The Book of Jonas (19 page)

“Should we not go?” says Younis again.

But Christopher is not paying attention. He appears unaware that Younis has said anything, or even that he is present. His lips are firmly shut, his eyes squinting in concentration as his hand moves, laboring obsessively.

“Hey!” says Younis.

Christopher looks up, reluctantly, to meet Younis’s gaze with blank incomprehension.

“Should we not leave?” Younis says.

“We cannot leave. There is too much to do here.”

Younis is amazed by the fact that even while he speaks, even while he is not looking, his hand continues to move, carrying on with its work.

“What, never?” says Younis.

Christopher only continues to stare blankly, and then he winces in unmistakable pain. For a moment, Younis thinks that maybe the question somehow stung him. But then he looks down to see that Christopher has pricked his thumb, and that his pant leg is stained with tiny drops. He quickly grabs some gauze from his pack and wraps it around the thumb.

“Ah, well,” he says, once the wound is stanched. “What’s a little blood, shed in the common defense?”

There is no knock at the door, no buzzer sounding warning; no one asks permission to enter. The holding-cell door simply opens and there is Paul. He wears a rumpled T-shirt underneath a plaid, unbuttoned flannel, and his hair is uncombed.

“You’re only the second client I’ve ever had to visit in jail,” he says. “The first one burned down her house. What did you do?”

Jonas sits up and rubs his head. “Nothing,” he says, breathing out.

Paul’s expression tightens, his lips pursing together, and he turns to leave, saying, “Well, then you can get yourself out.”

“No, wait,” says Jonas. “I, Hakma, we went into this building up on Fifth, to see the view. They say I was trespassing. Intoxicated publicly. Although we weren’t in public, really.”

“Where’s your friend?”

“I don’t know.”

“He’s not here. But you are, Jonas.”

“I tried to run.”

Before they are even out of the police station, Paul spells out two conditions that Jonas must meet. They are nonnegotiable if Paul is to continue working with him. If he doesn’t oblige, Paul says, he’ll wish Jonas all the best and be on his way. The choice is his.

Jonas says that it’s all just pointless, that he is unable to comprehend why Paul stands by him. “I’m not worth it,” he says. But then, reluctantly, he agrees.

The next evening, Jonas sits to one side of a small circle of people facing one another across a linoleum-floored basement. He knows that he is supposed to say something. He has been listening to them for ten minutes, going around the circle one after another, all saying the same thing. Some of them say it quietly; some share it with voices full of pride, some as though they have just run a great distance.

“Hello, my name is Jonas,” he says, and the words come out as they’re supposed to, but he thinks it is all ridiculous, stupid. He can barely keep a straight face. He pictures everyone he has ever known laughing at him. It’s all so pathetic. But he goes, because he has agreed, and because he knows that several of Paul’s other clients are in the group, and that they will tell Paul if he does not.

After the first meeting he says to Paul that it’s okay, that he doesn’t think he needs to go, tells him he’s not that far gone, doesn’t really have a problem, tells him it doesn’t mean anything to him.

Paul assures Jonas that he does not care.

“It’s been one day since my last drink.”

“Just keep going,” says Paul. “That’s the deal.”

At the meetings, Jonas always sits in a chair by the door, figuring that from there he can get out quickly if he has to.

“Maybe you can tell me what happened the night you left your village,” says Paul. “Or maybe you can talk about what happened between then and the time you were found, up in the hills, and taken to the hospital.”

Jonas believes himself to be physically incapable of talking about it any further. He feels his stomach clench into a tight ball, his jaw stiffen. There are things Jonas will not talk about. He has developed a skill for deflecting the conversation if it appears to be approaching any of them. He stares at the floor, wishing the moment would go away, vowing to stay silent until it does.

“What else happened, Jonas?”

Almost involuntarily, Jonas tilts his head to the side, as though someone has grabbed the back of his neck and is pinching the muscles together. He feels his face contort slightly, squinting his eye and grimacing his cheek. Once or twice, he opens his mouth to say something, but nothing escapes. The silence drags on, forcing the air from the room.

“What else?” says Paul.

“He saved my life,” says Jonas finally, a bare whisper that catches in his throat.

Jezebel laid out in that field all day. It was a standoff. Seemed like every person who lived in that village was armed and holed up inside it. They wouldn’t come out, so we had to wait for the firepower to go in. And she laid out there in no-man’s-land.

She was about forty meters away, and I found that if I set my mind in the right way, I could convince myself that she had simply gotten tired and put her head down for a nap. I could pretend she was going to pop up any minute, awake and refreshed, and laugh her way back home.

I don’t know who started calling her Jezebel. We were lying in the dugout, and someone, maybe it was Gordy, nodded his head and whispered, “I’m so tired I could sleep like Jezebel over there.” And then someone chuckled. And then we all called her that. She became our mascot. Recon team Jezebel.

Maybe I shouldn’t have, but I felt responsible. When the moon came up, I went out to get her. It was this weird crescent moon that seemed to give off more light than it should have. I walked out toward her, and the silver moonlight shone off the rocks and her dress with the same intensity, so that I kept losing sight of her among the field of stones. When I got to her, I bent down to look her over. I couldn’t find a wound anywhere. For a second I thought that maybe she really was asleep. Her eyes were closed and she looked peaceful, at rest. Then I saw a tiny, dark dot on her throat. Only
when I picked her up I realized there was nothing left to the back of her neck.

I lifted her and carried her as gently as I could back up to our position. The order had come down that we were going to go in, so they were all folding up their kits, hoisting their packs to their shoulders. Turner hacked at the bottom of the shallow dugout with his folding spade to make it deep enough. Probably we shouldn’t have, but it felt proper. I stepped down into the pit and placed Jezebel as easily as I could on the floor of it. I put a rock under her head to prop her up a little, but that didn’t look very comfortable, so I pulled out my green handkerchief and folded it under her head.

We pushed the dry earth on top of her. Someone whispered that prayer, the one about ashes and dust, because that’s all anyone could think of. None of us could remember the whole thing properly, so we mumbled some words to tell her how sorry we were that it had to go the way it did. And then they all filed off, down the ridge, getting ready to go in.

But I stayed there a few minutes, staring at the earth. Something caught my eye in the moonlight, a little flash on the ground, and I bent down and picked up a gray stone with a streak of white quartz in it that reflected the moon.

I still have that stone, here in my pocket. Probably it is not one of the stones Jezebel collected in her little bag that morning, and probably it didn’t fall out as we buried her.

But sometimes I pretend that it did.

“Maybe we can try something,” says Paul. “Something to help you explore this a little more, talk about the rest of it.”

They have been sitting for twenty minutes in silence. Jonas feels pinned to his chair like an insect.

“I already have,” he says.

“But there’s more to it, isn’t there?”

Jonas says nothing.

“Isn’t there,” says Paul again.

“Well, then, maybe you can tell me,” says Jonas at last, “because I can’t say.”

“Okay,” says Paul, “if you don’t know, maybe you can guess. Sitting here looking at the floor is not going to cut it. Picture yourself up there on the mountain. What’s going on? What’s there? What do you see? What do you hear? Lots of things might have happened. Maybe you can tell me about those things. Maybe you can tell me what might have happened. Hypothetically.”

“I don’t know that I can.”

“Try.”

Jonas tells Paul the same thing he told Rose Henderson while he sat in her living room, drinking juice and eating cookies.

A possibility, says Jonas. He says that maybe he left his village. Maybe he was compelled. Maybe he was forced to leave by events upon which he refused to dwell. Maybe he found himself all alone, up on the mountain, huddled in the mouth of the cave his father had told him about months earlier. Maybe he was unable, for a variety of reasons, to decide between living and dying.

And maybe at that moment, Christopher stepped onto the side of the mountain as though descending from a cloud, and built him a fire, and warmed him, and fed him, and stitched him up, and eased his pain. And then, his work done, maybe Christopher stepped back into the void, dissolved back into the air like a thought.

Rose runs into them sometimes, usually at a regional meeting, or a national one, because they are spread out across the country. They always seem to already know who she is, and they approach, tentatively, to introduce themselves. I knew
Christopher, they say, and they surround her like a cordon, off to one side of the room, all of them nearly twice her height, and they tell her about her son.

Early on, they tell her, he developed a reputation for being the calm one, the quiet one, the deep one. In the chaos of basic training, the dirty jokes about girls and would-be girlfriends, the rowdy towel-snapping and the occasional fistfights, Christopher always maintained a mellow, almost aloof presence. Even as a noob (a newbie, they explain, as they all were at one time), he seemed to know the score better even than the gunnery sergeant. He suffered the yelling, the physical training, the hazing, with an air of detachment, as though he were watching street theater.

One of them tells her a story, not meant to alarm, he assures her, but this is what Christopher was like.

There was once a mistake made during a live-fire exercise, and a grenade went off much too close to their dugout position, showering them with dirt. In the absolute silence following the explosion, they took a hasty roll call, tallying the living, all present and accounted for, until they came to his name, and there was silence.

“Henderson,” they say. “Henderson.” They look around.

And when he finally answers, his voice is like the open wind, entirely unconcerned, and possibly even a little annoyed at being compelled to speak. There they were, all freaking out, and then there’s this voice.

“Yeah, man,” said the voice. “I’m fine.” Yeah, man, just like that. And they smile at the memory.

Rose seems happy to meet them, talk to them, seems
touched even by their fumbling efforts to comfort her, and in her desire to not dwell on her own loss, her desire to accommodate them, she refrains from pointing out the irony of hearing from them about the first time, the time when her son came back.

Jonas blacks out. He wakes up in a boat, tied to a tree, floating in the shallows of the river, down by the Fourteenth Street bridge. Another time, he wakes up with a shout when a cigarette burns his chest, having fallen from his mouth as he nodded off. He wakes up in someone’s living room, the floor covered with people who have not yet woken. He wakes up in front of his television set, his pants bunched around his ankles. He wakes up to a dog licking his face. He wakes up next to nameless girls. He wakes to find himself covered with incomprehensible bruises. He wakes up choking on vomit. He wakes up and has no idea where he is. He wakes up to laughter, still sitting in a booth at the bar, and everyone turned to smile at him, the bright strobe of a camera flash, and it’s not until he gets home, stumbles into the bathroom, and looks in the mirror that he realizes that on his face has been drawn the face of a clown.

In another photo, a group of soldiers dressed in sand-colored camouflage and weighed down by gear crouch beside a low wall. The sky is overcast, and all of them except one have removed their large, dark sunglasses, which lie strapped on top of their helmets. Behind them, farther down the wall, in the background, a goat stands unconcerned in the dust.

Each of the soldiers looks in a different direction, as though they are each either keeping watch over a different quadrant or have no idea in which direction they should be looking. The soldier in the foreground grips his weapon so tightly that his fingers have turned white at the knuckles. Because they have removed their sunglasses from their faces (all of them except one), their expressions are clearly visible. They look to be on the verge of panic.

The sun setting again on the mountain, Younis feels himself caught in a whirlpool.

One moment he fears for his life. He has seen it in Christopher’s eyes. He has snapped. He peers from across the fire through a suspicious mask, eyes narrowed to dark slits, glances
filled with menace. Younis fears he will not live through the night. He wonders only why it has not been done already.

The next moment he fills with rage. He barely cares whether he lives. For what is his heart now but a hole, what is his life but loss, what is the sum of his entire being but absence? And who is to blame for that?

And the next moment he thinks that maybe they will go their separate ways in peace. After all, one of them saved the other’s life. That must count for something. He almost trusts him. They are victims of circumstance, and his own misfortune is theirs shared.

He tries to settle on one interpretation. He searches for an objective reality. He struggles in vain to slow the wheel of conviction spinning uncontrollably in his mind. The more he tries to get a fix on the truth, the more he is dragged in circles, unable to see clearly, unable to stop.