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of the anciently good and the contemporary mustachioed Bible-thumpers. He was for the people who were willing to get nailed to crosses or strapped to altars or to spend their lives wandering in the desert. I would have done any of these things if I had thought it would return Olivia to us, but I also doubted God would notice my sacrifice. I had a suspicion he was too busy taking care of the genuinely black-and-white people like my Sunday school teacher, not the fake faithless believers like me.
    Then on the night of June 23, 1978, at the Emmanuel Mission School, a place roughly halfway between town and our farm, eight British missionaries and four of their children, ranging in age from six to three weeks old, were killed by liberation forces. I can’t remember now how we came to see the photographs of the massacre at our school, but I have a memory of us students huddled over grainy images that had been published in a booklet by the Rhodesian Ministry of Information. What has remained vivid for me all these years later is a photo of Pamela Grace, the bayoneted newborn lying face up, her mouth open, arm outstretched to her bloody impaled mother.
    Perhaps inevitably, the image of that dead missionary baby became conflated in my mind with the memory of Olivia’s motionless corpse on the bed of our neighbor’s spare room on the afternoon of her drowning. Death might give meaning to life, rendering it precious and fleeting and something not to be wasted, I already understood that, but the death of blameless babies seemed to me worse than senseless. It degraded life and rendered it cheap and pointless. My already shaky belief vaporized, leaving nothing but fear and a terrible sense of aloneness in its place.
    I came to the only possible logical conclusion: God could not exist. Little Pamela, child of two missionaries, did not look as if she had been blasted directly to heaven. Like Olivia, she looked awfully and futilely dead. And if God hadn’t been with those babies in their tiny innocence, or at least gathered them to him bodily at the moment of their demise, then he certainly wasn’t with us, or with our soldiers, or even with the Sunday school teacher. God was nowhere. It was just all we Godless people—regardless of whether we were black-and-white people or colorful people—bashing up against one another on a lonely planet. None of us was going to be saved by anyone but each other.
    My flawed but convincing calculations made mathematical leaps. Since God was nonexistent, the only thing that stood between oblivion and me was love. Unlovable people, I reasoned, were invisibly endangered. Lovable people were memorable. Lacking natural cuteness, I used the gift of volume I had been granted from birth and I became siren loud, deliberately unforgettable. Wanting to ensure a reliable exit from any catastrophe, I was careful to make every entrance count. I stage-managed my way into the center of my parents’ boozy get-togethers by dressing up as a troopie, singing patriotic Rhodesian songs (of which we believed ABBA to be some of the leading writers), performing faux stripteasing acts behind bedsheets over which I flung my mother’s underwear pilfered from her top drawer. I sang about not losing and having no regrets, layering an approximation of the Swedish accents of Anni-Frid and Agnetha over my Rhodesian nasal whine.
    And in the absence of God, I transferred his authority to the next highest, visible, logical power: my father. After all, like God, Dad’s rules were absolute, capricious, and patriarchal. “Don’t argue with your father,” he said, if we ever dared contradict him. Like God, Dad could seem remote and mysterious, by turns withholding and munificent. Like with God, you could talk to Dad without the expectation of reply or favor, and even if nothing happened, or the outcome was unfavorable, you could comfort yourself by arguing that he knew best. And as the man of the house, and, more important, the man