Blind Panic Read Online Free PDF Page A

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