Blinding Light (45 page)

“Give me a hint.”

“Tell me what it's about.”

“The physical side of the act of creation.”

“Yes?”

“The origin of art.”

“Be a little more specific.”

“Look, it's about itself.”

He said it was more a book about transgression and trespassing than
Trespassing
had been; it was all interior travel. He did not say that datura was the means, its name like an elegant, darting vehicle that had taken him the whole distance, there and back.

In the days that followed, Ava sulked, stung by his insistence on going to the White House dinner blind, showing up impaired in public as the president's guest, someone who would be photographed and written about. When he talked Ava stepped away to give him room, for he seemed to crowd her, to look past her, as though he were haranguing a multitude of people, the wider world, speaking more expansively, like a man starring in his own movie. He appeared to be aware that a public process was at work on the Vineyard, a marveling at him for his prescience, the murmuring witnesses to his renewed fame, the triumphant second act of his life, more dramatic, more visible and original, than the first.

He imagined his face on his book jacket: eyes opaque with the drug and yet shocking, with a wounded corrosive stare on which nothing was lost, for this new book was like the oldest book in the world, a confession that was prophecy and revelation.

He had dreamed of writing such a book. He had yearned to create it but had been baffled and tentative, not knowing how to begin. The book he had envisioned was calculated to eliminate the possibility of any biography of him, to make the notion of a biographer a joke. A parasite, a hanger-on, an outsider, an intruder, a stammering explainer with his nose against a smeared windowpane, staring into thick curtains—who needed such a person? For someone who wrote the truth exhaustively, setting everything down without any inhibition, making the ultimate confession, a biography was superfluous. Why would anyone bother? There would be nothing to write, nothing new, nothing of value. So with the book he called his novel, he had taken over the work of all the prospective biographers.

“I've put them out of business,” he said loudly, as though to the world.

Axelrod said, “We can get it into the catalogue now. If you deliver the manuscript on a disk before the end of the month, we can publish in the spring. Shall we say it's travel?”

“It's travel, it's autobiography, it's everything. Most of all it's fiction.”

“Hell of a title.”

As for the paragraph for the catalogue the editor asked for, Steadman said, “How much better
not
to have one.” And when the editor seemed doubtful, Steadman said, “Just the title.”

There was general approval for the two-thousand-year-old title,
The Book of Revelation.

In a damp and breezy October of slapped-down waves in the harbor and discoloring and withering leaves up-island, the Vineyard had almost emptied of visitors and was returned again to its year-rounders. After his months of steady work it seemed odd to Steadman to be here with so little to do except process his manuscript. In the course of almost a year of dictation—they had returned from Ecuador the previous November—a woman with a secretarial service in Edgartown had transcribed the tapes he had made with Ava. The woman had said she was unshockable. “As the mother of three boys and a girl, with a husband in the Coast Guard, I've seen just about everything.” At first she sent the pages using a courier service. Then, perhaps to save money, she delivered the printed pages in person. She had kept pace with the dictation, the tapes and notes, and not long after Steadman finished, she handed him the remainder of the first draft of the novel, with the tightlipped smile of someone tested to the limit, as though holding back her disapproval.

The book was complete, needing only line corrections and slight revision. Having the whole book before him was a pleasure. But he worked without the drug. How plain the printed words seemed compared to the stipple of brilliant pixels in his drug visions.

He dabbed at errors, rubbing highlights into words and phrases, deleting preciousness (“frenzied and oculate waves” became “wild eye-spotted swells”; he crossed out the words “numinous,” “ineffable,” and “chiastic”). Now that his days were relieved only by his trifling with the manuscript, he found himself disoriented. He was glad to be free of the anxiety of the guilty lopsided life of a writer with an unfinished book, but he missed the day-filling routine of dictation, the drama of his sexual nights, the anticipation of taking the drug each morning. The music had stopped, the racket in his head was gone, the house was whole but predictable, colorless, no longer hallucinatory. One day was like another, the empty hours of silent mornings and much too long afternoons and dreamless nights that had no objective, not even the promise of Ava. She was always tired: her work, her life, was elsewhere. He was reminded of his life before Ecuador, when he'd had nothing to do, nothing to write; when he had felt cynical and impotent. He was not impotent now, yet he felt his desire slackening, the old disobedience that was like a deafness of the flesh.

He found he could not read easily; habituated to glowing shapes and colors, his eyes were unaccustomed to the severity of small print. The letters jumped and rearranged themselves as he blinked, making him feel dyslexic. So he put on earphones and listened to audiotapes. The glimpse of Blind Pew on the television that morning had stirred his interest. In his present mood of impatience he had a boxed set of tapes, Stevenson classics, sent to him in a taxi from Vineyard Haven. He shut out the world by clamping Stevenson to his ears. Some passages he marveled at, but the best of them saddened him with their exactitude and made him feel lonely. He had often felt this when he was affected by the truth in fiction.

He missed his datura, he missed its pleasures, he missed its benign guidance, the way it had helped him in new directions; he missed the way it had led him upward to a vantage point where he saw himself so clearly he could concentrate on his wholeness, like a man in front of a mirror sketching his self-portrait. He missed the complexities of color, the way one color appeared as separated layers, like leaves of innocent light given meaning when they were arrayed together. The drug had given him access, and now he was just a man on the outside.

The drug had allowed him to range widely in time and space, to peel experience from his body and mind, and now without it he was smaller and shallower, with an obscure sense of loss, like someone so stunned by the death of a loved one, he suffered all the more from the trauma because—so deranged by the loss—he could not recall the loved one's name or face. Under the spell of the drug, the future that had once been full of suggestion and promise was now unreadable. The past was distant and inaccessible. He was a small figure on the parapet of the present, feeling very little except the obvious and violent compulsion to jump.

He was sighted now, returned to the gray daylight and misleading surfaces of the visible world.

With nothing to keep her at home, and as if atoning for all the time she had taken off, Ava worked long hours, odd hours, spending arduous days at the hospital. She was like a missionary doctor on a remote Third World island, where everyone expected favors, every patient was hopeless and desperate, every case an emergency, and failure was common. Ava knew all the Vineyard families. “I have to do it. If I didn't, who would?” The sort of thing Steadman had seen in places like New Guinea and Haiti. Sometimes Ava worked twenty-four hours without sleep; she was often on call all night.

Cursing the pager, dreading the phone, the three a.m. emergencies, the midnight births, Steadman was reminded of the early days of their love affair. He had forgotten that she had a life of her own.

“This is normal,” she said when he complained. “Look, we were writing all day and fucking all night.”

“What's wrong with that?”

“It's nice, but let's say it's less usual,” she said. “I'm a doctor. I think the difficulties of doctoring made me a reckless lover. But now I'm back to work. Get used to it.”

She stopped using makeup. Her choice of clothes, even when she was not at the hospital, seemed clinical, even dowdy. Usually she wore green scrubs around the house.

“You got what you wanted,” she said. “Your book.”

“It wasn't only that.”

“Okay. You got your reputation back. Your manhood.”

But he resisted simplifying it. He said, “Are you going to make it all my trip and deny that there was some pleasure in it for you?”

“It was like a year of insanity. Yes, I found it exciting, but I am so glad it's over.”

He stared at her, and seeing she was unmoved, he said, “Don't you see what's beginning?”

“I can do without excitements. We have enough of those at the hospital.” She saw that he was still staring defiantly at her. “People die there. They give birth. They come in with bone splinters sticking out of their flesh. You should see a motorcycle victim sometime. These people are scared, they're in pain. Some of them do nothing but cry. And we have a psychiatric unit, too, you know. They need me more than you do.”

He turned his back on her. He said, “It's like you've forgotten everything we did those days.”

“When I start to miss it I'll read your book.”

He wondered if he would ever feel as lost again as he had before he met her, but he told himself no, he had his book, he had no fear of solitude. Blindness was the ultimate in solitude, yet blindness had made him bold and filled him with courage.

“Listen to this,” he said one day, on her return from work. He read from a sheet of paper, a rare example of his handwriting. “After I drank, the most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably new and, from its very novelty, incredibly sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a millrace in my fancy, a solution to the bonds of obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul—”

“How can you write that arrogant shit?” she said, interrupting him, and when he began to laugh at her, she hissed at him.

“I didn't write it,” he said slyly. “A doctor wrote that.”

“Some quack,” she said.

“Dr. Jekyll,” he said. “He would have agreed with you!”

Without telling Ava—he wanted her to feel neglectful—he admitted to himself that his life was still full. He would have objected more loudly to being left on his own except that around the time Ava had returned to the hospital he began again to be in demand. He started to receive messages from intermediaries—Axelrod, the publisher's publicity department, helpful friends—telling him there were people who wanted to meet him. He got calls nearly every day—people tipped off that he was writing again, that the author of
Trespassing
had a new book.

One of the requests came from the television show
60 Minutes.
Would Steadman agree to an interview? He guessed how this had come about: Mike and Mary Wallace had been at Wolfbein's most recent party. The hook would be: famous recluse, stricken blind, produces a new book in his enforced darkness. The title of the segment would be something like “Edge of Night.”

Axelrod had relayed the message. “They want to follow you around at home on the Vineyard and do an in-depth interview.”

Other messages, nearly all from TV shows and photographers, implored him to return their calls to discuss what they might do together. There was no ambiguity in the requests: he was to be seen close up by a camera, to be observed at work and at home—they put it in a kindly way. He was at first flattered but easily saw the renewed interest as intrusive journalism, the voyeuristic wish to film him walking into walls, stumbling, and perhaps falling on his face in picturesque Vineyard settings. Steadman knew that they wanted to see his sideways gait, his faltering gestures, his groping fingers, his big blank face and swiveling head. Great TV, they were thinking—and what a surprise they would get when they saw that he walked headlong with a strut and a slashing cane, with well-aimed gestures and an animated gaze.

“Out of the question,” he told Axelrod.

Someone from the
New York Times
called to schedule “At Home with Slade Steadman,” and again he suspected an eagerness to see him bumping his head and knocking things to the floor, crumbs on his shirt, mismatched socks.
People
magazine suggested something similar, but insisted on an exclusive. The
Boston Globe
reminded him that he was a native son, but it was the travel editor who called. Would Steadman consider an interview on the sailing ship
Shenandoah
? Freelance photographers asked for sittings and portraits. There was no letup. And when the book was announced in the publisher's catalogue the number of requests multiplied. Bookstores urged him to visit, universities asked him to speak, and would he please be the keynote speaker at a seminar on travel writing “for seniors with disabilities”?

In almost every inquiry there was an allusion to his blindness: offers of assistance, a limo, a ticket, an escort, “anything we can do to make this as painless as possible for you.” “We have many visually impaired students in our institution,” one letter said. “I did Borges,” one photographer claimed, adding, “I'd show you the contact sheets, but I guess you'll have to take my word for it.” Subtler suggestions patronized him: “Lots of people ought to have the chance to share your story.” And one of the universities, offering a large fee and promising a good audience, wrote, “We have a full range of handicapped access.”