A few days later a man showed up at the Biz-E-Bee wearing a rainbow sash. He was middle-aged, slender, tanned and sandy-haired like he’d been conceived on a surfboard, and spoke with a lispy New Orleans accent. He asked Quỳnh to direct him to where Cameron had risen, Quỳnh shaking his head no and telling the man that his wife didn’t like them doing that anymore. The man smiled, said please, he was on his way back from a Mardi Gras event in Mobile and had stopped to say a quick prayer. He wasn’t the typical pilgrim, bóng for sure, so Quỳnh led him out to the parking lot and swirled a finger at the dim echo of paint on the asphalt.
Hat came around the corner at just that moment, walking back from having her hair done at the Snip ’n’ Shear two blocks west. Quỳnh cringed at the sight of her, anticipating an angry scowl, but her expression was merely quizzical, her head mildly tilted. When she sidled up beside him she did so without a word.
The man stepped inside and lifting his hands brought both index fingers to his thumbs, as though measuring out an invisible length of string. Then he lowered his head and closed his eyes and silently mumbled for about half a minute while Quỳnh stood watching him with one hiked eyebrow. Afterward Quỳnh couldn’t help asking, “What did you pray for?”
“Love and understanding,” the man answered, so quickly and lightly as to suggest the answer was self-evident, like he was ordering dinner in a restaurant that offered a single dish.
Quỳnh pulled at his neck as he considered this, thinking the prayer was kind of fruity but at the same time remembering all the hundreds of people who’d hauled their private maladies into that same space seeking custom-tailored grace, begging God to focus his big lens exclusively on them, everyone, including him, hustling for a crumb of their own. “Yeah, okay,” Quỳnh said gruffly, as if approval was his to dispense. He glanced at his wife beside him, but she didn’t see him looking, her head bobbing softly in some intricately private way. “I like that,” Quỳnh said. “That sound about right.”
* * *
Did it matter? Not in any official way, to the Lifetime Network, whose executives had already shelved Miracle Man, indefinitely, after the New Year’s Eve brawl, and saw in the lawsuit reasonable grounds to cancel the show altogether, which they did on January 20, just prior to the Television Critics Association meeting that Cameron and Tanya had once been scheduled to attend. A complex and protracted bout of squabbling followed between Scott T. Griffin’s agents and the network, mirroring the marriage separation proceedings that Griffin was also entering, but the arguing amounted, essentially, to a fight over money. Custody of the show—and of Cameron’s story—didn’t really factor; it was a foregone casualty, a failed draft consigned to a drawer.
Griffin, though, wasn’t ready to be done with the story. He’d finally gotten Cameron on the phone, five days after the fight, Cameron showering him with apologies for, as he put it, losing his shit, but also exuding scarce signals that he wanted to continue with the show, which Griffin was still insisting was possible. Unable to get around the network’s suspension, however, and bleeding money daily, Griffin cleared out of the Ocean Springs cottage and flew back to Los Angeles three days later. Honeybun, his valiant first mate, remained by his side until the end, with even Kaitlyn jumping ship before Griffin was conceding its sinking. Griffin understood that in the world of reality-television production he was a corpse: a guy who’d been crushed by a story too big and unruly for him to control. The allegations in the lawsuit—that he’d been inebriated during filming, that his reckless mismanagement had stoked a volatile situation—felt like gratuitous bullet holes, the shots movie hitmen fire at downed bodies to confirm a kill. He was dead and then he got deader.
Yet in the lawsuit’s bigger allegation—that Cameron attacked Landry in order to keep his homosexuality a secret—Griffin was spying a diamond glint of opportunity. Not for television—screw television—but for a feature-length documentary, the kind of work he’d originally set out to do back when he was the golden boy of his MFA program, the real shit, the big screen, art. He wrote Cameron a long letter in early March, laying out his idea. The existing footage belonged to him, and if not he’d work out the clearances, which meant at least half the work was already in the can—it all just needed to be re-thought, re-framed, re-edited, re-lit with this bright new halogen beam of complexity. Alone in his bed, night after night, he watched the documentary-to-be in the multiplex of his imagination, brought to tears by Rufus Wainwright singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” over the closing credits, a nonexistent dream track that felt impossibly moving and unassailably vindicating.
“What else did I have to do?” Griffin says, that trademark laugh of his trailing into a weak, spumy cough. By February he was scrounging for advertising work, filming blue-vested actors watering plants and stacking lumber for stock ad footage for Lowe’s while trying to juggle funereal phone calls from his agent and his divorce attorney and his personal attorney and his company attorney, half the conversations closing with them saying, “We’ll get through this.” Was there a word, Griffin wondered, for an anti-miracle? God healed and revived people, right, but did he also, you know, just zap others—bury them neck-deep in a divine dump of shit just to see if and how they’d wriggle free? As an adult he’d only ever been to church for weddings or funerals, so he didn’t know; most of what he knew about God came from old Al Green albums. But a self-pitying part of him figured this might be his condition. Or maybe L.A.’s dippy namaste crowd—his yoga-pantsed, soon-to-be ex-wife among them—was actually onto something with their spacey talk about energy transfer and chi balance: Maybe Cameron, in the wake of that giant karmic explosion of his, had somehow vacuumed all the karma right out of Griffin, like some killer black hole, just hoovered him clean. Griffin didn’t know. New Age philosophy wasn’t his thing any more than Christianity or astrophysics was. All he knew was that his life started unraveling the moment Cameron Harris entered it, but that Cameron still seemed his best hope for stitching it back together.
Cameron never responded to his letter, which was, Griffin supposed, a kind of response in itself. But while he was still holding out hope he met Honeybun for drinks one evening over in Silver Lake. By this time Honeybun had landed a job on, to Griffin’s astonishment, another Lifetime reality show, this one called Little Women: L.A. and about five women—“little people, not midgets,” came Bun’s admonition—living life below the four-foot mark. But it was an assistant camera gig, journeyman work. (Curiously, Little Women: L.A. would also suffer an on-camera bar-brawl incident, between cast members in January 2016, with Honeybun, groaning from déjà vu, operating the camera.)
Honeybun did what he always did lately: extracted grumbles of praise from Griffin for his majestic and unerring gaydar along with a formal admission of Griffin’s error in having doubted him. Griffin submitted, having long since exhausted his excuses and by now embracing—relishing, even—the concept of a gay Cameron Harris.
Through the first round of drinks they bellyached about the torpid, glutted state of the reality-show industry, Griffin likening it to “end times of the traveling carnival era,” before he started pitching his documentary idea. Honeybun sipped his drink through a straw and shrugged noncommittally as Griffin wound himself tighter and tighter into salesman mode. Honeybun sat listening to himself being inserted into the blueprint, Griffin charting the soulful new careers he was seeing for the two of them, a second vodka adding a rhapsodic note to Griffin’s vision for the documentary. He talked as though he were reading from A. O. Scott’s future New York Times review following the film’s premiere at Sundance. Then Honeybun stopped him.
“Whoa, go back to what you just said,” Honeybun told him. “About the metaphor…”
“Yeah, yeah,” Griffin said, baring his teeth in a grin. He threw back some of his drink and wiped his lips with a forearm. “That’s how you can frame this, right? Cameron rising out of his wheelchair—that was like him com
ing out of the closet, stepping into his true identity, unlocking his real self. That was him rising into, like, the full flower of his humanity. You following me?”
“Uh, no,” Honeybun said flatly. He’d worked on and off with Griffin for ten years and had come to love him like a brother, but, like any brother, he sometimes longed to whack him with a bat. “You realize, right, that you’re equating being gay with being paralyzed? That’s just…stupid. And obnoxious.”
“Not gay,” Griffin said. He looked hurt. “Closeted.”
“Dude.” Honeybun shook his head. “You’re just not getting it. Being paralyzed is being paralyzed. It’s not a metaphor for anything. It’s a neurological fucking condition.”
Griffin frowned and shrugged, wary of tainting a rare night out with Bun but also too secure in his vision to engage the point any further. He started in on the potential for grant money, Honeybun stirring the dregs of his drink and looking away to scan the crowding rooftop bar and beyond it the sun setting over the Pacific, saying, “Uh-hunh,” saying, “Sure,” Griffin uncharacteristically oblivious to the fact that he was failing to close the sale—one more small thing, among so many larger others that year, that he’d find impossible to understand.
* * *
The January 25 church bulletin at Our Lady Queen of Angels Catholic Church—which Cameron Harris, like most parishioners, skipped reading—included something odd. Inside a box claiming a sixth of a page, in an urgent-looking, bolded, italicized, fourteen-point font, was a passage from Saint Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, one of the later books of the New Testament:
For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord’s death till he come. Therefore whosoever shall eat this bread and drink this cup of the Lord unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord. But let a man examine himself, and then let him eat of that bread and drink of that cup. For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body.
A few parishioners, after reading this, found themselves glancing toward Cameron, who sat blankly in a pew, alone as always, in the same front-left area he commonly occupied, wearing the same basic uniform—khaki pants, white button-down shirt—in which his mother had always dressed him for Mass. They interpreted this, correctly, as a warning shot from Father Ace—a warning shot that Cameron, having folded the bulletin and tucked it behind one of the hymnal books, failed to see coming.
All Cameron knew of Father Ace’s thinking came from a call the priest made to him after someone had alerted him to the contents of Landry’s lawsuit. “People are talking about some very strange rumors and I will ask you to be straight with me,” the priest said, the irony skating past Cameron until recounting the call later. Cameron paused for a swallow, then promised to oblige.
Father Ace asked, “Do you know what these rumors are?”
“I got some idea, yessir.”
“And is there any truth to what they’re saying—about your inclinations?”
“My inclinations?” He released a bubble of anxiety as a grunt. “I ain’t sure what that means, Father.”
“That you suffer from an attraction to men.”
“Uh, I ain’t sure about the suffer part, but, yeah…” Cameron fumbled a cigarette from his shirt pocket while holding the phone with his other hand. “This is kinda personal, and I ain’t real comfortable talking about it, but…yeah, that’s like the way I’m wired.”
The priest sighed. “We are all ‘wired,’ as you say, for weakness. But what God asks of us is not only to resist sin, but to renounce it.”
“Renounce it,” Cameron repeated into the phone.
“The Lord delivered unto you an astonishing gift, Cameron Harris.”
Cameron lit his cigarette, squinting. “He did, yessir.”
“And what is that saying you have here? The horse that offers you a gift—you should never punch it in the mouth.”
“It’s something like that, yessir.”
“This has not come up in your confessions,” Father Ace said.
“Well, I ain’t done anything to confess to you,” said Cameron. “Not since, you know, everything happened.”
A hopeful lilt entered the priest’s voice, as if on top of one miracle he was finding layered another one. “You no longer suffer this attraction?”
Now it was Cameron’s turn to sigh. “Father, I don’t know how to confess to being what I am. That’s kinda like asking you to hit me with ten Hail Marys for having blue eyes. It ain’t like—ain’t like I ever got a choice in the matter.”
“Someone told you that,” Father Ace said, “and that person is wrong.”
“No one told me that, Father,” he said, his mind reeling nine years back to when he opened himself to Jim Yarbrough, his mom’s boyfriend, as if to fact-check his own statement; but no, what Jim told him was that a leopard had spots and a leopard couldn’t choose not to. “I ain’t talked to but like five people about this my whole life. Who you’re attracted to—it ain’t like choosing between Coke and Pepsi.”
“Cameron—”
“I don’t know how I’m supposed to confess to just—to being alive.”
“You are alive,” the priest came back, icily now, “because God created you. And you are walking, today, because God granted you an astonishing second chance. A miracle, Cameron.”
“Then—but it’s God who made me this way, Father.” He was hating every second of this, feeling hurled backward in time to when he was fourteen and briefly believed, like Father Ace did now, that a choice was his to make—that willpower alone could relocate the true north of his desires. “Because I swear to you I sure didn’t.”
“You are very important to me, Cameron,” Father Ace said, his voice coolly tightening. “Not just personally, though I care about you a great deal—but to our ministry in Christ. Do you understand that?”
“Yessir, Father, I do.”
“You have been healed in one regard, but you must heal yourself further.”
Cameron exhaled a long gray stream of smoke, shaking his head. “I can’t change what I am, Father.”
“This,” the priest said, sighing, “is what a paralyzed man says.”
Near the end of the eleven a.m. Mass on February 1, one week after the menacingly bolded passage from First Corinthians appeared in the church bulletin, Cameron stood up as usual and filed into line for Communion. While the Catholic liturgy’s most revered sacrament, the routine is simple: The priest holds the Communion wafer aloft and declares, “The body of Christ”; the communicant cups his hands, and says, “Amen,” to receive the wafer into his hands or else opens his mouth to receive it upon his tongue.
Only this time it didn’t go that way. Cameron stepped forward with his hands cupped, as usual, but Father Ace shook his head twice before jerking it sideways, to move Cameron along. Confused, Cameron said again, “Amen,” this time as a question, but Father Ace stood motionless and waxy-eyed, refusing him the sacrament. Cameron dropped his head, his face flushing hot as he made his way back to the pew, feeling the eyes of the church tracking him like those upon a convict shuffling toward the gallows.
He remained in the pew, his own gaze fixed upon his shoelaces, as the church emptied. Alone, lit by the polychrome shafts of Sunday light slanting through the stained-glass windows, he found himself staring at the mahogany crucifix behind the altar with its sculpted Jesus nailed to the cross. Cameron’s focus narrowed to the expression on Jesus’s face: serene and assured and fulfilled, unlike that of any dead man Cameron had ever seen. That was the point, Cameron supposed—that Jesus transcended all sorrow and agony. But didn’t it also deny, he found himself wondering, an equally essential point: that Jesus was one of us, extraordinarily but ordinarily human, built from flesh and bones and nerve fibers to which he, too, had to answer—master but also serv
ant to all the pain and privations of bodily existence? Who Cameron was, inside, had never been any secret to Jesus, whether God had designed him that way or whether, as Father Ace implied, Cameron had somehow, with no memory to affirm it, redesigned himself. And yet Jesus had hoisted him to his feet anyway, reconnected his nerves, awarded him back the disorienting mess of his former life. He peered raptly and steadily at Jesus’s expression. It wasn’t the face of a deal maker, a man who’d trade mercy for acquiescence. It was the face, if he stared long and hard enough at it, of a man who might understand.
Father Ace, when he returned to the sanctuary, wore a different expression—that of a man scalded by betrayal. And from a distant, empathetic angle Cameron gathered why: For six months now Father Ace had been extolling Cameron from the altar, pointing to him as a model of God’s infinite power and love; he’d pushed his skeptical bishop into green-lighting the miracle investigation and had devoted hours and days to Cameron’s case, hours and days that he could’ve otherwise bestowed on his parishioners with their rehab stints and restraining orders and dying parents and spiritual skidding. He’d staked his entire ministry, in some sense, upon Cameron, who now sat blinking at him, dejected and confused. Father Ace had brought him back into the church, and now he was kicking him out.
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