Paul Theroux - Blinding Light

“Let me give you a hand,” the doctor said when she saw him groping.

Her big hands wrapped his in their soft pads. An odor of strong soap and salty sweat told him that she was plain and heavy. She led him haltingly to a chair.

“Darling?” he called out.

“Dr. Katsina’s in the other room.”

Her familiarity with the layout of the house perplexed Steadman, and it made him feel like more of a stranger himself.

“Just relax for me.”

She held his chin, and he could tell from the warmth on his eyes that she was shining a light into them, one then the other.

“Are you taking any medication?”

“No.”

“No drugs?”

His mouth was woolly as he said, “No drugs.”

“Any discomfort?”

He hesitated then, for the agony of his blindness was like a raw seeping wound in the torn-open meat of his body, which prevented him from being able to think about anything else.

“None.”

She put a cuff on his arm, cinching it with Velcro, and took his blood pressure. She made notes; he heard the rattle of the paper, the click of her ballpoint. She was hovering near his face. He sensed her breath, felt her fingertips positioning his head; she was peering at him.

“What color is this?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can you see the light?”

“No.”

She seemed to be taking measurements and noting them. She did not say anything more to Steadman, but after she left the room, he heard her speaking in an undertone to Ava.

“I’ve got a slot later this afternoon.”

Such was Steadman’s vagueness that he did not know the doctor had gone until Ava told him. And then he said he resented the fact that he had been left out of the discussion. Ava ignored this and said if he was willing, he could be examined further at the hospital. He agreed but halfheartedly: he had little willpower. His blindness had demoralized him, lowered his spirits. These days he woke in the morning and expected nothing except more darkness.

On the way to the hospital, nothing was familiar. Even his own car, the sound of the gravel in his driveway, the route to town with all its turns and stops, it was all strange. He stood, gangly and hapless, while Ava signed him in. Then, assisted by an orderly, with Ava holding his arm, he was taken to a room.

“Hello again.”

The same doctor, greeting him. But she might have been anyone. Ava helped him to a cushioned chair, where he sat listening to the clicking and shuffling of metal instruments chiming on a metal tray.

“Rest your chin here,” the doctor said, tipping his head forward.

He heard switches being thrown, the snapping of toggles, a slight diminution of heat on his face; lights out.

“Can you read the middle line?”

“No.”

“How about the top line?”

He sighed and said, “I can’t see anything.”

“Please try.”

“What do you mean, ‘Please try’? I can’t do this.”

And then — was it the odor? was it her prodding voice? — he realized she was the doctor who had examined him at Mass. Eye and Ear in Boston.

“I know you,” he said.

“I’m Dr. Budberg.”

He shrank, settling into the chair in embarrassment, remembering the rest. He said, “I’m so sorry.”

She was brisk, she ignored him. She said, “We’ll need bloodwork. And a glaucoma test. I’m going to schedule an MRI and a CAT scan, too.”

Fitting his face to the mask-like frame, she shot puffs of air into his eyes, one at a time, and scrutinized them with more light, which heated his eye sockets and warmed his head.

“Have you had any ear infections?”

“No.”

But she wasn’t through. Any trauma to the head? Severe headache? Migraine? Stress? Significant pain on one side of the body? Diabetes?

He made his replies with glum certainty, his mind on something else. He remembered how he had rattled off the lines of the eye chart from memory, every letter, defying Dr. Budberg to find him blind and confounding her diagnosis. But his pedantic memory was gone now. All he had were the instincts of a burrowing animal, a blunt mole-like awareness of heat and cold and bad air, of trailing fingers like rootlets raking his face, a confining darkness.

He had insulted this woman. He remembered it clearly because he had enjoyed it as a victory, and he had seen only when it was too late how sad she had been, heavy and gasping with grief, lumpish, bereaved. He wanted to apologize again, but she had left him and was at the door, confiding details to Ava.

“Pressure’s normal. No apparent retinal detachment. No apparent nerve trauma. I’m getting responses. I’d like to see him again.”

Ava was murmuring. Steadman heard “idiopathic” attached to some other, even less intelligible words. He called out in a trembly voice, “What does that mean?”

“You haven’t damaged your eyes, so there’s hope,” Ava said.

A wheelchair was brought and, feeling useless, he was pushed to another room, where blood was drawn from his arm. He had no idea who did it; he was jabbed in silence. Someone said, “You’ll be fine. You’re going to surprise everyone.” Drops were splashed into his eyes, and whatever they were seemed to scorch him. He imagined a distracted nurse using the wrong drops and blinding him, or someone wicked doing it deliberately. He was left alone after that. Ava was outside the room, conferring again, but with whom? He sat drooping, as though learning how to be stupid.

On the way home, Ava was so preoccupied with driving she said nothing at first. These days he imagined that when she was silent she was thinking of her lover, that nameless grateful-sounding woman. Past Vineyard Haven and the worst of the traffic, she spoke up.

“You’re going to be all right.”

That sounded like surrender. He said, “Really?”

“Dr. Budberg knows her stuff. And she’s upbeat.”

This was so unpromising he didn’t reply.

“You’ve got plenty of options.”

She was telling him it was hopeless: they couldn’t help. All they could offer was lame, unconvincing encouragement, which was like the worst expression of despair.

In the days that followed, he wondered when the nameless woman would return as a sex partner. But there was no sign of her. Perhaps Ava was meeting her somewhere else, or perhaps she was so concerned about him that she was not meeting her at all. Given his condition the frivolity of a threesome was simply reckless. More worrying than anything, Steadman found Ava’s diminished desire a sign of pessimism.

“They’re still running tests on that drug you gave them,” Ava said.

Did she believe she was helping him to be optimistic? Crumbs of hope only made him feel worse and woeful. And she spoke to him as though to a fretful child.

He said, “What are they not telling me?”

“The contributing factors.”

“Such as?”

“Okay,” Ava said. “Maybe it’s an undetectable ear infection that spread and deadened your optic nerve. Or it could be a brain tumor compressing the synapses, a compression lesion of the optic nerve. Or a brain aneurysm, something we call an arteriovenous malformation, intertwined blood vessels that clot, creating an outpouring of one vessel. That compresses, or leaks, and affects the brain tissue that controls optical functions.”

“So it’s not the drug?”

“I’ve read some of the literature. It’s pretty unscientific. Most of it is anecdotal, and all from small-town dopers. But the message seems to be that the alkaloids affect the visual center of the brain.”

“Great news.”

“You asked for it.”

After that, his low spirits kept him in the house. The invitations continued coming for the summer parties, but he was too sad and ashamed to accept. He couldn’t face the questions, and the prospect of all the good humor of party chatter saddened him further. He could not bear to be pitied, or worse, beset by partygoers who had come to regard him as a marvel. Steadman the blind man who could read minds and see through walls and trot up and down swinging his cane — the showoff, the bore in dark glasses who claimed to have acquired the gift of total recall, the White House dinner guest, the world traveler and writer who had announced to one interviewer, “A perfect memory is prophetic.”