A Vision of Fire (20 page)

Caitlin couldn't understand. Her eardrums were throbbing from pressure that wrapped around her head, pressure that was closing her throat, blocking sound and breath.

The recent past, the present, her world and life were all out of
focus. Wherever she was, whoever she was, whatever she was seeing, was rising before her with razor-edged clarity.

And suddenly the words became familiar. The columned structure, vast and high, was known to her. The buildings beyond, dark among patches of lavender and green foliage, were places she had seen. And farther away, those peaks that looked less like mountains than like explosions of ice—

She was looking through eyes that were not her own at a world that was not her own. The pale young man pleaded with her from the floor.

“Save my brother, save me! Please! Show us how!”

“
I am no longer Guardian to him or to you
,”
she said in the voice of an old man, unable to control the words coming from her own throat. “
You put your faith in things that have no true power
.
You have crafted your own fate.
”

“We will repent, we will speak the
cazh
!”

“
No
,” she replied sadly. “
You will die
.”

The speaker turned away and the young man propelled himself up from the floor and ran away into the street. Her body hurried to join the other robed figures near the columns a dozen or so yards away, their arms raised toward the dark skies. Her sleeves heavy with oil, she lifted her hands to complete the prayer of
cazh
and let out a howling scream. Her hands were suddenly on fire, her fingers whirling to pieces in the air even as she signed a word, the only word she could manage, a superlative for “transform.”

There was another scream and suddenly Caitlin was on the floor. Not a stone floor but a hospital floor.

“Dr. O'Hara!”

Caitlin opened her eyes to see Maryam's face hovering over her. Her head felt exceedingly light, her hands excessively warm, her brain extraordinarily confused. For a moment it was as if she had forgotten how to speak.

“You screamed,” Maryam said.

“I—no. No.”

There was no point in even attempting to explain. She wasn't sure she
could
explain, since she didn't entirely understand it herself. Caitlin pulled away from Maryam and shoved herself up from the floor, grabbing the railing of Atash's bed. She was reeling.

“It was Atash,” Caitlin gasped.

“What are you saying?”

Caitlin fell silent. As with the snake in Haiti, she had been through something Atash was experiencing. She looked down at the young man. His fixed, red-rimmed eyes were staring at a corner of the ceiling. A tear was sliding down his cheek, and a line of blood trailed from his mouth down over his chin. She reached for his throat with her right hand, searching for a pulse . . .

“You'd better call for the doctor,” Caitlin said sadly.

“What is it?”

“He's dead,” she replied.

CHAPTER 27

C
aitlin sat in reception again, a spartan room with religious symbols on the walls. Maryam was on her cell phone, sitting under a brass scimitar suspended point-up. An overhead light effected a glow.

Her hands and forearms heavy, Caitlin opened her tablet but stared at the dark screen. She knew she should Skype her father or Barbara, even Ben, but what she had witnessed—no, what she had
experienced
—had knocked her numb.

A part of her didn't want to stop the numbness. Atash's pain had joined Maanik and Gaelle's with a ferocious intensity and she felt guilty for not having come here days earlier when she might have been able to . . . do something. Maybe she could have worked with him in stages, used hypnosis, something to mediate between him and the vision. Now he was dead, and he had died in torment.

Then fear suffused the numbness.
Did his death in the vision cause his death in body?
If so, Maanik and Gaelle were in
mortal
danger. She began to shake.

A hand dropped on her shoulder but she did not respond. Then the hand turned her chin so that she was looking into Maryam's hazel eyes. They were softer than she had seen them before now.

“Dr. O'Hara, you must focus.”

Caitlin nodded blankly.

“Doctor, I am not a woman who selects what she sees. I see everything. When your hand was on the young man I saw your head moving. Not like this.” She nodded her head back and forth, then gestured at Caitlin's Hermès scarf. “Your head moved as if, beneath the scarf, your hair was alive.”

Her words to Ben—about Maanik's hair justifying this trip—came back to her. So did a little bit of life. “Go on,” said Caitlin.

Maryam stared at her. “You do not seem surprised.”

“Strangely, no,” she admitted. “Please, what else did you see?”

Maryam regarded her skeptically.

“Please,” Caitlin pleaded. “It's all helpful information.”

Maryam sat beside her. “When you fell backward, this came forward.” The young woman touched a strand of hair that had loosened from Caitlin's scarf and was framing her face. “I watched it move as if a wind had caught it, but the windows were closed, there was no fan, no breeze. I am not an imaginative woman, doctor. I saw this.”

“I believe you,” Caitlin said. “There are things going on that I do not understand. That's why I came here.”

“I know this now, so I am going to take you to see someone. We have enough time before your flight tonight.”

Caitlin's mind cleared slightly. “Is this a polite way of saying that I am under arrest?”

Maryam smiled and discreetly looked around the room. “Doctor, if that were the case you would not have to ask.”

The young woman pressed her fingers on Caitlin's palm. Caitlin noticed that the back of Maryam's hand was grayish, very wrinkled, almost blistered in places. It was a hand that, some time ago, had been badly burned.

“I was a girl during the war with Iraq,” she said. “I was once a patient here.”

Caitlin met her gaze and thought of the fortitude it must have taken for this woman to accompany her, whether by order or volun
tarily, to return to this place of pain, sadness, and fear. Caitlin squeezed her hand gently. “Go on.”

“There is more you should see while you are here.”

Maryam rose and Caitlin followed her to the waiting sedan.

Forty-five minutes later they pulled up in front of a low, concrete apartment building. Caitlin followed Maryam into one of the apartments and was seated in a living room with sparse furniture and a flowered bedsheet for a curtain. She heard gentle clinks from what must have been the kitchen and became vaguely aware that Maryam was not beside her. Opposite Caitlin on the pale green wall was an elaborate design rising from the floor and flowering in red over the expanse—dots, starbursts, wheels like eyes, flourishing feathers. It was like a
mehndi
design, an adornment painted in henna on Hindu women's hands before a wedding.

And jasmine—she was suddenly aware of the strikingly familiar smell of jasmine tea as it wafted up to her. A cup and saucer had been placed on the low table. The aroma loosened the tension that had built behind her eyes, and unexpectedly, tears began flowing down her face.

“A cup of tears,” said a soft male voice beside her after she gasped several long sobs. “In some cultures, there are sacred vessels that permit us to mourn.”

Caitlin wiped her eyes with the palms of her hands and took a deep, shuddering breath.

“Is it always jasmine?” Caitlin asked as she composed herself.

“It is whatever it needs to be,” he answered.

Beside her stood a small Indian man with graying hair, somewhere in his sixties. He had remarkably lopsided ears and a gentleness in his eyes that made him seem instantly friendly.

“I am Vahin,” he said with a smile that warmed and comforted her.

“I'm Caitlin,” she replied. She looked around. “Where is Maryam?”

“She is outside,” he said, taking a seat in a shabby armchair opposite her. “The dear lady and I have very different business in this city but she . . . crossed lines, shall we say? She thought you and I should speak.”

“I'm grateful to you both. What do you do, Vahin?”

“I am something like a clergyman to the Hindu community.”

“Forgive me, but are you allowed to do that here?”

“We have a small community in and around the city,” he said. “Iran allows us our religious freedom and India allows her resident Shia Muslims to visit Iran. It is a mutually beneficial relationship.”

“If you like living at the stress point between two vastly different cultures,” she said.

“Some of us have that calling.” He smiled mysteriously. “But now, to your situation. Tell me what your tears told the cup. Omit nothing.”

While Vahin sipped his tea Caitlin told him everything, not just about Atash but about Maanik and Gaelle, the Norse and Mongolian connections, Jack London's reactions, and her own glimpses of impossible visions. Vahin sat quietly throughout, nodding now and then, and occasionally dipping his head to one side.

“So,” said Caitlin upon finishing, “how crazy does that all sound to you?”

“Not at all,” Vahin replied. “You seem to feel that because you cannot rationalize what you have experienced it is therefore irrational. That is not the case. We do not blame words for being insufficient to express new ideas. We simply find better words. Do you know who put forth that idea?”

Caitlin shook her head.

“The Norse,” he told her.

“Vikings,” she said, starting slightly.

“Yes. They understood that the energy that binds us, one to the other, was manifest in each of us as thought . . . and thought as language. But it was what you would call a two-way street. If you changed the words you could change the way you thought about the energy.” He rose and carried their cups into the kitchen, and Caitlin heard again the sounds of making tea. She decided to follow, and as she entered the room he smiled and continued. “In 1984, I traveled to Bhopal just after the Union Carbide tragedy. Do you remember that?”

“I do,” she said. “The factory that accidentally released the poisonous gas.”

“The factory was making a pesticide. The gas spread through the slums surrounding the factory and thousands upon thousands of people died. It was most ghastly. I was part of the local clergy asked to help relocate the orphans of this disaster. I kept track of my orphans and visited them when I could over the years.” He placed another cup of tea in Caitlin's hands. “A fresh cup.” He smiled. “No tears.”

“Thank you.” Caitlin smiled back as she followed him back into the living room. This time he joined her on the couch.

“As to why Maryam brought you here. We have a mutual friend, one of the children in my care who was in the hospital with her. For many decades after the Bhopal tragedy, he spoke in tongues. It was involuntary, in no way linked with any religious ceremony. And she has heard me tell of another child, a young girl, whose arms would sometimes flare in a rash that looked like a chemical burn. The girl called it a
motu-cazh
.”

His words caused Caitlin to start again. This time he noticed.

“You've heard that?” Vahin asked.

“The second part sounded familiar,” she said.

“Well, I disagreed with a psychologist who was part of my group. He argued that it resembled stigmata, a physiological expression of psychological distress. I thought it was much more.”

Caitlin drank her tea and waited patiently. Vahin seemed to be searching for the words to express his thoughts precisely. Finally, he leaned forward and set his tea on the table.

“Let me first tell you something that is clear to me,” he continued. “The left-hand, right-hand activity you mentioned. With your left hand you collected enormous force from the snake, with the right hand you pushed a girl against a wall without touching her. That is the natural flow of things.”

“To become superhuman?”

“No,” he said patiently. “To be a conduit for the energy of the
universe. The left hand receives energy, the right hand emits it. This is very old knowledge from Tantric Buddhism. It is similar to chi energy among the Shaolin monks in China.”

He cupped his hands around an invisible sphere and pushed it toward Caitlin. A subtle sensation of warmth washed over her throat.

“I—I
felt
that,” she marveled.

He continued. “Buddhism, Hinduism, the Vedas, Chinese Taoism, Tai Chi, the paganism that fathered the Viking faiths—the seeds of our minds were not planted in straight rows with walls between them. Every culture has discovered this same phenomenon of energy, both inside of us and surrounding us, all the while connecting us.”

“You mentioned Tai Chi,” Caitlin said, remembering the men and women from the park.

“Tai Chi is an example of great strength used to empower, not to destroy.” He moved his hands in a way that reminded Caitlin of Maanik's gestures. “Movement stirs the energy inside our bodies and it also opens us to energy from the outside. When those two energies merge we are enlightened, uplifted.”

“Are you talking about life energy or—the soul?” she asked, not entirely comfortable using the latter term.

“Both.”

“Something that survives death.”

He nodded once and pointed to the tea on the table. “When the leaves are gone, the scent remains in the air . . . and in the mind. It is rekindled, the memory is refreshed, when new tea is brewed. So it is with the soul. With death, the soul hovers until it finds a new body.”

“Hovers how? Where?” Caitlin challenged. “Limbo? Heaven?”

“I prefer to call it the transpersonal plane,” he replied. “As to where?” He paused and gestured simply “out there.”

Caitlin sighed. “I have problems with that idea.”

“Much of the world, throughout history, has embraced some form of that concept.”

“I mean no disrespect, but there are still flat-earthers too,” she said.

He smiled benignly. “Tell me why
you
reject it.”

She collected her thoughts. “I don't believe in a cosmic scorekeeper. That seems to be the general conception of God, with heaven as a reward for subjective behavior that changes from culture to culture. I also don't believe that a soul is a kind of immaterial flash drive where things get stored and then dumped into—”

She stopped herself.

“Yes?” Vahin smiled. “A waiting body? A body weakened by injury or trauma, a body hungry for strong, healing energy?”

Caitlin shook her head. “No. I don't accept it. That isn't what's happening.”

“Self-immolation. A father almost assassinated. A stepmother's near-drowning. The loss of parents in a horrible mass poisoning.”

“That's trauma and natural human empathy,” Caitlin said. “I see it all the time. Obviously,
I'm
feeling it, yet I haven't suffered a trauma.”

“Haven't you? Haven't you shared the traumas of these children?”

“As I said, empathy. That's not the same as experiencing it firsthand.”

“In fact, your experience could in some ways be worse,” he suggested. “You are collecting these experiences and internalizing them. They may be massing exponentially.”

Okay
, she thought.
He could be right about that.
Caitlin had always kept a strong emotional connection out of the doctor-patient equation. These kids had broken through that.

“But you are missing the point,” Vahin went on. “You are trying to explain
away
before I can explain.”

“I'm sorry,” she said quickly, “I truly am. I'm being—well, I'm doing what I always do. Forgive me. Please enlighten me.”

Vahin took a moment to consider his approach. “I believe that the common link between these children you have met is trauma, but not just their own trauma.”

“What are you saying?” Caitlin asked. “That there is something else that links them?”

He nodded.

“Your transpersonal plane? The place that's all around us?” she guessed, still unconvinced.

“You doubt,” Vahin said. “But accept, for a moment, the truth of what I say. Think of the bond those three children's souls would instantly share. Then multiply that by the countless souls you have not personally met. What else could cause them to experience that level of anguish?”

The suffering implicit in the nightmarish math of that prospect gave her a chill. “All right,” Caitlin said. “Let's say for the sake of argument that there
are
traumatized souls somewhere else—let's call it your transpersonal plane. The assaults I've witnessed would suggest that these ‘countless' souls are opportunistically seeking souls inside the bodies of traumatized youths.”