The Illumination_ A Novel - Kevin Brockmeier [68]
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