Odyssey

by Walter Mosley

  “How did you do that?” Valentina asked.

  “What?”

  “How did you know where the glass was?”

  “Myna.”

  “What?”

  “Myna’s the waitress. She knows that I’m blind now and she always puts everything in the same place. That way I know exactly where to put my hands. I’ll show you.” Without turning his head away from Valentina, Sovereign moved his left hand through the air and let it descend on the leather bill folder. He flipped this open, then reached into its right front pocket, producing a twenty-dollar bill. He placed the money on top of the open folder and smiled.

  “How did you know it was enough to cover the cost?” Valentina asked.

  “My bills are separated into different pockets,” he said, “one for each denomination. In other countries they make the denominations different sizes, but here in America they make you work at it. I get the teller at the bank to help me with that. And Myna knows to stack the bills of my change from left to right starting at the edge of the leather wallet. If a denomination is missing she leaves a little gap to indicate it.”

  “So,” Valentina said, “you accept the breakup now?”

  “Yes.”

  “I wish you had been able to do it earlier,” she said.

  “Me too,” Sovereign replied from deep within his underground grotto.

  “Will we still be friends?”

  “As long as you want.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Valentina asked, still, Sovereign thought, looking for a way to get the upper hand.

  “That I will answer your calls and you can come visit whenever you want.”

  “No hard feelings?”

  “Lots of feeling,” he said, “but none of it hard.”

  The sway of the conversation reminded Sovereign of his grandfather’s boat. He was that vessel, floating away from shore, soon to be lost. He wasn’t sad but merely lonely.

  “What are you thinking?” Valentina asked.

  “About my grandfather.”

  “What about him?”

  “One day we were standing next to this big lake. I said, ‘Look at that lake, Granddad,’ and he said, ‘I see the little of it that I can see.’ And when I asked him what he meant, he said, ‘I can’t see the bottom and I can’t see the other side. What I do see is only a very little part of what makes up the lake that I know to be there.’ ”

  “Did he really say that or are you just making it up?” Valentina asked. For the first time her voice carried some of its old mirth.

  “I’m pretty sure he said it,” Sovereign replied, “but you know memory is like that lake—you think you know it but you never have it all.”

  “I have to get back to work.”

  “I’m glad you came here, Valentina. I’m glad you found me.”

  “I remembered you used to come here for lunch on your days off,” she said.

  “I’m glad.”

  “Good-bye,” she said, and he felt a feathery kiss on his left eyebrow. After a few moments he realized that she was gone.

  He thought that maybe he hadn’t tricked her after all, that maybe he’d broken a cycle in himself and not between them. Maybe his grandfather had lectured him on the unconscious shortsightedness of men for just such a day as this.

  “Were you lying?” Seth Offeran asked an hour and a half later.

  “I thought I was,” Sovereign said. “But when I think about it, maybe it was the only way that I could speak the truth.”

  “Explain.”

  “Everything I do is a game, Doctor. Every word, every question or statement or answer I give is designed to help me win.”

  “Win what?”

  “I don’t know.… I mean, I used to think that I knew. Getting my parents to think I was the best over my brother and sister, getting the top grades, or making the team. Even in the lunchroom I’d try to be the most popular by making fun of other kids’ problems or differences.”

  “And that was winning?” Seth Offeran asked.

  “I thought so. People always seem to be trying to get the upper hand. Valentina was trying to in our conversation. She wanted to put the blame for our breakup on me. She feels that it was my fault for wanting children and not the relationship she’d offered. She couldn’t say that, so she wanted me to act brutish so she could reject me for the way I treated her.”

  “You can’t be sure of that.”

  “Do you think I’m wrong about her?”

  Sovereign counted the seconds—one, one thousand, two, one thousand, three, one thousand—while Offeran thought about the question. As he counted he realized that he wasn’t trying to win anything. This insight made him wish that he could see the psychoanalyst’s face. He wanted to make eye-to-eye connection with the man and was sorry that he could not.

  “No,” Offeran said at last. “From everything you’ve told me about Valentina and your talk I believe that she would try to shift the responsibility for the breakup to you. But can you blame her?”

  “No. She’s a very ambitious woman, but success for her is more emotional than it is material. She needs to believe that she’s done the right thing. Guilt undermines her claim on success.”

  “Like losing does for you,” Offeran added.

  “Just so.”

  “Are you playing me right now, Sovereign?”

  “I don’t believe I am. I’m beginning to like these talks. And … and I only short-circuited the talk with Valentina because I really do think she’s right.”

  “Right about what?”

  “If I had approached her differently, if I had shared my feelings with her rather than just thrown the idea of a child on the table like some kind of stillborn hope, maybe … maybe we could have talked about it—learned something.”

  “So you stymied her attempt to blame you because what she would have said was true and you were trying to protect yourself from the pain of that truth.”

  “Yes.”

  “Has any of your sight returned?”

  “No.”

  “Not even a glimmer?”

  “No. Why do you ask?”

  “That’s why we’re here,” Offeran replied. “We’re here to unknot the psychological basis for your blindness. Every time I notice a change in you I will ask the same question.”

  At that moment Sovereign’s head jerked to the right.

  “What was that?” the doctor asked.

  “A tic, a spasm. I’ve been having them ever since I lost my sight.”

  “There’s a fly in here today,” Offeran said. “I heard it buzz behind me just before your head moved.”

  “So?”

  “So maybe you saw the fly and responded on an unconscious level.”

  “I didn’t see anything.”

  “Our time is up for today.”

  In the Red Rover car service car and through the front door of his apartment building, up the elevator and on the way to his white sofa, Sovereign was thinking; he was thinking about that fly and how quickly his head moved. He’d heard the buzzing too, but he didn’t remember seeing anything.…

  The idea that he made up his condition seemed preposterous. How could a man make himself not see the world around him? Like a child denying the obvious. But he wasn’t a frightened boy. Sovereign was a man who lived in the world, made a living, made a difference. How could such a person be petulant and stubborn enough to shut down an entire sense?

  It was ridiculous.

  Putting the absurd notion out of his mind, Sovereign set about doing his daily exercises.

  From the first full day of his blindness he realized that he’d have to work out. It was the home-delivery pizza and Chinese food that convinced him. He was eating badly and too much. He had once been a fat man. It took years of changing his eating habits to get down to a normal weight. Now that he was eating junk food again he’d have to balance it another way.

  The first day he did three push-ups, seven abdominal crunches, and fifteen steps running i
n place, bringing his knees nearly up to his shoulders. He did this circuit of exercises three times and stopped, winded. By the end of the second week he’d gotten up to twelve push-ups, twenty-five crunches, fifty running-in-place steps, and ten circuits. After that he’d only increased the repetitions. By that Wednesday afternoon he’d gotten up to thirty-two circuits. He liked the sweat and the fact that his muscles were getting hard.

  After exercising and showering Sovereign went to the drawer where Galeta stored his casual clothes. He dressed and went out again.

  “Where you going, Mr. James?” Axel Parman, one of the doormen, asked.

  “Out. Going to walk around the block.”

  “Good for you. You don’t want this kind of thing to get you down.”

  Outside Sovereign heard the sounds of cars and footsteps, experienced the air and sun on his face. His muscles shook a bit from the hard exercise but that served only to increase his feeling of well-being. Tapping to the left with his white cane he hugged the wall of his block-square apartment building and went all the way around. He completed this circuit again, and again. He lost count of the times he’d walked around the building as his thoughts drifted.

  He’d given Valentina something she desired. The walnut-eyed brunette had never expected anyone to recognize her for the person she wanted to be. And he, Sovereign, had long been waiting for a woman to offer herself to him with seemingly no strings attached.

  “Has anybody ever sucked your dick like this?” she asked him not one hour after they’d had their first lunch together.

  They were reclining on his white sofa and he was thinking, Yes, they have, except no, they haven’t, because nobody ever asked that question before. It was the way she talked to him that drove Sovereign wild.

  And then, two weeks later, she said while riding him, “I’m leaving Verso.”

  “Your husband?”

  “I told him yesterday.”

  “But …”

  “Don’t worry, Sovy; I don’t want to move in on you. All you have to do is keep talking to me and keep that dick hard when I come over.”

  She was twenty-one years younger than he and white and married (soon to be divorced), but Sovereign could not bring himself to break away.

  Walking around the fourth corner of his building, blind as Justice, Sovereign felt that erection again.

  “That was a good walk,” the doorman said.

  Sovereign nodded but he didn’t say anything. He felt his way toward the elevator and pressed the button for the ninth floor. Down the hall Valentina’s number repeated itself again and again in his mind. He mumbled it while fumbling for the keyhole. He said it aloud as he slammed the front door shut. He imagined the bearded shape of her pubic hair and the glistening pink clitoris while his fingers searched for the phone on the high counter.

  His heart was pounding. His muscles were trembling now with anticipation. But when he closed his fingers around the receiver he froze. It was as if a bucket of ice had been thrown down his pants.

  He dropped the phone back into its cradle and climbed onto one of his three red leather-and-chrome stools. Sitting there he realized that it was the feeling he had that he wanted, the memory of a seduction by error.

  It was finished. It was done.

  A shadow moved over his sightless eyes and Sovereign once again wondered if he had made himself blind so that he could no longer see how lost he was.

  “And what about that shadow you say passed over you?” Seth Offeran asked.

  “That was three weeks ago,” Sovereign said.

  “You haven’t seen it again?”

  “No.”

  “Any sudden head movements?”

  “I believe you, Doctor.”

  “What?”

  “I believe that I’m not really blind. I think that you’re right. Last night I dreamed that I could see again. It was so real, so powerful that I got up off my sofa and went to turn on the light. But when I got there I realized that it was already on and I was still in darkness. I thought that once I accepted what you say that my sight would come back … at least partly.”

  “Obviously you haven’t accepted that you’re the cause of the affliction.”

  “But I know it’s true.”

  “Knowledge is a strong thing, but what you feel is stronger.”

  A hum came up from out of Sovereign’s chest, what sounded to him like the approach of a giant wasp in a low-budget science fiction movie from the fifties. He sat back against the cushions of the therapist’s couch with no fear of knives or shards of glass cutting into his kidneys.

  “It’s a process, Mr. James. You have experienced a powerful trauma and then you forgot it. We are here to bring that experience to light.”

  “You think that spouting a metaphor is gonna give me back my vision?”

  “I think that you wake up from a dream and reach out for the light switch. I think that your whole life has been in shadow.”

  “What shadow?” Sovereign James asked.

  “Maybe not a solitary shadow,” Offeran said, “but darkness set out by an intricate network of lies that have been with you for your entire adult life.

  “Your ex-girlfriend believes that you share her estimation of herself when really your recommendation was a mere whim. Your employers believe you’re working for their benefit while in reality you’re trying to overturn their world. Your fellow workers think that you are against them and on the side of the white bosses, but you see yourself as the puppet master, pulling the strings for both black and white.”

  Images of Valentina and the offices of Techno-Sym appeared in James’s mind. They weren’t exactly superimposed, but they were juxtaposed as Offeran had placed them. The space was like one of the large galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His bosses and coworkers, employees both black and white, and then Verso Andrews standing inside an ornate and gilded wooden frame that hung from an invisible, virtual wall. Valentina was standing there looking up at her ex-husband. He was looking down on her.

  In the background the nonwhite members of Techno-Sym muttered complaints while the others merely spoke in general. Verso and Valentina were conversing but Sovereign couldn’t make out what they were saying.

  He leaned closer to the separated couple and turned his ear to hear.

  Their voices blended into one. The voice was saying something to him, to Sovereign.

  “What?”

  “Our time is up,” Dr. Offeran said.

  “Up? We just started.”

  “You fell asleep in the beginning of the session.”

  “Why didn’t you wake me?”

  “We’ll take that up tomorrow.”

  “What do my parents have to do with anything?” Sovereign asked the next day.

  “You have very little to say about them,” Offeran said. “In my experience patients usually avoid subjects that are painful to them.”

  Sovereign no longer bantered with his therapist. But often he’d spend long spans in silence while thinking about the questions he was asked.

  Solar James had married Winifred Handly. He was a wharf manager at the shipping yards and she a seamstress who took in work from a French cleaner’s in downtown San Diego. He was the color of a block of amber set in a sunny windowsill and she was dark as blackstrap molasses.

  Solar bought two plots of land on the outskirts of the city and built a three-story cylindrical home that had four front doors and five bedrooms, three children and two dogs.

  His sister, Zenith, was a year older. She lived in St. Louis and had been married to the same man, Thomas Thomas, for twenty-seven years. Zenith favored their father and rarely had a word for Sovereign, even when they were children.

  His brother, Drum, was two years younger and the favorite of both parents. Drum didn’t look like any of the rest of the family. He was tall and sand colored, handsome with light brown eyes.

  Drum could get in trouble standing still on a lonely road alone, their grandfather Eagle James would say
.

  Sovereign loved his brother and was devastated when the FBI had come to the house saying that he was being sought in connection with a bank robbery committed in Los Angeles.

  “I got a letter six years ago,” Sovereign said.

  “From one of your parents?”

  “It came from Peru but there was no signature.”

  “Who was it from?”

  “Maybe my brother. He’s on the run from the FBI. They think he robbed a bank or something. He was only seventeen but they called him the mastermind. Statute of limitations is up, I think. Anyway I got this letter. Really it was no more than a note. It said, ‘Keep your hands up and your feet planted.’ ”

  “What did that mean to you?”

  “Me and my brother used to take boxing lessons together. He was better than me, even though I had two years and twenty pounds on him.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Drum, but everybody called him Eddie.”

  Those words hung in the air between the doctor and the sightless patient who now believed he wasn’t truly blind.

  After a full five minutes Sovereign began to speak again.

  “Every evening my parents would get together and talk to each other in the sitting room with the curtains open so they could look out on the line of trees that separated us from the houses behind our lot. They’d talk but it was like they were talking to somebody not there.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My father would say how the bosses on the wharf were racist and kept Negroes down and my mom would say that he was a hard worker and did a good job caring for his family.”

  “She was telling him that he was doing a good job even against a hard time.”

  “I know it sounds like that, Seth, but that’s not how it was in the room. She never asked what the bosses were doing and he didn’t thank her for her hard work and compliments. Don’t get me wrong; they were very close. My grandfather used to say that they were like a tree and the soil. One grew out of the other and in doing so enriched the very ground it stood upon, but still they lived in different worlds, spoke separate languages, and had dreams with little or nothing in common.”