Midnight and the Meaning of Love Read online

  Everywhere in our bedroom there were signs that this was a woman, a wife who lived here beside me, her husband, and definitely intended to stay. We are teenagers, Akemi and I, but we are both sure of our bond. Furthermore, we took that bold and irreversible step into marriage and our two hearts became one.

  She had left her designer life and luxurious apartment behind and moved into the Brooklyn projects to be beside and beneath me. So in love, even in the chaos of this hood, and the glare of the ambulances and scream of their sirens, she could only see me. Each day her love became more sweeter, her smile even brighter.

  After hearing Umma’s story, I understood now that in the Sudan, my home country, the kidnapping of females is unusual but has happened, especially when two men were battling over the same woman. A Sudanese man will fight hard and by any means necessary to earn the right and advantage over the next man to marry the bride of his choice and make her his own.

  Yet our men never battle over a woman after the marriage has already taken place, been witnessed, acknowledged, and agreed on. We never battle to win a woman after her husband has gone into her. And I had gone into my wife Akemi over and over and in so many ways that the thought alone made my heart begin to race and my entire body began to sweat like summer, but in the spring season.

  I looked at my bedsheets that I had never thought about before. Umma had selected those sheets knowing that a man wouldn’t mind but a woman would. She dressed up my bed one day while I was out. Umma wanted Akemi to feel good and welcomed. I had to admit that those Egyptian cotton sheets were soft and comfortable. Only Akemi’s skin was softer.

  Eateda is the word from back home that describes for us a bigger offense.

  My mind switched to that thought. Eateda happens when a kidnapper steals a woman against her will, then rapes her. I promised myself that in my blood relation beef with my wife’s father, this was not that type of problem. Yet I also knew that when a man is not beside his woman, protecting, loving, providing, and influencing her all the time, eateda is always possible by any man who is allowed to be in the same room with her, if that man is living low.

  * * *

  My sensei taught me the technique of breathing a certain way to lower the blood pressure and calm the mind and settle the heart. It was not a technique meant to prevent a murder. A man has to think but not too much. Thinking to an extreme can paralyze a man’s actions and turn him into a passive coward. What Sensei taught me was a technique meant mainly to calm a warrior to prepare him to make the sharpest, wisest, most effective strike against his target. So I was using it as I stepped swiftly down the subway stairs and out of the spring air. Now it was Monday. My feet were moving rhythmically with my breathing. My game face was neutral, but my soul was scowling. Each time that I cleared my murderous thoughts, they would reappear.

  Chapter 3

  PRESSURE

  I could easily recognize her from behind. As the packed train swerved and jerked, I caught quick glimpses of her pretty neck and shoulders. Her bare arm was extended upward, graceful like a ballerina’s, her hands holding the grip lightly like fingers properly placed on piano keys. Seeing nice-looking NY girls was an all-day thing. But it became much more personal when it was a familiar female, someone whose bedroom I had been in before, whose swollen naked nipples I had already seen. A female who had begged me for a kiss and whose infant daughter I had once held in my arms. It was Bangs, and it was a one-in-a-million chance that we would end up on the same train on the same day at the same time, both coming from and going to different places, I was sure.

  Immediately, I moved away from her and to my left, my knapsack hitting someone standing next to me. I pushed toward the connecting train doors to switch cars. The train car that I moved into was no better, a very tight crowd. But it was better because they were all strangers. There was no risk or emotion in it for me.

  “I saw your reflection on the window glass,” Bangs said sweetly, suddenly appearing before me. “I know you knew it was me. I wanted to see if you would come over by me or not,” she said.

  I didn’t answer her. I didn’t move or turn.

  The train screeched to a stop. The conductor’s voice boomed out something over a broken speaker, it was some ill transit equipment that never got fixed. He knew it didn’t work and so did all the passengers. Only he knew what he was announcing. As for the rest of us, you either knew where you were headed or you didn’t. This is New York and if there is a problem, it’s your problem, handle it.

  Bangs

  The train doors opened and some people got off. I was facing the door and Bangs stepped into the now cleared-out space and faced me, looking into my eyes. A new crowd pushed in and now Bangs was pressed close up on me.

  It was a warm day and warmer underground. Only the thin silk of her clothes separated me from her. Ever since I met her, it was like this, me not expecting to see her, her suddenly appearing, full of life, skin so pretty, baby oil glistening, and hair cleaned and pulled up into a bun, with bangs framing her eyes. Fourteen years young and already breeded, her body was full of obvious curves and power. I tried to step back, but it wasn’t happening. There was nowhere to move.

  “At least if you see me, you could speak, right, Supastar?” A name she had always called me, a women’s way of weakening a man with her nonstop admiration. Her pretty lips were thick and natural, wearing no gloss today. Her eyes were still searching me for answers—that I had already given her a thousand times. It didn’t matter to her that I am in love and married to someone else. She would keep pushing like the marathon runner she is. No matter what kind of setbacks occurred, she would slow her pace, catch her breath, reestablish her rhythm and stride, and speed up once again, completely convinced that she could win.

  My mind was clear and straight, but even without looking into her eyes, my body was committing mutiny, heating up at the proximity. The train pulled left and then right. She grabbed my waist to stop herself from being tossed here and there. She kept her left hand on my body.

  “You don’t hafta say nuphin, Supastar. You know you still got my heart,” she said softly, yet with bold style. I didn’t say nothing in response to her.

  “And I’m not worried about it no more because I have a secret about me and you.”

  I didn’t know what the fuck she was talking about. There were no secrets between me and her. There was no saliva, no blood, no sperm or sweat exchanged between us. Okay, maybe some sweat—we had danced pressed together at a party once—but all her secrets were her own. I had told her everything and broke off dealing with her before anything ever really got started between us. I told her that me and her could never be. I even turned down her offers and resisted my feelings to slide my tongue into her mouth. So she had no claim on me.

  “Move, please,” she said to the people blocking her exit at the next stop. As she got off, I wondered exactly where she was coming from, but I shut those thoughts down by reminding myself that she wasn’t my girl, wife, or responsibility. I knew she was surprised by my silence, maybe even hurt. But what was I supposed to do with her if she kept running up on me like this? I liked her, but the sexual feeling that she had swirling around her made me uneasy. It felt like whenever she came around, I had to triple my efforts to ignore and resist.

  There was one good thing about knowing her, though. Whenever I was the most tensed up, she would make me smile or loosen up with her ways, and for the few minutes that we rode in the train, she paused my murderous thoughts. Yet the moment she disappeared, I forgot her and they returned.

  Chapter 4

  RAGE

  After I buried the burners, I shot over to the dojo. I knew it might be empty. I wasn’t scheduled for a private lesson and there was no class at the time either. I knew that I might be disturbing my teacher on his downtime, but I felt like fighting somebody, striking a jaw, kicking a head off, slamming a rival. So I went.

  Sensei drew back the curtain and checked my face through the thick glass window before
unlocking the closed dojo door. A serious and mostly silent man whose eyebrows expressed his thoughts, he stood looking at me like a mind reader before clearing the way for me to step inside unannounced.

  “Rage is the opposite of thought,” Sensei said suddenly. I didn’t respond. “Whoever has put you into this frame of mind has more control over you right now, than you have over yourself. If he is your opponent and you will face him today, you will be defeated.”

  I had thought that I had my game face on. I just knew I was looking neutral. Obviously, I was wrong.

  “It’s not the look on your face. It’s your energy: all yang, no yin.”

  “Excuse me?” I questioned.

  “It’s all heat coming off of your body. Too much heat for someone so cool.” He managed a slight smile with no laughter accompanying it. “Change into your dogi,” he ordered.

  After I suited up, Sensei led me into some unfamiliar movements. They were slow like a strange dance, not the swift and sharp and precise and lethal movements or kata of our caliber and mastery. The movements were so slow that it took a lot of patience for me to execute them. Sensei remained focused and performed the same movements continuously. He didn’t stop, so I didn’t either. Twenty or thirty minutes in, I felt myself becoming more calm and comfortable. Sixty minutes total and I was covered with a sheen of sweat and feeling so calm that I could easily ease into a deep sleep.

  “Now we can begin class,” Sensei said, tossing me a white hand towel. I tossed it back and used one of the clean white washcloths I kept in my back pocket throughout the spring and summer season. I wiped my forehead, face, and then neck. He nodded for me to take a seat on the floor and then sat across from me.

  I waited for him to introduce the material for today’s impromptu private lesson. But still he said nothing. I thought he might be looking for a suki, which is what it is called when an opponent is looking for a means of a surprise attack, when a warrior has stupidly left himself open. I leaped back onto my feet, remembering how this sensei had got the better of me in a few encounters. I had told myself that if he attempted to defeat me ever again, I would treat him as an enemy and not as my teacher of seven years and the man who had presided over my wedding, representing my wife and translating her Japanese words, thoughts, and feelings.

  “Yame,” Sensei said, meaning “at ease” or “relax.” “Suwate,” Sensei ordered, meaning “take a seat.” He used the Japanese commands that I was accustomed to in our regular group training at the dojo.

  “You have something to ask me. I am waiting to hear it,” Sensei said with absolute certainty. For seconds I searched my mind. I thought I came to the dojo to fight, but obviously my teacher thought I needed his counsel. I was not the type to confide in any other man. My trust was in Allah, my father, myself, and my Umma. For me there was no one else. I have two best friends, Ameer and Chris, but I still kept most things from them. I’m not a liar, but I am an expert at concealing things.

  So now I sat there calmly but unwilling to give up any information about my life, my wife, my war.

  “Now you are thinking,” Sensei observed. “It is so much better than rage.”

  I listened to Sensei’s words but chose to remain silent. If anyone should understand me, it was him, a ninja, a master of ninjutsu the art of invisibility, the man who trained me to be a ninja also. We knew well that ninjutsu stands above all other Asian forms or do, meaning way of life. Ninjutsu is not recreation or sport. It is the supreme art of war, the science of fighting so fiercely and precisely and thoroughly that your enemies are defeated and eliminated and your survival is the only possible outcome.

  We sat in silence for ten more minutes before Sensei broke it.

  “There are many forms of fighting and fighting happens on many levels. You have been trained most often on a physical level. You have mastered that. You have done very well as a student of weapons also. But there is a form of fighting that happens between thinkers on the thought level.” He paused, I guessed to let his words sink into my mind. And I was listening and considering what he was saying. I was even noticing how he was using his mind to maneuver around my silence and make the most accurate predictions about what exactly was going on with me.

  “A warrior must know what kind of battle he is going into. If it is physical, we ninjas fight to the finish. We take our enemy down. You know that. But the same way we don’t draw our weapons unless we are prepared for the finish, we must know when we are in a battle of another kind.” He searched my face for reactions.

  “In a thought battle, the superior fighter is the superior thinker. The superior thinker is the warrior with the best plan, someone who has stepped back and measured all the angles. A thinker who has thought about the situation from his enemy’s point of view and determined his enemy’s thoughts and moves from the beginning to the end. A thinker must have good sentinels, soldiers on his side who gather information and do reconnaissance. Or as a ninja, in an unpredictable situation he must know how to gather information quickly by himself.”

  “Sensei, let me get it right,” I said, interrupting him. “A thought battle would be the type of battle that a fighter is in when he has already decided that murder is not an option, right?”

  Sensei’s facial expression changed. “We don’t speak of murder,” he said firmly yet very quietly. “Let us just say that, yes, some battles are not physical, so taking down your opponent is not your objective, but winning still is your objective, understand?”

  “Of course.” I nodded in agreement. After all, this was the kind of battle that I was entering with Akemi’s father. And through this conversation with my teacher, I really understood, accepted, and confirmed that murder was not an option and that this battle was a thought battle. The only part of this battle that was physical was that at the end I had to have my wife back into my hands and living in my presence, not his.

  “Then there are spiritual battles. These are the most complex. But to make it simple, let me say that if you are convinced of the truth of your cause, that what you are fighting for is right and true, then you will become capable of gaining the confidence you need to have the upper hand over your opponent on a spiritual level. To be certain of your rightness requires some meditation. When you came into the dojo today, you were without meditation. You were only anger. This is why I led you in a session of tai chi, to prepare you to be able to meditate and be certain that you are right in whatever your cause may be. There is always a chance that you are wrong. Meditation will reveal this to you.”

  I listened intently to what he was suggesting. I wondered for a minute if meditation was really so different from prayer. As a Muslim, I pray throughout the day and night, although I try not to pray at times when my mind is clouded and angry. Fortunately, most of the time my mind is not cloudy or angry, just focused.

  “Do you meditate, Sensei?”

  “Only sometimes, when necessary.”

  “Because most battles are physical?” I asked and stated with confidence. Then a natural smile came across my face. “And in a physical battle, you have no worries, no reason to meditate or hesitate, right, Sensei? And I don’t either.” I held up my fists to emphasize. We both laughed some.

  “There, it is good to see your smile,” Sensei reacted. “Your passion and your heart are your assets. The best warriors are passionate and they use the thunder in their hearts to conquer anyone and to overcome any obstacle that threatens their heart.”

  I thought about his words for some seconds, and really asked myself if they were true. In the streets, no one says that a man’s passion is good. The streets take passion as a weakness. Niggas work overtime to prove that they are cold, colder, the coldest.

  “So who has threatened your heart, the heart of a newlywed that should be at ease?” he asked with a half smile mixed with a true concern. Maybe he thought that he had relaxed me so successfully that he had eased me into a talkative state. But that wasn’t the case.

  After a momentary pause, he
said with a confident and solemn face, “Allow me to guess. Your opponent, it is your wife’s father, Naoko Nakamura, a man who has many enemies but even more friends.”

  I didn’t smile or shift or acknowledge Sensei’s guesses in any way. I couldn’t tell him that my new wife was gone, stolen away even if it was by her own father’s doing. It involved too much pain, insult, and yes, shame. In Sudanese tradition, shame is a heavy burden, like wearing a jacket and pants and a hat and even boots all filled with lead.

  “Do you know him, Sensei?” I asked.

  “Naoko Nakamura is neither my friend nor my enemy. We are both Japanese. That is all we have in common. He does not know or care that I exist.”

  “Then why did you bring his name up and speak on it as if you know him?” I asked, unable to shield my general distrust.

  “Every Japanese knows him, especially in my age group. He was born on the day that the Americans dropped a two-ton bomb on the Japanese people of Hiroshima and then Nagasaki. After so much death and sorrow, most Japanese people just wanted peace at any cost. They welcomed the Americans in and didn’t fight the occupation. Not Naoko. He lost his father the day he was born. When he became a very young man, he wanted revenge. He worked relentlessly, was not a physical fighter, but was more clever than a nine-tailed fox. He was a great organizer of men, a real team builder, Japan’s extreme patriot, and a masterful businessman, so successful that he became known throughout the Asian continent as “the Man Who Never Surrendered.”