Midnight and the Meaning of Love Read online

  “No problem, you are good customer,” he said.

  “Allah hafiz,” I said, a small sign to him that we are all Muslims and he should simply do his job and act honorably with us.

  I told Naja to get out so we would both walk Umma inside. There was no way I would leave her sitting and waiting in the cab while I escorted Umma.

  “Oh man, I thought we were all going out to eat or to do something fun. This is Umma’s job again!” she complained softly.

  * * *

  “Pop the trunk,” I told the driver when Naja and I arrived at Mr. Ghazzali’s house in the Bronx. “Come out, Naja.”

  “Suitcases? Okay, what’s going on?” she asked me.

  “You’ll see,” I told her. Then, before I could knock on the fence or ring the bell, Sudana opened it, all smiles as if she didn’t have one problem in the world.

  “Salaam alaikum, Sudana! You told me to come back soon and visit you. I wasn’t planning on it, but I guess I am here,” Naja said playfully.

  “Don’t you like my house? I made sure I got here early just so I could see you,” Sudana said to Naja.

  “Me or my brother?” Naja asked smartly.

  “Both of you!” Sudana embraced it.

  “Is your father home?” I asked her.

  “Laysa,” Sudana said, meaning no. “Everybody in my house is either at work or school.”

  “Aight, so I’ll put these suitcases downstairs and then I’ll leave. I got the key,” I told Sudana.

  “Leave?” Naja said, surprised.

  “Sudana has agreed to watch you while I’m out and while Umma is at work,” I explained.

  “Then what are the suitcases for?” Naja pushed.

  “When I get back tonight, I’ll explain everything to you, okay?”

  Naja nodded yes but pouted also.

  I opened the side door to the basement apartment and brought the suitcases inside. Sudana and Naja both followed me instead of going in the front door and remaining upstairs in the house, which is what I expected them to do.

  “Aren’t you two going upstairs?” I asked.

  “Yes, I’ll take Naja up. I cooked something for her. I know you’re hungry after school and all, right?” Sudana asked Naja.

  “Yep, long as it’s good!” Naja answered.

  “Tell Sudana thank you,” I corrected Naja. “You already know that it’s good because Sudana cooked it.”

  Sudana’s smile lit up the dim basement. Her hazel eyes sparkled like pretty marbles or glow-in-the-dark trinkets.

  “C’mon, let’s go up,” I told them. Sudana followed me. Naja followed Sudana.

  Outside in the warm air I watched them go in the front door. Sudana turned toward me and asked, “Can you come inside for a minute?”

  “Since your father is not here, I’ll just leave now,” I told her with certainty.

  “It’s important, just for three minutes,” Sudana said, and then made the kind of face that older people make when they don’t want to speak freely in front of a child.

  So I said, “Okay, three minutes and then I gotta go.”

  Inside, Sudana whisked Naja away into a back room, the kitchen, I guessed. I heard the plates and cups clinking and then heard a television come on, a loud commercial blaring out before Sudana must’ve lowered the volume. I heard Naja’s little hands clapping because she is never allowed to watch television when we are in our Brooklyn apartment.

  Sudana emerged alone. “Would you take off your shirt, please?” she requested.

  “What?”

  “Take it off. I need to see something,” she said with a straight face.

  “Nah. I’m out,” I told her.

  “On the back of your shirt there is a small spot of blood. It seemed fresh and I want to see your wound,” she said as though she were a medical professional. “I can take care of it for you. I’m going to become a doctor in the future, and my sister, Basima, is already in medical school and training to become a doctor also, so I know well how to treat a wound. Please, sit down and let me look at it.”

  “Not in your father’s house,” I denied her.

  “Okay then, we’ll step downstairs to your apartment. It is yours for the month, right?” she said, smiling politely, not like a come-on but as if she were already a nurse. She left the room and returned with a medical bag. I figured it had to be Basima’s bag.

  “It will be quick, I promise. Oh, but it does depend on how bad it is. If it is something I cannot handle, I’ll send you to straight to the hospital.”

  “It’s not that serious,” I assured her. “I’m definitely not going to the hospital.”

  “Follow me,” she said. She opened the door that led to the basement apartment and went down six steps. She turned around facing me and said, “You can sit here on the step so we can hear Naja if she calls us or comes.” Sudana flipped a switch and a bright light shined down on the stairs. She was standing over me and I was seated.

  “Take it off. I won’t look at you as a man. I will look at you only as a patient.”

  I didn’t believe her. Women are all emotion, I thought to myself, recalling my father’s lessons. Yet I found myself cooperating with her anyway. I reminded myself that last time she had put me to sleep using some strange technique and pressing down on the center of my head with her two fingers.

  I pulled off my shirt. She saw my gun. I moved it out from my waist and laid it down on the stairs beside me, facing the wall. When my chest and shoulder and back were bare, Sudana looked at me like a woman looks at a man. I could feel her heart softening. I could see it also in her eyes. She caught herself and redirected her energy. She began unwrapping the cut from my duel with Sensei. When she saw the whole thing, she suddenly made a sound, sssssss, sucking the air in through her teeth, as though the wound was worse than she expected, and as if she felt my pain also. The sound she made with her mouth made me feel something that I was trying not to feel. She opened her medical bag and used her free hand to begin searching through the items inside.

  “Wait one minute,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”

  She returned with a needle and a cigarette lighter and some hefty thread. “You need stitches,” she said confidently. She set herself up on the stairs.

  She cleaned my wound first. The cold alcohol against my warm skin and her light touch and gentle rub with the clean cotton felt way better than when I had wrapped the wound myself. She flicked on the lighter and burned the tip of the needle until it turned black. Then she swiped the thread with alcohol and threaded her now sterilized sewing needle.

  “This is going to hurt a little but help a lot,” she said softly, standing so close to me that I could feel her body heat separate from the warmth of the atmosphere. She stood so close that I could see the texture of her pretty lips and smell her seductive Sudanese scent. She pierced my skin with the needle, and it pinched but wasn’t nothing to me really.

  “I gave you ten stitches. You really only needed eight, but just to be sure. When you leave on your trip, Akemi can take your stitches out. I can write her a note and tell her exactly how to do it. Or maybe she knows how to do it already?” Sudana said, smiling. She was a subtle and seductive teenaged female. I understood all her hidden messages even though I never acknowledged them. Looking up at her, I broke out in my first genuine smile of my day.

  “So handsome,” Sudana whispered. “Please don’t smile at me.” She packed up her medical bag quickly. The second she had it all organized, she brushed by me, climbing the six stairs and flicking off the light as she moved up.

  “Put your shirt back on,” she gently ordered me.

  “I’m sorry,” she apologized while my back was toward her.

  “For what?” I asked her without turning around.

  “I tried, but I ended up looking at you as a man, not as a patient,” she said softly. Switching to Arabic, she added, “Now I can never take back what I’ve seen and what I felt, and I don’t even want to.” Our language, in this situat
ion, seated in the dark staircase of her home, aroused me.

  I threw my shirt on swiftly and stood right up. “Sudana,” I called her back. “I’m gonna lock this door from the inside and go down here to make my prayer. I’ll leave from out the side exit, okay?”

  She nodded knowingly. As Muslim, we needed prayer to keep our minds right and our actions also.

  “When I ring your bell, meet me outside so you can lock your fence. Oh, and thank you, for healing me,” I told her. She smiled and moved her eyes away.

  When I pressed her bell, she came to the door alone. She handed me a man’s shirt without looking at me. “It’s my older brother’s shirt. You can wear it for now since you have that blood spot on the back of your shirt still.”

  “Thanks, but I’m good. I’ll take care of it,” I said.

  Outside in the sunlight she seemed embarrassed to look at me, even though now she had seen much more of me than she was ever supposed to. So I didn’t stare at her either. I shifted my eyes and said, “I’ll see you. I mean, I’ll see your family tonight when I bring my Umma.”

  On my way to practice I picked up a new shirt and white tee from a random shop. I stuffed my old shirt with the blood spot in my back pocket and just rocked it like that. I wasn’t about to leave my clothes at any woman’s house who was not my wife from here on in. In my mind I pictured crazy-ass Bangs taking my hoodie to some zany fortune-teller and started laughing, even though I was alone.

  Chapter 20

  FRIENDS

  “Your left shoulder is moving a little slow, my man!” Vega yelled to me. “If you got one good shoulder and one good hand, you better practice shooting with them. Like I told all you players, if you gotta fight or fuck, do it after the game, not before. I need all of you to be in top condition to make me look good!”

  After basketball practice, Bangs didn’t show up uninvited like she normally would. Only my eyes did a quick and thorough search. I didn’t move one other muscle or limb to go looking for her. I had dojo tonight and everything in my Thursday schedule was back to back. I left the gym in a pack with the others and headed down the steps to the subway with a few of them. I jumped on the train and headed to the dojo.

  * * *

  On the street outside the dojo, I could see Ameer. He was coming from one direction and I was coming from the other. Other fighters walked up and pulled up one by one and entered the dojo. I stood waiting for Ameer to reach me. Meanwhile, the Caddy pulled up smoothly. I watched as Ameer seen the Caddy from a distance. Then he dropped back some, and sidestepped and waited for Chris’s father, Reverend Broadman, to pull off. I wondered why.

  “What’s up, brother?” Chris gave me a pound.

  “I see you got your chauffeur service in full effect,” I kidded him.

  “Yeah, I got a ride here, but I gotta get the train home. Tonight The Cosby Show is on and my father watches it with my mother and little brother and sister religiously! I mean nobody can schedule anything when that show is on.”

  “The Cosby Show?” I repeated.

  “C’mon now, I know you heard about it before and seen it too,” Chris said.

  “I ain’t seen it,” I assured him.

  “Man, there’s a girl on that show I’m gonna marry, Lisa Bonet! Damn, she’s fine. Let’s go in,” Chris said, grabbing my injured arm.

  “Ameer’s coming up now.” I pointed.

  Two black eyes and a busted lip, that’s what Ameer was hiding.

  “What the fuck happened to you?” Chris asked first.

  “Who we gotta see?” I asked Ameer seriously. “Whoever did this shit to you, we gotta see him. We could do that tonight. We could do that instead of dojo.” I was running on immediate reaction.

  “It ain’t like dat,” Ameer said calmly. I was used to him being the one who’s hyped up and me being the one who’s calm. Now there was a reversal.

  “You saying it’s not like that. Your face is saying that it is like that,” I told him.

  “Let’s just find out what happened first,” Chris said, as he threw his rational thinking in. “If we skip the dojo, we can go get some pizza and see what’s up with all this, you know, come up with a plan.”

  “Aight, I’m down,” I told them.

  “You’re gonna skip dojo!” Ameer smiled through his mangled face.

  “You look like you need to skip it also. Besides my shoulder is a little fucked up. I need to rest it before tomorrow night’s game.”

  “What happened to your shoulder?” Chris delved.

  “Nah, it’s just a little something. It’s nothing,” I dodged.

  “Hold up, we got three minutes before class starts. Let me say something to Sensei since we are all three skipping dojo,” I told them.

  “I’m gonna chill out here,” Ameer said. “Me too,” Chris agreed, as though Sensei was our father, who the two of them were afraid to confront, disagree with, or disappoint.

  The usual advanced fighters were on the floor waiting for our teacher. I gave my greetings to some of them and pushed off straight to Sensei’s office.

  “Konbonwa, Sensei,” I greeted him. I pulled the envelope with the payment that I was supposed to give him at our private lesson out of my back pocket. “You and I got distracted earlier. These are my fees.” I handed him the envelope.

  “No, thank you,” he said politely, using his trained hand to push the envelope back toward me. “This money has somehow confused our bond as teacher and student,” Sensei said. I understood what he was getting at, but I didn’t want to enter into some long and deep exchange with him right before he was scheduled to teach and while my friends were outside waiting.

  Slowly and clearly, without any disrespect in my tone, I said, “Sensei, I respect you and I am grateful that you have been my teacher. I want to pay as usual and continue our training when I return. I don’t think that simply because I finally won one match between you and me that our bond is any different. And I know that if you wanted to throw your kunai this afternoon and stop my heart, you could have. Now please, accept my payment.”

  “I won’t accept any more money from you. If you really do return after a week’s time, we will continue.” He nodded his head but still seemed doubtful. I grabbed him up and gave him a first-time hug. I knew this was not his tradition.

  “Thank you, Sensei,” I said sincerely. I was good to go as long as he wasn’t trying to cut me off for what I thought wasn’t a good-enough reason.

  “Three things before you leave, one, never carry a firearm to an airport,” Sensei said evenly.

  “I would never,” I assured him, as though that couldn’t apply to me.

  “Two, even though you say that you are not traveling to Japan, if you do find yourself there, never purchase a gun. It is not like New York. If you are captured with a gun, they will put you in their prison forever.” He stared hard at me to push his point.

  “Three, if there is any complication between you and Naoko Nakamura, and he refuses to allow his daughter to return to the United States, let her choose whether to leave or remain in the country. If she chooses to leave, let her leave the country of her own will on her own two feet.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Don’t put yourself in a position where any authority could accuse you of kidnapping or any other kind of crime that carries a severe penalty. If you do, you will pay the price for every foreigner.”

  “Pay the price for every foreigner?” I asked.

  “The Japanese as a people have always distrusted foreigners. Don’t give them any excuse to snatch your freedom from you.”

  “Sensei, I understand,” I told him.

  “Here, take this …” Sensei opened his top desk drawer. Before he could hand me anything else, I put up my hand for him to stop.

  “Sensei, you have given me more than enough, too much,” I protested. He ignored me and pushed a ring across his desk where I was standing. The ring was not made of gold. It was shaped for a man’s finger and made from
pearl. On the top surface was a wicked black insignia made from onyx. It looked powerful on the white pearl. On second look and second thought, I could tell that the ring must belong to Sensei, because the size of it was definitely for him. I looked down at my own big hand.

  Sensei, watching me intently, said, “Wear it on any finger. Just be certain to display it. In Japan, and in many Asian places, this ring will win you favors that otherwise would be forbidden. Possessing it may allow the impossible to happen. It may even save your life.”

  I listened, but I didn’t believe in charms and material items that supposedly have superpowers, although the ring was nice-looking. I knew I could not refuse him, without causing further insult. I accepted it and thanked him. Sensei said, “Sayonara.”

  Sayonara. It was the word I hated most coming from my wife’s lips. I paused and felt a chill. Sensei walked toward the class with a slight limp.

  “Ameer and Chris are with me. They will both miss class tonight also.”

  “Of course,” Sensei said. “They are your friends. Let them bid you farewell.”

  * * *

  We walked away toward our regular pizza spot. At a newsstand Chris tossed a dollar for some cheap children’s sunglasses. “Here, put these on,” he joked Ameer.

  “Fuck it. It’s about to be dark. I don’t need ’em,” Ameer said, but then he put them on just to go along with Chris’s joke. “At least you picked the right color, red!” Ameer cheered, fucked up but still thinking about his ball team. I was silent and thinking on how both me and Ameer would be playing tomorrow night’s Hustlers League games with injuries, a slight handicap.

  With a large, hot cheese pizza pie at the center of our table and two Cokes and one water, we each grabbed a slice and dropped it down onto the too-thin white paper plates. Chris grabbed the salt and I grabbed the crushed red pepper and Ameer grabbed the garlic. Instinctively, I whispered “Allah, la ilaha illallah muhammadur rasulullah” over my slice before I bit into it.