Paul Theroux - Blinding Light

For a brief spell his vision was no longer yellow-hued but clear, bright as a Hawaiian lagoon, impressive in its depthless clarity. But he saw another blue, and for a brief period he enjoyed the piercing sight of crystalline imagery.

He followed all the post-op instructions. He used the drops, took the antibiotics, did not touch his eyes with his fingers, but still — was it the snorkeling? the sea water? the swimming? — the tiny incisions became infected. He was put on stronger antibiotics, to which he was allergic, and in the days he refrained from taking them, the infection got a grip. He went back to the doctor and was informed that he was losing his corneas.

He remained in Hawaii, he said, awaiting a cornea transplant, his eyes bandaged. Blindfolded in all that sunlight! The transplant was done and he flew back to Boston, only to be told that the operation was a failure.

“The doctor looks at me and says, ‘Your corneas are decompensating.’”

They tried again, this time with a world-class medical team: the waiting, the suspense, the exhaustion of the surgery. And those corneas, too, were rejected.

“I accepted this condition. Maybe someday I will get a healthy transplant that will take, and you’ll see me reading on the beach. But that’s out of my hands. I don’t want to live on false hope.”

That was his story. Except for the mention of snorkeling in Hawaii, none of it was true. But it didn’t matter, for with the datura he was truly blind. With his stick and his unhesitating gait he had emerged from seclusion to become a dramatic public figure on the Vineyard party circuit. There was renewed interest in his life and work. And somehow people knew that after years of silence he was working on a book.

It was easy for people to believe the fiction that he had been rendered blind from an infection and his cornea transplants had gone wrong. Medical mistakes were so common, everyone understood. Many people countered with a medical mishap of their own — misdiagnosis, wrong medication, unexpected side effects. “He went in for tonsillitis and they gave him a vasectomy.”

People agreed with him when he said, “Doctors make you sick.” And he was surprised that his explanation was so easily accepted, glad that he did not have to elaborate on his lies. It helped his story when Ava agreed that his doctors had been incompetent.

He knew that nothing would have been harder to explain than the drug he had happened upon in the Secoya village down the Aguarico River in the Oriente province of Ecuador, when he had been looking for ayahuasca and been introduced by Manfred to that rare datura, the ragged and attenuated clone of angel’s trumpet; and how the blinding light had allowed him a downward transcendence into a new life, with a new vocabulary of sight.

“Phosphenes,” Ava said.

The word that science offered was inadequate for the visions that were now his.

At one time he had taken pleasure in the act of writing, had enjoyed filling a page, crossing out half of it, beginning again, adding improvements and variations in the margin, preparing a fair copy, like a monk scratching away on vellum. But now, with the prevision of his blindness, setting down the words seemed much less important than contriving a sequence of images in his head. Why write when such visions were so intense? And the fact was that the very writing of them seemed to diminish them.

And when the moment came, using a pen was out of the question, and he had no use for a keyboard. He needed a tape recorder, needed a woman to stimulate him — not any woman but someone he desired, and now there was only one. He was so enraptured, so possessed by his vision, and given such fluency, that he needed to speak his book and for Ava to set it down as well as record it. His book was an exuberance, an intense erotic prayer; her writing it was not submissive but a form of interrogation. The act of his dictating and her murmuring and saying “Yes, yes” or “Wait” was sexual, too, because she was an essential and active partner in it, just as obsessed.

Ava was sometimes Ava and sometimes Dr. Katsina, depending on the time of day, and their nighttime relationship was the more passionate for their daytime detachment. Needing her so badly in order to get on with his book, he was grateful for her being there, but he was so dependent he was at times resentful — not toward her but toward the whole scheme of creation. He wanted to be a beacon, a prophet. And the fact was that without her he would have been nothing but a harmless paranoiac, a secret king, living in seclusion, impotently, frivolously fantasizing to a whirring machine.

ONCE, NOT THAT LONG before, Ava had seemed just a face and figure, another woman, but loving, desirable, bright. Now she was the living embodiment of his ideal woman — a comforter, a partner, a protector, a helper, a healer, a friend; and she was hungrier than he was. He loved to think that she never said no, that she initiated sex. I am waiting for you. Come here.

She had become his life, his greatest friend, and his need was deeper than love. She was his companion, she was his mistress, she dominated him, she attended him, she was both his soothing submissive nurse and his bossy doctor. He depended on her for everything. She took orders, and in serving him she guided him, became part of his days and nights. Though she had said she would never do such a thing, she had vacated her Vineyard Haven house and moved in with him up-island. Now the whole estate was as much hers as his. She was his secretary, encouraging him in his dictation and operating the tape recorder. She was everything but his eyes — he had his own eyes. But she was in his work, helping him live it, helping him write it. She was half his book, as she put it: the blind man’s lover.

She still fought him, accusing him of pomposity, but the proof that he had been profoundly changed was evident in his work. He admitted to her that the moment he had felt the most liberated by his blindness was the moment he needed her the most, realizing that he could not live without her. He did not question this paradox. He could not separate those two contradictions. In his darkness he held out his eager hand to grope forward, and she grasped it with her uncertain hand and led him onward.

“I feel responsible for your blindness.”

“Now you’re the one who’s boasting.”

“Wasn’t it an awful shock?”

“No, I’m a new man.”

A year ago, it had been her idea to go to Ecuador, on the jungle drug tour. The blindness that resulted, Steadman said, was his good fortune. He had gone looking for an idea, anything to write; he had never thought he would have a second chance, another book, a real life. In the face of Steadman’s apparent irrationality Ava desired to take the blame. But there was no blame. He had seen into her heart, he needed her, he was only grateful.

“You’ve given me life,” he said.

“My life, unfortunately — I’m not working, I haven’t done any doctoring for months, and the hospital keeps calling to say they’re shorthanded,” she said. “But maybe that’s what love is, a kind of selfish sacrifice. The illusion that you’re giving someone your life.”

“Don’t call it love,” he said, and became extravagant. “You’re a shepherdess, a shaman, a priestess.”

She said, “Just don’t ask me to marry you.”

He laughed with surprise and relief.

“Because I never want to give you that power over me. And I don’t want any myself.”

“What do you want?”

“What you want — pleasant surprises. Go into the library and wait for me.”

He did as he was told, and saw that the stained-glass windows he had installed to protect his books from the sun were darkened by the gloomy afternoon, each color in each panel like a distinct aroma that was fading. He stood, not knowing what was in store, but savoring what he knew would be pleasurable. Facing the dim colors of the windows, he heard the library door open and shut.