“What are the charges?”
“They’re just holdin’ me, Lena. They say they can do that as long as they want.”
“We’ll see about that.”
“When is the last time you spoke to your brother?” Curtis May, a young, caramel-colored agent, asked.
“At the airport.”
“Did he have a ticket?”
“You know he did.”
“A ticket you bought.”
Sovereign didn’t answer, because they’d already covered that ground.
“You bought the ticket for a man named Aldus Martins,” Agent May said.
“Yes.”
“Even though you knew that was not his name.”
“Drum changed his name. At least that’s what he said.”
“He was wanted for bank robbery.”
“That was thirty years ago. I thought there was a statute of limitations.”
“Your brother is a criminal.”
Sovereign snorted and shrugged. He’d had only a few hours’ sleep, and that was sitting upright in a tourist-class airplane seat.
“I have the power to keep you in custody indefinitely,” the federal agent said. It was less a warning and more an open threat.
“I have nowhere to go, Agent May. You can send me down to Guantánamo for all I care.”
“Where is Drum James?”
“I don’t know. We were sitting down at the gate and he said he had to go to the bathroom. He went and never came back.”
“Why didn’t you stay to find him?”
“Because I’m supposed to be here standing trial for attempted murder.”
Curtis May, Fiona Lockhart, C. W. Fordheim, and a man named Stockton had taken turns questioning Sovereign. The prisoner maintained a sense of tranquillity by studying his wardens’ faces. He was still amazed by the miracle of returned sight.
For long periods they left him alone in the small interrogation chamber. He remained seated so as not to cause the need to urinate. They didn’t let him go very often and so he drank little and kept still.
But even with all these precautions the urge to go was rising again. He was alone and despairing at the loss of the snapshot of his sister. He heard a sound outside and looked to the door, realizing as he did so that he had not tried to see if it was unlocked. It was at that moment that the door swung open and Fiona Lockhart entered with a tall man in a lime-green suit.
Lockhart was short and slender but her pale face was harder than her male counterparts’. She was wearing a man’s suit with no tie and patent-leather, lace-up black shoes. The man next to her had a deep tan and gray eyes.
“Where is your brother, Mr. James?” Lockhart asked.
Sovereign had no intention of answering the question again, but even if that was his desire, the man in the green suit spoke before he would have been able to.
“My name is Didem, Mr. James. I’m a special assistant to the mayor’s office.”
“His office?”
“Lena Altuna has made a complaint to the city about your situation, and Judge Lowell wants you in her courtroom.”
“I don’t understand,” Sovereign admitted.
“I’m taking you out of here. Come with me.”
“You might as well stay, Mr. James,” Agent Lockhart said. “As soon as we file the papers there will be a federal warrant issued.”
“Come on, Mr. James,” the man called Didem said. “You look like you could use some rest.”
Lena Altuna was waiting for him at the outside entrance of the government building. She wore a maroon suit with a pale violet collar. Behind her, at the curb, was a chauffeur in a black suit standing at the side of his black Town Car. Seeing this man made him think of Theodore and his excursion through the middle South.
“How are you?” Lena asked her old classmate.
“A little dazed.”
“Did you tell them anything?”
“Everything I knew. Almost all of it. And what I didn’t say they didn’t ask me about.”
“Good.”
“How did you do it, Lena?”
“Even the Patriot Act needs a court order to validate arrest without warrant. I just called in some favors with city hall.
“I know you’re tired. But give me a minute before we get into the car. I know the driver but I don’t want him to have to lie for me.”
“Sure, Lena. Talk.”
“I’m taking you to a hotel in the West Village, to stay in a room paid for by my offices. That way if the government wants you they’ll have to work at finding you. You’ll have an expense account with the hotel, so you won’t have to use your credit cards, and I’ll give you a thousand in cash for incidentals.”
“Thanks. That’s above and beyond.”
“I’m just taking it out of your advance. Tomorrow morning I’ll have a car bring you to court. Judge Lowell, at my request, will change the venue half an hour before the hearing. That way she can set a trial date without interference from the feds.”
Sovereign smiled and nodded, took an envelope stuffed with twenty-dollar bills, and climbed into the car with his lawyer. A minute after settling into the plush leather seat at the back of the Lincoln, Sovereign fell deeply asleep. He wasn’t aware of sight or time, weight, or even the desire to go to the toilet. He didn’t dream. Some weeks later, when he remembered this nonmoment, he thought that it was a blinking of his soul — an instant of complete spiritual blindness. It was as if he was gone from the earth completely: not dead but way beyond the Land of Nod.
“Sovereign. Sovereign.”
They were stopped at the busy corner of 14th Street and 6th Avenue in Manhattan. He could have walked to his apartment from there.
Staggering out onto the sunny street of the bustling city, Sovereign James was amazed. The sights and sounds, even the feel of the breeze on his skin, were things remembered and things new. For a time all of his senses had ceased and now they were roaring back to life. He grinned and opened his mouth to take in as much air as possible.
“It’s beautiful,” he said.
“Come on, Sovereign,” Lena replied. “We have to go.”
Walking down along the street, Sovereign tried to keep on a straight path but the life of the city distracted him. There was a young black woman with big legs and a very short skirt, a satisfied sneer on her lips about something good. Her gait and expression brought to mind a storied character dancing down the sidewalk, a nearly mythological personage whom many tales and exaggerations were based on.
Sovereign’s heart was beating fast, his mind switching channels, unable to hold on to a thought for more than a few seconds.
“Come on, Sovereign,” Lena Altuna said for the sixth or seventh time.
He had stopped in front of a coffee shop to look in through the big window. There was an elderly white couple sitting there, facing each other but reading newspapers. Their clothes were shabby and the restaurant was cheap. They had come there together, had ordered the same meal. They wore wedding rings and seemed enthralled with the news.
“Thank you for getting me out of there, Lena,” he said.
“What?”
“I could have died in there. I mean, my spirit could have.”
“Come on,” she said. “We have to go.”
When he made it to the hotel room Sovereign finally got to go to the toilet. It was an intense urination. He felt, for the first time ever, that an incredibly long and slender snake was escaping his body, returning to the world. He stood there, barefoot on the hard tile, thinking about dimensions that existed beyond his perceptions. These were places that he inhabited but did not see.
He fell onto the king-size bed and was instantly unconscious, unknowing. It was a welcomed death of sorts: passing out, passing away.
Once again there was a cessation of tactile experience; there was no sense of temperature, light, or sound, but inside this bout of emptiness there was a feeling of awareness, a being that Sovereign might have shared with other points of view. He lay there unaware of his being but coexisting with something, or somethings, else.