Blind Panic (8 page)

The baby pointed to the mirror again, and turned his head to lookup at Jasmine. “
A mm-mm
,” he said.

“That’s ‘a mm-mm’?”

“
A mm-mm. A mm-mm.
”

Jasmine peered into the mirror again. Their silhouettes were still there, but it looked as if there was somebody else in the living room, standing between them and the balcony window.

She cried out, “Ah!” and turned around, but the living room remained brightly sunlit and there was nobody there.

She turned back. In the mirror, she could clearly see somebody standing about ten feet behind them. A very tall man wrapped in a dark maroon blanket, with a strange kind of headdress on his head, like the skull of a bull, complete with its horns. The headdress was hung with beads and feathers, and also with what looked like birds’ skulls, although the living room in the mirror was so gloomy now that it was impossible for her to tell for sure.

“Do you see him, Auntie Ammy?” she whispered.

Auntie Ammy nodded, and shifted the baby over to her left arm so that she could cross herself. “I sees him. The baby’s showin’ us a vision. Whoever is making the floor tingle and the air as thick as soup, that’s what he looks like.”

The figure remained unmoving, although the warm breeze that was blowing in through the balcony window made his beads and feathers stir. As Jasmine’s eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, she began to make out a stern face with an aquiline nose and hennalike whorls of decoration on his cheeks. His eyes gleamed silver. In his hands he was carrying a stick tied with clumps of fur and black birds’ feathers. The shaft of the stick had rows of teeth hammered into it, at least a hundred, possibly more. They looked like a mixture of human and animal teeth.

Jasmine turned quickly around for a second time, but there was still nobody standing behind them in the
real
living room. In the mirror, however, the figure remained where he was, watching them.

“Who is that?” she whispered to Auntie Ammy. “How come we can see him in the mirror but he’s not actually here?”

“
A gah!
” said the baby, and began to jump up and down in Auntie Ammy’s arms. “
A mm-mm!
”

“Hush up, little fella,” said Auntie Ammy. “Whoever that is, I don’t think it’s wise to rile him none.”

Jasmine could now see the figure quite clearly, although he seemed to be transparent, because she could see the brocade couch that was behind him, and the bookshelf with Auntie Ammy’s books and figurines.

“Is it a
ghost?
” she asked Auntie Ammy.

“I don’t think so. It’s more like a
divination
, if you understand my meanin’. What we’re seein’ here in this lookin’ mirror is what this little fella can see inside his head, and since he can’t explain it to us or draw it, he has to show us in the glass.”

“But who is it?
What
is it?”

“It’s ‘a mm-mm.’ That’s all I can tell you as of right now.”

Jasmine went right up to the mirror and cupped her hands on each side of her face to mask the bright sunlight from the real living room. The figure appeared to be looking in their direction, but she couldn’t be sure. Even if he was, his eyes seemed to be focused on something much farther away. His lips were moving, as though he was reciting some incantation to himself, repetitive and obscure, like Auntie Ammy’s prayer to Oyá.

She felt spooked, in much the same way that victims of vicious crimes feel spooked when they have to identify their assailants through two-way mirrors. But she didn’t feel for a moment that the figure was any kind of a threat. As Auntie Ammy had said, he was only a vision. The question was: who was he, and why had he appeared in Auntie Ammy’s mirror?

As she peered at the figure more intently, she saw that small black specks were dropping from its headdress and its horns, and onto the floor. When she looked down at them she realized with horrified fascination that they were scuttling in all directions. They were beetles of some kind, like cockroaches, and as the figure continued to recite his incantation, more and more of them showered down from his headdress, and from his blanket, and scurried across the living room floor. Within a few minutes, there were hundreds of them.

She backed away from the mirror and said to Auntie
Ammy, “Just look! Look at those
bugs!
Aren’t they
disgusting?
”

Auntie Ammy crossed herself again; but the baby pointed at the beetles in the mirror and said, “
Wah-wahs.
”

“So that’s what they are,” said Auntie Ammy. “Wahwahs.”

“
Wah-wahs
,” the baby repeated.

Auntie Ammy said, “Jazz, honey, why don’t you turn the lookin’ mirror around so that it’s facin’ the wall? I don’t like this divination one little bit, I can tell you.”

“Okay,” said Jasmine. “Whatever you want.”

She stepped back toward the mirror, but as she did so, her shoes crunched on something on the floor. She looked down and saw that she had trodden on a huge cockroach, which was lying on its back, half crushed with its antennae waving. Three or four more cockroaches were running across the floor close by, and within seconds more and more of them appeared. They were pouring out of a narrow crack between the skirting-board and the floor, dark brown and shiny, and as they poured out they made a rustling, rattling noise.

“This ain’t possible!” Auntie Ammy exclaimed in horror. She lifted the baby higher in her arms and retreated across the living room, toward the balcony. “What’s in that lookin’ mirror, that may be a sign of somethin’ real that’s really goin’ to occur, but that’s not really real! That’s no more real than what you might see in a crystal ball!”

Jasmine was performing a frenzied flamenco, stamping on as many cockroaches as she could. But the insects kept on gushing out of the crack beneath the skirting board, and soon they had covered almost half the living room floor and were swarming all over Jasmine’s shoes and up her calves.

“The lookin’ mirror!” Auntie Ammy cried out. “Turn the lookin’ mirror to the wall!”

Crunching her way back across the room, Jasmine took hold of the mirror and tried to lift it away from the wall so that she could turn it around. It was unbelievably heavy, and she could manage to lift it only three or four inches. And inside
it, she saw the figure suddenly begin to flicker, like a character in a speeded-up movie. As it flickered it began to move toward her in quick, threatening jerks.

She was more than spooked now; she was terrified. She let go of the mirror and it banged back flat against the wall. The nail that was holding it gave way, and it dropped onto the floor and smashed. Cowrie shells and triangles of broken glass were scattered all around Jasmine’s feet.

“My lookin’ mirror!” wailed Auntie Ammy. “My precious, precious lookin’ mirror!”

But Jasmine was too busy scanning the floor. The swarm of cockroaches had vanished as if they had never existed. Even the dead ones that she had squashed beneath her feet had disappeared.

“They’re gone,” she said. “I can’t believe it. They’re all gone.”

“
Wah-wahs
,” said the baby, wriggling his fingers at her as if he were trying to imitate a cockroach.

Jasmine came over and took him out of Auntie Ammy’s arms. “No, sweet thing. No more wah-wahs. The wah-wahs have taken a powder, thank God.”

Auntie Ammy placed a cushion on the floor and knelt down on it so she could pick up the remains of her mirror.

“I don’t know what my grandfather would say if he could see his lookin’ mirror now. He always made me promise to keep it safe, because it would keep
me
safe—that’s what he said. He said it would help him to rest easy in heaven, knowin’ that this lookin’ mirror was always here to protect me.”

“I’m sorry, Auntie Ammy. I truly am.”

“No, Jazz. It wasn’t not your fault. Whoever it was, that divination we saw, he was copiously powerful, I can tell you, and maybe the lookin’ mirror protected me in the only way it could, which was to fall and to break so that there was no way for that divination to come through to us.”

“You think it really could have?”

Auntie Ammy gripped the side of the couch and eased herself back onto her feet. “I’ve heard of that happenin’ before,
but only once or twice. Once was a woman in Mexico whose husband had been lost at sea, and one night before she went to bed she saw him in her lookin’ mirror just crossin’ past her bedroom door. When she woke up the next morning his wedding band was restin’ on the nightstand beside her and there was wet footprints all the way across her carpet.”

Jasmine said nothing, but gently swayed the baby in her arms. The baby said, “
Wah-wahs. A mm-mm.
”

“No, little fella, all the
wah-wahs
have gone now, and so has the
mm-mm.
”

“I should take him over to children’s services,” said Jasmine. “It doesn’t look like they’re going to send anybody to collect him, does it?”

“Well, I just hope he stays safe, with that gift of his. I wouldn’t like to think of nothing unspeakable comin’ through no lookin’ mirror and inflictin harm on him.”

“Auntie Ammy, we can’t possibly keep him.”

“I don’t know. Would he be such a burden? And maybe I could learn to tell his ass from his other end.”

“I don’t believe you sometimes. I really don’t. Only twenty minutes ago, you couldn’t wait to get rid of him.”

“Twenty minutes ago I still had a mirror to protect me. Now all I got is this child.”

The baby lifted up his arm again and pointed to the ceiling.

“
A gah.
”

“You see what I mean?” Auntie Ammy demanded. “The whole world is goin’ to fall apart and this child is the only one who can save us.”

She had barely finished speaking when they a heard a thunderous rumble from the northeast. It sounded like an airliner approaching, decelerating wildly as it came toward them. The rumble was interspersed with high-pitched engine screams as the pilot tried to reduce his speed, and to bring his airplane in line with a runway at LAX.

“Oh, Jesus,” said Jasmine. “We need to get out of here.”

But it was too late. They heard the airliner descending less than a mile to the south of them, over Rogers Park, and then there was a devastating explosion, followed by a complicated series of crackles, like a fireworks display. Only a few seconds later, another airliner came down over the Hollywood Park Race Track, and then another, over Culver City. It sounded as if Satan were banging all the doors of hell, one after the other.

“Oh my God,” said Auntie Ammy. “It’s the end of the world.”

They went back out onto the balcony, and saw three black plumes of smoke rising up high into the sky. The baby pointed to each of them, and looked up into Jasmine’s eyes and said, “
A gah! A mm-mm!
”

“Yes, sweetheart,” said Jasmine. “You’re absolutely right. A gah. A mm-mm.”

Portland, Oregon

I knew nothing about those airliners dropping out of the sky until we were making our approach to Portland International and I looked out the window and saw that the afternoon sun was intermittently blotted out by clouds of brown smoke.

“Looks like they’re having some serious cookouts here,” I said to Amelia, who was engrossed in her book about Shengong soul projection.

“What?” she said, taking off her half-glasses. I loved her in those glasses. She looked academic and sensual, both at the same time. She had short Titian hair and a sharp, sculptured face, like a pre-Raphaelite princess. But she had a really great figure and I would have bet money that underneath that gray woolen skirt she was wearing only a tiny black lace thong. Actually that was only my fevered imagination working overtime, but we fortune-tellers have a license to use our fevered imaginations not only for fun and profit, but for our own amusement, too.

She leaned forward and peered out the window. “My
God
, Harry. It looks like half the airport’s on fire.”

I craned my neck so I could see around her shoulder. She was right. The northeastern side of PDX was crawling with flames, and thick gray smoke was pouring across the Columbia River, almost blotting out Lemon Island and Government
Island and the Glenn Jackson Bridge, which carries Route 205 over to Washington State.

As we circled slowly around the airport, I could see that the flames were forming the cruciform outline of a burning airliner. Its tail fin was still intact, with its US Airways Stars and Stripes still emblazoned on it, but the fuselage had been gutted, and I could even see the ash gray rows of incinerated seats.

“Holy Veronica,” I said. But everyone else in the business-class cabin was remarkably hushed, except for one man who began to warble a prayer in Yiddish. “
Y’hi ratzon milfanekha A-donai E-loheinu velohei avoteinu…
”

Amelia leaned close to me and said, “You hear that? He’s praying for a safe journey.”

“How do you know that?”

“I was engaged to a Jewish guy once. That was before MacArthur. Well, the guy before the guy before MacArthur.”

“You never told me.”

“We broke up after three months. His mother hated me. She called me a
mechascheife.
A witch. I predicted his father would have a heart attack, and he did.”

It was then that the captain came on the PA. “Ladies and gentlemen, you can see for yourselves that there has been a serious incident here at Portland International Airport. I ask you all to assist me and my crew by remaining calm.

“I have been in contact with the tower and requested an alternative landing destination, but they have informed me that there have been similar incidents at a number of other cities, and there are no suitable airfields within our range that can take us. Because of this our safest course of action is to make an immediate landing here, on runway 28R.

“I have not been given any further details about the reported incidents at other airfields, but I will pass on any additional information that I receive from the tower just as soon as I get it.

“I realize that you will be very anxious for news, but I
must ask you not to switch on your cell phones until we have safely landed and come to a complete stop at the terminal building.”

Now, suddenly, there was a bustle and a flurry as everybody switched on their cell phones and started to make calls.

“Joanne!” gabbled the old guy just across the aisle from me. “I have to make this quick…but there’s been a crash at Portland Airport and the pilot’s telling us there’s been more crashes at other airports, too.”

He paused and nodded, and then he looked across the aisle at me and said, “It’s my daughter. She says that it’s been on the news for the past half hour. Over twenty planes have come down, all across the country. Miami, Boston, Kansas City, Missouri. Hundreds of people killed. Maybe
thousands!
”

Amelia took hold of my hand and squeezed it tight. She didn’t say anything, but I could guess what she was thinking.

The man in front of me stood up. He was wearing a red plaid coat and he had a greasy black comb-over and two protuberant front teeth, like a beaver. “Ay-rabs!” he announced. “Those ragheads did it again! What happened to all that tightened-up security they were supposed to give us?”

A flight attendant came down the aisle, asking people to switch off their cell phones. A middle-aged woman caught hold of her sleeve and begged her, “Please…do you have any news of other flights? My daughter and her family are flying to Cincinnati today.”

“I’m sorry,” said the flight attendant. “All they told us was ‘similar incidents.’ Now, please,
sir!
The captain requires that everybody turns off their cells.”

“Do they know
how
the planes came down?” asked Beaver Teeth. “Was it hijackers?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t have any more details. Now will you please sit down and buckle up? We’ll be making our approach in a very few minutes.”

“Ay-rabs!” Beaver Teeth repeated. “Al Qa-fricking-eda! We should’ve kicked the whole goddamn lot of them out of the country right after nine-eleven!”

Now the aircraft was making a tight turn over the river, and reflected sunlight revolved across the cabin ceiling. The engines were giving out a loud, descending scream and the air-conditioning was hissing. Amelia kept on tightly holding my hand but I wasn’t entirely certain which one of us was reassuring the other.

“We’re going to be okay, Harry,” she told me. “I promise you.”

Since she was a genuine clairvoyant, as opposed to a lucky blusterer like me, I was almost inclined to take her word for it. All the same, I really disliked the feeling that I might die within the next five minutes.
Horribly
, too, like being disemboweled by a jagged segment of torn-open fuselage, or mushed into human salsa against the seat in front of me, or cremated alive by blazing aviation fuel, grinning and screaming with agonized laughter like the Crypt Keeper.

Not only that, there wasn’t enough time remaining to have even the most perfunctory sex with Amelia; or a last shot of Jack Daniel’s; or to order a hand-held electric fan out of the in-flight catalog.

We came down so fast that we almost burst out of our seat belts, and hit the runway with a bounce that jolted the breath out of us. Then the engines roared into reverse, and the pilot jammed the brakes so hard that the airplane dipped and bucked like a giant canoe plunging down the rapids. Almost immediately, he swerved off the runway to the right, and sped us away from the burning carnage of the US Airways flight, but we still passed through dense curtains of drifting smoke, and a strong smell of burning rubber blew in through the air vents.

The passengers clapped and whooped and whistled, and some of them stamped their feet, but Amelia and I did nothing but look into each other’s eyes. and our eyes said
phew
. I think we both realized then that we were not yet ready for
the spirit world. There was still too much for us to do in solid real-people world. Maybe there was even a chance that she and I might consummate a love that both of us had always acknowledged, but never openly admitted. Or maybe I was just being slushy. I admit that I can be, especially when I watch repeats of
The Way We Were.

As we taxied toward the terminal buildings, the Jewish guy was giving thanks to God for his safe arrival, as well he might, and Beaver Teeth was already talking on his cell to his brother in Cedar Rapids. “How many? Thirty-four? Christ Almighty, I don’t believe it! And what? Auto wrecks?
How
many? I don’t believe what I’m hearing, Malcolm. It’s Armageddon. That’s what it is. Arma-fricking-geddon.”

Inside the terminal it was chaos, with crowds of weeping relatives and TV crews and firefighters and police. There must have been more than one hundred paramedics there, too, but all they were doing was standing around the baggage carousels looking glum, because there was nobody left alive for them to tend to. I overheard one of the TV reporters saying that flight 490 from Chicago had nosedived straight into the end of the runway and exploded on impact. There had been 107 passengers and crew on board, and no survivors.

There was no hope of collecting our bags, so Amelia and I went straight through the terminal and managed to hail ourselves a cab. The cabdriver was a gloomy type with a big nose and a gray buzz cut, and he relentlessly chewed gum all the way. As we left the airport and headed south toward the city, I turned around and looked back at the smoke rising from the end of the runway.

“You know what I think?” said the cabdriver. “I think we should retaliate, right now, because this ain’t going to stop.”

“Retaliate?” I asked him. “Against who, exactly?”

The cabdriver flapped one hand. “The what’s-their-god-damn-names. The terrorists. All of them. We should nuke the Middle East and show them they can’t get away with it.”

“Okay. Any particular part of the Middle East, or all of it?”

“Wipe ‘em out, that’s what I say. They’ve never been nothing but trouble, have they? Palestinians, Eye-ranians. Goddamned Eye-raqis.” He sniffed, and added, “Greeks.”

As we drove through the center of Portland, he turned up his radio so that we could listen to the continuing news bulletins from all over the country. It was just past five in the afternoon, and since one o’clock in the morning, thirty-seven airliners had crashed, most of them at airports, but some of them into suburbs or forests or mountains. Early estimates suggested that nearly four thousand five hundred people had been killed, and thousands more seriously injured.

All commercial and private flights had now been grounded, and John Rostoff, the secretary for homeland security, had warned that they would not resume until his department understood how so many airliners could have been brought down, and who was responsible for it.

At the same time, there had been thousands of serious traffic pileups all across the country. Drivers had collided with oncoming traffic or driven straight across busy intersections without stopping or simply run off the road.

There had been countless other accidents, too, such as people stepping off the sidewalk in front of speeding cars, or falling down stairs or escalators, or walking into swimming pools or lakes.

The cabdriver turned the radio down. “You know what I think?”

“No, we don’t,” said Amelia. “But I’m sure you’re going to tell us.”

“They’ve put something in the water—that’s what I think. Like maybe LSD or something like that.”

“Who has?”

“The terrorists. The goddamned Eye-ranians.”

“Well, you could be right,” Amelia told him. “But it could
be somebody who hates us even more than the goddamned Eye-ranians.”

“You mean like the Canucks?”

We turned at last into the aspen-lined campus of the Oregon Health and Science University and stopped outside the Casey Eye Institute, a dazzling white building, six stories high, with hundreds of shining windows; it was more like a luxury cruise liner than a clinic. As I paid him, the cabdriver said, “You know what I think? I think this is the end of America as we know it. You mark my words.”

Amelia and I took the elevator up to level four, where her sister Lizzie and her family were being treated. The floor of the reception area was made entirely of tempered glass, and it glowed phosphorescent blue in the early-afternoon sunlight, so that it looked as if we were walking across the set of a science fiction movie.

On a normal day this would have been a cool haven of clinical calm. But today, a half dozen doctors and nurses were gathered around the nurses’ station, grimly watching the TV news. The volume was muted, but a streamer across the bottom of the screen was telling the whole apocalyptic story. Thirty-nine airliners were now confirmed as having crashed. What was even more alarming, two F4D Tomcats had collided over the ocean off San Diego, with the loss of all four crew members. If our military planes were falling out of the sky, too, then it was pretty obvious that we were in deep and serious doo-doo.

Amelia and I joined the doctors and nurses, and we watched as the news grew more apocalyptic by the minute. Remember that terrible pit-of-the-stomach feeling we all had as we watched the World Trade towers coming down? We had that same feeling right then, only worse.

John Rostoff, the secretary for homeland security, appeared on the screen, and a tall crimson-faced doctor standing next to me told the nurse, “Turn up the sound, will you, Janet?”

Rostoff was saying, “…everything we possibly can to identify the cause of all these tragic accidents.”

He squinted at the teleprompter in front of him, and then he said, “From the flight recordings that we have so far managed to retrieve, it seems highly likely that the pilots of the ill-fated airliners were affected by sudden and totally unexpected attacks of one hundred percent blindness. And eyewitness accounts of some of the worst vehicular accidents across the country seem to suggest that drivers, too, have suffered sudden loss of sight, with disastrous consequences.

“We have no idea yet whether this blindness was caused by some naturally occurring phenomenon, such as trachoma, or whether it could be the result of terrorist activity. But both victims and survivors are being examined by experts from the Centers for Disease Control as a matter of extreme urgency.”

“It’s an epidemic, in my opinion,” said the crimson-faced doctor, turning around and talking to me as if I were some kind of well-known expert on eye diseases. “It could be a virulent form of CMV. That’s spread by nothing more than human contact.”

“Could be some contaminated food product,” suggested a Korean doctor. “A particular brand of soda, maybe, tainted with methanol. That happened in Louisiana a few years ago. Thirty, maybe forty people went blind before they found out what the cause was.”

A coppery-headed nurse came over to greet us. In a hushed voice, she said, “Mrs. Carlsson?”

“That’s me,” said Amelia.

“Your sister has been
so
excited about your coming, Mrs. Carlsson. She’s been talking about nothing else all morning.”