Paul Theroux - Blinding Light

“No. I remembered it. I’ve had eye tests my whole life.”

The doctor became insistent. “You didn’t see the chart? You saw darkness?”

“There is no darkness. Have you heard of a man named Shakespeare? A writer. I now know that his most inaccurate line is ‘Looking on darkness which the blind do see.’ Black is the one color I can’t see.”

“You can see colors?”

“I am like Jorge Luis Borges, who made that observation. A writer. He was blind. ‘I live in a world of colors,”’ Steadman said, and still in his quoting tone, ‘“The world of the blind is not the night that you imagine.’”

“What sort of colors?” She was holding the pencil again in her stubby fingers.

He faced her and said, “Monkey-ass purple, clitoral pink, venous blue, nipple umber.”

But Dr. Budberg had turned away, her jaw set hard, swelling her jowls. She interrupted him, saying, “So you were unable to read the eye chart.”

“My reader’s and writer’s sight is gone,” Steadman said. “When something ends, something else begins. There are all sorts of vision, not all of them measurable.”

Working her legs and feet, the doctor rolled herself to her desk. She said, “You’ll have to come back. We’ll schedule a PET scan and an MRI. Make an appointment with the receptionist.”

“You didn’t even know I’m stone blind,” Steadman said. He began to laugh, poking his face at her.

“This examination is over.”

“Now you know I’m blind, but you don’t know why,” he said. “Why not admit it?”

She was insulted, he could tell. Doctors might be habitually hearty, but that was a distracting ruse to josh you; they refused to be teased themselves.

“I’m a medical miracle,” Steadman said.

“Really,” the doctor said in an uneasy murmur, hardly parting her lips.

“I see more than you do,” Steadman said. “Who knows more than a blind man?”

“Then why did you bother to come here?” she said. Her voice, intending insult, went shrill.

“Maybe for verification,” he said. “Maybe to give you some timely medical advice.”

She drew back from him. It was what strangers had been doing all this day in Boston, reacting to him, stifling their feelings, looking fearful, because they saw he was blind — the pilot, the flight attendant, the cabbie, the waiter at the Union Oyster House, people on the sidewalk and in the elevator. He went closer to the doctor, putting on his dark glasses, lifting his cane, looking fierce, like a swordsman.

“If you can’t do anything to control your weight,” Steadman said, “how do you expect me to trust you with my precious eyes?”

That was too much for Dr. Budberg. She rose awkwardly, stumbling a little, snatching papers and folders from her desk. She hurried out of the examining room, leaving Steadman to find his own way to the door.

But now that she was gone he saw her clearly, as he had suspected at the outset, and was alarmed, for at the moment of the doctor’s abrupt departure, when she was in motion, Steadman realized his error. Dr. Budberg was in mourning. He had been too severe with her. He had not understood. The way she walked, slightly lopsided, her head tucked into her shoulders, holding one arm crooked — her whole posture of grief — told him that she was miserable, bereaved, and he had hurt her a little more, made her sadder, kicked her. Feeling sorry for her didn’t help. Someone close to her had died. Grieving had deprived her of sleep and made her inattentive and unintentionally remote and slow and officious.

“What did you say to piss her off?” Ava asked when Steadman entered the waiting room — and he knew that the doctor had preceded him.

Steadman wanted that twenty minutes back; with shame he recalled his rudeness. He went to the reception counter and handed in his file folder to a woman in a white smock sitting at a computer.

“Want to schedule an appointment?”

In a low voice, Steadman said, “Dr. Budberg — someone died in her family.”

“Daughter,” the woman said, narrowing her eyes, her face crumpling. “Terrible to lose a child.”

He did not want to know more than that. Details would only make him feel worse.

“What’s wrong? You act like you got some bad news,” Ava said.

“I was a little hard on that doctor,” he said, touching the face of his watch. “We’ve got two hours before our flight. Let’s find a cab.”

A taxi was waiting by the front entrance of the hospital. The driver got out to help but Steadman waved him away and snatched the door open.

The driver said, “Where to?”

“You know the Two O’Clock Lounge?”

“It’s not called that anymore.”

“Does it matter?” He could tell that Ava was staring at him. He said, “I need something life-affirming.”

The place was called Pinky’s, at the same address on Washington Street where the Two O’Clock Lounge had once been. Leaving the hot sidewalk, they entered the darkened doorway into a room of loud music that was cool and poorly lit and dirty, smelling of spilled beer. He sniffed again: naked flesh, two women dancing slowly on a mirrored floor, a pair of long-legged nudes, seeming to ignore the beckoning men.

“I hate places like this,” Ava said. “I’m a doctor. I don’t need it.”

“You need it because you’re a doctor.”

“Please not down front.”

But Steadman insisted, and she followed him through the darkness to the edge of the stage, where they sat holding hands among men in attitudes of intense concentration, almost worship. One woman, wholly naked, twirling in a slow dance in high heels, approached. She smiled at Ava, looking curious when she saw Steadman’s dark glasses and white cane, so confident in his blindness, not seeing her and yet smiling.

“Now she’s squatting,” he said.

“I see some pretty tortured labia. Some warts.”

“Please stop being a doctor.”

When Ava fell silent and he felt her fingers, warm and moving in his hand, he was aroused, sensing her sudden awkward interest.

She said, “I’ve never been in one of these places before.”

“Think of it as an examining room,” Steadman said. “Slip a five-dollar bill into her garter and you can give her a physical.”

She let go of his hand, groped in the shadow beneath her, and fished in her bag. He loved the furtiveness of her movement, tipping the naked dancer with a self-conscious gesture of concealment, woman to woman. He savored the silence as the other woman came near and squatted and opened her legs, and Ava said, “Such pretty girls, such beautiful bodies — what are they doing here? Is it that they have low self-esteem?”

“How is this different from a hospital?” Steadman said. “Look at the interns at work.”

The solemnity of the men whose heads rested between the knees of the naked women, the attentive way they studied what they saw, a complex pinkness, like a live blossom — yes, they could have been the most serious medical students.

“Or like boys playing doctor.”

“It’s also like a temple,” Steadman said, and he explained: a bit of magic, some mirrors, ritual glimpses of the forbidden. “They’re not weak — these women are in charge. They’re priestesses. The men are helpless worshipers.”

That squatting woman, seeing Ava smile, had pursed her lips and made a kissing sound when Ava rewarded her with a folded and tucked-in five-dollar bill.

And then the kneeling woman leaned slightly and reached behind Ava and drew her head closer, placing it between her naked breasts. Ava laughed a little, then realizing she was caught, her mouth against the cleavage, she became flustered as the woman moved quickly from side to side, slapping Ava’s face and cheeks with the weight of her loose breasts and laughing in triumph.