Midnight and the Meaning of Love (8 page)

“If we got separated, I could find you easily. Your sneakers are cleaner than everyone else’s and your laces are so cool. How come my sneakers are dirty? How come when you walk around all day, your sneakers never get dirty?” she asked, looking up at me. I just smiled. But I did decide I would buy her a new pair of kicks. We dipped into a sneaker store. She wanted to pick. When she came back with some polka-dot skips, I chose for her instead. The DeQuan in me wouldn’t let it slide. He had been the five percenter, fashion regulator, gun dealer, fight promoter, and big brother to his five blood brothers and for my whole Brooklyn block before he got knocked.

Cho and his nephew Chow were in a rhythm, satisfying the customers and knocking them off the line one by one. I waited till the small crowd cleared.

“What you do here on a weekday?” Cho questioned.

“I came to give you a heads-up. This weekend I am going to work Friday like regular, but I have to take off all day Saturday the tenth and the following weekend, the sixteenth and the seventeenth.” There was a long pause between us. Cho looked like he was thinking real hard about my simple and clear request. Just then I saw Saachi, Akemi’s young cousin, walk up and sit down beside Naja outside Cho’s door.

“I’m letting you know now to give you enough time to get someone to fill in for me, okay?” I asked, but I was definite.

Cho folded his arms across his chest. “You chase Japanese girl to the end of the earth!”

Since I don’t discuss my wife with other men, I didn’t answer Cho. I knew that he knew that my letting him know was a courtesy, not a request. “I’ll see you on Friday morning, Cho. Don’t count me out. I’ll be here for sure,” I reassured him.

He mumbled something back at me, some sentences spoken in Chinese. So I figured he must be talking to himself.

“Mayonaka!” Eight-year-young Saachi jumped off the steps and put her hands right on her hips, where she liked to keep them. She was calling me by the name that Akemi called me. Mayonaka, meaning “midnight” in Japanese. Naja followed behind her. Before the little Japanese girl could start dropping her word bombs, her father, who is also my wife’s uncle, appeared outside their family store door, which was four doors down from Cho’s on the same side of the block.

“Ooh, you better go, you know. Here comes your father,” Naja warned Saachi. But the little girl only removed one hand from her hip and said through a half smile, “He’s only scary for you guys. My father’s very nice to me.” She turned on her toes to take off, and I slowed her down. “We’ll walk over with you,” I said. She and Naja began skipping slowly. Naja got her first scuff mark on her new ACGs.

“
Konbanwa
, Uncle Nakamura,” I said, using the Japanese language intentionally.

“Good evening,” he answered in English dryly and for his own reasons too.

“How’s it going? How’s business?” I asked, even though I had just seen him on Sunday when I was searching for Akemi. I suspected that he may have even called the cops on me for loitering outside of his store door, but really for loving and marrying his niece.

“Fine,” he responded with one word only.

“See you next time, Saachi,” Naja said.

“Good night,” I said.

I purposely wanted to appear to be calm and pleasant in this “thought battle” that I was having with the Japanese men in my wife’s family. There was no reason to tip him off that I was headed over to take back what was mine. Inside I was boiling once again. I could tell from this uncle’s posture that they thought they had won. It was as though they believed that they lived in the first world and I was stuck in the third or fourth or fifth world, that somehow I wouldn’t be able to figure out how to cross the Pacific Ocean beyond Alaska and over the Siberian mountains to get my wife. In a short time, they would discover that they were wrong.

“What did Saachi say to you?” I asked Naja.

“First she asked me what I was doing over here. Then she showed
me this string that she had in her pocket and how she could twist it into a bunch of different shapes. Then she asked me if I missed Akemi and if we had heard from her.”

“What did you tell her?”

“What could I tell her? I don’t know anything,” Naja said with her arms raised halfway and palms facing up.

“Are you sure you didn’t say anything extra?” I checked.

“I just told her that I do miss Akemi and that I am sure she will come back real soon.” Then Naja shifted her eyes away from me.

“And?” I pushed.

“And what?” she said softly but understanding the intensity in me. “Saachi said that Akemi is
never coming back.
”

The words of my seven-years-young sister hit me in the chest like powerful kicks.

“But I told Saachi that she really doesn’t know that for sure,” Naja said confidently.

“And?” I continued.

“Saachi said that her father told her that Akemi’s father saved Akemi from ruining her life.”

My jaw tightened. I stood still on the busy block holding my sister’s hand, thinking.

“That’s it, that’s all Saachi said. Oh, wait a minute, I left one thing out. Earlier, she told me that her real name is Sachiko but that she lets people she likes call her Saachi for short. She said Sachiko means ‘happiness.’ But the mean thing she told me about you ruining Akemi’s life, she said that last. Then you came outside.”

“Me and Chris dipped into our funds and bought you a wedding present. We
could’ve
got you something before, if you
would have
let us know you was getting married,” Ameer said.

We were in the dojo locker room suiting up in our
dogis
—me, Ameer, and Chris, my two best friends. They were weeks late with their gift, but it was cool. Truth is, I wasn’t expecting anything at all.

“So, since the money came from our car fund, that means that I paid for a third of my wedding gift?” I said, kidding them about the money that we all three had saved up over our seven-year friendship.

“True, true.” Chris smiled. “But, brother, that’s not the point!” Chris added.

“So where is it?” I asked, standing with my arms extended doubtfully.

“It’s at Ameer’s place,” Chris said.

I turned toward Ameer and asked him, “Is this gift something that you used first? ’Cause if you already used it, you can keep it. Y’all know I don’t like leftovers!” I slammed my locker shut, laughing.

“That’s cold,” Ameer answered. “Maybe I
should
use it first.”

We hit the floor, taking up our positions.

Naja shrank herself into a corner beneath the large, antique gray metal fan, reading the new book I had just bought her.

During the second dojo hour, Sensei called out for sparring. Although he always chose random partners, he tried to avoid putting me, Chris, and Ameer up against one another. He put me against a muscular heavyweight instead, an old dude, about twenty-nine or so.

It wasn’t a conscious choice for me to place the face of Akemi’s
rude-ass uncle over the face of my sparring partner.
Akemi is never coming back.
I kept hearing that one sentence. I must have heard it too much or too loud in my mind. I landed a blow to my opponent that shifted his jaw and cracked his nose. It was only his slow stream of blood running from his nose, over his lips, and onto his teeth that brought my mind back into focus and into the dojo.

“My bad, man,” I said. Sensei stood staring. It didn’t move me. We are warriors and some blood gotta spill sometimes. This time was not the first time someone caught a bad one in our ninjutsu dojo.

Later, outside the dojo, me, Ameer, and Chris conspired in the warm night weather.

“What’s up for tonight?” I asked them.

“Nothing, man. You brought your kid sister. I wanted you to come through the East tonight,” Ameer said, referring to East New York.

“Word? Chris, you headed to the East?” I asked.

“Punishment, remember? I’m still on punishment.” As we all laughed, Chris’s father, Reverend Broadman rolled up, pushing the Caddy, and snatched Chris up.

“How ’bout tomorrow night? I can come through after ball practice but it’ll be late,” I told Ameer.

“Nah, then come through in the afternoon after I get back from school, ’round four thirty. It’ll be safer for you then.” Ameer glanced down at my father’s watch, then smiled. “You know how the East—”

“Yeah, you know me.” I gave him a pound. “I’ll check you tomorrow,” I said as I walked away.

“I wouldn’t want none of them boys around my way to steal your wedding gift from you, especially after you paid for it and I used it first!” Ameer said with a laugh. He got that one off on me.

“Later,” I told him, and grabbed my sister’s hand and kept moving.

“Is it wrong if I think that your friend is handsome?” Naja asked me, as we rode on the train and after being unusually silent the whole time.

“What do you mean?” I said, shocked, and having nothing else to say.

“You know like he gives a girl a special feeling when she looks at him, Ameer does,” she said quietly.

“Don’t look at him then! That’s why the Quran teaches us to
lower our gaze. When you see boys, don’t stare at them. Don’t talk to them. Don’t let them look into your eyes and you don’t look into theirs either. Don’t do anything,” I scolded her, feeling off guard.

“It’s only the first time I felt that,” she said softly. “And I don’t see boys or stare at them either. I go to an all-girls school, remember? Maybe I only noticed him because you brought me here again. Sorry,” she apologized.

“I’m sorry too.” I hugged my sister with one arm. “I won’t bring you there no more, and you let your first time feeling be your last time feeling, until …”

“Until when?” she asked.

“Until it’s time for you to marry.”

“Who knows when that is?” she said below her breath.

The yard light flashed on and Mustapha opened the fence at 10:00 p.m. on the dot. He greeted me first, then shifted his greeting to Naja.

“Hey, are you sleepy?” he asked her in English. But Naja wouldn’t lift her head to allow her eyes to look at him or even toward him. I guess she was taking my scolding to heart and to the extreme. But I thought it was good that she knew I was serious. I thought it was even better that she was already making an effort.

“Hi. Nope, I’m not sleepy yet but I’m about to be,” Naja said, still staring down at either her own two feet or the Ghazzali’s grass.

“Come on in,” he welcomed us.

“It’s my friend the prime minister,” Mr. Ghazzali said with a serious tone yet a genuine smile. I felt bad about greeting his warmth with suspicion, but somehow, suspicion had become a significant part of me. His playful tone and the name that he had dubbed me, “the prime minister,” was not a compliment to me. My father had been the top adviser to the true prime minister of the Sudan. I secretly wondered if Mr. Ghazzali had known that all along or if maybe he only recently figured it out.

When my father would come home to the comfort of our Sudanese estate, El Beit Rahim, that he built, he was sometimes filled from head to toe with dilemmas. On some nights, I didn’t even need the children’s books that he often gifted to me. My father would sit at my side in my bedroom and tell me stories that he pulled from the depths of his mind and core of his heart. Instead of talking serious politics with me, a young boy at that time, he would give his
higher-ups, and subordinates animal titles, revealing their characters and actions woven into a simple tale. He would tell me the story of one general, starring “the vulture,” who invited and dined on death. One of his cabinet members he described as an elephant who no one could help but notice because of his size. An elephant who took up more than his share of space, made incredible piles of poop, ate up everything, but did nothing else. I would laugh at my father’s tales and then ask him, “What animal are you, Father?” My father would think first, then break out in a broad smile, each of his sparkling white teeth set perfectly in his mouth. “I am the camel. I can go for long months without water, although I prefer to drink every day. I can store food and eat it on a day when there is nothing else and everyone else’s food is gone. I can carry many men on my back through the desert to an oasis that I know for certain is there. Yet the men usually give up before we reach there, and I am left alone and saddled with their luggage.”

At seven years young, I didn’t know the word
metaphor
. Now, as a teenaged young man, I understood exactly what my father meant.

When I asked my father which animal our Umma is, he stood up, standing six-foot-eight, and walked a few steps in circles. “Umma,” he said, “cannot be described as any animal. She is the sun. No matter where I am traveling in the world, I can feel her warmth and heat. If I look into the sky, she is there radiant and shining. She can never be mistaken for anyone else. When she walks away for even a short time, I can’t wait for her return. If she were never to return, nothing else would matter.”

My father silenced me with his words that night as my mind gripped their meaning. A tear did come to my childish eyes. “You must not cry,” my father cautioned me. “It is our job to keep the tears from Umma’s eyes. It is every man’s and every son’s job to bring happiness to mothers and wives and sisters.”

“Good evening, Mr. Ghazzali,” I greeted him.

“I know you will want to get right down to business. You and I can step into my office. Maybe your sister can sit with my oldest daughter, Basima.” Mr. Ghazzali called upstairs for Basima to come down. Sudana appeared instead.

“Basima is still at Fordham U. She said she will be there studying
for her final exams,” Sudana told her father. Mr. Ghazzali seemed disturbed for some seconds and then pulled himself out of the mood. Sudana took Naja with her.

“My sister and I have to meet Umma at her job at midnight,” I told him, so he would be mindful of my time. It was already 10:15.