A Vision of Fire

by Gillian Anderson

  Like Neanderthals in their caves, she thought. Our brains have evolved but our bodies are still locked in the Pleistocene.

  Caitlin suddenly felt as cold as if a deep winter wind had raced down the street toward her, but it wasn’t from thoughts of the Ice Age. It was an idea gleaned from what Anita had said. Banding together in a group happened not just in person but also through computers and phones and Wi-Fi. What if millions and millions of teenagers had flocked to the Internet and social media over the past twenty years not just because it made them feel like masters of their caves, carving their universe into manageable pieces. What if there actually was an external threat, barely sensed, that was causing them to flock like birds? What if Maanik and Gaelle and possibly Atash and who knew how many others were the first to semiconsciously pick up those signals?

  My god, she thought. Were they that close to the cliff, as Ben had said? Was Pakistan the imminent threat? Was it a big enough threat for the type of global reaction she was envisioning? Or were they reacting to something else? Something bigger?

  And if so, what on earth could that be?

  CHAPTER 21

  Motahhari Hospital, Tehran

  Atash Gulshan had been taken off the ventilator the day before, so the hospital room was unusually hushed. Now and then the corridors echoed with a rattling instrument trolley. Outside there was little traffic; it was one of the high-pollution days when only hospitals and banks stayed open. A sickly yellow-gray smog filled the window, partly obscuring the trees of the courtyard below.

  The room had only the one patient. Two female nurses in blue uniforms and black scarves were changing the dressings on Atash’s legs. They worked silently, hoping not to be noticed and caught up in yet another argument about women tending to men. This relatively small hospital had not fared well against the national shortage of male nurses, yet the women’s service to Atash still provoked a debate with the male doctor whenever he visited. The end of the argument was always the same, the doctor shaking his head and saying, “For the brother of a criminal, I suppose it doesn’t matter who ministers to him. Change the bandages.”

  Atash had received no visitors, no flowers, no bright quilt, no photographs, no other touches from home. He was an embarrassment.

  One hour ago Atash had been given enough pain medication to prepare him for this twice-daily routine of circulation stimulation and rebandaging, leaving him in a waking dream state. His body was bolstered on all sides, propping him up and nearly immobilizing his upper body. The blanket was pulled up to his torso, covering his catheter tubes but leaving his legs exposed for the two nurses. The nurse working on his bandaged left leg was slowly manipulating his ankle joint so that he would have some chance of retaining full range of motion if he ever walked again. The nurse working on his right leg was removing his bandages. On his right foot and calf were fourth-degree burns. What scraps of skin remained were black. His heel had burned away to the bone and his calf muscles were raw shreds. Atash had burns on 90 percent of his body; it was a miracle he was alive.

  “To suffer for the sins of his brother, that is why he lives,” a visiting cleric had murmured after inquiring who he was. The only compassion the young man received was from the two women who shouldn’t have been touching him.

  • • •

  Atash was barely aware of the miracle of his survival. In his waking dream he was running after his older brother, Rashid—no, somehow he was hovering above and behind him as Rashid was running a military-­style parkour training through the city, sprinting hard, climbing walls, flipping over stairs, leaping fountains, all the while pursued by police.

  “Don’t run, Rashid!” Atash called. “It will only make things worse!” But Atash already knew what the result of the trial would be. Homosexuality was the official “crime,” but drug trafficking and sedition would be added on to create the impression that homosexuals were all thoroughly debased.

  Suddenly, the stocky figure of Rashid stopped running. He turned to Atash, who was now on the ground, facing him. He seemed different somehow. The air around them quickly filled with a kind of smoke, rolling in like a haboob in the desert. Only this wasn’t sand or smoke. Atash’s throat and eyes began to burn as if the air were misty with acid.

  “Brother!” he cried, squinting into the haze.

  Was that Rashid? It had to be. That’s who he had been chasing. Atash moved through the thickening clouds toward the indistinct shape.

  “Rashid!”

  The figure moved toward him in silhouette against the fog. Atash gagged on the choking sulfur, heard high winds rushing past his ears. He reached toward the figure even as the smoke swallowed it. “Come! It’s urgent now! We have to go!”

  “Go where?” the other said in a voice that was like a sour song, melodious but off-key.

  “Back,” Atash replied. “Back to the courtyard!”

  His brother was yelling a reply, but while Atash heard the words, he had no idea what they signified. Something about boats . . . the sea . . .

  “What are you saying?” Atash demanded. “I don’t understand!”

  His brother was now entirely lost in the smoke but Atash could still hear his voice—a voice, shrill and frightened. “I am saying that you and the Believers, you’re insane!”

  “And you’re blind!” Atash shouted back. But this time it was not his own voice he heard. It was higher, fairer.

  “Blind? Your glogharasor are blind!”

  His brother had shouted a curse—it meant “stupid sacrifices.” Atash did not know how he knew the meaning, but he did.

  The figure suddenly appeared again through the smoke, only it was definitely not Rashid but somehow was still a brother. His skin was pale, his features unfamiliar. His layered attire was billowing in the strong wind, fastened to his chest with a strangely curving silver brooch. The figure picked up a bag like a seaman’s grip and grabbed Atash’s hand.

  “Come!” the figure shouted. “Now!”

  Atash grabbed the nearest heavy object, an ice pick that stood on end like a candlestick holder, and bashed it across his older brother’s head—but lightly, only enough to knock him out. Then he picked him up under the shoulders and dragged him backward through the streets. But—Atash looked around—this was not Tehran. It was the flaming hell of someplace else.

  As he lumbered backward Atash could see that his brother was bleeding from the wound on his head. Somehow he knew where he was going. It was a short haul to a courtyard through the sooty vapors and stench, made easier by the empty pathways. Ash fell, clogging his nostrils and drying his throat. He paused to pull a scarf of some kind in front of his mouth. Atash heard screams and running on other streets but then he saw them, lit by the fire in the center of the courtyard, ringed by very tall, dark, rectangular columns. The Believers were forming the sacred circle, white and yellow robes turning and turning. Their arms were moving up and down and around. Atash pulled his brother over and made as if to join the circle, but a tall man stepped forward and put out a hand, stopping him.

  Atash had forgotten the oil. He laid his brother’s head and shoulders on the smooth cobblestones, then ran into the nearest house and pawed through the stranger’s shelves. He found some, ran back to the courtyard, and, uttering words that were familiar even if their meaning was not, he poured the oil all over his brother and then himself. He picked up his brother and continued into the circle of whirling robes—

  But it was too late. He was struck in the face and chest by a wall of heat so powerful, so intense, that it knocked him onto his back and rocked the columns around him. He felt the oil sizzle on exposed areas of his flesh and then everywhere as his body ignited. He heard his brother wake from unconsciousness with a piercing shriek, heard cries ride the air like specters of those already dead. His eyes—what they could see before they melted—could not process the chaos and scope of what lay behind the superheated shock wave.<
br />
  • • •

  The nurses looked up at the small sounds coming from their patient.

  “He is talking in his sleep,” one of them said quietly.

  “I wonder what his thoughts could be,” said the other.

  “Regret, I would think.”

  “Perhaps he is discussing the secret to igniting cold sunflower oil.”

  “Do not even begin to ask that question.”

  “But it’s impossible—”

  “Quiet! Do you want to attract accusations of black magic?”

  The curious nurse hushed, and the nurses continued their gentle work in silence.

  CHAPTER 22

  Before sitting down to dinner, Caitlin did some prep work for the session with Maanik. There were still some matters she had to resolve in her own mind.

  The day’s events and her return from Haiti had been disorienting, yet she was surprised by how normal dinnertime with Jacob seemed. Ordinarily, whenever she returned from being away her son overwhelmed her with questions about where she had been and who she had seen and what she had done. She had always assumed that this was more than just his way of reconnecting. It was his way of feeling as though he hadn’t lost her for those few days, that she had somehow been collecting information and experiences to bring back for him.

  Tonight, however, Jacob was utterly uninterested in Haiti. Caitlin even tested it, dangling a few unfinished sentences about her trip, but he never took the bait. He just kept up a steady monologue about Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, which he was reading for school, and how he was going to use the novel as the basis for an essay about endangered animals.

  “The Mexican walking fish is so doomed,” he said with a fervor that caused him to half-speak, half-sign in order to get it all out. “So are big creatures like manatees and orcas.”

  “Do you have a favorite?” Caitlin asked.

  “I love them all,” he said. “I was wondering, would Captain Nemo be an ocean conservationist if he were alive today?”

  “Honey, he was never actually alive—he’s a fictional character.”

  Jacob rejected that thought with a shake of his head. “Every fictional character is based on someone. My English teacher told us that.”

  “Oh?” Caitlin said. “Winnie-the-Pooh?”

  “He was a real teddy bear,” Jacob said. “Just not alive.”

  He had her; that was true.

  Her son was no different than on any other evening. She realized as she considered it that she had been expecting him to be different because she herself had been through so much. But he wasn’t the one who was adrift. She was, and he was the anchor.

  Over ice cream, Jacob was telling her he wanted to read the second Nemo adventure, The Mysterious Island, when Caitlin impetuously interrupted him.

  “Hey, do you want to do an experiment with me?” she signed.

  He shrugged like a bored teenager but curled up one leg and leaned forward at the same time, interested. She hoped it would be a few years before he discovered the “too cool for school” attitude.

  “Okay, we’re going to hold hands for one minute,” Caitlin signed.

  Jacob opened his eyes wide, rolled them, and pretended to die in his chair.

  “Don’t worry,” she signed. “It’s nothing mushy. I just kind of want to see what happens.”

  “Can I be timekeeper?” he signed, and she handed over her phone. Then she explained that she didn’t want him to do or think anything in particular while they were holding hands, and she wouldn’t either. They were just going to see if anything happened on its own. He ­nodded—the suggestion seemed remotely interesting—then tapped her phone and signed, “Go.” She held his right hand with her right hand.

  Nothing happened on her side. She still felt unsettled. Jacob got restless but only in the way a ten-year-old fidgets as a minute ticks by. When the phone beeped she asked if he’d felt anything and he said no.

  “Okay,” she said. “Again.”

  “Last time?” he asked.

  She shrugged noncommittally.

  This time when he started the countdown, she held his left hand with her left hand.

  Again, nothing happened in her heart, her mind. Jacob’s attention strayed to the phone and she had to stop him from playing with it.

  After the beep she said, “Once more, please.”

  He huffed but set the countdown, and she picked up his left hand with her right. Nothing happened for a few seconds. Then Jacob suddenly focused, like the time he’d seen a hawk fly by the window. She wasn’t sure what he was focused on—he seemed to be looking at the table rather than at her hand—but she recognized the stillness that settled into his body, the serious expression on his face. She felt nothing in her hand or anywhere else but clearly something was happening for him.

  Suddenly Jacob broke their connection. Not violently but with some urgency, as if he’d touched a hot pan handle. He leaned across the table and put his hands on her cheeks and held her head. Staring at her face he said, “Mommy . . . ,” as if he was affirming it was her.

  “I’m here. Are you okay?”

  He moved his hands away to sign but held her firm with his gaze. “I’m sorry,” he signed. “I’m not big enough to help hold it.”

  The look on his face showed the feeling of his phrase.

  “Hold what?” she asked. But he was sliding off his chair and not looking at her. He gave her a hug and went to his room. Caitlin was about to follow when she was interrupted by the arrival of the sitter, Theodora, who would watch him when she went to the Pawars’.

  After letting the sitter in, Caitlin poked her head around Jacob’s door; her mind wouldn’t drop the conversation. He was doing his homework and held up a drawing of Captain Nemo he’d made.

  “That’s lovely,” she signed. And it was. Nemo’s beard in particular was enchanting, drawn as though it were a frozen white wave.

  “Jacob, before, what did you mean by ‘hold it’?” she signed.

  Jacob tapped three fingers near his mouth, then made a stretching motion with both hands: “water” and “big.”

  Caitlin felt a chill. She positioned herself to make sure he could read her lips. “Do you mean the ocean?” she asked, as she repeated his signs for “big water.” Jacob visited the ocean several times a year with his grandparents on Long Island.

  He nodded.

  She relaxed a little. “Did you see the ocean when you were holding my hand?”

  He shook his head no.

  “Then how did you know it was the ocean?”

  “It was really big and it was moving.”

  “Moving—like waves on the beach?”

  He shook his head again. “I have to work now, Mommy.”

  He turned back to his schoolwork like a mini-Caitlin. She lingered a moment in case he decided to say more. When he did not, she bent over and gave him his good-night kiss, which he returned. Nothing about the event seemed to be bothering him and for that she was relieved, but his reaction still unnerved her. Why would he mention a wave? Had he somehow tapped into her visions?

  Halfway down the stairs, heading out of her apartment, Caitlin remembered how she had once described psychiatry to Jacob: helping people hold their problems in the light until they solved them. Maybe he had simply sensed her preoccupation with the traumatized girls and went to a place where he always felt calm—the ocean.

  The ground was shifting under Caitlin’s feet, more than it had when she was working with hundreds of people after the Phuket tsunami. Those were tragic multitudes; these were two girls, two individuals whom she knew and had spoken to. She was usually so balanced. If she suddenly wobbled, Jacob would surely feel it.

  In the cab to the east side, Caitlin did some quick reading. Upon arriving at the Pawars’ apartment, she asked for a few minutes alone on
the balcony before she saw Maanik. Kamala showed her outside and shut the door behind her. Caitlin looked at the lights of apartments and streetlamps rippling on the East River, looked up at sharp clouds slipping past a full, bright moon. Despite the fact that Ben was about to arrive, she felt strangely alone. Maybe it was because their history was like a circus act. Sometimes they were hanging from the same trapeze, sometimes they were on opposite ends of the tent, and sometimes they were plummeting toward the net. Their relationship wasn’t exactly something to hold on to.

  Still, she was glad to see him standing before her when she went back into the apartment. He had a warm smile—a relaxed smile, for the first time in days—and a bag full of gadgets: video camera, backup sound recorder, and tablet.

  “Good day?” she asked hopefully.

  “Almost,” he whispered. “The representatives huddled separately so I didn’t have to interpret too much today.”

  They set up the equipment in Maanik’s room and the girl watched them without comment; she seemed more distant than she’d been earlier, but not apprehensive. Resigned? Braced? It was difficult to tell.

  Caitlin sat beside her and explained everything she was going to say and do as a guide throughout the session. Maanik listened without comment or acknowledgment. Ben crouched a few feet away, ready to turn on the devices and take notes on his tablet. The Pawars sat side by side across the room, on chairs from the dining room. Jack London hovered nearby but seemed more interested in sniffing the cuffs of Ben’s pants than what Caitlin was about to do.

  Caitlin kept one eye on the dog while she walked Maanik through the countdown to a state of hypnosis. The only change in Jack London’s behavior was that he shoved his nose under a pant cuff and thoroughly inspected Ben’s sock.

  Maanik was also unperturbed. She slipped into a deep, relaxed state without resistance.

  Caitlin had debated with herself whether to frame this to Maanik as simple hypnosis or as a “past life” session. The very phrase “past-life regression” still made her cringe a bit. However, she had looked up the process of regression and read about it again on the ride over. She was surprised to find that it was very similar to ordinary hypnosis. Still, Caitlin decided that actually saying the phrase “past life” would be too leading. She wanted Maanik to describe what she was seeing and experiencing unencumbered.