“Mr. James?”
“Antonio?”
“Take three steps forward and you’ll be at my back door.”
The HR officer did this but after the second step he ran into someone, or rather, she ran into him. She stepped on his toe while ramming something hard into his right breastbone.
“Why don’t you watch where you’re going?” a woman said angrily. And then, “Oh! I didn’t notice that you were...”
“He’s blind, lady,” Antonio called from his car.
“Let me help you,” she said, taking hold of his right biceps.
“Get your hands off me, woman,” Sovereign said. “I didn’t ask to be touched.”
“Are you all right, sir?” That was the doorman from earlier.
“I’m so sorry,” the woman said as she released his arm.
“Just keep moving, Mr. James,” Antonio added. “The door is still right in front of you...”
That night, in his Greenwich Village apartment, Sovereign was exhausted. He ordered a sausage-and-peppers pizza again. After eating he drank water from the tap without bothering with a glass. When the eating and drinking were done he tried to lie down on the sofa but the room started spinning and he was forced to sit up.
The sun had gone down. He knew this because of the chill on his skin. He reached for the blanket but it was gone. Galeta, the cleaning lady, had rearranged things again. But in spite of the cold he drifted off, imagining that he was in Eagle James’s rowboat without an oar on a wide, placid lake. He could hear the burble of fish gliding beneath him, imagining the lines of their passage through the chill waters. There was the sun above, filtered by water, and the stench of putrefaction coming in literal waves around him.
He was a fish aware only of sensation and broken images through the blue-green lens of underwater life. He had no brain, or at least very little. The watery world was revolving — a rotation within the orbit of the planet. He could feel the earth moving and himself projected in a world where up and down and even gravity were relative terms.
“How do you feel?” the dream image of Seth Offeran asked.
“Free.”
“What do you want?”
Instead of answering, Sovereign felt a band of pain across his chest. This was a pain he always felt after swimming the first few days of summer.
“Your fins need exercise,” his father would say.
“Come lie down,” his mother told him.
And then the phone rang.
The first jangled report was modulated by the water. The second salvo of sound coincided with him rising up from the lake. By the fifth ring the answering machine engaged and Sovereign realized that he was lying on his side on the sofa.
“This is the phone line of Sovereign James,” the machine said. “I’m not in right now or else I’m otherwise engaged. Please leave a message and I will return your call forthwith.”
There was a beep and then a few seconds of silence.
“Sovy?” a woman’s voice asked tentatively. “Sovy, are you there? I don’t know why you won’t return my calls. I mean, I still care about you. I want to help. Please let me come over. The doorman told me that you didn’t want to see me. I need to hear that from you. You owe me that much...”
The room started spinning and Sovereign sat up.
“No matter what has happened between us I still care for you,” Valentina continued. “We need to talk. Sovy... Sovereign.”
There was a moment of silence and then the click of a phone being disengaged. Nausea from the spinning brought Sovereign to his feet. When he stood, the feeling of motion stopped.
He stood there with his hands hanging down, a sentry in the darkness — a man, he felt, who was soon to disappear.
The next day one of Sovereign’s regular drivers, Reuben Quinta, dropped him off in front of the 86th Street building.
“If you swing back around at three-oh-five I’ll be standing right out front,” Sovereign said, and then he maneuvered his hand to give Reuben a three-dollar tip and a handshake.
“You got it, Mr. James.”
The heat of the sun was beating down. Sovereign turned one hundred and eighty degrees, walked the nine steps to the first door of the vestibule, opened the door, and took two and half steps more to the second portal. He walked straight to the back wall of the entrance room, touched the wall in an act of friendly spatial recognition after ten and a half paces, then walked directly to the Craigson Group’s door without touching the wall or even really counting his steps. He pushed the door open and smiled to himself that he was right about its not being locked or latched.
Even inside the office where Offeran had guided him, Sovereign felt that he remembered the path. He came to where he thought the door was but encountered a wall. To the left he found a door and knocked.
No answer.
He knocked again.
The knob jiggled and clicked. A slight movement of air told Sovereign that a door had opened.
“Yes?” a woman’s voice asked. “Can I help you?”
She was shy of five six, half a foot shorter than Sovereign.
“I was looking for Dr. Offeran. I was sure that this was his door.”
“He’s the pink door behind you.”
“Directly behind me?”
After a pause the woman said, “Yes.”
“I’m here, Mr. James,” Offeran’s voice said. “Right behind you.”
“Thank you,” Sovereign said to the woman before him. Then he turned and headed in the direction of his doctor’s voice.
He had the feeling of passing through a doorway.
“Couch is just a few steps ahead of you,” Seth Offeran said.
As he was seating himself Sovereign heard the door to the office close.
“That was inaccurate language for a blind man,” James said.
“What?”
“ ‘A few steps.’ That could mean two or four. I mean, I know in usage it means three, but most people aren’t aware of that fact.”
“Sorry,” Offeran said. “I’ll use the correct number from now on.”
Again Sovereign felt as if he had scored a point in some kind of unique game. But this time the victory felt hollow.
“How did you sleep?” the doctor asked.
“Fine, great. You know, the only time I ever see anything is in my dreams.”
“Did you dream about me?”
“Yes, I did.”
“What did I look like in your dream?”
Sovereign smiled. “Is this some kind of trick, Doctor?”
“No. I was wondering if you might have let an image of me in even though you believe that you have not seen me.”
“So you agree with Dr. Tomcat that I’m really not blind but fakin’ it.”
“No. I believe what you’re telling me. But that doesn’t discount the possibility that you’re suffering from conversion disorder.”
“What’s that?”
“That is when a person redirects the focus of a severe anxiety into the manifestation of a psychosomatic illness. This could be paralysis, general numbness, or the interruption of one of the senses — including sight.”
If this were a boxing match, Sovereign thought, he’d be flat on his back at this moment.
“I didn’t see you,” he said, mentally getting to his feet. “You asked a question but I didn’t see your face.”
“What did I ask?”
“I don’t remember.” This was true.
“What was the rest of the dream about...?”
The hour was used up talking about Eagle James and the boat that Sovereign knew of but had never seen. He enjoyed talking about his family and their stories. This hour, and many more after that, allowed him access to a world that he thought he’d left behind after going off to college and starting his professional life as a human resources revolutionary.