“I want my job back.”
“I can make that happen.”
“And for my researches I want you to describe the drugs and the blindness. Some people it works on, others it has no effect. It is useless for me, just makes me sick. But for you it is effective.”
“I’ll tell you everything,” he said with a kind of timid gratitude.
“And the skull. You talked about it. You must say you are a liar and a cheat.”
“I promise. I swear to you, I’ll let you tape-record it.”
Another dry bark of laughter and “Sank you!” With a click like a thrown switch came a whir, and another click, and “let you tape-record it.
“Please don’t let go,” Steadman said, because in concentrating on his tape recorder Manfred had loosened his grip on his end of the shirt.
“You were taking drugs for your book. And you lied. Not a poor unlucky man with an accident, but a liar and an arrogant.”
“I admit it.”
Steadman felt the sleeve of the sweatshirt go slack.
“Maybe I just let go and leave you here.”
Steadman was chest-deep in swirling seawater, treading the submerged rocks. The loud tide slapped the diffside. He was reaching with his free hand, snatching at the soaked shirt with the other, when he heard a commotion above him, a rackety agitated voice.
“That’s him. That’s the man!”
In a different, denying tone, Manfred said, “I do nossing.”
“The one in the water, Officer. He tried to knock my son down the stairs. He assaulted me. Don’t cry, Brett, it’s going to be all right.” “What’s going on here?” A different voice.
“It’s okay, Officer,” Manfred said. With that he pulled on the shirt and brought Steadman nearer. “I am helping my friend.”
“Not that one — the other one!” said the angry man.
“This man is blind,” Manfred said.
“He threatened me!”
“Hold on, sir.”
“He hit me! That’s assault with a weapon! A stick. A shod foot.”
“Back off, sir. Give them room.”
“Officer, I am an attorney!” the man screeched, but his voice was receding, as though he were being led up the stairs.
Feeling the wet sleeve tighten further, Steadman lowered his head. He steadied himself in the water with his free hand and gripped harder and let himself be tugged to the foot of the stairs.
“Easy,” Manfred said, and helped Steadman up, placing his hand on the rail.
He was soaked, trembling with fatigue and panic as if tumbled in a black barrel of water, and still in darkness. He groped on the stairs, pulling himself onward, aware that Manfred was bumping along beside him. He sobbed and laughed and said, “Thank you!”
At the top of the stairs he fell to his knees and breathed deeply. Out of the wind, away from the water, he was hot, as though he had crawled up the cliff into a different day. In that moment his blindness didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except that he was alive.
Then he heard from a little distance, “Aren’t you going to do anything, Officer?”
“Step away, sir. This man is in shock.”
Manfred said, “I take him home.” He guided Steadman to his car and helped him in. As soon as he shut the door, he wrapped Steadman in a blanket and said, “I would not let you drown but I like to see you in trouble. That was nice.”
Feeling tearful, Steadman did not reply.
“You thought I was your girlfriend throwing things at you. That is very funny.”
Steadman wondered why he had called her name. Perhaps an effect of “The Blind Man’s Wife,” his belief that their love affair was over. He said, “I’ve been desperate. She found me a doctor — for my eyes. Nothing works.” He fell silent. “I’ve had a hard time.”
“Too much of cars on this island,” Manfred said, braking. Then the familiar cough and bark — he was amused. “You went to a doctor! Ha!” “A specialist.”
“Even more funny.”
“They’ve prescribed all sorts of medicine.”
“There is only one medicine.”
Driving, grunting at the traffic, Manfred spoke almost without thought, in the most literal way.
“You are unhappy. You are sick. You take medicine. But this is not the same. If someone gets sick because of a shaman, only a shaman can make it right. The way up is the way down. You don’t know this? The medicine that makes you sick, the same medicine will cure you.”
“You think so?”
“This I know.”
“You could have told me in New York.”
“No. I thought your blindness was false.” He said, “I hear of it with datura but I never see it. Why you behave so bad?”
“It was different,” Steadman said. “I was blind but I had a kind of inward vision. I had perception. I could move. I was happy.”
“Yah?”
“Then I had no control. Everything went black.”
“With how much of the drug?”
“No drug. I had saturated myself, maybe destroyed some nerves.”
“Funny, I never hear about this before. But the shaman, he knows.”
“That man on the river?”
“Yah. Don Pablo — my friend. A healing shaman they call him.”
Manfred was making turns through the outskirts of Vineyard Haven, all the narrow one-way streets, cursing the other drivers as he spoke. Then he seemed to remember again.
“You went to a doctor!”
Steadman said, “Help me, Manfred. Take me there. I’ll do anything you ask.”
“You must pay. And I want my job back. I want my good name back. I am not a thief. My father was a good man. You must help me.”
“Yes.”
“And I want your story.”
“My story is all I have.”
“That’s why I want it. Your story must belong to me. You must belong to me.” He kept driving, straighter now on the up-island road. “Say yes and we will go.”
Steadman stared into the darkness. He said, “You want directions to my house?”
Manfred said, “You think I don’t know the way?”
SIX. The River of Light
1
THERE WAS SO LITTLE he could tell of the journey. Dark — so dark it was not travel at all. He saw nothing, he heard hardly anything, he was numb with despair. It was a stunned and fatal fall through a tube of air-softened space, like an endless burial, a vertical night drop into a narrow and bottomless hole. He had surrendered himself to Manfred and the trip, as though to be sacrificed. He was prodded by Manfred’s ignorant fingers, and Manfred’s meddling voice misled him. He was soaked in darkness, he was hardly human, just a hostage, dying in stages.
The passing scene was indecipherable, the dark places meant nothing but delays — the wait in Boston, the change of planes in Miami, the long flight to Quito. They offered nothing to remember. The blindfold mask he had once worn was now his own face.
Before he left the Vineyard, Ava had said, “Are you okay?”
Doing her duty, Ava was more efficient, because she was out of love. But her nurse-like kindness and unselfish attention mattered more to him than her exhausting passion. Her awkwardness was like the clumsy shame of atonement. As an invalid, he understood.
Terrible for her, he thought: the healer who can’t help, sensing that she had failed him. He knew very little now, but one thing was certain — standing there trying to console him, she was not alone. Her new lover was with her and she was happy.
She had repeated her question.
“No,” he said. “Not okay at all.”
A whisper leaked through his mind, saying Find the heart of the flower.
And with that he left with Manfred, a man he despised, to return to Ecuador to try to undo everything that had been done: to rid himself of the first journey, and the drug, and his story, seeking to be healed. The long slow trip unfolded in darkness. He forgot each thing as soon as it passed. Manfred never stopped saying “Money.” He was a noisy eater and he ate constantly, chewing, swallowing, smacking his jaws.