Cameron Wilson

Cameron is a thin coyote with gray, beige, and brown fur. He has a small scar above his left eyebrow.

He wears a green plaid flannel shirt over a white t-shirt that bears an image of a green pine tree, and blue jeans. Cameron also wears blue briefs with a white band and markings.

Cameron is generally very quiet and reserved. He tends to keep his thoughts to himself, but opens up and takes a more playful and at times even sarcastic attitude with Devon. Cameron is often shown to be anxious, and can become easily frustrated. He struggles with a low sense of self-worth, and trauma from a troubled upbringing.

Cam expresses a skepticism towards the supernatural and a dislike of religion, and claims to believe in a universe with no inherent meaning. He also dislikes his mental health being ignored or sensationalized into something it's not, and he worries greatly about relapsing into the darker periods of his life. He greatly enjoys music and occasionally calms down by playing guitar or piano.

Cameron was born in December of 1995 and grew up on the outskirts of a city in the Northwest called Bridgetown, in a trailer park with his mother. His father was abusive and likely schizophrenic, and left the family and later killed himself sometime in the mid-2000s. Cameron has a history of addiction and mental illness that appears to be inherited, and spent three years dependent on opioids before getting clean in college. As a child, Cam had mild motor and vocal tics, possibly as a result of Tourette's syndrome, but grew out of them eventually.

When he turned eight, Cam began seeing a monster in a raincoat and convinced himself it was simply a hallucination created by his mind. Visions of the monster recurred sporadically throughout his life, with such frequency that its presence became familiar to Cam. His most recent sighting occurred in October 2019, the year before Arches takes place.

Cam often saw other creatures throughout his early life, including one with a flat face that moved like a spider and crawled on his face to whisper things to him. After his first time trying ketamine as a teenager, Cam realized that drug use made his hallucinations worse.

Cameron's mother used amphetamines heavily and suffered from a recurring delusion that she could hear the voice of God. The voice told her to seek out arch-like shapes in order to find the gateway to heaven, and she drowned when Cam was a teenager after trying to swim under a bridge. Cam regrets not intervening to help her, but acknowledges he was frequently high himself during his mother's decline.

During his junior year of high school, Cam had a bad trip on shrooms that lasted eight hours and 'permanently fucked' his sense of self. It ruined psychoactive drugs for him and he stayed away from marijuana afterward, since even the use of lighter drugs brought him close to freaking out. Despite all his substance abuse, Cam managed to remain a straight-A student, and he credits this with helping him put his life on a better path.

Cam plays several instruments; he learned guitar in high school because his music idols played it, but he prefers the piano.

At some point, Cameron had a vision of a friend of his being shot in the head that ultimately came true, but he rationalized it as a coincidence and a likely outcome of his friend's risky lifestyle.

Before Dev, Cameron dated an abusive man named Dylan for an unknown amount of time. The scar on Cam's brow is from one of Dylan's punches, although when it happened Cam told everyone that it came from a fall. Cam was occasionally the one to initiate violent exchanges with Dylan and seems to harbor a sense of internalized shame and regret about this despite Dylan's cruelty, which is tied to the low sense of self-worth the relationship left him with.

Cameron attended the University of Pueblo, where he met and began dating Devon and received a degree in music. In his junior year, he was signed by an indie record label after a song he wrote about his abusive relationship with Dylan caught their attention, but the label ultimately dropped him without releasing any of his music. In his own perception of the event in hindsight, Cam has led himself to believe that he deserved it.

Cam took antidepressant and antipsychotic medications in college, but they made him feel miserable and inhibited his ability to write music, which he believed led to him being dropped from the label. At some point following this, he stopped taking them with Dev's encouragement. At some point, Cam learned about Dev's guilt over the death of Lupita and began supporting his efforts to find catharsis regarding her passing. Cam seems to accept Dev's interest in the paranormal as a form of coping and genuinely hopes that his boyfriend finds the answers he's looking for, though he dislikes Dev's theories about his visions and delusions being some form of psychic power and rarely gets involved with Dev's ghost hunts himself.

After graduation, Cam and Dev relocated to Fort Allen. Cam recently learned that Devon's company will be transferring him to the city of Bonneville, and the two have been preparing for the move. At the time of Arches, Cameron works in customer support at a call center for a company called Hulian, but hates the job.

Cam and Dev are rescued from Echo and their saga briefly catches the attention of the public, before the mounting pandemic takes over the news cycle. After the media frenzy, the relative quiet eases Cam's recovery, and after surgery and physical therapy he mostly recovers physically, although he sustains nerve damage that affects his fingers. This makes it extremely difficult for him to play guitar despite his eagerness to get back to it.

Cam soon begins to struggle with a sense of strangeness or dissociation; he feels like he is 'not quite himself' and starts hearing a bitter, pessimistic voice in his head at least daily.

After his experience in Echo, Cam retains a lingering psychic sense that sometimes picks up on thoughts and feelings around him. He tries to experiment with this perception, but finds that he either needs drugs or to be in a place with a high rate of supernatural activity to sense anything deliberately. Cam discovers that he is able to detect "echoes" of malevolent energy, which he knows are not truly the ghosts of people and considers more akin to demons. He glimpses one during a visit to Dev's childhood home, but Dev tells him to ignore it, and Cam can tell that Dev wishes their experience, including Cam's psychic awakening, had never happened.

As time progresses, Cam feels a growing sense of unreality, as if he is not present or missing part of himself, and it becomes increasingly difficult to separate his sense of self from the strange, nearly omniscient perspective he melded with in Echo. He wakes up crying repeatedly, thinking he is back in the town.

In April 2020, around three weeks after the escape from Echo, Cam resumes his job remotely from home, hoping to reassert some normalcy and feel useful again. After a demeaning interaction with a customer Cam thinks about everything he has been through, and then suddenly feels dizzy and dissociated like he is tripping. The hearing loss in Cam's right ear, the result of Brian's gun, is replaced by the cruel nagging voice in his head that does not seem like his own thoughts. It calls Cam worthless and tells him Brian has 'poisoned him' forever, then encourages him to smash the keyboard; Cam does, then collapses sobbing on the ground. Dev drives him to the hospital, while the voice laughs at Cam from inside his head. In hindsight, Cam considers this moment to be the 'terrible change' he foresaw while leaving Echo.

By October 2020, the intrusive voice has begun returning regularly, every few days, and remains manageable but clearly present despite antipsychotic treatment. It sometimes sounds deep and masculine but sometimes like Brian, and its interjections range from cruel and judgmental to meaninglessly inane. Cam becomes depressed, his thoughts disorganized, and he loses interest in his hobbies and motivations. After receiving an official schizophrenia diagnosis he endures a gauntlet of brutal side effects from his various medications. These include debilitating motor and vocal tics, although they lessen after Devon helps him find a psychiatrist that Cam trusts more and she adjusts his prescription. Cam loses interest in sex, alienating him further from himself, and the mismatch in their libidos adds strain to his relationship with Dev.

Cam also resents that Dev supervises him while he takes his medication, although they have agreed that he should do it for at least a year, and snaps at him for not trusting him. Egged on by the voice, which encourages him to do violence against Dev, Cam spitefully escalates the ensuing conflict into an argument, the kind that he remarks they never had before Echo, and notices that for some reason making Dev angry feels good. At his lowest, Cam hopes Dev will hit him and end the relationship, though he knows Dev never would. Cam finds himself contemplating suicide, but not if Dev is around to suffer the loss. Dev hugs him as their fight cools, smothering his worry, and Cam mourns the good life he used to have just months before.

At some point shortly afterward, Dev is left breathless by a sudden panic attack and Cam comforts him until he recovers, and then sleeps on the couch in Dev's study while Dev works late, in case he is needed again.

Cam dreams of the alternate future that he glimpsed in the cavern with Brian, where he was killed by the shotgun blast. In this reality, Cam is dead but a version of him has persisted in some form in Dev's mind, and the two are planning to dedicate themselves to fighting against the malevolent "echoes" that plague places like Echo. Cam innately does not trust the version of himself that he sees inhabiting Dev in these dreams, and thinks of it as lacking a soul. It seems so much like he used to before his diagnosis, however, that he considers whether he would take the trade-off if given the chance.

By reaching out to mentally probe it, Cam is able to learn that the other Cam began communicating with Dev immediately after he managed to kill Brian back in Echo, and so considers it some kind of vestige of the town. Suddenly, the 'dead Cameron' in Devon notices that it is being observed, and alerts Dev of this. Cam then finds himself experiencing the perspective of one of Brian's captives, who died after vomiting while gagged. Cam awakens from his dream and vomits, then resolves to call in an anonymous tip about the identity of the dead man, as he has done with each vision he has had of Brian's victims.

By the summer of 2021, Cam feels like he has started to live some kind of life again, albeit a new unfamiliar one, and he decides to join Dev on a trip to see Arturo. Partly because he senses a growing distance between him and Artie and partly to make sure his friend is recovering well, Cam micro-doses on psilocybin before the visit in order to magnify his abilities and fully take in the mood and emotions of the reunion, although he feels guilty both for keeping this from Dev and for planning to pry into Artie's mind.

Cam senses that Artie is damaged but at peace, much like himself, and is surprised to find that Artie is also more mentally fortified than anyone he has tried to read. He peers further and realizes with shock that Artie is afraid of him, and filled with worry that Cam is somehow still connected to Echo. By sharing his recovery process Cam is able to connect with Artie, however, and Cam feels reassured that his friend is truly on a good path.

Maria then enters and commiserates with Cam about her own difficulties with antipsychotics and other medications. Cam enjoys her company, but suspects that she has been ushered into the room to sweep him out of the conversation between Artie and Dev. Cam knows with extrasensory certainty that he will only speak with Artie a few more times, and although he feels a deep unfairness as he watches Dev and Artie get along without him he foresees that they will have a long and happy friendship. He resolves not to visit again so that he does force Artie to confront the connection to Echo that Cam seems to represent to him, especially after he intuits that Artie can sense when his mind is being read. Ultimately, it is unclear how much of Cam's interpretation of the situation accurately reflects Artie and Maria's feelings and how much is a result of Cam projecting his own self-doubt and paranoia about being a burden to his friends.

By March 2023, Cam and Dev are married. Cam's delusions and depersonalization have mostly subsided, but his lack of motivation and anhedonia have persisted, leading him to give up making music for good. He also worries about Dev, and finds himself cheering up his boyfriend more often than the other way around. One snowy evening, as they sit together near a Mormon temple in their new home of Bonneville City, Cam asks Dev if he ever found what he was looking for when they went to Echo. Despite his bitter regrets, Dev is focused on their relationship and the present, and the two reflect on how the chapters of their lives have changed them. Cam remarks that he feels a particular energy around places of spirituality and belief like the temple, and guesses that it means that there may be hope even for those who are gone, as well as hope for them both to recover. Dev kisses him deeply, and the two agree to live long lives together.