He stared at her, and seeing she was unmoved, he said, “Don’t you see what’s beginning?”
“I can do without excitements. We have enough of those at the hospital.” She saw that he was still staring defiantly at her. “People die there. They give birth. They come in with bone splinters sticking out of their flesh. You should see a motorcycle victim sometime. These people are scared, they’re in pain. Some of them do nothing but cry. And we have a psychiatric unit, too, you know. They need me more than you do.”
He turned his back on her. He said, “It’s like you’ve forgotten everything we did those days.”
“When I start to miss it I’ll read your book.”
He wondered if he would ever feel as lost again as he had before he met her, but he told himself no, he had his book, he had no fear of solitude. Blindness was the ultimate in solitude, yet blindness had made him bold and filled him with courage.
“Listen to this,” he said one day, on her return from work. He read from a sheet of paper, a rare example of his handwriting. “After I drank, the most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably new and, from its very novelty, incredibly sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a millrace in my fancy, a solution to the bonds of obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul—”
“How can you write that arrogant shit?” she said, interrupting him, and when he began to laugh at her, she hissed at him.
“I didn’t write it,” he said slyly. “A doctor wrote that.”
“Some quack,” she said.
“Dr. Jekyll,” he said. “He would have agreed with you!”
Without telling Ava — he wanted her to feel neglectful — he admitted to himself that his life was still full. He would have objected more loudly to being left on his own except that around the time Ava had returned to the hospital he began again to be in demand. He started to receive messages from intermediaries — Axelrod, the publisher’s publicity department, helpful friends — telling him there were people who wanted to meet him. He got calls nearly every day — people tipped off that he was writing again, that the author of Trespassing had a new book.
One of the requests came from the television show 60 Minutes. Would Steadman agree to an interview? He guessed how this had come about: Mike and Mary Wallace had been at Wolfbein’s most recent party. The hook would be: famous recluse, stricken blind, produces a new book in his enforced darkness. The title of the segment would be something like “Edge of Night.”
Axelrod had relayed the message. “They want to follow you around at home on the Vineyard and do an in-depth interview.”
Other messages, nearly all from TV shows and photographers, implored him to return their calls to discuss what they might do together. There was no ambiguity in the requests: he was to be seen close up by a camera, to be observed at work and at home — they put it in a kindly way. He was at first flattered but easily saw the renewed interest as intrusive journalism, the voyeuristic wish to film him walking into walls, stumbling, and perhaps falling on his face in picturesque Vineyard settings. Steadman knew that they wanted to see his sideways gait, his faltering gestures, his groping fingers, his big blank face and swiveling head. Great TV, they were thinking — and what a surprise they would get when they saw that he walked headlong with a strut and a slashing cane, with well-aimed gestures and an animated gaze.
“Out of the question,” he told Axelrod.
Someone from the New York Times called to schedule “At Home with Slade Steadman,” and again he suspected an eagerness to see him bumping his head and knocking things to the floor, crumbs on his shirt, mismatched socks. People magazine suggested something similar, but insisted on an exclusive. The Boston Globe reminded him that he was a native son, but it was the travel editor who called. Would Steadman consider an interview on the sailing ship Shenandoah? Freelance photographers asked for sittings and portraits. There was no letup. And when the book was announced in the publisher’s catalogue the number of requests multiplied. Bookstores urged him to visit, universities asked him to speak, and would he please be the keynote speaker at a seminar on travel writing “for seniors with disabilities”?
In almost every inquiry there was an allusion to his blindness: offers of assistance, a limo, a ticket, an escort, “anything we can do to make this as painless as possible for you.” “We have many visually impaired students in our institution,” one letter said. “I did Borges,” one photographer claimed, adding, “I’d show you the contact sheets, but I guess you’ll have to take my word for it.” Subtler suggestions patronized him: “Lots of people ought to have the chance to share your story.” And one of the universities, offering a large fee and promising a good audience, wrote, “We have a full range of handicapped access.”
“They think I’m a cripple,” he told Axelrod.
But seeing an advantage in creating buzz — his editor’s expression — Axelrod advocated early publicity for the book. The New York Times Magazine had put in a request.
“They’re not promising you the cover — they never do that — but there’s an excellent possibility of it. Think of the sales.”
The thought No one knows me — his sense of being a wraith, a phantom, an anonymous presence — had always driven his writing and made him content. But now Steadman laughed, because his book was done and his life and work, once so hidden, so widely speculated on, would soon belong to the world. There would be nothing else to tell.
“I’m differently abled,” he told Axelrod. “If only they knew how differently abled I am.”
All that was known of him was his blindness and his new book. He liked that, because the truth of his blindness — its gifts — was so startling. To the imploring journalists and askers after his appearance, he was a casualty, an object lesson, a freak, a moral parable, tabloid fodder; not a writer but a survivor. They wanted to hear about his pain. And he smiled because there was no pain, only joy — a bigger story but an unexpected one, and perhaps of more limited appeal, for people wanted to share his suffering.
So the word was out that he had a book. He suspected he would be marketed as a miracle, a survivor who had managed to tell his tale, batting the air with one hand and whirling his white cane with the other. He was eyeless and enigmatic, but also valiant and pathetic, a licensed bore, someone who made you shut up and listen so that he could be sententious, always managing to succeed against the odds.
All lies. He had never been more clear-sighted than when, drugged, he had blinded himself and entered the mind and heart of the small hopeful thirteen-year-old he had once been. Nothing was more important than finding that child and rewarding him. In that simple wish the book was born.
“I am not a cripple,” he wanted to say to the prospective interviewers and TV people. “Blindness has been an asset. I could never have completed this book without it.”
He said this to Ava, told her how he had valued the trip to Ecuador, learning the uses of datura. Blindness had changed him, living with her had changed him, the book had meant everything.
She was smiling as he spoke. She controlled her voice, holding her emotion in her mouth, and said, “So much for you. But what do you think all this did to me?”