Anatomy of a Miracle

by Jonathan Miles

  “So today’s tests’ll show what, exactly?” he asked, leaning forward as though ready to immediately start them.

  “If the regeneration we think we saw was actually that, and if, by progressing, that might’ve allowed you to regain functionality.”

  “Awesome,” Cameron said, but noted, with a prickle of confusion, the doctor shaking her head and scowling. “But how come no one ever told me this was possible? How come they—”

  “Because it’s not.”

  “Not what?”

  “Not possible. Maybe you missed what I said a second ago—sorry, I know this is a huge headful. The glial scar environment prohibits axonal regrowth. Neuroregeneration doesn’t happen in the central nervous system.”

  “So now you’re telling me something impossible happened.”

  “No.” A fluster eroded her tone. “Because if it were impossible, it couldn’t have happened.”

  “I am so fucking confused,” said Tanya.

  “Doctor,” Cameron said, pausing for a moment to calm his own flustered mind. “This is the most wonderful freaking thing that ever happened to me. To anybody. I mean, it’s like I got…it’s like I got born again.” The evocation didn’t strike him until after he’d said it. “I don’t mean like that. I mean physically—it’s like someone hit the reset button. I mean, hell, look at me.” He kicked his legs out, his heels banging the base of the exam table. “But you know what the hard part is? And I feel like shit for even saying this out loud here, walking past them other guys out there who’d kill to be in my shoes.”

  “Literally in your shoes,” added Tanya.

  “The only hard part?” he continued. “It’s not knowing what the fuck just happened to me.”

  “Cameron, I totally get it,” Janice said, though she hadn’t anticipated this level of concern—what sounded like desperation crackling in his voice. Their phone conversation had suggested a more blithely elated Cameron, leaving her with the sense that lack of concern might present a clinical challenge for her. “We know a lot about the body and how it works, but we don’t know everything. There’s a number of medical conditions we simply don’t understand yet. We call those idiopathic conditions. And then there are conditions we sort of understand but not really. Rabies, for instance. It’s been around forever but we still don’t know why it’s fatal—whether it kills brain cells directly or shuts down the brain with overstimulation. If I had a rabies patient here, I’d be in the terrible position of telling that patient that he’s going to die and I can’t explain exactly how or why.”

  Cameron grunted. “Sounds like you just told me to suck it up.”

  “No no, not at all. What I’m saying is that I wish I could explain what happened to you, but I can’t. Not yet. But we’re going to test the hell out of you today, okay? Because I want to know the reason you’re walking as much as you do. Maybe even more, because whatever your body did, other bodies should be able to do the same thing. We’re all the same model.”

  “Parts is parts,” he said.

  Janice nodded. “Something like that.”

  “So until then, what?” said Cameron. “I’m supposed to say it’s a—what was that, an idiotpathic condition?”

  Tanya snorted.

  “Idiopathic. No, it’s—”

  “Why ain’t it a miracle?” Tanya broke in. “That’s what the newspaper called it. That’s what it looked like to me. I was right there.”

  Cameron nodded at his sister then turned back to Janice. “That’s what a miracle is, right? Something impossible happening?”

  Janice took her time asking, “Are you religious?”

  “Not especially. Probably a lot more today than I was a week ago.”

  “Is that something you want to believe? That it was a miracle?”

  “I don’t know that I want to believe anything…”

  “Because it’s not my place to advise you on what to believe or what not to believe,” said Janice. “That’s for clergy. My job is to deal with what I can see.”

  “But it could be a miracle,” he pressed, “if the stuff you said was impossible really happened?”

  “I can’t stop you from using that word. But it’s not my word.”

  “What’s your word?”

  “I don’t have one.” She sighed. “Not yet. But since we’re defining miracles here, I’ll give you my own definition of one, for what it’s worth. I’d say it’s an event that happens in advance of an explanation for it.”

  Cameron digested this for a while, staring down at his knees. “So I’m like a UFO.”

  Janice let out a rare laugh. “I can get behind that, sure.”

  “U.W.O.,” Tanya said, and in reply to their puzzled glances explained, “Unidentified Walking Object.”

  “I like that even better,” said Janice. “Let’s get you over to radiology, okay? They’ve kind of cleared the decks for you today.”

  In retrospect, Janice would say, this initial post-recovery consultation was a failure: She’d dismissed the possibility of a miracle without marshaling any evidence to counter it. The scant information she did divulge, moreover, contradicted her position. By disclosing that the phenomenal nature of Cameron’s recovery appeared to be mirrored at the cellular level, she’d inadvertently fortified any claims for a miracle. “Because what nature can’t explain,” she’d say later, “supernature can. And will.”

  And did. As Cameron recycled her words through his mind—while lying motionless inside the white donut hole of an MRI scanner and later as a technician pricked his back and legs with needle electrodes—he experienced a clarity similar to the clarity that the tequila provided him. Science was confirming his recovery as extraordinary, but was unable to explain it—not even with a guess. The doctor had images, but the images didn’t make sense. That was because his body had accomplished what bodies cannot accomplish. What’d happened to him in the Biz-E-Bee parking lot wasn’t, as he’d previously thought, a miracle on par with Biloxi High throwing all those laterals to score a million-to-one touchdown. It was on par, instead, with Biloxi turning the Gulfport defenders into stone statues.

  Here was the sign he’d requested, the proof for which he’d prayed: his doctor banging his knee with a rubber hammer while whispering Jesus’s name.

  On the ride home, overcome with euphoria unlike anything he’d ever experienced, he pulled out the business card he’d been given in the waiting room. Tanya glanced over to see him rocking slightly in the passenger seat, pressing the card to his forehead with his eyes closed and lips trembling.

  “What the hell you doing?” she said.

  “Shut up, I’m praying.”

  “You’re praying?”

  “Just shut up for a minute.”

  “Aw shit,” she said.

  five

  The first hint of what was to befall the Biz-E-Bee arrived on foot, on the morning of August 28, carrying a seven-foot-tall red inflatable crucifix on his shoulder. He was wearing a tunic-style white shirt from which the sleeves had been cut and a pair of faded floral-print surf shorts. Flowing indiscriminately from his jaw was a beard that was white with scraggles of yellow blond. His skin evoked a dried apricot or mango: ochre, leathery, gnarled, and here and there dusted with windblown sand. He smiled almost constantly but just shy of happily.

  Lê Nhu Quỳnh was alone in the store that morning. A car honk drew his attention outside, to where the man was hauling his big red crucifix across Division Street, indifferent to the stuttering traffic. Quỳnh watched the man beeline his way across the parking lot to the front of the store where he rested his crucifix against a window, wiped the sweat from his brow with a forearm, surveyed the empty lot with a look of keen satisfaction, and then sat down on the curb.

  When a customer pulled in, the man shouted some sort of welcome that Quỳnh couldn’t quite make out. The man did th
e same with two additional customers, one of whom, a regular, said to Quỳnh at the register, “Didn’t take long for the loonies to show up, huh?”

  Quỳnh has never had much patience for loonies, who rank near the top of a list of human annoyances that includes drunks, solicitors, teenagers in groups of more than three, coupon users, check writers, shirtless men, hundred-dollar-bill breakers, fake-ID presenters, customers who smoke at the register, correct-change verifiers, bathroom users, spare-change dumpers, beer drinkers who bust open six-packs to buy single cans, navigators of freshly mopped wet floors, and coffee drinkers who use two or more nested cups rather than a cardboard sleeve. But loonies—or “crazies,” as Quỳnh prefers—come equipped with the most complications. It’s easy to evict a solicitor or to hustle out a drunk. With crazies, a more delicate touch can be required.

  Quỳnh wasn’t feeling delicate that morning. Hat was at the dentist with Little Kim, and because the Lês have no dental insurance (and possibly because they grant their daughter free rein to the store’s soda inventory), Kim’s dental appointments had been proving reliably calamitous to their checking-account balance. Quỳnh had spent the last hour girding himself for the damages, calculating, as is his wont, several worst-case scenarios; Kim’s last visit had caused them to miss a lease payment on their car. But while this was the most immediate stressor, others lurked close behind: the state tax authority was threatening collection action on a first-quarter sales tax miscalculation Quỳnh had made; one of the Biz-E-Bee’s vendors had revoked ninety-day terms, downgrading them to C.O.D. status; and, due to an outstanding balance, their propane supplier had padlocked the big blue cage of tanks outside. About a month before Cameron’s recovery, in fact, Quỳnh had mostly stopped opening the mail. Even the certified letters he slipped unopened into stacks. Exiting the store, then, he was in zero mood for a loony.

  Quỳnh is a small man, even by Vietnamese standards, yet the coiled energy he projects adds at least six inches to his stature. He wears his worries and aggravations like a very tall hat. Even behind the counter, where a degree of inertia is expected, he exudes a harried and frenetic air, tending to customers while also surveilling a bank of screens—his laptop, the security-camera feeds, and a small video monitor on which an action movie is often playing—that one regular jokingly calls the “NATO command center.” For this customer and others, it can feel like buying a candy bar from an air traffic controller. The Cuban-style guayabera shirts Quỳnh favors should temper this effect, with their suggestion of bongo ease, but they don’t, especially when Quỳnh overstuffs the many pockets with notes and cigarettes and vendor invoices and other workaday debris, as though ornamenting himself with stress. He seems mired in a constant state of besiegement.

  “What you want?” he snapped to the man outside.

  “Good morning to you, brother,” came the reply.

  Again Quỳnh snapped, “What you want?”

  “I have come to meet Christ our Savior.”

  Quỳnh shook his head. “He not here.”

  The way the man chuckled called to mind a cartoon Santa: ho ho haw. “But this is the place, is it not?” The man pointed up to the sign. “The Biz-E-Bee.”

  “This is my store. I own it.”

  “Ah! Then you are a blessed man, brother.” The man gestured to the pavement between his feet. “This is holy ground.”

  “You going to buy something?”

  Again the man broadened his smile. “I have not walked all the way from Chunchula, Alabama, for nabs and a Coke, I can tell you that.”

  Quỳnh didn’t know where Chunchula, Alabama, was, except that it was in Alabama, which meant the man was either lying about having walked or he was crazy. Or both: an even likelier possibility. “Customers only,” Quỳnh told him. Now it was his turn to motion to a sign, this one on the door. “You see? No loitering.”

  “Oh, I don’t wish to loiter. My intention is to wait.”

  Quỳnh waved his arms as if to disperse the foul odor of this response. “That’s the same thing!”

  “I see. Well then.” Lifting his eyebrows and slowly turning his head, the man assessed the storefront area. “Maybe I can go ’round side, then, how’d that be?”

  “No.”

  “All right then. How about over yonder?”

  “No.”

  “Brother.” The man’s smile was diminishing now, as he lifted himself up from the curb, the effort shuddering his knees. “I’ve walked thirty-seven hours. We’re talking about the Son of Man here.”

  Quỳnh folded his arms, unimpressed.

  Shrugging, the man lowered his eyes. “Reckon I’ll take to the sidewalk, then.”

  “Not there either.”

  “Oh come on, brother. That’s a public sidewalk.”

  “Then go there, fine.” Quỳnh turned toward the door, not quite pleased with this arrangement but guided by an old Vietnamese proverb: Argue with a smart man, and you’ll never win. Argue with a stupid man, and you’ll never stop.

  “Mind I leave my cross here?” the man called after him.

  “No way.”

  The man sighed. “You’re not a Christian, hoss, are you?”

  Quỳnh paused in the open doorway, his loony-evicting instinct validated by the faint growl he’d caught in the man’s tone. “I’m a businessman,” he said.

  “All the riches of the world,” said the man, extinguishing any menace with his broadest smile yet, “are to be found in Christ the Savior.”

  The bell above the door sounded Quỳnh’s response as he returned into the store. From behind the register he watched the man haul his crucifix to the corner and lean it against a streetlamp post. He watched the man sit down beneath it on the sidewalk, facing the parking lot. And then, quite against his will, Quỳnh watched him wait.

  Ignoring him should’ve been easy, but wasn’t. The man’s unbroken surveillance carried a radioactive charge that Quỳnh sensed through the glass and from forty yards away, an atomic-level disturbance that left Quỳnh feeling more jumpy and irritated than usual. Even with his back turned, he registered the man’s stare. Customers provided a trickle of distraction, but after each transaction Quỳnh caught himself glancing out the window and grimacing from the way the man’s eyes seemed to lock instantaneously with his. Something about the intensity of the man’s waiting, too, felt infectious, so that after a while Quỳnh felt that he was also waiting—for what, he didn’t know, but when he noticed the man rising he found himself gripped by a strange excitement and craning his neck for a view of what’d caused the man to stand. When it became clear the man was merely stretching his legs, Quỳnh cursed himself aloud, and, lest he go crazy himself, vowed to ignore him for good.

  If not for that trickle of customers, he might’ve accomplished this. Every third or fourth one made some remark about the man and his cross. One asked if the man was some sort of advertisement, to which Quỳnh responded by waving his arms in that same odor-dispersing way.

  Despite all the questions he’d fielded since news of Cameron’s recovery broke, Quỳnh hadn’t devoted much hard thought to what’d happened to Cameron outside his store. “Amazing,” he sometimes said. “Crazy,” he said at other times. Hat considered it a bona fide act of God, but then she considered everything an act of God. (“If she goes to the Piggly Wiggly for chicken and finds chicken on sale,” he says, “that was God.”) Quỳnh’s own loose assessment of what’d happened chimed with Cameron’s initial take: that it had been some kind of extraordinary biological event—a natural marvel, to be sure, but no more or less a marvel than the grapefruit-sized sulfide meteorite that came crashing through a friend’s roof in the New Orleans neighborhood of Versailles. That it had happened at the Biz-E-Bee, he figured, was mere happenstance, as when convenience store owners in luckier states sold winning lotto tickets—though the analogy doesn’t quite align, as Quỳnh point
s out, because store owners receive a cut of lotto winnings. All Quỳnh had received, so far, was a slew of questions and now a visit from a guy with a blow-up cross.

  Hat, Little Kim, and a $443.00 receipt from the dentist entered the store just after noon. Quỳnh was goggling the receipt in openmouthed shock—this was the worst-case scenario plus a hundred dollars—when Hat asked, “What’s going on with the guy outside?”

  Absently, he said, “What guy?”

  “The one with the big red crucifix.”

  “Ah, some crazy,” he said. “Says he walked here all the way from Alabama.”

  “Alabama? Why?”

  “To meet Mr. Jesus.” Quỳnh started calling Jesus “Mr. Jesus” years ago, as a way of needling his wife about her faith, but the reference had long ago lost its sting and was now marital parlance.

  “Because of the newspaper?”

  “I guess. He wanted to loiter out front but I said no way buddy. If he stays much longer I’m calling the police.”

  “How long has he been there?”

  “Eight thirty or nine, maybe. Right after you left.”

  Hat peered out the window at the man for a while. Then she went to the visi-cooler and fetched a bottle of water. As she made to open the front door Quỳnh said, “What are you doing?”

  “I’m bringing him some water. It’s ninety-seven degrees out there.”

  “I told you, he’s crazy.”

  “Crazy or not, he’s got to be thirsty.”

  “Then he can buy himself some water! No way. He’s in front of a store! Don’t encourage him or—”

  The bell above the door sounded her rebuttal.

  This kind of bickering can sometimes feel like the default dynamic for the Lês. As with most married couples, however, the true nature of their disputes is rarely related to the subject at hand. They argue about the leaves when it’s the roots they’re angry about.

  For Quỳnh and Hat, these roots are their opposite worldviews. Quỳnh tends to see the world as a minefield of doom, with life defined by its constant brushing against death; he is never positioned more than an inch away from catastrophe. Hat’s outlook can be difficult to unbraid from her faith, but, theological certainties aside, a strand of optimism runs through her. The secular branch of her perspective can sometimes feel gleaned from motivational posters—“obstacles,” she’s fond of saying, “are just opportunities in disguise”—yet with this earnest radiance comes a kind of strength, an immunity against the panic and angst that infect her husband. They both credit this polarity to their age difference—Quỳnh is forty-six, while Hat is thirty-three—with Quỳnh citing naïveté as a symptom of Hat’s relative youth. Yet residue from their disparate childhoods in Vietnam must surely play a role as well.