Odyssey Read online

  And that afternoon with Toni Loam he felt that he wanted to talk more, but there was nothing else to say.

  “You got somethin’ to drink, Mr. James?”

  “Over there,” he said, gesturing toward the open kitchen, “in the refrigerator.”

  “You want sumpin’?”

  He shook his head and listened to the muted sounds of the young woman opening the refrigerator and jostling a bottle that clinked against another. Orange juice, he thought.

  “Glasses are in the cabinet to the left of the icebox.”

  “You sure you don’t want some?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “It must be hard gettin’ around in here.”

  “I know the place pretty well and I have a woman come in to clean and do some light shopping.”

  “Must be nice to be rich like that.” Toni had returned to the red chair.

  “Rich people,” Sovereign said, “the truly wealthy, own the earth. I just rent this little piece of turf. One big storm and it could all wash away. A moderate-sized earthquake could swallow up everything I ever did.”

  “You too deep, Mr. James.”

  “Call me … call me Sovy.”

  “What kinda name is that?”

  “My nickname. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Uh-huh,” she mused. “It must be messed up to wake up one day and be blind.”

  “We all have problems in life, I guess,” James said. “My grandfather broke his back before I was born and spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair. Toward the end there the only way he could get anywhere was if somebody pushed him.”

  “I think I’d kill myself if that happened to me,” Toni said.

  “I should probably let you go, Miss Loam,” Sovereign said, getting to his feet. “Thank you again for helping me.”

  “Thank you for this money. It’s gonna be real helpful.”

  They walked to the door and she opened it.

  “You can call me if your maid gets sick or you need help some day that she don’t come,” Toni said.

  “Thank you for that. Good-bye now.”

  The phone rang that night. Sovereign didn’t have any idea of the time when the call woke him up. He blundered over to the high countertop that separated the slender kitchen from the spacious living room, picked up the phone, dropped it, searched around the floor, and finally got it to his ear.

  “Hello?”

  “Sovy?”

  “Zenith?” Twenty years without a word between them and he still knew his sister’s voice as clearly as he did when they were kids. It wasn’t the same voice, not exactly, but there was something about the tone that had a resonance inside his mind.

  “Lurlene called Mama,” Zenith James-Thomas said.

  Lurlene Twyst was a cousin on his mother’s side who called the various family members on every holiday. She was a busybody but the kind of gossip who kept everyone informed.

  “How are the kids, Zenith?”

  “Grown.”

  “How’s Tom-Tom?”

  “Fine. Lurlene told Mama that you lost your sight.”

  “Blind,” Sovereign said. “I’ve gone blind.”

  “What happened?”

  “I woke up one morning and I couldn’t see a thing.”

  “What do the doctors say?”

  “That it’s psychological. The experts call it hysterical blindness.”

  “So you’re faking it,” she said in her most condemnatory voice.

  “Excuse me, but I gotta go rob some orphans, Zenith. Good-bye.”

  “Hold on, Sovy. I didn’t mean—”

  “My name is Sovereign, Zenith. You have a name and I do too.”

  “I didn’t mean that you aren’t suffering. But when you say psychological that means you’re making it up, right?”

  Sovereign replaced the phone in its cradle and then went to pull the jack from the wall. He went back to his sofa and sat there with his heart thundering.

  He was surprised at the rage his sister could call up in him after all these years.

  “Hello?” she said at three thirty-one that morning.

  “It’s me,” Sovereign James murmured.

  “It’s just Sugah, Mama. I told her to call me when she got in so I wouldn’t worry.… I don’t know why. I answered it on the first ring. You must’a not been asleep anyway.… No, I’m’a be right off.… Yes, Mama.… Yes, Mama.

  “You still there, Mr. James? I mean, Sovy.”

  “I didn’t mean to get you in trouble.”

  “It’s my phone and my room and I gave her two hunnert an’ forty dollars when I got back from your house. So she can’t be tellin’ me who to talk to or when.”

  “I should have waited until morning.”

  “You don’t know. I might have been gone by then. Anyway it was probably important, right?”

  “Feels silly.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s two things. I really shouldn’t bother you this late.”

  “I’m up now, daddy. Talk.”

  For the first time since his blindness Sovereign was thankful. He didn’t know why the girl he had barely glimpsed calling him daddy made a difference, but that solitary word out of her mouth opened a door to laughter.

  “What you laughin’ about?” she asked, the smile lurking in her throat.

  “It’s nothing. You just make me happy.”

  “Then tell me the two things.”

  “My sister called.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “It’s the first time I’ve heard from her in more than twenty years.”

  “Damn. That’s my whole life almost. What she want? Somebody die?”

  “She heard that I was blind and called. But when I told her it was psychological she said that I was faking.”

  “You want me to call her?”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “I’d tell the bitch that you had to be blind. How else could a man walk up to you with a bludgeon stick an’ hit you in the head and you don’t even try to duck? I’d ask her do she think you’d make that shit up too.”

  “That would set Zenith back on her ass,” Sovereign said. “It sure would. But no, honey, I just needed to tell somebody and I find that I don’t have that many friends.”

  “How come you don’t? You got a nice place. People could be over there all the time. You know, my mama’s apartment half yours and we got seven people in here sometimes, just sittin’ around.”

  “I don’t know. Most of the people I communicated with are at my job. I’ve worked there for twenty-one years.”

  “Couldn’t you call somebody you work with?”

  “I guess not.”

  “What’s the other thing?”

  “What?” Sovereign asked as he thought about the paucity of his social life.

  “You said you wanted to talk about two things.”

  There was Bert Sender, head of publicity, and Antoinette Laird, director of interoffice communications; these were friends, people he’d known for well over a decade. Neither one had called since he left the office. He had a home number for Bert from a dozen years ago.

  Why was he calling this child in the middle of the night? Why didn’t he go to his father’s funeral or to see his mother down South for Christmas?

  “That man attacking me,” Sovereign said, “showed me many things. He let me see your face and also made it clear that my existence has shrunk down to the size of my grandfather’s life in his wheelchair. But Granddad had family and neighbors and drinking buddies. He had a full life up until the day he blew his brains out.”

  “He killed himself?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “I’m sorry about what I said before … about how I’d kill myself if I was like your granddad. I didn’t know.”

  “What I wondered was if maybe you’d have a couple of days a week to go around with me. You know … take me shopping or to a concert or maybe a play. You know, I can’t even go outside wi
thout thinking that there might be somebody with a blackjack ready to hit me.

  “I’d pay you for it.”

  “Okay.”

  The one-word assent caught James up short.

  “Okay?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Just like that? You don’t need to know anything else?”

  “Like what?”

  “How much I’m willing to pay, for instance.”

  “You already gimme fi’e hunnert. That’s pay for five weeks right there. And if I take you to lunch I get to eat too, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “That’s okay, Mr. James. I don’t need to know nuthin’. If I don’t like it I’ll just quit.”

  “And she just said yes at three thirty in the morning?” Seth Offeran asked.

  “It surprised me too. I wanted to have her work for me like I did for my grandfather up until the day he killed himself.”

  “Your grandfather committed suicide?”

  “Yeah. Didn’t we talk about that?”

  “No. When did this happen?”

  “I was eleven and pushing him in his wheelchair down along the beach. He sent me to buy a root beer. He would always take a sip or two but it was really for me. And while I was gone he shot himself.”

  “Are you considering suicide?” the doctor asked.

  “No. Why would you ask that?”

  “Because you tell me about your grandfather and obviously you’ve been thinking about him. You’re hiring this young woman to take your place with him and so you become him—the disabled man who killed himself.”

  “Wow. And aren’t you worried that you’re putting that idea into my head?” Sovereign asked.

  “I’m not afraid to face realities, Mr. James. If you’re considering suicide then we should talk about it.”

  “Never crossed my mind.”

  “Tell me more about your grandfather,” Offeran said. “What was his name again?”

  “Eagle James.”

  “Odd name.”

  “He was raised on a reservation up in Washington State. His people were a cross between black and red. He was as black as me but he was named by his people.”

  “All the people in your family have interesting names,” Offeran said.

  “That comes from my father’s mother, Athena Winston-James. She came from Tennessee and was brought up on the notion that a black person’s name had to have power or elevation, or both. She died giving birth to my father but he kept up her tradition. Solar was my father and he named us Sovereign, Zenith, and Drum.”

  “Makes you different.”

  “The most different one was my younger brother, Drum, but he had everybody call him Eddie. Like I told you, most of the time I called him Drum-Eddie. He had about a dozen nicknames for me.”

  “And what was it about Eagle James?”

  “Granddad was my lifeline when I was a boy. He told me everything. He even said how after he was wounded in the war …”

  The words trailed off.

  “What about his wound?” the doctor asked when Sovereign hesitated.

  “Years later he went to a doctor and the doctor told him that he was impotent due to the operation they performed to save him.”

  “Yes?”

  “That operation took place two years before my father was sired.”

  “Oh. What did your father think about that?”

  “No one ever told him.”

  “Your grandfather made you keep it a secret?”

  “Not really. I just never told my dad. I couldn’t see how telling him would help anything.”

  “That’s a heavy responsibility for a little boy.”

  “It was my grandmother’s indiscretion, and she died in childbirth.”

  “That’s still a tough position for a child.”

  “I suppose. I never thought about it too much. I mean, I loved my grandfather and that was all I needed to know. He was the only father my father ever knew. Why mess that up?”

  “You weren’t related to him by blood but by love,” Seth Offeran said. “And now this young woman will be like that for you, your only connection with the world.”

  “That’s strange, isn’t it?”

  “What do you mean by strange?”

  “That a man in the fiftieth year of life has no friends he can call on, no family.”

  “Your sister called last night.”

  “She said that my blindness wasn’t serious because I made it up.”

  “No. She just said that you made it up. In a way she’s right.”

  “I want to see.”

  “Maybe,” Seth Offeran said. “Maybe you want somebody to take care of you. The black people in your office don’t appreciate what you’re doing for them. Valentina left when you asked to have a child, reminding you of what your grandfather’s wife did to him. Now, because of your blindness, this young woman, this Toni Loam, feels like the only one who might care.”

  The words reverberated inside the vast darkness of Sovereign’s mind. He felt giddy and hopeful … then lost. He wanted to take out his cell phone and talk to the child right then. But he also wanted to see her—a momentary break from his blindness.

  “It’s like escaping from prison,” he uttered.

  “What’s that?”

  “That’s what my grandfather used to say. He said, ‘Let’s have us a jailbreak, little man,’ and I knew that he wanted me to push him around the block or down along the beach. He’d play his transistor radio and we’d sing along even though he never knew the words.”

  “You loved him.”

  James didn’t realize that there were tears coming from his eyes until he felt the tissue pressed against his fingers.

  “Thank you, Doctor,” he said.

  Back home, in the middle of his twenty-ninth set of push-ups, Sovereign was giggling. He was thinking of his grandfather singing nonsense lyrics to a Beatles song. I’d love to get this on, he sang.

  After exercising he took a shower. After showering he usually turned on NPR to hear the news about events of the day. But that late afternoon he went into his bedroom, to the window. He lifted the screenless pane up high and sat there, behind his desk and on the windowsill, listening to the rumblings of his city.

  There were voices and laughter, cars stopping and going, honking and idling. Now and then he could feel a rumble through the building: the PATH train making its journey either to or from New Jersey.

  He thought about Toni’s face, about her name and himself as a boy. The images got tumbled together and at some point they were both children in the summer heat on the San Diego beach. He remembered wheeling his grandfather out on a long, slender pier that extended over the bay. The water beneath them was deep, and once, a school of a dozen or more sharks passed beneath them. Gray skinned, sleek, and maybe six feet at the longest, they cut through the water, beautiful enemies with no conscience or malice.

  A helicopter passed overhead. Nonsensically Sovereign was reminded of frogs sitting below murky waters, looking up for insects, preferably dragonflies.

  Dragonfly’s the most beautiful bug there is, Eagle James once told his grandson. Like a monarch butterfly with attitude.

  Monarch, Sovereign, and helicopters flying overhead, him down under the murky sky waiting for the morning, when a child might come and save him.

  That night, with the window still open, Sovereign decided to go to bed. It was a big decision. He hadn’t been in his bed since the day he woke up blind.

  The first thing he experienced that morning was the room spinning and then the realization that he couldn’t see. The sequence of these events seemed very important. First the spinning, then the blindness. It was like when the merry-go-round of his childhood went too fast and he felt as if he’d be thrown off and scraped by the gravel.

  Too fast! Too fast! the girls and littler boys would shout. And Sovereign would laugh, kicking the ground and worried at the same time that he’d gone beyond his limits.…

  The
bed felt as if it was moving under him. It turned and wobbled like a magic carpet low on juice. He kissed the palm of his hand and stayed prone in the bed under the covers. After a while the feeling started to remind him of being in a boat on troubled waters. Nausea roiled but he stayed on his side. His ears seemed to fill up and a moan came from his chest. When he thought that he couldn’t take it anymore he started to writhe, mimicking the movements of his unstable mind: shoulder up and then hip to the side, his legs straight out and then pulled up tight; he rolled over to his other side and then pressed his hands out. Sovereign kept thrashing about until he found the rhythm of the motion that spun the room. He was lying on his stomach moving his hips and chest, shoulders and knees. The erection was a surprise, not what he was after or even wanted. But he had to keep on moving, moving. He was an eel in the ocean looking for a hole to hunt from, a sharp-toothed snake with eyes that had seen a hundred million years of so-called progress.

  The orgasm was also a surprise. He’d felt the erection like a response, not a passion. But he came hard and copiously, grunting like a wild creature rutting by scent and color. After it was over he shuddered for a minute or more and then felt a chill run through his body like a living thing giving up the ghost.

  And for the first time in more than two months he was lying down and not dizzy. The room was still and his heart was beating fast. He grinned and shut his eyes tight. Still blind, he fell asleep smiling.

  “So what do we do today?” Toni Loam asked Sovereign James at ten thirty-seven the next morning.

  “What time do you have to be home?”

  “I’m a full-grown woman, Mr. James. I don’t have a curfew.”

  “I asked you to call me Sovy.”

  “That was before I was gonna work for you. Now that you’re my boss I feel better calling you mister.”

  “Well, Miss Loam,” he said, smiling, “I didn’t mean that you had a curfew. I just thought you might have a job or maybe a date.”

  “No work, no boyfriend, no nothin’ to do but work for you.”

  There was an elation and a flutter in Sovereign’s chest. This was not sexual. It was like a slave, he thought, who wakes up one morning and finds that his chains are gone—not broken but just gone. So are the slave quarters and the other slaves, slave master, and the slave master’s family too. It was waking up after a dream had already come true into another dream about how things could be after that.