Odyssey (5 page)

The next thing Sovereign knew, the heat of the sun was radiating across his face. He had fallen asleep thinking about his mentor and his own private rebellion against the racist overlords of a bankrupt system. Not enemies, but pieces on the other side of the chessboard—pawns who played their roles without cognition or true malice.

He took off his clothes from the day before, showered, shaved with a waterproof electric, took one of the four plastic pouches from the top drawer of his bureau that Galeta prepared for him twice a week, and dressed for the day.

He could make instant coffee and eat cereal for breakfast. Weetabix and two percent milk. At noon he left for the West Village diner that was two blocks from his apartment building—on Hudson Street. The counter waitress, Myna, would greet him from the spot where there was an empty stool and he’d say hello while getting to his seat.

This routine ran like clockwork and he felt comfortable with it.

Sitting down after greeting the waitress, Sovereign thought that blindness had always been a part of his life, of everyone’s life. There was so much that he didn’t see … but it took the loss of his sight to make him aware of the hollow darkness that surrounds everyone.

He had just ordered a grilled cheese sandwich with tomato soup when he sensed the movement of someone sitting in the stool beside him. It was a woman. He knew this because she wore perfume, not cologne.

“Hello,” he said to his new happenstance neighbor.

“Why’d you disconnect the phones, Sovy?” Valentina Holman said.

“Call me Sovereign.”

“What?”

“That’s my name, Sovereign James. Using my nickname makes it sound like we’re close, intimate, but we’re not.”

“We were very close.”

“But no longer.”

There was a long spate of silence. Sovereign knew that Valentina was thinking
of leaving. Maybe she’d go silently and he could eat in peace.

“Here you go, sugar,” the waitress, Myna, said. “Grilled yellow cheese and red soup. What can I get for you, honey?”

“Coffee,” Valentina said, “black.”

A beat, then two.

“I should have talked to you after I left,” she said at last. “I was wrong and I’m sorry about that.”

“I accept your apology,” he said. “We don’t have to talk about it again.”

“What if I want to talk about it?”

“That’s okay too.” He put a spoonful of soup in his mouth and burned his tongue.

“Too hot?” Valentina asked.

“I’m sorry too,” Sovereign said.

“About what?”

“Calling you last night. It was wrong for me to wake you up at that hour.”

“I was already awake,” she said softly, “thinking about you.”

“What about me?” Sovereign bit into his sandwich and burned his upper palate. He did this on purpose. He needed to feel pain in order to keep from saying things he ought not say.

“I’m just sorry that we had to break up … that’s all.”

Sovereign heard the words, knew what they’d be before she spoke them. He also knew the reply she expected:
It didn’t have to be. You’re the one who broke it off
. Once he said this she had the choice of a variety of responses, but all of them would end in her claim that he was attempting to control her and not admitting his own culpability in the demise of their relationship. Somewhere in the ensuing conversation she would let slip that if he had been able to allow her to articulate the way in which they dealt with each other, she might have given him what he wanted. This nearly unspoken revelation would hurt him and soon after she would say that she had to go—leaving him with the undeclared knowledge that he had sabotaged his own chance at happiness.

Blindness had granted him insight.

“You’re right,” he said.

For a moment silence accompanied the symphony of sightlessness.

“What does that mean?” Valentina said at last.

“I agree with you,” he said. “It’s a very sad thing, our breakup. Now we have to accept it and move on.”

The soup had cooled and the sandwich too. Sovereign’s mouth still burned but his mind was a deep dark pool of frigid water, a lake that sat deep below the ground filled with the laughter of blind, unheard, and undreamed-of fish.

“You aren’t angry?”

“I was never angry,” Sovereign said—both liar and truth teller. “I was only talking out of the pain I felt. You had the courage to leave. You did what I couldn’t do and so I yelled. I’m sorry.”

“What are you saying?” she asked amid the imagined laughter of fish.

“I hope that you and Verso are able to come to some kind of understanding,” Sovereign said. “Either you get back together or he can accept what went wrong.”

Reaching out his left hand, Sovereign closed his fingers around the chilly,
sweating water glass.

“How did you do that?” Valentina asked.

“What?”

“How did you know where the glass was?”

“Myna.”

“What?”

“Myna’s the waitress. She knows that I’m blind now and she always puts everything in the same place. That way I know exactly where to put my hands. I’ll show you.” Without turning his head away from Valentina, Sovereign moved his left hand through the air and let it descend on the leather bill folder. He flipped this open, then reached into its right front pocket, producing a twenty-dollar bill. He placed the money on top of the open folder and smiled.

“How did you know it was enough to cover the cost?” Valentina asked.

“My bills are separated into different pockets,” he said, “one for each denomination. In other countries they make the denominations different sizes, but here in America they make you work at it. I get the teller at the bank to help me with that. And Myna knows to stack the bills of my change from left to right starting at the edge of the leather wallet. If a denomination is missing she leaves a little gap to indicate it.”

“So,” Valentina said, “you accept the breakup now?”

“Yes.”

“I wish you had been able to do it earlier,” she said.

“Me too,” Sovereign replied from deep within his underground grotto.

“Will we still be friends?”

“As long as you want.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Valentina asked, still, Sovereign thought, looking for a way to get the upper hand.

“That I will answer your calls and you can come visit whenever you want.”

“No hard feelings?”

“Lots of feeling,” he said, “but none of it hard.”

The sway of the conversation reminded Sovereign of his grandfather’s boat. He was that vessel, floating away from shore, soon to be lost. He wasn’t sad but merely lonely.

“What are you thinking?” Valentina asked.

“About my grandfather.”

“What about him?”

“One day we were standing next to this big lake. I said, ‘Look at that lake, Granddad,’ and he said, ‘I see the little of it that I can see.’ And when I asked him what he meant, he said, ‘I can’t see the bottom and I can’t see the other side. What I do see is only a very little part of what makes up the lake that I know to be there.’ ”

“Did he really say that or are you just making it up?” Valentina asked. For the first time her voice carried some of its old mirth.

“I’m pretty sure he said it,” Sovereign replied, “but you know memory is like that lake—you think you know it but you never have it all.”

“I have to get back to work.”

“I’m glad you came here, Valentina. I’m glad you found me.”

“I remembered you used to come here for lunch on your days off,” she said.

“I’m glad.”

“Good-bye,” she said, and he felt a feathery kiss on his left eyebrow. After a few moments he realized that she was gone.

He thought that maybe he hadn’t tricked her after all, that maybe he’d broken a cycle in himself and not between them. Maybe his grandfather had lectured him on the unconscious shortsightedness of men for just such a day as this.

“Were you lying?” Seth Offeran asked an hour and a half later.

“I thought I was,” Sovereign said. “But when I think about it, maybe it was the only way that I could speak the truth.”

“Explain.”

“Everything I do is a game, Doctor. Every word, every question or statement or answer I give is designed to help me win.”

“Win what?”

“I don’t know.… I mean, I used to think that I knew. Getting my parents to think I was the best over my brother and sister, getting the top grades, or making the team. Even in the lunchroom I’d try to be the most popular by making fun of other kids’ problems or differences.”

“And that was winning?” Seth Offeran asked.

“I thought so. People always seem to be trying to get the upper hand. Valentina was trying to in our conversation. She wanted to put the blame for our breakup on me. She feels that it was my fault for wanting children and not the relationship she’d offered. She couldn’t say that, so she wanted me to act brutish so she could reject me for the way I treated her.”

“You can’t be sure of that.”

“Do you think I’m wrong about her?”

Sovereign counted the seconds—one, one thousand, two, one thousand, three, one thousand—while Offeran thought about the question. As he counted he realized that he wasn’t trying to win anything. This insight made him wish that he could see the psychoanalyst’s face. He wanted to make eye-to-eye connection with the man and was sorry that he could not.

“No,” Offeran said at last. “From everything you’ve told me about Valentina and your talk I believe that she would try to shift the responsibility for the breakup to you. But can you blame her?”

“No. She’s a very ambitious woman, but success for her is more emotional than it is material. She needs to believe that she’s done the right thing. Guilt undermines her claim on success.”

“Like losing does for you,” Offeran added.

“Just so.”

“Are you playing me right now, Sovereign?”

“I don’t believe I am. I’m beginning to like these talks. And … and I only short-circuited the talk with Valentina because I really do think she’s right.”

“Right about what?”

“If I had approached her differently, if I had shared my feelings with her rather than just thrown the idea of a child on the table like some kind of stillborn hope, maybe … maybe we could have talked about it—learned something.”

“So you stymied her attempt to blame you because what she would have said was true and you were trying to protect yourself from the pain of that truth.”

“Yes.”

“Has any of your sight returned?”

“No.”

“Not even a glimmer?”

“No. Why do you ask?”

“That’s why we’re here,” Offeran replied. “We’re here to unknot the psychological basis for your blindness. Every time I notice a change in you I will ask the same question.”

At that moment Sovereign’s head jerked to the right.

“What was that?” the doctor asked.

“A tic, a spasm. I’ve been having them ever since I lost my sight.”

“There’s a fly in here today,” Offeran said. “I heard it buzz behind me just before your head moved.”

“So?”

“So maybe you saw the fly and responded on an unconscious level.”

“I didn’t see anything.”

“Our time is up for today.”

In the Red Rover car service car and through the front door of his apartment building, up the elevator and on the way to his white sofa, Sovereign was thinking; he was thinking about that fly and how quickly his head moved. He’d heard the buzzing too, but he didn’t remember seeing anything.…

The idea that he made up his condition seemed preposterous. How could a man make himself not see the world around him? Like a child denying the obvious. But he wasn’t a frightened boy. Sovereign was a man who lived in the world, made a living, made a difference. How could such a person be petulant and stubborn enough to shut down an entire sense?

It was ridiculous.

Putting the absurd notion out of his mind, Sovereign set about doing his daily exercises.

From the first full day of his blindness he realized that he’d have to work out. It was the home-delivery pizza and Chinese food that convinced him. He was eating badly and too much. He had once been a fat man. It took years of changing his eating habits to get down to a normal weight. Now that he was eating junk food again he’d have to balance it another way.