Odyssey (3 page)

The sun had gone down. He knew this because of the chill on his skin. He reached for the blanket but it was gone. Galeta, the cleaning lady, had rearranged things again. But in spite of the cold he drifted off, imagining that he was in Eagle James’s rowboat without an oar on a wide, placid lake. He could hear the burble of fish gliding beneath him, imagining the lines of their passage through the chill waters. There was the sun above, filtered by water, and the stench of putrefaction coming in literal waves around him.

He was a fish aware only of sensation and broken images through the blue-green lens of underwater life. He had no brain, or at least very little. The watery world was revolving—a rotation within the orbit of the planet. He could feel the earth moving and himself projected in a world where up and down and even gravity were relative terms.

“How do you feel?” the dream image of Seth Offeran asked.

“Free.”

“What do you want?”

Instead of answering, Sovereign felt a band of pain across his chest. This was a pain he always felt after swimming the first few days of summer.

“Your fins need exercise,” his father would say.

“Come lie down,” his mother told him.

And then the phone rang.

The first jangled report was modulated by the water. The second salvo of sound coincided with him rising up from the lake. By the fifth ring the answering machine engaged and Sovereign realized that he was lying on his side on the sofa.

“This is the phone line of Sovereign James,” the machine said. “I’m not in right now or else I’m otherwise engaged. Please leave a message and I will return your call forthwith.”

There was a beep and then a few seconds of silence.

“Sovy?” a woman’s voice asked tentatively. “Sovy, are you there? I don’t know why you won’t return my calls. I mean, I still care about you. I want to help. Please let me come over. The doorman told me that you didn’t want to see me. I need to hear that from you. You owe me that much.…”

The room started spinning and Sovereign sat up.

“No matter what has happened between us I still care for you,” Valentina continued. “We need to talk. Sovy … Sovereign.”

There was a moment of silence and then the click of a phone being disengaged. Nausea from the spinning brought Sovereign to his feet. When he stood, the feeling of motion stopped.

He stood there with his hands hanging down, a sentry in the darkness—a man, he felt, who was soon to disappear.

The next day one of Sovereign’s regular drivers, Reuben Quinta, dropped him off in front of the 86th Street building.

“If you swing back around at three-oh-five I’ll be standing right out front,” Sovereign said, and then he maneuvered his hand to give Reuben a three-dollar tip and a handshake.

“You got it, Mr. James.”

The heat of the sun was beating down. Sovereign turned one hundred and eighty degrees, walked the nine steps to the first door of the vestibule, opened the door, and took two and half steps more to the second portal. He walked straight to the back wall of the entrance room, touched the wall in an act of friendly spatial recognition after ten and a half paces, then walked directly to the Craigson Group’s door without touching the wall or even really counting his steps. He pushed the door open and smiled to himself that he was right about its not being locked or latched.

Even inside the office where Offeran had guided him, Sovereign felt that he remembered the path. He came to where he thought the door was but encountered a wall. To the left he found a door and knocked.

No answer.

He knocked again.

The knob jiggled and clicked. A slight movement of air told Sovereign that a door had opened.

“Yes?” a woman’s voice asked. “Can I help you?”

She was shy of five six, half a foot shorter than Sovereign.

“I was looking for Dr. Offeran. I was sure that this was his door.”

“He’s the pink door behind you.”

“Directly behind me?”

After a pause the woman said, “Yes.”

“I’m here, Mr. James,” Offeran’s voice said. “Right behind you.”

“Thank you,” Sovereign said to the woman before him. Then he turned and headed in the direction of his doctor’s voice.

He had the feeling of passing through a doorway.

“Couch is just a few steps ahead of you,” Seth Offeran said.

As he was seating himself Sovereign heard the door to the office close.

“That was inaccurate language for a blind man,” James said.

“What?”

“ ‘A few steps.’ That could mean two or four. I mean, I know in usage it means three, but most people aren’t aware of that fact.”

“Sorry,” Offeran said. “I’ll use the correct number from now on.”

Again Sovereign felt as if he had scored a point in some kind of unique game. But this time the victory felt hollow.

“How did you sleep?” the doctor asked.

“Fine, great. You know, the only time I ever see anything is in my dreams.”

“Did you dream about me?”

“Yes, I did.”

“What did I look like in your dream?”

Sovereign smiled. “Is this some kind of trick, Doctor?”

“No. I was wondering if you might have let an image of me in even though you believe that you have not seen me.”

“So you agree with Dr. Tomcat that I’m really not blind but fakin’ it.”

“No. I believe what you’re telling me. But that doesn’t discount the possibility that you’re suffering from conversion disorder.”

“What’s that?”

“That is when a person redirects the focus of a severe anxiety into the manifestation of a psychosomatic illness. This could be paralysis, general numbness, or the interruption of one of the senses—including sight.”

If this were a boxing match, Sovereign thought, he’d be flat on his back at this moment.

“I didn’t see you,” he said, mentally getting to his feet. “You asked a question but I didn’t see your face.”

“What did I ask?”

“I don’t remember.” This was true.

“What was the rest of the dream about …?”

The hour was used up talking about Eagle James and the boat that Sovereign knew of but had never seen. He enjoyed talking about his family and their stories. This hour, and many more after that, allowed him access to a world that he thought he’d left behind after going off to college and starting his professional life
as a human resources revolutionary.

“Why did Valentina break it off with you?” Dr. Seth Offeran asked on the following Tuesday, the seventh session of Sovereign’s therapy.

“She didn’t want children,” Sovereign said. “I told you that already.”

“Was that something new for her?”

“No, we had kinda agreed on it,” Sovereign said, haltingly.

“Was there any more to it?”

“She had worked for Techno-Sym and I’d given her a glowing recommendation for her new position at Jolly Jake’s Virtual Arcade Corporation.”

“And you told her about it?”

“No. No. I guess they’re pretty loose at Jolly Jake’s and the employment director let her take a look at her file. She called and asked me out to lunch.”

“And you went?”

“I didn’t see why not,” Sovereign said. “I had no idea that she had seen my recommendation, and anyway … she was married.”

“Married?”

“Yes, to another employee of Techno-Sym. Verso Andrews.”

“And what was the lunch about?”

“Like I said, she’d read my letter to JJ’s Arcade and wanted to thank me. We talked and I told her that she had always been an outstanding employee who did the job because of professionalism and not for any other reason.

“You have to understand, Doctor, I look at work as a political act. All other things being equal—it doesn’t matter about the race or gender of the employee but only their attitude.”

“And Valentina was thankful,” Offeran said.

“She came home with me and stayed until late that night. Two weeks later she left Verso and got a place about eight blocks from my apartment building. She made it clear that she would be my girlfriend but that we could never marry or have a conventional life together.”

“How did that make you feel?”

“I had a girlfriend then,” Sovereign said. “Her name was, still is, Claudette. Claudy had been talkin’ to me about kids for almost a year. ‘It’s time for me to start a family,’ she’d say before we went to bed, and, ‘You know I want to have a little girl,’ she’d say when we woke up in the morning. Almost every day she’d say something about it, especially after we had sex.”

“And you didn’t want to have a child with her,” the doctor concluded.

“
She
didn’t want to have a child with me.”

“But she said—”

“She said that she wanted a baby, that she wanted a little girl. She never asked me if I wanted it. She was asking me to give her a baby like it was a gift or something.”

“So you felt left out.”

“Let me ask you something, Doctor.”

“What’s that, Mr. James?”

“If you had a patient tell you that he got shot in the chest, would you ask him if he
felt
like he was attacked?”

“I understand.”

“I hope so,” Sovereign James said. “ ’Cause Claudette wanted her own baby and her own family and I just happened to be the sperm donor who was on the other side of the bed at the time.”

“Did you want a child?”

“Not that child.”

“But what did you want, Sovereign?”

“I wanted a woman to take me by the hand, look me in the eye, and say, ‘I want your baby, daddy. Yours.’ ”

“And Claudette said that she wanted her own child.”

“Only reason I had to be in the room was that she couldn’t do it any other way.”

“But that’s not completely true,” Offeran countered. “She wanted you to father that child, those children, and to be with her as they grew.”

“I’m a romantic, Dr. Offeran,” Sovereign said after a brief silence. “I might be black, blind, and a revolutionary to boot, but I believe that a child between a man and a woman doesn’t have anything to do with a biological clock or a hormonal timetable.”

“You’re looking right into my eyes, Mr. James.”

“I am? Because I don’t see a damn thing.”

“Hey, Mr. James,” Roger Jones hailed from his window at the vestibule of the building.

Roger was the young doorman who helped him on the first day. They had been talking for a few days now.

“Hey, Roger.”

“Reuben is waiting at the corner. He couldn’t park in front of the building like usual.”

“Okay.”

“They gonna let you get back to work soon?”

“I don’t know yet. Everybody says that I’m not really blind and I’m just makin’ all this up.”

“How can they say that when they see how you are?”

“People believe in all kinds of things, Roger. That’s why the world is almost always at war.”

“I don’t get you.”

“If people weren’t so damn sure that they’re right all the time maybe we’d talk more and get things straight.”

That night Sovereign went over the talk with Offeran in minute detail. He had taken to doing this every night. The specifics of his conversations were almost
visible in his mind.

Is Claudette a black woman?
the doctor had asked.