10
Caleb awoke from the dream at the same time the fever broke. It was mid-afternoon on a nameless day. He struggled out of bed, weak to exhaustion, and in the sunlight filtering through the curtains he found a bowl of raisins, nuts and bananas on the table.
Still in Alexandria. How long had he been out? What was happening back in New York? He needed to check back soon. He could only imagine if he were stuck here past the start of the semester. How would his students fare with Lombardo or — God help them — Henrik Jenson as his substitute? He had to get out of here as soon as he was cleared to fly, if not sooner. Pain he could handle. He wasn’t quite sure about his tolerance for his mother or her crazy friends.
With a full stomach and confidence that the food would not be coming back up, he made it to the shower. After dressing in sweat pants, sandals and an old T-shirt, he left the room and took the stairs down to the lobby. His head still felt weak, lost in a fog, but he kept moving, taking a short break against a wall as he made his way to the conference room. He forced a smile to a rotund, dark-skinned maid who gave him a wide berth and then he opened the door.
Around a long table littered with papers, pencils, tape recorders and half-full ashtrays sat the ten members of the Morpheus Initiative. A video camera on a tripod was set up in the corner to record everything that transpired. Helen sat at the far end of the table, peering at four pages spread in front of her, and George Waxman stood behind her, busily taping sketches to the wall in groups that seemed to be related by their subject matter. He wore a white polo shirt with a turned-up collar and starched blue jeans and cowboy boots, like he had just stepped into a country bar, the kind with peanuts on the floor and a mechanical bull in the corner. He turned at the sound of the door.
“Caleb. Good of you to show up, finally.” He pointed to an open chair. “Take a seat. I didn’t realize you university types had such weak constitutions.”
Caleb’s mother offered a tired smile. “Feeling better, hon?” She wore a multicolored local shawl and big red plastic sunglasses pushed up on her head. She was radiant, her face tanned and her eyes shining. She had the poise and grace of a deity. In fact, in silhouette she looked like an Egyptian goddesses painted on the crumbling walls around this city, like Isis maybe, or Caleb’s local favorite, Seshat, the wife of Thoth and the goddess of writing and libraries.
This blasphemous comparison made Caleb even angrier with her for intruding into his imagination, weaving herself into the tapestry of the ancient religion he had found so fascinating and liberating. Caleb opened his mouth to speak, but suddenly felt overwhelmed with nausea. Weak and his head spinning, he staggered toward the table. He smelled menthol. Smoke clogged his lungs and stung his eyes, a blinding light…
… and he is descending the narrow spiral staircase again, rounding the final bend as the statues of the god and goddess come into view, leaning toward him with wide, staring eyes.
Hands held him upright. Someone guided him to the chair and he slumped forward, turning his head and taking sharp breaths.
“Okay,” said Waxman, oblivious to Caleb’s condition, and stretched and walked back to the wall. “Let’s see where we are. Caleb, you can just listen for now and play catch-up later. The rest of the team has just come back from the morning session with their impressions of the assignment, which we’ve now taped to the wall. They were each asked to concentrate on a single object and draw whatever came to them.” He set his burning cigarette down in an ashtray as he adjusted his shirt and regarded the drawings again. Helen frowned and moved the ashtray away from Caleb.
Waxman continued. “You were all directed to focus on a symbol, one familiar to most of you. It is a staff with snakes wrapped around it—”
Caleb sat up straight.
“—the caduceus, symbol of medical practice everywhere.” Waxman adjusted his collar. “I’m sure everyone had preconceived notions of its meaning, but that’ll simply be another factor to account when we analyze your visions.” He looked down his glasses at everyone before taking stock of the pictures on the wall.
“Okay, what do we have?” continued Waxman. “Xavier, you drew what look like spheres or balls circling around a snake. Consistent, but unusual. Not sure what that means, yet.”
Caleb’s breath came out in shallow, choking puffs. Flashes of his dream returned with pounding clarity…
… showing him the subterranean chamber, Caesar’s shadow thrust impotently upon the wall, the snake heads eyeing him with indifference.
With the back of his ballpoint pen, Waxman tapped the next sheet. “Two of you, Tom and Nina, drew something like a door with bars across it, and above this Nina sketched a flame and wrote something… that I can’t quite read.”
At the other end of the table, with her lustrous hair tied back behind her head in a yellow scarf, Nina Osseni cleared her throat. Caleb took deep breaths, trying to ground himself in just one world. Sensing the pull again from the other side, he forced all his attention onto this woman. She seemed cat-like, calm and calculating. Her eyes scanned everyone sitting around the table, like she trusted no one and was ready for an attack to come from any angle. “I wrote ‘Light,’” she said, “just because I had the impression that the flame was different somehow. Like it wasn’t meant for warmth, but for illumination only?”
“I see, Nina. Thank you.” Waxman chewed on his pen and took another step to the right. Caleb watched his mother, saw how her gaze followed Waxman, like he was some kind of god, or hero at least, in her eyes.
“Then,” Waxman continued, “we have five mostly unrelated drawings: Mary drew waves with some kind of wreckage or bodies floating in the water; Elliot sketched a tower tipping over on its side; Amelia drew a temple-like building with lots of pillars and put a gate around it; Victor drew a pyramid in the desert, near an oasis; and Dennis… I don’t know what this is.”
“Sorry,” said a heavyset bald man, sweating and smoking across from Caleb. “I didn’t get a good impression of anything this time around. I had the sense of something choking or smothered under heavy layers of, I don’t know, something black and hot.” He rubbed his forehead and took a sip of Pepsi. “Sorry.”
“Don’t worry, Dennis.” Waxman smiled. “It’s not an exact science. Good days and bad.”
Helen held up one last drawing. “Then there’s mine,” she said, “which, admittedly, is biased, since I know the ultimate target.”
“True, so while we can’t count yours as a valid blind experiment, it’s telling nonetheless.” Waxman gave her a light pat on the shoulder.
Caleb narrowed his eyes, then tried to focus on his mother’s picture. She had drawn a series of doors, one after another. Seven in total, with some kind of dog or jackal standing guard before each one. But what pulled his eye was something she had drawn in the upper corner, away from the doors.
He stood, reached over Helen’s shoulder and snatched the sheet from her. He held it up, staring at the smaller image of a crudely drawn mountain, its top blown off. Jagged lines rolled down its sides toward two separate sites that looked like domed houses, one on each side of the mountain.
Waxman was frowning. “What are you doing?”
Helen tried to grab it back from him. “Honey,” she said, “just sit and listen for now.”
“I know what this is,” Caleb said, and the room quieted down. He stumbled forward, took a piece of tape and stuck her picture on the wall, overlapping Tom and Victor’s drawings.