Gillian Anderson - A Vision of Fire

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.”

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.