A Vision of Fire (14 page)

“Go away how? Do you mean like falling asleep?”

“Not exactly.”

“Do you feel dizziness or do you sense anything different, visually or with any of your senses?”

“Well . . .” Maanik frowned in concentration. “It's like I disappear.
No, that's not right. It's like first I am in pieces, small pieces, and
then
I disappear.”

“I'm not sure I follow. Small pieces?”

“My ears are listening, my fingers are feeling, my nose is smelling, my eyes are looking, but they are not connected. It's sort of like every part of me is candles stuck in a cake.”

“I like that description.” Caitlin smiled. “Go on.”

The girl suddenly grew solemn.

“Maanik?”

She was looking at Jack London. “Candles.”

“What about them?”

“Flickering.” She rolled the dog over with her left hand and rubbed his belly. He snorted in his sleep.

“What is it?” Caitlin pressed her. “What's wrong?”

“I don't know,” Maanik said. “I just felt this sadness.”

Caitlin reached out and held the girl's hand. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Maanik didn't answer. The silence that settled on the room reminded Caitlin of the quiet in the hallway, unfriendly and oppressive.

“Maanik—can you hear me?”

The girl was staring at the dog.

“Are you worried about Jack London?”

She didn't answer. Tears were now dropping onto the bedsheet. They were tears of sadness, great mourning. She turned away.

“Maanik?”

“My arm,” she said in a low monotone.

Caitlin leaned in a little closer. She was trying to look into Maanik's face, to get the girl to see her. “What about your arm?”

“My left arm,” Maanik said. “It's gone.”

“That's not true. You're petting Jack London with it. Your arm is fine.”

“No.”

Caitlin let her pause, sensing that something else was coming.

“My arm is bloody and ripped off and a terrible mess.” She began to squirm a little. “The animal . . . is dead.”

“Maanik, listen. What you're seeing is not real.”

Maanik didn't seem to hear. “I am disappearing, like pieces of paper in a fire.”

“That's a dream,” Caitlin insisted quietly. She shifted onto the bed and put her arms around the girl. “You're right here, in your apartment, in your room, with me.”

“No. It's happening right now.
Help me!
”

“What's happening?”

Maanik's mind seemed to be searching for the right word. “The end,” she sobbed. “It is the end.”

CHAPTER 20

F
rom the corner of her eye Caitlin saw Mrs. Pawar appear in the doorway. Caitlin put up a hand to stop her from coming in.

Maanik's arms started to rise and words spilled from the girl's lips—not English, not Hindi. But Caitlin thought she could still see some of Maanik left in her eyes. They were pleading with her. Jack London leaped from the bed and began spinning and barking.

The girl was no longer capable of answering questions and Caitlin did not want to lose her again. Reaching out, she touched Maanik's left ear and said, “Blackberries.”

Like strings had been cut, Maanik went limp. Her eyes closed and she relaxed into sleep. Freed from whatever thrall he had been in, Jack London sat on his haunches and howled.

Caitlin heard Mrs. Pawar breathing heavily in the doorway.

“What just happened?” she asked.

“I don't know,” Caitlin replied. “Maanik woke, seemed all right, and then relapsed. Please, you've got to promise you won't do anything to the dog.”

“Why? What has he got to do with this?”

“I don't know,” Caitlin said, “but I am becoming certain that he's important. Please?”

Mrs. Pawar nodded tightly.

Caitlin crossed the room unsteadily. There was a wave of guilt: had
she
done something to send Maanik drifting away? Had she crowded her? Had her proximity triggered a panic attack?

It was the mention of candles that got to her. That seemed to transfix her.

Was fire a metaphor for “gunfire,” the transformation of something foreign and terrifying into a concept she could understand?

This was not the first fire reference Caitlin had heard since she'd been introduced to Maanik.
There was Ben's interpretation of the language: fire, arms, pain. There were the flames Caitlin had seen flashing in the vision with Gaelle. And there was Atash, the boy who had set himself on fire in Iran.

Or is this a dead end?
she wondered. Fire was not exactly uncommon.

“Doctor?”

Caitlin snapped from her reflection. “Yes?”

“May I ask what you are thinking? I feel so helpless.”

Caitlin turned to her. “Of course. I'm sorry.” She looked into the woman's tired eyes. “Mrs. Pawar, how does your husband cope with stress? I mean the mechanism.”

“He prays.”

“In the apartment?”

“Sometimes. He must be seen in public, to show himself as a humble man, and he goes to a temple here or among Indian-Americans on Third Avenue. However, he prefers to pray in the living room.”

“In ‘the peace of many choices,' ” Caitlin said.

Mrs. Pawar brightened. “Yes.”

“Then you'll understand, perhaps, what I'm about to say. When we pray, we close our eyes. We relax our bodies. We access a spiritual side that is driven by faith, not logic. I believe your daughter has done something like that, only much deeper. She spoke to me briefly about how she thinks she ‘disappears.' Maanik may have created what she thought was a safe place for herself inside, except her fears got in there
with her. They have become real things made of fire, loss, physical pain.”

“My poor girl—”

“Mrs. Pawar, if this
is
a self-induced trance, I must get ‘in there' and bring her out.”

The woman nodded as Caitlin spoke. There was a hint of hope in her eyes.

“I'm coming back tonight, with Ben,” Caitlin said. “In the meantime, I want you to do something for Maanik.”

“Anything.”

“Look after yourself. Feed yourself well, take a nap if you can, take a walk, even if it's just to take Jack London around the block.”

“But the way I look,” the woman said. “If I meet someone I know—”

“Chances are pretty good that anyone you run into around here has been impacted by the situation in Kashmir. They will understand and respect your privacy.”

Mrs. Pawar agreed and Caitlin checked her watch. She had a twelve-thirty session and could just make it. Excusing herself, she hurried from the apartment into the corridor. While she waited for the elevator, she registered that the atmosphere seemed different than before. The sense of omen seemed closer.

Exponentially closer.

Rushing to her appointment, Caitlin left a message for Ben telling him to clear his schedule for the evening, then grabbed a cab. Her mind scanned what she recalled about the Iranian boy. His brother was executed, he set himself on fire, he was hospitalized. She looked him up again in the newsletter. Logorrhea; no suggestion of a language or gestures, but then this was Iran. Even medical information didn't exactly get out intact.

Had Atash been trying to mimic some kind of pain
he
was feeling, expressing it as fire, or was it another cause, something deeper and not voluntary? Or was he simply rebelling against the murder of his
brother? Caitlin tried to do a search online to see if he was still alive but the cab ride was too short. She was then thrown into several straight hours of sessions with clients. Taking advantage of a short break in the late afternoon, she looked up the rat infestation at NYU. It seemed to be centered around an old mansion on Fifth Avenue, an exclusive club for world travelers. There were no teenagers on the premises, as far as her quick check could determine before her next client.

As her appointments rolled through the afternoon, Caitlin's regulars appeared to be doing surprisingly well. Most of them had been relying more heavily on group therapy in her absence, groups she had set up months ago. After her final client, she read a text from Ben saying he would meet her at the Pawars' apartment.

Before she left the office, Caitlin called on her colleague Dr. Anita Carter, who filled in for her when there were emergencies. African-American and originally from Atlanta, she had a classic New York approach to problems: acknowledge them, solve them, file them, and go to dinner. Caitlin seriously envied her uncanny ability to compartmentalize.

“Just a heads-up,” Anita said. “You've got a couple of bean counters who've expressed displeasure about your recent period of unavailability.”

“Let me guess,” Caitlin said, “Lauren from hospital admin and Phil from CUNY.”

“The lady's not just a healer, she's a psychic!” Anita said.

“I'll bet they used those very words, too,” Caitlin said. “ ‘Period of unavailability.' ”

“Why say ‘absence' when you can use something big and formidable? Just throw a little oil on those troubled waters, will you?”

“Yeah. I'll e-mail them, explain that these clients are exhibiting a desperate level of trauma.”

“Suicidal?”

“I don't think so,” Caitlin replied, “but they are highly unpredictable.”

“Well, remind Lauren and Phil about our liability unless we commit our assets—namely you—to the problem, and they'll back off,” Anita said. She fixed Caitlin with a knowing look. “Want to talk about any of it?”

“Maybe later,” Caitlin said, unable to reveal who she was treating. “I'm beat, I'll tell you that much. How's everybody else doing?”

“We're in a pretty quiet phase right now,” Anita replied. “There's still a couple weeks before the stress of December exams hits.”

“So you haven't seen anything out of the ordinary?”

Anita shook her head. “Anything specific on your mind?”

“No, I was just wondering.”

“Lady, you never just wonder. What is it?”

Caitlin made a
You got me
face. “The tension between India and Pakistan. It seems to be knocking people off balance.”

“A couple of the kids mentioned that, but there's so much hyperbole on the Web it's tough to know what's a real or a passing fear. A celebrity dies in a car crash, kids are afraid of cars for a day or two or three. Speaking of which, when you have the time, I want to talk about setting up focus groups on shared Internet and social media paranoia.”

“I like the idea,” Caitlin said. “Shared angst.”

“It's like terrier frenzy,” Anita said. “One dog gets upset, so another dog gets upset because
that
dog is upset, making the first dog even
more
upset.”

“Right, you have two Jack Russells,” Caitlin said. “Do they do that a lot?”

“Every time the doorbell rings,” she said. “Funny thing is, for all its problems I bless the Internet every day, no exaggeration. The more cases I read, the more analysis that's offered, the more I feel we can help people.”

Caitlin thanked her again for her help and began walking home. She was glad to hear that Anita's dogs weren't behaving out of the ordinary. She had enough trouble worrying about people without
adding more animals into the mix. She kept wondering, though, about what Anita had said in relation to mass anxiety.

What's that word for when a group turns this way and then that at the same time?

“Flocking,” that was it. Coming together in a group, banding for mutual protection from a danger, from fears that linger like a low, slow hum.

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

A
tash 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.

• • •

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.