Blinding Light (66 page)

Feeling the wet sleeve tighten further, Steadman lowered his head. He steadied himself in the water with his free hand and gripped harder and let himself be tugged to the foot of the stairs.

“Easy,” Manfred said, and helped Steadman up, placing his hand on the rail.

He was soaked, trembling with fatigue and panic as if tumbled in a black barrel of water, and still in darkness. He groped on the stairs, pulling himself onward, aware that Manfred was bumping along beside him. He sobbed and laughed and said, “Thank you!”

At the top of the stairs he fell to his knees and breathed deeply. Out of the wind, away from the water, he was hot, as though he had crawled up the cliff into a different day. In that moment his blindness didn't matter. Nothing mattered except that he was alive.

Then he heard from a little distance, “Aren't you going to do anything, Officer?”

“Step away, sir. This man is in shock.”

Manfred said, “I take him home.” He guided Steadman to his car and helped him in. As soon as he shut the door, he wrapped Steadman in a blanket and said, “I would not let you drown but I like to see you in trouble. That was nice.”

Feeling tearful, Steadman did not reply.

“You thought I was your girlfriend throwing things at you. That is very funny.”

Steadman wondered why he had called her name. Perhaps an effect of “The Blind Man's Wife,” his belief that their love affair was over. He said, “I've been desperate. She found me a doctor—for my eyes. Nothing works.” He fell silent. “I've had a hard time.”

“Too much of cars on this island,” Manfred said, braking. Then the familiar cough and bark—he was amused. “You went to a doctor! Ha!” “A specialist.”

“Even more funny.”

“They've prescribed all sorts of medicine.”

“There is only one medicine.”

Driving, grunting at the traffic, Manfred spoke almost without thought, in the most literal way.

“You are unhappy. You are sick. You take medicine. But this is not the same. If someone gets sick because of a shaman, only a shaman can make it right. The way up is the way down. You don't know this? The medicine that makes you sick, the same medicine will cure you.”

“You think so?”

“This I know.”

“You could have told me in New York.”

“No. I thought your blindness was false.” He said, “I hear of it with datura but I never see it. Why you behave so bad?”

“It was different,” Steadman said. “I was blind but I had a kind of inward vision. I had perception. I could move. I was happy.”

“Yah?”

“Then I had no control. Everything went black.”

“With how much of the drug?”

“No drug. I had saturated myself, maybe destroyed some nerves.”

“Funny, I never hear about this before. But the shaman, he knows.”

“That man on the river?”

“Yah. Don Pablo—my friend. A healing shaman they call him.”

Manfred was making turns through the outskirts of Vineyard Haven, all the narrow one-way streets, cursing the other drivers as he spoke. Then he seemed to remember again.

“You went to a doctor!”

Steadman said, “Help me, Manfred. Take me there. I'll do anything you ask.”

“You must pay. And I want my job back. I want my good name back. I am not a thief. My father was a good man. You must help me.”

“Yes.”

“And I want your story.”

“My story is all I have.”

“That's why I want it. Your story must belong to me. You must belong to me.” He kept driving, straighter now on the up-island road. “Say yes and we will go.”

Steadman stared into the darkness. He said, “You want directions to my house?”

Manfred said, “You think I don't know the way?”

T
HERE WAS SO LITTLE
he could tell of the journey. Dark—so dark it was not travel at all. He saw nothing, he heard hardly anything, he was numb with despair. It was a stunned and fatal fall through a tube of air-softened space, like an endless burial, a vertical night drop into a narrow and bottomless hole. He had surrendered himself to Manfred and the trip, as though to be sacrificed. He was prodded by Manfred's ignorant fingers, and Manfred's meddling voice misled him. He was soaked in darkness, he was hardly human, just a hostage, dying in stages.

The passing scene was indecipherable, the dark places meant nothing but delays—the wait in Boston, the change of planes in Miami, the long flight to Quito. They offered nothing to remember. The blindfold mask he had once worn was now his own face.

Before he left the Vineyard, Ava had said, “Are you okay?”

Doing her duty, Ava was more efficient, because she was out of love. But her nurse-like kindness and unselfish attention mattered more to him than her exhausting passion. Her awkwardness was like the clumsy shame of atonement. As an invalid, he understood.

Terrible for her, he thought: the healer who can't help, sensing that she had failed him. He knew very little now, but one thing was certain—standing there trying to console him, she was not alone. Her new lover was with her and she was happy.

She had repeated her question.

“No,” he said. “Not okay at all.”

A whisper leaked through his mind, saying
Find the heart of the flower.

And with that he left with Manfred, a man he despised, to return to Ecuador to try to undo everything that had been done: to rid himself of the first journey, and the drug, and his story, seeking to be healed. The long slow trip unfolded in darkness. He forgot each thing as soon as it passed. Manfred never stopped saying “Money.” He was a noisy eater and he ate constantly, chewing, swallowing, smacking his jaws.

After they arrived in Quito, Steadman could not say if the trip had taken a day or a week, or whether it was true they had arrived. Manfreds gabbling was no proof of it. Steadman was still falling, but through thinner air, and he thought, All cities are dreadful in the dark. The hotel room was a tomb in which he lay mummified, waiting for Manfred's knock.

Another plane, a narrower seat, a bumpy landing. Manfred said “Lago,” and helped him down the stairs.

He was clasped by a big man, and then Nestor's voice: “Sorry.”

“It's all my fault.”

“That's good. You're humble. That will help.” Then he spoke to Manfred.
“Hola, Alemán
.”

Another night in a hotel room, this one stifling, Manfred next door watching soccer on television.

The boat trip nauseated him, the fumes from the chugging engine, the tipping seat, the empty reassurances of “Not far.”

“They believe the river is a snake,” Manfred said.

Nestor said, “You don't believe it?”

The moment he said that, Steadman felt the boat muscled from beneath by the coils of a snake.

Not long after that, on one reach of the river, they were spun in the outer eddy of a whirlpool. When they stopped circling and the gurgle of the eddy ceased in a softer bubbling, the engine stopped, too. Steadman heard the chatter of villagers, the quacking tribal welcome, the sterner voice of Nestor negotiating, speaking Secoya. The incomprehensible language in the darkness completed Steadman's sense of being nowhere.

That night he lay on the platform, Manfred not far off, first eating in his loud snaffling way and then snoring. When he woke Manfred was talking to Nestor, making demands. He was uneasy here, just another visitor, an ineffectual consultant among specialists.

How many days passed? Steadman asked himself, but couldn't say for sure. He woke, he napped, he had nothing to do. He did not need to know anything except that he was where he wanted to be. Here his sickness had a name. Hope here was a smell of vegetation and decay, the nagging of birds, the ripsawing of insects, the giggling of children, and most of all the muddy surge of the river snaking past, sucking at the hollows of the soft embankment; hope in the dusty stink of pollen, hope in the foul wood smoke, hope in the human odors of the village, hope in Manfred, the man he hated.

Cross-legged on the platform, he smelled what he could not see: the smoke, the river, the rotting forest. He was calm; as long as the shaman was not here, he had not failed. He knew why he was here. He belonged here.

Manfred was impatient. Something in the way he ate, in the very way the man breathed beside him, conveyed to Steadman that he was feeling helpless and upset. He asked, “Where is the
curandero?”

“The messenger has been sent. But Don Pablo is afraid, of course,” Nestor said. “He might not come.”

So it was Don Pablo who was to perform the healing.

“To make you well he must become ill. He was very sick once. That was how he became a
pajé.
A man can only have that power after he has been cured of a bad illness. It is the only way. The sick man becomes a healer. Maybe our friend here will be a healer.”

Steadman heard in Manfred's mutter an objection to this, not specific words but a sound that meant “It will never happen.”

Nestor said, “And you will have to drink poison.”

 

Don Pablo arrived that night. It was as though he had descended through the boughs of the forest canopy, settling slowly into the village like a spider on its thread. He had not announced himself, yet he created an atmosphere, a silence, like dense space around him. Steadman was aware of his presence, and he smelled him, an odor of vines, a sweetness of tobacco smoke. Don Pablo asked no questions. He mumbled in Secoya and took Steadman's hands in his own and pressed them.

The Secoya words meant nothing, but at his touch, Steadman began to cry.

In a tone of approval, Don Pablo said,
“Listo
"

Manfred woke Steadman early the next day. He had become like a keeper, inattentive and meddling, yet suspicious of others.

“Don't take food,” Manfred said. “Nothing to drink.”

Without saying so, Steadman knew it was the day.

“He says you are dead.”

Naked before this man, unable to object, Steadman understood this to be part of the process. He grew weaker in the heat as the hours passed, yet it was still light when he was led to the pavilion, Manfred on one side, Nestor on the other. From the way Manfred helped carry him, his grip on Steadman's arm, Steadman could tell that Manfred was proprietorial, the pressure of ownership in his grip.

Steadman's sightless eyes prickled with the sharpness of wood smoke. That his useless eyes could still smart with the sting of smoke he took as a hopeful sign.

“Daytime is better for a healing,” Nestor said.

“Because there are demons in the dark,” Manfred said.

“More
demons in the dark,” Nestor said. “There are demons all the time.”

Led like a prisoner to be slaughtered, shuffling flat-footed without his shoes, Steadman lost his fear of death. Don Pablo was right: he was already dead. This was the meaning of his illness, gone with everything else. Infection had emptied him of vitality.

Nestor said to Manfred, “You can go. I will stay with him.”

“I must stay,” Manfred said. “This is my story now.”

Steadman was lowered to a mat, and he lay listening to the preparation—rustlings, pourings, squeezings, the chuckle of liquid in clay jugs, the mutters of the Secoya, the children's whispers, their breathing. The afternoon sun heated his face. He heard murmuring, which could have been dismay or a prayer, and then the first of the chants.

“Don Pablo is drinking,” Nestor said. “He has found his stool.”

Steadman could hear Don Pablo scraping the stool nearer.

A cup was placed in Steadman's hands. He drank, he retched, he drank again. Altogether he took four cups. Then he lay on his back, lumps of earth or broken-off brush stumps poking against his spine. He was soaked with sweat, his cheeks flecked with vomit.

Groaning over him, Don Pablo hovered, puffing a cigar. He blew smoke in Steadman's eyes. He brushed them with a bundle of wilted leaves. All the while he continued groaning, a rhythmic chant low in his throat.

Feeling slight pressure on his eyes, Steadman lifted his arms and touched two smooth stones that Don Pablo had placed on his lids. His arms became very heavy as the drug took hold—the first stage he recognized from so many other times: the sound of rain drenching his mind; the trembling would be next, then the stars, the snakes, a milkiness in his vision, and finally his slipping free of his body and ascending to stare down at himself in trance-like concentration.

Don Pablo was anxious. He choked a little, he gagged and spat, and finally grew quiet. He placed his fist on one of Steadmans eyes, pressing the stone. Using his clenched fist as a pipe, he put his lips on it and began to suck air through it. Someone else, one of the acolytes or helpers, was singing like a novice monk in long organ notes of harmonious groans.

Sucking, spitting, Don Pablo began to work on Steadman's other eye. The drug had given Steadman a sense of being wadded in cotton. He was watching his mummification from the wooden rooftree of the pavilion, his stretched-out body like a smoked corpse, as though his soul had left it.

And it had. He was the soul observing the men tinkering with the shell of his being. Drunk with the drug and groaning in pain, the men led by Don Pablo were drooling over him.

Steadman sank deeper into a darkness suffused with green. He was underwater, enclosed by a snake, wrapped in its coils, being swept downstream. The pulsing of the snake's slippery entrails was like the suck and rush of a river.

With a stinging sense of being bitten, Steadman's whole body contorted, his muscles wrung like rags, his brain convulsed, until he was twisted small. With a mild sinking acceptance, he thought, I am dying. And his eyes were wet, not weeping but bleeding, wounded by the stones that had weighed on them.
I am dying, meester.