Odyssey (11 page)

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.

But Sovereign didn’t let on to experiencing this ecstasy. He concentrated on staying calm and inscrutable.

“You haven’t asked what I’m paying you,” he said.

“You ain’t told me what we doin’.”

“Twelve dollars an hour. In cash.”

“Okay.”

Their days fell into an easy schedule: three days a week, shopping for clothes and household necessities, food, and books on tape at the bookstore; lunch at noon and her waiting in the large entrance chamber of the building on 86th Street while Sovereign spent fifty minutes talking about the day he’d spent with her.

They called each other mister and miss and she rarely touched him except when he was about to veer into harm’s way. Galeta had met Toni once and Sovereign could tell from her tone of voice that the Greek housecleaner didn’t like his helper from the hood. Dr. Offeran had asked that Sovereign bring Toni in on a session but the Techno-Sym HR officer demurred.

“I don’t pay her for that,” he said.

For entertainment the duo traded off interests. He took her to movies that she wanted to see and in turn she agreed to go to plays and one opera that interested
him.

“Did that bore you to death?” he’d ask her after a play or musical, opera, and once a speech by a black public intellectual on the inversion of racism.

“It was interesting,” she would say without fail.

The movies she liked were comedies and she never asked what he thought about them. But if she had asked he would have told her that he loved the way she laughed and giggled at the jokes and situations that writers and directors made up to distract her. And if she had gone further to ask, “Distracted from what?” he would have said, “From the ugliness of our lives on these streets and in the work we have to do to maintain that ugliness.”

But even this was not really true. He just loved to hear her laugh, touching his forearm now and again when something was exceptionally funny to her.

One day, in the middle of a comedy called
Making Her Over
, Sovereign leaned toward her and said, “You have been a godsend for me, Toni. You’ve made this darkness bearable.”

For long minutes after this confession Toni made no sounds of laughter. Sovereign felt that maybe she was moved by what he’d said.

One Tuesday, thirteen weeks into Sovereign James’s blindness, Toni had asked if they could stay in and have pizza instead of their usual busy schedule.

“It’s rainin’ outside,” she said, “and anyway I’m just tired.”

“Not sleeping?” Sovereign asked.

“Naw, I mean, yeah, I’m sleepin’ all right. It’s just that I want a pizza an’ maybe watch some TV. Could we?”

“Sure. I haven’t turned the television on in months but we can watch if you want.”

The pizza came but Toni didn’t turn on the television. They sat side by side on the white sofa, under the noonday sun. She served him his sausage-and-mushroom slices on a paper plate and wiped his chin twice when grease dripped down it.

She was exceptionally quiet. Sovereign knew from experience that this meant she had something to say. Toni’s need to say anything serious was always preceded by an almost profound silence. He could tell by the way she phrased her sentences that she was somewhat intimidated by his precise articulation.

“You remember what you said that day at
Makin’ Her Ovah
?” she asked when they had finished the pizza and were sipping on their orange sodas.

Sovereign almost told her that he’d said many things, but he knew what she meant and nodded.

“I felt really bad when you said that.”

“Why?” he asked. “It was a compliment.”

“Yeah, but …”

“What?”

“The man that attacked you is Lemuel Johnson. I was with him that day he hit you but I didn’t know he was gonna do that. That’s why I screamed. When he went after you with that MP’s baton he had I screamed for him to stop. But he didn’t, so I stayed to help you.”

She said these words all in a rush. And behind his wall of blindness, Sovereign was not surprised. It was not that he suspected her of being in cahoots with his
attacker, but she was alien, from some other world, and therefore presented difference. Most of the things she told him were windows onto a foreign experience—like her friend Tasha, who had befriended an older man at the behest of her boyfriend.

Cedric told Tasha that the old man had money and that he could pay her rent and they could have a place to stay until he got it together to pay for them—Cedric and Tasha—to get married
.

What do you think about that?
Sovereign had asked Toni.

It’d be all right if they told the man what they was doin’. I mean … he old an’ should know a young girl like Tasha ain’t gonna be all his—even if he paid for her rent. But if they lie like that then he might could get mad, an’ you know even a old man might have him a gun
.

These last few words brought to Sovereign’s mind Eagle James.

“What were you doing with this Lemuel?” Sovereign was a little shocked by his equanimity.

“I had been wit’ him for three days—that time. His brother joined the army an’ left and his apartment was free for the rest of the month. Jacob gave Lemuel the key and we was gettin’ high an’ stayin’ there. Then he said, Lemuel said, that he needed some money and whenever he did he went ovah to the West Village and robbed some rich kids. He said all he had to do was scare ’em with his baton. I told him I didn’t like that idea but he said he was gonna do it anyway, and I had already been up in his house spendin’ his money for three days.”

“What difference does that make?” Sovereign asked, like a mechanic seeing an odd connection under the hood of a foreign-made truck.

“It was stupid but he made me feel like I was the reason he was broke and I owed it to him to go along. And he said that he nevah hit nobody too hard and so I said okay. It was stupid.”

“But then he attacked me.”

“And I started screamin’,” Toni said. “I didn’t even know I was gonna do that. But there you were, mindin’ yo’ own business, and he raised his club.… I just screamed. I knew that it was wrong for me to be there.”

“But if you weren’t there he might have beaten me to death. You came with him and then, at the last minute, you broke away and did what was right.”

Silence.

The southern-facing windows of the apartment were open. Outside, a few blocks away, someone was practicing bagpipes on a rooftop somewhere. The sonorous tones seemed to writhe around Sovereign’s head, like he had to do to get comfortable in his own bed.

“You not mad?”

“Surprisingly, no, I’m not.”

“You not gonna fire me or tell the police?”

“Let me ask you something, Toni.”

“Yeah?”

“Have you seen Lemuel since that day?”

“He come ovah the house an’ told me that he’d kill me if I told the cops. I told him that if I was gonna tell the police that he’d already be in jail. Me too.”

“Was that the last time you saw him?”

Again there was a pause filled with the austere accompaniment of the Scottish pipes.

“He call me just about every week.”

“To make sure that you’re keeping your word?”

“Naw. He wanna get wit’ me.”

“He’s your boyfriend?”

“More like a jump-off. You know … somebody you see every now and then when you need to be with somebody.”