“Tolstoy said there’s only two stories in all of literature,” he began. “Fella goes on a journey, that’s one. Stranger comes to town, that’s the other. Or in this case here I reckon we’d say, anomaly comes to town.” His face glowed puckishly. “Sounds a little Greek, doesn’t it? Hail ye Anomaly, scion of Medicina…”
“Science isn’t stories, Daddy,” Janice said flatly, reminded anew why she’d relished living in Pittsburgh during med school. No one ever seemed to sit on porches making up stories.
“Oh, of course it’s just stories,” he said. “Fella goes on a journey, that’s Darwin’s plot, that’s evolution. This fish, see, he’s bored, wants to check out what’s beyond the water, so he jumps out onto the land, gives it a quick look-see, says I’m going to need me some lungs and some feets. But he don’t got them. So he tells his fish kids and they tell their fish kids until one of them grows some lungs and some feet and next thing you know they’re living in trees gnawing bananas until one of them says, y’all watch this, I’m fixing to blow some minds by walking on two feets. And so on and so forth. Different fellas but they’re on the same journey.”
Janice sipped her tea, hearing the cicada music recede and then crest behind her father’s voice, finding herself both irritated and enchanted to feel seven years old again.
“And stranger comes to town, Tolstoy’s other one,” her father went on, darkness creasing his face as some of the playfulness ebbed from his tone. “Well, that’s the Earth itself coming into existence, isn’t it? That whole ball of wax. Or pan out wider and it’s the origins of matter, of the universe. The story of a fella named Something arriving at a place called Nothing.”
Janice laughed. “All you’re demonstrating,” she said, adding some girlish velvet to her tone in order to blunt any sting, “is that if you make the box big enough you can fit anything inside it.”
He grunted softly, more stimulated than stung.
“But you’re also missing a crucial difference,” she continued. “Science doesn’t tell. It asks.”
He shrugged. “Same way stories do.”
“That so?” she said, the arch of her eyebrow signaling more amusement than she was actually feeling.
“Oh indeed. Indeed.” His big lips glistened from a fresh sip of bourbon. “Stories, made-up ones anyway, they always begin with a tacit question: What if?”
“What if,” Janice echoed.
“That’s right, what if,” he said. “What if a woman named Anna married a mouse named Karenin but fell dumbly in love with a louse named Vronsky? What if a little-bitty redneck boy named Thomas Sutpen never got over a slave making him use the back door of a plantation house? What if biting a single cookie could crack open the essence of time itself, every one of the little-bitty crumbs like atoms bursting with experience? Stories, see, they ask what if the same way experiments do. They both start from the same place.”
“And where’s that?”
He mulled this for a while, stretching his neck and surveying the backyard, before announcing, “Leflore County, Mississippi.”
“Oh, Daddy…”
“Now hear me out, Janny. Follow this old white rabbit for just a minute.” Janice waited while he dropped his gaze and cocked his head, as though struggling to hear something. He rubbed a fingertip against his glass. “I could tell you two stories right now. One involves ol’ Snuffy Covington, who was before your time. He was the county agent back in the fifties, real peculiar fellow, and he figured out how to control the boll weevil one night after listening to the Rocky Marciano–Jersey Joe Walcott fight on the radio.” He paused to regard Janice’s blank expression, then said, “The other one’s about your mama dying.”
She nodded her selection at him, steeling herself, and he began with a question: “You ever hear about the Heider-Simmel experiment?”
Janice frowned at this starting-line digression, tightening her jaw and shaking her head no.
“A famous psychological study from back in the forties,” he explained. “Heider and Simmel, they showed people a short film with nothing but a few geometric shapes moving along the screen then asked those people what-all they’d seen. Just like that: What’d you see? And all but one of them people come back with a story. The big triangle was trying to help the circle, they said. The little triangle was trying to get the circle away from the big one. The rectangle that didn’t move was apathetic to the drama. That sort of thing. Only one of them, out of dozens, said he’d just seen some moving shapes. Just one of them.”
Janice vented an impatient sigh. “I thought this was about Mom…”
“Those shapes,” he shot back, “were your mama’s cancer.”
He studied the table for a while, his daughter studying him, the cicadas hushing themselves as though respecting the moment.
“Those shapes came to take her away and every night the universe asked me what I was seeing,” he went on. “And every night I tried telling myself and her and y’all a new story that wasn’t just these meaningless shapes of cancer erasing her from our lives. Every night I wrote and revised those stories in my head because I refused—and to this goddamn day I still refuse—to accept her cancer as some movement of random shapes, as a purely biological concern. Because to accept that I’d have to accept her as a random shape, too, as one more meaningless fragment in a meaningless mosaic. And she wasn’t.”
“No,” Janice heard herself whisper.
“No she wasn’t.” His hand gripped his glass as though to lift it for a sip but all he did was squeeze it. “She was extraordinary in every sense but also in the sense that we’re all extraordinary, that human life is extraordinary, that we’re all somehow endowed with a consciousness allowing us to see with our eyes closed, to conjure what’s not there and sometimes what never could be there, and with lips and hands, too, that allow us to convey that vision to the consciousness of others, to transmit not only information but meaning as well. Meaning and joy and heartbreak and whatever the invisible molecules are that constitute love.”
The cicadas crested again and for a few speechless moments it appeared that father and daughter were doing nothing more than listening to them.
“So I told stories,” he said. “Some of them were sad and some funny and some were ridiculous and some were just me spinning whatever I had to keep spinning to keep from crying. Maybe they weren’t the best stories and if I could do it all over again I might’ve kept back a few of them from you and your brothers because the trust of a child is infinite but so easily breakable too. But I couldn’t be like that single cold bastard from Heider and Simmel’s experiment. I couldn’t accept her dying as just her dying. If there were laws to the universe then those laws had to be just ones, and I felt it was mine to prove that somehow—to myself if no one else. Otherwise what cause did I have to put you and the boys on the school bus every morning, make y’all finish your greens every supper? What was to stop me,” he said, lifting his glass and shaking the ice as though brandishing a pistol, “from doing anything but this all day?”
Janice hadn’t registered much after his reference to the cold bastard, which she’d felt to be a drive-by slight aimed at or at least near her—a half-concealed critique of her own clinical dispassion, her capacity for describing without ascribing, despite knowing that her hoax theory had shown these qualities to be more aspirational than inherent. Her mind swirled. The way her father had reckoned with her mother’s illness and death had been an open wound for twenty-three years, but this fresh sting, a pinprick in comparison, was now eclipsing it. Did the deficit of imagination her father seemed to see in her bespeak a corresponding deficit of love?
“But there’s a true story, Daddy,” she protested. “And what’s true doesn’t need to be imagined. You can see it right in front of you. It wasn’t shapes that took her, it was brainstem glioma. And that doesn’t mean Mama died without—without meaning.”
&nb
sp; The way he smiled at her, like his heart was bunched in his throat, felt like a correction. It told her she’d misunderstood him—had substituted herself for her father’s strawman, had imagined the slight. She’d always been too sensitive to his disapproval, she knew, even back when it’d conversely validated her. She softened, watching her father’s face twitch with thought or emotion—it was never clear, with him, where one stopped and the other started.
“Imagination,” he said to her, “isn’t just seeing what’s not there.” His voice was gentle, a barrel-aged murmur. “Imagination is also what we use to figure out why what’s there is the way it is.”
She said nothing as he lit another cigarette, so forcefully shaking the match as to also shake off the old grief he’d summoned.
“Let’s throw William Blake’s notion onto the table,” he said, as Janice waved smoke from the actual table, “that between what’s known in the universe and what’s unknown there are doors. Imagination is the only thing that opens those doors.”
Janice sighed. “Imagination is also the quickest path down rabbit holes,” she said, thinking of her own.
“That’s surely true.” Her father let out a smoky grunt. “I reckon history would show rabbit holes outnumbering Blake’s doors by about a hundred thousand to one.”
“But the questions I’m asking about what happened to Cameron,” she said, circling the conversation back to where it’d begun. “They’re questions, Daddy, they’re not parts of any story, and they’re not imagined. I feel like you’re lumping me in with all the miracle thumpers. I don’t have something to prove.”
“Of course you do,” he said. “What you aim to prove is that the body, like the universe, works according to static laws. That what applies to one set of nerves applies to all sets of nerves. That the story, once identified, resolves the same way every time. The miracle thumpers—I like that phrase—their desire is for the opposite. Isn’t that right? That those laws can be suspended by a higher power. That your biological fate is not necessarily mine. But it’s too easy, now, to overstate these as competing aims. It’s a common and rather toxic form of glibness. Because what they are, see, they’re just parallel routes to the same place.”
“And that’s what?”
“Consolation,” he said.
“Not understanding?”
“Understanding’s just a form of consolation. Understanding something means trusting that it’s true. Doesn’t mean it is true. Just that you believe it is.”
Janice smiled, wagging her head and emitting a low, exasperated moan. “If we were on the phone,” she said, a dimple dotting her cheek, “I’d be saying, sorry, Daddy, you’re breaking up on me.”
“Well, that’s why this here’s better,” he said, matching her dimple for dimple as he ashed his cigarette. He leaned forward. “All I’m saying to you is that what happened with this boy was more than mechanical. I don’t mean the actual mechanism, the anomaly. Thing is, you imagined him staying in that chair and he somehow imagined himself out of it. You wrote one story—and by you I mean everyone relying upon our agreed-upon ideas of the known world—and his body wrote another. And all these people heard that story of his and every one of them tried and failed to understand it so they rewrote it in whatever way made sense to them, whatever way consoled them, until it didn’t make sense to them anymore so they had to write it another way. And maybe one of those stories was true and maybe none of them were. Maybe the true story is the one you’ll tell when you figure out the anomaly. But it won’t really matter, not in what we call the grand scheme.”
“And why is that?” she said, feeling a faint twinge in her middle: the regular smoosh of digestion, probably, but—possibly?—the baby’s first tentative, exploratory kick, another set of legs sparking with life deep inside her.
“Because it’s like what Muriel Rukeyser wrote,” her father was saying, dreamily now, and peering out into the yard as if reciting lines printed upon the night sky. “ ‘The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.’ ” He turned to her with a grin, lush crinkles framing his eyes, and reaching not for his glass but for his daughter’s hand he asked, “And isn’t that, doctor…why, isn’t that just about as beautiful as it gets?”
epilogue
The playlist for the trip was Cameron’s: Patsy and Willie and Dolly and Tammy, all the old warbly-voiced, pedal steel–smeared standbys, one twangy heartache after another. The route plugged into the GPS was likewise of Cameron’s design: east to Mobile, up through the piney woods to Montgomery, then over to Macon for a wide northbound swoop around Atlanta toward the mountains and into White County, Georgia. The blue car, too, belonged to Cameron, though not in any technical sense: Three months after the still-birthed cancellation of Miracle Man, no one from the production company or the network or from Ford had come to reclaim the twin sedans granted to its stars. Yet the driver, as always, was Tanya, a Bonus Value Light smoldering idly between her fingers on the steering wheel, like a stick of incense, her other hand pressing her phone to her ear.
“Aw, girl, you know,” she was saying to a friend. “Regular old Saturday. Just driving to Georgia to meet my brother’s gay black lover.”
She flashed a wide and wicked grin her brother’s way, silently cackling at her own teasing, and Cameron responded with a tolerant roll of his eyes before returning his attention to the landscape clicking past: billboards for lawyers and preachers, tattered roadside memorial wreaths, homemade signs for deer processing with arrows pointing every direction, the earth painted a single mutt color of green and beige save for the early pastel wildflowers bending in the spring breeze. Feeling his stomach knotting again Cameron cracked the window and lit a cigarette, listening to Tanya going on about her new job at their mama’s old hospital and the night classes she was taking to become a nurse. The job had her working with the elderly—“I’m getting so damn good at wiping butts,” she was saying—but she was gunning for a slot in the pediatric ward. What she wanted was to work with kids. She was good at that, she thought. Her brother might be proof.
Finishing the call, she announced, “Cheryl says hey.”
“Hey,” he said back, to the window.
“Says she still thinks she can turn you.”
“Reckon I been turned enough,” he said.
Tanya dunked her cigarette into a coffee cup in the console and then took in the passing scenery, humming vacantly along with a pedal-steel solo. She blinked at the windshield, her eyes narrowing. “You remember riding up this way to see Aunt Bylinda and them?” As Cameron shook his head no she said, “Yeah, might be you were too little to remember.”
He shrugged. “Must’ve been.”
“Yeah, you were back in your car seat singing ‘Barney’ songs. Mama singing along. Y’all bout to killed me with that. Guess you don’t remember the bull neither.”
He swung his head. “What bull?”
“Uncle Bill’s. Thing was huge, with these big old horns. Like those Texas cattle or something. You and me rode out with Uncle Bill to feed the hogs one night. You was in the bed of his truck when that bull come up and sticks his head right in there, snorting at you like this.” She flared her nostrils and grunted. “Then you got to screaming and kinda curled yourself into a ball which just gets the bull more curious or something so he’s rocking the whole truck sticking his head in there and snorting. You about peed your pants.”
Cameron couldn’t tell whether Tanya meant this as a funny story or not. It didn’t sound funny to him. “What’d Uncle Bill do?”
“Aw, you know him. He was off feeding the pigs and shouting at you not to worry. Saying the bull was friendly. You wasn’t buying it.”
After a few beats of silence Cameron stared at her and asked, “What were you doing?”
“Me?” Tanya frowned as if her own role in the incident hadn’t occurred to her. “I was back there with you. Trying to keep
that bull off you. I starting shoving his head away and shit. Pushing on its nose.”
“Telling me it was all okay,” Cameron said.
She brightened. “You remember now?”
“Naw.” His voice was quiet, pensive, but assured. “I just figured.”
He took a drag from his cigarette, exhaling the smoke sideways out the cracked window.
“You always been protecting me, ain’t you?” he said.
Tanya swallowed, eyes fixed upon the highway. “Not always,” she said.
“It’s sure felt like always to me.”
What to say to this—Tanya didn’t know. A FreightConnex tractor-trailer hurtled past in the left lane, Reverend Fahey’s quotation on its backside passing unnoticed. Kitty Wells was singing a duet with Red Foley, sounding to Tanya like some archaeological recording engineered with tin cans and fence wire. Cracker Barrel, two miles ahead. A boarded-up church off the frontage road, its sign reading, THE BIBLE PREVENTS TRUTH DECAY. Finally she said, “That wasn’t me back at the Biz-E-Bee.”
“Wasn’t me neither,” said Cameron.
For a long while thereafter they rode through Alabama in silence, the mystery riding with them as it probably always will, its presence disturbing and comforting in shifting but ultimately equal measures, undeniable yet unfathomable: a ghost of wonder that may never cease to haunt them and those close to them, untethering them from the world’s known limits. Perhaps this will always be their routine: a reminder, a thick and ponderous silence, and then an unsettling sense of strange liberty and stranger privilege.
Tanya lit another cigarette as Cameron was absently doodling the window with a fingertip, as though tracing the contours of the highwayside.
“You nervous?” she said.
“Little bit,” he admitted.
“I mean, shit,” she said, squinting less from the sun than from the thoughts in her head. “All these years gone by and y’all ain’t been nowhere together except Afghanistan.” She paused, wagging her head as she absorbed her own words, ingesting the dilemmas of her brother’s nearing future. “What the hell do you even do?”
Anatomy of a Miracle Page 41
