Уолтер Мосли - Odyssey

“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.