Midnight and the Meaning of Love (24 page)

Coming out of the toilet, I bumped right into her. She was leaning on the opposite wall that was filled with compartments.

“Ready?” she asked. “Where are your cards? Let me see them.” She held her hand out. She wore light pink-tinted polish, had clean nails, and a cheap watch. Realizing her intent, I pulled the cards out of my pocket, so she could use them to quiz me.

“Ohayou gozaimas,”
she said in a small voice not to disturb the other passengers.

“Good morning,” I answered.

“Tasukete?”
she said smiling.

“Please help,” I answered.

“Otosan?”
she asked.

“Father,” I answered.

“Migi?”

“To the right.”

“Hidari?”
she said.

“Um, to the left,” I answered.

“Masugu.”

“Straight.”

“Chotto matte?”
she asked.

“Um, wait a minute,” I remembered.

“You’re good!” she said, smiling some more. “Are you sure you didn’t know these words before you boarded our plane?”

“No.” I smiled at her distrust.

“You have a great mind. At first I was expecting to find an unaccompanied minor sitting in your seat. Instead I found a handsome man”—she gestured with one hand beside her face and moved it downward, actually touching me—“well dressed and a genius!” she tried to gas me up. “Okay, one more. Here it goes,” she said excitedly.
“Utsukushi!”

I had a mental picture of the words I had printed on my cards and I didn’t recall that word at all. “That’s not one of my words,” I told her calmly. “What does it mean?”

“It means beautiful,” she said, handed me back my cards, and proceeded down the aisle before me. An elderly woman seated in the last row beside the men’s room lifted her mask to reveal only one of her eyes and smiled at me. Then she put the mask back on. I guess she had overheard our exchange and had an opinion about it.

* * *

Four more hours into the blackened and now cloudless sky, I became restless and wanted to get my music back. I headed up to seat 42A, where I discovered three solid rows of teenaged girls sitting side by side in Yuka’s section. I wondered what kind of group they were traveling in.

I didn’t see any adults, but I figured there had to be a chaperone. Come to think of it, there were not any complete families traveling on this flight, it seemed, at least not in the coach section.

“Yuka,” I called, but four arms went up immediately and all at once each turned on their overhead lights. Now I had eight Asian eyes focused on me. But one girl in the middle didn’t turn on her light. She was asleep. She was also pretty enough to distract me from swapping back my music. She was obviously Japanese and also obviously black, her skin the color of honey. Her eyelashes were as black as could be and unusually long. She wore cornrows, precise and perfect, that looked like bolts of lightning laid tight and zigzagging across her scalp. Her hair was thick like ours but long like theirs. I predicted that when she awakened and stood up, she would stand about five feet seven inches tall. Even though she was still sitting, I could see that she had the curves of a filled-out African female but the delicate frame of a Japanese woman too. I thought to myself,
Seeing her is like looking at a blue diamond, something you would hardly ever see, but if you happened to get a glimpse of one, you’d find yourself looking at it again and again.

“Chiasa,” Yuka said. Her voice brought me back to the reason I was there.

“What does that mean?” I asked her.

“
Her
name is Chiasa,” she said, concerning the sleeping girl.

“I came for my Walkman,” I told her. But I glanced at the sleeping one again. She had a gold medal dangling on a red ribbon that she wore around her neck. It was rising up and down as she breathed in and out.

“Are you part of a team?” I asked Yuka. The other three girls were all watching curiously, but not speaking or joining in.

“I speak English, but my friends only speak a little,” Yuka said, holding up her two fingers to gesture, “a little bit.” Yuka turned her body around away from me while still seated, revealing the chenille fabric kanji letters across the back of her jacket.

Looking at them by the snatches of available light on the mostly darkened plane, I asked, “What does it say?”

“Girls’ Kendo Club of Japan,” she said with pride.

“Kendo Club?” I asked.

“We fight,” she said, smiling.

I laughed. “What kind of fighting?”

“Sword,” she answered smoothly.

I stepped back one step, impressed. “How many are you?” I asked.

“Sixteen,” Yuka said. “We are returning home from the competition.”

“Your team won?” I asked, while assuming.

“Our team came in third place,” Yuka said. Then the girl seated next to her pointed to the sleeping girl but didn’t say anything.

“She won?” I asked her.

“Chiasa won the one-on-one competition,” Yuka said reluctantly. “
Now
she is just
sleeping.
”

Yuka wanted me to stay and talk to her about music and everything else. “How many pairs of sneakers do you have? Who’s your favorite performing artist? Have you ever seen the movie named
Wild Style
? Is this your first trip to Japan?” She hit me with a slew of questions. Meanwhile her three friends watched intently and seemed impressed with their bilingual leader, Yuka. They were in awe of her command of the all-English conversation. None of them could put together a complete English sentence, but when they did try and make little comments, I could understand their simple meaning and gestures each time. Each one of them was different from the others in looks and ways and feeling, and believe me, they checked me out thoroughly also.

“Let’s trade something we don’t have to take back,” Yuka invited.

“I don’t think so,” I told her. “Everything I have I’m planning to keep.” Just then, the sleeping girl shifted in her seat.

“Later,” I said, and then turned to leave.

“Wait!”
Yuka said. “You didn’t tell us your name.”

I paused. “Midnight,” I answered.

“Oh,” Yuka said.
“Doushite?”

“Huh?” I asked.

“Why are you called Midnight?” she asked, her head looking up to me from her seat.

“Why are you called Yuka?” I asked, standing still in the aisle.

“I’ll tell you,” she volunteered. “
Chotto matte!
Will you stay a little longer?” I was noticing, as I listened with the intent to learn, that Yuka was mixing a sentence half in Japanese, the other half in English. “Here, I’ll write it out for you.” She took out a pen and some paper.
“All Japanese names have a meaning. It really depends on which kanji your parents used when they gave the name. My name is like this.” She wrote on the paper. “It means ‘Superior flower.’ Her name is Yuki. It’s like this,” she said, writing. It means ‘snow.’ Her name is Hikari and it means ‘light.’ And her name is Chou. It means ‘Butterfly.’ I watched and listened closely. To me, the kanji writing always looked powerful, passionate, and mysterious even without me knowing its meaning.

“Chiasa, what does her name mean?” I asked casually, noticing that Yuka had skipped over her.

“I don’t really know which kanji …,” Yuka answered hesitantly, and laid her pen down on her tray.

“One thousand mornings!” Yuki answered, proud to participate and overpronouncing and pushing out each English word separately.

“One thousand mornings,” I repeated. Chiasa’s name sounded soulful to me. Then I wondered about the true meaning of it. I wanted to know why she had that name, the story behind it. It sounded more powerful than the simple definitions of the other girls’ names.

“What about yours? What does it mean?” Yuka asked.

“Think about it,” I answered. “It was nice meeting you, Yuka, Yuki, Hikari, and Chou.” They applauded because I remembered.

I wondered if they had met other foreigners who couldn’t remember or pronounce their short and simple names. Then I threw the thought right out of my mind. Them girls were just bored and anxious to get off this tight flight, same as me. We were all teenagers traveling in an adult world, our bodies packed with energy but forced to sit still on a flight for hours and hours.

* * *

As I returned to my seat, I caught glimpses of one of the in-flight films playing on at least half of the screens in my area. Even without the volume I could see a full cast of black men as fools, clowns, and useless, cruel creatures.
Those are the black Americans,
I thought to myself.

With time I became more and more anxious to see my wife. So time cruelly doubled down and began to move twice as slow. We were halfway there now. I prepared to have the dinner that my family packed me, feeling some strange sense of comfort about eating
as most of the other passengers slept. After washing up in the men’s room and pulling down the shopping bag with the metal tiffin containers of my food I hit the call button and requested water.

“Mizu,”
the flight attendant said, offering the Japanese word for water.
“Kappu,”
she said for cup. She looked at my food and said,
“Oishi mitai deska
! It looks delicious!
Karai
?” she asked. “Is it spicy?” she translated.

“Definitely spicy,” I admitted, as I tried to write these new words that she was using down in my memory.

“Definitely better than plane food,” she said, leaning in too close. She laughed lightly.

“Right” was all I said. Finally she left.

As I enjoyed the way Sudanese leftovers can taste even better and even richer than when they were first prepared and served, I thought about how Ramadan began at sunset on Saturday in America, which meant fasting would begin at sunrise on Sunday morning. I kept myself occupied trying to figure out what time it was now and what was my exact location over which country. I recalled the map I had surveyed, then purchased at Marty Bookbinder’s bookstore. I was flying from the United States—New York, to be exact—out over Alaska past Canada, past the Siberian mountains past Russia … Then I broke out into a smile.
A man has to work hard for his woman
, I thought.

Moments later I checked my watch, still set on New York Eastern Standard time. Back in Brooklyn it was 2:00 a.m. I cleaned up my area, content, and headed to the back to rinse my containers.

Returning, I met Yuka walking up the aisle. We both stopped at my seat. As I packed the clean containers back into the shopping bag and pushed it back into the overhead compartment, Yuka made me an offer.

“Let me keep the music that you let me listen to before. You can choose one of these.” I sat down, not feeling right about standing over her in such a closed-in area. She pulled up my tray from its side pocket, which made me have to straighten up my posture. She laid down a piece of paper shaped like a bird. “It’s a paper crane, you know, origami. It’s good luck. Yuki made it.” I just looked at it. It was crafted well but I didn’t feel no connection to it. She put a card down. “It’s a Japanese phone card. It’s mine, but
you’ll need it
,” she said, so sure that
she had me open. My nonresponse made her put down her next item. It was a red patch with two black swords clashing in midair. I liked it. “It’s from our dojo,” she said, knowing it was worth more than the other choices she was offering. I figured it probably belonged to one of them girls, or was supposed to be worn on their jacket sleeve or uniform.

“You must really like my music,” I said. She ignored my statement and tried to flip it on me.

“You like it. I can tell,” she said, then pointed at the patch. “When you like something, it shows just a little bit on your face,” she said holding up her two fingers once again, for “a little bit.”

“Oh yeah? No one
ever
said that,” I told her swiftly.

“Maybe they were not looking closely,” she said, and held her hand out for my music. “Take this one.” I slid her the cassette Bangs had given me the other night. It was Frankie Beverly and Maze, a joint called “Before I Let Go,” “Sweet Thing” by Chaka Khan, and a bunch of slow cuts I didn’t want or need to feel.

As she put it in her pocket, an older lady appeared and stood behind her in the aisle. Just one look, the older lady gave her, and no words. Yuka turned, bowed to the older woman, and then rushed up the aisle back to her seat. The lady turned and followed her and stood by her seat once she reached it. If she was scolding Yuka, it was a silent scolding, because I could not hear a word or see her attitude in her gestures or body language.
She must be their chaperone,
I thought. Somehow, whatever adult is assigned to chaperone teenagers always falls asleep before us, or is absent at the exact moment that something they are supposed to be preventing is going down. Or maybe she was seated up in business class or first class even, as her girls were packed like sardines in coach.

* * *

In the morning the cabin lights were on full blast and it was too bright. I thought the sunlight was forcing me to squint, but it wasn’t. The stink of pork hung in the stagnant air as passengers sucked down two one-inch-cubed squares of egg and one undercooked-looking slice of ham.

I looked to my left toward the window as the passenger across the aisle at the window seat began lifting his window cover. It was
actually nighttime all over again, although my watch set on American time read 6:00 a.m.

“We are one hour away from Narita Airport. The time in Tokyo is now six p.m. Your flight attendant will be coming through the cabin collecting your trays and accepting trash. We would appreciate your cooperation in keeping the aisles clear. We will be landing at seven p.m. Tokyo time. Please accept and complete your landing cards and customs documents. Your flight attendants will be distributing them throughout the cabin.”