The Book of Jonas

by Stephen Dau

  He is welcomed to America when he makes any of thousands of observations about his new world: the largeness of the cars, the tallness of the buildings, the neatness of the manicured lawns, the cleanliness of the parks, the skimpiness of the girls’ clothing, the enormity of the meals served at restaurants.

  For a short time, the Martins welcome him to America anytime he says anything.

  One evening Jonas and the Martins walk down Stanwix Street together after a lavish dinner at the Chatham Center, Jonas having eaten triple portions of a succulent roast served from the buffet. A dark figure sits in a doorway off of the sidewalk, legs splayed out in front of him, rattling a paper cup with a few coins in it. As he has done with the past three such figures they have passed on the street, Mr. Martin pulls a bill out of his wallet and gives it to Jonas to drop into the man’s cup.

  “Thank you, sir,” says the man.

  “You are welcome,” says Jonas, suddenly uncomfortable.

  “Hey,” says the man, “you have a funny accent!”

  “Yes,” says Jonas.

  “Well,” says the man, “welcome to America.”

  14

  He remembers that they first came to see him while he was still in the hospital. It was run by Americans, and he remembers the bright light filtering into his room through curtains as clean and white as the fresh bandages wrapped around his forearm. He was hooked up to a tube that they said would keep him hydrated, and there was a little vase of flowers on a table next to the bed, brought to him by a smiling army nurse in a white uniform, who told him only that the flowers had been sent by friends.

  They expressed keener interest in him after they learned he could speak English. He told them he learned it in school, that his father spoke it fluently, that he always listened to the BBC, that he loved American movies.

  But good as his English was, he had trouble understanding their questions. It seemed they asked him his name hundreds of times, so often that he started giving them different names each time they asked. “No, you must be mistaken; I am Raul,” he would say, or, “I’m sorry, Younis is no longer here. I am Klaus.”

  They took it as a sign of spirit.

  Their questions increased in number and meandered aimlessly, so he simply chatted with them, digressing at will. He chatted amiably about the time of day, the date, the color of the sky, the best way to make couscous, the history of central Asia, animal husbandry, the legends of the constellations, methods to determine whether someone was lying, tips for negotiating with sellers in the market. On these subjects and others he seemed to impress them with his knowledge, or, absent knowledge, his ability to substitute plausible conjecture.

  But when they would ask, as they periodically did, about his family, his mother, at least, or his father, the English speaker, for whom they were searching diligently, or his home, so they might better know where to search, he fell silent, studying with rapt attention the coarse weave of the cotton blankets, and refused to speak. They insisted that they were searching everywhere, and that anything he could tell them would be helpful. They pleaded with his silence, but eventually their pleas gave way to the realization, faint at first, but growing with each passing day, that perhaps he remained silent because he knew they would never be found.

  15

  Jonas finds the Martin children to be a mystery.

  Ad-son is a mystery because Jonas rarely sees him. He is the same age as Jonas, and he appears briefly before school, for breakfast, and occasionally at dinner before he disappears into his room for hours on end. Once in a while he says something to Jonas, asks him a question about video games or sports, but these questions are posed in passing. Ad-son seems to remain uninvested in Jonas, unemotional, as though by speaking with him, he is utilizing the scientific method to query a science experiment.

  Cutie is a mystery because Jonas does not see her enough. She is two years older, and heavily involved in school activities, cheerleading and gymnastics and something called pep club. Jonas is shocked to find that the Martins allow her to visit with her boyfriend in the living room entirely unsupervised. He is alternately attracted to her and repelled by her, forcing himself not to dwell upon her bare legs or the occasional swear word that escapes her lips when she thinks her parents aren’t listening. For a time, he is vaguely concerned about living with a family that allows their only daughter to be alone with a man who is not a blood relative, particularly while wearing such provocative clothing.

  Cutie, in turn, seems to regard Jonas with an affectionate, condescending interest, as though he is a puppy that has wandered into her garden. After breakfast one morning, she kisses her mother on the cheek, punches Ad-son in the arm, and then pats Jonas on the head before gliding through the house and out the front door to her boyfriend’s waiting car, carried on a cloud of perfume and a toss of blond hair.

  Once, when everyone has left the house, he stands in turn at each of the doorways to their bedrooms and tries to place them into context. He does not enter the rooms, in part out of fear of being caught, and in part out of fear of what he might find.

  Cutie’s room is pink and white, the corners piled with dirty clothes and the shelves punctuated with a smattering of toys left over from a time when she was a younger girl: stuffed animals, a doll or a glittery pinwheel or knickknacks held firm like memories.

  Ad-son’s room is tidier, but is still filled with stuff, with superheroes and army men, a computer screen on a desk in front of the window, at which he sits for hours a day in front of video games and other mysteries. The walls of both rooms are covered with posters—singers and actors in Cutie’s room, and in Ad-son’s, football and hockey players and, on the wall next to his desk, a tiny picture of a girl in a bathing suit.

  By contrast, Jonas’s room is austere, bare-walled, with a simple pine table and chair, both of them labeled with stickers underneath that say, “IKEA,” and a small closet, which is empty except for Jonas’s several hanging shirts.

  “You can change things around however you like,” Mrs. Martin had said when she first showed him the room. “We can take you to get some things.”

  It was said almost in passing, in the midst of the activity surrounding his arrival, but then the weeks had rolled by, and the promise to “get some things” for the room had been forgotten. Jonas doesn’t mind, though. For one thing, he likes the room’s clean spareness, and feels that within its space his existence is boiled down to its most basic essence, devoid of the complications of ownership and maintenance.

  But the main reason he does not decorate his room is that he feels it would make him too familiar.

  Like their rooms, the Martin children announce their identities to the world, inform everyone who cares to know about their every want, dream, proclivity, interest, hobby, or passion. Within a few months, Jonas feels that he knows basically everything there is to know about their lives. For example, he knows that Cutie, although superficially warm and friendly, values her popularity and standing at school above almost anything else, that her greatest fear is losing her status. He knows that Ad-son, while trying to appear cool and aloof and smart, is concerned about where he fits in, about the prospect of living forever in his sister’s shadow.

  But Jonas lives in a clean white room with a single bed. He strives to keep himself unknowable. He comes to see mystery as an asset. For as much a mystery as he once found the Martin children, he himself remains a far deeper mystery. He enjoys being unfamiliar. Exotic. But he fails to realize that, by declining the opportunity to define himself, he allows others, less interested, more callous, meaner others, to create definitions for him.

  16

  “Where do you go in your mind?” asks Paul, and Jonas tells him that sometimes he doesn’t know, that sometimes he looks up to realize that an hour or more has passed as he sits in the library, or on the edge of his bed, or on a park bench, and that he has no recollection of it.

  “Doesn’t that worry you?” asks Paul. “How much time do you spend in thi
s way, drifting and unaware, in your head?”

  At first Jonas doesn’t understand the question. Or thinks that maybe he understands it differently from the way Paul intends it. But then he thinks that he does understand, and his face lights up with comprehension.

  “Oh, lifetimes,” he says at last. “I have spent lifetimes un-conscious.”

  17

  Reluctantly, Jonas remembers that the soldier was called Christopher. When he eventually says the name, he pronounces it precisely, unaccented, as though he has practiced saying it.

  “I probably would not have survived without him,” says Jonas, looking around the office, out the window, searching for something interesting to comment upon, something to once again shift the conversation. They have been circling this subject for twenty minutes, Paul pushing him for more information, and Jonas reluctant to talk about it.

  “Is it not enough,” says Jonas, “to know that I have been helped by many people?”

  “Why won’t you talk about him?”

  “There was a doctor,” says Jonas. “At the American hospital. She was older than myself, but still young, for a doctor. Let us talk about her. She was wonderful. She helped me. She had smooth hands and fine wrinkles around her eyes, from laughing, and for the time I was there I lived on her smile.”

  “And yet you can talk about her easily.”

  “She helped me. I probably wouldn’t be here without her, either.”

  “But you recall her without difficulty. While this other person, this Christopher, you do not like to mention him. Why is this?”

  “She was prettier.”

  When Paul does not respond, but simply looks levelly at Jonas from across his desk, Jonas says, “Is it not enough to know that I survived, that I have been helped along the way?”

  “I’m afraid,” says Paul, “that it is not.”

  18

  I am no longer certain of much.

  I carry a stone around in my pocket. It’s hard gray granite. It is pierced by a thin, marbled vein of white quartz. I can feel its rough surface on my palm, but I am consumed by the fear that it will turn to dust in my hand.

  Increasingly, I find everything I cling to is fragile.

  I remember from an earth sciences class that the white quartz in the stone was formed by something called an igneous intrusion. A crack in the granite let a tiny thread of magma, under pressure, penetrate the rock, where it cooled for years, eventually turning into the white streak running through the gray stone. The streak is like a scar, the molten rock pressed into it like blood.

  This is not a rare occurrence, this penetration of solid rock by molten rock under pressure. It happens all the time. Deep in the earth, it is happening right now. Stones like this are not scarce. Just yesterday I walked through a field littered with them. An entire field full of scarred stones. They are abundant. For every diamond in the ground there are probably a million stones like this one. And yet to me, right now, it is the most beautiful thing in the world. The invasion, the pressure. The magma has exploited the injured rock, and has made it beautiful.

  When I lie here and cannot sleep, these are the sorts of things I tell myself.

  19

  Outdoors, Jonas is in charge, at peace. It’s late summer, early September, and he walks slowly, reluctantly to school, out of the subdivision and into the lush forest that encroaches from all sides, the sights and smells as if from a tropical island, compared with the desert hills of his childhood. He memorizes their names: the musky scent of Bradford pear, the earthy sassafras, the brilliant rhododendron. Autumn is filled with the deep mystery of fallen leaves, the first sharp whiff of coming frost, lit by curious jack-o’-lanterns, and the winter, foot after foot of snow.

  He reads the Bible he has been given. He reads that God created light and darkness on the first day, then that He created the sun, which separates day and night, on the fourth. He reads that man was created before woman, then that they were created at the same time. He reads that God is jealous, and then that He is loving and kind; that man is inherently evil, and then that he is created in God’s image; that woman is equal to man, and then that she is subservient. He strives to find in it some direction, some solace from the Book’s words, some sense of comfort, but he is instead driven mad by its internal inconsistencies.

  The taunting turns physical. Jonas’s skinny frame persuades some of the bolder kids that he won’t fight back. It’s relatively mild at first: stepping on his heels in the hallway to pull off his shoes, overturned plates of food, and when Jonas tells them to stop they just laugh harder.

  “Say it again, Apu. ‘Stop eet.’”

  He shows up late to class. Sometimes he doesn’t show up. He finds the schoolwork almost ridiculously easy, and reasons that it is deserving of only part of his time. He spends a whole day in a wooded trace of land between home and school, sitting under a sugar maple. He tracks a deer for a mile in the forest.

  The next day he shows up to school as though nothing happened, and the senile old teacher asks for a written excuse, signed by his host parents.

  “What excuse,” he says, “I was here.”

  She walks away, looking confused.

  Even attending part-time, he gets A’s.

  20

  Where do you go in your mind, Paul asks, and Jonas tells him that sometimes he travels to a meadow with a clear stream running through the middle of it, past a shade tree where a lioness and a gazelle stand looking at each other, a cobalt sky spread overhead. This place is the result of a creativity exercise that was once taught to him by a writing teacher. It was supposed to be a safe place where they could access their inner voice, their muse, but he’s not sure that’s exactly what it turned out to be.

  “It is a mental construct,” he says to Paul. “I know it is not real.”

  21

  There is much he cannot remember. In place of these memories, his head is filled with facts. Names, dates, places. He is baffled by what he knows almost as much as by what he does not. For example, he knows that the Empire State Building is nearly fifteen hundred feet tall, that the Declaration of Independence was written in 1776, that the New Deal saved America from communism, that the first World Series was played in 1903. These facts were given to him by the 1980 edition of The New Book of Knowledge encyclopedia, which showed up, minus the V volume, in an aid shipment, or maybe with a missionary group, and sat with a smattering of other books—a large English dictionary, the Koran, A Tale of Two Cities—in a rough-hewn bookcase at the back of the schoolroom, its row of blue-and-white spines promising enlightenment.

  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.

  22

  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 descende
d 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.