Work was out of the question, and he feared the gaze of strangers. He felt wronged and old-womanish, unable to read or write. The radio was no relief; it blared the president’s misery and satirized it. Steadman could not listen to the rumors and innuendos without being ashamed of the president’s reluctant schoolboy confession, the ghastly details of it, a sneaky joyless muddle of cocksucking and cheap gifts and cold pizza. One rumor had the president on the phone, a wet cigar in his hand, the fat girl on her knees, her chubby fingers steadying his cock in her mouth. Another rumor concerned the existence of a semen-smeared dress.
The gleeful howls of the whole country against the president for his unconvincing denial and his paltry pleasure unnerved Steadman. People seemed not just glad that he had been exposed but giddy with relief that they themselves had not been caught. This summer everyone felt innocent and indignant. And the sanctimony of the reaction had its echo in the criticism of Steadman. Some people had listened to Manfred; some were howling in their own way against Steadman, believing that his drug-induced blindness was a ruse. But while the Internet buzzed with it, the press was single-minded in pursuing the president, overshadowing Manfred’s whisper campaign with shouts of accusation and demands for the president to resign or risk impeachment.
“I have no intention of resigning,” the president said. That emboldened Steadman. The president was facing and debating his critics, defying them, insisting that he was entitled to a private life, even if that meant enticing the fat girl to his office and groping her and making her kneel and ejaculating on her cheap dress.
Compared to this, Steadman’s scandal was a trifle; nothing was pettier than a literary fuss. And who cared? The Book of Revelation was still selling well. There was no drama, only unanswered questions, and even these had died down. Yet Steadman was stone blind and crippled by it, beset by fugitive noises in the house that no longer seemed his own. He did not wear his stereo headphones anymore, because they interfered with his monitoring the movements of the intruder he suspected. The sounds of this stranger were incessant.
“Who’s that?”
The faint scrape of guilty feet, perhaps the thin soles and light tread of a woman’s shoes, then silence.
“Who’s there?”
The click of a door shutting, the pad of retreating footsteps.
“I can hear you!”
But his shout created silence, and then he knew that the stranger had fled and that he was alone.
On the evenings when she wasn’t at the hospital, Ava comforted him. She nursed him, sat and drank wine with him. She made the simple meals he requested, French fries and fish sandwiches and raw chopped vegetables. He ate with his hands, could not manage a spoon or fork; he often bobbled his glass and spilled his wine. His clumsiness at meals frustrated him. His stumbling enraged him. He was depressed by his inability to work.
He wanted to write a short story, something related to his condition. He imagined what it might be, not the details of the story but how it might look — like a folktale, that sort of compact narrative, full of shocks and reverses, of a blind man lost on an island, ironic with horror. He wanted to publish it to dramatize his pain, to show the world how he was suffering and to prove he was still writing. But the effort was more than he could bear, and except for the physical ache of his sadness, his head was empty.
Now and then he talked on the phone. Axelrod was a regular caller, giving him updates about sales, and the news was so good he felt fraudulent. He was embarrassed by the gusto in his book, shamed by all his hubristic boasts, for the truth was somber, a sad man in a dark house. He was not the character in that book; he was a damaged man, suffering a self-inflicted wound. Some people were still whispering about him: he knew he deserved it.
Ava seemed tender, yet he was convinced that she stayed with him unwillingly, just treating him and failing at it. She was dissatisfied, and who could blame her?
He told her this. He found a way of saying that he was unworthy of her.
Her reply was unexpected. She said, “You’re the one who taught me that sex is selfish.”
What sex? But he didn’t ask. They had been home for more than a month now, and he had no desire; he had not touched her. Some days he was so absorbed by darkness he hardly recognized her.
He said, “I don’t deserve you.”
“Maybe it’s nothing to do with you. Maybe I’m here for my own reasons.”
This was a different Ava, the doctor not the lover, the pulse-taker, the clinician in all things. She seemed genuinely concerned with his condition: his blood pressure, his headaches, his tremulous hands, the effects of the drug on his nerves.
She was breezier, seemingly happier, more content now that she was spending so much time at the hospital. It was clear to Steadman that the amanuensis, the facilitator of transcription, and the checker of manuscripts were not roles that Ava had had any liking for. And that suggested to him that the sexual roles he had assigned her she had acted out with some reluctance. How was he to have known? She had been frenzied, so convincing a sex partner he had known her only as his lover.
He was chair-bound now most of the time; they had not made love. Yet she did not comment, didn’t reproach him, didn’t even allude to it. All those steamy druggy months of dressing up, trawling in his memory, and now nothing.
She said, “I’m expecting the results from the lab any day now.”
Bucking him up with science and changing the subject, she put no pressure on him.
The results came as a computer printout, perforated pages that she rattled and unfolded. He imagined it as something like a DNA report, with inky furrows and squiggles, a smudged hand-drawn document with the look of a musical score.
He prodded her several times with questions before she said, “It’s inconclusive.”
“But what does it say?”
“There’s some heavy-duty alkaloids in that residue. They’re trying to sort out how they combine with enzymes. How they affect the synapses. They also think that there have been Latin American studies on people who’ve regularly taken it. Maybe case histories of those Indians.”
“What does that mean?”
“According to this analysis, datura contains a group of alkaloids called beta-carbolines. The psychotropic trigger is a substance called harmine.”
The very word seemed dangerous and hurtful.
“Its overuse can lead to insanity or, it says here, blindness.” She was speaking reasonably, interpreting the document, folding it and turning pages. “But there’s a note saying that the lab is still trying to separate these elements of the drug. If we know the cause, we might find the cure.”
Steadman said, “You’re right. This is my own fault.”
“I never said that.”
“But you thought it.”
“No. I was on that trip too, remember. I admired you for taking a risk.”
“And look where it got me.”
He was sitting upright, rigid, like a man in a straight-backed chair about to be electrocuted.
“There’s something called atropine in this drug. I know what that is from med school. We use it to dilate the pupil. Maybe it’s combined with another chemical that affects the whole of the eye and the optic nerve.”
He had risked that poison for an ambitious idea. And now he contemplated the book’s success as he sat alone, lost in his house, a parody of the man the papers had praised on his tour: “a visionary writer more dazzling as a blind man than most people are who are blessed with eyesight.” He had secretly believed himself to be a prophet, the tiger of a new religion. He had boasted of x-ray vision and declared, “Blindness is a gift.” All that showboating, flourishing his cane like a huckster in a carnival. And it had begun with Manfred, downriver in the Oriente. He had drunk this toxic cocktail of murky jungle chemicals; he had been granted his wish, and now was in the dark.