Paul Theroux - Blinding Light

“Should I read your book? I’m not too sure I’ll like it.”

“My father loved your first book. He was such a bastard. He hit on my best friend and then he left my mom and the last we heard he was somewhere in Alaska.”

And one woman said in an urgent whisper, “I could take you home.” But he was driven to the hotel by Pam Fowler, and he lay in his room thinking, I like this.

The next morning she drove him to the airport for the flight to Portland. He was coddled again on the plane, but this time he did not protest. This was better than being at home. He did not feel nagged; he was well looked after, like a fragile adored child. When he got off the plane he called Ava. “I’m fine.” She seemed surprised that he was calling. She did not want to know more. She said she was busy at the hospital.

In Portland the woman escort, Julie, took him directly to a radio station. The interviewer announced himself as blind. For the first time on this trip Steadman was conscious of a pitiless scrutiny, not curiosity or fear but a piercing intelligence, like a beam of light turned on him.

“My wife read your book to me,” the blind interviewer said as he expertly worked the controls of the recorder. “I want to tell you that you write as only a blind man can — that’s a compliment. Reality for us is hallucinatory. Sighted people don’t know that. It’s a different grammar, a different vocabulary, a different world. It’s inside the world that sighted people see, but it’s hidden from them.”

After that, the interview went well. The blind man asked about the book — he was to be the only interviewer to address the book. Everyone else asked Steadman about his blindness. They sat face to face, blank stare to blank stare, talking amiably. And when the interview was over Steadman felt he had passed a crucial test.

In the evening he gave his pep talk about blindness at Powell’s Books, another large turnout, the close attention of eager and sympathetic readers, the sour smell of unsold books on shelves, the pleasant aroma of his own new book, like the tang of warm muffins, the new paper, the freshly cut pages, the clean slippery dust jacket, and now and then an old musty copy of Trespassing thrust before him for his signature.

“Hey, did you know you got kind of a crappy review in Time magazine?”

“Thanks for signing my book, but the only thing is, I can’t read your handwriting.”

He had learned a new way of signing his name, with a flourish, deliberately making it elegant, defying the people who stared at him hungrily as though he were defenseless and edible.

Again he was asked by a woman, “Can I see you to your hotel?” She had been standing behind his table, sighing. This time he accepted. He dismissed his escort, Julie, but when he got into the strange woman’s car he realized that she was heavy: she rocked the car as she slid onto her seat. How had he missed that before? Perhaps she had been standing behind him the whole time. She had a sweet small-girl voice. The car was littered with candy wrappers and cat hairs.

“ Trespassing changed my life,” she said in the bar of the Heathman Hotel. She had insisted on buying him a drink.

Now he could see everything, not just her bulk and her lank hair but the suture seams in her skull.

“I could show you to your room. I’m not making suggestions. I’m just saying I don’t have to be anywhere in particular.”

But she was making suggestions. She was sad-faced and forlorn. Her dewlaps shook as she sucked on a straw, nursing her daiquiri. What she did not know was that other people in the bar were staring, some in chairs and looking like figures in an altarpiece depicting fallen souls and damnation.

“I feel I owe you something. I believe in giving back.”

Steadman saw again that for some women blindness was not simple allure but acted as a powerful aphrodisiac. He became sad, telling her gently that he had an early flight, and he refused her assistance to the elevator, leaving her to pay the bill. Upstairs, he fiddled with his radio, deciding not to call Ava.

He flew on, feeling lighter, to San Francisco, and was met again and driven up the freeway to the city in the clear air that was spanked with waterborne sunlight from the bay. After he checked into his hotel the escort, an elderly man, said, “There’s time for drop-ins. Couple of chains near here.”

He said, “Okay,” and at the first bookstore, “I can handle this alone.”

In the short distance from the car to the entrance of the store he startled a flock of crumb-pecking pigeons and they flew up, a fluttering of winged rats, shitting and spattering onlookers as they ascended into the chafing wind.

He moved with hesitation to the information desk, pursuing the brisk tap of computer keys.

“I’m here to sign my book.”

“And you are?”

“Slade Steadman.”

“Is anyone expecting you?”

“I don’t know.” He tapped his cane, as though to indicate time passing.

“The manager’s on break.”

Now with all his senses wide open he was able to discern the features of the speaker, a young man wearing a filthy knitted cap, with pale hands, arrogant as only a very dim person could be, too obtuse to understand his own arrogance, quietly sniveling, at the vortex of a hundred thousand books.

“What was the name of the book again?”

“The Book of Revelation.”

A woman waiting at the desk near Steadman piped up. “You ain’t going to find that here.”

She was black and big, in a soft loose dress, with hair knotted like rug nap, her heavy-fleshed arms the color of undercooked ham and nipples like figs on her slack breasts.

“That there would be in devotional,” she said.

“I wish I could be more helpful,” the young man said.

Steadman yelped, something like a cry of pain, attracting attention, and then slashed with his stick and cleared his way to the street.

That gave him a story to tell interviewers. There were two that day, and each time he boasted of his blindness. The journalists were kind, yet he knew that they would mention the crumbs on his shirt front, his wild hair, and if his socks didn’t match they would say so.

That night, in Corte Madera, half an hour north of San Francisco, he talked about his blindness at Book Passage. He elaborated on Borges and Melville and quoted from Shakespeare. He felt so intensely observed he thought that few people actually listened to him. A woman in the front row seemed to smile in fear, her teeth bared, holding her fist to her mouth in anxiety and seeming to bite it like a large dripping fruit. Most of the people were fretful, embarrassed, as though watching an amateur acrobat without a net inching his way across a high wire.

They gathered afterward for his signature, murmuring at him: women with backpacks, men with handbags, their pockets crammed with paper, one boy like an Inca slinger, his cap with drooping earflaps.

“My cousin is blind and he, like, learned to play bass guitar and is really good at it now.”

“You should sign yourself up for one of them dogs. One of them Labs.”

“I can’t afford your book, but would you mind signing this picture of you I cut out of the paper?”

And as he left a flamboyant blonde offered him a lift and laughed beautifully when he declined.

Back in San Francisco, the streets were thronged with sprawling beggars demanding money. Steadman stared brazenly at them, poking with his stick and marveling how, at his refusal, one man farted an explosion of black swallows and green gas.

The next morning, on the way to the airport, the elderly male escort said, “I’ve been kind of wondering. You fully insured?”

Steadman flew to Denver and was met by a young woman who demanded to carry his bag. She drove efficiently, chatted to him without mentioning his blindness, then said, “Can’t you tell I’m a hottie?” Another talk, more interviews, good news of his book sales, a glimpse of a young couple kissing in the parking structure of the Tattered Cover bookstore, where a worshipful crowd applauded him and bought copies of his book for him to sign.