Paul Theroux - Blinding Light

“You liked upstaging him.”

“Probably,” Steadman said. “Then Diana died and upstaged us both. What a night.”

He knew that Ava was still staring at him, still annoyed, from the way she breathed.

She said, “Not everyone wishes you well.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’m sure there are people who are glad you’ve been taken down a peg, and others who suspect you’re faking. Anyway, why haven’t you asked me to find you an eye doctor? I could refer you to a specialist.”

“You think I’m faking,” he said. “You’ve been cold.”

The party and all the gossip afterward, the fact of his having reappeared among all those people, this abrupt visibility, were jarring, and so their evenings were changed. The sexual masquerade at night, the delicious routine, was over for now. His being with Ava, blind, for the hours of that party, the president’s arm around him, had had a powerful effect — had sobered them, made them self-conscious, kept them from their usual intimacy. More than that, all this had let blinding light fall on them and exaggerate the space between them.

“I guess so. You’re someone different.”

“I’m writing again,” he said.

Until that night of visibility he had felt that this woman was also inhabiting his skin. He had loved the intensity of their seclusion, loved the shadows over them, the shadows within, the shadows they threw in the bedroom. But going public for the first time since arriving back from Ecuador, and being noticed, even praised for his handicap, had altered things. It was a change of air. Allowing other people into their lives, they had revealed Slade’s secret, the spectacle of his blindness, shocking everyone with the obvious ailment and keeping the deeper truth hidden.

“It’s a trick,” she said.

Not blindness at all, she went on, but a state of luminous euphoria brought on by a jungle potion. You reached for a bottle, you took a drink, and you were in a brighter, blazing room, and the room opened onto the world.

That last telephone call (“You touched me”) had exasperated Ava and left Steadman murmuring. They faced each other, seeing only the walls.

“Deny that it’s a trick,” Ava said.

But Steadman had no denial, nor anything else to say. Then, nagged by what he remembered, he said, “What do you mean, eye doctor? Why should I go to an eye doctor?”

“You have a condition without a name.”

“It’s called blindness.”

“Blindness is a result, an induced condition, because you’ve been taking that drug,” Ava said. “Or why else do you have it?”

Steadman turned away and stumbled slightly, hating his unsteadiness, resenting Ava’s accusations and wishing that he was dictating his book to her instead of listening to her. She was still talking!

“Blindness always has a cause. It has an etiology, a pathology. Do you want a lecture on the visual cortex and the neurological basis of visual imagery? Blind people are always experts on their condition. They lecture doctors about retinitis and macular degeneration, they know all about PET scans and functional MRIs. About cataracts, the various ways of operating, the recovery time, the risks of infection.”

“So what?”

“For you it’s metaphysical. It’s mystical. All you do is gloat over your blindness. You love the attention. You love people talking about you and calling you. Those sentimental women.”

“They don’t ask why I’m blind.”

“But the president did. I saw you squirming and evading the question. He wanted to help you. He wants to find you a doctor. You looked ridiculous in your hemming and hawing.”

“He understood that I’m blind. He also understood that I’m hypervisual, I’m prescient. I see more than anyone. I could smell his anxiety, I could hear it when he was talking about something completely unrelated — his mention of Chuck Berry. I could differentiate people at the party by their smell alone.”

“Do you want people to know that you got your blindness out of a bottle?”

Now he saw what she was hinting at. She was right: going to the party had exposed him to the possibility of questions he couldn’t answer truthfully. And there would be more questions. He needed a better explanation; he needed a story.

“They want to help you,” Ava said, and she laughed at the thought of it, but it was a shallow, wounded laugh.

“What would be the point of seeing a doctor?”

“So that you can say you’ve seen a doctor.”

“You’re a doctor.”

“I’m the blind man’s lover.”

HE WOKE much too early, seeing the whole day ahead in Boston and feeling cross, thinking of how he loathed medical doctors, their absurd authority, their bossy arrogance, their airs — you were familiar, they were formal; you were small, they were large; “Wait here, Slade, the doctor is busy at the moment.” A doctor posed as a figure of power and wisdom, knowing how to ease pain and cure sickness and save lives. Those skills were like a higher form of plumbing, mastered by earnest drudges, yet they regarded themselves as shamans and did not want to be judged like ordinary mortals. They hated their learning to be called into question, and they never listened.

Ava was different from every doctor he had ever known. She read books for pleasure, she did not advertise herself as a doctor, and she did not disagree with him when he declared that doctors caused illnesses, that hospitals were disease factories, that most new drugs were poorly tested and overprescribed. Doctors made people sick with dirty drugs. The ideal doctor-patient relationship was his love affair with Ava, or the Secoya shaman’s with his ayahuasca-taker. To be humbled by the chanting shaman and granted visions by his drug — that was the purest healing.

That week of revelation on the Aguarico River reminded Steadman that they had not left the Vineyard since arriving back from Ecuador last November — had been buried alive all winter and spring and into the summer, those dazzling months of work and sex. And then at nine, starting for the airport, Ava at the wheel, Steadman furious in the passenger seat, scowling at an impenetrable line of traffic they were trying to join, they came to a dead stop at the junction of his country lane and the main road.

Summer people in crawling cars, sunburned and squinting in impatience, children’s bored bobbing faces at the windows — an unbroken line of cars going nowhere. Disgusted by all these intrusive strangers in their Jeeps and minivans and truck-like vehicles with big wheels and bumpers and bike racks, only ten minutes into the trip, Steadman regretted agreeing to the eye appointment in Boston.

“Take the shortcut.” He was staring at her leg, praying for it to articulate her gas-pedal foot.

“I can’t even get into the traffic.”

Trying to force a space for herself, Ava eased the car forward, but when a Range Rover hesitated and a space opened, a man on a moped darted into it, as though sucked into a vacuum, and after him a procession of bikes — dad, mom, wobbling kids, and another adult in skintight spandex on two wheels towing a bike trailer. Then the urgent inching cars closed the gap. A red-faced woman in the passenger seat of a convertible peered at Steadman, and with her arms folded and her head forward she opened her mouth wide, her nose pinched white, and yawned irritably, with a coarse goose-hiss that he could hear.

“Go home!” he called out.

The woman smacked her lips and blinked and calmly mouthed the words “Fuck you.”

Ava sighed at the slowly moving line of cars and headed into them, forcing open a space angled sideways, in the path of oncoming cars, but still only half inserted, for the traffic had stopped again in what was a two-mile backup into Vineyard Haven. The shortcut to the airport was still almost a mile away.