Lewyn was left, as usual, to his own thoughts, and they seemed to be in equal parts apprehensive and self-flagellant. To another person, he now saw, the fact of a very white and very blond young man from Utah, with a large family of similarly white and blond people, might have fairly shrieked MORMON. To himself and his siblings, though, a Saul Steinberg distortion had basically divided the country into New York City, its suburbs, the Vineyard （where the Oppenheimer cottage—not, of course, really a cottage—clung to a fragile dune）， and New England, Florida, and California. The rest was, well, the rest. Unexplored, but full of people who enjoyed strange pastimes like watching cars drive around a track and shooting things dead. Jonas, it had always been obvious, was some kind of not-Jewish person from the rest of the country. But did he truly believe in God? And wait, had he actually just spoken the words “Heavenly Father”？
In fact, Jonas Bingham of Ogden, Utah, did maintain an ongoing （if one-sided） conversation with an entity he referred to, without irony, as “Heavenly Father.” It further turned out that virtually everyone Jonas had ever known （and certainly everyone he was related to） likewise held routine conversations with this same “Heavenly Father.” It was also true that Jonas, born and reared in Utah, was far less a stranger to upstate New York than Lewyn himself was, having visited the area no fewer than four times with his large and smiling family. “It’s a special place for Mormons, you know.”
No, of course Lewyn didn’t know. “Really? Ithaca?”
“Not Ithaca. West of Ithaca.” Jonas opened a map on his computer and pointed to some random spot, between Rochester and Syracuse. “Where we began,” he said simply.
Lewyn frowned. He was thoroughly ignorant, of course, about the vast and foreign territory known as “upstate New York,” where people lived without reference to Brooklyn Heights or even Manhattan, otherwise known as the center of the universe. The notion that something had actually happened in this backwoods wilderness which was of critical interest to millions of people around the world would come as something of a shock.
Jonas tipped back in his chair and braced his long legs against Lewyn’s bedframe. “You’re pretty much in the dark about us, aren’t you?” He shook his head, but he was laughing, too. Then he told his roommate a story about a long-ago farm boy and a pillar of light in the woods behind his house, and golden plates dug up out of the ground, which became the Book of Mormon, and which contained everything Jonas Bingham personally believed about the world. Lewyn struggled to control his own face as he listened, and he did listen. The great stories of the Hebrew Bible had never, particularly, stirred him: Abraham and Isaac, Joseph and his troublesome coat, the Exodus and the Red Sea and Moses, hauling the tablets of the law down to the gathered tribe … it was interesting, in the way that all history was interesting, as something that had probably happened, in some version, at some time. The Babylonian Exile, which had scattered his ancestors across the globe and sown their centuries of harassment and suffering, had always given him a sad and guilty feeling, since he himself had never been forced from his home. Far worse even than that, of course, had befallen the Jews over the centuries, including the crimes against Joseph Oppenheimer, his own designated family martyr, but even poor Joseph Oppenheimer’s story had weirdly not been as compelling as Jonas’s unsettling story.
“Is any of this true?” he asked his roommate, an instant before realizing how rude the question must sound. But Jonas only shrugged.
“The thing is, I don’t have to answer that. The story comes down to us through our tradition. Not all that different from your family tradition, I guess. And that’s enough for some people. But the Book of Mormon actually comes with instructions if we’re not ready to believe. It says all we have to do is ask Heavenly Father with a sincere heart if the story is true, and He’ll answer us. Which is exactly what I did when I was fourteen. Now I know it’s true.”
“You mean, you believe in it.”
“No. I know it.”
Then he got up and asked if Lewyn wanted anything from the common room down the corridor, where the candy machines were, and when he came back he returned to Large Animal Theriogenology and ate his Snickers bar. An hour later Jonas closed his ponderous textbook, quietly thanked his Heavenly Father for the day, and turned out the light. Instantly, he was asleep, breathing deeply, his shoulder rising and falling in the light from Lewyn’s own reading lamp. But Lewyn couldn’t sleep, not even after he’d given up on the Romans and his own ponderous textbook. He lay awake in his bed for hours and thought of angelic forms, hovering in the trees of a sacred grove, only an hour westward.