Blinding Light (50 page)

“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.

“Can you say something like, ‘To an amazing woman, from someone who knows'?”

“When does this come out in paperback?”

That night, a room-service dinner in his hotel room, and then an early-morning flight to Chicago.

The escort waiting at O'Hare was a powerful man named Bill, who held his bag with one hand and steered Steadman through the airport with the other. In the car he said, “You had a message,” and dialed the publicist and passed the phone to Steadman.

“I've added another interview in New York,” she said. “A German paper, but the interview will appear in English on the Internet. He says he knows you. Manfred something. Big fan.”

All through the Chicago appointments Steadman was aware of being watched by a yellow-eyed owl perched in a round window, like a porthole cut into the sky.
Manfred something. Big fan.

“You knew Bruce Chatwin, right? He's a fantastic writer, probably my all-time favorite.”

“The guy that played you in the TV series doesn't look like you at all. Plus, he's got that phony accent.”

“I don't know Braille,” he said in the hotel elevator. “Will someone press seventeen for me?”

The elevator mirror reflected different faces from the one staring in. No one had mentioned his book. Three newspaper interviews, one taped for radio, a photo shoot on Michigan Avenue—all centered on his blindness. He slept badly, thinking of Manfred. In the morning Bill sped him to O'Hare, saying only “This is the right direction at this hour of the morning. I'll have to get into that mess going back to the city.”

At the departure gate Steadman was seated next to a porcine nun in a black habit like a witch's gown, and she was tugging at her ragged earlobes as she prayed.

Fingers touched his hand, not the nun's but those of a harassed tearful man, who spoke in a fretful voice, “You can preboard.”

Steadman was crowded by the waiting passengers. “Back!” he said, and raking with his cane, pushed past men with roll-on bags and youths with greasy knapsacks and bipolar children on Prozac and a man with garbage on his breath.

The same yellow-eyed owl peered down at him from a porthole over Manhattan.

By this time he had become accustomed to the telling silence and the sign language—rapid overt gestures of people who did not realize he was aware of what they were doing. He was used to the grunts, the nudges, the puzzlement, the boisterous greetings, the condescending heartiness that was one of the worst expressions of pity. Pity was on most people's minds when they saw him. But he suffered it, because he did not want to reveal himself through his anger. And the pity was that of semiliterates and oafs.

Equally stupid, well-meaning people, like the taxi driver who took him to his first interview, tried to offer him hope.

“Maybe get one of them eye transplants.”

“I like myself as I am.”

“But what if you could find an organ donor?”

“Hit that jogger and we'll have one.”

“You saw that woman?”

“No. You saw her and swerved.”

Yet New York City seemed perfect for a blind person: the logic of the streets, the indifferent passersby, the unexpected politeness of people. At the bookstore signings there were the usual questions.

“Do you plan to see Ved Mehta while you're here in the city? I would have thought he'd be really supportive.”

“Did you know visually challenged people are allowed to touch some of the sculptures at mom a?
GO
for it!”

New Yorkers announced themselves beforehand, as though shouting ahead from a great distance. In New York, Steadman knew what people wanted long before they asked, knew what questions they were preparing to pose, knew when they were staring at him, when they turned away and pretended to be interested. New York was used to strangeness, for only true oddity was news, and so for his four days in the city he had a starring role, as the well-known and perceptive traveler who was now the blind novelist.

On his second morning, he was taken to the
Today
show.

“Mr. Steadman, you're kind of a legend in the book world, and the TV world, too, with the inspiration for that long-running TV series,” the wheedling woman interviewer said. “There's so much to talk about. I want to ask you about your latest book this morning.”

This morneen
was the way she said it. She was puppet-faced and tiny and held a clipboard, tossing her scraped-aside hair as she spoke. She leaned forward and her voice became a quack.

“But first, what a tragedy it must be to have lost your cherished gift; of sight.”

Steadman welcomed the vulgarity of her gloating manner. Because she was not asking a question but rather making a mawkish pronouncement, he could respond with a dignified rejoinder, putting her in her place. It was always a mistake to answer a question. No one remembered questions anyway; much better to say what was on your mind.

“Losing my sight was a blessing,” he said. “I would never have known how much I was missing. I may see less but I understand more.”

“Yet isn't it incredibly painful to know what you've lost?”

Her persistence annoyed him, and he could barely control himself in his reply. “I have tried to make my blindness an asset. I believe my book is the better for it.”

“Talk to me a little bit about the downside,” she said.

“What you are doing to me now is the downside,” he said, his voice sharpening. “You are asking the question that way because you think that you're superior, that you are whole and I am somehow incomplete.” He smiled at her and knew from the light on his face that the camera captured his angry smile. “I assure you that this is not the case. You are mistaken and misled, and I, Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs, perceived the scene and foretold the rest.”

At the mention of “wrinkled dugs” the woman became flustered and broke off the interview as soon as he finished his sentence. She thanked him for showing up and apologized for not getting to his book. Steadman had the impression that he had terrified her and she was relieved to see him go, eager to move on to the next item, which was an update on the president's disgrace.

Back at the hotel, there was a message from Ava. He called her on her cell phone. She said she had just seen him on the show.

“You were good. You looked so confident. You don't need me.”

With a few hours free he experimented with the city. He strolled down the sidewalk, going south from his hotel on Madison Avenue. It was not easy. Pedestrians bore down on him, moving fast, tramping hard, sometimes pushing him aside, mumbling to themselves, some of them singing off-key, under their breath, with a kind of panic. But at least they didn't stare.

Taping a segment of
Charlie Rose,
he became aware that he could say anything that came into his head, because Rose, though portentous, was unprepared.

“Slade Steadman,” the man began in his ponderous way, lowering his head, “you have written the best-known travel book of our time. For many years you were a virtual recluse, rarely venturing out of your house...”

This descriptive prologue continued, and when Rose showed no sign of finishing, Steadman interrupted him, confusing him, and described his book, explaining why he had chosen the confessional mode for his novel of a man's sexuality.

The face he saw later that night in his hotel room, that filled his television screen, a great animated head, the wild hair, the dark glasses, the confident sneer and frowning delivery, had him peering closely. He was glad he was alone, glad that the drug had worn off so he could watch himself. He paid hardly any attention to what he was saying, but he could not take his eyes off his face, which was distorted and heavy, masked by the glasses. He imagined a stranger seeing the face of this blind man and being cowed by fear and awe.

In contrast with Steadman's rumpled jacket and black turtleneck sweater, Charlie Rose was nattily dressed in pinstripes. He looked presentable but rather pained, even overwhelmed by the fierce presence of Slade Steadman.

He spoke at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square, and afterward, a woman looking for a signature said, “What do you miss most?” Before he could reply, she was gone. He appeared on a panel at the 92nd Street Y. He was interviewed at the National Public Radio station downtown, in a studio hookup with Terry Gross on
Fresh Air.
He was photographed on a bench in a part of Central Park that was near his hotel.