He imagined his face on his book jacket: eyes opaque with the drug and yet shocking, with a wounded corrosive stare on which nothing was lost, for this new book was like the oldest book in the world, a confession that was prophecy and revelation.
He had dreamed of writing such a book. He had yearned to create it but had been baffled and tentative, not knowing how to begin. The book he had envisioned was calculated to eliminate the possibility of any biography of him, to make the notion of a biographer a joke. A parasite, a hanger-on, an outsider, an intruder, a stammering explainer with his nose against a smeared windowpane, staring into thick curtains — who needed such a person? For someone who wrote the truth exhaustively, setting everything down without any inhibition, making the ultimate confession, a biography was superfluous. Why would anyone bother? There would be nothing to write, nothing new, nothing of value. So with the book he called his novel, he had taken over the work of all the prospective biographers.
“I’ve put them out of business,” he said loudly, as though to the world.
Axelrod said, “We can get it into the catalogue now. If you deliver the manuscript on a disk before the end of the month, we can publish in the spring. Shall we say it’s travel?”
“It’s travel, it’s autobiography, it’s everything. Most of all it’s fiction.”
“Hell of a title.”
As for the paragraph for the catalogue the editor asked for, Steadman said, “How much better not to have one.” And when the editor seemed doubtful, Steadman said, “Just the title.”
There was general approval for the two-thousand-year-old title, The Book of Revelation.
In a damp and breezy October of slapped-down waves in the harbor and discoloring and withering leaves up-island, the Vineyard had almost emptied of visitors and was returned again to its year-rounders. After his months of steady work it seemed odd to Steadman to be here with so little to do except process his manuscript. In the course of almost a year of dictation — they had returned from Ecuador the previous November — a woman with a secretarial service in Edgartown had transcribed the tapes he had made with Ava. The woman had said she was unshockable. “As the mother of three boys and a girl, with a husband in the Coast Guard, I’ve seen just about everything.” At first she sent the pages using a courier service. Then, perhaps to save money, she delivered the printed pages in person. She had kept pace with the dictation, the tapes and notes, and not long after Steadman finished, she handed him the remainder of the first draft of the novel, with the tightlipped smile of someone tested to the limit, as though holding back her disapproval.
The book was complete, needing only line corrections and slight revision. Having the whole book before him was a pleasure. But he worked without the drug. How plain the printed words seemed compared to the stipple of brilliant pixels in his drug visions.
He dabbed at errors, rubbing highlights into words and phrases, deleting preciousness (“frenzied and oculate waves” became “wild eye-spotted swells”; he crossed out the words “numinous,” “ineffable,” and “chiastic”). Now that his days were relieved only by his trifling with the manuscript, he found himself disoriented. He was glad to be free of the anxiety of the guilty lopsided life of a writer with an unfinished book, but he missed the day-filling routine of dictation, the drama of his sexual nights, the anticipation of taking the drug each morning. The music had stopped, the racket in his head was gone, the house was whole but predictable, colorless, no longer hallucinatory. One day was like another, the empty hours of silent mornings and much too long afternoons and dreamless nights that had no objective, not even the promise of Ava. She was always tired: her work, her life, was elsewhere. He was reminded of his life before Ecuador, when he’d had nothing to do, nothing to write; when he had felt cynical and impotent. He was not impotent now, yet he felt his desire slackening, the old disobedience that was like a deafness of the flesh.
He found he could not read easily; habituated to glowing shapes and colors, his eyes were unaccustomed to the severity of small print. The letters jumped and rearranged themselves as he blinked, making him feel dyslexic. So he put on earphones and listened to audiotapes. The glimpse of Blind Pew on the television that morning had stirred his interest. In his present mood of impatience he had a boxed set of tapes, Stevenson classics, sent to him in a taxi from Vineyard Haven. He shut out the world by clamping Stevenson to his ears. Some passages he marveled at, but the best of them saddened him with their exactitude and made him feel lonely. He had often felt this when he was affected by the truth in fiction.
He missed his datura, he missed its pleasures, he missed its benign guidance, the way it had helped him in new directions; he missed the way it had led him upward to a vantage point where he saw himself so clearly he could concentrate on his wholeness, like a man in front of a mirror sketching his self-portrait. He missed the complexities of color, the way one color appeared as separated layers, like leaves of innocent light given meaning when they were arrayed together. The drug had given him access, and now he was just a man on the outside.
The drug had allowed him to range widely in time and space, to peel experience from his body and mind, and now without it he was smaller and shallower, with an obscure sense of loss, like someone so stunned by the death of a loved one, he suffered all the more from the trauma because — so deranged by the loss — he could not recall the loved one’s name or face. Under the spell of the drug, the future that had once been full of suggestion and promise was now unreadable. The past was distant and inaccessible. He was a small figure on the parapet of the present, feeling very little except the obvious and violent compulsion to jump.
He was sighted now, returned to the gray daylight and misleading surfaces of the visible world.
With nothing to keep her at home, and as if atoning for all the time she had taken off, Ava worked long hours, odd hours, spending arduous days at the hospital. She was like a missionary doctor on a remote Third World island, where everyone expected favors, every patient was hopeless and desperate, every case an emergency, and failure was common. Ava knew all the Vineyard families. “I have to do it. If I didn’t, who would?” The sort of thing Steadman had seen in places like New Guinea and Haiti. Sometimes Ava worked twenty-four hours without sleep; she was often on call all night.
Cursing the pager, dreading the phone, the three a.m. emergencies, the midnight births, Steadman was reminded of the early days of their love affair. He had forgotten that she had a life of her own.
“This is normal,” she said when he complained. “Look, we were writing all day and fucking all night.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“It’s nice, but let’s say it’s less usual,” she said. “I’m a doctor. I think the difficulties of doctoring made me a reckless lover. But now I’m back to work. Get used to it.”
She stopped using makeup. Her choice of clothes, even when she was not at the hospital, seemed clinical, even dowdy. Usually she wore green scrubs around the house.
“You got what you wanted,” she said. “Your book.”
“It wasn’t only that.”
“Okay. You got your reputation back. Your manhood.”
But he resisted simplifying it. He said, “Are you going to make it all my trip and deny that there was some pleasure in it for you?”
“It was like a year of insanity. Yes, I found it exciting, but I am so glad it’s over.”