Walter Mosley

Odyssey

In memory of Jean Bethke Elshtain

Part One

“Ouch! Damn!” Sovereign James muttered when he bumped into the unexpected second door to the entrance of the East 86th Street address. It was his first appointment with Dr. Seth Offeran at the building on the north side of the block between Madison and 5th.

“Let me get that for you, sir,” a man said.

Hearing the voice a host of assumptions and physical bearings leapt to Sovereign’s mind.

The speaker was young, probably white, and he worked for the building, most likely a doorman. Sovereign was also pretty sure that the young white man was not in the vestibule. The voice sounded like it came from another room, through a window or something like that.

He heard the click and slide of a lock and the young man, whose voice had come from the left, was now before him saying, “Come on through, sir.”

James took three steps, enough to cross the second threshold and clear the arc of the door in case it opened inward.

“How can I help you?”

“I’m here to see Dr. Offeran,” Sovereign James said, turning his head twenty degrees to face the source of the question.

“Easy. Take eight or nine steps forward and you’ll come to a wall. From there you turn left and keep on going. The first door you pass on the right will be the Craigson Group. The buzzer is on the left side of the door, I’d say about chest level for you.”

“Thank you.”

“No problem.”

Holding his left hand out tentatively, Sovereign took eight steps, felt nothing, went half a pace more, and his fingers made contact with the wall. He stopped there and turned to face back the way he had come.

“Excuse me,” he said into space.

“Yes, sir,” the voice replied cheerily. There were a few hard footsteps and then, at closer proximity, “What do you need?”

“You get a lot of blind people in here?”

“No more than anywhere else, I guess.”

Sovereign estimated that the voice came from a height equal to his own: a shade under six feet.

Details, he thought, details in the dark.

“I was wondering,” James said, “because your directions seemed to be designed for somebody like me.”

“Yeah,” the young man replied. Sovereign imagined that he heard a grin behind the word. “My uncle Toad was blind and he’d tear your head off if you couldn’t explain exactly the place you were in and how to get around in it. He used to say, ‘If I want somebody’s hand on me I’ll hire a girl.’ ”

“I see. Did you like your uncle?”

“Not one bit. But my dad says that just because you don’t like somebody, that doesn’t mean you can’t learn from ’em.”

The contraction of them made Sovereign wonder about the young man’s origins.

“Your uncle was looking for independence and some dignity.”

“Yeah.” No grin there. “My dad said that too.”

Sovereign had hit a sour note and the conversation foundered for three or four seconds.

“Well... thank you,” the blind man said. He held out a hand in the general direction the voice had last come from.

“No problem.” A soft, sweaty hand grasped his. From the grip Sovereign thought that the doorman might have been carrying a few extra pounds.

“Let me ask you something,” Sovereign said.

“What’s that?”

They released each other.

“You say your uncle’s name was Toad?”

“His real name was Theodore. I guess they could’ve called him Tad or Ted or even Teddy but he was so bad tempered that those names didn’t really fit.”

Of late Sovereign enjoyed topics like this. Conversations where there was no visual aid involved, no light or shade or color. He felt a smile cross his face and thought about the warmth of sunlight on his skin.

“Just turn right,” the young man said. “Follow the wall and keep going till the first door you come to.”

Sovereign nodded, turned, and made his way along the barrier, like a sightless bug, he thought, moving forward more by instinct than purpose.

After eleven steps the air around him changed, became closer. Underfoot the hard floor was suddenly carpeted. Sovereign James assumed that he had entered a first-floor hallway. Reaching out he touched the wall to his right. It had no definite texture, neither hard nor very soft. Maybe it was plasterboard or wallpapered wood. He tried to imagine the length of the hall or if it were brightly lit, but these estimations were beyond him.

Five steps after he entered the hallway Sovereign’s fingers trailed over the outer edge of a doorframe. There, at chest level as the doorman had promised, was a small rectangular button that protruded slightly. It was warm to the touch. There was probably a small lightbulb underneath.

Smiling at the secondhand feel of light, Sovereign wished that he had asked the doorman his name. He pressed the button three times — one long, one short, and one long — as he had been instructed to do. Then he stood there patiently as the world around him hummed and murmured, whispered and pinged.

Ninety seconds passed.

“Mr. James?” a man’s voice said.

The door opening made no sound. The hinges must have been well oiled and the doorknob mechanism too — or maybe, Sovereign thought, the lock was not engaged and anyone with the knowledge could just push his way in.

“Dr. Offeran?” James held out his right hand.

A strong, meaty fist grabbed him by the knuckles and then he was being pulled forward, guided by another hand at his elbow. The blind man resisted briefly and then allowed himself to be ushered forth in this manner.

He didn’t resent the help — not exactly. It was just that when people took him physically through new spaces his mind went blank and lost focus. After his benefactors were gone he had no idea of where he was or how to make his way back to familiar surroundings.

But this was different. Dr. Offeran wasn’t a passerby do-gooder. He’d still be there to show the way out when the appointment was over.

“Right this way, Mr. James. We’re going through the waiting room to my office. Go right ahead.” After three steps, a pause, and then, after four more steps, the hand gripped his elbow and Offeran said, “There’s a couch right in front of you. Make yourself comfortable. Can I take your coat?”

“No, thank you.”

Sovereign felt for the couch with his shins and knees. When he was sure of its height and placement he took off the thin trench coat, folded it with a rolling motion of his forearms, turned, and sat down.

Sitting on a new chair or sofa brought up anxieties for the newly blind Human Resources and employment officer. Even though he told himself that it was irrational, he’d often imagine broken glass or some sharp implement jabbing from the backrest into his kidneys.

“Well,” the modulated, medium-toned doctor said. “It’s good to meet you.”

“I guess,” Sovereign replied. “I don’t even know why I’m here really. I mean, I know why but I don’t see the purpose.”

“You were referred to me by Dr. Katz. Tom knows his business.”

“He couldn’t diagnose me.”

“Would you like to lie down, Mr. James?”

“No. No, thank you.”

“I always have my patients lie down on the couch.”

“You ever get bedbugs?”

“Never. You don’t have to worry about that. Now if you wouldn’t mind.”

“I do mind.”

A siren suddenly blared from outside. Hearing the high-pitched whine Sovereign could tell that there was an open window in the room. Turning his head he became aware of a slight current of air, proving his surmise.

“I’m afraid that I must insist,” Dr. Offeran said. “You know you have to go through this process in order to satisfy the insurance.”

“I can’t lie down, Doctor.”

“Why not?”

“Because when I do the room starts spinning. Well, I guess it isn’t the room, because I can’t see it, but I get all dizzy and off-balance. It feels like I’m on my back in a raft that floated out over a whirlpool. After lying down it takes me a while to get back up again. One time I fought it, stood straight up and fell on my butt.”

“How do you manage to sleep at night?”

“Sit on my sofa in the living room and meditate or listen to the radio until I’m out. Then I lie down naturally. I can do it if I’m already out, but if I’m awake... no way.”

Now that he was aware of the window Sovereign could make out the susurration of traffic in the distance. There was also the drone of a motor idling somewhere nearby.

Offeran was silent, considering the information that James presented.

“Do you think that Dr. Katz’s parents were jokers?” the reluctant patient asked.

“Jokers? What do you mean?”

“They’re the ones who named their kid Tom Katz.”

There came a grunt that might have been a laugh.

Sovereign ran his right palm along the rough fabric cushion beneath him.

“I think his mother was Catholic,” Offeran, the doctor without a face, said. “Her father’s name was Thomas and he had just died when Dr. Katz was born.”

“Just one a’ those crazy things,” James said, thinking of the once popular jazz song.

“I suppose we could start the sessions with you sitting up,” Offeran said. “But I’d like to come back to this issue of your dizziness in future sessions.”

“How many of these sessions are there going to be?”

“As many as it takes. The way this works is that you come every weekday afternoon at two. I will use that time to evaluate you and your progress... Maybe I’ll even be of some help.”

“Doctor, I need to get back to work. I’m tired of goin’ from place to place and having people tell me that they don’t know what’s wrong. I can tell them what’s wrong.”

“And what’s that, Mr. James?”

“I’m blind. Thursday morning, six weeks ago, I woke up and couldn’t see a blessed thing. Nothing. From that day to this I been like a blind bug. They sent me home and then to twenty different doctors, hospitals, clinics, and wherever and they all told me that because they can’t say why I’m blind that I must not be. I wish they had these eyes. All I want is to get back on the job and do what I know. I don’t need to see to do my work.”

“You’re a human resources officer?”

“And the head of employment, yes.”

“Don’t you need to look someone in the eye to understand them?”

“At Techno-Sym we work as teams. There are always two HR officers at an internal interview. Most of what I ever understood was in the voice that speaks and the answers given. If there’s any body language my partner can pick up on that.”

Ellen Saunders came unbidden into Sovereign’s mind at that moment. She was wearing a camel-colored dress that was a bit short, sitting across from him and Myrna Malloy. Ellen’s skin was the same tone but a slightly different color from the dress. Her legs were crossed. Her expression was unpleasant even though it was just a routine yearly evaluation.

Then, in the vision and quite unexpectedly, a bird of black and scarlet fluttered up and landed on the taciturn woman’s shoulder. The stark colors of the bird’s plumage stood out from the mild browns of the woman and her dress. The black eyes of the creature were intelligent and predatory. It was, Sovereign thought, like her angry soul made manifest, animated by a bird of prey.

When had he met with Ellen? He couldn’t remember.

“Mr. James?”

“Yes?”

“I asked you a question.”

“Sorry. My mind must have drifted.”

“What were you thinking?”

“Trying to remember the last time I was in my office... doing my job.”

“I told the mothahfuckah he better chill,” a man’s voice from outside the window exclaimed.

Someone else, a woman, laughed.

“I asked you if you believed that your blindness has a physical basis.”

“I can’t see. That’s physical, isn’t it?”

“Not necessarily. You must have studied psychology to get your degree, Mr. James.”

“Freud has been disproved on a hundred different points.”

“But hysterical blindness has not.”

“I haven’t had any traumatic experience. I had been working all week doing what I’ve done for twenty years or more.”

“You’re an exceptional man, Mr. James.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But it is an exceptional man who has had no traumas in an entire life of forty-nine years.”

Again an image appeared in Sovereign’s mind. This time he was standing on a weatherworn wood pier looking down on a rowboat. It was his grandfather Eagle James’s boat. Sovereign had never been on that pier, never seen that dinghy, but his grandfather had told him about it a dozen times from his wheelchair. The HR officer remembered distinctly the odor of urine and vodka along with the story of the days that Eagle caught carp as big as Sonny Liston’s arm.

“Are you making fun of me, Doctor?” Sovereign asked to mask the memory.

“Dr. Katz and the other doctors have all said that they can see no physical reason for your blindness, Mr. James. They’ve done CAT scans, MRIs, X-rays, and physical examinations. They’ve performed every chemical test that I know of and still they’ve come up with nothing. The insurance company will not pay for retraining for your job unless you go through this process with me.

“Now... I have given in about you sitting up during our sessions. But if you want to resist the process I will have to report accordingly.”

Sovereign smiled and thought of the sun again. He nodded and said, “I’ve given that speech a hundred times, whenever an employee has been sent to me with some kind of behavior problem. One time I had a guy whose coworker had given him a blow job in the copy room at lunch. She locked the door and unzipped his pants. In the days after that he kept trying to talk to her. She made a complaint to our office about his attentions.”

“What did you say to the man?” Dr. Offeran asked.

“I knew both employees. It was very possible, but not at all provable, that the woman had done this thing. I told him that. I said that he had to let it go.”

“And what was his answer?”

“He said that he loved her.”

“And the outcome?”

“We fired him. The woman, her name was Marla, felt so guilty that she called him and they got together. I hear they got married, then divorced.”

“So you can understand my position?” Seth Offeran said.

“I suppose.”

“I don’t need you to believe in psychoanalysis or Freud... or me, for that matter,” the doctor added. “All you have to do is participate in the process to my satisfaction.”

A horn honked and a man yelled something indecipherable. The sound of wings flapping brought back the hallucinatory memory of the red-and-black bird on the camel-clothed woman’s shoulder.

“Okay, Doctor,” James said. “The signs all say for me to comply... or maybe submit.”

“Then we can get started?”

“Yes, sir,” Sovereign said. He was thinking about the young white doorman saying the same words.

“What happened the Wednesday before you lost your sight?”

“My eyes were bothering me. I was blinking and one time, when I was reading a report, the words got all blurry.”

“Anything out of the ordinary happen at work, or anywhere else?”

“No.”

“What did happen?”

A wave of dizziness spiraled through Sovereign’s head. He sat back against the cushion and took in a deep breath. The day, which he had described a dozen times in the last six weeks, flitted away from him and then came back in fragments. He remembered his assistant, Shelly Monteri, bringing him coffee with sugar in it even though Shelly knew that he didn’t like sugar. There was a pigeon building a nest on the ledge of his office window.

“I...” he said. “I spent most of the day reading e-mails from headhunters who were sending in the résumés of applicants for a systems manager position that had recently opened up. I remember thinking that you couldn’t make a choice without actually meeting the person.”

“Seeing them,” Offeran interjected.

“I had an afternoon meeting with my supervisor.”

“About what?”

“There had been a complaint.”

“What kind of complaint?”

“A few of the employees had blamed me for racism in my hiring practices.”

“They thought that you were excluding white applicants?”

“No.”

In the following silence Sovereign thought about his supervisor Martin LeRoy’s office. It was on a corner of the twelfth floor of the building and looked down 5th Avenue toward Greenwich Village. It was a triangular room but large enough to overcome the inherent disadvantages of such an awkward layout. LeRoy was a pudgy white man with steely eyes. He smiled when Sovereign entered the Isosceles Office.

“No?” Offeran asked.

“They...” Sovereign said, “they were saying that I was racist against black people.”

Sovereign enjoyed the doctor’s momentary silence. This whole concept of therapy felt like a match of some sort: like tennis or maybe even boxing. The only way he could stay focused was to compete against the questions asked.

“I don’t understand,” Offeran said. “You are a black man.”

“They said that I had a different, a higher set of standards for black and brown applicants, that I let in whites who were less qualified than their colored counterparts.”

“Was that true?”

“That depends.”

“Depends on what?”

“Is what I say in here to you confidential?”

“Completely. I will report on your state of mind but under oath I cannot reveal the content of our conversations.”

“Then yes, I do hold a higher standard for black and brown applicants. Always have. Always will.”

“So the complaint is valid. You are racist.”

“Yes, against whites.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I let in any old white guy. He could misspell his own name and I’d be likely to offer him a job. But when it comes to a brother or sister they’d better have every single i dotted and t crossed. When I’m finished with Techno-Sym their best employees will be people who look like me. From the president on down there’ll be a good chance for that job to be held by a person of color.”

Sovereign took in a deep breath and it felt especially good. He had said something that was true in his heart. This set off a sense of elation that he rarely, if ever, felt.

“Do you hate white people that much?” Offeran asked. The tone of the question was less professional. This also lent to Sovereign’s feeling of delight.

“Not at all, Doctor. I just know that if we — so-called African and Hispanic Americans — ever plan to make it past the handout stage, we have to be the best. So I only hire the best. And once they’re in I do everything to make sure that they are given the chances they deserve.”

“How did the meeting with your supervisor go?”

“Great. All I had to do was point out the failings of the people I rejected. As long as I wasn’t deep-sixing white applicants he didn’t care. There’s no way in the world that he could believe that I was trying to take over his company from the inside. I mean... who would expect a capitalist revolution inside of an already capitalist system?”

Another spate of silence ensued. Sovereign was comfortable in the gap of communication. He felt in charge of the session and therefore safe from... from... he didn’t exactly know what the danger was but it was definitely there, in that room.

“What happened after you left work?” Offeran asked. His tone was again authoritative.

“Nothing. Valentina came over to pick up the rest of her stuff.”

“Your girlfriend?”

“Ex.”

“When did you break up?”

“A week or so before I went blind. But that’s not the cause. She broke it off with me but I accepted it.”

“Why?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“I need to get to know your state of mind before the event. I’ll also want to know what you ate and what TV shows, if any, you watched. I’ll want you to tell me about any dreams you had that Wednesday and any recurring dreams you’ve had over the years. I will ask questions about your parents and siblings, if you have children—”

“No kids,” Sovereign said brusquely. “No, no kids at all.”

“You seem bothered by that.”

“Valentina was the one who was bothered.”

“That you didn’t have children?”

“That I wanted them. You see, she’s quite a bit younger than I am. And she’s white on top of that. Her father doesn’t care what she does but her mother... her mother worries.”

“About what?”

The smile across Sovereign’s face no longer reminded him of the sun. “For the children,” he said.

The rest of the hour was filled with what seemed to Sovereign like meaningless details of his life. Valentina had left because he wanted kids. His father had complained to his mother that the kids were too much trouble. He was born in San Diego but had gone to City College in New York, had graduated number nine in his class, and had worked for Techno-Sym for twenty-one years.

“I was the only one not white that first day,” he told the psychoanalyst, “but now they got thirty-two black employees and half that number of other people of color. Four of them are on higher pay grades than I’m on.”

Talk, talk, talk. That’s what Sovereign James thought about the hour. But at least he got to compete and tell the truth without worrying about the consequences.

After a hundred or more questions Dr. Seth Offeran said, “The hour’s up, Mr. James. I’ll see you at the same time tomorrow.”

Sovereign sighed.

“Finally,” he said. “You know I haven’t talked so much nonsense since I was a little boy in San Diego.”

“Oh? Who did you talk to then?”

“I used to push my grandfather Eagle around in his wheelchair and ask him about everything under the sun. My mother said it was all those questions that finally gave him a heart attack.”

After five steps down the carpeted hall and eleven more along the wall, Sovereign did a ninety-degree turn and took eleven steps, reached out, and found the handle of the front door. This he pulled open before striding through. He located the second door just as easily and walked with confidence to the outer limit of the inset entrance. He had taken out the collapsible white cane, holding it carelessly in his left hand so that people would know that he was blind and stay out of his way.

Taking the cell phone from his trench coat pocket he hit the right keys and held the phone to his ear.

“Red Rover,” a voice said, cutting the first ring off in the middle.

“Sovereign James ready for a pickup on the north side of East Eighty-sixth between Madison and Fifth.”

“Hello, Mr. James. We’ll have a car there in eight minutes.”

The street sounds were, of course, louder outside. He heard a long conversation between two men about a baseball game the night before. Another man was speaking Arabic in a consistent stream. Sovereign figured that it was a food vendor talking on his cell phone. He smelled the burning meat and no one answered the man’s indecipherable words.

“Mr. James?”

“Antonio?”

“Take three steps forward and you’ll be at my back door.”

The HR officer did this but after the second step he ran into someone, or rather, she ran into him. She stepped on his toe while ramming something hard into his right breastbone.

“Why don’t you watch where you’re going?” a woman said angrily. And then, “Oh! I didn’t notice that you were...”

“He’s blind, lady,” Antonio called from his car.

“Let me help you,” she said, taking hold of his right biceps.

“Get your hands off me, woman,” Sovereign said. “I didn’t ask to be touched.”

“Are you all right, sir?” That was the doorman from earlier.

“I’m so sorry,” the woman said as she released his arm.

“Just keep moving, Mr. James,” Antonio added. “The door is still right in front of you...”

That night, in his Greenwich Village apartment, Sovereign was exhausted. He ordered a sausage-and-peppers pizza again. After eating he drank water from the tap without bothering with a glass. When the eating and drinking were done he tried to lie down on the sofa but the room started spinning and he was forced to sit up.

The sun had gone down. He knew this because of the chill on his skin. He reached for the blanket but it was gone. Galeta, the cleaning lady, had rearranged things again. But in spite of the cold he drifted off, imagining that he was in Eagle James’s rowboat without an oar on a wide, placid lake. He could hear the burble of fish gliding beneath him, imagining the lines of their passage through the chill waters. There was the sun above, filtered by water, and the stench of putrefaction coming in literal waves around him.

He was a fish aware only of sensation and broken images through the blue-green lens of underwater life. He had no brain, or at least very little. The watery world was revolving — a rotation within the orbit of the planet. He could feel the earth moving and himself projected in a world where up and down and even gravity were relative terms.

“How do you feel?” the dream image of Seth Offeran asked.

“Free.”

“What do you want?”

Instead of answering, Sovereign felt a band of pain across his chest. This was a pain he always felt after swimming the first few days of summer.

“Your fins need exercise,” his father would say.

“Come lie down,” his mother told him.

And then the phone rang.

The first jangled report was modulated by the water. The second salvo of sound coincided with him rising up from the lake. By the fifth ring the answering machine engaged and Sovereign realized that he was lying on his side on the sofa.

“This is the phone line of Sovereign James,” the machine said. “I’m not in right now or else I’m otherwise engaged. Please leave a message and I will return your call forthwith.”

There was a beep and then a few seconds of silence.

“Sovy?” a woman’s voice asked tentatively. “Sovy, are you there? I don’t know why you won’t return my calls. I mean, I still care about you. I want to help. Please let me come over. The doorman told me that you didn’t want to see me. I need to hear that from you. You owe me that much...”

The room started spinning and Sovereign sat up.

“No matter what has happened between us I still care for you,” Valentina continued. “We need to talk. Sovy... Sovereign.”

There was a moment of silence and then the click of a phone being disengaged. Nausea from the spinning brought Sovereign to his feet. When he stood, the feeling of motion stopped.

He stood there with his hands hanging down, a sentry in the darkness — a man, he felt, who was soon to disappear.

The next day one of Sovereign’s regular drivers, Reuben Quinta, dropped him off in front of the 86th Street building.

“If you swing back around at three-oh-five I’ll be standing right out front,” Sovereign said, and then he maneuvered his hand to give Reuben a three-dollar tip and a handshake.

“You got it, Mr. James.”

The heat of the sun was beating down. Sovereign turned one hundred and eighty degrees, walked the nine steps to the first door of the vestibule, opened the door, and took two and half steps more to the second portal. He walked straight to the back wall of the entrance room, touched the wall in an act of friendly spatial recognition after ten and a half paces, then walked directly to the Craigson Group’s door without touching the wall or even really counting his steps. He pushed the door open and smiled to himself that he was right about its not being locked or latched.

Even inside the office where Offeran had guided him, Sovereign felt that he remembered the path. He came to where he thought the door was but encountered a wall. To the left he found a door and knocked.

No answer.

He knocked again.

The knob jiggled and clicked. A slight movement of air told Sovereign that a door had opened.

“Yes?” a woman’s voice asked. “Can I help you?”

She was shy of five six, half a foot shorter than Sovereign.

“I was looking for Dr. Offeran. I was sure that this was his door.”

“He’s the pink door behind you.”

“Directly behind me?”

After a pause the woman said, “Yes.”

“I’m here, Mr. James,” Offeran’s voice said. “Right behind you.”

“Thank you,” Sovereign said to the woman before him. Then he turned and headed in the direction of his doctor’s voice.

He had the feeling of passing through a doorway.

“Couch is just a few steps ahead of you,” Seth Offeran said.

As he was seating himself Sovereign heard the door to the office close.

“That was inaccurate language for a blind man,” James said.

“What?”

“ ‘A few steps.’ That could mean two or four. I mean, I know in usage it means three, but most people aren’t aware of that fact.”

“Sorry,” Offeran said. “I’ll use the correct number from now on.”

Again Sovereign felt as if he had scored a point in some kind of unique game. But this time the victory felt hollow.

“How did you sleep?” the doctor asked.

“Fine, great. You know, the only time I ever see anything is in my dreams.”

“Did you dream about me?”

“Yes, I did.”

“What did I look like in your dream?”

Sovereign smiled. “Is this some kind of trick, Doctor?”

“No. I was wondering if you might have let an image of me in even though you believe that you have not seen me.”

“So you agree with Dr. Tomcat that I’m really not blind but fakin’ it.”

“No. I believe what you’re telling me. But that doesn’t discount the possibility that you’re suffering from conversion disorder.”

“What’s that?”

“That is when a person redirects the focus of a severe anxiety into the manifestation of a psychosomatic illness. This could be paralysis, general numbness, or the interruption of one of the senses — including sight.”

If this were a boxing match, Sovereign thought, he’d be flat on his back at this moment.

“I didn’t see you,” he said, mentally getting to his feet. “You asked a question but I didn’t see your face.”

“What did I ask?”

“I don’t remember.” This was true.

“What was the rest of the dream about...?”

The hour was used up talking about Eagle James and the boat that Sovereign knew of but had never seen. He enjoyed talking about his family and their stories. This hour, and many more after that, allowed him access to a world that he thought he’d left behind after going off to college and starting his professional life as a human resources revolutionary.

“Why did Valentina break it off with you?” Dr. Seth Offeran asked on the following Tuesday, the seventh session of Sovereign’s therapy.

“She didn’t want children,” Sovereign said. “I told you that already.”

“Was that something new for her?”

“No, we had kinda agreed on it,” Sovereign said, haltingly.

“Was there any more to it?”

“She had worked for Techno-Sym and I’d given her a glowing recommendation for her new position at Jolly Jake’s Virtual Arcade Corporation.”

“And you told her about it?”

“No. No. I guess they’re pretty loose at Jolly Jake’s and the employment director let her take a look at her file. She called and asked me out to lunch.”

“And you went?”

“I didn’t see why not,” Sovereign said. “I had no idea that she had seen my recommendation, and anyway... she was married.”

“Married?”

“Yes, to another employee of Techno-Sym. Verso Andrews.”

“And what was the lunch about?”

“Like I said, she’d read my letter to JJ’s Arcade and wanted to thank me. We talked and I told her that she had always been an outstanding employee who did the job because of professionalism and not for any other reason.

“You have to understand, Doctor, I look at work as a political act. All other things being equal — it doesn’t matter about the race or gender of the employee but only their attitude.”

“And Valentina was thankful,” Offeran said.

“She came home with me and stayed until late that night. Two weeks later she left Verso and got a place about eight blocks from my apartment building. She made it clear that she would be my girlfriend but that we could never marry or have a conventional life together.”

“How did that make you feel?”

“I had a girlfriend then,” Sovereign said. “Her name was, still is, Claudette. Claudy had been talkin’ to me about kids for almost a year. ‘It’s time for me to start a family,’ she’d say before we went to bed, and, ‘You know I want to have a little girl,’ she’d say when we woke up in the morning. Almost every day she’d say something about it, especially after we had sex.”

“And you didn’t want to have a child with her,” the doctor concluded.

“She didn’t want to have a child with me.”

“But she said—”

“She said that she wanted a baby, that she wanted a little girl. She never asked me if I wanted it. She was asking me to give her a baby like it was a gift or something.”

“So you felt left out.”

“Let me ask you something, Doctor.”

“What’s that, Mr. James?”

“If you had a patient tell you that he got shot in the chest, would you ask him if he felt like he was attacked?”

“I understand.”

“I hope so,” Sovereign James said. “ ’Cause Claudette wanted her own baby and her own family and I just happened to be the sperm donor who was on the other side of the bed at the time.”

“Did you want a child?”

“Not that child.”

“But what did you want, Sovereign?”

“I wanted a woman to take me by the hand, look me in the eye, and say, ‘I want your baby, daddy. Yours.’ ”

“And Claudette said that she wanted her own child.”

“Only reason I had to be in the room was that she couldn’t do it any other way.”

“But that’s not completely true,” Offeran countered. “She wanted you to father that child, those children, and to be with her as they grew.”

“I’m a romantic, Dr. Offeran,” Sovereign said after a brief silence. “I might be black, blind, and a revolutionary to boot, but I believe that a child between a man and a woman doesn’t have anything to do with a biological clock or a hormonal timetable.”

“You’re looking right into my eyes, Mr. James.”

“I am? Because I don’t see a damn thing.”

“Hey, Mr. James,” Roger Jones hailed from his window at the vestibule of the building.

Roger was the young doorman who helped him on the first day. They had been talking for a few days now.

“Hey, Roger.”

“Reuben is waiting at the corner. He couldn’t park in front of the building like usual.”

“Okay.”

“They gonna let you get back to work soon?”

“I don’t know yet. Everybody says that I’m not really blind and I’m just makin’ all this up.”

“How can they say that when they see how you are?”

“People believe in all kinds of things, Roger. That’s why the world is almost always at war.”

“I don’t get you.”

“If people weren’t so damn sure that they’re right all the time maybe we’d talk more and get things straight.”

That night Sovereign went over the talk with Offeran in minute detail. He had taken to doing this every night. The specifics of his conversations were almost visible in his mind.

Is Claudette a black woman? the doctor had asked.

Sure is. And fine too. That woman got a rump get me hot just to think about it.

If you’re a racial revolutionary and you obviously want children, then wouldn’t Claudette be the perfect choice? he asked.

That’s half the way there, Doctor. But you got to remember — any child I produce will be a black child in this racist nation. And the woman who bears my child will have to want me and only me to be that father.

But that’s unrealistic, Offeran said. Women need to have children...

Sovereign remembered the afternoon that he’d taken off from work when Valentina had come over. After hours of lovemaking she noticed a dry spot on his thigh. She got olive oil from his kitchen and began to massage it on his skin. He got excited and asked her to kiss his erection. But instead she began to suck on his testicles. The oil dripped down from there and she kept rubbing it in. He put his legs up, allowing her to massage his buttocks and rectum.

She was shaking his shoulders before he realized that he had passed out. That was when he knew that he wanted Valentina to bear his progeny.

“But I’m married,” she said.

“Separated,” he countered. “Soon to be divorced.”

He hadn’t told the doctor this part of the story. Time was up and he was happy to leave.

“You’re a racist,” Darius Maynard said a few weeks before Sovereign’s eyes gave out.

He, Maynard, was sitting in the visitor’s chair opposite Sovereign’s broad hickory desk. Darius was two decades younger than James and wore a blue blazer and khaki pants. In contrast the senior HR official wore a dark, dark green suit with a black vest and yellow shirt.

Only the older man wore a tie.

“Myrna Malloy was also at the interview,” Sovereign said. “You haven’t accused her as far as I know.”

“You’re the one who makes the final decision.”

“The evaluation process is confidential.”

“And you’re a racist.”

Sovereign James smiled. He liked Maynard. His skin was the color of darkening egg custard and his eyes didn’t know whether to be brown or green. Even though he was almost thirty, his voice still cracked when he got excited.

Sovereign wondered if the young man had ever learned how to tie a tie.

“I’m six shades darker than you, young man.”

“What about Phil Vance?”

“What about him?”

“You turned him down for the unit coordinator’s position,” Darius said. “You gave the job to Aldo Menton and he wasn’t half as qualified.”

Phil Vance. Sovereign remembered the flashy young man: handsome and black skinned and always smiling, like the cat that had just done away with the noisome canary. He was a graduate of Tufts, descended from a good family. Private schools all the way. For Vance, Techno-Sym was just a stepping-stone. He hadn’t done enough homework to know exactly what international services the self-defined data-clone company provided.

Just point me at the job and I will get it done, Vance had told Sovereign.

He hadn’t even bothered to maintain eye contact.

“You’re the data librarian, are you not, Mr. Maynard?” Sovereign asked.

“And I know everything about that job,” the custard-colored young man said.

“And I am the human resources professional. You maintain the global logic center and I provide the best possible staff.”

“You do what the white man tells you to do!” Maynard shouted.

Sovereign started from the dream with a stifled yelp. Everything had been the same except the last words of the young librarian. In the real conversation Maynard had swallowed his humiliation and gone off to organize a movement against the HR department, James in particular.

This turn of events hadn’t bothered Sovereign. He even expected it. For the people of color to organize, if only in a failed movement, would prepare them for future battles at Techno-Sym and elsewhere.

But the condemnation that reared its head in the nightmare caused self-doubt. What did it mean? Had he somehow been brainwashed by a self-perpetuating system that made him think he was working for his people while he was indeed doing the opposite?

Fully awake and prone on the white sofa, Sovereign felt his head begin to spin. He sat up and then stood, stumbled across the living room, careful to avoid the coffee table, reached the high counter, and felt around for the multipurpose clock. He found the talk bar and pressed it.

“The time is two thirty-seven a.m., September fourteenth, two thousand ten,” the clock’s voice said.

Two thirty-seven and he was wide-awake, heart pounding, and uncertain about the most important deeds of the last twenty years of his life. He stood there in the darkness, and in the dark, not exactly thinking but feeling that he had come to an unexpected border without the proper papers. The past was gone and the future was barred... and it was two thirty-seven, maybe thirty-eight by now, and he was lost.

His feet were bare but he still had on his trousers, shirt, and jacket. The temperature in the apartment was always set at seventy-two degrees, because there was no way for him to read the thermostat. He needed the jacket to balance the heat. His feet were cold but he didn’t mind. The light was probably off. He laid both hands on the high Formica counter and cocked his head, listening for any sound that might inform or distract him.

There came various susurrations from the street below, mainly traffic. Now and then a voice was heard, some laughter, and once a dog barking frantically. After a very long time Sovereign made out the gentle plash of water dripping from the kitchen spigot into the porcelain basin. Hearing the almost inaudible plop and splatter he remembered the dark, weblike system of tiny cracks throughout the ancient sink. He moved his head from side to side as if gazing upon the slick, spattered surface in bright sunlight with 20/20 vision.

Memory was in many ways clearer and more accurate than what his eyesight had been. He found that he was able to use his imagination to get a better focus than he’d ever experienced before.

After a while of listening and remembering, he hit the time bar again.

“The time is three-oh-nine a.m., September fourteenth, two thousand ten,” the voice said.

Sovereign took the cell phone from his pocket. He imagined seeing the green glow of the face and entered a number that he knew well.

“Hello? Sovy?” she said, answering on the first ring.

“Hey, Val.”

“What time is it?”

“Just about three in the morning.”

“How... How are you?”

“Blind as Homer.”

“What happened to you?”

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

“Are you okay?”

“I’m blind.”

“I know. I’m sorry. You must feel awful. Can I help?”

“No.”

“I could go shopping for you.”

“I do that over the phone. They deliver. And the limo service, Red Rover, takes me wherever I need to go.”

“I’m so sorry, Sovy,” Valentina Holman said. There was actual grief in her voice.

“I’m not dead. Just blind.”

“Is it curable?”

“What’s going on with you, Valentina?”

There was silence then. Now that there was an opening for conversation the night seemed to close in.

“Nothing,” she said weakly.

“Nothing at all? You don’t go to work? You don’t watch TV, read books? You don’t have friends?”

“Verso wants to get back together.”

“Did you tell him about us?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I didn’t think you would like that.”

“I didn’t like you leaving me. That didn’t seem to make any difference.”

Silence filled the darkness that already encased Sovereign’s head.

“Valentina,” he said after maybe a minute.

No answer.

He hit the time bar on the talking clock.

“The time is three twelve a.m., September fourteenth, two thousand ten,” the mechanical male voice said.

“Who was that?” she asked.

“A clock I got that actually tells the time.”

“What do you want me to say, Sovy?”

“It would have been nice if you had answered my calls when I could still read the daily papers.”

“I didn’t know that you’d go blind.”

“So by that logic you’d agree to reconsider getting back together if I only just died.”

The connection broke off and Sovereign knew that Valentina had hung up. He couldn’t figure out how to hit the right keys to turn off his cell phone, so he took the battery out of the back and stacked the powerless phone and its power source together on the high countertop. Then he went to the landline and followed the cord back to the wall. While he was disconnecting the jack, the phone made the whisper of a ring.

That would be Valentina calling back, sorry for having hung up but angry that he wouldn’t give her the space to shun him and his attentions once more.

He realized there in the early morning that he knew Valentina well enough to have an hours-long conversation with her even if she was not there.

Was that love? Was it intimacy?

No, he thought, prediction is an objective phenomenon, a knowledge but not an emotion. Valentina had taken her love along with her and all he could do was push her buttons and remember what had been.

And what was that?

He ambled over to the sofa, banging his left shin against the low coffee table along the way.

Sitting down, he wondered what it had been between him and the white woman he praised so highly for her new job. There was no reason for him to give her such acclaim. She did her job and never malingered or caused dissent, but she was in no other way exceptional.

He remembered the cream-colored recommendation form that he’d received from Jolly Jake’s Virtual Arcade Corporation. It was such a fancy and sophisticated form. It seemed incongruous with the slapdash organization of the company.

There was an area provided, about half a page, where he could, if he wished, add any extra details about the candidate. In the smallest letters he penned an outstanding reference. Exceptional attention to detail, he’d said. The highest professional decorum. Miss Holman not only brings her best game to the job, but she brings out the best in others on her team.

There was no logical reason for this outlandish recommendation. James hardly knew the woman. And though he did not hold enmity toward white women, he didn’t see it as his political duty to help them in their struggles against their enemies.

Enemies. Forgetting his late-night argument with Valentina, Sovereign considered a word that he had exorcised from his vocabulary while still at college.

Generals and nations have enemies, his political science professor Jane Mithrill had lectured. Revolutionaries work for the people. Even if you find yourself on the side of one group or another at any particular juncture, you must always remember that your work is for the betterment of the human race, not any group, class, tribe, gender, or nationality.

The wild-eyed Irish professor would clench her fists and raise her voice until she was nearly screaming in her sermonlike lectures. She was loved and hated by students and professors. She believed, as many of the founding fathers did, that revolution was the normal state of society. It was she more than anyone else who caused Sovereign to turn his back on capitalism and the Church, making him a mole for a movement that had no central governing body or even a sense of recognition among its members...

The next thing Sovereign knew, the heat of the sun was radiating across his face. He had fallen asleep thinking about his mentor and his own private rebellion against the racist overlords of a bankrupt system. Not enemies, but pieces on the other side of the chessboard — pawns who played their roles without cognition or true malice.

He took off his clothes from the day before, showered, shaved with a waterproof electric, took one of the four plastic pouches from the top drawer of his bureau that Galeta prepared for him twice a week, and dressed for the day.

He could make instant coffee and eat cereal for breakfast. Weetabix and two percent milk. At noon he left for the West Village diner that was two blocks from his apartment building — on Hudson Street. The counter waitress, Myna, would greet him from the spot where there was an empty stool and he’d say hello while getting to his seat.

This routine ran like clockwork and he felt comfortable with it.

Sitting down after greeting the waitress, Sovereign thought that blindness had always been a part of his life, of everyone’s life. There was so much that he didn’t see... but it took the loss of his sight to make him aware of the hollow darkness that surrounds everyone.

He had just ordered a grilled cheese sandwich with tomato soup when he sensed the movement of someone sitting in the stool beside him. It was a woman. He knew this because she wore perfume, not cologne.

“Hello,” he said to his new happenstance neighbor.

“Why’d you disconnect the phones, Sovy?” Valentina Holman said.

“Call me Sovereign.”

“What?”

“That’s my name, Sovereign James. Using my nickname makes it sound like we’re close, intimate, but we’re not.”

“We were very close.”

“But no longer.”

There was a long spate of silence. Sovereign knew that Valentina was thinking of leaving. Maybe she’d go silently and he could eat in peace.

“Here you go, sugar,” the waitress, Myna, said. “Grilled yellow cheese and red soup. What can I get for you, honey?”

“Coffee,” Valentina said, “black.”

A beat, then two.

“I should have talked to you after I left,” she said at last. “I was wrong and I’m sorry about that.”

“I accept your apology,” he said. “We don’t have to talk about it again.”

“What if I want to talk about it?”

“That’s okay too.” He put a spoonful of soup in his mouth and burned his tongue.

“Too hot?” Valentina asked.

“I’m sorry too,” Sovereign said.

“About what?”

“Calling you last night. It was wrong for me to wake you up at that hour.”

“I was already awake,” she said softly, “thinking about you.”

“What about me?” Sovereign bit into his sandwich and burned his upper palate. He did this on purpose. He needed to feel pain in order to keep from saying things he ought not say.

“I’m just sorry that we had to break up... that’s all.”

Sovereign heard the words, knew what they’d be before she spoke them. He also knew the reply she expected: It didn’t have to be. You’re the one who broke it off. Once he said this she had the choice of a variety of responses, but all of them would end in her claim that he was attempting to control her and not admitting his own culpability in the demise of their relationship. Somewhere in the ensuing conversation she would let slip that if he had been able to allow her to articulate the way in which they dealt with each other, she might have given him what he wanted. This nearly unspoken revelation would hurt him and soon after she would say that she had to go — leaving him with the undeclared knowledge that he had sabotaged his own chance at happiness.

Blindness had granted him insight.

“You’re right,” he said.

For a moment silence accompanied the symphony of sightlessness.

“What does that mean?” Valentina said at last.

“I agree with you,” he said. “It’s a very sad thing, our breakup. Now we have to accept it and move on.”

The soup had cooled and the sandwich too. Sovereign’s mouth still burned but his mind was a deep dark pool of frigid water, a lake that sat deep below the ground filled with the laughter of blind, unheard, and undreamed-of fish.

“You aren’t angry?”

“I was never angry,” Sovereign said — both liar and truth teller. “I was only talking out of the pain I felt. You had the courage to leave. You did what I couldn’t do and so I yelled. I’m sorry.”

“What are you saying?” she asked amid the imagined laughter of fish.

“I hope that you and Verso are able to come to some kind of understanding,” Sovereign said. “Either you get back together or he can accept what went wrong.”

Reaching out his left hand, Sovereign closed his fingers around the chilly, sweating water glass.

“How did you do that?” Valentina asked.

“What?”

“How did you know where the glass was?”

“Myna.”

“What?”

“Myna’s the waitress. She knows that I’m blind now and she always puts everything in the same place. That way I know exactly where to put my hands. I’ll show you.” Without turning his head away from Valentina, Sovereign moved his left hand through the air and let it descend on the leather bill folder. He flipped this open, then reached into its right front pocket, producing a twenty-dollar bill. He placed the money on top of the open folder and smiled.

“How did you know it was enough to cover the cost?” Valentina asked.

“My bills are separated into different pockets,” he said, “one for each denomination. In other countries they make the denominations different sizes, but here in America they make you work at it. I get the teller at the bank to help me with that. And Myna knows to stack the bills of my change from left to right starting at the edge of the leather wallet. If a denomination is missing she leaves a little gap to indicate it.”

“So,” Valentina said, “you accept the breakup now?”

“Yes.”

“I wish you had been able to do it earlier,” she said.

“Me too,” Sovereign replied from deep within his underground grotto.

“Will we still be friends?”

“As long as you want.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Valentina asked, still, Sovereign thought, looking for a way to get the upper hand.

“That I will answer your calls and you can come visit whenever you want.”

“No hard feelings?”

“Lots of feeling,” he said, “but none of it hard.”

The sway of the conversation reminded Sovereign of his grandfather’s boat. He was that vessel, floating away from shore, soon to be lost. He wasn’t sad but merely lonely.

“What are you thinking?” Valentina asked.

“About my grandfather.”

“What about him?”

“One day we were standing next to this big lake. I said, ‘Look at that lake, Granddad,’ and he said, ‘I see the little of it that I can see.’ And when I asked him what he meant, he said, ‘I can’t see the bottom and I can’t see the other side. What I do see is only a very little part of what makes up the lake that I know to be there.’ ”

“Did he really say that or are you just making it up?” Valentina asked. For the first time her voice carried some of its old mirth.

“I’m pretty sure he said it,” Sovereign replied, “but you know memory is like that lake — you think you know it but you never have it all.”

“I have to get back to work.”

“I’m glad you came here, Valentina. I’m glad you found me.”

“I remembered you used to come here for lunch on your days off,” she said.

“I’m glad.”

“Good-bye,” she said, and he felt a feathery kiss on his left eyebrow. After a few moments he realized that she was gone.

He thought that maybe he hadn’t tricked her after all, that maybe he’d broken a cycle in himself and not between them. Maybe his grandfather had lectured him on the unconscious shortsightedness of men for just such a day as this.

“Were you lying?” Seth Offeran asked an hour and a half later.

“I thought I was,” Sovereign said. “But when I think about it, maybe it was the only way that I could speak the truth.”

“Explain.”

“Everything I do is a game, Doctor. Every word, every question or statement or answer I give is designed to help me win.”

“Win what?”

“I don’t know... I mean, I used to think that I knew. Getting my parents to think I was the best over my brother and sister, getting the top grades, or making the team. Even in the lunchroom I’d try to be the most popular by making fun of other kids’ problems or differences.”

“And that was winning?” Seth Offeran asked.

“I thought so. People always seem to be trying to get the upper hand. Valentina was trying to in our conversation. She wanted to put the blame for our breakup on me. She feels that it was my fault for wanting children and not the relationship she’d offered. She couldn’t say that, so she wanted me to act brutish so she could reject me for the way I treated her.”

“You can’t be sure of that.”

“Do you think I’m wrong about her?”

Sovereign counted the seconds — one, one thousand, two, one thousand, three, one thousand — while Offeran thought about the question. As he counted he realized that he wasn’t trying to win anything. This insight made him wish that he could see the psychoanalyst’s face. He wanted to make eye-to-eye connection with the man and was sorry that he could not.

“No,” Offeran said at last. “From everything you’ve told me about Valentina and your talk I believe that she would try to shift the responsibility for the breakup to you. But can you blame her?”

“No. She’s a very ambitious woman, but success for her is more emotional than it is material. She needs to believe that she’s done the right thing. Guilt undermines her claim on success.”

“Like losing does for you,” Offeran added.

“Just so.”

“Are you playing me right now, Sovereign?”

“I don’t believe I am. I’m beginning to like these talks. And... and I only short-circuited the talk with Valentina because I really do think she’s right.”

“Right about what?”

“If I had approached her differently, if I had shared my feelings with her rather than just thrown the idea of a child on the table like some kind of stillborn hope, maybe... maybe we could have talked about it — learned something.”

“So you stymied her attempt to blame you because what she would have said was true and you were trying to protect yourself from the pain of that truth.”

“Yes.”

“Has any of your sight returned?”

“No.”

“Not even a glimmer?”

“No. Why do you ask?”

“That’s why we’re here,” Offeran replied. “We’re here to unknot the psychological basis for your blindness. Every time I notice a change in you I will ask the same question.”

At that moment Sovereign’s head jerked to the right.

“What was that?” the doctor asked.

“A tic, a spasm. I’ve been having them ever since I lost my sight.”

“There’s a fly in here today,” Offeran said. “I heard it buzz behind me just before your head moved.”

“So?”

“So maybe you saw the fly and responded on an unconscious level.”

“I didn’t see anything.”

“Our time is up for today.”

In the Red Rover car service car and through the front door of his apartment building, up the elevator and on the way to his white sofa, Sovereign was thinking; he was thinking about that fly and how quickly his head moved. He’d heard the buzzing too, but he didn’t remember seeing anything...

The idea that he made up his condition seemed preposterous. How could a man make himself not see the world around him? Like a child denying the obvious. But he wasn’t a frightened boy. Sovereign was a man who lived in the world, made a living, made a difference. How could such a person be petulant and stubborn enough to shut down an entire sense?

It was ridiculous.

Putting the absurd notion out of his mind, Sovereign set about doing his daily exercises.

From the first full day of his blindness he realized that he’d have to work out. It was the home-delivery pizza and Chinese food that convinced him. He was eating badly and too much. He had once been a fat man. It took years of changing his eating habits to get down to a normal weight. Now that he was eating junk food again he’d have to balance it another way.

The first day he did three push-ups, seven abdominal crunches, and fifteen steps running in place, bringing his knees nearly up to his shoulders. He did this circuit of exercises three times and stopped, winded. By the end of the second week he’d gotten up to twelve push-ups, twenty-five crunches, fifty running-in-place steps, and ten circuits. After that he’d only increased the repetitions. By that Wednesday afternoon he’d gotten up to thirty-two circuits. He liked the sweat and the fact that his muscles were getting hard.

After exercising and showering Sovereign went to the drawer where Galeta stored his casual clothes. He dressed and went out again.

“Where you going, Mr. James?” Axel Parman, one of the doormen, asked.

“Out. Going to walk around the block.”

“Good for you. You don’t want this kind of thing to get you down.”

Outside Sovereign heard the sounds of cars and footsteps, experienced the air and sun on his face. His muscles shook a bit from the hard exercise but that served only to increase his feeling of well-being. Tapping to the left with his white cane he hugged the wall of his block-square apartment building and went all the way around. He completed this circuit again, and again. He lost count of the times he’d walked around the building as his thoughts drifted.

He’d given Valentina something she desired. The walnut-eyed brunette had never expected anyone to recognize her for the person she wanted to be. And he, Sovereign, had long been waiting for a woman to offer herself to him with seemingly no strings attached.

“Has anybody ever sucked your dick like this?” she asked him not one hour after they’d had their first lunch together.

They were reclining on his white sofa and he was thinking, Yes, they have, except no, they haven’t, because nobody ever asked that question before. It was the way she talked to him that drove Sovereign wild.

And then, two weeks later, she said while riding him, “I’m leaving Verso.”

“Your husband?”

“I told him yesterday.”

“But...”

“Don’t worry, Sovy; I don’t want to move in on you. All you have to do is keep talking to me and keep that dick hard when I come over.”

She was twenty-one years younger than he and white and married (soon to be divorced), but Sovereign could not bring himself to break away.

Walking around the fourth corner of his building, blind as Justice, Sovereign felt that erection again.

“That was a good walk,” the doorman said.

Sovereign nodded but he didn’t say anything. He felt his way toward the elevator and pressed the button for the ninth floor. Down the hall Valentina’s number repeated itself again and again in his mind. He mumbled it while fumbling for the keyhole. He said it aloud as he slammed the front door shut. He imagined the bearded shape of her pubic hair and the glistening pink clitoris while his fingers searched for the phone on the high counter.

His heart was pounding. His muscles were trembling now with anticipation. But when he closed his fingers around the receiver he froze. It was as if a bucket of ice had been thrown down his pants.

He dropped the phone back into its cradle and climbed onto one of his three red leather-and-chrome stools. Sitting there he realized that it was the feeling he had that he wanted, the memory of a seduction by error.

It was finished. It was done.

A shadow moved over his sightless eyes and Sovereign once again wondered if he had made himself blind so that he could no longer see how lost he was.

“And what about that shadow you say passed over you?” Seth Offeran asked.

“That was three weeks ago,” Sovereign said.

“You haven’t seen it again?”

“No.”

“Any sudden head movements?”

“I believe you, Doctor.”

“What?”

“I believe that I’m not really blind. I think that you’re right. Last night I dreamed that I could see again. It was so real, so powerful that I got up off my sofa and went to turn on the light. But when I got there I realized that it was already on and I was still in darkness. I thought that once I accepted what you say that my sight would come back... at least partly.”

“Obviously you haven’t accepted that you’re the cause of the affliction.”

“But I know it’s true.”

“Knowledge is a strong thing, but what you feel is stronger.”

A hum came up from out of Sovereign’s chest, what sounded to him like the approach of a giant wasp in a low-budget science fiction movie from the fifties. He sat back against the cushions of the therapist’s couch with no fear of knives or shards of glass cutting into his kidneys.

“It’s a process, Mr. James. You have experienced a powerful trauma and then you forgot it. We are here to bring that experience to light.”

“You think that spouting a metaphor is gonna give me back my vision?”

“I think that you wake up from a dream and reach out for the light switch. I think that your whole life has been in shadow.”

“What shadow?” Sovereign James asked.

“Maybe not a solitary shadow,” Offeran said, “but darkness set out by an intricate network of lies that have been with you for your entire adult life.

“Your ex-girlfriend believes that you share her estimation of herself when really your recommendation was a mere whim. Your employers believe you’re working for their benefit while in reality you’re trying to overturn their world. Your fellow workers think that you are against them and on the side of the white bosses, but you see yourself as the puppet master, pulling the strings for both black and white.”

Images of Valentina and the offices of Techno-Sym appeared in James’s mind. They weren’t exactly superimposed, but they were juxtaposed as Offeran had placed them. The space was like one of the large galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His bosses and coworkers, employees both black and white, and then Verso Andrews standing inside an ornate and gilded wooden frame that hung from an invisible, virtual wall. Valentina was standing there looking up at her ex-husband. He was looking down on her.

In the background the nonwhite members of Techno-Sym muttered complaints while the others merely spoke in general. Verso and Valentina were conversing but Sovereign couldn’t make out what they were saying.

He leaned closer to the separated couple and turned his ear to hear.

Their voices blended into one. The voice was saying something to him, to Sovereign.

“What?”

“Our time is up,” Dr. Offeran said.

“Up? We just started.”

“You fell asleep in the beginning of the session.”

“Why didn’t you wake me?”

“We’ll take that up tomorrow.”

“What do my parents have to do with anything?” Sovereign asked the next day.

“You have very little to say about them,” Offeran said. “In my experience patients usually avoid subjects that are painful to them.”

Sovereign no longer bantered with his therapist. But often he’d spend long spans in silence while thinking about the questions he was asked.

Solar James had married Winifred Handly. He was a wharf manager at the shipping yards and she a seamstress who took in work from a French cleaner’s in downtown San Diego. He was the color of a block of amber set in a sunny windowsill and she was dark as blackstrap molasses.

Solar bought two plots of land on the outskirts of the city and built a three-story cylindrical home that had four front doors and five bedrooms, three children and two dogs.

His sister, Zenith, was a year older. She lived in St. Louis and had been married to the same man, Thomas Thomas, for twenty-seven years. Zenith favored their father and rarely had a word for Sovereign, even when they were children.

His brother, Drum, was two years younger and the favorite of both parents. Drum didn’t look like any of the rest of the family. He was tall and sand colored, handsome with light brown eyes.

Drum could get in trouble standing still on a lonely road alone, their grandfather Eagle James would say.

Sovereign loved his brother and was devastated when the FBI had come to the house saying that he was being sought in connection with a bank robbery committed in Los Angeles.

“I got a letter six years ago,” Sovereign said.

“From one of your parents?”

“It came from Peru but there was no signature.”

“Who was it from?”

“Maybe my brother. He’s on the run from the FBI. They think he robbed a bank or something. He was only seventeen but they called him the mastermind. Statute of limitations is up, I think. Anyway I got this letter. Really it was no more than a note. It said, ‘Keep your hands up and your feet planted.’ ”

“What did that mean to you?”

“Me and my brother used to take boxing lessons together. He was better than me, even though I had two years and twenty pounds on him.”

“What’s his name?”

“Drum, but everybody called him Eddie.”

Those words hung in the air between the doctor and the sightless patient who now believed he wasn’t truly blind.

After a full five minutes Sovereign began to speak again.

“Every evening my parents would get together and talk to each other in the sitting room with the curtains open so they could look out on the line of trees that separated us from the houses behind our lot. They’d talk but it was like they were talking to somebody not there.”

“What do you mean?”

“My father would say how the bosses on the wharf were racist and kept Negroes down and my mom would say that he was a hard worker and did a good job caring for his family.”

“She was telling him that he was doing a good job even against a hard time.”

“I know it sounds like that, Seth, but that’s not how it was in the room. She never asked what the bosses were doing and he didn’t thank her for her hard work and compliments. Don’t get me wrong; they were very close. My grandfather used to say that they were like a tree and the soil. One grew out of the other and in doing so enriched the very ground it stood upon, but still they lived in different worlds, spoke separate languages, and had dreams with little or nothing in common.”

“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.”

“Lucky for me that you were.”

“That’s what I said.”

The image of Koyo was still in Sovereign’s head. Her eyes were both flat and deep, and when they made love she hummed as if there were something inside the cave of her being that was moaning in anticipation of freedom.

“Why you call me?” Toni asked.

“To thank you,” he said, and then on a whim, “and to offer you a reward.”

“What kinda reward?”

“I know I can’t pay for something heroic — I mean, heroism comes naturally — but I wanted to give you five hundred dollars for coming to my aid. If you hadn’t screamed that man might have killed me.”

“Really? Five hundred?”

“Yes. Certainly. I’ll send you a check.”

“Um. I don’t have no account and them check-cashin’ places take up to half a’ what you give ’em.”

“I don’t like the idea of sending cash in the mail.”

“Especially not to my house,” she agreed. “You know even the rats around here got P.O. boxes.”

There was a spate of silence.

“Is your head all right?” Toni asked.

“It hurts a little. Were you wearing an ochre dress?”

“What’s that?”

“Like a dark yellow.”

“I thought you was blind?”

“I am. I mean, I think I am. But when that guy hit me the second time, for just a few seconds I could see. That’s why I know the color of your dress.”

“I knew you was lookin’ right at me. I thought so.”

“That’s why I’m calling so late,” Sovereign said. “I’m actually happy.”

“Happy about what?”

“I only went blind recently and I thought that I’d never see again. I’m almost thankful that that man hit me.”

“You shouldn’t be. That was terrible what he did. Hittin’ a blind man like that.”

“But I got to see your lovely face.”

“Oh,” she said. “Um... I could come by and pick up that money if you still wanna give it to me. Do you live in that neighborhood?”

“That would be great. Yes. I live in the building where I got attacked. The entrance is on the Washington Street side.”

“I could come at noon tomorrow.”

“That’s a problem. How about four?”

“Okay.”

“Just tell the doorman Sovereign James. My apartment is nine-F.”

“You have a doorman? Really?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“I never knew nobody with a doorman before.”

Sovereign didn’t sleep that night. He thought about the young woman’s voice and the color of the dress that he’d glimpsed through a blind man’s eyes. He pressed the bandage on the side of his head and grinned at the pain.

“Where were you yesterday, Mr. James?” Dr. Seth Offeran asked at the beginning of the next day’s session.

Up until that moment Sovereign had not realized that he’d missed a day.

“I was attacked.”

“That’s the reason for the bandage?”

“A mugger hit me and stole my wallet.”

“That’s terrible. Are you all right?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine. I didn’t get much sleep last night, but, you know, being blind is like sleepin’ twenty-four hours a day while you’re wide-awake.”

“You feel that blindness is a form of unconsciousness.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“We’re closer to our unconscious mind in the sleep state.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Sovereign said. “Maybe so. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I was attacked by a man and saved by a woman, a young woman. He hit me in the head with a blackjack or something and she screamed bloody murder.”

“He ran away?”

“Like a rat with the cheese.”

“And how do you feel about that?”

A smile broadened across Sovereign’s face. He didn’t mean to show so much emotion, but the joy of his experience was overwhelming.

“The ambulance took me to the hospital. The doctors wanted me to stay the night, but I didn’t need that mess. I forgot about you, though, didn’t even remember till just this minute.”

“You’re smiling, Mr. James.”

“Am I?”

“Are you happy to have skipped a day?”

“You get paid anyway... right?”

“The question is about how you feel, not if I get paid or not.”

“I could see clearly for ten seconds and not so much so for another eleven.”

“When?”

“Right after that motherfucker hit me upside the head, that’s when.”

“The blow returned your sight?”

“For half a minute, a little less than that. I saw the girl clear as my sister. And I got a quick glimpse of the dude’s face too.”

“Any glimmers since then?”

“No,” Sovereign James said. “No. I called the girl near about two thirty this morning.”

“Pretty early, isn’t it?”

“That’s when my day’s been starting lately. Wake up in the dark and stay that way and time begins to have less meaning.”

When you get old enough, Eagle James had told his grandson, the rules that once was just don’t seem to matter no more. Old man says what he wants to do, and who’s gonna tell him no when I keep a pistol under the blanket in my wheelchair?

Sovereign pushed Eagle’s wheelchair wherever the old man wanted to go. The eighty-year-old Kansan was heavy and so was the steel chair, but the boy loved his grandfather and didn’t want anybody else to ferry him around.

Not that anyone else wanted to.

They cruised the block, went shopping for his mother, and made secret excursions to the liquor store, where Eagle would buy P&M whiskey by the half pint. On weekends they went on longer expeditions.

“What are you thinking about, Mr. James?” Seth Offeran asked.

“That ochre dress that Toni Loam was wearing. She’s a young woman, maybe ten pounds less than she should be. Plain at first look but in hindsight there was a prettiness to her cheeks and eyes.”

“Are you going to see her?”

“That’s a funny question, Doctor. I’d like to see her. I’d give everything I have just to see that yellow dress again. But I’ll have to make do with a hello and a handshake.”

“I think it might be good for you to spend some time with this woman,” the psychiatrist offered. “She’s the only thing you’ve seen since your sight shut off.”

“You make it sound like a faucet.”

“Yes, I did.”

“Like I turned it off on purpose.”

“Have you ever seen anything so horrendous that it made you shut your eyes so hard you thought that they might never open again?”

“No, can’t say that I have.”

He was walking down a long lane leading to the beach. It was a sultry afternoon and summer, so the sun was hot and the asphalt heated through his flip-flop rubber thongs until it felt as if they might melt. The path curved and he was carrying a cold can of root beer that his grandfather had given him twenty-five cents to buy. They drank from the same pop-top can when they were alone and Winifred wasn’t there to stop them.

The shadows were long and the air was beginning to cool. Soon he’d push the wheelchair to the edge of the parking lot and use the pay phone to call his mother to come get them.

A dozen seagulls burst suddenly into the air and wheeled high toward the sky. Something had frightened them.

Eagle James’s chair was turned away from the water. That was odd. He was slumped over and a red ribbon ran down from his nose and across the blue work shirt that he wore every day. If Winifred wanted to wash that shirt she had to do it after he went to sleep and get it back in his bureau before he woke up in the morning.

The ribbon was glistening like it was made from nylon or fancy Chinese silk, like it was wet. And Eagle was winking but steadily, not opening his left eye and smiling as he usually did.

It wasn’t until he called and Eagle didn’t respond that Sovereign realized there was something wrong. Then he saw the pistol on the ground in front of the wheelchair and he remembered Eagle saying, Never let ’em count you out, boy. If they comin’ to get ya and you know there’s no way out, there’s still a way. And then he’d hold his thumb and point finger like the muzzle of a pistol up his nose. When the thumb came down Sovereign would close his eyes.

The buzzer to his apartment was mild but insistent. Sovereign woke up realizing that his dream was the answer to Offeran’s question.

“Hello?” he said into the intercom phone.

“A Toni Loam for you, Mr. James,” the doorman Axel Parman said.

“Send her up.”

At first Sovereign stood behind the closed door waiting for the knock or buzz, but after a few minutes he moved out into the hall. He tilted his head for the sound of footsteps on the hard carpet or maybe a sigh of confusion.

He was eager, even nervous. The feeling in the pit of his stomach was exactly the same as when he asked Shirley Bestman to go see Star Wars Episode VI: The Return of the Jedi with him.

“Mr. James?” she said from down the hall.

“Yes.”

“I walked around the other way lookin’ for nine-F but it went all the way up to Z and I didn’t see it.” Her voice got louder as she approached the door.

He was about to say, If the letters were going up why didn’t you turn around? But he thought better of the criticism. Then he wondered at this self-censorship. For years, he realized, he’d been rude and brusque with just about everyone, but now that he needed people he bit his tongue. Before Toni he resented the fact that he was expected to gag himself; now, though, he realized that he wanted to hold back.

“Hi,” she said.

When she laid a hand on his wrist he flinched and gasped.

“I’m sorry,” Toni Loam said then. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Uh,” he grunted, discomfited by his behavior, “no. I mean, I was just surprised to feel a hand on mine. Do you want to come in, Miss Loam?”

“Uh-huh.”

Sovereign took a step back and gestured for the unseen young woman to enter. He felt more than heard her go past and followed. When they entered into the large living room he said, “Why don’t you sit on the red chair, Miss Loam?”

He went to the white sofa and settled on the southern end.

“So, can you see now?” she asked.

“Not one whit.”

“ ’Cause you move around like you can, and you called the chair red and all.”

“I’ve lived in this apartment for eighteen years. I could have been blindfolded for most of that time and told you everything about the place.”

“And it felt like you was lookin’ right at me when I was walkin’ down the hall,” she said, still leery.

“No. I can’t see. I haven’t seen a thing in nine weeks, except for you when that man attacked me.”

“But the police said that you couldn’t identify the man.”

“I didn’t tell them because... because I’m seeing a psychiatrist who believes my blindness is mental and not physical, and if I admitted that to the police it might have gotten back to my employers and they would blame me for faking my condition and fire me. But I really am blind. I mean, I have been except for that twenty seconds or so there when that guy hit me.”

“People can go blind in they minds?” Toni asked.

“That’s what they tell me.”

“Damn. But if you didn’t tell the police why’d you tell me?”

The question caught Sovereign up short. He had gauged the girl by her limited language and articulation. If she had come to him looking for a job he would have sent her away without a second thought. But her question, whatever motivated it, got to the heart of why he’d called.

“You might have saved my life,” he said. “If you hadn’t screamed and kept on screaming that man would have probably hit me again. The police said it was a blunt instrument. He could have cracked my skull open.”

“So? That don’t have nuthin’ to do with me talkin’ an’ makin’ you lose your job or sumpin’. You already safe now.”

Sunlight was falling on his left hand. He felt the heat between his fingers.

“Ever since,” Sovereign James said, and then he stopped, remembering the vastness of that parking lot and the can of root beer that he moved from hand to hand to keep the cold from burning his fingers. “Ever since I’ve been blind I experience the world differently.”

“Different how?”

“It’s like I owe something, a bill that I forgot to pay. And it’s not just that... It’s as if I was tied by a long rope and then all of a sudden the rope is cut and I’m free, but I don’t know where I am, much less where to go.”

“But what do I have to do with that?”

“When I could see, people touched my life all the time and I took it for granted. I thought I knew everything. All I had to do was look at somebody or hear five words out of their mouth and I thought I knew everything about them. I wasn’t grateful for a damn thing. My own father fed me and protected me from the world. He built a house for his family and one day I just took off. I didn’t even go to his funeral. Now it’s too late. But... but you came up and saved me, and if I don’t give you something, I mean something more than a reward, then I’m still the same man I was — not worth saving.”

As Sovereign spoke a world opened up to him. He realized how much he missed his father’s father and how he had been a bad son. Maybe, he mused briefly, this was why he had never married and sired children; maybe he didn’t feel worthy to be a parent.

“I think I know what you mean,” Toni said. “It’s like my auntie G.”

“Who’s that?”

“She lived upstairs from us. My mama said that she was our auntie, but really she was Mama’s mother, only they got raised by Auntie G’s mama. Auntie G had had my mama when she was just twelve, so her mother raised them both like they was hers. Nobody said until my mama was grown, and so she treated Auntie G like they was sisters. And Auntie G lived in her rooms upstairs and was always makin’ brownies and lettin’ the little kids come up an’ watch her TV. One time when I was still little my mama got arrested and Auntie G let me live with her for seven weeks.”

“She was your grandmother.”

“She was my auntie G. And when she died, when I was twenty, nobody did nuthin’, not even Mama. The city buried her in what they call Potter’s Field and there wasn’t even no service or nuthin’.

“I was away then and when I got back I spent three weeks tryin’ to find the number of the grave site so I could at least bring some flowers for her.”

“What was her real name?”

“Giselle Breakwater. I told the people that but they didn’t care. And now I feel like I let her down.”

“No,” Sovereign James said.

“What you mean, no?” Toni said, anger threatening to come out in her voice.

“The fact that you tried to find her makes the memorial for her. You sitting here right now talking about her is better than any bouquet or eulogy. You are a living testament to that woman. No one could do more.”

Toni and Sovereign sat in the silence that followed his words. If he could have he would have seen that her brow was furrowed and her eyes were steady on him.

“There’s an envelope on the glass table between us,” Sovereign said. “It’s for you.”

He waited long enough for her to take the letter and open it. Inside she would find twenty-five twenty-dollar bills and a folded piece of notepaper saying Thank you.

“They wanted to give me hundred-dollar bills at the bank, but I thought twenties would be easier to deal with,” he said.

“This nice,” she said. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Um... what do you do, Toni?”

“You mean like a job?”

“Yes.”

“I work at a beauty shop part-time sometimes. I do braids mainly, but Iris teaching me about stylin’.”

“Only sometimes?”

“They got a whole lotta full-time girls. I just take their place when they out sick or sumpin’.”

“Do you like the work?”

“I like bein’ around the people there. It’s almost all women except for Albert. He’s gay and Iris say he’s the second-best stylist in the whole shop.”

“Next to her?”

“No, next to Lisa Banning. Lisa used to do them wild hairstyles for Motown singers in the eighties. Iris say that Lisa could make wine into water.”

“You mean water into wine.”

“No,” Toni said with a sneer in her voice. “Lisa say that it’s easy to turn water into wine... all you need is some fruit. But turnin’ it back — that’s the hard trick.”

Something about the banter in the language reminded him of his grandfather and their long weekend excursions down the Southern California shoreline.

“You smilin’, Mr. James.”

“I’m forty-nine years old,” he said.

“I’ll be twenty-two in September.”

“You know what that means, Toni?”

“What.”

“It means that you’re already in the twenty-second year of your life. When you’re born they say how many months old you are until your first birthday. But all that time up till then is your first year.”

“It’s like you’re always ahead of yourself,” she added.

“That’s right.”

“So you in your fiftieth year,” she said.

“Half the way into a century and all I have to show for it is a pair of crazy eyes.”

“You don’t really have to give me all this money, you know.”

“Can you use it?”

“Oh yeah. I’m livin’ wit’ my mama but she wants me to help out.”

For years after his grandfather’s suicide Sovereign wished that they had gone farther, that he hadn’t gone to buy that root beer. In his dreams he’d get to that spot along the beach wanting more than anything to go farther. But in the dreamscape the paved path had ended and he couldn’t take a step more.

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 without 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.

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.”

“And do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Need to be with him.”

“No.”

“But there’s something you’re not saying.”

“You know how I nevah have wine when we go out at them nice restaurants, Mr. James?” Toni Loam asked.

While nodding he thought that she used this proper address to get back inside the shelter of their relationship. She had probably been thinking about this confession for days, realizing that she had to make it but also hoping to keep her position with him.

“Lemuel was the first man I had evah been wit’,” she said. “I thought I loved him at first. But then it was only when we got drunk or high. When I get drunk I get sexy. So I don’t drink.”

“But you remember drinking, and when you do you remember loving Lemuel the thief.”

“Yeah, kinda like that.”

“... and so she knew the man who attacked you?” Seth Offeran asked the next day while Sovereign James ran the palm of his right hand across the rough fabric of the doctor’s sofa and while Toni Loam sat in the entrance hall on the leather banquette that surrounded a pillar at the far western side of that vast room. Even though this wasn’t one of their regular days, she had asked to come with him, because she wanted to hear right away if the doctor wanted him to fire her.

“Yes,” James said. “She thought he was going to bully some children out of their allowances.”

“That’s still a crime.”

“Petty crime.”

“You’re going to keep letting her into your home?”

“She has a key. She can come and go as she pleases.”

“Do you want to have sex with her?”

Sovereign thought about the bagpipes then, about the sinewy gyrations of the music, about the brawny legs in a Highland kilt. That brought to mind how he danced with the vertigo that lying down brought on. He masturbated every night just to get to the place that allowed him to rest in his bed.

He didn’t imagine Toni when he was thrashing against the mattress but he did think about her being there with him after the powerful release.

“No,” he said. “No... I... She makes me happy, Dr. Offeran. She calls me Mr. James and laughs at the silliest things. When I’m with her I feel like there’s somebody there. I haven’t felt like that since I used to ferry my grandfather around.”

“But she’s a danger.”

“More to herself than to me. She saved me.”

“But she didn’t turn her boyfriend in to the police.”

“How could she do that? He could kill her at any time, any time at all.”

“Are you in love with her?”

Sovereign hadn’t expected the question. Often he had supposed an array of choices for the next question the doctor might ask. After the first few weeks of therapy he had gotten pretty good at predicting the range of the doctor’s possible inquiries. How do you feel about that? was a standard when a bald statement had been made. What did it look like? was the question when his blindness (either physical or emotional) came up.

He didn’t always know what the doctor would ask or comment upon. Now and again, when Sovereign was frustrated with the claims of his therapist, Offeran would say that it was the same with his father, Sovereign’s father — that Offeran had taken the father figure’s place.

You’re just saying that because you read it in a book, James would tell his doctor.

I’m saying it because it is most probably true.

But the question about love took Sovereign completely off guard. He had loved his grandfather. Maybe his grandfather was the only person he had ever truly loved. And here he was comparing Toni to Eagle. If someone had asked him how he felt about her, if they had left the definition up to him, he would have said that he was guiding the child, showing her what the world could be like. The word love would have never entered into the dialogue.

It struck him that he also loved his siblings. Zenith had contempt for him, but Drum-Eddie was a different case altogether. Eddie was a true thief, a bank robber. Sovereign’s love for Eddie drove him from his temperate San Diego home; it brought him to New York, where, at times, he still thought he caught a glimpse of Eddie and some mink-wearing beauty walking down Park or Sutton Place South.

“Mr. James,” Seth Offeran said.

“Yes.”

“Do you?”

“Love her?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe I do. But I can’t say for sure.”

“Why not?”

“Because that word added onto the girl has no exact echo in my heart.”

After tussling with his mattress Sovereign fell into a fitful sleep. His dreams were more like thoughts rising up unbidden from an overworked mind. There was Toni, who had stalked and then saved him. She confessed her crime. How could he blame her? There was the shadowy figure of Lemuel Johnson, who attacked him and then ran like a coward from a woman’s screams.

He recited the two dozen names of Negro, Puerto Rican, and Native American men and women whom he’d hired in order to secretly take over Techno-Sym. They didn’t know his design and he felt an emptiness where this thought resided. His heart was a cold chamber where love had no counterpart, no place where it could attach. There was a history of love but that was all taken away decades before.

The phone began ringing.

There was Eagle James, who was impotent and still a father to Solar. There was Solar, who was full of commandments and confident in his bloodline. Eagle’s long dialogue on life ended with a pistol shoved up his nose and fired. The doctor said that the bullet exploded against the inside of the old man’s skull. Solar asked Sovereign why he didn’t tell somebody about the gun...

In his sleep Sovereign realized that his father blamed him for Eagle’s death — Sovereign blamed himself.

The phone was still ringing.

A light shone somewhere inside of Sovereign’s mind and he was suddenly aware of the darkness that blindness had rung down on him. He was so good at keeping secrets that his grandfather had died and his own father never knew his bastardy; Sovereign had harmed one and protected the other. The dream thoughts told him that it should have been the other way around.

The phone stopped ringing.

Light was more than sight, he thought. Vision was always partial, unrevealing at the last.

Why couldn’t he dream about sex or Drum-Eddie? Why were these ideas rumbling around his head like bad meat in a starving man’s gut?

The phone started ringing again.

Sovereign stumbled up out of bed and blundered through the rooms to reach out for it, almost desperately.

“Hello?”

“It’s Zenith, Sovereign.”

“What time is it?”

“A little past midnight in New York. Don’t hang up.”

“What do you want, Zenith?”

“I spoke to Thomas about our talk on the phone. He told me that it wasn’t right to say that you were making it up. He said that all I had to do was to think of what I’d say if one of our children had something like that.”

“You mean if you were related to the person suffering the ailment.”

“I know you’re my brother, Sovereign.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Grandpa Eagle told me that he was made impotent by that wound he suffered in World War One.”

“But...”

“But that means he wasn’t our grandfather. Maybe I’m only your half brother. Maybe they found me in a hole somewhere and we’re not related at all.”

“Don’t be crazy, Sovereign.”

“You already think I’m crazy. Why not act like it?”

“I’m calling to apologize.”

“You’re calling because Thomas told you to, Zenith.”

“You used to call me Z.”

“That was a long time ago — when I could see and I still hoped that my sister would love me.”

“Maybe I should call back later.”

“Whatever.”

Sovereign wondered why blindness made him so sensitive to silence. It was like the senses were somehow blended together, making a third, undefined form of perception.

“We haven’t talked for a long time, Sovereign. And maybe I was... I don’t know... maybe I was distant when I was a child. I thought you and Eddie were just little boys, that you didn’t understand things. I treated you like kids, and I didn’t like kids very much. But that’s all. You are still my brother and I do love you.”

Sovereign exhaled and then waited for the breath to come back in. He thought about his stinky sister and playing hide-and-seek with Drum-Eddie, about the ribbon of blood flowing out from Eagle’s nostril and the image of a bullet exploding in his brain; the ribbon of blood was the tie.

Maybe he had been thinking about suicide.

Either fathering a child or dying — that was the choice.

“Sovereign?”

“Yes, Zenith?”

“Do you need me to come out there?”

“No, baby, no. I got it covered.”

“I read up on hysterical blindness. Most cases recover.”

“Yeah, but do they ever get over it?”

Five weeks passed.

Sovereign and Toni didn’t talk about Lemuel or her part in his attack. Seth Offeran kept asking to meet the girl, but Sovereign would not bring her into the room. He’d tantalize the doctor, telling him that she was only a few steps away, but there she’d stay.

Toni and the blind man did their shopping, ate their lunches, and attended popular movies and poetry readings, plays, and speeches. She talked more and more about her mother and half sisters and half brothers, a man who might have been her father, and the grandmother who was put to rest without a proper funeral.

“Where were you when she died?” Sovereign asked one day when he felt that she could bear the strain.

“With Lemuel,” she said. “That was when he had got out of jail for sellin’ drugs. We was up in his apartment in the Bronx for eight days. Auntie G had a heart attack and I didn’t even know.”

“No one called you?”

“The phone was disconnected.”

“And why didn’t your mother bury her?”

“She got into one a’ her moods and couldn’t do nuthin’. When she get like that she go in the bedroom and don’t come out for days.”

They were sitting on the white sofa and Sovereign felt her grasp his forefinger and thumb, one with each hand.

“It wasn’t your fault, Toni.”

“I would’a broke it off wit’ Lemuel back then but when he heard about what happened he brought me white roses and said that I should put them on the table and that could be my funeral for my auntie G.”

During those weeks the machinery of the couple’s life worked perfectly. Sovereign, though he never articulated it, had accepted his blindness as he did the daily conversations with Seth Offeran. When Toni wasn’t there he’d listen to books on tape, the news, or just errant sounds out the window. His exercises leveled off at thirty-three circuits.

Then the mechanism broke down.

It started on a Tuesday evening after Toni had gone home. The day had been spent at a fancy grocery store where they ate lunch, shopped, and then came home to watch pay-per-view TV.

Toni had departed at seven-oh-seven by Sovereign’s talking clock.

The phone rang soon after that.

“Hello?” Sovereign said.

“Mr. James.”

“Dr. Offeran?”

“Yes.”

“This is a surprise. I didn’t even know that you had my number.”

“Dr. Katz had it. He called and told me that the insurance company has requested that you submit to further testing now that therapy has proven ineffective.”

“That means you give up?” James felt victorious and contradictorily nauseous at the prospect.

“No, not at all. I feel that we’ve made great progress and that you are on the verge of a significant psychic event. It’s just that it has taken longer than the timetables allow for in the insurance medical books. So Dr. Katz needs to see you tomorrow at the time of our session. You go to see him, he’ll find that your physical condition is unchanged, and we will have our appointment day after tomorrow as usual.”

“What do you mean, a significant psychic event?”

“We’ll talk about that at the next session.”

Sovereign was still trying to decipher the term significant psychic event when the phone rang two hours later. He was sure that it was Offeran calling to apologize for not making himself clear, and at the same time, he knew that the psychoanalyst would never call back like that.

“Hello?”

“May I speak to Sovereign James?” a woman with a slight Jamaican lilt asked.

“This is him.”

“You’re Sovereign James?”

“Yes.”

“I have to change your appointment with Dr. Katz to a ten-forty-five slot,” she said.

“Tomorrow morning?”

“That’s right. Can you make that time?”

“I guess so.”

“Should I e-mail or fax you the information?”

“What is Dr. Katz’s specialty?” Sovereign asked, irked more by the change in plans than anything else.

“Come again?”

“Katz specializes in blindness, right?”

“Yes.”

“So what am I going to do with a fax?”

“Ten forty-five tomorrow morning,” she replied. “Do you need directions?”

Sovereign hung up the phone.

The eye exam was the same as it had been three months before. There was a lot of waiting and craning his neck, sitting inside of a machine that made a high-pitched hum now and again while the doctor asked questions about his vision.

Joey Atlanta from Red Rover picked him up and drove him home.

“What time is it, Joey?” Sovereign asked before getting out of the car.

“One fifty-two,” the driver said.

“Waste a whole damn day for Tomcat to tell me what I knew before I went there.”

“That’s how they make their money,” Joey said. “By takin’ ours.”

Coming into the building the doorman Geoffrey LaMott said, “Hey, Mr. J. How you doin’ today?”

“Fine, Geoff. You?”

“Just fine. I—”

“How’s the family?”

“Great.”

“Gina got over that flu?”

“Yes, sir. I—”

“See you later, Geoff,” Sovereign said.

If he hadn’t cut the young attendant off maybe things would have worked out differently. He usually stopped and talked to LaMott about the world of politics, the young man’s growing family, and the goings-on in the building. But that day Sovereign was bothered that he missed a meeting with his therapist because of some note in a claim adjuster’s ledger.

Opening his door he thought that he’d heard a sound: a footfall maybe.

“Hello?” he called. “Miss Loam? Galeta?”

He moved through the entrance toward the living room, wondering if his ears were playing tricks after all that humming from Tom Katz’s machines. He felt the openness of the larger room, its high ceiling yawning above... and then she yelled, “Nooo!”

The moments after the shout were filled with sensations and insight. First, and most jarring, was the immediate and complete return of his vision. The sunlight coming through the window was bright, slamming down from a cloudless sky. The thought accompanying this brightness was that it was now Toni’s fear that ignited his vision and not the blow that was coming...

Lemuel Johnson stood four feet away, raising a two-and-a-half-foot black baton that most resembled a top-hatted magician’s wand, only somewhat thicker.

Toni screamed again.

A look of hesitation on Lemuel’s face told Sovereign that the young black man could see that he was being seen. Shaking off this surprise, Lemuel took a long step forward, swinging down with his weapon. Sovereign fell easily into the sway he was taught in the boxing gym thirty-five years earlier. The baton swung past his head and he lashed out with a jab that Drum-Eddie always avoided — not so for Lemuel Johnson.

The younger, taller man leaned into the upthrust punch. The skin below his left eye ruptured and Toni screamed again.

“Get away from him, Lem!” she shouted.

Instead Lemuel swung a vicious backhand at Sovereign with the rod. All the weeks of exercise had increased the strength in the older man’s thighs. He lowered down six inches below the arc of the blow and fired back with heavy punches to the head, stomach, and chest. Lemuel exhaled a stench-filled breath and fell backward two steps. Sovereign bounced on his feet and swayed his shoulders, expecting his opponent to come forward with the weapon again. But Lemuel Johnson turned and ran toward the front of the apartment.

For a moment Sovereign was confused. His sight had returned. His enemy had been defeated. Life was new — again. And then something rose up in him. It was only later that he identified this something as rage. And it was later still that he understood that this passion was the significant psychic event that Offeran had predicted.

Sovereign reached his front door just as Lemuel was rushing out. He clocked the young man with a blow to the back of his head, but that just propelled his reluctant opponent faster. Lemuel dropped the baton and ran full-out to the end of the hallway where the exit sign redly glowed.

Sovereign ran after him. He chased him to the door and then down the stairs. He had proven himself Lemuel’s better in hand-to-hand combat but the younger man was still the faster. If the exit door on the first floor had not been buckled a bit, making it stick, Lemuel would have gotten away. But he wasted four seconds, no more, pushing frantically against the door. Sovereign came up behind him two steps into the entry area and began to pummel him as he ran.

Lemuel stopped and pushed against James’s shoulders. Sovereign fell back while trying to throw a punch. His legs crossed and he stumbled, giving Lemuel a chance to head for the door.

“Mr. James!” Geoffrey LaMott shouted from behind his counter.

Sovereign righted himself and then barreled after Lemuel, who was slowed by the postman coming in with his wheeled mailbag.

Sovereign leapt from the stairs leading to the exit and tackled Lemuel through the front door and into the street. There he battered Lemuel Johnson with fists, forearms, and elbows. A dreamlike feeling of lightness infused itself into his attack — so much so that he was unaware that people had grabbed him by both arms and were pulling him off of his hapless victim.

It wasn’t until the middle of the interview with Captain Turpin that Sovereign came back to himself and at least partially realized all that had happened.

Part Two

Standing in front of the huge building — made from rough-hewn, dark brown stone bricks — Sovereign stopped to appreciate a place he had been but not seen. He clenched his sore fists and smiled, feeling neither anger nor mirth but rather a deep, almost religious astonishment.

Passing the outer door he could see through the second, as it was a collection of semiopaque glass squares. The hazy image of a man in red and black stood on the other side. To the left there was an opening in the wall that allowed James to see into an empty dark yellow room.

Sovereign took in a deep breath through his nostrils and felt the continual, recurrent thrumming of anxiety in his chest.

The door before him swung open and there stood a chubby young white man in a streamlined beefeater’s uniform. A look of wonder passed over the freckled face and then the youth smiled.

“Mr. James.”

“Roger?”

“You can see me?”

“You know it.”

Roger held out a hand and Sovereign took it, his knuckles aching from the grip. He was surprised when the young white man leaned forward to hug him and slap his back.

“Congratulations,” the doorman said. “What happened? Did they operate or give you some kind of medicine?”

Shaking his head, he said, “Scare therapy.”

“What?”

“I’ll talk to you about it some other time. Right now I’m five minutes late.”

“You bet, Mr. James. You bet.”

Eight long paces to the wall and a turn to the left, a few steps away stood an entranceway leading into the long dark hall that he’d walked along five days a week for months. Sovereign was impressed that a blind man could negotiate a world like this, a world where sight told you almost everything.

The door was dark wood with three brass tags placed in a vertical row along the upper left-hand side.

DR. BELFORD TANNING, PH.D.

DR. IRIS LAMONT, SOCIAL WORK, PH.D.

DR. SETH OFFERAN, PH.D., M.D.

Sovereign ran the fingertips of his left hand along the brass tags, noticing the scabs from the fight. He tried to call up a feeling about the wounds — guilt or triumph, he didn’t care which — but nothing would come. He felt nothing but a sense of wondrous paradoxical nostalgia at seeing places that had been concealed.

Striding quickly through the waiting area he knocked on Offeran’s door.

It opened immediately.

Roly-poly, bald, and bespectacled Offeran wore a gray suit, pale blue shirt, and a black-and-white-checked tie. The lenses of his rimless glasses were rectangular and small. His head was egg shaped and his face hairless except for the eyebrows and lashes. The gray-brown brows furrowed and Offeran smiled.

“You can see me?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“Come in.”

“... and so you say she screamed and you could suddenly see?” the alabaster-skinned, sixty-something psychoanalyst asked.

“Yes,” black Sovereign replied, looking at the hundreds of books packed in the shelving on the far side of the room. “The office is larger than I’d imagined.”

“And you were arrested?” Offeran went on.

Sovereign noticed a framed etching leaning on the bookshelf. It was the image of a black-and-red bird. This was the bird that entered his reverie about Ellen Saunders in her camel-colored suit.

“For assault, yes,” Sovereign said. “That might change to attempted murder or even second-degree murder if he dies.”

“And it was the girl, Toni Loam, who brought him into your house.”

“You don’t have to say it like that, Dr. Offeran. You don’t have to say it like that.”

“What else am I supposed to think if not that she was conspiring against you? Why would you think any different?”

“It was two o’clock on a weekday, and she was gone when you called to cancel and when Katz’s people called to reschedule. She had no reason to think that I’d be home then. The doorman told me that they had just gotten there.”

“Maybe they went there to lie in wait.”

“Then why would she holler?”

“I don’t know. Maybe... maybe at the last minute she found that she couldn’t go through with it.”

Sovereign grinned.

“Why do you smile, Mr. James?”

“Because we’re sitting here, just two people talking. I like that. I have really benefited from coming here.”

Silence, Sovereign thought, wasn’t the same when you could gaze into the eyes of someone thinking.

“I’d like to keep coming for a while, if that’s okay, Doctor.”

“You’re no longer blind,” the therapist said. “The insurance might pay for a week of follow-up, but after that they’ll stop.”

“I’ve saved money my whole life,” Sovereign James confessed. “I can afford a couple months of you... that and two lawyers too.”

“So you’re really going to pay for her defense?”

“And her bail. I should have her out of there by tomorrow morning.”

“Won’t the police suspect that the two of you set up this... this Lemuel?”

Sovereign shrugged and smiled.

“So can I keep seeing you?” he asked.

“I think you might need to.”

On Madison at three in the afternoon Sovereign grinned and sighed. The thrumming anxiety was still there inside his breast like an angry bumblebee roused from its winter’s hibernation.

Bumble — he thought about the word — that’s what I’ve done through all my life. There I was thinking I was shrewd and revolutionary and really I was just bumbling through like a blind man, only I didn’t even know I was handicapped.

He walked south to 57th Street, over to 9th Avenue, and then headed straight down. He enjoyed the sights like a starved man eating his first meal in many days. There was a jaunty young woman’s firm butt and a dead rat in the gutter, a trash can full to overflowing on 33rd Street, and two little blond girls walking arm in arm and giggling, their chubby mothers chattering and watching from three steps behind.

While walking he went over the events of the past twenty-four hours.

“The last time I spoke to you, you were blind, Mr. James,” Captain Turpin said an hour after he’d nearly killed Lemuel Johnson.

They were sitting in his living room, the sun still streaming. A uniformed policeman stood next to the high counter. Sovereign sat on the white sofa while Turpin took the red chair.

“Yes,” he said. “I was. It was a psychological condition but I really couldn’t see a thing.”

“And when was this psychological condition cured?”

“I walked in here blind, Toni screamed, and suddenly I could see the young man raising his cudgel.”

He could also see then that the captain didn’t believe him. Despite her Caucasian name and diction she was amber skinned, possibly from Puerto Rico or farther south. She wore a dark maroon dress with an off-white jacket and a blue shoulder bag. She was slender and hard-eyed, not pretty but beautiful to someone.

“You expect me to believe that you miraculously regained your vision just in time to fend off Johnson?”

“It’s all I can tell you, Captain. I was more surprised than anyone else. I had just come home from a specialist who hasn’t been able to help me. I’ve been going to therapy five days a week...”

“How did you meet Toni Loam?”

“I called her after you gave me her name.”

“Why?”

“She saved my life.”

“But she knew your assailant.”

“I don’t get what you mean,” Sovereign said, realizing he was still a little stunned. “Are you saying that because she knew Lemuel, she didn’t save me?”

“Lemuel?”

“That’s what Toni called him. It’s his name.”

“Why did she have the key to your apartment?”

“I hired her to help me get around.”

“And what was she doing with the man who allegedly attacked you on the street and also, you say, in your apartment?”

“I know it sounds odd,” Sovereign said. “I mean, none of it makes much logical sense... from the outside, that is. But everything I’m telling you is true.”

“That you were blind, but not really,” she said. “That you hired the woman who was with the man who beat you on the street. That a woman screamed and inexplicably your sight, which you never really lost, came back. That a man, even though half your age and a head taller, armed with a bludgeon, was no match for you in a fight and you beat him into a coma in front of a dozen witnesses on Washington Street.”

Turpin had a mole on her right cheek. Sovereign considered this blemish seriously and for quite a few seconds before saying, “Essentially, yes.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. James,” Captain Turpin said. “But I’m going to have to arrest you for aggravated assault. Let’s hope it doesn’t get any worse than that.”

After walking home from his session with Offeran, Sovereign went to his apartment for the first time since his arrest. He’d spent the night in police custody. They questioned him for many hours. It wasn’t the captain, whom he liked, but two detectives, Martin Quick and Patrick O’Lande. They were both white men, younger and shorter than Sovereign. He didn’t know why their age and size meant so much to him, but he found it hard to take them seriously.

The interrogators had various interpretations of the events that weren’t true. They thought, as Offeran suspected, that maybe Toni and Sovereign plotted together to kill Lemuel but the kid ran and Sovereign lost his cool (cool — that was the word Quick used) and beat him like a dog.

Added to this was the supposed intelligence that they had gathered, reporting as fact that Sovereign had never been blind and had been planning a crime like this for months. He was bent, a psychopath who, after being attacked by Johnson, plotted his revenge on the unsuspecting mugger.

“If he dies you’re going down for murder,” Quick said. He had a squashy face dominated by a shapeless nose.

“How is he doing?” Sovereign asked.

“Do you really care?” Patrick O’Lande asked.

“I didn’t even know I was hitting him,” Sovereign replied. “I mean, after he ran from my place.”

“So now you got amnesia on top of made-up blindness?” Quick said.

“I’m not going to win this argument with you, am I, gentlemen?”

Both cops sat back in their metal folding chairs looking bothered.

The only reason for this reaction, Sovereign thought, was that they weren’t used to being called gentlemen by criminal suspects.

“All you have to do is tell the truth,” O’Lande said at last.

“Can I ask you something first?”

“What?” Quick said.

“You don’t believe that I was blind and that my sight came back when Toni Loam screamed; am I right about that?”

“It’s hard to believe,” O’Lande admitted. He was younger than his partner by ten years or so, and handsome. His hair was strawberry blond and his features mild but manly. “Coincidences almost always point to guilt.”

“So,” Sovereign said haltingly, “the only truth is that I need a lawyer who will believe what you guys do not.”

They left him locked in the interrogation room, alone, for the rest of the night. The only reason James could see for this was that Turpin liked him and was maybe unsure about his guilt. They could have thrown him in a cell with dozens of hardened criminals but instead he got a pass: his own private room with a table and chair. There was also a rumpled newspaper, the New York Post, in a plastic trash can.

For years, until his condition, Sovereign eschewed the news in any form — radio, television, or print. These mediums, he believed, rarely told the truth. But in that room — by himself, after almost killing a man, regaining his sight, and understanding that in some way he loved the sour-faced young woman who simultaneously put him in harm’s way and saved him — in that room he read every article from politics to sports.

In the morning, through his court-appointed lawyer, Gilda Meyers, Sovereign pleaded not guilty due to compelling extenuating circumstances, and the prosecutor didn’t argue about low bail.

He immediately went to see an old friend from college, Lena Altuna. Lena had been a public defender for fifteen years before she went into business for herself.

“I don’t know, Sovy,” the forty-seven-year-old New Yorker said.

“You don’t know what?”

“This will be a hard enough case to win without you paying for Miss Loam. The guilt lies with either you, her, or both of you together conspiring against Mr. James. He is the victim no matter his intentions.”

“But I don’t believe she was trying to hurt either one of us,” Sovereign argued. “At least not physically.”

“Shouldn’t you know that before championing her case? Especially since it will weaken any argument you might make.”

“Get somebody to bail her out,” James offered. “Tell them to have her get in touch with me and I will make up my mind whether or not to help in her defense.”

“That’s not an advisable course, Sovereign.”

Lena had olive skin and incongruous green eyes. Her face was long and filled with longing — longing for justice, Sovereign had often thought. They saw each other only at five-year class reunion parties. Every time they met she went on long diatribes about how the nonwhite, poor, and elderly populations never got a fair shake.

Sovereign liked her commitment; he had felt that his secret actions at work equaled hers. Now, however, he doubted himself.

“While I was blind she was kind and generous to me,” Sovereign said. “I can’t turn my back on her without finding out her motives on my own.”

Lena stared at James for a while before saying, “All right, Sovy. You win. I’ll have someone post her bail. But she will be advised on the case as her lawyer sees fit.”

“Just tell her I’d like to talk to her too.”

He could lie down without dizziness or masturbation. Sleep, however, hovered somewhere in the darkness of the room. He was awake and afloat on a stream of unbidden thoughts. He remembered times with his family, and at school with other children who had faces but few names; he thought of teachers who scolded him for mistakes and ignored his every success. Or maybe, Sovereign thought, his school chums did have names that he hadn’t bothered to learn, and the teachers were just doing their jobs. These thoughts led to his grandfather and the ragged hole left by his sudden death. Sovereign was angry most of the time — angry at everyone except Drum-Eddie.

Three weeks before Eddie left the house and didn’t return, four weeks before the FBI came looking for him, Eddie found Sovereign at the Clairemont branch of the San Diego library. Nineteen-year-old Sovereign was studying a guidebook for the SAT exam and scowling.

“Don’t look like no good book to me,” Eddie had said.

The conversation came back as whole cloth, like many a forgotten and submerged experience had since James first visited Offeran.

“Need to,” Sovereign said. He had been paring down his sentences lately. He had read that people talked too much and should concentrate only exactly on what they intended to say.

Drum-Eddie was handsome and easygoing. He turned the chair across from his brother and sat astride it backward.

“How come you didn’t take the test before you graduated, like everybody else?” Eddie asked.

“Thought I was gonna join the marines. Thought I would go to school on the G.I. Bill and then I wouldn’t have to go to Daddy for the money.”

“But he got the money all saved up. All Daddy do is save money.”

“I wanted to do it on my own.”

“So how come you didn’t sign up on your eighteenth birthday?”

They hadn’t talked much in the previous six months. Eddie spent a lot of time out of the house with new friends and interests. He rarely came to the boxing gym anymore.

“I got flat feet and a heart murmur,” Sovereign James said. “The recruiter told me that if we were still at war they’d’a taken me in a second. But now they cuttin’ back.”

“But that was a year ago, JJ. Why it take you so long to apply to college?”

“I’ve been thinking. What do you want, Eddie?”

“I got somethin’ to tell you, bro.”

“What?”

“I’m gonna go on vacation. I might even retire.”

“Retire?” Sovereign didn’t add that Eddie was only seventeen, because this was an obvious fact and there was no need to state it.

“So you might not see me for a while, man,” Drum said, ignoring the implied critique. “Remember that I will always be your brother.”

In the morning Sovereign was still thinking about Eddie, about how he looked up to him even though he was younger.

He lay back in the bed awake with eyes closed. He couldn’t see but he wasn’t blind either. This reality seemed like some important philosophical premise but he couldn’t unravel it.

Eyes still shut he climbed from the bed and made it into the kitchen without running into anything. He approached the far west window of the living room and then opened his eyes upon south Manhattan. It was bright but early. Cars wended down the West Village streets and people walked with purpose. Across the street and a few floors down a woman was running full-out in her living room, on a fancy treadmill. In another room, but still the same apartment, a man was serving breakfast to two small children at a round table just large enough for a family of four.

Sovereign opened the window, imagining that he could see the sibilant sounds curling in on the currents of air that rolled in over his shins, ankles, and feet.

He was naked, brawnier than he had been before the episode; that was how he had come to think of his blindness — an episode. Looking down at his uncircumcised penis he smiled. Then he gazed at a plump man walking up Washington Street in a stride made circular by the girth of his thighs. He carried a brown briefcase and wore an unprofessional baby-blue suit. The woman was still running on her treadmill while the father and the children talked and talked, ate and talked.

With the breeze on his knees and people filling his eyes, Sovereign felt love welling up in his chest. The bumblebee had been replaced with hummingbird-like passion. He didn’t know anything about the people he saw or the origins of the sounds the city made, but that didn’t matter. The police could come and arrest him; they probably would. Some judge might well send him to prison. He didn’t want to go — but even the prospect of incarceration couldn’t dim the beauty of the world he beheld...

“Like God,” he whispered, “beholding creation and not able to tell the difference between what He made and who He was.”

The phone rang and Sovereign started but didn’t know it. He turned and looked at the phone and it rang again. He walked from the window a little reluctantly, feeling that he was in some ways a deity abandoning his subject.

“Hello?”

“Mr. James.”

“Miss Loam.”

“I’m so sorry...”

They talked on the phone for more than an hour. She had been released late the night before and interviewed briefly by Stanford Miles, a colleague of Lena Altuna’s.

“Mr. Miles told me that you paid my bail and wanted me to call but he said that that wasn’t a good idea. He said that if we were talking the court might say that we planned to hurt Lemuel. So I went ovah to my friends Monique and Simba’s house and stayed with them last night. I didn’t know if I should call you but I had to at least tell you I was sorry.”

“The only reason to be sorry is if you’ve done something wrong.”

“Of course I did sumpin’ wrong,” she said, almost in anger. “You got arrested and me too. Lem is in the hospital and they don’t even know if he evah gonna wake up. All of that is wrong.”

“Why did you bring him to my house?” Sovereign asked.

A siren blared outside and Sovereign went to the window, hoping to catch a glimpse of the fire engine. He looked around but was distracted by a huge ocean liner making its way up the Hudson River. It was the size of a downtown skyscraper laid on its side.

“Mr. James?”

“Yes, Miss Loam?”

“Three days ago was the anniversary of my auntie G’s death. I went home and Lemuel was upstairs with my mama and them. He had brought her white roses and a bottle of whiskey. When I got there he cracked open the liquor and said we should make a toast to her.

“I didn’t want to but I could see that Mama was so sad, and I didn’t want her to get in one a’ her moods.

“After we drank a little bit too much I went down with Lem to this place we used to go. It’s kinda like a bar but it’s downstairs and don’t have no license. He started talkin’ to me about you.”

“Me? What did he know about me?”

“Mama told him that I was workin’ for this rich blind man down in the Village. I was gettin’ drunk an’ he was talkin’ real nice. He said he was sorry for what happened and then we went to his apartment. He told me he had a job and that he was grateful that I didn’t turn him ovah to the cops.

“But later on he was mad about me bein’ wit’ you all the time. I told him that we called each other mister and miss and that you was old and that it was just a job. But he was still mad that we was together like him and me used to be and... I don’t know...”

“So how did you end up here?” Sovereign James asked.

“He told me that if I brought him up to your place and kissed him up there and let him take one thing, like a watch or sumpin’, he would forget about it and believe me. He said that I could come live wit’ him and he’d work and pay the rent. And I thought it would be okay, because you’d be at Dr. Offeran’s and I could buy you another watch and quit workin’ for you.”

“You were going to give up your job with me?”

“Uh-huh. I knew I’d break your trust bringin’ Lem up there and I thought he had really changed, but now I know he haven’t. Now I know that it’s ’cause he wit’ me that he do like that.”

“You blame yourself?”

“Since we been broken up he got a job at the supermarket and got a place to stay and everything. But just one night wit’ me and he dropped all that. Instead of goin’ to work he wanna come fuck me up in your bed, and then when you walked in he tried to beat you again even though you blind and no threat to him. At least, that’s what he thought.”

Sovereign sat down in the red chair, reclining and allowing his feelings and musings to mingle. The rage he felt at Lemuel Johnson returned and he noticed that he had the beginnings of an erection. He wondered if a man could fall prey to his own base nature because of the feeling he had for a woman, and he thought that he would fight for Toni Loam no matter the consequence to him.

In the back of his mind his father and sister called him a fool, while his mother just shook her head and Drum-Eddie grinned. His grandfather would have something wise to say, but whatever it was it wouldn’t matter, because in the end men were just fools anyway...

“Men are fools,” Sovereign said into the receiver. “We’re always blaming women for the things we do when really it’s the fault in our own natures.”

“What do you mean, Mr. James?”

“If a man gets addicted to heroin you can’t say that it was the heroin’s fault, can you?”

“No. I guess not.”

“If a man leaves his wife and she finds another man, she can’t blame herself if her first husband gets mad, can she?”

“Not if he the one that left.”

“Then it’s not your fault that Lemuel can’t think right when it’s time for him to do so.”

“But I brought him up there.”

“Yes... and that was wrong, but you didn’t expect him to attack me, or for me to be there at all — did you?”

“No.”

“Then we’ll forget about it and look to the future.”

“But I let him take one a’ your watches and I was gonna... fuck him up in your bed.”

“I don’t care about any of that, Miss Loam. I can see again and this time it was because of your shouting to save me. I saw you reaching out to pull Lemuel back. I saw the sun coming in...”

In the following lull in the conversation Sovereign noticed a small beetle walking along the windowsill. It was a seasonal wood beetle that lived in the floors of the apartment building. He usually crushed these bugs whenever he saw them, but this time, a self-ordained deity, he just watched in a minor stupor of amazement.

He asked if Toni’s mother was okay and she told a long and convoluted story, at the end of which her mother ended up in East St. Louis for a few weeks visiting Auntie G’s sister.

“Why you do that to Lemuel?” she asked in his ear.

The bug moved along like a rude cottage, given life and legs, that was now lumbering away from a lifelong servitude to civilization.

“I don’t know,” Sovereign James said.

“You got to know. You ran after him. You chased him down and beat him like a dog.”

Sovereign tried to remember the fight, but everything that happened after he left the apartment was hazy. There was a roar in his ears and a damnable squeaking in the distance. There was a heart beating and the back of somebody he was trying to catch up with but never could.

“I can only say that I probably hated him, but I can’t remember feeling or doing anything.”

“But you almost killed him,” she insisted. “You put him in a coma.”

Sovereign could tell that she was hurt. He wanted to explain but could not. He wanted to make her feel better the way he wished someone had done for him when Eagle had died.

Sovereign now had a full erection.

“He made me mad,” the employment officer said.

“What?”

“He made me mad,” Sovereign said again, voicing an emotion that he could not remember but that he was certain of. “How dare he come into my house and steal from me and expect to have sex in my bed with a woman that I...”

“That you what?”

“A woman under my protection.”

“What does that mean?”

Sovereign took the erection in his left hand.

“I’m not sure,” he lied. “I feel very close to you, and when I saw him push you I got angry.”

“Like you were jealous?” Toni Loam asked in a voice that was new to Sovereign.

He squeezed the hard prick and winced.

“You saved me,” he said instead of really answering. “You... you were the only face that I saw in three months.”

“And so, like, you had a crush on me or sumpin’?”

Blindness, Sovereign thought, was a boon if it didn’t last forever. He could see through a finely developed mind’s eye that Toni’s words offered a door. He couldn’t tell if this portal was an entrance or exit. He dawdled in front of this gateway, feeling... feeling... free.

“Yes,” he said at last.

“Yes, you had a crush on me?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What?”

“I said yes.”

“Say it,” she said, and Sovereign had the feeling that the woman he spoke to had transformed in an instant like a larva into something beautiful, winged, and maybe deadly.

“I love you,” he said, not considering the words.

“What? I thought you said you had a crush on me.”

“That’s what you said. You said it, not me.”

The beetle was gone. The room down below, where the woman had been running, was empty, as was the kitchen where the husband and children had eaten and talked. The man in the baby-blue suit was probably at work by now, and the fire that the sirens sang for was no doubt extinguished.

“You love me?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Did you mean it?”

“I think so.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Because I’m in my fiftieth year and you’re in your twenty-second. Because I was blind and stupid and because I’ve always been alone in one room or another. Because you’re young and beautiful and I’m an old toad.”

“I’m not beautiful,” she said, and he laughed. “Why you laughin’?”

“Because I am a fool and there’s nothing I can do about it. Or... better still — I am a fool and I haven’t been able to do anything about it until I jumped on your boyfriend, and I don’t even remember doing that.”

“And you did it because you love me?”

“I’m not jealous,” he assured her. “It’s just that I haven’t been able to feel much for so long, and now that I have you, or had you, in my life I feel like I can go outside.”

“I don’t know what that means, Mr. James.”

“It’s like I was blind before I was blind, and losing my sight brought me ’round to a place that I had never seen even though I was sighted,” he said, realizing that his comprehension was mostly gibberish.

“But what’s that got to do with Lemuel and you sayin’ that you love me?”

“Everything for me has always been a secret,” he said, feeling that these words were somehow bedrock. “My father’s father couldn’t make a woman pregnant but his wife had my father anyway. I never told anybody that. The people who I employ are part of a one-man conspiracy to take over the white business world one hire at a time. I want to be with a woman and so I give her a job taking me around just so I can sit next to her in a movie theater and listen to her laugh.

“The only straightforward thing I’ve done in a very long time is beat on Lemuel. Even though I don’t remember it, that came from the heart.”

“Don’t you feel guilty?”

“I am guilty,” he said, “so I don’t have to feel anything at all.”

“You want me to come ovah there, Mr. James?”

“More than anything I ever wanted, Miss Loam.”

The phone rang late that night. Toni Loam was half out of the covers, her butt partly revealed. The room smelled of sex, and Sovereign felt the stirrings of an erection as he looked down on the young woman’s strong right leg.

The phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Hail King James,” a man’s voice intoned. There was the hint of an unidentifiable accent in the otherwise American voice.

“Eddie?”

“They been callin’ me Jinx for the last twenty-five years or so.”

Toni was sound asleep. The digital alarm clock next to the bed read four-oh-seven. There were four used condoms under the green glow of the clock, strewn on the night table. Sovereign got up with the cordless phone and walked out of the bedroom to the high counter that separated the living room from the open kitchen. All across Lower Manhattan electric lights glimmered and winked from ten thousand office windows set in a hundred and more skyscrapers. The New Jersey skyline rivaled Manhattan’s.

“Eddie?” he said again.

“Fit as a fiddle and tight as a drum.” It was something their father used to say when he wasn’t disciplining the boy.

“How’d you get my number?”

“I call Mama once a year,” he said. “That anniversary happened to be yesterday, and she said that Lurlene Twyst said that you went blind.”

“It was a psychological condition. I got better.”

“That’s good. I thought I might have to pony up for a Seein’ Eye dog. You know, the kind that carry a keg of brandy ’round their necks.”

“You talk to Mama every year?”

“Ever since Daddy died.”

“FBI still after you?”

“Statute of limitations is up on that.”

“Where are you, Eddie?”

“You okay, Jimmy James?” Drum had half a dozen nicknames for his brother.

“A guy attacked me and I got mad. I beat him pretty bad... at least, that’s what they tell me.”

“Wow, Jimmy J, you gonna be a bigger gangster than me.”

“You didn’t say where you were, Eddie.”

“Down around São Paulo, man. Down around there.”

“Brazil?”

“Portuguese and Carnival.”

“So Mom has known where you were all this time?”

“I didn’t want her to worry more than she had to after Pops died, and I wanted to know if she needed anything.”

“She sure kept your secret. Does Zenith know?”

“She been talkin’ to Mama, man.”

During the long span of silence Sovereign studied the muted colors in the dim rooms: reluctant blues, hesitant red, and yellow remembering light gray in its sleep.

“You need any help, JJ?”

“I’d like to see you, Drum.”

“Come on down. I promise if you get here I will show you the best time you ever had.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“No wife and kids, huh?”

“No... not yet anyway. You?”

“Consuelo’s my bride. Pedro, Sistene, and Sovereign the kids.”

“Oh.”

“Catch you later, brother. Don’t give ’em an inch and they can’t drag you down.”

The phone disengaged but Sovereign stood there with the receiver pressed to his ear, the caress almost unconscious. He had missed his brother from the day he’d gone.

“Sovereign?”

Her standing there next to him was almost a crime; that was the first thought he had seeing the naked girl. She kissed his lower lip and bit it lightly. He touched her shoulder and she bent her head to caress the sore knuckles.

“Who was that?”

“My brother.”

“What he want?”

“He heard that I was blind and was worried.”

She took his hand in hers.

“I never knew you liked me that much,” she said.

“Maybe I didn’t either.”

“Why didn’t you say sumpin’?”

“I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t even know that I wanted to say anything.”

“You gettin’ hard again.”

“Maybe we should calm down a little,” Sovereign said, feeling that he was both pleading and lying in the same statement.

“Is he comin’ ovah?”

“Who?”

“Your brother.”

“Let’s go to bed.”

Lounging on her back in the bed, Toni had her head on his thigh.

“I thought you said that your brother robbed a bank and disappeared thirty years ago.”

The sun was a crack of silver and scarlet at the far end of the horizon. Sovereign once more had a full erection, due partly to Toni Loam running her thumb up one side and down the other. The motion was an idle one and this excited the older man all the more.

“That’s right.”

“How he even know your number?”

“Drum-Eddie can find anything he sets his mind to,” Sovereign said, experiencing jealousy and desire, despair and satisfaction.

“That’s a funny name.”

“He called me out of the blue. For all I knew he was dead... No, that’s not true. I never really thought he was dead.”

“Are you going to see him?”

“I shouldn’t be seeing you,” Sovereign said.

“Why not? You like me, right?”

“Our ages, our needs make us different enough. Too much.”

“Felt to me that you needed exactly what I did,” she said. “Feels like it right now.”

“Then there’s Lemuel.”

She moved her thumb away.

“If the court sees us as lovers they’ll believe we set him up,” Sovereign added.

“But we didn’t, and they gonna have to believe that.”

“Just because we say it’s true doesn’t mean that they will believe us,” Sovereign said, thinking that the way Drum-Eddie and Toni spoke was similar.

“That don’t mattah... not if you really love me.”

“How can we know something like that, Toni? I mean, I only said those words on the phone yesterday.”

“I always liked you,” she said. “I just thought that you was too fancy and the only reason you had me around was to keep you company until you could see again.”

“You thought that I’d regain my sight?”

“You wasn’t evah blind, not really. I mean, if a bird went by the windah or a fly flew past you’d always flinch. You didn’t seem to know it but you did. It’s just that you didn’t want to see anything.”

She ran her thumb down the underside of the older man’s penis with a little more pressure and the phallus pushed back.

She smiled at that.

“But I’m so much older than you are,” he said, feeling the thrill and rise in his shoulders.

“Up where I come from, girls got boyfriends twenty years older than them all the time.”

“I’m even older than that.”

“We been together, Mr. James,” she said. “We got to know each other. So what if they think sumpin’ else?”

“What if they hold it against us in court?”

“So what?” she asked. “I’m’a cut off my hands so they cain’t put handcuffs on me?”

Sovereign laughed and Toni climbed up to kiss him. He moved his head once but she took hold of his hair and lowered her lips on his.

After a long and promising kiss, Sovereign said, “I’ll call the lawyers and tell them what we’ve decided. But right now I have to start getting ready to go to work.”

“Do you have to go?” she said with a playful whine.

“Yes. We’re going to need the money.”

“Can I stay here and watch TV?”

“My house is yours.”

Sovereign arrived at Techno-Sym at nine fifty-seven that morning. The company had done well forming partnerships throughout Asia, making tools that facilitated the furtherance of mass production techniques that helped the Eastern juggernaut compete so well with Western corporations.

We are a cancer on the American labor field, Martin LeRoy used to say to Sovereign. Sometimes the White House and Senate send people down here to question us about what we’re doing for the Chinese and Vietnamese factories. They can’t shut us down so they use us kinda like spies.

“Mr. James!” Shelly Monteri, Sovereign’s secretary, was surprised to see him that morning.

“Miss Monteri.”

Her parents were Bolivian but despite her ecru skin she seemed to identify herself as white. He didn’t mind her internal confusion. The war he was conducting had nothing to do with consciousness. A black pawn could think that it was a migrating flamingo for all he cared.

“We...” Shelly stammered, “we weren’t told that you were coming back... I... I... I mean coming in today.”

“Who’s been doing my job while I was gone?”

“Mrs. Malloy.”

“When Myrna gets here tell her that I’m back and that I’ll be resuming my duties.”

His office was longer than it was wide. But it felt substantial — not like a tunnel or passage. The broad cherrywood desk sat at the far end under a high window that opened upon north 5th Avenue. His back had always been turned to the outside. He rarely stood by the old-fashioned green-tinted glass to look down on the avenue and its denizens.

The corporate persons, those institutions that have hijacked the rights of citizens, Professor Jane Mithrill would lecture, have effectively reduced Americans’ status as citizens to that of mere denizens.

Sovereign looked at the people in the street, hundreds of them, walking with purpose down the sidewalks, on green and amber lights. There were cars and taxis, buses and bicycles rushing along, carrying passengers with feigned citizenship. Or maybe, he thought, Jane had been wrong — not wrong exactly, because it was true that a mere majority of votes could not enforce the will of the people, not wrong but off about the misplaced emphasis with which she had arrogantly dismissed the only chance that the servants of business had.

“Miss Monteri?” Sovereign said into the intercom.

“Yes, Mr. James?”

“Get in touch with Darius Maynard and ask him to come to my office... if he will.”

“Yes, sir.”

After that he entered his home number on the phone’s number pad, something that he could not remember ever having done before.

“Hello?” Toni Loam said.

“Hey.”

“I was thinkin’ about you,” she said.

“What were you thinking?”

“That I like a uncircumcised man. It’s like he givin’ me a handle and a place to put my tongue.”

“You know I don’t need you to talk to me like that, girl.”

“You just don’t think you do,” Toni said. “You think that ’cause you fi’ty, you done lived all them years and gathered up everything there is to know. But I know things that you don’t know. I know that you need me to talk about your dick because I seen it and it was mine.”

They talked awhile longer and then the intercom buzzed.

“I got to go, Toni.”

“What time you comin’ home?”

Home. He thought about the word. It meant something different when Toni said it. There were echoes and reverberations in that shivering syllable.

Darius Maynard was tall and brownish yellow in color. He wore light suits as a rule and hand-knotted bow ties. He never wore a white shirt but dark primary colors, like navy or twilight-forest green. His hair was thick and nappy, not too long, and not processed either.

“Mr. James,” he said with only mild belligerence in his tone.

“Sit down, Darius.” This was the first time that Sovereign had ever used a first name when directly addressing a fellow employee.

Maynard seemed to recognize this transgression, giving his superior an odd glance as he sat.

“You wanted to see me?”

Unconsciously, Sovereign brought all the tips of his fingers together before his chest. Neither was he aware of the slight smile on his face.

Darius was the ideal employee, in the older man’s eyes. He’d come from a working-class family in Pittsburgh and had attended a state school. He was smart and, even better, hardworking. He knew how to get along with others but had not forsaken his race for a paycheck.

“I read about you in the paper, Mr. James,” Maynard said to fill the silence.

“Oh?”

“It was in the Post. They said you were in jail.”

Anger mixed with hope, Sovereign thought. Millions of everyday denizens had wasted their lives sipping on that cocktail.

“Do you have something to ask me?” Darius Maynard said.

The question startled James.

“Excuse me, Mr. Maynard,” he said, coming back to himself. “The... the experience of blindness has made me talk a little less. I think it was because I was listening all the time.”

“I wasn’t sayin’ anything.”

“I know. The listening is kind of a peripheral exercise. You know, like seeing out of the corner of your eye. For some reason sight and sound are connected.”

Sovereign put his hands flat on the desk and stared at the brown bow tie with its little yellow polka dots.

“Am I here for some reason?” Darius Maynard asked the odd inquisitor.

“Do you remember the day you came to me for your last interview?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I asked you about your socks. You wore a coal-gray suit with bright pink cotton socks and black shoes.”

“I remember. You said that you expected any man you hired to wear sensible socks to work.”

“That was two declarations in one sentence,” Sovereign said. “First that you were hired, and second, that I needed a certain sense of decorum from you.”

Darius’s face was vaguely square shaped, though to James it seemed that it should have been round. The young man’s expression was serious and wondering.

“You know what I would have said to a white man wearing a black suit and pink socks?”

Darius just stared, waiting.

“Do you?” James prompted.

“No.”

“Nothing. Not a goddamned thing. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I think so.”

For a while the employer and employee sat facing each other. Sovereign, for his part, could feel the world spinning and other worlds within turning on their own gyres.

Finally the older man said, “I tell you this because I have a question for you.”

“For me?”

“Yes. I want you to tell me if what I’ve been doing is right.”

Darius glowered.

“How can I answer that?” the younger man said.

“If you can’t, you can’t. I won’t hold it against you. I never told anybody about this before. Nobody.”

“You use that criterion on every hire?” the data analyst asked.

Sovereign nodded and looked away.

“The whole time you’ve worked here?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Is your question the answer to mine?”

A look of confusion passed over Darius’s face and then he shook his head.

“If it isn’t, then I’ll keep my answer until you give me yours,” Sovereign said.

“I think I should go back to my desk,” Maynard said.

“Okay. I’ll be here until I’m not anymore. You can come up anytime. I’ll be looking forward to it.”

At noon doughy Martin LeRoy showed up at Sovereign’s office. Over the day many of his fellow workers had come by to wish Sovereign well and say that they were happy to see him. Not one of them had called him in his absence. He knew somehow that this wasn’t because he was black but due to the fact that he was unapproachable, even aloof. No one, except LeRoy, felt close to him. And even though Martin hadn’t called he had sent a letter telling Sovereign that he hoped he got better soon.

Sending a letter to a blind man.

“Sovereign,” the short and chubby VP greeted him.

“Mr. LeRoy.”

“You can see again, huh?” LeRoy said, peering into the taller man’s face.

“Yes.”

“What was wrong?”

“No one knows. I was blind and then I could see.”

“Like they talked about in my grandmother’s church.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

LeRoy took a seat and Sovereign did too — not behind his desk but in the second visitor’s chair, next to his superior.

“The CEO called down to ask about you, Mr. James.”

“Oh?”

“He’s worried about the assault charges pending against you.”

“I wasn’t aware of any pending charges,” James said.

“Our legal department called the city prosecutor. He said that they were considering charges — assault, attempted murder, and if this Johnson dies, maybe manslaughter, maybe worse.”

“Oh.”

That bumblebee sprang to life in Sovereign’s chest.

“What do you intend to do?” LeRoy asked.

“My intentions are pretty much meaningless. What you do is more the question.”

“It was suggested that we let you go,” Martin LeRoy said. “But I told them that you’ve been an exemplary employee for decades and that we should at least wait and see what the lawyers have to say.”

“Really?”

“You sound surprised.”

Sovereign thought of Solar disowning Drum-Eddie. He wondered at the war waging in his own heart and mind.

“If it looks like things are going to get bad, Mr. LeRoy, I’ll quit on my own. You can tell the CEO that.”

At one thirty Sovereign left for lunch. He called a Red Rover car and had it take him to 86th Street, where he encountered the plump, freckle-faced doorman — Roger.

“Are you all right, Mr. James?” Roger asked.

“Yes. Fine.”

“I was reading about you in the papers. They were trying to say that you faked your blindness, that you tricked that guy. If they take you to court you have them call me, sir. Have them call me and I will testify.”

Instead of answering, Sovereign just held out a hand. He was deeply moved, and even more confused, by the emotional tone of the redhead.

“I’ve been remembering the story of Odysseus,” were the first words he said to Seth Offeran.

“Lost at sea,” Offeran said in a knowing way.

“The story of a man lost at sea told by a blind man so that others could be entertained and history might be passed down.”

“You see yourself as a historian?”

“As a blind man.”

“But you are no longer blind, Mr. James.”

“Maybe not,” Sovereign said. “I mean... you ask me how I see myself and I think that what I’ve seen has not been true. My mind is full of misinformation and that can’t make up for lenses that cause me to think I’m comprehending a world that I have no true knowledge of.

“Homer saw his world better than I do mine. What I’ve done is to make everybody up and then attach so many meanings to the words coming out of their mouths that almost everything I think I know is really a lie.”

“I don’t understand, Sovereign,” Dr. Offeran said.

“In the words of the poet, ‘I’ve wasted my life.’ ”

Sovereign could feel himself breathing and again he was transported to the wharf his grandfather talked about, looking down on the boat that he’d never seen.

“The snake is possibly the luckiest of all creatures,” Offeran posed.

“What makes you say that?”

“He sheds his skin, goes into hiding because his new scales are sensitive, and then comes out into life, leaving behind his old bonds and pains.”

There came a shooting pain in Sovereign James’s side. He winced and then glowered.

“What?” Offeran asked.

“Talking to a black man about shedding his skin and you ask what?”

“Asking a man to let go of his misperceptions,” Offeran corrected. “This is not about race.”

“Maybe not, Seth. But here you sit on your brown chair talking to me like you were a textbook deciphering symbols. Your words are deader than a snake’s husk.”

“My mother died three weeks ago,” the psychoanalyst said. “She had suffered for six years. My sister and I took turns staying at her apartment, sleeping on the sofa, so that she wouldn’t have to experience the dislocation of the nursing home. At the funeral I could see the relief in my sister’s eyes. I was happy for her and I felt relieved too.”

“You mother was your skin?”

“The snake doesn’t look at the husk and call it a waste. He simply feels the exhilaration of freedom and the strangeness of transformation.”

“So you’re saying that I’m dragging the past with me.”

“I’m saying that there comes a time to let go.”

Sovereign intended to go back to work after the session but instead he wandered the streets of Manhattan, thinking about what lay beneath his dark skin.

After many hours and no answers he found himself at the entrance of a hospital named after the patron saint of the poor and infirm. Going to an official window he asked a question and received an answer. The woman behind the information counter hadn’t even looked up at him, hadn’t seen him, he thought.

The upper hallway smelled of chemicals and sweat infused with the faint odor of urine wafting from doorways. There came sounds of meaningless clicking, and television sets reverberated on the hard surfaces of the walls, ceilings, and floors.

The door to his room was open. He lay in the bed and she sat there next to him holding his limp, insensate hand.

“Toni,” Sovereign whispered.

She was startled and stood up from the metal chair.

“How did you know I was here?”

“I didn’t,” he said. “I was just walking and I remembered my doorman saying something about him being brought here.”

“Why would you come to see him?”

Sovereign glanced at the man in the hospital bed. There were bruises on Lemuel’s face and tubes in his mouth and nostrils. An IV needle connected to a clear drip bag was stuck in a vein of his right arm, and various electrodes and wires ran from the bedside to a large, many-screened monitoring device. The lights in the machine throbbed like the electronic representation of a heart.

“I didn’t mean to cause this,” James said.

“It’s like a dream or a movie,” Toni Loam murmured. “Like something that happens, that was meant to happen even though you nevah wanted it.”

“You love him,” Sovereign stated.

She looked away from both men and Sovereign felt a faint smile etch itself on his lips.

“I should go,” he said.

She returned to her chair.

“Are you coming later?” he asked.

“I... I don’t think so.”

Late that night the phone rang. Sovereign was aware of being alone in the bed. He was thinking, as the phone was ringing, that he’d had unprotected sex with the woman who was no longer in his bed — not the night before but in the morning. It had seemed so natural that he didn’t even question it — at the time.

“Hello?”

“Sovereign.”

“Drum, I didn’t expect to hear from you for at least a year — if ever.”

“I looked you up online, Brother. Damn. You’re in big trouble, man.”

“Could be.”

“Maybe you better come on down, JJ. Down here a man can get lost. At least, he’ll never be found.”

“I don’t have any trouble getting lost.”

“You know what I mean, Sovereign. Once the man is on your ass he gonna stay there like a dog on a scent.”

“Is that why you never came back?”

“We talkin’ ’bout you, man.”

“Why don’t you come home, Eddie? Come on home. You said you always wanted to live in New York.”

“That boat has sailed, brother.”

“The world is round. That boat could be coming back to harbor.”

The laugh in Sovereign’s ear was familiar, half-forgotten. It brought him all the way back to the threshold of childhood.

“You changed, Sovy,” Drum-Eddie James said. “You sound like you lettin’ the world in.”

“Will you come?”

“Mama said that you haven’t seen her since two weeks after the FBI came lookin’ for me.”

“You come here and we’ll go see her together.”

“Take care a’ yourself, JJ,” Drum said before breaking the connection.

At eleven twenty-seven that morning Sovereign James was at his desk deep into the applications of potential employees. Just one day back and his desk was already piled with work.

He enjoyed leafing through the résumés. For some reason his job seemed easier and clearer than it had ever been before. There was challenging information to decipher but no longer was he scrutinizing the words for secret codes about gender, race, and revolution. The forms were filled with truths and lies, hopes and hapless fatalism.

Hardin Pope had attended high school in Virginia and college in Atlanta. He ended his bout with higher learning at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. There he started out as a mathematician but changed his course to modular systems design. When Mr. Pope came in for his interview, Sovereign decided, the proper question to ask would be why he changed his major.

He scribbled that note on the form, placed it on the interview pile, and was reaching for another folder when someone knocked on his door. He wondered if Shelly was away from her desk. The young receptionist often was in the toilet or down at the staff kitchen flirting with the men from the mailroom.

“Come in,” he said.

The phone rang.

Darius Maynard opened the door and entered, followed by six other employees: Donna Price from accounting; Lola Alifah, who managed the new accounts in the marketing department; Winston Shatz, the security supervisor; Warren Chisel; LeAnne Moore; and finally Bob Simon, assistant to the vice president in charge of operations. Four of the men and Lola carried plastic red folding chairs.

Sovereign smiled. He had never before seen the seven African-American employees, handpicked by him, gathered together. And even though he now questioned the validity of his actions he still felt a parental kinship.

“Mr. James,” Darius began.

“Shelly?” Sovereign called out.

The phone rang for the third time.

“Shelly?” No answer.

Sovereign held up a hand to Darius. The others were settling in.

“My receptionist stepped away,” James said. “I’ll just take this and then switch it over to the automated system... Hello?”

“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.”

When Sovereign looked out the window the jet was gone and yet still in his mind. He wondered how long that image would stay with him: a gray winged aircraft in a fading blue sky.

“That’s the story, Mr. Selfridge. If the prosecutor wants to send me to prison I’ll be unhappy to go, but I probably will. My whole life, I now realize, has been under a blanket of darkness. Now that I can see it I will not turn away — from anything.”

The small white messenger’s left heel was pumping up and down. The nail of his left thumb grazed the skin of his lower lip. His eyes, black like his hair, peered into Sovereign’s words.

“You look like Jinx,” Monte said after a few moments’ gaze, “around the eyes.”

“That’s Eddie, right?”

“Yeah,” he replied with a smile.

“So what’s the verdict, Monte?”

“You got a good lawyer?”

“She’s a lawyer and she gives good advice even if I don’t take it.”

Monte Selfridge grinned with recognition, as if seeing himself in a highly polished mirror of ideas.

“Jinx did have a message,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“He wanted me to tell you that he loves you.”

These words brought up an odd feeling in Sovereign. For a moment he was at a loss, and then he realized that it was a question without words noodling through his mind, like a sightless worm.

The jiggle and swish of the front door sounded.

“Sovereign?” Toni Loam called.

“In here.”

She was wearing the ochre dress from that day. The hem made it only halfway down her thighs. She had strong brown legs that made Sovereign’s heart skip. It was a physical feeling that he wanted to deny. But it persisted.

“Oh,” she said. “I didn’t know you had company.”

Monte was seated on the white sofa while Sovereign had the red chair.

“This is Monte Selfridge,” Sovereign said, “an emissary from my brother, who, as you know, is a retired bank robber now living in Brazil, or thereabouts.”

“Oh,” she said again.

Toni walked across the room, up to Sovereign in the red chair, and seated herself on his lap.

His erection was instantaneous and insistent, a perfect counterpoint to the skipping of his heart.

“Hello, Mr. Selfridge,” Toni said, curling her left arm around Sovereign’s neck.

A musky, half-sweet odor came from her body, her torso. The dress and perfume, the aggressive seating, and even the huskiness of her voice were all designed as a message for Sovereign — a man realizing that he had lived alone in his mind for far too long.

“I think I’m interrupting,” the emissary said.

“No, not at all,” Sovereign replied. “I haven’t heard from my brother in the last thirty years. Now he’s called me twice in as many days and sent you. I won’t send away maybe my only connection to him.”

“That’s right,” Toni said. “We can all have dinner together. Sovereign said that we were having French.”

“Yes,” Sovereign added. “I insist.”

“Then at least you can allow me to take you two out to a place I know.”

The restaurant was on the third floor of a nondescript building on the Bowery — Chez Willomena la Terre. The aluminum elevator carried no more than four at a time, and the small dining room, with its zinc bar, had only nine tables — all of which were in use.

“How did you ever find this place?” Sovereign asked Monte after the salad made of Bibb lettuce with olive oil, garlic, and red wine dressing. “The food is great.”

“I’ve been coming here for seventeen years,” the mortal Mercury admitted. “My mom was friends with Willomena. Do you like it, Miss Loam?”

“The bread is good,” she said.

Her left hand was stroking Sovereign’s thigh under the table.

After coq au vin with escarole and scalloped potatoes, Monte ordered apple tarts and a bottle of cognac for the table.

The conversation up until that time had flowed easily back and forth between the diners. Toni liked to talk about her family and the people who lived in her mother’s building. She didn’t mention Lemuel, but Sovereign thought that he could tell when she skipped over a memory or a significant moment in a story that might have included her sometimes ex.

For his part James told about his capitalistic revolutionary career that spanned a more than twenty years, admitting that, in the end, it had probably been a misguided adventure.

“Sounds like a practicable idea to me,” Monte said. “I mean, somebody has to make the plans — and execute them.”

Monte was careful not to reveal anything about his work or clients. He acknowledged coming from Cleveland and going to school in Akron.

“I was good at languages but otherwise pretty poor in school,” he said. “That’s what brought me to South America in the end.”

After two snifters of cognac Sovereign was feeling warm and fuzzy.

“Tell me about my brother,” he asked their host.

“Jinx lives in the City of God,” Monte said, lifting his glass in a toast to his absent friend.

“What do that mean?” Toni asked in a different timbre than Sovereign was used to.

“A long time ago,” Selfridge answered, “Saint Augustine said that all hope was preordained, that those meant to go to heaven were fated from birth. No matter what they did in life all they had to do was confess at the end and they would be elevated to the heavenly choir.”

“Even murderers?” the girl asked.

“Worse,” Monte acknowledged. “You see, man thinks that he understands sin and evil but he doesn’t.”

“He don’t?”

“No. We are only infants in the eyes of heaven... or at least in the eyes of Augustine deciphering the will of the infinite. For him we were children, the progeny of a parent who had his favorites and his more numerous black sheep. God chooses at the very instant he first sees a mortal soul. He knows the company he wants to keep in the immortal city.”

“What happens to the ones he don’t choose?” Toni asked, an awestruck parishioner from a country hamlet on her first visit to the Vatican.

“They fade from the memory of God and therefore cease to exist.”

Sovereign didn’t realize how closely he’d been listening until the emissary spoke these words. That was when the soft feeling of inebriation turned toward sorrow in his chest.

“That’s just the end for them?” Toni said, echoing Sovereign’s feeling with her tone.

“Yes.”

“What chance do you have to be picked?”

“The walls of heaven contain an infinite space,” Monte told the girl. “But the void outside dwarfs that. Almost all people born and living are destined to disappear in the annals of man and God.”

“But what about my brother?” Sovereign interposed.

Monte and Toni turned toward him, resentment at his interruption fixed on their faces. Then Monte sat back and smiled.

“Jinx is one of the special ones,” he said. “The kind of guy who always gets it right even when he fucks up royally. Excuse my language. He’s the one in a million. When he jumps out of the frying pan he lands on a desert island with a village full of native girls who have been waiting for him but they never knew it.”

“That why you call him Jinx?” Sovereign asked. “Because he’s so lucky?”

“Lucky,” Monte said, “is a guy who wins the lottery and then realizes his life hasn’t really gotten any better. Your brother was born rich. He came to a small village in southern Peru, gave all of his money to a local hospital on a whim, and was adopted by the entire town — protected until he could start an intercontinental import-export business based in Brazil, Rome, and Moscow.”

“So Eddie’s happy,” Sovereign said. “Is that what you’re telling me?”

“Your brother is one of the rare beings in this world who is satisfied with his lot. He’s a good friend, and even when he’s your enemy he holds no animosity or grudge. He was able to leave one life behind him and start a new one without a care.”

“Like a snake shedding its skin,” Sovereign muttered.

“What’d you say, baby?” Toni asked.

“Nothing, honey. Just remembering a talk I had.”

“Where do you live, Mr. Selfridge?” Toni asked their host.

“I move around a lot,” he said. “I have a house near the water in Havana, and wives in Bristol, Jo-burg, and Des Moines.”

“You got more than one wife?”

“They all know about one another,” he explained. “The children are aware of their siblings. I even take them all on vacation sometimes.”

“I didn’t think you could own property in Cuba,” she said. “My friend Pasqual told me that communists don’t let people own nuthin’.”

“Maybe not him. But the rules in every society are always shifting. Maybe one day I’ll go home to Cuba and find somebody else living in my little place.”

“What would you do about that?” Sovereign asked, pouring drinks for both Selfridge and himself.

“I’d sit down and talk with them... try to understand where they’re coming from.”

The bumblebee in Sovereign’s chest had turned into a giant moth. The feathery fluttering scared him but he tried not to show it.

“What about you, Mr. James?” Monte asked.

“What about me?”

“What’s it like going blind and then suddenly getting your vision back?”

Once again Sovereign found himself in the sun-flooded living room with the young man attacking him. Ecstasy and desperation descended upon him but he didn’t say that.

“It’s like,” he said, “you were leaning out of a window to get a better view of a fine young woman like Toni here. She looks up and smiles and you bend farther, not thinking about what you’re doing. And then you fall. Suddenly everything is completely different and you can’t adjust to it because you don’t know the rules. You know you’re gonna die and you accept that reality in a split second. And then your clothes snag on a flagpole or lamp ornament and there you are, suspended above the ground, already dead because you accepted it but still alive because of some crazy serendipity of fate.

“And while you hang there, you’re wondering, should you just let go and hit the ground like you were supposed to or should you climb back into the window and go on with your business like nothing happened?”

Toni took his hand and squeezed it.

Monte smiled and raised his glass.

“It’s getting late,” the admitted bigamist said. “There are rooms downstairs that you guys could stay in. That is, if you don’t want to bother going home.”

“Rooms?” Sovereign said. “At a restaurant?”

“You fell out the window; Alice tumbled down a rabbit hole,” Monte said. “It’s all the same. There’s always a different world out there. Always.”

It was a small dark room that had a window on the Bowery. Toni and Sovereign toppled onto the single mattress, laughing and kissing sloppily.

“I didn’t bring any condoms,” he said while she tugged at his belt.

“That’s okay,” she whispered, now unzipping his pants.

“I’m so drunk I don’t think I could get that far.”

“You can if I help you.”

“I just like lying here next to you, Miss Loam. I like how smooth your skin is.”

“Would you really jump out a windah to see me, daddy?”

“I already did that. I already did that.”

The dream started out normally — a displaced reality far from the province of the world. Sovereign was pushing his grandfather’s wheelchair down the long ribbon of asphalt that bordered the Pacific Ocean. The chair was heavier than usual but the little boy had become a man and so managed with no trouble.

“I’ve been thinking about what you said, Sovy,” Eagle James espoused. “And I do believe you’re right. My son will be hurt by me just shootin’ myself. He won’t know what to do.”

“Thank you, Grandpa Eagle,” the man said with a boy’s deference.

Then the old man, quicker than Sovereign could imagine, pulled out the dark pistol, shoved the barrel up his right nostril with his right hand, and fired. The shot lit up the old man’s right eye like one of the flashbulbs of the boy’s Kodak Brownie camera. Then the blood slithered out, an angry snake chasing the fallen pistol that had disturbed its hibernation.

Sovereign for his part was trying to resolve the conundrum of the right nostril. He thought that the proper place to point the pistol would have been the left side — right hand, left side. If Eagle had made that choice, the proper one, he might not have awakened the snake and would probably have survived.

A child was running, his little feet thudding on the pathway. Looking in the direction of the quick, light steps, Sovereign saw himself as a boy hurrying to his grandfather’s side.

Eagle was dead. And even though Sovereign had returned, and obviously had tried to convince his grandfather to put off the suicide, little Sovereign was still there buying the root beer for him and his grandfather.

Sovereign the man took a step backward and so went unnoticed by the boy, who ran to the wheelchair, stopped, and stared long enough to comprehend what had happened. When the reality of Eagle James’s death settled on the boy he screamed and closed his eyes, fell to the blacktop, and wailed. In the distance Sovereign the man could see people pointing and running his way. The men gathered around the dead man and a white woman picked up the boy, whose eyes were still closed, and held him to her breast.

“Open your eyes, Sovereign,” Solar James commanded.

“No!”

The boy was lying abed with his mother applying a wet towel to his forehead. Sovereign the man stood still in a quiet corner remembering these events as he saw them. Offeran was right. He had kept his eyes shut for almost a day after seeing that glistening snake, that red ribbon of death. This was his attempt to deny the truth.

“Did you know my father had that pistol?” Solar asked angrily.

“Solar!” Winifred shouted. “Let him be!”

The boy wailed. The man watching the dream-memory turned away. He gritted his teeth, expecting to hear the argument continue, but instead there came a kind of blessed silence.

In his sleep Sovereign realized the connection between sight and sound in his mind. Relief, like that cool towel on the boy’s fever, came to him. He turned back and saw himself as a child awakening in the small bed with the early morning sun peeking in from the window. There was another bed in the room — Drum-Eddie’s. That bed was empty, so little Sovereign jumped out from under the covers. He heard sounds from downstairs and followed them, unaware that he himself was being followed by the full-grown dreamer.

From the turn in the stairs Sovereign found himself looking down at his mother and father, and himself at the age of nineteen.

“He is no longer my son,” Solar James was saying. “He’s a thug and a thief and no longer my son.”

“But you weren’t Grandpa Eagle’s son and he always loved you,” the small boy shouted.

No one heard him.

“That’s some dream,” Seth Offeran said that afternoon. “Any thoughts?”

“I woke up crying. Lucky for me Toni sleeps like a stone.”

“Why lucky? Why shouldn’t she see you cry?”

“Because... I don’t know... Because...”

Offeran sat back in his chair.

Relieved by the psychiatrist’s silence, Sovereign said, “In the morning, when Toni woke up, we went down the stairway two floors to the kitchen. A biracial woman named Madeline was cleaning. She told us that Monte had left that morning for South America. We offered to pay her for the room but she said that it wasn’t a hotel but a courtesy for favored customers. She said that Monte always stayed with them when he was in town.”

“Strange,” Offeran said.

“I forgot about me shutting my eyes to my grandfather’s suicide. I guess you were right about the connection. I guess I’m upset at myself for not speaking up for Eddie too. No matter what he did we should have stood by him.”

“Keeping secrets always takes a toll on children,” Offeran said.

When Sovereign felt the tears cascading down his cheeks he shut his eyes tight and clenched his fists.

“But sooner or later,” Offeran continued, “you have to look at what you are and who you are and where — no matter the cost.”

The rage he felt at Lemuel rose up in his chest again. He understood it now. He couldn’t explain but he knew why he’d beaten that boy, battered him. It was a suppressed violence that had always been there, and anger that survived an entire ice age of suppression and false awareness.

“What about Toni Loam?” Offeran asked.

“She’s like me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Looking for the answer to a question she can’t ask. Wanting to be somewhere, but when she gets there wanting something else. Whenever I see that girl, or think about seeing her, my dick gets hard. I’m not even excited, not really, but my dick gets hard like a rock.”

“Does she appreciate your feelings?”

“She knows how she makes me feel. But in a way it’s like I’m one of the courses in a big feast and she’s outside starving.”

“Sounds kind of hopeless,” Offeran said.

“What can I tell you, Doctor? I loved my grandfather and he took his own life almost in front of me. I loved my father and kept from him the greatest secret he’d ever know. I loved my brother and sister but they abandoned me too. And my mother... I haven’t paid her nearly enough of what I owe.”

On the way to the subway from the doctor’s office, Sovereign’s cell phone sounded.

“Yes?”

“Hello, Sovereign, this is Lena.”

He felt dizzy for a moment but then the feeling dissipated.

“How’s my case coming?”

“The prosecutors are moving forward with charges. I’ve got an appointment with Judge Lowell for an arraignment hearing a week from today. You won’t have to go to jail or pay bail, and I want to ask her for a closed hearing with just the judge and no jury.”

“Why?”

“It’s a simple case but very technical. I believe that we can win on the evidence. But I don’t want to make a circus out of it. I believe that Lowell will understand and appreciate our approach and point of view.”

For the time it took to take three breaths Sovereign pretended that he was thinking over Lena Altuna’s logic. But he knew that he couldn’t make any criticism of her claims.

“Do what you think is right, Lena,” he said at last. “I’ll follow along and hope for the best.”

It was near ten that night when Sovereign began to wonder what had happened to Toni. He called her cell phone but it went straight to voice mail. He tried to think of where she might be. He didn’t know her mother’s number or address, not even her first name. Maybe she was at Lemuel’s apartment. She certainly wasn’t at the hospital. Visiting hours were over at nine.

When the landline rang he was certain that it was her calling to apologize or break up, explain that she really was attacking him that day but changed her mind, or maybe to confess her love. She could have said it all with no contradiction.

“Hello?”

“Sovereign... hi.”

“Valentina. Hey... how are you?”

“Is what the paper said true?”

“About me beating a man into a coma? Yes.”

“What happened?”

“You read the papers. They got most of it down. Keep on reading. There’s going to be a trial.”

“I wanted to hear it from you.”

“Why?” Sovereign asked.

A beeping sound came from the earpiece.

“Hold on, Val, I have another call.”

Sovereign tapped the cradle button and said, “Hello?”

“Hello, Sovereign.”

“I’m on another call, Toni. Can I get back to you in five minutes?”

“Okay. I’ll leave my cell phone on.”

He tapped the button again.

“Hey, Valentina, sorry about that.”

“I’m getting back together with Verso,” she said. “We’re going to remarry.”

“Whoa. Congratulations.”

“I need to know that you aren’t going to give us any problems. I mean, he doesn’t know about you and me, but after I read that article...”

“After you read that article what?”

“I don’t want you going off like a wild man attacking Verso.”

I see, said the blind man, though I haven’t any eyes. It was a phrase Eagle James used to say at moments of sudden insight. The boy Sovereign loved hearing it.

“You think because of those newspaper articles that I might attack your ex-husband?”

“I know it sounds silly but the papers said that that was what you did.”

“Don’t worry, Valentina. I wish you well and I will stay away from Verso.”

“Your blindness is cured?”

“Yeah,” he said, again thinking of his faux grandfather’s saying. “Listen, Valentina, that call that came in was important. I have to return. You take care and don’t worry about me at all.”

“If you need anything you can call me,” she said.

“I won’t.”

“Hi, Sovereign,” Toni said after one ring.

“What’s up?”

“The prosecutor sent the cops to bring me down to his office,” she said. “They told me that either I was gonna testify against you or they was gonna charge me with attempted murder. They said that they could say that I lured Lemuel in there so you could attack him.”

Sovereign wondered about some legal scholar a thousand years in the future looking back on this case. In the future, he thought, human DNA would be mixed with that of other creatures, and human brains would be augmented with tiny living computers that would make thought much easier, clearer, and unbelievably fast. What would this far-flung thinker suppose about lower intellects making up the crime as they executed inept laws?

“Sovereign,” Toni said.

“I don’t know what to say, honey. You and I both know what happened. What did your lawyer tell you?”

“He said that if the DA was right, I should take his offer and say you planned it.”

“But you know I didn’t.”

“I know I shouldn’t’a been wit’ you right after what you did to Lem,” she said.

“No,” Sovereign agreed, “maybe we should have waited for a little while.”

“What do you think I should do?”

“I suppose the truth isn’t an option.”

“This ain’t funny.”

“No.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“What are you asking me, Toni?”

“They gonna put me in prison, Sovereign. They gonna put me in jail, and the lawyer you give me has told me to turn you ovah.”

“I have to go,” he said.

“What?”

“I have to go and you have to do what’s best for you. We’re both just troglodytes trying to climb out of Plato’s cave.”

“What the fuck are you talkin’ about?”

Sovereign, instead of answering, hung up the landline and disconnected it from the wall. Squatting there, with the slender cord between his thumb and forefinger, he was reminded of the times in his life when he’d cut off contact with family, friends, and loved ones.

Loved ones. He let the words roll around in his mind, trying to make sense of them. Finally admitting to failure in this attempt, he turned off the lights in his apartment, opened the window wide, and sat on the sill for hours, with his eyes closed, listening for sounds in the night.

A little before one the next day Sovereign was leaving his apartment building to go up to Seth Offeran’s. He’d made it only a few steps past the doors when someone called to him.

“Mr. James.”

It was a young white man wearing a green sports jacket and black slacks. The T-shirt he wore was yellow and his tawny hair carelessly brushed.

“Yes?”

“My name is Russ Lamply and I’d like to ask you about the charges leveled against you.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I’m working with the Times and wanted just a few words.”

“ ‘I don’t think so’ is four words. You’ve got yourself a bonus.”

“Did you know the man you fought with?”

“I have to be going. Good-bye, Mr. Lamply.”

Sovereign turned and headed for Christopher Street. The reporter followed.

“I just need a statement for my story,” he said.

Sovereign suppressed a grin and kept on moving. He felt inexplicably happy.

“Your brother was being sought in connection to a bank robbery, wasn’t he?” Lamply asked as they turned right on Christopher and walked east.

“It has been reported that you and the man you attacked, Lemuel Johnson, were fighting over a woman you were both involved with.”

Sovereign was half a step ahead of his ineffectual interlocutor. Lamply couldn’t see the now apparent grin.

“What about the charges of racism leveled against you at your workplace, Techno-Sym? Or your long absence from the job for a supposed case of hysterical blindness?”

Sovereign, without realizing it, picked up his pace.

“The woman who was with Mr. Johnson in your apartment is ready to be a witness against you,” Lamply said, raising his voice.

Sovereign felt his humor turning in on itself. The muscles of his forearms clenched, and the hours he spent exercising each day seemed to be singing. He turned to face the fair young journalist, raised his hand, seemingly intent on striking the young man. Then he yelled, “Taxi!”

The yellow car pulled to the curb and Sovereign forced his angry hand down to grab the handle.

“The trial has already been set,” Lamply said in fast, clipped words. “You’d think that you’d want your side of the story in the paper.”

James threw himself into the backseat of the cab.

“Eighty-sixth and Madison, please.”

“Mr. James,” the reporter called as the car pulled away.

In the back of that taxicab Sovereign was painfully aware of the meaning of the word psychosomatic. His head was spinning and hurting. His fists were clenched and he could not make them release. There was also an ache in his chest and the color red somewhere between his line of vision and imagination. He had lost control, barely escaping the violence welling up inside. The only power left to him was the ability to breathe in, hold the breath for a brief moment, and then exhale.

“Are you okay?” the driver asked, looking up into his rearview mirror.

“Yes,” Sovereign managed to say.

Each breath became deeper, and by the time they had reached 14th Street the HR manager was able to splay out his fingers. He realized that he was sitting at a tilt to the left side and sat up straight.

Once he had regained control he wanted to talk to the driver but couldn’t think of anything to say. The picture on the hack license matched the face in the mirror. The man’s name was Amir Fez. He had a mustache and some hair on his chin — not enough to be called a proper beard. His eyes were dark, and though he was not smiling Sovereign guessed at great humor and concern from his expressions. None of this was the basis for a conversation, so Sovereign sat back and wondered at the possibility that he was a criminal. Maybe the prosecutor had gleaned the threat in Sovereign’s actions and wanted to take steps to protect New Yorkers from his possibly uncontrollable rage.

James took in an enormous gulp of air. He was free to breathe. All people, he thought, had this liberty. The idea of inalienable rights based on a notion of undeniable biological politics calmed him. He closed his eyes and rested his head against the window, becoming conscious of the exhaustion his rage caused.

In the self-imposed darkness, inside the moving vehicle, Sovereign felt lulled and peaceful...

“We’re here, mister,” the driver said.

It felt like only moments since he’d escaped the journalist, but they had made it all the way to the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Sovereign gave thirty dollars for an eighteen-dollar ride, feeling somehow grateful to the driver. He stumbled out onto the curb and had to stop for a minute to allow the sleep to slough off his mind. He stood there stroking his left arm with his right hand, remembering running the same palm over Offeran’s sofa cushion when he could not see — or would not.

“... and so you wanted to hit him?” Offeran asked after hearing the story of the reporter.

“I wanted to destroy him,” Sovereign said. “If I had struck that first blow I know I wouldn’t have been able to stop. I would have killed him if I could have.”

“Where do you think this rage is coming from?” the doctor asked.

“It’s a — what did you call it? — a significant psychic event.”

Offeran smiled and nodded.

“When I was a kid I used to listen to Bob Dylan,” Sovereign said. “Him and Jimi Hendrix. I never let anybody know that.”

“Why not?”

“Because black kids weren’t supposed to listen to them. Kids at my school would have made fun of me.”

“But Hendrix was black.”

“But he didn’t play the right kind of music. And Dylan wasn’t only white; he sang like a drowning cat. But I loved both of them and listened when nobody was around. Except for Eddie, of course. I told Eddie everything. My grandfather too. Eagle would listen to anything I had to say. I was his favorite.”

“What does this music have to do with your anger?”

“I don’t know. Or maybe... Maybe it’s just that I had to keep everything a secret. My grandfather’s pistol, my father’s parentage... Even the real job I thought I was doing underneath the job they hired me for. I’m like a spy in a foreign country, a mole in the enemy’s camp. I left everything behind me and no one knew a damn thing about who I am. I can lie up in the bed with a woman, laugh my ass off with somebody at a bar, but as close as I get, no one can really see me.”

A sympathetic hum escaped Offeran’s throat. This single sound told Sovereign that his doctor thought that he was on the right track.

“But what difference does it make,” Sovereign asked, “if you ask me where I am and all I can tell you is that I’m lost?”

“Because even if that’s the only thing you know, then you are not lost — not completely.”

That night in bed, alone and awake for hours, Sovereign tried to imagine his way out of his troubled mind. He wasn’t worried about the trial or the possibility of conviction. He wasn’t worried about the fact that he had stopped going to work even though he was over his condition.

He missed Toni, not the lover but the giggling young woman who walked with him down the streets of New York and protected him from harm.

After a long while he fell into a deep sleep, something close to a child’s slumber — even hibernation. He dreamed that he was a big hulking fish that burrowed under the sand on the ocean floor. From there he peeked out at the water above, safe from predators. The chill of the water was a comfort to him; it meant that he was safe. The currents above made a kind of sibilant music that was almost subliminal. For a long time he lay there nestled under the sand...

And then there came a tickle and a disturbance. Something was stroking his underside like the dorsal fin of a larger creature buried even deeper, coming up after his millennial nap. Sovereign the fish moved left and then right but he could not escape the feeling of a pressure that, while not unpleasant, worked against his peaceful retreat.

Finally the erection roused him from his sleep.

Toni was sitting next to him on the bed, naked and gently teasing his manhood.

“I wondered when you was gonna wake up,” she said.

“What are you doing here?”

“Pullin’ on yo’ dick is what.”

Sovereign took her by the wrist.

“Move your hand away, Sovereign,” she said. “I’m doin’ what I wanna do right now.”

“Why?”

“Because.”

“Because what?”

“Because I liked you evah since that day I came ovah an’ you gave me that money. You didn’t have to do that, but I know you did ’cause you liked me. You only saw me for a minute but you liked me more than people known me my whole life.”

Somewhere between the words and the quick feathery motions of her fingers, a powerful orgasm rose up in James. He grunted and bucked from his hips and she grabbed on hard.

“That’s right, baby,” she said. “Uh-huh, yeah, just like that.”

She started moving her hand again and he reached out to stop her.

“Move your hand, Sovereign,” she said again. “This is my dick right now.”

Obeying her, he smiled at his own submission.

“What you laughin’ at?” she asked with a sour, sweet turn to her lips.

“You say you always liked me?” he replied.

“Uh-huh. And I only realized it when you hung up on me. Everybody’s tellin’ me that I should do what the prosecutor say, but where were they when you were takin’ me to dinner and the movies and sittin’ next to me when I was watchin’ TV and you was blind?

“When you hung up on me I felt like somebody just slammed the do’ in my face and there I was, out in the cold.”

“Are you saying that you love me, girl?”

“I don’t know about love or whatever, but I like you and you like me and that’s more than I got from anybody else.”

Sovereign saw the words she spoke written out in a single line. In the jagged horizon the letters made he saw a long and slender key to the questions he had been asking for days.

“You gettin’ hard again, daddy.”

Sovereign wondered if Lena Altuna’s brown hair was dyed. It looked to be the same color it had been when they were at school. But that was a long time ago. He’d had some short, curly gray hairs grow out in the past five years. These silver ghosts had also appeared on his chin and chest.

“We need to know every person’s name who can testify to your blindness and your character,” she was saying.

“Like doormen and doctors?” James asked.

“Neighbors, store clerks, and anyone else who saw you on a regular basis,” Altuna added. “We have the medical reports, and the prosecution might even bring in the group suing you at your job if they think that it speaks to your trustworthiness. Do you have any family who might shed light on your condition?”

“I haven’t seen my family in years.”

Lena sat up straight and away from the high back of her chair. They were in a fifty-fifth-floor conference room, the exterior wall of which was made from a thick sheet of glass. Through this he could see half a dozen jets circling in a holding pattern over the eastern airports.

“What about Toni Loam?” Altuna asked.

“We’ve become lovers, I guess.”

“The prosecution is pressing her to testify against you.”

“I know.”

“Maybe your relationship will muddy the waters of her testimony.”

“I want you to argue with the judge that we should be tried together,” Sovereign said.

“Why?”

“Because the only way there could have been a crime is if we planned it together. But we didn’t, and I want to be guilty or not based upon what I did or didn’t do. And I don’t want to be exonerated if Toni isn’t also released.”

As the jets went through their slow-motion waiting dance over Queens, Long Island, and Brooklyn, Lena frowned. Sovereign identified with the aircraft, thinking that his whole life had been one long holding pattern after another. He was waiting right now — for clearance to enter yet another queue: If he was shunted down the path to the right he would be convicted and sent to a prison, where he would be locked away, periodically pummeled, and bored to tears by purposelessness and mental inactivity; to the left he would be free, probably unemployed, occupying a life that no longer had meaning or direction. Either way, happiness and satisfaction were improbable. He’d leave the courtroom looking for another line to wait in — and another after that.

“I understand it,” Lena said. “But what do we say when the prosecution tries to make it seem like you were going to turn over your lover to get out from under the crime you planned together?”

“But I’m not indicting her.”

“She brought Johnson into your house, at least with the intent of mischief and theft.”

“I always told Toni that my house was hers. Even if she felt that she was doing something wrong it doesn’t matter. She had the key, the access, and the right to do whatever she wanted. She can’t be responsible for a friend who decided to attack me.”

“You would have made a good lawyer, Sovereign.”

“I hardly even make a patchwork human being.”

That afternoon James made it back to his office. Shelly Monteri — wearing a clamshell-colored square-cut dress and a locket made from pure gold — was at her station, talking on the phone and examining her dark blue nails when Sovereign came upon her.

“I have to go, Mom,” the young woman said, hanging up. “Hello, Mr. James. How are you today?”

“Anybody looking for me?”

“No, sir. But the applicant files are piling up in your in-box.”

“Send them over to Ms. Malloy. Tell her that I’ve been preoccupied with my trial and that I didn’t think I could give this batch the proper attention.”

He could see that the receptionist wanted to ask about the upcoming court case but couldn’t find the words in their professional relationship to bring it up. Sovereign smiled at her dilemma and went by her post into his office.

The red plastic folding chairs were still arrayed before his desk. In them he could see the young, and not so young, black faces that he had confessed to. He perched at the edge of his chair, elbows on the desk. There he imagined a longer conversation with the unofficial Black Workers’ Union. They discussed the discontinuity between generations and the intangible nature of psychic disruptions. They talked about slavery and prisons, Bosnia and Rwanda. They tried to place their experience and his actions into an acceptable mode of behavior, and even though they failed at this, the imaginary process retained some innate value. After sitting in that position, having that pretend conference for an hour or more, he got up and left the office, passing Shelly but not speaking to her.

Six weeks passed. Sovereign did not return to his office. Seventeen days after he left Techno-Sym for the final time he received a letter informing him that he’d been placed on indefinite, and paid, medical leave. The forms were signed by Martin LeRoy and Seth Offeran.

Every second or third day Toni Loam would come over. She’d been given a full-time position at the beauty shop and moved to a room on 128th Street near Morningside Park. They made love and watched television, went out to eat and had sex. She learned that he became excited when she talked about what they were doing, especially when she would tell him what he was seeing.

“You like that ass?” she’d ask when she found him looking, or knew it. “Say it and you can have it all night long.”

“You know you don’t have to talk to me the way you do sometimes,” he said to her at an outside table at an Italian restaurant on 6th Avenue.

“You don’t like it?” she asked, tilting her head doubtfully.

“I don’t want you to think that I only see you as an object.”

“I don’t object.”

“I mean that it’s not just the sex why I like you, Toni.”

“You don’t like havin’ sex with me?”

“I love it.”

“Then what’s wrong?”

“Sometimes I think you’re just doing it and saying it because you know that’s what I like — what I need.”

“So? You don’t think I need this dinner? You don’t think I need to see your eyes bright up when you look at me in them tight purple panties?”

“It seems so... so primitive.”

“Primitive like animals?”

“Yes.”

“Ain’t you a animal, Sovereign?”

“I’m not going to win this argument, am I?”

“You could win it and lose me.”

“No, thanks.”

That was on a Tuesday evening. Toni left the next morning near noon for her job at the hairdresser’s. Sovereign spent the afternoon exercising and listening to a collection of Chopin piano concertos, took a cab up to 86th Street, met with Offeran, and came home.

It was a little before five when the buzzer from the downstairs doorman sounded.

“Yes?”

“A Drum-Eddie to see you, sir.”

Sovereign’s mind went blank for a few moments. He stood there holding the phone with one hand and pressing his chin with the middle finger of the other.

“Mr. James?” the doorman said.

“Send him up, Jolly.”

His fists were clenched again. Sovereign waited in the hallway, holding the door open with his shoulder. The wait seemed interminable. There was a thrumming in the muscles of his back and a return of the ache between the knuckles of his hands.

He knew, was sure, that this was not his brother coming up the elevator. Maybe the FBI had sent an agent, or it could have been another personal representative like Monte. The moth and the bumblebee vied over control of his chest. He was hoping that Toni would come over and protect him.

Protect him?

The man coming down the hallway was tall, slender, and bald. Clad in a dark shirt and trousers, he wore a white waistcoat and had a festive scarf hanging loosely about his neck.

He had the right coloring for Eddie.

The mustache wasn’t evident until he was only a few feet away. It wasn’t razor-thin but well trimmed. His smile almost annihilated the meager swath of lip hair.

“You look exactly the same, JJ.”

“Drum... is it really you, man?”

The taller, more slender man embraced Sovereign and whispered, “You never did see it comin’, bro.”

Arm in arm the brothers walked into the apartment. They sat side by side on the white sofa, all four hands holding on to one another.

Sovereign had the urge to kiss his brother on the lips but did not, this prohibition brought about by a dream he once had of kissing his father’s corpse good-bye.

“Eddie.”

“Yeah, Jimmy J?”

“You said that they called you Jinx nowadays.”

“I been lucky.”

“I don’t know whether I should ask you where you’ve been or why you’re here.”

They released hands.

Drum-Eddie got up from the sofa and moved to the red chair, where he sat back expansively and crossed his left leg over the right.

“Nice place you got here,” he said. “How long?”

“More than twenty years.”

“I’ve changed countries more often than you’ve moved out of neighborhoods.”

Eddie’s eyes were the same. He’d lost his hair but maintained a young man’s physique. His eyes still danced and played.

Sovereign felt like Scrooge in the presence of a magical sprite that had come out of time to laugh at him.

“I missed you, man,” Sovereign said.

“I knew it must’a hurt you when I ran but I didn’t have a choice. My, um, confederates weren’t of the proper quality, and so when the law got their hands on one of ’em I had to go.”

“But you could have come back. There’s a statute of limitations, isn’t there?”

“Once the law marks you there’s no loophole big enough to wriggle through, Sovy. Shit. Feds throw you in jail for havin’ knowledge of a crime or for crossin’ a border without proper notice. Anyway, North America’s all right, but there’s fun to be had on at least four other continents — fun and profit.”

Tears flowed from Sovereign’s eyes and he was not ashamed.

“Damn, JJ, where’d you learn how to cry?”

“It was goin’ blind. Blindness opened up my eyes.”

The brothers talked well into the night. When Sovereign suggested that they go out for dinner, Eddie said that he’d rather have delivery pizza.

“You know the one thing I always miss the most about the U.S. is its pizza. Thirty years go by and pepperoni and tomato sauce is still the same.”

The man named Drum spent a long time explaining his crime.

“It just happened,” he began. “You know I had that job for the construction gang in downtown L.A. that summer — the one that Pops made me do when the lawyer got me off of that joyridin’ beef. That’s where I met Landry and Peters.”

“Who were they?” the older brother asked.

“Two white ex-cons got jobs through this federal program. They told me all about prison and robbin’ liquor stores. I was young and thought their stories were cool.

“And then I got to know this girl work in the main office named Tricks. I think it was Trixie at first but it just got cut down. She took a likin’ to me, and because she was five years older she thought that maybe she could give me a biology lesson or two. It was up in her bed that I learned about the deal that a whole group of construction companies had with Manufacturers Bank. They would switch off which branch they’d use for the money when the workers cashed their checks. That way a bank robber couldn’t predict where to hit. But they hired a teenager, two white ex-cons, and a young white woman hungry for a boy like I was. You know, it seemed like a perfect setup, and I made the plans with Landry and Peters. And it would have gone off without a hitch, but Landry liked to drink and he talked about me in some bar.”

“You?” Sovereign asked.

“Yeah, man. He hated black people before he met me, but once we started hangin’ out he realized that he was wrong. He was braggin’ on how smart I was, bein’ a fool in doin’ so.”

“That’s how the FBI found out about you?”

“The morning after the robbery they grabbed Peters and he told them that I was the mastermind, which was true, and that I had stoled the money for the Black Panthers, which was not true. He said that we were buyin’ guns and was gonna kill cops in Culver City or sumpin’. Landry disappeared. I think he was killed. He had expensive tastes and was in debt to some rough people. They held Peters for a long time while lookin’ for me. He confessed to the crime but never had to face his day in court.”

“So they think you’re a terrorist?”

“That’s right.”

“Then why are you here?”

“ ’Cause I’m worried about you, my brother. I’m worried about you.”

“That’s like the raja worried ’bout the earthworm,” Sovereign said.

“You remembah that story?” Eddie asked. “Granddad loved that one.”

It was a tale that someone had told their grandfather about an East Indian king who was so steeped in his belief in God that he wouldn’t even step on an earthworm. The story was supposed to explain a reverence for life, but Eagle James just laughed.

A man cain’t kill a earthworm would starve in three days. You know he wouldn’t be able to eat a rabbit or even a potatah. Shit. Scientists say that there’s all kindsa life too little to see in your water. Man cain’t kill a earthworm really have to love God, ’cause he’ll be up in heaven before you know it.

The boys loved telling the story to their grandfather because he used the word shit and that was taboo in their house.

“You’re my brother,” Eddie said, “and I had to come to make sure you’re all right.”

“Are you in danger of being arrested?”

“Some. But you know the men lookin’ for me don’t have any idea of who I am or where I might be. They lookin’ for a smell rather than a style, and so we could pass each other in the street and they would never know.”

“I’m okay, Eddie. I mean, it was worth a few months being blind if when I opened my eyes you were here like you are right now. I missed you.”

“What about this Toni Loam?” Drum-Eddie asked.

“Monte told you about her?”

“That’s why he was here... to find out about you.”

“What’d he say about Toni?”

“That she was street. That she seemed to care about you. That you reached out and touched her every few minutes or so and she smiled whenever you would.”

“I did?”

“You don’t remember?”

“I’ve been in kind of a dream, Eddie. I know what I’m thinking but that’s about it. I like Toni. I like her a lot. And she likes me but it’s complicated. Her boyfriend, the one I almost killed, is still in her life. He’s in a coma but she’s worried about him. And I don’t know what to think.”

“About her and the boyfriend?”

“No. I don’t care about that; I just know it. What I’m trying to say is that either I wasted my life or I left it behind. It’s like I wake up every day without the slightest idea what will happen. It might be a war or the Garden of Eden out there.”

“I could promise you both,” Drum-Eddie said. “Come on down to South America with me, Sovereign. Learn Spanish and Portuguese and we could go into business together.”

“What kind of business?”

“Import, export, and services rendered.”

“Legal?”

“Whatever you do, it’s legal one place and a death sentence in another. You know that, Sovy.”

“Why are you here, Eddie?”

“Mama asked me to come.”

“Mama?”

“Yeah, man. I hope you don’t think that Lurlene Twyst is checkin’ up on you because you were her favorite cousin. It’s because Mama is her favorite aunt. Mama don’t care that you turned your back on her. She will not do that to you.”

“I haven’t called for one birthday,” Sovereign said.

“She’s had seventy-seven birthdays, Sovereign. She don’t need no reminders.”

“I can’t go,” Sovereign said.

“Why not? You want to give the district attorney the chance to put you in jail ’cause a man broke into your house?”

“I’m not afraid.”

“So? If you get in the ring with a man can’t punch, that don’t mean you don’t put up your gloves. Survival is practice. That’s an exercise you got to do every day.”

“Granddad told me that another man fathered Pops.”

Drum-Eddie was good-looking but not extremely so; that was what Sovereign was thinking. The potency of Drum was the way he talked and how he paid attention. Just seeing him you knew that this was someone you had to take seriously.

“Who?” Eddie asked.

“Grandpa Eagle didn’t know,” Sovereign said, and then added all the rest that he knew.

“But you never told me?” Eddie said.

“I wasn’t supposed to,” Sovereign said, feeling like a little boy again. “Maybe... maybe if I had you wouldn’t have ever robbed that bank.”

“That’s what you think? You think that it was your fault that I did what I did? You got that on your shoulders too?”

“You and Pops were always fighting, Eddie. I think that if he knew better, if he knew the kind of love that Granddad had for him, then maybe he would have tried harder with you.”

“Damn,” Drum-Eddie James said. His grin seemed to fill the room. “Sovy, there you were, quiet as a mouse, thinkin’ that everything was your problem and your fault.”

“I knew about Eagle’s pistol,” Sovereign said.

“So did I,” Eddie replied. “So did Zenith. All the kids knew, man. And me an’ Pops fought because I’ve always been what I am. You know I was born to live my life, brother. Born to it.”

“But you were just a kid.”

“Not really, Sovy, not really at all. By the time I was thirteen I’d had sex with half a dozen girls. At fifteen I’d already stole a car with Porky Kidd. We sold it to a chop shop that Porky’s brother knew about in L.A. and took the bus home.

“No, Sovy. I wasn’t a kid long enough to talk about, and I’m grateful for the life I got.”

“So if that’s true,” Sovereign James said to his long-lost and now found brother, “it means that I was born to my life and I should be grateful for what I got.”

Eddie smiled and held up his hands.

“That’s your problem right there, JJ,” he said. “You think that life is an argument. There you are, thinkin’ that if you could just say the right words then you could make everything make sense. But you know that ain’t so, brother. It’s not some game you playin’ that you just count up the points at the end of the night and go to bed havin’ played your best. People wanna bring you down, Jimmy J. And even if you got the high score at the end, they’ll just say you cheated and throw you in jail anyways.”

Sovereign understood the wisdom of his brother’s words. He appreciated the fact the Drum-Eddie had risked his own liberty to give that speech eye-to-eye.

“You’re right, Eddie,” Sovereign said. “I know you are. I knew before you got here, but hearing it makes me know even better. You got to understand, man; you got to understand that I’m not like you are. I don’t know how to pick up and run. I’m like a tree, rooted in the ground. For me there’s only here where I am and that’s it. There’s no there. There’s no elsewhere. There’s only right here where I am.”

“So you not comin’ down to Brazil?”

“I can’t.”

“What if you went to sleep tonight and then when you woke up you found yourself in a cottage on the shores of Bahia? What if you didn’t have to move but somebody dug up your roots and replanted you on a beach somewhere?”

“You could do that?”

“Man, the government and the television got people thinkin’ that they ain’t free, not really. They make you believe that the only way to get to the end of the road is to follow the street. But the street is a lie, man. The street is a lie. You got alleys and buildings and shortcuts. You got the long way ’round and you don’t even have to go where they say you wanna go. They don’t own you. They don’t own the street. They don’t own a mothahfuckin’ thing. All they got is you agreein’ that they know and they own and they control. But all you got to do is say no and that’s all she wrote for them.”

Sovereign realized that his uneducated brother had encapsulated his entire graduate career in those few words.

“I want to wake up in my own bed, Eddie. I know I’m small-minded and a slave to the system of my mind. I know too that the thoughts in my head don’t belong to me, that what I see isn’t necessarily what’s there. I live a life informed by corporations, ancient religious belief systems, and governments that care more for their own maintenance than the people who comprise them. I used to think that it was racism that blinded us, but now I know that all of us, except for the special few like you, are tied by our necks to an unstable anchor — that that weight can pull any or all of us down at any time.

“It’s like living at the base of an active volcano or volunteering for the army while there’s a war raging. There’s nothing wrong with giving up, brother, not while there’s people like you out there keeping the truth alive and refusing to accept the lies.”

“You talk pretty, Sovereign. They teach you that in school?”

“What else do you want, Eddie?”

“Let’s go to the airport in Hartford.”

“Why?”

“It’s a surprise.”

“I thought I just told you that I don’t like surprises.”

“Trust me, JJ.”

In the private wing of the small public airport, Eddie and Sovereign were led to a largish hangar where a midsize private jet was housed. The pilot wore reflective sunglasses and had a walnut mustache that was shot through with gray.

“Mr. Jinx,” the pilot said.

“You ready, Fydor?”

“Yes, sir. We’ve got clearance. You and your guest can board anytime.”

The pilot climbed in and Drum-Eddie put a foot on the first step. His brother held back.

“I told you that I’m not going to Brazil, Eddie.”

“I hope you don’t think this little plane can go that far,” the bank robber said. “We just takin’ a day trip, JJ. You will be back in time for your next court date.”

The copilot was a broad-faced, middle-aged white woman who was already seated in the cockpit.

The body of the jet had twelve seats, six on each side. The first two rows faced each other. Eddie sat with his back to the cockpit and Sovereign opposite him.

“Is this your plane, Drum?”

“No. A guy named Ryan Herkle owns it.”

“And how did you get him to let you use it?”

“Ryan has a son named Lloyd. Lloyd killed a guy in a fight on a yacht off of the Florida Keys. When the boy was out on a million dollars’ bail I was engaged to smuggle him down to a little Chilean village. Ryan gives the town one hundred thousand dollars a year and they look after the kid. Because I’m the go-between he does me favors when he can. I make sure never to lean on him too hard.”

“Where we going?”

“An airstrip outside of Riletteville.”

“South Carolina?”

“Mama wants to see you, JJ. If I can’t save you at least I can give her something.”

The flight was smooth and exceptionally silent. Sovereign decided that the inside of the plane must have had extra soundproofing so that the usual roar of flight was reduced to a mild hum.

Eddie spent his time reading documents on an electronic tablet, while Sovereign found a book in the netting behind one of the chairs — a very old paperback entitled Hothouse by Brian Aldiss.

It was a slender text about a far-flung future where mammals, reptiles, insects, and fish had been mostly supplanted by aggressive, all-encompassing plant life. One of the few nonplant forms of life that had survived were minuscule green humans who had barely held on in the billion years of plant evolution. These beings were tiny and primitive, matriarchal in their social structure, and existential inasmuch as their lives were immediate and their sense of a future nonexistent.

“Good book?” Eddie asked as the plane began its descent.

“Yeah. Yeah. It makes you think that maybe life has a sense to it even if you can’t see it when you’re living it.”

“Philosophy?”

“Science fiction.”

“Pretty much the same thing, wouldn’t you say?”

“Have you gone to college, Eddie?”

“I once helped a guy move a nuclear bomb out of the Balkans and return it to some dudes in uniform in Moscow,” he said. “Yeah, man. I been to school.”

Not long after Eddie made that admission, the wheels touched down and they disembarked from the plane.

“We got a call while in flight, Mr. Jinx,” Fydor the pilot said to Sovereign’s brother. “We can’t wait for you. But Mr. Herkle has made reservations for you on the flight back to New York day after tomorrow. You have to pay for them but your seats will be held.”

A driver picked the brothers up at the dark airstrip and drove them, in a teal Cadillac, to a motel on a highway that had no other buildings in sight.

In the parking lot the driver, an elderly black man named Theodore, gave them keys with little yellow tags that identified their room numbers.

“You can get us tomorrow morning at seven, Theodore,” Eddie said.

“Yes, sir, Mr. Drum.”

The rooms to the single-story motel, the El Dorado, all faced the asphalt lot. Eddie went to his door at the far corner, while Sovereign was assigned to a center room.

Sovereign’s room was a simple boxlike space with pitted green linoleum floors and small frames containing photographs of paintings of flowers hanging on the faded salmon-colored walls. The digital alarm clock was chained to the night table, and there sat an automatic coffeemaker on a ledge opposite the queen-size bed.

Sovereign took out his cell phone and saw that he’d received a series of calls from Toni. He pressed a button, wondering at his ability to see her call.

“Where are you?” were her first words.

“Down South.”

“Are you running?”

“No. I’m down here visiting my mother. She’s been worried about the trial and wants to see me.”

For a long moment there was silence.

“Are you leaving me, Sovereign?”

“Never. I’m down here for one day. I’ll probably have dinner with her tomorrow night and fly back in the morning.”

“We have a meeting with the judge on Monday morning.”

“I’ll be back way before then.”

“Okay.”

“You sound mad, Miss Loam.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you were goin’?”

“It came up all of a sudden. You know I really should do this. I haven’t even called my mother for over twenty years.”

“Why not?”

“If I knew the answer to that, baby, I’d be living in my own skin, laughing at people who thought they knew me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I love you, Toni Loam.”

“I got to go, Sovereign. I’ll come by your place day after tomorrow.”

In the morning Theodore took Eddie and Sovereign twenty-seven miles to a small hamlet nestled in a pine-and-dogwood forest in the middle of a sweltering plain of swamps and tobacco farms.

On the solitary main street there were quite a few two-story buildings, the bottoms of which were stores and businesses, with the upper floors either for storage or apartments. Up a rickety set of unpainted wood stairs, over a store called Capman’s Dry Goods, was a large apartment.

When Eddie threw the door open he yelled, “Mama!”

They were standing in a nondescript room that might have been called an entrance hall but it seemed unfinished. There was a sod-encrusted shovel leaning in a far corner and a red rocking chair by a door in the wall opposite the entrance.

An old woman came through this door. She was very thin and wore a loose dress that was once bright blue but now well on its way to turning gray. The hem went almost all the way down to her bony ankles, and her bristly hair was white.

“Mama?” Sovereign said.

It wasn’t until she smiled that he actually recognized her.

“Baby.” Her steps were slow and considered, but it was clear that she didn’t want help.

Zenith appeared at the door behind her in a pink dress suit, the cost of which would have probably paid his mother’s rent for a year.

Winifred James approached her middle child and put her arms around his neck as Toni often did. She rested her forehead against his jaw and he embraced her, ever so gently.

The hug was so tender as to feel insubstantial. Sovereign had the impression that he had gathered in his arms a parcel of smoke that had once been his mother: a fleeting moment before an expected ending.

“I missed you, baby,” she whispered. “I missed you.”

“Mama,” he said, unable to put together any other thought or concept.

“Come on, Mama,” Zenith said after a couple of minutes of this sober, sorrowful embrace. “Let’s bring Sovereign in and let him sit down.”

“Oh, yes,” Winifred James said. But she didn’t let go. “Yes, we should give him some a’ that hard lemonade you made.”

Sovereign stood there with his frail mother in his arms. It was an odd feeling, a solitary incident that was out of the range of any experience he had known.

“Mama,” Eddie said, and she raised her head from Sovy’s jaw. “Mama, come on in the dining room and we’ll all sit down and talk.”

While saying these words Drum-Eddie took his mother by the hand, disentangled her from Sovereign, and led her from the unfinished room into the interior of the apartment.

“Sit down and talk,” she said, repeating the words gratefully.

The dining room was a shock.

It was a comparable size to the dining room they had in the cylindrical San Diego home. It was laid out with the same furniture, and even the carpet looked similar to the one Sovereign and Drum rolled on as children.

“Mama took everything from the old house and brought it out here,” Eddie said in answer to the bewilderment on Sovereign’s face. “She wanted to be back home in South Carolina, but she didn’t want to leave our San Diego place either.”

Zenith, now older, even more stern-looking than she had been as a precocious child, helped Eddie settle Winifred in the chair she had sat in at every meal that Sovereign could remember.

“Go on to your seat, Sovy — I mean Sovereign,” Zenith said.

The children seated themselves around their mother, leaving a chair empty for Solar James, who had been dead for sixteen years. There was also an empty place for Eagle James’s wheelchair, and a guest seat that was rarely used.

With everyone seated a pall of early-morning silence fell over the long-lost family. It dawned on Sovereign that for the first time in many days the expectation of state retribution for his brutal attack on Lemuel Johnson had fallen away — completely. The people he had known best and longest were seated around him in a space displaced by thousands of miles.

An amber-colored woman of middle age strode into the room just before Sovereign was about to ask why they were sitting so passively. She was a chubby woman who looked to be strong. Her garrulous smile showed off one gold-capped tooth.

“Hello, Mr. Sovereign,” the short bundle of strength and ebullience exclaimed. “I’m Mary Klay and I work for your mother when she needs it.”

“Are we related?” Sovereign asked as the woman stopped maybe a foot from his chair.

“Heavens, no, my love. The Handlys are the oldest family around here. They have people working for them.”

While Sovereign tried to tease out the logic of deep roots and wealth, Mary Klay asked the assembled family, “Pancakes or hash scramble for breakfast?”

“Can we have both, Aunt Mary?” Eddie said.

“Of course you can, Mr. Drum-Eddie. Of course you can.”

A jagged twitch of energy crossed the inside of Sovereign’s chest. He understood that this was jealousy, that his family had gone on without him, eating off the same table and bringing new members into the fold.

What had he been doing all those years when Christmases and Thanksgivings were celebrated and he was in the apartment plotting revolution like a child playing with tiny dark green plastic soldiers?

“Sovereign?” Winifred Handly-James said.

“Yes, Mama?”

“Are you in trouble, son?”

“I am,” he said. “I mean, I am, but maybe not in the way people are saying.”

The old woman’s face was doll-size but not rigid. Her eyes seemed to change with each idea he espoused.

“I mean, there’s a man I beat terribly. I went blind there for a couple of months.”

“That must have been awful,” Winifred uttered softly but clearly.

“You would have thought so, Mama, but really it made me understand so much. You know there’s people runnin’ around with eyes wide open but seeing only what they think they see.”

“Oh, baby,” Winifred said, “don’t you know it. The older I get the more people look like those that I knew a long, long time ago. And it’s so crazy, because I know it’s not the same people, but I feel for them the same way I did the people they look like from forty, fifty years ago. I met this one man in the store in downtown Pomegranateville and invited him to dinner because he looked so much like Lucius Lowery, a man I knew before I met your father. We was halfway through the meal before I realized that I couldn’t get the right words out of him.”

The food came then, brought in on platters by two adolescent boys, both of them dark brown and deferential.

The scramble was hash browns mixed in with eggs, onions, bacon, and a homemade sausage of some kind. The pancakes were whole-wheat with strawberries and real maple syrup. They were all served with a beverage made of chicory and coffee, and fresh-squeezed orange juice.

When they started eating, Eddie began regaling them with stories from their childhood — a childhood experienced in that very room, albeit in another town and state. When Zenith laughed at the stories, Sovereign remembered that she had always been partial to his younger brother, from afar at least. He hadn’t been fully conscious of this as a child. When he was young, Eddie was his best friend, not hers. That was what his philosophy professors would have called an ontological fact — as reliable as the existence of the Pacific Ocean or the phases of the moon.

Eddie reeled out one memory after another while the serving boys, under the watchful eye of Mary Klay, kept food on their plates. Zenith laughed and nodded, while Winifred’s eyes kept drifting back to Sovereign, who neither ate nor drank but filled his eyes and ears with the long-ago that he was sure had been lost.

“... and, and, and,” Eddie was saying excitedly, “there was that time that Mr. Kurisawa from next door told Dad that the cherry tree marked the line between our properties.”

“I remember that,” Sovereign said. His voice sound odd in his mouth. It didn’t sound to him like who he should have been in that conversation. He was supposed to be younger, more excited.

“What do you remember, Sovy... I... I... I mean Sovereign?” Zenith asked.

The question made Sovereign realize that he had frozen in the middle of his interruption. He was just saying that he remembered Mr. Kurisawa and the feud between Solar and the oldest resident of their neighborhood.

Both men honestly believed that the tree proved his property line, but each felt that the far side of the tree from his property was the marker. Each man hankered to put up a fence to prove his claim, but every time one of them made the attempt the other would come out yelling and cursing.

They argued and fought for more than a year before Mr. Kurisawa called Solar James over for a drink one afternoon. Winifred was afraid that the men would kill each other, but after two hours Solar came back and said that the men agreed to hire a land surveyor to come over and mark out both property lines. The man who was proven wrong would have to pay the twenty-five-hundred-dollar fee.

Sovereign remembered the story but he didn’t speak it. This was because he had forgotten who had won the bet. The fence was never built...

“Sovereign?”

“Yes, Mama?”

“What’s wrong, baby?”

“I need to go outside for some air,” he replied.

He stood up from the table of his childhood and found the door that led to an external staircase.

Going outside he felt a definite sense of displacement. He was expecting the old yard with its Saint Augustine grass and slatted redwood fence across the back. Instead he found a patchy landscape of weeds and bare soil, a scattering of pine and dogwoods. There was no fence. The property just went on and on as if no one owned it. It was hot and muggy. Sovereign felt sweat forming on his brow and back.

He started walking over the uneven terrain, thinking that he would stop only if he came to a fence or maybe some natural barrier.

It was early morning but the summer heat was palpable; it felt like a pressure on his lungs and head. His breathing was labored in the heavy atmosphere. His feet hit the ground flat and hard. The impacts were uneven, as if he were staggering toward an end rather than headed somewhere.

“Sovereign.”

The clouds in the sky were everything from white to Brooks Brothers gray. Insects dive-bombed him, but Sovereign was unimpressed by their challenge. He was headed somewhere, probably wouldn’t make it. He was coming from a definite place but he was not certain of that origin.

“Sovereign.”

He wasn’t even sure if he had stopped before or after hearing his name the second time. He did think about the name, though. Sovereign. That was the address for a king.

“Sovereign.” It was Zenith.

“Hey,” the defendant said to his sister.

“What’s wrong, Sovereign?” Zenith asked as she walked up to him.

There was a man inside the man standing before the Midwestern housewife. The inside man, the old Sovereign, wanted to ridicule her stupidity. What’s wrong? I was blind and then I nearly killed a man. And now I’m going to stand trial for attempted murder. Do I have to be bleeding for you to see my problem?

“You can call me Sovy, Z,” the new Sovereign James said.

The woman’s intense eyes and dark ochre-colored skin seemed to be at odds with each other in some indefinable way. Then the gaze softened and she took him in her arms, pressing his head down on her shoulder with her right hand.

“Sovy,” she whispered into his ear.

“I was all alone, Z,” he said. These words brought his mind to the edge of the darkness that had been his blindness. He could see the impenetrable gloom but still failed at making the connection.

“What do you mean?” Zenith asked.

Moving back from the embrace the siblings held hands, forming an imperfect circle between them.

“I don’t know,” Sovereign said. “I mean, I... for years I was just going forward as if I was trying to get somewhere. Everything seemed to make sense. I cooked some pork chops, called women on the phone. I had an important job and a secret agenda. I wanted to have a child but don’t ask me why.”

When Zenith let go of her brother’s hands he felt as if he might fall, even though they hadn’t been leaning away from each other.

“Let’s get back,” she said.

“Don’t do that.”

“What?”

“Don’t come out here to stop me walking away and then just turn your back.”

“But, Sovy, I’m not a doctor.”

“You’re my sister.”

“We haven’t seen each other in twenty years.”

“But can’t you talk to me anyway?”

“What do you want me to say?” Zenith asked, the old edge in her words. “I don’t know you anymore.”

The old Sovereign was defeated by these words. The new man who stood in his stead felt liberated from a yen that had never been satisfied. The old, dissipating persona wanted to say, loudly, You never knew me. But the new man kept his mouth shut.

“Sovereign,” Zenith said.

“Let’s get back before the grits get cold,” newly self-named Sovereign the Second said.

He walked ahead of his sister at first but she caught up. When they were walking side by side he asked about her children.

After the breakfast was over Sovereign and his mother sat in his father’s old den. The shelving and blue carpet, walnut desk, and even the books were the same. There were no curved walls in Winifred James’s new house, but the innards were, in some limited instances, exact replicas of a life gone by.

After spending enough time, Sovereign realized that the color of the walls was similar but not the same as in his father’s den. Those walls were antique white but the new borders were brighter. Here and there were doodads and little photographs from Winifred’s current life in South Carolina. There was a photograph of one of the serving boys when he was six or seven, mugging for the camera.

These differences lent a stronger sense of reality to the home. It was as if life had continued in the home of his childhood. During his long absence the family had gone on.

Mother and son sat side by side on a sofa upholstered in animal skin. Solar James used to say this was the skin of a lion he’d killed in the Kenyan desert. The children all believed him until Drum-Eddie one day said that there were no hairy brown lions in the World Book Encyclopedia.

“It’s so good to see you, Eddie, um, I mean Sovy,” the slightly distracted older black woman said.

“Eagle wasn’t Papa’s real father,” Sovereign replied.

Winifred’s skin had begun graying as her hair had obviously done over the years. This lightening process made her seem less tangible, like a fading dream in the material illusion of the South Carolinian home.

She squinted and finally said, “No?”

“He was impotent. I guess she was fooling around.”

“Eagle told you about that?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I’m raisin’ three hogs two miles out of town on my old friend Georgia’s farm. I go out there almost every morning to feed and visit them. When they hear me comin’ they get all excited and grunt and squeal.”

“You raise ’em for meat?” Sovereign asked while looking across the shelves.

Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Booker T. Washington, LeRoi Jones, Zora Neale Hurston, and a hundred other black literary lights filled out the library. Sovereign had rarely, if ever, asked his father about these books. But now, in the displaced San Diego library, he realized that his entire life had been governed by the content and impact of books that he’d never read.

“No, baby,” Winifred said. “I mean, I guess that was my intention at first, but after a while I just started to love ’em.”

“What?”

“The hogs. Clyde, Mr. North Hampton, and Earl. They rely on me even though I had at one time planned to kill ’em.”

“Are you all right, Mama?”

“Eddie says that he wants to take you down South America. I think you should go with him.”

“What about you?” Sovereign asked.

“It’s too hot down there for me,” she said, casting a casual gaze at the window. “And Spanish makes my head hurt. I mean, it’s a beautiful language but I don’t know it.”

“Portuguese.”

“What?”

“That’s what they speak in Brazil.”

“You’re young enough that you could learn, baby.”

“What do you think about Eagle and Dad?”

“Father is just a word, baby. We all related when you come right down to it — the sharks and dogwoods, snails and men.”

“And sea anemone,” Sovereign the Second uttered.

“Say what?”

“It’s an animal that acts like a plant,” he said. “It anchors itself to a rock or crevice and then waits for food to come by.”

Winifred pried her gaze from whatever she’d seen outside. Her eyes were pale brown, maybe, Sovereign thought, a little occluded. But they saw him well enough.

“The only problem is the air,” she said after the long, noncompetitive test of wills.

“What about it?”

“It’s heavy with moisture. Solar can’t be here because the air is wrong. But I can still remember him. Sometimes I forget but then I’ll be standing in one a’ his old rooms and it hits me. I see him passin’ by a door or hear him clearing his throat somewhere in the house. That’s always a little second of happiness for me. That’s how I am — jumpin’ from one little spot of happiness to the other and raisin’ my hogs.”

“It’s time to go, JJ.”

Drum-Eddie was standing at the door to Solar’s displaced den.

“Oh,” Winifred said.

“Yes, it is,” Sovereign said.

He leaned over to kiss his mother. She pulled away at first and then stayed in place long enough for her son to plant an awkward kiss along her jawline.

She put a hand on his knee and said, “You’ll come back to see me now and then, won’t you, son?”

“Yes, Mama. I just gotta get this court thing settled.”

“Do what Eddie tells you, baby. He knows about the law.”

Zenith was waiting outside the front door. She carried a brown paper bag and a nine-by-twelve-inch folder of black leather. Drum-Eddie and his brother approached their older sister. Behind her was Theodore, standing at the side of his teal Caddy.

“Mom made you some pork sandwiches and banana bread,” she said, handing the bag to Drum. “And I put together this little album of pictures, Sovy. It’s the boys mostly — over the years, growing up.”

She handed the folder to Sovereign and moved forward, toward the front door. In this way she handed him the book and went past at the same time, not giving him a chance to even thank her.

She was going into the house as he was turning.

Sovereign searched for the words to stop his sister, the incantation to make her into someone who might someday love him. But the spell eluded him.

“Z got a whole lotta problems, JJ. It ain’t you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Excuse me, sirs,” Theodore said, “but if we want to make your flight we will have to go.”

In the backseat Sovereign stared out the windows until the little town his mother had colonized was out of sight. He settled back down, looking at his hands in his lap.

Seeing his hands was part of the recurring revelation of sight. It was a touchstone of awareness of the blessing (yes, he thought, the blessing) of the magic of vision. This moment of grace — when it happened, sporadically after he’d tried to murder Lemuel Johnson — usually opened a door to some other miracle or near-miracle.

At that moment it was his mother and her replication of a life with a man who’d died thousands of miles away. Through Winifred he felt a sense of history that changed with the moments and years that passed. This history, Sovereign felt while gazing at the creases in his pinkish-brown palms, was like the ocean: undeniable and yet never the same.

“You can’t take it personally,” Drum-Eddie said, breaking into the reverie.

“What?”

Sovereign looked up at his brother then. He noticed that even though Eddie wore an elegant lightweight tan suit and a dark blue linen shirt, his belt was two lengths of rough hemp rope knotted together at the front.

“I don’t know what it’s like for other families, Jimmy J, but we, all of us James kids, got one thing in common.”

“What’s that?”

“Kinda like that movie I liked so much when I was a kid.”

“The Wizard of Oz?”

“That’s it. Here you got a scarecrow, robot man, and a lion, and all of ’em wantin’ sumpin’ they ain’t got. Every one of ’em all magic and shit but they still out there searchin’ for stuff don’t mean a thing.”

“What’s Z missing?”

“Love.”

“You mean she doesn’t know how?”

“That might be true, but no, that’s not what she after. Z come an’ see Mama six times a year, but all Mama want is to see you and me — and Pops too, even though he’s dead. Mama think Z’s there for the men. And Daddy took Zenith for granted. Just ’cause she did everything he said, he didn’t really seem to care about her.”

“But she has her own family.”

“Yeah,” Eddie agreed. “Maybe it’s different there, but when she comes here everything looks the same.”

“And me? What am I missing?”

“You? That’s easy. You always lookin’ for that perfect spin. You know, like when someone skim rocks on the water and wanna make that flat stone jump really far and then bounce ten or twelve times — that’s what you always been after. Like when you would only say a few words instead of a whole sentence. You did that, on and off, for six months. It was like you was lookin’ for the one word that would say everything. And because you don’t have that one answer it’s like you don’t have anything.”

“And you, Eddie?” Sovereign asked. “You don’t seem to be missing a thing.”

“I’m the worst one, Sovy — the worst. I don’t have an anchor, man. I was born so free that I could leave my family behind on a whim. I robbed that bank with those two fools and thirty-six hours later I was laid up with a mamacita learnin’ Spanish and drinkin’ mescal. I left my whole country behind and didn’t even give it a second thought.

“No, Sovy, you, me, and Z been on that Yellow Brick Road for our whole lives — singin’ and dancin’ and worried ’bout that Wicked Witch.”

“But you and Z got families, man. You got kids.”

“You somebody’s kid, JJ. You got a brother and sister and a mother that you don’t never see.”

Sovereign looked out the front window, past the elderly chauffeur. He wondered if maybe all that had gone wrong in his life wasn’t his fault — not exactly. He wondered if the decisions he’d made were just extensions of paths laid out well before he was born. Maybe there was some gene from the father of his father, the man whom no one knew. Maybe it was the death of his grandmother delivering Solar to an impotent father.

But all of that had changed with his blindness. The loss of sight had erased the world and now what he saw was not the same. Blindness had reclaimed his family, as much as possible. Blindness had brought love and passion into his life.

“You grinnin’, Jimmy J,” Drum-Eddie said.

“I guess even the psyche has an immune system,” Sovereign replied.

They drove for hours, finally reaching the airport at Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina. Sovereign paid for their tickets with a debit card and they went to the gate to wait for the plane to LaGuardia.

Somewhere in the middle of the drive the brothers went silent. They sat next to each other, enjoying a physical closeness they hadn’t known since their teens. At the airport they maintained this fraternal quiet.

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 question 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 and 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—”

“You’re claiming that Mr. James was blind at the time of the fight?” Judge Lowell said.

“Not neurologically but neurotically, yes, at least...” Altuna hesitated. “At least, he was blind at the onset of Johnson’s attack.”

“It’s hard for the court to recognize that a blind man of your client’s age and profession could do such damage to a healthy young man armed with a truncheon.”

“It is on this question that our case hinges,” Altuna said. “When Lemuel Johnson attacked Sovereign James, Toni Loam screamed. We have aural witnesses to that event. Hearing a woman whom he had great affection for cry out in such a manner brought Mr. James, literally, to his senses. His sight returned at the moment of greatest need. My client was under physical attack by Johnson and shocked by the return of his vision. In his confusion he lashed out at an enemy. And even though he overreacted, we maintain that he was not in control of his actions and should therefore be seen as innocent in the eyes of the law.”

Judge Lowell laced her hands, bringing the middle knuckle of her right index finger to her lips. From this pose she considered the case.

“The district attorney’s office,” piped up the second of the two prosecutors, “is willing to save time and expense by allowing summary judgment on the facts given. Attempted murder in the first degree seems a plausible verdict.”

“Ms. Altuna?” the judge asked.

“No,” Lena said. “We believe that the evidential discovery will bear out our claim. It is too much to ask the court, or anyone, to believe my clients’ claims on just their testimony. No. We need a full trial to prove our case.”

“I agree,” said the judge. “Mr. Atwell?”

The second prosecutor, a white man, said, “Yes, Your Honor?”

“Any requests about bail?”

“Seeing that the defendant, Mr. James, failed to appear at the first trial date, we believe that he should be remanded. We’ll accept a hundred thousand dollars’ bail on Miss Loam.”

“Mr. James was detained by federal authorities on suspicion, nothing else,” Altuna said. “And he was arrested at LaGuardia Airport on the day before his trial date. The only call he was allowed, he made to me, asking that I tell the court about his situation.”

“He left the state,” Alva Sutter said.

“No one told him not to,” Altuna replied. “A man is innocent until proven guilty.”

That night in their hotel room Toni Loam and Sovereign James had sex again and again without condoms or any other form of birth control. They hadn’t talked about the trial or the low bail set by Judge Lowell. They hadn’t worried about conviction. Sex was the only thing they were interested in.

They fucked and then had room service, fucked and fell asleep. They woke up and rolled around with such abandon that they fell off the bed laughing and fucking.

It wasn’t until three thirty that morning that they woke up and started to talk.

“I don’t know, Sovy,” Toni said.

“You don’t know what?” He kissed her left shoulder and she shuddered.

“How did we get here?”

“This hotel?”

“Standin’ trial, and you got the government on you too. Lem is in the hospital and might not ever wake up. And here we are fuckin’ our brains out like we don’t have a care in the world.”

“Better that than worrying about things we can’t change. The government doesn’t know where I am right now, and we have a good chance of being found innocent.”

“But I’m not innocent,” Toni said. “I brought Lem up there. And ’cause you came in one or the other of you was gonna get killed. That’s on me.”

Sovereign could hear the pain in her voice, see it in her face and hand gestures.

“But what if you were Lem’s father?” he asked.

“What you mean?”

“Wouldn’t his father tell him that he had no business up in my house? Wouldn’t he tell him that it was a coward who’d attack a blind man with a club?”

“Maybe.”

“And me,” Sovereign continued. “I’m the one who beat him. I was blind and then blinded by rage, but still, I didn’t have to punish him like that.”

“But you did.”

“We all did something wrong, Toni. We all did. Not one of us is innocent. We should have known better. We will the next time.”

Sovereign looked over at the girl. She was asleep just that quickly.

The trial took four and a half weeks. Every morning the couple appeared at the nondescript building on Lafayette and listened to witnesses being questioned and cross-examined: doormen and Red Rover limousine drivers; doctors Seth Offeran and Thomas Katz; nurses, waitresses, and some people whom Sovereign had never met.

A woman who lived in his neighborhood testified that Sovereign had changed his direction seemingly to avoid a dog that wasn’t on a chain. And then there was the paramedic who brought James to the hospital after Johnson had attacked him the first time.

“They told me that he was blind,” Rosa Lopez said. She had copper skin and plum-colored freckles. “But when I was reaching back and forth over his head for the oxygen mask, he swayed as if he was watchin’ what I was doing.”

Both sides had experts who did their best to negate the others’ claims. Testimony was long and tedious, repetitious and, often, needlessly specific — at least, that was what Sovereign thought.

The ex — HR manager wondered how such bland discussion could end up in prison sentences. There were people dying in wars, suffering from famine, and here he sat with a roomful of professionals asking questions like was sight associated with a sound, did he move his head every time, and how long ago did you witness this behavior?

“Why does a old man like you always have his dick so hard?” Toni complained one afternoon when court had been let out early. They’d just finished with a room-service meal.

“Because I look at you and come alive,” Sovereign said.

“You been alive for fifty years.”

“I wish. But you know, I feel like I die every day in that fake courtroom. It’s like they bunged me up in a coffin and I’m lyin’ there waiting for the gravediggers to finish before they can lay me to rest.”

Toni grinned and shrugged off the one-piece ochre dress that Sovereign loved.

“You so funny,” she said. “Gimme that dick here.”

She reached out and tugged on him. He grunted and touched her cheek.

That was when the phone rang.

“You gonna answer it?” Toni asked.

“I’m kinda busy.”

“It might be about the trial.”

Toni held on to the erection while Sovereign answered.

“Hello,” he said, stifling a moan of satisfaction.

“Bro?”

“Eddie?” Sovereign stood up and away from the bed.

“Man, I cain’t leave you alone for a minute you ain’t wandered into some quicksand?”

“Where are you?”

“Downstairs.”

“Downstairs where?”

“Your hotel, baby. You know I always got the latest intelligence.”

He was sitting at far end of the dark bar. It was just after four in the afternoon, so there were few customers. Drum-Eddie James was wearing a shark-gray suit, yellow dress shirt replete with ruby cuff links, and black patent-leather shoes. He was talking to a young blond woman with dark garnet lips and gray-green eyes.

“JJ,” Drum-Eddie said as he stood away from the bar stool. “This here is... What’s your name again?”

“Carmen,” the twenty-something woman said. Her nostrils flared.

“Carmen, this is my brother — JJ. We got some business.”

“Okay,” Carmen said, a little reluctantly. “I’ll be sitting at that table over in the corner for a while.”

She touched his gray sleeve and moved away.

“You shouldn’t be here, Eddie,” Sovereign said when the young woman was out of earshot.

“I don’t think I ever been in a place I should’ve been in,” he replied. “Drink?”

“Cognac.”

“Bartender,” Eddie hailed, and when the redheaded man behind the bar looked up, “VSOP for my brother here — in a snifter.”

“Eddie, what are you doing here?”

“I heard that you got in all kindsa trouble for buyin’ my ticket, man.”

“The feds haven’t bothered me since that first day.”

“That’s ’cause I called ’em.”

“You what?”

“I met with this dude down in Havana, state department guy. I told him that I’d be happy to have an enlightening sit-down if they promised to take the weight off a’ you.”

The bartender put a very large snifter, with a good amount of brandy in it, down next to Sovereign’s elbow.

“I’m free of them?”

“Me too. Once we talked they said it was okay for me to come back to the U.S.”

“So you’re moving back?”

“Naw, man. I like it down in South America. I got wiggle room down there — wriggle room too.”

Blond Carmen was staring at the men from her seat in the corner; Sovereign could see her in the mirror behind the bar.

“What?” Eddie asked when the silence had spanned a minute.

“I don’t understand, man.”

“What?”

“Here you are crossin’ borders and makin’ deals with the federal government. You know where I’m hiding and got pretty girls waitin’ their turn. What is it you do that nobody else knows?”

Drum James sat up straight and crossed his legs. He brought the index finger of his left hand to his nose. Sovereign remembered then that his brother was ambidextrous.

“I figure it like this, Jimmy,” he said. “In this world you can either work for somebody else or do your own thing.”

“Like rob a bank?”

“Whatever. You just look at your options and pick the best one.”

“Everybody does that.”

“No, no, no, no, no. Not at all. People take jobs they don’t want, stay in marriages they hate, pay taxes for things they don’t wanna do, and live among people they don’t like. They love their enemies and hate their friends, break their promises and forget about bein’ happy altogether.

“And if you don’t do those things you will find that people are drawn to you. If you livin’ free everybody wants a piece of it. That girl in the corner, federal government too. They don’t care about that bank. They know that the bank the biggest crook there is. They don’t care about drugs or communists or ten thousand poor people starving to death. They just want people like me in the mix. They don’t know why but they do anyway.”

“Do you know why, Eddie?”

“Sure.”

“Are you gonna tell me?”

“It’s like that Carmen in the corner,” the sand-colored man said. “She sees how free somebody is and that makes her feel how trapped she is, even if she don’t know it. She reach out for me, and I got a question.”

“What’s that?” Sovereign James asked his brother.

“ ‘Do you wanna get yourself free or get me caught in the trap you in?’ ”

“And what do you do, according to the answer she gives?”

“First,” Drum-Eddie James said, “I have to figure out if she’s lyin’.”

“About what?”

“That’s not the right question.”

“What is?” Sovereign James asked.

“The question is who she’s lyin’ to.”

“And who is that?”

“Either to me, herself, or both of us,” Eddie said, showing not the slightest bit of humor. “She might say she wanna get free and believe it but it’s still not true. She might be testin’ me, sayin’ she wants the trap, but really she wants me to pry her outta the situation she’s in. She might even be tellin’ me the truth, just not the way it sounds.”

“What does that mean?”

“She might wanna be free for the night and crawl back to her cage in the morning.”

“And when you figure it out,” Sovereign asked, “what do you do then?”

To Sovereign, Drum-Eddie’s smile was like the crack of dawn at the end of a stormy night.

“You might not be able to tell the difference from the outside,” Drum said. “You know it’s the human animal have all them questions and shit, but it’s the animal period that gets up in the bed.

“I do the same things but my intentions are different. If she’s lookin’ to be free I invite her down to Rio and mean it. If she wants to trap me I make the same invitation but never call back.”

“What about what you want, Eddie?”

“Me? I got everything I need, brother. Got it like the grippe.”

“And why are you here?”

“Just to see you, JJ. Just to see you.”

When Sovereign’s eyes met Drum-Eddie’s he wondered if they had ever looked at each other like that before: with love that was deeper than any words could accurately attend.

“I’ve missed you, Eddie.”

“I sent you a text that has all my permanent numbers. If you need me I’m always only half a second away.”

The bank robber got up and slapped his brother’s shoulder. He walked across the bar to where Carmen was waiting. When she stood Sovereign did too.

That night Sovereign rolled into a ball in the hotel bed. Toni curled around him, stroking his head and shoulders. He shivered now and then, causing the young woman to whisper, “Shhhh.”

“You know how sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night and think that maybe you missed something the day before?” he asked late into the night.

“Like what?” she asked.

“Maybe... maybe you said the wrong thing to somebody important, or maybe they said something important to you but you didn’t get it at the time.”

“Yeah,” she said softly. “You feel like that?”

“Every morning lately I wake up I feel like I missed my whole goddamned life.”

“The prosecution would like to present one more witness, Your Honor, before turning the case over for judgment.”

“And who is this witness?”

“Lemuel Johnson.”

“What?” Toni cried out.

The judge didn’t ask for order. Toni’s outcry echoed her own surprise.

“He regained consciousness,” Sutter continued, “two days ago, and the doctors say that he is strong enough to make a statement.”

“Your Honor,” Lena Altuna nearly shouted. “The prosecution has presented their witnesses. We were not informed.”

There was a window behind the judge. The glass was opaque green. Sovereign thought about the haze of light illuminating the room while hiding its sources. He felt Toni grabbing his forearm. There was a moth fluttering in the upper right-hand corner of the window frame.

“It’s okay,” he whispered.

“But, Ms. Altuna,” the judge was saying. “Mr. Johnson is the victim of the crime we’re judging here. He is the only witness, other than the defendants, who experienced the entire flow of events.”

“But he has an interest in keeping his role secret,” Altuna said. “And he might harbor anger at my client for fighting him.”

“I will try my best to keep an open mind, Counselor,” Judge Lowell said. “Mr. Sutter.”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“When can you have Mr. Johnson in court?”

“This afternoon at two.”

“Then we are adjourned until two.”

“Maybe we should run,” Toni suggested at a tapioca tea bar in Chinatown. “You know Lem is gonna want to get some payback for you kickin’ his ass like that. And if they told him that we’re together he’ll wanna get me too.”

“There’s a cigar box in my suitcase in the closet at the hotel,” Sovereign replied. “I got about eighteen thousand dollars in there. You could take it and run. I’ll tell the court you got sick with fear or something.”

“Where you get that money from?”

“Remember when my brother came by the other day?”

“Yeah?”

“He told me that the government is off me, that I could go home whenever I want. I went straight to the bank and cleaned out one of my CDs.”

“Let’s take that money and run.”

“I can’t.”

“You gonna go back?”

“I have to.”

“Why? Why can’t you and me run together?”

“Because I’m not my brother.”

There was a plain walnut chair to the right of Judge Lowell’s makeshift bench. This seat was for witnesses. When the court had been reconvened, at two-oh-seven, the door opened and everyone looked.

Lemuel Johnson had no marks from the beating on his face but he’d lost at least twenty pounds and moved slowly, as if his joints were stiff.

“Oh no,” Toni whispered.

The youngish man limped, without help from the uniformed nurse who followed him, until he had reached the seat. He put out his left hand and steadied himself on the judge’s bench before lowering himself into the witness chair.

The nurse was ecru skinned and voluptuous, forty-something and stern.

Sovereign found that he approved of Lemuel’s guardian.

“State your name for the court,” Alva Sutter said to the final witness.

“Lemuel Fister Johnson.”

“Do you promise to tell the truth here today?”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

Sovereign was taken by the use of the word promise. There was so much meaning to the word used; in this case it was like a child’s fearful request.

“Tell us what happened on the day of the attack,” Alva said.

“I met Toni when she was thirteen and I was twenty-four,” he said.

“I’m asking about the attack, Mr. Johnson,” Alva said.

“I’m tryin’ to get there,” Lemuel replied.

“Just the events as they occurred leading up to the attack.”

“Mr. Sutter,” Judge Lowell interrupted. “It seems to me that the witness is trying to give us a full picture of himself and the defendants.”

“But, Your Honor, we’re only concerned with the crime.”

“You may continue, Mr. Johnson,” Lowell said.

“Your Honor,” Alva protested.

“Sit down, Mr. Sutter.”

When the assistant district attorney obeyed the judge, she turned to Lemuel and said, “Please continue, Mr. Johnson.”

“She was thirteen and I was twenty-four,” the witness said again. “She was young but still almost a woman even way back then.”

Sovereign realized that Lemuel had been thinking very deeply about his testimony. The statement was etched in his mind and he spoke almost as if he were unaware of the words.

“... I was crazy about her and told her,” Lemuel continued. “She told me that I was too old but I bought her a name bracelet and ice cream...”

Toni’s grip on Sovereign’s arm eased.

“... I was like her father and brother and lover all rolled up into one. We’d fight and shit, I mean, stuff. We broke up a few times but we always come back together. I was crazy about her and proud of her and, you know...”

Lemuel’s hands were clasped together in his lap and his head was lowered. He looked to the world like a poor penitent in the back row of a wealthy church.

He looked up then and stared directly at Toni Loam.

She gasped and let go of Sovereign.

“I took her down to the West Village lookin’ for some teenager to rob,” Lemuel Johnson testified. “When I saw that man there he was blind. I hit him with my baton. I hit him once and Toni screamed. I hit him again and Toni screamed some more. I ripped out his pockets and took his money.”

“How long ago was that?” the judge asked.

“Four months. Somethin’ like that.”

“And he was blind?”

“Musta been. He turned right at me and didn’t see me swingin’.”

“And what happened in the defendant’s apartment?” the judge asked.

“Toni left me after I hit a blind man. She said that I wasn’t the person she thought I was. She was right about that. I knew it even then but I was too proud. And when I heard that she was at the blind man’s house every day I got mad. Here he was, rich and could pay her to be with him, and he couldn’t even see.

“So I got me a job and made some money, got me an apartment and went over her house. I told her that I was a new man and that I could be who she wanted me to be. It would’a been fine but then we celebrated and I got drunk...”

Sovereign was suddenly aware of a new conflict between him and the mugger. Lemuel came out of his coma with the intention of taking Toni back. He understood that he couldn’t hurt her or Sovereign and so he would testify to that love under oath, exonerating both of them.

“... I told her to take me to the rich blind man’s house,” Lemuel went on. “I told her to let me take something of his and for her to kiss me there where she worked. We didn’t expect him to come in.”

“Was he still blind?” Judge Lowell stayed on point.

“He walked into the room, face pointed right at me, but his eyes didn’t see.”

“And did you attack him?”

“When I saw him just walk into that house as easy as you please and I knew he had been there every day with my girl I just went crazy. I lifted up my baton — that’s when Toni screamed again. The blind man could suddenly see me and we started to fight. I tried to put him down and then I tried to run. But he was real strong and... and he come after me like in one of those dreams where the giant is on your trail you runnin’ in mud.

“I really don’t remember what happened after that until I woke up in the hospital. They told me about the trial and I wanted to come here and set the records straight.”

Sovereign had the unsettling feeling that if he were alone in a room with Lemuel again, he might take up where he had left off in the street in front of his apartment building.

Sutter and Altuna questioned and cross-questioned the witness but he told the same tale over and over. He was the child molester, mugger, thief. Sovereign was blind and then he could see. Toni’s only crime was believing in him.

Somewhere near five o’clock both sides rested their arguments.

“I will consider the evidence and render my verdict by Monday,” Judge Lowell informed them.

In the hallway outside of the makeshift courtroom Lemuel was waiting with his stern-faced nurse. He limped up to Toni and said, “I’ll be in the hospital for another week. You can call me there if you want.”

On Lafayette Toni told Sovereign that she was going to her mother’s apartment for a few days.

“She been sayin’ that she missed me,” the woman-child lied. “I just need some space.”

“Are you leaving me?” Sovereign asked.

“For a few days.”

“And beyond that?”

“I’m just goin’ home to see my mother.”

“And your boyfriend?”

A feral look spread across the young woman’s face. She sneered and shivered. Before her expression could turn into words she turned quickly and ran.

Sovereign then remembered chasing Lemuel down the hall to the stairs, toward the front door of the building and out to the street. As he stood on Lafayette, his big fists hung at his sides, Sovereign’s breath came in shallow gusts. This reminded him of the desert out around Palm Springs, where his family went for vacation once a year. He wasn’t quite clear about why the desert came to mind, but the memory felt good in his mind — slow and dry.

Part Three

Sovereign James walked toward his apartment from the temporary courtroom that late afternoon. On his way he wondered what would have happened if he and Toni had run away together. Their love was overwhelming and insufficient, unexpected and doomed. Their love was like his life had been. It wasn’t a new thing but a repetition of the old in a new configuration. If he had run with her, sooner or later she would have drifted off to the life she needed. That was the pattern he’d created for himself.

The big bronze doorman, Jolly, was behind the reception desk at Sovereign’s building.

“Mr. James,” the young man hailed. “Haven’t seen you in weeks.”

“Been on trial for attempted murder. The feds were after me too but that stopped.”

“What about the trial?” Jolly asked, his seemingly unsinkable mirth receding behind squinty eyes.

“Judge said she’ll give the verdict on Monday.”

“I remember now,” the young man said. “Axel said that they called him and Geoffrey to testify. I thought they meant in some kind of lawsuit.”

“No.”

“You think they’re gonna find you guilty?”

“Maybe. Probably not completely... but who knows?”

Sovereign walked through the front door of his apartment, closing it behind him. He shut his eyes and stood there — waiting for inspiration. But the feeling of blindness had gone. He no longer knew how to move in darkness.

His sun-flooded living room with its red chair and white sofa held the silent echo of Toni’s scream and the straining of the life-and-death struggle with Lemuel Fister Johnson. His whole life, it seemed, had been in preparation for that fight, when he now knew he should have been training for some other goal.

He sat in the red chair for a while and then moved to the sofa. Three hours later he went to the bedroom and lay down on the big bed. The room had been cleaned multiple times by Galeta and so the scent of Toni’s floral perfume was absent. He closed his eyes but sleep didn’t come. He imagined the dizzying swirl blindness had foisted upon him, but that too had abandoned him.

On Saturday he exercised, fried pork chops, and read Treasure Island, a favorite novel of boyhood.

On Sunday he exercised, fried pork chops, and read Treasure Island again.

No one called that weekend. There was no one to call.

Late Sunday night Sovereign called Seth Offeran’s office phone.

“This is Dr. Offeran’s line,” Seth Offeran’s voice said. “Please leave a message and a number and I will get back to you.”

“It’s Sovereign James, Doctor. I’d like to see you early next week if I’m not in prison. Can you call back and tell me if that’s possible? I can make it any time except Monday at nine. That’s when the judge renders her verdict.”

There were no dreams, because Sovereign did not sleep that weekend. He lay in bed with his eyes shut but was aware of the light, and the possibility of sight, just beyond those closed lids.

Toni hadn’t called but he wasn’t surprised by this. He hadn’t called her. He didn’t know what to say. His birthday was next week. He’d be fifty — exactly half a century old. There was a spider crawling up the wall as Monday’s sun rose to illuminate the opposite end of his bedroom. He was still in shadow but the light was there before him.

The phone rang and the voice-mail message engaged but there was only silence. A few minutes later the phone rang again.

“Hello?”

“Sovereign?”

“Lena.”

“Judge Lowell’s secretary called me this morning...”

“What time is it?”

“A little after seven.”

“She had him call you this early?”

“She said that there’s no case without Lemuel’s corroboration. Even if he’s lying there’s no basis for a conviction. So she’s vacating the case.”

Sovereign looked down and saw that his digital message machine had logged one hundred and forty-seven voice mails.

“Sovereign?”

“Yeah, Lena?”

“Did you hear me?”

“Do I have to go down to Lafayette today?”

“You’re free, Sovy. The case is dismissed.”

“I see.” He was wondering about all those messages.

“Are you all right, Sovereign? Is there somebody I should call?”

“I’m the only one,” he said. “Thank you, Lena. Just send me a bill and I’ll put the check in the mail.”

“... most of the calls,” Sovereign was saying, “came from businesses and salespeople. Most of those were trying to sell me insurance or wanting me to take out loans. There were four wrong numbers and one call from Lemuel Johnson—”

“What did he have to say?” Seth Offeran asked.

“He started off trying to apologize for attacking me twice. He said he shouldn’t have done it but the beating I gave him more than made it equal. It was almost as if he was saying that he allowed me to beat him like that. And then he started talking about Toni, about how much he loved her and how they were supposed to be together.”

“When did he leave this message?”

“The first day he was conscious.”

“How did he get the number?”

“Toni probably used his phone to call me or something. Maybe he got it from her mother.”

“That call sounds crazy.”

“Drugged. He sounded high on the line. Probably some kind of opiate for the pain.”

“Have you heard from Toni?”

“No.”

“Have you called her?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Valentina Holman left me a message about three weeks past.”

“And?”

“She and Verso broke up again. They called off the wedding.”

“Why?”

“She told him about me.”

“Why did she say she did that?”

“It was just a short message and I didn’t call her yet. I probably won’t call. But as far as her telling him is concerned — I figure it’s better that they get it out before the wedding. I mean, if he’s gonna be jealous she should know it before they have kids.”

“I thought you said that she didn’t want children?”

“With me. That doesn’t mean she wouldn’t have Verso’s kids.”

“Why did you call me, Sovereign?”

“Things happen, Doctor. They happen and we respond but the world keeps on going anyway. Not matter what happens, that’s not the end.”

“What happened with you?”

“The judge found me innocent and Lemuel Johnson won our contest. I went home and there was nothing there. I don’t have a job anymore and with that went my only real purpose — the secret revolution that I no longer believe in. I’ll be fifty years old next week, and probably the most fertile time of my life was when I was a blind man.”

“You lament the return of your vision?”

“My mother died last week.”

“What?”

“My sister called. She said that Mama lost strength after my visit. She said that Mama was just holding on to see me one last time.”

“But didn’t you just see your brother a few days ago? Why didn’t he tell you about your mother?”

“He must’ve been in the country for the funeral,” Sovereign said. “Probably didn’t tell me because I was still on trial. Maybe he thought I’d run out of state to go to the funeral.”

“How do you feel about your mother’s passing?”

“I miss Toni,” Sovereign said, as if this answered the doctor’s question. “Not the Toni who needs to run off and go with her old boyfriend but the girl who for a little while thought that she was in love with the man I was.”

“The man you were? What does that mean?”

“I was on a road,” he said. “I was blind of eye but still moving forward. In here, with you, I brought up the questions that mark my life. I was going somewhere but now I’ve hit a dead end.”

“Your life isn’t over.”

“Isn’t our time up, Doctor?”

“We can stay a few more minutes.”

“No. I need to go.”

“Can we talk about medication first?”

“Next time.”

“Shall we meet this time tomorrow?”

“I’ll call you to set up the next appointment.”

“Sovereign.”

“Yes, Seth?”

“I think we should keep up this dialogue.”

“I’ll call you.”

Sovereign had accrued more than a million dollars in his years of employment. Interest and sensible investment had augmented his savings. And so he was in no hurry to go out looking for a new job.

He sat in his Village apartment waiting for the dark mood to break. But as the days went by he failed to locate hope.

Three weeks and two days after the judge had found him not guilty the phone rang. He picked up the receiver but didn’t say anything.

“Sovereign,” Toni Loam said.

“Hey.”

“Can I come ovah?”

“All right.”

Geoffrey LaMott called from downstairs announcing that Toni was asking for him.

“You want me to send her away, Mr. J?”

“No, Geoff, send her on up.”

He went to the door of his apartment, threw it open, and waited.

He stood in the crack of the door, half in and half out of the hall. A young woman in jeans and a pink T-shirt walked by with a small Tibetan spaniel on a rhinestone leash. The long-haired little blond dog pranced up to Sovereign and curtsied in dog fashion. Sovereign knelt down, holding out his left hand.

At first the spaniel backed away but then it moved forward and licked his knuckle.

“She likes you,” the woman said.

Looking up, Sovereign saw that his new neighbor had limp brown hair and a pretty pale face.

“What’s her name?” he asked.

“Hi, Sovereign,” Toni said. She had walked up while he was making friends with the dog and its mistress.

“Come on, Astrid,” the new neighbor said to her little dog. They went on down the hall, leaving Toni and Sovereign.

“Come on in.”

She followed him through the L-shaped inner hall to the deep living room. He waved at the red chair and she sat down.

“Drink?”

“No, thanks.”

“How’ve you been?”

“Could you sit down?” she asked.

Sovereign lowered himself onto the white sofa and clasped his hands.

“How have you been, Toni?”

“Okay.”

“It’s been a while.”

“I’m back together with Lem.”

Sovereign’s nod was almost imperceptible.

“You not surprised?” she asked.

“He was making his play on the witness stand. Are they going to try him for the attacks on me?”

“Only if you make a complaint.”

“Is that why you’re here, to keep me from putting him in the crosshairs?”

“I’m sorry, Sovereign, but you know I been with him what seems like my whole life. And he’s really tryin’ this time.”

They sat in silence for a while then.

“I’m not after your man, Toni. If the DA comes to me I might testify, but they haven’t called yet.”

“Lem’s sorry for what he did.”

“Is that all?”

“Do you want to go to bed?”

“Um.”

“I still like you,” she said almost dispassionately. “And I owe you at least that much.”

“What would Lemuel think about that?”

“He the one send me here to talk to you. I don’t have to tell him nuthin’.”

They sat for at least five minutes before rising at the same moment.

“I’m pregnant,” Toni said, fifteen seconds after Sovereign had come.

“That’s kinda quick, isn’t it?”

“I’m not jokin’,” she said. “All that foolin’ around we did when we thought we was goin’ to prison.”

“Does Lemuel know?”

“I’m’a tell him it’s his.”

Sovereign thought about his grandmother then, the woman he never met. Maybe Eagle wanted a child and she realized he’d never make one. Maybe this was the only way Toni could give Sovereign her love.

Sovereign James sat in the open window of his apartment after Toni left. He was waiting to see her walking down the street toward the turn to her train. The window was open wide and a strong breeze was blowing over him. He sat there teetering on the ninth floor, thinking about his mother and father, brother and sister, about all the years he’d spent working in the shadows of race and capitalism. He wanted to call Drum-Eddie but he was ashamed at his weakness. He wanted Toni to stay with him but he knew that Lemuel would always have first claim on her heart.

Maybe, he thought, if he had killed Lemuel... But no. Everything that happened was supposed to be: his grandfather Eagle shooting himself, Drum-Eddie robbing that bank.

Sovereign noticed that a few people in the building across the way and one or two people in the street were looking up at him. He was leaning forward, pretty far out, but his left foot was curled around the leg of the desk behind him.

A woman pointed at him.

The bell from the front desk sounded.

Toni appeared on the street below, walking slowly, gripping her cranberry-colored bag.

Sovereign leaned out a bit farther.

A woman from below screamed something.

Half an hour before, Toni had experienced a powerful orgasm riding on top of Sovereign. He’d held her hands down at her sides and bucked underneath.

“Do it, daddy,” she’d uttered. “Do it hard.”

And now there she was, pregnant with his child, walking down the street. They’d never see each other again. He’d never hold her or sit next to her while she laughed at some stupid comedy.

His foot let go of the heavy oaken leg.

“Don’t do it!” a man from across the way cried.

Toni turned and looked up.

Without a thought Sovereign let his weight fall. He would sail to the ground, gaining speed as he plummeted. He would hit with such impact that most of his bones would shatter. There’d be no pain, no regret, no convalescence. Death would be like his life had been, only without the distractions.

Screams attended the sway. The bell from downstairs was ringing. And then suddenly, in the middle of the fall, Sovereign’s body stopped its downward trend. Looking up and to the left he saw that his hand — of its own volition, it seemed — had darted out and grabbed the windowsill. His muscles in his forearm were taut like metal cables, and his fingers crunched the slender slats of wood.

His hand had decided to stop him. He wanted to die, to fall, to end it here and now. But this was not to be.

Toni was watching; maybe she called out.

His hand had saved him as if it were a friend or relative or maybe even a disdaining cop.

Hanging half the way out of his apartment window, Sovereign grinned.

He pulled himself back in and went to the living room, where he sat in the red chair, realizing that his old life had ended in that window and the new life had not yet begun.

Content

Walter Mosley
Odyssey

Part One

Part Two

Part Three