There was no logical reason for this outlandish recommendation. James hardly knew the woman. And though he did not hold enmity toward white women, he didn’t see it as his political duty to help them in their struggles against their enemies.
Enemies. Forgetting his late-night argument with Valentina, Sovereign considered a word that he had exorcised from his vocabulary while still at college.
Generals and nations have enemies, his political science professor Jane Mithrill had lectured. Revolutionaries work for the people. Even if you find yourself on the side of one group or another at any particular juncture, you must always remember that your work is for the betterment of the human race, not any group, class, tribe, gender, or nationality.
The wild-eyed Irish professor would clench her fists and raise her voice until she was nearly screaming in her sermonlike lectures. She was loved and hated by students and professors. She believed, as many of the founding fathers did, that revolution was the normal state of society. It was she more than anyone else who caused Sovereign to turn his back on capitalism and the Church, making him a mole for a movement that had no central governing body or even a sense of recognition among its members...
The next thing Sovereign knew, the heat of the sun was radiating across his face. He had fallen asleep thinking about his mentor and his own private rebellion against the racist overlords of a bankrupt system. Not enemies, but pieces on the other side of the chessboard — pawns who played their roles without cognition or true malice.
He took off his clothes from the day before, showered, shaved with a waterproof electric, took one of the four plastic pouches from the top drawer of his bureau that Galeta prepared for him twice a week, and dressed for the day.
He could make instant coffee and eat cereal for breakfast. Weetabix and two percent milk. At noon he left for the West Village diner that was two blocks from his apartment building — on Hudson Street. The counter waitress, Myna, would greet him from the spot where there was an empty stool and he’d say hello while getting to his seat.
This routine ran like clockwork and he felt comfortable with it.
Sitting down after greeting the waitress, Sovereign thought that blindness had always been a part of his life, of everyone’s life. There was so much that he didn’t see... but it took the loss of his sight to make him aware of the hollow darkness that surrounds everyone.
He had just ordered a grilled cheese sandwich with tomato soup when he sensed the movement of someone sitting in the stool beside him. It was a woman. He knew this because she wore perfume, not cologne.
“Hello,” he said to his new happenstance neighbor.
“Why’d you disconnect the phones, Sovy?” Valentina Holman said.
“Call me Sovereign.”
“What?”
“That’s my name, Sovereign James. Using my nickname makes it sound like we’re close, intimate, but we’re not.”
“We were very close.”
“But no longer.”
There was a long spate of silence. Sovereign knew that Valentina was thinking of leaving. Maybe she’d go silently and he could eat in peace.
“Here you go, sugar,” the waitress, Myna, said. “Grilled yellow cheese and red soup. What can I get for you, honey?”
“Coffee,” Valentina said, “black.”
A beat, then two.
“I should have talked to you after I left,” she said at last. “I was wrong and I’m sorry about that.”
“I accept your apology,” he said. “We don’t have to talk about it again.”
“What if I want to talk about it?”
“That’s okay too.” He put a spoonful of soup in his mouth and burned his tongue.
“Too hot?” Valentina asked.
“I’m sorry too,” Sovereign said.
“About what?”
“Calling you last night. It was wrong for me to wake you up at that hour.”
“I was already awake,” she said softly, “thinking about you.”
“What about me?” Sovereign bit into his sandwich and burned his upper palate. He did this on purpose. He needed to feel pain in order to keep from saying things he ought not say.
“I’m just sorry that we had to break up... that’s all.”
Sovereign heard the words, knew what they’d be before she spoke them. He also knew the reply she expected: It didn’t have to be. You’re the one who broke it off. Once he said this she had the choice of a variety of responses, but all of them would end in her claim that he was attempting to control her and not admitting his own culpability in the demise of their relationship. Somewhere in the ensuing conversation she would let slip that if he had been able to allow her to articulate the way in which they dealt with each other, she might have given him what he wanted. This nearly unspoken revelation would hurt him and soon after she would say that she had to go — leaving him with the undeclared knowledge that he had sabotaged his own chance at happiness.
Blindness had granted him insight.
“You’re right,” he said.
For a moment silence accompanied the symphony of sightlessness.
“What does that mean?” Valentina said at last.
“I agree with you,” he said. “It’s a very sad thing, our breakup. Now we have to accept it and move on.”
The soup had cooled and the sandwich too. Sovereign’s mouth still burned but his mind was a deep dark pool of frigid water, a lake that sat deep below the ground filled with the laughter of blind, unheard, and undreamed-of fish.
“You aren’t angry?”
“I was never angry,” Sovereign said — both liar and truth teller. “I was only talking out of the pain I felt. You had the courage to leave. You did what I couldn’t do and so I yelled. I’m sorry.”
“What are you saying?” she asked amid the imagined laughter of fish.
“I hope that you and Verso are able to come to some kind of understanding,” Sovereign said. “Either you get back together or he can accept what went wrong.”
Reaching out his left hand, Sovereign closed his fingers around the chilly, sweating water glass.
“How did you do that?” Valentina asked.
“What?”
“How did you know where the glass was?”
“Myna.”
“What?”
“Myna’s the waitress. She knows that I’m blind now and she always puts everything in the same place. That way I know exactly where to put my hands. I’ll show you.” Without turning his head away from Valentina, Sovereign moved his left hand through the air and let it descend on the leather bill folder. He flipped this open, then reached into its right front pocket, producing a twenty-dollar bill. He placed the money on top of the open folder and smiled.
“How did you know it was enough to cover the cost?” Valentina asked.
“My bills are separated into different pockets,” he said, “one for each denomination. In other countries they make the denominations different sizes, but here in America they make you work at it. I get the teller at the bank to help me with that. And Myna knows to stack the bills of my change from left to right starting at the edge of the leather wallet. If a denomination is missing she leaves a little gap to indicate it.”
“So,” Valentina said, “you accept the breakup now?”
“Yes.”
“I wish you had been able to do it earlier,” she said.
“Me too,” Sovereign replied from deep within his underground grotto.
“Will we still be friends?”
“As long as you want.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Valentina asked, still, Sovereign thought, looking for a way to get the upper hand.
“That I will answer your calls and you can come visit whenever you want.”