But Sovereign didn’t let on to experiencing this ecstasy. He concentrated on staying calm and inscrutable.
“You haven’t asked what I’m paying you,” he said.
“You ain’t told me what we doin’.”
“Twelve dollars an hour. In cash.”
“Okay.”
Their days fell into an easy schedule: three days a week, shopping for clothes and household necessities, food, and books on tape at the bookstore; lunch at noon and her waiting in the large entrance chamber of the building on 86th Street while Sovereign spent fifty minutes talking about the day he’d spent with her.
They called each other mister and miss and she rarely touched him except when he was about to veer into harm’s way. Galeta had met Toni once and Sovereign could tell from her tone of voice that the Greek housecleaner didn’t like his helper from the hood. Dr. Offeran had asked that Sovereign bring Toni in on a session but the Techno-Sym HR officer demurred.
“I don’t pay her for that,” he said.
For entertainment the duo traded off interests. He took her to movies that she wanted to see and in turn she agreed to go to plays and one opera that interested him.
“Did that bore you to death?” he’d ask her after a play or musical, opera, and once a speech by a black public intellectual on the inversion of racism.
“It was interesting,” she would say without fail.
The movies she liked were comedies and she never asked what he thought about them. But if she had asked he would have told her that he loved the way she laughed and giggled at the jokes and situations that writers and directors made up to distract her. And if she had gone further to ask, “Distracted from what?” he would have said, “From the ugliness of our lives on these streets and in the work we have to do to maintain that ugliness.”
But even this was not really true. He just loved to hear her laugh, touching his forearm now and again when something was exceptionally funny to her.
One day, in the middle of a comedy called Making Her Over, Sovereign leaned toward her and said, “You have been a godsend for me, Toni. You’ve made this darkness bearable.”
For long minutes after this confession Toni made no sounds of laughter. Sovereign felt that maybe she was moved by what he’d said.
One Tuesday, thirteen weeks into Sovereign James’s blindness, Toni had asked if they could stay in and have pizza instead of their usual busy schedule.
“It’s rainin’ outside,” she said, “and anyway I’m just tired.”
“Not sleeping?” Sovereign asked.
“Naw, I mean, yeah, I’m sleepin’ all right. It’s just that I want a pizza an’ maybe watch some TV. Could we?”
“Sure. I haven’t turned the television on in months but we can watch if you want.”
The pizza came but Toni didn’t turn on the television. They sat side by side on the white sofa, under the noonday sun. She served him his sausage-and-mushroom slices on a paper plate and wiped his chin twice when grease dripped down it.
She was exceptionally quiet. Sovereign knew from experience that this meant she had something to say. Toni’s need to say anything serious was always preceded by an almost profound silence. He could tell by the way she phrased her sentences that she was somewhat intimidated by his precise articulation.
“You remember what you said that day at Makin’ Her Ovah?” she asked when they had finished the pizza and were sipping on their orange sodas.
Sovereign almost told her that he’d said many things, but he knew what she meant and nodded.
“I felt really bad when you said that.”
“Why?” he asked. “It was a compliment.”
“Yeah, but …”
“What?”
“The man that attacked you is Lemuel Johnson. I was with him that day he hit you but I didn’t know he was gonna do that. That’s why I screamed. When he went after you with that MP’s baton he had I screamed for him to stop. But he didn’t, so I stayed to help you.”
She said these words all in a rush. And behind his wall of blindness, Sovereign was not surprised. It was not that he suspected her of being in cahoots with his attacker, but she was alien, from some other world, and therefore presented difference. Most of the things she told him were windows onto a foreign experience—like her friend Tasha, who had befriended an older man at the behest of her boyfriend.
Cedric told Tasha that the old man had money and that he could pay her rent and they could have a place to stay until he got it together to pay for them—Cedric and Tasha—to get married.
What do you think about that? Sovereign had asked Toni.
It’d be all right if they told the man what they was doin’. I mean … he old an’ should know a young girl like Tasha ain’t gonna be all his—even if he paid for her rent. But if they lie like that then he might could get mad, an’ you know even a old man might have him a gun.
These last few words brought to Sovereign’s mind Eagle James.
“What were you doing with this Lemuel?” Sovereign was a little shocked by his equanimity.
“I had been wit’ him for three days—that time. His brother joined the army an’ left and his apartment was free for the rest of the month. Jacob gave Lemuel the key and we was gettin’ high an’ stayin’ there. Then he said, Lemuel said, that he needed some money and whenever he did he went ovah to the West Village and robbed some rich kids. He said all he had to do was scare ’em with his baton. I told him I didn’t like that idea but he said he was gonna do it anyway, and I had already been up in his house spendin’ his money for three days.”
“What difference does that make?” Sovereign asked, like a mechanic seeing an odd connection under the hood of a foreign-made truck.
“It was stupid but he made me feel like I was the reason he was broke and I owed it to him to go along. And he said that he nevah hit nobody too hard and so I said okay. It was stupid.”
“But then he attacked me.”
“And I started screamin’,” Toni said. “I didn’t even know I was gonna do that. But there you were, mindin’ yo’ own business, and he raised his club.… I just screamed. I knew that it was wrong for me to be there.”
“But if you weren’t there he might have beaten me to death. You came with him and then, at the last minute, you broke away and did what was right.”
Silence.
The southern-facing windows of the apartment were open. Outside, a few blocks away, someone was practicing bagpipes on a rooftop somewhere. The sonorous tones seemed to writhe around Sovereign’s head, like he had to do to get comfortable in his own bed.
“You not mad?”
“Surprisingly, no, I’m not.”
“You not gonna fire me or tell the police?”
“Let me ask you something, Toni.”
“Yeah?”
“Have you seen Lemuel since that day?”
“He come ovah the house an’ told me that he’d kill me if I told the cops. I told him that if I was gonna tell the police that he’d already be in jail. Me too.”
“Was that the last time you saw him?”
Again there was a pause filled with the austere accompaniment of the Scottish pipes.
“He call me just about every week.”
“To make sure that you’re keeping your word?”
“Naw. He wanna get wit’ me.”
“He’s your boyfriend?”
“More like a jump-off. You know … somebody you see every now and then when you need to be with somebody.”
“And do you?”
“Do I what?”
“Need to be with him.”
“No.”
“But there’s something you’re not saying.”
“You know how I nevah have wine when we go out at them nice restaurants, Mr. James?” Toni Loam asked.
While nodding he thought that she used this proper address to get back inside the shelter of their relationship. She had probably been thinking about this confession for days, real
izing that she had to make it but also hoping to keep her position with him.
“Lemuel was the first man I had evah been wit’,” she said. “I thought I loved him at first. But then it was only when we got drunk or high. When I get drunk I get sexy. So I don’t drink.”
“But you remember drinking, and when you do you remember loving Lemuel the thief.”
“Yeah, kinda like that.”
“… and so she knew the man who attacked you?” Seth Offeran asked the next day while Sovereign James ran the palm of his right hand across the rough fabric of the doctor’s sofa and while Toni Loam sat in the entrance hall on the leather banquette that surrounded a pillar at the far western side of that vast room. Even though this wasn’t one of their regular days, she had asked to come with him, because she wanted to hear right away if the doctor wanted him to fire her.
“Yes,” James said. “She thought he was going to bully some children out of their allowances.”
“That’s still a crime.”
“Petty crime.”
“You’re going to keep letting her into your home?”
“She has a key. She can come and go as she pleases.”
“Do you want to have sex with her?”
Sovereign thought about the bagpipes then, about the sinewy gyrations of the music, about the brawny legs in a Highland kilt. That brought to mind how he danced with the vertigo that lying down brought on. He masturbated every night just to get to the place that allowed him to rest in his bed.
He didn’t imagine Toni when he was thrashing against the mattress but he did think about her being there with him after the powerful release.
“No,” he said. “No … I … She makes me happy, Dr. Offeran. She calls me Mr. James and laughs at the silliest things. When I’m with her I feel like there’s somebody there. I haven’t felt like that since I used to ferry my grandfather around.”
“But she’s a danger.”
“More to herself than to me. She saved me.”
“But she didn’t turn her boyfriend in to the police.”
“How could she do that? He could kill her at any time, any time at all.”
“Are you in love with her?”
Sovereign hadn’t expected the question. Often he had supposed an array of choices for the next question the doctor might ask. After the first few weeks of therapy he had gotten pretty good at predicting the range of the doctor’s possible inquiries. How do you feel about that? was a standard when a bald statement had been made. What did it look like? was the question when his blindness (either physical or emotional) came up.
He didn’t always know what the doctor would ask or comment upon. Now and again, when Sovereign was frustrated with the claims of his therapist, Offeran would say that it was the same with his father, Sovereign’s father—that Offeran had taken the father figure’s place.
You’re just saying that because you read it in a book, James would tell his doctor.
I’m saying it because it is most probably true.
But the question about love took Sovereign completely off guard. He had loved his grandfather. Maybe his grandfather was the only person he had ever truly loved. And here he was comparing Toni to Eagle. If someone had asked him how he felt about her, if they had left the definition up to him, he would have said that he was guiding the child, showing her what the world could be like. The word love would have never entered into the dialogue.
It struck him that he also loved his siblings. Zenith had contempt for him, but Drum-Eddie was a different case altogether. Eddie was a true thief, a bank robber. Sovereign’s love for Eddie drove him from his temperate San Diego home; it brought him to New York, where, at times, he still thought he caught a glimpse of Eddie and some mink-wearing beauty walking down Park or Sutton Place South.
“Mr. James,” Seth Offeran said.
“Yes.”
“Do you?”
“Love her?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe I do. But I can’t say for sure.”
“Why not?”
“Because that word added onto the girl has no exact echo in my heart.”
After tussling with his mattress Sovereign fell into a fitful sleep. His dreams were more like thoughts rising up unbidden from an overworked mind. There was Toni, who had stalked and then saved him. She confessed her crime. How could he blame her? There was the shadowy figure of Lemuel Johnson, who attacked him and then ran like a coward from a woman’s screams.
He recited the two dozen names of Negro, Puerto Rican, and Native American men and women whom he’d hired in order to secretly take over Techno-Sym. They didn’t know his design and he felt an emptiness where this thought resided. His heart was a cold chamber where love had no counterpart, no place where it could attach. There was a history of love but that was all taken away decades before.
The phone began ringing.
There was Eagle James, who was impotent and still a father to Solar. There was Solar, who was full of commandments and confident in his bloodline. Eagle’s long dialogue on life ended with a pistol shoved up his nose and fired. The doctor said that the bullet exploded against the inside of the old man’s skull. Solar asked Sovereign why he didn’t tell somebody about the gun.…
In his sleep Sovereign realized that his father blamed him for Eagle’s death—Sovereign blamed himself.
The phone was still ringing.
A light shone somewhere inside of Sovereign’s mind and he was suddenly aware of the darkness that blindness had rung down on him. He was so good at keeping secrets that his grandfather had died and his own father never knew his bastardy; Sovereign had harmed one and protected the other. The dream thoughts told him that it should have been the other way around.
The phone stopped ringing.
Light was more than sight, he thought. Vision was always partial, unrevealing at the last.
Why couldn’t he dream about sex or Drum-Eddie? Why were these ideas rumbling around his head like bad meat in a starving man’s gut?
The phone started ringing again.
Sovereign stumbled up out of bed and blundered through the rooms to reach out for it, almost desperately.
“Hello?”
“It’s Zenith, Sovereign.”
“What time is it?”
“A little past midnight in New York. Don’t hang up.”
“What do you want, Zenith?”
“I spoke to Thomas about our talk on the phone. He told me that it wasn’t right to say that you were making it up. He said that all I had to do was to think of what I’d say if one of our children had something like that.”
“You mean if you were related to the person suffering the ailment.”
“I know you’re my brother, Sovereign.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Grandpa Eagle told me that he was made impotent by that wound he suffered in World War One.”
“But …”
“But that means he wasn’t our grandfather. Maybe I’m only your half brother. Maybe they found me in a hole somewhere and we’re not related at all.”
“Don’t be crazy, Sovereign.”
“You already think I’m crazy. Why not act like it?”
“I’m calling to apologize.”
“You’re calling because Thomas told you to, Zenith.”
“You used to call me Z.”
“That was a long time ago—when I could see and I still hoped that my sister would love me.”
“Maybe I should call back later.”
“Whatever.”
Sovereign wondered why blindness made him so sensitive to silence. It was like the senses were somehow blended together, making a third, undefined form of perception.
“We haven’t talked for a long time, Sovereign. And maybe I was … I don’t know … maybe I was distant when I was a child. I thought you and Eddie were just little boys, that you didn’t understand things. I treated you like kids, and I didn’t like kids very much.
But that’s all. You are still my brother and I do love you.”
Sovereign exhaled and then waited for the breath to come back in. He thought about his stinky sister and playing hide-and-seek with Drum-Eddie, about the ribbon of blood flowing out from Eagle’s nostril and the image of a bullet exploding in his brain; the ribbon of blood was the tie.
Maybe he had been thinking about suicide.
Either fathering a child or dying—that was the choice.
“Sovereign?”
“Yes, Zenith?”
“Do you need me to come out there?”
“No, baby, no. I got it covered.”
“I read up on hysterical blindness. Most cases recover.”
“Yeah, but do they ever get over it?”
Five weeks passed.
Sovereign and Toni didn’t talk about Lemuel or her part in his attack. Seth Offeran kept asking to meet the girl, but Sovereign would not bring her into the room. He’d tantalize the doctor, telling him that she was only a few steps away, but there she’d stay.
Toni and the blind man did their shopping, ate their lunches, and attended popular movies and poetry readings, plays, and speeches. She talked more and more about her mother and half sisters and half brothers, a man who might have been her father, and the grandmother who was put to rest without a proper funeral.
“Where were you when she died?” Sovereign asked one day when he felt that she could bear the strain.
“With Lemuel,” she said. “That was when he had got out of jail for sellin’ drugs. We was up in his apartment in the Bronx for eight days. Auntie G had a heart attack and I didn’t even know.”
“No one called you?”
“The phone was disconnected.”
“And why didn’t your mother bury her?”
“She got into one a’ her moods and couldn’t do nuthin’. When she get like that she go in the bedroom and don’t come out for days.”
They were sitting on the white sofa and Sovereign felt her grasp his forefinger and thumb, one with each hand.
“It wasn’t your fault, Toni.”
“I would’a broke it off wit’ Lemuel back then but when he heard about what happened he brought me white roses and said that I should put them on the table and that could be my funeral for my auntie G.”
Odyssey Page 8