Blinding Light (30 page)

Or they told you nothing at all, treated you like a pickled specimen, a sample ailment, a case number. Then they squinted and scrutinized, frowned and scribbled, as this fat uncommunicative harridan was doing now. They were drug dealers with the dirtiest drugs, which cleared up some symptoms but gave you others: dizziness, nausea, insomnia, anxiety, impotence, skin rash, hair loss, depression, renal failure, the shakes, and you were incapacitated by these side effects, or died. A few doses of a vaguely named antipsychotic drug and you ended up palsied, with all the outward symptoms of Parkinson's disease. Check into a hospital to fix a painful rotator cuff and you picked up bacteria that triggered arthritis so crippling you couldn't get out of bed. Hospital air was soupy with germs. Shot-happy doctors made people ill, as this woman had already begun trying to do to Steadman, demoralizing him by ignoring him, by breathing hard, a kind of poisonous exhalation. But he knew better.

“What is your name?”

“Dr. Budberg,” she said in a panting breath, surprised by the sudden question, but not so startled that she forgot to give him her title.

He wanted to remind her that all ignorance needs a name. She was really no better than a Vineyard lout doing yard work, who smiled resentfully at words like “threadbare” and “profusion” and “extricate,” and was insulted when Steadman used them, saying with aggression, “I guess I'll have to write that down, Mr. Steadman.”

He said to Dr. Budberg, “I do the same work as Herr Grass and Dr. Canetti and Mr. Wolcott.” When she did not react, nor even raise her head, he added, “Señor García Márquez, Mr. White, Mr. Milosz, and Mrs. Gordimer.”

Her hesitation showed him he had rung no bells—her head still down, her pencil motionless, poised over the blank line headed
Occupation.

“They won the Nobel Prize for literature,” Steadman said, and wondered what she would say. She said nothing. “I haven't so far, but may I say you have a strange scotoma?”

She looked at him and—given her specialty, this seemed odd—blinked in confusion.

“Writer,” he said.

Just last week the president of the United States met me, he wanted to say. And: How is it that this exalted man knew my name and work, and you, arrogant lump that you are, did not?

Dr. Budberg was wearing what he took to be her game face. Doctors learned early how not to look fazed. She was proof of such scientific posturing, busying herself with an eye chart, shifting in her chair, rolling it on its casters as she skidded and stumped with her lisping crepe-soled infirmary shoes. She adjusted the viewing hood, and Steadman knew he was no more than a pair of goggling eyes attached to an insurance policy.

But in the studied scorn of her indifference, a bit too contrived, she lost her poise and knocked her pencil to the floor. Before she could retrieve it, Steadman stood and walked four steps and snatched it, played with it a little, fingered its lettering, made her wait for it, then handed it over and sat down again, all unhesitatingly and without using his cane.

“Put your head in here. Use the chin rest,” she said, fitting the metal viewer bracket onto his face and staring at his eyes.

“Can you read anything?”

“What do you want?”

“How about the top line?”

Steadman read the top line.

“Can you read the next line?”

Steadman read the smaller letters, the whole line.

“Can you see anything else?”

Without pausing, Steadman read four more lines.

“The last line you read isn't on the chart,” the doctor said, as though Steadman had uttered something fatuous.

“Move the chart up,” he said.

She did so, making the yellow projection of the lighted rectangle jump, and the newly exposed bottom line was the line he had recited.

“How did you know that?”

“Because I'm not reading it,” he said.

The heavy woman shunted her weight and became clumsy in her confusion, heavier-seeming, not liking what she heard, fussed by the illogic of it, snatching at the arms of her chair. She was still fussing, swinging the binocular mask of the viewer bracket away from his eyes.

“What do you see now?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“So you can't read anything?”

“I can read everything.” He kept his chin on the metal rest and stared straight ahead. “I've seen all those lines before. Why don't you people get new eye charts?”

She leaned and shone a light into his eyes and peered into his skull—the warmth of the light brushed his cornea like a feather. He could smell the doctor's sour body. She said nothing, but he could tell that she was disturbed. He was reminded of his first impression, how sadness penetrated her flesh and was eating at it from within.

“You're getting no response. My pupils are still dilated and you don't know why,” he said. His chin hard on the chin rest restricted him from easily opening his mouth and made his voice sound mocking and robotic, a tone he instantly became fond of and exploited. “No sign of trauma. You're bewildered.”

“I am not bewildered,” she said too loudly. “It could be neurological.” “You say ‘could be'—so you don't know.”

“Are you presently taking any medication?”

He said no, but warily, using the chin rest to disguise the unease in his voice.

Fixing and clamping his head again, the doctor swung a new arm out of the apparatus and leveled it, like a small pistol aimed at his right eye, and she fired a bullet of air into his cornea. She repeated it with his left eye.

“My pressure's normal,” Steadman said. “Why don't you tell me these things.”

She was briefly abashed and then she recovered and became formal again. She said, “This is a little unusual.”

“Are you suggesting I am a little blind?”

“I didn't say that.”

He could tell he was annoying her, and he was at last happy. He lifted his head from the hollow of the viewing stand and smiled at her.

“I am totally blind,” he said. “Now you know.”

His teasing made her obstinate. She said, “You read the chart perfectly.”

“No. I remembered it. I've had eye tests my whole life.”

The doctor became insistent. “You didn't see the chart? You saw darkness?”

“There is no darkness. Have you heard of a man named Shakespeare? A writer. I now know that his most inaccurate line is ‘Looking on darkness which the blind do see.' Black is the one color I can't see.”

“You can see colors?”

“I am like Jorge Luis Borges, who made that observation. A writer. He was blind. ‘I live in a world of colors,”' Steadman said, and still in his quoting tone, ‘“The world of the blind is not the night that you imagine.'”

“What sort of colors?” She was holding the pencil again in her stubby fingers.

He faced her and said, “Monkey-ass purple, clitoral pink, venous blue, nipple umber.”

But Dr. Budberg had turned away, her jaw set hard, swelling her jowls. She interrupted him, saying, “So you were unable to read the eye chart.”

“My reader's and writer's sight is gone,” Steadman said. “When something ends, something else begins. There are all sorts of vision, not all of them measurable.”

Working her legs and feet, the doctor rolled herself to her desk. She said, “You'll have to come back. We'll schedule a
PET
scan and an MRI. Make an appointment with the receptionist.”

“You didn't even know I'm stone blind,” Steadman said. He began to laugh, poking his face at her.

“This examination is over.”

“Now you know I'm blind, but you don't know why,” he said. “Why not admit it?”

She was insulted, he could tell. Doctors might be habitually hearty, but that was a distracting ruse to josh you; they refused to be teased themselves.

“I'm a medical miracle,” Steadman said.

“Really,” the doctor said in an uneasy murmur, hardly parting her lips.

“I see more than you do,” Steadman said. “Who knows more than a blind man?”

“Then why did you bother to come here?” she said. Her voice, intending insult, went shrill.

“Maybe for verification,” he said. “Maybe to give you some timely medical advice.”

She drew back from him. It was what strangers had been doing all this day in Boston, reacting to him, stifling their feelings, looking fearful, because they saw he was blind—the pilot, the flight attendant, the cabbie, the waiter at the Union Oyster House, people on the sidewalk and in the elevator. He went closer to the doctor, putting on his dark glasses, lifting his cane, looking fierce, like a swordsman.

“If you can't do anything to control your weight,” Steadman said, “how do you expect me to trust you with my precious eyes?”

That was too much for Dr. Budberg. She rose awkwardly, stumbling a little, snatching papers and folders from her desk. She hurried out of the examining room, leaving Steadman to find his own way to the door.

But now that she was gone he saw her clearly, as he had suspected at the outset, and was alarmed, for at the moment of the doctor's abrupt departure, when she was in motion, Steadman realized his error. Dr. Budberg was in mourning. He had been too severe with her. He had not understood. The way she walked, slightly lopsided, her head tucked into her shoulders, holding one arm crooked—her whole posture of grief—told him that she was miserable, bereaved, and he had hurt her a little more, made her sadder, kicked her. Feeling sorry for her didn't help. Someone close to her had died. Grieving had deprived her of sleep and made her inattentive and unintentionally remote and slow and officious.

“What did you say to piss her off?” Ava asked when Steadman entered the waiting room—and he knew that the doctor had preceded him.

Steadman wanted that twenty minutes back; with shame he recalled his rudeness. He went to the reception counter and handed in his file folder to a woman in a white smock sitting at a computer.

“Want to schedule an appointment?”

In a low voice, Steadman said, “Dr. Budberg—someone died in her family.”

“Daughter,” the woman said, narrowing her eyes, her face crumpling. “Terrible to lose a child.”

He did not want to know more than that. Details would only make him feel worse.

“What's wrong? You act like you got some bad news,” Ava said.

“I was a little hard on that doctor,” he said, touching the face of his watch. “We've got two hours before our flight. Let's find a cab.”

A taxi was waiting by the front entrance of the hospital. The driver got out to help but Steadman waved him away and snatched the door open.

The driver said, “Where to?”

“You know the Two O'Clock Lounge?”

“It's not called that anymore.”

“Does it matter?” He could tell that Ava was staring at him. He said, “I need something life-affirming.”

The place was called Pinky's, at the same address on Washington Street where the Two O'Clock Lounge had once been. Leaving the hot sidewalk, they entered the darkened doorway into a room of loud music that was cool and poorly lit and dirty, smelling of spilled beer. He sniffed again: naked flesh, two women dancing slowly on a mirrored floor, a pair of long-legged nudes, seeming to ignore the beckoning men.

“I hate places like this,” Ava said. “I'm a doctor. I don't need it.”

“You need it
because
you're a doctor.”

“Please not down front.”

But Steadman insisted, and she followed him through the darkness to the edge of the stage, where they sat holding hands among men in attitudes of intense concentration, almost worship. One woman, wholly naked, twirling in a slow dance in high heels, approached. She smiled at Ava, looking curious when she saw Steadman's dark glasses and white cane, so confident in his blindness, not seeing her and yet smiling.

“Now she's squatting,” he said.

“I see some pretty tortured labia. Some warts.”

“Please stop being a doctor.”

When Ava fell silent and he felt her fingers, warm and moving in his hand, he was aroused, sensing her sudden awkward interest.

She said, “I've never been in one of these places before.”

“Think of it as an examining room,” Steadman said. “Slip a five-dollar bill into her garter and you can give her a physical.”

She let go of his hand, groped in the shadow beneath her, and fished in her bag. He loved the furtiveness of her movement, tipping the naked dancer with a self-conscious gesture of concealment, woman to woman. He savored the silence as the other woman came near and squatted and opened her legs, and Ava said, “Such pretty girls, such beautiful bodies—what are they doing here? Is it that they have low self-esteem?”

“How is this different from a hospital?” Steadman said. “Look at the interns at work.”

The solemnity of the men whose heads rested between the knees of the naked women, the attentive way they studied what they saw, a complex pinkness, like a live blossom—yes, they could have been the most serious medical students.

“Or like boys playing doctor.”

“It's also like a temple,” Steadman said, and he explained: a bit of magic, some mirrors, ritual glimpses of the forbidden. “They're not weak—these women are in charge. They're priestesses. The men are helpless worshipers.”

That squatting woman, seeing Ava smile, had pursed her lips and made a kissing sound when Ava rewarded her with a folded and tucked-in five-dollar bill.

And then the kneeling woman leaned slightly and reached behind Ava and drew her head closer, placing it between her naked breasts. Ava laughed a little, then realizing she was caught, her mouth against the cleavage, she became flustered as the woman moved quickly from side to side, slapping Ava's face and cheeks with the weight of her loose breasts and laughing in triumph.