“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 tide 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.