Уолтер Мосли - Odyssey

“You were going to give up your job with me?”

“Uh-huh. I knew I’d break your trust bringin’ Lem up there and I thought he had really changed, but now I know he haven’t. Now I know that it’s ’cause he wit’ me that he do like that.”

“You blame yourself?”

“Since we been broken up he got a job at the supermarket and got a place to stay and everything. But just one night wit’ me and he dropped all that. Instead of goin’ to work he wanna come fuck me up in your bed, and then when you walked in he tried to beat you again even though you blind and no threat to him. At least, that’s what he thought.”

Sovereign sat down in the red chair, reclining and allowing his feelings and musings to mingle. The rage he felt at Lemuel Johnson returned and he noticed that he had the beginnings of an erection. He wondered if a man could fall prey to his own base nature because of the feeling he had for a woman, and he thought that he would fight for Toni Loam no matter the consequence to him.

In the back of his mind his father and sister called him a fool, while his mother just shook her head and Drum-Eddie grinned. His grandfather would have something wise to say, but whatever it was it wouldn’t matter, because in the end men were just fools anyway...

“Men are fools,” Sovereign said into the receiver. “We’re always blaming women for the things we do when really it’s the fault in our own natures.”

“What do you mean, Mr. James?”

“If a man gets addicted to heroin you can’t say that it was the heroin’s fault, can you?”

“No. I guess not.”

“If a man leaves his wife and she finds another man, she can’t blame herself if her first husband gets mad, can she?”

“Not if he the one that left.”

“Then it’s not your fault that Lemuel can’t think right when it’s time for him to do so.”

“But I brought him up there.”

“Yes... and that was wrong, but you didn’t expect him to attack me, or for me to be there at all — did you?”

“No.”

“Then we’ll forget about it and look to the future.”

“But I let him take one a’ your watches and I was gonna... fuck him up in your bed.”

“I don’t care about any of that, Miss Loam. I can see again and this time it was because of your shouting to save me. I saw you reaching out to pull Lemuel back. I saw the sun coming in...”

In the following lull in the conversation Sovereign noticed a small beetle walking along the windowsill. It was a seasonal wood beetle that lived in the floors of the apartment building. He usually crushed these bugs whenever he saw them, but this time, a self-ordained deity, he just watched in a minor stupor of amazement.

He asked if Toni’s mother was okay and she told a long and convoluted story, at the end of which her mother ended up in East St. Louis for a few weeks visiting Auntie G’s sister.

“Why you do that to Lemuel?” she asked in his ear.

The bug moved along like a rude cottage, given life and legs, that was now lumbering away from a lifelong servitude to civilization.

“I don’t know,” Sovereign James said.

“You got to know. You ran after him. You chased him down and beat him like a dog.”

Sovereign tried to remember the fight, but everything that happened after he left the apartment was hazy. There was a roar in his ears and a damnable squeaking in the distance. There was a heart beating and the back of somebody he was trying to catch up with but never could.

“I can only say that I probably hated him, but I can’t remember feeling or doing anything.”

“But you almost killed him,” she insisted. “You put him in a coma.”

Sovereign could tell that she was hurt. He wanted to explain but could not. He wanted to make her feel better the way he wished someone had done for him when Eagle had died.

Sovereign now had a full erection.

“He made me mad,” the employment officer said.

“What?”

“He made me mad,” Sovereign said again, voicing an emotion that he could not remember but that he was certain of. “How dare he come into my house and steal from me and expect to have sex in my bed with a woman that I...”

“That you what?”

“A woman under my protection.”

“What does that mean?”

Sovereign took the erection in his left hand.

“I’m not sure,” he lied. “I feel very close to you, and when I saw him push you I got angry.”

“Like you were jealous?” Toni Loam asked in a voice that was new to Sovereign.

He squeezed the hard prick and winced.

“You saved me,” he said instead of really answering. “You... you were the only face that I saw in three months.”

“And so, like, you had a crush on me or sumpin’?”

Blindness, Sovereign thought, was a boon if it didn’t last forever. He could see through a finely developed mind’s eye that Toni’s words offered a door. He couldn’t tell if this portal was an entrance or exit. He dawdled in front of this gateway, feeling... feeling... free.

“Yes,” he said at last.

“Yes, you had a crush on me?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What?”

“I said yes.”

“Say it,” she said, and Sovereign had the feeling that the woman he spoke to had transformed in an instant like a larva into something beautiful, winged, and maybe deadly.

“I love you,” he said, not considering the words.

“What? I thought you said you had a crush on me.”

“That’s what you said. You said it, not me.”

The beetle was gone. The room down below, where the woman had been running, was empty, as was the kitchen where the husband and children had eaten and talked. The man in the baby-blue suit was probably at work by now, and the fire that the sirens sang for was no doubt extinguished.

“You love me?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Did you mean it?”

“I think so.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Because I’m in my fiftieth year and you’re in your twenty-second. Because I was blind and stupid and because I’ve always been alone in one room or another. Because you’re young and beautiful and I’m an old toad.”

“I’m not beautiful,” she said, and he laughed. “Why you laughin’?”

“Because I am a fool and there’s nothing I can do about it. Or... better still — I am a fool and I haven’t been able to do anything about it until I jumped on your boyfriend, and I don’t even remember doing that.”

“And you did it because you love me?”

“I’m not jealous,” he assured her. “It’s just that I haven’t been able to feel much for so long, and now that I have you, or had you, in my life I feel like I can go outside.”

“I don’t know what that means, Mr. James.”

“It’s like I was blind before I was blind, and losing my sight brought me ’round to a place that I had never seen even though I was sighted,” he said, realizing that his comprehension was mostly gibberish.

“But what’s that got to do with Lemuel and you sayin’ that you love me?”

“Everything for me has always been a secret,” he said, feeling that these words were somehow bedrock. “My father’s father couldn’t make a woman pregnant but his wife had my father anyway. I never told anybody that. The people who I employ are part of a one-man conspiracy to take over the white business world one hire at a time. I want to be with a woman and so I give her a job taking me around just so I can sit next to her in a movie theater and listen to her laugh.

“The only straightforward thing I’ve done in a very long time is beat on Lemuel. Even though I don’t remember it, that came from the heart.”

“Don’t you feel guilty?”

“I am guilty,” he said, “so I don’t have to feel anything at all.”