The Book of Jonas

by Stephen Dau

  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.

  31

  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.

  32

  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.”

  33

  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.

  34

  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.

  35

  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.

  36

  But we weren’t done.

  I didn’t have time to think much about Jezebel because the second company arrived, and then it was time to go in.

  I did not know that we were that capable. We bombed the hell out of that place. We had come up the river with great intelligence. We knew who was there, in the village. They told us they were the guys who ambushed us, who killed Jacobs.

  We came up the river, and they told us about the village, about the bad guys who were in there. The place was crawling with them, they said. They were all excited about it when they told us. It’s a free-fire zone, they said, so stay aggressive. If you see anyone, odds are they’re muj. We got ‘em, they said. They’ll never know what hit ‘em, they said. They’re there, you know, right where we thought they’d be. We thought they’d be there and there they were. We came up the river, which took us most of the night, and then we got position on them up on this hill. Then there was the standoff all that afternoon, while we waited for reinforcements.

  We buried the girl in the moonlight, and then we moved out.

  It was all laid out in front of us, the whole thing, just like they told us it would be. I knew what we could do. Well, I thought I knew what we could do. Turns out I had never seen them unleashed like that. They wanted a fight. That river is rough, you know? We figured that would be the hardest part. But we did it. We got position on them, up on that rise, all laid out in front of us.

  I did it. I was on the radio, so it was down to me. I got the signal, and I started calling ordnance in, and that place just lit up. Just rained on them. And then we went in, fast. Your heart rate goes up, and we had to go in hard, but it didn’t seem real.

  Or maybe, when I look back on it now, it seemed so real that everything else seems fake.

  A couple of them started shooting back, pretty scattered, but we lit them up fast. And then we get in, and there’s just rubble everywhere. By that time, it’s just a big debris field, you know. And every once in a while, someone takes a shot at us, but we clear it out quick.

  And then we were going down this street, and we came around a corner, and there’s … It was just broken. Everywhere, rocks and stones and rubble. And over there is a body that just looks like another
pile of clothes, and a leg sticking up through the rubble here, but this isn’t the worst part. Not by a long shot.

  Because I look, and there, in the middle of this, there’s … in this, I don’t know, what used to be a house or something, sitting in between all the stones, there is this little child. He’s a toddler. He’s holding on to this scrap of blanket or something, and he wasn’t even crying. That was the worst part. His face was blank, and he just stared up at us, and there was nothing moving anywhere around him, and he looked right at me. And I remember thinking, as I looked at this kid holding on to a blanket in the middle of that rubble: This is my fault. I did this.

  And then they must have regrouped or something, because all of a sudden everything opened up all around us. It was like every man, woman, and child in the place suddenly had a weapon, and they were all aimed at us. I didn’t fire another shot, though. I kept my weapon up. Okay, once or twice I shot at a wall around somebody, to scare them, or over their heads.

  But the whole time I thought to myself: Fuck this.

  That’s when I saw the kid. He was older, early teens maybe, and for a long time he just stood there in the street. My first thought when I saw him was, He’d better get himself out of here, or he’s done.

  And then that’s exactly what he did. Just like that. Like I thought it and he did it. He ducked back between two houses, heading east, down toward the river.

  And then I thought, Maybe I’d better get myself out of here, too.

  To my surprise, I followed him.

  I just started walking. Made the decision and went down between the same two houses he did. I know it doesn’t make sense. None of it makes sense. What if I had followed him down there and a bunch of his friends were there waiting? What if he was sent in there specifically to lure unsuspecting idiots like me back where his brothers could pop them? But that didn’t happen.

  He was simply trying to get out.

  Same as me.

  37

  The last time he saw his home, he was five thousand feet above it.

  Sometimes it comes back to him at a word or a sound. Distantly he hears footfalls and stones clattering. Their muffled voices rise and fall, rise and fall, as he drifts in and out of consciousness, each time their words coming closer and closer before drifting away again in a fog. Something hard pokes him in the ribs.

  “Dude’s still breathing,” someone says.

  “Be careful. You never know,” says someone else.

  He feels a hand on his arm, feels himself being rolled over.

  “He’s just a kid,” says someone. A hand now behind his head, his leg is moved. He is being examined, prodded. The wind whips up the slope, whistling in his ear.

  “No way he stitched that up by himself,” someone says.

  He feels himself lifted from the ground, reaches out with his arm but touches only air. He panics, but it is a distant panic, kept away by the deep haze.

  “Whoa, easy there, buddy!” someone says, and then another voice screaming, hard against his head, “Remain calm. We will help you.”

  He tries to clear his vision, and at last resolves the blurry image of two men, one at his head and the other, with his back to him, at his feet. The man at his feet stumbles over something, nearly dropping him onto the rocks, and a distant stab of pain pierces his arm. He hears himself moan.

  “Watch it,” says a voice. “You’re gonna drop him over the edge.”

  “Easier walk back if I do,” says another.

  The noise has been there all along, but he becomes aware of it only as it gets louder, through the haze, drowns out the voices, the footfalls, the clattering rocks, the wind. The distant thump-thump-thump gets louder and louder until he can feel it, waves of pressure echoing in his head and thudding through his chest, and a violent wind presses down upon every inch of his body.

  He feels himself lifted from the world, and then he is a falcon riding high on the thermals, unattached, unhindered, a hundred feet, a thousand feet; he is borne up and away. As the giant bird banks sharply, he is able, for a moment, to bring the earth into focus.

  There is the river, rendered tiny and powerless from this odd angle, like a rivulet from an overturned water bucket, and there is the road beside it, and a miniature truck kicking up dust as it careens along in slow motion. He strives to fix his location, struggles to place himself into context, but everything is skewed and unfamiliar.

  But when he sees his village, there is no mistaking it. There is the road angling back from the river, and there are the ruins of the caravanserai, where the river road branches apart as it enters the town, and there is the village itself, its streets and houses and fenced-in yards with their orchards. And there is a smoke-blackened house, and there is another, its walls knocked almost casually over, and there is another, still smoldering gently, releasing a single thin tendril of smoke, like a beckoning finger.

  And there above it all is Younis, about to pass out again, but conscious for an instant, and aware, and focused, taking it all in, committing the scene to memory, vowing to himself that, if he can recall nothing else, he will always remember this.

  38

  Monday, November 10 (AP)—The U.S. military has stated that it is investigating a raid conducted last month.

  American soldiers apparently believed they were attacking an insurgent hideout in a remote village, and residents of the village claim the Americans killed at least eighteen people. By all accounts, U.S. soldiers arrived before dawn and hit several targets, after an extensive air and artillery barrage.

  But beyond that, there appears to be little agreement about what actually happened.

  At the first target, the district government offices, they destroyed ammunition, killed four guards, and captured twenty-seven prisoners. But according to some residents, those captured were gunmen loyal to a local politician, plus six people they described as common criminals, pulled out of the local jail. Other residents, however, report that those captured and killed had been inciting violence against international forces for months. While some locals say that the insurgents abandoned the offices weeks ago, others say the building’s occupants were heavily involved in insurgent activity.

  Another target was a former school building. Armed men were living there, and the U.S. military believes the building had become an insurgent hideout. But once again, locals disagree about who occupied the building. According to some residents and officials, it was actually the headquarters of a local disarmament commission, where officials were collecting weapons from the countryside; others say it was the headquarters of a well-armed insurgent faction.

  The morning after the raid, a disarmament commission official says he found vehicles full of bullet holes, gaps blown into the walls, and bodies strewn across three classrooms. Residents say some of the dead men’s wrists were bound with plastic handcuffs, evidence that some prisoners were tied up and shot. A U.S. military spokesman disputes this allegation, however, claiming that the prisoners were already dead when soldiers arrived at the location.

  At least one source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, reports that the targeted village had been confused with another village some fifty miles away. According to local sources, some families of the dead have already received compensation from the United States—paid in American hundred-dollar bills. It is unclear whether this is true, and, if it is, what criteria were used to distribute this money.

  For now, at least, the U.S. military is standing behind its assertion that the government offices and former school building were used by an insurgent operation.

  The raid also resulted in the wounding of three U.S. soldiers. The whereabouts of a fourth soldier are still unknown. Several buildings described as private residences were also destroyed, and some inhabitants are still unaccounted for.

  Several villagers say the Americans attacked buildings that had become headquarters for two competing political factions. Each faction accuses the other of feeding false information to the U.S. military
, tricking the soldiers into destroying its opposition.

  Other officials describe the raid not as a conspiracy, but a mistake, suggesting that locals inadvertently gave the American forces flawed intelligence.

  Pentagon officials have said thus far that they have received conflicting information about the scope and nature of the operation.

  39

  I am here by choice. I am ready to accept the consequences of my actions. As I look back, I can see plainly that every choice I have ever made, every action, big or small, was like a single brick in the road leading me here. I will accept responsibility.

  I am ready. Tonight I will tell him. He must suspect already. I will tell him, or maybe I will let him read it himself, here, in these pages, where I have laid it out as honestly as I am able. Either way, he should know the truth.

  And then everything can either fall apart or hang together, or go whichever way it will.

  40

  “Hello,” he says to the small circle of chairs. “My name is Jonas.”

  “Hello, Jonas,” comes the reply, like a chant. And then a single voice, gentle in the quiet room, says, “And, Jonas, how long has it been since you last had a drink?”

  But there is no reply.

  The silence stretches on, longer than it seems it should. It grows to encompass the room. Some of those present realize what’s going on before others, and they look up. One by one, those gathered in the circle, those whose heads had been bowed as though in thought or prayer, those who had been staring at the walls or the floor, the one or two who held their eyes gently closed, lift their heads to look at the figure sitting in the chair next to the door, his head held in his hands, his body shaking with sobs.