The Book of Jonas (20 page)

At first, Jonas thinks the letter on university stationery is an invitation to another student-faculty function. He opens it expecting to be asked to a reception or a dinner. He is pleased by this, thinks that maybe it’s what he needs, a little social interaction with people other than his regular circle. Feeling for some reason that an invitation should be opened properly, rather than simply torn, he goes to the kitchen drawer and, unable to locate a letter opener, pulls out a sharp knife.

We had orders.

We had orders. We had orders. We had orders. We had orders. We had orders. We had orders. We had orders. We had orders. We had orders.

Those were the guys, they said. Light ‘em up.

An order is an order. We could not risk letting them go. I’m sorry it had to go the way it did. I really am. I would change it in an instant if I could. I would go back in time and do it differently. I would ask questions. I would raise objections. I would ask to see the intel. I would pay attention to the nagging sensation in the core of my brain that was trying to tell me that something was wrong. Truly I would.

But we had orders, and they were very clear.

An order is an order.

We had orders.

“Hello, my name is Jonas, and I may have a problem. You know. With drinking, I guess.”

“Hello, Jonas.”

“And, Jonas, how long has it been since you’ve had a drink?”

“About an hour and a half.”

In this photo is Christopher, wearing the same uniform, same gun, but he does not wear the dark sunglasses and therefore it is easy to tell that it is him. He looks young. He seems to hold his weapon’s weight with difficulty. His body is turned slightly to the right as he walks through the dust, and he looks in the general direction of the camera, but off to the side and down, as though assessing something on the ground to the photographer’s right. His expression is determined, but slightly unsure, an expression which strives to betray nothing even as it betrays everything, the expression of a young boy playing poker with grown men.

Behind him, slightly blurred, is a house or mound or hill, some large object, but it is impossible to tell exactly what it is, because it is covered with people sitting, as though in an arena, watching the soldier who has suddenly appeared among them. These people, all of them men, wear beards. Some of them wear tightly wound cloth
lugees
wrapped around their heads, while some of them are bareheaded. To the right side of the picture, in the background, two of these men appear to be talking, whispering. They look to be amused, as though they are quietly making a wager.

He has had a recurring thought. A daydream. He tells it to Hakma over drinks.

They have contacted him. He walks down the fluorescent corridor. Travelers rush past him pulling wheeled suitcases or hunched under weighty backpacks. He carries no bag, nothing to hold him up at security, which he has eased through like a leaf floating through rapids. He knows what he is supposed to do. A young woman hurries ahead of him, gripping her child’s hand.

“Come on,” she says to the unconcerned boy. “They’re already boarding.”

He steps onto the swift conveyor, adjusting his balance as the belt takes over. He is being pulled along now, set in motion, no longer entirely under his own power.

He doesn’t know how they found him, how they knew he was ready.

He finds the bathroom, the one at the far end of the long corridor, the least-used. He waits for everyone to leave, for the bathroom to be empty, a lull. Then he goes over to the trash can, which is stainless steel and set into the wall. He reaches into it, rummages through damp paper towels until his hand strikes something solid, a strap, which he grabs and pulls. It is heavier than he imagined, and he struggles to pull it out of the trash.

He knows what to do.

He hauls it into a stall, locks the door, removes his jacket and shirt, lowers the vest over his shoulders, straps it around his body, heavy as the earth. Then he puts his clothes back on over it.

A voice, commanding and feminine, echoing from the tiled walls, urges him to report unattended baggage. He opens the stall door to see that the bathroom has filled with people, and he is momentarily confused, unable to find the exit. When at last he does, he joins the throng of travelers, of fathers and mothers and aunts and brothers struggling under the weight of luggage and worry, or buoyed by excitement and anticipation, or driven by determined focus, but he feels no connection to any of them, because he is already gone.

I thought she might make it. I really did.

I keep replaying it in my mind.

I must have been delusional. I thought something could still happen after the shooting started. I thought there would be a little break, then, a space of time during which she would trip and fall out of the way, or hear her mother calling, or turn around and get out of there at the last moment. She could have bent down to pick up another rock. I don’t know, anything. Run light-speed across the field, back to where she came from.

Even now, in my mind, I want to yell at her to get down.

But there was no space of time, no gap. It was instant. I spoke and the guns roared. They continue to roar. I cannot get them out of my head.

She was standing there, curious and vibrant, and then she was a crumpled sack of laundry on the rocks. There was no time for anything, no gust of wind that would blow the bullets off course, no time for angels to descend from the sky and lift her off to safety.

Maybe, he tells Paul. Maybe he fled his village, was forced to leave. Maybe he found his way up to the cave his father had told him about. Maybe Christopher saved his life, stitched him up, built him a fire.

But then maybe at some point Christopher started to lose it. Maybe he was crazy. Maybe he thought they needed to move, or realized that they were in the wrong place; maybe he thought they needed to be somewhere else. Maybe he started freaking out because he suddenly realized that he was AWOL on some mountaintop with a wounded hajji.

Maybe Christopher insisted that they pack up, move out. Maybe they rushed to get to the top of some other hill, that hill over there, the one on top of which Christopher suddenly realized they were supposed to be. But maybe, when they got up on top of that one, Christopher realized that it was not the right hill either. Maybe he looked at a map. Maybe this happened a few times. Maybe they were tired. Maybe Christopher started thinking they were supposed to be in a valley, rather than on a mountaintop. That valley over there, and maybe they wandered all over the southern mountains, wandered for days.

Maybe one time it started getting dark while they were out searching around. Maybe the path was difficult, lined with
boulders and rocks that were just the right size to trip over, and maybe they were tired. Maybe the trail was narrow, and the mountainside fell away next to it, off into the darkness. Maybe Christopher stepped the wrong way, caught a rock with the side of his boot and tripped, stumbled, fell over the cliff edge. Maybe one instant he was there, and the next he was not. Maybe he dropped without making a sound, silently, like a stone.

They tell Rose that he was selfless, that he was always the first to help out. If a noob packed too much gear and struggled over the hills they’d been climbing all morning, it was always Christopher who offered to switch packs with him, carry for him his extra weight. He never seemed to mind cleaning the latrine, or pulling zero-hour guard duty, both of which, he said, gave him time to think. Through anything that came his way, he maintained a Zen-like aura of impregnability. Someone started to call him Yoda, a nickname created in an effort to get to the heart of his calm bearing, and it stuck for a while, but always felt insufficient, cartoony.

One of them, the son of a religious family from Oregon, tells her that he always went to Christopher for advice. His family told him that he should talk only to the chaplain, and he did that sometimes, too, but he always found Christopher to
be more real, wise in the same way the chaplain was wise, but street-smart in a way that the chaplain was not.

They tell her they had total confidence in him, both as a soldier and as a person. They tell her he gave them strength. They tell her she could be proud of him, that he was a real credit to her as a mother. They tell her that anyone should be proud beyond words to have had a son like him.

He sees two versions of the future. Paul asks him to describe them. One is shadowed, and the other is lit by truth.

“I don’t know what to do,” says Jonas.

“Do?” says Paul. “You know what you have to do.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Sure you do. You have to start making good choices. You have to establish a track record of positive action.”

Jonas looks at the silver statue on Paul’s desk, molded into its indescribable shape, like an ellipse, or the melting clocks he once saw in a painting.

“I don’t know,” says Jonas. “I feel like I’m running out of time.”

In the foreground, two soldiers, one of them lying prone on the ground, looking down the sight of a sniper rifle supported by a tripod on the earth in front of him. The other soldier crouches beside him, scanning the horizon, a mortar tube slung around his back and the butt of his rifle lodged into his shoulder, ready to come up, ready to be aimed at the slightest provocation. Around them, debris—splinters of wood, stone, mud—covers the damp pavement. In the middle distance stand a series of what may have been houses, the remnants of a wall framing a phantom window the only way to determine what they might have been. And beyond that, in the background, a great mountain range, high and blue in the distance, snowcapped and stunning in its beauty, totally unconcerned by it all.

Jonas wakes up and cannot move. He wakes up and sees his dead mother at the foot of his bed. He wakes up floating over the world, totally unconnected and able to see everything, everyone in it. He wakes up and thinks he is dead. He wakes up and wishes he were. He wakes up and then goes back to sleep.
He wakes up wishing that he could be back on the mountain, because at least then he knew the score: Either you lived or you died, and it was all just that simple. He wakes up realizing both that something needs to change, and that he doesn’t know how to change it.

Then one day he wakes up knowing deeply in his heart that someday soon he is not going to wake up.

The groups Rose helps to organize will grow and change and adapt according to their own needs, in their own time. Friendships will be forged. They will gather at someone’s house, or in a bar, or at a football game, huddled before and after around a smoking grill in the parking lot, or at a park on a Saturday afternoon, bringing with them their girlfriends and their wives and their children. They will meet up in pairs or in large groups. They will gather at irregular intervals and in various locations. It will start with a phone call, or a message, or a random meeting on some city street, and they will come together, and they will remember.

In one of these groups, standing loosely around a barbecue, they will remember that the barracks was little more than a cinder-block enclosure with a corrugated metal roof. They will remember that, unbelievably in that godforsaken desert, it was raining when they filed back in, the only rain any of them can remember from the whole tour. Their heads hang down, and
they are little more than shadows wrapped in ponchos, which are gradually stripped off and left dripping from nails on the wall, or draped over the ends of steel bunk frames. In silence stark as death, they sit on the edges of their bunks, or on the floor, their legs stretched out in front of them and their backs propped against the wall. Or they just stand, jaws drooping and shoulders slouched.

But this is not quite correct, one of them will say, taking a swig from a bottle of beer, poking at the glowing charcoal. This is not quite the way it was. It was not raining, was it? It rained the day Jacobs got killed. Not only that, but at that time, they did not yet know. It was only the day after they went in, remember, and at that time they hadn’t known for sure, thought he might still be out there, hunkered beside a rock somewhere. In fact, one lone voice will say, when they filed into the barracks they were concerned, curious, but optimistic. It was raining, sure thing, but they were not yet in mourning, as they tried to piece together the events, tried to determine where it might all have gone wrong.