by Stephen Dau
1
Occasionally Jonas hears the voice of his savior.
It comes to him when he is unable to turn his thoughts to anything else. The voice he hears is gentle and deep. When he remembers it, he tries to get it right, tries to match the words exactly, but has the familiar feeling that he is adding and subtracting, substituting what should have been said for what he fails to remember accurately.
What should have been said. What he fails to remember.
He is haunted by both.
2
You probably wonder why I want you to read this, why I am telling you all this.
I know who you are. We came to your village, all laid out in the moonlight. We were up on the rise, and then we were like a wave, relentless, effective, crashing down the hill.
I had enough. We snapped. Something snapped. I snapped. And then I followed you here.
I know who you are. I saw you leave. I followed you. I tracked you down the river, watched you turn toward the hills at the balancing rock, chased you up and over the stony slope, looked on as you lost your path and then found it again, lost it and then found it once more.
I watched you. I had to talk to you. I had to explain. I had to make you understand. I had to ask your forgiveness.
And here I lie, prostrate in the dust before you.
Waiting.
3
Jonas wakes in sheets soaked with sweat. He is haunted. He gets out of bed, grabs a T-shirt. He has seen two versions of the future. He gathers together everything he has saved from the packet, every letter, every photocopied photograph, every newspaper clipping, even the envelope itself, labeled in Rose’s flowing script in blue ink, labeled “Christopher.”
He sees two versions of his future. Then he sees three. Then he sees a thousand, each a slightly distorted reflection of the others, all of them shining back at him like pieces of a shattered mirror.
He goes out into the night. The cold air smells like snow, and his arms prickle in the wind. Picking his path along the cracked cement sidewalk, he makes his way to the park beside the river, next to the railroad bridge on Fourteenth Street.
He has seen himself grown and married, the father of a young child. As he walks to the river, he avoids the cracks in the cement, as though stepping on one of them will open a chasm through which he will fall and be lost. He has seen himself as a criminal, as a murderer, as someone entirely able to rationalize what he has become. He can hear the river before he gets to it, the roar of the rapids out in the middle, seemingly unconnected to the calm, shallow water near the shore. But he knows that a stick or a leaf, floating in the shallows, can be suddenly caught up and taken out and away, into the roaring tempest.
But this is inaccurate. The river is quiet, its flowing volumes of water pouring silent and deep. The yellowed street lamps light his way. To get to the park, he must descend a steep embankment, past a fenced-in cemetery, its standing tombstones pointing toward God. As he struggles near the top of the slope, he trips on a rock, twisting his ankle, and nearly falls over the side, into the river below.
The last time he saw his home, he was five thousand feet above it. He cannot quiet his mind. He has read the Bible he has been given. He has read that God is loving and kind, and then that He is jealous. He has read somewhere else that Jesus died for his sins. He has read that the meek shall inherit the earth, and he does not want any part of it.
The shrill air brings his life to the top of his skin.
He stands with difficulty, takes an agonizing step, his ankle throbbing each time his foot hits the cold ground. He struggles with categories. He can neither place himself into context, nor can he be placed. The usual labels fail. He is a victim. He is a perpetrator. He is a terrorist. He is a refugee. He feels himself placed neatly into boxes. He fights against labels. He is omniscient. He is a criminal.
He has gathered everything together, everything he has, all the physical proof that tells him who he is, who Christopher was, and he takes it all down to the park, next to the bridge, which spans the river pouring dark and wide below. He is a man. He is a boy. He is human. He is an alien.
He wants to burn it, burn everything associated with it, burn his past and send it skyward in a burst of smoke and sparks. He is an arsonist. He is a fireman. He is an archivist. He is a vandal. He has arrived at the park, limping on his twisted ankle, and has placed the sheaf of papers on the ground next to a large boulder before he realizes that he has forgotten to bring any matches.
He is incompetent.
He comes up with another plan. He climbs back up the steep embankment, up to the base of the bridge, climbs the brief stone staircase and grabs hold of the bridge’s rusting, cast-iron service ladder. He lives in the buckle of the rust belt. He climbs the ladder and walks out onto a narrow metal catwalk suspended underneath the bridge. He is the product of generations spent in wind and cold. He belongs, secure in his mobile community. He is an outsider. He wonders who has a greater claim to the truth, himself or those who would label him. His darkness is palpable. He skews the demographic.
The rusting catwalk sways under his steps, and he feels each footfall echo through the metal. Maybe he is just like anyone of a certain age. Or maybe he is not. Maybe he is such the product of loss that his soul reeks of it.
He walks on the catwalk out into the middle of the bridge, high over the water. The night is quiet, and he hears the traffic onshore, an airplane passing high overhead, on its way to somewhere else.
He feels the train before he sees it. The rails above him begin to sing with a high-pitched, metallic sound, like the highest note of a chorus of violins, and then he hears what sounds like a hundred flags cracking in the wind, and an engine noise like a broken scooter, and underneath that is a low whistle, like his father calling to the sheep, the whole cacophony getting louder and louder and stretching on until forever. The catwalk jumps and shakes, and the single light on the front of the train’s engine lights up the tracks like daytime, so that Jonas can see nothing in the harsh glare. He grips the railing, grips also the packet of papers that tells him who he is. The train passes only feet over his head, shaking the catwalk until his shoes bounce from its surface. He begins to scream, not out of pain or fear or panic, but words, fully formed, screams, enumerates for the world all that has been taken from him, all that he has lost, but finds the words inaudible underneath the roaring train.
And then it is almost instantaneously silent. Subtle noises return in the wake, the river’s gurgle, the traffic on the shore, the distant echo of a tugboat’s horn.
Almost as an afterthought, he tosses the sheaf of papers off of the bridge.
As they fly through the air, the pages reflect faintly the meager light from headlights and street lamps onshore. He watches them fly. Many of the pages stick more or less together, forming a relatively solid, plummeting mass, leading the way through the chill air for other individual sheets of paper, which expand, separate from themselves, become a multitude of individual pages, fluttering down, all of them finding their way, eventually, into the pitch-black. They settle silently onto the river’s surface, where they remain dimly visible for a time, white sparks floating in the night, until they gradually log with water, and disappear.
4
Someone will buy a round, and someone else will speak up. Remember the river, they will say. Remember how rough it was, the rapids frothy as though a giant blender churned on the riverbed deep below us. Which boat were you in? someone will ask. Oh, that’s right, someone else will say, suddenly remembering something he swore at the time he would never forget. And then there was Chris, remember, Henderson in the bow, pointing us through the rapids.
And do you remember that moon, someone will say, that thin crescent moon slung low in the sky? I have never since seen a moon quite like that one, the way the tiny little sliver of it seemed to light up the whole valley, the whole world, the whole future in front of us, dusted with light.
5
The next mornin
g, Jonas has a plan. He decides that he wants to talk. There is something he knows he must do. His life now revolves around it.
He is suddenly wide-awake, and looks out the window to see that winter has descended like a thick, white duvet. He is out of bed, fighting against the cold of his room. He turns the shower on, hot enough to make him wince, swaying his body under the stream. He is nervous, excited, feels the tension bunch in his stomach and run down his arms to his fingers. He feels himself on the verge of flight.
Outside, he has to concentrate to keep from slipping on the packed snow as his footsteps take him, almost of their own will, to Paul’s office.
“All right,” says Paul. “Why now?”
“Because there is something I have to do, and it starts with this.”
Jonas watches his distorted reflection in Paul’s silver statue. He wants to get it out, he says. He has a plan.
But he senses that Paul’s energy has subtly changed. He feels it in the room when he arrives. It’s nothing overt, at first. Paul seems a little distracted, that’s all. He seems to be marginally less interested in hearing what Jonas has to say, and Jonas assumes that it is because he is thinking about something else.
Nevertheless, Jonas carries on, tells him about the night he left his village, tells him about fleeing into the mountains, about finding the cave, about losing consciousness in the cold and wind, about meeting Christopher there, about how Christopher stitched him up, fed him, built him a fire.
But still he feels that something has changed. Paul wants to hear, he says, wants to know what happened, and still thinks Jonas needs to tell it.
“Then what’s the problem?” asks Jonas.
“I’m concerned,” says Paul. “I’m concerned about what happened. I’m worried it might be something I have to report. But I’m not sure. I have no experience with this. I have no idea what the law says about this.”
Jonas has never seen Paul unable to find his words, or act awkward or ill at ease, and he finds the sight of it troubling.
“Look,” says Paul, “let me make a phone call, okay? It shouldn’t take too long. I just want to be sure I’m not going to get you into trouble.”
And so Jonas is left alone in Paul’s office, left alone to contemplate the enigmatic statue on the desk, left to watch his distorted reflection play across its surface.
Paul comes back into the office after a few minutes, but it is Jonas who speaks.
“I’ve been thinking,” says Jonas. “I trust you. This has to come out. You have convinced me of that. This is going to consume me. I don’t need a shrink to tell me that.” He glances again at the statue on Paul’s desk, and thinks to himself that this will probably be the last time he sees it.
“Yes,” says Paul, “but as I told you, I am obligated. It’s a legal thing. It’s not my choice. It may seem arbitrary, I know.”
“But what could happen?”
“In reality, I don’t know, for sure. Maybe nothing. Maybe they would just come and talk to you. Maybe they would issue a warrant for your arrest. It’s hard to tell. They’ve been taking this stuff pretty seriously lately.”
“But it is your choice when you tell them, right?”
“Sorry?”
“You don’t have to report it today, right?”
“I don’t think there is a time … I don’t know.”
“You could give me a few days. You could fill out the form, file the report or make the phone call, or do whatever it is that you have to do, and if anyone ever asks, you could tell them that you did it as soon as you were able. You could do that, right?”
Paul tugs absently at the hair in his goatee, and lets out a long sigh.
“I could,” he says at last. “Look, nobody is forcing you.”
“I know,” says Jonas. “That’s why I’m going to do it.”
“This makes no sense.”
“Don’t you see? It’s the same thing. You’ll be helping me. Forcing me to go. Helping me to do something difficult. Just like Christopher helped me.”
“Christopher helped you. You mean when he saved you?”
“No, at the end. When he helped me do it. He knew. He helped me do it. He knew what would happen, what had to happen. He set it up to happen. He knew.”
“He knew what?”
“He knew who I was. He tracked me up there. He set it up to happen.”
“Set up what, Jonas?”
“He had to know what I would do. He had to. He just had to.”
6
Younis has been lying with his eyes open for hours, lying at the edge of the cave, the dying fire flickering shadows against the rock wall. He has been listening, waiting for Christopher’s breath to calm, regularize into the pattern of sleep. He knows now what will happen, what has to happen. He will be purposeful about it. Deliberate. It will be fast. He will grant him that. Speed will be the only good in it.
He knows where the knife will be, honed and hard and cold, its hilt protruding from the rocky soil. He has measured, in his mind, the distance. He is convinced that even Christopher understands what must happen. For has he not told him what to do? Has he not placed the knife in the ground each night, each night slightly farther away from himself and slightly closer to Younis? Does he merely imagine it?
He listens for the breath, the gentle rhythm, the peace. He vows that he will not even wake him. Silently he makes this promise to both of them. He will be swift, precise. The decision has already been made. There will be no pain, no struggle. Just peace. His own desires are no longer a consideration. What will happen is what must happen, what is fated to happen. What has been decided.
Afterward, he will roll his body gently off the cliff. He will scatter some earth after him. He will say a few words, low and heartfelt, about loss, about God, about how sorry he is that it had to be this way.
Then he will sit down on a rock and read the book, cover to cover. He will linger over some passages, and skim through others. He will place the book gently under a rock at the back of the cave, confident that he is the only one in the world who knows where it is.
But for now, he is being pulled along, set in motion, his own will no longer figuring into it. He listens again for the breath, calculates his position.
And then—does he imagine it?—Christopher opens his eyes.
For a moment they see each other, a blink, and Younis hesitates. Within a moment they meet. Younis realizes what he is about, feels the weight of a moment that will stretch, in his mind, into an eternity.
And then his eyes are closed.
And then he is motion.
He pops into the air like a gazelle, a blur, silent, focused, springing to his feet and across the rocky precipice in a single action, and the knife is exactly where he knew it would be, and it is in his hand, unsheathed from the earth.
He sees himself as though from the outside, detached, as though it is someone else doing it. And from this place, this disembodied vantage, he sees himself, now a flash, darting across the open space, now merging with the figure prone on the ground, now springing up to stand over him, taut and ready.
And he is surprised by how easy it is, how quiet, how neatly the knife’s sharp edge slits his sleeping throat, how simple, like a stone plopping into water.
1
One year the group rents out the Carlisle Auditorium in Pittsburgh. The next, they are booked into the Bethel Park Recreation Center. The following year they are given an anonymous donation, which allows them to rent out a portion of the convention center. The group calling itself Military Families for Truth grows, changes, adapts. Other groups take root, sprout up in other parts of the country. The fertile soil of the Southeast, Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, others in the rocks and scrub of Arizona, Utah, still others under the Northwest rain.
Rose leads a delegation to Capitol Hill, to talk with the representatives in Congress. A member from Michigan introduces himself. He has heard of Rose, and asks her to speak with his colleagues. Loss has come to his
state, he tells her, and who is Rose if not loss’s spokesperson?
She develops bureaucratic skill. She familiarizes herself with grant applications and donor forums and aid requests. She learns how to advocate for or against legislation, how to submit requests under the Freedom of Information Act, learns who makes the decisions at particular government agencies, and how to most effectively apply pressure to them.
The groups grow, change, merge. Local groups combine into regional groups, which then become national collectives. An umbrella organization is formed, called the Associated Families of Veterans, and Rose is elected its first president.
And yet, despite her tireless efforts, the meticulous attention to detail, it is so often the role of chance or luck that brings her any form of comfort, any sense of closure. An e-mail message, which she now sends and receives proficiently, arrives one day as though from a cloud, or a chance encounter at a meeting or conference, someone who seeks her out, happens across her path.
So it is that Rose finds herself walking across the cavernous expanse of yet another convention center, this one in Denver or Chicago or Albuquerque, her great plume of red hair now streaked liberally with white, walking quickly, purposefully, because she is late to be somewhere else and the place is so big that it takes forever to get anywhere. She sees him from the corner of her eye, peripherally, before she hears his voice.
“Excuse me,” he says, and she does not want to be rude, does not want to appear uninterested, but she is late and the appointment is important and…
“Excuse me,” says the man again, and now Rose sees no way out. She turns to look at him, make contact with him.
“Are you Rose Henderson?” he says as he approaches.
Rose tilts her head back to look up at him. He is balding, his hair cut short in an attempt to cover the fact. He looks to be approaching middle age. He has powerfully built shoulders and arms, but is developing a paunch around his middle.
