Gillian Anderson - A Vision of Fire

Caitlin stepped into the queue for boarding. Almost immediately she got a text from Ben: M deteriorating. Fire a real hazard.

The person behind her clucked her tongue; the queue had moved but she had not. Caitlin stepped to the side.

Juggling her phone, ticket, passport, and a letter from the Iranian ambassador providing clearance to go home, she typed back: I have new info. I’ll come straight from airport.

She waited; no response. She considered calling Ben but knew the explanations would not make a short conversation. Final boarding was called. Caitlin, last in line, hurriedly presented her ticket and was waved in.

Iran Air, it turned out, did not allow its passengers to use their cell phones or access the Internet during flights. That was frustrating; Caitlin knew that for thirteen hours she would wonder what Ben meant by “real hazard.” Had Maanik tried to set herself on fire like Atash? Negotiations be damned: if Maanik had harmed herself beyond scraping her forearms, Mrs. Pawar wouldn’t have waited. The girl would already be in the hospital—she would at this moment be drugged into an overmedicated automaton, and that would be the end of the exploration into what was truly happening to her.

Hold on , Caitlin urged Maanik in her head. Hold on till I’m back.

Of course she didn’t believe Maanik would hear that, and yet the impulse did not seem so crazy after all she had experienced.

What if Vahin is right? If Maanik’s mind was open to this “transpersonal plane,” and Caitlin herself had some access to it as well, wasn’t it conceivable that a message could pass from her to Maanik? Vahin had speculated that Caitlin may have acquired access because she had placed herself in such close psychic proximity to the affected young adults.

“Vibrations,” he had said to her, pressing pamphlets and booklets into her hands before she left. “Each of us is like a tuning fork that does not stop. Like the tea, the soul vibrates and survives outside the body, outside of time. In life, we change pitch and resonate with each other, sometimes in pairs, sometimes in groups. Why should the soul be different?” He added in parting, “There are those of us who believe it is the purpose of all life to achieve a complete resonance—all of us as one.”

“Make me one with everything.” Caitlin found herself muttering the oft-mocked phrase of Eastern mystics.

“New-agey” was the expression that came to mind. Yet everything she had seen, the gestures and words, the shared symbol, the reactions of the animals, was exactly that: new-agey, mystical, quasireligious, fantastic. Choose the outré word that fit. But she could not disavow any of it, from the floating hair and fabric to the shock waves to the visions. Those were a part of that strange reality Vahin advocated. What made his explanation less valid than any other?

Caitlin mentally reviewed the signs along the road to this point.

The shared symbol drawn by both Gaelle and Maanik seemed a good place to begin. If Atash had been able to use his hands, might he have drawn it too? Caitlin still found the triangles made of crescents to be inexplicable. They were slightly Celtic yet not. They vaguely resembled a radioactive symbol—but that could be a time-biased comparison, looking back from the present instead of looking toward the present. If this symbol were really as old as a habitable Antarctica, perhaps it had been the unconscious inspiration for the modern symbol?

Habitable Antarctica. The thought had occurred to her so easily. She remembered the apparent map Maanik had drawn. When they reviewed its shape and topography, it linked closely to a map of Antarctica as though surveyed from the air. Could people have flown that long ago? Caitlin had seen ice in the vision with Atash—was that also Antarctica? Perhaps an ancient someone had traveled above it by balloon? She thought back to one of Jacob’s science experiments. All that would have required were thermal currents somehow directed into a big sheath of—what? Pelts? Leather?

Too heavy.

Animal tissue? In the past, whales had been harvested for nearly every part of their body. Thin tissue, sinew, skin—was that possible?

The word “fantastic” came back to her. Maybe she was making leaps—but nothing else came close to making sense.

Antarctica. A different time, a different climate. With people ? Humans? A society, a civilization? What else could it be? There was a sophisticated language of words and gestures. She thought of all the stories and fables she had heard in her life, from Noah and the flood to the Greek myth of Icarus. Even scholars had always said there was probably a foundation to our most exotic tales.

The first thing she would do when she had Internet again would be to search for any cataclysms that had occurred at the South Pole over the millennia, right back to Pangaea if necessary. The patients had mentioned fire from the sky and something about a wave. There had to be some connection. Her mind might be arguing against it, but that’s what minds did. Her gut was telling her this was the right direction.

The plane banked left and Caitlin watched through her window as the Caspian Sea tilted back into view, sparkling in the late afternoon sun. She closed her eyes and recalled her conversation with Ben in the park in Turtle Bay. Her breath fluttered at the thought of him. She decided to talk to him, to ask to start over when the immediate crises subsided.

If they subsided.

She thought of poor Maanik wobbling through the hallways of a psych ward, drugged to oblivion. She contemplated the larger populace struggling thirty thousand feet below, constantly at war or at the mercy of an unstable climate and formidable geology. What if Vahin was correct? What if some ancient race was correct: that the vibration of souls, their continuation out of the body, was the way to truly survive? What if, in some ancient theology, there lay the common, long-lost origins of Valhalla and the Elysian Fields and Heaven?

The transpersonal plane.

Caitlin focused again. More than anything else, she wanted to communicate with Maanik, tell her I’m still with you, distance be damned . Vahin said they were connected. Could she send a thought to Maanik? How? What kind of wave could she make that would touch the girl?

She tried to relax her thoughts. She recalled the park, with Ben. Sunshine, unbuttoning their coats. Ben exuberantly describing the words he had deciphered from Maanik’s gibberish. “Fire,” of course, and “sky,” but also “water.”

Big water.

And then, suddenly, Caitlin had it. Atash had tried to form the superlative when she entered his hospital room—left hand angling away from the body, right hand crossing up the body on a diagonal. She didn’t remember the spoken word that went with it but she didn’t need to. The gesture had to be enough.

She closed her eyes and calmed herself as completely as if she were about to guide a client into hypnosis. She thought of Jack London first, the beagle barometer, remembered him sleeping and snoring. Then she thought of Maanik. She sifted through their moments together, remembered when Maanik had made a face for her, when she had seemed most like her normal teenage self. When she saw the girl clearly, when she felt the laugh they’d shared, Caitlin gently angled her left hand away from her torso and crossed her right hand up toward her left shoulder. Unexpectedly her lungs took a deep inhale and then exhaled—it felt as though she had pushed a physical weight away from her sternum, off her left shoulder. She kept her mind on Maanik and thought to her:

Ocean… big water… you and me together… hold on…