Gillian Anderson - A Vision of Fire

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.”