Blinding Light

by Paul Theroux

  The thing was to shut them down as quickly as possible.

  Steadman had learned that, in an interview, if you fell silent and watched and waited instead of answering, people volunteered more detail. In this instance another man, a bystander, offered the detail.

  “It’s quote-unquote adventure travel,” that man said.

  “Eco-porn,” Ava said. “Eco-chic. Voyeurism must be such a wet dream for you.”

  That man winced, but the man named Hack said, “We’re traveling together. Didn’t you see our T-shirts?”

  He unbuttoned his khaki safari shirt, revealing the lettering on his T-shirt: The Gang of Four.

  “Until they finish the renovation on our house,” the second man was saying. “We’re reconfiguring the interior of a lovely old Victorian. We’ve got twelve thousand square feet. It’s on an acre in a lovely part of San Francisco. Sea Cliff? Robin Williams lives nearby, and so do Hack and Janey.”

  “Marshall Hackler—call me Hack,” said the big slouching man, inviting a handshake with his carelessly thrust out arm.

  And Janey was apparently the woman on the cell phone. She just flapped her fingers and turned away, but another woman who had been listening—she was pretty, bright-eyed, the one holding the paperback of Trespassing, in a bush vest and green trousers, dressed for a safari—smiled and said, “Ecuador. A year ago it was Rwanda. We were the last people in there before the Africans massacred the people on that tour. We had the same guide. He was almost killed. No one can go now. We were incredibly lucky.”

  The woman speaking on the cell phone broke off and said, “We’re whole-hoggers. We want it all.”

  “Janey’s doing the interior. But we’re reconfiguring the outside, too. Swales. Berms. I’ve got the footprint and the plans with me—still working out siting of the lap pool. Downstream we’ll be putting in a guesthouse and sort of meld it with the landscaping.”

  Hack put his arm around the man and said, “This guy actually wrote a book.”

  Dismissing this with a boastful smile, the man said, “For my sins,” then took a breath and added, “Anyway, I sold my company and got into hedge funds. This was—oh, gosh—before the NASDAQ tanked in—what? Last April?”

  Steadman leaned toward him, saying nothing, smiling his obscure smile at the self-conscious “oh, gosh.”

  “And I got in the high eight figures.”

  Hack said, “So he said to me, ‘Let’s get jiggy wid it.’ ’Cause he’s an A-player. He’s a well-known author, too.”

  At the mention of “high eight figures”—what was that, tens of millions, right?—Ava barked loudly, as though at an outrage, and the woman in the Trespassing vest glanced over her cell phone and said, “Do keep it down. I’m talking.”

  “Wood worked for two solid years for that payday,” the other woman said, looking up from Steadman’s book.

  His name was Wood?

  Janey, Hack’s wife, was saying in a wiffling English accent into her cell phone, “It seems frightful. But in point of fact, single people spend a disproportionate amount of time in the loo. The laboratory, as you might say.”

  Both couples were dressed alike, mostly in Trespassing clothes from the catalogue: trousers with zip-off legs that turned them into shorts, shirts with zip-off sleeves, reversible jackets, thick socks, hiking shoes, floppy hats, mesh-lined vests, and fanny packs at their waists.

  Seeing them, Steadman wanted to say: I give away ten percent of my pretax profits from catalogue sales to environmental causes. How much do you contribute?

  “This has something like seventeen pockets,” the woman with the book said, patting her vest, seeing that Ava was staring at it—but Ava was staring at the TOG logo. She slapped it some more. “These gussets are really useful. And check out this placket.”

  And when Ava’s gaze drifted to the woman’s expensive watch—it was the Trespassing Mermaid—she said, “It’s a chronometer. Titanium. Certified for like a billion meters. That’s your vacuum-release valve,” and twisted it. “We dive—Janey doesn’t but she snorkels.” The woman on the phone turned away at the mention of her name and kept chewing on the phone. “We’re hoping to do some in the Galápagos.”

  Steadman was so delighted to hear that they were going in the opposite direction he did not tell them that snorkeling there was strictly regulated, but encouraged her instead. The man he took to be her husband was going through the sectioned-off pockets of his own padded vest. He brought out a folded map and his boarding pass and a wallet that looked like a small parcel, with slots for air tickets, dollar bills, and pesos. The wallet, too, was a Trespassing accessory.

  “What I love about American money is its tensile strength. It’s the high rag content. Leave a couple of bucks in a bathing suit and never mind. All you have to do is dry it out. It actually stands up to a washer-dryer.”

  “You mean you can launder it?” Ava said.

  Janey, the young woman with the English accent, said “Ta very mooch for now” and “By-yee” and snapped her phone off, and collapsing it, she turned it into a small dark cookie. The other woman reached into another expensive catalogue item, the Trespassing Gourmet Lunch Tote, a padded food satchel with a cooler compartment. She handed her husband a wrapped sandwich.

  “We always bring our own,” Hack said, chewing between bites. “It’s smoked turkey with provolone and tomato and an herbed vinaigrette dressing.”

  Noting that the man said “herbed,” Ava frowned and turned away, and the woman looked up from her book and offered Ava half a sandwich, saying that she had plenty. Ava’s tight smile meant “no thanks.” Tapping the cover of Trespassing, Hack put his arm around the woman and said, “That must be one hell of a read.”

  The woman said, “It’s awesome.”

  “Like how?”

  “Like in its, um, modalities. In its, um, tropes.”

  “You’ve been reading it for weeks and ignoring me.”

  “I read real slow when I’m liking something.”

  “So who wrote it?”

  Steadman, who had been listening closely, braced himself, putting on his most implacable face.

  The woman said, “This, like, you know, legendary has-been. The outdoor-gear freak. He’s more a lifestyle than a writer.” Then, “You guys married?”

  Hearing “legendary has-been,” Ava shut her eyes and smiled in anger. As for the question, everything about it, too, was wrong. The “you,” the “guys,” the very word “married.”

  “I’m Sabra Wilmutt,” the woman said.

  “I’m Jonquil J. Christ.”

  Sabra’s face looked suddenly slapped and lopsided. She said, “I don’t get it.”

  “The J is for Jesus.”

  As Ava spoke, the reboarding announcement was made.

  What does it matter? Ava’s expression said to Steadman, who had heard it all. But Steadman had been attentive to the woman named Sabra, immersed in Trespassing. It was just this awful flight to get through, and after that they would never see any of them again.

  2

  AIRBORNE ONCE MORE, isolated and blindfolded, with the slipstream crackling at the airplane’s windows and fizzing along the fuselage, the passengers were at last silenced. Steadman reflected on what they had said. They were boasting, of course, but because most boasting was bluff and lies, really they had given very little away. He took them to be lawyers, even the one who had sold his company, because of their affectations. Lawyers never volunteered the truth, because the truth was debatable, and this was why they could hold two opposing views in their head, and seemed capable of believing both, as they tossed out challenges and suppositions, speaking in irrelevancies calculated to throw you off. The merchandising of Trespassing was a wilderness of lawyers waving contracts. Challenge them with a tough question and they handed you a sandwich.

  But he said to Ava, “What was that all about?” for the way she had called attention to herself among those strangers. Steadman had described in Trespassing how it was always a fat
al mistake in travel to be conspicuous. The greatest travelers made themselves invisible. An invisible man was a man of power.

  Ava just shrugged, pretending he was worked up over nothing. Yet she knew she was motivated by their breakup. Underlying her sarcasm was the suspicion that if the people found out that she was with Steadman the famous writer, he would have to take the blame for her behavior: her insolence was his insolence. Breaking up had liberated Ava and made her reckless and indifferent to his worry, helped her see what a baby he was—“and writing is your dolly.” She couldn’t play with it, couldn’t even touch it. He fussed with it in his room. And as time had passed the dolly had become more special, first a toy, then a fetish object, then a totem, and finally an idol that represented something approaching a deity. “Fucking writers,” Ava had begun saying.

  Steadman had carefully not asked the other people any questions for fear they would ask him the same things. He was on this trip for a reason, his own assignment, and he wanted it to be secret. He had covertly been taking notes, and he was still taking them. The meal trays had been cleared and he had just written the word máscara.

  The lovely, dark-eyed, plump-lipped woman, looking like a prison guard in her black uniform, was the flight attendant. Brisk and busy, she murmured, “Mascara, mascara moving down the aisle, handing out blindfolds. Each passenger accepted one awkwardly {as though they had been handed a condom, he noted, which in a sense they had) and with varying reactions: bewilderment, suspicion, surprise, amusement, embarrassment. None had looked grateful, yet each had put the blindfold on.

  Turning to size up the masked passengers, Steadman had taken a good look at the Trespassing Treads—the hiking shoes—and the Trespassing cargo pants and multipocket vests and the Trespassing daypack at Hack’s feet. The woman named Sabra was reading Trespassing— or, rather, not reading it, since the thick thing lay spread open, turned over on her lap.

  Just behind them was Manfred, the man who had announced in a heavy German accent that he was an American. He pulled the mask over his eyes and ratcheted his seat back and slept. He was wearing black Mephisto hiking shoes and a black hat and black leather vest. In their blindfolding they seemed to Steadman like participants in a solemn ceremony, some of them novices, some old hands. That did not make the blindfolds any less bizarre, yet it was somehow appropriate to this night flight to Ecuador, all of them gringos, more or less unprepared—willing and innocent and irrationally confident, flying blind.

  Passing the blindfold to Ava, Steadman had noticed her trying to suppress a smile. She had not smiled for weeks, especially not that sort, a coquettish curl of the lips, with so much understood in it. When she put the blindfold on she was still smiling, looking helpless and eager, her mouth kissing air, like an amorous wink with her lips that suggested she knew she was being watched. Steadman touched her hand, and she snagged his fingers and squeezed. At that point Steadman put his own mask over his eyes.

  He thought about the stopover, the delay, how the people who talk the most, using those cliches, pretending to be inarticulate, were often the reverse, and trying to hide something.

  How much they had told him: the SUV, the house, the sale of the business, the shoes, the biking, the knife, the travel, the gear that he knew only too well—all of it could be summed up in one word, money. They meant it when they called themselves A-players, and were serious only in their jokes.

  His desire as a writer, as a man, was to know them, to see into them, behind their masks. To translate what they said. To know them on the most fundamental level. But he knew enough now to dismiss them and go the other way, to use what he had found.

  “You’re a pornographer,” Ava had said to him recently, to irritate him, another truthful piece of abuse from their breakup.

  Yes, he thought, the truest expression of our being is our passionate engagement in the act of sex. To know that was to know almost everything, that we are most ourselves in sex, our most monkey-like, our most human, so why shouldn’t he be fascinated? He realized this now because it was over with them, until last night no sex for months, only her hideous efficiency and angry humor and her long days and nights at the hospital.

  Shifting in her seat, seeming to wake, Ava sighed. Steadman hated it when she talked to strangers. Once it had been he doing it, and he had thrived. But that ended, and now he listened to her. Her talk bored him, made him anxious; she never knew when to stop. Neither of them hid their annoyance. But what did it matter? This was their last trip. They had planned it for months, and the very planning of it, as the most ambitious holiday they had ever had, put such a strain on them, all the negotiation that collapsed into nagging and quarreling, that they realized how unsuited they were to each other.

  They were certain now that they would split up, and this realization calmed them and released them from their struggle. Recognizing that they had reached a conclusion more final than a truce, they had the dull serenity and silent patience of a couple who know they have no future. It was better to see each other as a stranger than as an enemy, and in this slipping away they lost much of their history—the false, insincere part that had been their meaningless romance. They were tougher, not sentimental, hard to convince. No favors: with none of the frivolous generosity of lovers, they were, oddly, now equals. But more circumspect, less knowable, than when they had first met.

  So this trip was practical. Though the planning had been full of conflict and taken so long, they went ahead with it. They had to take the trip or they would lose their deposit and forfeit the plane tickets. Ava said, “You actually care about the money?” The money was a pretext for the mission: he hoped the trip would lead him to his book.

  Holding the blindfold, he said, “This thing cost two grand.”

  She said, “It’s probably worth it.”

  To travel in separate rows, to pretend not to know each other, would have been ridiculous—they had discussed these strategies. They still needed each other, needed most of all to be let down gently, to part without drama. They still liked being together, even if they were no longer in love. The finality—the peculiarity of nothingness, no hope, no future—affected their sex life, gave it a vicious push. The night before they left they made love as though they were strangers, meeting by chance, emboldened by their anonymity to be selfish, even brutal, seeming to use each other. But the rough grappling in the dark room surprised and delighted them, afterward leaving them gasping, sprawling naked on the carpet, looking beaten and broken, as though they had fallen to the floor from a great height.

  “I liked that,” Ava had said. She knew that Steadman had too. It had reminded her of the first time, the blind recklessness of it, when they had just met and knew only each other’s first name. “That was nice.”

  Ava had not been put off by the coldness of it, Steadman’s apparent indifference to her, his concentrating on his pleasure. He probably had not noticed that she was using him, that only her pleasure mattered to her. And it proved that they were finished, it was over, she could say anything to him now, even tell him she didn’t like what he was writing. They were strangers again in the dark room. She slipped her hand between his thighs and touched him and told him she wanted him again. She shocked him, she aroused him with her demand, her saying, “And if you can’t get it up, what good are you?”

  Afterward she had said in a teasing, greedy way, “Maybe we’ll meet other people on the trip.”

  Blindfolded, he remembered everything.

  Two hours into the second leg of the flight, and even taking into account the delay in Miami, the only people they had met were the talkative travelers who called themselves the Gang of Four, the Hacklers and the Wilmutts: big, loud Marshall Hackler—Hack—his English wife, Janey, the overly tidy reader, Sabra, and her husband, the competitor named Wood. The dark, bug-eyed German, Manfred Steiger, had hovered, wanting to enter the conversation, squinting, grinning, showing his teeth in a what’s-going-on? face.

  Here was the odd thing. Steadman felt he
had met another person, too, and what fascinated him was that it was Ava, someone he thought he knew well, the woman he had once believed he would marry. She was someone else, someone new, a woman he both feared and desired. It was not just her lovemaking, her selfish sensualism that turned him into a voyeur, like a man watching a woman masturbate—that was how it seemed, and he had liked it. There was her frankness, too, her telling him his work was pretentious, her air of independence, and a toughness that made her seem strong. Most of all, her dealing with the other travelers, snapping “eco-porn” and “Jonquil J. Christ” and any other insulting thing that came into her head. He wondered if the fact that she was a doctor, used to giving reassurance and help, made it all the more thrilling for her to abuse these people.

  Under his blindfold Steadman fell asleep, and the vibration of the plane, the engine howl, his damp palms on the armrests, and the smell of the dinner trays and dusty carpet and reheated food—it all entered his dream. He toppled and, still toppling, realized that he had lost his balance in an anatomical landscape. The valleys were the creases in a woman’s body, and that discovery woke him. The plane was bright and stank of warm plastic and it was dawn, the just-risen sun blazing on the left side of the plane. Coffee was being served.

  “Ever been to Ecuador?” he heard. It was the man named Wood, blowing on his coffee, speaking across the aisle.

  Ava said, “Hey, that sounds like an invitation.”

  That was another aspect of the new Ava—her teasing, her mockery, the way she deflected questions like a child, like a coquette, being impossible and domineering, as though these people were trying to woo her.

  “It’s where this aircraft is going,” the man said, maintaining his composure.

  “Right. We’re getting off at the next stop.”

  “How long are you guys going to be there?”

  That “guys” again, and it seemed to Steadman that the man was preparing to ask what they were planning to do there, and Steadman hoped that Ava would resist answering the question.