“Uh-huh.”
“I asked you about your socks. You wore a coal-gray suit with bright pink cotton socks and black shoes.”
“I remember. You said that you expected any man you hired to wear sensible socks to work.”
“That was two declarations in one sentence,” Sovereign said. “First that you were hired, and second, that I needed a certain sense of decorum from you.”
Darius’s face was vaguely square shaped, though to James it seemed that it should have been round. The young man’s expression was serious and wondering.
“You know what I would have said to a white man wearing a black suit and pink socks?”
Darius just stared, waiting.
“Do you?” James prompted.
“No.”
“Nothing. Not a goddamned thing. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I think so.”
For a while the employer and employee sat facing each other. Sovereign, for his part, could feel the world spinning and other worlds within turning on their own gyres.
Finally the older man said, “I tell you this because I have a question for you.”
“For me?”
“Yes. I want you to tell me if what I’ve been doing is right.”
Darius glowered.
“How can I answer that?” the younger man said.
“If you can’t, you can’t. I won’t hold it against you. I never told anybody about this before. Nobody.”
“You use that criterion on every hire?” the data analyst asked.
Sovereign nodded and looked away.
“The whole time you’ve worked here?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Is your question the answer to mine?”
A look of confusion passed over Darius’s face and then he shook his head.
“If it isn’t, then I’ll keep my answer until you give me yours,” Sovereign said.
“I think I should go back to my desk,” Maynard said.
“Okay. I’ll be here until I’m not anymore. You can come up anytime. I’ll be looking forward to it.”
At noon doughy Martin LeRoy showed up at Sovereign’s office. Over the day many of his fellow workers had come by to wish Sovereign well and say that they were happy to see him. Not one of them had called him in his absence. He knew somehow that this wasn’t because he was black but due to the fact that he was unapproachable, even aloof. No one, except LeRoy, felt close to him. And even though Martin hadn’t called he had sent a letter telling Sovereign that he hoped he got better soon.
Sending a letter to a blind man.
“Sovereign,” the short and chubby VP greeted him.
“Mr. LeRoy.”
“You can see again, huh?” LeRoy said, peering into the taller man’s face.
“Yes.”
“What was wrong?”
“No one knows. I was blind and then I could see.”
“Like they talked about in my grandmother’s church.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
LeRoy took a seat and Sovereign did too — not behind his desk but in the second visitor’s chair, next to his superior.
“The CEO called down to ask about you, Mr. James.”
“Oh?”
“He’s worried about the assault charges pending against you.”
“I wasn’t aware of any pending charges,” James said.
“Our legal department called the city prosecutor. He said that they were considering charges — assault, attempted murder, and if this Johnson dies, maybe manslaughter, maybe worse.”
“Oh.”
That bumblebee sprang to life in Sovereign’s chest.
“What do you intend to do?” LeRoy asked.
“My intentions are pretty much meaningless. What you do is more the question.”
“It was suggested that we let you go,” Martin LeRoy said. “But I told them that you’ve been an exemplary employee for decades and that we should at least wait and see what the lawyers have to say.”
“Really?”
“You sound surprised.”
Sovereign thought of Solar disowning Drum-Eddie. He wondered at the war waging in his own heart and mind.
“If it looks like things are going to get bad, Mr. LeRoy, I’ll quit on my own. You can tell the CEO that.”
At one thirty Sovereign left for lunch. He called a Red Rover car and had it take him to 86th Street, where he encountered the plump, freckle-faced doorman — Roger.
“Are you all right, Mr. James?” Roger asked.
“Yes. Fine.”
“I was reading about you in the papers. They were trying to say that you faked your blindness, that you tricked that guy. If they take you to court you have them call me, sir. Have them call me and I will testify.”
Instead of answering, Sovereign just held out a hand. He was deeply moved, and even more confused, by the emotional tone of the redhead.
“I’ve been remembering the story of Odysseus,” were the first words he said to Seth Offeran.
“Lost at sea,” Offeran said in a knowing way.
“The story of a man lost at sea told by a blind man so that others could be entertained and history might be passed down.”
“You see yourself as a historian?”
“As a blind man.”
“But you are no longer blind, Mr. James.”
“Maybe not,” Sovereign said. “I mean... you ask me how I see myself and I think that what I’ve seen has not been true. My mind is full of misinformation and that can’t make up for lenses that cause me to think I’m comprehending a world that I have no true knowledge of.
“Homer saw his world better than I do mine. What I’ve done is to make everybody up and then attach so many meanings to the words coming out of their mouths that almost everything I think I know is really a lie.”
“I don’t understand, Sovereign,” Dr. Offeran said.
“In the words of the poet, ‘I’ve wasted my life.’ ”
Sovereign could feel himself breathing and again he was transported to the wharf his grandfather talked about, looking down on the boat that he’d never seen.
“The snake is possibly the luckiest of all creatures,” Offeran posed.
“What makes you say that?”
“He sheds his skin, goes into hiding because his new scales are sensitive, and then comes out into life, leaving behind his old bonds and pains.”
There came a shooting pain in Sovereign James’s side. He winced and then glowered.
“What?” Offeran asked.
“Talking to a black man about shedding his skin and you ask what?”
“Asking a man to let go of his misperceptions,” Offeran corrected. “This is not about race.”
“Maybe not, Seth. But here you sit on your brown chair talking to me like you were a textbook deciphering symbols. Your words are deader than a snake’s husk.”
“My mother died three weeks ago,” the psychoanalyst said. “She had suffered for six years. My sister and I took turns staying at her apartment, sleeping on the sofa, so that she wouldn’t have to experience the dislocation of the nursing home. At the funeral I could see the relief in my sister’s eyes. I was happy for her and I felt relieved too.”
“You mother was your skin?”
“The snake doesn’t look at the husk and call it a waste. He simply feels the exhilaration of freedom and the strangeness of transformation.”
“So you’re saying that I’m dragging the past with me.”
“I’m saying that there comes a time to let go.”
Sovereign intended to go back to work after the session but instead he wandered the streets of Manhattan, thinking about what lay beneath his dark skin.
After many hours and no answers he found himself at the entrance of a hospital named after the patron saint of the poor and infirm. Going to an official window he asked a question and received an answer. The woman behind the information counter hadn’t even looked up at him, hadn’t seen him, he thought.