Blinding Light

by Paul Theroux

  She began to cry, at least it seemed as though she were sobbing, as she pressed her body against his face, rumpling his blindfold, so that he felt the silk and stitching against his lips. He remembered—not in words but as a yearning—how he had wanted to chew on her beautiful clothes, almost frightening himself with his memory of how he had wanted to eat her.

  “Let me, let me,” she said.

  He did not know what she meant until he sensed the panties go loose on him, and she worked them free of his legs with her long arms.

  Then he was naked, blindfolded, climbing on her as she toppled backward onto the bed. She pulled him nearer, balancing him and finally opening her legs for him, and as she snatched at her tumbling clothes to receive him, he marveled at how they fitted, his body on hers.

  He was not raw anymore. Her cool fingers had enclosed him, and there was the cooler sensation of her silks as she stroked him and used him to push more deeply inside, to the hottest part of her body. She tightened on him until he could not stand it and could only whimper, as if among all the lips, silks, and flesh he were penetrating a flower, scattering rose petals. And after it ceased, the last petal falling, and he shivered and gasped and went cold, she was howling into his mouth for more.

  He slept a little and woke drooling on her breast. His blindfold was off but the room was in darkness. He couldn’t see, he had no idea where he was, he didn’t know his own name. The woman’s body was an island where he had washed ashore, cast up and saved by a furious wave.

  He remained perfectly still, trying to remember, afraid to speak.

  She said, “Playing isn’t wrong.”

  The kindness in her voice gladdened him.

  She said, “We can do this every day.”

  He wanted to say yes, but did not dare to say anything, fearful of how his voice would sound, for she had turned him inside out, and now he was at his nakedest.

  “This is our secret,” she said. “You can dress me. You’re not going to tell anyone, are you?”

  “No,” he said, obeying her, hearing a note of urgency in her voice, needing him to say no.

  “Will you let me make you happy?” she asked.

  He said yes with his body, and she asked him again.

  “Yes, Mrs. Bronster.”

  Then she let go of him. She pleaded with him, seeming to beg him with the heavy flesh of her own struggling body: “If you tell anyone, I’ll harm you.”

  He turned away, reaching for his blindfold, but after the room went quiet there was no need for the blindfold. She was gone.

  At dinner she was still wearing the clothes he had chosen. He loved sitting at the table with quacking Tom and cranky Nita, talking about everything except that. The clothes meant everything—that he possessed her, that she possessed him: that was their secret. She had made him her blind and willing lover. She had made him a man.

  “First love,” he said in a whisper to Ava, and she slipped off his silken blindfold.

  Everything he had seen in his mind’s eye, everything the datura made possible, that he had remembered and relived of his hidden life, of his sexual history, all that and more he had dictated to Ava. There was so much of it, for the larger part of his life he had lived in secret. He was gratified by the symmetry of it, its reality, its oddness, and he reflected that the rarest thing in books or movies, in which decapitation and rape and outrage were commonplace, was the simple joyous act of two lovers fucking.

  In his interior narrative he had taken a longer and more difficult journey than the one he had described in Trespassing. There was frailty and failure, too, embarrassments and risk. Yet he never felt more powerful than he had on those nights and days, blindly revisiting his past. That power vitalized his belief in the chronicle of second chances that he had relived with Ava as every passion he had ever known.

  Long ago, as a solitary boy, he had not understood the meaning of his desires. Now, enacted in the blinding light of the drug, they were coherent. The fulfilled yearning of youth was the only passion that mattered. He told himself that what he imagined was also real. What he had wanted and never gotten had made him who he was; what had lain buried in his memory was dragged out of the darkness and given life. And nothing was more sexual than the forbidden glimpses of his past, nothing truer than his fantasies. He called it fiction because every written thing was fiction.

  So his work was done. The past made sense. At last he had his novel, The Book of Revelation, and he could face the world again.

  FOUR

  Book Tour

  1

  HE WAS EUPHORIC at having finished his book, relieved of a burden he had carried like an uncomplaining drudge for so long it had cut and wounded him, enfeebling his body. All that suspense, the thing not done and tentative, the fragment of a promise kept in a stack of notes and tapes, had made him feel incomplete. His shattered sense of having been injured, of needing to heal, was nothing glorious—not the secret agony that was said to be the source of art. The dull pain had made him feel like a lower animal in the slow process of regenerating a limb from a broken stump. Now his work done, he was active again, whole and happy.

  Except for some tidying up—the last transcripts and edits—Steadman had his book. This reward for all the years of silence, something at last his own, was a sexual confession in the form of a novel. He was at first so lightheaded he did not miss the datura tea he had drunk every working day in order to find the thread of his narrative. He was jubilant, with the exquisite thrill of his past revealed and understood.

  Throughout the year of writing he had never needed to tell his editor he was at work. The whispers had reached New York early on. This man was Ron Axelrod. As a new young editor he had inherited Steadman when Steadman’s first editor had died. But for years that editor, and Axelrod too, had seen no new writing from Steadman and had merely shuffled contracts and processed the new tie-in editions of Trespassing.

  Steadman phoned Axelrod and gave him the news. He said a disk with the first part of the manuscript was in the mail. He said, “I’m back in business.”

  “I don’t know whether you’re aware of it,” Axelrod said after he had read the early chapters, “but there’s a touch of mysticism in your book.”

  “Just tell me it’s on the spring list.”

  “There’s probably enough lead time. If you deliver the whole thing soon, we can try.”

  It did not seem that anything better could happen to improve his mood. And then another call came. Ava was at work; she had gone back to the hospital the day after the dictation had been finished and the last tapes sent for transcription. Lazing in bed on a Saturday morning, propped on pillows and relaxed, watching television, at first too drowsy to change the channel from Teletubbies, Steadman groped for the remote switch and pinched it and a new program flashed onto the screen. It was a stark cartoon in lurid colors, a wicked-faced man in a beaky green eyeshade tapping his stick under a stormy sky along a cobblestone road. Above his bony head was a swinging sign on a large old house, The Admiral Benbow Inn. He wore a black cape and hood that made him seem like a swaggering and wicked jackdaw.

  “Will any kind friend inform a poor blind man who has lost the precious sight of his eyes in the gracious defense of his native country, England —and God bless King George—where or in what part of the country he may now be?”

  A young cartoon boy whom Steadman knew to be Jim Hawkins, but drawn with a pale face that was meek and girlish, stepped from the shadows holding a flickering orange-windowed lantern.

  “You are at the Admiral Benbow.”

  The blind hooded man whirled around and snatched at Jim’s hand and twisted the boy’s skinny arm behind his back.

  “Now, boy, take me to the Captain.”

  “Sir, upon my word, I dare not”

  “Take me in straight or I’ll break your arm.”

  Steadman watched Blind Pew bully and terrify the boy. Then, as Blind Pew entered the inn, Steadman’s phone rang.

  “This is
the White House, president’s office. We’d like to speak to Mr. Slade Steadman.”

  His thumb on the remote switch, he muted the TV. As soon as Blind Pew delivered the Black Spot there was mayhem—old grizzled sea dogs ransacking the rooms and tipping over sea chests.

  “Speaking.”

  Blind Pew was outside, groping again, and lost. Steadman watched in triumph, feeling contempt for the malevolent and stumbling blind man, who without any warning had been deserted by the others.

  “The president wonders if you are free to attend a dinner at the White House on November tenth, for the visit of the chancellor of Germany.”

  As in silence Blind Pew struggled on the empty, shadowy road, calling out for help, the woman on the phone explained that this was a call only to see whether he could attend the White House dinner. If the answer was yes, an invitation would be sent.

  “Delighted to accept. Does this invitation extend to my partner, Dr. Ava Katsina?”

  “Of course.”

  Steadman spelled Ava’s name, and the White House secretary went over the details (“This will be black tie”), and Blind Pew fell into a ditch. He climbed crabwise out of it and, once again on the road, was trampled to death by five galloping horses.

  Ava was pleased by the news. She moved lightly, happily, restless with pleasure, still wearing her green hospital scrubs. “This is great,” and looked at Steadman sideways, smiling uncertainly, because it seemed there was more and he was not divulging it. And when she saw the froglike expression on his face, heavy-lidded, his eyes half shut, his lips pressed together, she said, “Okay, what is it?”

  He didn’t say, he squinted and looked froggier, he paced a little. The thought This is perfect showed on his face.

  Ava followed, staying with him, and then he turned and said, “They asked me about my”—he raised his arms and clawed a pair of quotation marks in the air with his hooked fingers—“special needs.”

  A slackening look of disturbance clouded Ava’s face.

  “And you told them—?”

  Steadman laughed, much too loudly, a honk of confidence.

  With pleading eyes Ava held him. She said, “When you try to be enigmatic you can be such a bully.”

  “I can see in the dark,” he said.

  She screamed, howled in protest, which thinned to a cry of agony and betrayal.

  “You can’t do this.”

  He was in no doubt that he could, yet he knew from that moment he would never convince her of it.

  “It’s a lie.”

  In what was almost a whisper, but a heated one, Ava said, “I have just come from the hospital. We have real sick people there. ‘Special needs,’ all of that. We have sick children. We have people confused and upset because they’ve just been told they have macular degeneration, for which there is no cure. What an insult, what an outrage, for you to pretend to be blind.”

  “Not pretend,” he said.

  She shouted and left the room saying “No!” But he knew there would be more over dinner, and there was. She said that she had felt guilty about returning to work at the hospital so soon after his finishing the book, leaving him so abruptly. But now she was glad, she said. She wished she had gone sooner.

  When he didn’t reply she said, “I can’t stand your smug face.”

  In the days after that he felt so idle and liberated he used the datura again and found the alteration powerfully hallucinogenic. Even his voice underwent a change, became declaratory, with a stammering vibrato. Datura was a friend. Blind, he was able to reconstitute his world and find his true place in it.

  “Back from the dead,” he said.

  The whole day ahead was his, without any obligation on his part to cast his mind back and revisit his past; nothing to accomplish. He had written his book.

  That day Axelrod called again with the news that The Book of Revelation was on the spring list.

  “But you’ll have to help me with the catalogue copy.”

  “Give me a hint.”

  “Tell me what it’s about.”

  “The physical side of the act of creation.”

  “Yes?”

  “The origin of art.”

  “Be a little more specific.”

  “Look, it’s about itself.”

  He said it was more a book about transgression and trespassing than Trespassing had been; it was all interior travel. He did not say that datura was the means, its name like an elegant, darting vehicle that had taken him the whole distance, there and back.

  In the days that followed, Ava sulked, stung by his insistence on going to the White House dinner blind, showing up impaired in public as the president’s guest, someone who would be photographed and written about. When he talked Ava stepped away to give him room, for he seemed to crowd her, to look past her, as though he were haranguing a multitude of people, the wider world, speaking more expansively, like a man starring in his own movie. He appeared to be aware that a public process was at work on the Vineyard, a marveling at him for his prescience, the murmuring witnesses to his renewed fame, the triumphant second act of his life, more dramatic, more visible and original, than the first.

  He imagined his face on his book jacket: eyes opaque with the drug and yet shocking, with a wounded corrosive stare on which nothing was lost, for this new book was like the oldest book in the world, a confession that was prophecy and revelation.

  He had dreamed of writing such a book. He had yearned to create it but had been baffled and tentative, not knowing how to begin. The book he had envisioned was calculated to eliminate the possibility of any biography of him, to make the notion of a biographer a joke. A parasite, a hanger-on, an outsider, an intruder, a stammering explainer with his nose against a smeared windowpane, staring into thick curtains—who needed such a person? For someone who wrote the truth exhaustively, setting everything down without any inhibition, making the ultimate confession, a biography was superfluous. Why would anyone bother? There would be nothing to write, nothing new, nothing of value. So with the book he called his novel, he had taken over the work of all the prospective biographers.

  “I’ve put them out of business,” he said loudly, as though to the world.

  Axelrod said, “We can get it into the catalogue now. If you deliver the manuscript on a disk before the end of the month, we can publish in the spring. Shall we say it’s travel?”

  “It’s travel, it’s autobiography, it’s everything. Most of all it’s fiction.”

  “Hell of a title.”

  As for the paragraph for the catalogue the editor asked for, Steadman said, “How much better not to have one.” And when the editor seemed doubtful, Steadman said, “Just the title.”

  There was general approval for the two-thousand-year-old title, The Book of Revelation.

  In a damp and breezy October of slapped-down waves in the harbor and discoloring and withering leaves up-island, the Vineyard had almost emptied of visitors and was returned again to its year-rounders. After his months of steady work it seemed odd to Steadman to be here with so little to do except process his manuscript. In the course of almost a year of dictation—they had returned from Ecuador the previous November—a woman with a secretarial service in Edgartown had transcribed the tapes he had made with Ava. The woman had said she was unshockable. “As the mother of three boys and a girl, with a husband in the Coast Guard, I’ve seen just about everything.” At first she sent the pages using a courier service. Then, perhaps to save money, she delivered the printed pages in person. She had kept pace with the dictation, the tapes and notes, and not long after Steadman finished, she handed him the remainder of the first draft of the novel, with the tightlipped smile of someone tested to the limit, as though holding back her disapproval.

  The book was complete, needing only line corrections and slight revision. Having the whole book before him was a pleasure. But he worked without the drug. How plain the printed words seemed compared to the stipple of brilliant pixels in his drug visions.


  He dabbed at errors, rubbing highlights into words and phrases, deleting preciousness (“frenzied and oculate waves” became “wild eye-spotted swells”; he crossed out the words “numinous,” “ineffable,” and “chiastic”). Now that his days were relieved only by his trifling with the manuscript, he found himself disoriented. He was glad to be free of the anxiety of the guilty lopsided life of a writer with an unfinished book, but he missed the day-filling routine of dictation, the drama of his sexual nights, the anticipation of taking the drug each morning. The music had stopped, the racket in his head was gone, the house was whole but predictable, colorless, no longer hallucinatory. One day was like another, the empty hours of silent mornings and much too long afternoons and dreamless nights that had no objective, not even the promise of Ava. She was always tired: her work, her life, was elsewhere. He was reminded of his life before Ecuador, when he’d had nothing to do, nothing to write; when he had felt cynical and impotent. He was not impotent now, yet he felt his desire slackening, the old disobedience that was like a deafness of the flesh.

  He found he could not read easily; habituated to glowing shapes and colors, his eyes were unaccustomed to the severity of small print. The letters jumped and rearranged themselves as he blinked, making him feel dyslexic. So he put on earphones and listened to audiotapes. The glimpse of Blind Pew on the television that morning had stirred his interest. In his present mood of impatience he had a boxed set of tapes, Stevenson classics, sent to him in a taxi from Vineyard Haven. He shut out the world by clamping Stevenson to his ears. Some passages he marveled at, but the best of them saddened him with their exactitude and made him feel lonely. He had often felt this when he was affected by the truth in fiction.