Blinding Light

by Paul Theroux

  He had no help at home anymore. As if out of spite, Ava opted for odd hours at the hospital. That was the trouble with doctors: at their most selfish they could claim to be unselfish. I have to do this! My patients need me! I have someone in labor! Get out of my way! Dr. Ava Katsina, anyway.

  “I’m going,” she’d say, and without another word would leave the house, trailing the settling dust of self-satisfied finality, as in the days before Ecuador when they had made the decision to split up. And here they were, facing another winter on the island.

  “I need you as much as ever,” he said.

  “Who will be my pouting chatelaine?” she mocked. “Listen, there are really sick people at the hospital, who need me much more.”

  Her bossy doctor’s voice was her most clinical and severe, always an order, like Take your medicine. No backtalk. Where was the compliant, agreeable sensualist of the past year who had aided him in his book? Here she was in baggy green scrubs, back at work, hoisting a sightless squalling baby that was dripping with womb slime.

  With her help he could easily have corrected his book, she reading the galley proofs while he lay drugged and insightful, suggesting improvements or deletions. But he was alone and undrugged, reduced to the menial condition of sober sighted scrutinizer, certain that he was missing something as he read, mumbling, his fretful finger poking at the lines.

  And yet in the task of publishing—all the minutiae of preparation, the discussions with Axelrod, weeks of it, choosing the jacket, planning the book tour—none of it distracted him from what had been hissed at him in the Rose Garden, Manfred Steiger reappearing from nowhere like an ugly-faced gnome in a folktale, accusing him of treachery, as if preparing to exact his price.

  This memory nagged at Steadman. Over the year he had worked on his book, he had not thought once of Manfred, nor even remembered the man’s association with the drug. He recalled the letter he had received; he was glad he had torn it up. Then, reentering the world, he had been confronted by Manfred, as though the man had been lying in wait all that time: the only other person in the world who had shared that secret experience of datura in the Ecuadorian rain forest. What did he want?

  Exasperated, needing relief at the end of the day, Steadman drank a measure of the drug, blinding himself so he could stare white-eyed at Ava when she got home, scowl at her and say, “You’re mad at me. You’ve had an awful day. You’ve been operating on someone. Eight hours of invasive surgery! Massive trauma to the brain! Insult to the cerebral cortex!”

  “You’re thinking of yourself and that stuff,” she said—he was still holding the cup he had emptied of the datura. “I was suturing a scalp wound.”

  “I can smell the blood.”

  “No blood on me.”

  “Buzzing molecules of blood.”

  He grumbled and accused her this way because he did not know how to tell her about Manfred. He guessed that she would say, “Your friend. Your fault.”

  Manfred had made no secret of being a writer. He had told Steadman he was a journalist. But so what? Steadman assumed he was based in the United States, maybe in Washington, but more likely in New York City. Steadman wanted to talk to him, find out his intentions. And I know your secret. Why had he put it that way? Sometimes it sounded coy, at other times a threat. Steadman was not afraid; he was insulted at being blindsided by the whisper. He imagined his phone call, or even better his confronting Manfred again, saying, as he had wanted to say in the Rose Garden, “Obviously it’s not a secret!”

  He had called the White House press office and announced who he was. The woman at the other end did not recognize his name. At an earlier time he would have said, “Trespassing? That book, that TV show, that movie? I’m the person responsible.”

  But he said, “I was a guest at the White House dinner a month ago.” “Do you know how many dinners we have?” was her putdown.

  Who hired these people? But he knew: grovelers and climbers who dealt with rich meddling businessmen demanding personal repayment for their campaign contributions.

  “The dinner for the chancellor of Germany,” Steadman said. “I doubt you were invited.”

  He had silenced her, though he heard what sounded like steam coming out of her ears.

  “I need the address of a reporter who was at the press conference.” “We can’t disclose personal information.”

  “Just the name of his newspaper. German.”

  “Have you tried the Internet?”

  “I’m blind. I am Steadman, the blind writer.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No you’re not.”

  “I wish I could help.”

  “No you don’t.”

  No wonder some blind people could be so bitter, so angry, so selfish, for they were always encountering oafs who said things like that, who sounded secretly pleased that they were able to be obstructive or worse, encumbering the blind with their smug pity.

  She was a flunky—a blind man deserved better. His indignation was a pretense but his annoyance with the woman was real. He had no second thoughts about his decision to go public as a blind man. That woman was an exception, because most of the time he was amused by the attention lavished on him for his supposed disability. Yet he was blind. His greatest satisfaction was that he was hardly handicapped at all, that he was superior in every important way to the incompetents and gropers and busybodies who claimed they wanted to help him.

  Manfred’s contact number was all he needed. But as time passed even that seemed less urgent.

  He began to go out alone, to Vineyard Haven to shop, to Oak Bluffs to have a drink at the Dockside bar where he had brought Ava on that first date, to restaurants in Edgartown. After so long in seclusion he loved being in public, enjoying the attention. A blind person was watched everywhere, like a fragile vase wobbling on a narrow shelf—what if it topples, what if it shatters? People hovered and held their hands out as though to break Steadman’s fall. To alarm them the more he walked faster when he knew he was being observed by someone very nervous, and he took long strides, defiant ones, swiping with his cane, like a man whipping at long grass.

  Women were especially solicitous: he loved their whispers, their soft sidelong glances, their fumbling concern, their warm, well-intentioned hands. Up to a point he accepted their help, just to smell them. They were redolent with longing, saturated with emotion, moist with desire, tremulous with thwarted motherhood; they touched because they needed to be touched themselves. He allowed himself to be stroked. He went no further, though he could have possessed them completely.

  Ava was taken care of, preoccupied at the hospital, but she was still in his life. When she arrived home and he asked her how her day had gone, she refused to describe it except in futile terms, as a series of pious ordeals: “We lost someone today,” or “A woman was medevaced to Boston.” There were fewer patients than in the summer, but the ailments were more serious. She made a point of ignoring the Christmas holiday, and worked on Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve, too, with her doctor’s martyred cry, “They need me.”

  Everyone on the island said she was an angel, but Steadman knew that by taking on such responsibility at the hospital she had a free pass everywhere else—didn’t have to shop, or cook, or clean, or give presents, or socialize, and so Steadman felt abandoned. He couldn’t complain about being ditched by a doctor. No one would listen, for whose work was more important? From their commanding position on the moral high ground, doctors always had the last word.

  Odd to think that she had been his reckless and sensual lover. But Steadman guessed that she looked back on their time together doing the book as frivolous. He wanted her to say this, so that he could reply, You are mistaken. It was revelation. What revelation is there in illness? The pathetic truth that people are frail and they sicken and die. Only the vitality of sex reveals the human essence.

  But she was angry. He played the conversation in his head. He went for walks. He pondered what he had written of sexuality and
risk, and one day the news came out—horribly, awkwardly, first as a rumor, then as a disputed denial—that the president had had a flirtation, perhaps an affair, with one of the young female interns at the White House.

  The speculation was preposterous. The simplest version sounded bad enough. Steadman remembered how he had guessed at the poor man’s confusion months before.

  I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I’m going to say this again. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time. Never. These allegations are false. I never had sex with that woman.

  The president spoke, beating the air with his finger. Seeing the pink and sleepless face, the humiliated and guilty mask of an adulterer, Steadman said, “Poor guy.”

  But Ava was contemptuous. “How could he be such a fool?”

  “He was smitten,” Steadman said.

  Ava’s expression said, I don’t get it.

  The revelation of the president’s waywardness overwhelmed everything else. It was all the talk on the Vineyard, and on the news-hungry earth. That the president of the United States had gotten blowjobs in the Oval Office from a chubby Jewish girl in her early twenties was world news.

  Steadman watched closely as the messy story unfolded. He guessed that if Manfred was a foreign correspondent, he must be covering it for his newspaper. Steadman was provoked to do something he had avoided up to now. He typed “Manfred Steiger” into his computer and got seventeen hits: stories in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, all with a Washington dateline. But he did not attempt to get in touch with Manfred.

  People who disliked the president before now hated him and were gleeful. His supporters faced the dilemma of explaining his behavior, or even justifying it. Most people’s marital embarrassments were minor compared to the president’s from late January onward.

  What was he thinking? It was the only topic of conversation these days, the president’s face fixed in an expression of defiance and shame, looking like a fool.

  Steadman was certain that his Book of Revelation would have greater resonance in a world bewildered by the fact that the most powerful man in the world had risked his whole reputation, his job, his marriage, the respect of his friends, in order to meet a pushy, privileged, fattish, and unappealing young woman and encourage her to fellate him while he sat glassy-eyed with lust in his White House office.

  It wasn’t strange at all, really, though you could hardly blame the president for denying it. It was at the heart of Steadman’s book, for safe inside the White House, having his cock sucked, the president was briefly a happy boy.

  With all the lies and evasions and half-truths he had told, the president was miserable, and yet he clung to power. He repeated that he would not give up, would not resign, would go on no matter how loud the mockery and the declarations of hatred. The hatred was not new, but the pity was something terrible. Steadman could tell that the president was chastened and weakened by the pity and that he found it hard to bear.

  Seeing the man so embattled, Steadman took his side, but he knew in advance that the president’s disgrace offered other ways for Ava and him to pick on each other.

  “He stepped on his dick, I grant you. He’s behaved like a fool. But what has he done wrong?”

  “I’d be out on my ear if I did that,” Ava said. “If I were caught fucking an orderly in my office I would be fired, no questions asked.”

  “No one is hurt by it. And he’ll have to endure the worst possible punishment—the whole world laughing at him and feeling superior. That’s a nightmare.”

  “My father was in the Navy,” Ava said. But she spoke in a tone of resignation, not outrage. “If he had done that he would have been shit-canned or demoted and posted to Diego Garcia. The president is the commander in chief of the armed forces.”

  “So what? That’s honorary.”

  “He’s pretending to be innocent, like you’re pretending to be blind.”

  “I am blind.”

  “What is it, an addiction? You can’t deal with stress? You can’t face the world? So you retreat. But instead of pot or speed, your drug is the Ecuadorian blindfold. The ultimate escape.”

  “It’s the opposite,” he said. The datura was insight, an asset, not evasion at all, not an escape from the world but immersion in it, the deepest possible confrontation with reality. “And if that’s not so, then how is it, after so much failure, did I succeed in writing my book?”

  “That’s simple. I helped you.”

  He couldn’t dispute this. He had repeatedly told her that he would have been lost without her.

  “And now you have it both ways. People pity you and yet you’re stronger than they are.”

  He had no answer. He knew it to be true.

  “It’s over between us,” she said. “I’m busy at the hospital. I should get a place of my own again.” As though thinking aloud, she went on softly, “All you’ve done is disrupt my life.”

  “Don’t go,” he said. With an effort of will, swallowing hard, he said, “Please.”

  “You don’t deserve me.”

  She was so strong now, with a fierceness in her fatigue and bright feverish eyes that came from working long hours at the hospital. And she was so formidable scrubbed of all her makeup, pale and intimidating.

  “What do you want?”

  He said in a small imploring voice, “I want you to accept that I am dependent on this drug for now.” He looked at his hands with mild surprise, as if he had just realized they belonged to someone else. “The basket is broken to bits. Someday soon I will run out of the juice. I won’t have the option of being blind. In the meantime...”

  “In the meantime I am not going to help you.”

  “Okay,” he said, lifting his empty hands and holding them as though to propitiate her. He wanted to say more but did not have the words to describe the fulfilled dream it had been for him: their living there, just the two of them; inhabiting the house, his fantasies, his book.

  “I’m not going on your book tour,” she said.

  “I can live with that.” And saying so, he decided that it was better if she didn’t come along in that mood, dragging her grudge with her, a nagging presence, casting a gloomy shadow, as she had on the trip to Washington.

  As though still negotiating, he said, “I’m almost out of the drug. Maybe a month or six weeks more.”

  “Go ahead, then,” she said, “make an idiot of yourself, like him.”

  The president was on TV, always shown before a crowd of delighted people. As he strode past a rope line, he leaned forward and hugged a grinning girl in a black beret—the fool embracing his fellatrix.

  Ava shook her head, and he could tell from her upright posture, her hand, the twitch of her hair—not making eye contact, reflective, not looking for an answer or expecting to be contradicted—that she was in her clinical mode, delivering a medical opinion.

  “God only knows what that stuff is doing to your nerves. But I can guess. Stressing the neurons. Toasting the ganglia. Burning out the synapses.”

  With a slow, dull smile he said, “It’s easier for me to talk to you after I’ve taken a dose.” He looked her full in the face; his eyes were glaucous and fish-like. “Because I can see what is really in your heart.”

  She seemed puzzled, not by that assertion, he knew, but by her realization that she had been home for more than an hour and had only just noticed that he was drugged, saturated, blinded. She had been able to be passive and playful as his sex partner, but in her doctor’s scrubs she hated surprises and especially hated being told things she didn’t know.

  She quickly recovered and said sharply, “So you insist on wearing a mask.”

  “So what?”

  “That makes you two different people. Yourself and your mask.”

  “That’s my problem. Or maybe my special gift.”

  “Your problem,” she said. “The fear that you will be unmasked. The fea
r of all mask wearers.”

  4

  THE WIDER WORLD that Steadman entered as a solitary blind man was deranged, inside out, constantly expanding with obvious conspirators, subtle freaks, and the mouth-breathing ectoplasm of strangers. Using her lunch break, Ava helped him at the checkin counter at the Vineyard airport. He clawed the air, as though trying to seize it and understand.

  “Just one person traveling?”

  The nibbling mouse-faced clerk, with chewed and bitten fingers, shiny boots, a sweaty bag at his feet, was the first of many people who seemed to Steadman grotesque approximations—worse, weirder than when he had been with Ava in D.C., perhaps the more phantasmal because he was alone.

  Sensing his unease, Ava said, “You’ll be fine.”

  “I’m being met by an escort in each city.”

  “Great,” Ava said, without any interest, her frowning face like bruised fruit. “Gotta go. I’m operating at two. Appendectomy.”

  She was gone the next moment, the woman whose beauty he had adored, who had inspired his wildest sexual fantasies, scuttling away in scrubs and tennis shoes, a medic on the move—so long, Doc.

  Steadman boarded the Boston flight and at once felt tossed into the funnel of his tour, toppling toward the black light, past the peripheral voices, just chatter. Most of what he heard was pointless—“They have their big meal at lunchtime”—but now and then the public emotion concentrated in the departure lounge was inexpressibly sad: “I watched him die,” and “Please don’t do this to me,” and “I don’t care if I ever see him again,” and “Ricky, did you remember to take your medication?”

  He traveled as though in a foreign land where he was fluent in the language, a high-tech world of absurdities, inhabited largely by scowly sniffing furry-faced humanoids and now and then a bewitching woman trailing her odor of desire. Some people emitted a faint glow, others a ranker smell or a telling whisper. Nothing was as he had once known it. He was trespassing again. At Logan Airport he called Axelrod.