A Vision of Fire: A Novel

by Gillian Anderson

  “No!” he screamed in his mind.

  “Mr. Jasso!”

  The flight attendant’s voice was at the far end of a tunnel.

  “Mr. Jasso!” she repeated.

  His shoulders were being shaken and his head bobbed in circles as he fought through the sensory chaos. Like poured molasses the plane began to come back into focus just as it thumped to a hard landing on the tarmac. He was aware of the rear-mounted jets roaring to help brake the aircraft, felt himself being pressed against the seat, saw the calm white of the cabin spread out in front of him . . .

  The flight attendant was hastily undoing her belt.

  “Wait, who had my shoulders?”

  “Are you all right, Mr. Jasso?”

  “What? Yes, yes. I’m fine,” he said.

  But he wasn’t. He felt nauseous, panicked. The vinyl of the camera case felt hot, no doubt from how tightly he had been clutching it.

  “I’ll get you some water,” the woman said.

  “No, I’m all right. Weren’t you affected?” he said, starting to get paranoid.

  “By what?” she asked. “The turbulence?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “You didn’t hear anything? See anything? Birds?”

  “At this altitude?”

  “That’s what I thought,” he said, more to himself.

  “No,” she said as the jet slowed and steadied. “I wasn’t looking outside. Perhaps a cloud formation, a trick of the sunlight?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Mr. Jasso, you look pale. Would you like to have a doctor meet us at the terminal?”

  “No, I’ll be fine,” he said. “It was just . . . overwork, I guess. It will pass.”

  She accepted his explanation with reluctance and went to the cockpit. The engines had slowed to a dull hum. Jasso thought he heard the woman ask about damage. The pilot said he was going out to check the aircraft when they refueled but didn’t think he was going to find anything. The engines and flaps seemed fine.

  Jasso drained what was left in his glass and sat very still as the jet taxied toward the refueling area. It seemed impossible, but . . .

  But the birds . . . they weren’t an illusion. They seemed to be throwing themselves at the jet.

  Was there something in the artifact that had . . . something in the stone, the metal? Perhaps it had interacted with particles in the air, with the electronics of the jet.

  He looked at the case, which sat blank and unrevealing on the table. It was somehow menacing in its faceless simplicity. With sudden urgency he reached for the flap and threw it back, taking out the cloth-bound artifact.

  The only thing trembling was his hand. The stone was very still. It was also cool. Whatever had begun in Port Stanley was apparently over.

  Replacing the relic in the case and closing it, he gestured for a second glass of scotch and stared at the sleek new terminal in the distance. It looked like a flying saucer, a low, inverted white bowl gleaming red in the new day.

  CHAPTER 11

  The morning broke slowly across Caitlin’s consciousness: a bright thread of illumination along the horizon, then flashes of yellow-orange light on the crests of waves, and finally the dawn itself. She had dreamed, she knew that, but remembered her dreams vaguely. Dark skies, gray water. And red. Somewhere there was red.

  She swung herself out of bed and padded in to wake Jacob, who was instantly revved, talking nonstop about his zoo essay. He was still bubbling as she dropped him off at a birthday party. Caitlin asked a favor from one of the attending parents to shuttle Jacob to a second party later that day—the usual Saturday birthday deluge—then let herself into her office to catch up on work. She left a message for the Pawars to call her and let her know how Maanik was doing. By noon she still hadn’t received a return call and she was beginning to worry. She considered calling Dr. Deshpande to see if he’d heard anything but she didn’t want to push his boundaries on confidentiality. She called Ben instead. She’d sent him some stills from Maanik’s video after she’d noticed the arm movements the night before, but his only reply was to ask her to meet him on his lunch break from the peace negotiations, which were continuing over the weekend. Ben specified that she should meet him at the UN and not at the Pawars’ apartment building.

  Did the Pawars not want to communicate with her? Now she was really worrying.

  She was given a day pass to Ben’s office, a glorified closet-space on the fifth floor. He barely resembled himself. His face was dark and he kept rubbing the bone beneath his left ear, an old stress tell from their undergrad days. He said hi to her and that was all as he scooped up his tablet and hurried her out of his office, down a couple floors, and into a slightly larger workspace with a desk and a couple of chairs.

  Shutting the door, he said, “This is one of the rooms they keep electronically secure. I was lucky to get it.”

  “What’s going on, Ben?” She was starting to feel uneasy.

  “Nothing about Maanik. Well, not exactly.”

  “You’ve lost me.”

  “At nine fifteen this morning the ambassador suddenly announced a thirty-minute break and disappeared into his office alone. He was visibly distracted, uneasy, very off.”

  “Had he received a call from home?”

  Ben shook his head. “Honestly, I think everything just piled up on him at that instant. Maanik, post-traumatic stress from nearly having been killed, and ratcheted-up expectations from both sides. Full disclosure—he’s had anxiety attacks in private now and then. It’s a freakin’ pressure cooker in there. And it got worse when he left. The Pakistani delegation basically lost it, started trumpeting that this was a ‘diplomatic illness’ for nefarious purposes.”

  “Maybe that was just posturing,” she offered, attempting to calm Ben from his own anxiety.

  He shook his head. “One radical openly theorized that the ambassador was buying time for India to move its civilians out of major metropolitan areas in preparation for a strike. Meanwhile, most of the Indian delegation also flipped out. They think the ambassador’s toying with them in some way, and they weren’t really sure he was on their side to begin with.”

  “Which he isn’t. He’s on a third side.”

  “Huh?”

  “He’s on the side of compromise,” Caitlin said.

  “Oh, right. Anyway, he was calmer after his break. I know he prays at times of stress, and maybe that’s what he needed. But when the talks started again it was like we’d been set back three days’ worth of negotiating.” Ben shook his head and drummed his fingers nervously on the table. “Caitlin, I’m afraid they might really do it this time. I think their atomic trigger fingers are finally overwhelming the instinct for self-preservation.”

  Caitlin put a hand on his shoulder and breathed deeply. For a moment they sat in silence. Then Ben gathered himself and flipped open his tablet.

  “So, I’m thinking we need some good news about Maanik for the ambassador just as fast as we can find some.”

  “Okay . . . ,” Caitlin said, trying to catch up with his still-manic thought process, “you have something in mind?”

  Ben opened the screenshots Caitlin had sent him. “I think you’re right about the arm movements. If this is a coherent language, they’re part of it. They may serve the same function as the diacritical marks in written Hebrew. Some of those marks change the letters, words; some serve as punctuation; some represent abstract concepts like numbers.”

  “Wait, are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

  “Yep.”

  “When did you study the video?” she asked.

  “Let’s just say it wouldn’t let me sleep.”

  “No wonder you look like crap.”

  “You look good too.”

  They smiled at each other.

  “Okay, I’m with you,” she said. “But Hebrew diacritical marks are simple. Lines, really.”

  “Right. I’m not sure what purpose these gestures serve, yet. They might be emphasis but I kind of
doubt it; they’re elaborate.”

  “Could they be parts of words, like prefixes and suffixes?”

  “Maybe, maybe, but look here.” Ben jumped to a screen grab Caitlin hadn’t made. He had caught a moment when Maanik was lying on the floor, her mouth open to speak, her hands resting calmly beside her. “This was when she first dropped those unfamiliar sounds into English. Her arms were still. The gestures only started as she sped up.” He switched to one of Caitlin’s screen grabs, where Maanik was still lying on the floor but her hands were in the air. Her left hand was angled away from her body; her right arm was starting to arc diagonally across her torso. “See? They could signify something we would ordinarily express through the subtleties of body language.”

  “We?” Caitlin said. “That would suggest there’s a ‘them’ in this equation.”

  “I know, that’s crazy.” He rubbed below his ear. “But these expressions of hers have patterns and they’re not like any I’ve ever seen. Maanik’s not just riffing, Cai. What’s more, it’s going to be tough even separating discrete words from her stream of speech, since she barely stopped to take breaths. It’s like when we hear a foreign language that seems to be a wild, racing babble to us but not to the speakers.”

  “And you just suggested that those speakers are . . . what?”

  “Cai, I really have no clue. Not from what little I’ve seen and heard here. Maybe it’s some kind of schizophasia or glossolalia—”

  “But people with schizophasia tend to use recognizable words, and Mrs. Pawar would have picked up on any kind of religious chant.”

  “I’m not saying it has to be those, exactly, but something like them. I just don’t know. This could be terra incognita. I’ve got a program that should help with transcription. I’ll get to it tonight, let you know what I find out.”

  He shut his tablet, stood, and before she could say anything, he leaned in and hugged her, briefly but close. She had wondered why he had brought her over here when he could have said everything on a phone call from this same secure room. This was why. The hug. She tried to imagine going home to an empty apartment every day after hours of frustrating peace talks. The sudden sense of loneliness overwhelmed her.

  “You know, they’re lucky to have you,” she said. “You may think being a translator makes you invisible, but you’re fighting to stay cool and grounded and I know everyone in the room is benefiting from that, whether they’re conscious of it or not. You’re doing a great job.”

  He let go before either of them felt awkward and guided her from the room without further conversation.

  Before leaving, Caitlin detoured across the newly renovated lobby to an exhibit: Photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 1945–1946. They were, in the oldest sense of the word, god-awful. She felt tears rise, looking at the dead or screaming people, the swaths of burn blisters, whole torsos stripped of skin, ears burned away, blinded eyes. And then there were the famous photos of human shadows on walls, caught in the atomic flash.

  How, how, how, Caitlin wondered, how can anyone see these and want to repeat history? These images weren’t just about nuclear bombs. They were about the unthinkable, lingering pain and horror caused by every war in every era. In them was an implicit warning that the next big conflagration would be exponentially worse. Yet here we are, rocketing toward it.

  Her blurred vision was caught by one particular image, a young girl curled over her dead baby brother. Caitlin was surprised by how much the girl looked like Maanik. Caitlin wiped her eyes. A sign warned that this was a place for solemn meditation, nothing else. She checked that the security guard was facing away, then snapped a picture of the photograph with her phone.

  As she left the lobby, more than anything in the world she wanted to put her arms around her son. But he was at the second birthday party and when she sent him a text—I love you, kiddo—there was no reply. Caitlin forced herself to return to her office and attack her backlog of paperwork instead of joining him at the party.

  Four hours later, there he was, on a massive sugar high, bright-eyed and huggable.

  Caitlin took him to a Ping-Pong club as a special treat for no particular reason—but after only half an hour, she received a phone call from the Pawars. They were in her neighborhood and were hoping to visit her, would that be all right?

  Even as she was assenting, Jacob’s hands were already rising to his hips in defiance. No doubt he recognized her apologetic shoulders and the sidelong glance that always signaled a change in plans.

  “One more game,” he signed when she ended the call.

  She shook her head and smiled. “So you’ll play as slowly as you can?”

  He couldn’t help snickering; she’d read him right.

  “Fifteen minutes,” she said. “And I’m sorry. I wouldn’t cut us off if I didn’t think it was important.”

  He just shrugged and served an extremely fast ball, which she missed.

  “I don’t want to go,” he signed. “You have to sweeten the pot.”

  She chuckled. “Where on earth did you pick up that phrase?” she signed.

  “I read it. Don’t change the subject.”

  “All right, what are you thinking?”

  “Extra hour of TV.”

  “No way.”

  “Okay, we order dinner.”

  His reply was so fast she laughed. Her kid was learning to set her up.

  “Okay,” she signed, feigning resignation, “but you pick the restaurant.”

  “No, I pick the restaurant!” Then he giggled as he saw how she’d gotten him.

  On their way home, they turned the corner onto their block and walked into the light of the setting sun. Suddenly Caitlin felt a strange pressure against her chest again, a profound sense of being watched, and that whatever was watching her was smarter and faster and fiercer. She grabbed Jacob’s hand, walked briskly, looking around for someone, something.

  It’s just me, she told herself unconvincingly. It’s just the exhibit and Maanik.

  She was suddenly distracted by the sight of a black sedan parked outside her brownstone apartment building. A tall, blond man with an earpiece and an arm cast nodded when he saw her, though she didn’t know him. He opened one of the back doors and Ambassador Pawar stepped out, followed by Mrs. Pawar. They stood together, composed and elegant, icons of stability despite everything they were going through.

  “Hello,” Caitlin said, offering her hand to the ambassador and his wife in turn. She introduced Jacob, who signed his welcome. The Pawars caught on and dipped their heads toward him, smiling.

  “Thank you for seeing us,” the ambassador said pleasantly.

  “Is everything all right?” Caitlin asked, not willing to wait until they got upstairs.

  He responded with a half smile. “There is a saying, ‘Durlabham hi sadaa sukham.’ It means that one cannot have happiness alone.”

  Caitlin smiled back.

  Upstairs, with Jacob ensconced in his room poring over menus, Caitlin seated the Pawars in the living room. She offered them tea, which they declined, stating that they only intended to stay a few minutes.

  “How was your day?” she asked generally, but meant the ambassador.

  “Taxing,” he replied.

  Caitlin turned to Mrs. Pawar. “Maanik?”

  “There have been no further incidents,” the woman said. “I’ve instructed Kamala in what to do. She will call if there is a recurrence.”

  “I see,” Caitlin said.

  “The blackberries,” the ambassador said. “It is somewhat disturbing that one can have that much power over a child. Over any human being, though I confess I could benefit from a cue like that in my professional life.”

  Caitlin smiled.

  “Maanik did agree to the cue,” Mrs. Pawar reminded him.

  “Yes, I would not have done it without her consent,” Caitlin said, trying to reassure them. “And believe me, if she ever feels an urgency to communicate that is more important than calming down, she can and
will ignore the cue.”

  The Pawars seemed surprised by that.

  “So she is not helpless,” the ambassador said.

  “Not in that sense, no.”

  “Then our real daughter is merely locked away somewhere?” he asked.

  “In a manner of speaking, that’s the case with many of the kids I see. But we frankly don’t know yet what Maanik is experiencing.”

  Mrs. Pawar pressed her palms together and the ambassador suddenly seemed to be searching for words—or courage, she couldn’t be sure which.

  “Dr. O’Hara,” he said slowly, “I know that our daughter needs help—help we must continue to provide as quietly as possible. This is not an easy thing for a father to do, to weigh his responsibilities against the well-being of his daughter. Yet it must be done.”

  The ambassador hesitated. Caitlin sensed that he was about to take a considerable leap of faith—or rather, a leap of science over faith.

  “Dr. O’Hara, I would like to ask that you continue to work with Maanik, at our home, by whatever means you deem best. I do not pretend that simply because I can turn my daughter off”—his voice caught and he cleared it—“that somehow she is healed. That is clearly not the case. I would like you to find the cause if you can—within the parameters of our home.”

  “Do you believe the problem is psychological?” Mrs. Pawar asked.

  “As opposed to a head trauma?” Caitlin said. “I believe so. There are no swollen areas or cuts, no sensitivity to sound and light, no irritability or confusion, clearly no issues with balance—in short, nothing to suggest even a mild head injury.”

  Both of the Pawars seemed to exhale as one.

  “Then please continue,” Mrs. Pawar said. “Please.”

  Caitlin was moved. She took a breath and said, “I’m very grateful that you feel this way and I will be honored to continue treating Maanik.” She reached forward and each of them grasped one of her hands. “Thank you for your trust.”