Odyssey Read online

  “That sounds like an indictment,” the psychoanalyst said.

  “I once had a professor at college who used to say that mortality is a living critique of the divine,” Sovereign replied. “If that’s true then all I’m doin’ is tellin’ it like it is.”

  That next morning Sovereign was taking his daily walk around the block; somewhere around twenty-seven revolutions was the norm. He wondered about his handsome, friendly, bank-robber brother and his aloof, distant sister with her two boys and husband with the redundant name. Sovereign had left San Diego for the East Coast when he was nineteen and never returned. His father died of a heart attack and Winifred moved back to South Carolina to her people. She once sent Sovereign a note asking him to come down and visit for Christmas.

  He didn’t answer.

  Turning a corner, using his one white antenna, the blind bug, once a sighted man, felt the sun on his face and smiled.

  A woman screamed and he felt a hard blow to the right side of his head. His shoulder thudded against the wall and the breath was forced from his lungs.

  The woman screamed a second time and he was struck again. This time he fell on his side and looked up.…

  There was the blurry image of a dark-skinned man ripping at the pockets of Sovereign’s pants and, beyond the thief, a young black woman in an ochre dress stood screaming.

  The thief turned Sovereign over and stole his wallet. Then he leapt to his feet and ran down the fading street.

  The young woman leaned over Sovereign.

  “Are you okay?” she said. “You’re bleeding.”

  It was a face both plain and pretty, pressed down by more pain than Sovereign felt from the blows. She began to fade into darkness and he reached out for her as if trying to hold on to the brief light granted him.

  With the darkness came unconsciousness.

  Even though he had practiced boxing in a San Diego boxing gym for six years, Sovereign had never been knocked out. The sensation wasn’t like sleep but more like stunned blindness. A part of his mind was now and then aware that there was something right next to him but he couldn’t see it, had to guess at its reality.

  His body was jostled about. The girl in the ochre dress alternately shouted and complained. Other voices spoke. The language was probably English but he couldn’t make out the words. Time moved forward in a herky-jerky fashion, skipping whole spans of events. He was being lifted from the ground at one point; a siren sounded; a man said the word hemorrhaging twice in quick succession but probably at different times.

  He had the impression of a copper-skinned woman sitting over him but he put this down as a dream or maybe an illusion.

  Somewhere along the way in the ambulance Sovereign’s hyperreal state of unconsciousness slipped into a drugged sleep. He had dreams but forgot them as soon as they occurred. He woke up but was still blind—or blind again after that beautiful moment of seeing the plain but pretty girl’s face.

  He was in a bed, under a single blanket. The smell of alcohol and other chemicals hovered in the air.

  A hospital bed.

  Consciousness was a disorienting experience now that he had had a glimpse of light. The world around him felt like a dream that he couldn’t wake up from.

  He lifted himself up from the mattress on one elbow.

  “Mr. James?” a woman’s voice said.

  “Yes?”

  “Mr. Sovereign James?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re awake?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’m Captain Turpin,” she said, “and I’m investigating your assault case.”

  “I see,” he said, and then smiled at a long-ago joke.

  “Do you know what happened?”

  “A man mugged me.”

  “A man? Are you sure it was a man?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “How can you be sure?” Captain Turpin asked. “I mean …”

  “You mean how can a blind man know what happened? I’m blind but I can still hear. He said something just before he hit me.”

  “What did he say?”

  “ ‘Hey, you, mothahfuckah.’ That’s what he said. He said that and I said, ‘What?’ And he said, ‘This what,’ and he hit me and then he hit me again. Why do they have a captain interviewing me? I mean, that seems like some serious rank for a mugging.”

  “The department wants to send a message to anyone thinking that they can start preying on our more vulnerable citizens.”

  Sovereign wondered at Turpin’s race. He couldn’t tell by her voice.

  “What did the man who hit you sound like?” she asked.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Sovereign James said, but he did know.

  “Was it a young voice? Just one man? Did he have an accent?”

  “He was probably black and not as old as me. I think he might have hit me with something hard. It didn’t feel like a fist.”

  “The doctors say that it was a blunt instrument, maybe a blackjack.”

  “Good thing I got a hard skull.”

  “Can you tell me anything else about your attacker?” Captain Turpin asked.

  “Why did you think it mighta been a woman?”

  “Witnesses say that you were struggling with a woman when you were on the ground.”

  “Struggling. No … no, no, no, no, no. Not struggling. A woman screamed to sound the alarm when that guy attacked me. Then she came up to ask if I was all right. She pressed something against the cut on my head and told me that it would be okay and that help was coming.”

  Some of this was true; most of it was not. Sovereign didn’t know why but he didn’t want to let on that he’d had sight for a moment. Also he felt that he wanted to protect the young woman who came to his aid.

  “Where is she?” he asked the captain.

  “Under arrest for suspicion of assault. I guess we’ll let her go now. You’re sure she wasn’t attacking you or helping the man who took your wallet?”

  “Absolutely not. She yelled before he hit me. She must have seen what he was about to do and was trying to warn me. But why do you keep on asking?”

  “Like I told you, Mr. James, witnesses saw the woman struggling with you.”

  “I reached out to grab on when I realized that she was helping me.… I was afraid. Anyway, the man, the one who hit me, took my wallet. Did this woman have my belongings on her?”

  “No.”

  “Is there any other reason to think that she was working with the mugger?”

  “Not really,” the captain said as she sighed. “Her name is Toni Loam. She was arrested for shoplifting a few months ago and had some problems with the law as a teenager. But if you say she was trying to help you …”

  “She was … definitely.”

  “Well, then there’s nothing we can do but try to get descriptions from the people who saw the attack. You’ve never heard of this Toni Loam before, have you, Mr. James?”

  “You really have it out for this girl, don’t you, Captain?”

  “I just believe in doing my job. Have you heard the name Toni Loam before, sir?”

  “Never.”

  The doctor wanted to keep Sovereign for observation but he refused. He contacted his banker, Ira Levitz, and told him to cancel his credit cards. He’d known Ira since he’d been just a teller, and had the assistant manager’s home phone number. After that he made a call to Red Rover and he was on his way back to the West Village.

  Up in his apartment, sitting on the white sofa that he could no longer see, Sovereign thought about the brief span of time that light filled his eyes. He was sure that the double blow to the head was what gave him that window of sight. But it was the memory of the vision of Toni Loam that enchanted him.

  She was chocolate brown, a touch darker than his skin, with a rounded nose and big frightened eyes. Her lips, he thought, were thick and protruded somewhat. Her head was oval, with cornrows running back from an intelligent forehead.

  The blind man went over
the scene in his mind again and again. The attack meant nothing but a mild headache. He had only a twenty-dollar bill and three low-limit credit cards in his wallet. The driver’s license was useless and his credit cards were now canceled. He was thankful for the attack because it meant that sight was possible.

  He wondered if he should pound his head against the wall until he was either sighted or dead.

  He even got up and walked to the wall that led from the open kitchen to the bedroom. He pressed his forehead on the plasterboard, then reared back and thumped it against the hard surface.

  “I’ll break the wall before I feel anything,” he said.

  And then he remembered something. When he was lying in the hospital bed, fully awake, the world wasn’t spinning. He talked and thought and lay on his back just like anybody else.

  He took a deep breath and made his way back to the sofa. He sat down, pulled his shoulders up straight, and allowed his body to fall to the side. There was a breathless silence, a shuddering in the air around his head, and then slowly the world started to swing in a wide and ever-faster arc. Sovereign used both arms to catapult himself back up.

  The last time he’d cried he was nineteen years old and his brother, Drum-Eddie, was gone forever, on the run from the FBI.

  That evening Solar James said, “Drum is no longer a son of mine,” to Winifred, Zenith, and Sovereign. Four days later Sovereign was on a Greyhound bus headed for New York. Eddie had always said that he wanted to go there one day. Maybe, Sovereign hoped, he would, sooner or later, see his brother walking down 5th Avenue with two women on his arms.

  “Mr. James,” a voice, a woman’s voice, said. “Mr. James.”

  There was a gentle touch to his shoulder. Not a shake but merely the pressure of a hand. Not enough to move him.

  “Yes, Galeta?”

  “What happened to you?” the Greek cleaning lady asked. He felt her touch on his right ear, just below the bandages the doctors had affixed to his head.

  “I fell,” he said, “tripped on the grating going around the building. Three stitches and a bump.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Oh yeah. Good Lord gave me an extra-thick skull so I could make it down the street of hard knocks.”

  “Can I do anything for you?”

  “Just do what you do, honey. Get me my iPod and I’ll sit here listening to books on tape while you run that lionlike vacuum cleaner over the walls and ceilings.”

  “It’s not so loud.” He could hear her smile. “And I only do the floors.”

  She laughed and touched his cheek with her palm.

  Galeta was a few years older than Sovereign, a Greek woman with dark olive skin and big freckles that had girth and texture. While physically strong she was emotionally fragile, and so he couldn’t bring himself to tell her about the mugging. She would have worried for days about him and also for her own safety.

  But there was another reason he lied. He saw the attack, the flash of vision, and the woman who helped him as part of a private domain in his mind. The experience was like a secret treasure that he guarded over jealously.

  So while Galeta ran the washing machine and dryer, dishwasher and vacuum cleaner, Sovereign tuned his MP3 player to The Hungry Tide, a novel by Amitav Ghosh. He loved the lush language and broad description wrought by the Indian writer. He got lost in the names and accents, places and belief systems. He listened for hours, seeing with verbal imagery and metaphor rather than rays of light. When the charge on his battery ran down he took off the sound-reducing headphones and realized that the apartment was silent. Galeta was gone.

  He knew that there would be fresh milk in the refrigerator, twelve microwavable meals in the freezer, and instant coffee on the counter. New changes of clothes would be in the proper dresser drawers, and his bathroom would be set up with everything in just the right place.

  He found the electric cord for his music device where it always was, plugged into a power strip on the high countertop. He sat there waiting for the device to rejuvenate, thinking about Toni’s ochre dress and the pain he associated with sight.

  He enjoyed the ache festering on the side of his head. It was like the promise of something miraculous—a seedling sprouting against a large pebble, an unborn chick pecking at its shell. He pressed against the bandages, hoping to find a connection to his eyes or his repressed emotions.

  What trauma had caused his condition? He wondered if it might have been the loss of his brother, or the fact that his parents never once came east to visit him.

  He went to sit on the white sofa, unable to pierce the veil of sight or his emotions. He sat upright, imagining himself an ancient king walled up in a cave because of some arcane ritual that had to be enacted for power to pass along.

  Who would replace him at Techno-Sym? Had he made enough of an impact to change the racial path of the company?

  His mind drifted from one topic to another. This wasn’t an unusual occurrence since he’d become a patient of Dr. Offeran. One thought led to another and after a while his mind seemed to be working on its own rather than by his direction.

  He found himself thinking about the day he told his father that he was leaving for New York.

  “That’s where your brother always said he wanted to go,” Solar James said to his son, his tone hard and unforgiving.

  “I’m not interested in UCLA,” Sovereign said.

  “Did you help your brother plan that bank robbery?”

  “I don’t believe he did it.”

  “Because if you did,” Solar said, as if his son had not spoken, “I will tell the FBI in a minute. No son or sons of mine will humiliate me like that.”

  “I plan to get a job and go to college,” Sovereign replied.

  “I hope you don’t expect me to help you. Why, the money I give might go to harboring a bank robber.”

  “That’s stupid.”

  “What did you say to me?”

  “I said that it’s stupid if you think Drum-Eddie would need money if you also think that he robbed a bank. If he robbed a bank what would he need with your little paycheck?”

  “Get your ass outta my house.”

  Those were the last words exchanged between father and son. His mother had written. His sister had not. Eight years later Winifred called to tell him that his father had died of a heart attack. That was the first year of his new job at Techno-Sym, then called Binatics Inc. Sovereign told his mother that he couldn’t take the time off, that they’d let him go, but this was when the company was just starting and he’d lose the chance to make something of himself in the corporate system.

  “Okay,” Winifred had said.

  “You fucking bastard,” Zenith told him fifteen minutes later on a separate call.

  It was again two thirty-seven in the morning. Sovereign marveled at the perfect synchronicity of his sleeplessness.

  “Please say a city and state,” the automated operator of the phone system said.

  “New York, New York,” Sovereign James said.

  “Private listing or business?” the soulless voice inquired.

  “Private.”

  “State the first and last name of the person you’re trying to reach.”

  “Toni Loam.”

  The lifeless intelligence seemed bemused or maybe bewildered.

  After a few moments of silence it said, “Please hold for an operator.”

  Sovereign almost hung up then. He was about to move the phone from his head when a man’s voice asked, “T-o-n-y L-o-m-e?”

  “I’m not sure. It could be T-o-n-i because it’s a woman. And I don’t know the spelling of the last name.”

  “Checking … checking. No T-o-n-i L-o-m-e.”

  “Try L-o-a-m,” Sovereign said on a hunch.

  “Oh. Yeah. There it is. Hold on.” The human operator disengaged.

  The automated voice then gave the number and said, “I will connect you at no extra cost.”

  Darkness pulsed behind Sovereign’s lying
eyes. He could feel his heart beating and the room beyond his body throbbing with electric machinery. He could hear water flowing through the plumbing embedded in the walls. Some insomniac had probably flushed a toilet on an upper floor.

  The phone rang.

  Zenith came to mind. She was tall and really quite lovely, especially when she was at her father’s side. Her eyes were cutting; she wore almost no makeup, and needed none. Sovereign realized, while the phone rang, that he loved his sister and had always felt bad that she did not return his feeling.

  The phone rang.

  The FBI had visited Sovereign three times in New York, once each year for the first years he was living there.

  “Your father told us that your brother always wanted to live in New York,” Agent DeGris told Sovereign during their second interview.

  “And that I was here and I was probably in cahoots with him?” James replied.

  “Are you?”

  “I don’t even believe he robbed a bank.”

  The phone rang.

  During the third interview he was living with a Senegalese foreign exchange student named Koyo. She was beautiful and said that she was devoted to him, but she moved out after the FBI had come. She told him that she couldn’t afford to be in the house of someone being investigated by federal authorities. Two weeks later she moved in with a premed student named Charles Riley. There were six calls on Sovereign’s phone bill to Riley’s number made weeks before the FBI’s visit.

  “Hello?” a young woman said in his ear.

  “Toni?” Sovereign said. “Toni Loam?”

  “Yes?” There was sleep in her voice. This made the blind man smile.

  “Hi. My name is Sovereign James.”

  “So? It’s almost three o’clock in the morning.”

  “Sorry about that. I mean … I just … I’m the man you helped today, the one that guy mugged.”

  “Oh.”

  “I was so upset that the police arrested you. I told them that you were just trying to help me. I hope they treated you better after I told them that.”

  “Not really,” she said in a muted Brooklyn accent. “They told me that they thought I was up to somethin’ in that neighborhood and that I didn’t have no business bein’ there.”