A Vision of Fire

CHAPTER 13

Caitlin ceded her Sunday morning with Jacob to one of his school friends, who’d come over to plan a partnered science project. Determined not to resort to working, Caitlin found herself sitting on the couch watching TV—and the face of Ambassador Pawar as reporters’ microphones bristled around him. Earlier that morning, the entire Indian delegation had, as a group, walked out of the United Nations building. Within minutes, the Pakistan delegation had followed. The talks had imploded.

Ambassador Pawar was holding fast to his diplomatic façade as he read a statement. “By no means does this presage a final decision on behalf of either country,” he said. “We are simply cooling our minds for future discussions.”

Caitlin hoped there was some truth to it, that the delegations had simply burned out. Yet as she inspected the ambassador’s face, she saw a set to his jaw that she had only seen when he was speaking of Maanik’s troubles. She suspected the disruption of the talks had been caused by something much more serious than exhaustion. She considered calling Ben, who had been silent since their discussion about the video.

Just then her phone buzzed. Speak of the devil. The text was from Ben but there was no message, only a video link. The owner of the video had posted it with a caption: “Crazy Haiti!” and a winking emoticon. Caitlin clicked the link and gasped. The first thing she saw was a young Haitian woman, her eyes rolled to the sky, her left hand angled away from her body, her right arm arcing across her torso—precisely the same gesture Maanik had made in her trance.

With a deep chill racing down her back, Caitlin watched the video all the way through. The familiar, unintelligible speech—it had to be speech—was difficult to hear on the recording. She thought she recognized two other gestures; then the young woman started screaming and a few minutes later the recording ended. Caitlin immediately watched it again, leaning forward from the couch and hunching over her phone.

What the hell is going on? she wondered. Two young women, geographically isolated, culturally unconnected, with the same physio-psychological symptoms? If there was a trigger, it had to be found. If there was more information that could help Maanik, she had to obtain it.

Just as she registered the silence behind her in the dining nook, she heard a sharp rap on the table. She turned to see both children staring at her in concern. Though his hearing aid was on, Jacob had knocked to get her attention.

“Mom, are you okay?” he said and signed.

“I’m fine,” she signed back. “Everything’s okay.”

“Who’s that screaming?” he signed.

Caitlin realized she should have muted her phone as she watched the video.

“It’s a girl,” she signed. “A client,” she said, hedging.

“Are you going to help her?”

“If she’ll let me,” Caitlin signed back, and it wasn’t a lie: she was going to have a session with this young woman even if she had to catch a flight to Haiti that night. Caitlin patted his shoulder and headed to her bedroom. Behind her Jacob rapped on the table again. She turned.

“Are you leaving soon?” he signed with a sigh.

She half-laughed and signed, “Knock before entering my brain, kiddo.”

He laughed too. “I did!” he signed. Then he quickly resumed his work with his friend. He knew he wasn’t allowed to press for details about her “kids,” as he had once called them.

Caitlin’s phone buzzed in her hand. A text gave a young woman’s name—Gaelle Anglade—with an address in Jacmel, Haiti, and an international phone number. There was also a message from Ben: UN Youth Development office says she’s fine. Taken to hospital released within hour. English-speaker.

That last was a little push. Ben knew Caitlin all too well. She sat on her bed, took a very deep breath, and tapped in the phone number.

“Allo, Anglade Charter Fishing,” said a young woman’s voice.

“Hello, is Gaelle Anglade there?”

“I am Gaelle,” she answered.

That was unexpected. The young woman’s voice was unhurried; Caitlin made sure hers was the same. “Hi, Gaelle. My name is Dr. Caitlin O’Hara and I am calling from New York City. Do you have a minute?”

There was a brief hesitation. “Do you need a boat?”

“Sounds like a great idea but perhaps some other day.” Caitlin chuckled. “Gaelle, I have a patient who I think is experiencing the same thing that happened to you in the market yesterday.”

Gaelle was silent for so long Caitlin said, “Hello?” to see if she had hung up.

“Are you a friend of Dr. Basher?” Gaelle’s voice was cautious, thick with distrust.

“I don’t know him.”

“Then… you saw that video?”

“I did,” Caitlin admitted. “It was a terrible invasion of your privacy and I’m sorry. I would like to help.”

There was silence, but it was a connected silence. She had not ended the call.

“How?” the young woman asked. It was not so much a question as a challenge.

“My patient has had repeated episodes, and while I have treated them I am still searching for a cause. I believe that talking with you might help.” Caitlin paused, then said, “I am concerned for you as well as for her, and very interested to learn if you too have had other episodes.”

“I do not have demons,” Gaelle stated. She seemed embarrassed.

“Of course not!” Caitlin replied. “Good lord, no!” She was well aware of what the woman would be up against in her culture, where Catholics, Protestants, and Vodou believers did not always live free of friction.

Caitlin heard the young woman speak away from the phone in Haitian Creole, talking to a male voice in the background. When she returned to the call, she asked Caitlin to repeat her name slowly and said she was looking her up online.

Caitlin obliged and heard typing. “You live in Jacmel?”

“Yes.”

“May I ask why you were in Port-au-Prince yesterday?”

“I train women at the market to use smartphones. It is a combination literacy and technology program.”

“Do you work for a phone company?”

“No, for my stepmother. She takes people out to fish. I am also studying to be a nurse. I would like to be a social worker so I find visiting programs to volunteer with. I have found your website, doctor.” Her voice turned upward. “You are a psychiatrist.”

“That is correct. I work with young adults.”

“Do you think I am ill? Mentally?”

“Not at all. I believe that you had a reaction to something—”

“Like an allergy? Peanuts? We don’t have food allergies in Haiti,” she said with disgust. “We cannot afford to.”

“I don’t believe it was digested or airborne,” Caitlin replied, as she would to a fellow professional. “It was something else.”

“I see.”

“I want to try and find out what it was. Gaelle, can I come see you? Can I meet you tomorrow?”

She heard the girl say, “Pas bon, pas bon,” but wasn’t sure whether she was saying “Bad, bad” to her or to the person with her.

“Gaelle?” Caitlin pressed. She didn’t want her to jump off the phone.

“No, thank you,” Gaelle said defensively. “I had a CAT scan yesterday, in Port-au-Prince. There is nothing wrong with me. That is in the past.”

“Gaelle, my other patient has had multiple experiences this past week. It appears the past does not always stay past. I’m afraid that what happened in the market could happen again. I just want to be sure. That’s why I am willing to fly down.”

The girl was silent. Caitlin remained patient.

“I am not sick,” Gaelle repeated. “But I want to be a good nurse. I want to help you help your other patient.”

Caitlin hadn’t realized she was holding her breath until she exhaled. “Thank you. I couldn’t ask for anything more. So you’ll see me then?”

“I will.”

CHAPTER 14

Gaelle 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 something 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.

The door to the office was open and Caitlin, first in, watched Gaelle stand up behind her desk as the little group strode in. The first thing Caitlin noticed was the slightly sunken look around Gaelle’s hazel eyes. This young woman had not been sleeping well. Otherwise, her hair had been freshly braided and pulled up into a chignon, and she was wearing a pale yellow blouse. Everything about her and the office was tidy, tucked in, as neatly organized as a nurse’s station in a hospital. And Gaelle’s manner was purposeful, just shy of abrupt.

The young woman did not seem overly pleased to see Dr. Basher or the Vodou family, but she greeted them courteously and shook hands. A surprisingly tall, strong middle-aged woman with a creased face and worried eyes appeared from a back room. She had an air of reticence that had grown over her formidable physicality like a vine on a wall. Gaelle introduced her as her stepmother, Marie-Jeanne, and she was cordial to the madame and her son, slightly less so with the Americans. Caitlin quickly asked to sit alone with Gaelle in the small garden in the back. Marie-Jeanne agreed to mind the office for a few minutes and Aaron took the madame and her son around the corner for coffee. They went willingly, the madame giving a shrug as if to say, Free coffee is free coffee.

Gaelle made it clear by her proper, unrelaxed manner that she had no interest in small talk. Caitlin asked her some basic questions about her family’s medical history, and Gaelle answered. Caitlin marked her answers in a small, unintimidating notebook.

“I want to make sure you understand,” Caitlin went on, “that you don’t need to feel embarrassed or ashamed about our talk.”

“This happened through no device of my doing,” Gaelle replied frostily. “What have I to be ashamed of?”

“I was not referring to the incident,” Caitlin said. “I meant my questions.”

Gaelle seemed embarrassed by her own defensiveness. She softened a little. “Please ask the questions you need to help your patient.”

“Thank you again. You said your mother died a few months after you were born. You were raised by your father?”

“Until I was sixteen, four years ago. Now he lives in the Dominican Republic. He works in a hotel.”

“Why did he leave?”

“The money is a little better there. I encouraged him to go.”

Caitlin smiled. It had no effect. “Dr. Basher explained to you what happened in the market? That you showed symptoms of drowning and hypothermia?”

Gaelle nodded once.

“Have you ever come close to drowning?”

“No.”

“Do you go out with your stepmother on the fishing boat?”

“Rarely. I have my work and my studies. I have little free time.”

“Do you ever swim in the ocean?”

“As I said, there is little free time.”

“What about when you were a child?” Caitlin pressed. “Might something have happened then?”

“Dr. O’Hara, I am from a town in the mountains where we walked for an hour to get our daily water. We moved here in 2012. An organization offered to establish fishing businesses for Haitians.”

“So you were inland during the 2010 earthquake?”

“Yes. I was not near the tsunami that struck Jacmel. I only saw trees falling, shacks collapsing onto the people inside them.” She closed her mouth, lips pressed tightly together.

“Gaelle, has anything happened recently—anything upsetting?” Caitlin was thinking of Maanik and the assassination attempt.

“Life is not easy here,” she said. “That is upsetting.”

“I understand,” Caitlin said. “I was asking about anything specific. Something that made you fearful, afraid?”

Gaelle took a moment. Her pinched expression did not suggest someone who was trying to remember something. Rather, she seemed uncertain about what to share.

“There are gangs who come out at night, from Port-au-Prince,” she said. “We go inside to escape the biting insects—but then the other hunters, they know where to find us.”

Caitlin felt a wave of anxiety rise as she imagined being afraid to walk in the town at night, being afraid of strangers.

“Were you hurt?”

Gaelle shook her head brusquely.

“Threatened?”

“They touch, they push, they grab,” she said with disgust in her voice. “Sometimes too much. That is not new. I am all right.”

Gaelle was not all right, and Caitlin hurt for her while resenting her own helplessness. But the psychiatrist accepted that she wasn’t getting anywhere with this conversation. And worse, she sensed that Gaelle was pulling up the drawbridge. She had to try something more direct.

“Gaelle, are you familiar with therapeutic hypnotism? Using a trance to access your subconscious?”

“A little. I researched psychiatry online last night.”

“Because…?”

“I like to know things,” she answered evasively.

“So do I.” Caitlin smiled.

The girl sat stony-faced. She did not want to bond.

“Gaelle, I have been using this technique with my other patient. I would like very much to try it with you.”

Before she even made the request Caitlin knew that Gaelle would say no. This young woman had fought for control in a country that afforded little. Structured time and a structured mind were as close as she could come to feeling safe.

“Before you answer,” Caitlin jumped in, “I want to explain that I am not asking this lightly. If I thought there was any other way to identify the cause of your episode, I would suggest it. This is emergency psychiatric medicine.”

Gaelle stared at her, placed her chin in her hand. “Do you believe that I am mentally ill?”

“I told you over the phone, I do not,” Caitlin said emphatically.

Gaelle stared at her a little longer, then stood. “I will discuss it with my stepmother. Please come back in a half hour.”

CHAPTER 15

Caitlin spent the time watching waves slide across the beach. She had always enjoyed going to Coney Island or Jones Beach as a kid, but back then the ocean was an adventure. Now it was a mystery. She remembered her dream, the black wave rolling toward her.

Is that the ultimate paradox of life, she wondered, that the universe should become less clear with age?

Yes, she decided with a last, admiring glance at the sea as she dusted sand from her butt. She looked at a grain among grains on the tip of her index finger.

“You were here before we were,” she said.

Caitlin did not brush the sand away but left it, like a second skin, and headed back to the pale green house. Now, away from the fresh sea breeze, she was starting to sweat through her blouse. The afternoon heat surpassed 90 degrees, typical for October in Haiti. Sunset and stronger winds from the Caribbean would provide some relief in the evening, but then mosquitoes and fleas would become plentiful. The universe had a cruel sense of humor.

A dozen people had clustered on the street by the Anglade office, not too close to the veranda. They were all Haitian and were loosely divided into two groups, those staring mutely at the house and those who were chatting with each other. Word had apparently spread about the Anglades’ visitors, but was it Caitlin or the Vodou clergy from the city who were attracting the attention? As soon as one person in the gathering saw her, they all turned their heads, fell into a stony silence, and watched her approach. There were no smiles, only cautious eyes and defensively lifted chins.

A man in a priest’s collar called to her in French or Creole, she wasn’t sure which. She replied only, “Excusez-moi.” Although she heard him start again, Caitlin didn’t break her pace toward the door. It was not the time to engage with anyone else, not now.

The door to the office was open, in keeping with tropical etiquette. Madame Langlois, her son, and Aaron had arrived before her. Houngan Enock had been speaking fervently to Marie-Jeanne; he stopped when Caitlin entered. The madame was perched in a corner holding her blue tarp bag on her lap with the patience of ages. Aaron was on his cell phone in the room behind the office. He was talking to the clinic and hydrating with a two-liter bottle of water.

As Caitlin made her way across the room she watched Gaelle, who was sitting at her desk in a semblance of normal working life, a cup of jasmine tea losing steam in a saucer nearby. The young woman was drawing on a small notepad and Caitlin leaned in for a closer look. She saw crescent marks in the shape of triangles, grouped into one large triangle. The symbols meant nothing to her but she didn’t have long to examine them. Gaelle moved the notepad aside and pulled a brochure over it. Gaelle’s guard was back up, and Caitlin thought better of asking about the drawing she had just hidden away.

“Is everything all right?” she asked instead.

Gaelle nodded.

“Have you had time to think on your own?” Caitlin did not emphasize the last three words but her meaning was clear. “This is your decision,” she added.

Gaelle shook her head and seemed about to speak, but Houngan Enock interrupted. “We do not value loneliness in Haiti, doctor.”

“What does that mean exactly?” Caitlin queried, restraining her increasing defensiveness.

“What I said. We are here to help her with this important decision.”

They heard an upswelling of noise from the street. Caitlin looked through the window. The group outside had increased in size and intensity.

“You are certainly bringing a lot of ‘help,’” Caitlin said quietly.

Gaelle gave her the ghost of a smile. At last, a connection, Caitlin thought.

Gaelle’s stepmother spoke in Creole. Gaelle translated for Caitlin. “She is saying, ‘Don’t blame our visitors. Since the video was on the Internet, we have been seeing many strangers around. Some Haitian, some white.’”

Caitlin spoke up. “Have they said anything to you, Gaelle? Done anything?”

“Only talk,” the girl answered unhappily. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Yes, it does. You should not have to live with that.” Caitlin cautiously moved a hand across the desk toward her. “Please let me help you.”

“So they can talk more?” Enock challenged.

“So I can help you stop an incident like the last one if it happens again.”

Gaelle looked at Caitlin, then at her desk, and shook her head slowly. “I must say no, doctor.”

“But why?”

Gaelle’s stepmother said something quickly, made an axe-like gesture with her hand. Gaelle translated, though it was unnecessary. “The decision is made.”

Enock smiled and placed himself on the edge of the desk, between Gaelle and Caitlin. He began to dig in his own plastic bag and pull out small boxes and bags. Caitlin tried to catch the madame’s eye but she was watching her son impassively.

Caitlin stood and stepped to one side. It was becoming clear what was soon to happen.

“Gaelle, is it your wish to seek help through a Vodou ceremony?” she asked.

They heard a sudden chant from the people in the street and then several voices rose in a Christian hymn. Marie-Jeanne and Enock began to speak quickly in Creole but Gaelle cut them off.

“No, I will go,” she said emphatically.

Gaelle stood and glided toward the door with elegance. From the window Caitlin saw her approach the Catholic priest. There was no sign that he was of special significance to her but she was respectful and unafraid. The people nearest the priest shot the young woman suspicious looks.

Aaron, now leaning on the doorjamb of the back room, spoke to Caitlin. “People are on edge,” he said.

“Clearly.”

“It’s not just this,” he said. “In early November there is usually a severe spike in violence in Port-au-Prince. It’s the Vodou holy days. Grave robbers desecrate Vodou territory, throw rocks at their holy people, that kind of thing. Sometimes there are riots, though I think it’s really all a vent because of the poverty here.”

Caitlin understood his point immediately: anything could spark off this crowd. Especially if they thought someone was possessed. That was why Gaelle had been so quick to deny it when they spoke.

“And there is white bias,” Enock snapped. “They come here and tell us that we are primitive yet they have no knowledge of our faith. Frightened people spread outrageous lies—that it was Vodou that caused the earthquake, that we bargain with devils. We do not do this ‘black magic’!” He shot the accusation at Caitlin personally.

“I would never say that you do,” Caitlin replied.

“Your questions in the car were… superior.”

“I never meant—”

“No. Your kind has been like this!” He threw his chin angrily toward the crowd and the priest. “Your arrogant manipulation of reality is more black magic than ours!” He slammed a jar of red powder onto the table next to him. “We look farther into reality. You… you just twist it.”

“How?” Caitlin asked, trying to stay focused and understanding.

“You peck at it, like chickens at meal. You study the pieces instead of the whole. That is not a cure! That is”—he took a moment to search for the word—“what you call dissection. It is autopsy.”

Against her will, Caitlin’s temper started to rise. But she kept her mouth shut.

“From what I know of Vodou,” Aaron said to no one in particular, “it’s a way for people to gather, bring up their problems, share food, dance, and feel that they matter—that they’re part of something bigger.”

“Your explanation is like the surface of the sea.” Enock scowled, moving his hand like rippling waves. “It is just what the white outsider sees.”

“You misunderstand me,” Aaron said. “I think all of those things are essential for our souls.”

“I tell you, you know nothing,” Enock sneered. “Either of you.”

“Then educate us!” Caitlin said.

Marie-Jeanne said something quickly to Enock that stopped him in his tracks. Enock paused and then casually translated for Caitlin.

“She says she knows what caused Gaelle’s fou in the market.”

All eyes snapped to Marie-Jeanne. She was rubbing her forehead and staring at the ceiling.

Enock continued translating. “You do not need to hypnotize Gaelle. She will tell you. Three days ago a tourist fell from Marie-Jeanne’s boat. Marie-Jeanne dove in and rescued him but she nearly drowned herself. When Gaelle heard of this she was very upset.”

Caitlin said nothing. She felt as if she’d been hit in the chest by one of those large breakers on the shore. This could not be a coincidence.

They heard voices rise in a hymn from the street. Caitlin looked out the window and there were thirty-five or forty people outside the house. Gaelle, still in the middle of them, turned from the priest and entered the office, frowning.

“They are children, sometimes,” she said. “Fighting, fighting, fighting about the business of others.”

Caitlin heard but did not process what Gaelle was saying. Her mind was still on what Enock had translated. “Gaelle, I must talk to you. I came here initially to help my patient in New York, to learn—”

“No!” the girl insisted before she even sat down. “Everything stops now. No confession, no hypnotism, nothing. I am not sick, except of all this nonsense!”

“You’re absolutely right,” Caitlin said, with sudden inspiration. She had to convince Gaelle, had to show her what was at stake. “This is not illness. It’s an assault of some kind.” She pulled out her phone and scrolled through her files.

“What are you saying?”

“Please, I can show you…”

Caitlin found the iconic picture of the girl from Hiroshima and handed the phone to Gaelle. A shade of empathy and fear crossed the young woman’s face.

“Who is this?” she asked.

“That is a girl who just survived a nuclear bomb. The look on her face, that intensity of suffering, is exactly what my patient in New York is experiencing. And what I believe you have experienced too.”

Enock, Aaron, and Marie-Jeanne all looked over Gaelle’s shoulder. For a moment Caitlin thought Gaelle might weep. The young woman handed the phone to her stepmother and spoke in Creole.

Enock stood peremptorily. “You are simply manipulating her. Sympathy is not a revelation,” he stated. “Nor is it action. I will show you both.”

He grabbed the small jar he had slammed on the table, then moved two chairs to clear a space on the floor and closed the door to the veranda. The crowd outside immediately responded to his actions as if they knew what was coming next. Their tones of disapproval rose into almost a chant.

But what was happening next? Caitlin thought she had tapped into something with Gaelle, that she was getting somewhere, but was this silence the girl’s only response? Was she going to submit to Enock?

The Houngan began tapping red powder out of his jar in a long line down the floor. Caitlin caught a very faint, familiar scent. It was cayenne pepper. Enock finished the first line and started tapping out a second one perpendicular to the first.

Caitlin was moving to confer with Aaron when Madame Langlois stood up and, handing her blue tarp bag to Caitlin, turned her fierce eyes on her son. In Creole, she snapped at him. He answered back defensively. Caitlin thought she recognized the word “papa” and asked Aaron about it.

“Papa Legba is the loa that guards the gate between our world and theirs,” he whispered in her ear. “No spirit can come through without his approval.”

“I don’t understand,” she whispered back. “Was Enock going to try to contact him?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted.

The madame suddenly marched into the back room and ordered her son to follow her. Enock huffed but turned and shoved past Aaron. Leaving the door to the back room open, they exploded into an argument in Creole. Gaelle looked slightly relieved.

“What’s wrong?” Caitlin asked.

“He was going to trace the Papa spirit’s symbol on the floor,” the girl explained. “His veve.”

“Why did Madame Langlois stop him?”

“It is always done with flour or cornmeal, not pepper. She is asking why he has so much cayenne in the first place. It’s expensive. He is saying it is more powerful.” Gaelle paused and listened. “She says that the power comes from the one who invokes, not the powder. Using cayenne will make him weak…” She searched for a word. “Forgetful.”

Despite the drama of the moment, Caitlin could not help but smile. Theirs was like any family squabble in any corner of the world.

“You’re brave,” Aaron said.

Caitlin raised an eyebrow.

“Holding the bag of a Vodou priestess.” He smiled.

Caitlin had forgotten the bag, rapt as she was in the debate in the next room. Through the open door, she saw the madame lift her son’s hand with the ring, then fling it down. Caitlin wondered if this argument would make Gaelle more or less inclined to listen to the Houngan’s advice, if the madame might allow her a little more leeway.

Suddenly, Caitlin’s eyes lowered to the blue tarp bag. She had felt it move. It had been infinitesimal but definitely real. There it was again, a little more lively this time. She gripped the bag tightly to keep from dropping it.

“Madame,” she breathed, with no sound behind her breath.

Madame Langlois looked in on Caitlin, sized up the situation in a glance, and entered the room immediately. Enock followed but she pointed at him with one finger and he sat in the nearest chair. Retrieving the bag, the madame hefted it twice gently, like a grocer judging the weight of a bag of grapes.

“This is very interesting,” the madame murmured to Caitlin. “Damballa is active in your life.”

Caitlin did not know who or what “Damballa” meant and did not feel disposed to speak. She remained absolutely still.

“He protects the weakened,” the madame continued. “This is why I brought him.”

Caitlin noticed that she did not say “the weak” but “the weakened.” It was an interesting distinction. The woman placed her bag on Gaelle’s desk and reached into it. Slowly and with both hands, she brought out a clean white bag that looked like a hotel pillowcase. Its end was twisted, curled over, and secured with white ribbons.

“Enock,” the madame said.

Her son stood quickly, looked around, and seized the bottle of water Aaron had been drinking from. He took the saucer from Gaelle’s cold cup of tea and poured a few tablespoons of water into it. Then he placed the saucer near the madame and went back to his seat.

As Madame Langlois unfastened the white ribbons, Caitlin felt cold fear grab her throat and heart.

“Fear is respect,” the madame said, as if from a distance.

She opened the pillowcase and slowly, almost lovingly, pulled out a tightly coiled snake.

Caitlin was barely breathing.

“The serpent is in pain,” the madame told Caitlin. Then she leaned toward the reptile and murmured, “Damballa is grateful for your sacrifice.”

Caitlin could not pull her eyes from the snake. It was not very big, and its scales were a chalky gray with copper spots shaped like a leopard’s. She remembered from one of Jacob’s projects that a snake only coiled tightly when it was very afraid. She saw the faintest of trembles across the snake’s skin. Had that been what she felt through the bag? But the bag was too thick… The madame held the snake near the water but it made no move toward it, no flick of the tongue to sense its surroundings.

“Why is it acting like this?” Caitlin asked. “Are you torturing it?”

“These tiny hands cannot harm her,” the madame said. “She is doing Damballa’s work.”

Madame Langlois slowly, stealthily stepped to Gaelle. The girl was crying silently and she craned backward as the snake neared her. Suddenly red liquid oozed from the snake’s eyes, nostrils, and mouth, dripping onto the floor. Caitlin felt bile rise in her throat. Some snakes, she remembered, could bleed from their orifices at will, in the presence of a predator. This snake was terrified… specifically of Gaelle.

Jack London flashed through Caitlin’s mind.

The madame stepped away from the girl but the snake continued to bleed. She pointed at Caitlin’s left hand. “Place your fingertips on her.”

“Me?” Caitlin said, mortified.

“Yes, you who knows so much.”

Caitlin tentatively lifted her hand and saw that her palm was literally dripping sweat. She thought about holding off, posing some of the myriad questions that flashed through her mind, but warily and somehow irresistibly she rested her fingertips on the snake’s outermost coil—

Suddenly Caitlin slammed backward on her heels and the world turned red. She was choking, suffocating on clouds, thick, billowing sulfur. She struggled for breath, tried to scream. She felt every major and minor muscle in her body tense and twist, as if she were the snake holding itself tight. And then she felt presences. That was the only way her brain could describe it. Shades, wraiths, something ephemeral but there.

People? Robes filled with wind? Red flashes of fire and lightning, illuminating sharp spires of pale rock.

Everything turned then, twisting in circles, hoops within hoops. And in the center was a terrible face with huge eyes. Its massive mouth gaped at her in a horrific smile. She flung up her right arm against it and all in a second the robes and the wind, the fire and rock, all of it seemed to ram through her arm and out of her hand—

Across the room, Gaelle fell hard against the wall. Was she thrown? Suddenly Caitlin could see again. She could see Gaelle against the wall, her whole body spasming. Her arms flailed sideways as she shouted unintelligible words. And then she started screaming and screaming.

Marie-Jeanne shouted and dove for her daughter, attempting to cradle her in her arms. Aaron followed, trying to support her head. He was shouting at the madame, “Stop it!” Outside fifty voices rose, some in angry shouts, some in desperate songs. Some pounded on the front door. Caitlin looked behind her at the faces pressed against the window, shouting. Then she noticed the madame. The old woman was choking.

Almost unconsciously, Caitlin stood and hurried to the madame’s side. She placed a hand on her back at the base of her neck. The woman was freezing, goose bumps rising from nape to shoulders. Incredibly, the madame was still holding the snake in her right hand. Forcing her fingers into the woman’s mouth, Caitlin worked it open, feeling for an obstruction—but there was none. Then suddenly the madame inhaled deeply, filling her lungs, then coughed, clearing her throat. As if this was an everyday occurrence, she nodded in thanks. She rose to her knees and bowed over Gaelle. Gripping the serpent tightly in her right hand, she placed her left hand on the girl’s ankle. A tremor passed through the older woman’s body like an earthquake but her right hand held the snake steady.

Then, abruptly, it was over.

Gaelle, curling away from all the hands around her, compressed into a fetal position against the wall and cried. Someone shoved the front door open and rushed into the room. It was the priest. He did not touch Gaelle, and he did not pray over her, only spoke quietly to her. He was serving as a buffer against the eyes and mouths that hovered just outside the office.

A half hour later, a calm settled over the Anglade Charter Fishing office. It had been hard-won. There had been an epic shouting match between the crowd and two policemen, and another among the Catholic priest, Marie-Jeanne, Enock, and Aaron, all of whom disagreed about what Gaelle required next. Even the madame had raised her voice in outrage at one point, but in this she was with Caitlin: the two women had conspired by joined will and physical interference to move Gaelle out of the office into the back room. Caitlin settled the young woman onto a makeshift bed of waterproof boat cushions.

As Gaelle was shifting from tears to exhaustion, the madame entered the room to place the snake back in its pillowcase and set it on a shelf where Gaelle would not see it. Caitlin smoothed the girl’s hair and forehead and wiped her cheeks until she fell asleep.

“She will protect,” said the madame, indicating the snake, then Gaelle.

Caitlin nodded. She did not understand what had happened, what role the snake had played, but there was no denying that there were powerful forces at work. She had endured nightmares after the encounter with Maanik and they were of a piece with the visions she had experienced here. Whatever the agent, it was strong enough to leap from one subconscious mind to another.

Right now, more than anything else, Caitlin wanted to curl up and sleep too. She knew the urge came not only from exhaustion but from fear. She just wanted to pretend none of this had happened. But she knew sleep would not be possible, not logistically or practically. Even now, when she closed her eyes, the memory of that manic face she had seen jerked her awake.

“You are okay,” Madame Langlois said to Caitlin.

Caitlin wasn’t sure whether the woman meant she was healthy or acceptable. Either way, she thanked her. Then she looked her in the eye and said, “I feel bad for the snake.”

Madame Langlois nodded. “Me too. There are alternatives.”

“Are they dangerous? To either Gaelle or the snake?”

“No. I will make a wanga, what you call a fetish. It will do the job of the snake. I will do that today.”

Caitlin slowly nodded. Whether it was household gods in ancient Egypt, totems in Native American lore, or Catholic icons, she had always understood that people thought inanimate objects had great power. Like the placebo effect, their beliefs could change their minds and actions, thus changing their situations. But maybe there was more to it. She had felt the power through the snake, and she had seen the madame wrestle with that power and manage it. If the madame also wrestled power into an object…

But you don’t believe any of this, her rational side was telling her. Snakes don’t intercept energy any more than frogs cause warts or pulverized eye of newt can make someone fall in love. That woman was squeezing the poor creature, choking it, putting on a show that caused Gaelle to react. And that caused you to react. The power of suggestion, that’s all this was. You brought back your nightmare because you were in a receptive, weakened state.

Maybe so, Caitlin told her brain. But maybe not.

Tentatively she asked, “Can an inanimate object handle that much… whatever it was? Energy? Pain?”

“It will take some doing,” the madame admitted, then unexpectedly smiled in a very tired way. “I will stay here with her. And if it must be, I will take some.” She shrugged. “That is the responsibility. That is the job.”

Caitlin smiled, closed her eyes, and rested the back of her head on the wall. From outside she heard people, tourists most likely, asking questions in a hodgepodge of languages. They reflected the confusion she felt. There was only one thing she knew for certain: like the universe itself, the scope of this mystery continued to confound, deepen, and expand.

“Doctor,” Madame Langlois said.

Caitlin opened her eyes to see the madame tearing a sheet of paper from a small notepad. She held out the page—it was Gaelle’s drawing of crescent triangles. “Take it,” the madame ordered. “This is not of Vodou.”

CHAPTER 16

Caitlin gasped herself awake on the plane.

The hum of the engines just outside the window had a soothing effect as she eased herself back…

From what?

The nightmare face from her vision in Haiti had violated her mind with startling ferocity… and contempt. She’d been dreaming of domestic familiarity: feeding Jacob’s fish while he was away on a sleepover. Then the awful thing appeared, leering with its hideous grin and lifeless gaze, burning like a brand into her brain.

The late evening flight from Haiti to New York was nearly empty and she had full privacy in the dark. As much as she flew, Caitlin didn’t really like it; she wished there were some way to ride outside the plane, with real air instead of this canned stuff, and a big, unobscured view. She turned to the side and brought her feet up on the seat next to her, curling into herself as Gaelle had curled against the wall.

Caitlin’s breathing was shallow and quick, panicked, and she was shaking; she felt as though she were wearing a heavy winter coat zipped tight to the throat. She tried tapping the sides of her eye sockets with her fingertips and running a slightly cupped hand down her breastbone, slowly, to focus on clearing her airway. Neither worked and she felt like she might start to cry. Caitlin had participated in too many street-corner arguments with dates, colleagues, a stalker, and decades of cab drivers; and Jacob, when he was little, had not been shy about calling attention to himself in restaurants when he felt frustrated. Over the last ten years Caitlin had become much more self-conscious about public displays.

Still shaking, she gently rested her head in her palms. No tears came. The magnitude of what she had experienced overcame her: How do I help these girls? Are their experiences related—and if so, by what conceivable mechanism? What am I missing?

And then there was Vodou.

An eccentric woman and a fussy, arrogant son. A charmed snake, or was it a possessed snake or drugged snake? The entire thing could have been smoke and mirrors, the madame or her son working some kind of trickery while Caitlin was distracted by Gaelle. Even the vision, that face, may have been induced by a combination of suggestion and a burned or powdered drug that Caitlin had smelled or ingested. She had not applied any kind of scientific methodology to the experience. The data was useless.

This is too much for me, she thought. I’ll give it to someone else, I’ll refer Maanik to some other kind of expert. Maybe what she needed, what they both needed, was exactly what the madame had provided: a figure of faith, not reason.

Yet another part of her was trying to get through with a message.

You have a choice.

It was the same choice that she had elucidated for every one of her clients at some stage of their therapy, because it was a fundamental part of being human and alive: you had to choose between being afraid and being angry.

Fear was a natural reaction, but if she chose to dwell in it, it would cripple her. She had to stop it before she spiraled downward. However, she was not naïve. For all kinds of evolutionary and biochemical reasons, positive thinking and “Go, Caitlin!” pep talks alone were not going to do the trick here. They didn’t have enough force to generate the necessary escape velocity.

So she chose anger. Not a knee-jerk, arrogant fury that could backfire and tie her in knots, but a clear, decisive, protective instinct. Whatever the cause of these episodes for Maanik and Gaelle, whatever she had felt herself, it was resulting in a certain torture, and that was unacceptable.

She sat up straight and turned on her seat light. Lowering the tray table in front of her, she pulled a pen and a few printouts from her bag. Flipping the printouts over, she prepared to write on their blank backs. What did Maanik and Gaelle’s episodes have in common? What did they possess that she was familiar with, that she did have practice in treating?

Start with what you experienced, she thought.

Freud believed that dreams were comprised of manifest and latent content. The manifest content was immediately recalled on waking and was thought to mask the true meaning of the dream: the forbidden, subconscious elements.

She found herself not writing but drawing. Before she knew it, she had accurately re-created the huge face and terrifying smile that had manifested in Haiti and woken her just moments ago. Now it was in front of her. Her mind had been throwing all kinds of words around to describe it—“otherworldly,” “evil,” “alien.” But the salient point was that the visual was real. Here it was, right before her.

What are you? she demanded.

Suddenly the hair rose on the back of her neck and she felt cold all over. The fear was back—the same flavor of fear she had tasted outside her office building when she was certain she was being watched. Her skin tingled, prickled all over. She adjusted herself in her seat and peered slowly around the dark cabin. The hum of the engines was the only thing that felt safe and sane. The dark was the exact opposite. One of her professors once remarked, “Young people and animals are instinctively afraid of the dark. What right have we to say they’re wrong?”

They were not wrong. The stillness and blackness about her felt like just a few shallow breaths from death. Her reading light gave scope to the darkness everywhere else; specks of starlight revealed the vastness of the night outside. The hints of light were like a map to Caitlin: the breadth of what she knew measured against the expanse of what she did not know. That in itself was terrifying.

Maybe someone was watching. Maybe it was the flight attendant. Maybe it was this face from the Vodou-induced trance.

Caitlin at this moment rallied her anger and chose not to care. They, whoever they were, could watch all they wanted as long as they didn’t interfere. She had work to do. She studied her drawing again and pulled out Gaelle’s sketch to compare them. The triangle of crescents looked almost Celtic, not at all similar to this. She put away the sketch and stared at the nightmare face again for several minutes. She could not shake the feeling that there was something familiar about it. She closed her eyes and combed through all the cultures she had experienced through travel and research. It didn’t seem like a mask, nothing like the horned, fanged Hannya figure of Noh theater. Intuitively she felt it was something carved. The Easter Island statues? No, that wasn’t it. The mouth wasn’t the same. This mouth had lips indicated by a line curving around eight or nine thick, oval teeth. Somewhere in Hawaii? In New Zealand, something from the Maori?

Tiki figures, she recalled with a jolt. They had large mouths and eyes very similar to this. She whipped out her phone; took a photo of her drawing, wincing from the bright flash; and texted it to Ben with a message: I saw this in connection with Gaelle. Long story. Polynesian influence?

Then Caitlin did what she had previously avoided. She walked herself through the trip from the time she got off the plane, making detailed notes on everything that she could remember, without gloss, without explanation, and with only momentary hesitation when she reached her experience of the force that had thrown Gaelle against the wall. What could she even call it—energy? The Vodou push? She wondered if an electrical force could possibly account for it. It was worth researching later. She wrote until her hand cramped, until she was done. Folding the pages carefully, she numbered them in case they fell, then tucked them away before once again attempting sleep. Her mind would gather strength; it would not feed her dream demon, not if she could help it. She turned off the light.

Her last thought was of something she’d seen through the window of the Land Rover heading back to Port-au-Prince—a patch of new trees planted on one of the mountainsides. The government had recently announced it was going to replant Haiti’s decimated forests. Caitlin hoped that the madame and her son would see it on their way back to the city and trust that fumbling, faulty human beings did sometimes create solutions.

Caitlin arrived home at two in the morning but her father was awake to open the door, allowing her to walk into a bright kitchen and a hug. She dropped her bag on the kitchen table and sat down.

“How is he?” she asked.

“Fine, fine,” Joe said. “A little quiet, maybe.”

“When?”

“Earlier tonight,” he said. “He just kind of stared out the window for, oh, two minutes or so. I left him. He snapped out of it.”

Caitlin felt a shiver. Two minutes. That’s about how long she was in her bizarre trance.

Her father chuckled. “I’ll tell you, though. He crowed like Peter Pan when he got me to eat kale.”

Caitlin returned to the moment. “Eat it and like it?”

Joe grinned. “It was better than I expected. Don’t tell your mother.”

Caitlin chuckled. She opened her bag and sorted through it, separating items she would leave in the bag and items to put away.

“Cai, why don’t you unpack in the morning? You look like you need as much sleep as you can get.”

She shook her head and kept sorting.

“How did things go down there?” he asked.

She stopped, looked at him sideways. “Dad, what’s the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to you? Something that didn’t have an explanation.”

“Hunh.” He sat back and thought, staring around the room much like Caitlin did when she needed to think. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man with close-set Irish blue eyes and a sort of permanent youthfulness. “Well,” he said, “to be honest, it was you.”

Caitlin stared at him in surprise.

“You had your own personality from the day you were born,” he went on. “Well, maybe the day after you were born. You were always such a watcher, big eyes studying everything, and with very little to say.”

“Mom said I was always quiet.”

“Quiet but not—what—not drowsy or dull. You were always alert. I could see something in your eyes. To your point, the question you asked, I don’t know where souls come from but I know they exist. I saw yours.”

Caitlin felt tears in her eyes, the tears that had refused to come before.

Her father placed a hand on her shoulder. “What’s on your mind? Did Haiti get to you?”

Caitlin shook her head. He stepped back. He knew not to pry, and she was relieved when he changed the subject.

“I remember you loved ghost stories when you were a kid,” he said. “You read every one you could get your hands on. I always wondered whether you’d seen one.”

Caitlin laughed. “Really? I remember the mythology books, Edith Hamilton. Oh, and Nancy Drew and the haunted lighthouse or farmhouse or something like that.”

“Oh sure. We stopped letting you read them when you had nightmares.”

She turned back toward him. “I had nightmares?”

“Normal kid stuff,” he said. “That’s what the doctor told us. We ended up giving all the books away and they stopped.”

It was Caitlin’s turn to say, “Hunh.” She placed her papers on the “to put away” stack. Her drawing of the face was on top and Joe picked it up to look at it. He laughed.

“Where in the hell did you see this?” he asked.

“Do you recognize it? I think it’s some kind of Polynesian tiki figure.”

He grinned. “It’s not often that I get to tell you you’re wrong.”

“What do you mean?”

He patted her hand and held up the drawing. “This is from your ancient past, kiddo.”

CHAPTER 17

Flora Davies, the forty-year-old chairwoman of the Group, was locking the airtight door of their basement on Ninth Street. The founder of the Group, Otis Davies, had purchased this grand mansion on the corner of Fifth Avenue early in the twentieth century. Named the Global Explorers’ Club, ostensibly it was a home for travelers who came to the city and needed a place to rest before leaving. Here they could relax among fellow adventurers, swap tales, study maps and rare books in the library, or leave treasures they had found to be collected at some future date. Treasures that the Group examined thoroughly. Statues, vases, tablets, and other finds that might have writing or images, carvings, or paintings that fit their particular interests served the Group’s highly secret need. It had proved a worthwhile arrangement. All the results of the Group’s efforts, previously scattered throughout the world in bank vaults and secret warehouses, were now consolidated in this basement.

Flora emerged from the side of the building and walked up the steps to the quiet street. She was heading to her apartment with the intention of getting some long-overdue sleep before Mikel arrived with his latest artifact from the Falklands. Other members would be arriving within hours to study it, and there would be much to do. Each new find was a key, and this particular key could well be the one that exponentially expanded what they knew, confirmed what they suspected, and ultimately narrowed their ancient search.

At this moment, however, Davies’s mind was not on the artifact. She stood at the top of the steps that led from the well of the basement door to street level and looked south toward the park. Something was wrong. She heard voices in the park, which was not unusual even at this hour, and dogs barking, which was also not uncommon. What she could not understand was why she didn’t see the towering white marble arch that was built to celebrate the centenary of George Washington’s inauguration as president. It was gone.

At a fast clip she walked toward the park where the Washington Square Arch used to be. As she neared it she realized she was wrong; the arch was there. Only it wasn’t white. And it wasn’t marble.

Through the center of the arch she saw a dozen or so students backed well away, standing by the fountain toward the south. They were looking, pointing, taking photos and cell phone videos—not that they would convey the real-time creepiness of a nearly eighty-foot structure covered bottom to top with rats.

When Davies realized what they were she stopped dead in her tracks and gasped. There must have been hundreds, even thousands. She had never seen, never heard of anything like this. Her first thought after her brain unfroze was that it was some kind of stunt, something concocted for a reality show or a guerilla cinema project by film school students.

That has to be it. They couldn’t be real, could they?

Suddenly spots of white appeared beneath the undulating carpet. First small and then larger, unevenly shaped patches. The students on the other side began to scream and as Davies started to realize that the rats were leaving their perch in great heaving swaths, someone jokingly cried, “Stampede!” The creatures raced in all directions, with one tidal wave of them rolling unswervingly toward her. A charge of dark gray fur pushed down the center of Fifth Avenue and along both sidewalks. She stood transfixed, not so much with fear or revulsion—though she felt both as the rats rushed over her feet—but because the rats were real, there were no cameras, and though her heart was racing, her mind was working harder still, trying to figure out what on earth was going on.

She turned protectively toward the club and that was when the real horror struck.

The concrete recess outside the basement door was overflowing with pile upon pile of the surging vermin. Were they trying to get in the door? They were squealing, scratching, and tearing at each other to get higher still as they formed a roiling triangle in the doorway. Under the streetlight she could see tufts of fur floating upward and the occasional streak of blood. Those that could not get into that small area flowed into the garden that fronted the structure. All the rats that couldn’t fit in the stairwell were facing in one direction, aligned as much as possible to the north and south.

Davies got as close as she could without making further contact. With shaking fingers she retrieved her cell phone from her shoulder bag and began shooting video. The rats’ activity was inexplicable indeed, but what challenged and distracted her was that this behavior was not entirely without precedent.

As lights flicked on in surrounding apartments, people rising to check out the shouts coming from the park and the strange thumping and scratching taking place right outside their doors, Davies switched off her video and stepped into the shadows.

She thought back to the call she had received from Mikel when he landed in Montevideo. The field agent had mentioned something strange—a flock of albatrosses that had flown directly at the plane from the north.

Davies put her cell phone away and walked up the vast stone steps to the front door of the Global Explorers’ Club. There would be no sleep tonight.

CHAPTER 18

Under orders from Joseph P. O’Hara, Caitlin was allowed to send exactly one e-mail about the drawing before she went to bed.

“That’s it, little lady,” he’d said in a voice she recognized from those old, old days when he let her make a phone call or have a Scooter Pie before retiring.

She had to tell Ben, and she had to tell him now; it couldn’t wait. Caitlin took her tablet into the bedroom, sat cross-legged against the headboard, prepared an e-mail with attached notes from her trip and a photo of Gaelle’s sketch, then wrote:

Caitlin set the tablet on the floor and crashed. Her mind and energy and body had all hit a wall and she had no trouble sleeping through the night.

She awoke feeling rested but restless, with a readiness to prowl through this mystery. Her father dropped Jacob off at school on his way out of the city and Caitlin looked over her work schedule. There was nothing until noon, after which the day was packed. To her surprise, Ben had not only called early and left a message but had time to meet. She called him back as soon as her “lads” were gone.

He picked up on the first ring.

“Hey, Cai.”

“That’s not good news, is it? That you have free time?” She didn’t really have to ask; his solemn voice said it all.

“No, it’s not,” he said. “The highest-level diplomats haven’t come back to the table. They’ve sent their lower-level people—trusted staff, essentially—to sort of act as placeholders. They can’t say much so they’re taking a lot of breaks.”

“So the world is closer to the brink?”

“I wouldn’t say closer,” Ben replied. “More like the cliff could give out with just one good sneeze. I’ll tell you more in person,” he said cautiously. “So please, let’s talk about something we can actually work out.”

“Roger that, and I have to say I’m really glad you can meet.”

Ben laughed, somewhat wryly. “Is that a crisis in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?”

“Both.” Caitlin laughed and said good-bye.

She slugged down some coffee her father had made and headed out. It was one of those blessedly mild days that late fall in New York sometimes delivered. Caitlin appreciated the transition from the heat of Haiti so she texted Ben suggesting they walk. He readily agreed.

Sitting in the cab for the short ride over, she saw the already infamous “Rat Pack” video on the backseat monitor. It was creepy, and the speculation was that Con Ed’s working underground replacing cables had caused the rodents to leave their “homes.” What was even creepier was the army of pest control personnel descending on stately Fifth Avenue, bagging dead rats and setting traps.

Caitlin met Ben with a warm hug that momentarily pushed his long, drawn expression into something like a smile. They strolled north from the United Nations through the small park in Turtle Bay. The sunlight glittered on the East River and they unbuttoned their coats.

“Anything new with Maanik?” Caitlin asked.

“She had a small incident,” he said. “Hansa found her talking to the dog in the middle of the night. What was strange was that he seemed to be listening. When Hansa tried to get her back to bed, Maanik started sobbing and flailing a little. But your cue worked.”

“How are her parents doing?”

“I didn’t speak with Hansa but the ambassador’s emotional state has shifted. He’s less anxious but he seems more… ‘sad’ is the only word that fits. A part of it has to be the sense that he’s failing the peace process, but I also think he feels as though he’s failing his daughter. He said something about having to take some kind of action before she’s stuck like this for life. I told him you were making progress.” Ben looked at her. “Are you?”

“Maybe. I’ve got so much to share with you—”

Ben put a hand on her arm. “Before we get to that, I…”

Caitlin sensed he was struggling with something and put a warm hand on top of his.

“I feel guilty for putting this on you.” Ben looked at the pavement.

“Go ahead. Seriously. You know I’ll keep it confidential.”

“Okay. There is a rumor—and I want to stress that it is a rumor—that some countries are considering shutting down their embassies in India and Pakistan and flying out their employees. Countries that include us, the UK, and Japan.”

“Oh my god,” said Caitlin.

“God?” Ben said. “You see God in this? Anywhere?”

Caitlin didn’t answer. The question made her think of her vision, of millennia of prophets and shamans and mystics who had visions, of the ivory-tower debates about the difficulty of distinguishing between profound faith and dementia. She got back on topic. “The cliff you talked about on the phone. It’s that close to crumbling?”

“It might be a brinksmanship maneuver, but those have a catastrophic tendency to take on a life of their own. It could be politicos testing the water to see how everyone reacts, whether the Indian and Pakistani delegates will come back to the table given the right impetus.” He exhaled and rubbed the bone below his ear. “I just don’t know.”

“What do you think?”

He hesitated. “I think it’s a ploy.”

“Is that what you would say to me anyway, to keep me from worrying?”

“No, Caitlin. I would never play you.”

“Okay.” She pressed his hand again. “You know those Magritte umbrellas that look black to everyone else but underneath they’re blue sky and puffy white clouds? We’re going to stand under one of those. Because if I don’t ignore what you just told me, I won’t be able to focus.”

He nodded and half-smiled. “I just felt like one of your patients getting a safe-haven visual.”

“You were.” She half-smiled back, then jumped into a description of her trip, ending with the conversation with her father. “So, his crazy idea that my drawing invokes the Vikings—when I say it out loud it seems to lose some weight but, Ben, he was one hundred percent certain.”

“It’s not so crazy,” Ben said. “My linguistic programs broke down the snatches of language we have and I did some comparing. Part of what came out of Maanik’s mouth seems to be rooted in Old Norse.”

Caitlin stopped and gaped at him. Finally, at least some of the pieces were coming together. She allowed herself a big smile.

“Don’t get too comfortable,” said Ben. “There’s a strong strand of Mongolian as well.”

“Oh. But Mongolian and Norse had no connection, at least not that I know of.”

He shook his head and laughed. “None at all. Nor the snippets of Japanese. This kind of discovery could make history in certain circles. Last night, when I confirmed all those languages, was the most exciting night of my life. Thank you, Cai. You made it happen.”

“What every woman loves to hear!” She grinned and realized she was flirting. She blamed it on his infectious enthusiasm and switched back to professionalism: “Can you give me specifics?”

He spoke slowly and deliberately to make his point. “This hybrid language should not exist, but it does. And it makes sense. The hand gestures are superlatives but they apply to nouns as well as adjectives. So for example, if I say ‘hergha’”—he rolled the r and sort of hacked out the second syllable—“it means ‘fire.’ But if I say it while doing this”—he made a circle with his hand, the palm facing his torso, then pushed it to the side exactly as Maanik and Gaelle had both done at different points—“it means ‘the biggest fire,’ a conflagration.”

“Can we sit down?” Caitlin could hardly believe what she was hearing. She needed a bench to take it all in. She shook her head not just in awe but in relief. Seeing her old friend perform the gesture without an accompanying fit of screams and scratching was profoundly comforting.

“You are amazing,” she said.

“Eh, it’s just good software.” He grinned, shrugging away the compliment. “I only have about twenty-five percent of the words translated, and we don’t have that many to begin with. Nouns have been easiest. What’s most interesting to me is that the word for ‘fire’ and its superlative appear very near the word for ‘sky.’”

“Do you have any idea why?”

“Well, I’d like to be cautious about interpretation but I doubt the proximity is accidental. This shows up in ancient China as yin-yang, with the sky being the ‘fire’ force and earth being a ‘water’ force. But in this language, the superlative for ‘fire’ also appears very near what I think are the words for ‘arm’ and ‘pain.’ So maybe…?” He urgently patted his forearms as if he were putting out flames.

“God, yes!” Caitlin exclaimed when it had soaked in. “If burning sparks were falling on my arms and wouldn’t go out, burning deeper into my flesh, I might try to scratch them away, like Maanik. All right, so in the broadest of terms, what kind of causes do we have for fire in the sky? Either it was manufactured means—firebombing or a burning building—or there was a natural cause. Lightning? A volcano? A meteor?”

“All of that is possible,” Ben said. He repeated another gesture they had seen in the videos: pointing his left hand away from him at an angle while crossing his body with his right hand. At the same time he said, “ ‘Ogrusse.’ That seems to be the superlative for ‘water,’ meaning ‘the biggest water,’ and it appears very near the word for ‘sky’ too.”

“You mean they’re interchangeable? ‘Sky’ and ‘water’? Because they’re blue?”

“I don’t think that’s it,” he said. “I took it to mean water that touches the sky.”

“Like a tsunami?”

“Again, still guesswork, but that’s a possibility.”

Caitlin thought back to Phuket. “You’d have to be sitting on the beach to see it quite like that, rolling in from the horizon.”

“If we’re talking about recent tsunamis, yeah. But what if this is a mega?” He extended his arms as if he were holding a barrel. “One big mother?”

“How big are we talking?” she asked.

“In living memory?” Ben replied. “Lituya Bay, Alaska, July 9, 1958. An 8.3-magnitude earthquake along the Fairweather Fault caused a landslide that pushed a hundred million cubic feet of earth and glacier into the narrow inlet of the bay. The result was a wave that rose 1,720 feet. That’s the tallest mega-tsunami of modern times, and I stress ‘modern times.’ There’s a whole lot of history that happened before we started keeping records.”

“Apparently,” Caitlin said. She shook her head, not quite able to process all of this. Partly from gratitude, partly for comfort, she hugged her companion. “Thank you, Ben. I have no way to say it enough, thank you.”

“Thurstillalotlfttoworkt,” he said into her collar.

They laughed at his muffled voice and she pulled back.

“There’s still a lot left to work out,” he repeated. “I was hoping you would bring back a video or something with more language from Haiti, but it doesn’t sound like you had a chance?”

Caitlin deflated. “No. I brought back stuff but I don’t know what it was.”

“More writing?”

“No,” she said.

“Caitlin?”

“The Vodou vision I had there, and then the nightmare on the plane. When I was hit with—with whatever it was, I felt heat, I saw fire.”

“Power of suggestion?”

“Well, sure, maybe. But from whom? The madame and her son didn’t say anything about fire. I mean, I was choking on sulfur, Ben. What would do that except a volcano?”

“But you weren’t around a volcano then. Or ever, were you?”

“I was around a caldera, once, in Southern California.”

“Right, dormant for how many thousands of years? How about incense, was there any of that in Haiti? Anything that could have suggested that smell?”

She shook her head.

Ben took a deep breath. “So, a volcano. How? Where?”

“What about when?”

“No.” Ben shook his head. “Not buying where you’re going.”

“Honestly, I don’t know where I’m going but stay with me. We know that both of these girls experienced something—nightmares, visions, hallucinations, whatever you want to call them. And we know that they didn’t experience these things at any other time in their short lives. All they seem to share, what stands out, is that both have a parent or stepparent—in any case, a close adult figure—who recently experienced a near-death incident.”

“And the suicidal boy in Iran that you mentioned, didn’t he have a relative who just died?”

“Yes, a brother who was executed. So these physio-visual-linguistic reactions are being triggered by family trauma, even if there is no direct bloodline.”

“Which tells you what?” Ben asked. “Other than some kind of post-traumatic stress being a possible trigger. Where’s the physical volcano? Where’s the water that touches the sky? You’re saying you all experienced some part of that. Where?”

“That’s just it,” Caitlin said. “I don’t know.”

“What else could it be, then? Genetic imprinting? Vodou? Aliens?” Ben said.

Caitlin slumped. She thought for a moment, then shook her head slowly. “Yeah, I’m not there either,” she said. Then she started to get excited again. “But hold on. You just said genetic imprinting. What if it’s something similar? Jung talked about genetic imprinting—feelings, ideas that were passed down from our ancestors. Maybe these three family bonds are creating a portal into that collective unconscious.”

“But we’re not just talking about vague feelings or even ideas. Maanik and Gaelle seemed transported, almost totally.”

“And me,” Caitlin said.

“To where? A volcano somewhere in the past?”

“Not just the volcano, the Vikings too,” she said. “A lost language.” Then she murmured, almost as if it came from her unconscious, going with the flow: “No, not genetic imprinting. That’s too specific, individual-to-individual, and Gaelle wasn’t related to her stepmother, at least not genetically. What about racial memory, Ben? Group experiences.”

“You mean like past lives?”

“Honestly, I don’t know what I mean,” she said. “Because there’s something the girls and I share, my Viking ship and the Old Norse factor in their language.”

Ben shook his head no. “That’s tenuous at best. And really, really specific. Besides, where do the Mongolian and Japanese fit?”

“I don’t know, but my point is we are dealing with something way older than any of us that has somehow manifested itself here, now.”

“I don’t know, Caitlin. If you’re going to consider racial memory and past lives, what’s to prevent you from considering future lives or—”

“You’re right.” Caitlin nodded.

“Cai, I wasn’t being serious.”

“But I am! Ben, what if? What if these phenomena—or just a single big phenomenon—are somehow free of time constraints? What if there is some kind of communal stream that’s carrying images and language—information—from ‘somewhen’ to ‘now’ and we’re here to receive and pass it forward?”

“Why you four?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I need to look up Pompeii, I remember there were eyewitness reports—”

“Pliny the Younger,” Ben said. “Chilling stuff. One of my schoolmates did a translation for his thesis.”

“Atlantis,” she muttered.

“Cai, don’t.”

Caitlin was only half-listening. Her brain was free-associating all over the map and through all the calendars that were and ever would be.

“Time to reattach your wires to the ground,” Ben said. “This is beyond speculation.”

“I’m fighting myself,” she said.

“Huh?”

“One of my professors always said that guesswork is part of the scientific method and if you skip that step, you just keep living in the same box that was handed to you at birth. I never really liked that intellectual bungee jump—but here I am, doing it!”

“And heading for the rocks,” Ben said. “You remember what your sophomore roommate used to call you?”

“ ‘The girl with rivets,’” Caitlin said. “Yeah. I like things to make sense. And this thing doesn’t seem to, does it?” Then she added almost dreamily, “But it must.”

Caitlin’s phone buzzed with a text. It was from Mrs. Pawar: My husband suggested I send this to you. It’s from Maanik.

Caitlin tapped on the attachment and a triangle made of triangles made of crescents filled the screen.

“Oh no. No.”

She turned the phone to show Ben.

“Jesus,” he breathed. “That’s impossible.”

“I’m going over there.” She stood, already tapping a reply to Mrs. Pawar. “I’ve got a couple hours before my first session.”

Caitlin started walking toward the Pawars’ building, then turned and spoke as she walked backward. “Thanks, Ben. Thanks for everything.”

“You’re welcome,” he said. “For everything.”

CHAPTER 19

Caitlin stood in the hall outside the Pawars’ apartment door for an unusually long moment. The corridor was thick with the same still, unwelcoming atmosphere as the last time she was there. And then a click on the other side of the peephole: someone had lifted the cover to look out. When the door opened, Caitlin realized why Mrs. Pawar had used it. The wife of an Indian diplomat would not allow most outsiders to see her in a housedress with no makeup. The woman clearly wasn’t eating or sleeping enough. When they’d first met, stress had penciled dark smudges around her eyes, but these past days had hollowed her cheeks. Caitlin was mildly shocked by her appearance.

“I’m sorry you had to wait,” the woman said.

“Don’t worry about that,” Caitlin answered, stepping into the apartment. She waited until the door was shut before asking, “Is Maanik all right?”

Mrs. Pawar locked the door behind them. “The blackberries finally worked,” she replied, with no sign of being relieved.

“Finally?” Caitlin asked. She noticed Kamala standing sentry several paces back. Caitlin guessed that Mrs. Pawar was beginning to micromanage the household, trying to control anything she could in the face of a nearly uncontrollable threat to her daughter.

“Just after I sent you Maanik’s drawing, she began running around the room, shrieking,” Mrs. Pawar said as they walked down the hall to Maanik’s bedroom. “She could not hear me. Or would not, I do not know. Finally, her father managed to restrain her and I was able to use your cue.”

“I’m sorry you had to go through that,” Caitlin said. She gently took the woman by the arm and slowed them down. “Tell me something, Mrs. Pawar. Have either you or your husband been having nightmares?”

“To have nightmares one must sleep,” the woman replied, stalwartly fighting tears. “Our world seems to be coming apart. There is no haven—not abroad, not in this city, not in our home. No, Dr. O’Hara, there have been no nightmares.”

“I understand,” Caitlin said. She released Mrs. Pawar’s arm and they continued toward the bedroom.

Proximity and a familial relationship clearly were factors in what was happening. Whatever nightmares Caitlin had experienced as a result of being with Maanik and Gaelle had come from a connection made through hypnosis… or possibly Vodou. Forces that operated on a subtle, subconscious level—but even accepting that, she could not even begin to see how such forces could generate the same symbol from two very different hands.

In Maanik’s boldly colored bedroom, the rich scent of flowers and harsher smell of chemical fragrance failed to mask the stale, stagnant air. Caitlin spotted an air freshener incongruously plugged into a surge protector also feeding Maanik’s computer. About a dozen small bouquets were arranged around the room, most of them including stuffed animals, which suggested they had been sent from Maanik’s friends. Doubtless they’d heard she was going to miss a week of school and realized something more unusual than flu was going on. Perhaps the Pawars were claiming stress from the attack on the ambassador.

The ambassador was sitting on his daughter’s bed with his arm around her shoulders, at once comforting and protective. Her freshly bandaged right wrist rested in his open palm. Her left hand rested on the back of Jack London, who was curled up and snoring. The ambassador looked up as Caitlin approached. He nodded courteously but he did not have a smile in him. Maanik was asleep, breathing through her mouth with a slight rasp. In contrast to her mother, she looked as though she had been eating: her cheeks had a healthy color and her face seemed fresh. But there was a shadowy quality in her brow, a pinching of the eyebrows, that showed distress even in sleep.

“Thank you for coming,” the ambassador said as he gently withdrew his arm from his daughter. He stood, passing the responsibility of propping up his daughter to his wife, and shook Caitlin’s hand. She could see he was hiding his unease better than Mrs. Pawar, out of necessity. “I feel so helpless.”

Caitlin impulsively placed her right hand on top of his. “Mr. Pawar, we are getting there.”

He glanced back at the spent form on the bed. “I wish I could believe that.”

Caitlin persisted. “I just spent time with a young lady who has a condition similar to your daughter’s.”

“Were you able to help her?” Mrs. Pawar asked hopefully.

“I was able to learn from her,” Caitlin said. She searched through the photos on her phone and held up Gaelle’s sketch. “She drew this too.”

After taking it in they shook their heads in shock.

“That’s what this phase is about,” Caitlin continued. “To learn. There is no easy explanation for why both girls are experiencing similar symptoms or why they both drew this symbol.” She put away her phone. “And there may not be a quick and easy fix for Maanik. I sometimes work with a high school for children from war-torn countries. They saw terrible things before America offered them political asylum. They experienced trauma as intense as your daughter’s and it takes months, sometimes years, before they find ways to be teenagers again.”

“I do not want to hear that,” the ambassador said, as if his wish could somehow sustain him.

“I understand,” said Caitlin, “but I will tell you this—you are lucky because Maanik has your support and the support of everyone around her, and she is a fighter.”

The ambassador looked at the floor. “Understand this too. I don’t want my daughter to be a fighter. I want her to be my daughter.”

“Of course. That’s my goal as well,” Caitlin said patiently. “Which is why I have several important requests to make.”

“What kind of requests?”

“First, I would like to hypnotize Maanik again.”

Mrs. Pawar reacted instantly. “No! My daughter is not a laboratory animal!”

“We cannot protect her, Hansa,” Mr. Pawar said evenly. “We can only love her, and loving her means taking the next necessary step.” He looked back at Caitlin. “All right.”

Mrs. Pawar tensed when she heard his pronouncement but said nothing.

“Thank you,” Caitlin said. “I won’t do it now but it does need to happen imminently. And for my second request, I would like Ben to be present during the hypnotism. He is known to you and, more importantly, to Maanik, and his linguistic skills could prove invaluable.”

Now the ambassador’s eyes sought his wife’s support. He received it in the slight softening of Mrs. Pawar’s expression.

“I trust Ben like a son,” he said to Caitlin. “You may ask him.”

“Thank you again.”

The ambassador’s brow lifted slightly. “Have you finished with your requests?”

“Not quite,” Caitlin said.

“I admire your resolve,” he said. “Perhaps you should take my place at the negotiating table.”

“Ben would tell you, sir, that I never give up.”

He finally smiled. “I’ve missed hearing such a hopeful expression.”

Caitlin smiled back warmly. “Hold the applause until I’m finished.”

“With?”

“Request number three. Jack London.”

The ambassador looked at her as if she might be pulling his leg. “What about him?”

“I want to try something. Now. It will just take a minute.”

The ambassador opened his hands in a gesture of approval and sat with anticipation in the desk chair. He and his wife watched as Caitlin approached Maanik’s bed. She scooped her hands gently under Jack London. The dog opened his eyes and gave her nearest fingers a few licks. Carrying him, she walked around the end of the bed to Maanik’s right side, where she was leaning against her mother. Caitlin held the dog close to Maanik’s right hand, which was resting in her lap. Instantly, the dog snapped his teeth at Caitlin’s hand, at the fingers he’d just been licking. Caitlin moved in time to avoid more than a nip but had to drop the snarling dog. He landed on the bedspread in an aggressive crouch, barking loudly at Maanik’s hand, then leaped from the bed and ran around to the other side. He stood there shaking and barking, but also trying to edge closer to the bed and to Maanik. It was a strange tug-of-war, as though invisible hands were pulling him in two directions.

The dog seemed about to jump back onto the bed when Mrs. Pawar raised her voice and Jack London froze. In rapid Hindi directed at her husband, she seemed to be arguing vehemently. Mr. Pawar started to argue back but checked himself and spoke in a low, calm voice.

Caitlin turned away to give them a semblance of privacy. She patted the bedspread near Maanik’s left hand. Jack London eyed her warily but soon jumped back to the place where he’d been sleeping earlier. He huddled against Maanik’s side and nudged his nose under the girl’s palm.

Caitlin heard a sigh from Mr. Pawar.

“I’m sorry,” Caitlin said.

“Do not be,” he told her. “How did you know he would respond like that?”

“I noticed him acting skittish last time, and in Haiti I saw animals reacting strangely around the other girl,” she said. She considered mentioning the rats in Washington Square but decided they had enough horrors to face, and there was hardly a shred of connection to the incident anyway.

The ambassador sighed sadly. “My wife wants to have him put down.”

“I would strongly argue against that,” Caitlin said quickly. “We don’t know what the connection is but it should not be broken.” She gestured at the restored tableau of mistress and pup. “My point in trying this little experiment is to show that there’s a little light here, a little bit of understanding. The dog is ahead of us, reacting to something that we don’t comprehend yet. But there’s hope that we can learn.”

The ambassador’s eyes were a bit brighter than they had been before. “I’m not sure what you mean but it is good to know that you think so. Now I must return to the United Nations. When will you come again?”

“This evening, if I can arrange it.”

“We will see you then,” he told her.

The ambassador grasped his wife’s hand and lingered just a moment as she squeezed back. Then he left the room.

“Excuse me,” said Mrs. Pawar. “I must give my husband something before he leaves.”

The woman started to stand, handing Maanik’s weight over to Caitlin. As the door closed behind her Caitlin carefully maneuvered the girl into a horizontal position, with Jack London adjusting to the new arrangement to stay close to her left hand. Placing Maanik’s head gently on her pillow, Caitlin glanced down—and jumped back.

Maanik’s eyes were open and regarding her. They were clear, alert, steady. Incredibly steady, like little machines that had suddenly locked onto her.

“Hello,” Maanik said softly. “I surprised you.”

“A little,” Caitlin admitted.

“You surprised me too.” A faint smile tugged at the girl’s mouth. “But I’m too tired to scream.”

Caitlin laughed nervously. “I guess that’s a good thing. Do you know where you are?”

Maanik nodded.

“Where?” Caitlin asked.

The girl looked around. “It is not the Taj Mahal, so it must be… my bedroom.”

Her parents had said she had a sense of humor. Caitlin was glad to see that it had returned intact. “Right. And do you know who I am?”

“I think so. Dr. O’Hara?”

“Caitlin,” she said, nodding. “And I’m happy to properly meet you.”

“Me too,” Maanik said.

“I’m unused to speaking like this with you,” Caitlin admitted. “I’ve only met you during emergencies.” Honesty, she’d always found, worked best with teenagers.

“I can try scaring you, if you like.”

“How would you do that?”

Maanik hitched up one side of her face and stuck out her tongue. “Howsh thish?”

Caitlin laughed. This was the easygoing girl she’d seen in the theater video. “How do you know about me? What do you know about me?”

“My parents said you are a doctor. A psychiatrist. Will I be cured soon?”

“Workin’ on it,” Caitlin said. “Can I get you anything? Food? Water?”

“I’m good,” the young woman said. Her left hand sought Jack London and began rubbing him behind the ears. He seemed normal, unperturbed. “How are my parents? Are they here?”

“Your mother’s in the living room. They’re doing very well under the circumstances.”

That seemed to bring Maanik down and Caitlin didn’t want that. She also didn’t know how much time they might have, whether this period of lucidity would last for an instant or endure. “Hey, are you up for a few questions? I have so many.”

“I’ll try to answer them,” Maanik said. “I’m a little confused.”

“Totally understandable. Me too.” Caitlin pulled the desk chair to the side of the bed and sat. “Let’s try this for starters. Do you remember what happens during your episodes?”

Maanik sat up, preparing to speak. “I remember nothing. I know about the screaming and scratching because my parents tell me. Oh, and”—she held up her right arm—“because I’m wrapped like the Mummy.”

Caitlin laughed. “So you don’t remember doing that.”

“Not at all.”

“Or speaking?”

“Speaking?”

“Not the way we’re talking now,” Caitlin said. “More like—acting.”

“No.”

Caitlin didn’t see the benefit of complicating Maanik’s grasp of the situation by mentioning other languages.

“You’re usually awake when the episodes begin,” she said. “What does it feel like when you—”

“Start to lose my shit?” Maanik cut in, eyeballing the door to make sure her mother couldn’t hear.

“You’re not wrong about that,” said Caitlin, enjoying the girl’s spunk.

Maanik looked away and continued patting the dog, whose eyes were shut. “It’s weird. I just, kind of… go away.”

“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

From 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}

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.

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.

She began by asking Maanik to choose a peaceful location, somewhere she felt safe and at home. She would be able to return to this place any time she wanted.

“Have you found a spot?” Caitlin asked.

“Yes, I’m there,” Maanik said.

“Tell me about it.”

“I’m under a pink and yellow tent. It’s swaying back and forth.” She laughed. “It’s on the back of an elephant.”

Everyone chuckled.

“That’s wonderful,” Caitlin said. “You feel perfectly safe up there?”

“Oh, yes.” Maanik sighed with contentment. “I’m in a line with men on white horses ahead of me and we’re walking slowly through the fields toward the mountains. They’re far away, though, we won’t get there tonight. It’s hot but we have a nice breeze. And I’m playing cards with my aunt. Round cards, all painted.”

There was a quiet exclamation from the Pawars’ corner. Mrs. Pawar said, “Ganjifa cards.”

The ambassador added, “For teaching the Mahabharata, devised centuries ago.”

Caitlin nodded but kept the focus on Maanik, who suddenly said dreamily, as if she were quoting, “The body is ashes but the breath is immortal.”

Ben whispered to the ambassador, “From the Vedas?”

The ambassador nodded and Mrs. Pawar seemed surprised.

“The Upanishads,” the woman said. She stared at her daughter and added, “Maanik has never studied them.”

“She may have overheard me,” Mr. Pawar said, but he didn’t sound confident.

“All right, Maanik,” Caitlin said. “Remember, you can come back to your tent on the elephant any time you want. Do you understand?”

“Mmmm.”

“I’m going to ask now that you find the other place, the place you’ve been visiting. The place where you’ve been having so much trouble.”

The smile dropped from the girl’s face. “I don’t want to,” she said in the smallest voice Caitlin had ever heard.

“I know,” Caitlin said. “I know it’s a big favor to ask. But this is to help me help you. Can you be brave and do this for yourself?”

Maanik hesitated, then nodded. She swallowed hard and crossed her arms on her chest protectively. Caitlin could see Maanik’s eyes moving under her eyelids as she looked around. Then her entire body jerked and her eyes flew open, but she was not looking at the room she was in. Her arms flung apart and just as quickly, she began slapping at her bandaged arms, hitting them in a way that made Caitlin shudder. She grabbed Maanik by the shoulders and leaned into her to stop the attack on herself. The girl was screaming again, silently, her mouth a wide O. Jack London suddenly started howling.

“Maanik, tell me where you are!” Caitlin said firmly.

The girl seemed to fight to regain control of her mouth. Her tortured lips pulled together and unfamiliar words spilled from them. She began gesturing with the wide circles and sudden slashes that Ben had identified as superlatives. Caitlin could see Maanik struggling to keep speaking, to make sense—as much as those words made sense—even as her eyes twitched rapidly in fear.

“Maanik, I know you can hear me,” Caitlin said. “Please find a way to tell me where you are.”

“I see tall posts,” she said. “Pieces are coming off, falling around us…”

“Posts? Made of wood?”

“Stone. Carvings. There are waves beyond… I smell salt.”

“The ocean?”

Maanik didn’t acknowledge this but Caitlin thought she saw the girl’s hair stir slightly, not as a result of any movement she made but lifted by something from behind. The window was covered by drapes and Caitlin could see no vents in the floor or ceiling. Maanik seemed to shiver. Her eyes narrowed and turned upward again.

“The sky! It is on fire!” she said.

“Is it sunset?”

The girl’s head shook slowly. “I don’t know.” Her brow knit. “I—I don’t think so.”

“Please concentrate,” Caitlin pressed. “Is it day or night?”

The girl’s head shook uncertainly and then her face twisted into another silent scream, more painful looking than if she were crying aloud. Her body stiffened and her feet struggled on the bed.

Ambassador Pawar rose slowly. “Please, Dr. O’Hara. I know I agreed, but I insist that you stop this!” His voice was tight with grief.

“I’m sorry, but I want her to stay with this as long as possible,” Caitlin said. “We must have the information.”

“We?” he asked.

“Yes, we.”

“But it is hurting her!”

Caitlin turned as much as she could to look directly at him. He was on his feet. “Mr. Pawar, your daughter has been experiencing this trauma for over a week. If she were any other person exhibiting such severe symptoms with an unknown cause, I would have hospitalized her days ago. But then she would have been heavily medicated and I would have had limited access to her. I don’t think either of us wants that, or the attention!”

Caitlin felt guilty using publicity as a lever but she desperately didn’t want to interrupt this session. Not now. The ambassador was silent.

“Cai,” Ben said, nodding toward the bed.

Maanik was moving like an eel, her body writhing, her mouth still opening and closing in wordless cries.

“We don’t know how deep this goes,” Caitlin said in a gentler voice, half-turning back toward the Pawars. “She can’t fully express it. If we fail to understand Maanik’s condition, I cannot, in good conscience, keep her in this bedroom much longer. But if there is a chance for us to understand, to heal her, we should take it.”

The Pawars were silent, agonized.

“She is strong,” Caitlin said, returning her full attention to the young woman. “I’m going to keep talking to her as long as I can.”

She heard Mr. Pawar sit heavily behind her.

“Please focus, Maanik,” Caitlin said. “Can you tell me if it’s day or night? Look around you.”

The young woman forced herself to use words.

“It is… night. The moon… so large! White light being eaten by the red light.”

“The red light. Is it the sunset? Or is it closer? Fire?”

“Flame,” she said. Her mouth made biting motions. “The dragon… red waves. So maddening!”

Maanik’s eyes slid to Caitlin for just a moment but it was long enough to show she was still there, herself, however small. Then Caitlin saw her hands return to the gesture she’d made earlier, when Caitlin had handed her a pen and paper. The one thing she and Ben hadn’t planned for. Caitlin felt Ben shove a tablet into her hands, a drawing app already open. Caitlin slid the tablet under Maanik’s right hand and though the girl was shrieking again, she simultaneously drew several long, undulating lines on the tablet. Then she dropped it and attacked her forearms again, this time with her nails.

As Caitlin tried to restrain her, Ben snuck the tablet from between them.

“Maanik, go back to the elephant!” Caitlin shouted.

Maanik shoved her body back against the pillows but then just as suddenly, she relaxed completely. Her hands fell limp, her eyes closed, and she took a very long and solid inhale.

“Are you there, Maanik? Are you back in the pink and yellow tent?”

It was a long moment before Maanik answered.

“Yes,” she said.

Caitlin saw a shudder pass through her, all the way through her.

“That’s great, you are doing terrific work, Maanik.”

“Yes,” she said again. But she seemed to be repeating the previous statement, not responding to Caitlin’s compliment. “Yes, I am here.”

“I’m so proud of you—” Caitlin said, but then it hit her: was Maanik talking to her?

“Oh no,” Maanik said, with a sudden terror to her voice. “It found me. It’s coming here! Ashes!” Her body stiffened and she let out a scream so petrified and agonized that Mrs. Pawar gasped and Caitlin’s eyes surged with tears. Choking on a sob, Caitlin leaned in, touched Maanik’s ear, and said, “Blackberries.”

The girl slumped back but it was an ugly movement, like all of her ligaments had been cut.

There was a horrible, horrible silence. The queasy hush that had always hovered outside the Pawars’ apartment was now inside. Caitlin felt she could almost taste it; it was deadly. She turned at the sound of Jack London retching on the carpet under Maanik’s desk, his small body convulsing. Even as Maanik began to breathe somewhat normally, Caitlin was still on high alert. She was afraid to look around, to give credence to something she was feeling: that something had come back with the girl.

CHAPTER 23

Caitlin remained with Ben as he dismantled his modest camera-and-tripod setup. Mr. Pawar hunched in his chair, rubbing his forehead with three fingers, while Mrs. Pawar sat on the bed with her sleeping daughter, having called for Kamala to take care of the vomit Jack London had left on the rug.

Caitlin was watching the dog closely. He had nearly slunk out of the bedroom but stopped just shy of the door.

What’s going on with you? Caitlin wondered.

She realized that the dog was trying to stay away from where he had thrown up but he did not want to desert Maanik. When no stern words or rebuke came from Kamala or Hansa, Jack London returned to the room, beginning with the edges of the windows, sniffing thoroughly with his shoulders sunk in “guard” mode.

Caitlin was doing her own less overt analysis of her surroundings. The noxious air that had choked the area around the bed was easing somewhat. The closeness she had felt, as though something were pressing in on her, had also dissipated; she felt almost light now, the way she did when she took off her ankle weights after jogging. Caitlin suspected that Jack London had sensed the same. Still, he was very cautious about approaching the bed—and Maanik, who had been the epicenter of whatever the dog had experienced. When he eventually leaped up onto the bed and sniffed around the girl, he showed an aversion not just to her right hand but also to her head. It was just the tiniest recoil. Finally, Jack London curled up by Maanik’s feet but remained on guard, staring at the wall behind her head.

“One good thing,” Ben said in a low voice.

“What’s that?” Caitlin asked.

“I’m sure Kashmir was pretty far from the ambassador’s thoughts the last half hour or so.”

Caitlin nodded. “Sometimes any break is a good break,” she said quietly. “In the session, did you notice Maanik’s hair?” She was trying not to lead his answer.

“I saw it move,” Ben replied. “Like it was caught in a breeze that wasn’t there.”

She exhaled more breath than she thought she’d been holding. Ben smiled.

“I’ll let you know if you’re going crazy, Dr. O’Hara,” he said.

“Good,” she said, laughing a little, “because I’m starting to wonder.”

“Cai, something definitely happened here, and like you said, it wasn’t all in Maanik’s head.”

Caitlin and Ben left the bedroom and Jack London, who was still gazing at the wall but with his head resting on his paws. They were followed by Mrs. Pawar, who sat in the living room, clearly shaken. Mr. Pawar stayed with Maanik. Caitlin went over and sat with Hansa for a while, just listening—the woman needed to vent her worries, not just about her daughter but about her husband.

“You can’t protect him from this,” Caitlin told her.

“I know that. My hope is that he can handle it all without breaking.” She looked at Caitlin with sad eyes. “He had no reaction at all, himself, to the attempt on his life. It is as if he has pushed that entirely out of his mind.”

“For now, most likely he has,” Caitlin said. “To him, these other concerns are greater.” She smiled. “Trust me, there will be time for you to care for him.”

“What about Maanik?” the woman asked. “Has this helped you understand?”

“I’m sure it has, I just have to sift through her answers,” Caitlin said. “We’ll be working on that this evening. I told you, we’re going to figure this out.”

“He is a caring man,” Mrs. Pawar said, looking at Ben.

“Very.” Caitlin beamed appreciatively.

Mrs. Pawar asked Kamala for water, then went to the window and looked down at the city. Caitlin implored Mrs. Pawar and Kamala to make sure that Maanik’s bedroom was aired out with the windows open twice a day, not just with plug-in fresheners, and that Maanik should also sit twice daily on the balcony, bundled up against the cold. Mrs. Pawar started to object, indicating an overlooking terrace to the east, but Caitlin pointed to a Japanese folding screen and suggested they use that for privacy.

Caitlin checked on Maanik one more time and bade the Pawars a good night. It wasn’t until Ben and Caitlin were in the elevator and nearly to the lobby that she allowed herself to ease from professional mode into her own mild release. She breathed through the slight queasiness and shakes.

“You okay?” Ben asked, noting her fingers’ trembling.

“Will be.”

But the feeling only grew as they stepped outside. A burning smell surrounded her, as if someone had lit a fire in a fireplace in one of the surrounding buildings. And then she felt eyes on her again, and a cold so thorough she shivered under her coat. She stopped just as they reached the sidewalk.

“Caitlin?” Ben asked. “What is it?”

“I feel like I’m being watched,” she murmured. Somehow it was harder to tell Ben this than any of the other bizarre details of the past few days.

Ben looked around. Save for a few people walking their dogs, the street was relatively free of pedestrians. He glanced up at the lowest windows in the building. There was no one looking down.

“I’m sure it’s some kind of emotional aftershock,” she said. “Paranoia. Let’s get a cab.”

“On second thought… ,” Ben said.

“What?”

“A security chief told me once that if you feel like you’ve got eyes on you, don’t take a cab. You don’t know who’s driving it, and you don’t know if they’ve been waiting for you out of your sight.”

“But I don’t think anyone’s actually watching me.”

“Doesn’t matter. We’re going to walk to the subway.”

He put his arm around her and they headed north, then west. There was a mild crosstown wind and Caitlin didn’t stop trembling until they reached Grand Central. They went through the main door instead of one of the side entrances. The turquoise vaulted ceiling and pale stars, the brass and opal clock in the center, helped her feel that she was standing on firm ground again.

“Better?” Ben asked.

“Much.” She smiled. There were a great many people here, and shops were still open. It was all very normal, almost cheerful. She straightened; she hadn’t realized that she had been curling into Ben’s side. He pulled his arm away but not completely, leaving his hand on her back as they strolled to the subway entrance.

“Let’s talk about something that has nothing to do with anything,” Ben suggested.

His flustered tone made Caitlin laugh and he chuckled with her. It took about two seconds for Caitlin to snap back to the larger reality.

“Her hair,” she said as they headed toward the subway steps. “That was just impossible. I mean, there’s no other word for it.”

“Cai, let your brain off the hook for a while,” Ben said as he slid his MetroCard from its holder. “I know you want to drive straight at the problem, but we both know that if we don’t give our brains a rest, a real rest, it fogs up the windshield.”

“You are right, O wise one.” She grinned. “Okay. I’ll power down. You’re taking the 6 home?”

“No, I’ll see you home first.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I know. But in case there are eyes on you, I’m taking you home.”

Caitlin felt a rebellious kick against his white knighthood—and ignored it. She knew she had a much better chance of powering down if he was there, staying alert.

As they walked to the Shuttle train platform, Caitlin looked at all the faces around her, allowing herself to just see them, not read them. This kind of passive observation was primarily a right-brain activity, which is why it was so relaxing for her, but it also allowed a simple love of people to come forth, the admiration of human beings that made her so happy to live in one of the world’s largest cities. Standing on the platform, she drank in the faces like fresh, pure water. And then, stepping onto the train and finding a pole to hang on to, she focused on Ben’s face as he held on beside her—that sweet, studious, heartbreaker face, all in one. The face that had been with her through some of the worst events she had ever experienced.

The train intercom chimed and she heard the old, familiar recording, “Stand clear of the closing doors.” Ben was looking down at someone’s tablet over her shoulder, reading whatever she was reading. Caitlin reached up to Ben’s now-stubbled cheek. He gave her a half smile but didn’t look up, intent on finishing the page before the passenger scrolled to the next.

Too bad, Caitlin thought as she gently pulled his head down and kissed him. He did not mind the interruption. To the contrary, it was something he’d been waiting patiently for—not just tonight but since he first laid eyes on her. He gave her his fullest attention and suddenly they were sheltered in complete and quiet privacy. Their lips felt like fire and water and air all in one—until the train jolted and they bumped noses and laughed. But only for a moment, because Ben pulled her in close with one arm and kissed her twenty years deep.

Many long kisses later, they reached the door of Caitlin’s apartment building. Ben hesitated on the sidewalk.

“Well, this is awkward,” he tried to joke.

“You can come up,” she said, turning his face to meet her eyes.

“You’re sure?”

“Yes. But—”

“I know.” He grinned. “We have to dial it back.”

“Huh?” she said, before realizing what he had meant. “No. Maanik’s drawing. I want to check it out now.”

They both laughed as she led the way up the brownstone steps, her back burning warmly and steadily under his gaze.

Jacob was asleep and so was the sitter, who departed drowsily. Ben sat at the table and pulled his tablet out of his bag, bringing up Maanik’s scrawl. Caitlin—who was immediately preoccupied again with the puzzle—realized she desperately wanted the drawing to mean something. Because she also knew that what she had told the Pawars was true: she could not justify leaving Maanik at home very much longer.

She and Ben huddled over the glowing screen. The drawing seemed unrelated to either the Viking longship or the symbol of crescents. Its wobbly lines seemed to undulate from upper left to lower right with something like a purpose, yet the lines themselves were as organically shaped as frost or the edges of a stain. Directional… textural… they appeared not to be casual.

But appearances are not necessarily reality, she reminded herself. They could be nothing more than random scrawls on which she was attempting to force pattern recognition.

“Thoughts?” she asked.

“Either too many or not enough,” he said, tapping a few keys. “Two years ago, even a year ago, it would have been hell figuring out what this might be. Now that image-search capabilities have improved…”

He finished uploading the image and they watched an online search begin. The “best guess” image that first appeared was an example of an irregularly shaped freckle—an indication of carcinoma, which dampened their spirits. Ben slowly scrolled through the long list of possible matches: children’s drawings; several poor illustrations of shorelines, which gave them pause; and a number of microscopic images of skin cells. Then Caitlin stabbed her finger at the screen.

“Hold on. That. What is that?”

Ben tapped on the image and it filled the screen. It was a map, yellowed and ancient. Ben placed it side by side with Maanik’s drawing and both of them felt the temperature of the room plummet as her image fit easily into the shape of Antarctica, matching the ancient map’s outline with remarkable precision.

“The Piri Reis map,” Ben read. “From the early sixteenth century.”

“I’ve heard of it,” Caitlin murmured. “It showed the contours of Antarctica before it was covered with ice. Which is impossible.”

“Right,” Ben countered, “which is why it says here that’s a still-disputed claim. The best explanations are that the map shows something else altogether, possibly a combination of two or more maps that were thought to be contiguous.”

Caitlin didn’t reply. Grabbing Maanik’s file folder, which had been at the top of her stack ever since she met the girl, she flipped through its pages. Past the drawing she had made of the Norse longship, through her notes on Haiti, down to the bottom, where she found the drawing Maanik had made with her right hand, her nondominant hand—the drawing Caitlin had thought resembled a steep cliff and water. She showed it to Ben.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“An iceberg,” Ben said instantly.

“Drawn by Maanik during one of her earliest episodes,” Caitlin said. She put the paper on the table and they stared at the images. Then Caitlin added the drawing of the longship. “The Vikings got as far as North America. Maybe they went even farther. To the south.”

“To Antarctica?”

“Why not? Maybe not Vikings exactly, but their ancestors. We’ve been on this planet, and probably seafaring, for quite a while.”

“Yes, but that’s still a whopping great distance, Cai. From anywhere to Antarctica.”

“Not necessarily,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Continental drift,” she said. “The landmasses were all closer, once.”

“During the Triassic, yeah, maybe you could’ve walked from Australia. But there were no people then. No mammals, in fact.”

“All right, what about—and we’re speaking just for the sake of argument here—what if it wasn’t Vikings coming south to find Antarctica? What if there were people sailing north from Antarctica?”

“Cai… ,” he cautioned.

“What if ancestors of the Vikings lived there and sailed primitive longships away from the ice?”

“That’s a very big ‘if.’”

“Why?” she asked. “Because we haven’t found traces of a civilization in the least explored continent on earth, where ice freezes and melts and shifts in a way that would stifle extended archeological research, hide any and all clues?”

“No, look at this.” He pointed at text on the Web page. “The argument that the Piri Reis map shows an ice-free Antarctica rests on an assumption that Antarctica was ice-free around 4000 BC. Most scientists are sure Antarctica was covered by at least three million years ago. Humans were barely out of the trees.”

Caitlin was silent.

Ben looked at her reflection in the tablet. He added quietly, “It also doesn’t explain what any of that would be doing inside Maanik’s head.”

“No,” Caitlin agreed. Her voice felt heavy, her words dropping like brass weights into the air. “But even you said that Maanik is seeing or channeling or experiencing something big.”

“Yes. It’s like a disaster movie of the mind,” he said. “The operative words being ‘of the mind,’ a kind of waking dream. I’d even possibly, maybe buy a shared dream.” He turned to look at her. “Why? Are you back on past lives again?”

“I don’t know that I was ever there,” she admitted. “I just don’t know what else to think.”

Ben shook his head. “Show me a Mongolian connection and I’ll try harder to buy into it. The language definitely shows traces of Mongolian ancestry. But even so, Antarctic Vikings sailing north to Central Asia? That’s a reach, Cai. About eight thousand miles of a reach.”

“Yeah,” she agreed. “Yeah. Fine, I’ve got nothing else.”

“It was a good try, though.”

“Sure, sure. A unified theory that explains everything… and nothing.”

“Let’s put it away for tonight,” Ben suggested.

Caitlin gathered up the drawings and put the file folder away, trying to stop her mind from chewing on the problem. When she turned back to Ben, his focus had changed. He was sitting there looking at her, not at her analytical avatar, and he was sitting very still. She reached out with her right hand and picked up his left hand. Instantly she felt a waterfall surge through her body, vaguely channeled through her right hand. It brought a feeling of such immense relief, she laughed. Ben smiled and inhaled deeply, as if he had just downed a liter of water and was catching his breath.

“Jacob said he wasn’t big enough to help hold it,” Caitlin said.

“Huh?”

“The ocean.”

“What made you think of that?”

“Nothing,” she lied.

Ben was silent, choosing his words carefully. Then he said, “I have a lot of empty space. To hold things.”

Caitlin stared at him, seeing all the countless moments he had been alone in his life. “You’ve got room for my slosh-over, you mean?”

He didn’t have to answer.

She shook her head. “That worries me. Relying on someone, emotionally.”

“Why? People help each other, Cai. It’s what we do.”

“Well, people do a lot of other things too, and some of them are pretty rotten.”

Ben chuckled. “And you think I’ve got a problem with commitment.”

“I never said that.”

“Not with words,” he said, smiling.

“Maybe we have complementary problems,” Caitlin said slowly as she stepped to him, gently pushing his shoulders back and draping a leg over his lap to straddle him. Her back was to the table edge, her body molded into his.

“Even a crazy fit is a fit,” Ben whispered.

She held her lips to his and they breathed together, deeply, as he laid his hands on her lower back and pulled her in tight. Ben was right: it was a crazy fit. But at the moment, it was a fit.

CHAPTER 24

The nocturnal world outside the Global Explorers’ Club mansion was uncommonly still.

Earlier that day, pigeons had avoided the area just north of Washington Square Park. Dogs had not seemed eager to walk on lower Fifth Avenue; they hit the broad street and stopped, refusing to go farther. Cats that normally sat in the windows of buildings across the street avoided their perches altogether.

Arni Haugan had not noticed any of that. He had been working in the basement of his chaotic chemistry lab for fourteen hours straight, since just before dawn, when Mikel had arrived with the artifact. The Group’s leading field agent had been delayed in Montevideo due to something about an albatross rookery and problems with the electronics of the private jet.

“You’re getting as sensitive as people,” the Caltech wunderkind muttered at his tablet as he waited for the results of a capillary electrophoresis test. Arni loved his tools; he just didn’t always appreciate their temperament.

Like now. The computer insisted there was a problem with the current being carried by the borate ions, and the homogeneous electric field was unstable. Which meant there was a problem with the electrophoresis setup, the software, or both.

He grunted. It was time to stop. He would start fresh in the morning.

Arni shut the tablet and pushed back from the table with his usual cocktail of relief and frustration. Work was never done but it felt good to lay it aside for a while. He needed to plug back into the real world. The air in the Group’s basement was rigorously filtered and purified as part of Flora Davies’s war on dust—the “silent, corrosive killer of relics,” as she described it—leaving the atmosphere with an almost electric perfume.

Arni was a synesthete, having always experienced one sense accompanied by another, especially colors with odors and sounds. The kids in elementary school used to call him “Nutso” because he used his Crayolas to illustrate what he smelled, heard, and tasted. This produced rhapsodic little works of art that no one understood but everyone responded to. His mother had always said that he should become an artist. She was one of the few parents, he suspected, who had ever regretted that her son elected, instead, to become a PhD.

Flora had found his synesthesia fascinating and potentially useful. He was convinced that this, not his strong but less-than-brilliant postgrad record, had scored him this job.

That, plus the fact that she needed someone willing to work in the opposite of an ivory tower, he thought. A scientific wine cellar.

The smell down here registered in his peripheral vision as straight, metallic, bright yellow lines. They didn’t impede his work and didn’t bother him until he’d put in over eight hours. Then they became constricting, like neon prison bars.

Arni had turned on a jazz playlist from his iPod to add a thin purple nebula to the yellow lines haunting his vision. Now he unplugged it, sending the basement into sepulchral silence. There had once been a pendulum clock rescued from a decommissioned train terminal, but when that died, Flora replaced it with a silent red display on the wall, like the countdown clock at Cape Canaveral.

Arni stretched, reviewing what his day’s work had produced: little more than confirmation of what they already knew. He had shaved a slice of rock from one unmarked corner of the card-sized stone and hunkered over it with the light microscope to affirm that, yes, as the weight and location had suggested, it was a pallasite meteorite with a nickel-iron matrix and olivine crystals, and a bit of chromite as well. He had dug out a minuscule sample of the substance inside the carvings and run chemical tests, affirming that no, they still had no idea what kind of tool had made them. There was no trace of non-indigenous stone or metal, no hint of thread from a cloth or fur from a pelt that may have been used to smooth it. Arni admitted to himself that a dull familiarity had set in when he compared this object with the others in the Group’s collection. Whether in stone or metal or clay or eroded alabaster or even rotted wood, the carvings were all alike in terms of relative size and depth. The only thing that altered between them was the arrangement of carvings.

Still wearing his latex gloves, he stowed the object in a large safe with the other eight objects.

“Cras dies novus est,” he said, quoting one of Flora’s favorite Latin expressions. “Tomorrow is a new day.” It always put an unapologetic, unbeaten cap on the day.

Arni flicked off the light. Just one stop in the locker room and he would be out of this sharp air and onto a nice, pungent uptown bus.

He e-mailed his friend Bewan to tell him he was on the way. Hanging up his lab coat, he pulled a new white button-down shirt from his locker. He was tired, but tired was the best way to enjoy Uranium, a throwback to the 1980s with disco music and black lights to make its cocktails glow. The sounds and tastes would become colors, unimpeded, and he’d finally relax.

Arni started to close his locker door and then stopped, going still.

The electronics. In the plane. In the lab.

A bloody meteorite!

Of all the tests they’d tried on the carved objects, they’d never checked to see if the objects were radioactive. There was no reason to. Everyone knew that pallasite meteorites weren’t radioactive—not enough to speak of. But “everyone knew” were words of death in scientific research. It wouldn’t take more than a minute to grab a Geiger counter and wave the wand over the object.

Arni opted not to change clothes again. He returned to the lab, flicked on the lights, and found one of the Group’s Geiger counters. He retrieved the meteorite and placed it on the worktable, then waved the Geiger wand in front of it. The count of ionizing events—evidence of radioactivity—was almost nonexistent. The Geiger produced a couple dull clicks at a limping, almost dead pace, generating one or two light brown spots in the corners of Arni’s vision. Nothing to get excited about.

Arni heard a ring. Damn. His phone back in the locker room. No matter. It was probably Bewan saying he would meet him at the club, was already in line. Arni had to hurry. He gave the wand one last sweep. Suddenly, brown drops began pattering in Arni’s vision like rain. He heard dull clicks at a rapid pace. The Geiger counter’s needle was beginning to twitch toward the right of the gauge—even though that was impossible. An object couldn’t suddenly develop radioactivity.

Then his synesthesia created a thin gray fog with black edges in his peripheral vision.

“Okay—that’s just crazy,” he said.

The gray fog was his unvarying response to recorded spoken voices, not the clicks that emanated from the Geiger counter.

“No,” he said out loud. These aren’t clicks coming from the machine.

They were dull, soft voices… coming from the stone? He moved closer, bent lower. There was no doubt about it. They were like voices on the wind—the chanting of angels came to mind. Arni practiced no religion nor believed in supernatural beings, but there the voices were.

He drew a sharp breath as the carvings began to pulse, not with his synesthetic lights but with an internal luminescence, ivory-white. The symbols were lighting up in a nonlinear order, each carving showing a soft visual pulse with every corresponding sound. The tones themselves were fractionally louder now. They reminded Arni of language tapes, native pronunciation slowed for the novice, but he immediately squashed that thought. The human propensity for personification meant that any unidentified sound resembling vocalization would automatically be interpreted as words and language. That was wishful, not scientific. He felt in his pocket for his phone. He had to record this—

His phone was in his locker. He reached over and rebooted his tablet. There was an audio recorder built in.

While it turned back on, Arni picked up the meteorite and turned it over, trying to see if there was a point of origin for the hum. He discovered that the stone was vibrating, but not in a way that could be producing the tone. The buzz was more like a mild electric current than a cell phone. It was not unpleasant to the touch; it was soothing, in fact. It made him want to hold it. The current seemed to magnify inside his body, as though triggering his own energy centers—the top of his skull, his forehead, his throat, his heart—

His thoughts suddenly felt muddy and something began throbbing behind his eyes, forcing itself forward. Something moving, something wholly other. Rust-red and swirling in a cyclonic cone, as if seen from the top, it was becoming thinner as he descended. Now, a landscape. A manufactured landscape of domes and spires incorporated among what seemed to be natural elements, long curves and slopes. The natural parts were enormous, making the artificial components seem like part of a train set or Christmas nativity—small. Very small. And nearly everything was white, as if the entire image was backlit or bottom-lit, somehow, as if light rays were extending up to create the image, yet no rays were visible.

Is this you or me? he asked the artifact.

Again Arni heard the voices. His orientation with the image changed. It tilted suddenly, in an uncanny lockstep with the sounds, so that Arni was looking up: specifically at a stone pillar about three stories high. It was tipped with something glinting green that made him think of the olivine crystals inside the meteorite. He looked around and saw that similar stone pillars circled the city…

And then the sky seemed to burst red again across its huge expanse. The landscape shifted, revealing a street, a route, at the end of which was white and blue in a riot of motion. This was not him, not his synesthetic response. The colors, the images, the sounds—they were all coming from the rock.

What are you? Arni demanded.

But he never got the answer, never saw what was at the end of the route. Suddenly his right brain and left brain ceased functioning together. His right brain continued to view the image. His left brain died, and he could no longer think to himself about what he was seeing. The right side of his body crumpled so quickly that he fell to the floor. Colors from all over the spectrum flooded his vision but he could not summon the ability to scream. Then just as suddenly, all the colors stopped, every sensation stopped, and he no longer felt his body touching the floor, no longer felt his body at all.

Arni experienced an overpowering urge to sleep. His eyes were shut but he still saw—for another moment. Then his medulla melted, and his corpus callosum, his thalamus, and his pons, and he stopped breathing even as his heart rate exploded.

Moments later he was dead, a trickle of blood and liquid brain dripping from his nose onto the collar of his new white shirt.