Blinding Light

1

HE WAS EUPHORIC at having finished his book, relieved of a burden he had carried like an uncomplaining drudge for so long it had cut and wounded him, enfeebling his body. All that suspense, the thing not done and tentative, the fragment of a promise kept in a stack of notes and tapes, had made him feel incomplete. His shattered sense of having been injured, of needing to heal, was nothing glorious — not the secret agony that was said to be the source of art. The dull pain had made him feel like a lower animal in the slow process of regenerating a limb from a broken stump. Now his work done, he was active again, whole and happy.

Except for some tidying up — the last transcripts and edits — Steadman had his book. This reward for all the years of silence, something at last his own, was a sexual confession in the form of a novel. He was at first so lightheaded he did not miss the datura tea he had drunk every working day in order to find the thread of his narrative. He was jubilant, with the exquisite thrill of his past revealed and understood.

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.

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.”

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?”

Steadman scowled at her. Because she so seldom talked about herself, this question seemed irrelevant.

“I don’t want to make you feel guilty,” she said, “but can you imagine what your behavior did to my head?”

He still scowled and looked deaf. He was niggled by the word “behavior.”

“I have a past, too,” she said.

“That’s for you to deal with,” he said in a tone of Who wants to know? He had become grim and uninterested. He wanted to turn away from her, for all this time, in her arms, lusting for her, he had seen her as every woman he had ever loved, and she had seen him as — who? — someone else, certainly.

“Your story,” she said, “is not to be confused with mine.”

Of course, another narrative had been unspooling in her mind, utterly different from his own, one he could not share.

“Be a doctor,” he said. “Help me. Heal me. Don’t tell me about your medical history.”

Still, he was puzzled by the parallel life she must have led while collaborating on his book. Sexuality was so private, so fantasy driven, so dependent on the past. He knew what role she played for him in his blissful reveries of childhood, but what part did he play in her simultaneous recollections and rehearsals? Better not ask.

“What does it all lead to?” she said. “People will wonder.”

“Happiness,” he said. “Anyone reading my book will see that all they need to know is in their own head. That’s my message. ‘You are the source of all wisdom. Of all pleasure.’”

So he told himself he was content. He took no notice of the invitations and requests, for he kept thinking of that morning of the phone call forewarning him — a “save the date” call for November. The invitation from the White House was sent by mail, the state dinner for the German chancellor. And a handwritten note on an enclosed card: The president is looking forward to seeing you.

One night in the first week of November, Steadman was at the chessboard, waiting for Ava to come home from the hospital. She hated eating late, regarded it as unhealthy; she had stopped drinking alcohol, since she might be summoned to the emergency room; she was always too weary these days for sex. Even chess was a labor for her, a single game might take days, but at least they were able to converse over the board.

He sat lightly, studying the chess pieces in a posture of patience and concentration. He was like a diner about to finish a meal, some scraps still on his plate, a man who was rested and alert and not very hungry, perhaps saving some of his food for his friend, who was about to turn up.

Ava entered without speaking, and it was only when she sat down that she spoke. “Your move.”

“Let’s play rapid transit,” he said. “I want to finish this tonight.”

As she made her move, she said, “You’re going drugged?” resuming the conversation that had ended the previous day when they had stood up from the chessboard.

“I’m at my best when I’m blind.” He took his turn without hesitating.

“It’s the White House. Everyone will see you. They’ll know.”

“Your move.”

After her move he swiftly took her rook, swooping with his knight.

“I want everyone to know.”

She let out a howl of agony, a surrendering cry of despair, not recognizable words but a dark lament that filled Steadman with horror for its sound of suffering. It was as though a knife had been plunged into her body, but she was not a victim, she was a witness, being given a long, hideous look at certain death — his death. He was fading as she looked helplessly on, and her howl at what he said was how she would feel at the sight of him dying. He saw that for her, with his certainty about being blind, he had died in her eyes.

Just afterward her voice changed to a gasp as she spoke with a scorched throat. “How can you?”

“I have to.”

“It’s a lie. It’s a mask,” she said, her voice catching.

“Blind Slade wrote that book,” he said. “To go any other way would be deceitful.”

“What if they found out the truth?”

“That is the truth. Please move.”

She moved, she was bent backward, as though wishing for words. She said, “To pretend to be afflicted.”

“I’m not afflicted,” he said, and struck again with his knight. “That’s the first thing people have to know.”

“It is such bullshit,” she said.

“Your move.”

She poked at a bishop, and in the next move lost him, and began to cry, the same lament but softer, more sorrowful, rubbing her eyes. With wet fingers she moved a pawn.

“I help sick people,” she said. “And you pretend to be sick. It makes a mockery of everything I do.”

“I became blind. I lost my sight. You know that.”

“People with brain tumors lose their sight. Diabetics lose their sight. People with detached retinas. Burn victims. Infected corneas. Serious head trauma. You should be ashamed.”

“I never said I was a victim. I never whined.”

“You’re worse. You boasted.”

He folded his hands and waited for her to move.

But she said, mimicking his voice, “I can write in the dark!”

“I can write in the dark. I am blinder than Borges when he wrote his essay ‘On Blindness.’ I wrote my book in the dark.” He had not looked up at her. He added, “If you don’t want to play, just say so.”

Ava stared at the board for a long while, then made a move, another fatal one. As Steadman plucked at her chess piece, Ava said, “I’m not going to help you. I won’t be part of it. Go to the White House blind if you like. What a mockery!”

He said, “It’s the truth. It’s who I am. Me at my best.”

Then he moved. She glanced down to see the trap. He said, “Checkmate,” and only then did he raise his eyes to her.

She recognized the bloodshot and glassy stare of his blindness as he sat triumphant over the chessboard. She put her hands in her lap and looked old and prim and distant.

He knew she would not howl again. No one could do that twice, with such a cry of horror. But she didn’t have to. He still heard it within himself. The sorrowing sound had deranged something in him — no longer a sound, but a pain lodged deep inside him, something torn, an ache that had displaced all his desire.

2

EVEN WITH THE invitation propped on the mantelpiece and the decision to go settled, Steadman kept receiving phone calls and faxes to verify additional details: his and Ava’s Social Security numbers, ages, birthplaces, home address, and — though Steadman had been explicit about his not needing help — a “Special Needs” form to be filled out and faxed back. Another form in the invitation package indicated that because rooms were unavailable, they were not being invited to stay the night in the White House. Attached to this was a list of hotels that offered special rates to White House dinner guests, with parking instructions, and “handicapped accessible” was mentioned here, too.

“‘Special needs’ describes me perfectly.”

“Why do you insist on doing this?”

He had to think a moment before he realized she didn’t mean the decision to accept the invitation but rather his insistence on attending the dinner blind. But he said nothing. His mind was made up.

Black tie had also been stressed — everything that was stated was stressed — and it was repeated that the chancellor of Germany was the guest of honor. Nothing was left to chance.

The morning of their departure, Steadman called Wolfbein to tell him the news and to ask for advice. Wolfbein was a friend of the president and a frequent overnighter at the White House.

“You putz,” he said, and he bantered, pretending to be hurt because he had not been invited. Then he urged Steadman always to remember to call him “Mr. President,” and not to bring a camera, and to observe protocol. “It’s ground zero. It’s the center of the world.” Wolfbein then became concerned. “How are you feeling?”

“Great. I can see through walls and around corners.”

When he put the phone down he was aware that Ava was behind him, leaning away, in a posture of disapproval.

She was silent on the way to Boston, silent on the plane to Washington, and it was only when they arrived at Reagan Airport that she spoke.

“I see the Jordans.”

Vernon and Ann Jordan approached and said hello. They had just arrived from New York, en route to the same dinner party.

“How’re you doing?” Vernon demanded in his hearty direct manner, fixing Steadman with a smile.

“X-ray vision,” Steadman said, tapping his dark glasses.

That pleased Vernon, who laughed loudly, his muscular body radiating light and health and humor. He was a man who smiled easily and whose casual manner masked a shrewd intelligence and fastidious discretion. Yet he was genuinely friendly, and near him Steadman felt that he was in the presence of a man of power, a smiling sorcerer who remembered everything he saw or heard.

“You know my wife,” Vernon said, and turning to Ann, said playfully, with a little bow, “Hello, wife.”

“I know you from the hospital,” Ann said to Ava. “We are all so thankful to you for your wonderful work.”

“Can we offer you good people a lift?” Vernon asked.

They accepted the ride with gratitude, feeling rescued, for they had traveled in silence and had arrived in Washington bewildered. And now, having been swept into the limo, they were treated to Vernon’s running commentary about the landmarks they were passing — the Pentagon, the Jefferson Memorial. He narrated tactfully, describing their beauty, using his enthusiasm for detail as a way of hiding the fact that he was doing this for a blind man.

“And here we are at the Willard. We’ll see you folks later.”

The formalities at check-in were brief and efficient, questions asked and ignored by Steadman, who brushed at his watch face with his fingertips and said, “We have to get a move on.”

He had taken a dose of the drug in the morning. He took another one in the hotel room after he changed into his tuxedo. Ava sat apart from him in the cab to the White House; she was remote, she disapproved, she was sorry she had come. A shadow of unease lay across her features, while Steadman’s were bathed in light.

After they were dropped at the side entrance, following the instructions on the map, they showed their IDs and were escorted (“This is the East Room”) to where there was a receiving line and drinks being served. Steadman was aware of a glazed and shimmering room filled with excited strangers.

“I’m right beside you,” Ava said.

“I know,” Steadman said. And then, “Do you believe this?”

The smells of fresh flowers and floor wax and new paint gave the place a hum of something venerable, the glory of an old hotel restored to luxury. All this with the contrasting odors of perfume and aftershave lotion and polished leather. But more conspicuous than anything was the insinuation of decay beneath the sweaty faces and the glitter, the corruption and the untruth, like the decrepitude that stank under the White House timbers — Steadman could smell it all.

The discomfort, the awkwardness, was palpable, too — bumped shoulders, loud greetings, the hyperalertness of strangers. But though no one seemed at home there — the whole gleaming structure was like a stage set — they were all energized by simply being in the place. With an intensity that was like a fever of madness, the guests seemed to Steadman like heavy animals in unnatural postures, tottering on their hind legs. They were clumsy, they were eager, they chattered and bantered in a way that made them seem skittish and tickled. Their attention was brief but vibrant, glittering for an instant and then flashing elsewhere, as they roved — the men especially — swinging their arms, shouldering forward, glancing sideways. Steadman was reminded first of ungainly athletes and then of greedy goodhearted apes.

Approaching the receiving line, Steadman was cued to the keen attention — gestures more obvious than murmurs — of people making way for him. They stood aside and let him pass, no one touching him, until the large warm arm of the president rested on his shoulder. With a firm fond hug, the president held on.

“So glad you could make it. And you, too, Doctor,” the president said, gripping Ava’s elbows. Then he turned and said, “This man is truly one of my favorite writers. And I can tell you, he’s a hero. Slade Steadman, this is His Excellency…”

But Steadman was grasped again, and the chancellor said, in a slight accent that made him seem kindly and precise, “Yes, in Germany as well. So good to meet you.”

He heard the soft bubble-burst of camera flashes and felt his face warmed as his picture was taken. He knew the others were smiling, he could tell by a tightness in their voices, but he did not smile. He tried to look serene and untroubled, indifferent to the cameras, for he knew these pictures would travel.

“You’ve probably been to Germany.” The voice was unmistakably Vernon Jordan’s. And Steadman was hugged and Vernon said, “How you doing now?”

He took the muscular hugs and the bantering to be reactions to his blindness. The making way, too — silence, pity, confusion, bewilderment, and head signals and hand gestures. He smiled at eliciting these reactions, and none were kinder than the president’s.

“Beautiful paintings,” Ava was saying as they left the receiving line.

No sooner had a waiter put a drink in Steadman’s hand than the president caught up with him and steered him to the other guests and introduced him. He insisted on including Steadman in every conversation—“the author of Trespassing’— and he held on to him with a gentle guiding hand. The president was being a big brother, a defender, an explainer, a benefactor, taking personal charge of him.

Twice, Steadman overheard people saying variations of “I wish my mother were alive, so I could call her and tell her where I am. She would be so proud.”

He heard voices with a clarity that kept the words in his memory, and the guests had the urgency of people trying to remember everything that was happening. They spoke in a mannered and self-conscious way, as though rehearsing what they would later report to their friends.

But with the words, the particular accents, he recognized the chief components of people — their lips, their ears and noses, their nervous hands and shuffling feet, the physicality of the guests standing in the room, the fleshy strangulatory handshakes, the way they kept patting him on the back, the fragrant iridescence of the women — was it their mascara? — the heavy faces of the men, the way they used their jaws in speaking, always aware they were conspicuous. The bulk and heft of their bumping elbows, the suggestion of sinew and fat, their long greedy arms, their impatient feet in heavy shoes. He was continually reminded of the density of their flesh, and aware of them as restless contending animals.

Although they made room for him when he moved, when he stood to talk they always seemed to be crowding him, backing him up, standing a bit too close, speaking a bit too loud, as if he were not blind but slow-witted.

Among themselves, in their odd unhesitating talk and movement, he saw the guests as wishing to be in agreement, all on the same side, all rooting for the same team, all delighted to be there in the White House. They were all in step, a great hairy hovering party, full-throated in solidarity and especially emphatic in their marveling bark-like laughter.

Steadman knew that the pretense of unanimity was a polite deception, and he felt only pity and condescension for these people. He was glad — proud, beaming, blind. But the roar of approval concerned him as much as the sweet perfume that masked the stink, for he could see it was the purest theater, the posturing and the falsehood, the insincerity, the fakery, the lies. The guests were nervous and unsure and grateful; if the president had asked, they would have agreed to anything. Ape-like, he kept thinking, and they had the moral blindness of primates too.

“We’re being summoned,” Ava said. “But I’m not sitting next to you.”

They went into the next room for dinner, Ava steering him, and then he was shown to his seat. He knew he was being watched as he was served a glass of wine and as the first course was put before him.

“Consommé,” he said, inhaling.

“That’s a ten,” the woman next to him said.

“No,” he said, feeling that she was patronizing him. “A ten for me is when it’s sashimi and I correctly guess maguro by the aroma alone.”

“Liz Barton,” the woman said. He could tell she was small and sure of herself, very young, with a confident gargly voice. “I know who you are. My father was such a fan.”

He swallowed his rebuke and said, “What do you do, Liz?”

“I’m in the attorney general’s office. Overseeing adjuncts to the Americans with Disabilities Act.”

“So I guess I’m not your first blind dinner partner,” Steadman said. “Not at all. I had the privilege of escorting Stevie Wonder when President Mandela visited.”

“I can see him now, grinning all over his face, wagging his head and shaking his beaded locks in gratitude,” Steadman said, turning to the person on his right and gesturing to Liz Barton. “This young woman insists on flattering me.”

By then the second course was being served. Steadman made small talk, realizing with disgust that this was required of him and already wishing to leave. He had shown up, he had presented himself to the president and the guests as the blind author, his picture had been taken. But he couldn’t leave, not yet, for the dinner was formal: there were toasts, affirmations of friendship between the United States and Germany, the repeated mention of a trade fair in Hannover.

“I am so sorry my wife is not here to join us. As first lady, she is on an official visit to Africa with our daughter and sends you all her good wishes.” Before the president sat down, he added, “I want to say a special word of thanks to my good friend and a great American writer, Slade Steadman.”

Snatching at his cane, Steadman rose and leaned on it and smiled, showing the room his dark glasses and his grim smile, and sensing the explosive puffs of air and flashes of light as cameras fired at him.

Coffee was served and the president offered to show the guests more of the White House: the Truman Balcony overlooking the South Lawn, the Green Room where Jefferson had dined, the smaller family dining room, and some artifacts, including a Gutenberg Bible, which had been brought from the Library of Congress in the German chancellors honor.

The crowd thinned, the women who had sat on either side of him had left, and Steadman was alone. As he wondered where Ava had gone, he felt a familiar hand massaging his shoulder and heard the president’s voice.

“Slade, I’m so glad to have you here with us. I do hope you’ll come back,” he said, and then, obviously to Ava, “Hi, there. When am I going to see you on the Vineyard, girl?”

“I hope it’s at the Wolfbeins’, Mr. President, rather than the hospital, where I usually spend my time,” Ava said.

“That’s so great, being a doctor there. I could have used you when I twisted my knee.” But when the president spoke, Steadman could tell his mind was racing, always elsewhere, on something else.

“I know your name,” the man said, another German accent.

They talked of Trespassing, all the familiar remarks — the boldness of it, the danger, the originality, how it had inspired a TV show and a clothing line. Steadman mentioned his new book and hoped that, before long, Trespassing would be forgotten and his Book of Revelation would be the topic of discussion.

But something else bothered him, for the president’s hand was still on his shoulder, and Steadman felt as he had back in the summer, that the president was a wounded man. A note of hurt and insincerity, of forced gaiety in his voice, a turbulence in his manner that appeared to be the opposite — such great poise that his equanimity could only be a pretense, the poise of someone with a secret, the grace and glibness of a man in pain, who wanted no one to know it, who hated most of all to be pitied, who never wanted his weakness, nor any of the many secrets humming in his heart, to be known.

All this time, the president and the German dinner guest were speaking — about writing, about cultural exchange, about the American Institute in Berlin. Steadman found himself saying, “Yes, of course, I would love to visit when my new book comes out.”

“You will be welcome,” the man said, and turned away to be introduced to someone else.

The president said to Steadman, “I hope you’ll join us tomorrow in the Rose Garden for the joint press conference. There’ll be a lot of journalists there who’d love to see you.”

He gave Steadman’s shoulder one last massage, the big brother grip of encouragement, and he moved away, into the throng of beaming guests who had lingered nearby, wishing to be noticed. Ava remained beside Steadman, her flank against his leg, and he knew by just this glancing touch that she was unhappy, inert, sullen.

“What’s wrong?”

“I feel so humiliated. How could you do this?”

He said, “Why do you want to have a private argument in such a public place?”

“I can’t help it. I feel awful. I should have stayed home. I hate being part of this charade.”

“I am blind,” he whispered.

“You’re not. It’s such a lie. And here you are soliciting all that pity. Is it that you need an audience?”

“It’s not a choice. It’s who I am.”

Ava was silenced but not convinced, even as they stepped outside to await their ride. He had to remind himself that he was facing the world from the North Portico of the White House. Ava was glum; she brought her dismay and her shame back to their room at the Willard, where she lay bluish and disapproving at the far edge of the big bed. They lay apart, miserable, another unhappy couple, one angry, the other ashamed. And lying there, he could not help but think of the president in his bedroom, equally disturbed by his own fictions, his own secrets.

In the morning, Steadman drank datura with his breakfast, then said, “I’m going to the joint press conference.”

Mortified, but claiming she had to pack, Ava said she would stay behind.

Steadman took a taxi to the White House. He showed his pass, and as he was escorted to the Rose Garden a man fell in step next to him.

“I’m from the Post. I’d love to do a piece about you.”

“Maybe some other time.”

He heard the murmur of the press corps some distance off. His escort said, “We’ve got a seat for you down front.”

The chair was at the end of the front row. He took his seat just as the president and the German chancellor emerged from the White House. Seeing him, the president approached and put his arm around him and said, “Great to see you here, Slade.”

Steadman heard the sound of cameras, the hubbub surrounding his being singled out. He sensed this watching as a pressure on his physical being, and knew, as he had the night before, that he was being observed, the object of curiosity, with his white cane and dark glasses and Panama hat. That was his image now, no longer affectations but part of his public identity.

He was considering this — I am a new man — when a stranger knelt next to him. But perhaps not a stranger. There was something familiar in the way the man crouched, the odors of his skin and stale hair. Steadman recognized people from a particular memory of what they ate, as though the residue of their diet seeped through their skin. This man represented familiar food, and the unseasonal warmth of this November day offered an exhalation of his sour shirt.

“I know you,” the man said, and his accent gave the rest away.

“Manfred.”

“And I know your secret.”

Steadman spoke again and then he was noticed, for he was addressing empty space. Manfred had crept away. Steadman reached out with a grasping, inquiring hand and said, “Wait.”

“Did you lose something?” an urgent voice behind him said.

“No, I’m fine.”

But he had to admit — and it was a revelation — that though he felt anything but impaired, he had a blind spot, and Manfred had vanished there, dissolving into that crack. Concentrating hard, Steadman was deaf to the press conference: until that moment he had forgotten the existence of Manfred.

In the taxi on the way to the airport, Ava said, “Did I miss anything?”

He said no. He did not mention Manfred — how to explain? Ava had never liked the man, and from his tone — Steadman kept replaying And I know your secret — Steadman could not discern the man’s motive, if indeed he had a deeper one than simply teasing him.

Steadman felt low and limited. The existence of a blind spot bothered him, like a previously undiagnosed ailment. And he had expected more from his visit to the White House. It was theater, with a large cast, on a vast stage, but his role was undemanding: just show up and be polite. Yet for him, singled out for being blind, it meant everything, a kind of dramatic debut. In his mind the president kept saying, I want to say a special word of thanks to my good friend and a great American writer, Slade Steadman— and as he rose, leaning on his cane, his dark glasses flashing, the loud applause that declared, as it continued with a sustained humility and praise, We see you. We approve. You are brave.

Yet he was discontented — not undermined but made insecure by a wisp of shadow, a doubter, as though at the periphery of all this praise he had sensed a spider descending on a long thin thread of its own gray spittle, preparing to spin a web.

3

HE HAD GONE to Washington to step out of his seclusion and to present himself to the world as a blind man. The president himself had vouched for him. Yet his keenest memory of the White House visit, the detail that he went on suffering, was not the president’s praise but rather the needling accusation breathed into his ear by Manfred. And I know your secret. The statement grew more sinister in implication as the weeks passed. The heavily accented voice made the words clumsier, more hurtful, like a cut from someone using a crude knife, requiring the idiot force of a vicious thrust because the thing was so blunt. And those few words were all Steadman had. He wanted more. He needed to deal with the man.

He had no help at home anymore. As if out of spite, Ava opted for odd hours at the hospital. That was the trouble with doctors: at their most selfish they could claim to be unselfish. I have to do this! My patients need me! I have someone in labor! Get out of my way! Dr. Ava Katsina, anyway.

“I’m going,” she’d say, and without another word would leave the house, trailing the settling dust of self-satisfied finality, as in the days before Ecuador when they had made the decision to split up. And here they were, facing another winter on the island.

“I need you as much as ever,” he said.

“Who will be my pouting chatelaine?” she mocked. “Listen, there are really sick people at the hospital, who need me much more.”

Her bossy doctor’s voice was her most clinical and severe, always an order, like Take your medicine. No backtalk. Where was the compliant, agreeable sensualist of the past year who had aided him in his book? Here she was in baggy green scrubs, back at work, hoisting a sightless squalling baby that was dripping with womb slime.

With her help he could easily have corrected his book, she reading the galley proofs while he lay drugged and insightful, suggesting improvements or deletions. But he was alone and undrugged, reduced to the menial condition of sober sighted scrutinizer, certain that he was missing something as he read, mumbling, his fretful finger poking at the lines.

And yet in the task of publishing — all the minutiae of preparation, the discussions with Axelrod, weeks of it, choosing the jacket, planning the book tour — none of it distracted him from what had been hissed at him in the Rose Garden, Manfred Steiger reappearing from nowhere like an ugly-faced gnome in a folktale, accusing him of treachery, as if preparing to exact his price.

This memory nagged at Steadman. Over the year he had worked on his book, he had not thought once of Manfred, nor even remembered the man’s association with the drug. He recalled the letter he had received; he was glad he had torn it up. Then, reentering the world, he had been confronted by Manfred, as though the man had been lying in wait all that time: the only other person in the world who had shared that secret experience of datura in the Ecuadorian rain forest. What did he want?

Exasperated, needing relief at the end of the day, Steadman drank a measure of the drug, blinding himself so he could stare white-eyed at Ava when she got home, scowl at her and say, “You’re mad at me. You’ve had an awful day. You’ve been operating on someone. Eight hours of invasive surgery! Massive trauma to the brain! Insult to the cerebral cortex!”

“You’re thinking of yourself and that stuff,” she said — he was still holding the cup he had emptied of the datura. “I was suturing a scalp wound.”

“I can smell the blood.”

“No blood on me.”

“Buzzing molecules of blood.”

He grumbled and accused her this way because he did not know how to tell her about Manfred. He guessed that she would say, “Your friend. Your fault.”

Manfred had made no secret of being a writer. He had told Steadman he was a journalist. But so what? Steadman assumed he was based in the United States, maybe in Washington, but more likely in New York City. Steadman wanted to talk to him, find out his intentions. And I know your secret. Why had he put it that way? Sometimes it sounded coy, at other times a threat. Steadman was not afraid; he was insulted at being blindsided by the whisper. He imagined his phone call, or even better his confronting Manfred again, saying, as he had wanted to say in the Rose Garden, “Obviously it’s not a secret!”

He had called the White House press office and announced who he was. The woman at the other end did not recognize his name. At an earlier time he would have said, “Trespassing? That book, that TV show, that movie? I’m the person responsible.”

But he said, “I was a guest at the White House dinner a month ago.” “Do you know how many dinners we have?” was her putdown.

Who hired these people? But he knew: grovelers and climbers who dealt with rich meddling businessmen demanding personal repayment for their campaign contributions.

“The dinner for the chancellor of Germany,” Steadman said. “I doubt you were invited.”

He had silenced her, though he heard what sounded like steam coming out of her ears.

“I need the address of a reporter who was at the press conference.” “We can’t disclose personal information.”

“Just the name of his newspaper. German.”

“Have you tried the Internet?”

“I’m blind. I am Steadman, the blind writer.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No you’re not.”

“I wish I could help.”

“No you don’t.”

No wonder some blind people could be so bitter, so angry, so selfish, for they were always encountering oafs who said things like that, who sounded secretly pleased that they were able to be obstructive or worse, encumbering the blind with their smug pity.

She was a flunky — a blind man deserved better. His indignation was a pretense but his annoyance with the woman was real. He had no second thoughts about his decision to go public as a blind man. That woman was an exception, because most of the time he was amused by the attention lavished on him for his supposed disability. Yet he was blind. His greatest satisfaction was that he was hardly handicapped at all, that he was superior in every important way to the incompetents and gropers and busybodies who claimed they wanted to help him.

Manfred’s contact number was all he needed. But as time passed even that seemed less urgent.

He began to go out alone, to Vineyard Haven to shop, to Oak Bluffs to have a drink at the Dockside bar where he had brought Ava on that first date, to restaurants in Edgartown. After so long in seclusion he loved being in public, enjoying the attention. A blind person was watched everywhere, like a fragile vase wobbling on a narrow shelf — what if it topples, what if it shatters? People hovered and held their hands out as though to break Steadman’s fall. To alarm them the more he walked faster when he knew he was being observed by someone very nervous, and he took long strides, defiant ones, swiping with his cane, like a man whipping at long grass.

Women were especially solicitous: he loved their whispers, their soft sidelong glances, their fumbling concern, their warm, well-intentioned hands. Up to a point he accepted their help, just to smell them. They were redolent with longing, saturated with emotion, moist with desire, tremulous with thwarted motherhood; they touched because they needed to be touched themselves. He allowed himself to be stroked. He went no further, though he could have possessed them completely.

Ava was taken care of, preoccupied at the hospital, but she was still in his life. When she arrived home and he asked her how her day had gone, she refused to describe it except in futile terms, as a series of pious ordeals: “We lost someone today,” or “A woman was medevaced to Boston.” There were fewer patients than in the summer, but the ailments were more serious. She made a point of ignoring the Christmas holiday, and worked on Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve, too, with her doctor’s martyred cry, “They need me.”

Everyone on the island said she was an angel, but Steadman knew that by taking on such responsibility at the hospital she had a free pass everywhere else — didn’t have to shop, or cook, or clean, or give presents, or socialize, and so Steadman felt abandoned. He couldn’t complain about being ditched by a doctor. No one would listen, for whose work was more important? From their commanding position on the moral high ground, doctors always had the last word.

Odd to think that she had been his reckless and sensual lover. But Steadman guessed that she looked back on their time together doing the book as frivolous. He wanted her to say this, so that he could reply, You are mistaken. It was revelation. What revelation is there in illness? The pathetic truth that people are frail and they sicken and die. Only the vitality of sex reveals the human essence.

But she was angry. He played the conversation in his head. He went for walks. He pondered what he had written of sexuality and risk, and one day the news came out — horribly, awkwardly, first as a rumor, then as a disputed denial — that the president had had a flirtation, perhaps an affair, with one of the young female interns at the White House.

The speculation was preposterous. The simplest version sounded bad enough. Steadman remembered how he had guessed at the poor man’s confusion months before.

I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I’m going to say this again. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time. Never. These allegations are false. I never had sex with that woman.

The president spoke, beating the air with his finger. Seeing the pink and sleepless face, the humiliated and guilty mask of an adulterer, Steadman said, “Poor guy.”

But Ava was contemptuous. “How could he be such a fool?”

“He was smitten,” Steadman said.

Ava’s expression said, I don’t get it.

The revelation of the president’s waywardness overwhelmed everything else. It was all the talk on the Vineyard, and on the news-hungry earth. That the president of the United States had gotten blowjobs in the Oval Office from a chubby Jewish girl in her early twenties was world news.

Steadman watched closely as the messy story unfolded. He guessed that if Manfred was a foreign correspondent, he must be covering it for his newspaper. Steadman was provoked to do something he had avoided up to now. He typed “Manfred Steiger” into his computer and got seventeen hits: stories in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, all with a Washington dateline. But he did not attempt to get in touch with Manfred.

People who disliked the president before now hated him and were gleeful. His supporters faced the dilemma of explaining his behavior, or even justifying it. Most people’s marital embarrassments were minor compared to the president’s from late January onward.

What was he thinking? It was the only topic of conversation these days, the president’s face fixed in an expression of defiance and shame, looking like a fool.

Steadman was certain that his Book of Revelation would have greater resonance in a world bewildered by the fact that the most powerful man in the world had risked his whole reputation, his job, his marriage, the respect of his friends, in order to meet a pushy, privileged, fattish, and unappealing young woman and encourage her to fellate him while he sat glassy-eyed with lust in his White House office.

It wasn’t strange at all, really, though you could hardly blame the president for denying it. It was at the heart of Steadman’s book, for safe inside the White House, having his cock sucked, the president was briefly a happy boy.

With all the lies and evasions and half-truths he had told, the president was miserable, and yet he clung to power. He repeated that he would not give up, would not resign, would go on no matter how loud the mockery and the declarations of hatred. The hatred was not new, but the pity was something terrible. Steadman could tell that the president was chastened and weakened by the pity and that he found it hard to bear.

Seeing the man so embattled, Steadman took his side, but he knew in advance that the president’s disgrace offered other ways for Ava and him to pick on each other.

“He stepped on his dick, I grant you. He’s behaved like a fool. But what has he done wrong?”

“I’d be out on my ear if I did that,” Ava said. “If I were caught fucking an orderly in my office I would be fired, no questions asked.”

“No one is hurt by it. And he’ll have to endure the worst possible punishment — the whole world laughing at him and feeling superior. That’s a nightmare.”

“My father was in the Navy,” Ava said. But she spoke in a tone of resignation, not outrage. “If he had done that he would have been shit-canned or demoted and posted to Diego Garcia. The president is the commander in chief of the armed forces.”

“So what? That’s honorary.”

“He’s pretending to be innocent, like you’re pretending to be blind.”

“I am blind.”

“What is it, an addiction? You can’t deal with stress? You can’t face the world? So you retreat. But instead of pot or speed, your drug is the Ecuadorian blindfold. The ultimate escape.”

“It’s the opposite,” he said. The datura was insight, an asset, not evasion at all, not an escape from the world but immersion in it, the deepest possible confrontation with reality. “And if that’s not so, then how is it, after so much failure, did I succeed in writing my book?”

“That’s simple. I helped you.”

He couldn’t dispute this. He had repeatedly told her that he would have been lost without her.

“And now you have it both ways. People pity you and yet you’re stronger than they are.”

He had no answer. He knew it to be true.

“It’s over between us,” she said. “I’m busy at the hospital. I should get a place of my own again.” As though thinking aloud, she went on softly, “All you’ve done is disrupt my life.”

“Don’t go,” he said. With an effort of will, swallowing hard, he said, “Please.”

“You don’t deserve me.”

She was so strong now, with a fierceness in her fatigue and bright feverish eyes that came from working long hours at the hospital. And she was so formidable scrubbed of all her makeup, pale and intimidating.

“What do you want?”

He said in a small imploring voice, “I want you to accept that I am dependent on this drug for now.” He looked at his hands with mild surprise, as if he had just realized they belonged to someone else. “The basket is broken to bits. Someday soon I will run out of the juice. I won’t have the option of being blind. In the meantime…”

“In the meantime I am not going to help you.”

“Okay,” he said, lifting his empty hands and holding them as though to propitiate her. He wanted to say more but did not have the words to describe the fulfilled dream it had been for him: their living there, just the two of them; inhabiting the house, his fantasies, his book.

“I’m not going on your book tour,” she said.

“I can live with that.” And saying so, he decided that it was better if she didn’t come along in that mood, dragging her grudge with her, a nagging presence, casting a gloomy shadow, as she had on the trip to Washington.

As though still negotiating, he said, “I’m almost out of the drug. Maybe a month or six weeks more.”

“Go ahead, then,” she said, “make an idiot of yourself, like him.”

The president was on TV, always shown before a crowd of delighted people. As he strode past a rope line, he leaned forward and hugged a grinning girl in a black beret — the fool embracing his fellatrix.

Ava shook her head, and he could tell from her upright posture, her hand, the twitch of her hair — not making eye contact, reflective, not looking for an answer or expecting to be contradicted — that she was in her clinical mode, delivering a medical opinion.

“God only knows what that stuff is doing to your nerves. But I can guess. Stressing the neurons. Toasting the ganglia. Burning out the synapses.”

With a slow, dull smile he said, “It’s easier for me to talk to you after I’ve taken a dose.” He looked her full in the face; his eyes were glaucous and fish-like. “Because I can see what is really in your heart.”

She seemed puzzled, not by that assertion, he knew, but by her realization that she had been home for more than an hour and had only just noticed that he was drugged, saturated, blinded. She had been able to be passive and playful as his sex partner, but in her doctor’s scrubs she hated surprises and especially hated being told things she didn’t know.

She quickly recovered and said sharply, “So you insist on wearing a mask.”

“So what?”

“That makes you two different people. Yourself and your mask.”

“That’s my problem. Or maybe my special gift.”

“Your problem,” she said. “The fear that you will be unmasked. The fear of all mask wearers.”

4

THE WIDER WORLD that Steadman entered as a solitary blind man was deranged, inside out, constantly expanding with obvious conspirators, subtle freaks, and the mouth-breathing ectoplasm of strangers. Using her lunch break, Ava helped him at the checkin counter at the Vineyard airport. He clawed the air, as though trying to seize it and understand.

“Just one person traveling?”

The nibbling mouse-faced clerk, with chewed and bitten fingers, shiny boots, a sweaty bag at his feet, was the first of many people who seemed to Steadman grotesque approximations — worse, weirder than when he had been with Ava in D.C., perhaps the more phantasmal because he was alone.

Sensing his unease, Ava said, “You’ll be fine.”

“I’m being met by an escort in each city.”

“Great,” Ava said, without any interest, her frowning face like bruised fruit. “Gotta go. I’m operating at two. Appendectomy.”

She was gone the next moment, the woman whose beauty he had adored, who had inspired his wildest sexual fantasies, scuttling away in scrubs and tennis shoes, a medic on the move — so long, Doc.

Steadman boarded the Boston flight and at once felt tossed into the funnel of his tour, toppling toward the black light, past the peripheral voices, just chatter. Most of what he heard was pointless—“They have their big meal at lunchtime”—but now and then the public emotion concentrated in the departure lounge was inexpressibly sad: “I watched him die,” and “Please don’t do this to me,” and “I don’t care if I ever see him again,” and “Ricky, did you remember to take your medication?”

He traveled as though in a foreign land where he was fluent in the language, a high-tech world of absurdities, inhabited largely by scowly sniffing furry-faced humanoids and now and then a bewitching woman trailing her odor of desire. Some people emitted a faint glow, others a ranker smell or a telling whisper. Nothing was as he had once known it. He was trespassing again. At Logan Airport he called Axelrod.

“Good news,” his editor reported. “We’ve almost sold out the first printing. We’re going back to press. Everyone wants to interview you. How’s it going?”

He couldn’t say. The dream-like distortions thronging the departure gates were not hindrances, more like revelations. A huge-headed fishfaced boy whining for candy, his teeth much too big for his mouth. Tramping bulky men burdened with satchels stuffed with fakery. Yammering old women, like a chorus of withered simpering baboons. The man next to him farting in fear and impatience. Scaly hands on him and unhelpful halitotic breath. All the world he saw anew; he was charged with his drug.

“I love you.” That was a desperate clumsy man with sweat in his fists.

“I love you, too.” Innocent, afraid, trapped, gabbling, speaking just to fill the dead air, and plainly insincere.

He found it so easy to tell when people were lying. He was the center of attention with his dark glasses, his cane, his hat, his handsome shoulder bag. He winced at the people gaping at him.

“Look, Steve, the guy’s blind. Go ahead, help him.”

“Get away from me.” He swept them aside with a swipe of his cane and kept them off, taking long strides as people scattered, making way for him.

Down a chilly ramp, an effeminate man at his side said, “Just a little bit farther, soldier, and let’s watch our step,” the man’s stinking fragrance like festering lilies and his hands pawing at Steadman’s sleeve.

On the long flight to Seattle he was pampered by a monstrous male nanny who said, “Want me to feed you?” Steadman swore at him and sat and suffered the stagnant air. He then put on his earphones and listened to a Philip Glass tape, which lulled him to sleep. He could sense the other passengers’ anxiety when he woke and groped forward to the toilet. The trip was an experience of jet howl, a racket of interruption and the passengers’ squalid fear.

“Are you being met here?”

He hated the babysitter’s tone. Already he was disgusted with bystanders’ insincere solicitude. It all made him defiant, assertive in his singularity.

A hand on his arm as he reached the bottom of the escalator.

“Hi. I’m Pam Fowler, your escort.”

She was a slow skinny woman who had forgotten where she’d parked her car. They roamed the lot for ten minutes until she found it.

“Just saw your Post-Intelligencer review,” she said as she buckled herself in. “It wasn’t very favorable. I had to look up the word ‘meretricious.’ Did I say that right?”

She drove badly, muttering the whole time in a nasal way, blaming herself for her ineptness.

“But it’s flying out of the stores. Elliott Bay reordered. They’re expecting you tonight.”

He was due to read at the Elliott Bay store, though “read” was not the word. He would talk instead, something about blindness.

“Have you seen your schedule?”

“What is your name?”

“Pam.”

“I am blind, Pam. I have not seen the schedule.”

It was a low blow, but he was still smarting from “It wasn’t very favorable.”

“I’m really sorry. I know that,” she said. “It’s just that you don’t seem blind.”

Turning to look at him, she took her eyes off the road. He could feel the car edging into the rumble strip, the washboard battering of the tires, the car’s echo from the nearby guardrail.

“Watch out!”

She braked, she apologized, she was now more nervous and her driving deteriorated. As if to placate him, she attempted small talk.

“Rainier’s out. Too bad you can’t see it.”

“But I can,” he said.

The hotel was large, with rank carpets and dust in the air. He was shown to his room by an awkward grunting bellman, and then he lay on his bed and dozed in the buzzing room until he was summoned to the event at Elliott Bay.

Stepping inside the bookstore, he knew from the stifling interior — the air sucked thin — that the place was packed. The day was damp. Only overdressed people on rainy days smelled worse than used books. People stepped away from him as always, seeing his glasses and cane, giving him room, as though he were fragile, as though fearing to touch him and topple him. One frightened pair of hands fumbled with his arm, trying to guide him.

“Just point me in the right direction.”

Already he hated being touched by strangers.

“I’m not going to read to you,” he said, taking his place at the raised table. “Instead, I’ll say a little about my condition. How unexpectedly I became blind. How what I thought would be a nightmare turned out to have its advantages. My book is not about blindness, but blindness helped me to imagine it and to write it.”

He searched the faces of the watching audience, and because he did not hesitate or look down at any notes, he seemed to alarm them when, with a kind of fierceness, he said, ‘“I have a way of always keeping my eyes shut, in order the more to concentrate the snugness of being in bed. Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if, darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences.’ That is Ishmael, in Moby Dick.”

His speaking with his blind and staring head erect created an even greater silence and apprehension. He recited Sassoon:

Does it matter? — losing your sight?…

There’s such splendid work for the blind;

And people will always be kind,

As you sit on the terrace remembering

And turning your face to the light.

The audience’s concentration was intense and seemed almost to crackle with attention. That calmed him and helped him pause and remember what he had planned. Rather than draw conclusions from the Melville, he plunged on. He disparaged King Lear for what he said was its crude depiction of blindness. “‘Looking on darkness which the blind do see’ is also wrong. Shakespeare is mistaken.” With the exception of the prophet Ahijah, the blind seer, the Bible is even more misleading on the subject of blindness — just a litany of ignorant threats and halftruths and false metaphors and the usual stumblers, Isaac, Samson, Eli, Zedekiah, Tobit, and the frantic and guilt-ridden taxman Saul. There was scriptural authority, he said, for making the case that God is blind.

“Darkness is the one thing I do not see,” he said. “Borges is right. The blind do not see black. The world is not dark to me. At its most indistinct it has a green glow, like the phosphorescence that is common in the densest rain forest. You see it on the narrow forking path, in the decay under the high canopy, exactly like an area in the Oriente province of Ecuador, where in fact I lost one form of sight and gained another.”

He quoted Milton and another poem by Sassoon. He had made mental notes. He was aware that he would be giving the same talk in all the cities on his tour, improving it, using the parts that worked, dropping the quotations that made the audiences restless.

Tonight, finishing with some lines from Borges’s essay “On Blindness,” his thanking the audience was drowned out by loud hospitable applause that seemed to say: You are brave, you are brilliant, you are heroic.

He sat and made the semblance of a signature in the books opened to the title page. His picture was taken, he was stroked, people whispered their thanks to him; everyone said something.

“Should I read your book? I’m not too sure I’ll like it.”

“My father loved your first book. He was such a bastard. He hit on my best friend and then he left my mom and the last we heard he was somewhere in Alaska.”

And one woman said in an urgent whisper, “I could take you home.” But he was driven to the hotel by Pam Fowler, and he lay in his room thinking, I like this.

The next morning she drove him to the airport for the flight to Portland. He was coddled again on the plane, but this time he did not protest. This was better than being at home. He did not feel nagged; he was well looked after, like a fragile adored child. When he got off the plane he called Ava. “I’m fine.” She seemed surprised that he was calling. She did not want to know more. She said she was busy at the hospital.

In Portland the woman escort, Julie, took him directly to a radio station. The interviewer announced himself as blind. For the first time on this trip Steadman was conscious of a pitiless scrutiny, not curiosity or fear but a piercing intelligence, like a beam of light turned on him.

“My wife read your book to me,” the blind interviewer said as he expertly worked the controls of the recorder. “I want to tell you that you write as only a blind man can — that’s a compliment. Reality for us is hallucinatory. Sighted people don’t know that. It’s a different grammar, a different vocabulary, a different world. It’s inside the world that sighted people see, but it’s hidden from them.”

After that, the interview went well. The blind man asked about the book — he was to be the only interviewer to address the book. Everyone else asked Steadman about his blindness. They sat face to face, blank stare to blank stare, talking amiably. And when the interview was over Steadman felt he had passed a crucial test.

In the evening he gave his pep talk about blindness at Powell’s Books, another large turnout, the close attention of eager and sympathetic readers, the sour smell of unsold books on shelves, the pleasant aroma of his own new book, like the tang of warm muffins, the new paper, the freshly cut pages, the clean slippery dust jacket, and now and then an old musty copy of Trespassing thrust before him for his signature.

“Hey, did you know you got kind of a crappy review in Time magazine?”

“Thanks for signing my book, but the only thing is, I can’t read your handwriting.”

He had learned a new way of signing his name, with a flourish, deliberately making it elegant, defying the people who stared at him hungrily as though he were defenseless and edible.

Again he was asked by a woman, “Can I see you to your hotel?” She had been standing behind his table, sighing. This time he accepted. He dismissed his escort, Julie, but when he got into the strange woman’s car he realized that she was heavy: she rocked the car as she slid onto her seat. How had he missed that before? Perhaps she had been standing behind him the whole time. She had a sweet small-girl voice. The car was littered with candy wrappers and cat hairs.

“ Trespassing changed my life,” she said in the bar of the Heathman Hotel. She had insisted on buying him a drink.

Now he could see everything, not just her bulk and her lank hair but the suture seams in her skull.

“I could show you to your room. I’m not making suggestions. I’m just saying I don’t have to be anywhere in particular.”

But she was making suggestions. She was sad-faced and forlorn. Her dewlaps shook as she sucked on a straw, nursing her daiquiri. What she did not know was that other people in the bar were staring, some in chairs and looking like figures in an altarpiece depicting fallen souls and damnation.

“I feel I owe you something. I believe in giving back.”

Steadman saw again that for some women blindness was not simple allure but acted as a powerful aphrodisiac. He became sad, telling her gently that he had an early flight, and he refused her assistance to the elevator, leaving her to pay the bill. Upstairs, he fiddled with his radio, deciding not to call Ava.

He flew on, feeling lighter, to San Francisco, and was met again and driven up the freeway to the city in the clear air that was spanked with waterborne sunlight from the bay. After he checked into his hotel the escort, an elderly man, said, “There’s time for drop-ins. Couple of chains near here.”

He said, “Okay,” and at the first bookstore, “I can handle this alone.”

In the short distance from the car to the entrance of the store he startled a flock of crumb-pecking pigeons and they flew up, a fluttering of winged rats, shitting and spattering onlookers as they ascended into the chafing wind.

He moved with hesitation to the information desk, pursuing the brisk tap of computer keys.

“I’m here to sign my book.”

“And you are?”

“Slade Steadman.”

“Is anyone expecting you?”

“I don’t know.” He tapped his cane, as though to indicate time passing.

“The manager’s on break.”

Now with all his senses wide open he was able to discern the features of the speaker, a young man wearing a filthy knitted cap, with pale hands, arrogant as only a very dim person could be, too obtuse to understand his own arrogance, quietly sniveling, at the vortex of a hundred thousand books.

“What was the name of the book again?”

“The Book of Revelation.”

A woman waiting at the desk near Steadman piped up. “You ain’t going to find that here.”

She was black and big, in a soft loose dress, with hair knotted like rug nap, her heavy-fleshed arms the color of undercooked ham and nipples like figs on her slack breasts.

“That there would be in devotional,” she said.

“I wish I could be more helpful,” the young man said.

Steadman yelped, something like a cry of pain, attracting attention, and then slashed with his stick and cleared his way to the street.

That gave him a story to tell interviewers. There were two that day, and each time he boasted of his blindness. The journalists were kind, yet he knew that they would mention the crumbs on his shirt front, his wild hair, and if his socks didn’t match they would say so.

That night, in Corte Madera, half an hour north of San Francisco, he talked about his blindness at Book Passage. He elaborated on Borges and Melville and quoted from Shakespeare. He felt so intensely observed he thought that few people actually listened to him. A woman in the front row seemed to smile in fear, her teeth bared, holding her fist to her mouth in anxiety and seeming to bite it like a large dripping fruit. Most of the people were fretful, embarrassed, as though watching an amateur acrobat without a net inching his way across a high wire.

They gathered afterward for his signature, murmuring at him: women with backpacks, men with handbags, their pockets crammed with paper, one boy like an Inca slinger, his cap with drooping earflaps.

“My cousin is blind and he, like, learned to play bass guitar and is really good at it now.”

“You should sign yourself up for one of them dogs. One of them Labs.”

“I can’t afford your book, but would you mind signing this picture of you I cut out of the paper?”

And as he left a flamboyant blonde offered him a lift and laughed beautifully when he declined.

Back in San Francisco, the streets were thronged with sprawling beggars demanding money. Steadman stared brazenly at them, poking with his stick and marveling how, at his refusal, one man farted an explosion of black swallows and green gas.

The next morning, on the way to the airport, the elderly male escort said, “I’ve been kind of wondering. You fully insured?”

Steadman flew to Denver and was met by a young woman who demanded to carry his bag. She drove efficiently, chatted to him without mentioning his blindness, then said, “Can’t you tell I’m a hottie?” Another talk, more interviews, good news of his book sales, a glimpse of a young couple kissing in the parking structure of the Tattered Cover bookstore, where a worshipful crowd applauded him and bought copies of his book for him to sign.

“Can you say something like, ‘To an amazing woman, from someone who knows’?”

“When does this come out in paperback?”

That night, a room-service dinner in his hotel room, and then an early-morning flight to Chicago.

The escort waiting at O’Hare was a powerful man named Bill, who held his bag with one hand and steered Steadman through the airport with the other. In the car he said, “You had a message,” and dialed the publicist and passed the phone to Steadman.

“I’ve added another interview in New York,” she said. “A German paper, but the interview will appear in English on the Internet. He says he knows you. Manfred something. Big fan.”

All through the Chicago appointments Steadman was aware of being watched by a yellow-eyed owl perched in a round window, like a porthole cut into the sky. Manfred something. Big fan.

“You knew Bruce Chatwin, right? He’s a fantastic writer, probably my all-time favorite.”

“The guy that played you in the TV series doesn’t look like you at all. Plus, he’s got that phony accent.”

“I don’t know Braille,” he said in the hotel elevator. “Will someone press seventeen for me?”

The elevator mirror reflected different faces from the one staring in. No one had mentioned his book. Three newspaper interviews, one taped for radio, a photo shoot on Michigan Avenue — all centered on his blindness. He slept badly, thinking of Manfred. In the morning Bill sped him to O’Hare, saying only “This is the right direction at this hour of the morning. I’ll have to get into that mess going back to the city.”

At the departure gate Steadman was seated next to a porcine nun in a black habit like a witch’s gown, and she was tugging at her ragged earlobes as she prayed.

Fingers touched his hand, not the nun’s but those of a harassed tearful man, who spoke in a fretful voice, “You can preboard.”

Steadman was crowded by the waiting passengers. “Back!” he said, and raking with his cane, pushed past men with roll-on bags and youths with greasy knapsacks and bipolar children on Prozac and a man with garbage on his breath.

The same yellow-eyed owl peered down at him from a porthole over Manhattan.

By this time he had become accustomed to the telling silence and the sign language — rapid overt gestures of people who did not realize he was aware of what they were doing. He was used to the grunts, the nudges, the puzzlement, the boisterous greetings, the condescending heartiness that was one of the worst expressions of pity. Pity was on most people’s minds when they saw him. But he suffered it, because he did not want to reveal himself through his anger. And the pity was that of semiliterates and oafs.

Equally stupid, well-meaning people, like the taxi driver who took him to his first interview, tried to offer him hope.

“Maybe get one of them eye transplants.”

“I like myself as I am.”

“But what if you could find an organ donor?”

“Hit that jogger and we’ll have one.”

“You saw that woman?”

“No. You saw her and swerved.”

Yet New York City seemed perfect for a blind person: the logic of the streets, the indifferent passersby, the unexpected politeness of people. At the bookstore signings there were the usual questions.

“Do you plan to see Ved Mehta while you’re here in the city? I would have thought he’d be really supportive.”

“Did you know visually challenged people are allowed to touch some of the sculptures at mom a? GO for it!”

New Yorkers announced themselves beforehand, as though shouting ahead from a great distance. In New York, Steadman knew what people wanted long before they asked, knew what questions they were preparing to pose, knew when they were staring at him, when they turned away and pretended to be interested. New York was used to strangeness, for only true oddity was news, and so for his four days in the city he had a starring role, as the well-known and perceptive traveler who was now the blind novelist.

On his second morning, he was taken to the Today show.

“Mr. Steadman, you’re kind of a legend in the book world, and the TV world, too, with the inspiration for that long-running TV series,” the wheedling woman interviewer said. “There’s so much to talk about. I want to ask you about your latest book this morning.”

This morneen was the way she said it. She was puppet-faced and tiny and held a clipboard, tossing her scraped-aside hair as she spoke. She leaned forward and her voice became a quack.

“But first, what a tragedy it must be to have lost your cherished gift; of sight.”

Steadman welcomed the vulgarity of her gloating manner. Because she was not asking a question but rather making a mawkish pronouncement, he could respond with a dignified rejoinder, putting her in her place. It was always a mistake to answer a question. No one remembered questions anyway; much better to say what was on your mind.

“Losing my sight was a blessing,” he said. “I would never have known how much I was missing. I may see less but I understand more.”

“Yet isn’t it incredibly painful to know what you’ve lost?”

Her persistence annoyed him, and he could barely control himself in his reply. “I have tried to make my blindness an asset. I believe my book is the better for it.”

“Talk to me a little bit about the downside,” she said.

“What you are doing to me now is the downside,” he said, his voice sharpening. “You are asking the question that way because you think that you’re superior, that you are whole and I am somehow incomplete.” He smiled at her and knew from the light on his face that the camera captured his angry smile. “I assure you that this is not the case. You are mistaken and misled, and I, Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs, perceived the scene and foretold the rest.”

At the mention of “wrinkled dugs” the woman became flustered and broke off the interview as soon as he finished his sentence. She thanked him for showing up and apologized for not getting to his book. Steadman had the impression that he had terrified her and she was relieved to see him go, eager to move on to the next item, which was an update on the president’s disgrace.

Back at the hotel, there was a message from Ava. He called her on her cell phone. She said she had just seen him on the show.

“You were good. You looked so confident. You don’t need me.”

With a few hours free he experimented with the city. He strolled down the sidewalk, going south from his hotel on Madison Avenue. It was not easy. Pedestrians bore down on him, moving fast, tramping hard, sometimes pushing him aside, mumbling to themselves, some of them singing off-key, under their breath, with a kind of panic. But at least they didn’t stare.

Taping a segment of Charlie Rose, he became aware that he could say anything that came into his head, because Rose, though portentous, was unprepared.

“Slade Steadman,” the man began in his ponderous way, lowering his head, “you have written the best-known travel book of our time. For many years you were a virtual recluse, rarely venturing out of your house…”

This descriptive prologue continued, and when Rose showed no sign of finishing, Steadman interrupted him, confusing him, and described his book, explaining why he had chosen the confessional mode for his novel of a man’s sexuality.

The face he saw later that night in his hotel room, that filled his television screen, a great animated head, the wild hair, the dark glasses, the confident sneer and frowning delivery, had him peering closely. He was glad he was alone, glad that the drug had worn off so he could watch himself. He paid hardly any attention to what he was saying, but he could not take his eyes off his face, which was distorted and heavy, masked by the glasses. He imagined a stranger seeing the face of this blind man and being cowed by fear and awe.

In contrast with Steadman’s rumpled jacket and black turtleneck sweater, Charlie Rose was nattily dressed in pinstripes. He looked presentable but rather pained, even overwhelmed by the fierce presence of Slade Steadman.

He spoke at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square, and afterward, a woman looking for a signature said, “What do you miss most?” Before he could reply, she was gone. He appeared on a panel at the 92nd Street Y. He was interviewed at the National Public Radio station downtown, in a studio hookup with Terry Gross on Fresh Air. He was photographed on a bench in a part of Central Park that was near his hotel.

All the odors, all the transparent talk. He could tell the instant he was introduced what these people thought of him, of his book, of his blindness. He always knew what they wanted. He had a powerful sense, the whole time, of being watched from a distance, followed, hovered over, almost breathed upon, as though shadowed by a stalker.

“I’m glad you can’t see me,” the photographer, a young woman, said. “I am such a mess.”

So rattled by his presence they wanted to say something, yet not knowing what to say, people often said the wrong thing. But still so new to it, and rattled by his anonymous watcher, Steadman was unforgiving.

“I can see you. You’re not a mess. But you’re angry, you’re agitated. I think you’re in serious debt.”

She became still, staring at him, saying nothing. Finally she said, “Shall we get this over with?”

Perhaps as a response to his mixed reviews, interviewers went out of their way to compliment his book. But one man, setting up his tape recorder at the outset of an interview, laughed awkwardly and said, “I wish I could tell you I liked your book.”

“I wish I could tell you I’m agreeing to this interview,” Steadman said, and rose from the settee in the hotel lobby where they had just ordered coffee. He left, brandishing his cane like a rapier.

He was blind, he was blameless, he could say anything, he could write anything. He was forgiven his shocking book because he was so obviously maimed. One review said it: “The outrage and candor of his book is appropriate to the author’s condition.”

The reviews that were read to him did not surprise him. He knew his book was graphic — so personal, so revealing, so near the bone, it did not seem like a novel at all. But he said, “You know, everything is fiction,” and because he was blind, he was not contradicted. Blindness was his license: blindness made him right.

“Never mind the reviews,” Axelrod said, which meant the reviews that hadn’t been read to him were perhaps worse than he guessed. “The sales are great. Your tour has been a huge success.”

Still, he was distracted, waiting for the inevitable.

5

THE CONFIDENT VOICE on the phone said, with odd singsong stresses, “I think we have an appointment at this hour, yah?”

“No” was in his mind. Listening hard, Steadman heard the words as sink and heff and zis.

“I have it so in my agenda,” the voice went on.

“Where are you?”

“In the lobby area. Just here.”

Chust here. Steadman felt besieged and frail and weary.

“I come upstairs, yah?” The foreign cadences of the voice made it seem even more gauche and importuning.

“No, no,” Steadman said, regretting that he might be revealing his weakness in overreacting. “Go away,” he wanted to say. But he said, “Be right down.”

Throughout the tour, whenever his concentration flagged or he lay sleepless in a hotel room, he had remembered Manfred — how the man had recognized him in Washington and said “I know your secret,” how he had obviously pursued him. The prospect of meeting Manfred nettled him because he suspected it would be a confrontation; but it did not greatly disturb him. Manfred was like a distant relation in need of a favor. Manfred smelled a salable story. Steadman knew that smell; he also knew how to deal with it, not by fleeing but by facing him, staring him down with his blind eyes.

Beyond all this nuisance was the melancholy fact that Manfred was real, flesh and blood, a tedious tricky man emerging from a shared episode in an actual past. That seemed incredible. In Steadman’s mind the trip to Ecuador had been like a fictional journey to a place of enchantment, full of dangers and unexpected discoveries, all the sorts of risks that an adventurer would have to overcome in order to find a magic formula. This potion, these twigs of rare datura, would deliver him from his feeling of futility and turn him into an engine of creation, would make him virile again, give him the book he longed to write, would inspire him and make his brain blaze like the prophet Ahijah’s.

Steadman savored the Ecuador experience as a remembered dream. He likened it to a mythical spell in the wilderness. Over the past year he had embellished it, deleting the oil drilling and the degenerate town of Lago Agrio and the grease-soaked roads and noisy boats on the muddy river. He had replaced these memories with the looming presence of the shamans and the vegetalistas and the ayahuasqueros. The trip had the color and light of a classic quest, the teasing revelation of unexpected magic, the strange and appropriate justice of transformation. Although he pleased himself with the inventions, the highlights, and the deletions, the transformation was something he had earned and deserved. He had come back a different man.

Those other travelers, those gringos? He had deleted them, too. Who would want to remember those voices, the complaints, the facetiousness? One squawk he had not forgotten. The bitch with the book, who had waved it at him and said, “It’s by this legendary has-been.”

And he had deleted Manfred as well. He did not want to remember that the drug was Manfred’s idea, Manfred’s tempting suggestion; that he had paid Manfred for it. He wanted to go on believing that he had ventured on that solitary journey as a dream hunter, questing with Ava, with whom he had fallen in love all over again. He hated to recall that it was a drug tour, that a grubby German had patronized him, that he was being revisited; that there were consequences.

Manfred was waiting for him in the hotel bar, the place sour-smelling and somnolent in the midafternoon heat, stuffy, dusty, mostly empty, with dense stale air that stank as though it had been chewed and spat out.

“So?” Manfred was standing, but obliquely, and Steadman sensed someone else beside him.

“Who’s with you?” Steadman said, walking past Manfred and the companion, someone he detected as a warm bulky presence.

“My photographer, Arnulf.”

“Tell him to go. No pictures.”

No words were exchanged. Manfred shrugged, the photographer pleaded a little, gesturing, screwing up his face, then shook his head and planted his feet more firmly.

Hearing the lisp and suck of a shutter, Steadman slashed at the camera and made contact. “Ach!” A yelp. Then, from the way the cane recoiled he knew he had made a direct hit and had also carved a stripe in the photographer’s wrist. The man stepped away and stowed his camera in a bag and zipped it, while Steadman stood over him.

“You almost break my camera,” the man muttered in a sullen way.

“I’ll break your fucking head,” Steadman said. “Get out of here and stop trying to take advantage of a blind man.”

Only when the photographer had gone did Steadman slide into a booth. Manfred sat across from him. He was wearing a thick noisy coat — leather, with flapping lapels, too heavy for this warm bar. Steadman could sense the dampness of the man’s skin, his sweaty face and glistening hair, his open mouth, breathing hard as he affected to be jolly.

“Never mind Arnulf. He is a fanatic for the pictures.”

But slashing at the man had eased Steadman’s anxiety and reassured him that he was never more alert than when he was on the drug: no one could deceive him when he was blind.

“It was so fantastic to see you in Washington,” Manfred said. “I tell my friends, ‘I know this man!’ In Ecuador, I think, ‘I will never see this man again.’ But here you are, crazy man. Fantastic.”

“Manfred, what do you want?”

“Cup of coffee. Little talk.”

“Skip the coffee.”

The leather sleeves of Manfred’s jacket rubbed the table, the leather elbows skidded: the coat was still an animal to Steadman, its skin peeled from living flesh.

“You sound not so friendly.”

“I didn’t like what you said in Washington.”

With a laugh-snort that wasn’t mirth, Manfred said, “I forget what I said to you.”

“You said, ‘I know your secret.’”

“Everyone has secrets. Even Mr. President.” He began to laugh again, but as though becoming conscious of Steadman’s silence, he added, “Good memory you have.”

“I don’t forget insults.”

“Yah! And me — I don’t forget.”

Steadman had reached across the table, his knuckles forward, and brushed what he suspected was a tape recorder.

“Nice machine.”

Manfred covered the small tape recorder with his hands, as if to conceal it. But still Steadman heard it working, the obscure tick of its timer that was hardly audible, more like a change in temperature, like a pointed flashing light, a flickering flame of altering numerals that repeated as a low pulse.

“Digital. Swiss. Teuer”

“That’s a brand?”

“No. Teuer — costive.”

Steadman seized the thing with his reaching hand, then quickly turned aside and dropped it to the floor. He crushed it with his shoe, feeling it go silent and die in pieces under his heel.

“No.” Manfred wailed, stooping.

“That’s for not asking permission.”

“You make me in a bad situation.”

Hearing the noise, a waiter had approached. He said, “Everything okay over here? Can I get you anything to drink?”

Coffee for Manfred, a glass of water for Steadman, and when the waiter had gone Manfred leaned across the table, put his face close to Steadman’s, and said in a punished voice, “I have no other recorder.”

“That’s what I was counting on.”

Manfred was still snorting. “You insult me in Ecuador. You say how my father is a Nazi. You call me a thief. And those people…”

Steadman was smiling at fazzer and Nay-zee and seef and said, “I described what I knew to be true.”

“…and those people,” Manfred repeated, “they tell Nestor to telephone the police. They make big trouble for me. The police they write a report. They threaten me. They insist for a heavy bribe, which I must pay.”

“I think you made out fine.”

“You tried to hurt me with the lies, despite I help you.”

All that seemed so long ago, in the dream forest, in the rising tide of color and light, like fresh blood eddying in his head, the splash of it sounding in his ears, the detailed loop and retrieval of memory. It was his first experience of the drug’s logic, the way his blindness had sorted and returned so much to him, the ordered images that helped him fit irregular fragments and overheard phrases and stray glimpses into whole smooth narratives, so seamless as to be absolute truths. The facts were so clear he had wanted to speak them aloud for their simplicity. Uttered, they sounded like accusations. He had marveled at the effects of the drug, its limpid truths, the purest consolations of blindness. Everything made sense with the datura; he was hopeful for more.

“My boss in America, he found out from the gringos. Those people on the trip were important business guys! I lose my job. No salary for almost a year. I write a little on my drug book. Now I am just doing a few stories for the Frankfurt paper. Did you lose your job?”

The mention of the job made Steadman smile: Manfred’s outrage seemed almost comical. The news that he had been fired had no effect on Steadman, who regarded jobs as burdens that were eventually lost as you moved on, the better for having been rejected. In Steadman’s experience the boss was always the worker’s inferior.

Into Steadman’s silence Manfred said, “Fuck you.”

The two men were quietly brooding when the waiter returned with his tray, the clatter of coffee cup and saucer, the clink of tumbler and water jug. Steadman was aware of the waiter’s abruptness, his resenting them for their paltry order that was like an intrusion. He fussed, yammering to himself, and then left.

“I hardly knew what I was saying,” Steadman said, recalling the scene in the hotel room in Quito. “I was just repeating what was in my head.”

Manfred was examining the smashed tape recorder, pushing buttons that didn’t work, weighing it like a stone, frowning at its useless weight.

“Now you make the more trouble for me.”

“It was the truth.”

The way Manfred breathed through the gaps in his teeth showed Steadman how the man had seized on the word, as though holding it and shaking it in his jaws.

“The truth, yah,” he said, his saliva sounding like juice in his mouth. “I think the same thing when I see you at the White House.”

In his disgusted impatience he lapsed into Teutonic consonants and became confused, saying sink and thame sing, sounding furious and vindictive and simple-minded in the accented present tense.

“I see you with the dark eyeglasses and the shtick. I see the president viz his arm around you, all the press corps so impressed. This is the truth? I don’t think so.”

Subtlety had not been a quality that Steadman associated with Manfred: he was bullheaded and self-absorbed in Ecuador, always reaching for another helping, searching for an advantage, querying, looking for more — his journalist’s traits, of which presumption was the most apparent. But his confident aggression was something new to Steadman, and it threw him, for he had become used to the gentle coddling of strangers confronted by blindness, feeling helpless, wishing only to propitiate him with their insistent “What can I do for you?” as they eased him forward and tried to make him comfortable.

Manfred was in his face, bristling, shaking his finger as though Steadman were not blind at all. And so Steadman exaggerated his calmness, so as not to rouse Manfred further.

“You pronounce that my father made a suicide.” He was shaking, stiffening, as he bore down on Steadman. “This is something painful for me. So you say, ‘Is the truth — too bad.’”

“I don’t know how I knew, but I knew.” And Steadman thought, Like I know now that you’ve just eaten, you are sour with the smell of meat and mustard and beer.

“Maybe I say something when I am taking the yaje. Or maybe asleep. Maybe you hear me. Okay.” He hammered the air with his head as he went on. “Is a secret for me. But you repeat it to the others. This I cannot stand.”

Steadman wanted to say, It was spoken somehow, it must have been true, and so what? Manfred seemed to go limp with loathing, and there was a sneer in his breathing, a kind of clammy heat that bothered Steadman more than the butting head.

“One thing I find curious.”

He said sing, he said koorios. His voice was shrill. There was no arguing with Manfred, who had become much angrier. But when he spoke again he seemed to be smiling, as if he had just thought of something, addressing Steadman in the halting tone a person uses to tease someone with a contradiction.

“I know some few blind people,” he said. “One thing about them. They always dress a certain special way. With special clothes. Beret. Cravat. Waistcoat. Colorful stockings, maybe yellow shoes, or boots. And why?”

“Tell me.”

“So you look at the clothes and not at the blindness.”

It seemed to Steadman a shrewd observation, the way in which a blind man may affect to be a dandy, using the style of his clothes to divert strangers’ attention from his tormented eyes.

“But not you,” Manfred said, needling him. “You want so much for people to look at your blindness. You need them to see you. You like their attention. Your clothes are nothing.”

The truth of this stopped Steadman cold. And it was worse hearing this insight in a bad accent, as though the man were cutting him with a rusty knife.

“What the fuck do you want?” Steadman said.

“I’m sorry?” Manfred said. “You are speaking to me?”

“I’ve just published a book. I’ve laid my heart bare. I’ve told the truth about myself — I’ve told everything. And you’re accusing me of being a hypocrite?”

“You ask me what I want,” Manfred said.

Steadman nodded slowly, knowing that Manfred was seeing his reflection in his dark glasses.

As Manfred leaned closer, the leather jacket tightened on his arms and across his back, like a belt being cinched and strained. Steadman could smell the worn and chafed leather, the damp corduroys, the long hair. Being frugal, leering at Steadman’s clothes and eyeing him sideways, insinuating himself into Steadman’s life — all that was a certain smell, too. And Steadman saw how similar he himself was, for all of Manfred’s traits marked him out as someone on the periphery, an ardent fantasist, a solitary eavesdropper, a lonely man, a writer.

Manfred said, “I want to know how it is happened that you are being blind.”

“An accident. A disease.”

“Which one, accident or disease?”

“Both. The disease was an accident. I lost my corneas.” He could tell that Manfred was still leaning, trying to see through the lenses for scars. “They got infected after I was hospitalized. The transplant surgery didn’t work. It was rejected. I have scar tissue. It sometimes happens.”

“When was this?”

“After Ecuador.”

Manfred’s smile of triumph was like a crease that ran the length of his body.

“I like your explanations. ‘Disease.’ ‘Hospital.’ ‘Transplant surgery.’ You know why I like them? Because of the words. ‘Corneas.’ ‘Rejected.’ ‘Scar tissue.’ I like them — they are scheiss. You tell me that you like the truth, so I ask you a question and what do you do? You lie to me.”

Steadman could not bear the man’s certainty, for he searched hard and saw that there was not a shred of doubt in Manfred’s mind.

“Like your president. He has done nothing wrong. He is blind too.”

Manfred had turned as he spoke, and Steadman realized that a TV set was on in the lounge and the president’s image obviously on it with a fragment of voice-over: “Sources in the White House confirm that the president assured them there was never any relationship…”

“You can ask my doctor.” Saying this, Steadman had a twisted picture in his mind of Ava howling.

Manfred said, “Your girlfriend doctor who says bad things about me also.”

His clumsiness made the accusation more hurtful somehow, and so Steadman merely faced him without emotion, hoping to confound him.

“I want for you to say the truth,” Manfred said.

“I’m not lying to you.”

“One word you are not saying.”

Steadman resolved not to let the man rile him, and he stared back, implacable in his dark glasses.

“It is the drug. Say that to me. ‘It is the drug.’”

“That was the beginning. The disease came afterward.”

“I don’t think so.” He wasn’t finished, but as he spoke, he turned and swallowed whatever he was going to say next. He looked in the direction of an approaching sound, not footsteps but the swish and flap of loose clothes.

“Mr. Steadman?”

A woman. He summed her up in just the saying of his name. She was slight, rather thin, with fragrant hair and a perfumed neck and a click of small finger joints and something in her throat — a stickiness, a tension that told him she was anxious and sexual.

“They said you were in here. I didn’t mean to interrupt, but would you please sign my book?”

Steadman was keenly aware of Manfred’s hostility, which was also a smell rising from his angry stiffened body.

“Be glad to.”

“Thanks so much,” she said, and held his wrist and placed the book in his hand. She kept a hand on his shoulder as he wrote his name with the usual flourish.

“Maybe I’ll see you later,” she said. “This is so kind of you.” And in an even voice to Manfred: “Sorry, mister.”

At that moment, as she retreated, Steadman felt a heaviness in his eyes, and then in a flicker of faint light he got an actual glimpse of the woman walking away — yes, she was small, in a fluttery pantsuit, but plumper than he had taken her to be. She glanced back with regret and longing, as though leaving with reluctance.

And Manfred, too, was apparent, but he was not the man Steadman had summed up in his blindness. He was a plainer and sadder approximation, not foreign at all but like a distant relative. Steadman realized how differently he had seen the man when he had stared blindly, and he wondered which one was the truth.

The whole experience of this glimpse lasted a few seconds, like a bad bulb flickering on and then failing, for no sooner had he seen Manfred, his features raked by a skeletal light, than he was eclipsed, as the drug took hold again and gripped him, possessing him, in the trance of its own blinding light.

“What were you saying?”

But in those seconds Manfred had stowed his broken tape recorder and gone.

6

THE MEMORY OF Manfred’s accusation gnawed at him. He headed into the remainder of his book tour feeling like a fugitive, his muscles slack with indecision. Because of his blindness he was treated like a celebrity, yet his low spirits killed his enjoyment, and the hearty welcomes he got — people always talking a bit too loudly, a bit too energetically, calling attention to themselves, as though he were not blind but deaf and dimwitted — made him listless and passive. He felt insulted when they yanked on his sleeve, vulnerable when they touched his body.

“I was so happy working on my book, so happy on the Vineyard,” he said to Ava from another hotel room. “Maybe I should have stayed home.”

“Maybe you should have stopped taking the drug.”

“There’s hardly any left.”

She sighed. She said, “How can you face these people?”

“That’s part of the punishment,” he said. “The anticlimax, the violation of being in the world, being observed as a freak.”

“You asked for it.” Without any sympathy she seemed to gloat.

“The thing is, here I am, publishing this personal novel that is not even an inch from the truth.”

“It’s a bestseller. What are you complaining about?”

“No one wants to talk about the book.”

“Then come home.”

“A few more days and I will.”

But the next time he called and spoke of returning home she said, “Why bother? I don’t want to see you in this mood.”

Ava was chilly, distant, back at work, busy: he had come to expect no consolation from her. She didn’t understand his need to continue as a blind man.

He told her that he had to go on taking the drug as long as some remained. When it was gone he would find a way of living without it.

“That’s what addicts always say. Sorry, I’m being paged.” And she hung up.

To Manfred it was his secret. Yet it had never occurred to Steadman that he had a secret. His blindness was something he had discovered as a cure for his silence, which was also his impotence, his frustrated attempts to write a novel. The accident of the drug he had exploited with effort, finding a reward in it when he might have found pain or obstruction or greater impotence. The drug was his virility, yet because of Manfred he found himself reacting defensively, behaving like a sneak, with a secret he went on swallowing, and always on guard against a leading question.

A day and a night in Washington, D.C., followed New York. Steadman took the train and was met at Union Station by the escort, “Everyone calls me Jerry,” an obliquely attentive man who used his deferential butler-like manner to be bossy, evasively insisting that it might be a good idea for Steadman to sign books in Rockville, Maryland. When that was done, they visited a radio station in Chevy Chase, seeming to surprise the interviewer.

“Your life must be so different now,” the interviewer said.

They never used the words “blind” or “blindness.” Were the words so shocking? Yet it was all that anyone wanted to talk about.

Ask me about my book, he thought. Steadman’s reputation as a difficult, at times forbidding interviewee prevented him from attacking the tone of the question. Everyone patronized, no one inquired. Yet he tried to be helpful; he wanted to seem strong. Stifling his rage, he deflected even the crassest questions. And all he could think of was Manfred, who doubted him, showing up like a vindictive gnome in a folktale to undo the hero’s magic. I know your secret.

By the time they got to the bookstore event at Politics and Prose, Steadman was hoarse with fatigue. Feeling frail, he spoke about his blindness, his overcoming almost twenty years of silence with this novel, to revisit the sexual life of his alter ego in The Book of Revelation. “I am a traveler, yet I discovered that the antipodes are within us, in the far continents of the mind,” he said, paraphrasing Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception. He chanted some lines from Thoreau:

I hearing get, who had but ears,

And sight, who had but eyes before.

He commanded the attention of the crowd by describing the inner journey of his novel, so different from the stunt that Trespassing now seemed. And then he signed a hundred copies of his book.

Afterward, breaking the silence in the car, Jerry said, “They ask really great questions.”

Regarding this as a dig, Steadman said nothing for a while, and then, “What do people in D.C. make of the president’s problems?”

“What do they ‘make’ of them? They make jokes,” Jerry said. “Notice how he’s playing the victim? First he denies everything, and then he gets other people to attack the press. He brought it all on himself and he’s blaming people for being interested. Hel-lo! Mr. Winkie is hanging out and you wonder why everyone’s staring.”

The man seemed triumphant and even drove his car that way, his head crooked in defiance.

“Power here is a zero-sum game,” he said, because Steadman had not replied. “A lot of people are glad to see the president diminished by all his pretense. More power for them.”

“How does his private life figure as pretense?”

“He lied,” Jerry said. “He pretended to be someone he’s not. People won’t forget that.” His lips were twisted in irony, and it seemed as though he were tasting it deeply, because he giggled a little and said, “I mean, Lordy, have you seen her?”

Steadman felt a surge of glee. He said, “How could I?”

It seemed so unreasonable for Steadman to say it — the woman’s face was everywhere — the man took his eyes off the road and turned to look at him.

“I’m blind, pal.”

“I keep forgetting,” the man said, fussing rather than apologizing. “You are so damned on the ball.”

The president was undergoing the sort of scrutiny Steadman dreaded being turned upon him for his blindness. Manfred’s questions seemed like intimations of this intrusion. Under pressure, the president had begun to appear tricky and defensive, his denials hollow. It was obvious that he had dispatched his aides to attack his accusers. They had spoken of a campaign to discredit the president — it was all a right-wing conspiracy. Yet the president seemed guilty and hunted and sleepless, more and more like a man under a strong light of scrutiny, looking pale and insubstantial.

As the days and weeks passed, Steadman had watched closely the man who had appeared to him, when they first met, not a paragon of suavity and power, but a sheepish and needy boy, craving listeners, wishing to be a big brother, nursing old grievances, and hiding his secret life.

A ringing startled Steadman from his reverie. Jerry handed him a cell phone. “For you.”

Axelrod again: “I just spoke with the manager of Politics and Prose. She was really pleased with the turnout. I hear the interviews went well, too.”

“All they want to talk about is my blindness.”

“The book’s selling. We are going back for another printing.”

“I’m being treated like a cripple.”

“They don’t like to think they’re advertising your book.”

“And some of them treat me like a freak.”

“Slade, don’t you see they’re looking for a headline?”

Steadman hung up. He was tired, and Jerry wore him out just sitting there attitudinizing, doubting him, jeering at the president. The president had become the butt of all jokes and now wore a shamed cringing look, like someone brutally mocked and still trying to maintain his dignity.

“I feel for him,” Steadman said.

“The smart money says he’ll resign.”

“Why should he?”

“For disgracing the office of president. For being a chubby-chaser. Listen, toots, I was in the service. If a senior officer was caught doing that, he’d have to resign.”

Steadman said, “Would you like someone checking up on what you do in your spare time?” and felt he had struck a nerve.

Then they were rolling up the driveway of the Ritz-Carlton. Jerry stopped the car and got out quickly to dash to the passenger side and help Steadman. But Steadman had already gotten out, provoked by the man’s fussy certainty. Wishing to be away from him, he swept with his cane, found the curb, and moved on.

“Can I help you?” A strange voice in his face.

“Yes, get out of my way.”

As soon as Steadman entered the hotel lobby he felt lonely, his feet unsteady, as though the floor were aslant, for loneliness was also a sorry flutter in his inner ear, a loss of balance.

He went to the bar and eased his way through the drinkers, who cleared a path for him. Feeling for a stool (“Right here,” someone said), he found one that had just been vacated, the cushion still warm. The acute perception of temperature had also become part of his blindness.

“What’ll it be?”

He ordered a glass of wine. It was put into his hand. He was careful to sip without spilling: people were watching.

A warm body next to him kept him wondering at its softness. He knew women by their obscure sounds, of chafing silks, tightening undergarments, the clatter of bangles as they slipped to a narrow wrist. This woman’s body spoke, and her breath, that fragrance. She stayed at his elbow, and she too was drinking wine — he knew by her sips and sighs.

He was thinking: Then don’t come home. I don’t want to see you in this mood.

“What’s your name?”

“Dewy Fourier.”

“That's an interesting name.”

“It’s French. Can I order you another cocktail?”

He was trying not to smile. “No thanks. One is my limit. But you can help me find the elevator.”

“I’d love to.”

She guided his elbow, crowding him, jostling him, because he knew the way out of the bar. At the elevator, she pressed the button before he could and was saying, “Where to?” as he tapped his way in beside her.

“Mind pressing fourteen?” The doors sucked shut, and when they were alone he said, “You only pressed one button.”

“I’m going where you’re going.”

They ascended in silence. He inhaled a vaguely familiar aroma, a thick odor of fresh blossoms, like syrup in the air. When the elevator stopped at the fourteenth floor the woman got out with him, still touching his arm. Her fingers told him everything: she was nervous, eager, young, excited. Her leather bag was not large, but it was heavy and dense.

“I know the way.”

She released him as he tapped toward the door of his room. She remained, walking slightly behind him.

He tucked his plastic key card into the slot of the door lock, but when it buzzed he did not push the door open. The woman was a warm breathing shape of perfumed flesh next to him. He heard the binding of her shoe strap. Her long naked body was apparent to him as a bright shadow, submissive beneath her insubstantial dress.

“Yes?”

“I was wondering if there was anything I could do for you.”

“I’m thinking,” he said.

She hesitated. She leaned toward him as though to kiss him. They stood at his door in an empty corridor, on a thick carpet, the distant sound of a food cart rattling out of a service elevator.

“I’m very oral.”

Now he hesitated. She was faced away from him, not out of shyness but making sure that no one would interrupt, the edginess of a fox near meat.

“Good. Then you can read to me.” He pushed his heavy door open.

He sensed her whole body reacting with relief as she passed him, still radiating warmth, and went inside. He followed her and kicked the door shut.

He put down his cane, took off his jacket, and threw it on the sofa. He found a bottle of mineral water and poured himself a drink. He jerked the drapes, closing them. Then he excused himself, went to the bathroom, brushed his teeth, and returned to the sitting room of the suite, where the woman was standing in the center, stiff with puzzlement, clutching her hands. She had placed her heavy handbag beside the sofa.

“Dewy?”

“I’m here.”

“I know. What do you think of my suite?”

“I can’t see anything.”

Only then did he realize that he had not turned on the lights. He laughed and switched on a lamp next to the sofa. He sat and stuck his legs out.

“It’s beautifully appointed. Very comfortable-looking. Exquisite taste.”

The words made him frown, but as he pitied her he was aware that she had stepped to the door and hooked the safety chain. And she had glanced into the bedroom as she passed it.

He went to her. He caught her arm and held her hand and touched her face. She was not tall, and though she radiated heat she was fleshy, even plump. He could tell by passing his fingers over her face that she was pretty, and when he touched her she did not resist. She relaxed and took half a step nearer and smiled. So far, in the strange distortions of this book tour the only women who had offered themselves to him had been heavy and slow and unsubtle, incurious about his mode of living. But this one, Dewy, was bright and attractive and — he wondered why — very curious. From the moment he had switched on the lamp she had not stopped looking around.

“I can see in the dark.”

“Incredible.”

“I know you from somewhere.”

She put her hand over her mouth to stifle her reaction.

“I signed a book for you.”

“If you say so.”

“I’m trying to think where it was. New York, maybe? What are you doing here? You’re a writer, aren’t you?”

“I do a little writing.”

“You’re following me. You were waiting for me in the bar.”

The answer yes was a perceptible twitch in her body.

“What is it you want to know?”

Her silences told him everything, and she was still looking around the room, as if searching for clues.

“Nothing,” she said.

He laughed, because he had made her so self-conscious and defensive. He said, “You said you’d read to me. What did you have in mind?”

“Something from your book.”

“It’s a little late.”

She felt for him, her fingertips stroking his thigh. “I’ve got all night.”

He was smiling at her, and she did not seem to be aware that he knew that as she was stroking him she was nodding at the corners of the room, pausing to examine the items on the tabletops, the clothes showing in his open suitcase, glancing back at his face to peer at his eyes.

“Something from my book.” That had surprised him. Even though he was suspicious of her, he was flattered by the suggestion. He moved away from her and, sitting on the sofa, felt for a copy that he had left on a side table.

She sat beside him and said, “Mind if I get comfortable?”

She slipped her shoes off and drew her legs up beneath her and still, from where she sat, she was searching the room.

“I like the scene where you’re in the car, making out,” she said. “And your date goes down on you.”

“Not me. The main character.”

“He doesn’t have a name — how am I supposed to know?” she said, and took the book from him and flipped pages. “Anyway, the back seat of the car. A hot night. It was a turn-on. Here it is.”

She began to read. “I look fucked!

“Still smiling and peering intently into the mirror of her compact, she wiped the smears of lipstick from her face, dabbed at her eyes, combed her hair. And just as he thought she had finished, she took out a pouch of cosmetics and applied mascara and thickened her eyelashes — slowly, paying no attention to him, who watched with fascination as she prettied her face. She rouged her cheeks, reddened her lips again using a brush and lip gloss, made herself a new face, a mask of desire.

“I love that,” she said. “It goes on.

“She faced him. The dusty moonlight deepened the texture of her makeup and softened the planes of her face, and what had seemed an innocently questioning smile in the small mirror was now lust lit by moonbeams.

“She leaned toward him and her lowering arm crushed her gown as she reached down and slid her hand along his thigh.”

As Dewy read, her voice thickened and purred, and she let one hand drop onto Steadman’s leg. Though her fingers crawled across his thigh he was hardly conscious of it. He was listening closely, not aroused by anything she read but instead questioning the punctuation and certain words. “Lust lit by moonbeams” seemed purplish and pointless. She was racing ahead, reading with emphasis.

“The sound of his pleasure came slanting from deep within his lungs and seemed like an echo of a softer sighing in her throat. Her breasts were in his hands, his thumbs grazing her nipples. Her touch was surer and so finely judged that she seemed to feel in the throb of his cock the spasm of his juice rising — knew even before he did that he was about to come. Then he knew, his body began to convulse, and as he cried ‘No’—because she had let go — she pushed him backward onto the seat and pressed her face down, lapping his cock into her mouth, curling her tongue around it, and the suddenness of it, the snaking of her tongue, the pressure of her lips, the hot grip of her mouth, triggered his orgasm, which was not juice at all but a demon eel thrashing in his loins and swimming swiftly up his cock, one whole creature of live slime fighting the stiffness as it rose and bulged at the tip and darted into her mouth.

“Holding him with one hand, she devoured it and was still swallowing as he went limp and slipped out of her mouth. When she looked up at him with her smeared face and smudged eyes, she was still greedily gulping, licking droplets from her gleaming lips.”

She put the book down and moved her hand between his legs, and then he kissed her. Moments before he had sensed warmth, a glow of pleasure, but there was none on her lips. She was made of clay, going through the motions — he could taste her indifference, another low temperature. Her hands and arms were cold, her grip was perfunctory, as if coaxing a stubborn lever. She was placid, really; there was no thirst in her body.

But she said, “That feels nice.”

He smiled at her lie. He could easily discern her calculation, a different sort of scrutiny, like the squinting gaze of a bobble-headed passenger sitting across from him on a train, sizing him up. As a blind man he had become used to that stranger’s gaze — people staring at him in public. But in his own room it alerted him. She sniffed as she searched, and still her hand was closing on him.

Then she stood and slipped out of her dress, and when she sat again and was naked he sensed that he knew her absolutely. He reached behind her and turned off the lamp.

“Why did you come here?”

She let go of him. Her whole body contracted as though denying the implication behind his question.

“I have a feeling someone sent you here.”

Her reaction, which was not audible, not visible, not an odor, nothing except a suggestion of furious molecules, her stiffening and becoming a fraction smaller, told him it was true.

“You’re trying to find out if I’m really blind.”

Again the whir of molecules, a swallow of air, her knees together, her surprise. He sensed all this in the darkness as a liquefaction slipping slowly past him.

“There’s no story,” he said. “Put your clothes on. You don’t belong here.”

She said, protesting, “You wrote this sexy book and I want to give you head and you throw me out of your hotel room? Tell me that’s not a story.”

But she had started to dress, trying to be calm, like someone woken and startled by the smell of smoke, preparing to flee a dangerous room.

“It was in New York,” he said. “In the hotel. You asked me to sign your book when I was with Manfred.”

“No.”

“He sent you here to check on me.”

“No.”

“Tell Manfred to stay away from me.”

She was fumbling with her dress, hopping a little as she pulled it on and straightened it. “Please put the light on.”

“If you tell me the truth.”

“Manfred said you were a kind of mind reader. I didn’t believe him. But I believe him now.”

Steadman switched on the light and said, “You have a yeast infection.”

The woman began to cry, and her crying hindered her movements as she finished dressing, her sobbing slowing her and making her clumsy. When she was done and had put on her shoes, she stumbled slightly as she left, yanking the door, catching and straining the safety chain, and crying in frustration as she unfastened it and went out.

Steadman sat, a film of guilt like scum on his face. Needing to complain, he rubbed his eyes and dialed Ava. Just as quickly he hung up, realizing as he tapped the keypad how late it must be. He had not checked his watch — he unconsciously assumed that his watch face would be visible. It usually was at this hour. Touch was like sight: he stroked the hands of his watch — almost midnight. He cursed Manfred. And he imagined the phone call he had just aborted, Ava saying, You pushed your luck — what did you expect?

What happened next was odder than anything that had happened on that odd day. He was groping toward the bedroom when he remembered that he had not taken the drug since rising that morning in New York to catch the early train to Washington. He had been blind for more than eighteen hours — unprecedented, unexplainable. And the moment this disturbing thought occurred to him, he bumped into the bedroom wall.

7

HE WAS SHAKEN out of the soup of an obscure dream of interrogation by the ringing phone — a man’s overbright voice saying “Hi” and nothing else, one of those needling people who do not identify themselves, but instead make you guess, as though to unsettle you or test your friendship. Who at this hour was so alert for this sort of teasing? But Steadman was certain — still limp with sleep, even as his unpleasant dream faded — it was Jerry, the escort from yesterday, saying in a more tentative way, “Are you there?”

“Right here.”

“What train do you want to catch?” He seemed chastened by Steadman’s abruptness. “I can meet you anytime.”

“Don’t bother. I’ll take a cab to the station.” And Steadman hung up before Jerry could reply. He was still annoyed by “They ask really great questions,” implying that — blind, standing in front of the bookstore crowd, speaking without notes for a full hour — Steadman had made no impression. All that Jerry could commend was the brilliance of the audience. But it was a strategy, his belittling, like not giving his name on the phone.

Steadman’s indignation was twofold. I am a writer, he thought, and I am blind. Bastard!

He had to put the phone down to concentrate. It was bad enough to be woken by an idiot call, but, much worse, he was not sure at that moment whether he was blind or sighted. In his confusion his mind was scoured of all thought. He sat up in bed stupefied. Feeling vulnerable, his memory impaired, he felt an animal compulsion to flee the hotel and the city.

He needed to leave, to return to New York; needed people to observe him in order that he could function. He felt lost when he was alone and blind, but the physicality of other people, their glances and gestures, the way they breathed and swallowed, all their human responses, their smells, their skin, their very nerves, helped guide him on his way.

He needed friends, Ava especially, a woman whose intelligence would match his, whose eager flesh was like a torch to bring the foreground into focus and make the wider world visible. That was nothing new; he had always wanted a woman near, someone to challenge him, to comfort him, a sexual friend, a listener, the ideal companion Ava had been throughout the writing of his book. The paradox was that while he had loved her for her independence, he had also wanted to possess her, so they could be sexual, wise and foolish together. He loved her for being so reckless and so bright, for often being the aggressor, for lighting his way, for her risks and her dares. Even now, though she seemed out of sympathy, she was necessary to him.

Alone, he saw the future as a grainy monochrome of days, indistinct and worrisome. He wanted color and perspective, the stabilizing echoes of human voices. He needed to be witnessed. This he realized anew as he moved through his hotel room, gathering his clothes and filling his bag. The young woman’s perfume clung to the sofa where she had sat and read to him from his book.

He finished shaving and was about to take a measure of the drug when, mixing it in a glass of water, he faltered and batted the air and put the glass down untasted. He was already blind. He felt for the mirror, fingertips on the glass, saw nothing, felt nothing, except the hot lights framing the mirror on his face. I’m losing it, he thought.

Often he had gone to bed blind, but when had he ever woken blind? The effects of the drug had always worn off while he slept. Now his heavy eyes made him clumsier as he stuffed his suitcase. And at last he went back to the bathroom and drank the drug hurriedly, splashing his chin. And he stood, unsteady, as if he had swallowed a syrup of light. The warmth spread from his stomach and whipped through his blood until the nerves throbbed behind his eyes and crackled, a phosphorescence that was electric.

Downstairs, in a suit like a school uniform saturated with the woolly smell of cigarette smoke, the bellman approached on big flapping feet to take his bag. The man was black and broad-shouldered, and the bag was insubstantial in his hand as he swung it into the taxi, holding the door open.

“You going to be all right?”

The man pitied him with a helpless, burdening concern, easing him into the taxi as Steadman studied him, summing him up as someone poor and unappreciated, living on his own but with children somewhere, who were kept away from him. Having to be at work at five a.m., he was already weary. His uniform was fairly new but his shoes were worn, the leather crushed, with thin soles. The man coughed, covering his wide scraped-looking face and his bruised lips. His lungs were spongy and rotten.

The taxi driver said, “How’d it happen?”

Strangers swept in, querying, seizing on his blindness like predators spotting a weakness.

“Long story.”

“You think you got problems? Check out the president. That man is breathing hard.”

“What’s the latest?”

“Talking ’bout ’peachment.”

The president’s woes, the scandal, the repeated denials and counterattacks, were on the radio in Steadman’s earphones all the way to New York. As he listened, he saw the president’s pink sheepish face and blue uncertain eyes, the bags of sleeplessness under them, as naked as a man’s features could be, as blank and pathetic and symmetrical as a target. He looked fragile and insulted and ashamed. He was everywhere on TV screens with the sound turned down, mouthing words and looking like a cornered man trying to persuade a gunman not to shoot. A man could not look more powerless, more hunted, more like prey, more bullied.

Steadman removed his headphones, and as though recognizing a decisive gesture, the woman sitting next to him on the train inclined her head and spoke in a gentle voice. “Going home?”

“No.”

“Not a New Yorker?”

“Just visiting.”

“I could show you around,” she said with conviction.

He wanted to surrender to her, to hold her; there was such a purr of protection in her voice.

“Where might you be staying?” she said.

She seemed as she spoke to invite him onto her lap, and in his mood of self-pity he was prepared to call her bluff and crawl beneath her arms, to lie there squashed under her breasts and allow himself to be suckled.

Instead of replying to her, he lifted his head and stared in her direction and watched her dissolve, become a pale flesh tone and an odor of crushed flowers. And just as quickly she bulked up again into the fattened reality of a broad-faced woman with a sack-like body and thick thighs, a rumpled dress, and puffy sorrowful eyes behind old-fashioned purple-rimmed glasses.

I am not blind, he thought. Could she tell?

Fading, narrowing, as though liquefying, she became a small anxious girl again. She was inquisitive and sexual, and he was aroused once more. But who was that woman he had just seen?

“My uncle was blind,” she said. “He had a kind of carapace. That’s not a good thing. I reached out to him. But he wouldn’t come out of his shell.”

The imagery he found sad and exact, and concentrating hard and leaning toward her, he realized she had gone. They had arrived at Penn Station. She had given up on him and left without saying goodbye.

He thought again, I’m losing it.

New York, its sallow shadowy light, the blatting of its cascading car horns, its rushing people, lay at the top of the escalator. He rose on the steps, his bag at his feet, into the steep indifferent city, the dirty bricks, the flat-faced buildings, the surly windows, the fleeing pedestrians, the toxic air. Someone nearby, a young stupid man, was swearing loudly in a foreign accent, vile disgusting words, spreading hostility like foulsmelling fumes. No one reacted.

In the taxi on the way to his hotel, Steadman reduced the city to its separate components, the scorched oil stink of exhaust, the noise of engines, the dense and unforgiving flow of traffic, the unintelligible voices as of an asylum turned inside out — all that and the radiance of its limitless sky. The city was never dark, never silent.

But his hotel was quiet enough. He was welcomed back by the staff as though cherished, the pet blind man, like the beloved cripple on whom all friendliness was bestowed by sentimental strangers. They exaggerated their attention because it seemed they could not imagine how, unless they made a fuss over him, he would possibly remember them.

Instead of calling Ava, he called Axelrod.

“You still have Boston and Philly,” he said. “And there’s that party tonight.”

The party was news to him. He asked for details.

“It’s in a private room at Waldo’s Grill. I’ll meet you at the hotel at six. We’ve invited media.”

Dreading it, he drugged himself, and the event was every bit as awful as he had feared, a hot overcrowded room above an overcrowded restaurant. The downstairs howl of diners reached the private room on the second floor and filled it with stinging sound. Steadman was introduced to the guests, who snatched at his free hand. He knew them from their hands and their voices.

One said, “I loved your book. They say you have a sixth sense. Tell me something.”

The man’s hand was clammy, unwashed, scummy with the city, impatient, insincere.

“I wouldn’t want to presume,” Steadman said.

“Go ahead.”

“You’re agitated. You have a lot on your mind that is all trivia. You are looking for a quote from me. You didn’t read my book.”

The man let go, shook Steadman’s hand free, and said, “That’s like an all-purpose answer, right?”

“Take my hand,” a woman said, bumping other people aside.

In a sudden glimpse that was soaked with dirty light, Steadman’s sight returned just as she clutched his hand. He saw the room — the guests drinking and taking food from trays, the cluster of people around him waiting to speak, all of them looking hungry and eager. He was confused by the faces, the reaching, the jostling. He was embarrassed and defensive, as though he were gazing through a one-way mirror. They had no idea he was looking at them. He couldn’t help it, and worse, he hated seeing them. These flashes of sight were like awful glimpses into his own past, like his mind coming alive to offer the vividness of shame and remorse he thought he had forgotten, visions like bad memories.

The woman seized his fingers. He saw her clearly, he saw everything. The flood of faces brimmed in the room, putting it in shadow. He was overwhelmed by the sight of it, and then his blindness took hold again, a glittering curtain descending over his eyes.

“Are you all right?”

Had he betrayed his brief ability to see? It was terrible the way the drug had become so unreliable. He drank it these days and saw the sorry unresolved reality of daylight. Then he skipped a dose and without any warning he was blinded, as though there remained in his body an undissolved sediment of the drug, a residue that was stirred by his blood flow, taking away his sight.

But his blindness now was not the blindness that had revealed the innermost world that was also his past; it was an obstacle, a kind of ignorance, a puzzlement. These days — tonight, for example, in the stuffy room of guests and spectators — he felt weak and defenseless, a blunderer, trying not to wave his arms at the walls.

“Cindy Adams. The Post. I was hoping you’d tell my fortune.”

How could he tell her that he was no longer capable of the party trick of prescience? He turned away, and an insistent man at his elbow said, “Can we talk somewhere quiet?”

People still touched him all the time, and they talked too loudly, poking or pawing him on each word. The man persisted. Steadman sensed that he was being tugged into a corner, away from the bump and shriek of party guests.

Where it was quieter, Steadman could tell that the man beside him was calm and inquisitive, confidently moving him against a wall as Steadman prodded the floor with his stick, almost losing his balance as the man nudged him.

“I’ve got a few questions.”

“Yes?”

“I really did read your book, but I want to talk to you about your blindness. Like, do you feel it gives you an edge?”

Though the tone was neutral, the question seemed hostile, especially now, jammed against the wall, beset by strangers in the stuffy room. He had been thrust into the party and was expected to perform. He had not had a drink, his eyesight had flickered, dark to light and back again, from one world to the other, the simpler world of sight to the tortured one of this new version of his blindness that was unfamiliar and overwhelming. Not just beset by strangers. He felt he was among enemies: the sour air in the room, the mutters, told him this, but he knew no more.

Reaching as though to restore his balance, he was reminded of the toppling figure of Blind Pew in the cartoon, arms spread in a gesture of appeal: Help me!

“No edge at all,” he said. “It’s a struggle.” He sensed skepticism in the way the man exhaled. “Please excuse me.”

“Some guy has a Web site claiming that you’ve been taking a drug.”

The word “drug,” uttered for the first time by a stranger, filled Steadman with such dread he was too numb to show alarm.

“Maybe a performance-enhancing drug. Like I say, maybe to get an edge.”

Steadman said, “Do you think that anyone would choose to be blind?”

“Right. That’s what I was wondering.”

Steadman had never felt blinder or less in control. He had swallowed a dose of the drug in the hotel room just before setting off for the party, and here he was, baffled, seeing nothing except when, in an occasional burst of ugly light, he had gotten a glimpse of the room and winced.

“I find that an insulting suggestion,” Steadman said, and felt for the wall.

“I’m sorry you think so,” the man said. “Hey, I was just asking.”

“Excuse me”—he recognized Axelrod’s voice. “I was wondering where you were.”

“This man was accusing me of faking.”

“I didn’t say you were faking. I was just trying to verify the rumors that you’re on some kind of drug.”

“Back off, asshole!” Axelrod said, shrieking at the man. “How dare you say that! This man has lost his eyesight. He has just published a great book. And you’re a guest here. How about showing a little respect?”

As Axelrod cowed the man with his fury, Steadman thought, Why didn’t I say that? Why wasn’t I that angry?

“I am so sorry,” Axelrod said. “You look tired. Maybe you should go. People will understand.”

Steadman left the party, and later in his hotel room he was so rattled he could not think straight. He reasoned that Manfred had put the word out, to expose him. And it was likely, as he had suspected, that the woman in Washington had come to his room to check up on him, to look for the drug, to see if he was really blind, to relay the information to Manfred.

He would go on denying it — there was no proof. But there was a greater problem, and it horrified him. He seemed to have no control over his blindness now. The drug was at times irrelevant. That night he lay in a sweat, waiting for the usual glimmer of light, the dull glow that told him the drug was weakening in him. But there was nothing, only the throb of New York, the city howl vibrating in his guts. He wondered if, after all the months of taking the drug, he had saturated himself with it, that his flesh was drenched.

He slept. He woke. He could not tell whether it was day or night, and he was terrified.

8

SO HE REMAINED in New York, and each morning in his hotel room he opened his eyes hoping that he was waking from the nightmare, that something had changed, that he was able to see. He would have been grateful for the merest glimmer of light. Each morning he was desolated. There was nothing but the city’s roar, like the endless slosh of muddy toppling surf, and though he could not understand it, there was something in that noise that always mocked him. He went to the window and was deafened by the traffic strangling the dust-thickened air. New York was an ocean and he was trapped at the bottom of it, suffocating at this black depth, dense with sound, struggling against the suck of the tide. He had lost even the memory of light, and sorrowing, he thought, I am in hell.

He had stayed in the city for its protection, for the way it seemed to accommodate every human type. Still, he suffered — why was it not luminous? — and he was too timid to leave. He canceled the rest of his tour: Philadelphia, Boston, the C-span segment, the photo shoot for the Time interview.

“It’s not a problem,” Axelrod said. “The book is doing great.”

But the city was not benign. He was a cripple here. He had slipped into a diabolical darkness that he had once denied ever existed. He was reminded every second of his ailment; he was seriously disabled, among strangers. Nothing was worse than to go to sleep miserable, trying to hope, and to get up the next morning just as miserable, and hopeless.

A call came, a voice said, “Mr. Steadman?” and when he said yes, “This is Trespassing. Please hold for Mr. Gurvitch.”

The next voice he heard was a gruff and displeased one.

“Shel Gurvitch, Trespassing Promotions.” And after a deep and pitying breath, “Slade, I don’t think we’ve met. I won’t waste your time. I just want to say that we were not told anything in advance about your publicity tour and, wait a minute”—Steadman had begun to object—“we couldn’t be sorrier about your accident. But we are seriously questioning what sort of a message your headlining is sending to the branding emphasis of our licensing base.”

“I have no idea what you mean.”

“Give you an example. The Limited Edition package.”

“Of my book?”

“No. The Trespassing Limited Edition that we proposed for the redesign of the new Jeep. We’ve just been turned down. We think it’s related to your accident.”

“What accident?”

“Your thing. Your eyesight. Your infirmity.”

Steadman put down the phone. He took no more calls. He hardly went out. And who was that always following him? He only needed to pause at a curb for someone to offer him money, believing he was panhandling. One person, passing him, pressed a bill into his hand. He was so startled he held it as he walked along, and moments later he was bumped — a whiff of acrid sweat — and the money was snatched from him.

Some awful logic was chopping him small as his book was being elevated. Yes, he had his book. His quest had been a success. Now he knew the price.

To control his fear and gain confidence, he folded the remainder of his crumbled drug in paper and made a parcel of it. He left his hotel, the Carlyle, took small slow steps one block up Madison, turned east, and tapped his way down 77th, across Park Avenue and onward, past Lenox Hill Hospital. He sensed a slackening of attention in passersby, which allowed him a shadowy intimation that he was being followed again — someone close behind him. He turned sharply, tottering in darkness.

“What do you want?”

Whoever it was shadowing him halted and took a breath.

“You think I don’t see you?” Steadman said. He gestured with his stick. “I know you’re there. You’re not fooling me. Is it Manfred?”

There was no sound except the slapping tread of a pedestrian striding through the murk. Never mind the darkness, forget the worrying voices — he could not breathe. It was as though all the air had been sucked from the city. In that vacuum, Steadman heard his own hollow voice in his ears.

“I know it’s you, Manfred. Or is it another of your whores dogging my heels?”

A woman’s voice inquired, “You want a hand, mister?”

“No.” He turned away from the voice.

“The outpatient entrance is right over here,” a man said.

“There’s nothing wrong with me!” Steadman shrieked.

He slashed with his cane, trying to emphasize the point, but he stumbled and someone said, “Careful with that stick, fella. Poke someone’s eye out.”

Clearing his way with the cane, he kept on to the end of the block, where there was an uprush of air at the subway entrance, a gust of urinous dust and warm human-scented air. He allowed himself to be helped across Lexington. He smelled fresh-baked bread, pizza, coffee. The helper said, “Spare any change?” Steadman gave the man all the coins in his pocket, and the man said, “This is chickenshit. I’m hungry and I just saved your sorry ass. Give me five bucks, fuckface.” Steadman kept going. He tapped his way to Third, to Second, moving very slowly, fearing that another abuser might try to ambush him, yet needing someone at each avenue, and fearing even more the sound of cars. He had hated the way people had touched him before. Now he needed their hands, the pressure of their fingers, their reassuring voices.

“There’s a footbridge somewhere near here,” he said to a man next to him who offered help, when he heard the cars at FDR Drive. It was a raceway; he was terrified.

“Few blocks down.” This gentle voice guided him, bucking him up as they walked. “Almost there, my friend. Few more steps.”

He was at last at the edge of the island, above the enclosed trough of speeding cars.

“Just get me onto the bridge, thanks. I’ll be okay.”

“You’re the boss.”

“Get me to the handrail.”

Already he was learning the cranky authority of the blind, hearing himself make demands and give orders and be obeyed by these invisible fingers, prodding and pinching his clothes.

But something was amiss: the man had hurried away. Steadman slapped his jacket and realized that the man had lifted his wallet.

Across the walkway he found the stairs, and at the bottom of them the rusty rail. He heard the wind slapping at the surface of the river and raising a chop. In the sluicing current, the lick of waves spilled past him and slopped at the embankment at his feet.

He took out the paper parcel and tore it open, scattering the crumbled twigs and stems of the drug. There was hardly any left, yet he wished this to be a ritual, an outward renunciation, ridding himself of it all. Some innate strictness told him that if he made an effort, as he had in the painful journey to this spot, and if the ritual was formal enough, he might get his wish: his sight back.

Then he would be abject. He would admit in public what he had done, how the vision and the recaptured memories in his book had been achieved. The journalist at the party had given him a truthful expression for it: I needed an edge. Until then, he would remain the man he claimed to be, Blind Slade. The wind was tearing at his jacket as he bowed and mumbled an apology, wanting to weep for his error. He had once worried about running out of the drug.

“You drop something?”

Steadman inclined his head to hear if this man’s voice was familiar — one of those sneaks he suspected of following him. It was a horror to stand gaping and not to know when people were watching him.

“No,” he said, and asked the voice for help in recrossing the footbridge and finding the street. When he managed this, the man steering him, bumping him along, he turned aside and thanked him. There was no reply. Though all noises rattled him, he found silence worse than any noise.

The man had stolen his watch. A craftsman on the Vineyard had made it for him. The watch face had no glass, only the sturdy hands, which Steadman traced with his fingertips to tell the time, and his continually touching it made the watch something precious, a talisman, and a friend.

“Bastard! I can see you!”

But his voice calling into the darkness sounded so tearful, so filled with woe, he stopped. He kept on walking. His footsteps were feeble and tentative; so was his cane. He pitied himself for his own anxious, searching sounds. He was terrified all the way back to the hotel, afraid that he would be flattened by a car, one of those honking taxis or a roaring unhesitating truck. He scowled each time he heard a horn, for every blare was warning him to back up. Having to be alert exhausted him, and he felt at any moment he might step into a hole.

What had gone wrong? He knew that Manfred was out to expose him, but any suggestion that he was faking his blindness could not be proven. He had never been blinder, his world never blacker. The quality of the darkness was complete, like a curtain of utter ignorance, a mangy blanket of evil, like the black drapes of a tyranny. This persistent night bore no relation to the peculiar illumination he had known before, brought on by the drug that had made him so happy. This was a stinking bag dragged over his head as though by a hangman, the doomladen obstacle to perception. His hands and legs were useless too. He was frightened and felt childish. The intimation of death in this was made worse because he was trapped in New York, city of terrifying noises and hostile voices and ambiguous smells, where he was treated like a trespasser.

He paused to rest near Madison Avenue, and someone with a dog — the creature snuffled at his shoes — said, “Hey.” But thinking he was being assaulted, he thrust with one hand and struck the person, and only then, as he smacked a hand holding a rag-like piece of paper, did he understand that the person had been offering him money as a handout.

“Fuck you! You broke my nail. You should get cancer!”

Cowering back in his room, he flinched when the phone rang: Axelrod.

“We are being flooded with requests for interviews.”

“No more interviews. I want to go home.”

“You don’t sound too perky.”

“Lost my coordinates.” Steadman became breathless with fear. “Can you get me a ticket to the Vineyard today?”

“Easter weekend,” Axelrod said. But the desperation in Steadman’s voice had alarmed him. “I’ll do what I can.”

He called back to say that all flights were full. The only free seat was two days off.

Despair, the memory of that dreadful walk, and the thefts made him feel so helpless he wanted to weep. He was intimidated, he was a child, and he sorrowed for himself, for his book had been so bold.

Out of the hoarse pathos of this solitary regret, like a dull murmuring aria of lamentation, he was reproached by his forgetfulness, the emptiness of his memory. His seclusion in the present had turned him into a sunken-eyed traveler who had strayed from his path and was lost on the bank of a jungle river. He could see it all, his wraith-like shape on one of those scoops of sand on a long reach between the overhanging foliage — some skimming birds, the muddy eddy bubbling like chocolate milk, the shadow of a chalky wide-winged ray shooting just beneath the surface. High up, a dark hawk floated in the hot gray sky.

This recollection, seeing himself as a castaway, was not a vision of horror but rather one of profound sadness, a memory of himself at his most innocent. There was an insistent voice, too, Manfred’s, urging him to get up, tempting him with the drug in the nearby village; the man loomed over him, his hands working.

I know a little about this one… It is great. It change your head, it give you experiences. Only the question of money, but you have money.

All other memories were closed to him, but this one he saw was him at his happiest, driven by hope, on the verge of his discovery of the drug. Manfred had revealed himself as a friend.

The drug tour, the quest, the surprises in Ecuador, which he had seen as a leap in the dark, had given him strength. Now he saw himself as the hawk might have seen the castaway on the crescent of wet sand on the riverbank, a raptor’s meditation. And this memory gave him more by offering him glimpses of the aftermath, the illuminations of blindness, the sight of him dictating his book, the months of seclusion, like years of enchantment in a remote castle, in which he had lived the narrative. Manfred had been right in his promise: he had been uplifted, he had achieved his book, he had never been happier.

And now he had sunk to this: the airless overfurnished cell of a hotel bedroom, the sense of being captive. He knew now he should never have come, but he had made his worst mistake in continuing the drug, to call attention to himself. Even the offering of his book had been a hasty decision. He had allowed himself to be hurried into the anticlimax of publication, the inevitable disappointment, the misunderstandings, his dubious performances on the tour, in bookstores and lecture halls — it had all been like a secret revealed, the disclosure of a weakness, a loss of power. He had once vowed never to go on the road. Why hadn’t he been satisfied with the writing of his book? He was in agony thinking of the purity of that task, and he reproached himself — he had Ava’s words — for his pride and his posturing.

Manfred was hovering, casting a shadow, looking for a story. But Steadman knew there was no vast plot, no conspiracy. No one had laid a trap for him. It was his own fault that he was being punished for pretending to be blind, his poisonous pride. And now, without drugs, without trying to deceive — in fact, against his will and to his shame; perhaps his body was saturated with the dirty drug — he was blinder than it was possible to imagine, as all the idle speculators had described. His blindness was the blindness of every cliché. He was in darkness like a wilderness of wool, his head wrapped, mummified, bent down and suffering the black misery of a frightened panting creature who expects at any moment to be pounced on.

Lost in the seamless darkness of his despair, he was accused of faking. The news was out. People were talking. Even in his blindness and seclusion he was not spared. Somehow — was it self-punishing? he wondered — he was still able to tell when people he knew well were lying to him. He heard hesitations, as though they were trying to minimize the rumors, but the hesitations only made them seem worse.

“I’ve heard a few things,” Axelrod told him when Steadman asked, hoping to be reassured that there was nothing. “Pay no attention to them. They’re cheap shots.”

“Like what.”

“Cheesy items on Page Six in the Post. ‘Sightings.’ No one takes any notice of them.”

But Steadman knew that everyone read that column, and Axelrod’s saying “items” alarmed him.

“Probably on the Internet, too,” Steadman said, angling for a denial. “Who looks at that crap?”

So it was true: accused of faking on a Web site, or more than one. He said, “Why don’t we put out a statement — like a press release?”

“You mean a formal denial?”

“Why not?”

Axelrod hesitated so long, Steadman was demoralized before his editor finally replied.

“Overkill. It’ll provoke questions. It could sink your book.” Axelrod sounded as if he were trying to convince himself as well as Steadman. “Besides, why dignify this slander with a rebuttal? Take the high road.” “Take the high road” was worrying, too, for it meant a campaign had been mounted, and it always implied that, in the attempt to undermine him, some damage had already been done.

“The important thing is, how are you doing?”

“I’ve been better.”

“The writer Eric Hoffer— The True Believer? — he went blind as a child,” Axelrod said. “At the age of fifteen he suddenly got his sight back. Turned him into a reader.”

“I hate heartwarming stories,” Steadman said. “I went for a walk. I was mugged twice — lost my wallet and my watch. Couple of people swore at me.”

“That’s really horrible.”

“Someone else gave me money.”

“At least the sales are great,” Axelrod said. He clearly wanted to change the subject.

Steadman took no pleasure in the news of his book’s success. He saw his stumbling in the dark as punishment for it. Only now was he able to understand that he had not been blind before. He had been drugged. The condition that he had known was the opposite of this. He had to learn how to cope with his blindness, for instead of feeling liberated he was limited, he was diminished, and the pain was hard for him to bear.

Still he was accused of faking. He could not read the newspapers, nor would anyone read them to him. But he knew. One measure of the gossip was the number of requests for interviews, and they were incessant. Some were needling, others were meant to scrutinize or embarrass him. They used the seriousness of the gossip as the pretext for his breaking his silence.

“You’ll only lose by hiding from the press,” one woman told him. She said she was a journalist from a wire service; Steadman’s statement would reach millions of readers.

“I have no statement.”

“Give me a few minutes. Let me come over. It could help your credibility.”

The very suggestion that his credibility needed help saddened him.

Saying no to everyone and screening his calls, he was condemned for being uncooperative. His insistence on seclusion was like proof of his guilt.

In his favor, the presidential scandal was being played out. People were obsessed with the unconvincing explanations for the president’s behavior — talk of secret meetings and phone sex with the young woman, extravagant talk of trysts, the repetition of the expression “oral sex.” And the accusations of another woman as well, who said the president had once exposed himself to her in a hotel room. She claimed that she could accurately describe the president’s penis. This took up so much space in the papers that attention on Steadman was diminished, though several importuning journalists said, “You’re behaving just like the president.” The president, too, was saying nothing.

There had been a time when he had imagined that the president might become his protector, that his power might be useful to Steadman in some way — an asset, perhaps, that the president read him and recommended him and had invited him to the White House. That was no help now. The favor the president had done him was to become involved in such a steamy scandal of his own that the newspapers were crowded with stories of his duplicity, eclipsing the rumors about Steadman. Steadman imagined the rumors to be repeating that, far from being blind, he was a reckless fantasist who had experimented with a psychotropic drug that produced spells of blindness and a glow of hypersensitivity.

The basis for his imagining such details was that he knew the supposition to have been true. It was no longer. He was sightless, he was weak, and being in New York was like being in enemy territory. Even at the height of his fame as the author of Trespassing he had not been in greater demand. And it was all an agony to him.

He had given explicit instructions to the hotel that he was not to be bothered or phoned; no one was allowed to enter his room. And so the knock on his door early on the morning he was to leave for the Vineyard was unexpected. As always, he woke and felt like clawing his eyes when he realized that nothing had changed. He groped to the door and opened it, seeing nothing.

“No visitors,” he said.

“It’s me”—Ava. She thrust herself into the room and shut the door as he grasped at the air, flailing.

“I’m taking you home.”

But he was struggling, saying, “Who’s with you? There’s someone else. Who is it?” Finally he allowed her to hold him, and when the door was kicked shut he began to cry.