Paul Theroux - Blinding Light

He didn’t say, he squinted and looked froggier, he paced a little. The thought This is perfect showed on his face.

Ava followed, staying with him, and then he turned and said, “They asked me about my”—he raised his arms and clawed a pair of quotation marks in the air with his hooked fingers—“special needs.”

A slackening look of disturbance clouded Ava’s face.

“And you told them—?”

Steadman laughed, much too loudly, a honk of confidence.

With pleading eyes Ava held him. She said, “When you try to be enigmatic you can be such a bully.”

“I can see in the dark,” he said.

She screamed, howled in protest, which thinned to a cry of agony and betrayal.

“You can’t do this.”

He was in no doubt that he could, yet he knew from that moment he would never convince her of it.

“It’s a lie.”

In what was almost a whisper, but a heated one, Ava said, “I have just come from the hospital. We have real sick people there. ‘Special needs,’ all of that. We have sick children. We have people confused and upset because they’ve just been told they have macular degeneration, for which there is no cure. What an insult, what an outrage, for you to pretend to be blind.”

“Not pretend,” he said.

She shouted and left the room saying “No!” But he knew there would be more over dinner, and there was. She said that she had felt guilty about returning to work at the hospital so soon after his finishing the book, leaving him so abruptly. But now she was glad, she said. She wished she had gone sooner.

When he didn’t reply she said, “I can’t stand your smug face.”

In the days after that he felt so idle and liberated he used the datura again and found the alteration powerfully hallucinogenic. Even his voice underwent a change, became declaratory, with a stammering vibrato. Datura was a friend. Blind, he was able to reconstitute his world and find his true place in it.

“Back from the dead,” he said.

The whole day ahead was his, without any obligation on his part to cast his mind back and revisit his past; nothing to accomplish. He had written his book.

That day Axelrod called again with the news that The Book of Revelation was on the spring list.

“But you’ll have to help me with the catalogue copy.”

“Give me a hint.”

“Tell me what it’s about.”

“The physical side of the act of creation.”

“Yes?”

“The origin of art.”

“Be a little more specific.”

“Look, it’s about itself.”

He said it was more a book about transgression and trespassing than Trespassing had been; it was all interior travel. He did not say that datura was the means, its name like an elegant, darting vehicle that had taken him the whole distance, there and back.

In the days that followed, Ava sulked, stung by his insistence on going to the White House dinner blind, showing up impaired in public as the president’s guest, someone who would be photographed and written about. When he talked Ava stepped away to give him room, for he seemed to crowd her, to look past her, as though he were haranguing a multitude of people, the wider world, speaking more expansively, like a man starring in his own movie. He appeared to be aware that a public process was at work on the Vineyard, a marveling at him for his prescience, the murmuring witnesses to his renewed fame, the triumphant second act of his life, more dramatic, more visible and original, than the first.

He imagined his face on his book jacket: eyes opaque with the drug and yet shocking, with a wounded corrosive stare on which nothing was lost, for this new book was like the oldest book in the world, a confession that was prophecy and revelation.

He had dreamed of writing such a book. He had yearned to create it but had been baffled and tentative, not knowing how to begin. The book he had envisioned was calculated to eliminate the possibility of any biography of him, to make the notion of a biographer a joke. A parasite, a hanger-on, an outsider, an intruder, a stammering explainer with his nose against a smeared windowpane, staring into thick curtains — who needed such a person? For someone who wrote the truth exhaustively, setting everything down without any inhibition, making the ultimate confession, a biography was superfluous. Why would anyone bother? There would be nothing to write, nothing new, nothing of value. So with the book he called his novel, he had taken over the work of all the prospective biographers.

“I’ve put them out of business,” he said loudly, as though to the world.

Axelrod said, “We can get it into the catalogue now. If you deliver the manuscript on a disk before the end of the month, we can publish in the spring. Shall we say it’s travel?”

“It’s travel, it’s autobiography, it’s everything. Most of all it’s fiction.”

“Hell of a title.”

As for the paragraph for the catalogue the editor asked for, Steadman said, “How much better not to have one.” And when the editor seemed doubtful, Steadman said, “Just the title.”

There was general approval for the two-thousand-year-old title, The Book of Revelation.

In a damp and breezy October of slapped-down waves in the harbor and discoloring and withering leaves up-island, the Vineyard had almost emptied of visitors and was returned again to its year-rounders. After his months of steady work it seemed odd to Steadman to be here with so little to do except process his manuscript. In the course of almost a year of dictation — they had returned from Ecuador the previous November — a woman with a secretarial service in Edgartown had transcribed the tapes he had made with Ava. The woman had said she was unshockable. “As the mother of three boys and a girl, with a husband in the Coast Guard, I’ve seen just about everything.” At first she sent the pages using a courier service. Then, perhaps to save money, she delivered the printed pages in person. She had kept pace with the dictation, the tapes and notes, and not long after Steadman finished, she handed him the remainder of the first draft of the novel, with the tightlipped smile of someone tested to the limit, as though holding back her disapproval.

The book was complete, needing only line corrections and slight revision. Having the whole book before him was a pleasure. But he worked without the drug. How plain the printed words seemed compared to the stipple of brilliant pixels in his drug visions.

He dabbed at errors, rubbing highlights into words and phrases, deleting preciousness (“frenzied and oculate waves” became “wild eye-spotted swells”; he crossed out the words “numinous,” “ineffable,” and “chiastic”). Now that his days were relieved only by his trifling with the manuscript, he found himself disoriented. He was glad to be free of the anxiety of the guilty lopsided life of a writer with an unfinished book, but he missed the day-filling routine of dictation, the drama of his sexual nights, the anticipation of taking the drug each morning. The music had stopped, the racket in his head was gone, the house was whole but predictable, colorless, no longer hallucinatory. One day was like another, the empty hours of silent mornings and much too long afternoons and dreamless nights that had no objective, not even the promise of Ava. She was always tired: her work, her life, was elsewhere. He was reminded of his life before Ecuador, when he’d had nothing to do, nothing to write; when he had felt cynical and impotent. He was not impotent now, yet he felt his desire slackening, the old disobedience that was like a deafness of the flesh.

He found he could not read easily; habituated to glowing shapes and colors, his eyes were unaccustomed to the severity of small print. The letters jumped and rearranged themselves as he blinked, making him feel dyslexic. So he put on earphones and listened to audiotapes. The glimpse of Blind Pew on the television that morning had stirred his interest. In his present mood of impatience he had a boxed set of tapes, Stevenson classics, sent to him in a taxi from Vineyard Haven. He shut out the world by clamping Stevenson to his ears. Some passages he marveled at, but the best of them saddened him with their exactitude and made him feel lonely. He had often felt this when he was affected by the truth in fiction.