Paul Theroux - Blinding Light

“I’m taking you home.”

But he was struggling, saying, “Who’s with you? There’s someone else. Who is it?” Finally he allowed her to hold him, and when the door was kicked shut he began to cry.

FROM THE MOMENT he stepped off the clanking plates of the ferry ramp he was fearful. He stubbed his toe on the rim of the ramp’s steel lip and stumbled ashore, flapping his arms for balance, feeling foolish as he toppled forward. Fog had delayed the flight to Boston, so they missed their connection; Ava drove a rental car to Woods Hole, where they caught the Uncatena. And when he was on the island, tasting abandonment, he thought, with a castaway’s woe, What am I doing here?

There was something else on his mind, but it was unformed, a wordless worry, like a lowering cloud with a human smell. He was unable to work it out and frame it as a whole thought, because the Boston shuttle had so disoriented him. The fussing of flight attendants, the offers of a wheelchair, the unhelpful hands plucking at him, the puzzled fingers twitching on his arm, people jerking his sleeves, patting him in idiot attempts at consolation; the mutters of “Hang in there” and “Go for it, big guy” and “Right this way, sir”—the gauntlet of well-wishers every blind person ran into each day.

And on the ferry, he had stood at the forward rail, near the blunt bow — for the air, and to get away from Ava and her noisy pager and clamoring cell phone. A man and woman crept up behind him — newcomers, eager visitors — to coo at the seascape.

“Lookit, lookit, lookit.”

“Whole buncha whitecaps,” the man said. “And that sailboat, see, she’s heeling over.”

“Seagulls,” the woman said.

“Following that fishing boat,” the man said, “for the scraps. And the baby gulls dive-bombing for fish.”

“Will you look at that,” the woman said. “Ever see anything so gorgeous?”

They were talking to him, Steadman realized, and in the moment of addressing him and drawing level, they saw his dark glasses and his slender cane, and their mistake.

“Awful sorry,” the man said in a voice he suddenly hushed, sucking it into his cheeks, abashed at seeing Steadman was blind. They made faces at each other, as people did in the presence of a blind person, and they whispered and stepped aside, chewing on their self-reproach.

“They’re terns,” Steadman said, “not baby gulls.”

He remained facing forward, the southwest wind tearing at his ears.

Another voice, Indian or Pakistani, said, but not to him, “Is the Winyard,” and soon the ferry was sounding its horn for the arrival in Vineyard Haven.

He was unsteady, he walked like a drunk, he was a stranger here, he did not belong to the place, he was intruding on someone else’s island, trespassing again. The smells here were not just foreign, they were hostile; he did not understand any of the voices; he was shoved and jarred by the bumps in the road, battering the tires, and felt insecure being driven by Ava — faintly nauseated, anticipating more bumps, more curses.

Stiff and breathless with panic, he did not recognize the odor of the sea in the wind, which was like a flapping blanket, ragged with the smell of garbage, and the low-tide hum of dead fish and decayed kelp and the whiff of diesel oil. The sharpness of the sounds and stinks made him timid in the same way as, at the ferry landing, the sudden laughter of the crew had put him on edge. He imagined that they were laughing at his unsteadiness, and they got away with it because he was so cowed, so feeble-looking.

What was worse, the other wordless fear — and its cloudy ambiguity made it awful — was his sense of a third person with them. He had an intimation of another body in the rental car from Boston; someone with them in the passenger lounge of the ferry; the same person in the taxi and again in Ava’s car from the Vineyard airport, where Ava had parked it, always sitting in the back seat (“You sit in front, Slade, with your long legs”), staring at the nape of his neck. They had not been alone. There had always been this third person with them who did not speak yet, who gave off a vaporous aura, a small breathing body humming with warmth.

He sat in the car, his damp hands holding the knobs of his knees, sensing this stranger behind him, a smirking eavesdropper — who?

“Aren’t you glad to be back?”

Unusually for her, Ava drove badly, even worse when she was talking, too fast and then too slow, stamping on the gas pedal, cursing the car ahead, pitching Steadman forward when she braked.

He was mute with worry, retching each time he tried to swallow. He spat out the window and thought, Where am I?

“You’re not wearing your seat belt.”

She pulled off the road, spilling him sideways as the car rocked on the ridge of the shoulder. She fastened him in with reprimanding fingers, as though buckling a child into a baby seat, and then resumed the drive.

She was in charge; she made him feel lost and helpless. She too seemed like someone else, bigger than ever. The way she touched him had seemed rough and abrupt, and all the way from New York she had stayed on her cell phone, setting up appointments for her patients and picking up messages. She seemed less like a lover than a caregiver — one of her hospital words. Nevertheless he had no idea what he would have done without her. Yes, he knew, he would have died in New York, where a blind man was a victim of every stranger’s indifference or fussy attention or reckless cruelty.

The lopsided fear of impotence that he recognized in himself from long ago heightened his notion of not belonging. He was frightened but he was passive, unresponsive, in a place that was so foreign he felt like a trespasser. That was another old feeling, but this time like a eunuch in a harem. The Vineyard was just a name; everything else was withheld from him.

He wanted to speak to Ava but did not know how to begin. Two thoughts tormented him — that he was in a strange place, that he had been abducted. The rest of his fragmented feelings he could not express. Had he been hit on the head and dragged away? He concentrated to listen to the harsh breathing of the person behind him, and realized the breathing was his own.

Ava said, “I’ve been talking to some lab people. I’ll need a sample of your drug. I want to have it tested for toxicity. I don’t know why I didn’t do it before.”

A crumbled plug of datura splinters was in a jar in his desk, hidden like an addict’s stash. He had kept it just in case he might crave it. But he did not crave it; he was disgusted by the very thought of stewing it and drinking the brew.

He struggled to speak. He finally said with self-reproach, “I poisoned myself.”

“You’re alive. Your book is a hit. Be happy.”

“I’m mutilated.”

He was miserable, and when he got to the house he felt like a hostage and hated its harsh smells and thought, Who lives in this place?

Ava was on call. She was paged as soon as she entered the house. She tapped at her phone as she led Steadman to his study and eased him into his leather armchair.

“I have to go to the hospital — an emergency. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

She put earphones into his hand and set a CD player in his lap, and she left. He did not switch it on. He sat with his head cocked, hearing someone sneaking around, two rooms away.

“I know you’re here. You can’t fool me.”

Without conviction his voice sounded timid. The feeble echo returned his words to him.

“Who are you?”

Of course, by his blurting this out, whoever it was became very quiet.

“What do you want?”