Anatomy of a Miracle

by Jonathan Miles

  Yet there were less quantifiable consolations too. His neighborhood customers squabbled with him, they stole from him, they wrote him bad checks, begged him for credit then cussed him for refusing, forgot what they’d come in for and then resented him not knowing, decided against the pint of ice cream in their hands and so abandoned it on a shelf, made fun of his accent when they thought he wasn’t listening, paid for a single bag of ice and then took three. They didn’t take selfies with him, as the pilgrims did. They didn’t purchase things from the Biz-E-Bee for the sole purpose of purchasing things from the Biz-E-Bee. They didn’t wander his store with enraptured awe that reminded Quỳnh of the way he’d regarded his grandmother’s farm in Vũng Tàu—as a sanctuary from the confounding, hardscrabble life beyond its small borders, as a hideaway from the world’s brute chaos, as a place of magic. That he did not share their faith was beside the point. He shared their esteem and yearning for places of enchantment—where geckos talked, as his father used to tell him, where none of the normal rules applied, where the world felt open to redesign.

  Here’s what’s strange, however: His wife, Hat, who did share the pilgrims’ faith, and whose indefatigable optimism had always been the counterweight to Quỳnh’s fatalism, was feeling the opposite. It was as though whatever force lifted Cameron to his feet had also reprogrammed the Lês. Now it was Hat lying awake at three a.m., worries sabotaging her sleep, while beside her Quỳnh lay dreaming—the reverse of what three a.m. had always looked like for the couple. She had no doubts about what she’d witnessed with her own eyes—Cameron suddenly upright and limping into the sunlight, and nothing but God to account for it—but felt guilty when she saw people praying in that rectangle, as though she and Quỳnh were offering these people something that wasn’t theirs to offer. If God had commanded Cameron to rise—and that’s what Hat believed—then she felt it was for a divinely precise reason. It wasn’t because this corner of Division Street and Reconfort Avenue had freed itself from the strictures of spiritual physics, that underneath the parking lot bubbled miraculous waters. Since September there’d been reports of repeat healings—a woman from D’Iberville was claiming the remission of her cancer following a prayer visit to the store; someone from New Orleans, Hat heard, was crediting the Biz-E-Bee for curing asthma—but Hat found herself instantly rejecting these stories, as much as Quỳnh savored them and as much as they bolstered the Biz-E-Bee’s legend. She knew it bucked against Jesus’s teachings, to believe only what she herself had seen, and sometimes, at three a.m., this is what rasped her mind.

  Cameron, too, was an abrasion. Why him? She knew it was futile to guess at God’s reasons, but she found herself trying anyway—and always failing. True, she’d barely known him. He was just another customer, so what she understood about him came via the tea leaves of his purchases: beer and cigarettes, mostly. That he’d been wounded in combat didn’t strike her, as it seemed to strike others, as in and of itself grounds for healing. (She’d overheard one man telling Gil that Cameron’s healing confirmed God’s approval of fighting Islamists, because, he said, “not a single sand nigger” was up and walking like Cameron was.) In fact she found the nature of Cameron’s injury slightly problematic. Her childhood in Vietnam had shown her, firsthand, the disfiguring effects of U.S. military intervention, and she admits a faint animus toward military men. The father she’d never known, whose service had marooned his wife and three daughters in that Saigon slum, had been a military man, something Hat’s mother—and to a lesser degree Hat herself—never stopped resenting.

  She was happy selling the religious items the Biz-E-Bee now stocked, and dismisses the question of whether doing so was capitalizing on Cameron’s strange fortune. “Would it be better,” she says, “to sell more Funyuns? More beer?” No, the question that bothered her was whether the real product for sale was hope—and false hope, at that. What did she owe to the sick and the lame who traveled there, some from thousands of miles away? What did she owe Gil, who disguised or denied his condition so well and so bravely, but who was clearly, day by day, losing the fight against his cancer—his appetite dwindling, his skin yellowing, his hands and sometimes his eyes twitching and trembling from what Hat knew was pain? She’d never felt so sanguine and lighthearted in the store office as when paying down their debts, one after the other, as though she and Quỳnh were finally stationed at the helm of their own destiny—but what other debts, she found herself wondering, might they be invisibly accruing?

  During one of those three a.m. interludes, surrendering the prospects of sleep, she fixed herself a cup of tea but finding no milk in their refrigerator she slipped into the store for some. While writing an I.O.U. at the counter, Quỳnh’s longtime requirement, she noticed something strange on one of Quỳnh’s security-camera feeds: A man was lying in the parking lot. Normally this would’ve alarmed her, and sent her fleeing back into the apartment to wake Quỳnh, but the man was lying inside the rectangle, and even in the grainy black-and-white feed she discerned something familiar about him. She turned on the exterior lights and as she opened the front door the man lifted his head from the asphalt.

  It was Ollie. He nodded yes when she asked if he was okay. She didn’t ask what he was doing out there, and he couldn’t have told her anyway. But she knew. And the knowing shot a hairline crack through her heart.

  She was almost anticipating, then, the icy breeze she felt flowing through her on the morning of December 18, when, alone in the store while Quỳnh was at the bank, she heard the bells above the door chime and looked up to see a man entering the store.

  His black hair was veined with gray and combed assiduously back, and the lines of his face were straight and severe, as though sculpted from some impossibly adamantine material. He wore a midnight-colored suit that even Hat, unattuned to the fineries of menswear, recognized as expertly tailored, and in his hand was a briefcase made from a leather more supple and mellow than any leather she’d seen. Approaching the counter he carried himself bluntly but with aristocratic poise, the air and light seeming to part for him out of an ancient deference. Hat noticed a silver pin, on his suit lapel, consisting of two crossed keys that were banded beneath a bejeweled triple crown.

  He told her he needed to talk about Cameron Harris, and his tone made clear he was on official business.

  twelve

  On December 19, Cameron Harris received a phone call from Nicola Ash, the senior director of publicity at Lifetime television overseeing the publicity campaign for Miracle Man. The series, as Cameron knew from Scott T. Griffin, was scheduled to premiere on March 15, in a Sunday prime-time slot, and this abbreviated time frame was flustering Ash. Bree Winterson had from the start envisioned Miracle Man as “real-time” television—not quite live, but also not filmed months in advance in the style of most docudramas—as a way of imbuing it with an added layer of authenticity: The audience wouldn’t have any clue about where the show was headed—and how or even if Cameron’s mystery would be resolved—because the producers wouldn’t either. This, went her thinking, would make it social-media catnip. Winterson’s notion was met with widespread derision and hand-wringing inside the network—Griffin’s team, for its part, felt unduly hamstrung by what they saw as a gimmick—until the podcast Serial debuted in October, and by November was proving an outsize hit. A spinoff of the public radio show This American Life, Serial chronicled the reinvestigation of a fifteen-year-old murder case in what the show’s producers also deemed “real time”—and its enormous success was validating Winterson’s vision.

  Still, with that vision came headaches, hassles, unworkable deadlines. Among them was the challenge Ash was given: How do you execute a strategic publicity campaign for what is essentially a work in progress? She had a few standard strategies locked in place, however, which was why she called Cameron that afternoon. Lifetime would be flying him and Tanya out to Los Angeles in late January, she told him, for a round of meet-and-greet receptions with aff
iliates, key advertisers, and members of the Television Critics Association. She was also booking him to speak at several large churches. In the meantime, she said, she’d nailed down coverage in a couple of “long-lead pubs,” or monthly magazines, that required his participation. Among these was a “totally cute” Q&A with Cosmopolitan that needed doing as quickly as possible, as the editors were dropping it into an issue they were closing before Christmas. She had Cosmo’s questions; all Cameron needed to do was to email her back his answers.

  “Oh, and one more thing,” she added. She couldn’t find the long-form questionnaire he was supposed to have filled out months earlier. Ash was surprised to hear Cameron say he hadn’t gotten around to it—that was the province of the network’s legal department, not known for its patience, but then she figured the lawyers might also be having trouble adapting to “real time.”

  Tanya, Cameron admits, wrote the answers to Cosmopolitan’s questions for him that night. (The interview, which ran in the March 2015 issue, was headlined, THE MIRAC-LAY-US (PLEASE!) STAR OF LIFETIME’S “MIRACLE MAN” OPENS UP ON GOD, COUNTRY, AND WHERE ON A WOMAN HE LIKES TO LAY HIS HANDS.) Among them:

  Q: What sorts of women are you attracted to?

  A: I’m a pretty simple guy, so I guess I’d say a simple woman. I don’t go for too much complicated stuff. Someone I could take care of, treat right. I don’t go for too much makeup or fancy skirts. I guess the main thing in life is to find someone who loves you, really truly crazy loves you.

  Afterward Tanya dug out the twenty-one-page questionnaires the network had FedExed them back in October and sat down on the couch to fill them out, her brother’s first. Cameron was sitting beside her with earphones on, playing Halo: Spartan Assault on the Xbox. Splayed open on the coffee table was a Domino’s pizza box, one side holding a few congealing slices and the other side serving as a receptacle for empty Bud Light cans. A gummy orange puddle of Catalina dressing was pooled near the slices, per the quirk of Biloxians to eat their pizza with Catalina or French salad dressing. Blinking in the corner were the lights on an artificial tree from Home Depot, contributing just a footnote of festivity. Though Cameron had inspired a boomlet of miracle-themed Christmas ornaments, his and Tanya’s tree was dressed with just one—a gold glass ball on which was etched IN CHRIST ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE, a gift from Father Ace.

  The house was unusually quiet—almost eerily so. The production crew was at their beachfront rental cottages across the bay in Ocean Springs; most of them were flying out the following day, a Saturday, for a one-week Christmas break. After a month and a half of filming, the quietude felt balmy and restorative, as though the at-ease command had been bestowed upon Reconfort Avenue.

  Cameron seemed, to Tanya, acutely in need of a break. She’d been noticing his moods pebbling over the course of the last several weeks. She wondered if the high of his recovery might be wearing off, now that swinging his legs from bed in the morning was no longer supplying that same giddy shock—if perhaps he was experiencing the post-miracle equivalent of a comedown.

  Not that he didn’t have recent cause for irritation. Two weeks back, his cellphone started ringing nonstop, with callers dialing him from Indonesia, South Africa, Australia, from places like Moldova, which Cameron didn’t even know was a country, people from all corners of the world calling him at all hours of the day and night—most asking for prayers and blessings though a few others accusing him, pungently, of fraud. How his number had gone public was a mystery until Tanya discovered a fake Twitter account under Cameron’s name offering up his phone number in the account bio. Scott T. Griffin found it all wildly entertaining and devoted two days to filming Cameron fielding these calls and playing some of the voicemails aloud, leading Tanya to suspect Scott T. was behind the fake Twitter account. (Griffin denies this; the person behind the short-lived account, however, has never been identified.) There was also the fresh worry, once Cameron received official notice from the VA that his disability status had been revoked, that the Army might call him back into service—but Tanya told him this fear was paranoid. Griffin weighed in with the same opinion. “That’d be terrible optics,” he assured Cameron.

  Even non-irritations, though, seemed to be rankling him. Four days earlier a bow-tied political operative named Shawn McNamara had come by the house for a meeting he’d requested. Tanya laughed out loud when McNamara revealed the reason for the meeting: to gauge Cameron’s interest in running in the Republican primary for the Mississippi state senate. Griffin kept the cameras rolling throughout, as McNamara presented his campaign-ready version of Cameron’s story—“decorated soldier, American hero, wounded in action, healed by the hand of the Almighty, and ready to serve again”—and crystal-balled a subsequent rise into a congressional seat, if Cameron was interested. “Endorsements don’t come better than God’s,” he told Cameron. During the meeting Tanya’s laughter remained constant (“Cam don’t even know how to vote,” she says, admitting the same about herself) and afterward, once McNamara left, this laughter spread to Scott T. and the crew. “I think Mr. Bowtie just wanted to get himself on TV,” Griffin can be heard saying on the unedited footage. But Cameron never laughed; he played along with McNamara, per Scott T.’s direction, but did so flatly, and afterward seemed neither amused nor flattered but rather offended. “Because my legs work again, now I’m qualified to be a senator?” he said later, on camera. “That’s some bullshit right there.”

  Tanya had been noticing more and more of this irked stance from her brother these past few weeks. He’d been absentminded, mopey, his default expression often colorless and drained. She was unaware he’d stopped taking his medications six weeks earlier, and, as she’d say later, “would’ve thrown a fit” had she known. But she didn’t: All she knew was that her brother was, in her words, “acting like a bitch,” which struck her as indefensible—what did he have to complain about now? Nothing she could see. She’d devoted so much and many of her twenty-nine years to steering him through the straits of anguish—after Daddy left, after Mama died, after Katrina blew through, after his return from Afghanistan—that to see him now, docked finally in a harbor of blessings and yet still brooding, still sulking into a beer can in the backyard—it was pissing her off. What the hell else did he want?

  Tanya only made it to the second query of the questionnaire’s Personal Information section before nudging her brother, who lifting an earphone from his ear glowered at the disruption.

  “It says here,” she said, “ ‘Have you ever been known by or used any nicknames or other names?’ ”

  “Jesus, Tan.” That vein in his neck was twitching slightly. “You know all my shit.”

  “I’ll just put Cam then, fine.”

  He replaced the earphone to resume the game as she muttered, “Don’t bite my head off.” The television screen popped with turquoise explosions and yellow laser fire. Then it froze as Cameron paused and once again raised his earphone.

  “Cambo,” he said.

  “Cambo? Who calls you that?”

  “Sergeant did. Over in Afghanistan.”

  “What’s it mean?”

  “Cambo, like Rambo.”

  “That’s funny. You want I put that down?”

  “Naw,” he said. “Don’t.”

  The turquoise explosions reappeared on the screen as Cameron went back to playing the game. Then they froze again. Cameron lifted the earphone once more to say, “Serious, Tan, don’t put that down.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Serious.”

  “I’m not.”

  Tanya kept on with the questionnaire, drinking a beer as she went:

  Do you have any physical conditions, special needs, accommodations or fears that we should know about?

  She wrote: Not anymore!

  Nothing about Tanya filling out her brother’s forms—or for that matter standing in for him for his Cosmopolitan
Q&A—was out of character for them. After their mother died, and Cameron’s already-middling grades took a deep and sudden plunge, Tanya had taken to doing Cameron’s homework for him. “Sometimes it was just easier,” she explains, “to do his math worksheet or whatever than to try to get his head screwed back on.” Charity morphed into habit—Cameron never filled out a single of the hundreds of forms required by the VA, every one of them bearing Tanya’s approximation of his signature—but Tanya has never seemed to mind.

  The questionnaire before her now, however, was probing way too deeply for her to manage solo, forcing her to nudge her brother yet again. This time he removed the headphones and sighed. “Shoot them at me.”

  The questionnaire was industry standard for reality-show applicants, having been developed in the wake of several mini-scandals that jolted networks in the genre’s early days—the groom on Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? with a restraining order smudging his past, the American Idol finalist with a weakness for driving drunk, the wholesome-seeming contestant on the dating show The Bachelor with an undisclosed sideline making foot-fetish videos. “I don’t want to get to the second-to-last episode of the season,” the producer Mark Burnett once told the New York Times, “and find out that one of my contestants is on the internet with a goat or something terrible like that.”

  “Here’s a good one,” Tanya said. “Says here, ‘Have you ever made or appeared in a sexually explicit video recording or photo?’ ”