Odyssey (2 page)

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.