I love you, Jacob, it said. I’ll Skype you as soon as I get a connection and I’ll be right back. XOXO
Her father gave her a big hug before she headed out to the waiting car.
“Don’t worry about Jacob,” he said.
“Of course I’m going to worry about him,” she said, sighing.
“I mean it, Miss Caitlin O’Hara,” he said as if he were reprimanding her thirty years ago. “You have to save all your worrying for yourself on this trip. I want extra caution from you, hear me?”
“I hear you.”
“Zero risks. I don’t care who needs help, you find someone else to help them.”
“It’s just one boy in a hospital bed. No natural disasters to run from.” She tried to smile.
He kissed her forehead. “God, I hope so.”
Just before Caitlin sat in the waiting sedan, Ben called with good news: she would not have to swing by the United Nations to pick up her papers. Not only would the Iranian ambassador’s wife meet her at the airport, Caitlin was invited to ride with them and their staff on the state jet.
A smile spread across Caitlin’s face. She thanked him again. He told her not to mention it. And meant just that.
She reached JFK and was met by a member of the mission staff, who advised her to put her head scarf on before they boarded. Caitlin reached into her carry-on and tied on her scarf—a present from Ben on one of their trips. He’d grabbed it from a nearby bazaar after she’d forgotten hers at the hotel, and the laughter they shared over its cheesy print had always trumped her vanity. She was then taken to the gate and across the tarmac to the waiting aircraft. The wife of the permanent representative of Iran welcomed Caitlin to join her fortuitously timed trip home to greet a new baby niece. After a period of courteous chitchat Caitlin curled into a plush fold-down seat with an eye mask and instantly slept. Exhaustion had finally caught up with her, and the thirteen hours felt like a gift.
She slept through the flight, a continuous rest for the first time in weeks, until the same staff member who had met her at the airport woke her.
“We will be landing within the hour,” the young man told her.
With the hum of the jet engines sounding especially loud in ears still full of cottony sleep, and the kick of guilt already starting again in her gut, Caitlin navigated to the restroom with her carry-on bag. She changed into clothes she hadn’t worn in years: tight jeans; a crisp, white Pink-brand shirt; and a bright red Yves Saint Laurent knee-length coat with long sleeves. She chose black eyeliner and mascara and a heightened but natural shade of lipstick, then applied them all a bit more strongly than she ordinarily would have. Finally she added short black suede boots with high heels and tied a red-and-blue Hermès Liberty scarf over her hair, carefully winding the ends around her neck. Ben’s cheesy scarf would not be appropriate in Tehran. It did not escape her sense of irony that she was preening for a theocracy in a way she never had for any man.
When she reentered the cabin, the representative’s wife, chatting on her phone, smiled and nodded approvingly. It was a small thing, but it felt good to have done something right.
Tehran’s time was eleven thirty in the morning. Caitlin’s concern about getting to Atash as soon as possible had made its way from Ben to Mohammed to the representative. The ambassador’s wife informed Caitlin that her guide would meet them at Imam Khomeini International Airport and take her directly to the hospital. At their private gate she was introduced to a woman in a severe black and gold head scarf and designer sunglasses pushed back on her head. She introduced herself as Maryam, no last name, and spent little time coordinating with the representative’s wife before ushering Caitlin through customs to a black sedan.
The windows of the car were smoked to near-opacity and Caitlin wondered during their half-hour ride whether she was supposed to pretend she was not really there, or that the city was not there around her. Maryam, sharing the backseat with her, only gave Caitlin’s form a once-over before spending the rest of the ride on her phone in Farsi.
Caitlin glimpsed what she could through the windows and briefly mourned what she would not be able to do on this trip. Under any other circumstance she would have treasured the opportunity to see Tehran, a city she’d long hoped to explore. As it was, the driver used only expressways and the city didn’t seem that different from any other. There were wider avenues than in New York, shorter buildings but with more massive proportions, something broader about the windows, fewer glass fronts. But she didn’t have the time to move closer and really look.
The expressway passed near a boulevard that was crammed sidewalk to sidewalk with people. The color green was prominent in banners and she could hear the chanting roar from the gathering.
“A protest?” she asked, though Maryam was still on the phone.
“Yes,” Maryam said. “Economic. The women bus drivers have not been paid in a month.”
But to Caitlin’s ears, the protest had sounded much more aggressive than that. She wondered whether here, too, people were feeling the tensions of a world on edge.
They merged onto a slightly smaller highway and greenery increased between the buildings. A handful of men and women stood together in a small park, moving slowly through a Tai Chi sequence. Caitlin was mildly shocked to see this Chinese practice in Iran, and the sliding and angular arm motions instantly reminded her of Maanik and Gaelle’s movements.
A possible Mongolian connection right there, she thought as the sedan pulled in at the hospital. Connecting Mongolian to Chinese would certainly be a smaller step than tying Mongolian to Viking.
At the hospital, Maryam sat with her in reception while Caitlin quickly Skyped Jacob. Dressed in his pajamas and eating a Popsicle, the boy barely signed to her with one hand.
Finally she said, “Jacob, I want you to understand something. It’s very important. The young man I’m visiting—he might die. That’s why I had to come.”
Jacob didn’t say much, but he seemed to snap back to his usual, empathetic self and he blew her two kisses before ending the chat.
When the tablet closed, Maryam escorted Caitlin to Atash’s floor. Their entrance to Atash’s room was barred by a doctor who was not impressed with two female visitors—until Maryam held up a card that looked like an ID. The doctor did not miraculously develop a sense of courtesy, but he did walk away.
“I will also interpret for you,” Maryam said as they entered the hospital room.
Caitlin had not expected the sight that greeted them. She knew the young man had suffered third-degree burns over three-quarters of his body and would be fully swathed in bandages. She knew he was being kept alive by an array of vascular tubes and catheters. None of that surprised her. But Caitlin had not anticipated his trying to turn toward her, from the shoulders, when she entered the room.
“Does he know you?” Maryam asked.
“No . . . ,” Caitlin replied, a trace of hesitation in her voice, though she did not know why.
Caitlin did not approach the bed from the side but circled it, seeing if his movements would follow her. They did. Her heart ached for the boy and for his circumstances. She recognized the flowerless, impersonal feel of an unvisited room, an unloved person, an abandonment far worse than the burns that had immobilized him.
He was not only awake, he was murmuring. Maryam leaned over his head to listen.
After a moment she said, “This is not Farsi.”
“Do you recognize it?”
The young woman shook her head once, sharply.
A wave of fierce energy rushed through Caitlin—she knew what was coming next, why she had hesitated when asked if the boy knew her. She had been here before. Not in this room, not with him, but with Maanik and Gaelle.
Atash’s hands moved as much as the bolsters allowed him. His left arm trembled to the shoulder as the hand fought to point away from his body. His right hand m
oved up diagonally, just inches but enough for Caitlin to recognize one of Maanik’s superlatives.
She pulled out her cell phone and held it up to record the gestures.
“No!” Maryam snapped.
“Please, this may help him! Someone else has to see—”
“No, absolutely.” She was not demonstrative about her insistence, simply firm in a way that told Caitlin there was no point in arguing. She suspected this was a rule meant to benefit not the patient but the paranoia of a totalitarian regime.
She stowed her cell phone, leaned over Atash, and listened. There were the guttural consonants, the whirring of Asiatic “r”s.
“Ask him to speak in Farsi, please,” she said.
Maryam leaned forward but before she finished the question Atash changed. His hands fixed rigidly and his utterances shifted in tone. The higher language disappeared, replaced by prolonged and very quiet grunts.
Caitlin felt her hands tighten helplessly. She knew the young man was in agony. She could only think of one way to communicate that might work, but both his hands were bandaged. She reached out with her left hand—the madame in Haiti had directed her to use her left hand with the snake; Jacob had sensed the ocean with his left—and lightly touched one of the only bare areas of Atash’s skin, his throat.
Something exploded inside Caitlin’s head. It was fast and heavy and pressed the sides of her skull outward, like the throb of a headache frozen painfully in place. Then it pushed through and was outside her body—pressure rolling around her, forcing her eyelids shut. She could not open her mouth to scream but she felt the cry in her throat.
She forced herself to open her eyes. The white of the walls, of the bandages, had been transformed into dark rock and ice—jagged towers of it coming into focus far behind the dark, rectangular columns that were in front of her. And a man, a pale young man, was communicating with hands and arms and strange but familiar words—leaning forward with urgency, begging, almost bowing with his pleading.
Caitlin couldn’t understand. Her eardrums were throbbing from pressure that wrapped around her head, pressure that was closing her throat, blocking sound and breath.
The recent past, the present, her world and life were all out of focus. Wherever she was, whoever she was, whatever she was seeing, was rising before her with razor-edged clarity.
And suddenly the words became familiar. The columned structure, vast and high, was known to her. The buildings beyond, dark among patches of lavender and green foliage, were places she had seen. And farther away, those peaks that looked less like mountains than like explosions of ice—
She was looking through eyes that were not her own at a world that was not her own. The pale young man pleaded with her from the floor.
“Save my brother, save me! Please! Show us how!”
“I am no longer Guardian to him or to you,” she said in the voice of an old man, unable to control the words coming from her own throat. “You put your faith in things that have no true power. You have crafted your own fate.”
“We will repent, we will speak the cazh!”
“No,” she replied sadly. “You will die.”
The speaker turned away and the young man propelled himself up from the floor and ran away into the street. Her body hurried to join the other robed figures near the columns a dozen or so yards away, their arms raised toward the dark skies. Her sleeves heavy with oil, she lifted her hands to complete the prayer of cazh and let out a howling scream. Her hands were suddenly on fire, her fingers whirling to pieces in the air even as she signed a word, the only word she could manage, a superlative for “transform.”
There was another scream and suddenly Caitlin was on the floor. Not a stone floor but a hospital floor.
“Dr. O’Hara!”
Caitlin opened her eyes to see Maryam’s face hovering over her. Her head felt exceedingly light, her hands excessively warm, her brain extraordinarily confused. For a moment it was as if she had forgotten how to speak.
“You screamed,” Maryam said.
“I—no. No.”
There was no point in even attempting to explain. She wasn’t sure she could explain, since she didn’t entirely understand it herself. Caitlin pulled away from Maryam and shoved herself up from the floor, grabbing the railing of Atash’s bed. She was reeling.
“It was Atash,” Caitlin gasped.
“What are you saying?”
Caitlin fell silent. As with the snake in Haiti, she had been through something Atash was experiencing. She looked down at the young man. His fixed, red-rimmed eyes were staring at a corner of the ceiling. A tear was sliding down his cheek, and a line of blood trailed from his mouth down over his chin. She reached for his throat with her right hand, searching for a pulse . . .
“You’d better call for the doctor,” Caitlin said sadly.
“What is it?”
“He’s dead,” she replied.
CHAPTER 27
Caitlin sat in reception again, a spartan room with religious symbols on the walls. Maryam was on her cell phone, sitting under a brass scimitar suspended point-up. An overhead light effected a glow.
Her hands and forearms heavy, Caitlin opened her tablet but stared at the dark screen. She knew she should Skype her father or Barbara, even Ben, but what she had witnessed—no, what she had experienced—had knocked her numb.
A part of her didn’t want to stop the numbness. Atash’s pain had joined Maanik and Gaelle’s with a ferocious intensity and she felt guilty for not having come here days earlier when she might have been able to . . . do something. Maybe she could have worked with him in stages, used hypnosis, something to mediate between him and the vision. Now he was dead, and he had died in torment.
Then fear suffused the numbness. Did his death in the vision cause his death in body? If so, Maanik and Gaelle were in mortal danger. She began to shake.
A hand dropped on her shoulder but she did not respond. Then the hand turned her chin so that she was looking into Maryam’s hazel eyes. They were softer than she had seen them before now.
“Dr. O’Hara, you must focus.”
Caitlin nodded blankly.
“Doctor, I am not a woman who selects what she sees. I see everything. When your hand was on the young man I saw your head moving. Not like this.” She nodded her head back and forth, then gestured at Caitlin’s Hermès scarf. “Your head moved as if, beneath the scarf, your hair was alive.”
Her words to Ben—about Maanik’s hair justifying this trip—came back to her. So did a little bit of life. “Go on,” said Caitlin.
Maryam stared at her. “You do not seem surprised.”
“Strangely, no,” she admitted. “Please, what else did you see?”
Maryam regarded her skeptically.
“Please,” Caitlin pleaded. “It’s all helpful information.”
Maryam sat beside her. “When you fell backward, this came forward.” The young woman touched a strand of hair that had loosened from Caitlin’s scarf and was framing her face. “I watched it move as if a wind had caught it, but the windows were closed, there was no fan, no breeze. I am not an imaginative woman, doctor. I saw this.”
“I believe you,” Caitlin said. “There are things going on that I do not understand. That’s why I came here.”
“I know this now, so I am going to take you to see someone. We have enough time before your flight tonight.”
Caitlin’s mind cleared slightly. “Is this a polite way of saying that I am under arrest?”
Maryam smiled and discreetly looked around the room. “Doctor, if that were the case you would not have to ask.”
The young woman pressed her fingers on Caitlin’s palm. Caitlin noticed that the back of Maryam’s hand was grayish, very wrinkled, almost blistered in places. It was a hand that, some time ago, had been badly burned.
“I was a
girl during the war with Iraq,” she said. “I was once a patient here.”
Caitlin met her gaze and thought of the fortitude it must have taken for this woman to accompany her, whether by order or voluntarily, to return to this place of pain, sadness, and fear. Caitlin squeezed her hand gently. “Go on.”
“There is more you should see while you are here.”
Maryam rose and Caitlin followed her to the waiting sedan.
Forty-five minutes later they pulled up in front of a low, concrete apartment building. Caitlin followed Maryam into one of the apartments and was seated in a living room with sparse furniture and a flowered bedsheet for a curtain. She heard gentle clinks from what must have been the kitchen and became vaguely aware that Maryam was not beside her. Opposite Caitlin on the pale green wall was an elaborate design rising from the floor and flowering in red over the expanse—dots, starbursts, wheels like eyes, flourishing feathers. It was like a mehndi design, an adornment painted in henna on Hindu women’s hands before a wedding.
And jasmine—she was suddenly aware of the strikingly familiar smell of jasmine tea as it wafted up to her. A cup and saucer had been placed on the low table. The aroma loosened the tension that had built behind her eyes, and unexpectedly, tears began flowing down her face.
“A cup of tears,” said a soft male voice beside her after she gasped several long sobs. “In some cultures, there are sacred vessels that permit us to mourn.”
Caitlin wiped her eyes with the palms of her hands and took a deep, shuddering breath.
“Is it always jasmine?” Caitlin asked as she composed herself.
“It is whatever it needs to be,” he answered.
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