Blinding Light

by Paul Theroux

  Now he was dumb and sightless and impotent once more, plunged into darkness, in a place where he didn’t belong, not knowing (and still he heard the mewing of someone else in the house) whether he was alone. There was no safety here. His only home was inside his head. The blinding was like a castration.

  He dozed in his chair and a door slam woke him. Either he had slept soundly or else Ava had not been long—whatever, he was hardly aware of having been left. He was not reassured; he felt ever more like a captive.

  He wondered if by some diabolical ploy she had taken him to a different house, one that would trap him by being strange, for nothing in this house seemed familiar. But why would she do that?

  Ava’s confidence made her seem all the more important. She made announcements, loud declarations, as though to a roomful of listeners. “This is absolutely the best time of the year,” and “I love driving on the island now,” and “You see lots of migratory birds around.”

  Late spring, the trees in leaf, the branches bristling, each opening bud a gilded green, new growth like small healthy claws: that was how Steadman recalled it, yet he stared into empty air, trying to imagine the dusted buds swelling into blossoms, the lawns thick from the rain. As though describing a distant planet, Ava told him that the island was chilly and damp, but lovely with flowers—the magnolias were a mass of creamy pink petals with no leaves, the lilacs had never smelled sweeter, robins hopped in the driveway, looking confused in the chill. The roads were empty. Some roadsides were scattered with the last of the daffodils, going brown.

  She must have looked at him then and seen that he was simply gaping, unmoved by her attempt to cheer him up with the description of the Vineyard spring.

  He said, “I think there is someone in this house.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  He marveled at this. “You didn’t say no!”

  “Because it seems such a paranoid thing to say.”

  “I knew there was no point in my mentioning it. I knew you’d deny it.”

  She did not reply. It maddened him when she fell silent.

  “Who is it?”

  After a long pause she said, “You’re being unreasonable.”

  “Why don’t you say ‘There’s no one here’?”

  “Okay. There’s no one here.”

  He tried to discern where she was standing. He turned to face her, to bear down on her. He said, “I don’t believe you.”

  Her unexpectedly calm voice came from a different part of the room, behind him. “That’s your problem. I think you’re tired.”

  “Tired!” he shouted, sitting forward on his big chair and rocking as he spoke, like someone grieving. “I’m not tired, I’m half out of my mind. I can’t see, I can’t walk, I’m half deaf. I’ve turned into a lump. You have no idea. At the beginning of my book tour I was bursting with health, I could see everything, I had my drug—I hardly needed an escort. I was hallucinating in a surreal world of interviewers and bookstores.” Saddened by the memory of it, he became breathless, but began again, his voice breaking. “And one day, without doing a thing, I lost it. I noticed the drug wasn’t working in the same way. I got flashes of eyesight without drinking anything. Then my vision just clicked off and stayed off. And it wasn’t like anything I had known. Some of my senses went with it. It was like I was being stifled. I felt small, I was in the dark. It’s how I feel now. Don’t you understand? I am terrified.”

  Ava knelt before him and took his hand. He could tell she was wearing her scrubs—a whiff of the hospital disinfectant still on them, and her hands so clean.

  “I’m going to help you.”

  Her saying that, suggesting that he needed help and that she was turning him into her feeble patient, made him more miserable. He was reminded of how helpless he was without her. To be her patient was to be her captive; a sickroom was a cage. But he was too unhappy to say anything more.

  Blind, illiterate, dumb, forgetful, stupid, sick—he felt less than a lump. The fact that she was in good health, and busy doctoring, only made him feel worse.

  “After we get the lab results of the drug tests we’ll know what our options are,” she said. “I’ve got a lot of confidence in the people who’ll do the analysis.”

  That did not console him, because he had not told her his deepest anxiety, that the darkness covering him now was like a funeral shroud. He was cold to her touch, he was mute unresponsive flesh, he was without a spark of desire, he was dead.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, and touched him again.

  Her uttering that empty expression filled him with despair. He shivered and drew back a little, covering himself, nudging her hand aside in an awkward gesture, almost prissy in its rejection.

  Even his bed was unfamiliar, even Ava’s body beside him, even her breathing. He had thought it was horrible to be blind and stumbling in New York, robbed and misled and abused, a jostled victim in the city. How could anything be worse? And he was mocked by everything he had done and said in the pompous elation of his drug vision. But it was so much worse to feel lost at home, for being a stranger here meant there was nowhere else to go.

  Being outside the house was sometimes like being submerged, but more often he likened it to living under the great dark dome of a gigantic insect. An enormous spider had lifted itself and was poised upright on its long legs—that was the sky, the world, the darkness; and he was underneath the thing, in its prickling shadow.

  Over the following few days, haltingly, sometimes tearful, he told Ava this. At first she seemed sympathetic. But when he complained more loudly at the injustice of it, she went quiet. Her silence was like an accusation that he easily imagined in her mind: So whose fault is that?

  He had needed a key to unlock his memories, to gain access to the past. Manfred had found the datura. Sometimes he saw the German standing in the smoky village, beckoning him, not the Manfred he knew but a cleaner, devilish Manfred with a fiery light behind him and the ayahuasca vines twined in the trees around him, the vines that were smooth and coiled like the biggest snakes.

  He had gotten the drug, he had finished his book, and the book had succeeded; he was famously blind. There were doubters and whisperers, but they had not seriously damaged him, and yet...

  “I’m a prisoner,” he said. “I’m completely dependent on you. I can’t do anything without you.”

  He knew she was listening, sensed she was smiling—not in triumph but mildly amused at his choice of words, the melodrama. He was sure of it when she spoke next.

  “Now you know what it was like for me.”

  2

  HE FOUNDERED IN DARKNESS, choking and blowing and sculling with his hands like a drowning infant. He had lost the subtle syntax of his vision, his face was flooded, and he who had mocked the word “darkness” was drinking it, and hacking as it fouled his throat like muddy water and stung his nose like soot; he was submerged in it as it streamed past his eyes. He was upended, just like the nosy child who had wandered off and tumbled into a brimming barrel. He had not drugged himself, so he was fully awake in his unhappiness. He had listened to Manfred, but he had not volunteered for this.

  The world he knew in this phase of his blindness was not passive. It was busy and hostile, and his own house rose against him, smacked his head, clawed his hands, twisted his legs, rapped his shins, tripped him, toppled him over. He had to be cautious; he had to creep. He sat for long hours fearing to move too much; he hardly walked. He had fallen and hurt his wrist and banged his elbow. Ava told him he was lucky it wasn’t anything more serious. The darkness was hot, and summer was now upon the island.

  Work was out of the question, and he feared the gaze of strangers. He felt wronged and old-womanish, unable to read or write. The radio was no relief; it blared the president’s misery and satirized it. Steadman could not listen to the rumors and innuendos without being ashamed of the president’s reluctant schoolboy confession, the ghastly details of it, a sneaky joyless muddle of cocksucking and cheap gif
ts and cold pizza. One rumor had the president on the phone, a wet cigar in his hand, the fat girl on her knees, her chubby fingers steadying his cock in her mouth. Another rumor concerned the existence of a semen-smeared dress.

  The gleeful howls of the whole country against the president for his unconvincing denial and his paltry pleasure unnerved Steadman. People seemed not just glad that he had been exposed but giddy with relief that they themselves had not been caught. This summer everyone felt innocent and indignant. And the sanctimony of the reaction had its echo in the criticism of Steadman. Some people had listened to Manfred; some were howling in their own way against Steadman, believing that his drug-induced blindness was a ruse. But while the Internet buzzed with it, the press was single-minded in pursuing the president, overshadowing Manfred’s whisper campaign with shouts of accusation and demands for the president to resign or risk impeachment.

  “I have no intention of resigning,” the president said. That emboldened Steadman. The president was facing and debating his critics, defying them, insisting that he was entitled to a private life, even if that meant enticing the fat girl to his office and groping her and making her kneel and ejaculating on her cheap dress.

  Compared to this, Steadman’s scandal was a trifle; nothing was pettier than a literary fuss. And who cared? The Book of Revelation was still selling well. There was no drama, only unanswered questions, and even these had died down. Yet Steadman was stone blind and crippled by it, beset by fugitive noises in the house that no longer seemed his own. He did not wear his stereo headphones anymore, because they interfered with his monitoring the movements of the intruder he suspected. The sounds of this stranger were incessant.

  “Who’s that?”

  The faint scrape of guilty feet, perhaps the thin soles and light tread of a woman’s shoes, then silence.

  “Who’s there?”

  The click of a door shutting, the pad of retreating footsteps.

  “I can hear you!”

  But his shout created silence, and then he knew that the stranger had fled and that he was alone.

  On the evenings when she wasn’t at the hospital, Ava comforted him. She nursed him, sat and drank wine with him. She made the simple meals he requested, French fries and fish sandwiches and raw chopped vegetables. He ate with his hands, could not manage a spoon or fork; he often bobbled his glass and spilled his wine. His clumsiness at meals frustrated him. His stumbling enraged him. He was depressed by his inability to work.

  He wanted to write a short story, something related to his condition. He imagined what it might be, not the details of the story but how it might look—like a folktale, that sort of compact narrative, full of shocks and reverses, of a blind man lost on an island, ironic with horror. He wanted to publish it to dramatize his pain, to show the world how he was suffering and to prove he was still writing. But the effort was more than he could bear, and except for the physical ache of his sadness, his head was empty.

  Now and then he talked on the phone. Axelrod was a regular caller, giving him updates about sales, and the news was so good he felt fraudulent. He was embarrassed by the gusto in his book, shamed by all his hubristic boasts, for the truth was somber, a sad man in a dark house. He was not the character in that book; he was a damaged man, suffering a self-inflicted wound. Some people were still whispering about him: he knew he deserved it.

  Ava seemed tender, yet he was convinced that she stayed with him unwillingly, just treating him and failing at it. She was dissatisfied, and who could blame her?

  He told her this. He found a way of saying that he was unworthy of her.

  Her reply was unexpected. She said, “You’re the one who taught me that sex is selfish.”

  What sex? But he didn’t ask. They had been home for more than a month now, and he had no desire; he had not touched her. Some days he was so absorbed by darkness he hardly recognized her.

  He said, “I don’t deserve you.”

  “Maybe it’s nothing to do with you. Maybe I’m here for my own reasons.”

  This was a different Ava, the doctor not the lover, the pulse-taker, the clinician in all things. She seemed genuinely concerned with his condition: his blood pressure, his headaches, his tremulous hands, the effects of the drug on his nerves.

  She was breezier, seemingly happier, more content now that she was spending so much time at the hospital. It was clear to Steadman that the amanuensis, the facilitator of transcription, and the checker of manuscripts were not roles that Ava had had any liking for. And that suggested to him that the sexual roles he had assigned her she had acted out with some reluctance. How was he to have known? She had been frenzied, so convincing a sex partner he had known her only as his lover.

  He was chair-bound now most of the time; they had not made love. Yet she did not comment, didn’t reproach him, didn’t even allude to it. All those steamy druggy months of dressing up, trawling in his memory, and now nothing.

  She said, “I’m expecting the results from the lab any day now.”

  Bucking him up with science and changing the subject, she put no pressure on him.

  The results came as a computer printout, perforated pages that she rattled and unfolded. He imagined it as something like a DNA report, with inky furrows and squiggles, a smudged hand-drawn document with the look of a musical score.

  He prodded her several times with questions before she said, “It’s inconclusive.”

  “But what does it say?”

  “There’s some heavy-duty alkaloids in that residue. They’re trying to sort out how they combine with enzymes. How they affect the synapses. They also think that there have been Latin American studies on people who’ve regularly taken it. Maybe case histories of those Indians.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “According to this analysis, datura contains a group of alkaloids called beta-carbolines. The psychotropic trigger is a substance called harmine.”

  The very word seemed dangerous and hurtful.

  “Its overuse can lead to insanity or, it says here, blindness.” She was speaking reasonably, interpreting the document, folding it and turning pages. “But there’s a note saying that the lab is still trying to separate these elements of the drug. If we know the cause, we might find the cure.”

  Steadman said, “You’re right. This is my own fault.”

  “I never said that.”

  “But you thought it.”

  “No. I was on that trip too, remember. I admired you for taking a risk.”

  “And look where it got me.”

  He was sitting upright, rigid, like a man in a straight-backed chair about to be electrocuted.

  “There’s something called atropine in this drug. I know what that is from med school. We use it to dilate the pupil. Maybe it’s combined with another chemical that affects the whole of the eye and the optic nerve.”

  He had risked that poison for an ambitious idea. And now he contemplated the book’s success as he sat alone, lost in his house, a parody of the man the papers had praised on his tour: “a visionary writer more dazzling as a blind man than most people are who are blessed with eyesight.” He had secretly believed himself to be a prophet, the tiger of a new religion. He had boasted of x-ray vision and declared, “Blindness is a gift.” All that showboating, flourishing his cane like a huckster in a carnival. And it had begun with Manfred, downriver in the Oriente. He had drunk this toxic cocktail of murky jungle chemicals; he had been granted his wish, and now was in the dark.

  He stumbled constantly, shuffled like an old geezer, not daring to lift his feet; he knocked things over, he fell. In his own house, the world he knew best, he was like a phantom. When Ava was at the hospital he sat fiddling with the radio, listening to the news of the president’s deceptions. He was appalled at how people hated the man, the things they said, the jokes they told, the merciless mockery. He imagined them turned against himself. He longed for Ava to return. He urged her to work at night so he could share her waking hours. He f
elt needy and superfluous and humiliated.

  He drank more and, drunk one evening when Ava got home, he confided in her. Embarrassed, yet determined to bare his soul, he told her of his insecurity, his timidities, his dreads; he reproached himself, he was abject, he said he was being punished for taking the drug.

  “I knew what I was doing. It’s just a cop-out to blame Manfred. I’m in a hell of my own making.”

  Ava listened. She seemed very calm, but it could have been fatigue—she was so weary after work. She said, “I’m in the business of healing people. I want you to trust me.”

  Shamed by his dependence on her, he saw that she welcomed it; she seemed to be strengthened by his pitiful surrender. He knew he was not imagining this, for she took him on her lap and cradled his head. The effect of his dependence roused something that was both maternal and sexual in her. As though gratified by his expression of helplessness, she held him with tender hands and stroked his hair; she had not touched him that way for a long time.

  “You’re going to be fine.”

  She could have been talking about his impotence as well as his blindness. He was mortified by her pity.

  She was wearing her scrubs, which were stiff and slightly rough to the touch. No lingerie, no perfume, no silks. He wondered, as though he were a patient supine in a hospital bed, whether she was comforted somehow by dressing in this clinical way and caressing him.

  “Just relax. Clear your mind. Don’t even think about sex.”

  He had not been—far from it. If only she knew. He had been imagining with horror the remainder of his life in darkness, the shadow of neglect, the obscurity of seeing nothing but the prison cell of blindness, which was both a tiny suffocating space and the emptiness of the entire unavailable world.