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.
Ava was sometimes Ava and sometimes Dr. Katsina, depending on the time of day, and their nighttime relationship was the more passionate for their daytime detachment. Needing her so badly in order to get on with his book, he was grateful for her being there, but he was so dependent he was at times resentful — not toward her but toward the whole scheme of creation. He wanted to be a beacon, a prophet. And the fact was that without her he would have been nothing but a harmless paranoiac, a secret king, living in seclusion, impotently, frivolously fantasizing to a whirring machine.