Уолтер Мосли - Odyssey

“Your brother is one of the rare beings in this world who is satisfied with his lot. He’s a good friend, and even when he’s your enemy he holds no animosity or grudge. He was able to leave one life behind him and start a new one without a care.”

“Like a snake shedding its skin,” Sovereign muttered.

“What’d you say, baby?” Toni asked.

“Nothing, honey. Just remembering a talk I had.”

“Where do you live, Mr. Selfridge?” Toni asked their host.

“I move around a lot,” he said. “I have a house near the water in Havana, and wives in Bristol, Jo-burg, and Des Moines.”

“You got more than one wife?”

“They all know about one another,” he explained. “The children are aware of their siblings. I even take them all on vacation sometimes.”

“I didn’t think you could own property in Cuba,” she said. “My friend Pasqual told me that communists don’t let people own nuthin’.”

“Maybe not him. But the rules in every society are always shifting. Maybe one day I’ll go home to Cuba and find somebody else living in my little place.”

“What would you do about that?” Sovereign asked, pouring drinks for both Selfridge and himself.

“I’d sit down and talk with them... try to understand where they’re coming from.”

The bumblebee in Sovereign’s chest had turned into a giant moth. The feathery fluttering scared him but he tried not to show it.

“What about you, Mr. James?” Monte asked.

“What about me?”

“What’s it like going blind and then suddenly getting your vision back?”

Once again Sovereign found himself in the sun-flooded living room with the young man attacking him. Ecstasy and desperation descended upon him but he didn’t say that.

“It’s like,” he said, “you were leaning out of a window to get a better view of a fine young woman like Toni here. She looks up and smiles and you bend farther, not thinking about what you’re doing. And then you fall. Suddenly everything is completely different and you can’t adjust to it because you don’t know the rules. You know you’re gonna die and you accept that reality in a split second. And then your clothes snag on a flagpole or lamp ornament and there you are, suspended above the ground, already dead because you accepted it but still alive because of some crazy serendipity of fate.

“And while you hang there, you’re wondering, should you just let go and hit the ground like you were supposed to or should you climb back into the window and go on with your business like nothing happened?”

Toni took his hand and squeezed it.

Monte smiled and raised his glass.

“It’s getting late,” the admitted bigamist said. “There are rooms downstairs that you guys could stay in. That is, if you don’t want to bother going home.”

“Rooms?” Sovereign said. “At a restaurant?”

“You fell out the window; Alice tumbled down a rabbit hole,” Monte said. “It’s all the same. There’s always a different world out there. Always.”

It was a small dark room that had a window on the Bowery. Toni and Sovereign toppled onto the single mattress, laughing and kissing sloppily.

“I didn’t bring any condoms,” he said while she tugged at his belt.

“That’s okay,” she whispered, now unzipping his pants.

“I’m so drunk I don’t think I could get that far.”

“You can if I help you.”

“I just like lying here next to you, Miss Loam. I like how smooth your skin is.”

“Would you really jump out a windah to see me, daddy?”

“I already did that. I already did that.”

The dream started out normally — a displaced reality far from the province of the world. Sovereign was pushing his grandfather’s wheelchair down the long ribbon of asphalt that bordered the Pacific Ocean. The chair was heavier than usual but the little boy had become a man and so managed with no trouble.

“I’ve been thinking about what you said, Sovy,” Eagle James espoused. “And I do believe you’re right. My son will be hurt by me just shootin’ myself. He won’t know what to do.”

“Thank you, Grandpa Eagle,” the man said with a boy’s deference.

Then the old man, quicker than Sovereign could imagine, pulled out the dark pistol, shoved the barrel up his right nostril with his right hand, and fired. The shot lit up the old man’s right eye like one of the flashbulbs of the boy’s Kodak Brownie camera. Then the blood slithered out, an angry snake chasing the fallen pistol that had disturbed its hibernation.

Sovereign for his part was trying to resolve the conundrum of the right nostril. He thought that the proper place to point the pistol would have been the left side — right hand, left side. If Eagle had made that choice, the proper one, he might not have awakened the snake and would probably have survived.

A child was running, his little feet thudding on the pathway. Looking in the direction of the quick, light steps, Sovereign saw himself as a boy hurrying to his grandfather’s side.

Eagle was dead. And even though Sovereign had returned, and obviously had tried to convince his grandfather to put off the suicide, little Sovereign was still there buying the root beer for him and his grandfather.

Sovereign the man took a step backward and so went unnoticed by the boy, who ran to the wheelchair, stopped, and stared long enough to comprehend what had happened. When the reality of Eagle James’s death settled on the boy he screamed and closed his eyes, fell to the blacktop, and wailed. In the distance Sovereign the man could see people pointing and running his way. The men gathered around the dead man and a white woman picked up the boy, whose eyes were still closed, and held him to her breast.

“Open your eyes, Sovereign,” Solar James commanded.

“No!”

The boy was lying abed with his mother applying a wet towel to his forehead. Sovereign the man stood still in a quiet corner remembering these events as he saw them. Offeran was right. He had kept his eyes shut for almost a day after seeing that glistening snake, that red ribbon of death. This was his attempt to deny the truth.

“Did you know my father had that pistol?” Solar asked angrily.

“Solar!” Winifred shouted. “Let him be!”

The boy wailed. The man watching the dream-memory turned away. He gritted his teeth, expecting to hear the argument continue, but instead there came a kind of blessed silence.

In his sleep Sovereign realized the connection between sight and sound in his mind. Relief, like that cool towel on the boy’s fever, came to him. He turned back and saw himself as a child awakening in the small bed with the early morning sun peeking in from the window. There was another bed in the room — Drum-Eddie’s. That bed was empty, so little Sovereign jumped out from under the covers. He heard sounds from downstairs and followed them, unaware that he himself was being followed by the full-grown dreamer.

From the turn in the stairs Sovereign found himself looking down at his mother and father, and himself at the age of nineteen.

“He is no longer my son,” Solar James was saying. “He’s a thug and a thief and no longer my son.”

“But you weren’t Grandpa Eagle’s son and he always loved you,” the small boy shouted.

No one heard him.

“That’s some dream,” Seth Offeran said that afternoon. “Any thoughts?”

“I woke up crying. Lucky for me Toni sleeps like a stone.”

“Why lucky? Why shouldn’t she see you cry?”

“Because... I don’t know... Because...”

Offeran sat back in his chair.

Relieved by the psychiatrist’s silence, Sovereign said, “In the morning, when Toni woke up, we went down the stairway two floors to the kitchen. A biracial woman named Madeline was cleaning. She told us that Monte had left that morning for South America. We offered to pay her for the room but she said that it wasn’t a hotel but a courtesy for favored customers. She said that Monte always stayed with them when he was in town.”