Blinding Light (54 page)

H
E WAS SHAKEN
out of the soup of an obscure dream of interrogation by the ringing phone—a man's overbright voice saying “Hi” and nothing else, one of those needling people who do not identify themselves, but instead make you guess, as though to unsettle you or test your friendship. Who at this hour was so alert for this sort of teasing? But Steadman was certain—still limp with sleep, even as his unpleasant dream faded—it was Jerry, the escort from yesterday, saying in a more tentative way, “Are you there?”

“Right here.”

“What train do you want to catch?” He seemed chastened by Steadman's abruptness. “I can meet you anytime.”

“Don't bother. I'll take a cab to the station.” And Steadman hung up before Jerry could reply. He was still annoyed by “They ask really great questions,” implying that—blind, standing in front of the bookstore crowd, speaking without notes for a full hour—Steadman had made no impression. All that Jerry could commend was the brilliance of the audience. But it was a strategy, his belittling, like not giving his name on the phone.

Steadman's indignation was twofold. I am a writer, he thought, and I am blind. Bastard!

He had to put the phone down to concentrate. It was bad enough to be woken by an idiot call, but, much worse, he was not sure at that moment whether he was blind or sighted. In his confusion his mind was scoured of all thought. He sat up in bed stupefied. Feeling vulnerable, his memory impaired, he felt an animal compulsion to flee the hotel and the city.

He needed to leave, to return to New York; needed people to observe him in order that he could function. He felt lost when he was alone and blind, but the physicality of other people, their glances and gestures, the way they breathed and swallowed, all their human responses, their smells, their skin, their very nerves, helped guide him on his way.

He needed friends, Ava especially, a woman whose intelligence would match his, whose eager flesh was like a torch to bring the foreground into focus and make the wider world visible. That was nothing new; he had always wanted a woman near, someone to challenge him, to comfort him, a sexual friend, a listener, the ideal companion Ava had been throughout the writing of his book. The paradox was that while he had loved her for her independence, he had also wanted to possess her, so they could be sexual, wise and foolish together. He loved her for being so reckless and so bright, for often being the aggressor, for lighting his way, for her risks and her dares. Even now, though she seemed out of sympathy, she was necessary to him.

Alone, he saw the future as a grainy monochrome of days, indistinct and worrisome. He wanted color and perspective, the stabilizing echoes of human voices. He needed to be witnessed. This he realized anew as he moved through his hotel room, gathering his clothes and filling his bag. The young woman's perfume clung to the sofa where she had sat and read to him from his book.

He finished shaving and was about to take a measure of the drug when, mixing it in a glass of water, he faltered and batted the air and put the glass down untasted. He was already blind. He felt for the mirror, fingertips on the glass, saw nothing, felt nothing, except the hot lights framing the mirror on his face. I'm losing it, he thought.

Often he had gone to bed blind, but when had he ever woken blind? The effects of the drug had always worn off while he slept. Now his heavy eyes made him clumsier as he stuffed his suitcase. And at last he went back to the bathroom and drank the drug hurriedly, splashing his chin. And he stood, unsteady, as if he had swallowed a syrup of light.
The warmth spread from his stomach and whipped through his blood until the nerves throbbed behind his eyes and crackled, a phosphorescence that was electric.

Downstairs, in a suit like a school uniform saturated with the woolly smell of cigarette smoke, the bellman approached on big flapping feet to take his bag. The man was black and broad-shouldered, and the bag was insubstantial in his hand as he swung it into the taxi, holding the door open.

“You going to be all right?”

The man pitied him with a helpless, burdening concern, easing him into the taxi as Steadman studied him, summing him up as someone poor and unappreciated, living on his own but with children somewhere, who were kept away from him. Having to be at work at five a.m., he was already weary. His uniform was fairly new but his shoes were worn, the leather crushed, with thin soles. The man coughed, covering his wide scraped-looking face and his bruised lips. His lungs were spongy and rotten.

The taxi driver said, “How'd it happen?”

Strangers swept in, querying, seizing on his blindness like predators spotting a weakness.

“Long story.”

“You think you got problems? Check out the president. That man is breathing hard.”

“What's the latest?”

“Talking 'bout 'peachment.”

The president's woes, the scandal, the repeated denials and counterattacks, were on the radio in Steadman's earphones all the way to New York. As he listened, he saw the president's pink sheepish face and blue uncertain eyes, the bags of sleeplessness under them, as naked as a man's features could be, as blank and pathetic and symmetrical as a target. He looked fragile and insulted and ashamed. He was everywhere on TV screens with the sound turned down, mouthing words and looking like a cornered man trying to persuade a gunman not to shoot. A man could not look more powerless, more hunted, more like prey, more bullied.

Steadman removed his headphones, and as though recognizing a decisive gesture, the woman sitting next to him on the train inclined her head and spoke in a gentle voice. “Going home?”

“No.”

“Not a New Yorker?”

“Just visiting.”

“I could show you around,” she said with conviction.

He wanted to surrender to her, to hold her; there was such a purr of protection in her voice.

“Where might you be staying?” she said.

She seemed as she spoke to invite him onto her lap, and in his mood of self-pity he was prepared to call her bluff and crawl beneath her arms, to lie there squashed under her breasts and allow himself to be suckled.

Instead of replying to her, he lifted his head and stared in her direction and watched her dissolve, become a pale flesh tone and an odor of crushed flowers. And just as quickly she bulked up again into the fattened reality of a broad-faced woman with a sack-like body and thick thighs, a rumpled dress, and puffy sorrowful eyes behind old-fashioned purple-rimmed glasses.

I am not blind, he thought. Could she tell?

Fading, narrowing, as though liquefying, she became a small anxious girl again. She was inquisitive and sexual, and he was aroused once more. But who was that woman he had just seen?

“My uncle was blind,” she said. “He had a kind of carapace. That's not a good thing. I reached out to him. But he wouldn't come out of his shell.”

The imagery he found sad and exact, and concentrating hard and leaning toward her, he realized she had gone. They had arrived at Penn Station. She had given up on him and left without saying goodbye.

He thought again, I'm losing it.

New York, its sallow shadowy light, the blatting of its cascading car horns, its rushing people, lay at the top of the escalator. He rose on the steps, his bag at his feet, into the steep indifferent city, the dirty bricks, the flat-faced buildings, the surly windows, the fleeing pedestrians, the toxic air. Someone nearby, a young stupid man, was swearing loudly in a foreign accent, vile disgusting words, spreading hostility like foulsmelling fumes. No one reacted.

In the taxi on the way to his hotel, Steadman reduced the city to its separate components, the scorched oil stink of exhaust, the noise of engines, the dense and unforgiving flow of traffic, the unintelligible voices as of an asylum turned inside out—all that and the radiance of its limitless sky. The city was never dark, never silent.

But his hotel was quiet enough. He was welcomed back by the staff as though cherished, the pet blind man, like the beloved cripple on whom all friendliness was bestowed by sentimental strangers. They exaggerated their attention because it seemed they could not imagine how, unless they made a fuss over him, he would possibly remember them.

Instead of calling Ava, he called Axelrod.

“You still have Boston and Philly,” he said. “And there's that party tonight.”

The party was news to him. He asked for details.

“It's in a private room at Waldo's Grill. I'll meet you at the hotel at six. We've invited media.”

Dreading it, he drugged himself, and the event was every bit as awful as he had feared, a hot overcrowded room above an overcrowded restaurant. The downstairs howl of diners reached the private room on the second floor and filled it with stinging sound. Steadman was introduced to the guests, who snatched at his free hand. He knew them from their hands and their voices.

One said, “I loved your book. They say you have a sixth sense. Tell me something.”

The man's hand was clammy, unwashed, scummy with the city, impatient, insincere.

“I wouldn't want to presume,” Steadman said.

“Go ahead.”

“You're agitated. You have a lot on your mind that is all trivia. You are looking for a quote from me. You didn't read my book.”

The man let go, shook Steadman's hand free, and said, “That's like an all-purpose answer, right?”

“Take my hand,” a woman said, bumping other people aside.

In a sudden glimpse that was soaked with dirty light, Steadman's sight returned just as she clutched his hand. He saw the room—the guests drinking and taking food from trays, the cluster of people around him waiting to speak, all of them looking hungry and eager. He was confused by the faces, the reaching, the jostling. He was embarrassed and defensive, as though he were gazing through a one-way mirror. They had no idea he was looking at them. He couldn't help it, and worse, he hated seeing them. These flashes of sight were like awful glimpses into his own past, like his mind coming alive to offer the vividness of shame and remorse he thought he had forgotten, visions like bad memories.

The woman seized his fingers. He saw her clearly, he saw everything. The flood of faces brimmed in the room, putting it in shadow. He was overwhelmed by the sight of it, and then his blindness took hold again, a glittering curtain descending over his eyes.

“Are you all right?”

Had he betrayed his brief ability to see? It was terrible the way the drug had become so unreliable. He drank it these days and saw the sorry unresolved reality of daylight. Then he skipped a dose and without any warning he was blinded, as though there remained in his body an undissolved sediment of the drug, a residue that was stirred by his blood flow, taking away his sight.

But his blindness now was not the blindness that had revealed the innermost world that was also his past; it was an obstacle, a kind of ignorance, a puzzlement. These days—tonight, for example, in the stuffy room of guests and spectators—he felt weak and defenseless, a blunderer, trying not to wave his arms at the walls.

“Cindy Adams. The
Post.
I was hoping you'd tell my fortune.”

How could he tell her that he was no longer capable of the party trick of prescience? He turned away, and an insistent man at his elbow said, “Can we talk somewhere quiet?”

People still touched him all the time, and they talked too loudly, poking or pawing him on each word. The man persisted. Steadman sensed that he was being tugged into a corner, away from the bump and shriek of party guests.

Where it was quieter, Steadman could tell that the man beside him was calm and inquisitive, confidently moving him against a wall as Steadman prodded the floor with his stick, almost losing his balance as the man nudged him.

“I've got a few questions.”

“Yes?”

“I really did read your book, but I want to talk to you about your blindness. Like, do you feel it gives you an edge?”

Though the tone was neutral, the question seemed hostile, especially now, jammed against the wall, beset by strangers in the stuffy room. He had been thrust into the party and was expected to perform. He had not had a drink, his eyesight had flickered, dark to light and back again, from one world to the other, the simpler world of sight to the tortured one of this new version of his blindness that was unfamiliar and overwhelming. Not just beset by strangers. He felt he was among enemies: the sour air in the room, the mutters, told him this, but he knew no more.

Reaching as though to restore his balance, he was reminded of the toppling figure of Blind Pew in the cartoon, arms spread in a gesture of appeal:
Help me!

“No edge at all,” he said. “It's a struggle.” He sensed skepticism in the way the man exhaled. “Please excuse me.”

“Some guy has a Web site claiming that you've been taking a drug.”

The word “drug,” uttered for the first time by a stranger, filled Steadman with such dread he was too numb to show alarm.

“Maybe a performance-enhancing drug. Like I say, maybe to get an edge.”

Steadman said, “Do you think that anyone would choose to be blind?”

“Right. That's what I was wondering.”

Steadman had never felt blinder or less in control. He had swallowed a dose of the drug in the hotel room just before setting off for the party, and here he was, baffled, seeing nothing except when, in an occasional burst of ugly light, he had gotten a glimpse of the room and winced.

“I find that an insulting suggestion,” Steadman said, and felt for the wall.

“I'm sorry you think so,” the man said. “Hey, I was just asking.”

“Excuse me”—he recognized Axelrod's voice. “I was wondering where you were.”

“This man was accusing me of faking.”

“I didn't say you were faking. I was just trying to verify the rumors that you're on some kind of drug.”