Odyssey (13 page)

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.

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.

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.