Blinding Light

by Paul Theroux

“Fuck you! You broke my nail. You should get cancer!”

  Cowering back in his room, he flinched when the phone rang: Axelrod.

  “We are being flooded with requests for interviews.”

  “No more interviews. I want to go home.”

  “You don’t sound too perky.”

  “Lost my coordinates.” Steadman became breathless with fear. “Can you get me a ticket to the Vineyard today?”

  “Easter weekend,” Axelrod said. But the desperation in Steadman’s voice had alarmed him. “I’ll do what I can.”

  He called back to say that all flights were full. The only free seat was two days off.

  Despair, the memory of that dreadful walk, and the thefts made him feel so helpless he wanted to weep. He was intimidated, he was a child, and he sorrowed for himself, for his book had been so bold.

  Out of the hoarse pathos of this solitary regret, like a dull murmuring aria of lamentation, he was reproached by his forgetfulness, the emptiness of his memory. His seclusion in the present had turned him into a sunken-eyed traveler who had strayed from his path and was lost on the bank of a jungle river. He could see it all, his wraith-like shape on one of those scoops of sand on a long reach between the overhanging foliage—some skimming birds, the muddy eddy bubbling like chocolate milk, the shadow of a chalky wide-winged ray shooting just beneath the surface. High up, a dark hawk floated in the hot gray sky.

  This recollection, seeing himself as a castaway, was not a vision of horror but rather one of profound sadness, a memory of himself at his most innocent. There was an insistent voice, too, Manfred’s, urging him to get up, tempting him with the drug in the nearby village; the man loomed over him, his hands working.

  I know a little about this one ... It is great. It change your head, it give you experiences. Only the question of money, but you have money.

  All other memories were closed to him, but this one he saw was him at his happiest, driven by hope, on the verge of his discovery of the drug. Manfred had revealed himself as a friend.

  The drug tour, the quest, the surprises in Ecuador, which he had seen as a leap in the dark, had given him strength. Now he saw himself as the hawk might have seen the castaway on the crescent of wet sand on the riverbank, a raptor’s meditation. And this memory gave him more by offering him glimpses of the aftermath, the illuminations of blindness, the sight of him dictating his book, the months of seclusion, like years of enchantment in a remote castle, in which he had lived the narrative. Manfred had been right in his promise: he had been uplifted, he had achieved his book, he had never been happier.

  And now he had sunk to this: the airless overfurnished cell of a hotel bedroom, the sense of being captive. He knew now he should never have come, but he had made his worst mistake in continuing the drug, to call attention to himself. Even the offering of his book had been a hasty decision. He had allowed himself to be hurried into the anticlimax of publication, the inevitable disappointment, the misunderstandings, his dubious performances on the tour, in bookstores and lecture halls—it had all been like a secret revealed, the disclosure of a weakness, a loss of power. He had once vowed never to go on the road. Why hadn’t he been satisfied with the writing of his book? He was in agony thinking of the purity of that task, and he reproached himself—he had Ava’s words—for his pride and his posturing.

  Manfred was hovering, casting a shadow, looking for a story. But Steadman knew there was no vast plot, no conspiracy. No one had laid a trap for him. It was his own fault that he was being punished for pretending to be blind, his poisonous pride. And now, without drugs, without trying to deceive—in fact, against his will and to his shame; perhaps his body was saturated with the dirty drug—he was blinder than it was possible to imagine, as all the idle speculators had described. His blindness was the blindness of every cliché. He was in darkness like a wilderness of wool, his head wrapped, mummified, bent down and suffering the black misery of a frightened panting creature who expects at any moment to be pounced on.

  Lost in the seamless darkness of his despair, he was accused of faking. The news was out. People were talking. Even in his blindness and seclusion he was not spared. Somehow—was it self-punishing? he wondered—he was still able to tell when people he knew well were lying to him. He heard hesitations, as though they were trying to minimize the rumors, but the hesitations only made them seem worse.

  “I’ve heard a few things,” Axelrod told him when Steadman asked, hoping to be reassured that there was nothing. “Pay no attention to them. They’re cheap shots.”

  “Like what.”

  “Cheesy items on Page Six in the Post. ‘Sightings.’ No one takes any notice of them.”

  But Steadman knew that everyone read that column, and Axelrod’s saying “items” alarmed him.

  “Probably on the Internet, too,” Steadman said, angling for a denial. “Who looks at that crap?”

  So it was true: accused of faking on a Web site, or more than one. He said, “Why don’t we put out a statement—like a press release?”

  “You mean a formal denial?”

  “Why not?”

  Axelrod hesitated so long, Steadman was demoralized before his editor finally replied.

  “Overkill. It’ll provoke questions. It could sink your book.” Axelrod sounded as if he were trying to convince himself as well as Steadman. “Besides, why dignify this slander with a rebuttal? Take the high road.” “Take the high road” was worrying, too, for it meant a campaign had been mounted, and it always implied that, in the attempt to undermine him, some damage had already been done.

  “The important thing is, how are you doing?”

  “I’ve been better.”

  “The writer Eric Hoffer— The True Believer?—he went blind as a child,” Axelrod said. “At the age of fifteen he suddenly got his sight back. Turned him into a reader.”

  “I hate heartwarming stories,” Steadman said. “I went for a walk. I was mugged twice—lost my wallet and my watch. Couple of people swore at me.”

  “That’s really horrible.”

  “Someone else gave me money.”

  “At least the sales are great,” Axelrod said. He clearly wanted to change the subject.

  Steadman took no pleasure in the news of his book’s success. He saw his stumbling in the dark as punishment for it. Only now was he able to understand that he had not been blind before. He had been drugged. The condition that he had known was the opposite of this. He had to learn how to cope with his blindness, for instead of feeling liberated he was limited, he was diminished, and the pain was hard for him to bear.

  Still he was accused of faking. He could not read the newspapers, nor would anyone read them to him. But he knew. One measure of the gossip was the number of requests for interviews, and they were incessant. Some were needling, others were meant to scrutinize or embarrass him. They used the seriousness of the gossip as the pretext for his breaking his silence.

  “You’ll only lose by hiding from the press,” one woman told him. She said she was a journalist from a wire service; Steadman’s statement would reach millions of readers.

  “I have no statement.”

  “Give me a few minutes. Let me come over. It could help your credibility.”

  The very suggestion that his credibility needed help saddened him.

  Saying no to everyone and screening his calls, he was condemned for being uncooperative. His insistence on seclusion was like proof of his guilt.

  In his favor, the presidential scandal was being played out. People were obsessed with the unconvincing explanations for the president’s behavior—talk of secret meetings and phone sex with the young woman, extravagant talk of trysts, the repetition of the expression “oral sex.” And the accusations of another woman as well, who said the president had once exposed himself to her in a hotel room. She claimed that she could accurately describe the president’s penis. This took up so much space in the papers that attention on Steadman was diminished, though several importuni
ng journalists said, “You’re behaving just like the president.” The president, too, was saying nothing.

  There had been a time when he had imagined that the president might become his protector, that his power might be useful to Steadman in some way—an asset, perhaps, that the president read him and recommended him and had invited him to the White House. That was no help now. The favor the president had done him was to become involved in such a steamy scandal of his own that the newspapers were crowded with stories of his duplicity, eclipsing the rumors about Steadman. Steadman imagined the rumors to be repeating that, far from being blind, he was a reckless fantasist who had experimented with a psychotropic drug that produced spells of blindness and a glow of hypersensitivity.

  The basis for his imagining such details was that he knew the supposition to have been true. It was no longer. He was sightless, he was weak, and being in New York was like being in enemy territory. Even at the height of his fame as the author of Trespassing he had not been in greater demand. And it was all an agony to him.

  He had given explicit instructions to the hotel that he was not to be bothered or phoned; no one was allowed to enter his room. And so the knock on his door early on the morning he was to leave for the Vineyard was unexpected. As always, he woke and felt like clawing his eyes when he realized that nothing had changed. He groped to the door and opened it, seeing nothing.

  “No visitors,” he said.

  “It’s me”—Ava. She thrust herself into the room and shut the door as he grasped at the air, flailing.

  “I’m taking you home.”

  But he was struggling, saying, “Who’s with you? There’s someone else. Who is it?” Finally he allowed her to hold him, and when the door was kicked shut he began to cry.

  FIVE

  The Blind Man’s Wife

  1

  FROM THE MOMENT he stepped off the clanking plates of the ferry ramp he was fearful. He stubbed his toe on the rim of the ramp’s steel lip and stumbled ashore, flapping his arms for balance, feeling foolish as he toppled forward. Fog had delayed the flight to Boston, so they missed their connection; Ava drove a rental car to Woods Hole, where they caught the Uncatena. And when he was on the island, tasting abandonment, he thought, with a castaway’s woe, What am I doing here?

  There was something else on his mind, but it was unformed, a wordless worry, like a lowering cloud with a human smell. He was unable to work it out and frame it as a whole thought, because the Boston shuttle had so disoriented him. The fussing of flight attendants, the offers of a wheelchair, the unhelpful hands plucking at him, the puzzled fingers twitching on his arm, people jerking his sleeves, patting him in idiot attempts at consolation; the mutters of “Hang in there” and “Go for it, big guy” and “Right this way, sir”—the gauntlet of well-wishers every blind person ran into each day.

  And on the ferry, he had stood at the forward rail, near the blunt bow—for the air, and to get away from Ava and her noisy pager and clamoring cell phone. A man and woman crept up behind him—newcomers, eager visitors—to coo at the seascape.

  “Lookit, lookit, lookit.”

  “Whole buncha whitecaps,” the man said. “And that sailboat, see, she’s heeling over.”

  “Seagulls,” the woman said.

  “Following that fishing boat,” the man said, “for the scraps. And the baby gulls dive-bombing for fish.”

  “Will you look at that,” the woman said. “Ever see anything so gorgeous?”

  They were talking to him, Steadman realized, and in the moment of addressing him and drawing level, they saw his dark glasses and his slender cane, and their mistake.

  “Awful sorry,” the man said in a voice he suddenly hushed, sucking it into his cheeks, abashed at seeing Steadman was blind. They made faces at each other, as people did in the presence of a blind person, and they whispered and stepped aside, chewing on their self-reproach.

  “They’re terns,” Steadman said, “not baby gulls.”

  He remained facing forward, the southwest wind tearing at his ears.

  Another voice, Indian or Pakistani, said, but not to him, “Is the Winyard,” and soon the ferry was sounding its horn for the arrival in Vineyard Haven.

  He was unsteady, he walked like a drunk, he was a stranger here, he did not belong to the place, he was intruding on someone else’s island, trespassing again. The smells here were not just foreign, they were hostile; he did not understand any of the voices; he was shoved and jarred by the bumps in the road, battering the tires, and felt insecure being driven by Ava—faintly nauseated, anticipating more bumps, more curses.

  Stiff and breathless with panic, he did not recognize the odor of the sea in the wind, which was like a flapping blanket, ragged with the smell of garbage, and the low-tide hum of dead fish and decayed kelp and the whiff of diesel oil. The sharpness of the sounds and stinks made him timid in the same way as, at the ferry landing, the sudden laughter of the crew had put him on edge. He imagined that they were laughing at his unsteadiness, and they got away with it because he was so cowed, so feeble-looking.

  What was worse, the other wordless fear—and its cloudy ambiguity made it awful—was his sense of a third person with them. He had an intimation of another body in the rental car from Boston; someone with them in the passenger lounge of the ferry; the same person in the taxi and again in Ava’s car from the Vineyard airport, where Ava had parked it, always sitting in the back seat (“You sit in front, Slade, with your long legs”), staring at the nape of his neck. They had not been alone. There had always been this third person with them who did not speak yet, who gave off a vaporous aura, a small breathing body humming with warmth.

  He sat in the car, his damp hands holding the knobs of his knees, sensing this stranger behind him, a smirking eavesdropper—who?

  “Aren’t you glad to be back?”

  Unusually for her, Ava drove badly, even worse when she was talking, too fast and then too slow, stamping on the gas pedal, cursing the car ahead, pitching Steadman forward when she braked.

  He was mute with worry, retching each time he tried to swallow. He spat out the window and thought, Where am I?

  “You’re not wearing your seat belt.”

  She pulled off the road, spilling him sideways as the car rocked on the ridge of the shoulder. She fastened him in with reprimanding fingers, as though buckling a child into a baby seat, and then resumed the drive.

  She was in charge; she made him feel lost and helpless. She too seemed like someone else, bigger than ever. The way she touched him had seemed rough and abrupt, and all the way from New York she had stayed on her cell phone, setting up appointments for her patients and picking up messages. She seemed less like a lover than a caregiver—one of her hospital words. Nevertheless he had no idea what he would have done without her. Yes, he knew, he would have died in New York, where a blind man was a victim of every stranger’s indifference or fussy attention or reckless cruelty.

  The lopsided fear of impotence that he recognized in himself from long ago heightened his notion of not belonging. He was frightened but he was passive, unresponsive, in a place that was so foreign he felt like a trespasser. That was another old feeling, but this time like a eunuch in a harem. The Vineyard was just a name; everything else was withheld from him.

  He wanted to speak to Ava but did not know how to begin. Two thoughts tormented him—that he was in a strange place, that he had been abducted. The rest of his fragmented feelings he could not express. Had he been hit on the head and dragged away? He concentrated to listen to the harsh breathing of the person behind him, and realized the breathing was his own.

  Ava said, “I’ve been talking to some lab people. I’ll need a sample of your drug. I want to have it tested for toxicity. I don’t know why I didn’t do it before.”

  A crumbled plug of datura splinters was in a jar in his desk, hidden like an addict’s stash. He had kept it just in case he might crave it. But he did not crave it; he was disgusted by the very thought o
f stewing it and drinking the brew.

  He struggled to speak. He finally said with self-reproach, “I poisoned myself.”

  “You’re alive. Your book is a hit. Be happy.”

  “I’m mutilated.”

  He was miserable, and when he got to the house he felt like a hostage and hated its harsh smells and thought, Who lives in this place?

  Ava was on call. She was paged as soon as she entered the house. She tapped at her phone as she led Steadman to his study and eased him into his leather armchair.

  “I have to go to the hospital—an emergency. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  She put earphones into his hand and set a CD player in his lap, and she left. He did not switch it on. He sat with his head cocked, hearing someone sneaking around, two rooms away.

  “I know you’re here. You can’t fool me.”

  Without conviction his voice sounded timid. The feeble echo returned his words to him.

  “Who are you?”

  Of course, by his blurting this out, whoever it was became very quiet.

  “What do you want?”

  The person had stiffened in a corner and was flattened against the wall.

  “I may be blind, but I’m not stupid!”

  He hated his weak screechy voice, and sitting there he reflected, sifting his thoughts, searching for reasons to hope. His discovery in his luminous phase, and the gusto of making his book, was that his sexual history was his own and not in any textbook, or any novel, or memoir. Similarities did not matter. All his travel and trespassing had prepared him for this revelation, which was a true epiphany, an actual encounter, something like being visited by an angel of desire, who had wakened in him the urge to be bold.

  You carried on blindly in your life, never daring to believe that one day you would be granted the gift of sight. It was like travel to a strange land where you knew the language and loved the culture—strange and secret to everyone else but the only place on earth you could call your own. All his intelligence, his eloquence, his savagery, his pleasures, every fantasy that existed inside him, everything he wished to see manifested, all his desires realized—that was sex for him. He had lived in a state of apprehension; he had relived it with happiness and understanding, making it new, turning it into a book. Everything he had done in his life had been a preparation for this discovery, a rehearsal for that pleasure.