Midnight and the Meaning of Love (48 page)

“Secrets,” I repeated, but not for an explanation or response. I had catalogued the two names in my mind permanently, Mayu Morita and Josna, aka Jo.

“Any last name for Josna?” I asked, while searching the list in my hand.

“No, sorry. She didn’t write it.”

“What about this person named Himawari?” I asked, noticing that she was the third person listed after Mayu and Josna.

“She’s Japanese and Akemi’s friend. They have some kind of girls-only club that meets at a location nearby their high school, but there’s no exact address. From the way Akemi describes it I don’t know if it’s a house or apartment or what. Akemi mentioned Himawari six or seven times, and the rest of the girls only briefly.

Now, if we divide up the lists, we should definitely be able to locate Akemi tomorrow,” Chiasa said confidently. “I’ll follow Mayu in the early morning. That might be it. But if not, I’ll check the first three places and you can check the last three places,” she said taking charge during the silence of my thoughts.

“Inshallah,”
I said, still trapped in my thoughts and measuring out my next moves.

“What?” Chiasa asked.

“What?” I responded.

“
Insha
what?” she asked.

“It means ‘God willing.’ If Allah wants us to be successful, we will be,” I explained.

“First you said God, then you said Allah. Which one is it?” Chiasa asked.

“Allah is God.
Allah
is Arabic for God in English,” I explained. “Sometimes English-speaking people get tight or scared or crazy when they hear Muslims say
Allah
.”

“Allah or God, hmm? The two words sound so different from one another,” Chiasa said. “
Allah
sounds softer and nicer,” she continued. “I’ll say
Allah
because it sounds better to me.” She turned away from me, then turned around and looked back. “And you’re right. My aunt Tasha would probably faint if she heard me say
‘Allah’
! She goes to church every Sunday, and when I visit her in New York, I have to go too.” Chiasa smiled.

“There’s only one God. So Aunt Tasha could chill,” I told her. Then I got up to leave.

“Are you leaving?” Chiasa asked.

“I have to,” I said.

“There are two beds,” Chiasa pointed out.

“Yeah, two beds and one room,” I told her.

“They have breakfast downstairs beginning at sunrise. We are on
the same block as Akemi’s high school. I checked it all out on the map. This is a strategic location,” she said.

“I’ll meet you downstairs for breakfast at five a.m.,” I responded. “Then we’ll head out. I’ll take the high school and the first three places on the list. You take Mayu’s house and the last three places on the list. Let’s meet back here afterward and compare notes. Hopefully Akemi will be with me when I get back here.” I meant it.

“Here, you need to show this key at breakfast.” Chiasa handed it to me.

“Do you have one for yourself?” I asked.

“Hai!”
She smiled.

I left. I had seen the small Holy Quran in Chiasa’s backpack pocket. I’m sure she had just bought it from the bookstore today. I liked that she didn’t pull it out and show it to me, like it was some kind of prop to win points. I believed that she bought it out of a real curiosity and with a true intention.

Outside the Hyatt, as I descended the hill, the thought dropped into my mind:
I know now what Chiasa switched.
She had straightened out her hair. It appeared much thinner and longer now. It gave her a different look. Her new look was nice. Her old look was very nice too.

* * *

After breakfast in the Hyatt dining area, a light meal and eight glasses of water (I wouldn’t let her drink any fruit juice. “The natural sugar will just make you more thirsty and hungry,” I explained to her.)

Chiasa left and moved into action.

I used my hotel key to access her room alone. Stripped down to my boxers and T-shirt, which I still wore from the night before, I unpacked my clippers from their heavy packaging. The bathroom mirror, which was divided into thirds, was perfect. I pulled up the left and right sides of the mirror so I could see the sides and back of my own head. I mapped out my plan in my mind. I switched the clippers on. When I heard them buzzing, I got busy, slowly. Without anyone or anything to disturb me, and the Do Not Disturb sign on the door, my hands were steady for my first real attempt at barbering my own head.

When I felt good about the job I had done and had checked my head out thoroughly, I switched them off and used the edger to make
my cut look professional. I eased out of my T-shirt with the coils of hair clinging everywhere. I balled it up and tossed it in the miniature garbage can. I checked out my shoulder. Ever since Akemi licked my wound, it had healed and disappeared. It was easy for me to believe that her saliva was salve, maybe because I wanted to. Thinking about her got me distracted. When I refocused, it sped me up. I wanted to get to the schoolyard before the students arrived so I could search each one as they climbed up, my eyes looking for only
my wife.

After a high-powered, soothing shower, I cracked open a new pair of Fruit of the Looms, a new pair of kicks, some blue Girbaud cargos, and a deep-blue Polo shirt. I changed my mind and put all that shit away and chose something better, also all fresh and crispy. I picked up my mess and then reached for my camera to use as a prop. Within seconds I realized that Chiasa had already taken it. In fact, it seemed like it had been hers since I first arrived in Tokyo. My binoculars would have to do. I dropped them around my neck and checked to make sure I had my shades. I turned off the digital Do Not Disturb sign and turned on the Make Up the Room sign.

In the hotel lobby I grabbed a free newspaper, folded it over, and wore it in my back pocket.

Outside the parade of felines was about to jump off. I hurried up the three or four hills and posted at the top. On purpose, I behaved like a tourist. Through my binoculars I scanned faces, focusing on this one and that one and refocusing on all the rest. After a while I flipped my aim down toward arriving shoes. It might sound crazy, but it would be faster and easier to identify her by her footwear. However, I kept coming up with penny loafers, mediocre pumps, flat and high-heeled sandals, as well as Converses and New Balances. My wife wasn’t in the mix. Soon the gates of the high school were drawn open to allow the students to enter. I posted on the side of the wall and watched the females who were streaming in from the Princess Line buses. An hour later, when the guards closed the iron gates, I moved. I walked around the perimeter of the high school toward the sides and the back, where I had not gone before. There were sports fields of every kind behind the black iron fence of spears. On the back side there was a basketball court. On my left, there was another full basketball court. This one was not locked behind an iron fence. It was wide open. So in my mind, it had to be part of the Kyoto Women’s
College, where everything was unlocked and accessible and females flowed in and out. I stood still, thinking.

It was hard to believe how expertly the Japanese mind their business. In Brooklyn I spent many hours considering how to move around uninterrupted by unwelcome assholes who jocked and harassed. Here it was the opposite. Each person is ignored so well, it’s bordering on insult. As I searched for my wife in the early morning sun that had just begun its slow boil, no one greeted me. No cop asked me, “What are you doing around here?” No teacher or professor said, “May I help you?” No student questioned, “Are you looking for someone here at the all-girls school?” No one offered to give me directions or show me around. I didn’t run up on anyone African, American, Latino, Indian, or even European. They were uniformly Japanese.

As I descended the hills, when I entered any of the small places of business, no one trembled or jerked. No attendant followed me up and down the isles. It was as though I was free and safe and invisible. It felt extremely peculiar to me.

I began thinking, how could I break the ice and get even one of these Japanese worker dudes to loosen up and look me in the eye and start spilling his guts so I could collect some clues, figure how they run shit out here in Kyoto? Even though I was a foreigner to them and they were all foreigners to me, I figured there had to be something common among men, besides women—a more neutral thing that could get the conversation started and keep the tempers of men from flaring. A plan was formulating in my mind.

At noon I returned to the schoolyard right between the high school and the college in my sweats and my Brooklyn T-shirt with a basketball in hand. I walked up on the guys who posted up on the rocks during their lunch break. I pushed my ball into one of them, right in his chest, and said, “
Konichiwa
, play ball!” He looked startled at first. Then a smile came through. He turned to his friends, who were slow to pick up. I walked away and he began to follow me. They began to follow him. I didn’t look back, but I knew they were still behind me because two of the five of them were smoking.

On the court I went right to it, getting the feel of the court and the nonregulation basket. Intentionally, I showed them my skills. They stood on the sideline watching like girls. I walked up to the original one and pushed the ball to him. Then I picked two of his
guys for my team, and gestured two of his guys to go to his side. I flagged the extra kid who was smoking a next cigarette, letting him know to move off the court and out the way. Using all hand motions, I checked the ball and we began to play. We were off to a slow start. Once the adrenaline started pumping, they would become more comfortable and the pace would pick up.

In three minutes a couple of females got drawn to us and stood watching. The guy I had tapped originally got pumped up at their arrival. Two minutes later he was out of his shirt. I went easy on them, letting them showcase their rudimentary performance. They played ball like they were keeping count of each step and move they made. It seemed like someone had taught them specific plays and moves and they thought they needed to stick to them like dance steps.

More girls collected. They weren’t rowdy though. They whispered to each other and watched with intense gazes. Two girls sat and opened their bento boxes and ate with their wooden chopsticks. Twenty minutes in, one of the players on the other team threw up the time-out signal and ran to the side, lifting the water bottle out of a girl’s hand and drinking some. Now I knew that he knew her, good.

By the time game one finished, there were twelve girls gathered around the six of us men and the seventh one seated on the sideline chain-smoking. I threw up two fingers so we could run the second game. A player from the other side threw up the X symbol, so I knew he had to leave. I motioned to the smoker, and he jumped up and replaced him. Six dudes in a circle organizing a game, but now the girls had formed a circle outside our circle like they were part of it. The original Japanese guy I chose to get the game started said to me in English, “name?”

I answered, “Mayonaka.” A girl from the outside circle repeated, “Mayonaka?” It was in the form of a question.

“
Hai,
Mayonaka!” I said confidently. I asked her,
“Namae?”
The two circles became one as they all gasped at my use of one short Japanese sentence.

“Reiko,” she answered, telling me her name. That set it off, and each person in our male/female circle announced their name. As I watched them become a bit more easy with each other, I’m thinking,
That’s right, I got my own
gokan
party going on.
The Japanese dudes seemed grateful. I figured they might have sat on those rocks reading
Manga and checking out comic-strip chicks with abnormally large tits and smoking for years without getting up the heart to approach one of these females before she graduated! In fifteen minutes that had all changed.

“Brooklyn?” One girl mispronounced it as she read my T-shirt in the form of a question.

“New York,” I responded, knowing that they would be more familiar.

“New York!” three of the girls gasped. One clapped and said, “I like New York.” They all giggled. Then the original Japanese guy, who I now knew was named Udo, pointed to my kicks. “I like,” he said.

“Yeah,” I acknowledged, not used to any male talking about how he liked something I was wearing.

“Michael Jordan?” Udo added.

“
Hai,
you know it,” I said. He was admiring my Nikes, Jordan’s black 1s. I understood. These joints were famous. Young Michael Jordan had come into the league last year and switched up the game with the all-black sneaker. The league was charging him a five-thousand-dollars violation fee per night just to rock these joints, and he was rocking ’em anyway. That’s why I called these my 5,000s.

Udo was now placing his foot beside my foot and saying “big,” referring to mine. I didn’t correct him. His feet were tiny, but why point it out? I was wearing an American size 10 men’s, not big for my six-foot-one height. I stepped back and bounced the ball to get the second game started. The girls dropped back into the background.

My team won the second game also. It was easy, since all six of the Japanese guys were basically watching me hoop. When we finished, I gave Udo the extra Brooklyn T-Shirt I had stuck in the fence for bargaining. I gave Yoshi my fitted and asked him to call the girl who gave him the water over here. When he came back with her, I asked her,
“Himawari-san wa doko ni imasuka?”
which means “Where is Himawari?” Yoshi and the girl both looked at one another first. Then the girl repeated,
“Himawari-san?”

“Hai!”
I confirmed.
“Tomodachi,”
I said, meaning friend.

“Wakarimashta,”
she said meaning that she understood. Yoshi, the guy, and Reiko, the girl, began speaking Japanese to one another, for what seemed like a long time. Yoshi then turned to me and said,
“San ji ni,”
which means at three o’clock.