“All the people in your family have interesting names,” Offeran said.
“That comes from my father’s mother, Athena Winston-James. She came from Tennessee and was brought up on the notion that a black person’s name had to have power or elevation, or both. She died giving birth to my father but he kept up her tradition. Solar was my father and he named us Sovereign, Zenith, and Drum.”
“Makes you different.”
“The most different one was my younger brother, Drum, but he had everybody call him Eddie. Like I told you, most of the time I called him Drum-Eddie. He had about a dozen nicknames for me.”
“And what was it about Eagle James?”
“Granddad was my lifeline when I was a boy. He told me everything. He even said how after he was wounded in the war...”
The words trailed off.
“What about his wound?” the doctor asked when Sovereign hesitated.
“Years later he went to a doctor and the doctor told him that he was impotent due to the operation they performed to save him.”
“Yes?”
“That operation took place two years before my father was sired.”
“Oh. What did your father think about that?”
“No one ever told him.”
“Your grandfather made you keep it a secret?”
“Not really. I just never told my dad. I couldn’t see how telling him would help anything.”
“That’s a heavy responsibility for a little boy.”
“It was my grandmother’s indiscretion, and she died in childbirth.”
“That’s still a tough position for a child.”
“I suppose. I never thought about it too much. I mean, I loved my grandfather and that was all I needed to know. He was the only father my father ever knew. Why mess that up?”
“You weren’t related to him by blood but by love,” Seth Offeran said. “And now this young woman will be like that for you, your only connection with the world.”
“That’s strange, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean by strange?”
“That a man in the fiftieth year of life has no friends he can call on, no family.”
“Your sister called last night.”
“She said that my blindness wasn’t serious because I made it up.”
“No. She just said that you made it up. In a way she’s right.”
“I want to see.”
“Maybe,” Seth Offeran said. “Maybe you want somebody to take care of you. The black people in your office don’t appreciate what you’re doing for them. Valentina left when you asked to have a child, reminding you of what your grandfather’s wife did to him. Now, because of your blindness, this young woman, this Toni Loam, feels like the only one who might care.”
The words reverberated inside the vast darkness of Sovereign’s mind. He felt giddy and hopeful... then lost. He wanted to take out his cell phone and talk to the child right then. But he also wanted to see her — a momentary break from his blindness.
“It’s like escaping from prison,” he uttered.
“What’s that?”
“That’s what my grandfather used to say. He said, ‘Let’s have us a jailbreak, little man,’ and I knew that he wanted me to push him around the block or down along the beach. He’d play his transistor radio and we’d sing along even though he never knew the words.”
“You loved him.”
James didn’t realize that there were tears coming from his eyes until he felt the tissue pressed against his fingers.
“Thank you, Doctor,” he said.
Back home, in the middle of his twenty-ninth set of push-ups, Sovereign was giggling. He was thinking of his grandfather singing nonsense lyrics to a Beatles song. I’d love to get this on, he sang.
After exercising he took a shower. After showering he usually turned on NPR to hear the news about events of the day. But that late afternoon he went into his bedroom, to the window. He lifted the screenless pane up high and sat there, behind his desk and on the windowsill, listening to the rumblings of his city.
There were voices and laughter, cars stopping and going, honking and idling. Now and then he could feel a rumble through the building: the PATH train making its journey either to or from New Jersey.
He thought about Toni’s face, about her name and himself as a boy. The images got tumbled together and at some point they were both children in the summer heat on the San Diego beach. He remembered wheeling his grandfather out on a long, slender pier that extended over the bay. The water beneath them was deep, and once, a school of a dozen or more sharks passed beneath them. Gray skinned, sleek, and maybe six feet at the longest, they cut through the water, beautiful enemies with no conscience or malice.
A helicopter passed overhead. Nonsensically Sovereign was reminded of frogs sitting below murky waters, looking up for insects, preferably dragonflies.
Dragonfly’s the most beautiful bug there is, Eagle James once told his grandson. Like a monarch butterfly with attitude.
Monarch, Sovereign, and helicopters flying overhead, him down under the murky sky waiting for the morning, when a child might come and save him.
That night, with the window still open, Sovereign decided to go to bed. It was a big decision. He hadn’t been in his bed since the day he woke up blind.
The first thing he experienced that morning was the room spinning and then the realization that he couldn’t see. The sequence of these events seemed very important. First the spinning, then the blindness. It was like when the merry-go-round of his childhood went too fast and he felt as if he’d be thrown off and scraped by the gravel.
Too fast! Too fast! the girls and littler boys would shout. And Sovereign would laugh, kicking the ground and worried at the same time that he’d gone beyond his limits...
The bed felt as if it was moving under him. It turned and wobbled like a magic carpet low on juice. He kissed the palm of his hand and stayed prone in the bed under the covers. After a while the feeling started to remind him of being in a boat on troubled waters. Nausea roiled but he stayed on his side. His ears seemed to fill up and a moan came from his chest. When he thought that he couldn’t take it anymore he started to writhe, mimicking the movements of his unstable mind: shoulder up and then hip to the side, his legs straight out and then pulled up tight; he rolled over to his other side and then pressed his hands out. Sovereign kept thrashing about until he found the rhythm of the motion that spun the room. He was lying on his stomach moving his hips and chest, shoulders and knees. The erection was a surprise, not what he was after or even wanted. But he had to keep on moving, moving. He was an eel in the ocean looking for a hole to hunt from, a sharp-toothed snake with eyes that had seen a hundred million years of so-called progress.
The orgasm was also a surprise. He’d felt the erection like a response, not a passion. But he came hard and copiously, grunting like a wild creature rutting by scent and color. After it was over he shuddered for a minute or more and then felt a chill run through his body like a living thing giving up the ghost.
And for the first time in more than two months he was lying down and not dizzy. The room was still and his heart was beating fast. He grinned and shut his eyes tight. Still blind, he fell asleep smiling.
“So what do we do today?” Toni Loam asked Sovereign James at ten thirty-seven the next morning.
“What time do you have to be home?”
“I’m a full-grown woman, Mr. James. I don’t have a curfew.”
“I asked you to call me Sovy.”
“That was before I was gonna work for you. Now that you’re my boss I feel better calling you mister.”