Paul Theroux - Blinding Light

“This is our secret,” she said. “You can dress me. You’re not going to tell anyone, are you?”

“No,” he said, obeying her, hearing a note of urgency in her voice, needing him to say no.

“Will you let me make you happy?” she asked.

He said yes with his body, and she asked him again.

“Yes, Mrs. Bronster.”

Then she let go of him. She pleaded with him, seeming to beg him with the heavy flesh of her own struggling body: “If you tell anyone, I’ll harm you.”

He turned away, reaching for his blindfold, but after the room went quiet there was no need for the blindfold. She was gone.

At dinner she was still wearing the clothes he had chosen. He loved sitting at the table with quacking Tom and cranky Nita, talking about everything except that. The clothes meant everything — that he possessed her, that she possessed him: that was their secret. She had made him her blind and willing lover. She had made him a man.

“First love,” he said in a whisper to Ava, and she slipped off his silken blindfold.

Everything he had seen in his mind’s eye, everything the datura made possible, that he had remembered and relived of his hidden life, of his sexual history, all that and more he had dictated to Ava. There was so much of it, for the larger part of his life he had lived in secret. He was gratified by the symmetry of it, its reality, its oddness, and he reflected that the rarest thing in books or movies, in which decapitation and rape and outrage were commonplace, was the simple joyous act of two lovers fucking.

In his interior narrative he had taken a longer and more difficult journey than the one he had described in Trespassing. There was frailty and failure, too, embarrassments and risk. Yet he never felt more powerful than he had on those nights and days, blindly revisiting his past. That power vitalized his belief in the chronicle of second chances that he had relived with Ava as every passion he had ever known.

Long ago, as a solitary boy, he had not understood the meaning of his desires. Now, enacted in the blinding light of the drug, they were coherent. The fulfilled yearning of youth was the only passion that mattered. He told himself that what he imagined was also real. What he had wanted and never gotten had made him who he was; what had lain buried in his memory was dragged out of the darkness and given life. And nothing was more sexual than the forbidden glimpses of his past, nothing truer than his fantasies. He called it fiction because every written thing was fiction.

So his work was done. The past made sense. At last he had his novel, The Book of Revelation, and he could face the world again.

HE WAS EUPHORIC at having finished his book, relieved of a burden he had carried like an uncomplaining drudge for so long it had cut and wounded him, enfeebling his body. All that suspense, the thing not done and tentative, the fragment of a promise kept in a stack of notes and tapes, had made him feel incomplete. His shattered sense of having been injured, of needing to heal, was nothing glorious — not the secret agony that was said to be the source of art. The dull pain had made him feel like a lower animal in the slow process of regenerating a limb from a broken stump. Now his work done, he was active again, whole and happy.

Except for some tidying up — the last transcripts and edits — Steadman had his book. This reward for all the years of silence, something at last his own, was a sexual confession in the form of a novel. He was at first so lightheaded he did not miss the datura tea he had drunk every working day in order to find the thread of his narrative. He was jubilant, with the exquisite thrill of his past revealed and understood.

Throughout the year of writing he had never needed to tell his editor he was at work. The whispers had reached New York early on. This man was Ron Axelrod. As a new young editor he had inherited Steadman when Steadman’s first editor had died. But for years that editor, and Axelrod too, had seen no new writing from Steadman and had merely shuffled contracts and processed the new tie-in editions of Trespassing.

Steadman phoned Axelrod and gave him the news. He said a disk with the first part of the manuscript was in the mail. He said, “I’m back in business.”

“I don’t know whether you’re aware of it,” Axelrod said after he had read the early chapters, “but there’s a touch of mysticism in your book.”

“Just tell me it’s on the spring list.”

“There’s probably enough lead time. If you deliver the whole thing soon, we can try.”

It did not seem that anything better could happen to improve his mood. And then another call came. Ava was at work; she had gone back to the hospital the day after the dictation had been finished and the last tapes sent for transcription. Lazing in bed on a Saturday morning, propped on pillows and relaxed, watching television, at first too drowsy to change the channel from Teletubbies, Steadman groped for the remote switch and pinched it and a new program flashed onto the screen. It was a stark cartoon in lurid colors, a wicked-faced man in a beaky green eyeshade tapping his stick under a stormy sky along a cobblestone road. Above his bony head was a swinging sign on a large old house, The Admiral Benbow Inn. He wore a black cape and hood that made him seem like a swaggering and wicked jackdaw.

“Will any kind friend inform a poor blind man who has lost the precious sight of his eyes in the gracious defense of his native country, England — and God bless King George — where or in what part of the country he may now be?”

A young cartoon boy whom Steadman knew to be Jim Hawkins, but drawn with a pale face that was meek and girlish, stepped from the shadows holding a flickering orange-windowed lantern.

“You are at the Admiral Benbow.”

The blind hooded man whirled around and snatched at Jim’s hand and twisted the boy’s skinny arm behind his back.

“Now, boy, take me to the Captain.”

“Sir, upon my word, I dare not”

“Take me in straight or I’ll break your arm.”

Steadman watched Blind Pew bully and terrify the boy. Then, as Blind Pew entered the inn, Steadman’s phone rang.

“This is the White House, president’s office. We’d like to speak to Mr. Slade Steadman.”

His thumb on the remote switch, he muted the TV. As soon as Blind Pew delivered the Black Spot there was mayhem — old grizzled sea dogs ransacking the rooms and tipping over sea chests.

“Speaking.”

Blind Pew was outside, groping again, and lost. Steadman watched in triumph, feeling contempt for the malevolent and stumbling blind man, who without any warning had been deserted by the others.

“The president wonders if you are free to attend a dinner at the White House on November tenth, for the visit of the chancellor of Germany.”

As in silence Blind Pew struggled on the empty, shadowy road, calling out for help, the woman on the phone explained that this was a call only to see whether he could attend the White House dinner. If the answer was yes, an invitation would be sent.

“Delighted to accept. Does this invitation extend to my partner, Dr. Ava Katsina?”

“Of course.”

Steadman spelled Ava’s name, and the White House secretary went over the details (“This will be black tie”), and Blind Pew fell into a ditch. He climbed crabwise out of it and, once again on the road, was trampled to death by five galloping horses.

Ava was pleased by the news. She moved lightly, happily, restless with pleasure, still wearing her green hospital scrubs. “This is great,” and looked at Steadman sideways, smiling uncertainly, because it seemed there was more and he was not divulging it. And when she saw the froglike expression on his face, heavy-lidded, his eyes half shut, his lips pressed together, she said, “Okay, what is it?”