Blinding Light

by Paul Theroux

  “You’re right here, sir,” a woman said—the flight attendant, Steadman knew, directing him to a seat on the aisle. Ava took the window seat.

  Steadman was aware of being close to Styron, just behind him, an odor, a mutter, the crunch of Styron’s folding a thick newspaper, the sense of his fragile fingers, his knuckles on the crease.

  “You going to Boston, Bill?”

  “Just to change planes,” Styron said. “Susanna’s filming Shadrach in North Carolina. She invited me down.”

  “I’m seeing a doctor at the Mass. Eye and Ear Infirmary.”

  “I hope it’s good news.”

  “Whatever. I’m happy.”

  “That’s what I mean by brave.”

  And again the contraction, the cramp of shame from Ava beside him, though they were not even touching. But he resented her reaction now, like an intrusion into his serenity.

  “I’m working on a book.”

  “That means everything,” Styron said.

  They taxied, the small plane’s wheels bumping; they took off, as though suddenly caught and lifted by a sling of wind, and the aircraft twisted and vibrated, the engine noise filling the compartment until they were well aloft and cruising, bumped by hidden angles of clouds and gulps of air.

  “I could fly this thing.”

  “Sure you could,” Styron said, with magnanimous authority and a little chuckle.

  Steadman threw off his seat belt. He hoisted himself from his seat and walked to the cockpit door, which was propped open.

  “Hi, Captain.”

  The noise was loudest here, the pile-driver racket of pistons and propellers, but one of the pilots sensed him standing at the door. He smiled when he saw the white slender cane and the dark glasses, the Panama hat, the elbows out, head upright, face forward, ears cocked, in a blind man’s alert posture, a listening animal.

  “Why are you flying along the canal? That’s not your usual flight path.”

  “Incoming traffic’s stacked up to the west because of weather. We’ve been given a slot on the south-facing runway, so we’ll make an easterly approach. Hey, how did you know our bearing?”

  “Sunshine,” Steadman said. “The canal entrance is down there. The Sandwich power plant. The harbor. The marsh. The dunes to the east. Scusset to the west—and now we’re banking toward Plymouth. Duxbury coming up, and we’re hitting the headwind, northwesterly today—”

  “Better take your seat, sir.”

  “Let me spell you at the controls.”

  Shortening his neck in apprehension, one pilot hunched forward, gripping his wheel protectively, while the other pilot kept his gaze on Steadman, looking alarmed at this smiling talkative blind man offering to fly the plane.

  “Move over,” Steadman said, nudging the man with his cane.

  “I’m going to have to insist that you return to your assigned seat and fasten your seat belt,” the man said, seeing himself and the copilot reflected on the mirror lenses of Steadman’s glasses.

  “You think I can’t fly blind? I can fly better blind.”

  “We’ll be landing in just a few minutes, sir,” the pilot said, as though to a madman.

  “I knew that,” Steadman said, and tapped his cane again. “Marshfield, North River—”

  “Step away from the controls!”

  At last, Ava touched his arm and said, “Please, Slade.”

  Returning to his seat, he brushed the terrified and anxious body of the flight attendant, who asked Ava in a murmur whether he was all right.

  Ava was too embarrassed to mention any of this in front of Bill Styron, and was relieved when they had landed and said their goodbyes and were in a cab a few minutes later. She was about to raise the subject of his bizarre behavior in the cockpit when, going through the Sumner Tunnel, Steadman took charge, saying, “Take a hard right after the exit. We’re going to Quincy Market. I’ll tell you where.”

  “Nothing wrong with your eyes, sir,” the cab driver said. His own dark eyes and big nose and part of his smile filled the smeared oblong of the rearview mirror.

  “Right here,” Steadman said, and then, as if reading the signs but without looking at them, “Martignetti Liquors. La Rosa Deli. Mama’s Pizza. The Big Dig labyrinth.”

  Silenced by Steadman’s talk, the cab driver began to frown, as though he were being mocked.

  “Stop here. We’ll walk.”

  “You said Quincy Market.”

  “But you’re not moving. The Union Oyster House is on a one-way street. It’s quicker to walk.”

  Then he was out of the car and Ava was paying the fare. The driver was nodding at the side mirror and saying, “Where’s the fire?” Steadman had hurried ahead, and when Ava caught up with him he was striding, slashing his cane at the sidewalk.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  He didn’t answer, he walked ahead of her, whipping his cane, scattering the other strollers, who, noticing that he was blind, seemed to regard him with a mixture of fear and awe. Farther on, he reached toward the bow window of the Union Oyster House and felt along the single panes, the thick cracked paint, and tapped his way into the entrance.

  A man and woman leaving the restaurant stepped back at the sight of this tall blind man—dark glasses, one arm outstretched, the other swishing a white cane, digging its ferrule into the threshold. A young waiter swept by him and bowed, almost genuflected, and said, “Right this way, sir.” Steadman followed the ingratiating voice to a side booth. A dangerous-looking man was always “sir.”

  Ava was sliding into the seat as Steadman said, “Too near the bar.”

  “The bar is empty, sir.”

  “I don’t want all those stools and bottles in my face.”

  The waiter was probably thinking, But you’re blind!

  “What about there?” Steadman’s white cane swung like a compass needle to indicate an empty table.

  “Reserved, I’m afraid.”

  Steadman peered at him and said, “Has it escaped your notice that I’m blind?”

  “I think we can accommodate you, sir,” the young man said, clearing two of the four place settings from the table in a clatter of silverware. “I’m Kevin. I’ll be your waiter today. May I offer you a cocktail?”

  Ava was tense, silent, fearful of what Steadman might say next, for he had an unsettling habit of joshing waiters, being amiable and ironic and overfriendly, which was worse than being stern, for it threw them off and sometimes insulted them. But he tapped the menu without looking at it.

  “No cocktails,” he said. “I’ll have a dozen oysters and a bowl of chowder.”

  “The lobster chowder is my personal favorite.”

  “Then why don’t you order it, Kevin? I’m having the clam chowder.”

  Ava said, “Lobster salad and a glass of iced tea,” and when the waiter had gone, “Slade, I wish you would calm down.”

  “I’m blind. I’m in another world from you. Maybe you shouldn’t have come.”

  She considered this. It was true that he had noticed things she had missed, but he seemed not to notice much that was obvious. He was especially sensitive to textures, odors, and voices.

  “I hate it when people talk on cell phones in restaurants.”

  After scanning the room, Ava finally located a man holding a cell phone to his ear at a far table; but she could not hear him.

  “And those people in that booth are whispering about me.”

  As soon as the oysters on the half shell were served, Steadman ran his fingers around the plate, counting the shells, and without hesitating selected the bottle of Tabasco sauce from the cluster of condiments and sauces at the side of the table. He shook drops on each oyster and then, squeezing a lemon wedge, passed it over the plate in a circular motion. His hands, held high, fussing a little, exaggerated the act, calling attention—and it was true, those women in the nearby booth (how did he know they were in a booth?) were whispering and commenting on Steadman’s precise gestures.

  �
��You’re showing off,” Ava said.

  “I’m in Boston.”

  “I like you better at home.”

  “Do you really?”

  He could tell she was trying to humor him. She ate quickly and nervously, feeling observed, apprehensive because of Steadman’s impulsive behavior. His blindness made him an extrovert, excited him, gave him a look of stealth and adroitness. He glided like an animal with night vision, even sniffed and held his head like a hypersensitive animal. Blindness sharpened his senses, but it also seemed to change his manner of walking and moving. He had a clear recollection of seeing a Secoya man emerge from the jungle on the banks of the Aguarico and thinking: I have never seen a man walk like that. Then, he had not been able to say what made the man’s walk so unusual, but now he knew it was a gait of total alertness.

  Hurrying from the cab to the restaurant, Steadman had had a similar skating walk, though his posture was straighter—his blind gestures were less tentative, more assertive and fluid, his gaze steadier and more intense, his head angled to hear better, for his eyes were empty. He seemed to see with his face, his lips, the surface of his skin, his fingertips, receiving pulses from the air.

  “I’ve never been to Boston as a blind man.”

  He hated Ava’s taunt—“showing off”—as though he needed to perform! He could see her so clearly now with his tongue, with his teeth, with his forehead, with his nose.

  “The city’s the same,” she said.

  “It’s different for me. I see more, so I’m responding differently. Why are you making me say this? I hate to explain things. It smells of building in progress—the stink of destruction, diesel oil and pulverized cement. All that and the discontent of tourists, the way they prowl, so uncertain. Most of them are lost. This restaurant, filled with strangers. It’s disconcerting. Because I’m not lost.”

  “We should have taken a later plane. Your appointment isn’t until two.”

  “I like having the spare time. You’re in a different city from me at the moment,” he said. “You’re sleepwalking.”

  “See what I mean? Bullshit.”

  “I am fully awake.”

  “You’re wired.”

  “Because of all the talk. I hear too much. Blindness bothers bystanders. They want to help, they don’t know how, they’re worried I’ll fall on my face. I heard someone say, ‘Look at that blind man, how fast he’s walking.’”

  “I think you were doing it on purpose.”

  That was partly true, he knew, but he objected to the onlookers because they gaped without any comprehension; did not know enough, didn’t see how clever he was. He wanted to be noticed, perhaps feared, or at least be seen as someone powerful. He felt deserving of praise, not pity; he saw more than any of them.

  Ava said, “I think you’re secretly enjoying yourself.”

  “I went to school in this city,” he said. “Scollay Square and the Old Howard used to be right up the street. Burlesque, strip shows, Irish saloons. Two streets away from here at the market I remember horses and pushcarts and vegetable sellers. My father used to take me, not for local color but to buy fresh fish.” He moved his plate away. “Fresher than this.”

  “You’ve got two oysters left.”

  “Bad ones.”

  “They look all right.”

  “That’s the trouble. But they’re poison.” He turned aside, for the waiter had appeared with the dessert menu and he knew the man had heard his last words. He pointed to the plate and said, “They’re dead. Give them a decent burial.”

  After lunch, with an hour more to kill and Steadman still restless, inquisitive, needing to move, they crossed City Hall Plaza to Cambridge Street—“It’s heartless. It’s a cheat. It’s a stage set”—and walked all the way to Charles. They passed the turnoff to the Mass. Eye and Ear Infirmary, threading their way among the taxis and ambulances and waiting people—some of the people looking damaged and newly mended, with bright white bandages taped over their eyes. Steadman hurried ahead of her.

  “Where are you going?”

  Saying nothing, making a show of his blind man’s ability to move quickly, he picked up his pace, crossed the main road, kept walking, found the Fiedler Footbridge ramp with his cane. He moved swiftly on the arch, over Storrow Drive, toward the sound of splashing and a racket of eager screamy voices. Without hesitating, he made a shortcut across the lawn to the chainlink fence at the perimeter of the public swimming pool. He stood there, his arms high, his fingers hooked to the fence.

  “I used to come here as a little kid, before we moved back to the Vineyard,” he said as Ava caught up and was next to him. He was gratified, feeling superior when he sensed Ava was out of breath.

  The swimming pool was a confusion of caged-in shrieks and chattering laughter, the slap of bare feet running on the cement apron of the pool, the explosive plunges—the noise and water and youthful exuberance, high spirits amounting almost to frenzy—and amid the howling the occasional shrill tweet of the lifeguard’s whistle, the smack and rap of the diving board stuttering on its chocks whenever anyone prepared to dive. In the heat and the sunshine and the full-throated screams, there was pushing and shoving—no serious swimmers, only jumpers and splashers, kids fooling.

  “They excited me,” Steadman said, seeing the past, “all those skinny flat-chested girls in tight, too small bathing suits, with pruny fingers and blue lips, running and shrieking. I could see that they weren’t afraid to take risks.”

  A thin pale-legged girl exactly matching Steadman’s description loudly dared a boy to push her off the edge of the pool.

  “They were the nakedest girls I knew. I used to squeeze them and touch them underwater. When they laughed I knew they wanted me to fondle them. One of them reached into my bathing suit and touched me and I was in heaven. Her little fingers finding me in all that water.”

  Still hanging on the fence, he smiled at the splashing and the howls, boys shouting like monkeys, girls’ meaningless shrieks and joyous objections, the free-for-all.

  Then Steadman’s tone hardened, and in a flat urgent voice he said, “There’s a kid in trouble. Over there. He’s going under. You see him?”

  At first Ava saw nothing but the mass of heads, the wet hair and beating arms in the pool, but one boy was saying nothing in the churning water, was not even struggling, just sinking at the deep end and—his mouth was open—giving a barely audible groan of surrender that was like a helpless and sorrowful farewell.

  “Help him!” Steadman called out, in a demand so loud he silenced the cluster of boys and girls on the other side of the chainlink fence.

  In the brief silence, the groan came again as a watery solemnity, a softer whisper of goodbye, and now Ava yelled, and when she caught the lifeguard’s eye, she pointed toward the struggling swimmer.

  The lifeguard threw off his baseball cap, vaulted from his high chair, and leaped behind the drowning boy. In the same movement he seized him and boosted him to the edge. The boy, all loose arms and legs, looking indignant and in shock, resisting the help in his bewilderment, began to choke and weep, miserably spewing water.

  “We’re done here,” Steadman said, and turned, hurrying ahead of Ava, tapping his stick toward the hospital.

  6

  PEOPLE PUSHING CANES and shuffling behind him, wearing eye patches and dark glasses, circulated in the hospital lobby, looking just like Steadman. But every one of them had a guide, moving slowly on the tucked-in arm of a spouse or nurse. “This way.” “Over here.” “Be careful.” They seemed so feeble that Steadman was determined to keep walking alone among them, ahead of Ava. And now Ava let him lead.

  She was appalled and impressed, seeing how he moved with conviction, commanding the space in front of him by sweeping it with his cane and taking long strides, shouldering through the crowd, half of it aimless casualties. The blind and near-blind kept close to the walls, out of the way, and Steadman’s only collision was with a fully sighted man laughing into a cell phone. Steadman sp
oke the word “asshole” and raised his elbows and walked on, ignoring the man’s apologies.

  They reported to the reception desk, summoned by a woman at a computer terminal. Ava took the folder of forms and began filling them out.

  “He’s here for his physical.”

  “Are you family, ma’am?”

  Ava kept writing, did not look up. She said, “You can call me Dr. Katsina.”

  “Just take a seat,” the woman at the computer said when the completed papers were handed over.

  The doctor kept them waiting. They sat in awkward, unwilling postures among magazines that were wrinkled and damp, having been picked through by so many anxious fingers. Hearing their names, people got slowly to their feet and entered small rooms to be examined. Steadman saw them as poor, weak, naked flesh, struggling to stay whole, flunking their tests, humiliated in their failure.

  “I don’t even know why I bothered to come here,” Steadman said. “I know what the verdict will be.”

  “I wish I knew.”

  “That’s what I’m saying. They won’t have the slightest idea.”

  Saying this, he stood—he was being summoned by a stammering receptionist. He was aware of the voice a fraction of a second before Ava heard anything.

  “Follow me, please,” the receptionist said. And to Ava: “If you don’t mind waiting.”

  Steadman was shown to a room where a woman wearing white was seated. She was the doctor. She was heavy, inert, her body as pale and dense as cheese, the swags of flesh on her slack arms squashed against her sides, her gaze fixed on a computer screen. Her smell of antiseptic and talc put Steadman in mind of plastic flowers, of disguise and decay. Her ankles were swollen, overflowing her shoes. A wall clock behind her was ticking, and the face of the clock resembled hers. He detected a sadness in her but, offended by her officious manner, rejected the thought.

  She did not rise or look at Steadman when he entered. Instead, she leaned away from him and shifted her heaviness onto the hams of her thickened thighs. When she picked up a pencil and clipboard her body filled the tight white uniform, binding it. She seemed to him like a keeper in a madhouse, chosen for her bulk. She had a bully’s body, and was probably a bit mad herself for her airless days in this sorry room, sitting in judgment on the sick. He disliked her for not greeting him—he a cripple, a blunderer, a blind man measuring his steps in the room with the tip of his cane.