Уолтер Мосли - Odyssey

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.