Paul Theroux - Blinding Light

He traveled as though in a foreign land where he was fluent in the language, a high-tech world of absurdities, inhabited largely by scowly sniffing furry-faced humanoids and now and then a bewitching woman trailing her odor of desire. Some people emitted a faint glow, others a ranker smell or a telling whisper. Nothing was as he had once known it. He was trespassing again. At Logan Airport he called Axelrod.

“Good news,” his editor reported. “We’ve almost sold out the first printing. We’re going back to press. Everyone wants to interview you. How’s it going?”

He couldn’t say. The dream-like distortions thronging the departure gates were not hindrances, more like revelations. A huge-headed fishfaced boy whining for candy, his teeth much too big for his mouth. Tramping bulky men burdened with satchels stuffed with fakery. Yammering old women, like a chorus of withered simpering baboons. The man next to him farting in fear and impatience. Scaly hands on him and unhelpful halitotic breath. All the world he saw anew; he was charged with his drug.

“I love you.” That was a desperate clumsy man with sweat in his fists.

“I love you, too.” Innocent, afraid, trapped, gabbling, speaking just to fill the dead air, and plainly insincere.

He found it so easy to tell when people were lying. He was the center of attention with his dark glasses, his cane, his hat, his handsome shoulder bag. He winced at the people gaping at him.

“Look, Steve, the guy’s blind. Go ahead, help him.”

“Get away from me.” He swept them aside with a swipe of his cane and kept them off, taking long strides as people scattered, making way for him.

Down a chilly ramp, an effeminate man at his side said, “Just a little bit farther, soldier, and let’s watch our step,” the man’s stinking fragrance like festering lilies and his hands pawing at Steadman’s sleeve.

On the long flight to Seattle he was pampered by a monstrous male nanny who said, “Want me to feed you?” Steadman swore at him and sat and suffered the stagnant air. He then put on his earphones and listened to a Philip Glass tape, which lulled him to sleep. He could sense the other passengers’ anxiety when he woke and groped forward to the toilet. The trip was an experience of jet howl, a racket of interruption and the passengers’ squalid fear.

“Are you being met here?”

He hated the babysitter’s tone. Already he was disgusted with bystanders’ insincere solicitude. It all made him defiant, assertive in his singularity.

A hand on his arm as he reached the bottom of the escalator.

“Hi. I’m Pam Fowler, your escort.”

She was a slow skinny woman who had forgotten where she’d parked her car. They roamed the lot for ten minutes until she found it.

“Just saw your Post-Intelligencer review,” she said as she buckled herself in. “It wasn’t very favorable. I had to look up the word ‘meretricious.’ Did I say that right?”

She drove badly, muttering the whole time in a nasal way, blaming herself for her ineptness.

“But it’s flying out of the stores. Elliott Bay reordered. They’re expecting you tonight.”

He was due to read at the Elliott Bay store, though “read” was not the word. He would talk instead, something about blindness.

“Have you seen your schedule?”

“What is your name?”

“Pam.”

“I am blind, Pam. I have not seen the schedule.”

It was a low blow, but he was still smarting from “It wasn’t very favorable.”

“I’m really sorry. I know that,” she said. “It’s just that you don’t seem blind.”

Turning to look at him, she took her eyes off the road. He could feel the car edging into the rumble strip, the washboard battering of the tires, the car’s echo from the nearby guardrail.

“Watch out!”

She braked, she apologized, she was now more nervous and her driving deteriorated. As if to placate him, she attempted small talk.

“Rainier’s out. Too bad you can’t see it.”

“But I can,” he said.

The hotel was large, with rank carpets and dust in the air. He was shown to his room by an awkward grunting bellman, and then he lay on his bed and dozed in the buzzing room until he was summoned to the event at Elliott Bay.

Stepping inside the bookstore, he knew from the stifling interior — the air sucked thin — that the place was packed. The day was damp. Only overdressed people on rainy days smelled worse than used books. People stepped away from him as always, seeing his glasses and cane, giving him room, as though he were fragile, as though fearing to touch him and topple him. One frightened pair of hands fumbled with his arm, trying to guide him.

“Just point me in the right direction.”

Already he hated being touched by strangers.

“I’m not going to read to you,” he said, taking his place at the raised table. “Instead, I’ll say a little about my condition. How unexpectedly I became blind. How what I thought would be a nightmare turned out to have its advantages. My book is not about blindness, but blindness helped me to imagine it and to write it.”

He searched the faces of the watching audience, and because he did not hesitate or look down at any notes, he seemed to alarm them when, with a kind of fierceness, he said, ‘“I have a way of always keeping my eyes shut, in order the more to concentrate the snugness of being in bed. Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if, darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences.’ That is Ishmael, in Moby Dick .”

His speaking with his blind and staring head erect created an even greater silence and apprehension. He recited Sassoon:

Does it matter? — losing your sight?…

There’s such splendid work for the blind;

And people will always be kind,

As you sit on the terrace remembering

And turning your face to the light.

The audience’s concentration was intense and seemed almost to crackle with attention. That calmed him and helped him pause and remember what he had planned. Rather than draw conclusions from the Melville, he plunged on. He disparaged King Lear for what he said was its crude depiction of blindness. “‘Looking on darkness which the blind do see’ is also wrong. Shakespeare is mistaken.” With the exception of the prophet Ahijah, the blind seer, the Bible is even more misleading on the subject of blindness — just a litany of ignorant threats and halftruths and false metaphors and the usual stumblers, Isaac, Samson, Eli, Zedekiah, Tobit, and the frantic and guilt-ridden taxman Saul. There was scriptural authority, he said, for making the case that God is blind.

“Darkness is the one thing I do not see,” he said. “Borges is right. The blind do not see black. The world is not dark to me. At its most indistinct it has a green glow, like the phosphorescence that is common in the densest rain forest. You see it on the narrow forking path, in the decay under the high canopy, exactly like an area in the Oriente province of Ecuador, where in fact I lost one form of sight and gained another.”

He quoted Milton and another poem by Sassoon. He had made mental notes. He was aware that he would be giving the same talk in all the cities on his tour, improving it, using the parts that worked, dropping the quotations that made the audiences restless.

Tonight, finishing with some lines from Borges’s essay “On Blindness,” his thanking the audience was drowned out by loud hospitable applause that seemed to say: You are brave, you are brilliant, you are heroic.

He sat and made the semblance of a signature in the books opened to the title page. His picture was taken, he was stroked, people whispered their thanks to him; everyone said something.