Midnight and the Meaning of Love (73 page)

“Long day,” he said.

“Yeah, are you working late?” I asked him. It was 5:00 p.m.

“I’ll be wrapping up soon. We can share some dinner together?”

Black Sea and the pretty girl knocked and entered. “Dinner and karaoke?” Black Sea offered.

“Listen, let’s set that up for tomorrow night, same time. Hope you don’t mind, that would be better for me. I have to take care of a few things,” I told them.

“Do you know your way back?” the professor asked me.

“I’m good. I’ll stop by to check my wife later. Is that alright with you?”

“Okay, see you then. Be sure to eat something. This is Korea. We don’t eat alone!”

Black Sea showed me to the shuttle. I was out.

I wanted to get back to Bada Ga to clean myself up for the Maghrib prayer after this afternoon’s unexpected workout. I was looking forward to arriving back just at the right time for breaking my fast properly and alone, and of course taking my run on the beach.

I ran my regular route even closer to the sea. The Friday night crowd was out, many of them stargazing. Some were lovers, or after-workers breaking open a bucket of chicken while gulping beers. The party boats were on the sea, all lit up in the distance. The daily ferries were carrying people from the pier to the other side of the deep waters. Certain boats were returning from one of the many small Korean islands out there. All I knew was it just felt good to me.

Another runner was coming up from the rear. I could hear his kicks on the damp sand. I was used to being the only runner out here during the tourists’ dinner hour. He pulled up on my right side. I glanced at him and nodded. We were both blacked out—black sweats, black kicks, black T-shirts, and black wool hats. I picked up my pace, not wanting to feel like I had a running partner.

Another runner pulled up on my left, keeping pace with me, and the one I left behind pulled back up on my right. Maybe it was some ego shit, but I decided to race ahead of them both, leaving them behind in my dust. So I did.

Two people up ahead were shaking out a blanket in the blackened sky. I swerved to run around them. They tried to move out of my way at the same time, so we clashed. When I stepped back to run around them, they advanced, forcefully bagging me inside their blanket like a shark entangled in a net.

What the fuck?
I was pushing against the blanket, angry that these two were so clumsy. The second man was already behind me. Instead of unraveling the damn thing, he was wrapping me in it. I caught on. Now I’m swinging and pushing. The blanket became more taut
around my body. The men held it firmly in their grip. Ropes were being strung around my ankles, which were already unable to move. When my feet became immobile, the rope was wrapped swiftly and professionally around my calves and thighs. As I fell to the right, like a tree that had received its last whack of the axe, another rope kept me from hitting the sand. They pulled me back up and tied it around my chest. They pushed me over. I heard some clips snapped shut. I was lifted sideways. Now I was being carried like cargo on the backs of three runners. I began shifting my body to at least put enough pressure to cause my attackers to lose their balance. But I knew it was futile. A rope tied properly can bind its victim even further if he tries to maneuver his way out.

My neck and head were covered by the blanket but not roped. However, there was not even a centimeter of space between my face and the heavy, abrasive material that was scraping against my face with each movement, mine and theirs. The air was coming in only through the tiniest invisible openings in the fiber of the cloth as well as the opening they left above my head. Since they made it possible for me to still continue breathing, I knew that they weren’t trying to kill me. Or they at least had a temporary reason to keep me alive.

Killing comes easy to a killer. If that’s what they truly wanted to do, it would’ve been done in seconds, I knew.

Use the time against them,
I told myself. The more merciful they were to me, the more they laid the path to their own destruction. But how would I accomplish it?

I heard the clips again before I was tossed like a load of laundry into some type of metal container. I knew it was metal because of the way I hit the floor and the vibration it sent through my bones. Then I heard the door close. It sounded like the closing of the metal security gates that Brooklyn business owners use to make sure their goods are still in the store in the morning. I heard and felt the engine turn on. It began rumbling. So I knew it was a truck, not a storage bin. There was no talking between the drivers up front, at least I couldn’t hear anything but the engine and the vibration of the metal and the roll of the tires.

As I searched out the origin of each sound, I sensed that there was a man posted in the back where I was, holding watch over me. Even through the blanket and ropes I felt his presence.

While my options were none, I thought about my enemies. Number one, Naoko Nakamura, of course, a man I’d easily pushed into the recess of my mind over the past week. Why not? I had evaded him, captured his daughter, my wife, and eased out of
his
country and into Korea, where he had natural enemies just because he was Japanese.

My mind raced ahead. Wait a minute. Maybe Dong Hwa the professor had pretended to be Nakamura’s enemy and I had naïvely bought in to his act. The professor had set me up, planned for my wife to sleep over at his place for the weekend while he and Nakamura conspired to kidnap me. I tossed the thought around.

Nah, Dong Hwa wouldn’t, not because of any love for me, but because of his disgust for the Japanese and for the years of emotional stress that his wife had suffered, not to mention his sister-in-law Joo Eun, who he had never met. Besides, Nakamura was wicked enough to conjure up this whole thing on his own. His pockets were deep enough to buy up as many hands, bodies, and souls as he needed to use.

Then Akemi’s Korean father came to mind. Heavy-handed Jung Oh. He was mad vexed the other night and never got no relief from it. He was definitely capable and strong enough to carry me on his back, but I watched him move so slow last time and get faked and dodged out so easily that I was one hundred that he wasn’t one of the runners out there on the beach. I thought further. He wasn’t rich either, or he didn’t look it. So I ruled him out and settled on the obvious choice, Nakamura and his underground army, Omote Tora and them.

The truck, which was riding more like a Jeep, began pulling up steep hills. That didn’t mean nothing, I thought to myself. It didn’t reveal any significant geographic location. Busan is a beast of a thousand steep hills engulfed in green mountains and sitting on pretty waters. How could I tell one from the other, bound and blind?

A forty-minute rough ride, then I felt the truck stop. The driver turned off the engine and there was silence. Instead of yelling to attract attention after I heard both front doors open and slam shut, or struggling to move around, I lay limp. If these men were ordered by Nakamura to bring me somewhere alive, I would use a ninja technique of slowing down my heart and playing dead to give the one riding back here with me the impression that he had fucked up and allowed me to lose consciousness or worse.

A heavy boot kicked me. I controlled my reflexes. He had confirmed his presence. The problem was, these men must have been ordered not to speak. The fact that no one was speaking threw me off. I had no way of knowing how many of them were guarding me or what language they were using. Were they hired Korean hands or Japanese Yakuza operating on Korean soil? Could any of them speak English? Or were they all gonna communicate with me with only their hands and feet, knives and guns?

I felt the heat from a high-powered flashlight. It appeared as a very dull beam through the thick blanket covering my face. Purposely I peed to give my guard the impression that I had even lost control over my bodily functions. Then the heat was gone. I could no longer see the beam of light. He must have switched it off or laid it aside. Then he yanked the tight rope that was tied around my chest and confining my arms. I remained motionless. When he released the rope, my body slammed back down to the floor. He must’ve panicked. I felt him grab the chest rope again without lifting me. I felt the ropes loosen. I knew he had cut them. Still I didn’t move.

He put his whole hand over my face like a football player palms a football. The only thing between my skin and his hand was the blanket. Rushing, which for me meant he was afraid that I was no longer breathing, he grabbed the top of the blanket material with both hands and began cutting it open from the top down. When the material fell off on either side of my face, I had my eyes opened in a dead man’s stare. But it was pitch-black dark. He pushed his face close to mine and I head-butted him hard. He fell over to my right.

Swiftly I pulled my arms and hands out from the blanket. I sat up and felt around for the flashlight. I switched it on and grabbed the knife from the floor. He was out cold. I traced a line down the center of my body with the knifepoint. The blanket fell off to the left and the right, leaving only the ropes around my ankles. I cut them off and got up.

Standing, I flashed the light quickly across his face. It was covered with black paint except for his eyes. I found some gloves on him. I put them on. I grabbed a patch of his hair with my left hand, pulled and held his head forward, then punched him in the face with a heavy right to make sure he was knocked out cold. I rolled him over onto the blanket, wrapped and tied him with the pieces of rope.

My mind switched. Why wasn’t anyone coming? If they weren’t coming in, they must’ve expected him to bring me out. I moved the beam of light over the truck floor area slowly, searching for anything else I could use. I saw a plastic crate in the corner and an object on the floor. I took one step closer. It was a pair of goggles.

I dragged his body to the crate that he must have been sitting on and propped him up in sitting position on the crate, his body weight leaning against the wall.

When I picked the goggles up and held them to my eyes, he was a blob of blue light, a target. I switched the flashlight off. He showed up even brighter blue through the goggles. They had some type of night vision capability. They were like a second set of eyes in the black of the night. When I looked away from him and at my own hands, the gloves I was wearing showed up blue. I looked down at my black Nike sweat suit, and it appeared to be covered with blue dust. I took the goggles off. I switched the flashlight back on and looked at him, the gloves, and my sweats with only the flashlight on. There was no blue. Everything was uniformly black. I put the goggles back on.

I took off my sneakers and all my clothes, even my pissy boxers, which were also showing up blue. That’s when I heard someone approaching the truck from outside. I went and stood on the opposite side from the propped-up blue man. The truck door was lifted from the bottom. As the number two man stood looking at the number one blue man in the left corner, I kicked him in the back of his neck and he fell forward. I leaped on him and wrestled him down and took his gun. A shot was fired from a distance, and when I looked up, the blue man was covered with fluorescent pink-purple fluid, a paint. Now man one and two were both down.

With the goggles on, I could see into a wooded area. The entire forest appeared through the goggles as a very pale green. When I looked down, however, man number two’s shirt showed up fluorescent yellow. So now I knew. I was their target. I was supposed to light up blue. The blanket they had wrapped me in must have been treated with the blue chemical. That’s why both me and man number one, who had been guarding me, had both been blue. The attackers were marked with yellow on the chest and over both kneecaps. Shots that are fired and hit explode pink. I got it. I was not supposed to have access to any goggles, or even to know the rules of the war. The enemy
would light up yellow to prevent themselves from shooting one another. Aim only at the blue guy. But I was changing the game. I wasn’t blue or yellow. I’m black and my bare skin wouldn’t light up on their goggles. I took off man number two’s boots and put ’em on. They were two sizes too big for me. I tightened the laces. I crawled beneath the truck, using the strength of my right arm to pull myself. My left hand was over my jewels. I waited.

It was twenty-eight minutes before I peeped or heard anyone coming. He came to check out blue man number one, who they thought was me. Number three was a yellow shirt. I let him approach slowly, in case he was not alone. Then I saw a man six feet behind him, another yellow shirt. I took aim and fired four shots. Both men splattered pink and went down. I hadn’t moved anything but my trigger finger.

I crawled out the driver’s side of the truck and duckwalked to the driver’s door. I looked around but saw no one. I opened the door and removed the keys. I crawled to a nearby tree, buried the keys below a big rock. I looked at the position of the truck and the location of the rock. I constructed a grid in my mind and marked it in my memory in case I needed to get the keys back. But for now, I knew I couldn’t drive a truck.
Since I can’t, no one will,
I thought to myself.
At least not with this set of keys.

I wouldn’t give them the chance to abandon me in an unknown forest. If I could eventually overpower one of them, I could force him to drive me out of here at the threat of losing his life.

As I crept through the wilderness, my eyes established a rhythm—down, up, left, right, side to side, down, up, left, right, side to side. I spotted a yellow target sitting in a tree. I stopped, took aim, caught him. He pinked and dropped. Someone returned fire in my direction, must’ve heard my shot. He missed. I wasn’t wearing a marker. Instead, his pink splattered on a bush. I dropped down and lay there as more shots were fired into my area.
Five men down, how many more are there?
I asked myself.