Blind Panic Read online

  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.”

  “Does she know about any of this?” I asked her, nodding toward the TV.

  The nurse said, “Lord no. We haven’t told any of our acute-care patients yet. We think they have enough stress to deal with, coping with their blindness.” She paused, and then she said, “It’s just terrible, isn’t it? A dear friend of mine was supposed to be flying to Miami today and I still haven’t heard from her.”

  She led us along the corridor, her white sneakers squeaking on the shiny, polished floor.

  Lizzie was sitting up in bed with a pale green mask over her eyes. She was three or four years younger than Amelia, and a little plumper, with freckles across the bridge of her nose, but just as pretty. When Amelia came into the room and said, “Lizzie?” she lifted both arms and let out a painful sob. Amelia embraced her, and shushed her, and then she sat down on the side of her bed and held her hands.

  “How’s Kevin? And Shauna? And David?”

  “They’re just the same as me. Totally blind, and the doctors don’t know why.”

  “How are they coping?”

  “Kevin and David seem to have accepted it, but poor Shauna can’t stop crying.”

  “I brought Harry with me,” said Amelia.

  “Harry? Harry Erskine? My God, I haven’t seen Harry for years.” She tried to smile, and said, wryly, “Not that I can see him now.”

  “Hi, Lizzie,” I told her. “I’m real sorry about what’s happened to you guys.”

  Lizzie held out one of her hands in my direction. “It’s so good of you to come, Harry. It’s been like a nightmare.”

  I took hold of her hand and kissed her on both cheeks. “Let’s hope this is only temporary, huh? What have the doctors told you?”

  “Nothing so far, except that the lenses in our eyes have all misted over, and they don’t know why.”

  “They don’t have any idea at all?”

  Lizzie shook her head. “At first they thought it might have been caused by some rare kind of infection that we caught in the woods. But they’ve done dozens of tests and there’s nothing else wrong with us, except that we’re blind.”

  “Maybe it’s traumatic,” Amelia suggested. “You know, like people who have a terrible shock and find that they can’t speak for a while.”

  “We didn’t suffer any trauma,” said Lizzie. “We were just cycling up the side of the canyon and there he was, standing by the side of the road.”

  She hesitated, as if she had forgotten what she was going to say. Amelia and I frowned at each other, and Amelia had just started to say, “What did he look like?” when Lizzie interrupted her. Her voice sounded oddly flat and expressionless, as if another woman were reading her words from a cue card. “Of course, we deserved it.”

  “You told me that before, on the phone,” said Amelia. “What do you mean, you deserved it?”

  Underneath her mask, Lizzie frowned. “I don’t understand you,” she said, and this time she sounded like her normal self.

  “You just said ‘we deserved it,’ and I wanted to know what you deserved.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Lizzie, you said it quite clearly. Harry heard you. Didn’t you, Harry?”

  “He was standing by the side of the road,” said Lizzie. “He was standing by the side of the road and there were two reflections, one on each side.”

  I hunkered down close beside the bed. “‘Reflections’?” I asked her. “What do you mean by ‘reflections’?”

  She made a slow up-and-down motion with her hand, as if she were cleaning a pane of glass. “They were like two long mirrors, standing beside him. They were like men but they were like reflections of men.” Again, that subtle change in tone. “We deserved it, though. We deserved to go blind. We spread the disease, after all.”

  “Lizzie, what did he look like?”

  “He looked like the One Who Went and Came Back. He looked like Hin-mut-too-yah-lat-kekht. Tall, very tall, with a face like a stone.”

  “He looked like who?”

  “Hin-mut-too-yah-lat-kekht. Thunder Rolling in the Mountains.”

  “I see,” I said, although I didn’t have the faintest idea what she was talking about. “And this Hin-mut-too-whatever, he spoke to you?”

  “He said that we deserved to go blind and die. He said that we spread the disease and the bones of his fathers were singing to him to show us no mercy.”

  “Listen to me, Lizzie,” said Amelia. “Can you remember what happened then? After he spoke to you, what did he do?”

  Lizzie began to move her head from side to side very emphatically. “We are all going to go blind and die. All of us. We deserve it. We deserve to be punished.”

  “Lizzie,” I said, “did he tell you his name?”

  “He looked like Hin-mut-too-yah-lat-kekht. But he was not really Hin-mut-too-yah-lat-kekt. He was the One Who Went and Came Back.”

  I glanced meaningfully at Amelia and Amelia glanced meaningfully at me. We both knew the various names of the One Who Went and Came Back. But who had told Lizzie about him? And who the hell was Hin-mut-too-yah-lat-kekht?

  Lizzie suddenly turned toward me and announced, “He knows who you are. He knows that you have come to see me. He says that this time you will be ground into dust. And he says that the wind will carry your dust far away from this land so that you will never be remembered here and there will be no trace of you to taint the ground in which the bones of his fathers are buried.”

  “Lizzie,” I urged her. “Listen to me, Lizzie. I need you to tell me his name. It’s important.”

  “I cannot speakhis name. He was driven out of this world, but he has returned. This time he has many faces and many names.”

  I grasped her hand and held it tight. She was very cold—so cold that she was shaking. “Was his name Misquamacus?" I asked her.

  “Harry, no—!” said Amelia.

  But it was too late. Lizzie’s back stiffened. Her fin
gers splayed out and her entire body went into a spasm. She thumped her head back onto the pillows and started to scream. It was like no scream that I had ever heard before. It was half scream and half roar, terrifying, and it went on and on without her taking a breath.

  The door burst open and two nurses came hurrying in, followed closely by a Chinese intern.

  “What happened?” one of the nurses asked us, while the other one bent over Lizzie and pressed her hand over her forehead, trying to calm her down.

  “I don’t know,” I told her. “She just suddenly lost it. I really don’t know.”

  What else could I say? That I had spoken the name of the most powerful Indian wonder-worker who had ever walked the North American continent? He Whose Face Appeared in the Sky? He Who Brings the Terror of Eternal Darkness? Misquamacus? The One Who Went and Came Back?

  Lizzie kept on screaming. Her voice was so piercing and harsh that we could hardly hear one another. Without any further hesitation the intern unlocked the drugs cabinet on the wall, took out a small bottle, and quickly filled a hypodermic needle. Then he walked around the bed, lifted up Lizzie’s left arm, and injected her.

  “Just a little sedative,” he told us. “Something to settle her down.”

  We waited, but more than a half minute went by and Lizzie continued to scream, her mouth stretched wide-open and every muscle in her body locked tight.

  The intern kept his hands cupped over his ears. “I don’t understand…She should have calmed down by now.” He paused. “To be totally frank with you, she should be unconscious. That dose would have dropped a horse.”

  One of the nurses looked up and said, “She’s hyperventilating, but I don’t know how. She’s screaming but she’s not breathing in.”

  The intern took another bottle of tranquilizer out of the medicine cabinet. Amelia said, “My God, how much are you going to give her?”

  “Only a very small dosage,” the intern assured her. He filled up his hypodermic again, but before he could approach the bed, Lizzie abruptly stopped screaming, and lay panting as if she had just finished running a marathon.