The Occurrence

  Ja’far led them down an unsteady ladder to the lowest surface of the site.

  In the growing moonlight they walked through bleached bones and weather-shattered trinkets left as prayers.

  “The terror began here long before Saddam,” Ja’far said.

  They reached a wall at the far edge of the site.

  Ja’far studied the moon.

  “What are you doing?” Julian asked.

  “Waiting,” Ja’far answered.

  “For what?” Dominique said.

  “The moon will guide us.”

  Dominique and Julian moved to a patch of ground away from the bones.

  Ja’far took the heavy satchel he’d been carrying, tossed it on the ground, opened it, and from inside took out a chunk of coal. He made a small pit, nestled the coal inside it and lit the coal with his Zippo. The coal took the flame, drew it in, and began to give off its warmth. Ja’far sat in front of the pit. Dominique and Julian did the same.

  “Are we going to be here a long time?” Julian asked.

  “Until the moon allows us to enter the cave.”

  Julian raised the collar of his jacket and moved to the other end of the gravesite.

  Dominique and Ja’far sat in the quiet of the desert night, Ja’far’s attention on the arc of the moon.

  Dominique studied Ja’far. In the glow of the coal heat there was something about him that looked familiar, beyond the echo of John Hurt.

  In the week since she’d met Jhana-Merise, Dominique couldn’t stop thinking about her—about one of the things she’d said: “we are base metal and our souls are threads of gold.”

  Ja’far was another thread being pulled through their lives. And while the idea of reincarnation wasn’t foreign to her, she’d come to a deeper understanding since that meeting, when Jhana-Merise said Dominique reminded her of her mother.

  Dominique had contacted the friends she’d made in Cuzco. The same friends who’d told her of the miracle of the boy in the burn unit. She’d asked them to see if they might be able to find any information on Vincente Salva’s wife, Jhana-Merise’s mother. What they found brought Dominique to another level in their collective evolution.

  The mother’s name was Daniela. She worked for a time as a guide at Machu Picchu. She was well-known for telling stories of the entities that lived in the mountains there. She had the reputation for speaking truth to power, not unlike Dominique’s quest in her work.

  Dominique had heard of split souls—souls with a power so huge they needed more than one personality within which to bring forth their purpose—the same soul that needed to occupy more than one human being in any given lifetime. There were even souls that had many splits. Could it be that each of those on this journey were part of the same soul? Was this the insight to which they were being led?

  “We’ve been here before, haven’t we?” she asked Ja’far.

  A sweet, orange wind stirred through the ancient killing field. The scent jolted Dominique’s memory back to an earlier time. A time of rescue, and ointments Bedouin had used to heal her when she was dying in the desert of an earlier life. It was this fruit she smelled, and this life she saw.

  “It was you who helped me,” she said in calm awe. “They were your hands that applied the ointments that cured me.”

  “Yes. I was one of the tribe who took care of you here. Inside this place is where you were saved.”

  “The Cave of Memory,” she said, remembering when she’d walked in the monotone of the desert, from a land to which she’d been banished. Walking upon sand with this tribe of which Ja’far had been part. The same sand she and Julian had walked on in their escape from the desert. The same sand that was on her bare feet in the cold of that night when they were saved. She’d been saved in many lives. Now it was her turn to save others.

  “Yes. We have been here before,” Ja’far said.

  The arc of the warm cream moon illuminated an unseen opening along a vertical line of rock.

  Ja’far moved his hands along the surface of the rock, along a seeming invisible line until he opened it enough for a human being to move through.

  Julian approached him, curious as to what he was doing. He saw the opening.

  “Did you move that rock?”

  “It wasn’t me alone. Now we must go inside.”

  Ja’far took out a small flashlight from his pocket and squeezed through the portal in the rock.

  Julian and Dominique followed.

  The scent of roses seeped from the pores of the ancient cave.

  Dominique remembered…

  She was being dragged across dry riverbeds on a boat made of sticks. Bedouin cocooned and covered her in oil moist leaves to protect her burned skin from the sun. She was brought into the cool of a cave she heard the Bedouin call, The Cave of Memory. Night came. A fire warmed against the desert rime. A story was told as flames glimmered on the cave walls of an earlier time. The eldest of the tribe anointed her eyes and skin with more ointments. They knew well of healing, these desert people. But what great realm had summoned them to save her?

  “It was as if you were placed there by God,” Dominique said. She saw Julian and Ja’far looking at her, as her experience traveled from the cave then, to now.

  “Are you all right?” Julian asked.

  “She’s remembering what happened here a thousand years ago,” Ja’far answered.

  Dominique saw that Julian was frightened and doubting. But he was here.

  Ja’far led Dominique and Julian through a maze of catacombs. They’d been walking for hours and stopped to rest. Dominique asked how much farther they needed to go. Ja’far told her that while the entrance point was the burial ground they’d come from, it wasn’t the location of the tablet. The catacombs would take them to under the abandoned warehouse many miles away from where they started. So, if they were followed, no one would be able to find the entrance through the rock they’d entered.

  “And if by some chance they were able to find it?” Julian asked.

  “They wouldn’t survive in the catacombs.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because we’re very deep under the ground.”

  “What about the air? How will we breathe when we get there?” Dominique asked.

  “We’re breathing now, and we’re already hundreds of feet under the desert.”

  “What are you talking about? How is that possible?” Julian demanded.

  “How is any of what’s happened to you possible?”

  Dominique saw that Julian was having a hard time buying this.

  “We’ve got to come to the surface at some point. Or are you planning to keep us here?”

  “When we’ve done what we came to do, we will go back to the surface.”

  “I’m fucking glad you’re that confident.”

  “I am,” Ja’far said. And he told them of the stories handed down for centuries. Stories that gave his tribe the knowledge to be guides and guardians. And with that wisdom came the ability to channel a vibration that would illuminate the tablet in the darkness of the catacombs—a vibration in those who had been given the task to lead others here. Ja’far came from such a tribe, and Dominique and Julian were for whom they had been waiting. He knew about them. About their lives, their childhoods. He told her something she’d never shared with anyone: how during her near-death in that hospital room in Pittsburgh, the young Dominique saw herself as an adult and knew she would survive. “The Two Dominiques you called it.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “The desert has revealed many things to our tribe. It’s how we survived.”

  Ja’far also knew of the young girl from Cuzco.

  Something flashed in the distance.

  “What’s that?” Dominique asked, startled.

  “It’s white rock. Quartz that glimmers when it catches the light.”

  “Where’s the light coming from?” Julian asked.

  “Welcome to the guardian of the tablet,” Ja’far said, poi
nting proudly to himself.

  They made their way toward the light at the end of the tunnel. They reached what seemed like a dead end and stood before a translucent wall.

  Julian touched the wall and pulled away.

  “Don’t be afraid. It’s testing your DNA,” Ja’far said. “It wants to be sure you are who you are supposed to be.”

  “Am I?”

  “Not yet, I’m afraid.”

  Dominique touched the wall. She didn’t pull away. She felt a language in its pulse.

  If she had to explain merging with the vibration in the wall…words failed. It was called a tablet, what she pressed her hand into, but there was nothing written on it.

  Searing heat ripped through her body and she clenched in the pain.

  Julian rushed to her.

  Ja’far stood in his way.

  Julian shoved him aside.

  “Stop,” Dominique shouted.

  Her voice rippled through the tunnels of the catacomb like the wrinkles a flat rock makes skipping over water on its endless glide.

  The sound traveled like it would never end. That’s when they realized it was no longer the echo of her voice that filled the air.

  The sound was coming from the tablet.

  Dominique remembered what Kurt had said about the sound love makes traveling through time. Was this that sound?

  “Yes,” Ja’far said in answer to her thought.

  The sound carried with it the pain of centuries. The pain she’d caused. The pain inflicted on her. That she was strong enough to absorb the horror, and transmute it to what she could only call the love beneath, brought forth from this mysterious wall an energy that penetrated her with words. They were: “Evil is the greatest source of transformation.”

  Julian watched as she seemed almost to become one with the wall, which throbbed. And the air smelled like honey.

  “What the fuck is going on?” Julian said.

  Ja’far raised his hand in a gesture to Julian that said, listen.

  Julian stilled himself and took in the sound. His breathing calmed, and his body quieted.

  “What’s happening?” Julian asked.

  “We’re constructing a portal from the darkest side of our soul to the light,” Ja’far answered.

  71

  Catherine listened to Nazir as he spoke of having traded angels for devils. They were in the garage of her cottage. He was helping her clean the furnace, for a cold front was moving in, and she needed to be certain there’d be heat for what might be a long stay. Julian had asked her to be with Nazir until he and Dominique came back from where they were going and could figure out what to do with him. They didn’t tell Catherine they were in the desert. But she knew.

  The furnace kicked on. Nazir jumped at the sudden sound.

  “It’s the heater. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  He moved toward its warmth.

  She could see he had something on his mind.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  He moved away. Disquieted.

  “You can trust me, Nazir.”

  He sat on one of the wooden boxes. On top of a stack of books, next to the box, he saw a photograph of a handsome young man. He didn’t take his eyes off the photo.

  “He’s my son. His name is Scott.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He died years ago.”

  Except for Hashim, she hadn’t been back to the cottage since Scott’s death here. She’d never wanted to come back. She’d tried to sell it, but something always interfered.

  “How did he die?”

  She was reluctant to reveal the truth, because she knew Nazir’s world looked upon homosexuality with rabid fury. But she was compelled to speak.

  “Complications caused by the AIDS virus. Do you know what that is?”

  “Yes.”

  She could see this was a scary level of intimacy for him. But Nazir was a young man, far from home, and she was still a mother.

  She sat next to him on another wooden box. He didn’t move away.

  “When did you first meet Hashim?” she asked.

  “I’ve known him ever since I can remember. He was my teacher and my friend.”

  “What was it like when they asked you to track him down here?”

  “I’d been betrayed before. Suspicion and doubt are part of our lives.”

  “But you trusted him for so long.”

  “Yes. But trust can be dangerous.”

  That he could doubt his mentor, to the extent of thinking he might be a traitor, surprised Catherine.

  She thought of the poem Hashim had given her, the tender poem he’d written when he was a boy. And she remembered what Dominique had said to her about first seeing Nazir in the warehouse—that if jihad was attracting young men this sensitive it meant there was much more to fear than anyone could imagine. What was it about their sensitivity that turned them to violence, and gave way to this mistrust? Wasn’t the ability to feel deeply a deterrent from cruelty and doubt, not a catalyst?

  “How can you be suspect of someone this close to you?”

  He folded his arms and turned away. She could see he was shamed by the question.

  “I’m not judging you, Nazir. I want to know. I want to understand.”

  When he stood she saw a shift in him, and wasn’t sure what it meant. But she wasn’t going to be afraid.

  “My mistrust of Hashim feels like betrayal. Because what he taught me was the opposite of what had come before—that we young are lost, humiliated, alienated, and looking for a place to put our rage. Hashim came from love. That is why so many of us followed him.”

  “But that love killed.”

  “Doesn’t the God of your faith allow people to die horrendous deaths? And doesn’t that same God come from love?”

  His words pushed her right back into the mournful memory of her son, and his harrowing death.

  She cried.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you sad.”

  “It wasn’t you.”

  She reached her hand out to him.

  He held it.

  “You’ve been kind to me. But I can’t stay. This is not where I belong.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “Allah will show the way.”

  72

  Nazir walked in the dark chill of a D.C. morning. His thoughts of finding a mosque for refuge evaporated in the fear of being recognized and caught. So, he sought refuge inside a church.

  Morning Mass was in progress.

  He crossed a border into a new land, foreign and forbidding.

  He slipped into a pew to not draw attention.

  An invisible pressure on his shoulder made him look across the aisle. A young girl smiled at him. She was sitting alongside an older man and a woman. Nazir thought he’d been discovered. Panic flushed through him.

  “Stay,” Jhana-Merise whispered from across the aisle. Nazir looked around for signs of danger. All he saw were worshippers, heads bowed.

  Jhana-Merise tiptoed to him and sat by his side.

  Arama touched Vincente’s hand. It stopped him from motioning his daughter back.

  “You’re safe with us,” Jhana-Merise said, nodding in the direction of her father and Arama.

  Nazir was still unsure.

  A sweet perfume hung in the air. He searched for the source of the thick smell.

  “It’s incense,” she said. “It’s not the same as the roses.”

  “You know about the roses?”

  “Yes. I’m the girl you told Dominique to ask the lawyer about. The same girl you heard the voice in the desert speak to you of.”

  Nazir had no idea how this all was being played out, or where it would end. He did know the energy that entered the warehouse after the drone hit, had infused him with a knowledge he had no way to possess on his own. He knew he was an integral part of what was unfolding. That he was drawn to a church, this church, was another way he was being led.

  As Mass continued,
he listened to Jhana-Merise talk of the stones and the tablet and the history of what they shared.

  She told him that many have written about tablets, from Plato to Isaac Newton. That much had been written about cuneiforms and tablets and sacred texts. But none have written about the tablet in the desert, because that tablet is a void, a portal, and only those who’d planted it can activate it, for the tablet may only be initiated through the love of those responsible for its existence.

  “We did not create it,” she said, “but we are the consciousness through which it will arrive. And what that consciousness will reveal will neither be easy to understand and accept, nor safe. It will confront the reality we’ve been anesthetized to believe.”

  The Mass continued, all eyes on the altar. But they were in their own world.

  Nazir spoke of a story his mother told him when he was a boy, about a secret red door. A secret door he would find one day and be offered the chance to go through. If he went through, he would remember who he was and wouldn’t be alone, for there were others who would remember, too, and be offered the same choice. He always believed that door was the red door Hashim had led him through in the safe house in Mosul when he was twelve, to learn the ways of his mentor.

  “Did your mother tell you who you would remember you were?” Jhana-Merise asked.

  The bells from the altar rang for communion.

  “No. I always asked her, and she always told me I would know when the time came.”

  Jhana-Merise took his hand and said, “The time has come.”

  73

  Isabel was startled when she entered her apartment. Not only were her sister, Jhana-Merise, and Vincente here, but Nazir was also standing in her living room. She recognized him from the photos she’d compiled for the DOJ’s case against Hashim.

  The pressure she’d been under, not only the quandary of what to reveal of Jhana-Merise’s presence and her knowledge of Hashim, but the intense preparation and secrecy for the trial had affected her performance. She’d been reprimanded for letting slip some classified discovery materials to a member of the defense team who hadn’t obtained the requisite security clearance. Since the trial had ended when Judge Littelton brought Hashim to chambers she’d been relegated to other work outside the DOJ’s purview. She was intent on working her way back into their graces. But the presence of Nazir in her apartment brought a new terror.