Paul Theroux - Blinding Light

The pencil lead trembled against the paper, then began paring at the page like a knife point. No other sound came from the doctor except the bump of her bare forearm on her desktop, like the skid of raw meat, a fat rind of cold pork slapped onto a butcher’s block.

As she began to write, and it sounded like an indictment, her scraping the paper with her pencil point, Steadman inwardly objected again: another doctor dominating him, behaving as pompously as a priestess, hinting that she had power over life and death, knew the diagnosis for all mortal ills, if not the cure, protective of the special language of illness, the code words of doom, a superstitious idiolect, a lingo that was all about fear and flesh. He was supine; there was no sympathy here.

He had come to believe that many doctors caused disease. Ava was a notable exception, yet he sometimes looked at her and thought, But you never know. He could rant on the subject of physician-assisted illness. Gnawing in secret like the canniest rats, worrying your confidence and good feeling with their arrogance and secrecy, doctors were at the bottom of it all. Steadman was certain that doctors brought healthy people down by uttering dire warnings and attaching the most grotesque meaning to the commonest and least harmful symptoms. “Your headache might be a brain tumor,” and “Your cough might be more serious than you think,” and “That skin blotch might be melanoma,” and “What you think is just bad eyesight is macular degeneration — you are going blind.” They were the bearers of fearsome news that made sick people sicker.

Or they told you nothing at all, treated you like a pickled specimen, a sample ailment, a case number. Then they squinted and scrutinized, frowned and scribbled, as this fat uncommunicative harridan was doing now. They were drug dealers with the dirtiest drugs, which cleared up some symptoms but gave you others: dizziness, nausea, insomnia, anxiety, impotence, skin rash, hair loss, depression, renal failure, the shakes, and you were incapacitated by these side effects, or died. A few doses of a vaguely named antipsychotic drug and you ended up palsied, with all the outward symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. Check into a hospital to fix a painful rotator cuff and you picked up bacteria that triggered arthritis so crippling you couldn’t get out of bed. Hospital air was soupy with germs. Shot-happy doctors made people ill, as this woman had already begun trying to do to Steadman, demoralizing him by ignoring him, by breathing hard, a kind of poisonous exhalation. But he knew better.

“What is your name?”

“Dr. Budberg,” she said in a panting breath, surprised by the sudden question, but not so startled that she forgot to give him her title.

He wanted to remind her that all ignorance needs a name. She was really no better than a Vineyard lout doing yard work, who smiled resentfully at words like “threadbare” and “profusion” and “extricate,” and was insulted when Steadman used them, saying with aggression, “I guess I’ll have to write that down, Mr. Steadman.”

He said to Dr. Budberg, “I do the same work as Herr Grass and Dr. Canetti and Mr. Wolcott.” When she did not react, nor even raise her head, he added, “Señor García Márquez, Mr. White, Mr. Milosz, and Mrs. Gordimer.”

Her hesitation showed him he had rung no bells — her head still down, her pencil motionless, poised over the blank line headed Occupation.

“They won the Nobel Prize for literature,” Steadman said, and wondered what she would say. She said nothing. “I haven’t so far, but may I say you have a strange scotoma?”

She looked at him and — given her specialty, this seemed odd — blinked in confusion.

“Writer,” he said.

Just last week the president of the United States met me, he wanted to say. And: How is it that this exalted man knew my name and work, and you, arrogant lump that you are, did not?

Dr. Budberg was wearing what he took to be her game face. Doctors learned early how not to look fazed. She was proof of such scientific posturing, busying herself with an eye chart, shifting in her chair, rolling it on its casters as she skidded and stumped with her lisping crepe-soled infirmary shoes. She adjusted the viewing hood, and Steadman knew he was no more than a pair of goggling eyes attached to an insurance policy.

But in the studied scorn of her indifference, a bit too contrived, she lost her poise and knocked her pencil to the floor. Before she could retrieve it, Steadman stood and walked four steps and snatched it, played with it a little, fingered its lettering, made her wait for it, then handed it over and sat down again, all unhesitatingly and without using his cane.

“Put your head in here. Use the chin rest,” she said, fitting the metal viewer bracket onto his face and staring at his eyes.

“Can you read anything?”

“What do you want?”

“How about the top line?”

Steadman read the top line.

“Can you read the next line?”

Steadman read the smaller letters, the whole line.

“Can you see anything else?”

Without pausing, Steadman read four more lines.

“The last line you read isn’t on the chart,” the doctor said, as though Steadman had uttered something fatuous.

“Move the chart up,” he said.

She did so, making the yellow projection of the lighted rectangle jump, and the newly exposed bottom line was the line he had recited.

“How did you know that?”

“Because I’m not reading it,” he said.

The heavy woman shunted her weight and became clumsy in her confusion, heavier-seeming, not liking what she heard, fussed by the illogic of it, snatching at the arms of her chair. She was still fussing, swinging the binocular mask of the viewer bracket away from his eyes.

“What do you see now?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“So you can’t read anything?”

“I can read everything.” He kept his chin on the metal rest and stared straight ahead. “I’ve seen all those lines before. Why don’t you people get new eye charts?”

She leaned and shone a light into his eyes and peered into his skull — the warmth of the light brushed his cornea like a feather. He could smell the doctor’s sour body. She said nothing, but he could tell that she was disturbed. He was reminded of his first impression, how sadness penetrated her flesh and was eating at it from within.

“You’re getting no response. My pupils are still dilated and you don’t know why,” he said. His chin hard on the chin rest restricted him from easily opening his mouth and made his voice sound mocking and robotic, a tone he instantly became fond of and exploited. “No sign of trauma. You’re bewildered.”

“I am not bewildered,” she said too loudly. “It could be neurological.” “You say ‘could be’—so you don’t know.”

“Are you presently taking any medication?”

He said no, but warily, using the chin rest to disguise the unease in his voice.

Fixing and clamping his head again, the doctor swung a new arm out of the apparatus and leveled it, like a small pistol aimed at his right eye, and she fired a bullet of air into his cornea. She repeated it with his left eye.

“My pressure’s normal,” Steadman said. “Why don’t you tell me these things.”

She was briefly abashed and then she recovered and became formal again. She said, “This is a little unusual.”

“Are you suggesting I am a little blind?”

“I didn’t say that.”

He could tell he was annoying her, and he was at last happy. He lifted his head from the hollow of the viewing stand and smiled at her.

“I am totally blind,” he said. “Now you know.”

His teasing made her obstinate. She said, “You read the chart perfectly.”