Months later, after training with a media consultant and learning that you needn’t answer questions directly (“answer the question you want to be asked, not the one you’re actually asked”), Cameron would come to see how easily he could’ve evaded it, could’ve bent the question to his answer rather than the other way around. But this dynamic—and the cynicism underlying it—was still alien to him. Castanedo was asking him a yes or no question, thereby compelling him to answer yes or no—even if his honest answer lay somewhere in between.
Twenty-three seconds: To reject the divine nature of his recovery, by responding with even a qualified no, was out of the question. Denying God’s active hand, he felt, would betray all the well-wishers who’d been streaming in and out of his house that day (some of whom were present during the interview, discernible in the background of the audio) as well as the hundreds of people who were still, at that very moment, hosanna-ing his photo on Facebook and channeling their prayers to and through him. Doing so would also betray Mrs. Dooley and the jubilant faith she’d shown as she’d come singing her way across the parking lot. And in some convoluted way, he thought, it would also betray his own dead mother, whom he’d never known to skip Mass on Sunday and who, for all he knew, might have engineered his recovery from up in Heaven, bequeathing her reward for a faithful life to her doubt-ridden son on earth. To give voice to those doubts in that moment—to answer with some variation of “I don’t know”—struck him as equally wrong, or maybe, for the weakness it evinced, even worse. Because though his doubts were real, they were still just doubts: clouds drifting low and heavy through his mind.
It took Castanedo repeating the question to pull an answer from Cameron. “Yessir,” he finally said. “I do. I think God decided he had another plan for me.” This last line, he later admitted, was an inversion of something an Army chaplain had said to him at the hospital at Landstuhl, a few days after his injury. “God decided he had another plan in mind for you,” he’d said, holding Cameron’s limp hand in his. At the time he’d registered the chaplain’s line in much the same insensible way he was registering the intravenous fluids entering his arm, and he was surprised, four years later, by the ease with which he retrieved it. He saw Castanedo smiling as the reporter lowered his head to jot this into his notepad.
If Tanya’s Facebook post—which required personal knowledge of Cameron’s former condition to appreciate, or, in the case of the later far-flung commenters, a measure of blind trust—displayed some virality, Castanedo’s Sun Herald feature all but exploded.
The story, which ran under the headline PARAPLEGIC BILOXI VET EXPERIENCES ‘MIRACULOUS’ RECOVERY; ‘GOD DECIDED HE HAD ANOTHER PLAN FOR ME,’ was neither long—about eighteen column inches, in newspaper-speak—nor probing. Castanedo quoted the pastor at Biloxi’s largest Catholic church, who said it sure sounded like a miracle to him, as well as an orthopedic surgeon in Gulfport, who said it was impossible to issue an “armchair diagnosis” but that he was unaware of any other spontaneous, post-traumatic recovery of function like the one described to him. (Familiar with its strict policies against public comment on specific medical cases, Castanedo didn’t attempt to contact the VA hospital.) But the story’s nimble atmospherics—and the quiet, low-slung heroism that underlit Castanedo’s portrayal of Cameron—cast a captivating glow. By August 28, two days after its publication in the Sun Herald’s print and online editions, hit counters on the online version had already registered more than three million page views. “If you exclude our Katrina-related coverage, it’s been the most-viewed story in the history of the paper’s website,” says Castanedo. “It sort of boggles the mind.” By week’s end, the story had been picked up not only by religious websites, such as Beliefnet, GodVine, and the Christian Post, but also by more mainstream outlets such as the Drudge Report, Huffington Post, and BuzzFeed, where, for a while on BuzzFeed’s “omg” feed, a rewritten version sat lodged between 14 PLACES YOU’D NEVER BELIEVE WERE IN SCOTLAND and 7 GLORIOUS PHOTOS OF IDRIS ELBA’S BULGE.
Precisely what accounts for online virality—the particular triggers that propel people to share content, be it a news story or lolcat video—remains a knotted mystery that content producers, marketers, and social scientists are working feverishly to untie. But Castanedo has a few hypotheses about why Cameron’s story broke through. “It was an incredibly positive story, for one thing,” he says. “People crave uplift. And it was an emotional story—an emotional mystery, really. Just think about the core elements: You’ve got a paralyzed veteran, this very solid and relatable young man, who somehow regains his ability to walk. If you’re religiously orientated, it’s a confirmation of your faith that you might feel driven to share. If you’re a non-believer, it’s kind of an out-there mystery that makes you curious. I think it just pressed a lot of different buttons.”
One button left unmentioned by Castanedo is timing. Saturated with unrelentingly grim headlines, the summer of 2014 was proving “an anxious and depressing muddle,” as the New Yorker’s George Packer characterized it. An outbreak of the Ebola virus in West Africa was threatening to become a pandemic; Israel and Hamas were engaged in a bloody tit-for-tat in Gaza; an airliner was blown out of the sky over eastern Ukraine, the bodies of its victims left strewn across wheat fields for days on end; the manically endearing actor and comedian Robin Williams hanged himself in his bedroom; an unarmed black teenager was shot and killed by police in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, sparking violent unrest; and with the swift and sudden rise of the militant Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the Middle East looked to be sinking into new depths of political instability. The night before Cameron’s recovery, in fact, NBC’s Tonight Show included a skit in which actual news anchors read fanciful stories they “wished were true,” rather than the genuine ones that, as host Jimmy Fallon said, kept tilting from bad to worse.
Cameron’s tale must have struck some people like a glint of hope amid all that gloom and gun smoke. Its suggestion, for those open to it, was that the impossible might be possible—that our understanding of the world and its workings, which seemed so darkly shadowed that summer, could still be dwarfed, and illuminated, by the world’s enigmas. Judging by the thousands of comments left on websites and forums that week, even some skeptics found themselves wanting to believe.
Cameron himself was one of these. Despite what he’d told Castanedo—a conviction he repeated a few days later for a local television reporter—he remained privately agnostic. This discrepancy in itself didn’t bother him. He’d long been adept at cordoning off his private self, at negotiating the border clashes between his inner and outer states, a skill that his Army service had only bolstered. What did bother him, however, was the agnosticism itself: the limbo of not knowing.
A party broke out at the house that second night, with a half-dozen of Tanya’s girlfriends pouring steady refills of blender margaritas, and Cameron discovered, a bit to his surprise, that with inebriation came clarity, that with tequila came faith. “Every time I’d get up to pee, when I’d get a minute alone,” he recalls, “I could feel myself getting more and more certain about it being a miracle. I could almost see it happening in the mirror.” He even got around to praying that night, after fleeing the living room sometime after one a.m. when one of Tanya’s girlfriends asked, more curiously than lasciviously, if “everything below the waist” had been restored. (Tanya threw a hairbrush at her.)
Cameron hadn’t prayed since his mother’s death—not for any dramatic reasons related to it, but rather because she wasn’t there to hound him about it anymore. Kneeling beside his bed the same way he’d done as a child, with the room spinning like an unlit carousel and with the cackling of Tanya and friends bleeding through the walls, he thanked God for the healing. “I don’t remember exactly what I said, and I’d probably be too embarrassed to repeat it if I did,” he says. “It was pretty over the top.” And then, despite the elated certainty that’d been building in his bloodstream
for hours, he found himself asking God for a sign—for some kind of signal that would confirm God’s role in his recovery. But even as he was asking it, he says, he was imagining God’s affronted rebuttal: “Healing you wasn’t sign enough?” He woke up on the floor late the next morning, stricken both by a hangover and the resumption of doubts. He treated both, he admits, by opening a can of Bud Light.
When Dr. Janice Lorimar-Cuevas called him the following afternoon, then, her voice was a welcome one. He’d regained a significant amount of muscle stamina by then—enough to navigate his way around the house without crutches, though not without clinging to walls or furniture for support. While his legs were strengthening, however, he felt that his mind was weakening—faltering under the weight of agnosticism. Dosing himself with beer and company was lightening that load—he describes the seventy-two hours following his recovery as “a rolling party” similar to the way they celebrate the days leading up to Mardi Gras—but he recognized the clarity this yielded him as ephemeral and artificial: “distraction therapy,” to crib a term from his VA social worker, for his incomprehension. Yet that weight wasn’t one from which he could free himself—his media interviews, he felt, were proof of that. Someone else had to lift that weight from him. “I guess I can be there as soon as you want me,” he told Dr. Lorimar-Cuevas—because if anyone could do it, he figured, she could.
Except she didn’t—at least not in the way he was expecting.
His entrance into Building 30 of the Gulf Coast Veterans Health Care System—on crutches, with Tanya at his side—provided Cameron his first taste of celebrity: double-takes of recognition, unusually effusive greetings from passing staffers, elbowings, gapes, a low hiss of whispers trailing in his wake. When he took a seat in the waiting area, as Tanya checked him in for his appointment, an elderly man sitting across from him fastened him with a hard and concentrated stare.
He said, “You the one from the newspaper.”
The man appeared bloated all over, as though inflated, and some sort of rosy, flaky skin condition claimed much of his big hairless scalp. A cane rested against his chair.
“Yessir,” Cameron answered.
The man nodded, and then with significant effort removed his wallet from his back pocket. Tremors shook his hands as he fished out a card and offered it to Cameron. Both men strained forward for the exchange.
The card, identifying him as a plumbing contractor, was yellowed and ancient-looking. The absence of an area code in front of the phone number suggested it was older than Cameron.
“That’s my business card. I was in the Navy back during the Second World War.”
“Lynn Faulk,” Cameron read aloud. “I know a couple of Faulks.”
The man announced, “I got cancer.”
Cameron swallowed. “Real sorry to hear that, sir.”
“I seen you in the newspaper. I’d be grateful you taking the time to say a prayer for me. About the cancer.”
“Yessir,” Cameron said. “I’ll do that, I sure will. But”—he paused, portioning out his words with care—“I don’t reckon my prayers’ll work any better than yours.”
“Sure look that way,” the man said, just as Tanya walked up to say they were ready for Cameron to go back. “Already?” Cameron said, accustomed to the trademark long waits of the VA system, and glancing up he saw Dr. Lorimar-Cuevas herself waiting in the doorway.
“You take good care of yourself, Mr. Faulk,” Cameron said after rising.
“You gonna say that prayer, right?”
“He will, mister,” said Tanya, ushering her brother forward with a hand fixed lightly to his back.
Cameron had never experienced a medical visit quite like this one, with the doctor herself, rather than a nurse, administering the preliminary checkups: height and weight, blood pressure, the standard routine. Far stranger to him, though, was the way his mobility went more or less unacknowledged; the doctor said very little, in fact, beyond what was necessary to guide Cameron through the procedures. No one said much, not even Tanya, and after a while the silence attained such a presence that, when the doctor turned her back, Cameron screwed up his face at Tanya, to note the weirdness of it, and Tanya mirrored his expression back at him with a bewildered shrug.
Not until Janice was done hammering his knees, to gauge his now-normal reflexes, did the mood finally shift. “Jesus,” she whispered, wagging her head with pent-up astonishment. It wasn’t the absence of clonus, the jerky contractions his legs formerly exhibited during reflex testing, that broke her composure. It was rather the nearness of his rewired legs to her, the proximal, final incontrovertibleness of them. “Jesus, Jesus.”
“Something else, ain’t it,” Cameron said, grinning.
“Whole thing happened in like a minute,” said Tanya. “I’d just gone in to get some milk.”
Recovering herself, Janice had Cameron tell the entire story to her again, transcribing everything into a notepad and peppering him with random-seeming questions unlike any the reporters had asked him: what he’d eaten for breakfast and lunch that day, what medicines he’d taken and when, if he ever used illegal stimulants or steroids or other drugs (“please let your brother answer,” she had to instruct Tanya), whether or not he’d applied sunscreen or anything else to his legs that day, if he’d recently received an electrical shock, whether or not he’d felt anything at all different in the hours, days, or weeks leading up to that Saturday afternoon. After a while Cameron gathered there was some aha detail she was hunting—was there something about how many fried oysters he ate that could shed light on this?—so when the battery of questions finally ended, without any sign of an epiphany from her, he asked, half-playfully, “So was it a miracle?”
“Ah, that.” She grimaced. “I don’t believe in miracles, personally. So my own answer would be no.”
“Then what did happen?” asked Tanya.
Ignoring Tanya, Janice told Cameron, “We’re going to be running you through several different tests today. MRI, EMG, some others—you’re basically getting the whole alphabet. And then later this week—or tomorrow if you can swing it—I’d like to get you over to Keesler for something called a DTI. That stands for Diffusion Tensor Imaging. It’s not something we can do here. And then we’re going to talk about getting you back into physical therapy for monitoring.”
“Damn,” said Cameron.
“It’s going to be a long day, I know,” she said. “But a heck of a lot happier than our usual consults, right?”
Cameron nodded and smiled, and then straightening himself on the examination table he asked, “So what happened to me, doc?”
“Something I can’t explain at the moment,” she said. This most fundamental of questions—the first one she’d expected Cameron to ask, and one she herself wanted answered—was one she’d hoped to somehow put off answering. “Definitely not until I get a look at the test results.”
Janice saw a pall of disappointment darken Cameron’s expression, and she heard it, too, in the long sigh he emitted. “Then can you maybe tell me what might’ve happened, because—”
“No,” she said. “I can’t.”
Tanya slapped her thighs and muttered something unintelligible.
“You can’t?” Cameron said.
Shaking her head no, Janice watched the disappointment on Cameron’s face blacken into frustration. A faint growl edged his voice as he asked, “So is there anything you can tell me about why I’m not sitting in my damn wheelchair right now? Or if I might be back in it tomorrow? Because you already said it wasn’t a miracle, so—”
“Look,” she said, setting aside her notepad and softening her tone in direct proportion to how much Cameron’s had hardened. “We’re kind of in uncharted waters here, both of us. Wonderful waters, obviously, but uncharted. The way medicine usually works is that a patient comes in presenting symptoms, and the physician dials in a dia
gnosis from a range of possibilities. In your case, we’re coming at it from the reverse angle, which we definitely like”—she smiled at him, drawing a gentle nod in response—“but also without that range of possibilities.”
“So you got no idea,” Tanya said.
“Here’s everything I know,” Janice told Cameron. “The imaging from prior testing suggests—and that’s all it does; suggests—that something we call neuroregeneration might have occurred. That’s when nerves repair themselves. They do that all the time in the peripheral nervous system. That’s these outer nerves”—she motioned to Cameron’s arms and legs—“connecting your limbs.”
“But not my spine.”
“Right. That’s the central nervous system. And that’s where neuroregeneration doesn’t happen. See, when the CNS is damaged, something called a glial scar develops, and by producing different families of molecules, the glial cells inhibit nerves from regenerating. The nerves are the same as in the PNS, but their environment is different. Basically, nerves can’t regrow over a glial scar. Now, we can’t say until we analyze today’s tests, but there’s some indication that yours might have done just that.”
“I don’t get it,” said Tanya.
Neither did Cameron, but he liked it. That molecules were involved was part of the appeal: Their role in his recovery—which, as a consistent D-grade student in high-school biology, he judged too intricate for him to probably ever comprehend—freed him from the effort he’d been expending trying to understand it from a spiritual angle. And it didn’t escape his notice that this explanation harked back to his own original theory: that the wonder—the miracle—was in the design. It flattered him to think he’d been correct from the beginning, before everybody else, as he’d later say, “started filling my glass with Jesus juice.”
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