Paul Theroux - Blinding Light

“Are you all right, Mr. Steadman?”

Leaning over him was a young woman with hot skin and an aroma of slippery kelp on her soft thighs, like a dripping mermaid with damp twisted hair and fish lips.

“He’s learning to hold his breath underwater,” Ava said, and the young woman shimmered into the sea and danced across a wave.

“She was offering herself,” Steadman said.

He shopped blind, he walked blind, he sailed his catboat blind, he drove blind to Squibnocket. He never lost his confidence, did not waver. But in spite of the authority of his gestures, he sometimes bobbled a line or dropped things; and though he did not falter himself, he made others falter — Ava especially was wrong-footed by him again and again.

The nighttime drive to Squibnocket was a cautious charade, a much shorter distance than Steadman realized or admitted. Ava meant it when she praised him, though she was overly sincere, a little too insistent, as if humoring a drunk or a madman.

In the street, dogs barked at him, and when children stared he screeched, “I’m a bat!”

On the day of the sail he handled the boat expertly, but did not know the tide had turned and was ebbing west, sweeping his small boat on its beam through the harbor to the lighthouse until, jerking on the main sheet, he found himself rocked in the troughs of West Chop. Ava took the tiller and guided them into the harbor entrance to Tashmoo Pond, because they couldn’t buck the outgoing tide at Vineyard Haven.

“You sailed the hard part,” Ava said.

Steadman knew he was being patronized by her, but didn’t mind her tone because she was in the dark, not he. He was compulsive, he needed to be blind, it was liberation to him.

This was his year of blinding light. He hoped for many more of them, light-years ahead. He had turned his life around. He was writing again. He hated to use the word “blind.” Blind meant struck down and helpless, and he had been elevated and inspired. The decision was his, the secret too — datura was not blindness but a mask in a play of revelation. He loved putting it on, he was reluctant to take it off, and when he did, it was an act of will, like throwing his head back and stabbing his eyes with needles.

He did not miss the irony in the image of needles, for he had become like an addict, needing the visions granted him in the darkness he brought on himself. Datura was a paradox, blindfolding him, giving him sight. Until then, all he had ever seen was a one-dimensional world, shabby and insubstantial in its shallowness. He realized on leaving it, borne by the drug, that he had spent his whole life truly blind, seeing only one plane, one surface.

Datura gave him night vision, like the superior sight and heightened senses of a nocturnal animal, one of the big yellow-eyed cats that dozed by day and prowled at night. He saw himself as the feline prophet of a new religion and his writing as revelation. What Nestor had called la venda de tigre, the tiger’s blindfold, had admitted him to a world of visions — the gauzy light, the luminous shapes, the peculiar phosphorescence all around him, the way black light was active, and most of all the smells, the touch, the taste of darkness. But the experience was also deeply physical. Nothing stirred him more sexually than this palpable darkness.

Dr. Budberg wrote him a brief blunt memo in which she confirmed his blindness. It was “of unknown origin.” She encouraged him to seek a second opinion and to consider more tests.

Ava said, “It would have helped if she had suggested a cause. Then we would have some sort of description for your blindness.”

Steadman said, “She’s the blind one!”—still annoyed that she had never heard of him, or at least pretended not to know his name. But she had problems of her own, her grief like a disease, bloating her and making her slow and sour.

“She was highly recommended. She comes to the island sometimes.”

In a list of scribbled notes on the “Additional Comments” page, she stated that he had no apparent vision, had failed all the tests, nothing registered, all the measuring instruments said so. He was a mystery, a problem, his sight was zero, and she had neither hope nor any remedy except a referral.

In the report it was as if Steadman’s eyes had been gouged out and the sockets sewn shut. No one was blinder — that was the story. But his cheerfulness and wit, his emergence from his solitude, had given him fame on the island — an island that was connected to the greater world. People on the Vineyard who knew him admired him; he was envied rather than pitied. In the island talk, which was constant, he was becoming a hero of handicap.

No one but Ava knew the truth, that his blindness was his choice, and reversible; his own decision. The effects lasted six or seven hours and then wore off, leaving a residue of craving, a longing for what had just ended, a memory of light, of commanding power.

He no longer questioned the datura but was only grateful for its being part of his life. He could see more clearly than ever, could feel, too, with intense sensitivity; his skin, his muscles, his nerves were electric. Sex seldom satisfied him completely; it made him greedier. It was something tactile that convulsed him, but was more than ever a brilliant spectacle, something ruthless and sudden even when it was anticipated.

“Because sex is the truth.”

The summer was passing. He dictated a portion of the book every day to Ava, and his dictation, which was taped and later transcribed, was often a dramatic episode, a set of instructions for a sexual encounter with her in her nighttime role as a seductress, Dr. Katsina. Summer days, summer nights, living and writing the erotic narrative that was his book. Blinding light, exquisite heat.

There were more parties, and — though Ava objected — Steadman was frequently the center of attention. When someone asked him what had happened to his sight, he explained that he had been blinded in such a simple way that he was amazed it had not happened more often. Why weren’t more people blind? Eyes were just blobs of jelly, like a pair of trembling oysters, the softest, most vulnerable parts of the body. Nothing violent had befallen him, just a series of preventable errors, so he said.

He had been traveling — spending some of the fortune he had made from the merchandising and licensing of Trespassing— and had been in Hawaii. He had a residential address there, having leased a beach house for the winter. On a whim, he applied for a driver’s license and, placing his chin on the metal rest for the eye exam, had looked into the chart and seen a blaze of light and faint, sketchy letters. He could not read a line, even with the glasses he sometimes used, and was failed by the apologetic clerk, who said, “Maybe you need new glasses.”

After trying many combinations of lenses on him, an eye doctor shone a light into his eyes and said he had severe cataracts. He would need immediate surgery.

“I was amazed. I said it was impossible. I was hardly fifty.”

But it was not unusual, he was told, especially given his extensive travel. Cataracts were sometimes hereditary, but there was also his exposure, in the years he spent outdoors, to ultraviolet rays. His father had worn thick glasses, the old inadequate remedy.

“It’s an easy operation,” the doctor said. “A slam dunk.”

Everyone said that, though Steadman believed that the expression “slam dunk” had come to mean, for him, certain failure. And so it seemed, for Steadman had both eyes operated on, separately, six weeks apart. Not laser surgery, he explained, but a procedure under a blazing light, the scraping sound, the murmuring of the surgeon and her assistant, a knife in each eye, but such a small incision that no sutures were needed.