Paul Theroux - Blinding Light

“What does that mean?”

“According to this analysis, datura contains a group of alkaloids called beta-carbolines. The psychotropic trigger is a substance called harmine.”

The very word seemed dangerous and hurtful.

“Its overuse can lead to insanity or, it says here, blindness.” She was speaking reasonably, interpreting the document, folding it and turning pages. “But there’s a note saying that the lab is still trying to separate these elements of the drug. If we know the cause, we might find the cure.”

Steadman said, “You’re right. This is my own fault.”

“I never said that.”

“But you thought it.”

“No. I was on that trip too, remember. I admired you for taking a risk.”

“And look where it got me.”

He was sitting upright, rigid, like a man in a straight-backed chair about to be electrocuted.

“There’s something called atropine in this drug. I know what that is from med school. We use it to dilate the pupil. Maybe it’s combined with another chemical that affects the whole of the eye and the optic nerve.”

He had risked that poison for an ambitious idea. And now he contemplated the book’s success as he sat alone, lost in his house, a parody of the man the papers had praised on his tour: “a visionary writer more dazzling as a blind man than most people are who are blessed with eyesight.” He had secretly believed himself to be a prophet, the tiger of a new religion. He had boasted of x-ray vision and declared, “Blindness is a gift.” All that showboating, flourishing his cane like a huckster in a carnival. And it had begun with Manfred, downriver in the Oriente. He had drunk this toxic cocktail of murky jungle chemicals; he had been granted his wish, and now was in the dark.

He stumbled constantly, shuffled like an old geezer, not daring to lift his feet; he knocked things over, he fell. In his own house, the world he knew best, he was like a phantom. When Ava was at the hospital he sat fiddling with the radio, listening to the news of the president’s deceptions. He was appalled at how people hated the man, the things they said, the jokes they told, the merciless mockery. He imagined them turned against himself. He longed for Ava to return. He urged her to work at night so he could share her waking hours. He felt needy and superfluous and humiliated.

He drank more and, drunk one evening when Ava got home, he confided in her. Embarrassed, yet determined to bare his soul, he told her of his insecurity, his timidities, his dreads; he reproached himself, he was abject, he said he was being punished for taking the drug.

“I knew what I was doing. It’s just a cop-out to blame Manfred. I’m in a hell of my own making.”

Ava listened. She seemed very calm, but it could have been fatigue — she was so weary after work. She said, “I’m in the business of healing people. I want you to trust me.”

Shamed by his dependence on her, he saw that she welcomed it; she seemed to be strengthened by his pitiful surrender. He knew he was not imagining this, for she took him on her lap and cradled his head. The effect of his dependence roused something that was both maternal and sexual in her. As though gratified by his expression of helplessness, she held him with tender hands and stroked his hair; she had not touched him that way for a long time.

“You’re going to be fine.”

She could have been talking about his impotence as well as his blindness. He was mortified by her pity.

She was wearing her scrubs, which were stiff and slightly rough to the touch. No lingerie, no perfume, no silks. He wondered, as though he were a patient supine in a hospital bed, whether she was comforted somehow by dressing in this clinical way and caressing him.

“Just relax. Clear your mind. Don’t even think about sex.”

He had not been — far from it. If only she knew. He had been imagining with horror the remainder of his life in darkness, the shadow of neglect, the obscurity of seeing nothing but the prison cell of blindness, which was both a tiny suffocating space and the emptiness of the entire unavailable world.

She was touching his face softly with her fingers, tracing his features. She lifted the shirt of her scrubs and supported her breast with her hand, grazing his lips with her nipple, saying, “Take me into your mouth. Bite me a little, suck me.”

Her taking the initiative now, as he was suffering — her attempt to interest him in sex — left him feeling awkward and faintly repelled and ever more the captive. He had no hunger, and dread had killed his desire.

One of her hands was behind him, steadying his head; her other hand, feeding her breast to him, pressed her nipple against his mouth. Lying against her, he heard her sigh, her whole body rippling with satisfaction.

She was warm and sexual, yet he was heavy, tense, unresponsive, and he was on the point of asking her, “What do you want me to do? Tell me, I want to please you,” as she had once asked him.

She seemed to understand, and in her crooning way she said, “You’ve got to stop thinking about your anxieties. Just let yourself float free. Can you do that, baby? It’s like finding the confidence and relaxation to be buoyant in a deep sea. Remember the first time you lay back in the ocean and let yourself float?”

But he lay as though afraid of drowning, his body locked and thick with misery.

“I want you to imagine being in water. Just let go, relax, and let it happen.”

She went on gently encouraging him, as if he felt apart, like a spectator at the edge of sex; and powerless, he sank in her arms and prepared himself to be weightless.

“Sex can be a way of seeing. You know that.”

He was hardly listening. His mouth was on her, he was comforted by her, and he was so absorbed, lying against her bare stomach, he really did seem to become less heavy, almost buoyant, her arms glowing on him. With this levitating sense of pleasure seeping into him, he felt detached and stopped listening to her. And Ava went on talking in a low regular cadence, as though to someone else, as he lay sucking on her nipple, the softness of her breast squashed against his cheek.

“Is that nice?”

As she spoke another hand crept across his leg from below and followed the seam on the fly of his jeans, feeling for his cock through the dense layer of cloth, the busy fingers asking a general question. And a moment later he felt his jeans being unfastened and loosened and tugged down. How could this be? He felt Ava’s two hands, one under his head, the other directing her breast. He was outstretched on the sofa, sleepy and slightly drunk, yet aware of the odd number, the insinuation of the third hand.

He made a move to pull away. Ava said, “Just let it happen,” and the ghost-like hand groped further, the fingers manipulating him until it was no longer so strange. Then the searching of a licking tongue and the heat of an eager mouth.

Burying his face in Ava’s breast, Steadman became fearful as the other mouth nuzzled him and enclosed his cock, at first gently, in a tasting way, and finally with gusto, sighing, the sighs sounding within his flesh and swelling. In a twinge of alarm, he let one hand trail down until he could feel the long hair of the woman below. She was wearing a studded leather dog collar that was tight on her neck. He felt further, into the warm declivity of her shoulder, and grazing his knuckles on her smooth cheek, he let his hand fall, and was greatly relieved when it found the fullness of her breast. She must have been kneeling next to the sofa, leaning across his legs, as though drinking at a fountain. Her breasts hung loose, slack and soft, and danced in his hand.

Unexpected light blazed in his mind. He surrendered to the caresses, and for the longest time on the sofa in the warm room he lay half smothered, half floating, while Ava consoled him. Or was she speaking to the other woman? There was a confidence in the way she spoke, almost as if she were gloating. It ceased to matter, for at last the separate strands of his desire became a knot, and the knot began to twist in his guts, and it slipped and tightened in his groin until it was an animal’s cramp of tortured muscle. In an instant it was yanked hard and it liquefied, spilling warmth all over him. He cried out once, and then he was raw and innocent again.