Midnight and the Meaning of Love

by Souljah, Sister

  When she stopped reminiscing, she found me looking at her. I was still stuck on “Let’s take a boat to Korea.” I could feel her feeling attached to me. I could feel myself feeling attached to her also. But it was complicated and impossible for now. She knew it also. Maybe that’s why she was invisible for the day, to stay away. So our feelings would not grow. And for the first time in my life as a young man, I understood something about my father, which I had never understood up until this second. I used to question, How could he have a woman as beautiful and wise and complete and sweet as Umma and still have space for a second wife to love and share with? Now, standing still in a tight toilet room about to part permanently with my lucky charm, my pretty puma, I had to ask myself, How could I not love her?

  “I’m just joking,” Chiasa said softly, about coming along with me and Akemi to Korea.

  “I have to pay you your money for the extra days that you worked,” I told her.

  “Instead of money, maybe you can give me something else?” she said.

  “Something like what?” I asked.

  “I gotta think about it. Something like one wish, whatever I ask you for.”

  “How could I agree to that?” I asked her. “It could be something that conflicts with my beliefs. Then I couldn’t do it.”

  “I wouldn’t ask you for something that conflicts with your beliefs. Give me a little trust, can’t you?” she said, exasperated.

  “Aight then, if it doesn’t conflict with my beliefs and it doesn’t bankrupt me, I’ll do it for you,” I made the rare promise to her. She smiled hugely.

  “Okay, so I’ll see you in Korea. How long are you staying there?” she asked me. “And what city are you going to?” she asked.

  “Busan. I’m headed to Busan, but I don’t know for how long,” I told her. “I have your number and I know where you live.” Then Chiasa looked uncertain. “Why? Can’t you just trust me a little?” I asked her.

  “I can!” She powered up. “Besides, I have your movie camera and some more of your stuff, so I know you’ll call me,” she joked. I looked at her without a smile to let her know that my stuff wasn’t the reason I would call.

  “Leave out of this hotel when I leave out,” I told her. “If you want to remain invisible, okay. Come to the airport. I’ll buy your ticket. Fly back to Osaka on the same flight so I can know you’re safe. At Osaka International Airport, we go our separate ways until I call you,” I said. “When we meet, we’ll even up and exchange everything that needs to be exchanged.”

  She agreed.

  Chapter 14

  AKEMI

  Although we ticketed and boarded the flight from Asahikawa Airport in Hokkaido separately, we were all seated in the same coach section, in the same row. Our flight to Osaka International Airport was full. I figured maybe we had gotten these last-minute three open seats because of some cancelation by some other passengers. I was grateful.

  Both Chiasa and I had aisle seats. Akemi sat beside me in the middle seat to my right. Of course I felt the impulse to introduce the two of them, but there were some strong points keeping me still. First, Chiasa had made it clear that she wanted to remain invisible. Thinking now ninja to ninja, I decided and understood that this was her strategic position. She wanted to burn her involvement with this mission just in case anything went wrong in the remaining hours or days. It was sharp of her, and I understood. So I stopped considering whether she had personal reasons for wanting us to appear anonymous to one another. With the network of thoughts about what had already taken place so far, what was happening now, and the plans for my and Akemi’s future, there was no more space left for me to decipher or confirm or pinpoint anything else.

  I also thought that introducing two women, my wife and the woman who had made it possible for me to find my wife, on a plane surrounded by strangers would be an unnecessary security problem. Their talking to one another might reveal too much. Who knows who’s listening? Besides, both of them would be speaking Japanese across and over me in a plane packed with primarily Japanese people. Only I would be left out of the language loop. Of course I chose the way that would lead to the well-being of my wife.

  Chiasa was a superb ninja. She did not make eye contact with me even once since she’d hopped in her taxi driving behind Josna, Akemi, and me, or when she adjusted her airline ticket as we stood in the same line. Even during our flight she turned her body leftward and laid her face away from me. She slept throughout the entire flight. Or at least she appeared to be sleeping, as I observed her breathing by the subtle and slow rise and fall of her breast. She must be exhausted, I thought to myself. The night before, she had sacrificed her sleep to allow me to get mine.

  Akemi was warm. She took my right hand and studied the lines that Allah had drawn in my palm. I didn’t know what she might be thinking. I did know that after one good look she might make a great drawing of just the inside of my hand—done so well that the viewer would feel that she knew my entire life story through Akemi’s passionate pencil strokes. She was like this, my wife. After looking closely, she began caressing my hand, moving her fingers lightly from my fingertips into my palms and up the insides of my wrists. She was feeling each of my veins with her fingertips, slowly and lightly. She is and was a continuous arousal to me. When she released my hand, she placed her hand onto the side of my face, stroking my skin. Then she slid one of her pretty, slim fingers to the inside of my ear. She was touching so lightly that it sent a strong sensation through my body. She swirled her finger out and down onto my jaw. Slowly, she began tracing my jawline. She paused one finger in the corner of my mouth. She traced the outline of my lips. I turned toward her and smiled. “What are you trying to do in here?” I asked her in English. She withdrew her hand and smiled also, her eyes flooded with feelings. She wrapped both of her hands around my arm and pressed her face against my body and steadied there.

  I knew I had to lead her and not the other way around. I had a real task to clearly explain Ramadan to her all and the specific beliefs and ways of my life, our new lives, without common words or familiar tongues. I had to be careful with a wife so warm and sweet and lodged so strong up in my heart that instead of focusing on my faith, I found my mind wandering and wanting to pull her up into my lap, facing me. Of course I knew the difference between faith and fantasy. After an intense morning that wasn’t truly over yet, the fantasy was very appealing.

  My sensual thoughts turned to loving thoughts. My loving thoughts turned to protective thoughts. I didn’t know which details Akemi knew and didn’t know. But I figured it had to be stressful for Akemi to be the daughter of Joo Eun Lee, who had been kidnapped, and then to be kidnapped herself by the same person, her father, or at least the man she obviously still believed was her father. My mind began juggling images of all the incredible material things that Akemi’s father had provided her and her mother with, and all the luxury and opportunities. Did he think his estate and his mountain and the clothes and the travels and the elite status that they enjoyed made it okay—canceled out that he had kidnapped a fifteen-year-young girl, hauled her overseas from her country by force, and married her? Did he believe that it was justifiable to drug my wife and fly her seven thousand miles away from me? Could he reason to himself that killing my twins, or even allowing them to live but hiding them away from their father for a lifetime was right? I was struggling in my narrow airline seat, my thoughts and mind and body in a battle.

  I had gone against my own ways and beliefs. I had killed lesser men for lesser violations than the ones Nakamura had committed. I had allowed Chiasa to shoot Makoto. Tranquilizing him was the same as leaving him “half dead,” which is something I don’t do or haven’t done in my young life. If I make the decision that a man because of his evil actions or his evil threat has to go, I don’t give that man a chance at a get-back. He doesn’t deserve one. Was it okay for Nakamura to be left alone and alive? Would he regroup and try to strike again? Of course he would. He was “the man who never surrender
s.”

  Let him come, I thought to myself. What makes a man powerful? I thought further. His God, his land, his culture, his language, his business, his ability to protect and defend, I answered back. Then I experienced another first, seated beside my wife, whom I had experienced a bunch of meaningful firsts with. For the first time since Umma and I had landed in the United States of America, my mind shifted from my responsibility and strategy of protecting Umma while we were living there, and building a business with her while we were living there, and buying a house for her while we were there, to a consideration to take Umma and my wife and sister and to return to the Sudan no matter how complicated that might become.

  If I had learned one lesson from traveling to Japan, it was that if a man could survive and build on his own land, surrounded by his own like-minded people, speaking his own language, following his own beliefs, he could control the outcome of his circumstances much better.

  I had seen that Americans didn’t believe what I believed. Japanese didn’t believe what I believed, and the environment that they had created made it impossible for a man to secure his wife and raise his children properly. There was no consensus among the men of America or the men of Japan about how to live properly, how to relate to their women, how to raise their sons and secure their daughters. How could there be a belief when the women in America and in Japan were nearly naked out of doors daily? To truly love and protect a woman in these surroundings would be to have to fight constantly. A man would spend most of his seconds and minutes and hours fighting. The only alternative would be to not love the women. If a man did not love women, he wouldn’t have any concern over them. He wouldn’t protect them. He wouldn’t marry them. He would only ignore or use and abuse them. Love makes a man protect his women. Anything else is not love. I was certain of this.

  It is not as though I had not witnessed these truths through my own father. I had witnessed them as a child, daily. I had even thought about them. I had remembered and cherished the memories also. Now I was seeing these truths as a man. Now I was deciding. If I had to constantly fight no matter where I lived and stood, why not fight in the land of my father, for the land of my father, and the faith and beliefs of my father? At least there the way of life was worth guarding, maintaining, and enjoying. There was a basic agreement between men over the simple things, like the definition of man, the definition of woman, the sacredness of family, what should be done in our homes versus what shouldn’t be done in our homes, and so on. Spilling blood or having my own blood spilled was easy for me to accept if it had a deeper meaning and a meaningful purpose and outcome. In fact, only now after all of this did I realize that, more than land and money and power, men around the globe were fighting over the meaning of life, the meaning of love, and the way we each should be living from day to day. The money and the power was just a method to control the meaning. Could that be true? I asked myself.

  In a flow of passengers moving at a careful pace toward the luggage carousel, Chiasa walked in front of us. In one sudden movement, she stopped, breaking the rhythm of the crowd, and searched the floor for four rocks that had somehow spilled from her pockets. Naturally I bent to help her pick them up. Quickly she grabbed two and so did I. Inside of the two seconds that we were both bent to the floor she whispered, “Check three o’clock, it’s Mayu from the Nakamura estate.”

  As I stood up looking in the three o’clock direction, Akemi was already seeing Mayu and waving her way. I pulled Akemi back and held her hand as Chiasa eased onward. Turning her focus toward me, Akemi said, “Josna.” There weren’t enough seconds available for me to think fast or switch plans or even to measure the threat. I was clear that my spot had been blown up now that Mayu saw me walking with Akemi as we exited the flight from Hokkaido and approached the luggage carousel. Mayu was standing among others in clear view on the opposite side of the divide. I recalled that Chiasa had described Mayu as the manager of the Nakamura estate who was secretly “on Akemi’s side.” I held Akemi with me until my backpack rolled around. I picked it up and we walked together through the luggage area and exited directly where Mayu stood waiting.

  Both Akemi and Mayu went into a series of bows. Then Akemi turned herself on an angle toward both Mayu and me and introduced me. I could only catch and understand a few of the Japanese words my wife used. But her tone and gestures held great affection and she went on as though she were presenting Mayu to a royal emissary or an important diplomat and not the hated nemesis of her father—Mayu’s longtime and current employer. Mayu bowed to me politely using only her head and not bending to the degrees that I had seen many Japanese people bow.

  “Konichiwa, hajime mashite, bokuwa Mayonaka desu.” I spoke the standard Japanese self-introduction. In a way that revealed so much about their culture, the woman Mayu barely looked at me. She didn’t smile or frown or display any emotion. She placed all her attention on Akemi and stepped to the side and rested one hand on the Louis Vuitton luggage stacked in size order on a cart beside her. Mayu spoke some more to Akemi, softly and calmly.

  As my eyes scanned the pile of red Epi leather luggage—a trunk, a suitcase, and a soft Cruiser sack, all matching—I took a deep breath. Either this conservative, crispy clean, and quality, well-dressed woman was a two-faced clever aid to Nakamura who wanted to saddle me with expensive and heavy red luggage that made me stand out and slow down so that I could be identified and caught, or she was just a concerned stand-in mother to Akemi who overdid it as mothers do when their love and concern are pushed to an extreme. Further, I guessed that she must think that Akemi was on her way to America. Why else would she pack so many items when Korea was a short jump across the sea? She must’ve also believed that Akemi would not return anytime soon.

  Akemi watched me from the corners of her pretty eyes, while showing respect toward Mayu at the same time. I could hear Mayu using familiar Japanese names, vocabulary words and phrases which I had memorized and learned by now, such as Nihon, which means “Japan,” otosan, which means “father,” ai, which means “love,” beikoku, which means America, kiotsukete, which means “be careful.” Then Mayu paused her speech for some seconds and asked Akemi in Japanese with a blank face but steady stare, “Are you sure?”

  “Hai!” Akemi responded. It was the eighth “Hai!” I had counted in their conversation filled, I imagined, with instructions, questions, and concerns.

  Mayu bowed a deep bow to Akemi and turned and left. Akemi watched me as I watched Mayu walking away. I was looking to see if Mayu joined anyone else. Was she at the airport alone for the sake of helping Akemi to leave the country undetected? Exactly who had unloaded and carried the heavy luggage for her? Was it one of Nakamura’s men or just a skycap or airport worker or taxi driver whom she had randomly selected? As she disappeared from my view, walking solemnly in small steps, wearing an expensive skirt suit and sturdy, quality elder-lady pumps, I thought to myself, Either she is doing a good job of acting, or she is actually all alone.

  What had she been told about Akemi’s travel and future plans? I wondered. I figured Josna had called ahead to Mayu—thinking with her heart and not her brain—and had had Mayu prepare Akemi’s clothing and essentials. As my wife’s best friend, Josna, I’m sure, felt that she knew exactly what Akemi needed and wanted and was accustomed to having.

  Earlier in Hokkaido Josna had lent Akemi her olive-green Adidas sweatpants and a tiny olive-green jacket to wear. Akemi had had no luggage or change of clothes since she had no idea that she was going to be sent up there to Hokkaido from her doctor’s visit. It was too much of a rush for me to judge or complain about the borrowed outfit. It was better than traveling with a dark-haired beauty dressed in a mini made up only of flowers. Thinking further, although Josna had caused Mayu to become the only person from the Nakamura estate to have actually seen me, other than Nakamura’s man Makoto, who lay tranquilized still in the tall Hokkaido grass that shielded him, I told myself not to harden my heart in judgment against Josna. She, after all, had ag
reed to give up her own passport to Akemi knowing full well that not having her documents in hand while living as a Nepali foreigner in Japan placed herself at legal risk.

  Josna had even agreed in the event that Akemi didn’t have her own passport, to shave her best friend’s head of her long, flowing, soft black locks, and transform her into a brown-skinned Nepali by brushing cosmetics over Akemi’s face, neck, hands, feet, and arms, as carefully as she would have prepared and handled one of her treasured sculptures. Josna was willing to do anything to make it possible for Akemi to ease beyond customs and passport inspection with her husband and then out of Japan, even though she really didn’t want her best friend and herself to be separated. Josna had moved beyond her fears and doubts and supported our love and marriage even though she probably thought we might be reckless. But her calling and informing Mayu had placed me in an even greater race against time and at a serious risk. What Chiasa had planned out and executed so perfectly had now been compromised by Josna.

  I knew that even though Josna and Akemi believed that Mayu was on Akemi’s side, we had no true way of knowing if Mayu had also tipped off Nakamura. If she told him, I was certain that even though he was away on his Asian tour, he would send his hired dogs out to descend on the airport or make some influential phone calls to Japanese authorities to intercept and interrupt—and to seize his daughter and stop me, perhaps permanently.

  Once again Chiasa had been ahead in her thinking and her strategy—and 100 percent on point.

  Now Akemi and I were packed into an immaculate cab exiting from a random airport exit on purpose. I had decided we would travel to South Korea by sea. Her father Nakamura, I believed, would underestimate me and never consider that I would use the sea route. Akemi and Josna did not know that it was an option either. In fact only Chiasa and I knew. We were both trained to keep our mouths shut—and to swallow our secrets until death. And now I knew the difference between a woman who is a man’s friend, and a woman whom a man loves, and a woman who is a man’s comrade.