A Vision of Fire

by Gillian Anderson

  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.”

  Mrs. Pawar clasped her hand more firmly before she could withdraw it. “I am afraid,” she said. “I do not wish to put that burden on you—”

  “It’s no burden at all,” Caitlin assured her, squeezing the woman’s hand gently. “As I said, this is what I do. First there is some research I’d like to complete. I will call tomorrow.”

  The ambassador put a comforting arm around his wife as they rose. He left Caitlin with a grateful smile as she saw them out the door.

  After they left, she ordered Indian food as per Jacob’s instructions and they watched TV. She checked her e-mail every two minutes, hoping to hear from Ben. There was nothing. She decided not to call him.

  Late that night, lying in bed, Caitlin found herself thinking of the photo exhibit. She thought of Maanik, of the child in the photograph at the UN. She reached to the wall and drummed on it with her fingers. For the first time, she was initiating it instead of Jacob.

  After a pause, she felt and heard him drumming back. It made her smile. And then, as if a witch’s spell had been broken, she plunged into sleep.

  CHAPTER 12

  Croix-des-Bossales Market

  Port-au-Prince, Haiti

  Dr. Aaron Basher hurried after the seven-year-old girl, one arm wrapped protectively around the emergency medical kit slung from his shoulder. The ground was slippery with thin mud, discarded plastic wrappers, and the overflowing sewage that covered most of the city. He kept one eye on the little girl, her steps purposeful though her feet flapped in the tattered shoes of a man, shoes that sloshed muck onto her toes with every step. She turned, flashing her “Lollipop Guild” T-shirt, which, like most apparel for the residents of Port-au-Prince, had been rejected by American thrift shops, sorted in Miami, and shipped to Haiti semi-legally.

  If irony were clean water, this would be a paradise, Aaron thought, not for the first time.

  “She was waving her arms around,” the girl pattered, “and she was saying something, nothing we know, and most of the women say she got a spirit but other women say no, she got the devil. She was talking so fast, it’s very important to her, she even drop one of the phones she shown us!”

  A fresh wave of stench pushed away the exhaust fumes that saturated the city. As he covered his nose with his sleeve, Aaron heard a woman screaming nearby. The ragged, shrill terror of the cry sent a chill over him. This was not a daytime sound, nor was it the kind of desperate shout that accompanied the attacks and assaults that regularly befell the populace after sundown.

  “Then she start to scream,” continued the little girl, gliding over the thickening trash and looking proudly around at the collection of small children who were now trailing them, curious what the white man in his scrubs was going to do.

  They turned a corner into an open patch of ground between several of the market’s long, open-sided, orange-roofed sheds. This gap in the sheds, like others, was nearly filled with garbage, full of plastic bags with food skins and peelings, the occasional animal carcass, and human waste from when someone couldn’t wait for one of the few portable toilets. It was all rotting in the tropical noon sun. Yet the screams, more hideous than the smell, dominated his attention.

  The screamer was a young Haitian woman, definitely under twenty, wearing a yellow T-shirt that said “Twerkin’ for the Weekend.” She was not desperately thin, as many Haitian women were, so he guessed she was getting regular meals from somewhere and probably was not a member of the poorest poor. She was standing barefoot in the mud, her hands raised slightly as if in supplication or protection, or both, and her whole body was rigid. She was staring up past the sheds at the sky, mouth agape.

  No one was touching her but all the ladies who sold the food in the market were watching. Aaron heard the word “fou” many times over and knew they were saying the young woman was psychotic.

  He placed his hands on her arms. She didn’t move them. He pressed a little. She resisted. He released them and placed his hands on her face. She didn’t register his presence, even when he pulled gently at the corners of her eyes to see if she would look at him. Nor did she stop screaming.

  Aaron had been trained to respond to post-traumatic stress disorder but this was different. He’d been in Port-au-Prince for five years, having arrived three weeks after the devastating earthquake, and he’d seen things that had kept him up vomiting at night. But he had never seen anything like this young woman. This was fresh trauma happening now. There had been no storm or earth tremor. There were no traces of blood on her body.

  He balanced his medical kit on a stack of calabash gourds and ­rifled through it, wondering what the hell he had that h
e could use. He wasn’t equipped with the effective sedatives of wealthy countries.

  Well, he thought, when in doubt, eliminate pain, even if a source of pain isn’t evident. He loaded a syringe with codeine and slipped the needle into the young woman’s bicep. She showed no reaction to the pinch.

  He stood back for a moment and, out of habit, looked at his kit to make sure no one was edging near it to steal something they could use . . . or sell. He realized that most of the children gathered in the square were watching a couple who were both aiming horizontal smartphones at the girl, shooting video. Half of Haiti now owned ordinary handsets but smartphones were still prohibitively expensive. Aaron did not have time to be disgusted by the couple. He suddenly noticed that he could hear motors and horns from the road again, and a cheerful music station from a hand-crank radio nearby. The young woman had stopped screaming.

  “C’est la fils avec vous?” Aaron asked the couple, remembering that the little girl had referred to the young woman as having a phone.

  “Mais non, non,” the man said with an American accent, reinforcing the denial with a wave of his hand.

  The woman put away her phone, tugged at his arm. They held trinkets from peddlers, had probably been walking through the market and sought to capture the drama of a native in distress. Aaron wondered what had been lifted from their pockets while they indulged themselves. He didn’t feel sorry for them. They could have offered something, a donation for medicine.

  He turned his attention back to the young woman. She was still staring at the sky, but now her physical behavior had changed. He could not say it was a more comforting sight. With her head tilted back and her mouth dropped open, she appeared to be holding her breath. Her arms were waving back and forth slowly with her hands curled in clawlike shapes. She seemed to want to move her legs as well but her feet were rooted to the filthy slop on the ground.

  What now? Aaron thought anxiously. He pawed through his kit again—bandages, dressings, ibuprofen, nothing that was going to help.

  The crowd of whispering women parted. Some moved aside willingly, others grudgingly. Aaron watched a few of them make the sign of the cross, and some sucked their teeth, a severe insult in Haiti. Others nodded respectfully toward an approaching figure. Aaron suddenly smelled a cigar, somehow able to penetrate through the stink of the garbage.

  “Mambo,” some of the onlookers said, explaining and introducing the woman who stepped out of the crowd. The Vodou priestess looked dismissively at the American doctor.

  About fifty years old, she was not wearing a hand-me-down American T-shirt but a threadbare, short-sleeved ivory blouse; a skirt that had once been a pale pink; and a thin white kerchief tied around her hair. Her elbows and hips were sharp with undernourishment, and her strong cheekbones would have been envied in another world. Her eyes, tough and fierce, regarded the young girl.

  Be respectful, Aaron thought as he stepped aside to admit the woman.

  “That girl is drowning,” the mambo said in clear English.

  Aaron was speechless. After a moment he said, “I don’t understand.”

  “You better hurry,” the mambo said. “She got ice-cold salt water in her chest.”

  The woman raised a cigar to her lips and stared at him.

  Aaron wrenched his eyes away and looked at the girl. He glanced from her arms to her neck to her open mouth, and, yes, if this girl had been in water, those hands might have been trying to claw to the surface. His mind shoved the thought away hard but . . . He looked at her face and, by god, her lips were turning blue. Her ears too. She was trembling all over and her arms were slowing down.

  This girl has hypothermia. In Haiti.

  Aaron waved at several women to move cabbages and stalks of sugarcane off a sheet that was spread beneath them on the ground. He turned to his kit and pulled out two packages and ripped them both open. As soon as the sheet was clear he put his hands under the girl’s armpits and dragged her to it as gently as possible. Supporting her body, he laid her down. He pulled a crackling silver Mylar emergency blanket from the larger ripped package and spread it over the girl to keep her warm under the scorching-hot sun. Then he checked for anything in her throat that might be obstructing her breathing—there was nothing. With one desperate glance at the mambo smoking her cigar, he interlocked his hands and leaned on the young woman’s chest to perform CPR. He ignored his brain, which demanded to know what the hell he was doing.

  After five pumps he pulled a piece of plastic from the smaller ripped package and placed it over the girl’s mouth so that he wouldn’t infect her with anything he might be carrying. He placed his mouth over hers to breathe into her lungs and was shocked to feel that her lips were warm. He pulled away, second-guessing everything, but the blue of her lips was unmistakable. Exhaling deeply into her, he then moved back to her chest and pressed on her heart, two, three, four, five, inhale . . . exhale into her, back to the chest . . .

  Suddenly the girl spasmed and hacked, hard. If they had been on a beach, by a swimming pool, in the flat bottom of a boat, a spout of water would have arced out of her mouth. Here, there was nothing. And yet, when she lay back down, she was coughing and breathing hoarsely exactly like someone who had been drowning only seconds ago.

  “Good God,” Aaron murmured. He turned to the mambo, a look of awe and confusion on his face. “Thank you,” he said.

  She tapped the ash off her cigar onto the foul ground. “Se bon ki ra,” she replied. “Good is rare.” Then she turned and walked into the crowd as it closed behind her.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER 13

  Caitlin ceded her Sunday morning with Jacob to one of his school friends, who’d come over to plan a partnered science project. Determined not to resort to working, Caitlin found herself sitting on the couch watching TV—and the face of Ambassador Pawar as reporters’ microphones bristled around him. Earlier that morning, the entire Indian delegation had, as a group, walked out of the United Nations building. Within minutes, the Pakistan delegation had followed. The talks had imploded.

  Ambassador Pawar was holding fast to his diplomatic façade as he read a statement. “By no means does this presage a final decision on behalf of either country,” he said. “We are simply cooling our minds for future discussions.”

  Caitlin hoped there was some truth to it, that the delegations had simply burned out. Yet as she inspected the ambassador’s face, she saw a set to his jaw that she had only seen when he was speaking of Maanik’s troubles. She suspected the disruption of the talks had been caused by something much more serious than exhaustion. She considered calling Ben, who had been silent since their discussion about the video.

  Just then her phone buzzed. Speak of the devil. The text was from Ben but there was no message, only a video link. The owner of the video had posted it with a caption: “Crazy Haiti!” and a winking emoticon. Caitlin clicked the link and gasped. The first thing she saw was a young Haitian woman, her eyes rolled to the sky, her left hand angled away from her body, her right arm arcing across her torso—precisely the same gesture Maanik had made in her trance.

  With a deep chill racing down her back, Caitlin watched the video all the way through. The familiar, unintelligible speech—it had to be speech—was difficult to hear on the recording. She thought she recognized two other gestures; then the young woman started screaming and a few minutes later the recording ended. Caitlin immediately watched it again, leaning forward from the couch and hunching over her phone.

  What the hell is going on? she wondered. Two young women, geographically isolated, culturally unconnected, with the same physio-psychological symptoms? If there was a trigger, it had to be found. If there was more information that could help Maanik, she had to obtain it.

  Just as she registered the silence behind her in the dining nook, she heard a sharp rap on the table. She turned to see both children staring at her in concern. Though his heari
ng aid was on, Jacob had knocked to get her attention.

  “Mom, are you okay?” he said and signed.

  “I’m fine,” she signed back. “Everything’s okay.”

  “Who’s that screaming?” he signed.

  Caitlin realized she should have muted her phone as she watched the video.

  “It’s a girl,” she signed. “A client,” she said, hedging.

  “Are you going to help her?”

  “If she’ll let me,” Caitlin signed back, and it wasn’t a lie: she was going to have a session with this young woman even if she had to catch a flight to Haiti that night. Caitlin patted his shoulder and headed to her bedroom. Behind her Jacob rapped on the table again. She turned.

  “Are you leaving soon?” he signed with a sigh.

  She half-laughed and signed, “Knock before entering my brain, kiddo.”

  He laughed too. “I did!” he signed. Then he quickly resumed his work with his friend. He knew he wasn’t allowed to press for details about her “kids,” as he had once called them.

  Caitlin’s phone buzzed in her hand. A text gave a young woman’s name—Gaelle Anglade—with an address in Jacmel, Haiti, and an international phone number. There was also a message from Ben: UN Youth Development office says she’s fine. Taken to hospital released within hour. English-speaker.

  That last was a little push. Ben knew Caitlin all too well. She sat on her bed, took a very deep breath, and tapped in the phone number.

  “Allo, Anglade Charter Fishing,” said a young woman’s voice.

  “Hello, is Gaelle Anglade there?”

  “I am Gaelle,” she answered.

  That was unexpected. The young woman’s voice was unhurried; Caitlin made sure hers was the same. “Hi, Gaelle. My name is Dr. Caitlin O’Hara and I am calling from New York City. Do you have a minute?”

  There was a brief hesitation. “Do you need a boat?”

  “Sounds like a great idea but perhaps some other day.” Caitlin chuckled. “Gaelle, I have a patient who I think is experiencing the same thing that happened to you in the market yesterday.”