by Paul Theroux
Equally stupid, well-meaning people, like the taxi driver who took him to his first interview, tried to offer him hope.
“Maybe get one of them eye transplants.”
“I like myself as I am.”
“But what if you could find an organ donor?”
“Hit that jogger and we’ll have one.”
“You saw that woman?”
“No. You saw her and swerved.”
Yet New York City seemed perfect for a blind person: the logic of the streets, the indifferent passersby, the unexpected politeness of people. At the bookstore signings there were the usual questions.
“Do you plan to see Ved Mehta while you’re here in the city? I would have thought he’d be really supportive.”
“Did you know visually challenged people are allowed to touch some of the sculptures at mom a? GO for it!”
New Yorkers announced themselves beforehand, as though shouting ahead from a great distance. In New York, Steadman knew what people wanted long before they asked, knew what questions they were preparing to pose, knew when they were staring at him, when they turned away and pretended to be interested. New York was used to strangeness, for only true oddity was news, and so for his four days in the city he had a starring role, as the well-known and perceptive traveler who was now the blind novelist.
On his second morning, he was taken to the Today show.
“Mr. Steadman, you’re kind of a legend in the book world, and the TV world, too, with the inspiration for that long-running TV series,” the wheedling woman interviewer said. “There’s so much to talk about. I want to ask you about your latest book this morning.”
This morneen was the way she said it. She was puppet-faced and tiny and held a clipboard, tossing her scraped-aside hair as she spoke. She leaned forward and her voice became a quack.
“But first, what a tragedy it must be to have lost your cherished gift; of sight.”
Steadman welcomed the vulgarity of her gloating manner. Because she was not asking a question but rather making a mawkish pronouncement, he could respond with a dignified rejoinder, putting her in her place. It was always a mistake to answer a question. No one remembered questions anyway; much better to say what was on your mind.
“Losing my sight was a blessing,” he said. “I would never have known how much I was missing. I may see less but I understand more.”
“Yet isn’t it incredibly painful to know what you’ve lost?”
Her persistence annoyed him, and he could barely control himself in his reply. “I have tried to make my blindness an asset. I believe my book is the better for it.”
“Talk to me a little bit about the downside,” she said.
“What you are doing to me now is the downside,” he said, his voice sharpening. “You are asking the question that way because you think that you’re superior, that you are whole and I am somehow incomplete.” He smiled at her and knew from the light on his face that the camera captured his angry smile. “I assure you that this is not the case. You are mistaken and misled, and I, Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs, perceived the scene and foretold the rest.”
At the mention of “wrinkled dugs” the woman became flustered and broke off the interview as soon as he finished his sentence. She thanked him for showing up and apologized for not getting to his book. Steadman had the impression that he had terrified her and she was relieved to see him go, eager to move on to the next item, which was an update on the president’s disgrace.
Back at the hotel, there was a message from Ava. He called her on her cell phone. She said she had just seen him on the show.
“You were good. You looked so confident. You don’t need me.”
With a few hours free he experimented with the city. He strolled down the sidewalk, going south from his hotel on Madison Avenue. It was not easy. Pedestrians bore down on him, moving fast, tramping hard, sometimes pushing him aside, mumbling to themselves, some of them singing off-key, under their breath, with a kind of panic. But at least they didn’t stare.
Taping a segment of Charlie Rose, he became aware that he could say anything that came into his head, because Rose, though portentous, was unprepared.
“Slade Steadman,” the man began in his ponderous way, lowering his head, “you have written the best-known travel book of our time. For many years you were a virtual recluse, rarely venturing out of your house...”
This descriptive prologue continued, and when Rose showed no sign of finishing, Steadman interrupted him, confusing him, and described his book, explaining why he had chosen the confessional mode for his novel of a man’s sexuality.
The face he saw later that night in his hotel room, that filled his television screen, a great animated head, the wild hair, the dark glasses, the confident sneer and frowning delivery, had him peering closely. He was glad he was alone, glad that the drug had worn off so he could watch himself. He paid hardly any attention to what he was saying, but he could not take his eyes off his face, which was distorted and heavy, masked by the glasses. He imagined a stranger seeing the face of this blind man and being cowed by fear and awe.
In contrast with Steadman’s rumpled jacket and black turtleneck sweater, Charlie Rose was nattily dressed in pinstripes. He looked presentable but rather pained, even overwhelmed by the fierce presence of Slade Steadman.
He spoke at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square, and afterward, a woman looking for a signature said, “What do you miss most?” Before he could reply, she was gone. He appeared on a panel at the 92nd Street Y. He was interviewed at the National Public Radio station downtown, in a studio hookup with Terry Gross on Fresh Air. He was photographed on a bench in a part of Central Park that was near his hotel.
All the odors, all the transparent talk. He could tell the instant he was introduced what these people thought of him, of his book, of his blindness. He always knew what they wanted. He had a powerful sense, the whole time, of being watched from a distance, followed, hovered over, almost breathed upon, as though shadowed by a stalker.
“I’m glad you can’t see me,” the photographer, a young woman, said. “I am such a mess.”
So rattled by his presence they wanted to say something, yet not knowing what to say, people often said the wrong thing. But still so new to it, and rattled by his anonymous watcher, Steadman was unforgiving.
“I can see you. You’re not a mess. But you’re angry, you’re agitated. I think you’re in serious debt.”
She became still, staring at him, saying nothing. Finally she said, “Shall we get this over with?”
Perhaps as a response to his mixed reviews, interviewers went out of their way to compliment his book. But one man, setting up his tape recorder at the outset of an interview, laughed awkwardly and said, “I wish I could tell you I liked your book.”
“I wish I could tell you I’m agreeing to this interview,” Steadman said, and rose from the settee in the hotel lobby where they had just ordered coffee. He left, brandishing his cane like a rapier.
He was blind, he was blameless, he could say anything, he could write anything. He was forgiven his shocking book because he was so obviously maimed. One review said it: “The outrage and candor of his book is appropriate to the author’s condition.”
The reviews that were read to him did not surprise him. He knew his book was graphic—so personal, so revealing, so near the bone, it did not seem like a novel at all. But he said, “You know, everything is fiction,” and because he was blind, he was not contradicted. Blindness was his license: blindness made him right.
“Never mind the reviews,” Axelrod said, which meant the reviews that hadn’t been read to him were perhaps worse than he guessed. “The sales are great. Your tour has been a huge success.”
Still, he was distracted, waiting for the inevitable.
5
THE CONFIDENT VOICE on the phone said, with odd singsong stresses, “I think we have an appointment at this hour, yah?”
“No” was in his mind. List
ening hard, Steadman heard the words as sink and heff and zis.
“I have it so in my agenda,” the voice went on.
“Where are you?”
“In the lobby area. Just here.”
Chust here. Steadman felt besieged and frail and weary.
“I come upstairs, yah?” The foreign cadences of the voice made it seem even more gauche and importuning.
“No, no,” Steadman said, regretting that he might be revealing his weakness in overreacting. “Go away,” he wanted to say. But he said, “Be right down.”
Throughout the tour, whenever his concentration flagged or he lay sleepless in a hotel room, he had remembered Manfred—how the man had recognized him in Washington and said “I know your secret,” how he had obviously pursued him. The prospect of meeting Manfred nettled him because he suspected it would be a confrontation; but it did not greatly disturb him. Manfred was like a distant relation in need of a favor. Manfred smelled a salable story. Steadman knew that smell; he also knew how to deal with it, not by fleeing but by facing him, staring him down with his blind eyes.
Beyond all this nuisance was the melancholy fact that Manfred was real, flesh and blood, a tedious tricky man emerging from a shared episode in an actual past. That seemed incredible. In Steadman’s mind the trip to Ecuador had been like a fictional journey to a place of enchantment, full of dangers and unexpected discoveries, all the sorts of risks that an adventurer would have to overcome in order to find a magic formula. This potion, these twigs of rare datura, would deliver him from his feeling of futility and turn him into an engine of creation, would make him virile again, give him the book he longed to write, would inspire him and make his brain blaze like the prophet Ahijah’s.
Steadman savored the Ecuador experience as a remembered dream. He likened it to a mythical spell in the wilderness. Over the past year he had embellished it, deleting the oil drilling and the degenerate town of Lago Agrio and the grease-soaked roads and noisy boats on the muddy river. He had replaced these memories with the looming presence of the shamans and the vegetalistas and the ayahuasqueros. The trip had the color and light of a classic quest, the teasing revelation of unexpected magic, the strange and appropriate justice of transformation. Although he pleased himself with the inventions, the highlights, and the deletions, the transformation was something he had earned and deserved. He had come back a different man.
Those other travelers, those gringos? He had deleted them, too. Who would want to remember those voices, the complaints, the facetiousness? One squawk he had not forgotten. The bitch with the book, who had waved it at him and said, “It’s by this legendary has-been.”
And he had deleted Manfred as well. He did not want to remember that the drug was Manfred’s idea, Manfred’s tempting suggestion; that he had paid Manfred for it. He wanted to go on believing that he had ventured on that solitary journey as a dream hunter, questing with Ava, with whom he had fallen in love all over again. He hated to recall that it was a drug tour, that a grubby German had patronized him, that he was being revisited; that there were consequences.
Manfred was waiting for him in the hotel bar, the place sour-smelling and somnolent in the midafternoon heat, stuffy, dusty, mostly empty, with dense stale air that stank as though it had been chewed and spat out.
“So?” Manfred was standing, but obliquely, and Steadman sensed someone else beside him.
“Who’s with you?” Steadman said, walking past Manfred and the companion, someone he detected as a warm bulky presence.
“My photographer, Arnulf.”
“Tell him to go. No pictures.”
No words were exchanged. Manfred shrugged, the photographer pleaded a little, gesturing, screwing up his face, then shook his head and planted his feet more firmly.
Hearing the lisp and suck of a shutter, Steadman slashed at the camera and made contact. “Ach!” A yelp. Then, from the way the cane recoiled he knew he had made a direct hit and had also carved a stripe in the photographer’s wrist. The man stepped away and stowed his camera in a bag and zipped it, while Steadman stood over him.
“You almost break my camera,” the man muttered in a sullen way.
“I’ll break your fucking head,” Steadman said. “Get out of here and stop trying to take advantage of a blind man.”
Only when the photographer had gone did Steadman slide into a booth. Manfred sat across from him. He was wearing a thick noisy coat—leather, with flapping lapels, too heavy for this warm bar. Steadman could sense the dampness of the man’s skin, his sweaty face and glistening hair, his open mouth, breathing hard as he affected to be jolly.
“Never mind Arnulf. He is a fanatic for the pictures.”
But slashing at the man had eased Steadman’s anxiety and reassured him that he was never more alert than when he was on the drug: no one could deceive him when he was blind.
“It was so fantastic to see you in Washington,” Manfred said. “I tell my friends, ‘I know this man!’ In Ecuador, I think, ‘I will never see this man again.’ But here you are, crazy man. Fantastic.”
“Manfred, what do you want?”
“Cup of coffee. Little talk.”
“Skip the coffee.”
The leather sleeves of Manfred’s jacket rubbed the table, the leather elbows skidded: the coat was still an animal to Steadman, its skin peeled from living flesh.
“You sound not so friendly.”
“I didn’t like what you said in Washington.”
With a laugh-snort that wasn’t mirth, Manfred said, “I forget what I said to you.”
“You said, ‘I know your secret.’”
“Everyone has secrets. Even Mr. President.” He began to laugh again, but as though becoming conscious of Steadman’s silence, he added, “Good memory you have.”
“I don’t forget insults.”
“Yah! And me—I don’t forget.”
Steadman had reached across the table, his knuckles forward, and brushed what he suspected was a tape recorder.
“Nice machine.”
Manfred covered the small tape recorder with his hands, as if to conceal it. But still Steadman heard it working, the obscure tick of its timer that was hardly audible, more like a change in temperature, like a pointed flashing light, a flickering flame of altering numerals that repeated as a low pulse.
“Digital. Swiss. Teuer”
“That’s a brand?”
“No. Teuer —costive.”
Steadman seized the thing with his reaching hand, then quickly turned aside and dropped it to the floor. He crushed it with his shoe, feeling it go silent and die in pieces under his heel.
“No.” Manfred wailed, stooping.
“That’s for not asking permission.”
“You make me in a bad situation.”
Hearing the noise, a waiter had approached. He said, “Everything okay over here? Can I get you anything to drink?”
Coffee for Manfred, a glass of water for Steadman, and when the waiter had gone Manfred leaned across the table, put his face close to Steadman’s, and said in a punished voice, “I have no other recorder.”
“That’s what I was counting on.”
Manfred was still snorting. “You insult me in Ecuador. You say how my father is a Nazi. You call me a thief. And those people...”
Steadman was smiling at fazzer and Nay-zee and seef and said, “I described what I knew to be true.”
“...and those people,” Manfred repeated, “they tell Nestor to telephone the police. They make big trouble for me. The police they write a report. They threaten me. They insist for a heavy bribe, which I must pay.”
“I think you made out fine.”
“You tried to hurt me with the lies, despite I help you.”
All that seemed so long ago, in the dream forest, in the rising tide of color and light, like fresh blood eddying in his head, the splash of it sounding in his ears, the detailed loop and retrieval of memory. It was his first experience of the drug’s logic, the way his b
lindness had sorted and returned so much to him, the ordered images that helped him fit irregular fragments and overheard phrases and stray glimpses into whole smooth narratives, so seamless as to be absolute truths. The facts were so clear he had wanted to speak them aloud for their simplicity. Uttered, they sounded like accusations. He had marveled at the effects of the drug, its limpid truths, the purest consolations of blindness. Everything made sense with the datura; he was hopeful for more.
“My boss in America, he found out from the gringos. Those people on the trip were important business guys! I lose my job. No salary for almost a year. I write a little on my drug book. Now I am just doing a few stories for the Frankfurt paper. Did you lose your job?”
The mention of the job made Steadman smile: Manfred’s outrage seemed almost comical. The news that he had been fired had no effect on Steadman, who regarded jobs as burdens that were eventually lost as you moved on, the better for having been rejected. In Steadman’s experience the boss was always the worker’s inferior.
Into Steadman’s silence Manfred said, “Fuck you.”
The two men were quietly brooding when the waiter returned with his tray, the clatter of coffee cup and saucer, the clink of tumbler and water jug. Steadman was aware of the waiter’s abruptness, his resenting them for their paltry order that was like an intrusion. He fussed, yammering to himself, and then left.
“I hardly knew what I was saying,” Steadman said, recalling the scene in the hotel room in Quito. “I was just repeating what was in my head.”
Manfred was examining the smashed tape recorder, pushing buttons that didn’t work, weighing it like a stone, frowning at its useless weight.
“Now you make the more trouble for me.”
“It was the truth.”
The way Manfred breathed through the gaps in his teeth showed Steadman how the man had seized on the word, as though holding it and shaking it in his jaws.
“The truth, yah,” he said, his saliva sounding like juice in his mouth. “I think the same thing when I see you at the White House.”
