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By Root 454 0

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 been 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