Anatomy of a Miracle

by Jonathan Miles

  Both of them left Vietnam at around the same age: Quỳnh as a seven-year-old, in 1975, and Hat, in 1989, as an eight-year-old. And both are the children of military men who failed to make it out of Vietnam alive. The similarities, however, stop there.

  Quỳnh barely knew his father, who was a South Vietnamese Army colonel stationed in Nha Trang, but what he knew of him was magical. Quỳnh remains half-convinced, for example, that his father could communicate with animals—especially the geckos that overran the walls of Quỳnh’s grandmother’s farm in Vũng Tàu, which would halt, and then thoughtfully respond, when his father spoke gecko to them: cac ke…cac ke. When Quỳnh would ask what the geckos were saying, his father would say, “They are asking about you. They think you are too small, too much like them, and that you should eat more.” Though the family lived most of the year in Saigon, it’s the farm in Vũng Tàu that Quỳnh recalls most vividly: the funky smell of the longans ripening in the orchard, the black clouds of bats swarming the orchard at dusk, the betel-leaf and areca-nut aroma of his grandmother’s kisses, the slow pounding of the gong lulling him to sleep during Buddhist prayer sessions, the pride and responsibility he felt when dispatched to the chicken coop to fetch the morning eggs. As to the war up north, his father rarely spoke about it, but when he did it was as a mild and temporary irritant—like a vexing business matter unworthy of discussion in the home. It would be over soon in any case, he promised. Southerners like him had been repelling invasions for generations: from the Chinese, Chams, Khmers, Japanese, and French. The communists, his weary pose suggested, would be no different.

  The fall of Saigon therefore came as a galactic shock—a breach of reality. Still, his father acted nonplussed. In the days preceding the South’s surrender he arranged for the family to escape the country via a patrol boat from Vũng Tàu that bore them to a U.S. liner headed for Guam. He was obligated to attend the funeral of a general, he said, but his plan was to follow in a few days and reunite with them in Guam. Instead he was captured, and almost immediately executed. Quỳnh doesn’t believe that his father lied to the family about the dangers he was facing, or that he understated them, nor does he think his father was under any illusions about those dangers. His father’s plan was solid, Quỳnh says, but it failed. His intelligence and effort weren’t enough; the world ate him anyway.

  Listening to Quỳnh recount the story of his life, one senses that Adam, interviewed years after his eviction from Eden, might employ a similarly nostalgia-crippled tone—the Fall of Man recast as the Fall of Saigon. All the tropical fruit scents and gecko magic fall away as Quỳnh’s autobiography sputters forward, the vibrant colors fading into a black-and-white tableau. Penniless, and reliant on charity, the Lês—Quỳnh, his mother, and his younger sister—drifted around the United States before locating distant relatives in Biloxi, one of the congealing points in the postwar Vietnamese diaspora. Quỳnh was among the first wave of Vietnamese immigrants, and suffered the hard lot of a pioneer. He struggled through adolescence, hounded by bullies and hamstrung by his difficulties mastering English, and dropped out of high school two months before he was set to graduate. (One year later, because of students like him, the Biloxi school district instituted bilingual education.) For the next eleven years he worked as a crabber for his mother’s second husband, fishing for blue crabs and selling them to restaurants and wholesalers, but that fell apart when his stepfather lost the boat to gambling debts. In the meantime he met Hat, who was seventeen at the time. On the night he proposed, she says, he noted their age difference, with fretful gravity, and also warned her that his life expectancy might be abbreviated, though he couldn’t say precisely why. “He asked me to marry him,” she recalls, “and then spent two hours trying to talk me out of saying yes.” (She found this odd but endearing, as though his care for her well-being trumped his desire to marry her.) More than a decade passed before Hat finally became pregnant—enough years for Quỳnh to abandon hope. So when Little Kim entered the world with her underdeveloped lungs, and the doctors in the neonatal intensive care unit assigned her long odds for survival, it made a kind of grim sense to Quỳnh, relaying the click of an awful logic. He awaits calamity with an intensity rivaling that of the man outside awaiting Christ.

  If Quỳnh is a man in exile, from a place as well as a time, his wife is an exhilarated escapee. For him, leaving Vietnam was a nightmare; for Hat, it was a glorious dream. This is where their age difference bears some meaningful weight: Hat was born in 1981, a bleak and scorched period in southern Vietnam. She has no memories of luscious longan orchards or magical geckos or even of her father, a former mid-level Army officer who was sentenced to a reeducation camp before she was born and subsequently died there. What she remembers, almost exclusively, is the frantic waiting in a Saigon slum, with her mother exhausting every means possible to get Hat and her two sisters out of the country. This included handing over twelve hundred dollars to a smuggler—a sum painstakingly scraped together over a six-year period—who then vanished with the money. Funds eventually dribbled in from relatives in Biloxi, along with news that the relatives’ church would sponsor the family’s immigration to the United States if they could somehow get to Thailand or Hong Kong.

  They left in the middle of the night, crammed onto a wooden boat with more than a hundred other refugees. Hat’s mother fell into a near-catatonic state, terrified of Thai pirates who were said to throw women and girls overboard after raping them. As Hat’s older sisters tried consoling their mother, Hat found herself drawn beside an elderly nun sitting against a gunwale and calmly praying the rosary. The nun seemed unafraid, her spindly fingers constantly traveling her rosary beads, and after a while Hat fell asleep with her head in the old woman’s lap, tranquilized by the murmured Hail Marys and the boat’s seesaw creaking. This pattern continued for days and nights, Hat’s mother and sisters cowering nearby while Hat was nestled into a trance that she likens to that of a cat waiting out a thunderstorm beneath a house. One morning, with dawn just a coral sliver on the horizon, a tremendous commotion on board jolted her awake. They were just off the island of Kokra in the Gulf of Thailand, and a flotilla of boats was headed fast their way from land—pirates for sure. The panic that greeted this sight almost capsized their boat. Hat heard her mother wail and watched her collapse to the deck retching. Hat let out a wail, too, but holding her close the old nun hushed her, saying the Virgin would protect them. The boats arrived, surrounding theirs. Two passengers leapt shrieking into the water, choosing the threat of sharks over the threat of pirates. But these weren’t pirates. They were local fishermen who’d come to offer aid.

  Hat lost track of the nun as she and the other refugees disembarked on the island, and never saw her again. But as a model for how to withstand fear and suffering, as a lodestar for courage and equanimity, Hat has never forgotten her. The story of the nun emerges, in fact, as a digression in Hat’s account of Kim’s weeks in the NICU—as a roundabout way of illustrating the divergent ways she and Quỳnh dealt with that trauma. Quỳnh, she says, resembled her mother on that boat, all cold sweat and tremors: He waited for his daughter to die while desperately hoping she wouldn’t. Hat, in contrast, awaited Kim’s recovery with no allowance for any other outcome. When she prayed, it was for the speed and ease of Kim’s recovery, not for the recovery itself. She never granted God that decision because she felt certain he’d already made it.

  This same rigid certitude was what Quỳnh glimpsed in his wife as she walked out the door and across the parking lot to where the man with the inflatable crucifix was stationed. Quỳnh watched her give him the bottle of water and for several minutes stand talking with him. Alone with Kim in the store, he wagged his head and cursed. Black thoughts came slinking into his mind: that perhaps this man was a serial killer and might now be inspired to dismember her, or that he was a local con artist who’d sniffed an opportunity to swindle a Christian do-gooder like Hat, or that Hat might return to the store
saying the man was grateful but also wanted some Doritos.

  Back inside the store she announced, “He has liver cancer.”

  “Oh,” said Quỳnh.

  “He’s dying. That’s why he’s here. He’s hoping to be cured.”

  “Oh,” Quỳnh said again.

  “He walked here for thirty-seven hours straight.”

  “That’s a long walk.” He cracked a roll of quarters into the register. “He should’ve taken Greyhound.”

  “He said you were very rude.”

  “What did he want me to do? This isn’t a hospital. We don’t cure people!”

  “I’m just telling you what he said.”

  “Did you tell him we don’t cure people?”

  “I didn’t tell him anything.”

  “You just gave him a Dasani water.”

  “I did,” she said. “It’s ninety-seven degrees out there and he has liver cancer.”

  “And hospitals have air-conditioning! And free water!”

  “Do you want me to pay you for the water?”

  “Why doesn’t he pay for it?”

  This argument mellowed—but didn’t end—for several hours, until a van pulled into the parking lot. The van was extra-long and gray and bore the name of a Hattiesburg church on its sides. Out of the van came seven or eight people, two of them young and clean-cut but the others old and plump and slow-footed. From behind the register Quỳnh and Hat watched as the people took cellphone photos of the store and the parking lot and then joined hands in a circle. One of them spoke while the others closed their eyes and bowed their heads.

  “Don’t you dare bring them any water,” Quỳnh told Hat, who made sure her husband noted her sneer before disappearing into the back office.

  The church group’s members, however, didn’t want mere water. What they wanted, instead, were random portions of everything: beef jerky, candy bars, potato chips, sunglasses, automotive air fresheners, 5-Hour Energy shot bottles, key chains, Tylenol, cans of Dinty Moore stew. With great but reverent excitement they roamed the three aisles of the Biz-E-Bee, loading their arms with a haphazard array of nonperishables, while Quỳnh regarded them with a bewildered squint. Lined up at the counter, they peppered him with questions about Cameron’s recovery, often interrupting his answers—“amazing,” he told them; “crazy,” he said—with more questions. They asked him for the precise spot where Cameron had stood, and after Quỳnh pointed to it several of them went outside and took turns standing there with their heads bowed again. Then one woman, white-haired and heavyset, asked Quỳnh if there was anything for sale with the name of the store on it.

  “With the name on it?”

  “Yessir,” she said. “Like a koozie or something.”

  Quỳnh thought about this for a while.

  “Maybe a business card?” she asked.

  Quỳnh glanced around, but the only thing behind the counter were his stacks of mail. “I have some mail I could sell you,” he offered.

  The woman brightened. “Can I see?”

  He fished out an unopened bill and laid it on the counter.

  She pursed her lips. “Anything else?” she asked.

  He replaced the bill with a glossy catalog from a convenience store wholesaler. On its cover was a photograph of a cream and sweetener dispensing machine upon which was glued a large label bearing the Biz-E-Bee’s name and address.

  “Oooh,” the woman said, reaching to touch it but then withdrawing her hand. “How much for that?”

  Quỳnh lifted it for a dramatic appraisal. “One dollar,” he said.

  “That’s fine,” the woman said, plucking a bill from a small change purse.

  When the church group finally left the store, it was with nine pieces of Biz-E-Bee mail—including a certified letter, for which Quỳnh charged an extra fifty cents—and with Quỳnh trailing them out the door with a wide and winning smile. He posed for a group photo in front of the store and then waved as the van backed out of the lot and turned onto Division Street.

  When Ollie came in to work, half an hour later, he found Quỳnh on the phone, still smiling, and nodding as he tapped keys on his laptop with the phone cradled against his shoulder. Noting Ollie’s entrance, Quỳnh placed his hand over the phone’s mouthpiece and told Ollie he needed him to do something. That man outside, with the big red cross? “Go bring him a Coke,” Quỳnh told him. “And some Doritos too.” Then he added seriously, “We have lot of work to do, big guy.”

  six

  On the morning of September 2, twenty-eight of the Gulf Coast Veterans Health Care System’s physicians and nurse practitioners filed into the recreation hall in Building 17 for the hospital’s monthly Interdisciplinary Quality Improvement Conference, or IQIC. These IQICs—which gather clinicians together to discuss patient cases in much the way cases get dissected in teaching hospitals—were a recent initiative, mandated by Washington, and the center’s chief of staff and medical director, Dr. Larry Turnbull, made no secret of his antipathy toward them. Any time a doctor spends talking to other doctors, went his thinking, is time stolen from patients. He opened this morning’s conference without any sort of greeting, which despite his antipathy was uncharacteristic of him; Dr. Turnbull’s beloved Mississippi State Bulldogs football team had three days earlier shut out Southern Miss, 49-0, and his audience was expecting at least ten minutes of a gloating recap during which to catch up on paperwork. “Well,” he said instead, “let’s just get to our business here.”

  Dr. Turnbull, who is seventy-four, is a native of the area—he grew up and still lives in Pascagoula, a bit east of Biloxi—and has been the center’s chief of staff since 1994, which makes him an anomaly in the VA system, where the moorings of appointments rarely withstand shifts in political winds. Credit for his longevity used to be chalked up to his friendship with Trent Lott, the former Republican senator and onetime Senate majority leader—they grew up together in Pascagoula—but Turnbull’s tenure has outlasted Lott’s, so nowadays no one knows. Still, no one disputes Dr. Turnbull’s skills as a cardiac surgeon, which age doesn’t seem to have blunted, nor his ferocious commitment to patient care, though some—Dr. Janice Lorimar-Cuevas among them—grumble that his concept of patient care hasn’t much evolved since his years as a combat medic in Vietnam. “It’s a country vet mentality,” she says. “Sew them up in the afternoon and put them back on the plow come morning. When you talk to him about holistic care you get the feeling he’s imagining an aromatherapy studio in Berkeley.”

  Janice was on the docket (as her husband, Nap, had phrased it) that morning—her first-ever IQIC presentation. Everyone knew why and since everyone wanted the inside skinny on Cameron’s recovery, the presentations preceding hers—including one about a recent admittee to the ER who’d briefly but dramatically been suspected of Ebola infection—were met with impatient disinterest. “Is there any other input we could possibly get here?” asked a frustrated clinical virologist after his Ebola-scare presentation, to averted-eyed silence. The speed at which the meeting was progressing, however, appeared to brighten Dr. Turnbull’s mood, so much so that when he called upon Janice for the morning’s final case, he accorded her a wide and gleaming grin and said, “Now let’s us all hear about your miracle fella, Dr. Cuevas.”

  Janice suppressed a wince. She was already rankled by the way the word miracle was being used to caulk the gaps and cracks in Cameron’s story, and she showed her irritation in the tight-lipped smile she returned Dr. Turnbull. Maybe, she thought, he’d meant it ironically. After setting up her laptop for her slide component, and switching on an iPhone app with which to record the presentation, she paused to survey her audience. No one was doing paperwork. Every eye was upon her. Dr. Turnbull, she noticed, was flexing his fingers and still grinning, as though anticipating entertainment.

  “So our patient,” she began, “is a twenty-six-year-old Cau
casian male admitted to us for outpatient care continuum. He presented as a T9 ASIA A with zone of partial preservation of pinprick to T12. LEM score of 0. Cause of the SCI was combat trauma—shrapnel from an IED. Date of injury, March twenty-second, two thousand ten.”

  As she clicked the remote control in her hand to display some of the earliest imagery in Cameron’s file she felt the entire room craning toward her.

  “The shrapnel entered the body from the right paraspinal area and crossed the midline through the spinal canal. It split the T9 vertebral body. As you can see from the MRI, the posterior element was shattered and the nerve roots sustained collateral damage from the burst fracture. The dura was also torn. A T9 decompression/fusion was performed at Brooke but patient showed minimal sensorimotor improvement even in the zone of partial preservation.

  “But this,” she went on, “is where things get really interesting.” With another click of the remote she put up a slide from Cameron’s current MRI. “On August twenty-third, the patient spontaneously regained lower extremity motor and sensory function.”

  Aside from a long whoa drifting from the back of the audience, the room went silent.