Throughout the year of writing he had never needed to tell his editor he was at work. The whispers had reached New York early on. This man was Ron Axelrod. As a new young editor he had inherited Steadman when Steadman’s first editor had died. But for years that editor, and Axelrod too, had seen no new writing from Steadman and had merely shuffled contracts and processed the new tie-in editions of Trespassing.
Steadman phoned Axelrod and gave him the news. He said a disk with the first part of the manuscript was in the mail. He said, “I’m back in business.”
“I don’t know whether you’re aware of it,” Axelrod said after he had read the early chapters, “but there’s a touch of mysticism in your book.”
“Just tell me it’s on the spring list.”
“There’s probably enough lead time. If you deliver the whole thing soon, we can try.”
It did not seem that anything better could happen to improve his mood. And then another call came. Ava was at work; she had gone back to the hospital the day after the dictation had been finished and the last tapes sent for transcription. Lazing in bed on a Saturday morning, propped on pillows and relaxed, watching television, at first too drowsy to change the channel from Teletubbies, Steadman groped for the remote switch and pinched it and a new program flashed onto the screen. It was a stark cartoon in lurid colors, a wicked-faced man in a beaky green eyeshade tapping his stick under a stormy sky along a cobblestone road. Above his bony head was a swinging sign on a large old house, The Admiral Benbow Inn. He wore a black cape and hood that made him seem like a swaggering and wicked jackdaw.
“Will any kind friend inform a poor blind man who has lost the precious sight of his eyes in the gracious defense of his native country, England — and God bless King George — where or in what part of the country he may now be?”
A young cartoon boy whom Steadman knew to be Jim Hawkins, but drawn with a pale face that was meek and girlish, stepped from the shadows holding a flickering orange-windowed lantern.
“You are at the Admiral Benbow.”
The blind hooded man whirled around and snatched at Jim’s hand and twisted the boy’s skinny arm behind his back.
“Now, boy, take me to the Captain.”
“Sir, upon my word, I dare not”
“Take me in straight or I’ll break your arm.”
Steadman watched Blind Pew bully and terrify the boy. Then, as Blind Pew entered the inn, Steadman’s phone rang.
“This is the White House, president’s office. We’d like to speak to Mr. Slade Steadman.”
His thumb on the remote switch, he muted the TV. As soon as Blind Pew delivered the Black Spot there was mayhem — old grizzled sea dogs ransacking the rooms and tipping over sea chests.
“Speaking.”
Blind Pew was outside, groping again, and lost. Steadman watched in triumph, feeling contempt for the malevolent and stumbling blind man, who without any warning had been deserted by the others.
“The president wonders if you are free to attend a dinner at the White House on November tenth, for the visit of the chancellor of Germany.”
As in silence Blind Pew struggled on the empty, shadowy road, calling out for help, the woman on the phone explained that this was a call only to see whether he could attend the White House dinner. If the answer was yes, an invitation would be sent.
“Delighted to accept. Does this invitation extend to my partner, Dr. Ava Katsina?”
“Of course.”
Steadman spelled Ava’s name, and the White House secretary went over the details (“This will be black tie”), and Blind Pew fell into a ditch. He climbed crabwise out of it and, once again on the road, was trampled to death by five galloping horses.
Ava was pleased by the news. She moved lightly, happily, restless with pleasure, still wearing her green hospital scrubs. “This is great,” and looked at Steadman sideways, smiling uncertainly, because it seemed there was more and he was not divulging it. And when she saw the froglike expression on his face, heavy-lidded, his eyes half shut, his lips pressed together, she said, “Okay, what is it?”
He didn’t say, he squinted and looked froggier, he paced a little. The thought This is perfect showed on his face.
Ava followed, staying with him, and then he turned and said, “They asked me about my”—he raised his arms and clawed a pair of quotation marks in the air with his hooked fingers—“special needs.”
A slackening look of disturbance clouded Ava’s face.
“And you told them—?”
Steadman laughed, much too loudly, a honk of confidence.
With pleading eyes Ava held him. She said, “When you try to be enigmatic you can be such a bully.”
“I can see in the dark,” he said.
She screamed, howled in protest, which thinned to a cry of agony and betrayal.
“You can’t do this.”
He was in no doubt that he could, yet he knew from that moment he would never convince her of it.
“It’s a lie.”
In what was almost a whisper, but a heated one, Ava said, “I have just come from the hospital. We have real sick people there. ‘Special needs,’ all of that. We have sick children. We have people confused and upset because they’ve just been told they have macular degeneration, for which there is no cure. What an insult, what an outrage, for you to pretend to be blind.”
“Not pretend,” he said.
She shouted and left the room saying “No!” But he knew there would be more over dinner, and there was. She said that she had felt guilty about returning to work at the hospital so soon after his finishing the book, leaving him so abruptly. But now she was glad, she said. She wished she had gone sooner.
When he didn’t reply she said, “I can’t stand your smug face.”
In the days after that he felt so idle and liberated he used the datura again and found the alteration powerfully hallucinogenic. Even his voice underwent a change, became declaratory, with a stammering vibrato. Datura was a friend. Blind, he was able to reconstitute his world and find his true place in it.
“Back from the dead,” he said.
The whole day ahead was his, without any obligation on his part to cast his mind back and revisit his past; nothing to accomplish. He had written his book.
That day Axelrod called again with the news that The Book of Revelation was on the spring list.
“But you’ll have to help me with the catalogue copy.”
“Give me a hint.”
“Tell me what it’s about.”
“The physical side of the act of creation.”
“Yes?”
“The origin of art.”
“Be a little more specific.”
“Look, it’s about itself.”
He said it was more a book about transgression and trespassing than Trespassing had been; it was all interior travel. He did not say that datura was the means, its name like an elegant, darting vehicle that had taken him the whole distance, there and back.
In the days that followed, Ava sulked, stung by his insistence on going to the White House dinner blind, showing up impaired in public as the president’s guest, someone who would be photographed and written about. When he talked Ava stepped away to give him room, for he seemed to crowd her, to look past her, as though he were haranguing a multitude of people, the wider world, speaking more expansively, like a man starring in his own movie. He appeared to be aware that a public process was at work on the Vineyard, a marveling at him for his prescience, the murmuring witnesses to his renewed fame, the triumphant second act of his life, more dramatic, more visible and original, than the first.