Paul Theroux - Blinding Light

Steadman had heard it all, no single word but the beat of it, the smack of flesh on flesh, and he was aroused by the fact that his lover had been surprised that way by the naked woman.

Ava’s eyes were shining, her mouth slightly agape, as though she had changed places with him, and she was stunned by the slap of the breasts on her face.

“If you like, we can stay,” he said.

“I have a much better idea.” She kissed him, her eyes still glittering, as the naked dancer looked on approvingly and winked.

They left Pinky’s and flew back to the Vineyard in the dark — much simpler at night, and an easier landing, a lot less traffic on the nighttime road. They were home in twenty minutes, Ava driving.

He kissed her inside the house. He held her. He said, “Now let me see.”

RISING FROM DARKNESS to light, abruptly dazzled, Steadman understood how religions caught fire, for what was revealed to him was not just the ardent power that blindness had granted him but the deception of sight. Where others saw opaque blobs, he saw symmetrical flames illuminating the passage of time, like a torchlit path, giving continuity and coherence to his memory. Not hallucinations and fantastic visions but the plainest, most persuasive reality, what he took to be truth: a lit-upness of his life.

He whispered to Ava, “Everyone I see is naked.”

“You’re boasting again,” Ava said. She challenged him with denials and evasions, because of his extravagance.

“No, you don’t understand. Nakedness is a kind of concealment, the most misleading kind. It subverts fantasy.”

Yesterday in Boston, at Pinky’s, he had been reflective, for nakedness was like defiance. The dancers had been girlish and coy, playful, teasing, protected by their nudity. Even the barest woman in the place looked peeled and raw, just feeble startled limbs, going through the motions, and others seemed more like pork to him now. Because he saw too much, something important was missing. The essential woman was hidden inside all that naked flesh.

Though the trip to Boston had been exhausting, it had been worth it for the sight of Ava in the bar, face forward, her cheeks slapped by the fat breasts of the dancer, her eyes alight.

“You liked it,” he said.

Ava said, “Couldn’t you tell — I wanted to go home with her. But I’m trying to keep you honest. The women who’ve been calling you up don’t care about your writing. And if you think you’re preternaturally prescient, then you’re a freak.”

His rattle of laughter disturbed her even more than his white sightless eyes.

To give herself confidence, she mocked him. “You’re like the kid who always wins at Pin the Tail on the Donkey. After a while everyone suspects that he’s peeking over his blindfold.”

“They’ll read my book and see that my power is real.”

“What happens when you lose it?”

“Sight and blindness are the same to me. Blindness is special sight.”

“You can’t keep up this pretense forever. Someone will find out and expose you.”

He laughed. Her challenges excited him by keeping him alert; he enjoyed repelling her attacks. He wanted her to fight him, or else later, embracing her, there would be nothing left to believe in. He smiled and said softly that he was not afraid, that the book would vindicate him and — as books seemed to do, as Trespassing had done — displace him.

“Ask Dr. Budberg. She was baffled. I told her I’m a medical miracle.”

“Oh, please.”

Ava seemed to think that her defiance might stimulate his humility. She kept at him, accusing him of being absurdly proud of going back and forth from blindness to sight. “You think you’re better, not because you’re blind but because you’re both, that the ability to switch makes you superior. You’re drinking flower juice from the jungle. That’s all.”

“Some people drink it and nothing happens. Remember Manfred?”

“That creep,” she said. “He was the one who got you into this.”

Because the drug was so effective on Steadman, he felt singled out, not lucky but chosen. He could see that Ava was weakening, but he relished her antagonism. Her doubt was necessary; he did not want a slave, he wanted an active partner; he needed her doctor’s skepticism.

“By the way, you’ve got wine stains all over your shirt,” she said sharply.

“And you’re having your period.”

“No,” she said, and then lamely added, “It just started.”

“Isn’t that what I said?”

He was like a goblin, but he was writing; he was living for his new novel. Only he and Ava knew that its wildest parts were the facts of his life, the most outrageous of his conceits the plain truth.

The many-sided trip to Boston that humid summer day, his stumble-strutting like a proud cripple and slashing his bone-white cane, finding his way, raising the alarm for the drowning boy, reading the doctor’s grief, understanding the implications of nakedness, had vitalized him and made him greedy for more. Being among strangers had always made him impatient and alert, and his blindness electrified him and endowed everyone he saw with a blue aura of revelation.

“Borges is right. Blindness is a gift.”

Still resisting, Ava said, “My worst patients are always the ones trying to prove they’re not sick.”

“I’m not your fucking patient!”

She shrugged and switched on the tape recorder and took dictation. He blinded himself and continued his book, speaking fluently, the storyteller reclining on his sofa. He came to see that the trip to Boston had been an interruption — necessary to preserve the appearance of having seen a specialist for his condition, but a disturbance of a routine on the island that he had found satisfying and productive.

Strange women still called, offering themselves to him. I know how you must feel. I’m sure I can help. Ava laughed insincerely at these anonymous calls, which were more frequent after dark.

Steadman teased her into taking him to see Titanic, at the Island Theater in Oak Bluffs, and he blinded himself in the dark, gulping his tonic covertly like a habitual user. Ava mocked the movie, but gaping at the screen, Steadman found it both melodramatic and upsetting. As he was watching, he was aware that across the road from the theater the harbor brimmed with a high tide, and far-off children’s voices, carrying across it with the sound of the sea, saddened him.

Afterward, in the night air, walking the streets of Oak Bluffs, blind among restless youths, many of them black, he felt even worse, and murmured, “They are prowling here. They have absolutely nothing to do. All these stalkers going in circles, looking for risks to take.” Their lazy muscularity terrified him, and their watchfulness alarmed him. They had such hunger. He said, “You have no idea how they glow.”

“Are you turning into a racist?”

“Some of these kids are angrier than you think.”

“They seem to be having a good time.”

“You have no idea.”

He said that what Ava took to be their taunting humor was really rage and envy and rivalry. They were too oblique to be observed in the normal way, but he saw their essence with his third eye; their appetite and energy were a set of readable odors. Where she saw boys in baggy pants with their caps on backward and girls in tight shorts, he saw a scrum of people trying to claim a place for themselves.

Another day they went to South Beach, using the fading of his blindness — had the dose been too small? — as an excuse to take the afternoon off from dictation. But the harsh distorting daylight pained his eyes, and daring himself in the wind that was filled with pelting sand grains, he blinded himself again. He was so daunted by the greater brightness, he ran headlong through the dunes before he leaped into the surf. Much more buoyant in blindness, he let himself be borne by the waves for a long time and then tossed into the rim of wet sand at the tidemark.