“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.
Sure is. And fine too. That woman got a rump get me hot just to think about it.
If you’re a racial revolutionary and you obviously want children, then wouldn’t Claudette be the perfect choice? he asked.
That’s half the way there, Doctor. But you got to remember—any child I produce will be a black child in this racist nation. And the woman who bears my child will have to want me and only me to be that father.
But that’s unrealistic, Offeran said. Women need to have children …
Sovereign remembered the afternoon that he’d taken off from work when Valentina had come over. After hours of lovemaking she noticed a dry spot on his thigh. She got olive oil from his kitchen and began to massage it on his skin. He got excited and asked her to kiss his erection. But instead she began to suck on his testicles. The oil dripped down from there and she kept rubbing it in. He put his legs up, allowing her to massage his buttocks and rectum.
She was shaking his shoulders before he realized that he had passed out. That was when he knew that he wanted Valentina to bear his progeny.
“But I’m married,” she said.
“Separated,” he countered. “Soon to be divorced.”
He hadn’t told the doctor this part of the story. Time was up and he was happy to leave.
“You’re a racist,” Darius Maynard said a few weeks before Sovereign’s eyes gave out.
He, Maynard, was sitting in the visitor’s chair opposite Sovereign’s broad hickory desk. Darius was two decades younger than James and wore a blue blazer and khaki pants. In contrast the senior HR official wore a dark, dark green suit with a black vest and yellow shirt.
Only the older man wore a tie.
“Myrna Malloy was also at the interview,” Sovereign said. “You haven’t accused her as far as I know.”
“You’re the one who makes the final decision.”
“The evaluation process is confidential.”
“And you’re a racist.”
Sovereign James smiled. He liked Maynard. His skin was the color of darkening egg custard and his eyes didn’t know whether to be brown or green. Even though he was almost thirty, his voice still cracked when he got excited.
Sovereign wondered if the young man had ever learned how to tie a tie.
“I’m six shades darker than you, young man.”
“What about Phil Vance?”
“What about him?”
“You turned him down for the unit coordinator’s position,” Darius said. “You gave the job to Aldo Menton and he wasn’t half as qualified.”
Phil Vance. Sovereign remembered the flashy young man: handsome and black skinned and always smiling, like the cat that had just done away with the noisome canary. He was a graduate of Tufts, descended from a good family. Private schools all the way. For Vance, Techno-Sym was just a stepping-stone. He hadn’t done enough homework to know exactly what international services the self-defined data-clone company provided.
Just point me at the job and I will get it done, Vance had told Sovereign.
He hadn’t even bothered to maintain eye contact.
“You’re the data librarian, are you not, Mr. Maynard?” Sovereign asked.
“And I know everything about that job,” the custard-colored young man said.
“And I am the human resources professional. You maintain the global logic center and I provide the best possible staff.”
“You do what the white man tells you to do!” Maynard shouted.
Sovereign started from the dream with a stifled yelp. Everything had been the same except the last words of the young librarian. In the real conversation Maynard had swallowed his humiliation and gone off to organize a movement against the HR department, James in particular.
This turn of events hadn’t bothered Sovereign. He even expected it. For the people of color to organize, if only in a failed movement, would prepare them for future battles at Techno-Sym and elsewhere.
But the condemnation that reared its head in the nightmare caused self-doubt. What did it mean? Had he somehow been brainwashed by a self-perpetuating system that made him think he was working for his people while he was indeed doing the opposite?
Fully awake and prone on the white sofa, Sovereign felt his head begin to spin. He sat up and then stood, stumbled across the living room, careful to avoid the coffee table, reached the high counter, and felt around for the multipurpose clock. He found the talk bar and pressed it.
“The time is two thirty-seven a.m., September fourteenth, two thousand ten,” the clock’s voice said.
Two thirty-seven and he was wide-awake, heart pounding, and uncertain about the most important deeds of the last twenty years of his life. He stood there in the darkness, and in the dark, not exactly thinking but feeling that he had come to an unexpected border without the proper papers. The past was gone and the future was barred … and it was two thirty-seven, maybe thirty-eight by now, and he was lost.
His feet were bare but he still had on his trousers, shirt, and jacket. The temperature in the apartment was always set at seventy-two degrees, because there was no way for him to read the thermostat. He needed the jacket to balance the heat. His feet were cold but he didn’t mind. The light was probably off. He laid both hands on the high Formica counter and cocked his head, listening for any sound that might inform or distract him.
There came various susurrations from the street below, mainly traffic. Now and then a voice was heard, some laughter, and once a dog barking frantically. After a very long time Sovereign made out the gentle plash of water dripping from the kitchen spigot into the porcelain basin. Hearing the almost inaudible plop and splatter he remembered the dark, weblike system of tiny cracks throughout the ancient sink. He moved his head from side to side as if gazing upon the slick, spattered surface in bright sunlight with 20/20 vision.
Memory was in many ways clearer and more accurate than what his eyesight had been. He found that he was able to use his imagination to get a better focus than he’d ever experienced before.
After a while of listening and remembering, he hit the time bar again.
“The time is three-oh-nine a.m., September fourteenth, two thousand ten,” the voice said.
Sovereign took the cell phone from his pocket. He
imagined seeing the green glow of the face and entered a number that he knew well.
“Hello? Sovy?” she said, answering on the first ring.
“Hey, Val.”
“What time is it?”
“Just about three in the morning.”
“How … How are you?”
“Blind as Homer.”
“What happened to you?”
“I don’t know. I woke up one morning and couldn’t see a thing.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m blind.”
“I know. I’m sorry. You must feel awful. Can I help?”
“No.”
“I could go shopping for you.”
“I do that over the phone. They deliver. And the limo service, Red Rover, takes me wherever I need to go.”
“I’m so sorry, Sovy,” Valentina Holman said. There was actual grief in her voice.
“I’m not dead. Just blind.”
“Is it curable?”
“What’s going on with you, Valentina?”
There was silence then. Now that there was an opening for conversation the night seemed to close in.
“Nothing,” she said weakly.
“Nothing at all? You don’t go to work? You don’t watch TV, read books? You don’t have friends?”
“Verso wants to get back together.”
“Did you tell him about us?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I didn’t think you would like that.”
“I didn’t like you leaving me. That didn’t seem to make any difference.”
Silence filled the darkness that already encased Sovereign’s head.
“Valentina,” he said after maybe a minute.
No answer.
He hit the time bar on the talking clock.
“The time is three twelve a.m., September fourteenth, two thousand ten,” the mechanical male voice said.
“Who was that?” she asked.
“A clock I got that actually tells the time.”
“What do you want me to say, Sovy?”
“It would have been nice if you had answered my calls when I could still read the daily papers.”
“I didn’t know that you’d go blind.”
“So by that logic you’d agree to reconsider getting back together if I only just died.”
The connection broke off and Sovereign knew that Valentina had hung up. He couldn’t figure out how to hit the right keys to turn off his cell phone, so he took the battery out of the back and stacked the powerless phone and its power source together on the high countertop. Then he went to the landline and followed the cord back to the wall. While he was disconnecting the jack, the phone made the whisper of a ring.
That would be Valentina calling back, sorry for having hung up but angry that he wouldn’t give her the space to shun him and his attentions once more.
He realized there in the early morning that he knew Valentina well enough to have an hours-long conversation with her even if she was not there.
Was that love? Was it intimacy?
No, he thought, prediction is an objective phenomenon, a knowledge but not an emotion. Valentina had taken her love along with her and all he could do was push her buttons and remember what had been.
And what was that?
He ambled over to the sofa, banging his left shin against the low coffee table along the way.
Sitting down, he wondered what it had been between him and the white woman he praised so highly for her new job. There was no reason for him to give her such acclaim. She did her job and never malingered or caused dissent, but she was in no other way exceptional.
He remembered the cream-colored recommendation form that he’d received from Jolly Jake’s Virtual Arcade Corporation. It was such a fancy and sophisticated form. It seemed incongruous with the slapdash organization of the company.
There was an area provided, about half a page, where he could, if he wished, add any extra details about the candidate. In the smallest letters he penned an outstanding reference. Exceptional attention to detail, he’d said. The highest professional decorum. Miss Holman not only brings her best game to the job, but she brings out the best in others on her team.
There was no logical reason for this outlandish recommendation. James hardly knew the woman. And though he did not hold enmity toward white women, he didn’t see it as his political duty to help them in their struggles against their enemies.
Enemies. Forgetting his late-night argument with Valentina, Sovereign considered a word that he had exorcised from his vocabulary while still at college.
Generals and nations have enemies, his political science professor Jane Mithrill had lectured. Revolutionaries work for the people. Even if you find yourself on the side of one group or another at any particular juncture, you must always remember that your work is for the betterment of the human race, not any group, class, tribe, gender, or nationality.
The wild-eyed Irish professor would clench her fists and raise her voice until she was nearly screaming in her sermonlike lectures. She was loved and hated by students and professors. She believed, as many of the founding fathers did, that revolution was the normal state of society. It was she more than anyone else who caused Sovereign to turn his back on capitalism and the Church, making him a mole for a movement that had no central governing body or even a sense of recognition among its members.…
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.
Odyssey Page 3