Blinding Light (29 page)

Ava said, “Lobster salad and a glass of iced tea,” and when the waiter had gone, “Slade, I wish you would calm down.”

“I'm blind. I'm in another world from you. Maybe you shouldn't have come.”

She considered this. It was true that he had noticed things she had missed, but he seemed not to notice much that was obvious. He was especially sensitive to textures, odors, and voices.

“I hate it when people talk on cell phones in restaurants.”

After scanning the room, Ava finally located a man holding a cell phone to his ear at a far table; but she could not hear him.

“And those people in that booth are whispering about me.”

As soon as the oysters on the half shell were served, Steadman ran his fingers around the plate, counting the shells, and without hesitating selected the bottle of Tabasco sauce from the cluster of condiments and sauces at the side of the table. He shook drops on each oyster and then, squeezing a lemon wedge, passed it over the plate in a circular motion. His hands, held high, fussing a little, exaggerated the act, calling attention—and it was true, those women in the nearby booth (how did he know they were in a booth?) were whispering and commenting on Steadman's precise gestures.

“You're showing off,” Ava said.

“I'm in Boston.”

“I like you better at home.”

“Do you really?”

He could tell she was trying to humor him. She ate quickly and nervously, feeling observed, apprehensive because of Steadman's impulsive behavior. His blindness made him an extrovert, excited him, gave him a look of stealth and adroitness. He glided like an animal with night vision, even sniffed and held his head like a hypersensitive animal. Blindness sharpened his senses, but it also seemed to change his manner of walking and moving. He had a clear recollection of seeing a Secoya man emerge from the jungle on the banks of the Aguarico and thinking: I have never seen a man walk like that. Then, he had not been able to say what made the man's walk so unusual, but now he knew it was a gait of total alertness.

Hurrying from the cab to the restaurant, Steadman had had a similar skating walk, though his posture was straighter—his blind gestures were less tentative, more assertive and fluid, his gaze steadier and more intense, his head angled to hear better, for his eyes were empty. He seemed to see with his face, his lips, the surface of his skin, his fingertips, receiving pulses from the air.

“I've never been to Boston as a blind man.”

He hated Ava's taunt—“showing off”—as though he needed to perform! He could see her so clearly now with his tongue, with his teeth, with his forehead, with his nose.

“The city's the same,” she said.

“It's different for me. I see more, so I'm responding differently. Why are you making me say this? I hate to explain things. It smells of building in progress—the stink of destruction, diesel oil and pulverized cement. All that and the discontent of tourists, the way they prowl, so uncertain. Most of them are lost. This restaurant, filled with strangers. It's disconcerting. Because I'm not lost.”

“We should have taken a later plane. Your appointment isn't until two.”

“I like having the spare time. You're in a different city from me at the moment,” he said. “You're sleepwalking.”

“See what I mean? Bullshit.”

“I am fully awake.”

“You're wired.”

“Because of all the talk. I hear too much. Blindness bothers bystanders. They want to help, they don't know how, they're worried I'll fall on my face. I heard someone say, ‘Look at that blind man, how fast he's walking.'”

“I think you were doing it on purpose.”

That was partly true, he knew, but he objected to the onlookers because they gaped without any comprehension; did not know enough, didn't see how clever he was. He wanted to be noticed, perhaps feared, or at least be seen as someone powerful. He felt deserving of praise, not pity; he saw more than any of them.

Ava said, “I think you're secretly enjoying yourself.”

“I went to school in this city,” he said. “Scollay Square and the Old Howard used to be right up the street. Burlesque, strip shows, Irish saloons. Two streets away from here at the market I remember horses and pushcarts and vegetable sellers. My father used to take me, not for local color but to buy fresh fish.” He moved his plate away. “Fresher than this.”

“You've got two oysters left.”

“Bad ones.”

“They look all right.”

“That's the trouble. But they're poison.” He turned aside, for the waiter had appeared with the dessert menu and he knew the man had heard his last words. He pointed to the plate and said, “They're dead. Give them a decent burial.”

After lunch, with an hour more to kill and Steadman still restless, inquisitive, needing to move, they crossed City Hall Plaza to Cambridge Street—“It's heartless. It's a cheat. It's a stage set”—and walked all the way to Charles. They passed the turnoff to the Mass. Eye and Ear Infirmary, threading their way among the taxis and ambulances and waiting people—some of the people looking damaged and newly mended, with bright white bandages taped over their eyes. Steadman hurried ahead of her.

“Where are you going?”

Saying nothing, making a show of his blind man's ability to move quickly, he picked up his pace, crossed the main road, kept walking, found the Fiedler Footbridge ramp with his cane. He moved swiftly on the arch, over Storrow Drive, toward the sound of splashing and a racket of eager screamy voices. Without hesitating, he made a shortcut across the lawn to the chainlink fence at the perimeter of the public swimming pool. He stood there, his arms high, his fingers hooked to the fence.

“I used to come here as a little kid, before we moved back to the Vineyard,” he said as Ava caught up and was next to him. He was gratified, feeling superior when he sensed Ava was out of breath.

The swimming pool was a confusion of caged-in shrieks and chattering laughter, the slap of bare feet running on the cement apron of the pool, the explosive plunges—the noise and water and youthful exuberance, high spirits amounting almost to frenzy—and amid the howling the occasional shrill tweet of the lifeguard's whistle, the smack and rap of the diving board stuttering on its chocks whenever anyone prepared to dive. In the heat and the sunshine and the full-throated screams, there was pushing and shoving—no serious swimmers, only jumpers and splashers, kids fooling.

“They excited me,” Steadman said, seeing the past, “all those skinny flat-chested girls in tight, too small bathing suits, with pruny fingers and blue lips, running and shrieking. I could see that they weren't afraid to take risks.”

A thin pale-legged girl exactly matching Steadman's description loudly dared a boy to push her off the edge of the pool.

“They were the nakedest girls I knew. I used to squeeze them and touch them underwater. When they laughed I knew they wanted me to fondle them. One of them reached into my bathing suit and touched me and I was in heaven. Her little fingers finding me in all that water.”

Still hanging on the fence, he smiled at the splashing and the howls, boys shouting like monkeys, girls' meaningless shrieks and joyous objections, the free-for-all.

Then Steadman's tone hardened, and in a flat urgent voice he said, “There's a kid in trouble. Over there. He's going under. You see him?”

At first Ava saw nothing but the mass of heads, the wet hair and beating arms in the pool, but one boy was saying nothing in the churning water, was not even struggling, just sinking at the deep end and—his mouth was open—giving a barely audible groan of surrender that was like a helpless and sorrowful farewell.

“Help him!” Steadman called out, in a demand so loud he silenced the cluster of boys and girls on the other side of the chainlink fence.

In the brief silence, the groan came again as a watery solemnity, a softer whisper of goodbye, and now Ava yelled, and when she caught the lifeguard's eye, she pointed toward the struggling swimmer.

The lifeguard threw off his baseball cap, vaulted from his high chair, and leaped behind the drowning boy. In the same movement he seized him and boosted him to the edge. The boy, all loose arms and legs, looking indignant and in shock, resisting the help in his bewilderment, began to choke and weep, miserably spewing water.

“We're done here,” Steadman said, and turned, hurrying ahead of Ava, tapping his stick toward the hospital.

P
EOPLE PUSHING CANES
and shuffling behind him, wearing eye patches and dark glasses, circulated in the hospital lobby, looking just like Steadman. But every one of them had a guide, moving slowly on the tucked-in arm of a spouse or nurse. “This way.” “Over here.” “Be careful.” They seemed so feeble that Steadman was determined to keep walking alone among them, ahead of Ava. And now Ava let him lead.

She was appalled and impressed, seeing how he moved with conviction, commanding the space in front of him by sweeping it with his cane and taking long strides, shouldering through the crowd, half of it aimless casualties. The blind and near-blind kept close to the walls, out of the way, and Steadman's only collision was with a fully sighted man laughing into a cell phone. Steadman spoke the word “asshole” and raised his elbows and walked on, ignoring the man's apologies.

They reported to the reception desk, summoned by a woman at a computer terminal. Ava took the folder of forms and began filling them out.

“He's here for his physical.”

“Are you family, ma'am?”

Ava kept writing, did not look up. She said, “You can call me Dr. Katsina.”

“Just take a seat,” the woman at the computer said when the completed papers were handed over.

The doctor kept them waiting. They sat in awkward, unwilling postures among magazines that were wrinkled and damp, having been picked through by so many anxious fingers. Hearing their names, people got slowly to their feet and entered small rooms to be examined. Steadman saw them as poor, weak, naked flesh, struggling to stay whole, flunking their tests, humiliated in their failure.

“I don't even know why I bothered to come here,” Steadman said. “I know what the verdict will be.”

“I wish I knew.”

“That's what I'm saying. They won't have the slightest idea.”

Saying this, he stood—he was being summoned by a stammering receptionist. He was aware of the voice a fraction of a second before Ava heard anything.

“Follow me, please,” the receptionist said. And to Ava: “If you don't mind waiting.”

Steadman was shown to a room where a woman wearing white was seated. She was the doctor. She was heavy, inert, her body as pale and dense as cheese, the swags of flesh on her slack arms squashed against her sides, her gaze fixed on a computer screen. Her smell of antiseptic and talc put Steadman in mind of plastic flowers, of disguise and decay. Her ankles were swollen, overflowing her shoes. A wall clock behind her was ticking, and the face of the clock resembled hers. He detected a sadness in her but, offended by her officious manner, rejected the thought.

She did not rise or look at Steadman when he entered. Instead, she leaned away from him and shifted her heaviness onto the hams of her thickened thighs. When she picked up a pencil and clipboard her body filled the tight white uniform, binding it. She seemed to him like a keeper in a madhouse, chosen for her bulk. She had a bully's body, and was probably a bit mad herself for her airless days in this sorry room, sitting in judgment on the sick. He disliked her for not greeting him—he a cripple, a blunderer, a blind man measuring his steps in the room with the tip of his cane.

Without engaging him in conversation, she watched his progress as he tapped with his stick and found a chair to sit in.

“When was your last complete physical?”

“Does it matter?”

“Lift your shirt for me,” she said, and he heard the squeak of her chair's casters, the tug of her crepe soles, as she rolled toward him with more orders, abbreviated ones: “Sleeves up. Mouth open. Lift your tongue.”

She took his blood pressure and temperature without commenting, but all the while she breathed through her nose with a rasp of the bristly hair inside her snout.

Scratching with her pencil, her plump hand chafing across the paper, she entered numbers as though carving them with the chisel of her pencil point.

“What sort of work do you do?”

He could hardly believe that the doctor, staring at his name, did not know this simple, well-known fact; that she was swollen and slow did not explain it. Everyone knew his name, which often annoyed him when someone recognized it and greeted him. In the past it had been like a mockery of him, for what he was not doing.

“I'm Slade Steadman.”

The pencil lead trembled against the paper, then began paring at the page like a knife point. No other sound came from the doctor except the bump of her bare forearm on her desktop, like the skid of raw meat, a fat rind of cold pork slapped onto a butcher's block.

As she began to write, and it sounded like an indictment, her scraping the paper with her pencil point, Steadman inwardly objected again: another doctor dominating him, behaving as pompously as a priestess, hinting that she had power over life and death, knew the diagnosis for all mortal ills, if not the cure, protective of the special language of illness, the code words of doom, a superstitious idiolect, a lingo that was all about fear and flesh. He was supine; there was no sympathy here.

He had come to believe that many doctors caused disease. Ava was a notable exception, yet he sometimes looked at her and thought, But you never know. He could rant on the subject of physician-assisted illness. Gnawing in secret like the canniest rats, worrying your confidence and good feeling with their arrogance and secrecy, doctors were at the bottom of it all. Steadman was certain that doctors brought healthy people down by uttering dire warnings and attaching the most grotesque meaning to the commonest and least harmful symptoms. “Your headache might be a brain tumor,” and “Your cough might be more serious than you think,” and “That skin blotch might be melanoma,” and “What you think is just bad eyesight is macular degeneration—you are going blind.” They were the bearers of fearsome news that made sick people sicker.