The Book of Jonas Read Online Free PDF

with a single bed. He strives to keep himself unknowable. He comes to see mystery as an asset. For as much a mystery as he once found the Martin children, he himself remains a far deeper mystery. He enjoys being unfamiliar. Exotic. But he fails to realize that, by declining the opportunity to define himself, he allows others, less interested, more callous, meaner others, to create definitions for him.
16
    “Where do you go in your mind?” asks Paul, and Jonas tells him that sometimes he doesn’t know, that sometimes he looks up to realize that an hour or more has passed as he sits in the library, or on the edge of his bed, or on a park bench, and that he has no recollection of it.
    “Doesn’t that worry you?” asks Paul. “How much time do you spend in this way, drifting and unaware, in your head?”
    At first Jonas doesn’t understand the question. Or thinks that maybe he understands it differently from the way Paul intends it. But then he thinks that he does understand, and his face lights up with comprehension.
    “Oh, lifetimes,” he says at last. “I have spent lifetimes un-conscious.”
17
    Reluctantly, Jonas remembers that the soldier was called Christopher. When he eventually says the name, he pronounces it precisely, unaccented, as though he has practiced saying it.
    “I probably would not have survived without him,” says Jonas, looking around the office, out the window, searching for something interesting to comment upon, something to onceagain shift the conversation. They have been circling this subject for twenty minutes, Paul pushing him for more information, and Jonas reluctant to talk about it.
    “Is it not enough,” says Jonas, “to know that I have been helped by many people?”
    “Why won’t you talk about him?”
    “There was a doctor,” says Jonas. “At the American hospital. She was older than myself, but still young, for a doctor. Let us talk about her. She was wonderful. She helped me. She had smooth hands and fine wrinkles around her eyes, from laughing, and for the time I was there I lived on her smile.”
    “And yet you can talk about her easily.”
    “She helped me. I probably wouldn’t be here without her, either.”
    “But you recall her without difficulty. While this other person, this Christopher, you do not like to mention him. Why is this?”
    “She was prettier.”
    When Paul does not respond, but simply looks levelly at Jonas from across his desk, Jonas says, “Is it not enough to know that I survived, that I have been helped along the way?”
    “I’m afraid,” says Paul, “that it is not.”
18
    I am no longer certain of much.
    I carry a stone around in my pocket. It’s hard gray granite. It ispierced by a thin, marbled vein of white quartz. I can feel its rough surface on my palm, but I am consumed by the fear that it will turn to dust in my hand.
    Increasingly, I find everything I cling to is fragile.
    I remember from an earth sciences class that the white quartz in the stone was formed by something called an igneous intrusion. A crack in the granite let a tiny thread of magma, under pressure, penetrate the rock, where it cooled for years, eventually turning into the white streak running through the gray stone. The streak is like a scar, the molten rock pressed into it like blood.
    This is not a rare occurrence, this penetration of solid rock by molten rock under pressure. It happens all the time. Deep in the earth, it is happening right now. Stones like this are not scarce. Just yesterday I walked through a field littered with them. An entire field full of scarred stones. They are abundant. For every diamond in the ground there are probably a million stones like this one. And yet to me, right now, it is the most beautiful thing in the world. The invasion, the pressure. The magma has exploited the injured rock, and has made it beautiful.
    When I lie here and cannot sleep, these are the sorts of things I tell myself.
19
    Outdoors, Jonas is in charge, at