by Paul Theroux
“My uncle was blind,” she said. “He had a kind of carapace. That’s not a good thing. I reached out to him. But he wouldn’t come out of his shell.”
The imagery he found sad and exact, and concentrating hard and leaning toward her, he realized she had gone. They had arrived at Penn Station. She had given up on him and left without saying goodbye.
He thought again, I’m losing it.
New York, its sallow shadowy light, the blatting of its cascading car horns, its rushing people, lay at the top of the escalator. He rose on the steps, his bag at his feet, into the steep indifferent city, the dirty bricks, the flat-faced buildings, the surly windows, the fleeing pedestrians, the toxic air. Someone nearby, a young stupid man, was swearing loudly in a foreign accent, vile disgusting words, spreading hostility like foulsmelling fumes. No one reacted.
In the taxi on the way to his hotel, Steadman reduced the city to its separate components, the scorched oil stink of exhaust, the noise of engines, the dense and unforgiving flow of traffic, the unintelligible voices as of an asylum turned inside out—all that and the radiance of its limitless sky. The city was never dark, never silent.
But his hotel was quiet enough. He was welcomed back by the staff as though cherished, the pet blind man, like the beloved cripple on whom all friendliness was bestowed by sentimental strangers. They exaggerated their attention because it seemed they could not imagine how, unless they made a fuss over him, he would possibly remember them.
Instead of calling Ava, he called Axelrod.
“You still have Boston and Philly,” he said. “And there’s that party tonight.”
The party was news to him. He asked for details.
“It’s in a private room at Waldo’s Grill. I’ll meet you at the hotel at six. We’ve invited media.”
Dreading it, he drugged himself, and the event was every bit as awful as he had feared, a hot overcrowded room above an overcrowded restaurant. The downstairs howl of diners reached the private room on the second floor and filled it with stinging sound. Steadman was introduced to the guests, who snatched at his free hand. He knew them from their hands and their voices.
One said, “I loved your book. They say you have a sixth sense. Tell me something.”
The man’s hand was clammy, unwashed, scummy with the city, impatient, insincere.
“I wouldn’t want to presume,” Steadman said.
“Go ahead.”
“You’re agitated. You have a lot on your mind that is all trivia. You are looking for a quote from me. You didn’t read my book.”
The man let go, shook Steadman’s hand free, and said, “That’s like an all-purpose answer, right?”
“Take my hand,” a woman said, bumping other people aside.
In a sudden glimpse that was soaked with dirty light, Steadman’s sight returned just as she clutched his hand. He saw the room—the guests drinking and taking food from trays, the cluster of people around him waiting to speak, all of them looking hungry and eager. He was confused by the faces, the reaching, the jostling. He was embarrassed and defensive, as though he were gazing through a one-way mirror. They had no idea he was looking at them. He couldn’t help it, and worse, he hated seeing them. These flashes of sight were like awful glimpses into his own past, like his mind coming alive to offer the vividness of shame and remorse he thought he had forgotten, visions like bad memories.
The woman seized his fingers. He saw her clearly, he saw everything. The flood of faces brimmed in the room, putting it in shadow. He was overwhelmed by the sight of it, and then his blindness took hold again, a glittering curtain descending over his eyes.
“Are you all right?”
Had he betrayed his brief ability to see? It was terrible the way the drug had become so unreliable. He drank it these days and saw the sorry unresolved reality of daylight. Then he skipped a dose and without any warning he was blinded, as though there remained in his body an undissolved sediment of the drug, a residue that was stirred by his blood flow, taking away his sight.
But his blindness now was not the blindness that had revealed the innermost world that was also his past; it was an obstacle, a kind of ignorance, a puzzlement. These days—tonight, for example, in the stuffy room of guests and spectators—he felt weak and defenseless, a blunderer, trying not to wave his arms at the walls.
“Cindy Adams. The Post. I was hoping you’d tell my fortune.”
How could he tell her that he was no longer capable of the party trick of prescience? He turned away, and an insistent man at his elbow said, “Can we talk somewhere quiet?”
People still touched him all the time, and they talked too loudly, poking or pawing him on each word. The man persisted. Steadman sensed that he was being tugged into a corner, away from the bump and shriek of party guests.
Where it was quieter, Steadman could tell that the man beside him was calm and inquisitive, confidently moving him against a wall as Steadman prodded the floor with his stick, almost losing his balance as the man nudged him.
“I’ve got a few questions.”
“Yes?”
“I really did read your book, but I want to talk to you about your blindness. Like, do you feel it gives you an edge?”
Though the tone was neutral, the question seemed hostile, especially now, jammed against the wall, beset by strangers in the stuffy room. He had been thrust into the party and was expected to perform. He had not had a drink, his eyesight had flickered, dark to light and back again, from one world to the other, the simpler world of sight to the tortured one of this new version of his blindness that was unfamiliar and overwhelming. Not just beset by strangers. He felt he was among enemies: the sour air in the room, the mutters, told him this, but he knew no more.
Reaching as though to restore his balance, he was reminded of the toppling figure of Blind Pew in the cartoon, arms spread in a gesture of appeal: Help me!
“No edge at all,” he said. “It’s a struggle.” He sensed skepticism in the way the man exhaled. “Please excuse me.”
“Some guy has a Web site claiming that you’ve been taking a drug.”
The word “drug,” uttered for the first time by a stranger, filled Steadman with such dread he was too numb to show alarm.
“Maybe a performance-enhancing drug. Like I say, maybe to get an edge.”
Steadman said, “Do you think that anyone would choose to be blind?”
“Right. That’s what I was wondering.”
Steadman had never felt blinder or less in control. He had swallowed a dose of the drug in the hotel room just before setting off for the party, and here he was, baffled, seeing nothing except when, in an occasional burst of ugly light, he had gotten a glimpse of the room and winced.
“I find that an insulting suggestion,” Steadman said, and felt for the wall.
“I’m sorry you think so,” the man said. “Hey, I was just asking.”
“Excuse me”—he recognized Axelrod’s voice. “I was wondering where you were.”
“This man was accusing me of faking.”
“I didn’t say you were faking. I was just trying to verify the rumors that you’re on some kind of drug.”
“Back off, asshole!” Axelrod said, shrieking at the man. “How dare you say that! This man has lost his eyesight. He has just published a great book. And you’re a guest here. How about showing a little respect?”
As Axelrod cowed the man with his fury, Steadman thought, Why didn’t I say that? Why wasn’t I that angry?
“I am so sorry,” Axelrod said. “You look tired. Maybe you should go. People will understand.”
Steadman left the party, and later in his hotel room he was so rattled he could not think straight. He reasoned that Manfred had put the word out, to expose him. And it was likely, as he had suspected, that the woman in Washington had come to his room to check up on him, to look for the drug, to see if he was really blind, to relay the information to Manfred.
He would go on denying it—there was no
proof. But there was a greater problem, and it horrified him. He seemed to have no control over his blindness now. The drug was at times irrelevant. That night he lay in a sweat, waiting for the usual glimmer of light, the dull glow that told him the drug was weakening in him. But there was nothing, only the throb of New York, the city howl vibrating in his guts. He wondered if, after all the months of taking the drug, he had saturated himself with it, that his flesh was drenched.
He slept. He woke. He could not tell whether it was day or night, and he was terrified.
8
SO HE REMAINED in New York, and each morning in his hotel room he opened his eyes hoping that he was waking from the nightmare, that something had changed, that he was able to see. He would have been grateful for the merest glimmer of light. Each morning he was desolated. There was nothing but the city’s roar, like the endless slosh of muddy toppling surf, and though he could not understand it, there was something in that noise that always mocked him. He went to the window and was deafened by the traffic strangling the dust-thickened air. New York was an ocean and he was trapped at the bottom of it, suffocating at this black depth, dense with sound, struggling against the suck of the tide. He had lost even the memory of light, and sorrowing, he thought, I am in hell.
He had stayed in the city for its protection, for the way it seemed to accommodate every human type. Still, he suffered—why was it not luminous?—and he was too timid to leave. He canceled the rest of his tour: Philadelphia, Boston, the C-span segment, the photo shoot for the Time interview.
“It’s not a problem,” Axelrod said. “The book is doing great.”
But the city was not benign. He was a cripple here. He had slipped into a diabolical darkness that he had once denied ever existed. He was reminded every second of his ailment; he was seriously disabled, among strangers. Nothing was worse than to go to sleep miserable, trying to hope, and to get up the next morning just as miserable, and hopeless.
A call came, a voice said, “Mr. Steadman?” and when he said yes, “This is Trespassing. Please hold for Mr. Gurvitch.”
The next voice he heard was a gruff and displeased one.
“Shel Gurvitch, Trespassing Promotions.” And after a deep and pitying breath, “Slade, I don’t think we’ve met. I won’t waste your time. I just want to say that we were not told anything in advance about your publicity tour and, wait a minute”—Steadman had begun to object—“we couldn’t be sorrier about your accident. But we are seriously questioning what sort of a message your headlining is sending to the branding emphasis of our licensing base.”
“I have no idea what you mean.”
“Give you an example. The Limited Edition package.”
“Of my book?”
“No. The Trespassing Limited Edition that we proposed for the redesign of the new Jeep. We’ve just been turned down. We think it’s related to your accident.”
“What accident?”
“Your thing. Your eyesight. Your infirmity.”
Steadman put down the phone. He took no more calls. He hardly went out. And who was that always following him? He only needed to pause at a curb for someone to offer him money, believing he was panhandling. One person, passing him, pressed a bill into his hand. He was so startled he held it as he walked along, and moments later he was bumped—a whiff of acrid sweat—and the money was snatched from him.
Some awful logic was chopping him small as his book was being elevated. Yes, he had his book. His quest had been a success. Now he knew the price.
To control his fear and gain confidence, he folded the remainder of his crumbled drug in paper and made a parcel of it. He left his hotel, the Carlyle, took small slow steps one block up Madison, turned east, and tapped his way down 77th, across Park Avenue and onward, past Lenox Hill Hospital. He sensed a slackening of attention in passersby, which allowed him a shadowy intimation that he was being followed again—someone close behind him. He turned sharply, tottering in darkness.
“What do you want?”
Whoever it was shadowing him halted and took a breath.
“You think I don’t see you?” Steadman said. He gestured with his stick. “I know you’re there. You’re not fooling me. Is it Manfred?”
There was no sound except the slapping tread of a pedestrian striding through the murk. Never mind the darkness, forget the worrying voices—he could not breathe. It was as though all the air had been sucked from the city. In that vacuum, Steadman heard his own hollow voice in his ears.
“I know it’s you, Manfred. Or is it another of your whores dogging my heels?”
A woman’s voice inquired, “You want a hand, mister?”
“No.” He turned away from the voice.
“The outpatient entrance is right over here,” a man said.
“There’s nothing wrong with me!” Steadman shrieked.
He slashed with his cane, trying to emphasize the point, but he stumbled and someone said, “Careful with that stick, fella. Poke someone’s eye out.”
Clearing his way with the cane, he kept on to the end of the block, where there was an uprush of air at the subway entrance, a gust of urinous dust and warm human-scented air. He allowed himself to be helped across Lexington. He smelled fresh-baked bread, pizza, coffee. The helper said, “Spare any change?” Steadman gave the man all the coins in his pocket, and the man said, “This is chickenshit. I’m hungry and I just saved your sorry ass. Give me five bucks, fuckface.” Steadman kept going. He tapped his way to Third, to Second, moving very slowly, fearing that another abuser might try to ambush him, yet needing someone at each avenue, and fearing even more the sound of cars. He had hated the way people had touched him before. Now he needed their hands, the pressure of their fingers, their reassuring voices.
“There’s a footbridge somewhere near here,” he said to a man next to him who offered help, when he heard the cars at FDR Drive. It was a raceway; he was terrified.
“Few blocks down.” This gentle voice guided him, bucking him up as they walked. “Almost there, my friend. Few more steps.”
He was at last at the edge of the island, above the enclosed trough of speeding cars.
“Just get me onto the bridge, thanks. I’ll be okay.”
“You’re the boss.”
“Get me to the handrail.”
Already he was learning the cranky authority of the blind, hearing himself make demands and give orders and be obeyed by these invisible fingers, prodding and pinching his clothes.
But something was amiss: the man had hurried away. Steadman slapped his jacket and realized that the man had lifted his wallet.
Across the walkway he found the stairs, and at the bottom of them the rusty rail. He heard the wind slapping at the surface of the river and raising a chop. In the sluicing current, the lick of waves spilled past him and slopped at the embankment at his feet.
He took out the paper parcel and tore it open, scattering the crumbled twigs and stems of the drug. There was hardly any left, yet he wished this to be a ritual, an outward renunciation, ridding himself of it all. Some innate strictness told him that if he made an effort, as he had in the painful journey to this spot, and if the ritual was formal enough, he might get his wish: his sight back.
Then he would be abject. He would admit in public what he had done, how the vision and the recaptured memories in his book had been achieved. The journalist at the party had given him a truthful expression for it: I needed an edge. Until then, he would remain the man he claimed to be, Blind Slade. The wind was tearing at his jacket as he bowed and mumbled an apology, wanting to weep for his error. He had once worried about running out of the drug.
“You drop something?”
Steadman inclined his head to hear if this man’s voice was familiar—one of those sneaks he suspected of following him. It was a horror to stand gaping and not to know when people were watching him.
“No,” he said, and asked the voice for help in recrossing the footbridge and finding the street. When he manag
ed this, the man steering him, bumping him along, he turned aside and thanked him. There was no reply. Though all noises rattled him, he found silence worse than any noise.
The man had stolen his watch. A craftsman on the Vineyard had made it for him. The watch face had no glass, only the sturdy hands, which Steadman traced with his fingertips to tell the time, and his continually touching it made the watch something precious, a talisman, and a friend.
“Bastard! I can see you!”
But his voice calling into the darkness sounded so tearful, so filled with woe, he stopped. He kept on walking. His footsteps were feeble and tentative; so was his cane. He pitied himself for his own anxious, searching sounds. He was terrified all the way back to the hotel, afraid that he would be flattened by a car, one of those honking taxis or a roaring unhesitating truck. He scowled each time he heard a horn, for every blare was warning him to back up. Having to be alert exhausted him, and he felt at any moment he might step into a hole.
What had gone wrong? He knew that Manfred was out to expose him, but any suggestion that he was faking his blindness could not be proven. He had never been blinder, his world never blacker. The quality of the darkness was complete, like a curtain of utter ignorance, a mangy blanket of evil, like the black drapes of a tyranny. This persistent night bore no relation to the peculiar illumination he had known before, brought on by the drug that had made him so happy. This was a stinking bag dragged over his head as though by a hangman, the doomladen obstacle to perception. His hands and legs were useless too. He was frightened and felt childish. The intimation of death in this was made worse because he was trapped in New York, city of terrifying noises and hostile voices and ambiguous smells, where he was treated like a trespasser.
He paused to rest near Madison Avenue, and someone with a dog—the creature snuffled at his shoes—said, “Hey.” But thinking he was being assaulted, he thrust with one hand and struck the person, and only then, as he smacked a hand holding a rag-like piece of paper, did he understand that the person had been offering him money as a handout.
