Anatomy of a Miracle

by Jonathan Miles

  Yet Peter Heekin-Kaye’s levelheaded middle ground—stripped of political cant, and open to the simultaneous possibilities that a genuine miracle could have occurred and that its recipient could be gay—attracted little support. Those who posited such a compromise found themselves shouted down on evangelical forums, no matter how often or how intently they quoted Mark 2:17 (“I came not to call the righteous, but the sinners”). No one would argue that the internet’s atmosphere for meaningful discourse is anything but thin; still, this debate suffered a profoundly quick asphyxiation. Two competing conspiracy theories rose from the suffocating muck: that the revelations about Cameron being gay were false, planted by media supporters of a so-called “Rainbow Jihad” against Christians; or that Cameron’s recovery itself was a hoax, either a television stunt or, more darkly, a trick by a flagrantly troubled (and gay) soldier to bilk four years of full disability from the government. (Links to the same coverage that Janice had mentioned to Euclide, about the not-quite-so-paralyzed Texas veteran caught grilling burgers, circulated widely.)

  It didn’t take long, then, for God to be shunted aside entirely, as seen in this Twitter post from late January, which provides a coarse if accurate distillation of the tenor of conservative Christians regarding Cameron’s recovery:

  Rob S. Stratton @Strattoncaster86

  Glad for anyone, Sodomite or not, to recover from injury. But no one should pretend God had anything directly to do with it.

  10:29 AM - 29 January 2015

  * * *

  Because Cameron was not, in this constricted but widespread view, merely a sinner—a vessel for divine mercy whose worthiness was open to dispute. He was a bar brawler, sure, but not, to anyone’s knowledge, a thief or a murderer or an adulterer; in fact he stood unaccused of breaking a single of the Ten Commandments.

  No, Cameron was seen as something far more dangerous than that: a symbol. For God to raise a gay man from the sorrow of paralysis, in the polarized America of 2014, was for God to take a political stance—to divinely rebuke his own followers, betraying their adherence to what they took to be his everlasting word. And God, most of those followers said, wouldn’t do that; ergo, Cameron’s recovery couldn’t be a miracle. It probably wasn’t even a bona fide recovery, many people started saying—was probably just an act engineered for a TV show, or maybe, like others said, a long and unsavory con job, or maybe even, as a few others said, a flubbed diagnosis by the bureaucratic half-wits at the VA. But it wasn’t a miracle—easy as that.

  * * *

  The shift was most readily apparent at the Biz-E-Bee. The large tour coaches disappeared almost at once, as if locked in place by a nation-wide recall, the last one rolling into the parking lot on January 28 to discharge a group of elderly Germans who seemed unaware not only of Cameron’s new complexities but of Cameron and his recovery at all. They were tourists, not pilgrims, their driver-slash-guide shuttling them off the bus at various sites of interest between Houston and Miami.

  Quỳnh stepped from the store to listen as their driver explained this stop’s significance to them: The world-famous Biz-E-Bee, he told them, was the set of a major new American television show about an injured Iraq war veteran who had been working at the store when his injuries had suddenly and mysteriously been healed, the presentation failing to clarify whether the show was fact or fiction, never mind the underlying events. Ollie drifted beside Quỳnh and the two men stood listening together, Ollie throwing a querulous stare Quỳnh’s way whenever the driver mangled another detail, Quỳnh just nodding back at Ollie with his lips pressed together, as if to say, I know and you know but it doesn’t matter if they don’t. This wasn’t unlike the glances Quỳnh’d once traded with his brother-in-law Anh, Hat’s sister’s husband, as Anh’s teenaged son went prattling on about a Vietnam War that he understood, or thought he did, exclusively from American movies. A bottle of entertainment, Quỳnh knew, will always outsell a bottle of history—and knowing this, he’d thought, had given him an advantage. What he hadn’t known, however, was how volatile and perishable the contents of both bottles could be.

  The Germans took hesitant, haphazard photos of the Biz-E-Bee, as though maybe their children or grandchildren back in Düsseldorf or Schweinfurt would recognize its elusive importance, but seemed otherwise unimpressed, a quarter of them retreating back to the bus the moment the driver finished. Inside the store the remaining Germans cleared out Quỳnh’s inventory of orange soda but purchased only a few souvenirs—a rosary, a votive, one of Gil’s funky snow globes that got shaken and reshaken for guttural laughs. After ushering them back into the bus the driver broke for a cigarette, standing squarely and obliviously in the exact spot where Cameron had risen. Ollie had scrubbed the rectangle of paint from the parking lot weeks before, per Hat’s command, but a dingy orange hint of it remained visible in the cracks, a ghost-like antumbra in the asphalt. “They saw alligators in Louisiana and now all they want to see is more alligators,” the driver told Quỳnh, venting more than apologizing. Quỳnh shrugged and said he understood: Alligators were pretty amazing.

  That Cameron was supposedly bóng, as gay men are derided in Vietnam, had come to Quỳnh as little shock. One reason was because he didn’t care. Why should he get an opinion on where someone else prefers to put his cu? Where Quỳnh enjoyed putting his, after all, was none of Cameron’s business. It had long bewildered Quỳnh that America’s loudest champions of liberty struck him as the quickest to erect a fence around the word—the same ones who, when Vietnamese immigrants like him began fishing the Gulf, strong-armed bait-shop owners into refusing to sell to Vietnamese fishermen, conspired to jack up boat prices, and lobbied state legislatures to restrict the sale of new shrimping licenses, all in the name of protecting the “freedom” of the Gulf fishery from people like Quỳnh. He’d recognized their faces in the scowls aimed at him and Hat at Gil’s funeral in little Chunchula, Alabama, from men irritated by the exotic mystery of their attendance as the Baptist preacher struggled to celebrate something of Gil’s life beyond the penitence of its end, Gil’s three ex-wives and six grown children sitting dry-eyed in the front pew as if watching justice being served.

  But the other, deeper reason Quỳnh felt no shock was because Cameron being gay was simply the other shoe, the one whose drop he’d been inveterately awaiting. Exuberance had intoxicated him in November and December, had pried him from his fatalistic crouch, until news of Cameron’s fight had cold-splashed him. Not that he’d quite known what to make of the fight; he hadn’t felt a fraction of Hat’s alarm and disgust. Cameron beating someone up in a bar didn’t seem like that other shoe. Quỳnh spent very little time in bars but his understanding, from the cops and from all the black-eyed, fist-bandaged drunks that came drifting through the Biz-E-Bee, was that people punched each other in bars all the time. But Cameron being bóng, on the other hand—close to half a year of marketing to what he called “Bible beaters,” and living with Gil, had equipped Quỳnh with a fair sense of their quirks and limitations, and this development, if true, strayed far too afield for them. Poor old Gil, for one, couldn’t have stomached it; if the cancer hadn’t killed him first this news would surely have done him in. Owing to this Quỳnh foresaw the coaches disappearing even sooner than they did. He’d come out to see the Germans only because, by his reckoning, they were already relics from a lost era—stragglers arriving to the feast as the plates were being cleared.

  For Hat, the revelation about Cameron threw her ever deeper into spiritual vertigo. Like forty-two percent of her adopted countrymen (according to a 2015 Pew Research poll), Hat believes that homosexuals are homosexual because they choose to be—that what constitutes homosexuality is not an inherent orientation but rather a selected set of actions. Everyone, to her thinking, is susceptible; but strong moral fiber, and, failing that, cultural proscription, keeps most people in check. Her dismay at Cameron’s bar fight eventually waned—men were men, after all. But coun
tenancing Cameron as a gay man was something she didn’t feel equipped to do. If she no longer believed in God—not in the way she once had, as a tender and careful overseer of human events—she still believed in the need for him. She still believed in the bedrock moral code he represented, or was invented to represent. And she felt certain that Cameron Harris, by choosing to be gay, violated that code.

  Hat was alone in the store when Cameron came in—his first visit since word reached her. If she hadn’t been alone, she thought later, she might not have said anything; Quỳnh, so generously accommodating of late, would’ve likely tried shushing her. Cameron eased in mumbling his standard hello then asked for cigarettes. Hat slid two packs across the counter.

  Quietly but sharply, as she rang him up, she said, “You shouldn’t have lied to us.”

  “Lied?” He stood there blinking. “About what?”

  “You know what,” grimacing.

  Cameron blinked several more times before nodding, piecing it together from the way she was averting her eyes. “That wasn’t no lie.” He rolled his shoulders in a pained shrug. “That just wasn’t nobody’s business.”

  Hat’s mouth fell open. “Nobody’s business?” She clawed toward the aisles of miracle merchandise behind him. “Look behind you, look at all that. It is our business. It’s been most of our business for months.”

  Cameron did as instructed, pivoting to survey all the curios he’d inspired, that rainbow skyline of candles that his legs had made people want to light. He turned back to Hat. “I didn’t ask,” he said, “for it to happen here.

  “Truth is,” he added, more foggily, “I ain’t even sure I ever asked for it to happen at all. Not the way it did.”

  Hat flattened her lips together as she uncreased the bills he’d passed her and added them to the cash drawer. “If you’d told us…” she began, flustered. “If you’d told us it would’ve been different.”

  She wasn’t thinking about all the merchandise as she said this, her and Quỳnh’s scuppered investment. Instead she was thinking about Gil. Because Cameron had betrayed Gil with his secret, she’d decided earlier: betrayed Gil by seeing him out there every day, by watching all that faith and devotion broiling on the asphalt, and doing nothing—when all he’d had to do, from the beginning, was take Gil aside, confide the truth to him, whisper how it was, so that Gil could understand that it hadn’t been a miracle or at least not a miracle in the way Gil thought of miracles.

  But then what? It suddenly occurred to her. She’d never played the scenario through to its end, always nipping it off at this point of principle. Shorn of his last hope, Gil would’ve almost surely limped back to Alabama, trailing a deflated, sagging cross, and died alone. Whereas in Biloxi his last months had been suffused with hope—so much hope, yes, and also food, laughter, Quỳnh’s silly shoot-em-up movies, a three-year-old who never wearied of an old man’s card tricks. And if loved ones hadn’t ministered to Gil’s final hours, the way it ought to be, then at least he’d died in the presence of someone who cared, who’d mourned. Which meant—and this was not just a thought, again, but a sensation that prickled her skin and dampened her eyes—that maybe God did exist, after all.

  Cameron didn’t acknowledge her hypothetical about outing himself to her and Quỳnh—it was too absurd to address. He dropped his gaze to where his cigarette packs were stacked on the counter. “It wasn’t like I planned all this,” he mumbled, part of him knowing he was taking more blame than he deserved but another part of him still oozing with guilt. Then, less than firmly, he said, “I won’t come around no more if there’s hard feelings.”

  Hat let out a small, mewling sound, almost but not quite the word no, and for the first time so far raised her eyes to his. Regarding Cameron in the fluorescent store lights she found, with dizzying confusion, that she couldn’t quite see him—not the way she could see other people, as contained and coherent. He was standing before her in triplicate or quadruplicate or even quintuplicate, each iteration—the one she knew, the one she thought she knew, the ones she didn’t know at all—slightly different from the rest, one of them an affront to God but another of them his divine instrument. And yet the aggregate of all these Camerons—his sulky blue eyes, every set of them, dropping back to the counter—was somehow beyond her capture or comprehending, an unsolvable equation, not because he was gay and not because he’d risen in her parking lot but because he was at once so ordinarily and extraordinarily human. She released a long and lingering sigh. Here was yet another reason for God: He alone understood. “No,” she finally said to him, slackening her voice with a gentler, maternal tone. “It’s not like that. It’s just…”

  What was he to her, after all—or what did she need him to be—beyond a customer? She had no claim on his soul, nor he on hers. Except this wasn’t true and she knew it. “It’s just hard when you don’t see what’s coming,” she said, recognizing as she spoke how insufficient this sounded but compelled to say something anyway, to lower her fists with words. She was fearing losing him. One iteration of him revolted her, it was true. But another iteration had proven to be her portal away from and now back to God. And yet another iteration seemed to her as frail and vulnerable as Little Kim had been in the neonatal ward and Gil had been on his deathbed, as though a part of him—his soul, maybe—was helplessly gasping.

  Hat glanced down to where Cameron’s hands were scooping the cigarettes and she plucked a dollar from the cash drawer. She slid it across to him and then, when he failed to react, tapped it twice.

  “What’s that?” he said, blinking again.

  “I forgot your discount.”

  Cameron examined the dollar. “Quỳnh says it don’t apply to smokes.”

  The way she swiveled her eyes made clear to him that Quỳnh wasn’t there, and thus his rules weren’t either. Confounded by these jumbled messages, Cameron pocketed the bill and nodded at her, wanting to apologize but not knowing what for and wanting to thank her but also not knowing what for: silenced by the anarchy of his own messaging. So he just nodded again, this time more deeply, and made for the door, over the jingle of the bell hearing her say, in that old familiar style, “See you next time, okay.”

  For a long while Hat sat motionless and blurry-headed behind the counter. When her concentration returned, focused by customers tramping in and then out, she found herself scanning the store with just one thing clear to her: They’d soon be broke again. Quỳnh had bet too many chips stocking souvenirs for the pilgrims. Those two full aisles of religious items in the Biz-E-Bee would be hogging that space for eternity if she and Quỳnh didn’t start marking prices down, which is what they ultimately if reluctantly did: fifty percent off in February, then seventy-five percent off, for a loss, come March. They needed to recover that semi-sacred shelf space for products the neighborhood actually needed: Cat Chow and Lorna Doone cookies and Cheez Whiz and FastStart carburetor cleaner and New Orleans Saints logo’d automotive air fresheners. Perhaps somewhere else it might’ve been different, say in California where Hat’s sister had recently moved. In Mississippi, however, they’d lost their license to sell faith and hope.

  Yet something about this calamity didn’t distress Quỳnh the way it formerly would’ve, and the way Hat feared it was going to. He didn’t take to moping, or cursing, or fretting himself awake at three a.m. Like Gil, he’d gambled on a miracle and lost. But unlike Gil he’d only lost money.

  And money, came a new thought, was like magic: It came and it went, and its value and meaning were for every man to decide for himself. Quỳnh consoled himself by thinking that life had thus far afforded him entry to two magical realms: his grandmother’s farm at Vũng Tàu, with its talking geckos and twilit bat swarms and those low sorcerous gongs that’d lulled him to sleep; and the Biz-E-Bee in the autumn and early winter of 2014, when for a brief time he’d felt endowed with almost wizardly power, when for a fast and rollicking period people had lo
oked to Quỳnh not for beer or cigarettes or diapers but for hope and for healing, when he’d been regarded, with reverence, as an emissary of something enchanted. But such realms were transitory, he decided, they were like gorgeously colored soap bubbles whose only destiny was to pop. And perhaps, he thought further, misfortune bore the same floaty impermanence. Only death was final. Everything else, like sunlight, like storms, moved in and moved out. What else was he to glean from Cameron’s rising?

  One unusually warm evening in late February Quỳnh was sitting out back with Steven Seagal, his pacifist fighting cock, and taking in nothing more than the funky salt breeze seeping through the trumpet vines and oleander and wax myrtle, when Little Kim slashed open the screen door and came waddling out to him. He scooped her in his arms and let her run her hands over his face as if she were blind and trying to identify him, the giggles he was charming out of her pitched lower than usual, issuing from someplace deep and nameless in her tiny chest. Jealous, Steven Seagal puffed and crowed and scrambled back when Little Kim probed a fingertip into his cage, and was soon scrambling in peckish circles as she did it again and then again, Quỳnh finding himself hypnotized by an old reflection he caught in her eyes. “Do you want to talk to Steven Seagal?” he asked her, and she laughed and said, “Chickens don’t talk.” But no they do, he told her, click-click-clicking his tongue so that the rooster cocked his head and waggled his big red comb and after a while emitted an intrigued few clucks. Little Kim’s mouth dropped open and she clapped and called for more and Quỳnh asked her what she wanted him to say to the rooster. As she considered this, with her fist pressed to her chin, he glanced up to see Hat watching them through the screen door, a spatula hanging loose in her hand and her face soft with an expression Quỳnh first thought he hadn’t seen in many years before realizing he’d never seen it at all. She smiled at Quỳnh, and as Little Kim told him to ask Steven Seagal his favorite color Quỳnh smiled back at her, thinking, Not two magical realms, no. Three.