kissed. And then Jonas feels a long stream of thick spittle running down his cheek. Someone else, someone unseen, spits at him again, but misses his face, and he feels it lodge instead in his hair.

He hears a girl’s voice say, “Eww, stop it; that’s gross,” but his arms remain pinned to his sides. And then, straining, he breaks free of the grip and stands up, his face wet and smelling of other people’s mouths. At that moment the old teacher steps back into the room, sees him standing up at his desk, and tells him sharply to sit back down.

“Welcome to America,” someone whispers, and the room erupts into laughter.

He remembers talking with one of his sponsors, just after he arrived in America. He remembers asking her why they were helping him.

“We are the right hand,” she said.

She was the director of the Friends International Assistance Society, the Quaker organization that helped people like him. She was heavyset and wore thick glasses, and she had a kindly face, but tired, her soft brown eyes deep and compassionate. She had just given him the small allowance he could use for “incidental expenses,” as they were called, which at this time usually consisted of pizza and bottomless cups of cola. He would meet with her regularly, every few weeks, and she would inquire after his progress, his health, his social adjustment. She would ask about his host family, which the society had found through an interfaith cooperative, and his school, his classes, his friends. He always painted for her a pleasant, sanitized picture, because he felt it would be rude to do otherwise.

He remembers her handing him this little sum of money sealed in a tiny white envelope, and he asked her why she did it, why she helped people like him. She looked at him for a moment from across her cheap metal desk, and then she said, “We are the right hand.”

This confused him. “The right hand of what?” he asked. “God?” He was amazed, because this was the kind of thing only
zealots thought highly enough of themselves to say, and this woman was no zealot. But she laughed gently.

“No, nothing so bold.” She glanced out the window briefly, as though looking for permission to continue; then she looked back to him. “Unfortunately,” she said, “our country sometimes has a habit of making a mess with its left hand and cleaning it up with its right. We are the right hand.”

The kid saved me. I should probably make that point. He showed me the way out. I saw him running down the street out of the corner of my eye, and out of habit I lifted my weapon toward him. I saw that he was running away from me, and I looked around, at what we had just done, and I saw this kid run down an alley, and I followed him. It wasn’t logical. There was no reason in it. He could have been leading me anywhere, death trap or salvation, and I didn’t care which. You always have choices, but there are times when the split second before you is so starkly illuminated, it becomes clear that everything you are, and everything you are ever going to be, hangs in the balance. And I had one choice to make, which is basically the choice you always have to make in any situation: stay or go.

So I went. I followed him. I didn’t care where he led me. And he ducked between some houses and down to the river, and then north along the river. I stayed far enough back that he didn’t know I was there, which was pretty easy, because the moonlight seemed to shine
on everything, and I could see him clearly up ahead of me, and the noise from the river, wide and beautiful and cursed, drowned out everything else.

They share a conversation in the kitchen, in the suburbs, Cutie and Ad-son clearing up after dinner, the clinking of plates and glasses in the sink, the canned echo of laughter from the television in the family room, the low hum of the dishwasher, and Mrs. Martin sitting alone with him at one corner of the kitchen table.

“I’d like to talk to you about something, Jonas,” she says, and for a moment he suspects she is on the verge of reaching out to grasp his hand. “Something important.”

“Okay.”

“You have traveled a long way to come to us, haven’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And you must have had many difficult experiences. Some horrible things must have happened to you.”

“Yes.”

“Jonas, did you ever think that perhaps there is a larger plan at work? Did you ever think that maybe you were brought here for a reason?”

“Well, I don’t … I mean, I’m not sure.”

“Jonas, I need to tell you that there is a way to clear away
all of these horrible experiences. A way to find comfort. A way to be forgiven for all of your sins.”

“Yes, well…”

“Jonas, I’m going to ask you probably the most important question you will ever be asked.”

“Are you?”

“It’s the same question I was asked years ago, the same question Mr. Martin was asked, and our children. We have all done this.”

“Okay, but…”

“Jonas, will you accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and savior?”

“My what?”

“Your personal Lord and savior. Will you establish a personal relationship with Jesus Christ?”

“My … savior from what?”

“From your sins, of course.”

“My sins?”

“Yes, Jonas. Your sins. After all, we are all sinners in the eyes of the Lord.”

“But were we not created in His image?”

“That was before. Before we sinned. Now we are all sinners, and must seek His forgiveness by accepting Jesus, whom He sent to die for us, to cleanse us of our sins.”

“All our sins?”

“Yes. But we must accept Him first.”

“All the sins of all the world?”

“Yes, Jonas.”

“Then he must truly have His hands full.”

Where do you go in your mind, Paul asks, and Jonas tells him sometimes he travels someplace else. He goes there in his dreams or in his waking thoughts, but when he is there, he is really there. He stands up high on the southern mountain, the wind blasting up from the far valley below, the first glow of sunrise pale in the east. The smoke, now black and ominous, rises from the burning village, and gunshots echo methodically from the rocks. No, Jonas tells him, this place is real. As real as the pen in your hand, as you note it, as real as the paper and ink. As real as that morning when it comes roaring back to him, standing on the precipice, so scared he can’t feel a thing.

And then he’s back, the poltergeist fading in the rearview mirror of Paul’s silver statue, and he’s safe, and maybe he understands a little bit more, and maybe he is ever so slightly wiser.

He remembers a clear day on the hill overlooking the village. The rapid, light-handed tapping of metal on stone echoing out over the valley as the mason labors beside a freshly dug grave.
The supine stone, destined to join the chorus of standing rocks which either reach for or point to God, is the same shape, but a shade lighter than its neighbors, which have weathered months or years or centuries and darkened accordingly, their rows on the hillside presenting a graded palette of loss.

He remembers staying in the mosque after prayers, kneeling with his eyes closed while everyone else stood to leave.

“Peace be upon you.”

“And upon you.”

He remembers the entire village weeping, and his father’s angry vows of revenge. He remembers feeling as though there were something overhead, a lens or a prism, an inverted pyramid, serving as a conduit, through which all the world’s sorrow was focused.

He remembers how they lowered them into the wounded earth, how they could have been sacks of laundry, or wool rugs wrapped in their protective gauze.

He remembers how, despite his vehement wishes, peace didn’t come to him through prayers, or reading the Book, or fiery sermons, all of which served only to cloud his focus. So he learned to wait for it. He would stay a long time, waiting. Forever if he had to, kneeling on the mosque’s worn rugs, long after everyone else had left, keeping his eyes closed until he lost track of time, forcing himself to stay, to concentrate through boredom and aching knees and legs fallen asleep, until at last it came, entering his soul with a whisper.

When he cannot be outdoors, he escapes the bullying, the interminable host family, the simplistic classes, by hiding away in the high school’s library. If the rest of the school is institutional, spartan, coldly lit by fluorescent lights, the library is an oasis of wooden bookshelves and learning, as though built a hundred years earlier. At some point, he comes to realize that this is because it was built years earlier, and while the rest of the school has been recently renovated—shiny, stainless-steel laboratory equipment in the science department, new classrooms filled with sparkling plastic-and-Formica-topped desks, whiteboards instead of chalkboards, a new athletics stadium—the library has undergone no such renovation. Unrefurbished as it is, timeworn and outdated though its shelves and tables and massive card-catalog file are, it is the best-appointed library Jonas has ever seen. As soon as he discovers it, almost by accident one afternoon while wandering the halls, he spends all his free time there.

He reads not only the Bible he has been given, but reads about it, about how it was created. He learns about the Council of Nicaea, where, as far as he can tell, a bunch of priests got together and determined, more or less arbitrarily, what would be included in the Book and what would not. He reads about what was not. He reads about the Apocrypha, the Gospel According to Thomas, and Peter and James. He reads about the Nag
Hammadi manuscripts. He is utterly fascinated by the thought that these writings had survived nearly two thousand years buried in the desert, that they had to be buried so that they might survive.

Often it is dark when he leaves the library, his footfalls echoing from the linoleum floor and institutional green tiles of the hallway. He stays so late that he is nearly locked in the building several times, and has to be let out by the scowling janitor. But he thinks to himself that, with so much he does not know, so much reading to do, this might not be so bad, to be sealed inside such a bastion of knowledge overnight, or for a weekend at the very most.

The recruiters came and talked with us in school, and I remember it like yesterday. I wasn’t interested. I told them I wanted to do something good. I told them I wanted to help people. I told them I couldn’t do it, told them I wasn’t interested.

But they told me that there was no better way to do good and to help people. They told me they helped people all the time. Doing good was what they were about. Plus they were going to pay me. Where else could I get paid for helping people? Plus they would pay for my college. Plus, in addition to helping people, and paying me, and paying for my college, they would teach me a skill. I would be helping people, and seeing the world, and earning money, and having
college paid for, and learning a skill that I could use later to earn money and help people.

In the end, it was a pretty easy decision.

He makes it into the news twice.

The first time, he is mentioned within a single sentence, in the form of a number. He is one of eighteen injured civilians. Twelve killed, eighteen injured. When she thinks he is old enough, the director of the Friends International Assistance Society tentatively shows him the newspaper clipping, which she has kept for long enough that it is just beginning to yellow at the edges. The article is short, and he has to read it three times before he realizes that he is not reading about someone else. He catches himself feeling that feeling, that momentary luxury of denial, of thinking, Oh, well, at least there were survivors. He is surprised at how little space the story occupies.