Odyssey Read Online Free Page B

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.

    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