The Book of Jonas Read Online Free

or other moniker, so as to avoid confusion.”
    The headmaster’s eyebrows knit together, as though of their own will, making his face look, thinks Younis, not unlike that of a confused puppy. The grip on his ear relaxing still further, Younis keeps talking.
    “It’s one of the basic grammatical rules of the English language,” he says.
    Too late, he realizes that he has gone too far. A brief flash of pain shocks his head, this time on his left ear as the headmaster smacks his face. But then it is over.
    “Insolent child,” says the headmaster as he paces to the front of the schoolroom. “Insolent, unruly boy.”
9
    He knows little about his new home. The city’s name is abbreviated to PIT on the luggage tag that still hangs, six monthsafter his arrival, from the strap on his duffel, and sounds German to his ear. He imagines it printed in the fractured typeface of old German newspapers. He has seen photos, read some literature. The city is silver, surrounded by water and traversed by bridges. It is home to industry and a sports team whose name sounds familiar, from newspaper articles or radio broadcasts. The society, which has placed him with the Martins, has also enrolled him in a high school, and in a few years can maybe even help him get into the university.
    According to a teacher, he lives in the middle of the “rust belt.” When he hears the term (which he finds misleading), he pictures himself buckling a flaking iron hoop around his waist. But there is a lot of green space, especially in the suburbs, and the downtown is stainless and tall, but relatively clean, which he is told it did not used to be. Its three rivers, each of them larger than the river next to which he spent his childhood, both bisect and hem in the city. He imagines the boundaries formed by their junction forcing the village, then the town, then the city to grow up rather than out. Underneath the polish is the old city, stone and brick and corniced, pre-Depression confident. Clapboard houses, miners’ and steelworkers’ houses, lie as though tossed like so many dice onto the surrounding hills, and the university with its towering cathedral looks on from the east.
    He strives to adapt to his new life, to understand his place in it. As a welcome present, Mrs. Martin gives him an ornate, leather-bound copy of the Bible, which he keeps on a shelf in his room. For a time, it is his only book.
    At the high school, he tries to talk to other students, but they trick him into saying things.
    “Hey, Apu,” says one of them, blond-haired and cold-eyed, “say, ‘Welcome to Quickie Mart.’ Say, ‘Thank you, come again.’”
    He tries to rid himself of the accent, practicing for hours in front of a mirror, but it is hard-wearing, like stone, a singsong abomination.
    He gets A’s in everything.
    He wanders the halls like a ghost.
10
    “Where do you go in your mind?” Paul asks. He wants to explore this. Jonas has told him that often he sees his body, his surroundings, and himself from the outside, objectively. This does not happen all the time, only when he is in a particularly high state of stress or concentration, but that when it does he knows what people are thinking, can feel the energy vibrations in a room, and understands hidden meanings. (Later, when Paul mentions that he is privately skeptical of the existence of God, Jonas says, as mysteriously as he can manage: “Yes. I know.”)
11
    If he remembers anything, he remembers the book.
    He remembers the scratching sound of pencil on paper. He remembers wondering, offhandedly at first, but with ever-increasinginterest, what was being written. He remembers the compulsion, the care with which the book was usually guarded.
    And he remembers spotting it almost by accident, unaccountably left lying on the ground next to the camouflage backpack, as though it had been casually tossed or dropped in the dust, the color of which nearly matched its worn leather cover, obscuring it to the point that