A Moment of Silence: Midnight III (The Midnight Series Book 3) (32 page)

“Hold on,” I said. She turned around and looked at me. Her skin was glowing from a layer of sweat. Her eyes were wide. Her
look was wild like a wildcat right after a satisfying session of sexing, screeching, and scratching in a secret alleyway.

“You smell like we’ve been fucking,” I said to her calmly. Her look turned suddenly shy. She blushed, and then sniffed herself.

“I don’t stink,” she said softly, almost like a whisper. I smiled at her.

“Not stink, you smell like sex.”

I picked up some sweats she had tossed onto the floor, and another tee. “Go to the shower first. Even if it’s only suds and a three-minute hot splash, that’s cool.” I added, handing her the clothes.

“Okay,” she surrendered softly. “But we are married. It’s fine that we’ve been fucking, right?” she asked, then broke into a smile.

“It’s definitely alright with me. And if you don’t get moving, we’ll be fucking again.”

She paused. Her eyes were locked onto mine in a serious but seductive stare. Her love was a visible energy that surrounded her body and even framed her face. I could feel it. She fought herself, I could sense. Then, she turned and left.

As soon as my second wife was out of my atmosphere, I returned to my right mind. Naked in another man’s house, I pushed right back through her hidden bedroom wall and into the dark corridor, moving quietly but swiftly down the interior steps and back to the place where I had left my clothes. With my shirt, boxers, and pants in one hand, I felt around the floor for my belt until I located it. Swiftly, I decided to get dressed in the corridor first.

Dressed, I purposely took another route through the servants’ path. Instead of returning to her bedroom, where there was no sink or water to clean myself up with, I would search for a path through the kitchen, or a bedroom that had a bathroom in it. Either way, unfamiliar with the layout, I had to move slowly now through the darkness, keeping both hands on the walls as I walked, to locate an opening or a button or a switch, while listening carefully for voices, just in case. But I believed that Aunt Tasha and my wife would be in her bedroom. That was on the second floor. Therefore that was exactly where I wasn’t headed.

I found a parallel crease in the wall. It wouldn’t open or push in. I
felt around for a button. There was none. I kept walking, still dragging my hands along the walls, trying to detect an opening. I found another one forty seconds later. It also did not open.
Strike two.
I would give one more try before I returned through the route to her bedroom. Walking through the dark, the path dropped down. It was a set of stairs. I took that route, hoping to get lucky. On the wall at the bottom of the steps, I felt around. My fingers felt a metal grate. It was a vent, but not a door. I crouched down and looked through and saw the cranberry-colored wall. I knew then it was Aunt Tasha’s office. When I pressed my face close to peer through the vent, I saw my wife seated in the pretty ten-thousand-dollar chair, still wearing her tight denim shorts. She had her hands over her face and fingers woven into her thick hair.
She didn’t get a chance to shower
, I realized. And she looked frustrated. Then Aunt Tasha walked in. I could see flashes of the white dress she had on earlier. My second wife removed her hands from her face.

“I don’t think of a baby as someone who prevents his mother from living and learning, or even flying. You had four sons, Aunt Tasha, and look at all of those degrees you have on your wall.”

I found myself in the middle of an emotional conversation between them.

“I had my first son, your cousin Junior, when I was twenty-nine. I had already completed all of my degrees and my residency,” her aunt explained.

“But, what if you had met Uncle Clem when you were sixteen, and you were super sure that he was the man for you. Would you have told him no? Would you have asked him to wait thirteen years until you have enough degrees to feel comfortable enough to love and marry him?” Chiasa pleaded.

However, Aunt Tasha, the “forensics fox,” seemed to be certain that she was the one who would ask all of the questions. She didn’t answer my wife’s sincere inquiries. Instead, she said, “And perhaps you have gone too far with this Muslim thing. I don’t think you really understand the depth of it. You have some romantic view that only a young and naïve girl could have. And, the way you told that Solomon
story was a little different than I remember it. I’ll tell you what I do remember. Solomon had forty or more wives. What will you do when your young husband brings back another woman and says ‘She is wife number two and three and four and so on?’ ” And then there was silence. I didn’t move. I knew I shouldn’t have come down here in the first place. Still, I wanted to hear for myself what my wife would say.

“I’m not greedy, Aunt Tasha. I’m so grateful to him. And he won’t come home with wife number three. And I am already . . . wife number two.”

Aunt Tasha screamed. She had an outburst.
Must run in the family
, I thought to myself. And in the pitch of her scream, I stayed stuck there.

Aunt Tasha began pushing the push buttons on her desk phone. I thought it was strange that she would make a call in the middle of her passionate conversation with her niece.

“Brother, I understand. You know I do,” she said to the person on the other end of her call. Again, it seemed like the middle of a conversation she had already been having with the caller, not the beginning. There were no greetings or intro, which would be normal manners. The person on the other end must have been over talking. Dr. Tasha sat listening, her face a little tight. Then she spoke. “He has the chronological age of a young teen. He has the mental age of a twenty-five-year-old. I interpreted the Wechsler’s. He zipped through it like it wasn’t even a challenge to him. He has a tremendous intellectual capacity. But the drawback is, he is difficult to pin to one cluster. He’s got a precarious mixture of personality types and I’m a profiler, so please believe me.

“This guy is incapable of functioning in a team. He’s incredibly confident but not histrionic. He’s introspective and resolute in his ideas and inextricable from his beliefs. He has this compelling beauty and implacable charm that triples his influence and capability, yet he doesn’t exploit it. The most dangerous element here is that he reviles authority, abhors instructions, advice, or orders. He disregards conventional thought and actions and has zero group identity. His mind manufactures alternative routes to every desirable destination. He will never
yield to a chain of command or relent before the hierarchy. And dear brother, your sweet daughter is absolutely in the palms of his hands.”

Then I knew. She was speaking to the General, Chiasa’s father, my father-in-law. The two of them together, I thought, formed a treacherous mountain for me to climb.

“Aunt Tasha, please allow me to speak to Daddy?” Chiasa requested. “It’s so unfair for you to analyze my husband as though he’s your patient.”

I turned and left, back down the path I used to get there in the first place.

*  *  *

All cleaned up, I had used an upstairs bathroom comfortably since I knew they were engrossed in the basement. I had also collected my wife’s panties, skirt, and blouse on my route back to her bedroom. Feeling better, I walked down the proper house staircase and into their family library. My wife still had not come up the stairs from her aunt’s office, where both of our pairs of shoes were located and the shopping bag of gifts, I remembered.

In their family library, I was searching for a dictionary. I found one, a medical dictionary. I laid it on a long, wide table. There was a bin filled with scrap paper and a cup of blue Bic pens, and another cup filled with number two pencils. I imagined all of her sons seated in here studying for their exams under the pressure of matching the degrees their parents had already earned. I had seen Clementine Xavier Moody’s degrees mounted in his private office. He’d completed the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business undergraduate and master’s degrees. He earned a PhD in business at Harvard. I thought of my father. He is also a man of degrees, who graduated from the University of Khartoum in Sudan, from the Sorbonne University in Paris, France, and earned his PhD here in Harlem at Columbia University. I then thought of myself. Earning money setting businesses into motion would be my primary skill, focus, and accomplishment. Study would be my hobby, instead of the other way around.

Flipping pages, I looked up the definition of
forensics.
It said, “The art of argumentation.” I paused and smiled. It sounded about right, fit Aunt Tasha perfectly. She has a degree in arguing and she would try to keep convincing my wife of her views no matter what because she was certified in arguments. I looked up the word
psychiatry.
It said “the practice of diagnosing mental disorders.” Maybe she specialized in arguing with crazy people. I laughed. But when I looked up the two words together,
forensic psychiatry
, the profession became even more clear to me: It said “the intersection of law, the courts, and mental illness.” Unlike the regular Webster’s dictionary that I regularly used, the medical dictionary went into long descriptions and several paragraphs. I got drawn into reading about all the professional angles that a forensic psychiatrist could pursue. The most amazing one was that a forensic psychiatrist could be hired to reconstruct the mindset of someone who was already dead. I stopped there. I leaned back. My mind was questioning my soul about whether that was even possible. Could one human being, just because he or she was a psychiatrist, even construct the mindset of a living person? Wouldn’t that involve the ability to read minds? Isn’t that a space reserved only to Allah? Were educated humans just so arrogant that they felt they could confidently enter that space and accurately figure out the workings of another person’s brain? And what about reconstructing the mind of someone whose soul had already returned to Allah? How smart would someone have to consider themself to be, to even agree to get paid to do that? I sat quietly.

Some minutes later I decided that it was not possible. It was guesswork being done by some people who studied so long and so much that no one could argue well enough with them to convince them that they were not capable of being right and exact or precise about these kinds of things. And if anyone tried to argue with them, they would have to have the same degrees to even be considered part of their discussion. And if they had earned the same degrees, they would just be another person agreeing with what the small group of “mind scientists” had already decided.

Aunt Tasha was a foxy owl for sure. But I think her belief that
she could read people would end up as her weakness. That bedroom she set up for Chiasa in her home was a good example of a misunderstanding. The darkened pink room was filled with furry stuffed animals and dolls. There was a dollhouse with furniture, and the bed had a box spring below the mattress and sat up high in the wooden frame. It was covered with pink sheets and a white-laced quilt. Nothing I saw in there was a match for Chiasa, who sleeps on the floor on purpose and would have model airplanes and plastic soldiers and a spinning globe and a wall of knives before ever considering a stuffed animal. Chiasa, definitely not a girl who played with dolls, had been given a room that must have fit Aunt Tasha’s designs and hopes and style and misinterpretations of the daughter she never had.

And I saw that she thought and felt she knew things about me that clearly she did not. I thought it was bold of her to think she could read me in less than four hours, as though she could summarize my life, thoughts, feelings, and even intentions,
la kadar Allah.
She had referred to me as
ominous.
I looked it up in their standard dictionary. It said, “Fateful. Either a good or evil omen.” Quickly, I looked up
prodigious
, another word she had used on me. It said, “Having an extraordinary force.” The third word that rolled off her tongue smoothly was
pulchritudinous.
I fumbled with the spelling for a few seconds. Then I located it. It said, “Physically beautiful.”

So, she believed that I am a physically beautiful, extraordinary force for either good or evil. More importantly, that I am “fateful.” I liked only that part. She needed to know that whatever the case, I am a part of her niece’s fate.

I found the copy of
Catcher in the Rye
in their library. I just flipped through it, deciding I would buy my own and read it, since every American high school student should do the same, according to her.

*  *  *

“Let’s walk to the train station,” my second wife requested that night. “I’d like to show you some things in Harlem.”

“You are going to show me around Harlem?” I smiled. I of course had been all through Harlem over my young years in this country.

“Sure.” I agreed to let her guide me around because I wanted to be sure that she wasn’t sad on the inside after her long talk with her aunt. I thought even though she has that beautiful smile, maybe she was covering up another feeling.

She chose to walk east, even though I knew we could catch the train on the west side where we had started out.

“I wanted to show you these two places,” she said, pointing. “There is the Schomburg Library. Have you been there?” she asked.

“Never,” I admitted.

“It’s the library that has all of the books and films and research materials about the African and African-American experience in the world, and specifically America. I only know about this place because Aunt Tasha took me here when I was ten. It’s not my favorite library, though. The best one is the main New York Public Library in midtown Manhattan, so awesome. The feng shui is so much better.”

“The feng shui?” I repeated.

“The feeling, the atmosphere,” she said. “In Chinese,
feng
means ‘wind.’ Shui means ‘water.’ And most Asians believe that the way a place is arranged adds to either a good healthy feeling or, if it is arranged poorly or is a cluttered place, causes a bad feeling,” she explained.