Paul Theroux - Blinding Light

The person had stiffened in a corner and was flattened against the wall.

“I may be blind, but I’m not stupid!”

He hated his weak screechy voice, and sitting there he reflected, sifting his thoughts, searching for reasons to hope. His discovery in his luminous phase, and the gusto of making his book, was that his sexual history was his own and not in any textbook, or any novel, or memoir. Similarities did not matter. All his travel and trespassing had prepared him for this revelation, which was a true epiphany, an actual encounter, something like being visited by an angel of desire, who had wakened in him the urge to be bold.

You carried on blindly in your life, never daring to believe that one day you would be granted the gift of sight. It was like travel to a strange land where you knew the language and loved the culture — strange and secret to everyone else but the only place on earth you could call your own. All his intelligence, his eloquence, his savagery, his pleasures, every fantasy that existed inside him, everything he wished to see manifested, all his desires realized — that was sex for him. He had lived in a state of apprehension; he had relived it with happiness and understanding, making it new, turning it into a book. Everything he had done in his life had been a preparation for this discovery, a rehearsal for that pleasure.

Now he was dumb and sightless and impotent once more, plunged into darkness, in a place where he didn’t belong, not knowing (and still he heard the mewing of someone else in the house) whether he was alone. There was no safety here. His only home was inside his head. The blinding was like a castration.

He dozed in his chair and a door slam woke him. Either he had slept soundly or else Ava had not been long — whatever, he was hardly aware of having been left. He was not reassured; he felt ever more like a captive.

He wondered if by some diabolical ploy she had taken him to a different house, one that would trap him by being strange, for nothing in this house seemed familiar. But why would she do that?

Ava’s confidence made her seem all the more important. She made announcements, loud declarations, as though to a roomful of listeners. “This is absolutely the best time of the year,” and “I love driving on the island now,” and “You see lots of migratory birds around.”

Late spring, the trees in leaf, the branches bristling, each opening bud a gilded green, new growth like small healthy claws: that was how Steadman recalled it, yet he stared into empty air, trying to imagine the dusted buds swelling into blossoms, the lawns thick from the rain. As though describing a distant planet, Ava told him that the island was chilly and damp, but lovely with flowers — the magnolias were a mass of creamy pink petals with no leaves, the lilacs had never smelled sweeter, robins hopped in the driveway, looking confused in the chill. The roads were empty. Some roadsides were scattered with the last of the daffodils, going brown.

She must have looked at him then and seen that he was simply gaping, unmoved by her attempt to cheer him up with the description of the Vineyard spring.

He said, “I think there is someone in this house.”

“Why do you say that?”

He marveled at this. “You didn’t say no!”

“Because it seems such a paranoid thing to say.”

“I knew there was no point in my mentioning it. I knew you’d deny it.”

She did not reply. It maddened him when she fell silent.

“Who is it?”

After a long pause she said, “You’re being unreasonable.”

“Why don’t you say ‘There’s no one here’?”

“Okay. There’s no one here.”

He tried to discern where she was standing. He turned to face her, to bear down on her. He said, “I don’t believe you.”

Her unexpectedly calm voice came from a different part of the room, behind him. “That’s your problem. I think you’re tired.”

“Tired!” he shouted, sitting forward on his big chair and rocking as he spoke, like someone grieving. “I’m not tired, I’m half out of my mind. I can’t see, I can’t walk, I’m half deaf. I’ve turned into a lump. You have no idea. At the beginning of my book tour I was bursting with health, I could see everything, I had my drug — I hardly needed an escort. I was hallucinating in a surreal world of interviewers and bookstores.” Saddened by the memory of it, he became breathless, but began again, his voice breaking. “And one day, without doing a thing, I lost it. I noticed the drug wasn’t working in the same way. I got flashes of eyesight without drinking anything. Then my vision just clicked off and stayed off. And it wasn’t like anything I had known. Some of my senses went with it. It was like I was being stifled. I felt small, I was in the dark. It’s how I feel now. Don’t you understand? I am terrified.”

Ava knelt before him and took his hand. He could tell she was wearing her scrubs — a whiff of the hospital disinfectant still on them, and her hands so clean.

“I’m going to help you.”

Her saying that, suggesting that he needed help and that she was turning him into her feeble patient, made him more miserable. He was reminded of how helpless he was without her. To be her patient was to be her captive; a sickroom was a cage. But he was too unhappy to say anything more.

Blind, illiterate, dumb, forgetful, stupid, sick — he felt less than a lump. The fact that she was in good health, and busy doctoring, only made him feel worse.

“After we get the lab results of the drug tests we’ll know what our options are,” she said. “I’ve got a lot of confidence in the people who’ll do the analysis.”

That did not console him, because he had not told her his deepest anxiety, that the darkness covering him now was like a funeral shroud. He was cold to her touch, he was mute unresponsive flesh, he was without a spark of desire, he was dead.

“Don’t worry,” she said, and touched him again.

Her uttering that empty expression filled him with despair. He shivered and drew back a little, covering himself, nudging her hand aside in an awkward gesture, almost prissy in its rejection.

Even his bed was unfamiliar, even Ava’s body beside him, even her breathing. He had thought it was horrible to be blind and stumbling in New York, robbed and misled and abused, a jostled victim in the city. How could anything be worse? And he was mocked by everything he had done and said in the pompous elation of his drug vision. But it was so much worse to feel lost at home, for being a stranger here meant there was nowhere else to go.

Being outside the house was sometimes like being submerged, but more often he likened it to living under the great dark dome of a gigantic insect. An enormous spider had lifted itself and was poised upright on its long legs — that was the sky, the world, the darkness; and he was underneath the thing, in its prickling shadow.

Over the following few days, haltingly, sometimes tearful, he told Ava this. At first she seemed sympathetic. But when he complained more loudly at the injustice of it, she went quiet. Her silence was like an accusation that he easily imagined in her mind: So whose fault is that?

He had needed a key to unlock his memories, to gain access to the past. Manfred had found the datura. Sometimes he saw the German standing in the smoky village, beckoning him, not the Manfred he knew but a cleaner, devilish Manfred with a fiery light behind him and the ayahuasca vines twined in the trees around him, the vines that were smooth and coiled like the biggest snakes.

He had gotten the drug, he had finished his book, and the book had succeeded; he was famously blind. There were doubters and whisperers, but they had not seriously damaged him, and yet…