Odyssey

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.