Midnight and the Meaning of Love (36 page)

As I moved through the network of underground tunnels that lies beneath Roppongi, I was not alone. There were many foreign men in motion, as well as Japanese men still suited up from work and groups of girls who I’d guess were from fourteen to twenty-five years young. The crowds were not loud or rowdy. Everyone seemed focused on getting to a specific destination uninterrupted. I was noticing now that every Tokyo prefecture had its own personality. In fact, as you climbed up the endless stacks of stairs from the train to the outdoors, you could not find anything similar to the last stop that you came from. Each location would be completely new and unique.

There were no wives, mothers, or children in Roppongi night-life. For four blocks to the north and four blocks to the south and four blocks to the east and four blocks to the west were all nightclubs, hostess bars, and restaurants. As I moved in the night breeze, I blended right in, which made me feel some ease.

“Bro-da!” an African voice called out to me. “Check it out. We have what you are looking for. You are looking for girl, yes?” he said oddly.

He was six-eight, towering over me, a more massive giant in the land of little people. Dressed in a not-too-cheap suit, he extended his hand. “Come now,” he said. “Club is free, drinks cost money, girls are very friendly. What you like? Japanese girl, Russian girl, Swedish girl, American girl? You choose.”

“I’m good,” I told him.
“Ramadan Kareem,”
I added solemnly.
Ramadan Kareem
is a Muslim greeting offered to Muslims around the world at the start of the Ramadan fast. I could tell this man was from Nigeria. I also knew from flipping through my atlas and maps that they had almost 150 million people in their West African nation, most of them Muslim. By offering him the holiday greeting, I could move him out of my path and maybe off of his corrupt purpose.

It backfired and piqued his curiosity instead. “I am Olatunde the Nigerian,” he said as he extended his hand, announcing himself as though he were his nation’s representative. “But here in Japan, friends call me Ola.” When I didn’t move or grasp or shake his hand, he took one step forward and looked down on me.

Brooklyn don’t break from no next man’s menacing stare. That’s hood basic 101. I stepped to his left to move beyond him and caught a glimpse of a four-foot-tall Japanese girl in eight-inch heels, the top of her head still barely above the Nigerian’s Pierre Cardin belt. From behind him she handed me a party card invite advertising the club that she was standing in front of. He turned and spoke harsh Japanese to her. She stepped all the way back to the club entrance.

“Tell Ola, what is your business here? You are in Roppongi for Ramadan. Surely you did not come here to pray in the land with no God.” He smiled a smile of satisfaction with himself.

“I’m good,” I told him again and stepped to his right, bypassing him. Before I was six steps away, I heard his rhyme begin again. “My friend, club is free, drinks cost money, girls are very friendly.” As I
checked the late, late night, early morning scene, this appeared to be the formula, an array of Nigerians fishing for any men to come trick a pile of cash on some doe-eyed female wearing an evening gown, nightgown, or miniskirt. And there seemed to be no shortage of takers.

When I reached the outer boundary of Roppongi Hills, the party scenes subsided and the lights were not glaring. The residential section was separate from the chaos of the clubs. I put my gloves and wool hat on, believing that if I could move swiftly through the shadows, I would go unnoticed. There were not many people out. I mainly saw closed boutiques, craft shops, and minimarkets. The houses behind them were woven in and up and on the various hills and slopes and narrow paths. The hour of the night, the trees and gardens made my invisibility possible. I walked nonchalantly past the front of Akemi’s father’s house without moving my head to inspect it. To reach the backyard, I would have to walk past the front, uphill, make a right, and then another. So I did.

There were two fifteen-foot-tall walls that ran down both sides of the street behind Akemi’s house. At the top of the walls were bushes, and no matter left or right, all you could see was wall and bushes. But her neighbor had a tree with a sturdy trunk and heavy branches and leaves that shielded the house from street-level onlookers. The tree extended into the sky. It was now the second day of Ramadan, and I considered that tree my second blessing.

As I climbed, gripping the bark with my gloves and my kicks, I cleared my mind of what-ifs and focused. I leaped from a branch onto the top of the wall. When I landed, my body brushed hard against the bushes, tiny little thorns sticking me enough to cause me to straighten up and balance and be mindful. I duckwalked across to Akemi’s side, and when I got there, I attempted to see through the bushes into her yard, but the bushes were too dense. I considered clipping and clearing through the bushes, and crawling through the clearing, but didn’t because although I might be successful in getting in that way, the next morning the gardener or any curious person would have just the evidence needed to confirm that someone had intruded on the property. Turning sideways, with my back now to the bushes and face to the wall, I pushed through the three-inch space between the wall and the bushes. The prickles scraped against my sweat jacket and pants and
wool hat and socks and boots but not enough to pierce my skin or cause my blood to flow.

Her yard was darker than the streets, and all the house lights were off. No dog—had there been one, he would’ve begun barking minutes ago when he smelled the unfamiliar scent of my presence even as I climbed the neighbor’s tree. Surveying, I counted four floors to the sturdy cement home, which resembled the best-built Brooklyn brownstones in its quality and the way it was carefully constructed. The top floors had cement terraces. With no fire escapes, there was no ladder or means of climbing up or down from them.

I began to walk in calculated steps. The grass crunched beneath my feet. Fortunately, the hum of a nearby generator should have made the sounds undetectable. I walked around the perimeter carefully, and up to the east side of the house. It was all good until I reached the eastern corner that led to the front. I heard a click and then some sort of motor started up. I saw a high beam approaching from the distance, and the heavy black iron gate that sealed off the front of their house began to open slowly. I eased back, pressing my body against the house on the dark side, so as not to be exposed by the increasing light. Adrenaline released in me, and swiftly I walked backward to the backyard and crossed over to the west side of the house, where I could escape the light and still see into the front. My jaw was tight and I began taking deep breaths to overcome my anger. I didn’t appreciate Nakamura creating a circumstance where I had to creep like a thief. But fuck it, he had. The car eased onto the property but the bright headlights prevented me from seeing details. The gate remained open, so I was sure that there were at least two passengers inside, one who intended to leave. Otherwise the gate would’ve closed behind them.

The driver’s door opened. A suited man leaped out and rushed around to the back passenger-seat door. He opened it and stood patiently like an employee. The passenger took his time, like an employer accustomed to being served would do.

When Nakamura finally emerged, the driver went into a series of bows to him and then ran around to the trunk. Nakamura followed, and now the trunk shielded my view of them both, and any possible view they could’ve had of me. I took a couple of steps back to a darkened ground-level window and tested it to see if it would slide open.
I was surprised when it did. I left it open by about only two centimeters, enough to stick my gloved fingers back in if I needed to.

More confident now that I had a definite way inside of the house, I walked toward the backyard again to shield my presence and wait. As I moved, I happened to look up. “Always look up,” my sensei had taught me. When I did, I saw for the first time that on the fourth floor of the west side of the building was a yellow light left on in an otherwise completely darkened house. Then I knew.

I heard the front door of the house opening. The car was moving now, and I heard the sound of rocks beneath the tires. Then the ignition switched off, and the glare of the lights deaded. The car door opened and closed. I could tell by the sequence of sounds that the car had only been parked. The iron gate had not closed yet. Suddenly I heard the sound of another car starting. The sound of the engine was a dead giveaway that it was a lower-quality vehicle. It moved, the sound of the car getting further and further away. The front door of the house shut as the iron gate also began closing. Then the sound of the second car was no more.

Carefully, I walked to the front again, using the west side of the house. The Japanese Bentley was parked against the house at the front. The gleaming blackness of the exterior was glossier than the blackness of the night. I drew closer to look at it. The interior was “pretty,” like Chiasa had said. The thick wool seats were piped out in thick leather, the seams solid and the inside incredible with granite fixtures, which would normally be used in a house. My stare into the car was broken only by the light switched on in the house on the ground floor on the front eastern side. I dropped down beside the car but did not touch it. I looked up. Another light came on then, on the second floor.

Believing that Nakamura was now upstairs, I duckwalked over to the front door of their house. I had observed that the Japanese normally left their shoes lined up right outside their house door before switching immediately into house slippers. Aside from Nakamura and possibly his daughter, who else could live here? A housemaid, or butler, or some security personnel? Yet if there were any security personnel on their property, they were doing a poor job.

I figured the shoes wouldn’t lie to me. Using my penlight, I beamed on the first pair of shoes. It was a men’s pair labeled REGAL. I believed it was a custom-made shoe. There was a second label stitched
inside embossed in kanji. I assumed it was Nakamura’s name in kanji letters, their version of a monogram. I’d say the soft leather shoe with the streamlined design and careful stitching was valued at about a thousand American dollars. Obviously they were the shoes that Naoko Nakamura had just eased his feet out of. A cheap pair of black, women’s work shoes. A cheap pair of white, well-worn, clean women’s work shoes. A pair of expensive pink pumps. I moved my light back and forth over those. They were expensive, but not expensive enough to be Akemi’s. Who could these belong to? Then I focused on the black-leather spring Gucci boots, so lovely they got my blood boiling. The bottoms were designed like sandals, but the rings of thick black leather curled around all the way beyond the ankle and up the calves. Imagining my wife’s pretty legs in them moved me. And I knew she had to have dropped at least two thousand American on those. Then there were the men’s high-top Converses seated beside them, a crime in and of itself.
Who the fuck wore those? The gardener,
I answered myself, trying to calm, calm all the way down.

With five pairs of shoes counted, the risk in this caper heightened. There was no way to tell where each of the people in the house who owned these shoes slept, or even if they were actually inside or not. I stood thinking quietly. I opened my Jansport, pulled out Akemi’s hundred-thousand-yen heels and switched them with her Guccis. I knew that if she saw the shoes that she had worn in New York with me to a wedding Umma and I had worked at, she would be 100 percent sure that I was here in Tokyo. Further, once she discovered that her Guccis were gone, she would know that I switched them. The Japanese don’t steal, right? So who else could’ve taken them? For now, alerting her that I was here, in Tokyo, would have to be enough for me. I had brought along the perfect clue.

Angry and tight, I threw my Jansport on my back and walked away along the west side of the house. On the fourth floor, the yellow light still beamed. It was the same color of light that lit up the basement at Cho’s where Akemi and I, newlyweds, first made love. It was the only light on the fourth floor that was on. Looking at it caused me to break my stride and to pause to think for a second. Then my legs started moving again.

Inside of me, I began to feel more like an animal than a man. An angry animal, a hungry animal, and that fury worked its way
through my chest. I left back out through the slot in the bushes. Like a tightrope walker I walked the wall off Naoko’s property and onto his neighbor’s side. I leaped up onto the same tree, the tree of the blessing, and climbed the branch like a gymnast on the parallel bars. I swung my feet up and reached a sturdier branch and used it. I kept climbing until I saw a way down. Then I dropped from the tree onto the neighbor’s barren roof. I sprinted across and jumped twelve feet to land back onto Naoko’s property—the rooftop. A black leopard can climb trees. In a tussel with the mighty lion, we are swift enough to snatch his meal and maneuver up to the high branches, leaving him below with no options but to watch and roar.

Blood pumping, swiftly I checked it all out. There was a strange bubble in the center of the roof, but I didn’t move toward it. A tilted white tent in one corner began to worry me. Was someone inside? Would Nakamura be strategic enough to station security on the roof? Nah, not likely. If so, how could he sleep through the thump of my jump over here and be considered a real professional security man? I did not approach it, though. Instead I looked over the top and down into the backyard and dropped down onto the terrace, the one positioned next door to the window on the west side with the yellow light.

The darkened window was halfway open; I moved the glass slowly to the left and peered beyond the thin, sheer curtain. There were two girls asleep in one queen-sized bed. The one closest to the window, where I was, was not Akemi. But the one wrapped in the colorful silk robe was. My pulse picked up and began racing, even though I held my perch stiff as a statue. I didn’t have to worry about anyone seeing me from the street as I squatted on the terrace. I already knew that the wall, the bushes, and the tree shielded all views. Still, I didn’t want to linger long. Yet how would I get her attention without arousing the other girl? Forty-five seconds and an idea formed. I remembered how she and I slept in my single bed in my Brooklyn bedroom. She used to think that my body was warm, and she would wrap her leg around me as she slept, her face on my chest, her hand on my balls, her hair brushing against my chin. We breathed together. When I shifted, she glued herself to my back and eased her arm through my arm, her fingertips brushing lightly against my stomach. Akemi, vibing so hard on me, that when I would awaken, she awoke a second
after as though she could feel and measure my breathing as she slept. As though she had one pinky finger on my eyelids as we slept to alert her about when I awakened, but she did not, she was just full of feelings—my feelings, her feelings—whether she was sleeping or awake. I guess I could call her a “light sleeper.” I was hoping so. And I could hear the subtle snore of the girl closest to me.