“There’s a footbridge somewhere near here,” he said to a man next to him who offered help, when he heard the cars at FDR Drive. It was a raceway; he was terrified.
“Few blocks down.” This gentle voice guided him, bucking him up as they walked. “Almost there, my friend. Few more steps.”
He was at last at the edge of the island, above the enclosed trough of speeding cars.
“Just get me onto the bridge, thanks. I’ll be okay.”
“You’re the boss.”
“Get me to the handrail.”
Already he was learning the cranky authority of the blind, hearing himself make demands and give orders and be obeyed by these invisible fingers, prodding and pinching his clothes.
But something was amiss: the man had hurried away. Steadman slapped his jacket and realized that the man had lifted his wallet.
Across the walkway he found the stairs, and at the bottom of them the rusty rail. He heard the wind slapping at the surface of the river and raising a chop. In the sluicing current, the lick of waves spilled past him and slopped at the embankment at his feet.
He took out the paper parcel and tore it open, scattering the crumbled twigs and stems of the drug. There was hardly any left, yet he wished this to be a ritual, an outward renunciation, ridding himself of it all. Some innate strictness told him that if he made an effort, as he had in the painful journey to this spot, and if the ritual was formal enough, he might get his wish: his sight back.
Then he would be abject. He would admit in public what he had done, how the vision and the recaptured memories in his book had been achieved. The journalist at the party had given him a truthful expression for it: I needed an edge. Until then, he would remain the man he claimed to be, Blind Slade. The wind was tearing at his jacket as he bowed and mumbled an apology, wanting to weep for his error. He had once worried about running out of the drug.
“You drop something?”
Steadman inclined his head to hear if this man’s voice was familiar — one of those sneaks he suspected of following him. It was a horror to stand gaping and not to know when people were watching him.
“No,” he said, and asked the voice for help in recrossing the footbridge and finding the street. When he managed this, the man steering him, bumping him along, he turned aside and thanked him. There was no reply. Though all noises rattled him, he found silence worse than any noise.
The man had stolen his watch. A craftsman on the Vineyard had made it for him. The watch face had no glass, only the sturdy hands, which Steadman traced with his fingertips to tell the time, and his continually touching it made the watch something precious, a talisman, and a friend.
“Bastard! I can see you!”
But his voice calling into the darkness sounded so tearful, so filled with woe, he stopped. He kept on walking. His footsteps were feeble and tentative; so was his cane. He pitied himself for his own anxious, searching sounds. He was terrified all the way back to the hotel, afraid that he would be flattened by a car, one of those honking taxis or a roaring unhesitating truck. He scowled each time he heard a horn, for every blare was warning him to back up. Having to be alert exhausted him, and he felt at any moment he might step into a hole.
What had gone wrong? He knew that Manfred was out to expose him, but any suggestion that he was faking his blindness could not be proven. He had never been blinder, his world never blacker. The quality of the darkness was complete, like a curtain of utter ignorance, a mangy blanket of evil, like the black drapes of a tyranny. This persistent night bore no relation to the peculiar illumination he had known before, brought on by the drug that had made him so happy. This was a stinking bag dragged over his head as though by a hangman, the doomladen obstacle to perception. His hands and legs were useless too. He was frightened and felt childish. The intimation of death in this was made worse because he was trapped in New York, city of terrifying noises and hostile voices and ambiguous smells, where he was treated like a trespasser.
He paused to rest near Madison Avenue, and someone with a dog — the creature snuffled at his shoes — said, “Hey.” But thinking he was being assaulted, he thrust with one hand and struck the person, and only then, as he smacked a hand holding a rag-like piece of paper, did he understand that the person had been offering him money as a handout.
“Fuck you! You broke my nail. You should get cancer!”
Cowering back in his room, he flinched when the phone rang: Axelrod.
“We are being flooded with requests for interviews.”
“No more interviews. I want to go home.”
“You don’t sound too perky.”
“Lost my coordinates.” Steadman became breathless with fear. “Can you get me a ticket to the Vineyard today?”
“Easter weekend,” Axelrod said. But the desperation in Steadman’s voice had alarmed him. “I’ll do what I can.”
He called back to say that all flights were full. The only free seat was two days off.
Despair, the memory of that dreadful walk, and the thefts made him feel so helpless he wanted to weep. He was intimidated, he was a child, and he sorrowed for himself, for his book had been so bold.
Out of the hoarse pathos of this solitary regret, like a dull murmuring aria of lamentation, he was reproached by his forgetfulness, the emptiness of his memory. His seclusion in the present had turned him into a sunken-eyed traveler who had strayed from his path and was lost on the bank of a jungle river. He could see it all, his wraith-like shape on one of those scoops of sand on a long reach between the overhanging foliage — some skimming birds, the muddy eddy bubbling like chocolate milk, the shadow of a chalky wide-winged ray shooting just beneath the surface. High up, a dark hawk floated in the hot gray sky.
This recollection, seeing himself as a castaway, was not a vision of horror but rather one of profound sadness, a memory of himself at his most innocent. There was an insistent voice, too, Manfred’s, urging him to get up, tempting him with the drug in the nearby village; the man loomed over him, his hands working.
I know a little about this one… It is great. It change your head, it give you experiences. Only the question of money, but you have money.
All other memories were closed to him, but this one he saw was him at his happiest, driven by hope, on the verge of his discovery of the drug. Manfred had revealed himself as a friend.
The drug tour, the quest, the surprises in Ecuador, which he had seen as a leap in the dark, had given him strength. Now he saw himself as the hawk might have seen the castaway on the crescent of wet sand on the riverbank, a raptor’s meditation. And this memory gave him more by offering him glimpses of the aftermath, the illuminations of blindness, the sight of him dictating his book, the months of seclusion, like years of enchantment in a remote castle, in which he had lived the narrative. Manfred had been right in his promise: he had been uplifted, he had achieved his book, he had never been happier.
And now he had sunk to this: the airless overfurnished cell of a hotel bedroom, the sense of being captive. He knew now he should never have come, but he had made his worst mistake in continuing the drug, to call attention to himself. Even the offering of his book had been a hasty decision. He had allowed himself to be hurried into the anticlimax of publication, the inevitable disappointment, the misunderstandings, his dubious performances on the tour, in bookstores and lecture halls — it had all been like a secret revealed, the disclosure of a weakness, a loss of power. He had once vowed never to go on the road. Why hadn’t he been satisfied with the writing of his book? He was in agony thinking of the purity of that task, and he reproached himself — he had Ava’s words — for his pride and his posturing.