Odyssey by Walter Mosley

her?”
    “No.”
    “Is there any other reason to think that she was working with the mugger?”
    “Not really,” the captain said as she sighed. “Her name is Toni Loam. She was arrested for shoplifting a few months ago and had some problems with the law as a teenager. But if you say she was trying to help you …”
    “She was … definitely.”
    “Well, then there’s nothing we can do but try to get descriptions from the people who saw the attack. You’ve never heard of this Toni Loam before, have you, Mr. James?”
    “You really have it out for this girl, don’t you, Captain?”
    “I just believe in doing my job. Have you heard the name Toni Loam before, sir?”
    “Never.”

    The doctor wanted to keep Sovereign for observation but he refused. He contacted his banker, Ira Levitz, and told him to cancel his credit cards. He’d known Ira since he’d been just a teller, and had the assistant manager’s home phone number. After that he made a call to Red Rover and he was on his way back to the West Village.
    Up in his apartment, sitting on the white sofa that he could no longer see, Sovereign thought about the brief span of time that light filled his eyes. He was sure that the double blow to the head was what gave him that window of sight. But it was the memory of the vision of Toni Loam that enchanted him.
    She was chocolate brown, a touch darker than his skin, with a rounded nose and big frightened eyes. Her lips, he thought, were thick and protruded somewhat. Her head was oval, with cornrows running back from an intelligent forehead.
    The blind man went over the scene in his mind again and again. The attack meant nothing but a mild headache. He had only a twenty-dollar bill and three low-limit credit cards in his wallet. The driver’s license was useless and his credit cards were now canceled. He was thankful for the attack because it meant that sight was possible.
    He wondered if he should pound his head against the wall until he was either sighted or dead.
    He even got up and walked to the wall that led from the open kitchen to the bedroom. He pressed his forehead on the plasterboard, then reared back and thumped it against the hard surface.
    “I’ll break the wall before I feel anything,” he said.
    And then he remembered something. When he was lying in the hospital bed, fully awake, the world wasn’t spinning. He talked and thought and lay on his back just like anybody else.
    He took a deep breath and made his way back to the sofa. He sat down, pulled his shoulders up straight, and allowed his body to fall to the side. There was a breathless silence, a shuddering in the air around his head, and then slowly the world started to swing in a wide and ever-faster arc. Sovereign used both arms to catapult himself back up.
    The last time he’d cried he was nineteen years old and his brother, Drum-Eddie, was gone forever, on the run from the FBI.
    That evening Solar James said, “Drum is no longer a son of mine,” to Winifred, Zenith, and Sovereign. Four days later Sovereign was on a Greyhound bus headed for New York. Eddie had always said that he wanted to go there one day. Maybe, Sovereign hoped, he would, sooner or later, see his brother walking down 5th Avenue with two women on his arms.

    “Mr. James,” a voice, a woman’s voice, said. “Mr. James.”
    There was a gentle touch to his shoulder. Not a shake but merely the pressure of a hand. Not enough to move him.
    “Yes, Galeta?”
    “What happened to you?” the Greek cleaning lady asked. He felt her touch on his right ear, just below the bandages the doctors had affixed to his head.
    “I fell,” he said, “tripped on the grating going around the building. Three stitches and a bump.”
    “Are you okay?”
    “Oh yeah. Good Lord gave me an extra-thick skull so I could make it down the street of hard knocks.”
    “Can I do anything for you?”
    “Just do what you do, honey. Get me my iPod and I’ll sit here listening to books on tape