“We’re here, mister,” the driver said.
It felt like only moments since he’d escaped the journalist, but they had made it all the way to the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
Sovereign gave thirty dollars for an eighteen-dollar ride, feeling somehow grateful to the driver. He stumbled out onto the curb and had to stop for a minute to allow the sleep to slough off his mind. He stood there stroking his left arm with his right hand, remembering running the same palm over Offeran’s sofa cushion when he could not see — or would not.
“... and so you wanted to hit him?” Offeran asked after hearing the story of the reporter.
“I wanted to destroy him,” Sovereign said. “If I had struck that first blow I know I wouldn’t have been able to stop. I would have killed him if I could have.”
“Where do you think this rage is coming from?” the doctor asked.
“It’s a — what did you call it? — a significant psychic event.”
Offeran smiled and nodded.
“When I was a kid I used to listen to Bob Dylan,” Sovereign said. “Him and Jimi Hendrix. I never let anybody know that.”
“Why not?”
“Because black kids weren’t supposed to listen to them. Kids at my school would have made fun of me.”
“But Hendrix was black.”
“But he didn’t play the right kind of music. And Dylan wasn’t only white; he sang like a drowning cat. But I loved both of them and listened when nobody was around. Except for Eddie, of course. I told Eddie everything. My grandfather too. Eagle would listen to anything I had to say. I was his favorite.”
“What does this music have to do with your anger?”
“I don’t know. Or maybe... Maybe it’s just that I had to keep everything a secret. My grandfather’s pistol, my father’s parentage... Even the real job I thought I was doing underneath the job they hired me for. I’m like a spy in a foreign country, a mole in the enemy’s camp. I left everything behind me and no one knew a damn thing about who I am. I can lie up in the bed with a woman, laugh my ass off with somebody at a bar, but as close as I get, no one can really see me.”
A sympathetic hum escaped Offeran’s throat. This single sound told Sovereign that his doctor thought that he was on the right track.
“But what difference does it make,” Sovereign asked, “if you ask me where I am and all I can tell you is that I’m lost?”
“Because even if that’s the only thing you know, then you are not lost — not completely.”
That night in bed, alone and awake for hours, Sovereign tried to imagine his way out of his troubled mind. He wasn’t worried about the trial or the possibility of conviction. He wasn’t worried about the fact that he had stopped going to work even though he was over his condition.
He missed Toni, not the lover but the giggling young woman who walked with him down the streets of New York and protected him from harm.
After a long while he fell into a deep sleep, something close to a child’s slumber — even hibernation. He dreamed that he was a big hulking fish that burrowed under the sand on the ocean floor. From there he peeked out at the water above, safe from predators. The chill of the water was a comfort to him; it meant that he was safe. The currents above made a kind of sibilant music that was almost subliminal. For a long time he lay there nestled under the sand...
And then there came a tickle and a disturbance. Something was stroking his underside like the dorsal fin of a larger creature buried even deeper, coming up after his millennial nap. Sovereign the fish moved left and then right but he could not escape the feeling of a pressure that, while not unpleasant, worked against his peaceful retreat.
Finally the erection roused him from his sleep.
Toni was sitting next to him on the bed, naked and gently teasing his manhood.
“I wondered when you was gonna wake up,” she said.
“What are you doing here?”
“Pullin’ on yo’ dick is what.”
Sovereign took her by the wrist.
“Move your hand away, Sovereign,” she said. “I’m doin’ what I wanna do right now.”
“Why?”
“Because.”
“Because what?”
“Because I liked you evah since that day I came ovah an’ you gave me that money. You didn’t have to do that, but I know you did ’cause you liked me. You only saw me for a minute but you liked me more than people known me my whole life.”
Somewhere between the words and the quick feathery motions of her fingers, a powerful orgasm rose up in James. He grunted and bucked from his hips and she grabbed on hard.
“That’s right, baby,” she said. “Uh-huh, yeah, just like that.”
She started moving her hand again and he reached out to stop her.
“Move your hand, Sovereign,” she said again. “This is my dick right now.”
Obeying her, he smiled at his own submission.
“What you laughin’ at?” she asked with a sour, sweet turn to her lips.
“You say you always liked me?” he replied.
“Uh-huh. And I only realized it when you hung up on me. Everybody’s tellin’ me that I should do what the prosecutor say, but where were they when you were takin’ me to dinner and the movies and sittin’ next to me when I was watchin’ TV and you was blind?
“When you hung up on me I felt like somebody just slammed the do’ in my face and there I was, out in the cold.”
“Are you saying that you love me, girl?”
“I don’t know about love or whatever, but I like you and you like me and that’s more than I got from anybody else.”
Sovereign saw the words she spoke written out in a single line. In the jagged horizon the letters made he saw a long and slender key to the questions he had been asking for days.
“You gettin’ hard again, daddy.”
Sovereign wondered if Lena Altuna’s brown hair was dyed. It looked to be the same color it had been when they were at school. But that was a long time ago. He’d had some short, curly gray hairs grow out in the past five years. These silver ghosts had also appeared on his chin and chest.
“We need to know every person’s name who can testify to your blindness and your character,” she was saying.
“Like doormen and doctors?” James asked.
“Neighbors, store clerks, and anyone else who saw you on a regular basis,” Altuna added. “We have the medical reports, and the prosecution might even bring in the group suing you at your job if they think that it speaks to your trustworthiness. Do you have any family who might shed light on your condition?”
“I haven’t seen my family in years.”
Lena sat up straight and away from the high back of her chair. They were in a fifty-fifth-floor conference room, the exterior wall of which was made from a thick sheet of glass. Through this he could see half a dozen jets circling in a holding pattern over the eastern airports.
“What about Toni Loam?” Altuna asked.
“We’ve become lovers, I guess.”
“The prosecution is pressing her to testify against you.”
“I know.”
“Maybe your relationship will muddy the waters of her testimony.”
“I want you to argue with the judge that we should be tried together,” Sovereign said.
“Why?”
“Because the only way there could have been a crime is if we planned it together. But we didn’t, and I want to be guilty or not based upon what I did or didn’t do. And I don’t want to be exonerated if Toni isn’t also released.”
As the jets went through their slow-motion waiting dance over Queens, Long Island, and Brooklyn, Lena frowned. Sovereign identified with the aircraft, thinking that his whole life had been one long holding pattern after another. He was waiting right now — for clearance to enter yet another queue: If he was shunted down the path to the right he would be convicted and sent to a prison, where he would be locked away, periodically pummeled, and bored to tears by purposelessness and mental inactivity; to the left he would be free, probably unemployed, occupying a life that no longer had meaning or direction. Either way, happiness and satisfaction were improbable. He’d leave the courtroom looking for another line to wait in — and another after that.