Odyssey

by Walter Mosley

  “They thought that you were excluding white applicants?”

  “No.”

  In the following silence Sovereign thought about his supervisor Martin LeRoy’s office. It was on a corner of the twelfth floor of the building and looked down 5th Avenue toward Greenwich Village. It was a triangular room but large enough to overcome the inherent disadvantages of such an awkward layout. LeRoy was a pudgy white man with steely eyes. He smiled when Sovereign entered the Isosceles Office.

  “No?” Offeran asked.

  “They …” Sovereign said, “they were saying that I was racist against black people.”

  Sovereign enjoyed the doctor’s momentary silence. This whole concept of therapy felt like a match of some sort: like tennis or maybe even boxing. The only way he could stay focused was to compete against the questions asked.

  “I don’t understand,” Offeran said. “You are a black man.”

  “They said that I had a different, a higher set of standards for black and brown applicants, that I let in whites who were less qualified than their colored counterparts.”

  “Was that true?”

  “That depends.”

  “Depends on what?”

  “Is what I say in here to you confidential?”

  “Completely. I will report on your state of mind but under oath I cannot reveal the content of our conversations.”

  “Then yes, I do hold a higher standard for black and brown applicants. Always have. Always will.”

  “So the complaint is valid. You are racist.”

  “Yes, against whites.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I let in any old white guy. He could misspell his own name and I’d be likely to offer him a job. But when it comes to a brother or sister they’d better have every single i dotted and t crossed. When I’m finished with Techno-Sym their best employees will be people who look like me. From the president on down there’ll be a good chance for that job to be held by a person of color.”

  Sovereign took in a deep breath and it felt especially good. He had said something that was true in his heart. This set off a sense of elation that he rarely, if ever, felt.

  “Do you hate white people that much?” Offeran asked. The tone of the question was less professional. This also lent to Sovereign’s feeling of delight.

  “Not at all, Doctor. I just know that if we—so-called African and Hispanic Americans—ever plan to make it past the handout stage, we have to be the best. So I only hire the best. And once they’re in I do everything to make sure that they are given the chances they deserve.”

  “How did the meeting with your supervisor go?”

  “Great. All I had to do was point out the failings of the people I rejected. As long as I wasn’t deep-sixing white applicants he didn’t care. There’s no way in the world that he could believe that I was trying to take over his company from the inside. I mean … who would expect a capitalist revolution inside of an already capitalist system?”

  Another spate of silence ensued. Sovereign was comfortable in the gap of communication. He felt in charge of the session and therefore safe from … from … he didn’t exactly know what the danger was but it was definitely there, in that room.

  “What happened after you left work?” Offeran asked. His tone was again authoritative.

  “Nothing. Valentina came over to pick up the rest of her stuff.”

  “Your girlfriend?”

  “Ex.”

  “When did you break up?”

  “A week or so before I went blind. But that’s not the cause. She broke it off with me but I accepted it.”

  “Why?”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “I need to get to know your state of mind before the event. I’ll also want to know what you ate and what TV shows, if any, you watched. I’ll want you to tell me about any dreams you had that Wednesday and any recurring dreams you’ve had over the years. I will ask questions about your parents and siblings, if you have children—”

  “No kids,” Sovereign said brusquely. “No, no kids at all.”

  “You seem bothered by that.”

  “Valentina was the one who was bothered.”

  “That you didn’t have children?”

  “That I wanted them. You see, she’s quite a bit younger than I am. And she’s white on top of that. Her father doesn’t care what she does but her mother … her mother worries.”

  “About what?”

  The smile across Sovereign’s face no longer reminded him of the sun. “For the children,” he said.

  The rest of the hour was filled with what seemed to Sovereign like meaningless details of his life. Valentina had left because he wanted kids. His father had complained to his mother that the kids were too much trouble. He was born in San Diego but had gone to City College in New York, had graduated number nine in his class, and had worked for Techno-Sym for twenty-one years.

  “I was the only one not white that first day,” he told the psychoanalyst, “but now they got thirty-two black employees and half that number of other people of color. Four of them are on higher pay grades than I’m on.”

  Talk, talk, talk. That’s what Sovereign James thought about the hour. But at least he got to compete and tell the truth without worrying about the consequences.

  After a hundred or more questions Dr. Seth Offeran said, “The hour’s up, Mr. James. I’ll see you at the same time tomorrow.”

  Sovereign sighed.

  “Finally,” he said. “You know I haven’t talked so much nonsense since I was a little boy in San Diego.”

  “Oh? Who did you talk to then?”

  “I used to push my grandfather Eagle around in his wheelchair and ask him about everything under the sun. My mother said it was all those questions that finally gave him a heart attack.”

  After five steps down the carpeted hall and eleven more along the wall, Sovereign did a ninety-degree turn and took eleven steps, reached out, and found the handle of the front door. This he pulled open before striding through. He located the second door just as easily and walked with confidence to the outer limit of the inset entrance. He had taken out the collapsible white cane, holding it carelessly in his left hand so that people would know that he was blind and stay out of his way.

  Taking the cell phone from his trench coat pocket he hit the right keys and held the phone to his ear.

  “Red Rover,” a voice said, cutting the first ring off in the middle.

  “Sovereign James ready for a pickup on the north side of East Eighty-sixth between Madison and Fifth.”

  “Hello, Mr. James. We’ll have a car there in eight minutes.”

  The street sounds were, of course, louder outside. He heard a long conversation between two men about a baseball game the night before. Another man was speaking Arabic in a consistent stream. Sovereign figured that it was a food vendor talking on his cell phone. He smelled the burning meat and no one answered the man’s indecipherable words.

  “Mr. James?”

  “Antonio?”

  “Take three steps forward and you’ll be at my back door.”

  The HR officer did this but after the second step he ran into someone, or rather, she ran into him. She stepped on his toe while ramming something hard into his right breastbone.

  “Why don’t you watch where you’re going?” a woman said angrily. And then, “Oh! I didn’t notice that you were …”

  “He’s blind, lady,” Antonio called from his car.

  “Let me help you,” she said, taking hold of his right biceps.

  “Get your hands off me, woman,” Sovereign said. “I didn’t ask to be touched.”

  “Are you all right, sir?” That was the doorman from earlier.

  “I’m so sorry,” the woman said as she released his arm.

  “Just keep moving, Mr. James,” Antonio added. “The door is still right in front of you.…”

  That night, in his Greenwich Village apartment, Sovereign wa
s exhausted. He ordered a sausage-and-peppers pizza again. After eating he drank water from the tap without bothering with a glass. When the eating and drinking were done he tried to lie down on the sofa but the room started spinning and he was forced to sit up.

  The sun had gone down. He knew this because of the chill on his skin. He reached for the blanket but it was gone. Galeta, the cleaning lady, had rearranged things again. But in spite of the cold he drifted off, imagining that he was in Eagle James’s rowboat without an oar on a wide, placid lake. He could hear the burble of fish gliding beneath him, imagining the lines of their passage through the chill waters. There was the sun above, filtered by water, and the stench of putrefaction coming in literal waves around him.

  He was a fish aware only of sensation and broken images through the blue-green lens of underwater life. He had no brain, or at least very little. The watery world was revolving—a rotation within the orbit of the planet. He could feel the earth moving and himself projected in a world where up and down and even gravity were relative terms.

  “How do you feel?” the dream image of Seth Offeran asked.

  “Free.”

  “What do you want?”

  Instead of answering, Sovereign felt a band of pain across his chest. This was a pain he always felt after swimming the first few days of summer.

  “Your fins need exercise,” his father would say.

  “Come lie down,” his mother told him.

  And then the phone rang.

  The first jangled report was modulated by the water. The second salvo of sound coincided with him rising up from the lake. By the fifth ring the answering machine engaged and Sovereign realized that he was lying on his side on the sofa.

  “This is the phone line of Sovereign James,” the machine said. “I’m not in right now or else I’m otherwise engaged. Please leave a message and I will return your call forthwith.”

  There was a beep and then a few seconds of silence.

  “Sovy?” a woman’s voice asked tentatively. “Sovy, are you there? I don’t know why you won’t return my calls. I mean, I still care about you. I want to help. Please let me come over. The doorman told me that you didn’t want to see me. I need to hear that from you. You owe me that much.…”

  The room started spinning and Sovereign sat up.

  “No matter what has happened between us I still care for you,” Valentina continued. “We need to talk. Sovy … Sovereign.”

  There was a moment of silence and then the click of a phone being disengaged. Nausea from the spinning brought Sovereign to his feet. When he stood, the feeling of motion stopped.

  He stood there with his hands hanging down, a sentry in the darkness—a man, he felt, who was soon to disappear.

  The next day one of Sovereign’s regular drivers, Reuben Quinta, dropped him off in front of the 86th Street building.

  “If you swing back around at three-oh-five I’ll be standing right out front,” Sovereign said, and then he maneuvered his hand to give Reuben a three-dollar tip and a handshake.

  “You got it, Mr. James.”

  The heat of the sun was beating down. Sovereign turned one hundred and eighty degrees, walked the nine steps to the first door of the vestibule, opened the door, and took two and half steps more to the second portal. He walked straight to the back wall of the entrance room, touched the wall in an act of friendly spatial recognition after ten and a half paces, then walked directly to the Craigson Group’s door without touching the wall or even really counting his steps. He pushed the door open and smiled to himself that he was right about its not being locked or latched.

  Even inside the office where Offeran had guided him, Sovereign felt that he remembered the path. He came to where he thought the door was but encountered a wall. To the left he found a door and knocked.

  No answer.

  He knocked again.

  The knob jiggled and clicked. A slight movement of air told Sovereign that a door had opened.

  “Yes?” a woman’s voice asked. “Can I help you?”

  She was shy of five six, half a foot shorter than Sovereign.

  “I was looking for Dr. Offeran. I was sure that this was his door.”

  “He’s the pink door behind you.”

  “Directly behind me?”

  After a pause the woman said, “Yes.”

  “I’m here, Mr. James,” Offeran’s voice said. “Right behind you.”

  “Thank you,” Sovereign said to the woman before him. Then he turned and headed in the direction of his doctor’s voice.

  He had the feeling of passing through a doorway.

  “Couch is just a few steps ahead of you,” Seth Offeran said.

  As he was seating himself Sovereign heard the door to the office close.

  “That was inaccurate language for a blind man,” James said.

  “What?”

  “ ‘A few steps.’ That could mean two or four. I mean, I know in usage it means three, but most people aren’t aware of that fact.”

  “Sorry,” Offeran said. “I’ll use the correct number from now on.”

  Again Sovereign felt as if he had scored a point in some kind of unique game. But this time the victory felt hollow.

  “How did you sleep?” the doctor asked.

  “Fine, great. You know, the only time I ever see anything is in my dreams.”

  “Did you dream about me?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “What did I look like in your dream?”

  Sovereign smiled. “Is this some kind of trick, Doctor?”

  “No. I was wondering if you might have let an image of me in even though you believe that you have not seen me.”

  “So you agree with Dr. Tomcat that I’m really not blind but fakin’ it.”

  “No. I believe what you’re telling me. But that doesn’t discount the possibility that you’re suffering from conversion disorder.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That is when a person redirects the focus of a severe anxiety into the manifestation of a psychosomatic illness. This could be paralysis, general numbness, or the interruption of one of the senses—including sight.”

  If this were a boxing match, Sovereign thought, he’d be flat on his back at this moment.

  “I didn’t see you,” he said, mentally getting to his feet. “You asked a question but I didn’t see your face.”

  “What did I ask?”

  “I don’t remember.” This was true.

  “What was the rest of the dream about …?”

  The hour was used up talking about Eagle James and the boat that Sovereign knew of but had never seen. He enjoyed talking about his family and their stories. This hour, and many more after that, allowed him access to a world that he thought he’d left behind after going off to college and starting his professional life as a human resources revolutionary.

  “Why did Valentina break it off with you?” Dr. Seth Offeran asked on the following Tuesday, the seventh session of Sovereign’s therapy.

  “She didn’t want children,” Sovereign said. “I told you that already.”

  “Was that something new for her?”

  “No, we had kinda agreed on it,” Sovereign said, haltingly.

  “Was there any more to it?”

  “She had worked for Techno-Sym and I’d given her a glowing recommendation for her new position at Jolly Jake’s Virtual Arcade Corporation.”

  “And you told her about it?”

  “No. No. I guess they’re pretty loose at Jolly Jake’s and the employment director let her take a look at her file. She called and asked me out to lunch.”

  “And you went?”

  “I didn’t see why not,” Sovereign said. “I had no idea that she had seen my recommendation, and anyway … she was married.”

  “Married?”

  “Yes, to another employee of Techno-Sym. Verso Andrews.”

  “And what was the lunch about?”

  “Like I said, she’d read my letter to JJ�
��s Arcade and wanted to thank me. We talked and I told her that she had always been an outstanding employee who did the job because of professionalism and not for any other reason.

  “You have to understand, Doctor, I look at work as a political act. All other things being equal—it doesn’t matter about the race or gender of the employee but only their attitude.”

  “And Valentina was thankful,” Offeran said.

  “She came home with me and stayed until late that night. Two weeks later she left Verso and got a place about eight blocks from my apartment building. She made it clear that she would be my girlfriend but that we could never marry or have a conventional life together.”

  “How did that make you feel?”

  “I had a girlfriend then,” Sovereign said. “Her name was, still is, Claudette. Claudy had been talkin’ to me about kids for almost a year. ‘It’s time for me to start a family,’ she’d say before we went to bed, and, ‘You know I want to have a little girl,’ she’d say when we woke up in the morning. Almost every day she’d say something about it, especially after we had sex.”

  “And you didn’t want to have a child with her,” the doctor concluded.

  “She didn’t want to have a child with me.”

  “But she said—”

  “She said that she wanted a baby, that she wanted a little girl. She never asked me if I wanted it. She was asking me to give her a baby like it was a gift or something.”

  “So you felt left out.”

  “Let me ask you something, Doctor.”

  “What’s that, Mr. James?”

  “If you had a patient tell you that he got shot in the chest, would you ask him if he felt like he was attacked?”

  “I understand.”

  “I hope so,” Sovereign James said. “ ’Cause Claudette wanted her own baby and her own family and I just happened to be the sperm donor who was on the other side of the bed at the time.”

  “Did you want a child?”

  “Not that child.”

  “But what did you want, Sovereign?”

  “I wanted a woman to take me by the hand, look me in the eye, and say, ‘I want your baby, daddy. Yours.’ ”

  “And Claudette said that she wanted her own child.”