Odyssey

by Walter Mosley

  “So what do you want us to do now, Mr. James?” Darius asked what turned out to be the last query of the unique meeting.

  “Do?” the HR manager asked himself. “I don’t know. It seemed to me that I should tell you people the truth. I don’t expect to be here much longer. Either I’ll get fired or put in jail or something. For twenty-one years I’ve been playing this game. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything but … but I just thought you should know.”

  Sovereign walked home. He didn’t want to be underground in the subway, in the backseat of a taxi, or on the high platform of a crowded bus. The sky was overcast, but he didn’t notice, because his eyes were studying the sidewalk before him. He was thinking about the ramifications of the spur-of-the-moment meeting with the unofficial Black Workers’ Union of Techno-Sym. The meeting was like a tiny ripple in a great tumultuous lake, he thought. The influences might be far-reaching but the origin would certainly be lost.

  There was a new doorman at the marble kiosk of his building—brawny and bronze. He was young and confident in his bearing and blue jacket-uniform. His only visible flaw was the smallness of his eyes.

  “Mr. James?” the greeter-guard asked, squinting.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m new today,” he said. “Name is Jolly.”

  “Jolly?”

  The big, beautiful man shrugged his navy-blue shoulders and then turned his puckered line of sight to a place behind Sovereign, to the chair.

  The chair was a pink wooden kitchen seat that Myron Hayes had put there for the times when he needed to rest before going upstairs to his apartment. Myron had cancer at the time and was going through treatments, radiation and chemical, to battle the disease. Every day he took a walk around the building but was often too tired even to stand waiting for the elevator just after the constitutional. So he had his neighbor, Nelson Briggs, bring the pink chair down for him to sit in.

  Myron survived the tumor but was killed a year later by a hit-and-run driver three blocks from their building. All that was left now was the hot-colored chair sitting alone against a broad terra-cotta-and-emerald wall.

  The small man sitting there had black hair and milky pale skin. With Jolly and Sovereign staring at him he rose and said, “Mr. James?”

  “Yes?”

  “Hi,” he said, taking two steps and holding out a hand. “I’m Monte Selfridge, a friend of your brother, Drum-Eddie.”

  Taking the proffered hand, Sovereign asked, “Are you a bank robber, Mr. Selfridge?”

  “No, sir. I’m in the international message trade.”

  “You work for AT&T?”

  The small man was in his late thirties, at most forty. He laughed, showing a row of healthy but uneven teeth.

  “No, sir,” he said again. “There are a lot of people all over the world who need their thoughts known without any kind of trail, electronic or ink. When the need gets great enough, people like me are employed to move the message from one place to the other.”

  “And Eddie has a message for me that he couldn’t pass on the phone?”

  “Can we go upstairs, sir?” Monte asked. “I don’t usually transact my business in open spaces that aren’t anonymous to the receiver.”

  “That’s me? I’m the receiver?”

  Monte Selfridge smiled.

  “So,” Sovereign James asked his brother’s representative once they had both settled in his living room. “I’m supposed to receive a message from Drum now?”

  “Actually this is more a personal favor than a proper transaction,” Monte said, looking a bit uncomfortable. “You see, your brother did me a big favor twelve years back and he’s asked me to reciprocate.”

  “You use a lot of big words, Mr. Selfridge.”

  “My profession crosses many languages and requires a broad vocabulary,” he admitted. “I never write anything down, and so words and their usage have a tendency to stick.”

  “What kind of favor?”

  “First Eddie heard that you were blind and then that you were being prosecuted for assault. He asked you if you needed help and you said no, but he wasn’t sure about that. So I’m here to talk to you about the situation.”

  “As far as I know, charges have not been lodged against me.”

  “Forty-eight hours from now they will be.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “I know a lot of people in New York, Mr. James. That’s why Eddie asked me to come see you.”

  Sovereign turned his head to look out the window. There was a jet going past, south of Manhattan island, above the false horizon line of skyscrapers. He imagined himself sitting next to a window in that airliner, looking down on the hundreds of thousands of anonymous people hidden inside the buildings, and so small they were invisible walking down the streets. He and Monte Selfridge were a part of that nameless, imperceptible mob. This thought provided relief.

  “I was blind,” he said easily, “and then I could see—but only for a moment. It was like a sudden shaft of light inside a shuttered room. In that brief frame of vision there was a young woman’s face. She turned out not to be the ideal woman I’d always wanted, but the window, that brief instant in time, would not leave me.”

  “You loved her?”

  “I do. And she in turn loves a series of distractions and tragedies. Through her I feel … I don’t know—strong. It’s stupid, really, meaningless. But that doesn’t matter.

  “She,” Sovereign continued, “she brought a man in here and he wound up attacking me. She hollered in my defense. My sight returned again, this time permanently, and I beat him nearly to death.”

  When Sovereign looked out the window the jet was gone and yet still in his mind. He wondered how long that image would stay with him: a gray winged aircraft in a fading blue sky.

  “That’s the story, Mr. Selfridge. If the prosecutor wants to send me to prison I’ll be unhappy to go, but I probably will. My whole life, I now realize, has been under a blanket of darkness. Now that I can see it I will not turn away—from anything.”

  The small white messenger’s left heel was pumping up and down. The nail of his left thumb grazed the skin of his lower lip. His eyes, black like his hair, peered into Sovereign’s words.

  “You look like Jinx,” Monte said after a few moments’ gaze, “around the eyes.”

  “That’s Eddie, right?”

  “Yeah,” he replied with a smile.

  “So what’s the verdict, Monte?”

  “You got a good lawyer?”

  “She’s a lawyer and she gives good advice even if I don’t take it.”

  Monte Selfridge grinned with recognition, as if seeing himself in a highly polished mirror of ideas.

  “Jinx did have a message,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “He wanted me to tell you that he loves you.”

  These words brought up an odd feeling in Sovereign. For a moment he was at a loss, and then he realized that it was a question without words noodling through his mind, like a sightless worm.

  The jiggle and swish of the front door sounded.

  “Sovereign?” Toni Loam called.

  “In here.”

  She was wearing the ochre dress from that day. The hem made it only halfway down her thighs. She had strong brown legs that made Sovereign’s heart skip. It was a physical feeling that he wanted to deny. But it persisted.

  “Oh,” she said. “I didn’t know you had company.”

  Monte was seated on the white sofa while Sovereign had the red chair.

  “This is Monte Selfridge,” Sovereign said, “an emissary from my brother, who, as you know, is a retired bank robber now living in Brazil, or thereabouts.”

  “Oh,” she said again.

  Toni walked across the room, up to Sovereign in the red chair, and seated herself on his lap.

  His erection was instantaneous and insistent, a perfect counterpoint to the skipping of his heart.

  “Hello, Mr. Selfridge,” Toni said, curling her left
arm around Sovereign’s neck.

  A musky, half-sweet odor came from her body, her torso. The dress and perfume, the aggressive seating, and even the huskiness of her voice were all designed as a message for Sovereign—a man realizing that he had lived alone in his mind for far too long.

  “I think I’m interrupting,” the emissary said.

  “No, not at all,” Sovereign replied. “I haven’t heard from my brother in the last thirty years. Now he’s called me twice in as many days and sent you. I won’t send away maybe my only connection to him.”

  “That’s right,” Toni said. “We can all have dinner together. Sovereign said that we were having French.”

  “Yes,” Sovereign added. “I insist.”

  “Then at least you can allow me to take you two out to a place I know.”

  The restaurant was on the third floor of a nondescript building on the Bowery—Chez Willomena la Terre. The aluminum elevator carried no more than four at a time, and the small dining room, with its zinc bar, had only nine tables—all of which were in use.

  “How did you ever find this place?” Sovereign asked Monte after the salad made of Bibb lettuce with olive oil, garlic, and red wine dressing. “The food is great.”

  “I’ve been coming here for seventeen years,” the mortal Mercury admitted. “My mom was friends with Willomena. Do you like it, Miss Loam?”

  “The bread is good,” she said.

  Her left hand was stroking Sovereign’s thigh under the table.

  After coq au vin with escarole and scalloped potatoes, Monte ordered apple tarts and a bottle of cognac for the table.

  The conversation up until that time had flowed easily back and forth between the diners. Toni liked to talk about her family and the people who lived in her mother’s building. She didn’t mention Lemuel, but Sovereign thought that he could tell when she skipped over a memory or a significant moment in a story that might have included her sometimes ex.

  For his part James told about his capitalistic revolutionary career that spanned a more than twenty years, admitting that, in the end, it had probably been a misguided adventure.

  “Sounds like a practicable idea to me,” Monte said. “I mean, somebody has to make the plans—and execute them.”

  Monte was careful not to reveal anything about his work or clients. He acknowledged coming from Cleveland and going to school in Akron.

  “I was good at languages but otherwise pretty poor in school,” he said. “That’s what brought me to South America in the end.”

  After two snifters of cognac Sovereign was feeling warm and fuzzy.

  “Tell me about my brother,” he asked their host.

  “Jinx lives in the City of God,” Monte said, lifting his glass in a toast to his absent friend.

  “What do that mean?” Toni asked in a different timbre than Sovereign was used to.

  “A long time ago,” Selfridge answered, “Saint Augustine said that all hope was preordained, that those meant to go to heaven were fated from birth. No matter what they did in life all they had to do was confess at the end and they would be elevated to the heavenly choir.”

  “Even murderers?” the girl asked.

  “Worse,” Monte acknowledged. “You see, man thinks that he understands sin and evil but he doesn’t.”

  “He don’t?”

  “No. We are only infants in the eyes of heaven … or at least in the eyes of Augustine deciphering the will of the infinite. For him we were children, the progeny of a parent who had his favorites and his more numerous black sheep. God chooses at the very instant he first sees a mortal soul. He knows the company he wants to keep in the immortal city.”

  “What happens to the ones he don’t choose?” Toni asked, an awestruck parishioner from a country hamlet on her first visit to the Vatican.

  “They fade from the memory of God and therefore cease to exist.”

  Sovereign didn’t realize how closely he’d been listening until the emissary spoke these words. That was when the soft feeling of inebriation turned toward sorrow in his chest.

  “That’s just the end for them?” Toni said, echoing Sovereign’s feeling with her tone.

  “Yes.”

  “What chance do you have to be picked?”

  “The walls of heaven contain an infinite space,” Monte told the girl. “But the void outside dwarfs that. Almost all people born and living are destined to disappear in the annals of man and God.”

  “But what about my brother?” Sovereign interposed.

  Monte and Toni turned toward him, resentment at his interruption fixed on their faces. Then Monte sat back and smiled.

  “Jinx is one of the special ones,” he said. “The kind of guy who always gets it right even when he fucks up royally. Excuse my language. He’s the one in a million. When he jumps out of the frying pan he lands on a desert island with a village full of native girls who have been waiting for him but they never knew it.”

  “That why you call him Jinx?” Sovereign asked. “Because he’s so lucky?”

  “Lucky,” Monte said, “is a guy who wins the lottery and then realizes his life hasn’t really gotten any better. Your brother was born rich. He came to a small village in southern Peru, gave all of his money to a local hospital on a whim, and was adopted by the entire town—protected until he could start an intercontinental import-export business based in Brazil, Rome, and Moscow.”

  “So Eddie’s happy,” Sovereign said. “Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “Your brother is one of the rare beings in this world who is satisfied with his lot. He’s a good friend, and even when he’s your enemy he holds no animosity or grudge. He was able to leave one life behind him and start a new one without a care.”

  “Like a snake shedding its skin,” Sovereign muttered.

  “What’d you say, baby?” Toni asked.

  “Nothing, honey. Just remembering a talk I had.”

  “Where do you live, Mr. Selfridge?” Toni asked their host.

  “I move around a lot,” he said. “I have a house near the water in Havana, and wives in Bristol, Jo-burg, and Des Moines.”

  “You got more than one wife?”

  “They all know about one another,” he explained. “The children are aware of their siblings. I even take them all on vacation sometimes.”

  “I didn’t think you could own property in Cuba,” she said. “My friend Pasqual told me that communists don’t let people own nuthin’.”

  “Maybe not him. But the rules in every society are always shifting. Maybe one day I’ll go home to Cuba and find somebody else living in my little place.”

  “What would you do about that?” Sovereign asked, pouring drinks for both Selfridge and himself.

  “I’d sit down and talk with them … try to understand where they’re coming from.”

  The bumblebee in Sovereign’s chest had turned into a giant moth. The feathery fluttering scared him but he tried not to show it.

  “What about you, Mr. James?” Monte asked.

  “What about me?”

  “What’s it like going blind and then suddenly getting your vision back?”

  Once again Sovereign found himself in the sun-flooded living room with the young man attacking him. Ecstasy and desperation descended upon him but he didn’t say that.

  “It’s like,” he said, “you were leaning out of a window to get a better view of a fine young woman like Toni here. She looks up and smiles and you bend farther, not thinking about what you’re doing. And then you fall. Suddenly everything is completely different and you can’t adjust to it because you don’t know the rules. You know you’re gonna die and you accept that reality in a split second. And then your clothes snag on a flagpole or lamp ornament and there you are, suspended above the ground, already dead because you accepted it but still alive because of some crazy serendipity of fate.

  “And while you hang there, you’re wondering, should you just let go and hit the ground like you were supposed to or shou
ld you climb back into the window and go on with your business like nothing happened?”

  Toni took his hand and squeezed it.

  Monte smiled and raised his glass.

  “It’s getting late,” the admitted bigamist said. “There are rooms downstairs that you guys could stay in. That is, if you don’t want to bother going home.”

  “Rooms?” Sovereign said. “At a restaurant?”

  “You fell out the window; Alice tumbled down a rabbit hole,” Monte said. “It’s all the same. There’s always a different world out there. Always.”

  It was a small dark room that had a window on the Bowery. Toni and Sovereign toppled onto the single mattress, laughing and kissing sloppily.

  “I didn’t bring any condoms,” he said while she tugged at his belt.

  “That’s okay,” she whispered, now unzipping his pants.

  “I’m so drunk I don’t think I could get that far.”

  “You can if I help you.”

  “I just like lying here next to you, Miss Loam. I like how smooth your skin is.”

  “Would you really jump out a windah to see me, daddy?”

  “I already did that. I already did that.”

  The dream started out normally—a displaced reality far from the province of the world. Sovereign was pushing his grandfather’s wheelchair down the long ribbon of asphalt that bordered the Pacific Ocean. The chair was heavier than usual but the little boy had become a man and so managed with no trouble.

  “I’ve been thinking about what you said, Sovy,” Eagle James espoused. “And I do believe you’re right. My son will be hurt by me just shootin’ myself. He won’t know what to do.”

  “Thank you, Grandpa Eagle,” the man said with a boy’s deference.

  Then the old man, quicker than Sovereign could imagine, pulled out the dark pistol, shoved the barrel up his right nostril with his right hand, and fired. The shot lit up the old man’s right eye like one of the flashbulbs of the boy’s Kodak Brownie camera. Then the blood slithered out, an angry snake chasing the fallen pistol that had disturbed its hibernation.

  Sovereign for his part was trying to resolve the conundrum of the right nostril. He thought that the proper place to point the pistol would have been the left side—right hand, left side. If Eagle had made that choice, the proper one, he might not have awakened the snake and would probably have survived.