“I can’t lie down, Doctor.”
“Why not?”
“Because when I do the room starts spinning. Well, I guess it isn’t the room, because I can’t see it, but I get all dizzy and off-balance. It feels like I’m on my back in a raft that floated out over a whirlpool. After lying down it takes me a while to get back up again. One time I fought it, stood straight up and fell on my butt.”
“How do you manage to sleep at night?”
“Sit on my sofa in the living room and meditate or listen to the radio until I’m out. Then I lie down naturally. I can do it if I’m already out, but if I’m awake... no way.”
Now that he was aware of the window Sovereign could make out the susurration of traffic in the distance. There was also the drone of a motor idling somewhere nearby.
Offeran was silent, considering the information that James presented.
“Do you think that Dr. Katz’s parents were jokers?” the reluctant patient asked.
“Jokers? What do you mean?”
“They’re the ones who named their kid Tom Katz.”
There came a grunt that might have been a laugh.
Sovereign ran his right palm along the rough fabric cushion beneath him.
“I think his mother was Catholic,” Offeran, the doctor without a face, said. “Her father’s name was Thomas and he had just died when Dr. Katz was born.”
“Just one a’ those crazy things,” James said, thinking of the once popular jazz song.
“I suppose we could start the sessions with you sitting up,” Offeran said. “But I’d like to come back to this issue of your dizziness in future sessions.”
“How many of these sessions are there going to be?”
“As many as it takes. The way this works is that you come every weekday afternoon at two. I will use that time to evaluate you and your progress... Maybe I’ll even be of some help.”
“Doctor, I need to get back to work. I’m tired of goin’ from place to place and having people tell me that they don’t know what’s wrong. I can tell them what’s wrong.”
“And what’s that, Mr. James?”
“I’m blind. Thursday morning, six weeks ago, I woke up and couldn’t see a blessed thing. Nothing. From that day to this I been like a blind bug. They sent me home and then to twenty different doctors, hospitals, clinics, and wherever and they all told me that because they can’t say why I’m blind that I must not be. I wish they had these eyes. All I want is to get back on the job and do what I know. I don’t need to see to do my work.”
“You’re a human resources officer?”
“And the head of employment, yes.”
“Don’t you need to look someone in the eye to understand them?”
“At Techno-Sym we work as teams. There are always two HR officers at an internal interview. Most of what I ever understood was in the voice that speaks and the answers given. If there’s any body language my partner can pick up on that.”
Ellen Saunders came unbidden into Sovereign’s mind at that moment. She was wearing a camel-colored dress that was a bit short, sitting across from him and Myrna Malloy. Ellen’s skin was the same tone but a slightly different color from the dress. Her legs were crossed. Her expression was unpleasant even though it was just a routine yearly evaluation.
Then, in the vision and quite unexpectedly, a bird of black and scarlet fluttered up and landed on the taciturn woman’s shoulder. The stark colors of the bird’s plumage stood out from the mild browns of the woman and her dress. The black eyes of the creature were intelligent and predatory. It was, Sovereign thought, like her angry soul made manifest, animated by a bird of prey.
When had he met with Ellen? He couldn’t remember.
“Mr. James?”
“Yes?”
“I asked you a question.”
“Sorry. My mind must have drifted.”
“What were you thinking?”
“Trying to remember the last time I was in my office... doing my job.”
“I told the mothahfuckah he better chill,” a man’s voice from outside the window exclaimed.
Someone else, a woman, laughed.
“I asked you if you believed that your blindness has a physical basis.”
“I can’t see. That’s physical, isn’t it?”
“Not necessarily. You must have studied psychology to get your degree, Mr. James.”
“Freud has been disproved on a hundred different points.”
“But hysterical blindness has not.”
“I haven’t had any traumatic experience. I had been working all week doing what I’ve done for twenty years or more.”
“You’re an exceptional man, Mr. James.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But it is an exceptional man who has had no traumas in an entire life of forty-nine years.”
Again an image appeared in Sovereign’s mind. This time he was standing on a weatherworn wood pier looking down on a rowboat. It was his grandfather Eagle James’s boat. Sovereign had never been on that pier, never seen that dinghy, but his grandfather had told him about it a dozen times from his wheelchair. The HR officer remembered distinctly the odor of urine and vodka along with the story of the days that Eagle caught carp as big as Sonny Liston’s arm.
“Are you making fun of me, Doctor?” Sovereign asked to mask the memory.
“Dr. Katz and the other doctors have all said that they can see no physical reason for your blindness, Mr. James. They’ve done CAT scans, MRIs, X-rays, and physical examinations. They’ve performed every chemical test that I know of and still they’ve come up with nothing. The insurance company will not pay for retraining for your job unless you go through this process with me.
“Now... I have given in about you sitting up during our sessions. But if you want to resist the process I will have to report accordingly.”
Sovereign smiled and thought of the sun again. He nodded and said, “I’ve given that speech a hundred times, whenever an employee has been sent to me with some kind of behavior problem. One time I had a guy whose coworker had given him a blow job in the copy room at lunch. She locked the door and unzipped his pants. In the days after that he kept trying to talk to her. She made a complaint to our office about his attentions.”
“What did you say to the man?” Dr. Offeran asked.
“I knew both employees. It was very possible, but not at all provable, that the woman had done this thing. I told him that. I said that he had to let it go.”
“And what was his answer?”
“He said that he loved her.”
“And the outcome?”
“We fired him. The woman, her name was Marla, felt so guilty that she called him and they got together. I hear they got married, then divorced.”
“So you can understand my position?” Seth Offeran said.
“I suppose.”
“I don’t need you to believe in psychoanalysis or Freud... or me, for that matter,” the doctor added. “All you have to do is participate in the process to my satisfaction.”
A horn honked and a man yelled something indecipherable. The sound of wings flapping brought back the hallucinatory memory of the red-and-black bird on the camel-clothed woman’s shoulder.
“Okay, Doctor,” James said. “The signs all say for me to comply... or maybe submit.”
“Then we can get started?”
“Yes, sir,” Sovereign said. He was thinking about the young white doorman saying the same words.
“What happened the Wednesday before you lost your sight?”
“My eyes were bothering me. I was blinking and one time, when I was reading a report, the words got all blurry.”
“Anything out of the ordinary happen at work, or anywhere else?”
“No.”