Blind Panic (2 page)

Miami, Florida

“I dreamed that my driver took me to the the Classic Grille. I just
had
to have one of their lobster-and-crab burgers. My driver opened the door of the car for me, and I high stepped it into the restaurant as if I was a fashion model. Everybody turned to look at me, but I stuck up my nose and swung my pearl necklace around like I really didn’t care. It was only then that the maître d’ said, ‘Hasn’t
madame
forgotten something?’ I said, ‘I don’t think so, Luigi. What?’

“He leaned forward and whispered in my ear, ‘
Madame
is wearing no clothes.’

“I looked down and he was right. Except for my pearls and my black patent Prada pumps, I was absolutely butt-naked. Brazilian and all, for pity’s sake.”

I almost choked on my rainbow-colored cocktail, and if you had ever seen Mrs. Zlotorynski, you would have known why. She was seventy-one and skeletally thin, with huge Chanel sunglasses and a nose like a buzzard on the lookout for a baby prairie dog to swoop down on.

“You know what that means, don’t you, Mrs. Z?” I asked her.

“It means that I’m insecure?”

I shook my head.

“It means that I’m frightened of people finding out that I was born in the South Bronx, and that my father sewed linings for a living?” She leaned closer when she said this, and
spoke in a very hoarse whisper, even though the nearest sunbather was more than twenty feet away, and he was snoring.

I shook my head again.

“It means that I’m worried about losing my money and ending up with nothing?”

“No, Mrs. Zlotorynski, your dream has nothing to do with your social status or your lack of self-esteem or, God forbid, your late husband’s investments in Pfizer pharmaceuticals. Men will always need Viagra! It simply means that you have an inner glow that you very rarely share. In your daily life, as you go about your business, you hardly ever display your natural warmheartedness.”

“My natural warmheartedness?”

“That’s right. You
understand
people, Mrs. Z. You feel what they feel. You have so much spiritual radiance. But most of the time you keep it tightly locked up in your inner jewelry box so that nobody can appreciate how caring you are.”

Mrs. Zlotorynski swung her scrawny legs around and sat up straight. It was impossible to see her eyes behind those sunglasses, but I would have bet you ten portraits of Benjamin Franklin that they were piggy with self-approval. Well, piggier than they usually were. You know what too much blepharoplasty can do to a girl.

She prodded my shoulder with one orange-polished fingernail—once, twice, three times. It was like being bitten by a particularly annoying mosquito.

“You—are—
so
—right!” she agreed. “I
do
have spiritual radiance. I
do
have warmth
.
I
am
beautiful. Inside of myself, I
shine
. Yet—do you know?—you’re one of the very few people who has ever recognized it. Apart from Morry, of course—
alev ha sholem
—but then Morry was hardly ever home. What did he know?”

I sat up, too, trying to shift myself out of fingernail range. “I’ve seen your driver. What’s his name? Emigdlio. The way he scowls at you behind your back…It’s a disgrace, don’t you think? Just because you asked him to drive your friends
home to Key West, at two thirty in the morning! It’s only three hundred twenty-eight miles, there and back! And Rosita! She’s supposed to be your maid. Yet when you told her to worm little Q-Tip for you, what did she do? She said that she wasn’t an animal doctor, and she stamped her foot and turned all sulky on you.

“Don’t these people understand how much you
feel
for them? I guess they don’t. But that’s what makes them ‘little people.’ That’s what you call them, isn’t it? And don’t they deserve it!”

“You are
so
right,” Mrs. Zlotorynski repeated. She opened her orange suede purse and took out her mirror so she could adjust her Marilyn Hikida straw hat with orange feather trim, and reapply her matching orange lip gloss. “They
are
little people, God help them. Well, God
has
to help them—doesn’t he?—because they don’t know how to help themselves!”

I lifted my cocktail in salute. My friends, I was having the time of my life. My old poker-playing buddy Marco Hernandez had gone on a three-month tour of Europe with the Joe Morales Mariachi Orchestra, and he had asked me to take care of his house in Coral Gables. Well, wouldn’t you? The humidity had been 93 percent on the day I left New York. The streets had smelled like a salami slicer’s armpit, and when I climbed out of the cab at LaGuardia, the handle had broken off my suitcase. But here I was, sitting on the beach outside of the five-star Delano Hotel, with the sun broiling the soles of my yellow plastic Crocs, and the blue Atlantic reassuring me with every languid splash that life had taken a turn for the very contented.

Marco had been a true friend. Before he left for Berlin, he had taken me to meet Eduardo, who was the concierge at the Casa Espléndido, and the smoothest-looking Cuban in Miami. Eduardo had a professionally-plucked pencil mustache and walked with a shimmer. For a modest percentage he had agreed to pass my cards around to every luxury hotel on South Beach:
Harry Erskine, foreteller of the future and diviner
of dreams
—especially the dreams of wealthy widows who were starved for flattery and suggestive conversation.

You can be as cynical as you like, but those seventy-plus babes with their vulture’s talons for fingernails and their withered necks and their wind-tunnel eyes, they just
melted
when I told them how gorgeous they were. And when I promised each of them that there was a hunky young stud in their reasonably near future, with gym-sculptured muscles and overcrowded Calvin Kleins, they almost lost consciousness with gratitude.

Okay, maybe I was less of a bona fide clairvoyant than a supplier of fruity fantasies, but I told those old aardvarks exactly what they wanted to hear, and my fee was not to be sniffed at—$175 an hour—and even more if I thought that I could get away with it. And since I
called
on my lady clients, rather than having them come to visit me, I got to visit almost every swanky hotel on Collins Avenue, and have lunch and cocktails bought for me, too. Today Mrs. Zlotorynski had taken me to the Blue Door Brasserie and treated me to their signature dish of slow-roasted duck and bananas. I had ordered it mostly as an ironical comment on the two of us. In her dark brown Zara bathing costume, Mrs. Zlotorysnki looked just like a slow-roasted duck, and I was bananas for not having left New York and come down to Miami twenty years ago.

“What can I
do,
then?” Mrs. Zlotorynski begged me. “How can I make people appreciate how warm I am?”

I checked my watch. I had to be at the Biltmore by three thirty to give a tarot reading to Mrs. Kaplan-Capaldi’s Burmese cat. That’s right, Mrs.
Benjamin
Kaplan-Capaldi, whose third husband owned half of Hialeah.

I took hold of Mrs. Zlotorynski’s papery-skinned, sun-withered hands, and admired my double reflection in her sunglasses. I looked so much younger with a suntan and blond highlights. In New York, I always looked baggy-eyed and asbestos gray, as if I subsisted on a diet of hot dogs and
Guinness and never left my apartment, which was not too far from the truth.

“Emigdlio and Rosita—they’re little people, sure. So what are you going to give them?”

“I don’t know, Harry. What do little people want?”

“No! That’s exactly it!
They
may be little people, but
you
—you’re
big
people, so give them
more
than they want! They won’t believe your generosity! They won’t believe how caring you are! You
are
caring, aren’t you?”

“What do you mean? Of course I’m caring. I’m
beyond
caring.”

“So what do you do to show how caring you are? You give Emigdlio some time off to spend with his family. Not just a single night. Not even
two
nights. You give him a long weekend, and you pay him a bonus, too, so that he can take his kids to Parrot World, or Chuck E. Cheese’s, or wherever little people go to amuse themselves.

“And Rosita, give
her
a bonus, too, and the pick of your wardrobe. I mean—why not? That will give you an excuse to go out and buy yourself a whole lot of new clothes.” As if she needed an excuse.

For a second I felt the tendons in Mrs. Zlotorynski’s wrists tighten up like piano wires. Generosity was so much against her nature that the very thought of it brought on a muscle spasm.

But I gave her my oiliest, most Liberace smile, and said, “Think how it’s going to get around. Emigdlio will tell all the other drivers how understanding you are, and Rosita will tell all of the other maids how happy she is to work for you, and before you know it, you’ll have such a reputation for warmth and humanity that—who knows?—you may even win a civic award for it.”

Mrs. Zlotorynski slowly started to nod, and then nodded even more emphatically, like a dipping bird. “You’re right, Harry!
That
was what my dream was all about! You’ve seen me as I really am—it’s about time the rest of the world did, too!”

But for God’s sake spare them the Brazilian,
I thought.

I kissed her hand. She was wearing so many emerald rings that I almost broke my front teeth. Then I noisily sucked up the dregs of my Nagayama Sunset, although I really could have used another, especially since they were eighteen dollars a hit and she was paying. “I really have to go now, Mrs. Z. As always, it’s been a delight.”

I waited, and waited, and then I repeated, “As
always,
it’s been a delight.”

“Oh! What a muddlehead I am!” she exclaimed, and picked up her purse. She took out a Delano Hotel envelope, reassuringly fat and squishy. “I don’t know how I coped, Harry, before you came into my life.”

The envelope vanished into the top pocket of my blue-and-yellow Hawaiian shirt as if it had never existed. A stage conjuror called something like the Great Nintendo had taught me that when I was doing bar work in the Village. “It works both ways, Mrs. Z. What would I do without
you?
”

I stood up and was just about to leave when she clung to the leg of my flappy linen pants. “You don’t have a
date
yet, do you?”

“A date?” Jesus—don’t tell me she was going to ask me out for the evening.

“I don’t mean to be pushy, but you did say that it would come to you very soon, and I’m just dying to enter it into my diary. The date—you know—when my new young beau will be coming into my life.”

I let out a scream of laughter. “Of course! Ha ha! Your new young beau! Well—I checked your tarot cards late last night, and they’re still saying March-ish, without being specifically specific as to which specific day.”

“I can hardly wait.”

“Well…don’t get yourself too excited.” Especially since I’m making this all up and I shall be long gone by March, back to New York.

I was trudging back across the soft, hot sand when Mrs.
Zlotorynski shrilled out, “
Harry!
Didn’t you forget something?”

I patted the front of my shirt. Forget something? I didn’t think so. My cell phone, my sunglasses, my Mega Millions lottery ticket, my $525 in large-denomination bills—all there.

“My mystic
motto!
You forgot my mystic
motto!
”

“Oh, your mystic motto! How could I? And I looked it up specially after I’d read your tarot cards!”

“Yes?”

I walked back to her. “It’s a very mystical mystic motto, Mrs. Z. More mystical than most. ‘Freedom is the greatest luxury of all. No matter how much caviar you heap onto a baked potato, it can never fly like a seagull.’”

“Oh, Harry! That’s so
deep!
And so true, too!”

“You won’t forget it, will you? When you’re being naturally warmhearted.”

“Of course not. How could I? ‘No matter how much caviar you heap on a seagull, it can never be a baked potato.’”

“Nearly right. It’ll do, anyhow.”

I was fighting my way through the billowing white sheers that hang in the Delano’s lobby when my cell phone rang.

“Harry?”

“Hold on there, I’ve just gotten myself tangled up in forty yards of muslin.”

“Harry, it’s Amelia.”

“Amelia?”
My heart stopped in midbeat, as if I had been bouncing a tennis ball against a schoolyard wall and somebody had unexpectedly caught it. “How did you know where I was?”

“I don’t know where you are. I’ve been ringing your home number but you never pick up.”

“I’m in Miami. You remember Marco Hernandez? Marco the Taco, we always used to call him. I’m house-sitting for him while he’s off on tour, tootling his ocarina or some such.”

Amelia; I couldn’t believe it. Amelia Carlsson, née Crusoe. She could have been the love of my life if our lives had turned out differently. She was thin, elegant, curly-haired, and highly bewitching, if you’re attracted to women with high cheekbones and prominent shoulder blades and out-of-focus eyes. We had always attracted each other, but the problem was that we hadn’t always attracted each other at the same time. When she broke up with that bearded grump MacArthur, I was happily married to Karen, with Lucy just born; and when I broke up with Karen, she was happily married to Bertil, this literal-minded Swede who thought that
Friends
was a reality TV show.

I hadn’t seen Amelia for more than two years now, the last time being a nightmarish experience that both of us preferred to forget. But it wasn’t just the nightmarish experience that kept us from seeing each other. Bertil seriously didn’t like me, mainly because he had as much sense of humor as a pickled herring, but also because he was jealous of our past, mine and Amelia’s, and he wasn’t so literal-minded and pickled-herringlike that he couldn’t sense our mutual attraction. Those glances, those smiles, those brushings-together in the kitchen doorway.

“Harry, something terrible’s happened and I couldn’t think who else to turn to.” She sounded very close to tears.

“Something terrible? What is it?” I managed to unwind myself from the sheers and find myself a pea green leather armchair where I could sit and talk to her.

“It’s my sister Lizzie,” she said. “She’s gone blind. Her whole family’s gone blind.”

“
What?
Did you say
blind?
”

“Totally. Lizzie and Kevin and the kids, too.”

“Amelia, that’s just awful. How the hell did that happen?”

“Lizzie doesn’t know. They were on a biking weekend at the Hell’s Canyon Recreation Area in Oregon. Apparently they were halfway up a hill when little David started to wobble and just fell off his bike. Then Shauna. Both of them were screaming that they couldn’t see. Lizzie and Kevin went to help them, but before they could reach them,
they
went blind, too.

“They didn’t dare to move, because they were so close to the edge of the canyon, and it was over five hundred feet down. They were lucky that a ranger came driving past or they might have had to stay there for hours or even
days
.”

“They all went blind? Just like that? And Lizzie doesn’t have any idea why?”

“None at all. And so far the doctors don’t have any idea, either. But something so strange has happened, which is why I’ve been trying to get in touch with you.”

“Something strange? How strange? I’m not too sure I like the sound of this.”

“Harry, I really need you to come with me. Please.”

“Where exactly are you thinking of going?”

“The Casey Eye Institute in Portland. We need to get there as soon as we can.”

“Did you say
Portland?
Portland,
Oregon?
That’s so far west it’s practically Japan.”

“United has a flight to Portland from Miami, and Continental has one from Newark, and they both connect in Denver, within about an hour of each other. We could meet up there.” She paused, and then she added, “I can pay for your tickets.”

“What about Bertie? Can’t Bertie go with you?”

“Bertil’s in Geneva, for a really important conference. He can’t get back here for another four days.”

“All the same, he won’t be very happy if
I
come with you, will he? What about that gay friend of yours? What’s his name, Blake Thingy the Third? Or that woman you met when you were teaching, the one with the teeth? You must have a million friends you can call on.”

“Harry, it has to be
you.
”

A very pretty young waitress in a white uniform with gilt buttons appeared through the sheers and asked me whether I would like anything from the bar.

“I’ll have another Nagayama Sunset, thanks. But go easy on the Nagayama. Oh—and bill it to Mrs. Zlotorynski, would you? In seven fifteen.”

Amelia said, “I hate to ask you, Harry. But nobody else will understand.”

“Understand
what,
exactly?”

“I’ve been talking to Lizzie on the phone. She’s so confused. She keeps saying things that don’t make any sense. I asked her if she was feeling any pain, but all she says is, ‘We spread the disease, didn’t we?’ But when I ask her
what
disease, she doesn’t answer.”

“Go on,” I coaxed her.

“This morning, she said, ‘We deserve this, don’t we?’ I said of course they didn’t. The doctors would soon find out what was wrong with them, and give them their sight back. But she said, ‘
No
, we deserve it, and it’s not just me and Kevin and the kids—it’s all of us. We’re
all
going to go blind and we’re all going to die, every single one of us.’”

“She’s in shock,” I suggested. “People say the weirdest things when they’re in shock. I was hit by a bus once, on Broadway, and for hours afterward I kept asking the way to Sarge’s Deli. Why would I want to go to Sarge’s Deli? Their blintzes are never hot enough and they have the rudest staff in the world.”

Amelia said, “
I
thought it was shock, to begin with. I told her to relax. I told her I’d make sure that she and her family got the best treatment possible. But she said, ‘Doctors can’t treat this blindness, Amelia. It’s not a medical condition. It’s medicine.’”

“
Medicine?
What did she mean by that?” This was definitely starting to disturb me, big-time. Unlike me, Amelia was a genuine clairvoyant and medium, and she could discuss pasta recipes with dead people. She could tell you what kind of person you were going to marry and what stinky old bag lady you were going to bump into when you crossed Lexington Avenue tomorrow. She knew all about plants and herbs and mirrors and crystal balls, and she could look at the worn-down pattern on the soles of your shoes and tell you that you were going to die by choking on a fishbone. She could even tell you what kind of fish.

“I asked her that, too,” said Amelia. “She didn’t answer me directly. She said, ‘We saw them, before we went blind. They were standing by the side of the road.’ I said, ‘
Who
was standing by the side of the road?’”

She hesitated for a moment, and then she said, “‘The One Who Went and Came Back. He had two mirrors with him.’”

I felt my scalp tingle as if my hair were infested with lice. “
The One Who Went and Came Back?
Are you sure?”

“She said it twice, Harry.”

“So what did you do?”

“What do you think? I asked her if she could tell me what he looked like. I asked her how she knew who he was.”

“And?”

“She said a word I didn’t understand. She kept repeating it. Something like ‘fatality,’ but not quite that.”

“And that was all? ‘
Fatality?
’”

“She put the phone down, and when I called back the nurse told me that she was too tired to talk to me any more. So I did a bead reading.”

“A
bead
reading? I never saw you do a bead reading before.”

“A smoke reading would have been better, but I was at work and there was no smoking. The beads are Navajo misfortune beads. They’re like Tibetan
tala
beads, only they’re not so concerned about how your rice is going to grow at twenty thousand feet above sea level. They’re more concerned with who your enemies are, and what’s going to come jumping out at you when you least expect it.”

The waitress brought my cocktail and I signed the check, including a two-fifty tip. I took a sip of frosty cachaca, and then I said, “Okay…So what did they say, these beads?”

“They said that a great darkness was coming. They said that a black cloak was sweeping across the sky. They said that men who cannot see can no longer be the masters of the world.”

“Go on,” I told her.

“They said that a great wonder worker had turned air and water and fire into flesh, and was walking the land of his ancestors, just as
they
had, in times long ago.”

I didn’t say anything, not right away.

Amelia said, “Harry? Are you still there?”

“I’m still here. How good are these beads, as a general rule? Misguided, fairly misguided, pretty accurate, or smack on the nose?”

“They’ve never been wrong in all the years that I’ve been
using them. They predicted nine-eleven, almost to the minute.”

“Okay. You’d better book me a ticket, then.”

I hung up the phone.
The One Who Went and Came Back
. I hadn’t heard that in a long time and I had hoped that I would never hear it again. It was one of the many names for the most fearsome Wampanoag medicine man of all time, Misquamacus. The prospect of a newly resurrected Misquamacus was seriously unfunny.

Misquamacus had been born nearly four hundred years ago. Native American legends say that when he was a very young adept, under the guidance of the notorious shaman Machitehew, he discovered a way to make spiritual contact with the Great Old Ones. These were the gods who had ruled the North American continent in the so-called Empty Time—in the days before days even existed—but had eventually been banished by Gitche Manitou to the farthest reaches of time and space.

From the Great Old Ones, Misquamacus was said to have acquired the power to bring on a thunderstorm just by shouting at the sky. He could fell hundreds of pine trees in a single day or bring down whole herds of deer with nothing more than an incantation and a tapping of medicine sticks. It was also said that he could appear in several different places simultaneously—sometimes thousands of miles apart.

In the seventeenth century, he had fought more ferociously against the English colonists than any other Native American, but in the end the Wampanoag had been cheated of their land and sold into slavery, and even He Who Brings the Terror of Eternal Darkness had been forced to throw in the towel. In the spring of 1655 he had made a solemn oath that he would drive out every last colonist, if not then, some time in the future, and he had taken “the way of the oil”—swallowing blazing oil to burn himself alive.

When he did that, he was able to be reborn in the body of any unsuspecting woman who happened to be in the locality
of his self-immolation—either in the past or in the future, whichever he chose. And the reason why
I
had gotten involved with him was because he had started to grow inside the body of a young woman in Manhattan called Karen Tandy, and Karen Tandy had started to have terrifying nightmares. Because of that, her mother had brought her to the only clairvoyant she knew—which was me—desperately asking for help. In turn, I had called on Amelia. I knew all of the patter and I could shuffle the tarot cards faster than Wild Bill Hickok could shuffle a poker deck, but Amelia was the genuine article.

With the reluctant help of a Sioux medicine man called Singing Rock, we had managed to use cutting-edge technology to send Misquamacus back to the spirit world. We had discovered that
everything
has a spirit, or manitou. Not just a tree or a rock or a turkey vulture, but a laptop, a Blackberry, and even a Wii. And the modern manitous were far more powerful than the ancient manitous.

But Misquamacus had constantly struggled to return, and every time he did so he caused destruction and death on a greater and greater scale. He took his revenge on Singing Rock, and killed him. And if you lived in Manhattan at the time, you’ll remember the so-called “seismic event” that brought down so many buildings. You’ll also remember the “blood disorder” that affected so many New Yorkers in the summer of 2002. Both are euphemisms for the destructive rage of Misquamacus.

About five years ago, I came across a picture of Misquamacus on the Internet, on some obscure website devoted to Keiller Webb, a nineteenth-century frontier photographer. There he was, Misquamacus, standing in the background of a daguerreotype taken at Pyramid Lake in Nevada on August 18, 1865. He was wearing a black stovepipe hat and was glaring at me furiously, as if he had
known
when this picture was taken that I would be looking at it one day.

He was stony-faced, his cheeks scarred with magical stigmata, and his deep-set eyes were glittering.

Then, less than eighteen months later, I came across another picture that had been taken only the previous day—August 17, 1865—at the Hassanamisco Indian Reservation near Grafton, Massachusetts. A group of Nipmuc Indians were posing in their finest clothes to celebrate the meeting of their tribal council. And right at the back of the group, on the left-hand side, was Misquamacus. It was unmistakably him, even though the distance between Pyramid Lake and Grafton is more than 2,400 miles.

His face was slightly blurred, because he must have moved during the exposure, but he wore the same black stovepipe hat, and around his neck he wore the same large silver medallion that Shauna had seen, like intertwining snakes. However, I had learned from Singing Rock that they weren’t snakes at all. They were the tentacles that grew from the face of the greatest of the Great Old Ones.

It was the symbol that Misquamacus carried of his mystical connection to a time when there was no time, and to inconceivable distances that made your head ring to think about them, and to beings that could turn the entire universe upside down, and walk around underneath the earth, in infinite darkness.