Odyssey (6 page)

The first day he did three push-ups, seven abdominal crunches, and fifteen steps running in place, bringing his knees nearly up to his shoulders. He did this circuit of exercises three times and stopped, winded. By the end of the second week he’d gotten up to twelve push-ups, twenty-five crunches, fifty running-in-place
steps, and ten circuits. After that he’d only increased the repetitions. By that Wednesday afternoon he’d gotten up to thirty-two circuits. He liked the sweat and the fact that his muscles were getting hard.

After exercising and showering Sovereign went to the drawer where Galeta stored his casual clothes. He dressed and went out again.

“Where you going, Mr. James?” Axel Parman, one of the doormen, asked.

“Out. Going to walk around the block.”

“Good for you. You don’t want this kind of thing to get you down.”

Outside Sovereign heard the sounds of cars and footsteps, experienced the air and sun on his face. His muscles shook a bit from the hard exercise but that served only to increase his feeling of well-being. Tapping to the left with his white cane he hugged the wall of his block-square apartment building and went all the way around. He completed this circuit again, and again. He lost count of the times he’d walked around the building as his thoughts drifted.

He’d given Valentina something she desired. The walnut-eyed brunette had never expected anyone to recognize her for the person she wanted to be. And he, Sovereign, had long been waiting for a woman to offer herself to him with seemingly no strings attached.

“Has anybody ever sucked your dick like this?” she asked him not one hour after they’d had their first lunch together.

They were reclining on his white sofa and he was thinking,
Yes, they have, except no, they haven’t, because nobody ever asked that question before
. It was the way she talked to him that drove Sovereign wild.

And then, two weeks later, she said while riding him, “I’m leaving Verso.”

“Your husband?”

“I told him yesterday.”

“But …”

“Don’t worry, Sovy; I don’t want to move in on you. All you have to do is keep talking to me and keep that dick hard when I come over.”

She was twenty-one years younger than he and white and married (soon to be divorced), but Sovereign could not bring himself to break away.

Walking around the fourth corner of his building, blind as Justice, Sovereign felt that erection again.

“That was a good walk,” the doorman said.

Sovereign nodded but he didn’t say anything. He felt his way toward the elevator and pressed the button for the ninth floor. Down the hall Valentina’s number repeated itself again and again in his mind. He mumbled it while fumbling for the keyhole. He said it aloud as he slammed the front door shut. He imagined the bearded shape of her pubic hair and the glistening pink clitoris while his fingers searched for the phone on the high counter.

His heart was pounding. His muscles were trembling now with anticipation. But when he closed his fingers around the receiver he froze. It was as if a bucket of ice had been thrown down his pants.

He dropped the phone back into its cradle and climbed onto one of his three red leather-and-chrome stools. Sitting there he realized that it was the feeling he had that he wanted, the memory of a seduction by error.

It was finished. It was done.

A shadow moved over his sightless eyes and Sovereign once again wondered if he had made himself blind so that he could no longer see how lost he was.

“And what about that shadow you say passed over you?” Seth Offeran asked.

“That was three weeks ago,” Sovereign said.

“You haven’t seen it again?”

“No.”

“Any sudden head movements?”

“I believe you, Doctor.”

“What?”

“I believe that I’m not really blind. I think that you’re right. Last night I dreamed that I could see again. It was so real, so powerful that I got up off my sofa and went to turn on the light. But when I got there I realized that it was already on and I was still in darkness. I thought that once I accepted what you say that my sight would come back … at least partly.”

“Obviously you haven’t accepted that you’re the cause of the affliction.”

“But I know it’s true.”

“Knowledge is a strong thing, but what you feel is stronger.”

A hum came up from out of Sovereign’s chest, what sounded to him like the approach of a giant wasp in a low-budget science fiction movie from the fifties. He sat back against the cushions of the therapist’s couch with no fear of knives or shards of glass cutting into his kidneys.

“It’s a process, Mr. James. You have experienced a powerful trauma and then you forgot it. We are here to bring that experience to light.”

“You think that spouting a metaphor is gonna give me back my vision?”

“I think that you wake up from a dream and reach out for the light switch. I think that your whole life has been in shadow.”

“What shadow?” Sovereign James asked.

“Maybe not a solitary shadow,” Offeran said, “but darkness set out by an intricate network of lies that have been with you for your entire adult life.

“Your ex-girlfriend believes that you share her estimation of herself when really your recommendation was a mere whim. Your employers believe you’re working for their benefit while in reality you’re trying to overturn their world. Your fellow workers think that you are against them and on the side of the white bosses, but you see yourself as the puppet master, pulling the strings for both black and white.”

Images of Valentina and the offices of Techno-Sym appeared in James’s mind. They weren’t exactly superimposed, but they were juxtaposed as Offeran had placed them. The space was like one of the large galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His bosses and coworkers, employees both black and white, and then Verso Andrews standing inside an ornate and gilded wooden frame that hung from an invisible, virtual wall. Valentina was standing there looking up at her ex-husband. He was looking down on her.

In the background the nonwhite members of Techno-Sym muttered
complaints while the others merely spoke in general. Verso and Valentina were conversing but Sovereign couldn’t make out what they were saying.

He leaned closer to the separated couple and turned his ear to hear.

Their voices blended into one. The voice was saying something to him, to Sovereign.

“What?”

“Our time is up,” Dr. Offeran said.

“Up? We just started.”

“You fell asleep in the beginning of the session.”

“Why didn’t you wake me?”

“We’ll take that up tomorrow.”

“What do my parents have to do with anything?” Sovereign asked the next day.

“You have very little to say about them,” Offeran said. “In my experience patients usually avoid subjects that are painful to them.”

Sovereign no longer bantered with his therapist. But often he’d spend long spans in silence while thinking about the questions he was asked.

Solar James had married Winifred Handly. He was a wharf manager at the shipping yards and she a seamstress who took in work from a French cleaner’s in downtown San Diego. He was the color of a block of amber set in a sunny windowsill and she was dark as blackstrap molasses.

Solar bought two plots of land on the outskirts of the city and built a three-story cylindrical home that had four front doors and five bedrooms, three children and two dogs.

His sister, Zenith, was a year older. She lived in St. Louis and had been married to the same man, Thomas Thomas, for twenty-seven years. Zenith favored their father and rarely had a word for Sovereign, even when they were children.

His brother, Drum, was two years younger and the favorite of both parents. Drum didn’t look like any of the rest of the family. He was tall and sand colored, handsome with light brown eyes.

Drum could get in trouble standing still on a lonely road alone
, their grandfather Eagle James would say.

Sovereign loved his brother and was devastated when the FBI had come to the house saying that he was being sought in connection with a bank robbery committed in Los Angeles.

“I got a letter six years ago,” Sovereign said.

“From one of your parents?”

“It came from Peru but there was no signature.”

“Who was it from?”

“Maybe my brother. He’s on the run from the FBI. They think he robbed a bank or something. He was only seventeen but they called him the mastermind. Statute of limitations is up, I think. Anyway I got this letter. Really it was no more than a note. It said, ‘Keep your hands up and your feet planted.’ ”

“What did that mean to you?”

“Me and my brother used to take boxing lessons together. He was better than me, even though I had two years and twenty pounds on him.”

“What’s his name?”

“Drum, but everybody called him Eddie.”

Those words hung in the air between the doctor and the sightless patient who now believed he wasn’t truly blind.

After a full five minutes Sovereign began to speak again.

“Every evening my parents would get together and talk to each other in the sitting room with the curtains open so they could look out on the line of trees that separated us from the houses behind our lot. They’d talk but it was like they were talking to somebody not there.”

“What do you mean?”

“My father would say how the bosses on the wharf were racist and kept Negroes down and my mom would say that he was a hard worker and did a good job caring for his family.”

“She was telling him that he was doing a good job even against a hard time.”

“I know it sounds like that, Seth, but that’s not how it was in the room. She never asked what the bosses were doing and he didn’t thank her for her hard work and compliments. Don’t get me wrong; they were very close. My grandfather used to say that they were like a tree and the soil. One grew out of the other and in doing so enriched the very ground it stood upon, but still they lived in different worlds, spoke separate languages, and had dreams with little or nothing in common.”

“That sounds like an indictment,” the psychoanalyst said.

“I once had a professor at college who used to say that mortality is a living critique of the divine,” Sovereign replied. “If that’s true then all I’m doin’ is tellin’ it like it is.”

That next morning Sovereign was taking his daily walk around the block; somewhere around twenty-seven revolutions was the norm. He wondered about his handsome, friendly, bank-robber brother and his aloof, distant sister with her two boys and husband with the redundant name. Sovereign had left San Diego for the East Coast when he was nineteen and never returned. His father died of a heart attack and Winifred moved back to South Carolina to her people. She once sent Sovereign a note asking him to come down and visit for Christmas.

He didn’t answer.

Turning a corner, using his one white antenna, the blind bug, once a sighted man, felt the sun on his face and smiled.

A woman screamed and he felt a hard blow to the right side of his head. His shoulder thudded against the wall and the breath was forced from his lungs.