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really there. He stands up high on the southern mountain, the wind blasting up from the far valley below, the first glow of sunrise pale in the east. The smoke, now black and ominous, rises from the burning village, and gunshots echo methodically from the rocks. No, Jonas tells him, this place is real. As real as the pen in your hand, as you note it, as real as the paper and ink. As real as that morning when it comes roaring back to him, standing on the precipice, so scared he can’t feel a thing.
    And then he’s back, the poltergeist fading in the rearview mirror of Paul’s silver statue, and he’s safe, and maybe he understands a little bit more, and maybe he is ever so slightly wiser.
27
    He remembers a clear day on the hill overlooking the village. The rapid, light-handed tapping of metal on stone echoing out over the valley as the mason labors beside a freshly dug grave.The supine stone, destined to join the chorus of standing rocks which either reach for or point to God, is the same shape, but a shade lighter than its neighbors, which have weathered months or years or centuries and darkened accordingly, their rows on the hillside presenting a graded palette of loss.
    He remembers staying in the mosque after prayers, kneeling with his eyes closed while everyone else stood to leave.
    “Peace be upon you.”
    “And upon you.”
    He remembers the entire village weeping, and his father’s angry vows of revenge. He remembers feeling as though there were something overhead, a lens or a prism, an inverted pyramid, serving as a conduit, through which all the world’s sorrow was focused.
    He remembers how they lowered them into the wounded earth, how they could have been sacks of laundry, or wool rugs wrapped in their protective gauze.
    He remembers how, despite his vehement wishes, peace didn’t come to him through prayers, or reading the Book, or fiery sermons, all of which served only to cloud his focus. So he learned to wait for it. He would stay a long time, waiting. Forever if he had to, kneeling on the mosque’s worn rugs, long after everyone else had left, keeping his eyes closed until he lost track of time, forcing himself to stay, to concentrate through boredom and aching knees and legs fallen asleep, until at last it came, entering his soul with a whisper.
28
    When he cannot be outdoors, he escapes the bullying, the interminable host family, the simplistic classes, by hiding away in the high school’s library. If the rest of the school is institutional, spartan, coldly lit by fluorescent lights, the library is an oasis of wooden bookshelves and learning, as though built a hundred years earlier. At some point, he comes to realize that this is because it was built years earlier, and while the rest of the school has been recently renovated—shiny, stainless-steel laboratory equipment in the science department, new classrooms filled with sparkling plastic-and-Formica-topped desks, whiteboards instead of chalkboards, a new athletics stadium—the library has undergone no such renovation. Unrefurbished as it is, timeworn and outdated though its shelves and tables and massive card-catalog file are, it is the best-appointed library Jonas has ever seen. As soon as he discovers it, almost by accident one afternoon while wandering the halls, he spends all his free time there.
    He reads not only the Bible he has been given, but reads about it, about how it was created. He learns about the Council of Nicaea, where, as far as he can tell, a bunch of priests got together and determined, more or less arbitrarily, what would be included in the Book and what would not. He reads about what was not. He reads about the Apocrypha, the Gospel According to Thomas, and Peter and James. He reads about the NagHammadi manuscripts. He is utterly fascinated by the thought that these writings had survived nearly two thousand years buried in the desert, that they had to be buried so that they might survive.
    Often it is dark when he leaves