Уолтер Мосли - Odyssey

“Sure, Lena. Talk.”

“I’m taking you to a hotel in the West Village, to stay in a room paid for by my offices. That way if the government wants you they’ll have to work at finding you. You’ll have an expense account with the hotel, so you won’t have to use your credit cards, and I’ll give you a thousand in cash for incidentals.”

“Thanks. That’s above and beyond.”

“I’m just taking it out of your advance. Tomorrow morning I’ll have a car bring you to court. Judge Lowell, at my request, will change the venue half an hour before the hearing. That way she can set a trial date without interference from the feds.”

Sovereign smiled and nodded, took an envelope stuffed with twenty-dollar bills, and climbed into the car with his lawyer. A minute after settling into the plush leather seat at the back of the Lincoln, Sovereign fell deeply asleep. He wasn’t aware of sight or time, weight, or even the desire to go to the toilet. He didn’t dream. Some weeks later, when he remembered this nonmoment, he thought that it was a blinking of his soul — an instant of complete spiritual blindness. It was as if he was gone from the earth completely: not dead but way beyond the Land of Nod.

“Sovereign. Sovereign.”

They were stopped at the busy corner of 14th Street and 6th Avenue in Manhattan. He could have walked to his apartment from there.

Staggering out onto the sunny street of the bustling city, Sovereign James was amazed. The sights and sounds, even the feel of the breeze on his skin, were things remembered and things new. For a time all of his senses had ceased and now they were roaring back to life. He grinned and opened his mouth to take in as much air as possible.

“It’s beautiful,” he said.

“Come on, Sovereign,” Lena replied. “We have to go.”

Walking down along the street, Sovereign tried to keep on a straight path but the life of the city distracted him. There was a young black woman with big legs and a very short skirt, a satisfied sneer on her lips about something good. Her gait and expression brought to mind a storied character dancing down the sidewalk, a nearly mythological personage whom many tales and exaggerations were based on.

Sovereign’s heart was beating fast, his mind switching channels, unable to hold on to a thought for more than a few seconds.

“Come on, Sovereign,” Lena Altuna said for the sixth or seventh time.

He had stopped in front of a coffee shop to look in through the big window. There was an elderly white couple sitting there, facing each other but reading newspapers. Their clothes were shabby and the restaurant was cheap. They had come there together, had ordered the same meal. They wore wedding rings and seemed enthralled with the news.

“Thank you for getting me out of there, Lena,” he said.

“What?”

“I could have died in there. I mean, my spirit could have.”

“Come on,” she said. “We have to go.”

When he made it to the hotel room Sovereign finally got to go to the toilet. It was an intense urination. He felt, for the first time ever, that an incredibly long and slender snake was escaping his body, returning to the world. He stood there, barefoot on the hard tile, thinking about dimensions that existed beyond his perceptions. These were places that he inhabited but did not see.

He fell onto the king-size bed and was instantly unconscious, unknowing. It was a welcomed death of sorts: passing out, passing away.

Once again there was a cessation of tactile experience; there was no sense of temperature, light, or sound, but inside this bout of emptiness there was a feeling of awareness, a being that Sovereign might have shared with other points of view. He lay there unaware of his being but coexisting with something, or somethings, else.

When the phone rang the first time he didn’t hear it at all.

He experienced the second bout of ringing as his brother and sister laughing and shouting, running through the sprinklers in the backyard. His mother was there and his father. There was a gray-brown mutt looking from a safe distance. This was a dog that Drum-Eddie had found on the beach and brought home.

Nathaniel — that was the dog’s name.

Silence.

Nothingness.

The third call again reminded him of children’s laughter and he woke up expecting to see them playing on the carpet next to his bed.

It was dark outside. The phone was ringing. He had to go to the toilet again.

He was not in federal custody.

Lurching upright, Sovereign went to the bathroom and returned to sit on the side of the bed. He was lost but not missing or absent. His brother was alive and his father the relative of snails and redwoods.

On the fourth call he picked up the phone midway through the second ring.

“Hello?”

“Mr. James.”

“Toni.” All the abstraction left his mind. Suddenly there was gravity and sound and light.

“Miss Altuna called and gave me your number. Where you been?”

As the words tumbled forth Sovereign realized with certainty that he was no longer the man he had been before the blindness. He told Toni Loam about his brother and mother, about his sister and her inability to experience love directly. He talked about the federal agents as if they were a gang rather than officials of the government, and about the young woman with the big legs and self-satisfied sneer.

“You lookin’ at other girls’ legs, huh?”

“Do you want to come over?”

The same driver who brought Sovereign to Greenwich Village from the Brooklyn courts picked him and Toni up the next morning. They were taken to a dirty brick building on Lafayette between Canal and Houston.

Lena met them at the entrance.

The lawyer led them past the first set of elevators and down a long, darkish hallway. There they came to a small lift that took them to the ninth floor.

Another dark hall brought them to a door. This opened into a rude room dominated by one large table faced by two smaller ones. Behind the long table sat a small woman with a wide face and brown hair. She wore a gray-and-brown dress suit with dull maroon shoes showing from under the table. Sitting at the table on her right were two men in business attire. The men looked up when Lena, Toni, and Sovereign entered.

To the left of the door they came through stood a uniformed guard, a black man with a big stomach and no discernible expression. Two more guards — a man and a woman, both white — stood behind the wide-faced woman at the long table.

Lena led her clients to the table on the small woman’s left.

“Good morning, Your Honor,” Lena said.

“Where is Miss Loam’s attorney?” the judge asked.

“We have agreed to have them tried together, Your Honor,” one of the men from the other table said.

“As you will, Mr. Sutter,” middle-aged Judge Lowell said. Turning to Sovereign she added, “I have allowed for this unusual meeting because of you, Mr. James. It seems that the federal government wants to whisk you away on the hope that you will lead them to your brother.”

Sovereign didn’t say anything, because Lowell hadn’t asked a question. Her eyes were hard and honed in on him.

“ Do you know where your brother is?” she asked.

“No. No, I don’t.”

The judge stared a moment more and then said, “Okay, then. Mr. Sutter, you may begin.”

“Your Honor,” the prosecutor said. He stood up.

Sutter (Sovereign later learned that the chief prosecutor’s first name was Alva) stood up, revealing his tall, gaunt frame. He was a light-colored African American with eyes that might have had a little green to them.

“Mr. James and Miss Loam are charged with a crime that, for all intents and purposes, they have admitted to. Miss Loam brought Lemuel Johnson to Mr. James’s apartment so that Mr. James could exact revenge for Mr. Johnson’s earlier attack on him. James attacked Johnson in his living room but the victim ran. James chased his victim from the ninth floor to the front of his building, where he pummeled the younger man into a coma in front of more than a dozen witnesses. The charge, as you know, is attempted murder to be shared equally between the defendants.”