Paul Theroux - Blinding Light

“Where are you going?”

Saying nothing, making a show of his blind man’s ability to move quickly, he picked up his pace, crossed the main road, kept walking, found the Fiedler Footbridge ramp with his cane. He moved swiftly on the arch, over Storrow Drive, toward the sound of splashing and a racket of eager screamy voices. Without hesitating, he made a shortcut across the lawn to the chainlink fence at the perimeter of the public swimming pool. He stood there, his arms high, his fingers hooked to the fence.

“I used to come here as a little kid, before we moved back to the Vineyard,” he said as Ava caught up and was next to him. He was gratified, feeling superior when he sensed Ava was out of breath.

The swimming pool was a confusion of caged-in shrieks and chattering laughter, the slap of bare feet running on the cement apron of the pool, the explosive plunges — the noise and water and youthful exuberance, high spirits amounting almost to frenzy — and amid the howling the occasional shrill tweet of the lifeguard’s whistle, the smack and rap of the diving board stuttering on its chocks whenever anyone prepared to dive. In the heat and the sunshine and the full-throated screams, there was pushing and shoving — no serious swimmers, only jumpers and splashers, kids fooling.

“They excited me,” Steadman said, seeing the past, “all those skinny flat-chested girls in tight, too small bathing suits, with pruny fingers and blue lips, running and shrieking. I could see that they weren’t afraid to take risks.”

A thin pale-legged girl exactly matching Steadman’s description loudly dared a boy to push her off the edge of the pool.

“They were the nakedest girls I knew. I used to squeeze them and touch them underwater. When they laughed I knew they wanted me to fondle them. One of them reached into my bathing suit and touched me and I was in heaven. Her little fingers finding me in all that water.”

Still hanging on the fence, he smiled at the splashing and the howls, boys shouting like monkeys, girls’ meaningless shrieks and joyous objections, the free-for-all.

Then Steadman’s tone hardened, and in a flat urgent voice he said, “There’s a kid in trouble. Over there. He’s going under. You see him?”

At first Ava saw nothing but the mass of heads, the wet hair and beating arms in the pool, but one boy was saying nothing in the churning water, was not even struggling, just sinking at the deep end and — his mouth was open — giving a barely audible groan of surrender that was like a helpless and sorrowful farewell.

“Help him!” Steadman called out, in a demand so loud he silenced the cluster of boys and girls on the other side of the chainlink fence.

In the brief silence, the groan came again as a watery solemnity, a softer whisper of goodbye, and now Ava yelled, and when she caught the lifeguard’s eye, she pointed toward the struggling swimmer.

The lifeguard threw off his baseball cap, vaulted from his high chair, and leaped behind the drowning boy. In the same movement he seized him and boosted him to the edge. The boy, all loose arms and legs, looking indignant and in shock, resisting the help in his bewilderment, began to choke and weep, miserably spewing water.

“We’re done here,” Steadman said, and turned, hurrying ahead of Ava, tapping his stick toward the hospital.

PEOPLE PUSHING CANES and shuffling behind him, wearing eye patches and dark glasses, circulated in the hospital lobby, looking just like Steadman. But every one of them had a guide, moving slowly on the tucked-in arm of a spouse or nurse. “This way.” “Over here.” “Be careful.” They seemed so feeble that Steadman was determined to keep walking alone among them, ahead of Ava. And now Ava let him lead.

She was appalled and impressed, seeing how he moved with conviction, commanding the space in front of him by sweeping it with his cane and taking long strides, shouldering through the crowd, half of it aimless casualties. The blind and near-blind kept close to the walls, out of the way, and Steadman’s only collision was with a fully sighted man laughing into a cell phone. Steadman spoke the word “asshole” and raised his elbows and walked on, ignoring the man’s apologies.

They reported to the reception desk, summoned by a woman at a computer terminal. Ava took the folder of forms and began filling them out.

“He’s here for his physical.”

“Are you family, ma’am?”

Ava kept writing, did not look up. She said, “You can call me Dr. Katsina.”

“Just take a seat,” the woman at the computer said when the completed papers were handed over.

The doctor kept them waiting. They sat in awkward, unwilling postures among magazines that were wrinkled and damp, having been picked through by so many anxious fingers. Hearing their names, people got slowly to their feet and entered small rooms to be examined. Steadman saw them as poor, weak, naked flesh, struggling to stay whole, flunking their tests, humiliated in their failure.

“I don’t even know why I bothered to come here,” Steadman said. “I know what the verdict will be.”

“I wish I knew.”

“That’s what I’m saying. They won’t have the slightest idea.”

Saying this, he stood — he was being summoned by a stammering receptionist. He was aware of the voice a fraction of a second before Ava heard anything.

“Follow me, please,” the receptionist said. And to Ava: “If you don’t mind waiting.”

Steadman was shown to a room where a woman wearing white was seated. She was the doctor. She was heavy, inert, her body as pale and dense as cheese, the swags of flesh on her slack arms squashed against her sides, her gaze fixed on a computer screen. Her smell of antiseptic and talc put Steadman in mind of plastic flowers, of disguise and decay. Her ankles were swollen, overflowing her shoes. A wall clock behind her was ticking, and the face of the clock resembled hers. He detected a sadness in her but, offended by her officious manner, rejected the thought.

She did not rise or look at Steadman when he entered. Instead, she leaned away from him and shifted her heaviness onto the hams of her thickened thighs. When she picked up a pencil and clipboard her body filled the tight white uniform, binding it. She seemed to him like a keeper in a madhouse, chosen for her bulk. She had a bully’s body, and was probably a bit mad herself for her airless days in this sorry room, sitting in judgment on the sick. He disliked her for not greeting him — he a cripple, a blunderer, a blind man measuring his steps in the room with the tip of his cane.

Without engaging him in conversation, she watched his progress as he tapped with his stick and found a chair to sit in.

“When was your last complete physical?”

“Does it matter?”

“Lift your shirt for me,” she said, and he heard the squeak of her chair’s casters, the tug of her crepe soles, as she rolled toward him with more orders, abbreviated ones: “Sleeves up. Mouth open. Lift your tongue.”

She took his blood pressure and temperature without commenting, but all the while she breathed through her nose with a rasp of the bristly hair inside her snout.

Scratching with her pencil, her plump hand chafing across the paper, she entered numbers as though carving them with the chisel of her pencil point.

“What sort of work do you do?”

He could hardly believe that the doctor, staring at his name, did not know this simple, well-known fact; that she was swollen and slow did not explain it. Everyone knew his name, which often annoyed him when someone recognized it and greeted him. In the past it had been like a mockery of him, for what he was not doing.

“I’m Slade Steadman.”