During those weeks the machinery of the couple’s life worked perfectly. Sovereign, though he never articulated it, had accepted his blindness as he did the daily conversations with Seth Offeran. When Toni wasn’t there he’d listen to books on tape, the news, or just errant sounds out the window. His exercises leveled off at thirty-three circuits.
Then the mechanism broke down.
It started on a Tuesday evening after Toni had gone home. The day had been spent at a fancy grocery store where they ate lunch, shopped, and then came home to watch pay-per-view TV.
Toni had departed at seven-oh-seven by Sovereign’s talking clock.
The phone rang soon after that.
“Hello?” Sovereign said.
“Mr. James.”
“Dr. Offeran?”
“Yes.”
“This is a surprise. I didn’t even know that you had my number.”
“Dr. Katz had it. He called and told me that the insurance company has requested that you submit to further testing now that therapy has proven ineffective.”
“That means you give up?” James felt victorious and contradictorily nauseous at the prospect.
“No, not at all. I feel that we’ve made great progress and that you are on the verge of a significant psychic event. It’s just that it has taken longer than the timetables allow for in the insurance medical books. So Dr. Katz needs to see you tomorrow at the time of our session. You go to see him, he’ll find that your physical condition is unchanged, and we will have our appointment day after tomorrow as usual.”
“What do you mean, a significant psychic event?”
“We’ll talk about that at the next session.”
Sovereign was still trying to decipher the term significant psychic event when the phone rang two hours later. He was sure that it was Offeran calling to apologize for not making himself clear, and at the same time, he knew that the psychoanalyst would never call back like that.
“Hello?”
“May I speak to Sovereign James?” a woman with a slight Jamaican lilt asked.
“This is him.”
“You’re Sovereign James?”
“Yes.”
“I have to change your appointment with Dr. Katz to a ten-forty-five slot,” she said.
“Tomorrow morning?”
“That’s right. Can you make that time?”
“I guess so.”
“Should I e-mail or fax you the information?”
“What is Dr. Katz’s specialty?” Sovereign asked, irked more by the change in plans than anything else.
“Come again?”
“Katz specializes in blindness, right?”
“Yes.”
“So what am I going to do with a fax?”
“Ten forty-five tomorrow morning,” she replied. “Do you need directions?”
Sovereign hung up the phone.
The eye exam was the same as it had been three months before. There was a lot of waiting and craning his neck, sitting inside of a machine that made a high-pitched hum now and again while the doctor asked questions about his vision.
Joey Atlanta from Red Rover picked him up and drove him home.
“What time is it, Joey?” Sovereign asked before getting out of the car.
“One fifty-two,” the driver said.
“Waste a whole damn day for Tomcat to tell me what I knew before I went there.”
“That’s how they make their money,” Joey said. “By takin’ ours.”
Coming into the building the doorman Geoffrey LaMott said, “Hey, Mr. J. How you doin’ today?”
“Fine, Geoff. You?”
“Just fine. I—”
“How’s the family?”
“Great.”
“Gina got over that flu?”
“Yes, sir. I—”
“See you later, Geoff,” Sovereign said.
If he hadn’t cut the young attendant off maybe things would have worked out differently. He usually stopped and talked to LaMott about the world of politics, the young man’s growing family, and the goings-on in the building. But that day Sovereign was bothered that he missed a meeting with his therapist because of some note in a claim adjuster’s ledger.
Opening his door he thought that he’d heard a sound: a footfall maybe.
“Hello?” he called. “Miss Loam? Galeta?”
He moved through the entrance toward the living room, wondering if his ears were playing tricks after all that humming from Tom Katz’s machines. He felt the openness of the larger room, its high ceiling yawning above … and then she yelled, “Nooo!”
The moments after the shout were filled with sensations and insight. First, and most jarring, was the immediate and complete return of his vision. The sunlight coming through the window was bright, slamming down from a cloudless sky. The thought accompanying this brightness was that it was now Toni’s fear that ignited his vision and not the blow that was coming.…
Lemuel Johnson stood four feet away, raising a two-and-a-half-foot black baton that most resembled a top-hatted magician’s wand, only somewhat thicker.
Toni screamed again.
A look of hesitation on Lemuel’s face told Sovereign that the young black man could see that he was being seen. Shaking off this surprise, Lemuel took a long step forward, swinging down with his weapon. Sovereign fell easily into the sway he was taught in the boxing gym thirty-five years earlier. The baton swung past his head and he lashed out with a jab that Drum-Eddie always avoided—not so for Lemuel Johnson.
The younger, taller man leaned into the upthrust punch. The skin below his left eye ruptured and Toni screamed again.
“Get away from him, Lem!” she shouted.
Instead Lemuel swung a vicious backhand at Sovereign with the rod. All the weeks of exercise had increased the strength in the older man’s thighs. He lowered down six inches below the arc of the blow and fired back with heavy punches to the head, stomach, and chest. Lemuel exhaled a stench-filled breath and fell backward two steps. Sovereign bounced on his feet and swayed his shoulders, expecting his opponent to come forward with the weapon again. But Lemuel Johnson turned and ran toward the front of the apartment.
For a moment Sovereign was confused. His sight had returned. His enemy had been defeated. Life was new—again. And then something rose up in him. It was only later that he identified this something as rage. And it was later still that he understood that this passion was the significant psychic event that Offeran had predicted.
Sovereign reached his front door just as Lemuel was rushing out. He clocked the young man with a blow to the back of his head, but that just propelled his reluctant opponent faster. Lemuel dropped the baton and ran full-out to the end of the hallway where the exit sign redly glowed.
Sovereign ran after him. He chased him to the door and then down the stairs. He had proven himself Lemuel’s better in hand-to-hand combat but the younger man was still the faster. If the exit door on the first floor had not been buckled a bit, making it stick, Lemuel would have gotten away. But he wasted four seconds, no more, pushing frantically against the door. Sovereign came up behind him two steps into the entry area and began to pummel him as he ran.
Lemuel stopped and pushed against James’s shoulders. Sovereign fell back while trying to throw a punch. His legs crossed and he stumbled, giving Lemuel a chance to head for the door.
“Mr. James!” Geoffrey LaMott shouted from behind his counter.
Sovereign righted himself and then barreled after Lemuel, who was slowed by the postman coming in with his wheeled mailbag.
Sovereign leapt from the stairs leading to the exit and tackled Lemuel through the front door and into the street. There he battered Lemuel Johnson with fists, forearms, and elbows. A dreamlike feeling of lightness infused itself into his attack—so much so that he was unaware that people had grabbed him by both arms and were pulling him off of his hapless victim.
It wasn’t until the middle of the interview with Captain Turpin that Sovereign ca
me back to himself and at least partially realized all that had happened.
PART TWO
Standing in front of the huge building—made from rough-hewn, dark brown stone bricks—Sovereign stopped to appreciate a place he had been but not seen. He clenched his sore fists and smiled, feeling neither anger nor mirth but rather a deep, almost religious astonishment.
Passing the outer door he could see through the second, as it was a collection of semiopaque glass squares. The hazy image of a man in red and black stood on the other side. To the left there was an opening in the wall that allowed James to see into an empty dark yellow room.
Sovereign took in a deep breath through his nostrils and felt the continual, recurrent thrumming of anxiety in his chest.
The door before him swung open and there stood a chubby young white man in a streamlined beefeater’s uniform. A look of wonder passed over the freckled face and then the youth smiled.
“Mr. James.”
“Roger?”
“You can see me?”
“You know it.”
Roger held out a hand and Sovereign took it, his knuckles aching from the grip. He was surprised when the young white man leaned forward to hug him and slap his back.
“Congratulations,” the doorman said. “What happened? Did they operate or give you some kind of medicine?”
Shaking his head, he said, “Scare therapy.”
“What?”
“I’ll talk to you about it some other time. Right now I’m five minutes late.”
“You bet, Mr. James. You bet.”
Eight long paces to the wall and a turn to the left, a few steps away stood an entranceway leading into the long dark hall that he’d walked along five days a week for months. Sovereign was impressed that a blind man could negotiate a world like this, a world where sight told you almost everything.
The door was dark wood with three brass tags placed in a vertical row along the upper left-hand side.
DR. BELFORD TANNING, PH.D.
DR. IRIS LAMONT, SOCIAL WORK, PH.D.
DR. SETH OFFERAN, PH.D., M.D.
Sovereign ran the fingertips of his left hand along the brass tags, noticing the scabs from the fight. He tried to call up a feeling about the wounds—guilt or triumph, he didn’t care which—but nothing would come. He felt nothing but a sense of wondrous paradoxical nostalgia at seeing places that had been concealed.
Striding quickly through the waiting area he knocked on Offeran’s door.
It opened immediately.
Roly-poly, bald, and bespectacled Offeran wore a gray suit, pale blue shirt, and a black-and-white-checked tie. The lenses of his rimless glasses were rectangular and small. His head was egg shaped and his face hairless except for the eyebrows and lashes. The gray-brown brows furrowed and Offeran smiled.
“You can see me?”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“Come in.”
“… and so you say she screamed and you could suddenly see?” the alabaster-skinned, sixty-something psychoanalyst asked.
“Yes,” black Sovereign replied, looking at the hundreds of books packed in the shelving on the far side of the room. “The office is larger than I’d imagined.”
“And you were arrested?” Offeran went on.
Sovereign noticed a framed etching leaning on the bookshelf. It was the image of a black-and-red bird. This was the bird that entered his reverie about Ellen Saunders in her camel-colored suit.
“For assault, yes,” Sovereign said. “That might change to attempted murder or even second-degree murder if he dies.”
“And it was the girl, Toni Loam, who brought him into your house.”
“You don’t have to say it like that, Dr. Offeran. You don’t have to say it like that.”
“What else am I supposed to think if not that she was conspiring against you? Why would you think any different?”
“It was two o’clock on a weekday, and she was gone when you called to cancel and when Katz’s people called to reschedule. She had no reason to think that I’d be home then. The doorman told me that they had just gotten there.”
“Maybe they went there to lie in wait.”
“Then why would she holler?”
“I don’t know. Maybe … maybe at the last minute she found that she couldn’t go through with it.”
Sovereign grinned.
“Why do you smile, Mr. James?”
“Because we’re sitting here, just two people talking. I like that. I have really benefited from coming here.”
Silence, Sovereign thought, wasn’t the same when you could gaze into the eyes of someone thinking.
“I’d like to keep coming for a while, if that’s okay, Doctor.”
“You’re no longer blind,” the therapist said. “The insurance might pay for a week of follow-up, but after that they’ll stop.”
“I’ve saved money my whole life,” Sovereign James confessed. “I can afford a couple months of you … that and two lawyers too.”
“So you’re really going to pay for her defense?”
“And her bail. I should have her out of there by tomorrow morning.”
“Won’t the police suspect that the two of you set up this … this Lemuel?”
Sovereign shrugged and smiled.
“So can I keep seeing you?” he asked.
“I think you might need to.”
On Madison at three in the afternoon Sovereign grinned and sighed. The thrumming anxiety was still there inside his breast like an angry bumblebee roused from its winter’s hibernation.
Bumble—he thought about the word—that’s what I’ve done through all my life. There I was thinking I was shrewd and revolutionary and really I was just bumbling through like a blind man, only I didn’t even know I was handicapped.
He walked south to 57th Street, over to 9th Avenue, and then headed straight down. He enjoyed the sights like a starved man eating his first meal in many days. There was a jaunty young woman’s firm butt and a dead rat in the gutter, a trash can full to overflowing on 33rd Street, and two little blond girls walking arm in arm and giggling, their chubby mothers chattering and watching from three steps behind.
While walking he went over the events of the past twenty-four hours.
“The last time I spoke to you, you were blind, Mr. James,” Captain Turpin said an hour after he’d nearly killed Lemuel Johnson.
They were sitting in his living room, the sun still streaming. A uniformed policeman stood next to the high counter. Sovereign sat on the white sofa while Turpin took the red chair.
“Yes,” he said. “I was. It was a psychological condition but I really couldn’t see a thing.”
“And when was this psychological condition cured?”
“I walked in here blind, Toni screamed, and suddenly I could see the young man raising his cudgel.”
He could also see then that the captain didn’t believe him. Despite her Caucasian name and diction she was amber skinned, possibly from Puerto Rico or farther south. She wore a dark maroon dress with an off-white jacket and a blue shoulder bag. She was slender and hard-eyed, not pretty but beautiful to someone.
“You expect me to believe that you miraculously regained your vision just in time to fend off Johnson?”
“It’s all I can tell you, Captain. I was more surprised than anyone else. I had just come home from a specialist who hasn’t been able to help me. I’ve been going to therapy five days a week.…”
“How did you meet Toni Loam?”
“I called her after you gave me her name.”
“Why?”
“She saved my life.”
“But she knew your assailant.”
“I don’t get what you mean,” Sovereign said, realizing he was still a little stunned. “Are you saying that because she knew Lemuel, she didn’t save me?”
“Lemuel?”
“That’s what Toni called him. It’s his name.”
“Why did she have the key to your apartment?”
“I hired her to help me get around.”
“And what was she doing with the man who allegedly attacked you on the street and also, you say, in your apartment?”
“I know it sounds odd,” Sovereign said. “I mean, none of it makes much logical sense … from the outside, that is. But everything I’m telling you is true.”
“That you were blind, but not really,” she said. “That you hired the woman who was with the man who beat you on the street. That a woman screamed and inexplicably your sight, which you never really lost, came back. That a man, even though half your age and a head taller, armed with a bludgeon, was no match for you in a fight and you beat him into a coma in front of a dozen witnesses on Washington Street.”
Turpin had a mole on her right cheek. Sovereign considered this blemish seriously and for quite a few seconds before saying, “Essentially, yes.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. James,” Captain Turpin said. “But I’m going to have to arrest you for aggravated assault. Let’s hope it doesn’t get any worse than that.”
After walking home from his session with Offeran, Sovereign went to his apartment for the first time since his arrest. He’d spent the night in police custody. They questioned him for many hours. It wasn’t the captain, whom he liked, but two detectives, Martin Quick and Patrick O’Lande. They were both white men, younger and shorter than Sovereign. He didn’t know why their age and size meant so much to him, but he found it hard to take them seriously.
The interrogators had various interpretations of the events that weren’t true. They thought, as Offeran suspected, that maybe Toni and Sovereign plotted together to kill Lemuel but the kid ran and Sovereign lost his cool (cool—that was the word Quick used) and beat him like a dog.
Added to this was the supposed intelligence that they had gathered, reporting as fact that Sovereign had never been blind and had been planning a crime like this for months. He was bent, a psychopath who, after being attacked by Johnson, plotted his revenge on the unsuspecting mugger.
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