Midnight and the Meaning of Love (21 page)

“Yo, give that money to Sensei like I asked you to. Ask him to hold my spot.”

I pulled some food out of the refrigerator, which Umma had wrapped up and stored. I placed everything on the countertop. “Here, you heat it up. I’ll be right back.”

In my room I moved my duffel bag onto my bed and took some personal items that belonged to my wife and packed them inside. I ignored my new Armani suit hanging in my closet.

“Hey, how come this food is all crushed up?” Ameer yelled from my kitchen.

“It taste good. Just heat it on a low flame,” I hollered back.

“It smells good, but damn, it’s like baby food,” he complained.

I didn’t bother telling him the answers Umma would have given, that “Sudanese foods like eggplant and chickpeas and beans and lentils are often ground and merged with delicious spices. It’s great for your digestion and Americans would eat them in this manner
if
they knew better.”

“There should be some lemon chicken breasts in there. Try ’em. Heat mine too,” I told him.

“Do I look like your fucking housemaid?”

“Just do it. You’re doing yours anyway. I gotta make an important phone call,” I told him.

“You got any Wonder Bread?” he yelled back. “I only eat Wonder Bread!”

I picked up the telephone in my room and pressed the fifteen numbers it took to contact Iwa Ikeda, Akemi’s English-speaking friend Sensei had told me about. I calculated it was 12:40 in the afternoon in Tokyo, and although it was late Friday night in New York, it was already the next day, Saturday afternoon, for them.

Four rings and then an answering machine switched on. Her entire message was spoken in Japanese. All I understood was the beep.

“Peace, Ikeda-san, this is Mayonaka calling for Akemi. She left your phone number as a contact. Thank you for helping us with our communication. Please tell Akemi that I’ll call her back at nine p.m. Tokyo time on Sunday night. If she can be there at your place at that time, we can talk. Please tell her everything will be okay, so take it easy,” I said, and then hung up.

My plan was to arrive at Narita Airport in Japan at 8:00 p.m. Tokyo time, clear customs, give Iwa Ikeda a call at 9:00 p.m. and arrange to meet up with my wife on the spot. I already knew I couldn’t stand to hear her crying over the phone while I stood uselessly, seven thousand miles away. Face to face was my true desire and only strategy.

True, I knew that I had conflicting information. I had two addresses for her father, one in Ginza and the other in Roppongi. I had the telephone number for Iwa Ikeda, who was staying somewhere in Tokyo, which led me to believe that Akemi was somewhere in Tokyo. I had the name of Akemi’s birthplace, where she also said she had lived, which is called Kyoto, and the name of the high school
she attended, Kyoto Girls’ HS, that was listed on the literature from her show at the Museum of Modern Art. The high school was also located in Kyoto.

As I flipped through the pieces of paper with her information on it, I was beginning to feel like one of the characters in the many mystery novels that I had read over the past couple of years.

“This shit is good!” Ameer said, scooping up his crushed vegetables with a spoon. “Word up, I thought it was gonna be nasty.”

“What did your coach say when he saw your face messed up like that?” I asked him.

“ ‘You’re late! Get on the court so they can fuck up your face some more!’ ” Ameer imitated his crazy coach.

“Nah, that ain’t right,” I said with disbelief.

“True,” he said matter-of-factly.

“We met our team owner tonight,” I shared.

“I bet he was filthy,” Ameer said, commenting on his riches.

I laughed. “He was Ferrari filthy!” I said calmly, but I guess with some passion to it.

“Oh my God!” Ameer said, truly amazed.

“I’ll tell you one thing, he didn’t seem like none of these hustlers from around here,” I pointed out.

“Yeah, I didn’t see no Ferraris parked down front of your building,” Ameer laughed.

“He was asking us some questions that no man in the street ever asked me before.”

“What, was he kicking the mathematics?” Ameer was talking his Five Percenter lingo.

“Nah, shit like, who are you? Where are you from originally? What’s more important than your life? Like that,” I told Ameer, as I thought back on it.

“Was he high?” Ameer asked.

“No, he was sober and clear. He was the type of cat that for some reason you might want to tell him a lie, but you end up telling him the truth.”

“Like you.” Ameer laughed once or twice and then turned quiet.

“So what do you want to do in the future?” I asked Ameer.

“Well, teacher …” Ameer switched his voice into a joke mode.

“Seriously.”

“Um, I want Sensei to offer me private weapons lesson without me having to ask him, like how he did with you. I want to have a girl that’s so bad, who makes me go so crazy, that I would do anything for her—”

“Would you marry her?” I asked him.

“That’s what I mean,” he said. “I want a girl who makes me lose my mind to the point that I would stand in front of a room full of my closest friends and family and say, ‘I do, I’ll do anything for you!’ ”

“You just fucking around,” I told Ameer.

“If you could get it, I could get it,” he said with a straight and serious stare. I didn’t take no offense to it. I thought if him looking at me try’na do the right thing made him want to do better in life, then all praise is due to Allah.

“And … I want my father to respect me,” Ameer said. “I want him to see me do good in life. And on his own, without my mom’s encouragement, I want him to say, “Son, you did good. You did even better than me.” Ameer looked like he was speaking to me honestly, while recalling something else. But with all jokes aside finally, it sounded like he was saying something true that he actually felt and meant.

Later that night after my bags were all packed, I threw Ameer a light blanket and a pillow. I dug my television out of my closet and set it on the table in the living room so he could watch it. I had to hear ten minutes of his jokes about my small television set, “an antique,” Ameer declared. Then he called me “Fred Sanford,” a name that I didn’t know. Next he accused me of treating him like “Grady,” another man I never heard of. Then he asked for a wire coat hanger. I handed him one. He threw it back at me and told me to stick it in the hole on top of the TV. “Move it to the left.” He laughed. I moved it and then he said, “Okay, stand there just like that. Don’t let it go.” He cracked up. I dropped the wire hanger and left the room and prepared myself for a makeup prayer. Ameer, still laughing, fell to the floor from the couch.

I made the prayer in my room on top of a clean towel, first standing—
“Allahu Akbar,”
which simply means “God is the greatest”—and then bending and eventually putting my head to the floor. Almost half an hour later, when I finally opened my eyes, I found Ameer standing still at my bedroom door watching me.

“What do you need?” I asked him.

“That’s how you pray?” he asked.

“Don’t you?” I asked.

“Never did,” he said.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Don’t know, just didn’t,” he said.

“You want to learn?” I offered.

“I do, but not now. Maybe when you get back home from Japan. It seems like if I do that, right now, if I start praying that way, something might change. Maybe after I finish, I won’t recognize myself.”

“Whenever, just let me know,” I told him.

In my prayers, I had asked that we make it through the night without a rude banging on my front door, a gang of officers coming to take me away for assault with a deadly weapon, my feet and my hands.

I had known what had to be done since the day that Bangs’s body shook with anger, the night her uncle snatched away her baby. I also knew I had to separate my Umma and my sister from anything that I might do. I knew I had to execute it swiftly and immediately afterward to be joined by one or more people whom I could use as an alibi in case there was an investigation. I knew I needed everyone to see me at that ball game last night and to also see me leave the game along with others. I also was certain that everything could go terribly wrong, but I calmed myself to accept that however it ended up going was how it was supposed to go.

If Bangs’s uncle hadn’t been at her house, my plan would’ve failed and I would’ve had to leave for Tokyo with the task undone. If her uncle had never come out of the house or stepped through the alley within the amount of time I had allotted myself, then nothing would’ve happened to him. I concluded that if he hadn’t deserved it somehow or if it wasn’t supposed to be me who avenged him for abusing Bangs, then he would have been
nowhere
in her vicinity. I had faced the dilemma like a complicated riddle. Admittedly, I even tried to excuse myself from doing anything about it. One voice in my mind argued,
Bangs is not my wife … If something goes wrong with me defending Bangs, I could miss out on rescuing my real wife, who I do love immensely, and to who I am willingly responsible.
Then the same voice argued,
Maybe Bangs is in this trouble because of something she did.
But in the end, I thought to myself that Bangs’s uncle was worse than a vulture, a creature that at least waits till
after
a death to pluck and pull
at the flesh. Her uncle was a man who did every fucked-up thing he could get away with, because he was confident either that every other man was doing the same thing as him, or every other man was absent, or every other man was too much of a coward to take him out. For me it became a matter that almost wasn’t about Bangs. It was about men needing to check other men and make sure they respect some boundaries and limits. And I knew from the moment that I got here on American soil, in the Brooklyn borough, that some of these niggas just had to go.

Saturday, May 10th, 1986

Sunlight came uninterrupted and remained, thankfully. I woke up at 9:00 a.m. I woke Ameer up at 9:30. I saddled him with my duffel bag and a knapsack, before he could even consider washing up or showering in my apartment. I didn’t have the time to give.

“You carry it. What the fuck is in here, cement?” he asked.

“I would, but it’s better if you carry it. I don’t want niggas around here to think I am going away. You know the streets. They might get excited and run up into my spot while I’m gone.” I also carried a knapsack on my back.

“True,” he said, and carried my stuff willingly all the way to the trunk of the taxi.

“Pull over on the right corner for a minute,” I told the cab driver when we reached the subway entrance.

“Your meter is running,” he told me in a heavy Indian accent.

“No problem,” I assured him. I took my backpack off and handed it over to Ameer. “You want to hold something?” I asked him, looking him dead in his eye to convey that it was one of my burners. He paused. “Nothing on it,” I guaranteed him.

“Hell yeah, word up,” he said calmly.

“Hold it for me,” I told him. He grabbed the backpack and climbed out of the cab.

“And be easy,” I added.

“Later,” we both said at the same time. He slammed the door.

I saw Ameer walk down the steps to the subway, the knapsack slung over his shoulder as my taxi sped off.

Even though the two living spaces at the Ghazzali home were separate, the scent of Sudanese foods being prepared was not. The entire place was filled with the warmth of spring and the scents of Khartoum.
³

I placed my duffel down and walked to the back room, looking for Umma. I found her in her new bedroom seated on her blanket, a pen in one hand and surrounded by papers. I wondered why even though I knocked, she did not answer. Gently, I pushed her door open; oddly, she did not look up at me.

“Umma!” I called.

She shook her head, used her right hand to move her hair from out of her face, wiped away a few tears, and finally held her head up to face me. Even though I had called out her name, seeing her expression, I couldn’t speak. She looked me over with a slow study.

“Allah is merciful,” she said. I heard these kinds of words many times, but not with the same kind of sorrow.

“I had a feeling last night,” Umma said. “In the evening it was just an anxious feeling. Then about ten o’clock at night it was a feeling of great joy. Then less than an hour later, my joy turned to a feeling of vulnerability—like I was in great danger. I was upstairs, myself and Naja and all the Ghazzali women. We were cooking, preparing for today. The men were here in the house, Mr. Ghazzali and his sons. Temirah must’ve noticed something also. As I kneaded the bread,
she asked me, ‘Sana, are you feeling okay?’ I said I was, but I wasn’t. It took some seconds for me to search myself. I didn’t want to worry Naja or anyone, so I stepped away. In the bathroom I made a prayer. Even as I was speaking to Allah, my moods were moving, heart racing a bit. When I opened my eyes, I knew I was not in danger. It was you.”

Standing still in the entrance of her door, I could now feel Umma’s intensity moving inside my chest, stirring inside me.

“Alhamdulillah!
Allah the merciful heard my prayer. You are here!” she said with a muffled excitement.

I smiled as a look of great relief came over her face. My own tension began to diffuse.

“You must remember son about the nature of a mother’s heart. Wherever you are in this world, if you are at ease, I am at ease. If you are troubled, I am troubled. This is the nature of true love. So whatever you consider, consider it first in your own mind. Then consider it again thinking only of me. Treat it as if we are one heart, one life, you and I.”

“Is that the meaning of love?” I asked, finally breaking my silence.

“True love is like this,” Umma said. “And since Akemi loves you and you love Akemi and she is there and you are here, you must know that true love is like this,” Umma emphasized, but her words also felt like a question placed before me. I thought of Naja, Umma, and Akemi. Afterward, all I could do was agree “Yes, true love is like this.”