The Illumination_ A Novel - Kevin Brockmeier [65]
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,