The Book of Jonas (7 page)

There is a residence card application, school admission forms, class enrollment forms, host family questionnaires. Because he receives monetary support, there are tax forms, academic progress reports, something called an “Adaptation Report,” which is used, he figures out, to determine his level of social isolation.

Early on, he must complete a form to obtain a social security card. He is mildly surprised to find that it requests the same
information that is requested by the form he must complete to obtain a library card, and that they both request the same information as the form he must fill out for a video rental card.

To go to college he must take a standardized test, which he finds to be nothing more than a big, complicated form. Eventually, he will fill out forms to apply for college, then to enroll there, then to apply for an apartment near campus. He fills out more forms for school: emergency contact forms, allergy declarations, vaccination certificates, more insurance forms.

Curious about this peculiar obsession with filling out forms, he does some research in the library. (He does this research on the same day he fills out the form to apply for his library card.) He reads that over the course of a lifetime the average person living in America will spend six months filling out forms. He learns that forms really didn’t catch on until the late eighteen hundreds, when the volume of activities people were doing—being born, dying, and getting married the top three—grew so great that the Victorian mind felt the overwhelming need to organize them scientifically. He learns that the form, in its current form, was originally called a formulary, and was invented by an Englishman named Charles Babbage, the same man who invented both an early kind of computer and the cow catcher, a device attached to the front of locomotives to clear debris from train tracks. He learns that Babbage once wrote to Alfred Tennyson to correct two lines from one of Tennyson’s poems, which Babbage felt lacked scientific accuracy. This, thinks Jonas, tells you everything you need to know about both the man and the invention of forms.

He will fill out forms to apply for a credit card (he will be
denied), to sign up for classes, once he is enrolled in the university, to obtain a bank account, into which his scholarship money is deposited, to reapply for a credit card (accepted this time, with a limit of five hundred dollars, which he will immediately spend on pizza, beer, and a series of baseball games).

Aptly named, the form, he feels. For not only is it orderly in appearance, but it also gives form to that which is hidden. His name, his age, ethnicity, religion, all mental constructs, made manifest through the use of forms. Collected passively, placed on blank lines waiting for answers, the information allows for the efficient counting, sorting, ordering, and categorizing of him, the actual thing the forms represent.

Filling out the forms helps Jonas memorize this information. The ink, usually black, as required by the form, sometimes blue, which Jonas prefers, flows from his pen and into the shapes of the letters and numbers that signify him. Often, after he completes a form, he has the eerie feeling of having just replicated himself, sending off a paper copy that will then live in the files of a cabinet in some warehouse, or be inputted into a computer. To the clerk at the bank or school or business or library or government agency, the form is now him. “Ah, yes,” the form says to its reader, “I can tell you all you need to know.” He feels dissected and displayed. Worse, he has begun to wonder what all these replicas of himself will get up to, once they are set free.

Nauseated by the thought of filling out yet another form, much less being tested for anything, he refuses to get a driver’s license.

The first time he sees her, she is surrounded by a field of poppies.

It’s their freshman year. They are at a Remembrance Sunday reception in the ornate English classroom in the Cathedral of Learning, to which he assumes they have been invited because of their connections to Commonwealth countries. The wood-paneled room, one of the towering, Gothic building’s many nationality-themed classrooms, was built after the war with artifacts rescued from the bombed ruins of the House of Commons, then transported across the Atlantic to be presented to the university as a gift. Something about it, the smell, or the way the light falls on the thick-grained tables, reminds Jonas of his boyhood schoolroom, and he feels as though it had been built especially for him. Tonight it is filled with gray-haired men and women and a smattering of students, all of whom wear the red-paper flowers of remembrance. She is tall and willowy and dark and cuts through the pomp like a thorn. Like a rose.

He stands at the long table filled with hors d’oeuvres and bottled water, speaking with one of the English professors. He watches her peripherally, tracking her red dress and graceful legs. He reaches out to pick up some sort of crab cake or cream puff, stretching his arm out of the sleeve as he does so, and sees the professor to whom he is speaking notice the scar on his forearm. He pulls the sleeve down.

“Climbing a tree as a child,” he says. “I fell.”

Then, unexpectedly, they are standing next to each other, both of them sipping from their warm bottles of water, looking intently at stained-glass windows bearing the coats of arms of various famous English institutions or people. Her name tag says Shakri.

“India?” he says.

“Delhi,” she says. “And you?”

Unlike him, he thinks, she wears her accent beautifully, effortlessly, like wings.

He tells her to guess, like he did, but she gives up after three tries.

Together they tour the room, closely regarding the oak desks, appraising two chairs rescued from Parliament and set in the place of honor at the head of the room, near the fireplace. “What do you want to bet they sat in someone’s loo?” says Jonas. “There’s an Englishman somewhere chuckling about that.”

He tries desperately to think of something else clever to say, something to make her laugh again, but everything he can think of seems contrived or forced. He asks her whether she enjoyed the cream puffs, then silently curses his mouth for allowing such inanity to escape it.

In the end, Shakri herself provides the opening. She asks him, with a forwardness that catches him off guard, whether he doesn’t want to just bag it and go for french fries—chips, she calls them—at the O, a local dive known for its french fries.

“Sure,” he says, trying to force himself to sound relaxed.

They cross the broad lawn outside the cathedral in the dusky light. He experiences her as a presence walking beside
him, a voice. He does not want to look directly at her for fear that he will end up simply staring. So he looks straight ahead as they talk about school, his friends, her family, movies and music, likes and dislikes, and anything else they can come up with, all the mundane details, all the minutiae of existence, but it is really just a pretext to be close to her, an excuse to extend their time, because all he can think is bliss.

Absent a nation, he creates his own. There is no initiation, no Pledge of Allegiance, no flag. Just a vague understanding, a discomfited sense of belonging. Hakma the Kurd is the first, and between the two of them, he and Jonas accrete new citizens, they joke, like a ball of tar.

They are different. They are slanty-eyed and dark-skinned. Their names are different. They are Ching Ji and Sinhal and Lhotsu and Thierry, the French kid they mostly just put up with because he pays for everything. They are Trevor from Zimbabwe, or from London, where he added a cockney twang to his southern African dialect of hollowed vowels and soft consonants (speaking, they tease him, like Nelson Mandela would speak if he found work as a chimney sweep). They are James, from Montana, who is someone’s roommate and who, as he is frequently reminded, is kept around as the token Yankee, a trapping of respectability, to be traded or sold at any convenient moment. They are interestingly garbed, avant-garde,
and nerdy. They listen to diverse music: electronica and funk, jazz and reggae. One of them may be royalty.

They are known everywhere, whether they are welcomed at chic lounges by bartenders who are eager to add a touch of ethnicity to their ambience, or they are the dark kids in the corner, most likely engineering students, who talk funny. Or maybe they are something in between, something more like their classmates, like everyone of a certain age: on their own, confident and self-absorbed and accomplished and immature and cruel and generous and smart and unconcerned and cavalier and sensitive and ambitious, and, and, and.

This sticks in my mind.

They tell us to put on our gas masks. They file us into a low, cinder-block hut. They make us stand against the walls. The sergeant enters and closes the door behind him. In the middle of the room is a low, wrought-iron table, and on top of it sits a silver cylinder, like a thermos. Its edges are brown with liquid stains, like coffee. The sergeant twists off the top of the cylinder and drops in several white pellets, releasing a thin haze. Then we are all ordered to take off our masks. None of us wants to do it. But he is yelling at us, telling us we will be court-martialed if we don’t.

My eyes tear up as soon as I take off the mask, and I gag on the smoke entering my lungs. We all start coughing up thick gobs of mucus, and our skin burns like it’s under a heat lamp. I
panic, nearly dropping the mask. I think I can see the silhouettes of people burned onto the walls. Just when I think I am going to black out, he tells us to put our masks back on. My skin still burns, but with the mask on, at least I can see clearly and breathe. After a minute, we are ordered to take off our masks again. This time we do it quickly, knowing that the faster we get them off, the faster we will be allowed to get them back on. This done, we file quickly out of the building and fall into a retching mass on the cool grass outside.

He soon finds that, except to those in the middle of it, being in love is the most boring thing, the most incomprehensible thing in the world.

They dine at a secluded corner table on a red-and-white paper tablecloth, upon which the food before them either loses all meaning or becomes their entire existence. Her hands fly around as she talks, seeming to push the words through the air in front of her, and he hangs from them like a strand of overcooked fettuccini.

She tells him that, were the earth the size of an apple, the surface would be as smooth as its skin. This bit of trivia feels vitally important to him, as though it says something fundamental about their lives. He finds it amusing when she tries to show him the correct way to hold a fork. He tells her that if you hold your hand at arm’s length out to the night sky, an area
of the night equivalent to the space of your thumbnail would contain a million stars, most of which cannot even be seen by the naked eye. By which he means that present between them are infinite possibilities.

And they are only dimly aware that, to an outside observer, someone lacking their interest or enthusiasm or imagination, they are talking a kind of silly code, a special language known only to them.

Paul has read an article, and is struck by the coincidence.

Jonas does not want to talk about it.

He was called Christopher.

“That’s amazing, don’t you think?” says Paul.

Jonas says nothing.

They know only that he was involved. He was called Christopher. And now Paul has read a story in the newspaper. He was from a town not too far away. His mother still lives there.

Jonas looks out the window.

They know he went off to war and that he did not come back. He did not, as they say, make it. But he was there, and he was involved, and maybe, just maybe, says Paul, that is something.

The first time Shakri asks him up to her apartment, it is all he can do to keep from bounding up the stairs ahead of her. They have been seeing each other for more than a month, and her sudden forwardness surprises him.

They kiss as she searches for her keys, kiss as she opens the door, kiss as she does not turn on the light. It is as though she has made up her mind. They fumble around over their clothes, awkwardly at first, as though learning the intricacies of sign language, but then with increased fluency, and then one of them suddenly learns how to undo a button, and it is all downhill from there.

Occasionally he is asked: Why America?

Sometimes he gives the long answer. Sometimes he says the question asks him, he feels, a larger question, asks him to place his experience in a global context. Secretly he enjoys this, likes being thought of as part of a movement, although he would never openly admit to this. Instead, he says that he had nothing, and that they came to him and offered him a choice.

Sometimes he mentions the Pakistanis and Indians living
generations deep in Bradford and Manchester, or the Congolese in Brussels, or Algerians and Moroccans in Paris, or Vietnamese throughout California. He has read about them, studied them in school, and even though he feels more alone than he imagines any of these other people must feel, secure as they are in their mobile communities, he tries to place his experience into the frame of these movements, into the complex relationship between victor and vanquished, colonizer and colonized.

A
diaspora
. A sociology professor first used that word to describe him, and he likes it, although he is careful not to reveal the satisfaction he derives from it. He practices using the word casually, in conversation. Diaspora. “As a member of the global diaspora, I feel…” And then he is off, propelled by the authority of membership. He likes how it sounds, but mostly he likes the word because of its hints of mystery and power, its implication of choice, all of which are entirely removed when the word “refugee” is used.

Sometimes, though, he doesn’t give the long answer. Sometimes he gives the short one. Why America? Because he had a choice. The same choice we always have. Stay or go.

And, given the choice, he went.