by Paul Theroux
“Good news,” his editor reported. “We’ve almost sold out the first printing. We’re going back to press. Everyone wants to interview you. How’s it going?”
He couldn’t say. The dream-like distortions thronging the departure gates were not hindrances, more like revelations. A huge-headed fishfaced boy whining for candy, his teeth much too big for his mouth. Tramping bulky men burdened with satchels stuffed with fakery. Yammering old women, like a chorus of withered simpering baboons. The man next to him farting in fear and impatience. Scaly hands on him and unhelpful halitotic breath. All the world he saw anew; he was charged with his drug.
“I love you.” That was a desperate clumsy man with sweat in his fists.
“I love you, too.” Innocent, afraid, trapped, gabbling, speaking just to fill the dead air, and plainly insincere.
He found it so easy to tell when people were lying. He was the center of attention with his dark glasses, his cane, his hat, his handsome shoulder bag. He winced at the people gaping at him.
“Look, Steve, the guy’s blind. Go ahead, help him.”
“Get away from me.” He swept them aside with a swipe of his cane and kept them off, taking long strides as people scattered, making way for him.
Down a chilly ramp, an effeminate man at his side said, “Just a little bit farther, soldier, and let’s watch our step,” the man’s stinking fragrance like festering lilies and his hands pawing at Steadman’s sleeve.
On the long flight to Seattle he was pampered by a monstrous male nanny who said, “Want me to feed you?” Steadman swore at him and sat and suffered the stagnant air. He then put on his earphones and listened to a Philip Glass tape, which lulled him to sleep. He could sense the other passengers’ anxiety when he woke and groped forward to the toilet. The trip was an experience of jet howl, a racket of interruption and the passengers’ squalid fear.
“Are you being met here?”
He hated the babysitter’s tone. Already he was disgusted with bystanders’ insincere solicitude. It all made him defiant, assertive in his singularity.
A hand on his arm as he reached the bottom of the escalator.
“Hi. I’m Pam Fowler, your escort.”
She was a slow skinny woman who had forgotten where she’d parked her car. They roamed the lot for ten minutes until she found it.
“Just saw your Post-Intelligencer review,” she said as she buckled herself in. “It wasn’t very favorable. I had to look up the word ‘meretricious.’ Did I say that right?”
She drove badly, muttering the whole time in a nasal way, blaming herself for her ineptness.
“But it’s flying out of the stores. Elliott Bay reordered. They’re expecting you tonight.”
He was due to read at the Elliott Bay store, though “read” was not the word. He would talk instead, something about blindness.
“Have you seen your schedule?”
“What is your name?”
“Pam.”
“I am blind, Pam. I have not seen the schedule.”
It was a low blow, but he was still smarting from “It wasn’t very favorable.”
“I’m really sorry. I know that,” she said. “It’s just that you don’t seem blind.”
Turning to look at him, she took her eyes off the road. He could feel the car edging into the rumble strip, the washboard battering of the tires, the car’s echo from the nearby guardrail.
“Watch out!”
She braked, she apologized, she was now more nervous and her driving deteriorated. As if to placate him, she attempted small talk.
“Rainier’s out. Too bad you can’t see it.”
“But I can,” he said.
The hotel was large, with rank carpets and dust in the air. He was shown to his room by an awkward grunting bellman, and then he lay on his bed and dozed in the buzzing room until he was summoned to the event at Elliott Bay.
Stepping inside the bookstore, he knew from the stifling interior—the air sucked thin—that the place was packed. The day was damp. Only overdressed people on rainy days smelled worse than used books. People stepped away from him as always, seeing his glasses and cane, giving him room, as though he were fragile, as though fearing to touch him and topple him. One frightened pair of hands fumbled with his arm, trying to guide him.
“Just point me in the right direction.”
Already he hated being touched by strangers.
“I’m not going to read to you,” he said, taking his place at the raised table. “Instead, I’ll say a little about my condition. How unexpectedly I became blind. How what I thought would be a nightmare turned out to have its advantages. My book is not about blindness, but blindness helped me to imagine it and to write it.”
He searched the faces of the watching audience, and because he did not hesitate or look down at any notes, he seemed to alarm them when, with a kind of fierceness, he said, ‘“I have a way of always keeping my eyes shut, in order the more to concentrate the snugness of being in bed. Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if, darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences.’ That is Ishmael, in Moby Dick.”
His speaking with his blind and staring head erect created an even greater silence and apprehension. He recited Sassoon:
Does it matter?—losing your sight?...
There’s such splendid work for the blind;
And people will always be kind,
As you sit on the terrace remembering
And turning your face to the light.
The audience’s concentration was intense and seemed almost to crackle with attention. That calmed him and helped him pause and remember what he had planned. Rather than draw conclusions from the Melville, he plunged on. He disparaged King Lear for what he said was its crude depiction of blindness. “‘Looking on darkness which the blind do see’ is also wrong. Shakespeare is mistaken.” With the exception of the prophet Ahijah, the blind seer, the Bible is even more misleading on the subject of blindness—just a litany of ignorant threats and halftruths and false metaphors and the usual stumblers, Isaac, Samson, Eli, Zedekiah, Tobit, and the frantic and guilt-ridden taxman Saul. There was scriptural authority, he said, for making the case that God is blind.
“Darkness is the one thing I do not see,” he said. “Borges is right. The blind do not see black. The world is not dark to me. At its most indistinct it has a green glow, like the phosphorescence that is common in the densest rain forest. You see it on the narrow forking path, in the decay under the high canopy, exactly like an area in the Oriente province of Ecuador, where in fact I lost one form of sight and gained another.”
He quoted Milton and another poem by Sassoon. He had made mental notes. He was aware that he would be giving the same talk in all the cities on his tour, improving it, using the parts that worked, dropping the quotations that made the audiences restless.
Tonight, finishing with some lines from Borges’s essay “On Blindness,” his thanking the audience was drowned out by loud hospitable applause that seemed to say: You are brave, you are brilliant, you are heroic.
He sat and made the semblance of a signature in the books opened to the title page. His picture was taken, he was stroked, people whispered their thanks to him; everyone said something.
“Should I read your book? I’m not too sure I’ll like it.”
“My father loved your first book. He was such a bastard. He hit on my best friend and then he left my mom and the last we heard he was somewhere in Alaska.”
And one woman said in an urgent whisper, “I could take you home.” But he was driven to the hotel by Pam Fowler, and he lay in his room thinking, I like this.
The next morning she drove him to the airport for the flight to Portland. He was coddled again on the plane, but this time he did not protest. This was better than being at home. He did not feel nagged; he was well looked after, like a fragile adored child. When he got off the plane he called Ava. “I’m fine.” She seemed surprised that
he was calling. She did not want to know more. She said she was busy at the hospital.
In Portland the woman escort, Julie, took him directly to a radio station. The interviewer announced himself as blind. For the first time on this trip Steadman was conscious of a pitiless scrutiny, not curiosity or fear but a piercing intelligence, like a beam of light turned on him.
“My wife read your book to me,” the blind interviewer said as he expertly worked the controls of the recorder. “I want to tell you that you write as only a blind man can—that’s a compliment. Reality for us is hallucinatory. Sighted people don’t know that. It’s a different grammar, a different vocabulary, a different world. It’s inside the world that sighted people see, but it’s hidden from them.”
After that, the interview went well. The blind man asked about the book—he was to be the only interviewer to address the book. Everyone else asked Steadman about his blindness. They sat face to face, blank stare to blank stare, talking amiably. And when the interview was over Steadman felt he had passed a crucial test.
In the evening he gave his pep talk about blindness at Powell’s Books, another large turnout, the close attention of eager and sympathetic readers, the sour smell of unsold books on shelves, the pleasant aroma of his own new book, like the tang of warm muffins, the new paper, the freshly cut pages, the clean slippery dust jacket, and now and then an old musty copy of Trespassing thrust before him for his signature.
“Hey, did you know you got kind of a crappy review in Time magazine?”
“Thanks for signing my book, but the only thing is, I can’t read your handwriting.”
He had learned a new way of signing his name, with a flourish, deliberately making it elegant, defying the people who stared at him hungrily as though he were defenseless and edible.
Again he was asked by a woman, “Can I see you to your hotel?” She had been standing behind his table, sighing. This time he accepted. He dismissed his escort, Julie, but when he got into the strange woman’s car he realized that she was heavy: she rocked the car as she slid onto her seat. How had he missed that before? Perhaps she had been standing behind him the whole time. She had a sweet small-girl voice. The car was littered with candy wrappers and cat hairs.
“ Trespassing changed my life,” she said in the bar of the Heathman Hotel. She had insisted on buying him a drink.
Now he could see everything, not just her bulk and her lank hair but the suture seams in her skull.
“I could show you to your room. I’m not making suggestions. I’m just saying I don’t have to be anywhere in particular.”
But she was making suggestions. She was sad-faced and forlorn. Her dewlaps shook as she sucked on a straw, nursing her daiquiri. What she did not know was that other people in the bar were staring, some in chairs and looking like figures in an altarpiece depicting fallen souls and damnation.
“I feel I owe you something. I believe in giving back.”
Steadman saw again that for some women blindness was not simple allure but acted as a powerful aphrodisiac. He became sad, telling her gently that he had an early flight, and he refused her assistance to the elevator, leaving her to pay the bill. Upstairs, he fiddled with his radio, deciding not to call Ava.
He flew on, feeling lighter, to San Francisco, and was met again and driven up the freeway to the city in the clear air that was spanked with waterborne sunlight from the bay. After he checked into his hotel the escort, an elderly man, said, “There’s time for drop-ins. Couple of chains near here.”
He said, “Okay,” and at the first bookstore, “I can handle this alone.”
In the short distance from the car to the entrance of the store he startled a flock of crumb-pecking pigeons and they flew up, a fluttering of winged rats, shitting and spattering onlookers as they ascended into the chafing wind.
He moved with hesitation to the information desk, pursuing the brisk tap of computer keys.
“I’m here to sign my book.”
“And you are?”
“Slade Steadman.”
“Is anyone expecting you?”
“I don’t know.” He tapped his cane, as though to indicate time passing.
“The manager’s on break.”
Now with all his senses wide open he was able to discern the features of the speaker, a young man wearing a filthy knitted cap, with pale hands, arrogant as only a very dim person could be, too obtuse to understand his own arrogance, quietly sniveling, at the vortex of a hundred thousand books.
“What was the name of the book again?”
“The Book of Revelation.”
A woman waiting at the desk near Steadman piped up. “You ain’t going to find that here.”
She was black and big, in a soft loose dress, with hair knotted like rug nap, her heavy-fleshed arms the color of undercooked ham and nipples like figs on her slack breasts.
“That there would be in devotional,” she said.
“I wish I could be more helpful,” the young man said.
Steadman yelped, something like a cry of pain, attracting attention, and then slashed with his stick and cleared his way to the street.
That gave him a story to tell interviewers. There were two that day, and each time he boasted of his blindness. The journalists were kind, yet he knew that they would mention the crumbs on his shirt front, his wild hair, and if his socks didn’t match they would say so.
That night, in Corte Madera, half an hour north of San Francisco, he talked about his blindness at Book Passage. He elaborated on Borges and Melville and quoted from Shakespeare. He felt so intensely observed he thought that few people actually listened to him. A woman in the front row seemed to smile in fear, her teeth bared, holding her fist to her mouth in anxiety and seeming to bite it like a large dripping fruit. Most of the people were fretful, embarrassed, as though watching an amateur acrobat without a net inching his way across a high wire.
They gathered afterward for his signature, murmuring at him: women with backpacks, men with handbags, their pockets crammed with paper, one boy like an Inca slinger, his cap with drooping earflaps.
“My cousin is blind and he, like, learned to play bass guitar and is really good at it now.”
“You should sign yourself up for one of them dogs. One of them Labs.”
“I can’t afford your book, but would you mind signing this picture of you I cut out of the paper?”
And as he left a flamboyant blonde offered him a lift and laughed beautifully when he declined.
Back in San Francisco, the streets were thronged with sprawling beggars demanding money. Steadman stared brazenly at them, poking with his stick and marveling how, at his refusal, one man farted an explosion of black swallows and green gas.
The next morning, on the way to the airport, the elderly male escort said, “I’ve been kind of wondering. You fully insured?”
Steadman flew to Denver and was met by a young woman who demanded to carry his bag. She drove efficiently, chatted to him without mentioning his blindness, then said, “Can’t you tell I’m a hottie?” Another talk, more interviews, good news of his book sales, a glimpse of a young couple kissing in the parking structure of the Tattered Cover bookstore, where a worshipful crowd applauded him and bought copies of his book for him to sign.
“Can you say something like, ‘To an amazing woman, from someone who knows’?”
“When does this come out in paperback?”
That night, a room-service dinner in his hotel room, and then an early-morning flight to Chicago.
The escort waiting at O’Hare was a powerful man named Bill, who held his bag with one hand and steered Steadman through the airport with the other. In the car he said, “You had a message,” and dialed the publicist and passed the phone to Steadman.
“I’ve added another interview in New York,” she said. “A German paper, but the interview will appear in English on the Internet. He says he knows you. Manfred something. Big fan.”
All through the Chicago appoi
ntments Steadman was aware of being watched by a yellow-eyed owl perched in a round window, like a porthole cut into the sky. Manfred something. Big fan.
“You knew Bruce Chatwin, right? He’s a fantastic writer, probably my all-time favorite.”
“The guy that played you in the TV series doesn’t look like you at all. Plus, he’s got that phony accent.”
“I don’t know Braille,” he said in the hotel elevator. “Will someone press seventeen for me?”
The elevator mirror reflected different faces from the one staring in. No one had mentioned his book. Three newspaper interviews, one taped for radio, a photo shoot on Michigan Avenue—all centered on his blindness. He slept badly, thinking of Manfred. In the morning Bill sped him to O’Hare, saying only “This is the right direction at this hour of the morning. I’ll have to get into that mess going back to the city.”
At the departure gate Steadman was seated next to a porcine nun in a black habit like a witch’s gown, and she was tugging at her ragged earlobes as she prayed.
Fingers touched his hand, not the nun’s but those of a harassed tearful man, who spoke in a fretful voice, “You can preboard.”
Steadman was crowded by the waiting passengers. “Back!” he said, and raking with his cane, pushed past men with roll-on bags and youths with greasy knapsacks and bipolar children on Prozac and a man with garbage on his breath.
The same yellow-eyed owl peered down at him from a porthole over Manhattan.
By this time he had become accustomed to the telling silence and the sign language—rapid overt gestures of people who did not realize he was aware of what they were doing. He was used to the grunts, the nudges, the puzzlement, the boisterous greetings, the condescending heartiness that was one of the worst expressions of pity. Pity was on most people’s minds when they saw him. But he suffered it, because he did not want to reveal himself through his anger. And the pity was that of semiliterates and oafs.