A Vision of Fire

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?