The Book of Jonas Read Online Free PDF Page B

peace. It’s late summer, early September, and he walks slowly, reluctantly to school, out ofthe subdivision and into the lush forest that encroaches from all sides, the sights and smells as if from a tropical island, compared with the desert hills of his childhood. He memorizes their names: the musky scent of Bradford pear, the earthy sassafras, the brilliant rhododendron. Autumn is filled with the deep mystery of fallen leaves, the first sharp whiff of coming frost, lit by curious jack-o’-lanterns, and the winter, foot after foot of snow.
    He reads the Bible he has been given. He reads that God created light and darkness on the first day, then that He created the sun, which separates day and night, on the fourth. He reads that man was created before woman, then that they were created at the same time. He reads that God is jealous, and then that He is loving and kind; that man is inherently evil, and then that he is created in God’s image; that woman is equal to man, and then that she is subservient. He strives to find in it some direction, some solace from the Book’s words, some sense of comfort, but he is instead driven mad by its internal inconsistencies.
    The taunting turns physical. Jonas’s skinny frame persuades some of the bolder kids that he won’t fight back. It’s relatively mild at first: stepping on his heels in the hallway to pull off his shoes, overturned plates of food, and when Jonas tells them to stop they just laugh harder.
    “Say it again, Apu. ‘Stop eet.’”
    He shows up late to class. Sometimes he doesn’t show up. He finds the schoolwork almost ridiculously easy, and reasons that it is deserving of only part of his time. He spends a wholeday in a wooded trace of land between home and school, sitting under a sugar maple. He tracks a deer for a mile in the forest.
    The next day he shows up to school as though nothing happened, and the senile old teacher asks for a written excuse, signed by his host parents.
    “What excuse,” he says, “I was here.”
    She walks away, looking confused.
    Even attending part-time, he gets A’s.
20
    Where do you go in your mind, Paul asks, and Jonas tells him that sometimes he travels to a meadow with a clear stream running through the middle of it, past a shade tree where a lioness and a gazelle stand looking at each other, a cobalt sky spread overhead. This place is the result of a creativity exercise that was once taught to him by a writing teacher. It was supposed to be a safe place where they could access their inner voice, their muse, but he’s not sure that’s exactly what it turned out to be.
    “It is a mental construct,” he says to Paul. “I know it is not real.”
21
    There is much he cannot remember. In place of these memories, his head is filled with facts. Names, dates, places. He is baffled by what he knows almost as much as by what he does not. For example, he knows that the Empire State Building is nearly fifteen hundred feet tall, that the Declaration of Independence was written in 1776, that the New Deal saved America from communism, that the first World Series was played in 1903. These facts were given to him by the 1980 edition of
The New Book of Knowledge
encyclopedia, which showed up, minus the
V
volume, in an aid shipment, or maybe with a missionary group, and sat with a smattering of other books—a large English dictionary, the Koran,
A Tale of Two Cities
—in a rough-hewn bookcase at the back of the schoolroom, its row of blue-and-white spines promising enlightenment.
    He remembers staying after class to read it, volume by volume, turning the pages right to left as the late-afternoon sunlight slanted through the school window. New York was founded by the Dutch; Gutenberg invented the printing press; the American Civil War was fought to end slavery.
    But he is nagged by the suspicion that his brain space is limited, that his mind must toss some things over into the current so that others might be accommodated. It is as