Odyssey (17 page)

She ran her thumb down the underside of the older man’s penis with a little more pressure and the phallus pushed back.

She smiled at that.

“But I’m so much older than you are,” he said, feeling the thrill and rise in his shoulders.

“Up where I come from, girls got boyfriends twenty years older than them all the time.”

“I’m even older than that.”

“We been together, Mr. James,” she said. “We got to know each other. So what if they think sumpin’ else?”

“What if they hold it against us in court?”

“So what?” she asked. “I’m’a cut off my hands so they cain’t put handcuffs on me?”

Sovereign laughed and Toni climbed up to kiss him. He moved his head once
but she took hold of his hair and lowered her lips on his.

After a long and promising kiss, Sovereign said, “I’ll call the lawyers and tell them what we’ve decided. But right now I have to start getting ready to go to work.”

“Do you have to go?” she said with a playful whine.

“Yes. We’re going to need the money.”

“Can I stay here and watch TV?”

“My house is yours.”

Sovereign arrived at Techno-Sym at nine fifty-seven that morning. The company had done well forming partnerships throughout Asia, making tools that facilitated the furtherance of mass production techniques that helped the Eastern juggernaut compete so well with Western corporations.

We are a cancer on the American labor field
, Martin LeRoy used to say to Sovereign.
Sometimes the White House and Senate send people down here to question us about what we’re doing for the Chinese and Vietnamese factories. They can’t shut us down so they use us kinda like spies
.

“Mr. James!” Shelly Monteri, Sovereign’s secretary, was surprised to see him that morning.

“Miss Monteri.”

Her parents were Bolivian but despite her ecru skin she seemed to identify herself as white. He didn’t mind her internal confusion. The war he was conducting had nothing to do with consciousness. A black pawn could think that it was a migrating flamingo for all he cared.

“We …” Shelly stammered, “we weren’t told that you were coming back.… I … I … I mean coming in today.”

“Who’s been doing my job while I was gone?”

“Mrs. Malloy.”

“When Myrna gets here tell her that I’m back and that I’ll be resuming my duties.”

His office was longer than it was wide. But it felt substantial—not like a tunnel or passage. The broad cherrywood desk sat at the far end under a high window that opened upon north 5th Avenue. His back had always been turned to the outside. He rarely stood by the old-fashioned green-tinted glass to look down on the avenue and its denizens.

The corporate persons, those institutions that have hijacked the rights of citizens
, Professor Jane Mithrill would lecture,
have effectively reduced Americans’ status as citizens to that of mere denizens
.

Sovereign looked at the people in the street, hundreds of them, walking with purpose down the sidewalks, on green and amber lights. There were cars and taxis, buses and bicycles rushing along, carrying passengers with feigned
citizenship. Or maybe, he thought, Jane had been wrong—not wrong exactly, because it was true that a mere majority of votes could not enforce the will of the people, not wrong but off about the misplaced emphasis with which she had arrogantly dismissed the only chance that the servants of business had.

“Miss Monteri?” Sovereign said into the intercom.

“Yes, Mr. James?”

“Get in touch with Darius Maynard and ask him to come to my office … if he will.”

“Yes, sir.”

After that he entered his home number on the phone’s number pad, something that he could not remember ever having done before.

“Hello?” Toni Loam said.

“Hey.”

“I was thinkin’ about you,” she said.

“What were you thinking?”

“That I like a uncircumcised man. It’s like he givin’ me a handle and a place to put my tongue.”

“You know I don’t need you to talk to me like that, girl.”

“You just don’t think you do,” Toni said. “You think that ’cause you fi’ty, you done lived all them years and gathered up everything there is to know. But I know things that you don’t know. I know that you need me to talk about your dick because I seen it and it was mine.”

They talked awhile longer and then the intercom buzzed.

“I got to go, Toni.”

“What time you comin’ home?”

Home
. He thought about the word. It meant something different when Toni said it. There were echoes and reverberations in that shivering syllable.

Darius Maynard was tall and brownish yellow in color. He wore light suits as a rule and hand-knotted bow ties. He never wore a white shirt but dark primary colors, like navy or twilight-forest green. His hair was thick and nappy, not too long, and not processed either.

“Mr. James,” he said with only mild belligerence in his tone.

“Sit down, Darius.” This was the first time that Sovereign had ever used a first name when directly addressing a fellow employee.

Maynard seemed to recognize this transgression, giving his superior an odd glance as he sat.

“You wanted to see me?”

Unconsciously, Sovereign brought all the tips of his fingers together before his chest. Neither was he aware of the slight smile on his face.

Darius was the ideal employee, in the older man’s eyes. He’d come from a working-class family in Pittsburgh and had attended a state school. He was smart and, even better, hardworking. He knew how to get along with others but had not forsaken his race for a paycheck.

“I read about you in the paper, Mr. James,” Maynard said to fill the silence.

“Oh?”

“It was in the
Post
. They said you were in jail.”

Anger mixed with hope
, Sovereign thought.
Millions of everyday denizens had wasted their lives sipping on that cocktail
.

“Do you have something to ask me?” Darius Maynard said.

The question startled James.

“Excuse me, Mr. Maynard,” he said, coming back to himself. “The … the experience of blindness has made me talk a little less. I think it was because I was listening all the time.”

“I wasn’t sayin’ anything.”

“I know. The listening is kind of a peripheral exercise. You know, like seeing out of the corner of your eye. For some reason sight and sound are connected.”

Sovereign put his hands flat on the desk and stared at the brown bow tie with its little yellow polka dots.

“Am I here for some reason?” Darius Maynard asked the odd inquisitor.

“Do you remember the day you came to me for your last interview?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I asked you about your socks. You wore a coal-gray suit with bright pink cotton socks and black shoes.”

“I remember. You said that you expected any man you hired to wear sensible socks to work.”

“That was two declarations in one sentence,” Sovereign said. “First that you were hired, and second, that I needed a certain sense of decorum from you.”

Darius’s face was vaguely square shaped, though to James it seemed that it should have been round. The young man’s expression was serious and wondering.

“You know what I would have said to a white man wearing a black suit and pink socks?”

Darius just stared, waiting.

“Do you?” James prompted.

“No.”

“Nothing. Not a goddamned thing. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I think so.”

For a while the employer and employee sat facing each other. Sovereign, for his part, could feel the world spinning and other worlds within turning on their own gyres.

Finally the older man said, “I tell you this because I have a question for you.”

“For me?”

“Yes. I want you to tell me if what I’ve been doing is right.”

Darius glowered.

“How can I answer that?” the younger man said.

“If you can’t, you can’t. I won’t hold it against you. I never told anybody about this before. Nobody.”

“You use that criterion on every hire?” the data analyst asked.

Sovereign nodded and looked away.

“The whole time you’ve worked here?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Is your question the answer to mine?”

A look of confusion passed over Darius’s face and then he shook his head.

“If it isn’t, then I’ll keep my answer until you give me yours,” Sovereign said.

“I think I should go back to my desk,” Maynard said.

“Okay. I’ll be here until I’m not anymore. You can come up anytime. I’ll be looking forward to it.”

At noon doughy Martin LeRoy showed up at Sovereign’s office. Over the day many of his fellow workers had come by to wish Sovereign well and say that they were happy to see him. Not one of them had called him in his absence. He knew somehow that this wasn’t because he was black but due to the fact that he was unapproachable, even aloof. No one, except LeRoy, felt close to him. And even though Martin hadn’t called he had sent a letter telling Sovereign that he hoped he got better soon.

Sending a letter to a blind man.

“Sovereign,” the short and chubby VP greeted him.

“Mr. LeRoy.”

“You can see again, huh?” LeRoy said, peering into the taller man’s face.

“Yes.”

“What was wrong?”

“No one knows. I was blind and then I could see.”

“Like they talked about in my grandmother’s church.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

LeRoy took a seat and Sovereign did too—not behind his desk but in the second visitor’s chair, next to his superior.

“The CEO called down to ask about you, Mr. James.”

“Oh?”

“He’s worried about the assault charges pending against you.”

“I wasn’t aware of any pending charges,” James said.

“Our legal department called the city prosecutor. He said that they were considering charges—assault, attempted murder, and if this Johnson dies, maybe manslaughter, maybe worse.”

“Oh.”

That bumblebee sprang to life in Sovereign’s chest.

“What do you intend to do?” LeRoy asked.

“My intentions are pretty much meaningless. What you do is more the question.”