Blinding Light (19 page)

He asked for some water. Janey poured some from a hotel bottle of mineral water and handed him the glass. Steadman did not drink immediately. He took a small bottle of dark liquid from his pocket.

“Is the datura,” Manfred said, as Steadman poured some into his glass and mixed it with a swizzle stick, muddying the water until it was the color of tea, with bits of broken and shredded stems floating on its surface.

This whole process was so pedestrian, so like someone taking a routine dose of medicine, the interest in the room shifted away from him and a buzz of voices resumed. Satisfied that they had persuaded Steadman and Ava to stay, the others felt they had won, so they ignored them, and it seemed they had forgotten Steadman's pointed question.

They expect you to be counterintuitive,
Sabra was saying.

It's a good thing Big Oil is taking over crappy little countries like this,
Hack was saying.

The redemptive thing about debt,
Wood was saying.

I don't fancy being a whole-hogger anymore,
Janey was saying.
I am done. Done and dusted.

And only Ava and Manfred watched Steadman drink the tall glass of dark water—Ava with a puzzled smile, Manfred with recognition and a kind of envious joy that looked like hunger.

In the glow that was spreading through his body like warmth, Steadman became aware of an enlargement of his physical being—a bigness—of shadows slipping into him, separating his mind from his body, his nerves from his flesh. Something prismatic in his vision began this process of separation, too. It was what he had felt in the village: a sense of fragile surfaces. Everything he saw had an absurd transparency, but what lay beneath it was unexpected, like the spider he had seen in the village, rising from the bottom of his cup after he had emptied it of the liquid, and strangest of all, not a drowned spider, but a large one frisky with intelligence, on lively legs.

Steadman was so engrossed he had stopped pretending to smile at what he saw. The room was transformed; the people in it, too. The words they used were visible to him. They had weight and density and texture; understanding their substance, he knew their history. He could examine each one, and he was astonished at their deception, for he was able to study them and translate them, and each one seemed to contradict itself absolutely, as love meant hate, and black white, and joy sorrow. “I mean it” was its opposite, insincerity, the proof of a lie.

The room was much bigger now, and it held many things that had not been visible to him before. The ceiling was high, the sound from outside very loud, and even the smallest murmuring voice was audible to him.

He was able to reason that if a dream lacks logic and connectedness, is random and puzzling, it was the opposite of a dream, and was wonderful for its coherence. The version he saw of this room he took to be the truth. These people existed in their essence. It was no dream for him—they inhabited a dream from which he had woken.

Next to him, Manfred had been gabbling to Ava and had not noticed that Ava's attention was fixed on Steadman.

“My father teach me how to paddle a boat,” Manfred was saying.

“Your father was a strange and violent man,” Steadman said. He had no idea why he said this or what he was going to say next, but the words kept coming. “He was a soldier. You hated him. But it's a terrible story.”

“Blimey,” Janey said, for she had been on the periphery of this conversation and saw Manfred's face redden as though from a choking fit.

Steadman said, “Your father was a Nazi.”

“That's not news, ducky. The Huns were all Nazis,” Janey said, looking at Manfred eagerly—something horrible and gloating on her big plain face and the way her tongue was clamped between her teeth in her eagerness to know more. Sensing a secret about to be revealed, she wore an expression like lechery.

Manfred said, “My father was not healthy. He was wrong in the head.”

“He was in the SS.”

“Not the SS, but the SA, the Sturm Abteilung. But so what? Why blame me for my father?”

Protesting, saying
vaht
and
fazzer
and uttering the German words, attempting defiance, he sounded weak and emotional.

“He was captured,” Steadman said. “He was in a prison camp.”

“In Russia, working in a labor camp for the mines,” Manfred said, “until the mid-fifties. Ten years after the war was over, the Russians released him. You know nothing of this. It was hard for us!”

“That wasn't the end,” Steadman said. “After he got sent home he couldn't adjust.”

Manfred said, “You don't know me! How can you know this?”

Now, with Manfred's clamor, the whole room was watching.

“And he killed himself,” Steadman said.

“Why are you bringing this up? Can't you see he's upset?” Sabra said. “We were supposed to be having a drink for our
despedida
.”

“You asked for the truth,” Steadman said. “Manfred hates his father. He hates all fathers. He hates all authority.”

“And that doesn't matter either.”

“His hatred has made him contemptuous. He hates you all. He is positively subversive.”

Manfred stared at Steadman with glistening eyes and sour insolence as the others waited for more.

“He's a thief.”

“This is a lie,” Manfred said. “I am important in my country. I know the biggest scientists. I am a writer on drugs and ethnobotany. I am a journalist in the States. Americans know my name.”

Steadman ignored him and said calmly, “Those thefts you attributed to the Indians in the village and the people in the hotel. Your binoculars, your knife, your traveler's checks—that was Manfred. He stole something from each of us.”

Janey said, “Is this true, Manfred?”

“Is a lie.”

But just that denial and the way he swallowed and sulked seemed the clearest proof of his guilt.

“I'm not missing anything,” Sabra said.

“He knows your Social Security number,” Steadman said.

He surprised himself with his own fluency, for he said these things without being aware of knowing them. And time was irrelevant, for nothing was hidden and he seemed to have access to the past in perfect recall. He knew everything that he had seen, and beneath each surface, as though in a state of controlled ecstasy—Sabra fussing in her wallet and Manfred staring hard at her clump of cards, the Social Security card on top, giving her full name and number.

“He memorized your numbers. He has one of your American Express card numbers too, but there's a credit limit,” Steadman said. “He has all your details. He can do a lot with them. Ever hear of identity theft? He can open an account in your name. He can access more of your information on the Internet. He can get a lot of money out of you long before you realize it. That's why he's leaving tomorrow. By the time you get back to the States, your cards will be maxed out.”

The room was silent except for the coarse scraping sound of Manfred's breathing through his nose.

“I'm going to ask the hotel to go through his room,” Hack said. “If they find my knife and Janey's binoculars, I'm calling the police.”

“Go ahead, look,” Manfred said, with energy the others took to be bluff. But he stood up and seemed to be edging toward the door, as if to prevent anyone from leaving.

“You look worried, Herr Mephistos,” Wood said.

Hack said to Steadman in a slurry drunken way, matey, slightly cockeyed, “I don't know how you knew this, but if you can prove any of it, there's something in it for you.”

Steadman said, “Maybe it's better not to look for the things that Manfred stole. I mean, what he said is true—he has quite a lot of influence.”

“He's a thief. You said so.”

“You're a thief, too,” Steadman said.

Ava said, “Darling, please,” as Hack bristled, stepping back, looking as though he were about to take a swing at Steadman, who was still seated impassively in an armchair. He stared straight ahead, looking through Hack's face.

“You've been sleeping with Sabra,” Steadman said.

Sabra gasped and stood up and denied it. Wood went close to her and said, “Beetle?”

Janey started to cry, saying, “I knew it!”

Hack made a dive for Steadman, but was body-checked by Manfred, who simply stepped into his path and tipped the lunging man aside.
With this new revelation, Manfred was attentive to Steadman, who seemed to know everything.

“It's probably been going on for years,” Steadman said. “For all the time you people have been taking trips together. Maybe it's the reason you've been taking the trips.”

“Get this guy out of here before I fucking kill him,” Hack said.

Wood said, “If there's any truth in this, Hack, I'll take you apart.”

“What a muggins I've been,” Janey said, sobbing.

Hack said, “Can't you see he's trying to start trouble?”

“But you're a cheat too,” Steadman said to Wood. “You told me about your business, but your figures don't add up. That can only mean that when you paid off all your partners you were cooking the books so you could sell the company for an inflated price. That's just one instance. You are incapable of telling the truth. Every time you say a number, it's false. That book you claimed you wrote was written by some students you hired and ripped off.”

“Bullshit,” Wood said.

“All you've ever done is screw people and play with a stacked deck,” Steadman said. “So it's kind of appropriate that your wife is a liar too.” Sabra said, “No, Wood, it's not true. Don't believe him.”

But her protests were drowned out by Janey, who had slumped to a sitting position on the floor and was sobbing loudly like a big sorrowing child.

“This is the saddest one of all,” Steadman said, still facing forward, speaking in a confident monotone. “Poor little Londoner, lost in America. She's having a nervous breakdown and doesn't even know it. Her husband is fucking her best friend. Both of them are lying to her. She thinks she's going crazy.”

Janey was murmuring “No, no, no.” Wood was glaring at Hack. Sabra's eyes were blazing. Manfred was smiling at the confusion, looking vindicated, and he loomed over Steadman like a protector.

Hack said to Ava, “If you don't get your boyfriend out of here I will fucking destroy him.”

After all these revelations, spoken with assurance, Steadman rose to go and staggered slightly. Now grasping absently for something to help steady him, he seemed uncertain. He groped forward, seeing a different room, and then hearing Ava—“This way,” she said—he stumbled and fell.

“What's with him?”

“He's blind,” Manfred said, almost in triumph, as though Steadman belonged to him. “He can see nossing.”

Sabra looked at Steadman with wonderment, searching his eyes. She moved her hand back and forth before his face. Steadman did not blink. “I was right,” she said in a hollow voice. “He doesn't know anything.”

Ava went to him and helped him up. Steadman whispered with feeling, “I can't live without you.”

He had never needed her more. He felt woeful, as though lost on a muddy star.

S
TEADMAN ASKED,
“What's that?”in a different tone, slipping into a small suspicious murmur and sucking air. He had interrupted himself in another voice, lost his fluency. His whole face went hot. He was reminded of his blindness only at times like this—the moment of intrusion by an unknown visitor, a dark noise, a sudden shadow he knew to be human.

You're in full flow, the most intimate description, your last word “lingerie,” and now there's a distant glimmering, the gulp of a quickening pulse, the chew-grind of trodden gravel, pebbles masticated by advancing footsoles. Until then it had been an average afternoon in his many-gabled house, on his estate up-island on Martha's Vineyard. He was lying on the sofa with his back to Ava, dictating his novel—drugged, blinded. Then he heard the stranger's heartbeat.

His voice was sharp: “The back door. It sounds like someone. A woman.”

“I don't hear anything.”

“She hasn't knocked yet. Go look.”

Narrating a sexually candid episode, he was unusually self-conscious; he had heard the sounds and felt like exposed prey. He lifted his head into the silence and moved like a listening animal, adjusting his body, tuned to danger, his alertness stiffening his neck, the whole room droning in his ears. He sensed that something was wrong. Anything unexpected here was like a threat to him.

“It's nothing,” Ava said. She did not glance up—his back was still turned to her anyway. He preferred this paranoiac posture, especially in the more sensual episodes. Even so, he could feel the warmth of her body when she was near him, as she was now, waiting, glowing, radiating body heat.

Ava reversed the tape to play the last of Steadman's dictation, where he had broken off:
All he could think of was the woman waiting for him after the meal, the lingerie
—

Still poised upright, startled, animal-like, gone rigid in attention, listening as though in a green clearing, he seemed to see the shrouded head, the suggestion of a uniform, the reaching hands, the broken fingernails of a meddler. The staring eyes, the big heavy feet. Only such a heedless intruder would make those sounds. Someone who did not belong always announced the fact in clumsy noises, or in the glare of meaningless silences. Even without knowing who owned it, strangers were often attracted to the big Gothic island house set in a meadow behind high stone walls, its cupola taller than its oldest oaks; but all strangers were unwelcome here.

Then there came a loud knock, insistent knuckles on wood.

“I said, go look.” His voice was breathless, his jaw set in aggression. He hardly paused before he added, “Doctor.”