The Book of Jonas by Stephen Dau Read Free Book Online

the library, his footfalls echoing from the linoleum floor and institutional green tiles of the hallway. He stays so late that he is nearly locked in the building several times, and has to be let out by the scowling janitor. But he thinks to himself that, with so much he does not know, so much reading to do, this might not be so bad, to be sealed inside such a bastion of knowledge overnight, or for a weekend at the very most.
29
    The recruiters came and talked with us in school, and I remember it like yesterday. I wasn’t interested. I told them I wanted to do something good. I told them I wanted to help people. I told them I couldn’t do it, told them I wasn’t interested.
    But they told me that there was no better way to do good and to help people. They told me they helped people all the time. Doing good was what they were about. Plus they were going to pay me. Where else could I get paid for helping people? Plus they would pay for my college. Plus, in addition to helping people, and paying me, and paying for my college, they would teach me a skill. I would be helping people, and seeing the world, and earning money, and havingcollege paid for, and learning a skill that I could use later to earn money and help people.
    In the end, it was a pretty easy decision.
30
    He makes it into the news twice.
    The first time, he is mentioned within a single sentence, in the form of a number. He is one of eighteen injured civilians. Twelve killed, eighteen injured. When she thinks he is old enough, the director of the Friends International Assistance Society tentatively shows him the newspaper clipping, which she has kept for long enough that it is just beginning to yellow at the edges. The article is short, and he has to read it three times before he realizes that he is not reading about someone else. He catches himself feeling that feeling, that momentary luxury of denial, of thinking, Oh, well, at least there were survivors. He is surprised at how little space the story occupies.
    Then he wonders which number he was.
    “I think that I was number five,” he says. “Of the eighteen.”
    “Why do you think that?”
    “It just feels right.”
31
    He walks down the high school hallway. It’s late in the day, after hours, and Jonas has been in the library since the final bell. He has been reading once again about the Bible. He has become obsessed with it.
    He has learned that the original son of God, prince of peace, savior of the world, was Caesar Augustus, that these honorifics were bestowed upon him by the Roman senate. This increases Jonas’s admiration for the early Christians, for their acts of defiance, appropriating the emperor’s titles to their crucified leader, an act that virtually guaranteed their own executions. And even though Mrs. Martin has told him repeatedly that the Book is the inerrant word of God, that it contains only historical facts, the more he learns, the more he comes to believe that the writings themselves live in metaphor, that they seek not to convey factual information, but to reveal larger truths. He comes to believe that by insisting on taking them literally, Mrs. Martin manages to simultaneously denigrate the scriptures and paint herself a fool.
    And so he walks down the hallway after hours, considering the meaning of spiritual truth, the enlightened path, and suddenly there is one of them, the big kid with freckles, standing next to the lockers and laughing with several of his friends.
    They have been waiting for him.
    “Hey, Apu,” says the freckled kid, sneering, and shoves Jonas into the bank of lockers, holds his head against the wall, reaches down to try to do something with his underwear.
    Jonas is flooded with despair. Something snaps, something in his mind. Whatever has allowed him to remain passive and afraid snaps like a thread. He feels it, feels the change, as his entire body becomes one single, collective muscle.
    He lifts his knee hard into the kid’s crotch, grabs a finger and