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.
Sovereign started from the dream with a stifled yelp. Everything had been the same except the last words of the young librarian. In the real conversation Maynard had swallowed his humiliation and gone off to organize a movement against the HR department, James in particular.
This turn of events hadn’t bothered Sovereign. He even expected it. For the people of color to organize, if only in a failed movement, would prepare them for future battles at Techno-Sym and elsewhere.
But the condemnation that reared its head in the nightmare caused self-doubt. What did it mean? Had he somehow been brainwashed by a self-perpetuating system that made him think he was working for his people while he was indeed doing the opposite?
Fully awake and prone on the white sofa, Sovereign felt his head begin to spin. He sat up and then stood, stumbled across the living room, careful to avoid the coffee table, reached the high counter, and felt around for the multipurpose clock. He found the talk bar and pressed it.
“The time is two thirty-seven a.m., September fourteenth, two thousand ten,” the clock’s voice said.
Two thirty-seven and he was wide-awake, heart pounding, and uncertain about the most important deeds of the last twenty years of his life. He stood there in the darkness, and in the dark, not exactly thinking but feeling that he had come to an unexpected border without the proper papers. The past was gone and the future was barred... and it was two thirty-seven, maybe thirty-eight by now, and he was lost.
His feet were bare but he still had on his trousers, shirt, and jacket. The temperature in the apartment was always set at seventy-two degrees, because there was no way for him to read the thermostat. He needed the jacket to balance the heat. His feet were cold but he didn’t mind. The light was probably off. He laid both hands on the high Formica counter and cocked his head, listening for any sound that might inform or distract him.
There came various susurrations from the street below, mainly traffic. Now and then a voice was heard, some laughter, and once a dog barking frantically. After a very long time Sovereign made out the gentle plash of water dripping from the kitchen spigot into the porcelain basin. Hearing the almost inaudible plop and splatter he remembered the dark, weblike system of tiny cracks throughout the ancient sink. He moved his head from side to side as if gazing upon the slick, spattered surface in bright sunlight with 20/20 vision.
Memory was in many ways clearer and more accurate than what his eyesight had been. He found that he was able to use his imagination to get a better focus than he’d ever experienced before.
After a while of listening and remembering, he hit the time bar again.
“The time is three-oh-nine a.m., September fourteenth, two thousand ten,” the voice said.
Sovereign took the cell phone from his pocket. He imagined seeing the green glow of the face and entered a number that he knew well.
“Hello? Sovy?” she said, answering on the first ring.
“Hey, Val.”
“What time is it?”
“Just about three in the morning.”
“How... How are you?”
“Blind as Homer.”
“What happened to you?”
“I don’t know. I woke up one morning and couldn’t see a thing.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m blind.”
“I know. I’m sorry. You must feel awful. Can I help?”
“No.”
“I could go shopping for you.”
“I do that over the phone. They deliver. And the limo service, Red Rover, takes me wherever I need to go.”
“I’m so sorry, Sovy,” Valentina Holman said. There was actual grief in her voice.
“I’m not dead. Just blind.”
“Is it curable?”
“What’s going on with you, Valentina?”
There was silence then. Now that there was an opening for conversation the night seemed to close in.
“Nothing,” she said weakly.
“Nothing at all? You don’t go to work? You don’t watch TV, read books? You don’t have friends?”
“Verso wants to get back together.”
“Did you tell him about us?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I didn’t think you would like that.”
“I didn’t like you leaving me. That didn’t seem to make any difference.”
Silence filled the darkness that already encased Sovereign’s head.
“Valentina,” he said after maybe a minute.
No answer.
He hit the time bar on the talking clock.
“The time is three twelve a.m., September fourteenth, two thousand ten,” the mechanical male voice said.
“Who was that?” she asked.
“A clock I got that actually tells the time.”
“What do you want me to say, Sovy?”
“It would have been nice if you had answered my calls when I could still read the daily papers.”
“I didn’t know that you’d go blind.”
“So by that logic you’d agree to reconsider getting back together if I only just died.”
The connection broke off and Sovereign knew that Valentina had hung up. He couldn’t figure out how to hit the right keys to turn off his cell phone, so he took the battery out of the back and stacked the powerless phone and its power source together on the high countertop. Then he went to the landline and followed the cord back to the wall. While he was disconnecting the jack, the phone made the whisper of a ring.
That would be Valentina calling back, sorry for having hung up but angry that he wouldn’t give her the space to shun him and his attentions once more.
He realized there in the early morning that he knew Valentina well enough to have an hours-long conversation with her even if she was not there.
Was that love? Was it intimacy?
No, he thought, prediction is an objective phenomenon, a knowledge but not an emotion. Valentina had taken her love along with her and all he could do was push her buttons and remember what had been.
And what was that?
He ambled over to the sofa, banging his left shin against the low coffee table along the way.
Sitting down, he wondered what it had been between him and the white woman he praised so highly for her new job. There was no reason for him to give her such acclaim. She did her job and never malingered or caused dissent, but she was in no other way exceptional.
He remembered the cream-colored recommendation form that he’d received from Jolly Jake’s Virtual Arcade Corporation. It was such a fancy and sophisticated form. It seemed incongruous with the slapdash organization of the company.
There was an area provided, about half a page, where he could, if he wished, add any extra details about the candidate. In the smallest letters he penned an outstanding reference. Exceptional attention to detail, he’d said. The highest professional decorum. Miss Holman not only brings her best game to the job, but she brings out the best in others on her team.