Уолтер Мосли - Odyssey

“Did he really say that or are you just making it up?” Valentina asked. For the first time her voice carried some of its old mirth.

“I’m pretty sure he said it,” Sovereign replied, “but you know memory is like that lake — you think you know it but you never have it all.”

“I have to get back to work.”

“I’m glad you came here, Valentina. I’m glad you found me.”

“I remembered you used to come here for lunch on your days off,” she said.

“I’m glad.”

“Good-bye,” she said, and he felt a feathery kiss on his left eyebrow. After a few moments he realized that she was gone.

He thought that maybe he hadn’t tricked her after all, that maybe he’d broken a cycle in himself and not between them. Maybe his grandfather had lectured him on the unconscious shortsightedness of men for just such a day as this.

“Were you lying?” Seth Offeran asked an hour and a half later.

“I thought I was,” Sovereign said. “But when I think about it, maybe it was the only way that I could speak the truth.”

“Explain.”

“Everything I do is a game, Doctor. Every word, every question or statement or answer I give is designed to help me win.”

“Win what?”

“I don’t know... I mean, I used to think that I knew. Getting my parents to think I was the best over my brother and sister, getting the top grades, or making the team. Even in the lunchroom I’d try to be the most popular by making fun of other kids’ problems or differences.”

“And that was winning?” Seth Offeran asked.

“I thought so. People always seem to be trying to get the upper hand. Valentina was trying to in our conversation. She wanted to put the blame for our breakup on me. She feels that it was my fault for wanting children and not the relationship she’d offered. She couldn’t say that, so she wanted me to act brutish so she could reject me for the way I treated her.”

“You can’t be sure of that.”

“Do you think I’m wrong about her?”

Sovereign counted the seconds — one, one thousand, two, one thousand, three, one thousand — while Offeran thought about the question. As he counted he realized that he wasn’t trying to win anything. This insight made him wish that he could see the psychoanalyst’s face. He wanted to make eye-to-eye connection with the man and was sorry that he could not.

“No,” Offeran said at last. “From everything you’ve told me about Valentina and your talk I believe that she would try to shift the responsibility for the breakup to you. But can you blame her?”

“No. She’s a very ambitious woman, but success for her is more emotional than it is material. She needs to believe that she’s done the right thing. Guilt undermines her claim on success.”

“Like losing does for you,” Offeran added.

“Just so.”

“Are you playing me right now, Sovereign?”

“I don’t believe I am. I’m beginning to like these talks. And... and I only short-circuited the talk with Valentina because I really do think she’s right.”

“Right about what?”

“If I had approached her differently, if I had shared my feelings with her rather than just thrown the idea of a child on the table like some kind of stillborn hope, maybe... maybe we could have talked about it — learned something.”

“So you stymied her attempt to blame you because what she would have said was true and you were trying to protect yourself from the pain of that truth.”

“Yes.”

“Has any of your sight returned?”

“No.”

“Not even a glimmer?”

“No. Why do you ask?”

“That’s why we’re here,” Offeran replied. “We’re here to unknot the psychological basis for your blindness. Every time I notice a change in you I will ask the same question.”

At that moment Sovereign’s head jerked to the right.

“What was that?” the doctor asked.

“A tic, a spasm. I’ve been having them ever since I lost my sight.”

“There’s a fly in here today,” Offeran said. “I heard it buzz behind me just before your head moved.”

“So?”

“So maybe you saw the fly and responded on an unconscious level.”

“I didn’t see anything.”

“Our time is up for today.”

In the Red Rover car service car and through the front door of his apartment building, up the elevator and on the way to his white sofa, Sovereign was thinking; he was thinking about that fly and how quickly his head moved. He’d heard the buzzing too, but he didn’t remember seeing anything...

The idea that he made up his condition seemed preposterous. How could a man make himself not see the world around him? Like a child denying the obvious. But he wasn’t a frightened boy. Sovereign was a man who lived in the world, made a living, made a difference. How could such a person be petulant and stubborn enough to shut down an entire sense?

It was ridiculous.

Putting the absurd notion out of his mind, Sovereign set about doing his daily exercises.

From the first full day of his blindness he realized that he’d have to work out. It was the home-delivery pizza and Chinese food that convinced him. He was eating badly and too much. He had once been a fat man. It took years of changing his eating habits to get down to a normal weight. Now that he was eating junk food again he’d have to balance it another way.

The first day he did three push-ups, seven abdominal crunches, and fifteen steps running in place, bringing his knees nearly up to his shoulders. He did this circuit of exercises three times and stopped, winded. By the end of the second week he’d gotten up to twelve push-ups, twenty-five crunches, fifty running-in-place steps, and ten circuits. After that he’d only increased the repetitions. By that Wednesday afternoon he’d gotten up to thirty-two circuits. He liked the sweat and the fact that his muscles were getting hard.

After exercising and showering Sovereign went to the drawer where Galeta stored his casual clothes. He dressed and went out again.

“Where you going, Mr. James?” Axel Parman, one of the doormen, asked.

“Out. Going to walk around the block.”

“Good for you. You don’t want this kind of thing to get you down.”

Outside Sovereign heard the sounds of cars and footsteps, experienced the air and sun on his face. His muscles shook a bit from the hard exercise but that served only to increase his feeling of well-being. Tapping to the left with his white cane he hugged the wall of his block-square apartment building and went all the way around. He completed this circuit again, and again. He lost count of the times he’d walked around the building as his thoughts drifted.

He’d given Valentina something she desired. The walnut-eyed brunette had never expected anyone to recognize her for the person she wanted to be. And he, Sovereign, had long been waiting for a woman to offer herself to him with seemingly no strings attached.

“Has anybody ever sucked your dick like this?” she asked him not one hour after they’d had their first lunch together.

They were reclining on his white sofa and he was thinking, Yes, they have, except no, they haven’t, because nobody ever asked that question before . It was the way she talked to him that drove Sovereign wild.

And then, two weeks later, she said while riding him, “I’m leaving Verso.”

“Your husband?”

“I told him yesterday.”

“But...”

“Don’t worry, Sovy; I don’t want to move in on you. All you have to do is keep talking to me and keep that dick hard when I come over.”

She was twenty-one years younger than he and white and married (soon to be divorced), but Sovereign could not bring himself to break away.