Anatomy of a Miracle

by Jonathan Miles

  “Do you wish to make a confession?” Father Ace asked, less an invitation than a challenge. It struck Cameron as such a small question, with Jesus hanging from the cross behind and above the priest, his benevolent-looking presence looming large as the sky.

  Weakly, Cameron said, “For being me?”

  The priest shut his eyes and very slowly shook his head, as though counting something off. “This cannot be the way,” he finally said, “that you repay his incredible mercy.”

  “Father,” Cameron pleaded, “I don’t feel, not in here, like who I am is wrong.”

  “Until you renounce your sins, and deliver your weakness unto the Lord,” Father Ace said, backing away to punctuate this as his final statement, the folds of his cassock seething in retreat, “you cannot be said to be living in a state of grace. And therefore I cannot and will not grant you the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist.” He paused inside a ribbon of color-stained sunlight. “With great tenderness in my heart, I leave this choice to you.”

  It wasn’t until Cameron was outside, descending the steps of the church, that it struck him. He noticed his legs carrying him down the concrete stairs, as only he could notice them, watched them flexing and tautening and flexing again beneath his khaki pants as they conveyed him to the base of the steps. He wheeled around and faced the open church door, the flooded veins of his neck surging. “I’m not living in a state of grace?” he said aloud, unconsciously shifting from foot to foot in a defiant shuffle-step, every one of his lower body’s nerves thrumming and twitching, his voice climbing from a choke to a shout. “I’m not? I’m not?”

  * * *

  The trucking magnate Norton Skag’s response to Cameron’s homosexuality, delicately disclosed to him from Rome by Dr. Antonio Liuni, after Euclide Abbascia’s report from Georgia, was all of two words: “Who cares?”

  This took Dr. Liuni by surprise, partly because it echoed Euclide’s nonplussed reaction. Dr. Liuni had been ascribing the latter, however, to his investigator’s youth and loose cosmopolitan leanings as well as to his over-lawyerly way of interpreting the gospels. (Of the 2,026 words attributed to Jesus in the four gospels, Euclide exasperated him by pointing out, not a single one addresses homosexuality.) But Skag? Dr. Liuni had been girding himself for smoking brimstone to come spraying from his phone. Dr. Liuni is of an older generation of Catholics, less apt to view church doctrine as something malleable and elastic, and his impression of Skag was of a man even farther to his right, a paleo-conservative in matters theological. Skag was known, in the United States, to be a significant donor to socially conservative politicians, a cash machine for the nation’s culture warriors, particularly generous to antiabortion activists.

  On the phone with Dr. Liuni, however, Skag wasn’t interested in theology or politics or even morality; he was only interested in a miracle for the Reverend Fahey. “The recipient doesn’t matter,” Skag growled. “You explained that to me yourself twenty years ago. Doesn’t matter if he’s a fairy. The miracle is what matters.” This was true, Dr. Liuni was forced to agree, but only in a legalistic sense. And after nearly half a century as a lawyer Dr. Liuni understood the wide gulf between the theory of the law—canon law especially—and its practice. Still, he did as his client demanded: He proceeded forward with the claim.

  He didn’t have far to proceed. On March 16, the head of the Biloxi Diocese, Bishop Xavier R. Coburn, retracted diocesan support for the miracle inquiry, due to “irredeemable inconsistencies in testimony,” and disbanded the four-man board he’d appointed to oversee it—effectively blocking Fahey’s route to sainthood as it wound through Cameron Harris.

  Skag was incensed. This time sparks did fly from Dr. Liuni’s phone, Skag breathing fire all the way from Detroit. It was a conference call, Euclide patched in from Washington. “What do these sons of bitches want down there?” he asked, suggesting Euclide tender some kind of offer. “A new church? Fine. A rec center? A seminary? My checkbook’s right in front of me. They can have all the zeros they want on it. I mean, for God’s sake, all we’re asking them for is a stamp so the case can move on up to the Consulta.”

  Cautiously, Dr. Liuni said, “It’s not exactly how these things are done.”

  “But it’s ridiculous,” Skag fumed. “This is a slam dunk case. Archbishop Fahey healed this boy, clear as day, and they’re brushing it aside. Why? I’d like one of these sons of bitches to tell me why.”

  Euclide cleared his throat. “Because they’re scared,” he said.

  “Scared of what?”

  “The resonance,” Euclide said.

  “I don’t even know what that means,” Skag grumbled. “All I know is that mercy’s not to be feared. Mercy’s to be celebrated.”

  This happened to align with Euclide’s view, but he took it one step further than Skag might have: love, in whatever form it took, wasn’t to be feared either. And this was why, in early April, while Euclide was in Tallahassee, Florida, looking into a cancer-remission case that had barely a tenth of the miracle potential of Cameron’s case, he found himself using a free day to drive four hours to Biloxi.

  When no one answered the door at the house on Reconfort Avenue, Euclide called Janice, by now aware that Father Ace had washed his hands of Cameron. Janice seemed weirdly protective of Cameron. Though she and Euclide had spoken on the phone since their interview, to jointly clear their suspicions about him, this still felt like a shift. After Euclide explained his purpose, though, she texted him Cameron’s number with a message saying he was full of surprises.

  Cameron, more so than Janice, also sounded wary on the phone—Euclide promised him he was paying an unofficial call, unrelated to church business—but said he was working a slip shift at work and would be headed home shortly for a couple hours. He’d meet him there.

  With time to kill Euclide wandered down to the Biz-E-Bee, exchanging pleasantries along the way with an old woman on her porch who noting his accent hollered out, “Where you from, child?” The MIRACULOUS DISCOUNTS sign was still hanging across the front of the store, and inside were printouts of the news coverage taped haphazardly to the walls, but there was little, otherwise, to denote what’d happened there: a far cry from Euclide’s last visit. From the man behind the counter whom he took to be Quỳnh, Lê Thị Hat’s husband, Euclide purchased the single worst cup of coffee he’d ever tasted and carried it outside. He stood near the door for awhile, watching a man sweep the parking lot, the man uttering strange bleating sounds with every third push of his broom. The man paid extra attention, Euclide noticed, to the section of the asphalt where Cameron had risen, still faintly marked. When he was done sweeping the man rested awhile in that very spot, leaning on his broom, slightly swaying, his eyelids fluttering and his lips softly trembling, Euclide observing him over the rim of his paper coffee cup. Yes, Euclide thought, his lips bending into a slow smile. God is there, friend. Don’t let anyone tell you he’s not.

  He arrived back at the house just as Cameron was pulling into the driveway. Cameron climbed out of the car in a uniform: shiny black pants and a bright blue shirt onto which a gold badge was pinned. Shaking hands and leading Euclide inside, Cameron told him that he was a month into his new job at the airport, working for the Transportation Security Administration, the TSA, or as Cameron wryly put it, “America’s varsity squad.” Polyester uniform aside, Euclide was struck, after all this time spent circling him, by how unremarkable Cameron seemed, by the folksy Huckleberry Finn-ness of him: the accommodating grin, the gleaming blue boyishness in his eyes, his mussed, sticky-looking hair, the clumsy cowboy drawl, the unkempt way he chugged half a quart of Gatorade standing in front of the open refrigerator. He seemed both familiar and exotic to Euclide, irregularly regular, an everyman who from various angles resembled and evoked no one else.

  Euclide didn’t stay long. His mission was a narrow and very precise one, and on one basic level unlike most of his others—he was
there not to receive information but to dispense it. But he began with a question anyway: “Have you spoken with Sergeant Lockwood since your recovery?”

  Cameron’s face paled, a range of expressions swirling across it. He reached for a cigarette, Euclide saw, in much the same way Dr. Liuni reached for an aspirin when his chest began stinging. “D?” Cameron said. “Nossir I ain’t.”

  “I have,” Euclide announced.

  Cameron nodded, Euclide inventorying what he saw flickering through Cameron’s eyes: resurrected pain, maybe; guilt; an old and persistent confusion; and something brighter, too, the thing Euclide’d hoped to see.

  “I am very certain he would welcome hearing from you,” Euclide told him, from his vest pocket fishing a folded piece of paper, with Damarkus’s cellphone number on it, and passing it to Cameron. Cameron unfolded the paper and stared at it as though reading a long and emphatic letter. “That’s really all I came this long way to say,” Euclide said, adding, “I thought I should do it in person.”

  Cameron’s mouth opened to speak, but nothing but air came out.

  “You and he, it seems clear,” Euclide said, “have some unfinished business,” tapping his chest. Cameron sat motionless for a while, not even blinking, Euclide continuing to tap at his chest until he was certain Cameron was registering his meaning, until Cameron’s eyes were blooming as wide as they could bloom, his unlit cigarette poised motionless between his fingers.

  Before leaving Biloxi Euclide stopped by Mary Mahoney’s Old French House, idly recalling the young waitress—lovely in his memory—who’d flirted him that second Negroni several months before. But she was off that day, the bartender told Euclide. He sighed and sipped his drink, watching the bartender wiping glassware in the window light, thinking maybe it was just as well: He’d had enough romance for one day.

  * * *

  By dint of coincidence, or maybe owing to the crisscrossing spokes of small-town life, Nap Cuevas was the first lawyer Tommy Landry contacted seeking representation a few days after the fight, Nap having represented Landry’s uncle three years before in one of the myriad cases arising from the BP oil spill. Nap let Landry talk for about ten minutes until his response felt fully formulated. Then he stopped him. “Mr. Landry, I’ve never said to this to a prospective client before, and it’s hard for me to imagine I’m ever going to say it to another one,” he said. “But based upon some knowledge of this case that I happen to have, and on what you’ve told me so far, I’d like to invite you to go fuck yourself.”

  And that, minus a few more turns of the screw, was how Nap Cuevas became Cameron Harris’s attorney.

  This story—exaggerated hardly at all—was soon being told and retold at dinner parties and in beachfront bars, with proud whiskeyed zest, by an unexpected and unannounced visitor to the Mississippi Coast: Janice’s father, Winston Lorimar. He arrived at his daughter’s house one night in early March, trailing a pair of disturbingly large suitcases along with Zeno, his fragrant Plott Hound, for what he described, blithely and benevolently, as an “open-ended stay.” He admitted he was rather early to greet the birth of his first grandchild, six months or so, but said the thought of Janny’s belly blossoming so distant and unseen had been ripping him into confetti. Plus, he announced, he wanted to deliver Janice her old crib from the attic. It wasn’t actually Janice’s old crib, rather her little brother Johnny’s, because her old crib had been put to use as a brooder for ducklings, but it was a sweet gesture anyway and Janice decided that, with a coat of paint, the crib could be adorable—and a tactile link, as well, to her mother, who was supposed to be here for this.

  Nap, to Janice’s surprise, seemed entirely—even irritatingly—unruffled by her father’s invasion. His presence gave Nap an excuse to mix his Sazeracs and provided him a partner for watching basketball, which Lorimar didn’t particularly enjoy but found pleasant enough to stare at so long as the volume stayed low (“Just can’t take all them shoes squeakin’ ”).

  Janice, in contrast, found herself recurrently galled, though after a while more by the dog, which climbed daily onto the sun-drenched kitchen table to doze, than by her father, who seemed uncharacteristically inclined to help out around the house: He took over mowing the lawn, for instance, which was obliging of him though she wished he wouldn’t pilot the riding mower shirtless wearing a scarf and goggles like Snoopy atop his Sopwith Camel, to the neighborhood’s gawky delight. From embarrassment, Janice sometimes found her hands covering her face, as they’d so regularly done during her teens, but she also began noticing a curious shift in her view of her father, a softer, more forgiving focus, which she was crediting to being pregnant. She realized, as a mother-to-be, that she was locked into her lineage; she was an individual, of course, but also a kind of middleman passing something more than mitochondrial DNA down the line, something deeper and less obvious than eye color and height and susceptibility to cancer. The differences, for the first time, felt less important than the similarities. Her father was crazy, yes, a yowling, sixty-seven-year-old dervish, and his response to life had always been to flail at its mysteries and discordances with fabulist stories—but then she too, as evidenced by the last few months, wasn’t immune to that.

  Winston liked hearing about Cameron. He liked bringing the case up in bars in the late afternoons, squinting at locals claiming to have known it was a hoax all along. He liked visiting the Biz-E-Bee and standing in that faded rectangle, chewing gum with his hands in his pockets. He liked ogling people in the Biloxi casinos and, whether they were impaired in any visible way or not, trying to determine why God might’ve opted to pass them over for a miracle. As a fiction writer, he sometimes invented backstories for them when the reason—someone snapping at a cocktail waitress, cussing a slot machine, general inertness—wasn’t obvious to him.

  The reasoning he devised for Cameron’s selection, on that note, went like this: “One by one God took away the boy’s daddy, his dog, his mama, his first true love, then his legs. After a while God felt bad about all that so he gave back the legs.”

  His daughter didn’t mind this interest—in fact she rather enjoyed it, as her father had never before paid much attention to her work—but she did find herself trying to steer him away from the metaphysical toward the physical, from the invisible to the visible. Winston Lorimar isn’t religious, but he is fond, in his words, of “the hoodoo in life”: the cracks in our knowledge and perceptions, the existential equivalent of the unplayable tones lurking between the black and white keys of a piano.

  Janice did have to concede to him that what was visible about Cameron’s case was limited and ambiguous, that the only conclusion the data and imaging could muster was a shrug. She was still doing what she could to investigate the case, feeling obligated to redouble her efforts after having steered herself into a ditch with her hoax theory. She’d experienced no eureka moments, not yet, and her progress felt measured in inches, but she had, nevertheless, arrived at a few conclusions.

  One was that whatever neuroregenerative process occurred had happened slowly, not instantly, so that Cameron’s rise from his wheelchair marked not the moment of his recovery but rather his realization of it. His lack of sensory response, until then, was likely psychological—a kind of reverse placebo effect, Cameron failing to notice the changes because his mind kept invalidating them. Her second conclusion was that his ability to stand and hobble a few steps, despite his atrophied leg muscles, was more than likely an adrenaline response. Cameron’s combat history, which she heard about from Euclide and verified with Cameron, suggested a man unusually reactive to the effects of adrenaline, able to channel those effects into very specific physical actions. And the third was that some anomaly in the glial scar environment—and that was as precise as she could get, some anomaly—had allowed neuroregeneration to transpire where medical science says it can’t, akin to a flower blooming in the absence of light.

  “So that’s the stor
y you’re telling,” her father said one night, after she’d laid it all out for him. They were sitting on the screened-in patio, Janice chiding her father for smoking and her father pretending not to hear. He had a tall glass of bourbon in front of him, her a steaming cup of Healthy Mama herbal tea. Zeno was snoring by his feet, having exhausted himself chasing moths, and the backyard was clamorous with cicadas, a thousand miniature tambourines being shaken in the dark.

  “It’s not a story, Daddy,” she said. “Come on. It’s a hypothesis. It’s as empirical as I can get right now.”

  “Naw,” he said, pursing his lips and shaking his head a shade too smugly for Janice, like someone holding the answer to a guessing game. “A hypothesis, that’s just a story told a different way. It’s a summary of observations, right? This led to that. When this happens, this other thing here does.”

  “That,” she said, shooing smoke away, “is a seriously simple way of looking at it.”

  “Simple? Here’s simple.” He stubbed out his cigarette and took a bracing sip-and-a-half of bourbon, grimacing happily. Winston Lorimar no longer resembles David Levine’s illustration of him in the New York Review of Books circa 1979, when Lieutenant Lucius & the Tristate Crematory Band was the passing rage. His face has widened and gone pouchy and the wild-man shock of hair that Levine accentuated went swirling down the bathtub drain decades ago. But the jungly eyebrows and over-plump lips that dominated Levine’s rendering still dominate Winston Lorimar’s face, imbuing his expressions with something of an epic quality. When he draws a cigarette to his lips it might as well be a roasted turkey leg. When he laughs it feels on behalf of an entire realm or at least a pub. He exudes a largeness of spirit, something overcrowded within.