“Why did Valentina break it off with you?” Dr. Seth Offeran asked on the following Tuesday, the seventh session of Sovereign’s therapy.
“She didn’t want children,” Sovereign said. “I told you that already.”
“Was that something new for her?”
“No, we had kinda agreed on it,” Sovereign said, haltingly.
“Was there any more to it?”
“She had worked for Techno-Sym and I’d given her a glowing recommendation for her new position at Jolly Jake’s Virtual Arcade Corporation.”
“And you told her about it?”
“No. No. I guess they’re pretty loose at Jolly Jake’s and the employment director let her take a look at her file. She called and asked me out to lunch.”
“And you went?”
“I didn’t see why not,” Sovereign said. “I had no idea that she had seen my recommendation, and anyway... she was married.”
“Married?”
“Yes, to another employee of Techno-Sym. Verso Andrews.”
“And what was the lunch about?”
“Like I said, she’d read my letter to JJ’s Arcade and wanted to thank me. We talked and I told her that she had always been an outstanding employee who did the job because of professionalism and not for any other reason.
“You have to understand, Doctor, I look at work as a political act. All other things being equal — it doesn’t matter about the race or gender of the employee but only their attitude.”
“And Valentina was thankful,” Offeran said.
“She came home with me and stayed until late that night. Two weeks later she left Verso and got a place about eight blocks from my apartment building. She made it clear that she would be my girlfriend but that we could never marry or have a conventional life together.”
“How did that make you feel?”
“I had a girlfriend then,” Sovereign said. “Her name was, still is, Claudette. Claudy had been talkin’ to me about kids for almost a year. ‘It’s time for me to start a family,’ she’d say before we went to bed, and, ‘You know I want to have a little girl,’ she’d say when we woke up in the morning. Almost every day she’d say something about it, especially after we had sex.”
“And you didn’t want to have a child with her,” the doctor concluded.
“She didn’t want to have a child with me.”
“But she said—”
“She said that she wanted a baby, that she wanted a little girl. She never asked me if I wanted it. She was asking me to give her a baby like it was a gift or something.”
“So you felt left out.”
“Let me ask you something, Doctor.”
“What’s that, Mr. James?”
“If you had a patient tell you that he got shot in the chest, would you ask him if he felt like he was attacked?”
“I understand.”
“I hope so,” Sovereign James said. “ ’Cause Claudette wanted her own baby and her own family and I just happened to be the sperm donor who was on the other side of the bed at the time.”
“Did you want a child?”
“Not that child.”
“But what did you want, Sovereign?”
“I wanted a woman to take me by the hand, look me in the eye, and say, ‘I want your baby, daddy. Yours.’ ”
“And Claudette said that she wanted her own child.”
“Only reason I had to be in the room was that she couldn’t do it any other way.”
“But that’s not completely true,” Offeran countered. “She wanted you to father that child, those children, and to be with her as they grew.”
“I’m a romantic, Dr. Offeran,” Sovereign said after a brief silence. “I might be black, blind, and a revolutionary to boot, but I believe that a child between a man and a woman doesn’t have anything to do with a biological clock or a hormonal timetable.”
“You’re looking right into my eyes, Mr. James.”
“I am? Because I don’t see a damn thing.”
“Hey, Mr. James,” Roger Jones hailed from his window at the vestibule of the building.
Roger was the young doorman who helped him on the first day. They had been talking for a few days now.
“Hey, Roger.”
“Reuben is waiting at the corner. He couldn’t park in front of the building like usual.”
“Okay.”
“They gonna let you get back to work soon?”
“I don’t know yet. Everybody says that I’m not really blind and I’m just makin’ all this up.”
“How can they say that when they see how you are?”
“People believe in all kinds of things, Roger. That’s why the world is almost always at war.”
“I don’t get you.”
“If people weren’t so damn sure that they’re right all the time maybe we’d talk more and get things straight.”
That night Sovereign went over the talk with Offeran in minute detail. He had taken to doing this every night. The specifics of his conversations were almost visible in his mind.
Is Claudette a black woman? the doctor had asked.
Sure is. And fine too. That woman got a rump get me hot just to think about it.
If you’re a racial revolutionary and you obviously want children, then wouldn’t Claudette be the perfect choice? he asked.
That’s half the way there, Doctor. But you got to remember — any child I produce will be a black child in this racist nation. And the woman who bears my child will have to want me and only me to be that father.
But that’s unrealistic, Offeran said. Women need to have children...
Sovereign remembered the afternoon that he’d taken off from work when Valentina had come over. After hours of lovemaking she noticed a dry spot on his thigh. She got olive oil from his kitchen and began to massage it on his skin. He got excited and asked her to kiss his erection. But instead she began to suck on his testicles. The oil dripped down from there and she kept rubbing it in. He put his legs up, allowing her to massage his buttocks and rectum.
She was shaking his shoulders before he realized that he had passed out. That was when he knew that he wanted Valentina to bear his progeny.
“But I’m married,” she said.
“Separated,” he countered. “Soon to be divorced.”
He hadn’t told the doctor this part of the story. Time was up and he was happy to leave.
“You’re a racist,” Darius Maynard said a few weeks before Sovereign’s eyes gave out.
He, Maynard, was sitting in the visitor’s chair opposite Sovereign’s broad hickory desk. Darius was two decades younger than James and wore a blue blazer and khaki pants. In contrast the senior HR official wore a dark, dark green suit with a black vest and yellow shirt.
Only the older man wore a tie.
“Myrna Malloy was also at the interview,” Sovereign said. “You haven’t accused her as far as I know.”
“You’re the one who makes the final decision.”
“The evaluation process is confidential.”
“And you’re a racist.”
Sovereign James smiled. He liked Maynard. His skin was the color of darkening egg custard and his eyes didn’t know whether to be brown or green. Even though he was almost thirty, his voice still cracked when he got excited.
Sovereign wondered if the young man had ever learned how to tie a tie.
“I’m six shades darker than you, young man.”
“What about Phil Vance?”
“What about him?”
“You turned him down for the unit coordinator’s position,” Darius said. “You gave the job to Aldo Menton and he wasn’t half as qualified.”
Phil Vance. Sovereign remembered the flashy young man: handsome and black skinned and always smiling, like the cat that had just done away with the noisome canary. He was a graduate of Tufts, descended from a good family. Private schools all the way. For Vance, Techno-Sym was just a stepping-stone. He hadn’t done enough homework to know exactly what international services the self-defined data-clone company provided.
Just point me at the job and I will get it done, Vance had told Sovereign.
He hadn’t even bothered to maintain eye contact.
“You’re the data librarian, are you not, Mr. Maynard?” Sovereign asked.
“And I know everything about that job,” the custard-colored young man said.
“And I am the human resources professional. You maintain the global logic center and I provide the best possible staff.”
“You do what the white man tells you to do!” Maynard shouted.