A Vision of Fire (6 page)

CHAPTER 8

C
aitlin was thrown back into a wall, and the breath was knocked from her. Her arms felt weak as water as she tried to prop herself up.

If this is a personality split
, she thought,
please let increased strength
not
be part of it!

Caitlin jerked herself onto her knees and reached out through Maanik's flailing arms to touch her left ear. “Blackberries,” she said.

The girl's hands dropped. She took a violent, deep breath, as if she might scream to the heavens, and then exhaled slowly, until the in-breath came and a natural quiet rhythm took hold. Within seconds, Caitlin heard the soft deep breaths of sleep.

After lifting Maanik onto her bed, Caitlin and Mrs. Pawar left the girl to rest and retired to the living room, where Kamala had made tea.

“If you don't mind, I'd like to wait a few more minutes, make sure everything is all right,” Caitlin said.

“Of course,” said Mrs. Pawar as she sat in an armchair. “I am sorry to take you from your work.”

“This
is
my work,” Caitlin said.

Mrs. Pawar smiled, but only briefly. “What's wrong with my daughter?” she asked.

“I don't know,” Caitlin admitted. “But we're going to find out.”

“We did the right thing? Just now?”

“Absolutely.”

The older woman sipped her tea. “Nothing like this has ever happened in our family.”

“I was about to ask, Mrs. Pawar—were there ever rumors or whispers, about an aunt, a grandparent, a cousin?”

“Whispers?”

“Their mind, their behavior, habits—anything. I understand there would have been a reticence to discuss it.”

The woman shook her head and looked down. “We do not speak of such things, but one knows. There was nothing.”

Caitlin believed her.

“Mrs. Pawar, I understand that you must keep this matter quiet. But if your daughter continues to have episodes you're going to have to get her to a clinic for tests. She might have hit her head during the assassination attempt—”

“The school nurse checked her, said there was nothing.”

“There are conditions an MRI or CT scan can explore that a doctor cannot. I already mentioned this to Dr. Deshpande, and you may need to be a little more aggressive . . .”

“I see,” the woman said helplessly.

“Surely your husband won't object if it's necessary.”

Mrs. Pawar regarded her. It was a look that told Caitlin:
Yes. At this moment, given the Kashmir situation, he might resist
.

Jack London, released from his crate by the housekeeper, made the rounds, sniffing at their feet.

“She seems so vulnerable, so fragile,” said Mrs. Pawar, “so unlike herself.”

“She's stronger than you think, and she's not alone in this,” Caitlin said. “Whatever's going on, if she shows any unusual signs of unrest, remember what to do: you touch her ear . . .”

The woman nodded, more to reassure herself than anything, but Caitlin left the Pawars' apartment with a knot in her stomach.

During the cab ride back, she called her office to tell her receptionist that she would keep her eleven thirty. Then she texted Ben:
Some progress today, I'll call u tonight. Send me ur most secure email address.

There was no immediate response, but she wasn't expecting one. He would be at the talks. She watched the news crawl on the TV monitor in the backseat of the cab. The tensions between India and Pakistan were being described as “volatile,” with more troops being moved to the borders. The United States ambassador's proposal for a demilitarized zone between the nations had been met with derision in India, whose pundits pointed out that Pakistan could not even establish a de-terrorized zone within its own borders. Meanwhile the local news reported that in Queens, fistfights were erupting among Indian and Pakistani neighbors. Police presence in the subways had tripled, and the emergency management department had been quietly checking on the state of the city's old fallout shelters as potential neighborhood command centers. Nor was New York alone in its anxiety; across the nation survivalist and prepper groups had replenished their stocks of ammunition, causing a shortage, and disappeared off the grid. An Internet questionnaire called “If This Is the End, I Will . . .” had gone viral.

Caitlin turned the screen off and spent the rest of the cab ride in uncomfortable silence. It seemed that war fears rode the air with their own wireless source: people. Maanik and her mother had given them a personal face for Caitlin.

It was with a great sense of relief that Caitlin walked into her top-floor office on West Fifty-Eighth Street. She experienced such a sudden feeling of comfort that there was almost an audible click. After going through her routine—coffee on the thumbprint coaster Jacob made when he was five, purse in the lowest desk drawer, phone in the top drawer and muted, coat on the hanger behind the door—Caitlin reviewed her schedule, but her mind kept shifting back to Maanik.

A diagnosis of schizophrenia was premature and sketchy, since
schizophrenics understood that there was a “them” and a “me.” Maanik had no “me” during her episodes, at least not the “me” she'd been for sixteen years. But a diagnosis of dissociative identity ­disorder—a split personality—wasn't accurate either because multiple personalities rarely had delusions. They lived in the real world. Maanik was obviously reacting to something that wasn't there. A form of petit mal or grand mal was a possibility, yet sufferers would not respond to hypnosis the way Maanik had.

One size did not fit all here. What was Caitlin missing?

She wanted to see the girl when she wasn't experiencing the cycle of behaviors. Even watching her quietly eat dinner would help Caitlin establish a baseline and get a firsthand sense of who she was.

Give it a rest
, Caitlin told herself. She had never healed anybody on day one, and besides, lingering over one case was a poor way to greet another. Her eleven thirty appointment would be arriving in about ten minutes and she felt the relief of . . . not normality, there was no such thing, but of having an established therapeutic history and many more months to devote to the work. Neither of these essentials was available with Maanik.

Why was she so different from any kid Caitlin had ever seen?

She had a sudden inspiration to search for her online, to see if there were any videos of her before the assassination. She kicked herself for not thinking of it before. She expected the Pawars to keep something of a lock on her public persona; the daughter of a diplomat had to have a strong concept of privacy. But there were several videos on her school website of Maanik engaging in debates as part of their Model UN. Caitlin clicked on one and noticed immediately how sure the girl was of herself. She certainly was not faking extroversion, which made these repeated inward collapses even stranger. In another video, Maanik was starring as the fiancée of an eccentric British aristocrat in a school play; at one point she gestured excessively and intoned, “I'm not diseased. I'm mismanaged.” Maanik rolled her eyes and the line got a huge laugh from the audience.

She seemed utterly normal, entirely comfortable in her own skin, impressively so. There were none of the tics or hints of darkness that shrouded most of the kids Caitlin saw. Could the assassination attempt have done so much damage? If her father had died or been wounded, yes. If her mother had suffered some kind of collapse, perhaps. But those severe triggers did not exist here. The reaction simply was not proportionate. Caitlin needed to think this through further but her eleven thirty was knocking on the door.

Hours later, after five more appointments and two conference calls, it was time to pick up Jacob. She could tell as she approached the front door of her building that the temperature outside had dropped considerably. She snuggled into her coat collar and caught herself humming “Let It Snow.” As she stepped outside her humming stopped and she suddenly felt a chill that had nothing to do with the weather. It ran up her backbone and tickled out along her shoulder blades like a small animal. Instinctively, she moved closer to the wall, stood still, and looked around.

What the hell?

Her heart was thumping harder; her breaths grew shorter. There seemed to be a cold wind against her arms but there was no motion in her sleeves. She had goose bumps.

Get a grip
, she told herself.

She saw people picking up their cars from the garage across the street, a smoker by a tree in the tiny park on top of the garage, a group of college students hurrying by her, but nothing to explain the chill that remained. She felt exposed, pinned there as though these other people existed on another plane and she was alone. Or nearly so.

There was also an unsettling sense of being watched. It was not a flash of exposure, like walking in front of a tourist taking videos.

Barbara was right
, she thought. She was so deep in other peoples' issues she had lost her own protective skin.

A burst of greetings startled her as students from the Roosevelt Hospital day program hustled out of the building and enfolded her in their group. Caitlin walked to the subway with them, pushing the noise and shapes of the city away, but not the creeping chill that danced along her spine.

CHAPTER 9

D
odging and maneuvering with Jacob through the crowded subway, Caitlin tried hard to shake the odd paranoia that had seized her outside her office, but it was like swallowing an oversized bite of a sandwich. She usually tried to make a game of their dash through rush hour—Crazy Football or Running with the Gazelles—but not today. Jacob was deep in his own thoughts and she just wanted to get home.

The third-floor hallway seemed unusually quiet, the clang of the keys uncommonly hollow. It reminded her, unpleasantly, of the feeling she'd had at the Pawars' apartment. A sense that she was somehow in danger. Not Jacob, just her.

Unlocking the door, she made a mental note to talk to Barbara about this, then happily turned her attention to roasting broccoli and defrosting and heating a container of congee for dinner. Jacob went straight to his room. They had arrived home just in time for his weekly online chat with his father. Caitlin was surprisingly glad for Andy's call right now; even abnormal normalcy was welcome.

Andrew Thwaite, divorced with three kids, was a sociologist from Sydney whom Caitlin had met in Thailand three weeks after the 2004 tsunami. He had joined one of her relief efforts, which Ben
helped to coordinate through the under-secretary-general of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. When they met, Caitlin felt that he was “right for right now,” as she'd expressed it to Ben.

“The people I've talked to say he's kind of a d-bag, Cai,” Ben had said.

“Oh, you checked?”

“Captain of your team,” he said evasively.

“Well, he's smart, he's entertaining, he isn't making any promises to be something he's not, and he's six-three and ripped.”

“Uh-huh. I know the type, a swaggering narcissist.”

“Strong words, Ben.”

“I've been living in the shadow of miserable hotshots like him my whole life. He'll use you and leave you in the dust.”

“Only after I leave him in mine. Hey, is this about me or you, Ben?”

“Fair enough,” he conceded, “but I think you've entirely misunderstood the meaning of ‘relief efforts.' ”

The disagreement ended in laughter. But after passion trumped caution and she found out she was pregnant, she decided to keep the child. Andy was notified and had stayed far away, making everything blessedly simple.

Until recently.

Around the time Andy's youngest kid went to college, in 2011, he'd suddenly asked for weekly video calls with Jacob. She had no objection to that. She and Jacob had discussed it repeatedly and Jacob seemed happy to accept him on the same level as an upstairs neighbor. But six months ago Andy had asked Caitlin why she hadn't chosen a cochlear implant operation for Jacob when he was younger.

“Because it's Jacob's choice,” she said.

“Jacob is ten,” Andy pointed out. “The earlier the operation is performed, the easier the learning curve—”

“Having to work a little harder is a fair price for his freedom of choice.”

“I don't think that's a choice a fifth grader should be allowed to make.”

At that point Caitlin had descended with Thor's hammer. Under no circumstances was Andy to have that conversation with her child. She delivered the message in a mode that had cowed recalcitrant bureaucrats around the world, and it seemed to work on Andy.

Still, Caitlin always checked Jacob when he came back from their video chats for signs that he'd had an uncomfortable conversation with his father. There were none today; he moved right along from a question about whether kids rode kangaroos in the outback to the topic of his homework, an opinion essay on the ethics of zoos.

As they discussed the different sides of the zoo issue, the back of Caitlin's mind was chewing over her own ethical dilemma: sending the video of Maanik's hypnosis session to Ben. She had already received his secure e-mail address, and she already knew she was going to send the file to him, despite it being against the rules of doctor-patient confidentiality. She concluded that because Ben was a friend of the family there was a chance the Pawars would agree if she asked—but she needed more certainty than just a chance. Sharing it with anyone other than Ben would be indefensible, yet she needed an outsider's perspective, confirmation of something she had begun wondering about, something she couldn't be sure was true. A full understanding of Maanik's very elusive inner world depended on this.

• • •

After dinner, when she and Jacob had finished washing the dishes, Caitlin sent Ben the file, then called him online. When his image appeared he was looking at something else on the screen and typing, and she could tell he was beat.

“Hey,” he said.

“For horses,” she replied.

He smirked. It wasn't funny, but Caitlin was. They were. That had always been their way: when one was down the other always took the high, droll road to help out.

“It's taking this long to download?” she asked.

“It's getting here ‘bit by bit,' ” he joked back.

“Yikes. Is the UN giving employees hand-me-down computers from 1995?”

“Clay and styluses.” He smiled. “I'm using the landline to download the file, plus I'm jumping it through a few other hoops. Extra protections.” He finally glanced at her. “I'm surprised you sent it, Cai.”

“It wasn't an easy decision but desperate minds call for desperate measures.”

“Are you feeling desperate?”

“I meant Maanik's mind.” She thought for a moment. “No, I'm not desperate. Yet.”

Ben glanced away, somber. Then he fixed on her again. “How
are
you feeling?”

“About what?” she said, hedging.

“Managing this in the epicenter of a world crisis.”

“I think we're all in that epicenter,” she said. “Any progress there?”

He shook his head. “You avoided the question.”

Now it was Caitlin who looked away. What she wanted to say was,
Honestly, I'm not myself and I don't know why
.
But this call was not about her.

“I'm very, very concentrated,” she said. “Sharp as a knife.”

“Don't lose yourself in this, Cai.”

“I won't. I know how to work my switchboard pretty well.” She smiled.

“ ‘Switchboard,' ” he muttered. “You realize we may be the last generation who knows what that means? I had to translate ‘VCR' for a young observer from Bhutan today. They had no idea what I was talking about.”

“I have no idea what you're talking about,” she teased.

“Nice.” He grinned. “You got any new ‘someone walks into a bar' jokes?”

Caitlin laughed and shook her head. “Those were the worst jokes ever,” she said apologetically.

“That's what made them so good. My all-time favorite? Ahem—‘A skeleton walks into a bar and orders a gin and tonic. And a mop.' ”

“I worry about you, Ben.” She rolled her eyes. “And no. I kind of outsourced the bulk of my sense of humor to Jacob a long time ago. He's got natural silliness and it's more than enough for one household.”

Ben shook his head. There was an imperceptibly longer, perceptibly more awkward silence. “What about the other parts of your life? Are you seeing anybody?”

“No. And why do we always have to have this conversation?”

“Not always—”

“You're like my mother,” she went on. “Or more accurately, my sister, who's due to gently kick me in the ass about that any day now, so I don't need it from you too.”

“Okay, okay,” he said. “I wasn't gonna kick you.”

They looked at each other. “Sorry,” she said. “I didn't mean to go off on you. Just a little stressed. Won't happen again.”

“Great. Anyhow, the video's downloaded. Let's see what we've got.”

Caitlin didn't miss the quick change of topic but filed the observation away for later.

Ben opened the video and tucked it in the corner of the chat window so they could both watch.

“Jeez,” he said when Maanik started speaking in gibberish.

“I know.”

“Wow,” he said again at the moment in the hypnosis when Caitlin felt she had been thrown into a wall. “What happened there?”

Caitlin didn't answer so that he could focus on the use of the “blackberries” cue. She wanted him to know the cue in case the am
bassador asked about it, but that wasn't the only reason she'd shared the video.

At the end of the video Ben ran it back again to the segment with Maanik's gibberish. Then they watched it a third time.

“You think that could be a language?” she asked.

Ben made a noncommittal sound and paused the video. He sat back, thinking. “There's a clipped similarity to Japanese in it,” he mused.

“I thought that too.”

“Right there,” he said, and rewound the segment again. “You hear that?”

Maanik was saying, “
Thyodularasi
.”

“Yes . . . ?” Caitlin said.

“That's a distinctly Asiatic ‘r,' ” Ben told her.

“It's prevalent throughout,” Caitlin said. “That's what makes the whole thing sound like Japanese, right?”

“That's part of it, along with the alveolar stops on the ‘d's and ‘t's. But at the beginning of that word, that's a very hard ‘th.' Those sounds don't coexist in any language.”

“Not anywhere?”

“Well, we don't have every tribal language on the planet down, but as a rule that ‘r' and that ‘th' don't evolve in the same tongue.”

The video flicked off and the screen reverted to just Ben, who was rubbing his eyes.

“Pretty amazing, right?” she said.

“What the hell is going on with that girl?”

“That's what I'm trying to find out, if the Pawars will let me.”

“Hold on, Caitlin. All you have to worry about is getting them through this period of the negotiations.”

“What?” She felt as though she'd been head-butted.

“That's why I brought you in,” he reminded her. “There are teams of people who can help once the ambassador doesn't have to worry about the media.”

“I understand that, but I'm not—I mean, I don't just want to be some stopgap.”

“Cai, I didn't mean that—I meant that this isn't in my control. I suspect they'll take her back to India as soon as we're clear of all the political barbed wire.”

“And what about Maanik? Ben, something is happening to that girl. I'm not just going to spackle her.”

“I wasn't implying that,” he said defensively. “Look, we're both tired and I shouldn't have said what I said. I'll back your play, whatever it is. I just know how you get when you're invested in a case, so keep a distance, okay?”

“I don't know if I can.”

He smiled. “A small distance. For your own mental well-being.”

“A small distance,” she agreed, and forced herself to smile back.

“And now I'm going to put myself to bed,” he said. “We'll see what my subconscious has to say about all this.”

“Is that all you've got?” she teased.

“I'm not a university go-getter anymore,” he said. “Those days ain't comin' back.”

Caitlin hid her disappointment. She'd shared the video with him so they could discuss that last part of the hypnosis, the wall moment. But the man needed rest before going back to the peace table.

“Good night,” she said.

“Good night, Cai,” he said, and raised a hand with effort as he signed off.

She raised a hand at the dark screen.

After answering a few e-mails and reading a few headlines in the professional newsletters, she went to say good night to Jacob. He was buzzing with energy and Caitlin had to sign “good night” to him so many times, curving her right hand over her left hand to say, “Night, night, night!” that she felt like a robot—so she walked stiff-legged, arms outstretched like the Frankenstein monster, toward the door. Many giggles later, Jacob finally drifted into silence.

Amazingly, Caitlin too managed to fall asleep at a decent time. But just a few hours later, she woke in a panic, feeling like she was clawing upward through blankets. The sign for “night” was stuck on a loop in her head like a song refrain, along with an old memory of Jacob trying to coach her signing.

“Mommy, it's in your elbows, fix your elbows!”

Damn it
, Caitlin thought as three o'clock became four o'clock. Why were elbows stuck in her brain? It had to be Maanik.

She got out of bed and turned on her tablet, booted the video of Maanik. She watched it from the moment the girl began speaking gibberish. Caitlin's spine straightened and her brain woke up. There was a definite change to how the girl's elbows were moving. After several viewings she was certain that they were inscribing specific arcs at specific times. Maanik was repeating some of the gestures, which suggested they had meaning—and might indicate that the gibberish had meaning too.

Caitlin took a deep breath, trying not to get overly excited. But she felt that she had just made a major breakthrough in this case. And if that were true, it might be possible to guide Maanik out of the morass sooner than she'd thought.