Blind Panic Read online

  She was interrupted, however, by the baby, who wriggled around on her lap and pointed to the opposite wall, where a mirror with an elaborate border of seashells hung.

  “A gah,” he said, and twisted around to make sure that Jasmine was looking at him, too.

  “What now, baby boy?” asked Jasmine.

  “A gah.” Now he was pointing with both hands, and nodding, too, like a little dipping duck.

  Jasmine said, “Please, God…don’t tell me another airplane’s coming down.”

  She and Auntie Ammy sat quite still and listened. They could hear the frantic screaming of fire trucks and ambulances that were speeding toward the airbus crash from all over South Los Angeles, and the flackering of police and media helicopters. Then there was a salvo of twenty or thirty explosions as more and more automobiles and trucks blew up. But they couldn’t hear any jet engines approaching.

  “What is it, honey cheeks?” Auntie Ammy asked the baby. “What can you see?”

  “A gah. A mm-mm.”

  “I don’t know,” said Auntie Ammy. “He must be seeing somethin’, but I’m darned if I can guess what it is.”

  The baby kept on pointing his fingers and nodding his head and bouncing up and down in Auntie Ammy’s lap, and eventually Jasmine said, “Do you think he’s pointing at the mirror?”

  “The lookin’ mirror? Why should he be doing that?”

  “That’s your special mirror, isn’t it? That’s what you always told me.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “You always said that was your special mirror on account of the shells.”

  “Well, it is. The shells, they’re cowrie shells, and they are stuck around the mirror in a special pattern. Up above, they say eyiolo osa, which means revolutions, and trouble, and fire. Down below, they say irosun oche, which means that the dead are circling around to see who they can grab. My grandfather, he gave me this mirror. He was a santéro, a Santeria priest. He said it would protect my family, because it would always show us what was wrong.”

  “A gah,” said the baby, still pointing with both hands toward the mirror, and nodding his head even more.

  “What is it, little fella? If only I could understand what you is tryin’ to tell me. Or better yet, if you could suddenly start to talk.”

  Auntie Ammy stood up and carried the baby over to the mirror. He stared at his reflection with great seriousness, as if he half expected it to say something. He moved his head slowly to the left, and then to the right. “A gah,” he repeated. “A mm-mm.”

  “Well, we know what ‘a gah’ means,” Jasmine pointed out. “But I have no notion at all what a ‘mm-mm’ is.”

  As the baby continued to stare at himself, however, the mirror gradually appeared to be growing darker.

  “Look at this,” said Auntie Ammy. “It looks almost like it’s nighttime in there.”

  Jasmine came and stood beside her. She was right: the room inside the mirror was so gloomy that all she could see were their silhouettes—Auntie Ammy with her huge petalfolded headscarf and Jasmine herself with her short, brushed-up hair and her big hoop earrings.

  “What’s happening, Auntie Ammy?” Jasmine asked her, frowning into the darkness.

  Auntie Ammy slowly shook her head from side to side. “I don’t know, Jazz, for sure. I seen things in this lookin’ mirror from time to time, shinin’ bright images that are gone in a flash, as if somebody was passin’ a window. But I ain’t never seen nothin’ like this here dark before.”

  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.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  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!”