Gradually he would forget nearly everything about Brinkley, Arkansas, just as he had forgotten nearly everything about the dozens of other small towns he had visited over the years, but for the rest of his life, every time he saw a skeleton chandeliering its way down a stand in a biology classroom, he would think of the girl whose bones fluoresced with pain. He never did find out what was wrong with her.
In the unseasonably warm October that followed Ryan’s fifty-sixth birthday, he received a letter from the Greater Council of Evangelical Churches thanking him for his fourteen years of service and asking him to give some thought to accepting a post in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, right in the middle of the 10/40 Window. He would be working in the literature ministry, the letter said, consulting with a team of African Christians who were translating the Bible into a local trading language called Dioula. “May God continue to bless you, Brother Shifrin,” the last paragraph read, “and may we ask that you give this matter your timely and most prayerful consideration.”
Prayerful consideration: that was the phrase that did it. It was one of his sister’s pet expressions, and no matter how often he heard it, it always seemed to ring with the sound of her voice.
Dear Lord, we come to You with prayerful consideration.
Well, I’ve given it some prayerful consideration, and I have to disagree with you there, Ryan.
Look, it failed the first time around, and the second time, too, so let me ask you, Dr. Bragg, with all prayerful consideration, why on earth would I put myself through chemotherapy again?
And so, because Ryan was willing to indulge the idea that there was a path laid out for him and it would be a mistake not to follow it, and because he knew what Judy would have done, he accepted the church’s invitation.
On his first day in Ouagadougou, he took a taxi from the airport to the hospitality house. The driver’s English was heavily accented, his words popping and rounding in on themselves like water pouring through a concrete pipe. Ryan’s brain lagged a few seconds behind in deciphering them, as when he asked what Ryan was doing in Burkina Faso. “Ah fume first of all?”
“Pardon?”
“The film festival, yeah?”
“Ah. No. I’m here on business. With the church.”
“The church. Christian, yeah? Not Muslim.”
“That’s right. Christian, not Muslim.”
The driver fell silent as a squadron of polished red and green motorbikes buzzed past him. Soon he pulled to a stop and said something about “the varieties of Heaven.” After a moment, Ryan was able to remodel the remark into, “The ride is over, sir.” His own misheard version of the words lingered with him, though, and as the months passed, he found himself considering their implications. What was Heaven, he wondered, and what were its varieties? He envisioned a system of countless Heavens, each assembled according to the desires of the person to whom God graced it. A Heaven of immaculate brushed metal planes. A Heaven of cheeseburgers and big-breasted redheads.
The Burkinabè were developing a new, more colloquial translation of the Bible, modeled after the Contemporary Living Version that had become so popular recently in America. Ryan’s colleagues worked with a swift good humor, completing ten to twelve pages a day. There was Souleymane Ouedraogo, a small, courtly man with the gentle speaking cadences and arched hairline of an economics professor; his wife, Assetou, who carried herself like a lamppost, with the rigid back and flexile neck of a woman who was so eager to articulate her thoughts that her body had evolved into nothing more than a structure to prop up her head; and then there was David Barro, barely out of his teens, an amiably bedraggled boy who always had crumbs on his shirt and smelled of the French bakery above which he kept his room. For Souleymane, Ryan imagined a Heaven of ocean waves the texture of long-haired mink. For Assetou, he imagined a Heaven of polite conversations in candlelit restaurants. David Barro, he was sure, would choose the Heaven he had already been given, a Heaven of good looks and youthful well-being and the aroma of bread baking forever in stone ovens.
Ryan was there to assist the three of them with the nuances of conversational English. Often his efforts to clarify some detail of the American vernacular amused them for reasons he did not understand, as when he attempted to explain a verse from the Song of Solomon with the words “making out, you know, heavy petting,” and they exchanged stares with one another, struggling to keep their lips twisted shut, then burst into spirited laughter. Little by little he forged a real friendship with them. The Christianity they practiced was colored by the animism that was their cultural heritage, just as his own Christianity, he was sure, was colored by his middle-class Western heritage, a heritage of—what? Good taste. Christmas gifts. Summer barbeques. But he was curious about their beliefs, and for the first time in his decade and a half of mission work, he did not reproach himself for adopting an anthropologist’s stance toward the subtleties of their faith. Often, after they had finished the day’s pages, he would join them for a drink, following them around the corner to a posh little bar with casement windows and shea-wood tables. Ryan would quiz them: Did the people of Burkina Faso believe that animals had souls? What about plants, stones, rivers, houses? And if they did have souls, were they capable of suffering? Could the Earth itself suffer? If we wounded it gravely enough, would it burst into light? No, of course not, David Barro would answer, chuckling lightly, or, Yes, of course, Souleymane would say, shaking his head at Ryan’s credulousness, and in return they would ask him various questions about America—how many guns he owned or what his local theme park was named. Every so often, the waiter whose job it was to collect the bottles from the tables would come by and slip their empties into the large front pocket of his apron, striding away with a heavy clinking sound.
For the first time since he was a teenager, Ryan felt the joy and surprise of discovering a whole new set of friends. He looked back fondly on the days when he had to force himself to rehearse their names so he wouldn’t forget them. Souleymane. Assetou. David Barro.
The three of them were working on the final chapters of Ezekiel the day the bomb propelled a thousand spurs of metal through their bodies. Ryan was returning from a coffee run when it happened. He stood across the street from the building they all shared, waiting for a gap in the stream of cars and bicycles, and a heavy percussive boom washed over him, and he flinched. At first, he imagined the sound was a lightning strike. The blast was so loud that it temporarily interrupted his hearing—only slowly did the din of horns and engines filter back into the silence. When he lifted his head, he saw a black, almost liquid smoke billowing from the windows of his office. Horrified, he rushed into the street, thinking that he could rescue the others if only he made it to them in time, but a dozen of the city’s ubiquitous red and green motorbikes suddenly sped past and forced him to return to the curb.
It wouldn’t have made any difference. The building was too hot to enter. By the time the rescue workers extinguished the fire and made their way through the pool of retardant foam, uncovering the table that Souleymane shared with David Barro, their bodies had already fallen dark and stopped moving. Only Assetou remained alive. Ryan watched as they carried her outside on a spinal board, a cataract of light pouring out of the hole where her knee had been. She died a few moments after the sun touched her skin.
What had happened? Slowly, over the next few weeks, the local paper Le Pays revealed the story. Unknown agents had apparently loaded a coffee can with thumbtacks, aluminum powder, and liquid nitroglycerine and placed it on a shelf along the front wall of the office. No timer was recovered, no trembler. The investigators’ working hypothesis was that the mixture had exploded when someone removed the lid to inspect the can’s contents, though it might just as easily have detonated when a shaft of sunlight struck it and raised the temperature, or even when the shelf was jostled by a passing lorry. Much was made of the fact that the office had housed a group of evangelical Christians. A police spokesperson speculated that the bomb had be
en planted, as similar devices had been, by the small anti-Christian wing of the country’s Muslim majority, “ailing and impoverished,” the reporter wrote, “visible in increasing numbers, wearing the familiar red and green of Burkina’s national colors.”
The incident faded quickly from the headlines. The few articles that mentioned Ryan neglected to provide his name, referring to him instead as “the surviving American.” And that was how he began to think of himself.
The Surviving American was reluctant to leave his bed in the morning.
The Surviving American lived on a diet of breakfast cereal and millet beer.
The Surviving American spent his nights waking at the slightest sound—a door slamming, an engine coughing—and his days feeling guilty that he had somehow let his friends down by failing to die with them.
The work they had completed was gone, lost in the blaze. The computers and flash drives. The boxes and boxes of notebooks. The ten thousand ink-stained pages where they had put the verses so painstakingly through their variations. And the faces of the dead could be forgotten so quickly. And it was autumn and life was going by. And why should he ever bother to learn a person’s name again?
When the church offered to send him to Tunisia, he accepted. He neglected to visit the doctor for his inoculations or to pick up the pills that had been recommended to him. Let what would take him take him, he thought, and six months later, in the city of Sfax, he was walking along a tiled avenue lined with fragrant olive trees when the earth seemed to tilt out of his reach. He reached for an iron post and stumbled to his knees. He was sure he had taken ill, contracted typhoid or malaria or one of the hundred other North African diseases the guidebooks had warned him against. Schistosomiasis. Dengue fever. Then he noticed all the others who had fallen down, a cityful of men and women waiting on all fours as the ground lurched and trembled. All around him the plate-glass windows of the shops and restaurants burst. The street tiles in their neat rows of yellow and red separated and fell clattering on top of one another. Several of the craft vendors’ carts went rolling and galloping across the sidewalk, crushing their broad linen umbrellas as they canted over. He heard buildings cracking along their foundations—it was a sound he recognized, but how? The roof of a nearby school lifted and resettled, a first time and then a second, and finally collapsed in a cloud of white dust that burgeoned into the air and rained down over the street like chalk, turning to paste in his mouth. There was a series of crashes, and he turned to see the luxury hotel at the corner dropping chunks of masonry. One of the chunks crushed a fruit display. Another snapped a power line, which went snaking over the rooftops of the cars, throwing off sparks. Then the entire side wall of the hotel tipped outward in a single piece and smashed against the pavement like a ceramic plate. He glimpsed what he thought was a woman clinging to a set of curtains as it toppled. As suddenly as it had started, the earthquake ceased, its dying tremors dislodging the last few icicles of glass from the window of a pastry shop. The people around him were slow to gain their feet. Ryan could hear them cursing in French and Arabic, could see the light from their broken bones, but aside from a coruscating blood bruise that had emerged on one of his knees, he himself was uninjured.
Two years later, in Indonesia, he was driving through a strip of shanties along the coast of Sumatra when a block of water surged over the lowlands, sweeping them flat like an arm clearing a table. The wave took his car, spun it around, and delivered it upright onto the shoulder of a nearby hill. He held tight to the steering wheel while the water drained from his floorboards. As soon as he was certain the ground beneath him was not going to rise up and carry him away, he pressed the ignition button on his dashboard, but the motor wouldn’t start. He stepped out of the car onto a mat of rattan canes and walked slowly back toward the ocean, picking his way through the wreckage of the countryside: television aerials with drenched flags of clothing wrapped around them, uprooted palms turning their pedestals of earth to the sky. The shanties alongside the road had been reduced to rubble. Through the stones and the sheets of corrugated tin he saw the scraps of a hundred bodies, their lesions and gashes piercing the air with the precise iridescent silver of a mirror catching a headlamp. A few dozen people were limping through the debris, throwing tree branches, baking pans, and strips of plywood off the piles, trying to dig free the buried. Ryan attempted to help them. Some of the lights beneath his hands kept glowing, while others flared out suddenly. Where were they going? To a Heaven of clean white bathrooms with hot and cold running water. A Heaven of knowing, just for a while, how it felt to be rich and healthy.
The next summer, in Costa Rica, he agreed to take a quartet of visiting Spanish missionaries to the final match of the Copa América series, the first major event the stadium had held since its remodeling. Ryan was at the outer ring buying souvenir programs for his guests, listening to the crowd do its stomp-stomp-clap routine, when the midfield stands collapsed. A tide of brown dust went pouring through the entrance bays, temporarily blinding him. The air was filled with moans and screams, electronic feedback, the occasional gunlike reports of wooden buttresses cracking. As soon as Ryan had regained his sight, he shouldered his way past a security guard, under a sign that read SECCIÓN F1 A J12. The walkway ended at a set of twisted handrails extending over a twenty-foot chasm, a man-made canyon of folding chairs and cinder blocks. A woman in a loose black dress had been thrown against the wall while she was leaving. Not since his weeks in Brinkley, Arkansas, had Ryan seen someone whose bones shone so fiercely through her clothing. The stacked blocks of her vertebrae. The strangely shaped elephant’s ears of her pelvis. The jumbled gravel piles of her wrists. All around him voices were shouting, “Doctor, doctor.” He was surprised to realize his own was doing the same.
It was September of the next year when he finally returned to the United States. He began serving from a small church between a Laundromat and a cashew chicken restaurant in Springfield, Missouri. The Ozarks passed through a beautiful warm autumn, then an icy winter, then a gray and moody spring. The dogwoods blossomed with tiny singed-looking flowers that came down all at once after a single weekend. Ryan was handing out New Testaments from a little knoll on the university’s commons one day when a strange light seeped into the sky and the sirens began to wail. He took shelter with several hundred college students in the campus bookstore, crouching in the social sciences aisle and listening to the speakers rustle with white noise. The tornado touched down over them once, for only a few seconds, as fastidiously as a finger pressing an ant into the dirt, and destroyed the building. Ryan covered his head as the textbooks opened their spines and whirled around him, smacking into the walls and floor like birds who had lost control of their wings. All he could hear was the freight-train sound of the wind racing through its circles. Then, in the darkness and silence, he opened his eyes. The two blocks of shelves he was kneeling between had listed into each other, forming a gablelike roof over his head. He crawled into the ruins of the bookstore and rose to his feet. Everywhere there were bodies, radiating from their hands and legs, chests and genitals, faces and stomachs. Their flesh presented a star-map of wounds, glorious and incomprehensible. He felt like a man from some ancient tribal legend who had angered the gods and been doomed to walk the constellations.
Sometimes, late at night, he would find himself reminiscing about the disasters he had lived through, the tornado and the earthquake, the tsunami and the nitroglycerine bomb, and a voice in his head would insist, The Lord must be looking out for you. Sixty-four years and never a major illness. Sixty-eight years and still going strong. Seventy years and seventy-one and seventy-two and seventy-three … and he would say to himself: No. One word: No. He did not believe—and who could?—in a God so hawk-eyed and brutal, a God who bestowed a cancer here, a deformity there, for you a septic embolism and for you a compound fracture, selecting one person for grief and another for happiness like a painter experimenting with degrees of light and shadow. And which was the light, he wonde
red, and which the shadow? If the trials of Job could be a sign of God’s favor, then couldn’t Ryan’s own good fortune be a sign of God’s hostility? Maybe the crippled, the bruised, the diseased, the damaged—maybe the reason their wounds shone in this world was because God was lending them His attention from the next, looking on with loving compassion or a cultivated interest in suffering. Compassion. A cultivated interest in suffering. Compassion. A cultivated interest in suffering. Those were the possibilities that played across Ryan’s mind as he lay in bed watching the darkness conduct its usual late-night scintillations. He listened to the legs of an insect ticking across the floor of his bedroom. Say that God’s attention was a product of His sympathy: well, then our pain came first, and it brought His gaze, and from His gaze arose the luminosity of our suffering: y + z = a. Say, on the other hand, that God’s attention was a product of His esteem for certain forms of afflicted beauty: then our pain came first, and it brought with it the luminosity of our suffering, which summoned His gaze: y + a = z. One was the cause and the other the effect, one a and the other z, though either way, our pain came first, our pain was inescapable, our pain was always y. What frightened Ryan—horrified him—was not the possibility that God did not love us but that He did love us and His love was merely decorative. Aesthetic rather than unconditional. That He loved us because we suffered, and our suffering was pleasing to His eyes. The Illumination had overturned all the old categories of thought. For a while Ryan had believed, along with the crystal healers and the televangelists, that the light that had come to their injuries would herald a new age of reconciliation and earthly brotherhood. You would think that taking the pain of every human being and making it so starkly visible—every drunken headache and frayed cuticle, every punctured lung and bowel pocked with cancer—would inspire waves of fellow feeling all over the world, or at least ripples of pity, and for a while maybe it had, but now there were children who had come of age knowing nothing else, running to their mothers to have a Band-Aid put on their flickers, asking, Why is the sky blue? and, Why does the sun hurt?, and still they grew into their destructiveness, and still they learned whose hurt to assuage and whose to disregard, and still there were soldiers enough for all the armies of the world. And every war left behind the shrapnel scars and shattered limbs of a hundred thousand ruined bodies. And every earthquake and every hurricane produced a holocaust of light. And when his sister died she had looked at him with the panic of someone who had no idea what was coming next. And when his friends in Burkina Faso died their wounds seemed to flood the sky. And the gun shops and munitions factories were as plentiful as blades of grass. And the emergency rooms were as full as they had ever been. And there were towns in the great open middle of the country where the cemeteries outnumbered the churches. And in the hockey stands and the boxing arenas, a cheer went up with every split lip, every burst capillary. And in the video games the schoolkids played, the aliens erupted in geysers of blood and golden tinsel. And in the tent cities and domestic violence shelters, the poor and the beaten huddled over their sores and bruises, cradling them like fussy children. And Ryan felt that he had spent his life in a darkened room, groping for meaning or at least consolation. And so, it seemed to him, had everyone else. And their bodies were aging and one day they would fail altogether. And every heart would be soaked in brightness. And every brain would burn out like an ember. And there was God, high on His throne, attending to the whole terrible procession of sorrows and traumas, corrosions and illnesses, with a cool, cerebral dispassion. He took His notes. He never uttered a syllable. He had the whole world, all the little children, you and me, brother, in His hands. And it seemed to Ryan that He viewed their bodies as a doctor would—so many sorry aging structures of blood and tissue, each displaying its own particular debility. Their wounds were majestic to Him, their tumors and lacerations. And perhaps it had always been that way. Perhaps the light He had brought to their injuries, or allowed the world to bring, was simply a new kind of ornamentation. The jewelry with which He decorated His lovers. The oil with which He anointed His sons. The Earth was crammed with Heaven, and every common bruise afire with God, but only he who saw took off his shoes. And if that was the case, Ryan thought, if it was our suffering that made us beautiful to God, and if that was why He allowed it to continue, then how dare He, how dare He, and why, why, why, why, why? He loved us, or so He said, but what did His love mean? What was it good for? It didn’t change anything, it didn’t improve anything, it only lingered in the distance, fluttering like a bird around the margins of their wretchedness. It was a sad little robin of a word, His “love.” It fled at the first sign of cold weather. Its bones were hollow and filled with air. Anyone could see how feeble it was, how insubstantial. How wrong. And here was the question that kept Ryan awake at night: Was it possible for God to sin? Or were God and sin the opposite poles of a binary system? Was sin whatever God was not—the cold to God’s warmth, the darkness to God’s light? Or was it stationary, absolute, and was God as capable of venturing into it as anyone else? Because it seemed to Ryan that if God could sin, and if their suffering was as needless as it appeared, and if He had permitted or even abetted it, then His love had soured into hatred, and He should take to His knees and repent. Never mind the foundations of the earth. Never mind the morning stars singing together. Never mind the sea shut up with doors. He had formed His children, endowed them with the breath of life, and set them free in a world of poison and fire. Of endless diseases and natural disasters. Floods and landslides. Volcanic eruptions. A world of spinal meningitis. Of cerebral palsy. Of neurochemical imbalances that made the weakest among people hate having to exist. Of genetic disorders that blanketed their skin in ulcers. Could He see them in their pain? Was He awake at all behind the lit windows of Heaven? For this was the hope that Ryan found himself nursing—that God had merely gone to sleep for a while and was not paying attention, that the glass of Heaven was dark, and the curtains were drawn, and the suffering of humankind was like the sunlight that gradually suffused the sky in the morning. And maybe, Ryan thought, that was all there was to it. Maybe the hour was still too early. Maybe they hadn’t yet suffered enough to rouse Him from His bed. A little more pain, a little more light, a few more blows and afflictions, and God would stretch His limbs and waken to the grand celestial daybreak. And the Earth would experience its restoration. And everything would be changed. The older Ryan became, the more the notion preoccupied him. He lay beneath his sheets watching the dim plane of the ceiling. Inside it he could see the same hallucination he had seen ever since he was a child forcing his eyes to make sense of the darkness, a thousand lambent spots that leaped and circled around one another like the static on an ancient television. And he knew that if he stared at them long enough they would come together as they always had, in a single overlapping field of Catherine wheels and carousels.