A Vision of Fire

“You have to do your job, so I will do mine.”

He took a deep breath, gazed at his daughter. This argument was hers. He kissed her forehead, lingering longer than before, and pressed her hands in his as he stood.

“Then I will see you for dinner, and I will call you during the day. I will make sure the principal allows you to keep your phone on. Maanik Pawar, you make me very proud.”

“You too, Papa Ambassador.” Her smile was weak but it was there.

He gave her one more peck on the top of her head, then left with a strong, purposeful stride. Maanik rose and immediately sat down again, her legs still wobbly. But she attended her second-period class, AP United States History.

The nurse asked the principal to text Maanik’s teachers, telling them to keep an eye on her.

Amid the subtle stares from kids she did not know well and thumbs up from those she did, Maanik sat in her seat, opened her notebook, and copied words from the board. Her pen ran dry and she scribbled in circles until the blue ink flowed, then she kept scribbling circles until she caught herself with a jerk. It was as if she had fallen asleep and suddenly there were circles on the page. She forced herself to pay attention.

Maanik listened, moved on with several classmates to Geometry, and midway through the lesson began drawing circles until the paper was full of them. Then she put down her pen and scratched under the sleeve of her dress. She didn’t feel itchy. She just needed to scratch.

“Papa…,” she whispered, the utterance more breath than word.

No one around her heard.

“Papa?” she said, louder this time.

The girl to her right looked over. “Maanik?”

The teacher glanced at her.

Maanik looked at the student beside her and saw a suddenly unfamiliar face. The girl’s flesh was pale, almost translucent, like ice on a pavement. Her eyes had a reddish cast, like a ruby in her mother’s jewel box. Her lips were a pale blue and very pronounced.

Maanik spoke, her voice wheezing from her chest. “Papa… help me!”

The teacher quickly made her way down the aisle. Maanik began breathing rapidly, digging her pen over and over into the desk with one hand and raking the back of her wrist with the other until rivulets of blood rose up.

The teacher gently restrained her hands and sent another student for the nurse.

“Maanik, don’t—”

Maanik suddenly threw her arms up, sending the teacher back against a desk, and thrashed in her seat before relaxing for the briefest moment. Then she screamed so loudly that the teacher pulled her close in a desperate, helpless effort to quiet her.

Maanik went limp just as the nurse arrived.

CHAPTER 2

Caitlin O’Hara, MD, PhD, two weeks shy of her forties and three sips into a cup of coffee, toggled keys on her tablet.

“We can’t give them the moon, Dr. O’Hara.”

“I didn’t ask for the moon,” she said to the voice coming from her tablet. “I asked for money, Ms. Tanaka, for twenty-five test shelters. You can do that.”

On-screen, a 3-D blueprint of a small house revolved and a wall disappeared so that Caitlin could zoom inside and view the interior. The house would accommodate twenty souls who had been sweltering or freezing in decaying tents for months. This new snap-together unit was created by a modular furniture manufacturer under contract to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. It was an update to a previous model that, among other concerns, had lacked a lock inside the front door. It had that now. All it needed was funding.

Tanaka’s boss, Director Qanooni, weighed in. “We simply do not have the hundred thousand dollars this project requires.”

“Which circles back to where we started this discussion,” O’Hara said. “Crowdfunding. I know it won’t deliver the windfalls you get from donor nations and it requires valuable person-hours to oversee. But lives are worth the effort.”

The conference call with the development officers of the World Health Organization was about to run over its scheduled half hour. But the need for the refugee shelters was absolute. That, and the clock ticking before Caitlin’s next client arrived, made her bold.

There was a short silence, after which Tanaka murmured to Qanooni and the director said, “I will take it to the board.”

“Please don’t,” Caitlin urged. “You know what ‘board’ stands for?” She answered her own question: “Bunch of Argumentative—”

“Thank you, doctor,” Qanooni interrupted hastily. “We are on the board, need I remind you?”

“You needn’t, and I’m sorry if you were offended.” Caitlin grinned. “But I cannot abide red tape. It never strangles bad ideas, only good ones. So please, just go to the nearest high school in Geneva, put some students to work for extra credit, and they’ll throw a funding website together in a couple of hours.”

“If only it were that simple.” Tanaka sighed. “There are liability issues.”