Eddie found a Spanish-language newspaper on an empty chair and Sovereign perused the folder that Zenith had given him. Thomas Thomas was a blond-haired, blue-eyed Berliner whom Zenith had met at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The boys, Gerhard and Zeus, were a year apart and as different from each other as two brothers could be—at least physically. One was tall and copper colored while the other, Zeus, was short, the hue of French roast coffee. There were eighty-one photos of the boys, separate and together, mostly laughing, in places all over the world. Often their father was standing with them, looking proud in some distant way.
There was only one photograph of Zenith. In it she was sitting with Zeus on her lap. The boy was maybe eight and quite drowsy. Zenith was looking off into space—distracted, tired. You got the feeling that if she saw the camera she would have turned away or stopped the picture from being taken.
Sovereign wondered why she included this snapshot in the collection. Then he realized that the sheet with the picture of Zenith had five photos affixed to it—all the other sheets had four. He wondered if Tom Tom, or maybe one of the boys, had secretly inserted this picture to give Sovereign a glimpse of his sister’s life.
The more he thought about the uniquely placed photo, the more it seemed as if his suspicion was right. It was Zenith’s intention to show her life without exposing herself, but the flesh and blood behind the images betrayed her, showing her life for what it was—the product of a melancholy kind of love.
Feeling satisfied with his prognosis, Sovereign smiled. At the same moment Drum-Eddie’s phone made the cry of an amplified whale song.
“Hello?” Eddie said into the tiny cell. “Yeah, yeah … Sure thing … Uh-huh … Bye now.”
“Who was that?”
“Bureaucrat.”
“What does that mean?”
“When’s the plane due in?” Eddie replied.
“Not for another hour.”
“I’m’a go to the toilet. I’ll be right back.”
After fifteen minutes Sovereign got up to look for his brother. He went into three different men’s toilets accessible in that section of the airport. He looked under stalls. He called out, “Eddie!” But his brother was gone again, as he had been all those years before.
The plane came to the gate and disgorged its passengers: New Yorkers mostly, down for business from the look of their clothes. When the passengers on his flight boarded, Sovereign was the last to get on. Next to him was his brother’s empty seat, a kind of visual reminder of the space he’d carried around since his brother left the first time, since his grandfather had taken his life while Sovereign bought soda.
While they were still on the ground Sovereign felt sorrow over Eddie’s abandonment. But when the jet built up velocity this feeling evaporated. As they gained altitude Sovereign felt a growing jollity in his chest, legs, and arms. He was happy to be on the move, going somewhere.
He grinned, lay back, closed his eyes, and fell asleep.
“Excuse me, sir.” Someone was shaking his shoulder. “Sir.”
Sovereign woke up and looked into the eyes of a young, mocha-colored woman. She seemed worried.
“Have we landed?” he asked.
“Yes. You were out the whole flight.”
Sovereign leaned forward to get up but was held back by the seat belt. He unbuckled, took in a deep breath, and lurched toward the front of the plane. He passed the pilot, copilot, and two more female flight attendants on the way out. They were all staring at him—probably angry, he thought, that he was making them wait.
Halfway down the enclosed exit ramp Sovereign thought of Eddie. He missed his brother but was not sad. Then he remembered the photo album. He’d put it down on the seat next to him. He turned to go back to get the eighty-one pictures and the one of his sister.…
“Mr. James,” a man intoned. The voice came from the exit of the ramp, an airport official, Sovereign thought.
Turning again, Sovereign was approached by three men in business attire. Two of them grabbed him by the arms, pulling them together at the wrists at his back.
The third man said, “You’re under arrest,” as handcuffs were snapped shut behind him.
“My photo album,” he said. “I left it on the plane.”
“Come with us,” the mouthpiece of the trio said.
“What’s the charge?”
“Patriot Act.”
“They arrested you for what?” Lena Altuna asked when Sovereign was finally allowed a call—twenty-five hours after his arrest.
“My brother,” Sovereign said. “He was wanted for a bank robbery thirty years ago. He left the country but comes back from time to time. The government says that he’s using forged papers and so they’re after him on some kind of national security charge.”
“What does that have to do with you?”
“He came to my house and said that my mother was worried and wanted to see me. We went down to South Carolina to visit her and were supposed to fly back together. I came alone, though.
“What I need you to do is to tell the judge and Toni that I’m under arrest and can’t make it to trial.”
“Where are you?”
“Federal courthouse in Brooklyn … I think.”
“What are the charges?”
“They’re just holdin’ me, Lena. They say they can do that as long as they want.”
“We’ll see about that.”
“When is the last time you spoke to your brother?” Curtis May, a young, caramel-colored agent, asked.
“At the airport.”
“Did he have a ticket?”
“You know he did.”
“A ticket you bought.”
Sovereign didn’t answer, because they’d already covered that ground.
“You bought the ticket for a man named Aldus Martins,” Agent May said.
“Yes.”
“Even though you knew that was not his name.”
“Drum changed his name. At least that’s what he said.”
“He was wanted for bank robbery.”
“That was thirty years ago. I thought there was a statute of limitations.”
“Your brother is a criminal.”
Sovereign snorted and shrugged. He’d had only a few hours’ sleep, and that was sitting upright in a tourist-class airplane seat.
“I have the power to keep you in custody indefinitely,” the federal agent said. It was less a warning and more an open threat.
“I have nowhere to go, Agent May. You can send me down to Guantánamo for all I care.”
“Where is Drum James?”
“I don’t know. We were sitting down at the gate and he said he had to go to the bathroom. He went and never came back.”
“Why didn’t you stay to find him?”
“Because I’m supposed to be here standing trial for attempted murder.”
Curtis May, Fiona Lockhart, C. W. Fordheim, and a man named Stockton had taken turns questioning Sovereign. The prisoner maintained a sense of tranquillity by studying his wardens’ faces. He was still amazed by the miracle of returned sight.
For long periods they left him alone in the small interrogation chamber. He remained seated so as not to cause the need to urinate. They didn’t let him go very often and so he drank little and kept still.
But even with all these precautions the urge to go was rising again. He was alone and despairing at the loss of the snapshot of his sister. He heard a sound outside and looked to the door, realizing as he did so that he had not tried to see if it was unlocked. It was at that moment that the door swung open and Fiona Lockhart entered with a tall man in a lime-green suit.
Lockhart was short and slender but her pale face was harder than her male counterparts’. She was wearing a man’s suit with no tie and patent-leather, lace-up black shoes. The man next to her had a deep tan and gray eyes.
“Where is your brother, Mr. James?” Lockhart asked.
Sovereign had no intention of answering the questio
n again, but even if that was his desire, the man in the green suit spoke before he would have been able to.
“My name is Didem, Mr. James. I’m a special assistant to the mayor’s office.”
“His office?”
“Lena Altuna has made a complaint to the city about your situation, and Judge Lowell wants you in her courtroom.”
“I don’t understand,” Sovereign admitted.
“I’m taking you out of here. Come with me.”
“You might as well stay, Mr. James,” Agent Lockhart said. “As soon as we file the papers there will be a federal warrant issued.”
“Come on, Mr. James,” the man called Didem said. “You look like you could use some rest.”
Lena Altuna was waiting for him at the outside entrance of the government building. She wore a maroon suit with a pale violet collar. Behind her, at the curb, was a chauffeur in a black suit standing at the side of his black Town Car. Seeing this man made him think of Theodore and his excursion through the middle South.
“How are you?” Lena asked her old classmate.
“A little dazed.”
“Did you tell them anything?”
“Everything I knew. Almost all of it. And what I didn’t say they didn’t ask me about.”
“Good.”
“How did you do it, Lena?”
“Even the Patriot Act needs a court order to validate arrest without warrant. I just called in some favors with city hall.
“I know you’re tired. But give me a minute before we get into the car. I know the driver but I don’t want him to have to lie for me.”
“Sure, Lena. Talk.”
“I’m taking you to a hotel in the West Village, to stay in a room paid for by my offices. That way if the government wants you they’ll have to work at finding you. You’ll have an expense account with the hotel, so you won’t have to use your credit cards, and I’ll give you a thousand in cash for incidentals.”
“Thanks. That’s above and beyond.”
“I’m just taking it out of your advance. Tomorrow morning I’ll have a car bring you to court. Judge Lowell, at my request, will change the venue half an hour before the hearing. That way she can set a trial date without interference from the feds.”
Sovereign smiled and nodded, took an envelope stuffed with twenty-dollar bills, and climbed into the car with his lawyer. A minute after settling into the plush leather seat at the back of the Lincoln, Sovereign fell deeply asleep. He wasn’t aware of sight or time, weight, or even the desire to go to the toilet. He didn’t dream. Some weeks later, when he remembered this nonmoment, he thought that it was a blinking of his soul—an instant of complete spiritual blindness. It was as if he was gone from the earth completely: not dead but way beyond the Land of Nod.
“Sovereign. Sovereign.”
They were stopped at the busy corner of 14th Street and 6th Avenue in Manhattan. He could have walked to his apartment from there.
Staggering out onto the sunny street of the bustling city, Sovereign James was amazed. The sights and sounds, even the feel of the breeze on his skin, were things remembered and things new. For a time all of his senses had ceased and now they were roaring back to life. He grinned and opened his mouth to take in as much air as possible.
“It’s beautiful,” he said.
“Come on, Sovereign,” Lena replied. “We have to go.”
Walking down along the street, Sovereign tried to keep on a straight path but the life of the city distracted him. There was a young black woman with big legs and a very short skirt, a satisfied sneer on her lips about something good. Her gait and expression brought to mind a storied character dancing down the sidewalk, a nearly mythological personage whom many tales and exaggerations were based on.
Sovereign’s heart was beating fast, his mind switching channels, unable to hold on to a thought for more than a few seconds.
“Come on, Sovereign,” Lena Altuna said for the sixth or seventh time.
He had stopped in front of a coffee shop to look in through the big window. There was an elderly white couple sitting there, facing each other but reading newspapers. Their clothes were shabby and the restaurant was cheap. They had come there together, had ordered the same meal. They wore wedding rings and seemed enthralled with the news.
“Thank you for getting me out of there, Lena,” he said.
“What?”
“I could have died in there. I mean, my spirit could have.”
“Come on,” she said. “We have to go.”
When he made it to the hotel room Sovereign finally got to go to the toilet. It was an intense urination. He felt, for the first time ever, that an incredibly long and slender snake was escaping his body, returning to the world. He stood there, barefoot on the hard tile, thinking about dimensions that existed beyond his perceptions. These were places that he inhabited but did not see.
He fell onto the king-size bed and was instantly unconscious, unknowing. It was a welcomed death of sorts: passing out, passing away.
Once again there was a cessation of tactile experience; there was no sense of temperature, light, or sound, but inside this bout of emptiness there was a feeling of awareness, a being that Sovereign might have shared with other points of view. He lay there unaware of his being but coexisting with something, or somethings, else.
When the phone rang the first time he didn’t hear it at all.
He experienced the second bout of ringing as his brother and sister laughing and shouting, running through the sprinklers in the backyard. His mother was there and his father. There was a gray-brown mutt looking from a safe distance. This was a dog that Drum-Eddie had found on the beach and brought home.
Nathaniel—that was the dog’s name.
Silence.
Nothingness.
The third call again reminded him of children’s laughter and he woke up expecting to see them playing on the carpet next to his bed.
It was dark outside. The phone was ringing. He had to go to the toilet again.
He was not in federal custody.
Lurching upright, Sovereign went to the bathroom and returned to sit on the side of the bed. He was lost but not missing or absent. His brother was alive and his father the relative of snails and redwoods.
On the fourth call he picked up the phone midway through the second ring.
“Hello?”
“Mr. James.”
“Toni.” All the abstraction left his mind. Suddenly there was gravity and sound and light.
“Miss Altuna called and gave me your number. Where you been?”
As the words tumbled forth Sovereign realized with certainty that he was no longer the man he had been before the blindness. He told Toni Loam about his brother and mother, about his sister and her inability to experience love directly. He talked about the federal agents as if they were a gang rather than officials of the government, and about the young woman with the big legs and self-satisfied sneer.
“You lookin’ at other girls’ legs, huh?”
“Do you want to come over?”
The same driver who brought Sovereign to Greenwich Village from the Brooklyn courts picked him and Toni up the next morning. They were taken to a dirty brick building on Lafayette between Canal and Houston.
Lena met them at the entrance.
The lawyer led them past the first set of elevators and down a long, darkish hallway. There they came to a small lift that took them to the ninth floor.
Another dark hall brought them to a door. This opened into a rude room dominated by one large table faced by two smaller ones. Behind the long table sat a small woman with a wide face and brown hair. She wore a gray-and-brown dress suit with dull maroon shoes showing from under the table. Sitting at the table on her right were two men in business attire. The men looked up when Lena, Toni, and Sovereign entered.
To the left of the door they came through stood a uniformed guard, a black man with a big stomach and no discernible expression. Two more guards—a man an
d a woman, both white—stood behind the wide-faced woman at the long table.
Lena led her clients to the table on the small woman’s left.
“Good morning, Your Honor,” Lena said.
“Where is Miss Loam’s attorney?” the judge asked.
“We have agreed to have them tried together, Your Honor,” one of the men from the other table said.
“As you will, Mr. Sutter,” middle-aged Judge Lowell said. Turning to Sovereign she added, “I have allowed for this unusual meeting because of you, Mr. James. It seems that the federal government wants to whisk you away on the hope that you will lead them to your brother.”
Sovereign didn’t say anything, because Lowell hadn’t asked a question. Her eyes were hard and honed in on him.
“Do you know where your brother is?” she asked.
“No. No, I don’t.”
The judge stared a moment more and then said, “Okay, then. Mr. Sutter, you may begin.”
“Your Honor,” the prosecutor said. He stood up.
Sutter (Sovereign later learned that the chief prosecutor’s first name was Alva) stood up, revealing his tall, gaunt frame. He was a light-colored African American with eyes that might have had a little green to them.
“Mr. James and Miss Loam are charged with a crime that, for all intents and purposes, they have admitted to. Miss Loam brought Lemuel Johnson to Mr. James’s apartment so that Mr. James could exact revenge for Mr. Johnson’s earlier attack on him. James attacked Johnson in his living room but the victim ran. James chased his victim from the ninth floor to the front of his building, where he pummeled the younger man into a coma in front of more than a dozen witnesses. The charge, as you know, is attempted murder to be shared equally between the defendants.”
Sovereign studied Sutter’s profile as he sat down. The prosecutor seemed sure and a little self-satisfied. Sovereign thought that this was just the kind of young man he’d hire for a job at Techno-Sym.
“Ms. Altuna,” Judge Lowell requested.
“The facts in this case are not in question, Your Honor,” Lena said as she rose. “But the intentions of my clients are mere supposition on the behalf of the district attorney. Miss Loam misguidedly and under the sway of her former lover brought Mr. Johnson into Mr. James’s home, a home that she had free access to. Mr. James had just returned from an unscheduled doctor’s appointment. An appointment, I might add, that corroborated my client’s experience of hysterical blindness—”
Odyssey Page 18
