Odyssey (19 page)

“Sovereign.”

“Hey, Toni. I’m surprised to hear from you.”

“Lem’s mother called my moms last night. She was cryin’ ovah him,” the young woman said, bulling her way headlong into a speech that she had obviously practiced. “She said that he was dyin’ and that it was because a’ me. So that’s why I went down there. And when I saw him it hurt my heart. I know that he jumped you. I know that you went crazy because he attacked you in your own house. But when you walked in that hospital room and he was lyin’ there I felt so bad that I couldn’t even think about bein’ wit’ you. That’s why I didn’t come ovah.…”

“Toni, I—”

“I know I shoulda called you or sumpin’,” she said, cutting him off. “But I was hurtin’ and I didn’t know how to talk. I mean, I was only thirteen when I first started seein’ Lem. It’s like I’ve known him since the first day I was a woman. But I don’t wanna let you go, Sovereign. I don’t want you to change the locks and tell the doormen to send me away. I know I should have called but I couldn’t, but I can’t just stop seein’ you neither.…”

“I’m in the middle of a meeting,” Sovereign managed to say. “Come on by tonight and we’ll have dinner and talk about it.”

“You not just sayin’ that?”

“Come over at seven and we’ll go out for a nice French dinner.”

There was the pressure of tears behind his eyes, but Sovereign held them back. The group had settled in their chairs. He wondered what they were doing there and why the child’s words moved him so. These thoughts blended together, strained for unity, but failed.

“Mr. James,” Darius said again.

“I’m all yours, Mr. Maynard.” He hung up the phone and hit the buttons necessary to channel future calls to the answering system.

“We all got together last night after work and talked about what you told me yesterday,” Darius began. “But just to get it right … You said that you held us black job applicants to a higher standard.”

Sovereign took in a deep breath through his nostrils. He gazed around at the various shades of his secret army, wondering if maybe this was a coup or a betrayal. Then he considered the inflated nature of his thoughts. Regardless … events had taken him beyond caring about Techno-Sym and his future, or his past, there.

“Yes,” he said. “That’s right.”

“Why?” Lola Alifah demanded. She was dark skinned, forty, with ringlets for a hairstyle, two children at home, and no husband. She’d gone to Columbia but Sovereign hadn’t held that against her.

“Because I thought that if I hired only the best people of color, one day you guys would take over the company.”

“Isn’t that crazy?” Warren Chisel, the biracial data editor, asked. He was from California and had to go to a junior college before he was prepared for UCLA.

“The world is crazy,” Sovereign said, not looking directly at Warren. “Most people work for the system knowing that the cards are stacked against them. Mostly they don’t do anything about it. I figured I would.”

Bob Simon, blunt featured and brown like apple butter, stared, not intending to join the conversation. Bob was Sovereign’s gamble. He had talent
and
ambition. There was a chance that he’d end up identifying with the bosses, but, Sovereign thought, even if he turned against his fellows his example as a leader might outweigh the drawbacks.

None of this mattered anymore. He didn’t care if Bob reported the meeting, if the people in that room, or outside of it, turned against him. He was wrong for leaving his ailing grandfather with a loaded gun, wrong for never telling his father that he was the product of an infidelity, wrong for abandoning his mother and failing to come to his own father’s funeral. Wrong—but he never knew it, as innocent as a tarantula feasting on a baby chick.

“But, Mr. James,” Donna Price said, “when were you going to tell us about this … this conspiracy of yours?”

Donna met all the secret criteria Sovereign had made for his ideal employees of color, but that wasn’t why he’d hired her. She was voluptuous and beautiful. Her clothes fit her like skin, not tight but effortless in color and motion. He’d even asked her out to dinner once, but she said that it wasn’t proper for an
employee to date her superior.

“Never,” he said, answering her question.

“Never? Then how was it going to work?”

“It’s working right now,” Sovereign said. “The fact that you lodged a complaint against me proves that you are talking. The positions you have achieved prove that I was right about your abilities.”

“But you gave us an unfair advantage,” Bob Simon said. “How can we trust in our own abilities if you protected us from real competition?”

Sovereign was surprised and pleased that Bob entered the conversation. It gave him, the old him, hope that his gamble was won.

“Before the turn of the century—the twenty-first century, not the twentieth—I would have said that I had to give you extra points because the playing field was tilted against you, Bob. I would have said that and I would have been right too. But the millennium changed and I wasn’t paying attention. My mind, my brain is living in the past but our bodies are here and now. You have to forgive me for doing what I’ve done, because I’ve disrespected you, but I didn’t know. That’s why I told Darius about what I did. I wanted you people to understand that I wasn’t working against you the way you thought but in another way, a more insidious way. I took actions that were correct at the start, but now the battle lines have been redrawn and you are the victims of friendly fire.”

This speech ended in silence. The people he’d hired had mildly befuddled looks on their faces.

“This is crazy,” Lola said.

“It’s like I went to sleep in America,” Sovereign agreed, “and I woke up in the world.”

“Now let me get this straight,” LeAnne Moore said. “You’ve been here more than twenty years, smiling at the white boss and hiring so that all the black people would have an advantage.”

“Not just blacks,” Sovereign said. “So-called Hispanics, one Native American, and some Asians too. Mostly it was blacks, though, mostly so.”

LeAnne was tall for a woman, five-ten, and round. She had the happy nature of a big person—what Sovereign thought of as natural humor. But she wasn’t smiling in that room, on that afternoon.

“From the first day you were here?” she asked.

“I studied political theory in college,” he explained, “Marx and Bakunin, the socialists and revolutionaries. It came to me that conscious revolution in the new world was impossible because it was idealistic. A workable revolution could be designed, but the people doing the work shouldn’t have to shoulder the expectations. Everyday working people have to raise children and pay the bills; they don’t have the time to worry about the reorganization of society. The professors and students lived in an ether removed from the exigencies of the everyday.

“That’s when I decided to go into human resources—I thought that I might make a difference without slogans and false optimism.”

“You decided that in college?” Warren Chisel said, as mild astonishment spread across his face.

The question nipped at Sovereign like an unexpected animal bite. What
had
he been thinking all those years? Could it be true that he felt he was guiding the future of an entire international corporation inside a moment of self-perceived political clarity?

The conversation went on for nearly two hours. Shelly Monteri came back and was surprised to find the impromptu meeting in progress. Sovereign sent her away, asking her to close the door and not to allow any interruption.

His hires asked questions and he answered as honestly as he could. In his mind he was questioning himself, feeling both a failure and quite satisfied.

“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.”