Blinding Light

  He whispered to Ava, “Everyone I see is naked.”

  “You’re boasting again,” Ava said. She challenged him with denials and evasions, because of his extravagance.

  “No, you don’t understand. Nakedness is a kind of concealment, the most misleading kind. It subverts fantasy.”

  Yesterday in Boston, at Pinky’s, he had been reflective, for nakedness was like defiance. The dancers had been girlish and coy, playful, teasing, protected by their nudity. Even the barest woman in the place looked peeled and raw, just feeble startled limbs, going through the motions, and others seemed more like pork to him now. Because he saw too much, something important was missing. The essential woman was hidden inside all that naked flesh.

  Though the trip to Boston had been exhausting, it had been worth it for the sight of Ava in the bar, face forward, her cheeks slapped by the fat breasts of the dancer, her eyes alight.

  “You liked it,” he said.

  Ava said, “Couldn’t you tell—I wanted to go home with her. But I’m trying to keep you honest. The women who’ve been calling you up don’t care about your writing. And if you think you’re preternaturally prescient, then you’re a freak.”

  His rattle of laughter disturbed her even more than his white sightless eyes.

  To give herself confidence, she mocked him. “You’re like the kid who always wins at Pin the Tail on the Donkey. After a while everyone suspects that he’s peeking over his blindfold.”

  “They’ll read my book and see that my power is real.”

  “What happens when you lose it?”

  “Sight and blindness are the same to me. Blindness is special sight.”

  “You can’t keep up this pretense forever. Someone will find out and expose you.”

  He laughed. Her challenges excited him by keeping him alert; he enjoyed repelling her attacks. He wanted her to fight him, or else later, embracing her, there would be nothing left to believe in. He smiled and said softly that he was not afraid, that the book would vindicate him and—as books seemed to do, as Trespassing had done—displace him.

  “Ask Dr. Budberg. She was baffled. I told her I’m a medical miracle.”

  “Oh, please.”

  Ava seemed to think that her defiance might stimulate his humility. She kept at him, accusing him of being absurdly proud of going back and forth from blindness to sight. “You think you’re better, not because you’re blind but because you’re both, that the ability to switch makes you superior. You’re drinking flower juice from the jungle. That’s all.”

  “Some people drink it and nothing happens. Remember Manfred?”

  “That creep,” she said. “He was the one who got you into this.”

  Because the drug was so effective on Steadman, he felt singled out, not lucky but chosen. He could see that Ava was weakening, but he relished her antagonism. Her doubt was necessary; he did not want a slave, he wanted an active partner; he needed her doctor’s skepticism.

  “By the way, you’ve got wine stains all over your shirt,” she said sharply.

  “And you’re having your period.”

  “No,” she said, and then lamely added, “It just started.”

  “Isn’t that what I said?”

  He was like a goblin, but he was writing; he was living for his new novel. Only he and Ava knew that its wildest parts were the facts of his life, the most outrageous of his conceits the plain truth.

  The many-sided trip to Boston that humid summer day, his stumble-strutting like a proud cripple and slashing his bone-white cane, finding his way, raising the alarm for the drowning boy, reading the doctor’s grief, understanding the implications of nakedness, had vitalized him and made him greedy for more. Being among strangers had always made him impatient and alert, and his blindness electrified him and endowed everyone he saw with a blue aura of revelation.

  “Borges is right. Blindness is a gift.”

  Still resisting, Ava said, “My worst patients are always the ones trying to prove they’re not sick.”

  “I’m not your fucking patient!”

  She shrugged and switched on the tape recorder and took dictation. He blinded himself and continued his book, speaking fluently, the storyteller reclining on his sofa. He came to see that the trip to Boston had been an interruption—necessary to preserve the appearance of having seen a specialist for his condition, but a disturbance of a routine on the island that he had found satisfying and productive.

  Strange women still called, offering themselves to him. I know how you must feel. I’m sure I can help. Ava laughed insincerely at these anonymous calls, which were more frequent after dark.

  Steadman teased her into taking him to see Titanic, at the Island Theater in Oak Bluffs, and he blinded himself in the dark, gulping his tonic covertly like a habitual user. Ava mocked the movie, but gaping at the screen, Steadman found it both melodramatic and upsetting. As he was watching, he was aware that across the road from the theater the harbor brimmed with a high tide, and far-off children’s voices, carrying across it with the sound of the sea, saddened him.

  Afterward, in the night air, walking the streets of Oak Bluffs, blind among restless youths, many of them black, he felt even worse, and murmured, “They are prowling here. They have absolutely nothing to do. All these stalkers going in circles, looking for risks to take.” Their lazy muscularity terrified him, and their watchfulness alarmed him. They had such hunger. He said, “You have no idea how they glow.”

  “Are you turning into a racist?”

  “Some of these kids are angrier than you think.”

  “They seem to be having a good time.”

  “You have no idea.”

  He said that what Ava took to be their taunting humor was really rage and envy and rivalry. They were too oblique to be observed in the normal way, but he saw their essence with his third eye; their appetite and energy were a set of readable odors. Where she saw boys in baggy pants with their caps on backward and girls in tight shorts, he saw a scrum of people trying to claim a place for themselves.

  Another day they went to South Beach, using the fading of his blindness—had the dose been too small?—as an excuse to take the afternoon off from dictation. But the harsh distorting daylight pained his eyes, and daring himself in the wind that was filled with pelting sand grains, he blinded himself again. He was so daunted by the greater brightness, he ran headlong through the dunes before he leaped into the surf. Much more buoyant in blindness, he let himself be borne by the waves for a long time and then tossed into the rim of wet sand at the tidemark.

  “Are you all right, Mr. Steadman?”

  Leaning over him was a young woman with hot skin and an aroma of slippery kelp on her soft thighs, like a dripping mermaid with damp twisted hair and fish lips.

  “He’s learning to hold his breath underwater,” Ava said, and the young woman shimmered into the sea and danced across a wave.

  “She was offering herself,” Steadman said.

  He shopped blind, he walked blind, he sailed his catboat blind, he drove blind to Squibnocket. He never lost his confidence, did not waver. But in spite of the authority of his gestures, he sometimes bobbled a line or dropped things; and though he did not falter himself, he made others falter—Ava especially was wrong-footed by him again and again.

  The nighttime drive to Squibnocket was a cautious charade, a much shorter distance than Steadman realized or admitted. Ava meant it when she praised him, though she was overly sincere, a little too insistent, as if humoring a drunk or a madman.

  In the street, dogs barked at him, and when children stared he screeched, “I’m a bat!”

  On the day of the sail he handled the boat expertly, but did not know the tide had turned and was ebbing west, sweeping his small boat on its beam through the harbor to the lighthouse until, jerking on the main sheet, he found himself rocked in the troughs of West Chop. Ava took the tiller and guided them into the harbor entrance to Tashmoo Pond, because they couldn’t buck the outgoing t
ide at Vineyard Haven.

  “You sailed the hard part,” Ava said.

  Steadman knew he was being patronized by her, but didn’t mind her tone because she was in the dark, not he. He was compulsive, he needed to be blind, it was liberation to him.

  This was his year of blinding light. He hoped for many more of them, light-years ahead. He had turned his life around. He was writing again. He hated to use the word “blind.” Blind meant struck down and helpless, and he had been elevated and inspired. The decision was his, the secret too—datura was not blindness but a mask in a play of revelation. He loved putting it on, he was reluctant to take it off, and when he did, it was an act of will, like throwing his head back and stabbing his eyes with needles.

  He did not miss the irony in the image of needles, for he had become like an addict, needing the visions granted him in the darkness he brought on himself. Datura was a paradox, blindfolding him, giving him sight. Until then, all he had ever seen was a one-dimensional world, shabby and insubstantial in its shallowness. He realized on leaving it, borne by the drug, that he had spent his whole life truly blind, seeing only one plane, one surface.

  Datura gave him night vision, like the superior sight and heightened senses of a nocturnal animal, one of the big yellow-eyed cats that dozed by day and prowled at night. He saw himself as the feline prophet of a new religion and his writing as revelation. What Nestor had called la venda de tigre, the tiger’s blindfold, had admitted him to a world of visions—the gauzy light, the luminous shapes, the peculiar phosphorescence all around him, the way black light was active, and most of all the smells, the touch, the taste of darkness. But the experience was also deeply physical. Nothing stirred him more sexually than this palpable darkness.

  Dr. Budberg wrote him a brief blunt memo in which she confirmed his blindness. It was “of unknown origin.” She encouraged him to seek a second opinion and to consider more tests.

  Ava said, “It would have helped if she had suggested a cause. Then we would have some sort of description for your blindness.”

  Steadman said, “She’s the blind one!”—still annoyed that she had never heard of him, or at least pretended not to know his name. But she had problems of her own, her grief like a disease, bloating her and making her slow and sour.

  “She was highly recommended. She comes to the island sometimes.”

  In a list of scribbled notes on the “Additional Comments” page, she stated that he had no apparent vision, had failed all the tests, nothing registered, all the measuring instruments said so. He was a mystery, a problem, his sight was zero, and she had neither hope nor any remedy except a referral.

  In the report it was as if Steadman’s eyes had been gouged out and the sockets sewn shut. No one was blinder—that was the story. But his cheerfulness and wit, his emergence from his solitude, had given him fame on the island—an island that was connected to the greater world. People on the Vineyard who knew him admired him; he was envied rather than pitied. In the island talk, which was constant, he was becoming a hero of handicap.

  No one but Ava knew the truth, that his blindness was his choice, and reversible; his own decision. The effects lasted six or seven hours and then wore off, leaving a residue of craving, a longing for what had just ended, a memory of light, of commanding power.

  He no longer questioned the datura but was only grateful for its being part of his life. He could see more clearly than ever, could feel, too, with intense sensitivity; his skin, his muscles, his nerves were electric. Sex seldom satisfied him completely; it made him greedier. It was something tactile that convulsed him, but was more than ever a brilliant spectacle, something ruthless and sudden even when it was anticipated.

  “Because sex is the truth.”

  The summer was passing. He dictated a portion of the book every day to Ava, and his dictation, which was taped and later transcribed, was often a dramatic episode, a set of instructions for a sexual encounter with her in her nighttime role as a seductress, Dr. Katsina. Summer days, summer nights, living and writing the erotic narrative that was his book. Blinding light, exquisite heat.

  There were more parties, and—though Ava objected—Steadman was frequently the center of attention. When someone asked him what had happened to his sight, he explained that he had been blinded in such a simple way that he was amazed it had not happened more often. Why weren’t more people blind? Eyes were just blobs of jelly, like a pair of trembling oysters, the softest, most vulnerable parts of the body. Nothing violent had befallen him, just a series of preventable errors, so he said.

  He had been traveling—spending some of the fortune he had made from the merchandising and licensing of Trespassing— and had been in Hawaii. He had a residential address there, having leased a beach house for the winter. On a whim, he applied for a driver’s license and, placing his chin on the metal rest for the eye exam, had looked into the chart and seen a blaze of light and faint, sketchy letters. He could not read a line, even with the glasses he sometimes used, and was failed by the apologetic clerk, who said, “Maybe you need new glasses.”

  After trying many combinations of lenses on him, an eye doctor shone a light into his eyes and said he had severe cataracts. He would need immediate surgery.

  “I was amazed. I said it was impossible. I was hardly fifty.”

  But it was not unusual, he was told, especially given his extensive travel. Cataracts were sometimes hereditary, but there was also his exposure, in the years he spent outdoors, to ultraviolet rays. His father had worn thick glasses, the old inadequate remedy.

  “It’s an easy operation,” the doctor said. “A slam dunk.”

  Everyone said that, though Steadman believed that the expression “slam dunk” had come to mean, for him, certain failure. And so it seemed, for Steadman had both eyes operated on, separately, six weeks apart. Not laser surgery, he explained, but a procedure under a blazing light, the scraping sound, the murmuring of the surgeon and her assistant, a knife in each eye, but such a small incision that no sutures were needed.

  For a brief spell his vision was no longer yellow-hued but clear, bright as a Hawaiian lagoon, impressive in its depthless clarity. But he saw another blue, and for a brief period he enjoyed the piercing sight of crystalline imagery.

  He followed all the post-op instructions. He used the drops, took the antibiotics, did not touch his eyes with his fingers, but still—was it the snorkeling? the sea water? the swimming?—the tiny incisions became infected. He was put on stronger antibiotics, to which he was allergic, and in the days he refrained from taking them, the infection got a grip. He went back to the doctor and was informed that he was losing his corneas.

  He remained in Hawaii, he said, awaiting a cornea transplant, his eyes bandaged. Blindfolded in all that sunlight! The transplant was done and he flew back to Boston, only to be told that the operation was a failure.

  “The doctor looks at me and says, ‘Your corneas are decompensating.’”

  They tried again, this time with a world-class medical team: the waiting, the suspense, the exhaustion of the surgery. And those corneas, too, were rejected.

  “I accepted this condition. Maybe someday I will get a healthy transplant that will take, and you’ll see me reading on the beach. But that’s out of my hands. I don’t want to live on false hope.”

  That was his story. Except for the mention of snorkeling in Hawaii, none of it was true. But it didn’t matter, for with the datura he was truly blind. With his stick and his unhesitating gait he had emerged from seclusion to become a dramatic public figure on the Vineyard party circuit. There was renewed interest in his life and work. And somehow people knew that after years of silence he was working on a book.

  It was easy for people to believe the fiction that he had been rendered blind from an infection and his cornea transplants had gone wrong. Medical mistakes were so common, everyone understood. Many people countered with a medical mishap of their own—misdiagnosis, wrong medication, unexpected side effects. ?
??He went in for tonsillitis and they gave him a vasectomy.”

  People agreed with him when he said, “Doctors make you sick.” And he was surprised that his explanation was so easily accepted, glad that he did not have to elaborate on his lies. It helped his story when Ava agreed that his doctors had been incompetent.

  He knew that nothing would have been harder to explain than the drug he had happened upon in the Secoya village down the Aguarico River in the Oriente province of Ecuador, when he had been looking for ayahuasca and been introduced by Manfred to that rare datura, the ragged and attenuated clone of angel’s trumpet; and how the blinding light had allowed him a downward transcendence into a new life, with a new vocabulary of sight.

  “Phosphenes,” Ava said.

  The word that science offered was inadequate for the visions that were now his.

  At one time he had taken pleasure in the act of writing, had enjoyed filling a page, crossing out half of it, beginning again, adding improvements and variations in the margin, preparing a fair copy, like a monk scratching away on vellum. But now, with the prevision of his blindness, setting down the words seemed much less important than contriving a sequence of images in his head. Why write when such visions were so intense? And the fact was that the very writing of them seemed to diminish them.

  And when the moment came, using a pen was out of the question, and he had no use for a keyboard. He needed a tape recorder, needed a woman to stimulate him—not any woman but someone he desired, and now there was only one. He was so enraptured, so possessed by his vision, and given such fluency, that he needed to speak his book and for Ava to set it down as well as record it. His book was an exuberance, an intense erotic prayer; her writing it was not submissive but a form of interrogation. The act of his dictating and her murmuring and saying “Yes, yes” or “Wait” was sexual, too, because she was an essential and active partner in it, just as obsessed.