Blinding Light (61 page)

On the way to the hospital, nothing was familiar. Even his own car, the sound of the gravel in his driveway, the route to town with all its turns and stops, it was all strange. He stood, gangly and hapless, while Ava signed him in. Then, assisted by an orderly, with Ava holding his arm, he was taken to a room.

“Hello again.”

The same doctor, greeting him. But she might have been anyone. Ava helped him to a cushioned chair, where he sat listening to the clicking and shuffling of metal instruments chiming on a metal tray.

“Rest your chin here,” the doctor said, tipping his head forward.

He heard switches being thrown, the snapping of toggles, a slight diminution of heat on his face; lights out.

“Can you read the middle line?”

“No.”

“How about the top line?”

He sighed and said, “I can't see anything.”

“Please try.”

“What do you mean, ‘Please try'? I can't do this.”

And then—was it the odor? was it her prodding voice?—he realized she was the doctor who had examined him at Mass. Eye and Ear in Boston.

“I know you,” he said.

“I'm Dr. Budberg.”

He shrank, settling into the chair in embarrassment, remembering the rest. He said, “I'm so sorry.”

She was brisk, she ignored him. She said, “We'll need bloodwork. And a glaucoma test. I'm going to schedule an MRI and a
CAT
scan, too.”

Fitting his face to the mask-like frame, she shot puffs of air into his eyes, one at a time, and scrutinized them with more light, which heated his eye sockets and warmed his head.

“Have you had any ear infections?”

“No.”

But she wasn't through. Any trauma to the head? Severe headache? Migraine? Stress? Significant pain on one side of the body? Diabetes?

He made his replies with glum certainty, his mind on something else. He remembered how he had rattled off the lines of the eye chart from memory, every letter, defying Dr. Budberg to find him blind and confounding her diagnosis. But his pedantic memory was gone now. All he had were the instincts of a burrowing animal, a blunt mole-like awareness of heat and cold and bad air, of trailing fingers like rootlets raking his face, a confining darkness.

He had insulted this woman. He remembered it clearly because he had enjoyed it as a victory, and he had seen only when it was too late how sad she had been, heavy and gasping with grief, lumpish, bereaved. He wanted to apologize again, but she had left him and was at the door, confiding details to Ava.

“Pressure's normal. No apparent retinal detachment. No apparent nerve trauma. I'm getting responses. I'd like to see him again.”

Ava was murmuring. Steadman heard “idiopathic” attached to some other, even less intelligible words. He called out in a trembly voice, “What does that mean?”

“You haven't damaged your eyes, so there's hope,” Ava said.

A wheelchair was brought and, feeling useless, he was pushed to another room, where blood was drawn from his arm. He had no idea who did it; he was jabbed in silence. Someone said, “You'll be fine. You're going to surprise everyone.” Drops were splashed into his eyes, and whatever they were seemed to scorch him. He imagined a distracted nurse using the wrong drops and blinding him, or someone wicked doing it deliberately. He was left alone after that. Ava was outside the room, conferring again, but with whom? He sat drooping, as though learning how to be stupid.

On the way home, Ava was so preoccupied with driving she said nothing at first. These days he imagined that when she was silent she was thinking of her lover, that nameless grateful-sounding woman. Past Vineyard Haven and the worst of the traffic, she spoke up.

“You're going to be all right.”

That sounded like surrender. He said, “Really?”

“Dr. Budberg knows her stuff. And she's upbeat.”

This was so unpromising he didn't reply.

“You've got plenty of options.”

She was telling him it was hopeless: they couldn't help. All they could offer was lame, unconvincing encouragement, which was like the worst expression of despair.

In the days that followed, he wondered when the nameless woman would return as a sex partner. But there was no sign of her. Perhaps Ava was meeting her somewhere else, or perhaps she was so concerned about him that she was not meeting her at all. Given his condition the frivolity of a threesome was simply reckless. More worrying than anything, Steadman found Ava's diminished desire a sign of pessimism.

“They're still running tests on that drug you gave them,” Ava said.

Did she believe she was helping him to be optimistic? Crumbs of hope only made him feel worse and woeful. And she spoke to him as though to a fretful child.

He said, “What are they not telling me?”

“The contributing factors.”

“Such as?”

“Okay,” Ava said. “Maybe it's an undetectable ear infection that spread and deadened your optic nerve. Or it could be a brain tumor compressing the synapses, a compression lesion of the optic nerve. Or a brain aneurysm, something we call an arteriovenous malformation, intertwined blood vessels that clot, creating an outpouring of one vessel. That compresses, or leaks, and affects the brain tissue that controls optical functions.”

“So it's not the drug?”

“I've read some of the literature. It's pretty unscientific. Most of it is anecdotal, and all from small-town dopers. But the message seems to be that the alkaloids affect the visual center of the brain.”

“Great news.”

“You asked for it.”

After that, his low spirits kept him in the house. The invitations continued coming for the summer parties, but he was too sad and ashamed to accept. He couldn't face the questions, and the prospect of all the good humor of party chatter saddened him further. He could not bear to be pitied, or worse, beset by partygoers who had come to regard him as a marvel. Steadman the blind man who could read minds and see through walls and trot up and down swinging his cane—the showoff, the bore in dark glasses who claimed to have acquired the gift of total recall, the White House dinner guest, the world traveler and writer who had announced to one interviewer, “A perfect memory is prophetic.”

He was satirized by everything he had done and said under the influence of the drug. He saw nothing now, but he understood the hateful fact that the drug had truly blinded him.

Wolfbein called repeatedly and left messages. Steadman avoided picking up the phone. But one day when Ava was at work and Steadman suspected that she might be calling, he answered and heard Wolfbein at the other end.

“You're coming to our party, you schmuck,” Wolfbein said in his friendly bullying way.

“No, Harry, please.”

“How about a cup of coffee?”

“I'm pretty busy.”

“Okay, if you won't come over to see me, I'll pay you a visit.”

Half an hour later Wolfbein's heavy vehicle was rolling down the gravel driveway. Steadman heard the car door slam, the feet on the porch, the front door rattle open.

“So you don't want to see your old friends anymore?”

Steadman stood with his arms at his sides, not knowing where to look. It was true: he did not want to see anyone.

“I haven't been well.”

“You look okay to me, fella.”

“Harry, I'm blind,” and his voice cracked on the word.

“Let's go for a ride.”

The big man took him by the arm and guided him out of the house, across the porch, down the steps. Steadman moved like a child, resisting, scuffing his feet but inarticulate. Wolfbein helped him into the passenger seat and buckled the safety belt. Steadman's head lolled on his loose neck; what was there to see?

“You were blind a year ago,” Wolfbein said, driving away. “I read the newspapers. I know what you've been through.”

“The papers have been accusing me of faking.”

“Don't pay any attention to that shit.”

Steadman had mentioned the papers for effect, hardly expecting a response. But Wolfbeins reply confirmed his fears.

“Fuck all those people,” Wolfbein said. “What do you care what they say?

He cared deeply, and Wolfbeins defiance alarmed him and made the whole issue seem much worse. “All those people” were like a formidable army of naggers and detractors.

“Next month we're hosting the big guy again,” Wolfbein said.

“The president?”

“Listen, Slade, he's hurting too.”

“Too” meant he had seen the pieces in which Steadman and the president were compared in their deceptions and denials: two hollow men who had trifled with the public trust, a pair of liars.

Wishing to be contradicted by his sympathetic friend, Steadman said, “People think I'm like him. Hiding something. Lying. I know I'm being lumped with him.”

“So what?”

“So what” was the same as yes.

“Where are we going?”

“Anywhere you want. Feel like an ice cream?”

“Go to town. Take West Chop Road,” Steadman said. “I want to hear the ocean.”

“You got it, buddy.”

His hearty tone made Steadman feel more pathetic, like a loser in need of encouragement.

“As if my book is somehow invalid because I wasn't really injured.”

“But you are injured, I can see it,” Wolfbein said. “People who run you down are horrible. Hey, I heard the drug stories. Please!”

It was like a question in the form of a hint, inviting an explanation. There was too much to tell, and where to begin?
A few years ago I decided to go to the Oriente in Ecuador, downriver...

Wolfbein was still talking. “Just because the president got a blowjob in the White House from a girl sneaking into his office, does that mean he can't get credit for the economy and for balancing the budget? He erased the deficit. We've got a surplus!”

But Steadman was thinking of the girl sneaking into the White House, another trespasser; and the president groping her, more trespassing.

They had come to a stop. Steadman heard the wind in tall trees and, in the distance, a sunken sound of cavernous water, the rush of the current, the slop and splash of windblown waves beneath the West Chop lighthouse. He could hear the snap of the flag on the pole.

“Just let this guy go by,” Wolfbein said, and shouted, “Go ahead! I'm not in your way!” He panted in irritation and said, “Look at him.”

Steadman heard the car accelerate and pass by them.

“Some people,” Wolfbein said.

“Who was it?”

“A schmuck—I don't know. He's gone. Want to get out?”

“Help me.”

Wolfbein unbuckled the safety belt and hoisted him out of the car. Steadman smelled the sea air on his face, and the flowers—daylilies here, heavy clouds of fragrant pollen. The wind thrashed at the leafy boughs of the tall oaks.

“It's a sunny day,” Steadman said sadly.

“Beautiful day,” Wolfbein said. He seemed at times to forget that Steadman was blind, or at least to think that Steadman was as alert and prescient as he had been the previous summer, the miracle man in dark glasses, amazing the guests. “Lovely. Kids on bikes. Lady walking her dog. Sailboats on the Sound. And here he comes again.”

A car rolled slowly past, the tire treads pinching small stones and snapping them to the curb.

Wolfbein sighed. “Schmuck.”

“Let's go down to the beach.”

“You don't want to do that, buddy.”

But he did. After all the resistance he had put up, now that he was here, he craved to be nearer the racing current, to tramp on the sand, to smell the tide wrack and hear the gulls and the riverine rush of the tide. “All those fucking steps. Go down there and we'll never get out.” Steadman remembered that Wolfbein was heavy. The man hated walking, and there were three long flights down to the beach. He was impatient. But he was indulgent, too.

“I want to help you, buddy. You need a medical procedure. Don't worry. I know people.”

Another extravagant apology, like Ava's and Dr. Budberg's and whoever had drawn his blood at the hospital. Everyone wanted to help; no one could do a thing. But they never admitted it, and that was the worst of it, the false hope, the hollow encouragement—bucking him up because they needed to be bucked up themselves. And meanwhile, as they were undermining him, they were getting on with their lives.

He went home, his head full of his story.

T
HE BLIND MAN
was someone like himself, a traveler and writer and recluse. He lived near West Chop, in the lane on the bluff where the paved road ended and the steps to the beach began.

That was the character in his story. Steadman could see him clearly, as though beckoning, inviting him into the narrative. But he found he could not continue. On the brightest days in his drowsy up-island solitude, with the sun baking his face and his dense eyelids, his grief was a physical pain. In that golden heat the agony he felt was like a terminal disease. He wondered how to go on living. His awareness of sunshine made him desolate, gave him the detachment, the fatalism, of someone very ill.

The rain, the fog, the days of drizzle, he could bear: he stayed indoors and brooded in the appropriate gloom. There was a frown of unresolved crisis in his features that made a crease of blame in his face, and the sour stillness in his house suggested the blurred stink of a sickroom.

Outside he could smell the tang of the summer's heat curling the cedar shingles and drying the tussocks of tall grass. He was imprisoned then, pierced by odors alone. He lamented what he could not see: the box hedge, the dry stone wall, his field thick with daylilies, the pitch pines and the birches. He hated that they belonged to other people. He could hardly recall Ava's face or body. Whom did she belong to now? He had become a big clumsy ignoramus who ate with his hands and seldom ever shaved. From highly colored dreams in which he was nimble, he woke to darkness, hardly knowing how to get out of bed.