Blinding Light

1

FROM THE MOMENT he stepped off the clanking plates of the ferry ramp he was fearful. He stubbed his toe on the rim of the ramp’s steel lip and stumbled ashore, flapping his arms for balance, feeling foolish as he toppled forward. Fog had delayed the flight to Boston, so they missed their connection; Ava drove a rental car to Woods Hole, where they caught the Uncatena. And when he was on the island, tasting abandonment, he thought, with a castaway’s woe, What am I doing here?

There was something else on his mind, but it was unformed, a wordless worry, like a lowering cloud with a human smell. He was unable to work it out and frame it as a whole thought, because the Boston shuttle had so disoriented him. The fussing of flight attendants, the offers of a wheelchair, the unhelpful hands plucking at him, the puzzled fingers twitching on his arm, people jerking his sleeves, patting him in idiot attempts at consolation; the mutters of “Hang in there” and “Go for it, big guy” and “Right this way, sir”—the gauntlet of well-wishers every blind person ran into each day.

And on the ferry, he had stood at the forward rail, near the blunt bow — for the air, and to get away from Ava and her noisy pager and clamoring cell phone. A man and woman crept up behind him — newcomers, eager visitors — to coo at the seascape.

“Lookit, lookit, lookit.”

“Whole buncha whitecaps,” the man said. “And that sailboat, see, she’s heeling over.”

“Seagulls,” the woman said.

“Following that fishing boat,” the man said, “for the scraps. And the baby gulls dive-bombing for fish.”

“Will you look at that,” the woman said. “Ever see anything so gorgeous?”

They were talking to him, Steadman realized, and in the moment of addressing him and drawing level, they saw his dark glasses and his slender cane, and their mistake.

“Awful sorry,” the man said in a voice he suddenly hushed, sucking it into his cheeks, abashed at seeing Steadman was blind. They made faces at each other, as people did in the presence of a blind person, and they whispered and stepped aside, chewing on their self-reproach.

“They’re terns,” Steadman said, “not baby gulls.”

He remained facing forward, the southwest wind tearing at his ears.

Another voice, Indian or Pakistani, said, but not to him, “Is the Winyard,” and soon the ferry was sounding its horn for the arrival in Vineyard Haven.

He was unsteady, he walked like a drunk, he was a stranger here, he did not belong to the place, he was intruding on someone else’s island, trespassing again. The smells here were not just foreign, they were hostile; he did not understand any of the voices; he was shoved and jarred by the bumps in the road, battering the tires, and felt insecure being driven by Ava — faintly nauseated, anticipating more bumps, more curses.

Stiff and breathless with panic, he did not recognize the odor of the sea in the wind, which was like a flapping blanket, ragged with the smell of garbage, and the low-tide hum of dead fish and decayed kelp and the whiff of diesel oil. The sharpness of the sounds and stinks made him timid in the same way as, at the ferry landing, the sudden laughter of the crew had put him on edge. He imagined that they were laughing at his unsteadiness, and they got away with it because he was so cowed, so feeble-looking.

What was worse, the other wordless fear — and its cloudy ambiguity made it awful — was his sense of a third person with them. He had an intimation of another body in the rental car from Boston; someone with them in the passenger lounge of the ferry; the same person in the taxi and again in Ava’s car from the Vineyard airport, where Ava had parked it, always sitting in the back seat (“You sit in front, Slade, with your long legs”), staring at the nape of his neck. They had not been alone. There had always been this third person with them who did not speak yet, who gave off a vaporous aura, a small breathing body humming with warmth.

He sat in the car, his damp hands holding the knobs of his knees, sensing this stranger behind him, a smirking eavesdropper — who?

“Aren’t you glad to be back?”

Unusually for her, Ava drove badly, even worse when she was talking, too fast and then too slow, stamping on the gas pedal, cursing the car ahead, pitching Steadman forward when she braked.

He was mute with worry, retching each time he tried to swallow. He spat out the window and thought, Where am I?

“You’re not wearing your seat belt.”

She pulled off the road, spilling him sideways as the car rocked on the ridge of the shoulder. She fastened him in with reprimanding fingers, as though buckling a child into a baby seat, and then resumed the drive.

She was in charge; she made him feel lost and helpless. She too seemed like someone else, bigger than ever. The way she touched him had seemed rough and abrupt, and all the way from New York she had stayed on her cell phone, setting up appointments for her patients and picking up messages. She seemed less like a lover than a caregiver — one of her hospital words. Nevertheless he had no idea what he would have done without her. Yes, he knew, he would have died in New York, where a blind man was a victim of every stranger’s indifference or fussy attention or reckless cruelty.

The lopsided fear of impotence that he recognized in himself from long ago heightened his notion of not belonging. He was frightened but he was passive, unresponsive, in a place that was so foreign he felt like a trespasser. That was another old feeling, but this time like a eunuch in a harem. The Vineyard was just a name; everything else was withheld from him.

He wanted to speak to Ava but did not know how to begin. Two thoughts tormented him — that he was in a strange place, that he had been abducted. The rest of his fragmented feelings he could not express. Had he been hit on the head and dragged away? He concentrated to listen to the harsh breathing of the person behind him, and realized the breathing was his own.

Ava said, “I’ve been talking to some lab people. I’ll need a sample of your drug. I want to have it tested for toxicity. I don’t know why I didn’t do it before.”

A crumbled plug of datura splinters was in a jar in his desk, hidden like an addict’s stash. He had kept it just in case he might crave it. But he did not crave it; he was disgusted by the very thought of stewing it and drinking the brew.

He struggled to speak. He finally said with self-reproach, “I poisoned myself.”

“You’re alive. Your book is a hit. Be happy.”

“I’m mutilated.”

He was miserable, and when he got to the house he felt like a hostage and hated its harsh smells and thought, Who lives in this place?

Ava was on call. She was paged as soon as she entered the house. She tapped at her phone as she led Steadman to his study and eased him into his leather armchair.

“I have to go to the hospital — an emergency. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

She put earphones into his hand and set a CD player in his lap, and she left. He did not switch it on. He sat with his head cocked, hearing someone sneaking around, two rooms away.

“I know you’re here. You can’t fool me.”

Without conviction his voice sounded timid. The feeble echo returned his words to him.

“Who are you?”

Of course, by his blurting this out, whoever it was became very quiet.

“What do you want?”

The person had stiffened in a corner and was flattened against the wall.

“I may be blind, but I’m not stupid!”

He hated his weak screechy voice, and sitting there he reflected, sifting his thoughts, searching for reasons to hope. His discovery in his luminous phase, and the gusto of making his book, was that his sexual history was his own and not in any textbook, or any novel, or memoir. Similarities did not matter. All his travel and trespassing had prepared him for this revelation, which was a true epiphany, an actual encounter, something like being visited by an angel of desire, who had wakened in him the urge to be bold.

You carried on blindly in your life, never daring to believe that one day you would be granted the gift of sight. It was like travel to a strange land where you knew the language and loved the culture — strange and secret to everyone else but the only place on earth you could call your own. All his intelligence, his eloquence, his savagery, his pleasures, every fantasy that existed inside him, everything he wished to see manifested, all his desires realized — that was sex for him. He had lived in a state of apprehension; he had relived it with happiness and understanding, making it new, turning it into a book. Everything he had done in his life had been a preparation for this discovery, a rehearsal for that pleasure.

Now he was dumb and sightless and impotent once more, plunged into darkness, in a place where he didn’t belong, not knowing (and still he heard the mewing of someone else in the house) whether he was alone. There was no safety here. His only home was inside his head. The blinding was like a castration.

He dozed in his chair and a door slam woke him. Either he had slept soundly or else Ava had not been long — whatever, he was hardly aware of having been left. He was not reassured; he felt ever more like a captive.

He wondered if by some diabolical ploy she had taken him to a different house, one that would trap him by being strange, for nothing in this house seemed familiar. But why would she do that?

Ava’s confidence made her seem all the more important. She made announcements, loud declarations, as though to a roomful of listeners. “This is absolutely the best time of the year,” and “I love driving on the island now,” and “You see lots of migratory birds around.”

Late spring, the trees in leaf, the branches bristling, each opening bud a gilded green, new growth like small healthy claws: that was how Steadman recalled it, yet he stared into empty air, trying to imagine the dusted buds swelling into blossoms, the lawns thick from the rain. As though describing a distant planet, Ava told him that the island was chilly and damp, but lovely with flowers — the magnolias were a mass of creamy pink petals with no leaves, the lilacs had never smelled sweeter, robins hopped in the driveway, looking confused in the chill. The roads were empty. Some roadsides were scattered with the last of the daffodils, going brown.

She must have looked at him then and seen that he was simply gaping, unmoved by her attempt to cheer him up with the description of the Vineyard spring.

He said, “I think there is someone in this house.”

“Why do you say that?”

He marveled at this. “You didn’t say no!”

“Because it seems such a paranoid thing to say.”

“I knew there was no point in my mentioning it. I knew you’d deny it.”

She did not reply. It maddened him when she fell silent.

“Who is it?”

After a long pause she said, “You’re being unreasonable.”

“Why don’t you say ‘There’s no one here’?”

“Okay. There’s no one here.”

He tried to discern where she was standing. He turned to face her, to bear down on her. He said, “I don’t believe you.”

Her unexpectedly calm voice came from a different part of the room, behind him. “That’s your problem. I think you’re tired.”

“Tired!” he shouted, sitting forward on his big chair and rocking as he spoke, like someone grieving. “I’m not tired, I’m half out of my mind. I can’t see, I can’t walk, I’m half deaf. I’ve turned into a lump. You have no idea. At the beginning of my book tour I was bursting with health, I could see everything, I had my drug — I hardly needed an escort. I was hallucinating in a surreal world of interviewers and bookstores.” Saddened by the memory of it, he became breathless, but began again, his voice breaking. “And one day, without doing a thing, I lost it. I noticed the drug wasn’t working in the same way. I got flashes of eyesight without drinking anything. Then my vision just clicked off and stayed off. And it wasn’t like anything I had known. Some of my senses went with it. It was like I was being stifled. I felt small, I was in the dark. It’s how I feel now. Don’t you understand? I am terrified.”

Ava knelt before him and took his hand. He could tell she was wearing her scrubs — a whiff of the hospital disinfectant still on them, and her hands so clean.

“I’m going to help you.”

Her saying that, suggesting that he needed help and that she was turning him into her feeble patient, made him more miserable. He was reminded of how helpless he was without her. To be her patient was to be her captive; a sickroom was a cage. But he was too unhappy to say anything more.

Blind, illiterate, dumb, forgetful, stupid, sick — he felt less than a lump. The fact that she was in good health, and busy doctoring, only made him feel worse.

“After we get the lab results of the drug tests we’ll know what our options are,” she said. “I’ve got a lot of confidence in the people who’ll do the analysis.”

That did not console him, because he had not told her his deepest anxiety, that the darkness covering him now was like a funeral shroud. He was cold to her touch, he was mute unresponsive flesh, he was without a spark of desire, he was dead.

“Don’t worry,” she said, and touched him again.

Her uttering that empty expression filled him with despair. He shivered and drew back a little, covering himself, nudging her hand aside in an awkward gesture, almost prissy in its rejection.

Even his bed was unfamiliar, even Ava’s body beside him, even her breathing. He had thought it was horrible to be blind and stumbling in New York, robbed and misled and abused, a jostled victim in the city. How could anything be worse? And he was mocked by everything he had done and said in the pompous elation of his drug vision. But it was so much worse to feel lost at home, for being a stranger here meant there was nowhere else to go.

Being outside the house was sometimes like being submerged, but more often he likened it to living under the great dark dome of a gigantic insect. An enormous spider had lifted itself and was poised upright on its long legs — that was the sky, the world, the darkness; and he was underneath the thing, in its prickling shadow.

Over the following few days, haltingly, sometimes tearful, he told Ava this. At first she seemed sympathetic. But when he complained more loudly at the injustice of it, she went quiet. Her silence was like an accusation that he easily imagined in her mind: So whose fault is that?

He had needed a key to unlock his memories, to gain access to the past. Manfred had found the datura. Sometimes he saw the German standing in the smoky village, beckoning him, not the Manfred he knew but a cleaner, devilish Manfred with a fiery light behind him and the ayahuasca vines twined in the trees around him, the vines that were smooth and coiled like the biggest snakes.

He had gotten the drug, he had finished his book, and the book had succeeded; he was famously blind. There were doubters and whisperers, but they had not seriously damaged him, and yet…

“I’m a prisoner,” he said. “I’m completely dependent on you. I can’t do anything without you.”

He knew she was listening, sensed she was smiling — not in triumph but mildly amused at his choice of words, the melodrama. He was sure of it when she spoke next.

“Now you know what it was like for me.”

2

HE FOUNDERED IN DARKNESS, choking and blowing and sculling with his hands like a drowning infant. He had lost the subtle syntax of his vision, his face was flooded, and he who had mocked the word “darkness” was drinking it, and hacking as it fouled his throat like muddy water and stung his nose like soot; he was submerged in it as it streamed past his eyes. He was upended, just like the nosy child who had wandered off and tumbled into a brimming barrel. He had not drugged himself, so he was fully awake in his unhappiness. He had listened to Manfred, but he had not volunteered for this.

The world he knew in this phase of his blindness was not passive. It was busy and hostile, and his own house rose against him, smacked his head, clawed his hands, twisted his legs, rapped his shins, tripped him, toppled him over. He had to be cautious; he had to creep. He sat for long hours fearing to move too much; he hardly walked. He had fallen and hurt his wrist and banged his elbow. Ava told him he was lucky it wasn’t anything more serious. The darkness was hot, and summer was now upon the island.

Work was out of the question, and he feared the gaze of strangers. He felt wronged and old-womanish, unable to read or write. The radio was no relief; it blared the president’s misery and satirized it. Steadman could not listen to the rumors and innuendos without being ashamed of the president’s reluctant schoolboy confession, the ghastly details of it, a sneaky joyless muddle of cocksucking and cheap gifts and cold pizza. One rumor had the president on the phone, a wet cigar in his hand, the fat girl on her knees, her chubby fingers steadying his cock in her mouth. Another rumor concerned the existence of a semen-smeared dress.

The gleeful howls of the whole country against the president for his unconvincing denial and his paltry pleasure unnerved Steadman. People seemed not just glad that he had been exposed but giddy with relief that they themselves had not been caught. This summer everyone felt innocent and indignant. And the sanctimony of the reaction had its echo in the criticism of Steadman. Some people had listened to Manfred; some were howling in their own way against Steadman, believing that his drug-induced blindness was a ruse. But while the Internet buzzed with it, the press was single-minded in pursuing the president, overshadowing Manfred’s whisper campaign with shouts of accusation and demands for the president to resign or risk impeachment.

“I have no intention of resigning,” the president said. That emboldened Steadman. The president was facing and debating his critics, defying them, insisting that he was entitled to a private life, even if that meant enticing the fat girl to his office and groping her and making her kneel and ejaculating on her cheap dress.

Compared to this, Steadman’s scandal was a trifle; nothing was pettier than a literary fuss. And who cared? The Book of Revelation was still selling well. There was no drama, only unanswered questions, and even these had died down. Yet Steadman was stone blind and crippled by it, beset by fugitive noises in the house that no longer seemed his own. He did not wear his stereo headphones anymore, because they interfered with his monitoring the movements of the intruder he suspected. The sounds of this stranger were incessant.

“Who’s that?”

The faint scrape of guilty feet, perhaps the thin soles and light tread of a woman’s shoes, then silence.

“Who’s there?”

The click of a door shutting, the pad of retreating footsteps.

“I can hear you!”

But his shout created silence, and then he knew that the stranger had fled and that he was alone.

On the evenings when she wasn’t at the hospital, Ava comforted him. She nursed him, sat and drank wine with him. She made the simple meals he requested, French fries and fish sandwiches and raw chopped vegetables. He ate with his hands, could not manage a spoon or fork; he often bobbled his glass and spilled his wine. His clumsiness at meals frustrated him. His stumbling enraged him. He was depressed by his inability to work.

He wanted to write a short story, something related to his condition. He imagined what it might be, not the details of the story but how it might look — like a folktale, that sort of compact narrative, full of shocks and reverses, of a blind man lost on an island, ironic with horror. He wanted to publish it to dramatize his pain, to show the world how he was suffering and to prove he was still writing. But the effort was more than he could bear, and except for the physical ache of his sadness, his head was empty.

Now and then he talked on the phone. Axelrod was a regular caller, giving him updates about sales, and the news was so good he felt fraudulent. He was embarrassed by the gusto in his book, shamed by all his hubristic boasts, for the truth was somber, a sad man in a dark house. He was not the character in that book; he was a damaged man, suffering a self-inflicted wound. Some people were still whispering about him: he knew he deserved it.

Ava seemed tender, yet he was convinced that she stayed with him unwillingly, just treating him and failing at it. She was dissatisfied, and who could blame her?

He told her this. He found a way of saying that he was unworthy of her.

Her reply was unexpected. She said, “You’re the one who taught me that sex is selfish.”

What sex? But he didn’t ask. They had been home for more than a month now, and he had no desire; he had not touched her. Some days he was so absorbed by darkness he hardly recognized her.

He said, “I don’t deserve you.”

“Maybe it’s nothing to do with you. Maybe I’m here for my own reasons.”

This was a different Ava, the doctor not the lover, the pulse-taker, the clinician in all things. She seemed genuinely concerned with his condition: his blood pressure, his headaches, his tremulous hands, the effects of the drug on his nerves.

She was breezier, seemingly happier, more content now that she was spending so much time at the hospital. It was clear to Steadman that the amanuensis, the facilitator of transcription, and the checker of manuscripts were not roles that Ava had had any liking for. And that suggested to him that the sexual roles he had assigned her she had acted out with some reluctance. How was he to have known? She had been frenzied, so convincing a sex partner he had known her only as his lover.

He was chair-bound now most of the time; they had not made love. Yet she did not comment, didn’t reproach him, didn’t even allude to it. All those steamy druggy months of dressing up, trawling in his memory, and now nothing.

She said, “I’m expecting the results from the lab any day now.”

Bucking him up with science and changing the subject, she put no pressure on him.

The results came as a computer printout, perforated pages that she rattled and unfolded. He imagined it as something like a DNA report, with inky furrows and squiggles, a smudged hand-drawn document with the look of a musical score.

He prodded her several times with questions before she said, “It’s inconclusive.”

“But what does it say?”

“There’s some heavy-duty alkaloids in that residue. They’re trying to sort out how they combine with enzymes. How they affect the synapses. They also think that there have been Latin American studies on people who’ve regularly taken it. Maybe case histories of those Indians.”

“What does that mean?”

“According to this analysis, datura contains a group of alkaloids called beta-carbolines. The psychotropic trigger is a substance called harmine.”

The very word seemed dangerous and hurtful.

“Its overuse can lead to insanity or, it says here, blindness.” She was speaking reasonably, interpreting the document, folding it and turning pages. “But there’s a note saying that the lab is still trying to separate these elements of the drug. If we know the cause, we might find the cure.”

Steadman said, “You’re right. This is my own fault.”

“I never said that.”

“But you thought it.”

“No. I was on that trip too, remember. I admired you for taking a risk.”

“And look where it got me.”

He was sitting upright, rigid, like a man in a straight-backed chair about to be electrocuted.

“There’s something called atropine in this drug. I know what that is from med school. We use it to dilate the pupil. Maybe it’s combined with another chemical that affects the whole of the eye and the optic nerve.”

He had risked that poison for an ambitious idea. And now he contemplated the book’s success as he sat alone, lost in his house, a parody of the man the papers had praised on his tour: “a visionary writer more dazzling as a blind man than most people are who are blessed with eyesight.” He had secretly believed himself to be a prophet, the tiger of a new religion. He had boasted of x-ray vision and declared, “Blindness is a gift.” All that showboating, flourishing his cane like a huckster in a carnival. And it had begun with Manfred, downriver in the Oriente. He had drunk this toxic cocktail of murky jungle chemicals; he had been granted his wish, and now was in the dark.

He stumbled constantly, shuffled like an old geezer, not daring to lift his feet; he knocked things over, he fell. In his own house, the world he knew best, he was like a phantom. When Ava was at the hospital he sat fiddling with the radio, listening to the news of the president’s deceptions. He was appalled at how people hated the man, the things they said, the jokes they told, the merciless mockery. He imagined them turned against himself. He longed for Ava to return. He urged her to work at night so he could share her waking hours. He felt needy and superfluous and humiliated.

He drank more and, drunk one evening when Ava got home, he confided in her. Embarrassed, yet determined to bare his soul, he told her of his insecurity, his timidities, his dreads; he reproached himself, he was abject, he said he was being punished for taking the drug.

“I knew what I was doing. It’s just a cop-out to blame Manfred. I’m in a hell of my own making.”

Ava listened. She seemed very calm, but it could have been fatigue — she was so weary after work. She said, “I’m in the business of healing people. I want you to trust me.”

Shamed by his dependence on her, he saw that she welcomed it; she seemed to be strengthened by his pitiful surrender. He knew he was not imagining this, for she took him on her lap and cradled his head. The effect of his dependence roused something that was both maternal and sexual in her. As though gratified by his expression of helplessness, she held him with tender hands and stroked his hair; she had not touched him that way for a long time.

“You’re going to be fine.”

She could have been talking about his impotence as well as his blindness. He was mortified by her pity.

She was wearing her scrubs, which were stiff and slightly rough to the touch. No lingerie, no perfume, no silks. He wondered, as though he were a patient supine in a hospital bed, whether she was comforted somehow by dressing in this clinical way and caressing him.

“Just relax. Clear your mind. Don’t even think about sex.”

He had not been — far from it. If only she knew. He had been imagining with horror the remainder of his life in darkness, the shadow of neglect, the obscurity of seeing nothing but the prison cell of blindness, which was both a tiny suffocating space and the emptiness of the entire unavailable world.

She was touching his face softly with her fingers, tracing his features. She lifted the shirt of her scrubs and supported her breast with her hand, grazing his lips with her nipple, saying, “Take me into your mouth. Bite me a little, suck me.”

Her taking the initiative now, as he was suffering — her attempt to interest him in sex — left him feeling awkward and faintly repelled and ever more the captive. He had no hunger, and dread had killed his desire.

One of her hands was behind him, steadying his head; her other hand, feeding her breast to him, pressed her nipple against his mouth. Lying against her, he heard her sigh, her whole body rippling with satisfaction.

She was warm and sexual, yet he was heavy, tense, unresponsive, and he was on the point of asking her, “What do you want me to do? Tell me, I want to please you,” as she had once asked him.

She seemed to understand, and in her crooning way she said, “You’ve got to stop thinking about your anxieties. Just let yourself float free. Can you do that, baby? It’s like finding the confidence and relaxation to be buoyant in a deep sea. Remember the first time you lay back in the ocean and let yourself float?”

But he lay as though afraid of drowning, his body locked and thick with misery.

“I want you to imagine being in water. Just let go, relax, and let it happen.”

She went on gently encouraging him, as if he felt apart, like a spectator at the edge of sex; and powerless, he sank in her arms and prepared himself to be weightless.

“Sex can be a way of seeing. You know that.”

He was hardly listening. His mouth was on her, he was comforted by her, and he was so absorbed, lying against her bare stomach, he really did seem to become less heavy, almost buoyant, her arms glowing on him. With this levitating sense of pleasure seeping into him, he felt detached and stopped listening to her. And Ava went on talking in a low regular cadence, as though to someone else, as he lay sucking on her nipple, the softness of her breast squashed against his cheek.

“Is that nice?”

As she spoke another hand crept across his leg from below and followed the seam on the fly of his jeans, feeling for his cock through the dense layer of cloth, the busy fingers asking a general question. And a moment later he felt his jeans being unfastened and loosened and tugged down. How could this be? He felt Ava’s two hands, one under his head, the other directing her breast. He was outstretched on the sofa, sleepy and slightly drunk, yet aware of the odd number, the insinuation of the third hand.

He made a move to pull away. Ava said, “Just let it happen,” and the ghost-like hand groped further, the fingers manipulating him until it was no longer so strange. Then the searching of a licking tongue and the heat of an eager mouth.

Burying his face in Ava’s breast, Steadman became fearful as the other mouth nuzzled him and enclosed his cock, at first gently, in a tasting way, and finally with gusto, sighing, the sighs sounding within his flesh and swelling. In a twinge of alarm, he let one hand trail down until he could feel the long hair of the woman below. She was wearing a studded leather dog collar that was tight on her neck. He felt further, into the warm declivity of her shoulder, and grazing his knuckles on her smooth cheek, he let his hand fall, and was greatly relieved when it found the fullness of her breast. She must have been kneeling next to the sofa, leaning across his legs, as though drinking at a fountain. Her breasts hung loose, slack and soft, and danced in his hand.

Unexpected light blazed in his mind. He surrendered to the caresses, and for the longest time on the sofa in the warm room he lay half smothered, half floating, while Ava consoled him. Or was she speaking to the other woman? There was a confidence in the way she spoke, almost as if she were gloating. It ceased to matter, for at last the separate strands of his desire became a knot, and the knot began to twist in his guts, and it slipped and tightened in his groin until it was an animal’s cramp of tortured muscle. In an instant it was yanked hard and it liquefied, spilling warmth all over him. He cried out once, and then he was raw and innocent again.

He sank into sleep, and was unconscious, wrapped in a happy dream of release. He had regained his eyesight. Sex had freed him. He recalled how he had suspected that there had been another person in the house — the shadow, the presence, the odd sounds. In his dream he was in the White House, at a jostling press conference in which he was doing all the talking to a respectful crowd. But he was defiant, tearful, saying “See? I was right!”

3

FEELING FOR AVA with creeping spider-like fingers in the bed when he woke, not knowing whether it was day or night, he found her arm and grasped it. At once he was doubtful, remembering. “Is that you?” She kissed him and drew him to her. He kissed her shoulder in a grateful way. She was happy, he could tell, not by anything she said — all she did was murmur — but by the teasing sigh in her throat, a simple grace note of irony.

“Who was that woman?”

“What does it matter if you liked what she did?”

He wondered whether he had really enjoyed it, because it had been so unexpected and unasked for, too sudden to savor. He did not reply at first; he considered that Ava, with her customary doctor’s thoroughness, had been preparing the encounter for weeks. He had to admit that he had finally been aroused, coaxed out of his impotence. But the truth was that he had felt lost in the act, slightly panicky and bewildered, too startled to be possessed. He had been foundering and flailing at the periphery of her pleasure. Her enjoyment had disturbed him.

“I loved it,” he said.

From the way her body settled as she was pressed against him, he knew it was the answer she wanted. Still, he felt the need to apologize.

“Maybe it’s because I’m feeling so anxious about my eyes. I can’t believe I’m so feeble.”

“You were blind before. You were blind for months. And you managed.”

“It was nothing like this. That was a kind of insight — you know! This is a prison. It’s punishment. And I’m not taking the drug”

“There’s such a thing as discontinuation syndrome.”

“I’m afraid to go very far.” He was too humiliated to say that he feared to leave the house at all.

“You should try. You’re stronger than you think.”

“Find me an eye doctor,” he said. “Please help me.”

“I have one lined up. She’s in Boston. She makes a monthly visit to the island. She’ll see you and run some tests.”

“What do I do in the meantime?”

“Write your story. You said you wanted to.”

He had told her of the short story he had planned, something like a Borges tale, compressed and allusive, something he would publish to prove that he was able to work. But all he had was a vague notion of the form; he had no narrative, no characters, no names or incidents.

“Nothing,” he said, summarizing what was in his mind.

“Can’t we do this?” She felt for him, but playfully.

Sex was like an intrusion, a hovering threat that made him feel small. When she touched him he felt clumsy and ignorant, like a big goofy boy intimidated by the mysteries of life and death, darkness and light, thinking, What will I do when I grow up? He had lost the ability to take a walk, to drive down the road, to sail a boat, to swim. He was a cripple, blind and incapable in the most fundamental way. Listening to the radio humbled him by reminding him of how futile he was, twisting a knob, holding his pathetic earphones. Though he struggled, mumbling to himself, he could not read or write, and even his speech seemed to be impaired. Half the time he stammered, unsure of whether he had a listener. For sex, for any pleasure, he needed the insight he had known before: the liberation of light.

What convinced him of that was the third hand of the night before. At one point in the intensity of his arousal, during the cramped convulsive unknotting, the sudden slippage of his ejaculation, he had sensed a sliver of light pierce his eyes. But no sooner had it blazed within the crevice of its narrow entry than it was gone. It was another reminder of what he had lost. He could not think of sex without feeling sad.

“Anyway, I was right,” he said, remembering the niggling thought. But it was a victory of sorts for him, something he badly needed. “There was someone in the house.”

Instead of speaking, Ava kissed him, but in a thoughtful way, holding her lips against his as though replying. She was always so scrupulous. She might refrain from responding but she never lied to him. He wondered what lesson there had been in her life that prevented her from deceiving him. Perhaps her study of medicine: the exactitudes of science had kept her truthful.

“Maybe I’m not as blind as I thought I was.”

“Gotta go,” she said, and bounded out of bed. “I’ll be late.”

He lay in bed trying to recall details of the night before. He had resisted, he had felt enticed, but he had little memory of it. The third hand had been like a wicked imp emerging from the darkness.

Before Ava left for the hospital, she said, “Try to get out today. Call a taxi, go into town. It’ll do you good.”

But when she was gone he became self-conscious, believing the other woman might still be in the house. He listened hard for a telling sound. Walking, he held his arms out, feeling his way forward, prepared to defend himself. His greatest fear was that without warning a stranger would touch him.

“If you’re here, say something.”

From the way his voice rang in the room he guessed there was no one, that she had gone.

He moped all morning, and toward midafternoon he called the taxi service and asked to be dropped on Main Street. “You going to be all right?” the young driver said with the bossy insincerity all the rest of them showed. In Vineyard Haven Steadman could tell that the sidewalk was busy with shufflers, but he also heard the remarks of people making way for him, even heard his name whispered several times, and “the writer.”

Moving slowly, tapping his cane, he did not fall, and he was encouraged to walk farther than he had planned. He made it past the deli, the gift shops, the Bunch of Grapes bookstore, the drugstore, and kept going, past the bank and the bagel shop. He was still going slowly but, more confident, more upright, now he guessed he was on West Chop Road — no people crowding him. A car with a rapping engine pulled beside him and a man’s voice called out, “Slade Steadman.”

Steadman stopped and, taking care, angled his body toward the street.

“Let me give you a lift.”

The car door slammed. The man was close to him, nudging him.

“Do I know you?” Steadman asked.

“Don’t think so, but I sure know you. Here, get in,” and the man guided him into the car. Steadman was too tired and confused to resist. “You’re not safe stumbling around like that,” the man said.

“I wasn’t stumbling.” Steadman spoke so sharply the man was silent. “Who are you?”

“Whitey Cubbage?” the man said in a querying way. “I guess your friend didn’t like that,” as if he had already forgotten Steadman was blind.

“What friend?”

But the man didn’t seem to hear. He drove on, narrating: “Lovely day… Damned cyclists… God, they’re tearing down the Norton place”—and soon made a turn. The car engine strained, seeming to climb a steep driveway, and with the car on this incline he stopped and yanked the hand brake.

“Where are we?”

“I live here,” the man said testily, as though rebuffing an ignorant question. “Come on in. Bet you could use a cup of coffee.”

He helped Steadman out of the car, and was so abrupt and impatient, leading him so clumsily, that Steadman stumbled on the porch steps. Seeing Steadman on his knees, holding the handrail, the man apologized.

“Can’t kill you” he said. “You’re the writer.”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve got everyone dogging your heels.”

Cubbage guided Steadman like an usher, cupping his elbow, steering him to a chair. The house smelled of unwashed clothes, and though he heard a clock marking time like a metronome, there was a great stillness, as of tightly shut windows. A trapped fly buzzed and bumped one windowpane. A faucet dripped, drops plopping into a brimming sink basin. Cats, too — Steadman smelled the litter box and heard the complaining purrs, some of them like swallowed bubbles. The whole world was shut out, and the stinks shut in.

“I know it’s a mess.”

“It’s fine,” Steadman said. “But I have to go.”

“You haven’t even heard my story yet.”

The man’s voice was wet-eyed and jowly, and the implacable ticks of the loud clock made his procrastination absurd.

“Got the plans of this house out of Popular Mechanics. Want to buy it? If you don’t, my idiot son will get it. It’d cost you less than a million. You could write a great book here.”

Steadman said, “Is that your story?”

“Of course not,” Cubbage said. “Listen, you shouldn’t pay a blind bit of notice to what people say. There’s no connection between anything you’ve done and this damn president.”

“Who said there was?”

“I don’t know, it’s going around,” the man said carelessly. He seemed to be stirring his hand in a cardboard box of oddments, because he made a clattering, the scrape of loose paper and the clink of trifles. Then came four clear notes of a banjo. “This is a little thing called ‘Sleepy Time Gal.’ ” He began strumming, but his plucking slowed and stopped as he began to sob miserably. “It’s my wife,” he said. He snuffled snot and tears. “Cancer took her. Forty-two years we were married. You can’t replace someone like that.”

“I’m very sorry,” Steadman said.

“Do you know what true love is?”

In a voice like stone Steadman said, “No.”

“Go ahead”—and he plucked the banjo again, a twangling note—“make me an offer on the house.”

“I can’t stay here any longer,” Steadman said.

“What about my story?”

“I’m late for an appointment.”

“Don’t you realize I saved you back there, from those people?”

“What people?”

“The ones following you. Looked like they wanted to pester you. And that man?”

“What man?”

“Dogging your heels.”

“Can you describe him? What did he look like?”

“How am I supposed to know what he looked like?” Cubbage was on his feet. “You’re the writer — you describe him.”

In a mood of resentment Cubbage fumbled and bullied Steadman down the stairs and into the car. Because of all the one-way streets, he took him by the back route down to the taxi stand at the ferry landing.

“That’s the thanks I get,” Cubbage said.

“I’ll call you,” Steadman said, to pacify him.

By the time he got home he could tell from the descent of cool air and the dropping of the wind that night had fallen. He also suspected from the way Ava spoke to him that she was not alone. Something dense, like a thickness of cloth, blotted the echo of Ava’s voice in the room.

She said, “I was beginning to think you’d taken up residence somewhere else.”

The choice of words, too — the sort of facetious and brittle formality a person used when someone else, someone who mattered, was listening.

Steadman was too rattled to banter with her, and he was acutely aware from the pulse of the stranger’s breathing that this other person was watching closely.

“What about that doctor who was going to examine me?”

“All in good time.” Another stagy and supercilious phrase, meant to be overheard. “Now, how about a drink?”

It was all like theater, all the obvious talk, but he was lost here. He said, “Okay,” and felt for his armchair. Sitting, drinking, he was weighted with a sense of captivity. Ava had put the glass of wine into his hand. She lingered beside him.

“I’ve been waiting for you.”

Her growly affection was unambiguous: she wanted sex. Yet he had hardly recovered from the old man’s weeping and bullying and the crazy interlude in his house, which was like an abduction. Do you know what true love is? and Dogging your heels— what was that all about? He was rueful: a blind man was everyone’s victim.

“I had an insane afternoon,” he said. “I did as you suggested. I went into town. I almost fell down about fifty times. I think I was being followed. Some crazy old bastard was after me.”

“Come over here,” Ava said. “You need to relax.”

She helped him to his feet. She led him onto the carpet and had him crouch and lie down. She put a pillow under his head.

As he lay, letting her fumble with his belt buckle, she radiated warmth, hovering over him. He tried to imagine her propped on one arm, leaning to tug his jeans off. But apart from a vague picture of her warm presence, he got nowhere and was conscious only of his naked legs stretched out. Even when she touched him, using her fingers and then her mouth to arouse him, he felt unfocused and unprepared.

“I’m sorry.”

He struggled to fantasize, yet his sense of being trapped, a reminder of the afternoon, crowded and distracted him. A hardening spark in his flesh gave him hope, but was more light than heat. He wanted to be overwhelmed, and he knew that was what Ava wanted. He lay on his back as though adrift, and she worked on him, squealing, her mouth filled with his flesh. When he was harder she mounted him. She rode him with furious impatience, and he was like a woman again, wincing beneath her thrusts.

“Now, yes, that’s what I want,” she said.

From the directness and practicality of her tone he knew she was not talking to him. A moment later he was nudged, something pressing his ear, and then his head was gripped and a mass of moist flesh settled against his face, warm soft skin at his ears, his nose and mouth brushed by the lips of a dripping vulva.

As Ava rode him, the other woman’s body rose and fell against his face, as if in the saddle of a cantering horse. Each time she lifted herself, releasing his ears, he could hear her squeals — and the sighs of Ava’s rapture, too, as she steadied the woman and kissed her. It was not the fierce kissing he had known, but a gentle chafing of soft lips and the pressure of fondling hands.

Her version of pleasure was so single-minded she made him feel more like her prisoner than her lover. Ava had taken charge again, but hers was not the tentative and maternal breastfeeding embrace of the night before. It was a piling on, aggressive and deliberate, an act in which he was a passive supine detail, something for the women to sit on and ride while they hugged and kissed. Lying there, he understood that he was an aspect of Ava’s fantasy, but not the object of it, not the center of her attention. There was no rapture for him, no tenderness, and now, as he was pummeled, hardly any arousal.

The nameless person, the silent woman, was smearing his face, stifling him as he gasped for breath. He was pinned to the floor, the weight of the two bodies on him, his cock feeling twisted and raw from being ridden, his whole head burning from the hot clamp of the bare legs. They went on, like delirious children assaulting a giant. And he was rubbed and smacked, the heat of that wet rag of flesh like being slapped in the face with raw meat.

In the women’s concentration on each other he was denied his orgasm, though they enjoyed a moment of frenzy together, yelping in triumph, sounding girlish. They didn’t seem to notice him then, but when they were done, laughing softly, shivering into each other’s arms, they gathered him up and helped him to bed.

“I hope we didn’t hurt him,” the woman said as they left the room.

There was so much he didn’t know. He lay there feeling bruised. All this time and he hardly knew anything.

For the following few days Ava worked odd hours again. Steadman brooded on his humiliation. The next time she was on the day shift and they had dinner together at home, he tried to broach the subject. He did not know where to begin. Never mind the visiting woman; who had Ava become, and what did she want?

“Shouldn’t we be talking about that”—he fished for the right word—“that encounter?”

“That was my encounter, not yours,” she said, sure of herself. “So there’s nothing to talk about. I just want you to know it’s not retributive.”

But he thought “retributive” was exactly what it was — retribution for the months and months of making his book, for the years of living his life, for his choosing the drug. And the retaliation was her way of showing him that she now knew what he had known all along, that sex was a different route, a different destination, for each person. Approaching that land of desire, one person saw a mountain and another a valley, a foreign landscape and culture, a confusion of language and costume. So that in any act of sex one person was at home feeling all the gusto and satisfaction of security, and the other was trespassing.

“I want to talk about it.”

“You’ll just interrogate me. I hate your writer’s questions.” As she spoke she got up and busied herself in the kitchen. “I’m happy. Therefore, there’s nothing to discuss.”

He didn’t pursue her, but he was sorry. He had wanted to explain that fear had robbed him of his libido.

A few days later he slipped into bed and was embraced. He did not know at first that it was the other woman until she kissed him and sighed. Bodies could seem almost identical, but a voice, a murmur, a kiss, they were a person’s uniqueness. And there was an odor — of breath, of skin and hair — that was singular, too.

He let himself be embraced and caressed, and he almost apologized for his futility when Ava slid into the bed behind him and snuggled up to him. Though she was against his back, everything about her was familiar. He was in the middle. He knew that he was somehow necessary to them, yet from their gropings that they were more interested in each other than in him. And so they lay tangled, but he knew that only he was in darkness.

The next morning, finding himself alone, he called Ava on her cell phone and left a message saying that they had to talk, and how about a drink somewhere? Ava returned the call later and said that she had reserved a table at the Dockside, overlooking the harbor in Oak Bluffs. She would pick him up after work. He took this as a good sign, something sentimental; it was the place he had brought her on their first date, where she had wept, realizing that he was the author of Trespassing.

“Your table is outside, as you requested,” the waitress said. She led them to it and took their order, two glasses of Merlot.

When she was gone, Ava said, “I love to see the island people waiting to meet the ferry. The bossy posture. The way they stand on the pier with their arms folded, searching for their friends on the boat. They seem so confident. ‘Here I am. I belong here. I’m going to take care of you.’”

She was not looking at him. Was she glancing down the pier where the Island Queen had just docked?

“What are you talking about?” Steadman said. She was speaking like a woman in a play, not listening, just making a superfluous pronouncement, pleased with herself, thinking she was giving information.

“Ah, here’s our drinks,” Ava said. This was also spoken like a line in a play.

Steadman sulked, thinking of his unwritten story, while the glasses of wine were set down. When he was sure the waitress had left, he said, “Can’t you see I’m miserable?”

Ava said, “It’s a beautiful evening. The harbor is full of sailboats. You’ve got a drink. We’re together. Why don’t we simply enjoy what we have?”

“What is this?” he said. She was haughty and enigmatic, and everything she said sounded stilted and fictional, as though she were not talking to him but merely reciting lines. “I don’t want to hear about the boats. I can’t see a thing.”

“I’ll be your eyes for a while.”

“I can’t read or write. I can barely think straight. Find me that specialist. Why don’t you help me?”

He meant to challenge her, but she surprised him, saying with amused detachment and with an archness he had never heard her use before, “Maybe what we’re doing with my friend will help you.”

It was the sort of thing he might have said before: sex as a cure, sex as vision, sex as blinding light, sex as a miracle drug.

He said, “Maybe you’re just using me.”

“This is an opportunity. Don’t ask me to explain it, but I know I won’t have another chance like this again.”

Women were usually spoken about by men — and by other women — as casualties of indecision, fretful, always on the hook, helpless, forever trifled with. But that had not been his experience at all. Men were the ditherers, the smilers, the feckless triflers. Men were fritterers, too: they took their time, because they had plenty of time. But women were remorseless timekeepers, ruthlessly so sometimes — certainly the women he had known in his life. They had given the impression of being passive and submissive, but they were not indifferent, far from it. They were watchful, perhaps silent, but obsessively alert, like raptors awaiting their chance.

And when the opportunity arose they knew it, and they pounced and gave it everything they had. He admired that, the way they singled out a choice and went for it.

“You like that other woman,” he said.

“You can’t imagine.”

Ava was smiling, he was sure of it, but he could not say how he knew — something in her tone.

Ava was another raptor. She had found someone else, and it so happened the lover was a woman. He was in between and felt weirdly privileged and perverse. He had never seen this ferocity in Ava, and he took it to be love.

“How was that Merlot?” the waitress said when Ava asked for the check.

“Very nice,” Ava said.

“Fine,” Steadman said.

“And how about that frozen daiquiri?”

What frozen daiquiri? Steadman thought.

“It was fabulous.” A woman’s voice at the same table — how was that possible? But as soon as he asked himself the question, he knew the answer.

And that night was another night with the other woman.

4

SUMMER NIGHTS on the Vineyard, thick with humidity, saturated with the rush of the tide, its lift and splash, its ebb that left bubbling mudflats, and the warmed blossoms of Rosa rugosa, a dustiness of daylilies and the sweet decay of leaf piles and pinched acorns under the scrub oaks: he knew every detail and still felt that he was trespassing. The sociable people on the island for the season rushed from party to party. Even Ava was on the circuit, perhaps with her woman friend — how was he to know? His friends called — Wolfbein was persistent — but Steadman made excuses and stayed home. He had discovered that going out was dangerous.

The seamless dark turned him into a pedantic clown in a gloomy farce, intending to be serious as he stumbled and fell. He was so lost he began to question whether he had been blind before. He repeated to himself with disbelief that this was like nothing he had ever known.

Even those times years ago on the Trespassing trip when he had woken in a reeking room in the middle of the night, gasping and swallowing black air and the shit stink of a rural village, not the slightest idea where he was. Burma? Bangladesh? Assam? That simple confusion, which cleared up at daybreak, was better by far than this. What he knew now was trespassing with the direst consequences. No way out. He seemed to exist in a deep hole, with all the stifling cushions of night stacked upon him, making him very small.

How could he beg for pity? Yet he wanted sympathy. Ava had a bystander’s slack attention. Would she listen to him? The curse of his involuntary blindness she seemed to regard as no more than another distraction, hardly amounting to an event, more like the continuation of his extended and episodic egotism as the famous recluse. He was another patient clamoring to be seen — at least that was how she made him feel. Her cold gaze held him in an unsubtle way as merely disabled, rather inconvenienced, somewhat bothered. And he felt he was dying.

His state of mind was the opposite of his old settled writing mood — the drug mood, which was bliss, and which he assumed by drinking datura. The mood that he put on, the mood that wore off. That was in the past, a game he had learned, and it no longer served him. He was now desperate. He had no control over this imprisoning shadow. He had not used the drug for months.

“I like the imagery,” Ava said when he told her these things. “But it’s like poetry, pretty but vague. It doesn’t help in making a diagnosis.”

Her pauses made him suspect that she might be taking notes about his condition. Something in her nose-breathing, air pauses like punctuation, suggested she was writing. She didn’t deny it.

“I always update my case histories.”

He tottered toward her on crooked unbelieving clown’s feet, his arms extended. “I’m a case history?”

“Just an expression.”

Still, it baffled him. And the confident way she said that, the way he was unsteady, groping for the arm of a chair that had been moved — and where was the sofa he had always used for dictation? — it all threw him. His disorientation robbed him of his sense of security and, worse, seemed to whisper that the house was not his anymore. The whole carefully built estate belonged to her and to her passions now.

“I don’t mean to minimize the bother.”

“Bother?” He tried to get his face close to hers, to show how strongly he objected to this belittling word.

“Slade, you’ve been this way for a year and a half.”

Even she, the physician, avoided the word “blind.”

“Not like this.” In spite of himself he could not contain the scream in his voice, and that also made him feel small.

She didn’t understand that the prescience he had experienced before as a mind reader, and the dark helplessness he felt now as an ignorant cripple, were two opposite modes of being. Maybe the drug had not really blinded him before but only given him a convincing illusion of blindness.

He knew that drinking even a drop of the drug had heightened his perceptions to the point where he was hyperreceptive to all physical stimuli. But there was an imaginative dimension, too. He was given so precise a memory that all experience was available to him — not just his ability to view the present: he was granted such an exalted reverie of insight that he saw both past and future illuminated in the diamond-bright datura darkness of his drug trance, which was a starry night of unlimited knowing in dripping stipples of color.

But now he had a bag over his head. He could not walk without stumbling, and his speech was affected, too. He spoke in a tentative and halting way, in a calling-out voice, never sure whether anyone was listening. Stammering and stumbling were similar uncertainties, and his loss of sex drive seemed to be related — blind and faltering in every way. Wasn’t it obvious to her that feeling powerless terrified him?

“Are you there? Say something.”

“I’m listening.”

“Who is that woman?”

Ava made a mirthful noise in her throat. She said, “Don’t you like her?”

“I’ve got other things on my mind.”

“But I don’t.”

He had suspected all along, but he was sure of it then: the woman was her opportunity. And what was he? “So you really are using me.”

“I promise I will do everything I can to make you well,” Ava said. “The specialist, the tests — I told you.”

“I think you’re playing some kind of game with me.”

“Nothing that should surprise you.”

“That woman—” he began to say.

Interrupting him, she said, “Don’t tell me you’re shocked.” She was playful, slightly mocking and resentful. “I don’t want to be your dolly. I was your dolly. And now are you saying you don’t want to be my dolly?”

While she was speaking he screamed, a horrible incompetent honking, just to shut her up, and then he screamed again, “I can’t see a fucking thing!”

He shattered the air in the room and shocked her into silence. He hadn’t wanted to raise his voice and betray the extent of his fear. But now she knew. He sensed her coming near him. Before, he would have known what was in her mind; would have seen into her heart, would have been able to turn away and sweep out of the room. But all he knew now was a lurking shadow and her unsteady breathing. She clasped his hands in hers.

“I’ll look after you,” she said. “Please don’t worry.”

He wanted to weep with confusion.

“But don’t deny me my pleasure,” she said. “I’ve never denied you yours.”

He didn’t believe her. That was another effect of his darkness. Nothing was real; even voices were false. Ava’s reassurance just depressed him. The more certain-sounding the promise, the less he was convinced. He was sure she was procrastinating, and selfishly, so she could go on involving him in her dalliance with her woman friend. And what he would have found pleasurable before was a torment to him now.

The woman did not show up after that conversation. Maybe his scream of “I can’t see a fucking thing!” had given Ava pause. Or maybe the woman had been present and had heard it, and had fled.

The echo of that fearful scream went on booming in his mind. It finally resolved itself into an angry idea, like a tight whipping wire. He saw a wicked fable, not as a narrative but as a vivid picture.

He remembered The Sleeping Herdsman, a postage-stamp-sized Rembrandt etching he had once seen, showing a man with a beard dozing in a grove of trees and near him a smiling and impish young woman, his wife or lover, fondled by a young man while the older man snoozed and his cow gaped. But there was a wickeder version. Not a sleeping man but a blind man trapped by his lover, the man a naive blunderer, the woman a calculating plotter.

The picture in his mind was a summing up of the whole drama. In the foreground, the blind man was sitting blank-faced in a garden, while nearby a gleeful woman with her legs apart was being mounted by a goggle-eyed youth — and the long-haired youth could have been a girl. The drama was straightforward and the image stayed in his memory, like the Rembrandt or a stark woodcut in a book of fables. This one would have been titled “The Blind Man’s Wife.”

She was the central figure, with her welcoming embrace; the blind man was helpless and fooled, the embodiment of inaction. It was impossible to tell from his ambiguous expression whether he knew what was happening, but even if he did, what could he do except rage at his blindness?

For that reason — the shame of it — Steadman did not rage. He persisted, though. He was so demoralized by seeing nothing, by writing nothing, by his dependence on Ava, that only this mocking picture of a betrayed man gave him hope.

Ava went on promising that the doctor would visit. And some days later the doctor came. Was it a few days? Was it a week or more? He didn’t know. He was blind to the passage of time, too.

“I’m going to ask you to sit right here next to me.”

It took him a moment to realize that the doctor was a woman. She was all business. This was not the lover — he understood that immediately from Ava’s deference.

“Let me give you a hand,” the doctor said when she saw him groping.

Her big hands wrapped his in their soft pads. An odor of strong soap and salty sweat told him that she was plain and heavy. She led him haltingly to a chair.

“Darling?” he called out.

“Dr. Katsina’s in the other room.”

Her familiarity with the layout of the house perplexed Steadman, and it made him feel like more of a stranger himself.

“Just relax for me.”

She held his chin, and he could tell from the warmth on his eyes that she was shining a light into them, one then the other.

“Are you taking any medication?”

“No.”

“No drugs?”

His mouth was woolly as he said, “No drugs.”

“Any discomfort?”

He hesitated then, for the agony of his blindness was like a raw seeping wound in the torn-open meat of his body, which prevented him from being able to think about anything else.

“None.”

She put a cuff on his arm, cinching it with Velcro, and took his blood pressure. She made notes; he heard the rattle of the paper, the click of her ballpoint. She was hovering near his face. He sensed her breath, felt her fingertips positioning his head; she was peering at him.

“What color is this?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can you see the light?”

“No.”

She seemed to be taking measurements and noting them. She did not say anything more to Steadman, but after she left the room, he heard her speaking in an undertone to Ava.

“I’ve got a slot later this afternoon.”

Such was Steadman’s vagueness that he did not know the doctor had gone until Ava told him. And then he said he resented the fact that he had been left out of the discussion. Ava ignored this and said if he was willing, he could be examined further at the hospital. He agreed but halfheartedly: he had little willpower. His blindness had demoralized him, lowered his spirits. These days he woke in the morning and expected nothing except more darkness.

On the way to the hospital, nothing was familiar. Even his own car, the sound of the gravel in his driveway, the route to town with all its turns and stops, it was all strange. He stood, gangly and hapless, while Ava signed him in. Then, assisted by an orderly, with Ava holding his arm, he was taken to a room.

“Hello again.”

The same doctor, greeting him. But she might have been anyone. Ava helped him to a cushioned chair, where he sat listening to the clicking and shuffling of metal instruments chiming on a metal tray.

“Rest your chin here,” the doctor said, tipping his head forward.

He heard switches being thrown, the snapping of toggles, a slight diminution of heat on his face; lights out.

“Can you read the middle line?”

“No.”

“How about the top line?”

He sighed and said, “I can’t see anything.”

“Please try.”

“What do you mean, ‘Please try’? I can’t do this.”

And then — was it the odor? was it her prodding voice? — he realized she was the doctor who had examined him at Mass. Eye and Ear in Boston.

“I know you,” he said.

“I’m Dr. Budberg.”

He shrank, settling into the chair in embarrassment, remembering the rest. He said, “I’m so sorry.”

She was brisk, she ignored him. She said, “We’ll need bloodwork. And a glaucoma test. I’m going to schedule an MRI and a CAT scan, too.”

Fitting his face to the mask-like frame, she shot puffs of air into his eyes, one at a time, and scrutinized them with more light, which heated his eye sockets and warmed his head.

“Have you had any ear infections?”

“No.”

But she wasn’t through. Any trauma to the head? Severe headache? Migraine? Stress? Significant pain on one side of the body? Diabetes?

He made his replies with glum certainty, his mind on something else. He remembered how he had rattled off the lines of the eye chart from memory, every letter, defying Dr. Budberg to find him blind and confounding her diagnosis. But his pedantic memory was gone now. All he had were the instincts of a burrowing animal, a blunt mole-like awareness of heat and cold and bad air, of trailing fingers like rootlets raking his face, a confining darkness.

He had insulted this woman. He remembered it clearly because he had enjoyed it as a victory, and he had seen only when it was too late how sad she had been, heavy and gasping with grief, lumpish, bereaved. He wanted to apologize again, but she had left him and was at the door, confiding details to Ava.

“Pressure’s normal. No apparent retinal detachment. No apparent nerve trauma. I’m getting responses. I’d like to see him again.”

Ava was murmuring. Steadman heard “idiopathic” attached to some other, even less intelligible words. He called out in a trembly voice, “What does that mean?”

“You haven’t damaged your eyes, so there’s hope,” Ava said.

A wheelchair was brought and, feeling useless, he was pushed to another room, where blood was drawn from his arm. He had no idea who did it; he was jabbed in silence. Someone said, “You’ll be fine. You’re going to surprise everyone.” Drops were splashed into his eyes, and whatever they were seemed to scorch him. He imagined a distracted nurse using the wrong drops and blinding him, or someone wicked doing it deliberately. He was left alone after that. Ava was outside the room, conferring again, but with whom? He sat drooping, as though learning how to be stupid.

On the way home, Ava was so preoccupied with driving she said nothing at first. These days he imagined that when she was silent she was thinking of her lover, that nameless grateful-sounding woman. Past Vineyard Haven and the worst of the traffic, she spoke up.

“You’re going to be all right.”

That sounded like surrender. He said, “Really?”

“Dr. Budberg knows her stuff. And she’s upbeat.”

This was so unpromising he didn’t reply.

“You’ve got plenty of options.”

She was telling him it was hopeless: they couldn’t help. All they could offer was lame, unconvincing encouragement, which was like the worst expression of despair.

In the days that followed, he wondered when the nameless woman would return as a sex partner. But there was no sign of her. Perhaps Ava was meeting her somewhere else, or perhaps she was so concerned about him that she was not meeting her at all. Given his condition the frivolity of a threesome was simply reckless. More worrying than anything, Steadman found Ava’s diminished desire a sign of pessimism.

“They’re still running tests on that drug you gave them,” Ava said.

Did she believe she was helping him to be optimistic? Crumbs of hope only made him feel worse and woeful. And she spoke to him as though to a fretful child.

He said, “What are they not telling me?”

“The contributing factors.”

“Such as?”

“Okay,” Ava said. “Maybe it’s an undetectable ear infection that spread and deadened your optic nerve. Or it could be a brain tumor compressing the synapses, a compression lesion of the optic nerve. Or a brain aneurysm, something we call an arteriovenous malformation, intertwined blood vessels that clot, creating an outpouring of one vessel. That compresses, or leaks, and affects the brain tissue that controls optical functions.”

“So it’s not the drug?”

“I’ve read some of the literature. It’s pretty unscientific. Most of it is anecdotal, and all from small-town dopers. But the message seems to be that the alkaloids affect the visual center of the brain.”

“Great news.”

“You asked for it.”

After that, his low spirits kept him in the house. The invitations continued coming for the summer parties, but he was too sad and ashamed to accept. He couldn’t face the questions, and the prospect of all the good humor of party chatter saddened him further. He could not bear to be pitied, or worse, beset by partygoers who had come to regard him as a marvel. Steadman the blind man who could read minds and see through walls and trot up and down swinging his cane — the showoff, the bore in dark glasses who claimed to have acquired the gift of total recall, the White House dinner guest, the world traveler and writer who had announced to one interviewer, “A perfect memory is prophetic.”

He was satirized by everything he had done and said under the influence of the drug. He saw nothing now, but he understood the hateful fact that the drug had truly blinded him.

Wolfbein called repeatedly and left messages. Steadman avoided picking up the phone. But one day when Ava was at work and Steadman suspected that she might be calling, he answered and heard Wolfbein at the other end.

“You’re coming to our party, you schmuck,” Wolfbein said in his friendly bullying way.

“No, Harry, please.”

“How about a cup of coffee?”

“I’m pretty busy.”

“Okay, if you won’t come over to see me, I’ll pay you a visit.”

Half an hour later Wolfbein’s heavy vehicle was rolling down the gravel driveway. Steadman heard the car door slam, the feet on the porch, the front door rattle open.

“So you don’t want to see your old friends anymore?”

Steadman stood with his arms at his sides, not knowing where to look. It was true: he did not want to see anyone.

“I haven’t been well.”

“You look okay to me, fella.”

“Harry, I’m blind,” and his voice cracked on the word.

“Let’s go for a ride.”

The big man took him by the arm and guided him out of the house, across the porch, down the steps. Steadman moved like a child, resisting, scuffing his feet but inarticulate. Wolfbein helped him into the passenger seat and buckled the safety belt. Steadman’s head lolled on his loose neck; what was there to see?

“You were blind a year ago,” Wolfbein said, driving away. “I read the newspapers. I know what you’ve been through.”

“The papers have been accusing me of faking.”

“Don’t pay any attention to that shit.”

Steadman had mentioned the papers for effect, hardly expecting a response. But Wolfbeins reply confirmed his fears.

“Fuck all those people,” Wolfbein said. “What do you care what they say?

He cared deeply, and Wolfbeins defiance alarmed him and made the whole issue seem much worse. “All those people” were like a formidable army of naggers and detractors.

“Next month we’re hosting the big guy again,” Wolfbein said.

“The president?”

“Listen, Slade, he’s hurting too.”

“Too” meant he had seen the pieces in which Steadman and the president were compared in their deceptions and denials: two hollow men who had trifled with the public trust, a pair of liars.

Wishing to be contradicted by his sympathetic friend, Steadman said, “People think I’m like him. Hiding something. Lying. I know I’m being lumped with him.”

“So what?”

“So what” was the same as yes.

“Where are we going?”

“Anywhere you want. Feel like an ice cream?”

“Go to town. Take West Chop Road,” Steadman said. “I want to hear the ocean.”

“You got it, buddy.”

His hearty tone made Steadman feel more pathetic, like a loser in need of encouragement.

“As if my book is somehow invalid because I wasn’t really injured.”

“But you are injured, I can see it,” Wolfbein said. “People who run you down are horrible. Hey, I heard the drug stories. Please!”

It was like a question in the form of a hint, inviting an explanation. There was too much to tell, and where to begin? A few years ago I decided to go to the Oriente in Ecuador, downriver…

Wolfbein was still talking. “Just because the president got a blowjob in the White House from a girl sneaking into his office, does that mean he can’t get credit for the economy and for balancing the budget? He erased the deficit. We’ve got a surplus!”

But Steadman was thinking of the girl sneaking into the White House, another trespasser; and the president groping her, more trespassing.

They had come to a stop. Steadman heard the wind in tall trees and, in the distance, a sunken sound of cavernous water, the rush of the current, the slop and splash of windblown waves beneath the West Chop lighthouse. He could hear the snap of the flag on the pole.

“Just let this guy go by,” Wolfbein said, and shouted, “Go ahead! I’m not in your way!” He panted in irritation and said, “Look at him.”

Steadman heard the car accelerate and pass by them.

“Some people,” Wolfbein said.

“Who was it?”

“A schmuck — I don’t know. He’s gone. Want to get out?”

“Help me.”

Wolfbein unbuckled the safety belt and hoisted him out of the car. Steadman smelled the sea air on his face, and the flowers — daylilies here, heavy clouds of fragrant pollen. The wind thrashed at the leafy boughs of the tall oaks.

“It’s a sunny day,” Steadman said sadly.

“Beautiful day,” Wolfbein said. He seemed at times to forget that Steadman was blind, or at least to think that Steadman was as alert and prescient as he had been the previous summer, the miracle man in dark glasses, amazing the guests. “Lovely. Kids on bikes. Lady walking her dog. Sailboats on the Sound. And here he comes again.”

A car rolled slowly past, the tire treads pinching small stones and snapping them to the curb.

Wolfbein sighed. “Schmuck.”

“Let’s go down to the beach.”

“You don’t want to do that, buddy.”

But he did. After all the resistance he had put up, now that he was here, he craved to be nearer the racing current, to tramp on the sand, to smell the tide wrack and hear the gulls and the riverine rush of the tide. “All those fucking steps. Go down there and we’ll never get out.” Steadman remembered that Wolfbein was heavy. The man hated walking, and there were three long flights down to the beach. He was impatient. But he was indulgent, too.

“I want to help you, buddy. You need a medical procedure. Don’t worry. I know people.”

Another extravagant apology, like Ava’s and Dr. Budberg’s and whoever had drawn his blood at the hospital. Everyone wanted to help; no one could do a thing. But they never admitted it, and that was the worst of it, the false hope, the hollow encouragement — bucking him up because they needed to be bucked up themselves. And meanwhile, as they were undermining him, they were getting on with their lives.

He went home, his head full of his story.

5

THE BLIND MAN was someone like himself, a traveler and writer and recluse. He lived near West Chop, in the lane on the bluff where the paved road ended and the steps to the beach began.

That was the character in his story. Steadman could see him clearly, as though beckoning, inviting him into the narrative. But he found he could not continue. On the brightest days in his drowsy up-island solitude, with the sun baking his face and his dense eyelids, his grief was a physical pain. In that golden heat the agony he felt was like a terminal disease. He wondered how to go on living. His awareness of sunshine made him desolate, gave him the detachment, the fatalism, of someone very ill.

The rain, the fog, the days of drizzle, he could bear: he stayed indoors and brooded in the appropriate gloom. There was a frown of unresolved crisis in his features that made a crease of blame in his face, and the sour stillness in his house suggested the blurred stink of a sickroom.

Outside he could smell the tang of the summer’s heat curling the cedar shingles and drying the tussocks of tall grass. He was imprisoned then, pierced by odors alone. He lamented what he could not see: the box hedge, the dry stone wall, his field thick with daylilies, the pitch pines and the birches. He hated that they belonged to other people. He could hardly recall Ava’s face or body. Whom did she belong to now? He had become a big clumsy ignoramus who ate with his hands and seldom ever shaved. From highly colored dreams in which he was nimble, he woke to darkness, hardly knowing how to get out of bed.

He was more reclusive than ever, avoiding everyone. He knew what they thought. The blind were not scribblers; they were celebrated in their evasions as storytellers and talkers. People patronized the blind, tried to propitiate them for their gloomy emanations, tiptoed around them, sat at their feet, feared them, asked them for stories, tried not to stare at the stains and crumbs on their shirt fronts, were jittery listeners, fearing what might come next.

Grieving, Steadman remembered the story he had angrily begun in his head about the blind man and his wife. The ugly drama it portrayed seemed an expression of his hurt. He was repentant, self-accusing. He needed to invent, to ease his mind. The story of the weak, credulous man and the opportunistic lover was like a fable of his failure.

With nothing else to do, Steadman felt that resolving the elements of the story would help him live. Yet even in his imagination the story scared him. He made it out of the materials of pure horror, hoping that when it was done he might know more about himself. His familiarity with the facts of it did not make it less brutal, but he suspected that the act of creation would make it easier to bear.

And so he resumed, concentrating on the blind man, who was someone like himself, a traveler and writer and recluse. His house was near West Chop, in the lane on the bluff where the paved road ended and the steps to the beach began.

Before he lost his sight, before he met the woman, the man believed that the active part of his life was over. He accepted that no great event would befall him, that he would grow smaller, his life narrower, less accidental, and he would die here in obscurity. He imagined one of those small rainy funerals in an up-island cemetery of old chewed-looking gravestones and pitted crosses.

In his self-imposed retirement, he seldom ventured out. When he did he kept to the same safe walk. He was not seeking anyone, not looking for anything, just passing the time. He was supremely content, steadied by his indifference.

There had been one scare, but that was on his former route. A weteyed elderly pedestrian named Cubbage ambushed him, saying “You’re the writer,” and feebly bullied him into his house. “Got the plans out of Popular Mechanics.” Cubbage detained him. “Want to buy it? If you don’t, my idiot son will get it. It’d cost you less than a million. You could write a great book here.” The man seized a banjo off a tattered hassock. “This is a little thing called ‘Sleepy Time Gal.’” He strummed a bit and began to cry miserably. “It’s my wife,” he said, his face streaming with tears. “Cancer took her. Thirty years we were married. You can’t replace someone like that. Do you know what true love is?”

The man said he had no idea.

“Then make me an offer on the house.”

Cubbage watched him flee. The man changed his route. He believed that he was happy because he had conquered desire and was floating, having achieved some sort of Buddhist ideal of nonattachment, as he sometimes joked.

On good days he walked in the woods behind the lighthouse, loving the smell of the trees and flowers, the pitch pines, the chokecherries, the scrub oaks, the leaf mold, the squirrel-bitten acorns, the sun warming the long grass, hot clumps of timothy, and cushions of moss like dense velvet that made him feel weightless.

He stuck to West Chop because in Vineyard Haven he saw women he had known years ago, swollen shapeless creatures like big bosomy men, and he realized that he had slept with them in his early days of fame, after the appearance of his celebrated book. He was chastened, for now they had come to look like him — solitary, unexercised, asexual, faintly mustached. He felt guilty and apologetic, for one that he took to be a former lover, a misshapen woman in a familiar knit, was in fact a man he had never seen before and the sort of person he knew he would keep bumping into afterward at the post office and the market.

Everything changed for him one end-of-summer day on the bluff of West Chop near the lighthouse when he saw a lovely woman standing alone. She faced him, looking fascinated, and then turned away and walked toward the tennis courts. He felt panic, a kind of hunger. He needed this woman. She was the one person who had been missing from his long life.

Understanding this, he was briefly happy, then he was ashamed and finally sorrowful, knowing for the first time the despair of love. He would waste away and die without her; with her he would live. He now knew that the reason he had taken the same walk every day was to meet this woman.

That night he lay in bed and could not call up her face. Her beauty was too subtle to remember with any accuracy. The next day he found her at the same spot and she hurried away — her sudden rush like a flushed quail, calling attention to her flight — down the road at the set of mailboxes reading Loss, Titley, Ours, Levensohn, Lempe. Which was she? In the days that followed he saw her twice more.

Self-conscious, he was reduced to being stealthy, glancing sideways to stare at her, to satisfy himself; but staring only made him hungrier. He was reminded of his distant past, of being small and poor, rather young, ignored by more powerful people while he toiled at his book and felt fameless. His book’s bold title provoked his friends to patronize him, until the book was reckoned a masterpiece and was then the occasion of their envious jokes.

Now people said to him, “How are you, buddy?”

He said, “I’m miserable,” but misery made him truthful. Speaking bluntly released his feelings of frustration. In the past he had often said the opposite of what he meant: “You seem perky,” to distracted souls; “I’ll try to remember that,” to pedants.

Now he said, “People might call themselves perfectionists, but at the bottom of pedantry is an abiding laziness. Raise enough objections and you never have to accomplish anything.”

The next time he saw the beautiful woman at West Chop he said hello.

“I was looking at that sailboat,” she said.

The windjammer Shenandoah, out of Vineyard Haven.

“Isn’t she beautiful?”

Emboldened by her directness, he said, “I hadn’t noticed. I couldn’t take my eyes off you. You are so lovely.”

Her laughter told him he had made an impression. They talked inconsequentially about the ferry schedule. He said, “See you tomorrow.”

That night he thought, And I hate my saggy face.

He had fallen in love with her, and he knew it was love because it was agony, the sort you died from. He felt famished when he saw her — her bright eyes, her full lips, her clear skin. He sought her out and felt humiliated by his longing for her.

To his delight, he began to run into her everywhere — at the drugstore on Main Street, the beach below the lighthouse, walking along the ferry landing, in the bagel cafe, and in the camera store where he was buying a pair of binoculars. Melanie Ours was her name.

He wooed her in the open air, doing most of the talking. Melanie was unaffected, soft-spoken, appreciative, and loving. One day she was clutching a small dog in the crook of her arm, nuzzling it and cuddling it in a way that suggested: I could treat you like this.

“It’s not mine,” she said. “It’s a friend’s.”

Wondering what friend made him unhappy. But he saw Melanie Ours again and loved her more. He mentioned to her that he was older than she by twenty years. She said, “So?” He feared she might want children. She smiled and said, “I want you.”

Nothing could have been simpler. They married, she moved in with him, he was joyful. They lived together in his house on the bluff behind West Chop.

He sometimes mentioned the places where they had bumped into each other.

She said, “I knew you’d be there,” and explained that she had known his movements and had contrived deliberately to appear at these seemingly chance encounters. He laughed shyly, feeling desired. She said, “I found you fascinating.” What more was there to know? Perhaps nothing, except that he learned that she was devoted to him, responsive and loving, forgiving as only a friend can be.

“I’m sorry, darling,” he said, early on, in bed, feeling futile. She held him, kissed him, and he wanted to weep with gratitude.

Months of bliss. He sometimes became alarmed when she was out of his sight. Setting eyes on her, he blessed his luck. She was a light to him. “I thought I knew what happiness was.” He was reminded that in the early, active part of his life he had been deluded.

This clarity of vision — his life now — was figurative and philosophical, but a paradox, for he found that in fact his eyesight was failing. He had trouble reading, even with glasses. He could not drive at night without being dazzled by the headlights of oncoming cars.

He had his eyes tested. He failed the exam. “It’s to be expected at your age,” the doctor said. “But new glasses won’t help. You have cataracts.”

He regarded this as good news, the promise that after his operation he would see better and be bathed in the glow of his lovely wife. But why was he asked to sign the waiver?

The doctor said, “There’s less than a one percent chance of the procedure going wrong.”

After the operation, still bleary-eyed and groping, he was given drops for his eyes. Melanie helped him apply the drops, and his eyes became scorched and infected. He lost his corneas, he got a transplant, and then more drops. The transplant failed. He howled.

As though rehearsing his defense in a malpractice suit, the doctor sternly reminded him of the odds: “Someone had to be in that one percent.”

Because he had signed the waiver, he could not sue and was not compensated. He did not need money anyway. He wanted his eyesight back, even the feeblest sort, as on the days when he had said, “I can see your face, sort of dark, but not your features.” He would have settled for that. He was the blind man now.

And, blind, he could not bear to be away from Melanie. Yet even when she was with him he was not consoled. He spoke to her, but she did not seem to hear him. Something wintry in her manner — why? He had never sensed it before, perhaps because her adoring eyes, her face, and her luminous skin had always overwhelmed him. Now he was aware of her as a different presence — her thumping clumsy footsteps, the sharp odor of her body, her harsh voice.

When she touched him her hands chilled him; her fingers felt reptilian. He was appalled even as she said, “Of course I love you.”

He was now confined to his house. He was bewildered in it, in rooms like obstacles. He tripped over his own furniture. He could not go anywhere without her, yet more and more she was absent.

“I need to shop. Everything takes longer when you come along.”

Shop for what? She had never shopped before. He began to ask her where she had been.

“Getting my nails done,” or “Having my hair colored,” or “At the dressmaker’s.”

But why? — since he could not see the nails, or the hair color, or her clothes.

“It’s for me,” she said.

He was confused by the mingled smells of her perfume, her nail polish, her shampoo, her new clothes. His blindness had wakened his other senses — he was hyperalert, sensitive to all stimuli. “I smell onions,” or “Smoke — tobacco smoke — in your hair.”

He smelled a man, he smelled sex, something humid and dog-like, and a roughness like razor burn on her chin. He was too sad to kill her. Instead I’ll kill myself.

What kept him from it was that she was sadder, and tense, as if she had received some bad news.

“What’s wrong?”

“Please, leave me alone.”

“You’re never home.”

“I was sick! You don’t care!”

After all that time, their first argument. She insisted that she loved him but was like someone else, someone cruel, a stranger. She returned with a new smell on her. These odors overwhelmed all other impressions and became like colors and shapes, some of them as layered and complex as unanswered questions.

Was he missing something because he was blind, or was he seeing her as she really was? There was that voice. Sometimes, speaking to him, she seemed a little formal and overinformative, as though she were also addressing someone else, as though she had a listener she was teasing with irrelevant detail and a sort of mocking pomposity.

“I certainly would not expect someone like you to understand the priorities of a woman whose primary goal is to find some sort of focus to give balance to her life.”

“What’s that noise?”

He was stifled by unfamiliar creaks in distant parts of the house.

“I didn’t hear anything.”

One evening at a party he felt awkward and lost in the host’s house, so he stood to the side, out of the way of guests, waiting for Melanie to bring him a drink. Brushed by a stranger, he inhaled a familiar odor.

“You’ve been sleeping with my wife,” he said without thinking.

He was surprised when a woman snorted and pinched his arm and said, “You’re imagining things!”

Guilty people in farces often used that platitude, but farce was so near to tragedy. He saw that he was becoming shrewder; he had a clear vision of that woman’s drunken face, purple, putty-like, with weepy reddened eyes.

He was nimbler in his own house. Melanie stumbled in the dark, banged doors, fuddled with simple things like the telephone and the bath plug, and faltered in corridors where now, to his astonishment, he was completely at home.

There was someone else lurking, he knew it clearly one night, in the big cluttered front room that looked out on the Sound. He had become accustomed to the dark. The other person was lost in it and made an uncertain canine shimmy, a backing up: someone making way for him.

“Who’s there?”

“Who do you think?” And she laughed in a rehearsed way, as though she had an audience and was laughing on someone else’s behalf.

“A man.”

She jeered much too loudly, attempting a convincing denial, a bit of theater.

Using his fingertips, he traced his way through the room, surprised by how well he knew the route, and went upstairs, where he paused and heard the front door click shut. Then he heard his wife unsteadily on the stairs.

“It was a woman. That’s why you laughed that way.”

Memory helped, desperation helped, blindness did the rest. He could see with his teeth, his tongue, his lips, his face, his whole body. He knew later that the two must have been making love — an unmistakable vibrato, the specific sounds irregular, like a lapse from ordinary life. Not like sex between a man and a woman, a pattern of slaps he knew, a familiar rhythm, a top and bottom, an act writhingly echoic, but instead a tussle of equals, the percussive kisses, the whappity-whap of two women: a sudden sapphic sandwich with no filling.

From believing that he was always alone, he began to understand that he was never alone. Even when there was no conversation he was aware of another presence, a muffled physicality that filled a space in the room and blunted the sounds he made, something molecular and cloth-like. No darkness at all, only light that was loosely or tightly woven, always revealing a coarse or helpful light. What people called darkness, and feared, for him had a face and features: he now knew the whir of human atoms.

Smells, too, perfumes that pierced his eyes, duskier aromas in his nostrils, a further fleshier suggestion that he tasted on his tongue, the distinct earthiness of swallowed food. Another person — had to be a woman; a man would have been less circumspect.

He tried to follow these smells, to account for them.

“I don’t smell anything.”

If she believed that betraying him before his blind eyes was working, she was wrong.

“It was a man last week, but this week it’s a woman.”

She laughed again, the conspiratorial, informing laugh, and her laughter roused an unmistakable movement that jarred the room.

“Or two women”—guessing that was why she laughed.

Sometimes the sound of kissing was like a certain sort of secret eating, furtive snacking on dripping overripe fruit. At other times the lovemaking resembled two soft bodies plopping through heavy clouds, encountering turbulence, or was like the thrashing of a single person sleeping poorly. They were bold in daylight, but even bolder in the dark, believing that because they could not see, they could not be seen. The eroticism of their solitude was the opposite of the crackly randomness of ordinary life.

People held in the rapture of sexuality were trapped animals. He shamefully remembered, I’m sorry, darling.

“I know what you’re doing.”

To test her sympathy, he pleaded for help and found himself alone. It was a ruse: he knew his way around the house, but he could expect nothing from her. In daylight he understood much; at night he understood almost everything. He was not confused by shadows: he thought of night as a friend, blindness as a gift.

His dead eyes made his wife reckless. He was not fooled. He knew her better, knew that she had taken lovers, thieved his money. His blindness was her opportunity, but he was not deceived.

There was worse to come. At another party he sniffed at a vase of flowers and said, “That water smells like my eye medicine.”

“You wouldn’t want to put that in your eyes,” the hostess said, and she explained that the chlorine in the water kept the flowers fresh longer by killing the bacteria.

Now he understood exactly who Melanie was and what she had done to him. She was the one who sounded lost and said in the dark, “Who’s there?” The woman was simple, greedy, and obvious. She had blinded him. He knew her and pitied her; he knew himself with a fatal disappointment.

All the beauty he had once known was false; he conceded that the world was an illusion. His book was false, history was false, what you saw was false. His life was not a tragedy but a revelation of unanswerable facts. He now knew what it was like to be dead, to be a specter, to see everything without being seen. What did you do with this enlightenment? You became obnoxious, truthful, stubborn.

A man said, “I’ve been on a diet.”

He replied, “You’ve got a long way to go.”

The editor of a magazine introduced herself. He said, “Not at the top of my reading list, I’m afraid.”

“That is hateful,” he said to a boy in Oak Bluffs who was listening to rap music in a convertible.

Explanations were pointless; understanding was like torture. It did not help that he now saw clearly his wife’s crime — not the dallying but her stratagem, her blinding him. How the woman who had plotted to marry him, whom he had loved, had substituted another solution for the one that had been prescribed to counter his eye infection. She had blinded him with the drops. He had lived through a mystery. He had solved a crime. Would anyone believe him? He interested a lawyer in the case, demanding secrecy, and rid himself of Melanie Ours.

The man Cubbage, who had accosted him and played the banjo and wept over his wife? The blind man met him again on the road and Cubbage was happy, pitying the man for his blindness, no longer bereaved. He had remarried, and was delighted that he had not sold his house. “We’re sitting on a fortune here.” The old misshapen women friends that the blind man had shrunk from before he now saw as contented souls, healthier than he was. “I am so sorry,” they said.

He sometimes wished for his sight back, so he could be calm, generous, and deluded. He was not pathetic, he was powerful, another life was beginning, but a harder one — he had no faith. He read nothing. He did not believe the lies of written history, the daily news, or the consolation of friends. His own book he regarded as little more than a lunatic fiction. Every written word was fiction or a half-truth. The worst of the visible world was bearable only because of its deceits and the way its truth was always hidden. But as a blind man liberated by a selfish woman he saw everything, and so he suffered, not from blindness but from clear-sightedness. Love was a dirty drug with hideous side effects.

He had no answer: He could not leave the island and live in a place where people identified him as blind. He knew with sorrow that all that awaited him was a sort of undeserved fame that was no different from failure. The paradoxes of his recent past exhausted him.

How did this thing end?

As Steadman went on imagining the story, he felt he had rescued something from his situation, like someone who finds meaning in a personal tragedy. And as long as the story remained unfinished, he felt he was not lost.

6

ALTHOUGH HE HAD not written a word of it, although it was all still stewing in his head, he was buoyant, possessed by the fable, with the sense of wellbeing he always felt at having imagined something whole. His pride in the plain facts of it matched his faith in his extravagant invention.

But his happiness didn’t last. The story made him secretive, for the woman in it was the villain and Ava had usually been kind, and even in her infidelity had been solicitous toward him. He was reproached by her kindness. And she went on indulging him, urging him to be upbeat, reminding him that she admired his work and that she would go on looking for a medical solution for him, more tests, another specialist.

He was grateful to her for her words; they were sincerely meant, but they were still only words. All praise these days sounded to him like the hollow pieties of a premature obituary. He was soon low again and unsure and as incomplete as his story. Maybe Melanie personified the blinding drug that had a feminine name — datura.

The simplest things reminded him of his helplessness. One day Ava said, “The mailman asked whether we have a red Corolla convertible. Apparently there’s one that’s often parked in our driveway.”

“It’s got to be a rental. Some tourist.”

“That’s just what I said.”

“So who’s the busybody, the mailman or the tourist?”

“You’re yelling at me,” she said, stating a fact.

Angry and hot-faced, he shouted again, “What do you expect me to do about it?”

“I just thought you’d like to know.”

“Why are you telling me? Tell the cops!”

She never shouted at him; it was always doctor and patient. Faced with his howling, she said softly, “I’ll deal with it. Now why don’t you let me take you out to dinner?”

Food was meaningless to him, yet he did not say no, did not say that a restaurant for him was just a charade, that he could hardly use a fork without stabbing his lips, that people would stare.

He said, “Maybe.”

“Or anything you want.”

“Anything” sounded like a sexual invitation, so he said, “If you mean your friend,” and didn’t finish.

“It’s up to you.”

The very thought of the three of them again overwhelmed him with sadness: being sat on and fondled, all that seething. Sex was an expression of health and optimism, and he was a pessimistic wreck with an unreliable libido.

“I’d do anything to help you. I care about you.”

He heard that as a note of farewell, different from caring for him. She wanted him healthy so she could leave him. They were back to where they had been in the weeks before Ecuador, the trip they had taken as a means of splitting up. They had no life together now, nothing to hold them together except his disability. They didn’t talk about the future or of love.

They had never used the word “love.” They avoided it as some people avoided red meat or refined sugar, and for the same reason, that abstaining from the word would make them healthier and stronger. They believed in love but hated the word, and loathed the moth-eaten expression I love you, which had been diminished and become so meaningless it had been reduced to a casual salutation. “I love you,” people said at the end of a casual phone call. It had taken the place of “See you later” and “Have a nice day.” It mattered less than his father’s farewell at the end of a phone call: “Be good.” His father had never used the word “love” either, yet he knew that the man had adored him.

Housebound among memories of his arrogance, Steadman said, “I think about only one thing. Getting back my eyesight.”

“I’m working on it,” Ava said. “And at least you have your book.”

He didn’t say what he felt — it was too melancholy. The book was pointless; it was incomplete. His life was not the sequence of his sexual history, it was everything that had led to its rediscovery, its periphery, all the circumstances, the landscape of his search, from the flight to Ecuador onward, how he had written it, the book tour, the president’s duplicity, the delusion of the drug, his failure, even the subsequent revelation, Ava’s dallying with her woman friend as he lay blindly supine. The sadness he was living through was the truest part, and yet it was not suggested in his book. His book was the narrative he knew now — this, the raggedness of reality, all of this.

But he said, “Right. I’ve got my book.”

The Book of Revelation was over, though. Good or bad, it was not his anymore. What preoccupied him now was the story of the blind man’s wife, the fable of his blindness.

Ava did not ask him how he spent his days. He knew she hated hearing that he did nothing but sit and brood. Asking him anything was like challenging him, and would have implicated her, made her feel partly responsible for his apparent indolence. He had no helpful reply. At least he had his short story. He clung to that with the tenuous hope of improving that fragment, looking to fiction for a solution to his dilemma, as he had once looked to travel for solace. Going away had always helped.

But if Ava had asked him what he was doing during the day, he would not have told her. What he was thinking was his business. The story was his secret, and anyway, the fictional lover was wicked. What would Ava make of that? Writing the story showed him how he wanted to blame Ava for his own trespassing, because he resented her freedom and her health.

He took some comfort in being able to recognize the changes in the weather. Some days he sweltered, the Vineyard afternoons when the wind dropped and there was no air, the long summer days of humidity, bright sunshine at seven in the evening, and some nights could seem suffocating. But then the wind would rise, the air cooled, and within a short time, hours sometimes, he would fumble in drawers for his sweater. These simple perceptions seemed to him necessary victories.

Weather was missing from his story, so was the physical texture of the island. The narrative hovered between being a mystery and a fable. He wanted it to be both more concrete and allusive, more of Borges in it, some sparkle, some magic. Not a pandering moral — that was just shabby — but persuasiveness, a greater sense of place, so that a reader would at the end find it the more disturbing for being familiar and unexplainable.

Perhaps that was what was also lacking in The Book of Revelation, a sense of place. As erotica its problem was its preoccupation with foreplay and foreground: interiors. Apart from the long gothic shadows, the role-playing in the chateau — wild nights, wild nights — there was no visible island.

Yet if his novel was a failure, his story had saved him. His secret inventions had always sustained him. He was more inclined to laugh at anyone who questioned how he spent his time and to ask other people how they could bear living without writing. The fact that he had published very little of it did not matter. He had been engaged in some sort of writing every day of his adult life. He loved the title “The Blind Man’s Wife.” He liked the way the story was full of intrusions.

How do I spend my days? he could have replied to Ava. I ponder my story.

Fearing that he might hear his own name, he avoided listening to the news. The scandal of the president’s affair, and his hiding and denying it, seemed to be the only topic, always speculating on the most vulgar details of the concealment. Every detail put Steadman on the defensive. He imagined being hounded in the same way, challenged and humiliated.

The president’s lame denial had alarmed him, but months later, in the period when Steadman was pondering his short story, the president admitted his mistake. His apology was horrifying, and though Steadman did not hear it the first time, it was replayed again and again, for it was not an apology at all but a statement of wounded defiance.

Steadman got to know the phrases by heart: “Questions about my private life, questions no American citizen would ever want to answer… I did have a relationship… a critical lapse in judgment and a personal failure on my part… I misled people… a desire to protect myself from the embarrassment of my own conduct… It’s nobody’s business but ours… Even presidents have private lives. It is time to stop the pursuit of personal destruction and the prying into private lives…”

Steadman did not hear sex in the president’s message; he heard his own voice speaking of drugs and blindness. The president was acting out Steadman’s own humiliation.

He was on his own. The story was all that he had written since his book, and as with the book, he had not touched a pen. He wrote in his head. When it was complete he would speak it into a tape recorder and find someone, not Ava, to transcribe it.

Ava had slipped away and lost herself in the hospital. She still lived in the house. She left meals for him, helped him find his clothes. But he knew her heart wasn’t in it. Her concern was professional now, a matter of ethics; he was a patient, a case, and her motto was “First do no harm.” She had not been able to find a cure. He was waiting for a chance to say, “I need a referral.”

In the meantime, “The Blind Man’s Wife” was all he had. He would use it like a man whittling a stick — rewrite it, improve it, polish it. Until it was done he would not have to think of anything else. The story was his patience and his consolation. Ava would have said “your dolly.”

In pitying him she had taught him that pity was useless. He needed to help himself.

Wolfbein called again, using the same tone of friendly bullying a nurse would use with a morose and bedridden patient.

“Something’s come up. You’re having lunch here today. The only question is, are you coming on your own or am I going over there to get you?”

“Harry, I’m useless.”

“I’ll be right over.”

He arrived a half hour later, honking his horn, and after Steadman got into the car, he drove fast, hardly speaking.

“What’s the hurry?”

“No hurry. Nice to see you,” Wolfbein said.

But the man was preoccupied, his hectic driving proved it, and he gabbled at the traffic. Although sunk in the depths of his blindness, Steadman understood the simple trip from his house to Lambert’s Cove to be a matter of reckless urgency.

“I told them to start without us,” Wolfbein said. “It’s all guys, by the way. The women have other plans.”

Then Steadman knew that Wolfbein’s picking him up and driving him to lunch had been unforeseen. Yet Wolfbein, seriously inconvenienced, had acted out of friendship. They arrived in a flurry, Wolfbein whispering to other people. Steadman was too bewildered to hear anything clearly. The house on the bluff that he had known so well seemed unfamiliar to him — strange elevations, sudden steps, echoes.

Wolfbein guided him through the living room to the sliding screen doors, then across the terrace to the wide lawn. Steadman had expected just the two of them for lunch on the terrace, Millie serving sandwiches. But this was something formal and unreadable. Steadman heard the chatter without making any sense of what was obviously a sizable and organized event.

“These guys will take care of you,” Wolfbein said, and seated him at a table. “I’ll be over there at the head table if you need me.”

Head table? Steadman’s own table companions were murmuring men, sounding British and inconsequential, talking about people they knew, none of whose names Steadman recognized. He felt for his glass and, finding a water tumbler, sipped from it, but cautiously, guessing he was being observed. His fingers tested the table, then encircled a fork handle. He pushed some food around his plate but did not dare to raise any to his mouth, for fear he would make a mess of it and embarrass himself. He sat, he knew, with a look of consternation on his face, trying to listen.

After a while a diffident voice beside him said, “Are you still working on that?”

Probably the waiter, but because Steadman was unsure, he said nothing. What if it was one of those other men at the table?

Dessert was served, the same diffident man saying in a querying voice, “Tiramisu?” Steadman worked a spoon into it, then nudged it aside. Coffee came. He risked a sip but slopped some of it on his chin.

Most of the talk seemed to be generated by the other table, or tables; Steadman couldn’t tell how many people were present. The voices were earnest, insistent, sounding strident at times; Steadman did not recognize any of them. The odd thing was that the men at his table, who had been murmuring about mutual friends, had stopped talking altogether and seemed to be listening to the conversations at the far tables, carrying across the lawn.

“Good Lord, is that the time?” the man next to him said, a lazy genteel voice. “I must push off.”

Some others said the same. Steadman had a sense that he was being acknowledged and thanked. One man said, “I’m so sorry we didn’t get a chance to talk.” Then a creaking of wooden folding chairs and all the voices shifting, becoming like whispers as the men moved off, up to the terrace, the lunch party ending, just like that.

Steadman sat, wondering if he was alone. He heard the wind chafing the trees, the chirp of birds, the trill of insects, a distant dog, a far-off ship’s horn skimming across the water. He was happier left like this, and in the sudden solitude he wondered what had been the point in coming? What he had taken to be Wolfbein’s impulsive lunch invitation had been something semiformal, a catered affair with rented tables and creaky chairs. He heard Wolfbein squawk from the terrace.

“Sorry, sorry,” Wolfbein called out as he approached. “I thought someone had come to get you.”

“I’m okay.” Saying that, he sounded feeble.

“The thing is, there were lots of people I wanted you to meet, but they all had to leave in a hurry.” Wolfbein had grasped Steadman’s arm and was helping him up. “These are strange times, my friend.”

“Who were all the other people?”

“You were sitting with Prince Andrew and Evelyn de Rothschild. I was with the president. Like I said, it was spur of the moment. He’s on the island to escape the press. He’s putting on a brave face, but believe me, you do not want his problems.”

Then Steadman knew: he had seen nothing. Apart from the story he was trying to write, he hardly existed.

On a fragrant morning in late August, his wide bank of lilies sweetening the breeze, at an hour when he was certain that Ava was gone, he called Information and ordered a taxi from Vineyard Haven.

“I need to get to West Chop.”

“Street and number?”

“Just the lighthouse.”

Setting off, he was less than a child. He took so little with him — that was a measure of his futility. No pen or paper, no tape recorder, no camera, nothing but his cane. He had money but could not tell one bill from another; a one could be a fifty. He could easily have been cheated. Yet he was going out in search of factual detail to relieve the starkness of his story.

He would carry everything in his head, but for all his bravado he was unconfident. His head was clouded with fear. He had sat like a wraith at Wolfbeins, and here he was trying to be a writer again. He was making a narrative using the simplest tools, like a tribal storyteller squatting on his haunches before a fire.

He felt undermined by not having any idea of the route the taxi was taking, and he was too proud to ask the driver. The turns made him queasy. He guessed the stop-and-go traffic was Old County Road, but it could have been Main Street. His blindness made him carsick. This man was in a rush. He was reminded of Wolfbeins speeding and swerving. A long straight stretch of slight ups and downs he took to be West Chop Road.

When the taxi stopped the driver said, “You sure you’re going to be all right?”

People said that because they didn’t care and didn’t want to be responsible for him. Everyone blamed him for being helpless.

“What are you suggesting?” he said, to confuse the man.

“You’re the boss.” He chose some bills from Steadman’s hand and cranked the door open to let him out.

“Just point me in the right direction.”

“Where would that be?”

“See some wooden steps leading down to the water?”

“Right over here, sir.”

The man’s hands were careless, only approximating the direction — he was in a hurry to get back into his taxi. But as he led him toward the stairs, Steadman could hear the sea slopping and splashing, like a vast tub filling, far below the lighthouse at the corner of the Chop.

The man’s loose grip was like rejection and made Steadman stumble. He said, “I’m okay now. Thanks.”

Without another word the man left him. Steadman told himself that he was glad for such lessons in indifference: he needed to be reminded that he was on his own.

The notion that this was literary work pleased him. He was walking in the setting of his story and would be grateful for any details — a smell, a sound, the texture of a leaf or a boulder. The age cracks in the weathered handrail that he felt now, the smooth split wood — that. He was looking for authenticity, for writing about a known place, he tended to take too much for granted.

“Hello.”

His first stab of fear today — not the voice alone but the fact that he had not known he was being observed. He could not tell whether the person on the stairs was going up or down. It sounded like an old woman.

“Going down to the beach?”

No, it was a small boy.

“Yes, I am,” Steadman said, trying to sound confident. And he heard the boy pass him, going up, the stair treads creaking, the boy climbing too fast.

“Take your time, Brett. You’re going to trip!”

A man’s voice beneath him on the steps. And then he addressed Steadman, talking a little too loudly. “Can I help you?”

“Can I help you?” was the typical Vineyarder’s rebuff when confronted by strangers — trespassers, all of them — and was the local equivalent of “Go away.”

Steadman ignored him, but the man persisted. “Visiting the island?”

“Never mind.”

“Manage all right?”

“Doing fine,” Steadman said, his anger rising. He had come here to be alone.

“Watch your step.”

This was too much, “Watch your fucking step!”—and he swiped with his cane as though swatting a fly, slashing twice and catching something hard, a protrusion he thought was the handrail, until a moment later the man uttered a strangled cry.

Then the man called out, “Daddy’s all right, Brett! Go back, son!”—warning the child who had preceded him up the stairs.

Steadman imagined the panting boy with red eyes and sweaty cheeks blushing with terror at seeing his father thrashed by a crazed blind man wheeling on the stairs. He had a glimpse of Blind Pew tottering on the road and snatching at Jim Hawkins, and he smiled at the confusion, father and son trying to reassure each other.

“Get the fuck out of my way!” Steadman said, and jabbed his stick at the man’s murmuring.

“Are you nuts?” The man was still gasping, probably nursing a wound, a welt somewhere the width of Steadman’s cane.

He slashed again, cutting the air with the sound of a whip and stepping to a lower tread on the stairs.

“Brett, be careful!” the man cried, his shriek turning womanish in panic. “Don’t come down here!”

And as Steadman raised his stick to strike once more, he was bumped again but softly, and sensed that the man was pushing past him, shaking the wooden stairs with his stamping feet, climbing up toward the road, hauling himself with desperate pulls on the handrail.

The angry energy of the confrontation still shivered in his muscles. He was exhilarated by his sudden aggression. And when he collected himself and resumed his descent, picking his way down, he thought, I can use that. It was why he had come, to collect such asides for his story, to verify impressions. He wanted to prove to himself that he could find his own way.

He wondered whether there was anyone else on the beach. He had been down here only a few times. He knew it was a narrow pocket beach, bouldery, with patches of sand, at the foot of a high vertical bluff, north-facing, of crumbled stone and loose gravel. The secluded spot was approachable only by the long wooden stairway that was like an old-fashioned fire escape at the rear of a tall tenement.

The water crashed and collapsed, the continuous slosh of Vineyard Sound, small lumpy waves that nagged at the shore. Steadman listened for voices and almost tripped when he got to the bottom of the stairs and stepped onto a pillow shape of soft sand. Then he let go of the rail and tapped his cane, whacking rock, poking pebbles, making his way along the wall of the bluff.

“Hello?”

Hearing no reply, he turned to the right, where he knew the widest beach was, but even so, after a few steps he strayed into the water and wet his shoes and trouser cuffs. He stopped again to listen for voices and thought he heard the stairs creak, trodden by weight from high up at the cliff face. He concentrated hard: nothing.

Seeing a blind man, a stranger would say, as all the others had done, “Want a hand?” and would encumber him with insincere assistance. He hated being asked, hated being noticed, being visibly crippled, with a perpetual frown of consternation. He smiled remembering his fury: Get the fuck out of my way! _

“Who is it?” he called out, because the wash of the sea at the shore obscured all other sounds,

He was alone. He had to be, or what was the point? He crawled onward like a dog, using his hands on a stretch of sand, and soon found himself bumping his way through waist-high boulders. They were set in a slope, like a revetment against the bluff. Touching them he was able to trace veins and cracks in the granite, and moving slowly he noticed with his slick fingers that many of them had bunches of kelp pinched between them, or swags of sea-rotted rope.

One slab of ramp-like rock was lying aslant the beach. It was so smooth, so warmed by the sun, he crept onto it and braced himself, and then he lay with his back against it. Its hardness and its heat penetrated his spine and soothed him.

In the rise and fall of the breaking chop just offshore he replayed his story of the blind man’s wife, moving through its current — the narrative seemed to him like moving water — reminding himself of its progress. The reclusive, unsuspicious man of some accomplishment was content until the younger woman tempted him. As though drugged and bewitched he fell in love with her, became possessed, then disenchanted, and finally blinded. Only when he was blind did he see the truth. He had been greedy, he had succumbed to temptation, he had wanted too much.

He liked it for having the rough splintery elements of a folktale. Was this a short story or an episode in a larger narrative of temptation and possession? He posed this question in a dark room — as dark as where he lay now — where two temptresses were teasing each other and tormenting him. He drowsed as these swaggering and tumbled waves, topped with mermaid’s hair, shouldered their way toward shore.

Then he was asleep, and the sound of the water washed away his story and imposed on his receptive mind a dream in which he lay canted on a raft like the black castaway in the Winslow Homer painting that showed sharks’ fins in the water. He was that castaway, and the raft was sliding down the deep and rounded face of a swell as he struggled to stay on board, the wind twitching at one side of his face and his palms and fingers pressing the barnacled edges of the raft. He sensed he was sliding to his death.

Spatters of sea spray reached his eyes, and the tearing sound of the sea became louder until, startled, he awoke as a wave washed across his feet and lower legs. He stood and stumbled in water up to his knees. Instinctively he scrambled, but the wrong way, into the sea, then fell and foundered in the cold water and believed he was drowning. He was too alarmed to cry out. He lost his cane in his fall but felt for a handhold on a rock and gripped it, raising himself for air.

Listening for the shore and slapping the water around him, he found some boulders and braced himself more securely. When he got his breath he hauled himself to the larger boulders that he guessed were part of the sea wall at the base of the cliff. He was soaked, he was in darkness, the sea was loud, and he was trembling. But he was alive.

The water had risen while he had napped. He had forgotten the unforgiving tide. This was to have been a brief foray down the steep stairs below the jaw of West Chop, a search for color, a literary outing, something to give him confidence. Now he was in sodden clothes and heavy water-soaked shoes, and he was gripping a rock, slashing his fingers on the sharp crust of button-like barnacles and periwinkles. The important thing was to remain calm, but he knew he had to find the stairs and climb out of this place, for there was more of the tide to come. High tide took away the beach, washed over the rocks; high tide was a flood of deepening water, way over his head.

“Anyone here?” he called out. Then, reluctantly, in a timid, testing way, “Help!”

He hated his small tentative voice. But he knew he had to call out. He tried again, louder, like a hoarse boy trying to be brave. If anyone had been there and heard him, they would have come to his aid. No one replied.

He moved as quickly as he could across the boulders, but after a few steps he lost his footing and became frantic and fell. Toppling, he went stupid, and he thrashed, twisted his arm, grazed his ear, banged his head like someone at the mercy of a bully. The physical pain made him more fearful. Still he scrabbled forward, crabwise on the boulders. They were slippery now with wet thickened seaweed.

Where were the stairs? The markers he had mentally noted — the boulders, the pebbly patches, the cushions of sand — were underwater, sunken by the tide.

All that was left of the shrunken beach were the boulders massed at the foot of the cliff, a vertical eminence that was the island’s wall. And he kept being assaulted. The brimming tide slammed his back with clouts of cold water.

Hanging on to the biggest boulder he could find, he felt for the steps, gasping all the while — frenzied breaths, gulps of air, salt water in his mouth. The sound of his own breathing was like the harsh wheeze of desperate fear, and it terrified him further. The splash of the water was loutish, indifferent, brutal — rising, falling; and though his head was teeming, the water was like a muscle without a mind, pushing him, pulling him. He would be separated, he would float free of the island, to be dragged down to choke to death in the sea.

As he lifted his face to the bluff, seeing only darkness, something plopped against his forehead. It just missed his right eye, and he knew when it fell farther, dropping to his shoulder, that it was a pebble. Had it been loosened from the cliff wall? He ducked, afraid there might be more, then looked up again, and again was staring into darkness.

Another pebble hit him, striking the top of his ear, hard enough to sting. And before he could react, another. He snatched at that last one and pressed it in his fingers. A pebble sucked smooth as a bead by the rolling water.

“Hey!” he called out.

And like a reply, something blunt and deliberate, another pebble struck his sore ear.

7

THE WELL-AIMED PEBBLES proved that someone was watching him and gave him hope of being saved. Yet there was no answer to his cries except more pebbles. Pock! He was popped on the shoulder with another one as this thought occurred to him. So it seemed like a game, a child’s game, a wicked child’s game of torment — and he was hit again, he called out again. What heartless bastard would torment a helpless blind man struggling in a swirling shore break?

Yet he had felt safer as soon as he guessed that the thrown pebbles were deliberate. He hugged the slippery boulder, his legs dragging in the push of the sea, the waves strengthening on the flooding tide. He called out again with thinning breath, his throat narrow with fear, and turned his hopeful face to the cliff. There came another targeted and bigger pebble. It stung one of his dead eyes and he thought, I’m lost.

The pebbles that had reassured him now threatened him, convincing him that whoever was watching him struggle wanted him to suffer.

“Who are you?”

A heavier hostile stone hit him on the head. Steadman clawed his hair and panicked at the thought of more of them, of being stoned to death.

“That hurt!” he called out in a child’s pleading voice.

The force of that last stone told him that whoever was chucking the stones was not far away. But while the first one had struck him lightly, as if lobbed, this one punished him with a painful lump.

A demented person was doing this, someone enjoying the sight of his being shoved by the rising tide and bullied by the slap of waves.

“Why are you doing that?”

Another pebble struck him. Reacting to it, he twisted his head and got a mouthful of seawater from a reaching wave. He gagged, and as he spewed he was hit again. He was quick enough to drag it off his shoulder as it landed and fling it back. His throw was so awkward he thought he heard a mocking laugh, though the sound of mockery could also have been the sound of the rough water around him.

“Please help me,” he called out.

A mass of small jeering pebbles smashed against his wet head.

“Can you hear me? I don’t know how much longer I can hold on.”

A single pebble struck his cheek like an insult.

“If it’s you, I’m sorry I hit you,” he called, remembering the man he had thrashed on the stairs. “Mister!” There was no response. He called again, “Ava?”

This time there was laughter, a low cough, the mirthless vindictive laugh of a man unused to laughing. It came again, a dry bark of unimpressed surprise.

In saying Ava’s name Steadman knew he had given himself away. “You think your girlfriend hates you like this?”

He heard sink, he heard zis, and he said, “Manfred.”

The two pebbles that hit him after that were the equivalent of “Of course.”

“Help me,” Steadman said, glad again but scarcely audible, splashed by the rising slop of the surf as he spoke. He felt foolish, his whole head dripping as he tested the boulders beneath him. He attempted a firmer footing, bracing his heel.

“Stay in the place where you are.”

The truculent voice was nearer and it, too, suggested the wavering sound of a man dodging waves and trying to keep his balance.

“How did you find me?”

“I never lost you.”

“The car in the driveway?”

“I was ever following you.”

Steadman remembered: the car that had been tailgating them when Wolfbein took him out, and the person that the old man Cubbage had mentioned.

“Ever since New York!”

“Why?”

“So to see.”

Hearing him, having this conversation, Steadman was giddy. Manfred! Moments ago he had felt lost, and now he was sure he would live.

“What do you want? I’ll give it to you. Just help me.”

Manfred’s low cough was a laugh of defiance that seemed to say “Never.”

“What I want? Maybe I want to see you die.”

“Manfred, please.”

“You make me a jackass in Ecuador, on the river. And in Quito. After I helped you find that amazing datura, all those lies. And I lose my job and my credibility because of you. I try to talk to you and you smash my tape recorder. You try to punish me. So, maybe I punish you.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know why.”

“I know why. Because you felt strong.”

“Maybe.” And as he spoke the water bellied under him and lifted him and almost tore his fingers from the rock. “Give me a hand. Where are the stairs?”

“You are not strong now. I could let you die. I could just watch you.” “I’ll give you whatever you want.”

“You are nothing now.” And nossing said it all.

“Please,” he said with a piteous catch in his voice.

“But I am sorry — yah — you are really blind.”

With a shriek that was so assertive it sounded like a boast, Steadman cried, “I can’t see a thing!”

“That is so incredible, yah.” Manfred was unmoved. “It spoils my story, my exposé, to get my job back. I want to unmask you.”

“I have no mask. I’m blind. Manfred, I can’t hang on.”

Steadman wanted to say more when another wave hit him hard and thrust him against the embankment. Before he could recover the water plucked him and dragged him down, rolling him underwater. He surfaced with pleading hands.

“Take this.”

A piece of cloth slapped Steadman’s arm. He grabbed it, the sleeve of a wet sweatshirt.

“Just hold it. Don’t touch me. I don’t trust people in the water. You keep one side of the shirt, I keep the other side. Do as I say or I let go and you drown.”

“Where are the stairs?”

“So incredible to see your desperateness. You are weak now.”

“Manfred, if you don’t help me I’ll drown.”

“A big scoop for me. Maybe I can find your body.”

“You wouldn’t do that. You’re joking.”

After a pause there came a growling chuckle. “Did you ever hear me make a joke?”

The wind had picked up, the sky went dark. Steadman felt the chill of the building clouds on his face. The cold salt spray soaked his head. Now he realized that because Manfred was implacable he had no hope. Manfred seemed glad to see him trapped. Steadman thought he might weep, dissolving in his darkness at this noisy edge of the ocean, pressed against the West Chop cliff, dying so near home.

“What is it you want from me?”

“I want my job back.”

“I can make that happen.”

“And for my researches I want you to describe the drugs and the blindness. Some people it works on, others it has no effect. It is useless for me, just makes me sick. But for you it is effective.”

“I’ll tell you everything,” he said with a kind of timid gratitude.

“And the skull. You talked about it. You must say you are a liar and a cheat.”

“I promise. I swear to you, I’ll let you tape-record it.”

Another dry bark of laughter and “Sank you!” With a click like a thrown switch came a whir, and another click, and “let you tape-record it.

“Please don’t let go,” Steadman said, because in concentrating on his tape recorder Manfred had loosened his grip on his end of the shirt.

“You were taking drugs for your book. And you lied. Not a poor unlucky man with an accident, but a liar and an arrogant.”

“I admit it.”

Steadman felt the sleeve of the sweatshirt go slack.

“Maybe I just let go and leave you here.”

Steadman was chest-deep in swirling seawater, treading the submerged rocks. The loud tide slapped the diffside. He was reaching with his free hand, snatching at the soaked shirt with the other, when he heard a commotion above him, a rackety agitated voice.

“That’s him. That’s the man!”

In a different, denying tone, Manfred said, “I do nossing.”

“The one in the water, Officer. He tried to knock my son down the stairs. He assaulted me. Don’t cry, Brett, it’s going to be all right.” “What’s going on here?” A different voice.

“It’s okay, Officer,” Manfred said. With that he pulled on the shirt and brought Steadman nearer. “I am helping my friend.”

“Not that one — the other one!” said the angry man.

“This man is blind,” Manfred said.

“He threatened me!”

“Hold on, sir.”

“He hit me! That’s assault with a weapon! A stick. A shod foot.”

“Back off, sir. Give them room.”

“Officer, I am an attorney!” the man screeched, but his voice was receding, as though he were being led up the stairs.

Feeling the wet sleeve tighten further, Steadman lowered his head. He steadied himself in the water with his free hand and gripped harder and let himself be tugged to the foot of the stairs.

“Easy,” Manfred said, and helped Steadman up, placing his hand on the rail.

He was soaked, trembling with fatigue and panic as if tumbled in a black barrel of water, and still in darkness. He groped on the stairs, pulling himself onward, aware that Manfred was bumping along beside him. He sobbed and laughed and said, “Thank you!”

At the top of the stairs he fell to his knees and breathed deeply. Out of the wind, away from the water, he was hot, as though he had crawled up the cliff into a different day. In that moment his blindness didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except that he was alive.

Then he heard from a little distance, “Aren’t you going to do anything, Officer?”

“Step away, sir. This man is in shock.”

Manfred said, “I take him home.” He guided Steadman to his car and helped him in. As soon as he shut the door, he wrapped Steadman in a blanket and said, “I would not let you drown but I like to see you in trouble. That was nice.”

Feeling tearful, Steadman did not reply.

“You thought I was your girlfriend throwing things at you. That is very funny.”

Steadman wondered why he had called her name. Perhaps an effect of “The Blind Man’s Wife,” his belief that their love affair was over. He said, “I’ve been desperate. She found me a doctor — for my eyes. Nothing works.” He fell silent. “I’ve had a hard time.”

“Too much of cars on this island,” Manfred said, braking. Then the familiar cough and bark — he was amused. “You went to a doctor! Ha!” “A specialist.”

“Even more funny.”

“They’ve prescribed all sorts of medicine.”

“There is only one medicine.”

Driving, grunting at the traffic, Manfred spoke almost without thought, in the most literal way.

“You are unhappy. You are sick. You take medicine. But this is not the same. If someone gets sick because of a shaman, only a shaman can make it right. The way up is the way down. You don’t know this? The medicine that makes you sick, the same medicine will cure you.”

“You think so?”

“This I know.”

“You could have told me in New York.”

“No. I thought your blindness was false.” He said, “I hear of it with datura but I never see it. Why you behave so bad?”

“It was different,” Steadman said. “I was blind but I had a kind of inward vision. I had perception. I could move. I was happy.”

“Yah?”

“Then I had no control. Everything went black.”

“With how much of the drug?”

“No drug. I had saturated myself, maybe destroyed some nerves.”

“Funny, I never hear about this before. But the shaman, he knows.”

“That man on the river?”

“Yah. Don Pablo — my friend. A healing shaman they call him.”

Manfred was making turns through the outskirts of Vineyard Haven, all the narrow one-way streets, cursing the other drivers as he spoke. Then he seemed to remember again.

“You went to a doctor!”

Steadman said, “Help me, Manfred. Take me there. I’ll do anything you ask.”

“You must pay. And I want my job back. I want my good name back. I am not a thief. My father was a good man. You must help me.”

“Yes.”

“And I want your story.”

“My story is all I have.”

“That’s why I want it. Your story must belong to me. You must belong to me.” He kept driving, straighter now on the up-island road. “Say yes and we will go.”

Steadman stared into the darkness. He said, “You want directions to my house?”

Manfred said, “You think I don’t know the way?”