Blinding Light (49 page)

“Okay,” he said, lifting his empty hands and holding them as though to propitiate her. He wanted to say more but did not have the words to describe the fulfilled dream it had been for him: their living there, just the two of them; inhabiting the house, his fantasies, his book.

“I'm not going on your book tour,” she said.

“I can live with that.” And saying so, he decided that it was better if she didn't come along in that mood, dragging her grudge with her, a nagging presence, casting a gloomy shadow, as she had on the trip to Washington.

As though still negotiating, he said, “I'm almost out of the drug. Maybe a month or six weeks more.”

“Go ahead, then,” she said, “make an idiot of yourself, like him.”

The president was on TV, always shown before a crowd of delighted people. As he strode past a rope line, he leaned forward and hugged a grinning girl in a black beret—the fool embracing his fellatrix.

Ava shook her head, and he could tell from her upright posture, her hand, the twitch of her hair—not making eye contact, reflective, not looking for an answer or expecting to be contradicted—that she was in her clinical mode, delivering a medical opinion.

“God only knows what that stuff is doing to your nerves. But I can guess. Stressing the neurons. Toasting the ganglia. Burning out the synapses.”

With a slow, dull smile he said, “It's easier for me to talk to you after I've taken a dose.” He looked her full in the face; his eyes were glaucous and fish-like. “Because I can see what is really in your heart.”

She seemed puzzled, not by that assertion, he knew, but by her realization that she had been home for more than an hour and had only just noticed that he was drugged, saturated, blinded. She had been able to be passive and playful as his sex partner, but in her doctor's scrubs she hated surprises and especially hated being told things she didn't know.

She quickly recovered and said sharply, “So you insist on wearing a mask.”

“So what?”

“That makes you two different people. Yourself and your mask.”

“That's my problem. Or maybe my special gift.”

“Your problem,” she said. “The fear that you will be unmasked. The fear of all mask wearers.”

T
HE WIDER WORLD
that Steadman entered as a solitary blind man was deranged, inside out, constantly expanding with obvious conspirators, subtle freaks, and the mouth-breathing ectoplasm of strangers. Using her lunch break, Ava helped him at the checkin counter at the Vineyard airport. He clawed the air, as though trying to seize it and understand.

“Just one person traveling?”

The nibbling mouse-faced clerk, with chewed and bitten fingers, shiny boots, a sweaty bag at his feet, was the first of many people who seemed to Steadman grotesque approximations—worse, weirder than when he had been with Ava in D.C., perhaps the more phantasmal because he was alone.

Sensing his unease, Ava said, “You'll be fine.”

“I'm being met by an escort in each city.”

“Great,” Ava said, without any interest, her frowning face like bruised fruit. “Gotta go. I'm operating at two. Appendectomy.”

She was gone the next moment, the woman whose beauty he had adored, who had inspired his wildest sexual fantasies, scuttling away in scrubs and tennis shoes, a medic on the move—so long, Doc.

 

Steadman boarded the Boston flight and at once felt tossed into the funnel of his tour, toppling toward the black light, past the peripheral voices, just chatter. Most of what he heard was pointless—“They have their big meal at lunchtime”—but now and then the public emotion concentrated in the departure lounge was inexpressibly sad: “I watched him die,” and “Please don't do this to me,” and “I don't care if I ever see him again,” and “Ricky, did you remember to take your medication?”

He traveled as though in a foreign land where he was fluent in the language, a high-tech world of absurdities, inhabited largely by scowly sniffing furry-faced humanoids and now and then a bewitching woman trailing her odor of desire. Some people emitted a faint glow, others a ranker smell or a telling whisper. Nothing was as he had once known it. He was trespassing again. At Logan Airport he called Axelrod.

“Good news,” his editor reported. “We've almost sold out the first printing. We're going back to press. Everyone wants to interview you. How's it going?”

He couldn't say. The dream-like distortions thronging the departure gates were not hindrances, more like revelations. A huge-headed fishfaced boy whining for candy, his teeth much too big for his mouth. Tramping bulky men burdened with satchels stuffed with fakery. Yammering old women, like a chorus of withered simpering baboons. The man next to him farting in fear and impatience. Scaly hands on him and unhelpful halitotic breath. All the world he saw anew; he was charged with his drug.

“I love you.” That was a desperate clumsy man with sweat in his fists.

“I love you, too.” Innocent, afraid, trapped, gabbling, speaking just to fill the dead air, and plainly insincere.

He found it so easy to tell when people were lying. He was the center of attention with his dark glasses, his cane, his hat, his handsome shoulder bag. He winced at the people gaping at him.

“Look, Steve, the guy's blind. Go ahead, help him.”

“Get away from me.” He swept them aside with a swipe of his cane and kept them off, taking long strides as people scattered, making way for him.

Down a chilly ramp, an effeminate man at his side said, “Just a little bit farther, soldier, and let's watch our step,” the man's stinking fragrance like festering lilies and his hands pawing at Steadman's sleeve.

On the long flight to Seattle he was pampered by a monstrous male nanny who said, “Want me to feed you?” Steadman swore at him and sat and suffered the stagnant air. He then put on his earphones and listened to a Philip Glass tape, which lulled him to sleep. He could sense the other passengers' anxiety when he woke and groped forward to the toilet. The trip was an experience of jet howl, a racket of interruption and the passengers' squalid fear.

“Are you being met here?”

He hated the babysitter's tone. Already he was disgusted with bystanders' insincere solicitude. It all made him defiant, assertive in his singularity.

A hand on his arm as he reached the bottom of the escalator.

“Hi. I'm Pam Fowler, your escort.”

She was a slow skinny woman who had forgotten where she'd parked her car. They roamed the lot for ten minutes until she found it.

“Just saw your
Post-Intelligencer
review,” she said as she buckled herself in. “It wasn't very favorable. I had to look up the word ‘meretricious.' Did I say that right?”

She drove badly, muttering the whole time in a nasal way, blaming herself for her ineptness.

“But it's flying out of the stores. Elliott Bay reordered. They're expecting you tonight.”

He was due to read at the Elliott Bay store, though “read” was not the word. He would talk instead, something about blindness.

“Have you seen your schedule?”

“What is your name?”

“Pam.”

“I am blind, Pam. I have not seen the schedule.”

It was a low blow, but he was still smarting from “It wasn't very favorable.”

“I'm really sorry. I know that,” she said. “It's just that you don't seem blind.”

Turning to look at him, she took her eyes off the road. He could feel the car edging into the rumble strip, the washboard battering of the tires, the car's echo from the nearby guardrail.

“Watch out!”

She braked, she apologized, she was now more nervous and her driving deteriorated. As if to placate him, she attempted small talk.

“Rainier's out. Too bad you can't see it.”

“But I can,” he said.

The hotel was large, with rank carpets and dust in the air. He was shown to his room by an awkward grunting bellman, and then he lay on his bed and dozed in the buzzing room until he was summoned to the event at Elliott Bay.

Stepping inside the bookstore, he knew from the stifling interior—the air sucked thin—that the place was packed. The day was damp. Only overdressed people on rainy days smelled worse than used books. People stepped away from him as always, seeing his glasses and cane, giving him room, as though he were fragile, as though fearing to touch him and topple him. One frightened pair of hands fumbled with his arm, trying to guide him.

“Just point me in the right direction.”

Already he hated being touched by strangers.

“I'm not going to read to you,” he said, taking his place at the raised table. “Instead, I'll say a little about my condition. How unexpectedly I became blind. How what I thought would be a nightmare turned out to have its advantages. My book is not about blindness, but blindness helped me to imagine it and to write it.”

He searched the faces of the watching audience, and because he did not hesitate or look down at any notes, he seemed to alarm them when, with a kind of fierceness, he said, ‘“I have a way of always keeping my eyes shut, in order the more to concentrate the snugness of being in bed. Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if, darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences.' That is Ishmael, in
Moby Dick
.”

His speaking with his blind and staring head erect created an even greater silence and apprehension. He recited Sassoon:

 

Does it matter?—losing your sight?...
There's such splendid work for the blind;
And people will always be kind,
As you sit on the terrace remembering
And turning your face to the light.

 

The audience's concentration was intense and seemed almost to crackle with attention. That calmed him and helped him pause and remember what he had planned. Rather than draw conclusions from the Melville, he plunged on. He disparaged
King Lear
for what he said was its crude depiction of blindness. “‘Looking on darkness which the blind do see' is also wrong. Shakespeare is mistaken.” With the exception of the prophet Ahijah, the blind seer, the Bible is even more misleading on the subject of blindness—just a litany of ignorant threats and halftruths and false metaphors and the usual stumblers, Isaac, Samson, Eli, Zedekiah, Tobit, and the frantic and guilt-ridden taxman Saul. There was scriptural authority, he said, for making the case that God is blind.

“Darkness is the one thing I do not see,” he said. “Borges is right. The blind do not see black. The world is not dark to me. At its most indistinct it has a green glow, like the phosphorescence that is common in the densest rain forest. You see it on the narrow forking path, in the decay under the high canopy, exactly like an area in the Oriente province of Ecuador, where in fact I lost one form of sight and gained another.”

He quoted Milton and another poem by Sassoon. He had made mental notes. He was aware that he would be giving the same talk in all the cities on his tour, improving it, using the parts that worked, dropping the quotations that made the audiences restless.

Tonight, finishing with some lines from Borges's essay “On Blindness,” his thanking the audience was drowned out by loud hospitable applause that seemed to say: You are brave, you are brilliant, you are heroic.

He sat and made the semblance of a signature in the books opened to the title page. His picture was taken, he was stroked, people whispered their thanks to him; everyone said something.

“Should I read your book? I'm not too sure I'll like it.”

“My father loved your first book. He was such a bastard. He hit on my best friend and then he left my mom and the last we heard he was somewhere in Alaska.”

And one woman said in an urgent whisper, “I could take you home.” But he was driven to the hotel by Pam Fowler, and he lay in his room thinking, I like this.

The next morning she drove him to the airport for the flight to Portland. He was coddled again on the plane, but this time he did not protest. This was better than being at home. He did not feel nagged; he was well looked after, like a fragile adored child. When he got off the plane he called Ava. “I'm fine.” She seemed surprised that he was calling. She did not want to know more. She said she was busy at the hospital.

In Portland the woman escort, Julie, took him directly to a radio station. The interviewer announced himself as blind. For the first time on this trip Steadman was conscious of a pitiless scrutiny, not curiosity or fear but a piercing intelligence, like a beam of light turned on him.

“My wife read your book to me,” the blind interviewer said as he expertly worked the controls of the recorder. “I want to tell you that you write as only a blind man can—that's a compliment. Reality for us is hallucinatory. Sighted people don't know that. It's a different grammar, a different vocabulary, a different world. It's inside the world that sighted people see, but it's hidden from them.”

After that, the interview went well. The blind man asked about the book—he was to be the only interviewer to address the book. Everyone else asked Steadman about his blindness. They sat face to face, blank stare to blank stare, talking amiably. And when the interview was over Steadman felt he had passed a crucial test.

In the evening he gave his pep talk about blindness at Powell's Books, another large turnout, the close attention of eager and sympathetic readers, the sour smell of unsold books on shelves, the pleasant aroma of his own new book, like the tang of warm muffins, the new paper, the freshly cut pages, the clean slippery dust jacket, and now and then an old musty copy of
Trespassing
thrust before him for his signature.

“Hey, did you know you got kind of a crappy review in
Time
magazine?”