Q: By yourself?
A: That’s right.
Q: Did you ever pray a novena?
A: Sometimes. But mostly it was just like talking.
Q: You and Reverend Fahey?
A: That’s right. Just talking, me and him. I’d tell him who was hurting, who could use his grace.
Q: And you’d mention Cameron Harris?
A: Lots of times, yessir I would. That boy had a hard row, losing his mama the way he did, then him getting blowed up in Afghanistan. You pray for those in need.
Q: But you also prayed for others in need?
A: Everyone in need. Everyone I thought needed grace.
Q: Was Cameron Harris special?
A: I reckon he needed more grace than just about anybody else.
Later, per protocol, Euclide quizzed Bearden on why she’d directed her prayers to Fahey and not to another beati or saint, such as Mother Teresa:
A: Well, I don’t know Mother Teresa. When you read about a saint in a book or something, you don’t really know them. How they talk, what their voice sounds like. What it feels like to sit in a room with them. Seeing Reverend Fahey on the TV all them years—I knew him. I knew how to talk to him. I knew what he’d say to me. I knew what he’d do for me.
Now, for Euclide, came the delicate part: determining why the late Nicholas Fahey—swamped by prayers from millions, from priests imploring him to aid the sick among their flocks to the parents of dying children kneeling despondent at their children’s bedsides—why Nicholas Fahey might’ve plucked from this supplicatory profusion a single appeal among many from Dorothy Alice Bearden of Biloxi, Mississippi. For two and a half hours he drew from her the story of her life, her sixty-one-year marriage, her children and grandchildren, the peaks and valleys of her eighty-two years on earth. After a while he zeroed in on her faith, her moral triumphs and failings, the questions and regrets that still wrested her from sleep. Euclide Abbascia is often mistaken for a priest; it’s a misapprehension he usually dispels but other times lets slide to his advantage. Priests are confessors, and confessions, as any detective knows, supply the protein to an investigation. Yet nothing Bearden revealed gave him pause to doubt either her or, for that matter, Reverend Fahey’s potential receptiveness.
Still, the interrogation was intense. At the end of it, Dot Bearden, whom no one has ever seen tire, who is known around St. Michael as the Energizer Bunny, whose great-grandchildren drop from weariness before she does—Dot Bearden collapsed. The sheer magnitude of what was under review—her splayed-open life and beliefs, the grand forces she appeared to have set into action—paled her face and sagged her eyes and when she tried to speak no sound emerged from her dry lips. Euclide removed her shoes for her, as she was eventually able to request, and fetched her a quilt so that she could nap on the couch. She asked him to pray with her, and he did.
As Euclide made to leave, she stopped him with a question: “Was it really me?” Her voice warbled; in the span of four hours it seemed the eighty-two years she’d so valiantly outraced had somehow caught up with her. “Was it really me that done this?”
“Of course not.” Euclide smiled. “It was God.”
Euclide Abbascia’s next visit, the following morning, was to Dr. Janice Lorimar-Cuevas. Hers was a tough interview to wrangle. (As usual, with physicians, he identified himself over the phone as Dr. Abbascia, employing the honorific that Italians bestow upon any college graduate. As Dr. Liuni had taught him, identifying oneself as a lawyer—even a canon lawyer—is the quickest way to spook an American physician into silence.) Janice sighed. She was frankly tired of discussing Cameron’s case, she told him, and when he explained his connection to the church she noted that she’d met with Father Ace not once but twice and couldn’t think of anything to add.
Euclide is used to this and much worse with doctors, some of whom refuse to speak with him at all. “Many of them are defensive,” he explains. “They view their inability to explain a medical situation as a professional failing, as something they don’t wish to have scrutinized. Others don’t want to lend credence—even by discussing the case—to any non-secular interpretation.” Janice felt traces of both reactions, she says, yet, despite her protestations, Cameron’s case was still entangling her mind as kudzu entangles an oak; when Euclide called, in fact, Cameron’s medical file happened to be staring up at her from her laptop screen. She said he could have an hour.
Janice was surprised, then, at how quickly she found herself warming to Euclide. He was exponentially more fluent in medicine than Father Ace—or really anyone without a medical degree with whom she’d discussed Cameron’s case, plus some people with medical degrees—but also, she admits, “impossibly charming.”
“It was like having Marcello Mastroianni sitting in your office,” she says, with an embarrassed flutter of a laugh. (Not for nothing did the Italian press deem the young Euclide a batticuore, or heartthrob. Spending time with Euclide Abbascia in public, one cannot fail to notice the effect he has on women—nor, for that matter, the effect they have upon him. As Dr. Liuni is known to say: Were it not for Euclide’s fondness for fast cars and beautiful women, he’d make a sensational priest—or husband.)
Bewitching charms aside, however, Euclide impressed Janice with his line of questioning. Unlike Father Ace, who seemed to be campaigning for Cameron’s recovery to be inexplicable, for Janice to throw up her arms in terminal bewilderment, Euclide seemed determined to ferret out a medical explanation. Several of his questions prompted her to scribble notes for her own follow-up. After a while, mildly dazzled, she told him he obviously had experience with cases like Cameron’s.
“A little, yes,” he replied. “But with recovery from paralysis there’s almost always a natural explanation. In fact, if you’re asking about my own experience, I should retract the word almost and just say always. You have to go back a long way, to 1977, for the most recent case of paralysis recovery that the Congregation approved as a miracle.”
This was the first time he’d deployed the word miracle, and Janice felt herself rankling. His incisive questioning had eclipsed the fact that he was there on behalf of the church, equipped with a very different agenda than hers. “So you’re—what?” she asked him. “A doctor of supernatural medicine?”
“I would call myself an investigator of thaumaturgic events.”
She frowned. “Thaumaturgic?”
“This is the scientific term for ‘miraculous.’ ”
She snorted lightly. “There’s a lot of irony baked into that definition.”
“Perhaps.” Euclide shrugged, smiling. “But then, as Søren Kierkegaard said, just because something inconceivable happens, in the scope of our perceptions, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”
“Well, you should know that I am no believer in miracles,” she told him. “I wasn’t before and I’m not one now.”
Euclide, used to hearing statements like this from physicians, gave her his canned response: “Your beliefs, Doctor, like mine, are irrelevant to this investigation. Only your findings.”
“Okay, but you’ll use my findings to draw a conclusion,” she said. “Isn’t that the dividing line here? Isn’t that where our purposes diverge? I’ve been hunting for a medical explanation, and you’re here hunting a miracle.”
“My objective,” he countered, as warm as she was cool, “is precisely the same as yours has been. To determine the precise cause of this recovery.”
“Ah, but you have another cause in your pocket.”
“I’m sorry?”
“If my findings are inconclusive, that’s it—they’re inconclusive. But to you, that means they are conclusive—of a miracle.”
“Not so,” he said. “If you have no medical conclusions, and I have no conclusions to offer, then there’s a void and we agree on it. We are in harmony. And this harmony is what I report. The Co
nsulta Medica examines our findings—very rigorously. After that, it’s up to the Congregation to determine if there might be a spiritual conclusion.”
“But that’s what I’m talking about,” she said. “In the absence of an explanation, the explanation is God. I’m sorry but I find that—I hope I’m not offending you, but I find that reductive. To say the least.”
“Offending me?” Euclide flashed her a big, almost mischievous grin. “Discussions like this, they’re my candy. But you’re voicing a common misperception about miracles. You see, the absences of medical intervention or a natural explanation do not in themselves signify divine intervention. It isn’t the absence of anything that proves a miracle. Just the opposite: It’s the presence of the divine.”
“Which isn’t provable,” she said flatly.
“But that’s what joins us here together today, isn’t it?” Again came Euclide’s smile, slightly flirtatious and wholly self-assured. “We are both confronted with things we cannot prove. We are both of us out past the borders of observation and data, and into the realm of belief.”
Janice leaned back in her chair and considered this, though not for long. Euclide’s swart charms and breezy intelligence were brushing a glossy sheen onto the conversation, but underneath that lacquer, she thought, was the same circular reasoning—God exists because the Bible says he does, and the Bible is God’s word, et cetera—she’d been hearing from religious types all her life, especially as a girl in the Mississippi Delta, where her lack of a church affiliation (she didn’t dare admit atheism until college) marked her for freakdom, made her a bull’s-eye for conversion.
Perhaps, she’d later think, it was this low-grade irritation—triggering an impulse to rebut the absurdly paranormal mindset of Euclide (and by extension all those grade-school missionaries who’d invited her to “fellowship” with them) with a different variety of outrageous thinking—that led her to divulge, to this total stranger, an idea that had been fermenting inside her for weeks, ever since her lunch with Cameron, and that she’d shared with no one save her husband, Nap. She tapped her desk with a pencil and ran her tongue along the inside of her teeth, an anxious habit. Then she said, “I’ve answered your questions. Can I ask you one?”
“By all means,” Euclide answered.
“Have you ever been involved in a case in which someone faked a miracle?”
“Faked?”
“Faked. As in a hoax.”
Euclide leveled a darkly curious gaze at her, and when he spoke he picked his words with slow caution, as in the way one navigates a room suddenly blackened by a power outage. “I’ve investigated dozens of alleged miracles that turned out to have been the result of natural forces…”
“That’s not what I’m talking about,” she said. “I’m talking about—I guess the word would be fraudulent. So-called miracles that turned out to have been deceptions.”
“I see,” he said. He was staring at her now, and she thought she could see the color of his eyes drop a shade, from bright blue to indigo, as if a cloud were passing through his head. “I’ve only heard or read of such cases, which do exist. By the time a case reaches my attention, though, it’s already undergone a preliminary investigation at the diocese…” His voice went trailing off, squelched by this new element Janice had slipped into the room. “Do you have reason to believe,” he finally asked, “that we might be looking at such a case?”
Janice blew the air from her cheeks, finding her own voice squelched by that same atmospheric shift. Then, with sluggish care of her own, she said, “Let’s just say I’m more comfortable with a human explanation for this recovery than with no explanation, and definitely more than with any mystical explanation.”
Euclide tilted forward in his chair, close enough to Janice for her to catch a slim breeze of cologne floating her way. “So you’ve thought about this,” he said to her.
She almost laughed. “I’ve thought about everything.”
“Can you tell me how it would it be possible?”
“Well, it’s all theoretical.”
“Theoretically, then.”
She tapped her pencil again, and then, after a what-the-hell exhalation, she laid it out: “Some patients, as I guess you know, can make full recoveries from spinal cord injuries, even when they seem to be paralyzed at the time of trauma.”
“You’re talking about spinal shock,” he said.
“I am. Functionality is recovered as the cord swelling goes down, usually within six months…or, in this case, possibly, after a successful decompression-fusion.”
Euclide nodded for her to continue.
“But what if the patient,” Janice said, “had a reason to want to be paralyzed?”
A bloated pause. “Because…”
“Because not being paralyzed meant he might have to return to combat.”
Euclide’s eyebrows performed a quick dance of intrigue before burrowing into a frown. “But how can one fake paralysis?”
“It’s not easy, but not impossible either,” she said. “I’ve found several cases in the VA files. Online, too.” Among those, she explained, was a 2012 case in which an Army specialist, supposedly paralyzed from the belly button down after suffering a traumatic brain injury in Iraq, received a mortgage-free, wheelchair-adapted house in Texas from a national nonprofit called Shelter for Our Troops. A neighbor boy, flying his new drone, caught video of the man standing at his backyard grill flipping burgers. “In this case, though, I think the patient”—Janice couldn’t bear the accusatory voltage of referring to Cameron by name—“would’ve required guidance at Brooke Army Medical Center. An accomplice on the hospital staff.”
Euclide asked her the same question she’d asked herself: Who would do this and why? The answer Janice gave him was based upon a theory her husband had devised while away at a legal convention in Mobile, which he’d sketched for her in a rambling late-night email:
“Someone at Brooke—a physician like you, a nurse, I don’t know—who’d seen too many boys come home in jagged pieces, who didn’t see the point of these drawn-out wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, who’d come to hate the idea of gluing these guys back together just to ship them back to the front lines, who then came upon a patient so traumatized by what he’d seen/done/experienced and so terrified of going back that he was willing to do anything, even to voluntarily immobilize himself, to avoid going back—someone who couldn’t bear to see the fear and dread in [the patient’s] eyes, couldn’t decline a plea for help. That’s who.”
“That’s my best and really only explanation for the imaging,” she said. To solidify the diagnosis, she explained, this theoretical accomplice would’ve needed to swap a more severe MRI into Cameron’s file. And perhaps to fudge the results of Cameron’s tests—or to coach him on squeaking through them on his own. He or she would’ve then seen Cameron discharged and sent home to Biloxi, with a medical retirement and full disability—and straight into the arms of a sister whose devotion to him was demonstrably limitless, and whose domineering manner during Janice’s medical consults might have been, in narrow-eyed retrospect, a way of shielding her brother from suspicion, of shifting attention from him to her.
Euclide digested all this for a while, with his lips pursed and his pen poised in his raised hand as though to scribble notes in the air. “But then,” he said, “we come to the event of August twenty-third.”
“The recovery, right,” Janice said, before a sudden spastic gulp. A gurgle of something acidic caught in her throat: something that felt like self-loathing. This wasn’t what Cameron Harris had authorized when he’d given her permission to discuss his case with church officials. But she was in too deep now, connecting the dots too smoothly and rapidly, to stop herself. “So, it’s been four years,” she said. “The patient’s terror has subsided. The war is winding down and there’s no chance he’ll ever be sent back into action. And he’s tired
of the subterfuge, the sores, maybe the loneliness. He wants to be free to be himself again, to walk again, to live the life he compromised in order to avoid returning to his unit.”
“Perhaps he fell in love,” Euclide offered.
“Who knows? We could list ten thousand reasons why he’d want his mobility back. Maybe his sister got tired of it, too—having to drive him around everywhere, do all the shopping, I don’t know…”
“Yes, okay, but what about his legs? We just went over this a little while ago. They were very clearly atrophied.”
“That,” she said, a flourish of certainty in her voice, “is the single biggest piece of evidence here.”
Euclide scrunched his face and shook his head. “I would think the muscular degradation actually negates this theory—”
“No, look,” she cut in. “His legs were atrophied. But not so much that he wasn’t able to stand on August twenty-third. The fact that he stood up and somehow walked—that’s been one of the biggest riddles of this whole thing. If you spend four years in a wheelchair, whether from actual paralysis or pretend paralysis, your leg muscles are going to atrophy, they’re going to waste away. Deterioration begins after just two weeks of immobility. On top of that you’ve got deterioration of the trunk muscles, which would make balancing almost impossible. Loss of length and trunk muscle, lack of coordination, loss of sensation and proprioception—the sense of where one’s joints are in space—all of this is what makes his ambulation so…”
“So unbelievable.”
“Right,” she said. “But let’s say you’re up and walking just a little bit every day—maybe to the bathroom and back, maybe to the kitchen when the window blinds are down, whatever. In that case you might retain just enough muscular functionality and coordination to be able to pull off the appearance of a spontaneous recovery. To get up out of your wheelchair in a convenience-store parking lot and take a few steps, in front of witnesses who’ve spent years seeing you paralyzed. To do the whole hallelujah pony show.”
Anatomy of a Miracle Page 22
