Paul Theroux - Blinding Light

What was he thinking? It was the only topic of conversation these days, the president’s face fixed in an expression of defiance and shame, looking like a fool.

Steadman was certain that his Book of Revelation would have greater resonance in a world bewildered by the fact that the most powerful man in the world had risked his whole reputation, his job, his marriage, the respect of his friends, in order to meet a pushy, privileged, fattish, and unappealing young woman and encourage her to fellate him while he sat glassy-eyed with lust in his White House office.

It wasn’t strange at all, really, though you could hardly blame the president for denying it. It was at the heart of Steadman’s book, for safe inside the White House, having his cock sucked, the president was briefly a happy boy.

With all the lies and evasions and half-truths he had told, the president was miserable, and yet he clung to power. He repeated that he would not give up, would not resign, would go on no matter how loud the mockery and the declarations of hatred. The hatred was not new, but the pity was something terrible. Steadman could tell that the president was chastened and weakened by the pity and that he found it hard to bear.

Seeing the man so embattled, Steadman took his side, but he knew in advance that the president’s disgrace offered other ways for Ava and him to pick on each other.

“He stepped on his dick, I grant you. He’s behaved like a fool. But what has he done wrong?”

“I’d be out on my ear if I did that,” Ava said. “If I were caught fucking an orderly in my office I would be fired, no questions asked.”

“No one is hurt by it. And he’ll have to endure the worst possible punishment — the whole world laughing at him and feeling superior. That’s a nightmare.”

“My father was in the Navy,” Ava said. But she spoke in a tone of resignation, not outrage. “If he had done that he would have been shit-canned or demoted and posted to Diego Garcia. The president is the commander in chief of the armed forces.”

“So what? That’s honorary.”

“He’s pretending to be innocent, like you’re pretending to be blind.”

“I am blind.”

“What is it, an addiction? You can’t deal with stress? You can’t face the world? So you retreat. But instead of pot or speed, your drug is the Ecuadorian blindfold. The ultimate escape.”

“It’s the opposite,” he said. The datura was insight, an asset, not evasion at all, not an escape from the world but immersion in it, the deepest possible confrontation with reality. “And if that’s not so, then how is it, after so much failure, did I succeed in writing my book?”

“That’s simple. I helped you.”

He couldn’t dispute this. He had repeatedly told her that he would have been lost without her.

“And now you have it both ways. People pity you and yet you’re stronger than they are.”

He had no answer. He knew it to be true.

“It’s over between us,” she said. “I’m busy at the hospital. I should get a place of my own again.” As though thinking aloud, she went on softly, “All you’ve done is disrupt my life.”

“Don’t go,” he said. With an effort of will, swallowing hard, he said, “Please.”

“You don’t deserve me.”

She was so strong now, with a fierceness in her fatigue and bright feverish eyes that came from working long hours at the hospital. And she was so formidable scrubbed of all her makeup, pale and intimidating.

“What do you want?”

He said in a small imploring voice, “I want you to accept that I am dependent on this drug for now.” He looked at his hands with mild surprise, as if he had just realized they belonged to someone else. “The basket is broken to bits. Someday soon I will run out of the juice. I won’t have the option of being blind. In the meantime…”

“In the meantime I am not going to help you.”

“Okay,” he said, lifting his empty hands and holding them as though to propitiate her. He wanted to say more but did not have the words to describe the fulfilled dream it had been for him: their living there, just the two of them; inhabiting the house, his fantasies, his book.

“I’m not going on your book tour,” she said.

“I can live with that.” And saying so, he decided that it was better if she didn’t come along in that mood, dragging her grudge with her, a nagging presence, casting a gloomy shadow, as she had on the trip to Washington.

As though still negotiating, he said, “I’m almost out of the drug. Maybe a month or six weeks more.”

“Go ahead, then,” she said, “make an idiot of yourself, like him.”

The president was on TV, always shown before a crowd of delighted people. As he strode past a rope line, he leaned forward and hugged a grinning girl in a black beret — the fool embracing his fellatrix.

Ava shook her head, and he could tell from her upright posture, her hand, the twitch of her hair — not making eye contact, reflective, not looking for an answer or expecting to be contradicted — that she was in her clinical mode, delivering a medical opinion.

“God only knows what that stuff is doing to your nerves. But I can guess. Stressing the neurons. Toasting the ganglia. Burning out the synapses.”

With a slow, dull smile he said, “It’s easier for me to talk to you after I’ve taken a dose.” He looked her full in the face; his eyes were glaucous and fish-like. “Because I can see what is really in your heart.”

She seemed puzzled, not by that assertion, he knew, but by her realization that she had been home for more than an hour and had only just noticed that he was drugged, saturated, blinded. She had been able to be passive and playful as his sex partner, but in her doctor’s scrubs she hated surprises and especially hated being told things she didn’t know.

She quickly recovered and said sharply, “So you insist on wearing a mask.”

“So what?”

“That makes you two different people. Yourself and your mask.”

“That’s my problem. Or maybe my special gift.”

“Your problem,” she said. “The fear that you will be unmasked. The fear of all mask wearers.”

THE WIDER WORLD that Steadman entered as a solitary blind man was deranged, inside out, constantly expanding with obvious conspirators, subtle freaks, and the mouth-breathing ectoplasm of strangers. Using her lunch break, Ava helped him at the checkin counter at the Vineyard airport. He clawed the air, as though trying to seize it and understand.

“Just one person traveling?”

The nibbling mouse-faced clerk, with chewed and bitten fingers, shiny boots, a sweaty bag at his feet, was the first of many people who seemed to Steadman grotesque approximations — worse, weirder than when he had been with Ava in D.C., perhaps the more phantasmal because he was alone.

Sensing his unease, Ava said, “You’ll be fine.”

“I’m being met by an escort in each city.”

“Great,” Ava said, without any interest, her frowning face like bruised fruit. “Gotta go. I’m operating at two. Appendectomy.”

She was gone the next moment, the woman whose beauty he had adored, who had inspired his wildest sexual fantasies, scuttling away in scrubs and tennis shoes, a medic on the move — so long, Doc.

Steadman boarded the Boston flight and at once felt tossed into the funnel of his tour, toppling toward the black light, past the peripheral voices, just chatter. Most of what he heard was pointless—“They have their big meal at lunchtime”—but now and then the public emotion concentrated in the departure lounge was inexpressibly sad: “I watched him die,” and “Please don’t do this to me,” and “I don’t care if I ever see him again,” and “Ricky, did you remember to take your medication?”