A Vision of Fire (9 page)

CHAPTER 14

G
aelle and Caitlin set a time and place for the following day. Then Caitlin called her parents on Long Island and her father agreed to come to the city to stay with Jacob. She jumped online to reserve a flight to Haiti leaving early the next morning with a return late that night. After booking transportation to and from the airports, she focused on the final necessity, a guide and translator. She did not consider calling Ben or even the ambassador to help, as she knew that most Haitians hated the UN. They believed that one of its camps had introduced cholera to the country for the first time in a century. Thousands had died; a lawsuit against the UN was crawling through the New York judicial system.

She called Sharon Tanaka at the World Health Organization instead. Sharon was a tough nut with budgets but an excellent connector. She agreed to find a good person to meet Caitlin the next morning at a hotel conveniently located in Port-au-Prince and escort her to Jacmel.

Logistics settled, Caitlin reached for the top shelf of her bedroom closet, where she kept a go-bag for emergencies. She banged the wall accidentally as she did so.

Jacob banged back—gently, reminding her to chill.

She knocked back, chilled. The sense of urgency wasn't gone, but now at least it had a direction.

• • •

Waking from a dreamless sleep just after dawn—and a half hour before her alarm was to go off—Caitlin put her mind to rescheduling her appointments. Dr. Anita Carter was on call if any of her kids had an emergency. Caitlin sent Mrs. Pawar an e-mail with the video from Haiti attached, explaining why she was going. She added that if there was another episode and the cue failed, they should try to administer one of the sedatives during one of her more conversational phases, assuming she would progress through the cycle she had demonstrated. Caitlin would change her flight back if necessary.

Caitlin also took a minute to check the news online before Jacob woke. The headlines were in big, bold type, ugly and ominous. Indian and Pakistani troops were being massed along the Line of Control—a buffer between India's Jammu and Kashmir and Pakistan's Azad Jammu and Kashmir—as well as near the Zero Point, which lay between the Indian states of Gujarat and Rajasthan and Pakistan's province of Sindh. The reporting was frank, the editorials pleading, the faces in the photographs set in every shade of fear, whether they were citizens, soldiers, or politicians.

A spark
, Caitlin thought. That was all it would take to ignite those long, fierce borders. Not necessarily a bullet there but a wrong word here. She was sure the Pawars would insulate Maanik from the news as best they could, but there was no way of knowing how much of her father's anxiety was being communicated subconsciously and whether that affected her condition. How could it not?

Jacob stalked behind her and put his arms around her. She turned and kissed his forehead.

“Morning, hon,” she signed.

“I am a zombie,” he replied with a mushy face.

“Then go make us oat brains.” She smiled. “Get it? Brains . . . bran.”

He acknowledged the joke with a grunt and shuffled to the kitchen to make breakfast.

Joseph Patrick O'Hara arrived shortly before seven. He was a big man with a pile of white hair and a chronic smile in his eyes. Jacob left the breakfast table to hug him around the waist while Caitlin kissed his cheek.

“Thanks, Pop,” she said. “It's good to see you.”

“Always a pleasure,” he replied, rubbing Jacob's hair.

That tended to be the length of their conversations whenever he drove in from Long Island to “sit”: she was always running late, he was always misjudging traffic, and they usually only spoke as she was racing into the hallway. Her father hugged her quickly as she headed to the waiting car service.

“I love you both!” she said at the door. “Jacob, you can stay up late but no video games, surfing the Web, or zombies after eight thirty. See you Tuesday.”

Caitlin was on her tablet for much of the four-hour flight. Most of that time was spent answering e-mails from patients and colleagues. She also went to the UN Youth Development website, which had first noted the YouTube video of Gaelle Anglade. There were no other reports of anything similar, but Caitlin couldn't help thinking of the boy in Iran who had first exhibited logorrhea, then set himself on fire. There had been no mention of gestures with him but perhaps . . . perhaps she was being hasty. She wouldn't even know this case in Haiti was related until she saw Gaelle face-to-face.

The airport in Port-au-Prince was a modern affair and the van to the hotel in Pétion-Ville, a wealthy district south of the city, was an air-conditioned, scented bubble. “Real” Haiti would begin when she left the district.

The hotel receptionist pointed her to the roofed section of the courtyard near the pool. That was where people met guests, she said.

The wicker chairs and tables were in deep shadow compared to the brilliant sunlight outside. Caitlin stood looking around and saw a white man approaching who seemed vaguely familiar. He was wearing scrubs and had just been sitting with two Haitians who were dressed more for the Port-au-Prince markets than a Pétion-Ville hotel. The duo remained sitting at a table out of the sun as he came forward.

“I'm Aaron Basher,” the white man said, offering his hand. Caitlin suddenly recognized him as Gaelle's doctor in the video.

“Caitlin O'Hara,” she replied.

“Sharon Tanaka asked—actually, she insisted—that I meet you and take you to Jacmel.”

“That sounds like her usual MO.” Caitlin smiled as she followed him to the table. She did not ask about his companions. He would introduce them in his own way.

“New Jersey?” she guessed about his accent.

“West Orange.” He nodded. “Go Jets,” he added as a somewhat sour joke. A football stadium with plush skyboxes was the polar opposite of Haiti.

They reached the others, who were uncommonly still in their wicker seats.

“Dr. O'Hara, I'd like to introduce you to Madame Mambo Langlois.” Aaron gestured toward a very thin, very formidable Haitian woman. He slightly emphasized “mambo” and gave the tiniest of bows.

Caitlin picked up on his cues: he was hoping she either knew what a mambo was or would notice his extra sign of respect. She bowed slightly and thanked the woman for accompanying Aaron. The woman did not rise from her chair or speak but she did offer Caitlin her hand. Caitlin accepted the handshake, which was something of a compliment from a Vodou high priestess.

“And this is Houngan Enock Capois, the madame's son.” The Vodou priest was about thirty, with the same startling cheekbones as his mother. He was wearing mirrored sunglasses and an antique
woman's ring on his right hand. It looked odd, almost ridiculous at first, until Caitlin realized the gold and emeralds were real in this poorest of nations. He barely shook her hand. His
disdain was clear.

“So, let's get to Jacmel,” Aaron announced with a sudden, pointed cheerfulness. The priest and priestess walked ahead, and Aaron managed to steal a second with Caitlin as he picked up her small suitcase. “They were waiting outside my house this morning,” he murmured.

“Is that common?”

He shook his head. “They seem to ‘know' things,” he whispered. “Gossip, probably.”

“Do they speak English?”

He nodded.

And then they were back within earshot, loading up the white four-door Land Cruiser Aaron had borrowed. Enock Capois immediately claimed the front seat, leaving Caitlin to sit with his mother in the back. Caitlin stopped herself from smiling. An assumption of hierarchy seemed almost quaint, but there was something preferable about sitting with the madame anyway.

With Aaron driving, the truck began the long climb up the hills outside of Pétion-Ville. Route 101 led south away from Port-au-Prince. It was a decently paved two-lane road lined with cobblestone gutters, sometimes concrete walls. Dark and brilliant greenery tumbled over the latter, backed by palm trees and a cloudless blue sky that seemed as flat and taut as a drum. But less than ten minutes later they began to see occasional pedestrians walking along the side of the road, carrying plastic jugs, plastic bags, bundled blue tarps, and car tires. If there was a universal sign of poverty, it was this: adults and children on the march, recycling, reusing, repurposing items that could barely buy them a single meal.

The mother and son seemed disinclined to talk and Caitlin decided there could be no harm in asking Aaron about Gaelle's episode in the market. That was, after all, why she had come.

Aaron recounted the incredible story—drowning on dry land, CPR, coughing up nothing—without editorializing. He had decided not to judge and Caitlin appreciated that.

“Gaelle mentioned that she had a CAT scan?” she said.

“Yes.”

“I was surprised to hear one was so readily available.”

“I snuck her in,” Aaron said bluntly. “We usually need the machine Saturday nights or on Sundays. Gangs smash the solar-panel streetlights on weekends so they can operate in the dark, so all the blunt-force head trauma tends to happen then.”

Madame Langlois spoke up: “People are angry.”

Caitlin regarded her. “Which people?”

“All. You know the name of the market where the video was made? Croix-des-Bossales.”

“The Slave Market,” Aaron translated.

“We keep the name to remind us. Someone always wants to be the new master.”

Her son reached up and turned Aaron's rearview mirror so that he could look at Caitlin without turning his head.

“You are a psychiatrist?” he asked. His accent was thicker than his mother's but his English was just as polished.

“Yes.”

“I have been to college too,” he said. “Do you teach people that they should not fear the world?”

“In a way. I help them to see that—”

“Is that what you are going to say to this young woman of Haiti?”

“I won't know until I—”

“Nature conspires against Haiti,” he said. “World governments conspire against us. Our past conspires against us. She has a dark life ahead of her.”

Caitlin heard Aaron mutter, “He's got a point.”

“Is that why she's so agitated?” Caitlin asked. She glanced at the man's mother. “Has someone or some
thing
chosen her to express Haiti's pain?”

She had kept the question broad, hoping that they would narrow the focus. Aaron seemed to tense; the “something” reference opened the door to gods and demons, the personifications of centuries of fear.

Enock did not take the bait. He just sucked his teeth. Aaron kept his eyes on the twisting road and pedestrians.

The madame broke the short silence. “I heard Dr. Basher treated knife wounds from the Group Zero fight two nights ago.”

Enock suddenly lost all interest in Caitlin. He pelted Aaron with questions about the victims, who apparently included some of his friends. Aaron gently restored his rearview mirror to its position as he answered that the wounds were not life-threatening, and gave Caitlin a warning look.

While Enock processed the information about his friends, the madame looked out the side window.

“Do you know that Vodou is currently illegal in Haiti?” she asked, clearly to Caitlin, though she was not looking at her.

“I thought it was protected in the constitution.”

“The new constitution last year did not include this protection.”

“I'm sorry. Religious freedom should not be optional.”

“We have been attacked for dancing, for our rites. There have been stonings of Vodou priestesses.”

“I didn't know.”

“So you understand, with pressure descending upon us, we are . . . cautious.”

Caitlin nodded once, twice. The woman was not apologizing, simply explaining her reserve.

“We are also proud,” the madame added.

“I understand, and my concern for Gaelle is genuine,” Caitlin replied. “Genuine and without judgment.”

“But you do not believe in demons,” she said.

“I don't believe in labels,” Caitlin replied.

The madame nodded and stared out the window again. There were fewer houses along the road now, and most of them were shacks.
The rounded mountaintops, deforested over the past century, looked bare and hungry.

“May I ask,” Caitlin said, thinking back to what Gaelle said and choosing her words carefully, “if
you
believe in spirits?”

The madame did not answer. Aaron's wary look in the mirror told her that was a yes.

Caitlin pressed on respectfully.

“What do you see when you look out there? Does it just look like a landscape to you, or is there more?”

The madame reached into her bag, pulled out a cigar, lit it, and smoked for a while. She said, “In Africa, elephants hear the footfalls of other elephants hundreds of miles away. They carry a map of the land in their minds far beyond anything we have. Pigeons, too. Plenty of other birds, other animals.”

“Subsonic communication,” Caitlin said, merging the worlds of science and magic.

The madame smoked. “Humans have this too. We don't use it.”

“Do you?”

Aaron frowned at Caitlin.

“I see only my tired country,” the madame said. “Only that.”

A silence stretched into quiet. Caitlin allowed the motion of the car among the hills to lull her into a reflective state—
Observe and let go, tide in, tide out
—but she was hoping that somehow answers, or at least the right questions, would rise from these depths. The torment of Maanik and now Gaelle was never far away.

Just over an hour later they crested a hill and saw the Caribbean sparkling below them. The southern coast, dotted with beaches, was like a flute channeling Haiti's tired breaths, sweetening the sound. Fortunately and unfortunately, the beaches were being discovered by foreign investors. Jacmel already had several resort communities, including one that was painted aggressively white. Caitlin was sure the planners had thought of it as bright and cheerful, but to a people who built mostly with gray concrete, the paint was an insult. Yet tourists
brought money for meals and education. The Anglade Charter Fishing office was tucked behind the slim, New Orleans–style columns of a pale green house. It would not have existed without the vacationers. Nor would Gaelle's education as a nurse.