“If he dies you’re going down for murder,” Quick said. He had a squashy face dominated by a shapeless nose.
“How is he doing?” Sovereign asked.
“Do you really care?” Patrick O’Lande asked.
“I didn’t even know I was hitting him,” Sovereign replied. “I mean, after he ran from my place.”
“So now you got amnesia on top of made-up blindness?” Quick said.
“I’m not going to win this argument with you, am I, gentlemen?”
Both cops sat back in their metal folding chairs looking bothered.
The only reason for this reaction, Sovereign thought, was that they weren’t used to being called gentlemen by criminal suspects.
“All you have to do is tell the truth,” O’Lande said at last.
“Can I ask you something first?”
“What?” Quick said.
“You don’t believe that I was blind and that my sight came back when Toni Loam screamed; am I right about that?”
“It’s hard to believe,” O’Lande admitted. He was younger than his partner by ten years or so, and handsome. His hair was strawberry blond and his features mild but manly. “Coincidences almost always point to guilt.”
“So,” Sovereign said haltingly, “the only truth is that I need a lawyer who will believe what you guys do not.”
They left him locked in the interrogation room, alone, for the rest of the night. The only reason James could see for this was that Turpin liked him and was maybe unsure about his guilt. They could have thrown him in a cell with dozens of hardened criminals but instead he got a pass: his own private room with a table and chair. There was also a rumpled newspaper, the New York Post, in a plastic trash can.
For years, until his condition, Sovereign eschewed the news in any form—radio, television, or print. These mediums, he believed, rarely told the truth. But in that room—by himself, after almost killing a man, regaining his sight, and understanding that in some way he loved the sour-faced young woman who simultaneously put him in harm’s way and saved him—in that room he read every article from politics to sports.
In the morning, through his court-appointed lawyer, Gilda Meyers, Sovereign pleaded not guilty due to compelling extenuating circumstances, and the prosecutor didn’t argue about low bail.
He immediately went to see an old friend from college, Lena Altuna. Lena had been a public defender for fifteen years before she went into business for herself.
“I don’t know, Sovy,” the forty-seven-year-old New Yorker said.
“You don’t know what?”
“This will be a hard enough case to win without you paying for Miss Loam. The guilt lies with either you, her, or both of you together conspiring against Mr. James. He is the victim no matter his intentions.”
“But I don’t believe she was trying to hurt either one of us,” Sovereign argued. “At least not physically.”
“Shouldn’t you know that before championing her case? Especially since it will weaken any argument you might make.”
“Get somebody to bail her out,” James offered. “Tell them to have her get in touch with me and I will make up my mind whether or not to help in her defense.”
“That’s not an advisable course, Sovereign.”
Lena had olive skin and incongruous green eyes. Her face was long and filled with longing—longing for justice, Sovereign had often thought. They saw each other only at five-year class reunion parties. Every time they met she went on long diatribes about how the nonwhite, poor, and elderly populations never got a fair shake.
Sovereign liked her commitment; he had felt that his secret actions at work equaled hers. Now, however, he doubted himself.
“While I was blind she was kind and generous to me,” Sovereign said. “I can’t turn my back on her without finding out her motives on my own.”
Lena stared at James for a while before saying, “All right, Sovy. You win. I’ll have someone post her bail. But she will be advised on the case as her lawyer sees fit.”
“Just tell her I’d like to talk to her too.”
He could lie down without dizziness or masturbation. Sleep, however, hovered somewhere in the darkness of the room. He was awake and afloat on a stream of unbidden thoughts. He remembered times with his family, and at school with other children who had faces but few names; he thought of teachers who scolded him for mistakes and ignored his every success. Or maybe, Sovereign thought, his school chums did have names that he hadn’t bothered to learn, and the teachers were just doing their jobs. These thoughts led to his grandfather and the ragged hole left by his sudden death. Sovereign was angry most of the time—angry at everyone except Drum-Eddie.
Three weeks before Eddie left the house and didn’t return, four weeks before the FBI came looking for him, Eddie found Sovereign at the Clairemont branch of the San Diego library. Nineteen-year-old Sovereign was studying a guidebook for the SAT exam and scowling.
“Don’t look like no good book to me,” Eddie had said.
The conversation came back as whole cloth, like many a forgotten and submerged experience had since James first visited Offeran.
“Need to,” Sovereign said. He had been paring down his sentences lately. He had read that people talked too much and should concentrate only exactly on what they intended to say.
Drum-Eddie was handsome and easygoing. He turned the chair across from his brother and sat astride it backward.
“How come you didn’t take the test before you graduated, like everybody else?” Eddie asked.
“Thought I was gonna join the marines. Thought I would go to school on the G.I. Bill and then I wouldn’t have to go to Daddy for the money.”
“But he got the money all saved up. All Daddy do is save money.”
“I wanted to do it on my own.”
“So how come you didn’t sign up on your eighteenth birthday?”
They hadn’t talked much in the previous six months. Eddie spent a lot of time out of the house with new friends and interests. He rarely came to the boxing gym anymore.
“I got flat feet and a heart murmur,” Sovereign James said. “The recruiter told me that if we were still at war they’d’a taken me in a second. But now they cuttin’ back.”
“But that was a year ago, JJ. Why it take you so long to apply to college?”
“I’ve been thinking. What do you want, Eddie?”
“I got somethin’ to tell you, bro.”
“What?”
“I’m gonna go on vacation. I might even retire.”
“Retire?” Sovereign didn’t add that Eddie was only seventeen, because this was an obvious fact and there was no need to state it.
“So you might not see me for a while, man,” Drum said, ignoring the implied critique. “Remember that I will always be your brother.”
In the morning Sovereign was still thinking about Eddie, about how he looked up to him even though he was younger.
He lay back in the bed awake with eyes closed. He couldn’t see but he wasn’t blind either. This reality seemed like some important philosophical premise but he couldn’t unravel it.
Eyes still shut he climbed from the bed and made it into the kitchen without running into anything. He approached the far west window of the living room and then opened his eyes upon south Manhattan. It was bright but early. Cars wended down the West Village streets and people walked with purpose. Across the street and a few floors down a woman was running full-out in her living room, on a fancy treadmill. In another room, but still the same apartment, a man was serving breakfast to two small children at a round table just large enough for a family of four.
Sovereign opened the window, imagining that he could see the sibilant sounds curling in on the currents of air that rolled in over his shins, ankles, and feet.
He was naked, brawnier than he had been before the episode; that was how he had come to think of his blindness—an episode. Looking down at his uncircumcised penis he smiled. Then he gazed at a plu
mp man walking up Washington Street in a stride made circular by the girth of his thighs. He carried a brown briefcase and wore an unprofessional baby-blue suit. The woman was still running on her treadmill while the father and the children talked and talked, ate and talked.
With the breeze on his knees and people filling his eyes, Sovereign felt love welling up in his chest. The bumblebee had been replaced with hummingbird-like passion. He didn’t know anything about the people he saw or the origins of the sounds the city made, but that didn’t matter. The police could come and arrest him; they probably would. Some judge might well send him to prison. He didn’t want to go—but even the prospect of incarceration couldn’t dim the beauty of the world he beheld.…
“Like God,” he whispered, “beholding creation and not able to tell the difference between what He made and who He was.”
The phone rang and Sovereign started but didn’t know it. He turned and looked at the phone and it rang again. He walked from the window a little reluctantly, feeling that he was in some ways a deity abandoning his subject.
“Hello?”
“Mr. James.”
“Miss Loam.”
“I’m so sorry.…”
They talked on the phone for more than an hour. She had been released late the night before and interviewed briefly by Stanford Miles, a colleague of Lena Altuna’s.
“Mr. Miles told me that you paid my bail and wanted me to call but he said that that wasn’t a good idea. He said that if we were talking the court might say that we planned to hurt Lemuel. So I went ovah to my friends Monique and Simba’s house and stayed with them last night. I didn’t know if I should call you but I had to at least tell you I was sorry.”
“The only reason to be sorry is if you’ve done something wrong.”
“Of course I did sumpin’ wrong,” she said, almost in anger. “You got arrested and me too. Lem is in the hospital and they don’t even know if he evah gonna wake up. All of that is wrong.”
“Why did you bring him to my house?” Sovereign asked.
A siren blared outside and Sovereign went to the window, hoping to catch a glimpse of the fire engine. He looked around but was distracted by a huge ocean liner making its way up the Hudson River. It was the size of a downtown skyscraper laid on its side.
“Mr. James?”
“Yes, Miss Loam?”
“Three days ago was the anniversary of my auntie G’s death. I went home and Lemuel was upstairs with my mama and them. He had brought her white roses and a bottle of whiskey. When I got there he cracked open the liquor and said we should make a toast to her.
“I didn’t want to but I could see that Mama was so sad, and I didn’t want her to get in one a’ her moods.
“After we drank a little bit too much I went down with Lem to this place we used to go. It’s kinda like a bar but it’s downstairs and don’t have no license. He started talkin’ to me about you.”
“Me? What did he know about me?”
“Mama told him that I was workin’ for this rich blind man down in the Village. I was gettin’ drunk an’ he was talkin’ real nice. He said he was sorry for what happened and then we went to his apartment. He told me he had a job and that he was grateful that I didn’t turn him ovah to the cops.
“But later on he was mad about me bein’ wit’ you all the time. I told him that we called each other mister and miss and that you was old and that it was just a job. But he was still mad that we was together like him and me used to be and … I don’t know.…”
“So how did you end up here?” Sovereign James asked.
“He told me that if I brought him up to your place and kissed him up there and let him take one thing, like a watch or sumpin’, he would forget about it and believe me. He said that I could come live wit’ him and he’d work and pay the rent. And I thought it would be okay, because you’d be at Dr. Offeran’s and I could buy you another watch and quit workin’ for you.”
“You were going to give up your job with me?”
“Uh-huh. I knew I’d break your trust bringin’ Lem up there and I thought he had really changed, but now I know he haven’t. Now I know that it’s ’cause he wit’ me that he do like that.”
“You blame yourself?”
“Since we been broken up he got a job at the supermarket and got a place to stay and everything. But just one night wit’ me and he dropped all that. Instead of goin’ to work he wanna come fuck me up in your bed, and then when you walked in he tried to beat you again even though you blind and no threat to him. At least, that’s what he thought.”
Sovereign sat down in the red chair, reclining and allowing his feelings and musings to mingle. The rage he felt at Lemuel Johnson returned and he noticed that he had the beginnings of an erection. He wondered if a man could fall prey to his own base nature because of the feeling he had for a woman, and he thought that he would fight for Toni Loam no matter the consequence to him.
In the back of his mind his father and sister called him a fool, while his mother just shook her head and Drum-Eddie grinned. His grandfather would have something wise to say, but whatever it was it wouldn’t matter, because in the end men were just fools anyway.…
“Men are fools,” Sovereign said into the receiver. “We’re always blaming women for the things we do when really it’s the fault in our own natures.”
“What do you mean, Mr. James?”
“If a man gets addicted to heroin you can’t say that it was the heroin’s fault, can you?”
“No. I guess not.”
“If a man leaves his wife and she finds another man, she can’t blame herself if her first husband gets mad, can she?”
“Not if he the one that left.”
“Then it’s not your fault that Lemuel can’t think right when it’s time for him to do so.”
“But I brought him up there.”
“Yes … and that was wrong, but you didn’t expect him to attack me, or for me to be there at all—did you?”
“No.”
“Then we’ll forget about it and look to the future.”
“But I let him take one a’ your watches and I was gonna … fuck him up in your bed.”
“I don’t care about any of that, Miss Loam. I can see again and this time it was because of your shouting to save me. I saw you reaching out to pull Lemuel back. I saw the sun coming in.…”
In the following lull in the conversation Sovereign noticed a small beetle walking along the windowsill. It was a seasonal wood beetle that lived in the floors of the apartment building. He usually crushed these bugs whenever he saw them, but this time, a self-ordained deity, he just watched in a minor stupor of amazement.
He asked if Toni’s mother was okay and she told a long and convoluted story, at the end of which her mother ended up in East St. Louis for a few weeks visiting Auntie G’s sister.
“Why you do that to Lemuel?” she asked in his ear.
The bug moved along like a rude cottage, given life and legs, that was now lumbering away from a lifelong servitude to civilization.
“I don’t know,” Sovereign James said.
“You got to know. You ran after him. You chased him down and beat him like a dog.”
Sovereign tried to remember the fight, but everything that happened after he left the apartment was hazy. There was a roar in his ears and a damnable squeaking in the distance. There was a heart beating and the back of somebody he was trying to catch up with but never could.
“I can only say that I probably hated him, but I can’t remember feeling or doing anything.”
“But you almost killed him,” she insisted. “You put him in a coma.”
Sovereign could tell that she was hurt. He wanted to explain but could not. He wanted to make her feel better the way he wished someone had done for him when Eagle had died.
Sovereign now had a full erection.
“He made me mad,” the employment officer said.
“What?”
“He made me mad,”
Sovereign said again, voicing an emotion that he could not remember but that he was certain of. “How dare he come into my house and steal from me and expect to have sex in my bed with a woman that I …”
“That you what?”
“A woman under my protection.”
“What does that mean?”
Sovereign took the erection in his left hand.
“I’m not sure,” he lied. “I feel very close to you, and when I saw him push you I got angry.”
“Like you were jealous?” Toni Loam asked in a voice that was new to Sovereign.
He squeezed the hard prick and winced.
“You saved me,” he said instead of really answering. “You … you were the only face that I saw in three months.”
“And so, like, you had a crush on me or sumpin’?”
Blindness, Sovereign thought, was a boon if it didn’t last forever. He could see through a finely developed mind’s eye that Toni’s words offered a door. He couldn’t tell if this portal was an entrance or exit. He dawdled in front of this gateway, feeling … feeling … free.
“Yes,” he said at last.
“Yes, you had a crush on me?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What?”
“I said yes.”
“Say it,” she said, and Sovereign had the feeling that the woman he spoke to had transformed in an instant like a larva into something beautiful, winged, and maybe deadly.
“I love you,” he said, not considering the words.
“What? I thought you said you had a crush on me.”
“That’s what you said. You said it, not me.”
The beetle was gone. The room down below, where the woman had been running, was empty, as was the kitchen where the husband and children had eaten and talked. The man in the baby-blue suit was probably at work by now, and the fire that the sirens sang for was no doubt extinguished.
“You love me?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Did you mean it?”
“I think so.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Because I’m in my fiftieth year and you’re in your twenty-second. Because I was blind and stupid and because I’ve always been alone in one room or another. Because you’re young and beautiful and I’m an old toad.”
Odyssey Page 10