The Occurrence

  He remembered one of the younger men, Brian Halloway, who was sent stateside after flipping out collecting body parts, blathering that he could feel spirits. Not just around the bodies and shattered pieces of flesh, and not just the Marine dead, but the spirits of all the dead of Iraq. That episode was enough to get him discharged.

  He thought of Brian as he looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. He could feel the spirit of the young girl around him and knew he’d never be able to sequester her deep inside him again. He also knew he’d never talk about it again. He had told Dominique, but if she ever brought it up, he’d chalk it up to a bullshit story just to get her off his back.

  The truth was, he knew remembering was part of something bigger.

  20

  It was almost midnight when the government plane landed at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland. Creeping fog and spitting rain made a less-than-warm welcome for Dominique and Julian, jet-lagged and exhausted.

  Senator Ledge stared out from the back seat of a government vehicle. He wiped the condensation that formed on the glass as his son and Dominique were escorted from the plane down to a covered area of the tarmac.

  Dominique’s boss at The Washington Post, waited for her under a large doorman’s umbrella outside his limo.

  Dominique was disappointed when she saw him. She hadn’t asked for him to pick her up. She wanted to be with Julian. Maybe it was just that they’d come out of their river of fire alive and that was the intense bond…

  But she knew it was more than that. It was something ancient. And she wanted to know what. She had fallen in love with him, broken self and all. She’d never fallen in love. She’d fucked, but love had evaded those beds. She knew his wounds—they were what drew her to him. She was wounded, too. And that he’d talked about what he saw in the warehouse, that he’d talked about the young girl, made her believe what had occurred in the aftermath of the bomb was meant to bring them together. To what, she did not know. But she knew it could heal. And maybe Hashim and the boy he’d called Nazir knew that, too.

  Rain thumped on the cover above them. She wrapped a shawl around her head. Julian lifted the collar of his coat to avoid the ripping wind. She slid her hand between the upturned collar and his face and felt his cheek.

  “You’re burning up,” she said, wanting to take care of him.

  “I should go. You go home, too. We’re both exhausted.”

  She knew the road back to each other would take time. She knew words went so far.

  It would take something more than each other to heal them. Something she’d been looking for, for a long time. Something that always seemed to be out of reach. Something that seemed to be coming in on them.

  21

  Saturday, September 12

  Jhana-Merise woke before dawn in a tiny stone guest room. This was her first morning in the Convent of La Merced ten miles from the center of Cuzco. A painting of Mother Mary hung on the wall over the stiff wooden bed on which she’d spent the night.

  She made her way through the ancient vaulted chambers of stone and mortar. Instinct brought her to where she saw Sister Helen greet the other nuns, assembled for morning prayers.

  Helen was a young woman—her lucent face bore traces of her Inca ancestors.

  Jhana-Merise asked Helen if she might join them. Helen smiled and led her down cold, narrow stone steps, to a dark catacomb with an altar and six pews.

  Jhana-Merise’s eyes adjusted to the candlelight. The smell of incense and the low hum of the sisters’ incantations before they joined in unison filled Jhana-Merise with the longed-for warmth of motherly love.

  Thirteen women between thirty and eighty knelt before the altar. Jhana-Merise observed each one. And in turn they each appeared to welcome her with their eyes.

  Jhana-Merise saw that some carried sadness, but most seemed serene in their chosen life. She took in these women in long tunics of white, and headpieces of royal blue, and felt safe within these cloistered walls.

  The dining room of dark, heavy wood and stone with faded frescoes on the walls from centuries before was familiar to Jhana-Merise. She knew of déjà vu. But this was more than what she knew. This shock of awareness went through her. A vibration, as if she were a string instrument. Some unseen hand brushed across her body. The same trembling she felt when she cured the young boy in the burn unit. The same trembling when she came out of the coma.

  Breakfast was spent in silence, yet the curious eyes of the nuns scanned this young visitor.

  Jhana-Merise discovered the way to connect in the silence was through a smile, and her openness seemed to melt some of the crusted corners of the curious women.

  Later that morning, Jhana-Merise knocked on the opened door to Sister Helen’s office. Helen looked up from her reading.

  “Jhana-Merise, please, come in.”

  Jhana-Merise entered. She looked around the room. It was an ascetic space with two wooden chairs, a journeyman’s desk, and a handmade crucifix on the wall behind the nun.

  “I can’t stay,” Jhana-Merise said.

  “I know.”

  “Will you help me convince my father?”

  “Of what?”

  “That he needs to take me to America.”

  Sister Helen knew this would be the last time she would see her. That Jhana-Merise was young, and youth deserved joy, didn’t dissuade her from believing the journey ahead for father and daughter was necessary, and perilous. Helen knew transformation came at great cost. The man on the cross behind her had paid the ultimate price for preaching oneness and love. And, as she looked into the young girl’s eyes, she imagined what those who’d been at that man’s side might have felt, the sorrow and expectation of helping to birth a new world.

  Helen would pray for Jhana-Merise and Vincente’s safe passage into their new world.

  “Are you afraid?” Sister Helen asked.

  “What is there to fear in knowing we’re not alone?”

  Helen cried.

  PART THREE

  Convergence

  22

  Thursday, September 17

  Dominique’s eyes darted to the walls, the books, the African artifacts in Adrien Kurt’s Washington, D.C. office. Anything to avoid his eyes. She was afraid of what she might be compelled to reveal. She was empowered by the experience in the warehouse, emboldened even. She also thought she could be going insane. Would Kurt believe her if she told him about the words written in the sunlight?

  She knew he’d worked for the government in some therapeutic capacity before he entered the private sector, but never could find out what that was. And she’d tried. All she could find was that he’d worked with soldiers at Walter Reed, in Maryland. She’d sensed there might be more to that story, but chose not to be a journalist in her own therapy. He was a mystery to her.

  For years prior to her tour in Iraq, she’d spent months coming to Kurt once a week for therapy, to work out shit with her family and her own ambitions. But it had been over two years since she’d been back. And even before she’d left for the Middle East she’d never revealed to him, or anyone, her thoughts of a deeper belief in her destiny—that she could change the world. Not some platitude, but a transformation that accepted evolution as an endless occurring. Not only toward where we may be going, but where we have come from. She wasn’t sure what all that meant, but it wouldn’t leave her alone. Transformation. Birthing what wasn’t before.

  The experience in the warehouse, and her implausible connection to Hashim had opened a door to the possibility of being connected to something beyond what she knew. It was something she didn’t dare say out loud to him.

  Kurt’s singular focus drew her deep into that expanse. A connection to something being birthed that wasn’t there before.

  She glanced at her briefcase on the floor. The stone, a fragment of an ancient cuneiform, was inside. She’d hidden it among her packed things on the army transport plane from Baghdad to Andrews. The writing etched in it she’d been unable to decipher.


  “A penny for your thoughts,” Kurt said.

  She laughed.

  “What?”

  “So, that’s what they’re worth?”

  Kurt leaned back and smiled. His confidence and gentleness, as well as the mystery surrounding his past, intrigued her and heightened the value and curiosity with which she’d always felt in his presence.

  “It must be weird to be back, huh?” he asked.

  “A little,” she said, meaning a lot. She heard the gentle rush of air from the vent, and the soft tick of the clock. She’d forgotten how much it comforted her. This room. This quiet. That had become rare. Hushes made her bristle in war zones. She’d come to embrace the sound of helicopters whooshing against the sky. The clusterfuck of firefights she’d rushed toward, a wild scribe addicted to tracers and phosphorous glow. And that addictive tang of gunpowder. The gifts of living in a war zone. Silence had kept her on pins and needles, not sound. But she allowed the silence to comfort her here.

  “How about your friends and folks? How are you doing with them in all this?” Kurt asked.

  It was hard to open up the first time back with him, but she needed to talk. That’s why she’d forced herself to make the appointment and keep it, despite the scratching of her haunted self to bury it all in an iron clad room of denial.

  “I haven’t seen my folks yet. Haven’t connected with any friends. I told them I need time, they seem good with that.”

  She watched the afternoon sun drop below the top of the arched window. A stream of light hit her eyes. She adjusted on the sofa to move out of the beam.

  “I’ll close the blinds.”

  Kurt got up and drew them shut.

  She stared at the clock on the table next to her and watched the second hand move around its face. Tick. Tick. Tick.

  She moved to the wall of books and distracted herself by studying the titles. She didn’t remember him having such a breadth of literature on the mystical: Dark Night of the Soul, by Saint John of the Cross. The Egyptian and Tibetan Books of the Dead. And a couple of books by the author Paul Von Ward: The Soul Genome: Science and Reincarnation, and, Gods, Genes and Consciousness, Nonhuman Intervention in Human History.

  “Jesus.”

  “What?”

  “How many gods do you believe in?”

  “It’s common after what you went through, Dominique.”

  “What is?”

  “The search for meaning. You’ve been on that search a long time, even if you won’t admit it. You sleeping okay?”

  She hadn’t been sleeping well. She was exhausted, unable to focus. She hadn’t heard from Julian in over a week and that weighed on her.

  She took a deep breath and came back to the sofa. She was queasy.

  “I’ve been having dreams.”

  “You want to tell me about them?”

  She rubbed her forehead. She began to sweat.

  “You all right?”

  “Pieces. They’re pieces. I’m being pulled into a…”

  She darted to the bathroom down the hall in his office apartment and closed the door.

  He heard her vomiting, and moved closer down the hall.

  After the sickness seemed to have passed, she was silent for a short time.

  “You okay in there?”

  “Yeah. I’ll be out in a minute.”

  In the bathroom, she looked at herself in the mirror. Pale. Trembling.

  She washed her hands and face, glared at herself, and whispered, “You’ve got to tell him.”

  “There are mints in the drawer,” he called to her through the door.

  She opened a box and popped two mints in her mouth.

  She opened the bathroom door and stood there.

  “You sure you’re alright?”

  She took a deep breath and said, “You’re going to think I’m crazy.”

  “If there’s one thing I know, it’s that you’re not crazy. You’ve been through eons of tragedy, starting with that hospital room in Pittsburgh, up to and including your brother’s death, and almost yours.”

  He led her back into the therapy room.

  “What would you think if I told you something came into the warehouse after the bomb hit?”

  “I’d think something came in after the bomb hit.”

  “What if I told you I saw writing on the sunlight that came in from the roof.”

  “I’d believe you.”

  “You’d believe me?”

  “Yes.”

  She picked up the empty water glass next to the carafe on the side table. She didn’t smoke and needed something to hold onto, in order to stop her hands from shaking.

  Her words flowed.

  She told him about the ground opening.

  Holding Hashim’s hand.

  The terrified wonder in Nazir’s eyes.

  “What about Julian?” Kurt asked.

  “His eyes went white as if he were blind, and a harsh sorrow flushed through him. I could taste it as much as I tasted the dust.”

  She didn’t tell him about the girl Julian told her he’d killed.

  She put the water glass down.

  Released from the pressure of holding the glass tight, her fingers came back to life and, like a waking spider, unfurled themselves of the tension.

  She picked up the briefcase on the floor by her chair. Opened it and took out a wad of newspaper. She unwrapped the paper. She held out the fragment to Kurt.

  He took it and rubbed his fingers around it.

  She smelled a faint trace of roses, and wondered if he could. He seemed to have no reaction to the change in the air.

  Slivers of light snuck through the blinds and landed on the stone in Kurt’s hand. The carved symbols were pronounced in the chiaroscuro light.

  “You found this in the warehouse?”

  “Yes. And if you didn’t think I was crazy before…”

  “I don’t think you’re crazy.”

  “You will now.”

  “Why?”

  “I believe the stone helped save us.”

  Kurt sat in his chair, and pointed for her to sit as well.

  “How much do you know about cuneiforms?” he asked, looking at the stone in his hand.

  “A little.”

  He gave her back the stone and the light seemed to follow it into her hand.

  “Do you know the story of Gilgamesh?” he asked.

  “I know it’s an early myth.”

  “In 1872 an engraver of bank notes in London, George Smith, made a discovery. He’d come upon clay tablets in a back room of the British Museum that spoke of man’s heritage being far more ancient than had been supposed. The tablets were said to be from the library of tens of thousands of volumes that King Assurbanipal had collected twenty-five centuries before, in the area that’s modern-day Iraq. What Smith discovered was these tablets told the story of the ‘Epic of Gilgamesh.’ A story of the quest to become human, and the search, and failure, to gain immortality. But what shocked Smith more was that he’d also found himself reading about a flood, an ark, and pairs of animals.”

  “Genesis.”

  “No. What he was reading wasn’t from the Bible. The tablets he’d found were already centuries old by the time the Genesis we know was supposed to have been written.”

  “You’re saying the Bible plagiarized it?”

  “I’m telling you what history suggests.”

  “And that is?”

  “We’re more than we know.”

  “What does this cuneiform have to do with Smith?”

  “Nothing directly. But it sets a context. A precedent for what you found. How one thing can open a door to another.”

  “Do you understand the symbols in the stone?” she asked.

  “Yes. The markings refer to an ancient myth from Sumer, a land once called Babylon that’s now Iraq.”

  “Is there anything you don’t know?”

  “A lot.”

  “That whole myth is inscribed on that little stone?
”

  “No. But early language did need to speak volumes in a limited space.”

  “The first Twitter?”

  “You might say that. These markings refer to an inner elevation in consciousness that leads to a place in the world where that level of transcendence exists in physical form. A portal. A split in the veil of reality. But access to it is denied to most.”

  “Are you saying we experienced a split in that veil in the warehouse?”

  “A tremendous force exists where you found this stone. Isn’t that what you’ve accused the government of? That maybe oil isn’t all of what attracts them there?”

  “I wasn’t thinking of mysterious portals.”

  “The Sumer myth also speaks of the Lady of the Roses.”

  Dominique had never experienced the phenomenon of time being stopped. Time never stopped. It either moved too fast or slow, but never stopped.

  But. Time. Had. Stopped.

  Her eyes blinked and things moved again.

  The ticking of the clock entered her hearing.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “I’m someone who understands what you went through.”

  “Because you’ve been through it?”

  “Let’s leave that for now. This is about you. And you’re not crazy. Okay?”

  She’d always trusted Kurt, but now sensed he possessed a soul much closer to her own than she ever could’ve imagined. And, she told him about the sound that came into the warehouse and penetrated her.

  “It makes no sense, I know, but…”

  “It makes all the sense in the world,” he answered. “It’s the sound love makes traveling through time.”

  She stared at him, not clear she heard correctly. “Did you say—”

  “Yes. It’s the sound love makes traveling through time. Most choose never to hear it.”

  She wanted to pursue her journalist’s drive and get answers to all the questions she had, but wasn’t sure she’d be able to comprehend what else he might say, as who he was seemed to lie deeper in the direction she was being led, and at the moment she had all she could handle.