Midnight

  The jeweler returned with the cases, opened them one last time to reassure us. He closed them, locked the clasp on each of the boxes, and placed each case into one black velvet sack. He put the sack inside a gold-embossed shopping bag. He asked, “Do you need an escort to your car?” He glanced at his armed guard.

  “No, we’re good,” I stood up and answered for Fawzi. I took the shopping bag, turning to Fawzi and saying, “Let me carry this for you.”

  “Don’t try to get away,” Fawzi joked. “You are probably much faster than me, but I am a long-distance runner. Way after you run your fastest race and run out of breath, I’ll keep coming and find you wherever you’re at.” He laughed. I didn’t.

  “And when you catch up with me, what will you do?” I asked him solemnly. I saw he felt a wave of intimidation. He was six feet. I was six one.

  “Lighten up. I’m just joking. My uncle told me that you are the perfect businessman, solid, reliable. I trust you,” Fawzi said, still smiling. I remembered then how comfortable money, family, and status makes a male youth feel. I relaxed some.

  I had about fifty questions I wanted to ask him. He was twenty-four years old, I calculated from the birth date on his driver’s license. He was only ten years older than me. He must have felt some of my same feelings about a female, or gone through some of my similar situations.

  He was already fully established. He was from my country and my religion. Maybe he could tell me something different than the shit that everyone else here was talking that didn’t sound right in my ear.

  I wanted to know if he was fucking these American girls while he was living up in Massachusetts. Or if he was waiting until marriage the way Muslim men and women are supposed to do. I wanted to know if he kept one secret girlfriend up there with him. And, if he did, what would he do with her after his wedding? Would he cut her off? Did he love her? What did his father require from him?

  I knew I needed to think before I spoke. I knew I had to put my words together right to ask about women, marriage, and personal things that every young man wants to know and should learn from his own father. I knew this would probably be the last time that I saw Fawzi, alone and man to man. After this, he would be swept up into a wedding whirlwind and beginning his new life.

  Outside, we walked. He suggested McDonald’s. I think he thought it was for my benefit. I laughed and directed him into a nearby Thai restaurant. It was 4:30 P.M. now. I had just enough time to have an early dinner with him, then deliver him and the jewels to his father.

  Before we were seated, I placed a call to his uncle, Mr. Salim Ahmed Amin Ghazzali, the one who hired us for the wedding and paid out the deposit. I gave him the address of the restaurant so that he would send a car to pick both of us up.

  “If Fawzi locates and purchases the jewels today, give us a call at once. We don’t want him walking the streets or riding the train with the jewels. We’ll send a car to wherever you are,” Mr. Ghazzali had instructed me in advance.

  I had insisted that it wasn’t necessary. Mr. Ghazzali insisted that it was.

  When I went to join Fawzi at our table, he was surrounded by the smoke from his cigarette and finishing off his Singha, a brand of Thai beer. I figured this was what Umma and his Auntie Temirah had been discussing concerning Fawzi’s “losing his tradition,” because Muslims don’t drink alcohol.

  I didn’t say nothing about it.

  “How long have you been living in America?” I asked him, taking my seat.

  “Let’s see. I completed my B.S. and master’s degree in five years at MIT. My Ph.D. took only two years at Harvard, that’s seven years.”

  “Before that, were you living in the Sudan?” I asked.

  “No. I did boarding school in Switzerland,” he said, matter-of-factly.

  The waiter interrupted. We placed our orders. “And bring me another beer,” Fawzi told him.

  “So how was it being away from Sudan? Did you like it better?” I asked.

  “I do as my father says. When he sent me to a European boarding school I was twelve years old. I graduated at the top of my class and got recruited on a full, five-year master’s program scholarship to attend MIT at age seventeen. By the time I was twenty-one, I’d graduated MIT and got recruited by a military firm in Massachusetts while completing my Ph.D. at Harvard. Now I’ve been hired by a firm here in New York and am set to get started working there next month. Not bad, right?” he asked, smiling and tapping his next cigarette on the tabletop, then lighting it up.

  “Then how did you meet your wife? She’s from Sudan, right?” I asked.

  “Oh, I see. You want to talk about women.” He smiled. “You are living here in New York, obeying your traditional Sudanese parents, and your balls are turning blue and you can’t take it anymore.” He cracked up with men’s kind of laughter.

  “You too are Muslim, a believer, right?” I reminded him. He leaned back, balancing his weight now on only two legs of the four-legged chair. He took a long drag from his cigarette and turned suddenly serious. “You know, when I first began studying engineering it was extremely difficult. Our professors would always tell us that most of us wouldn’t make it, never graduate. I didn’t want to lose my academic scholarship either. I had to keep my grades up. My father required this also.

  “I and a couple of my classmates would sit up sometimes for three or four nights in a row, crashing our brains together to solve just one math problem. Just looking for one right answer,” he said, wandering in his own thoughts.

  “That’s how it was for me when I first left Sudan. Everything European and American seemed wrong, backward, crazy. At first I would think about it real hard and all of the time. I was searching for explanations and answers.

  “In my heart, I am a Muslim man. Yet they have a saying here in America that you may have heard before, ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do.’ ”

  Our waiter served our food, Fawzi’s Singha, and my juice.

  Fawzi said, “The only thing the Thai are missing is home-baked bread. I wish I had some aseeda now,” he said, referring to a Sudanese bread that Umma makes so expertly.

  “Living over here in the U.S., if you want to be respected, you need to acknowledge and accept the American God. And his name is ‘money.’ Nothing matters more. All of their religion, rituals, and beliefs are entertainment, just something for them to say and not mean. Something to say to make them feel all right with themselves. Something they can squeeze into maybe one hour or two hours per week and that’s it. But every day, every hour, every minute, every second they are awake, they are doing something, anything to make money. And when they are asleep, they are even dreaming about money.

  “It is the opposite of Islam. America is the opposite of Sudan, where even if you are wealthy, you wake up to the call to prayer to praise Allah. You bend your knees in prayer five times in only one day. You stop everything and place Allah first. Back home, we say it, we believe it, and we do it. We serve Allah.

  “But, believe me, brother,” Fawzi said, gripping his fork and pressing it through the white tablecloth into the wooden table below, a nervous habit, I guessed. “If you get in the way of this white man’s money, they’ll kill you. They can do anything for money. I mean anything. I’ve seen their arsenal. I have even been part of a team that designed a few of their latest, deadliest items. They have weapons that can make you and your family evaporate into thin air. No one would ever know that any of you were ever here.”

  He was getting too heavy for me. I really wanted to speak about females.

  “You see I’m drinking this beer. It’s my second one today. I’ve learned to drink alcohol while living beside them. You have to. If you continually say, ‘I don’t drink,’ it makes them feel suspicious. They’ll start asking you a lot of questions. Next thing you know, you’ll be isolated and thrown aside, completely alone. They’ll spread rumors that you are some kind of foreign guerrilla or terrorist, even. It’s crazy.”

  “And the American females . .
.” I led in. Suddenly he relaxed and changed completely.

  “Hey, they are a truckload of fun. They’ll do anything, but they are garbage.”

  “So you have been with them?” I asked, carefully moving toward my real questions. He laughed.

  “Oh, yes.” He leaned in now. “They beg to suck my balls, so I let them. These American girls suck the stress out of my life and I don’t have to give them anything. I just speak politely and thank them for it.” He laughed, seeming to reminisce.

  “The first time it happened for me, I was a college freshman. The girl was too. She was from California, my lab partner. Late one night, two of the study guys fell asleep. She started caressing me, and tugging on my zipper. When she got on her knees and put her lips on my big boy, oh, what a feeling! After that night I was hooked. I just convinced myself it was okay to get it because it wasn’t actually sex or even fornication. I didn’t have to enter the woman’s womb.” He put his cigarette out, smashing it well after the fire was extinguished.

  “So do you fuck them or not?” I asked.

  “Never,” he answered, with only one word and a solid straight face. It was the shortest answer he had given to any one of my questions.

  “I could never slip up and have to bring even one of them home to my family. My mother would die. My father would disown me. So I don’t ever get myself into a position where any of them could get pregnant by me. Besides, the suck is good enough.”

  “Are you talking about the white girls or the Black American females?” I asked.

  “They are all the same, the American women. I’ll give you ten thousand dollars if you can find one single virgin American female who is not a child.” He was leaning forward and staring me dead in my eyes. “Each of them should be made with an odometer on their foreheads, like every car has. When you look at the high mileage on each of them, you wouldn’t even want to be bothered.

  “You won’t find one virgin. And this is only one of the many reasons why my parents have found me a Sudanese bride. She is Muslim, cultured, raised properly, and yes, a virgin, of course.” He leaned back, more relaxed now.

  “I will see her for the first time this Thursday when she arrives in the U.S. along with her entire family. But even then, she will be in niqab and hijab. Only her eyes will be available to me.”

  For three minutes I sat there, my mind blown away at how he could put so much care and finance into a woman he had never seen. It must have been easy for him to read the rare, confused look plastered onto my face.

  “I talked to her over the telephone for six months. She is seventeen years young and so sweet,” he emphasized. “She studies music and plays the violin. And she reads a lot too. She reads books I don’t ever get a chance to even look at. She prays for me and ridicules me when I miss saying my prayers, which is often. It’s gotten so I can’t get a good night’s sleep without hearing her voice. My phone bill is so crazy you couldn’t imagine.”

  “Are you worried at all?” I asked him seriously. He laughed again.

  “Why don’t you just ask straight out, how the Americans would ask. You want to know what if she’s ugly or fat or disappointing, right?”

  I wasn’t thinking that, but now that he mentioned it, it was a funny but good question.

  “Well, she would never have gotten beyond my mother’s inspection if she wasn’t right for me. The two of them were all the time meeting in Sudan and talking, even writing letters to each other when Mom was traveling. My father approves of her too, and he always protects my interests. I trust their judgment completely. I am sure I will love her. I am already very connected with her. After our wedding, she will belong to me forever.” The waiter brought the check. I took it before he could lay it on the table. I tucked the balance plus twenty dollars’ cash as a tip inside the billfold.

  “Hey, if I didn’t know any better, I would think you were planning a wedding for yourself also.” He smiled. “What age are you anyway?” he asked.

  “Fourteen,” I answered.

  “Man, you had me fooled. Fourteen and still you’re taller than me.” He looked at me. “Fourteen, the year of curiosity,” he said, seemingly speaking aloud to himself and remembering something.

  “It seems like a Sudanese wife is a major expense,” I said carefully. I knew it was true.

  “She doesn’t have to be. A lot depends on her class, her family background. If she is from a wealthy family, then she and her family will expect more. If she is a poor girl, she’ll be happy with handmade jewelry and hand-picked flowers from her groom’s backyard. If she’s rich or poor, if she loves you, she’ll follow wherever you go, even into a mud hut. Right?” he said, tossing the question my way. “What is shit to one man, is fertilizer to another.” He pulled out one more of his cigarettes.

  “Your wife’s family is wealthy, then?” I pushed.

  “Not really. But if my family has it, why not give it to her? She’ll become the mother of my children, inshallah. When I give her something, in some way, it still remains with me. It’s still mine, because she is mine. Besides, if she is happy, my life is so good. No intelligent man wants a miserable wife,” he said, his cigarette dangling and unlit.

  “Do you think living in this country might change your wife too?” I asked him.

  “No. She will follow my lead. I will love her. She will care for our home. This will give her so much to do. Anything she wants, I will provide. I’ll work for it. I will bring it home to her. My mother will stay on in the beginning and help her. Her auntie, a widow, will come and stay with us also.

  “My wife will have one baby every year for five years, inshallah. And by the time my first child is five, I will be set up in business in such a way that I will hire engineers to represent me here in the U.S. Then I will move with my family back to the Sudan, working my Sudanese office. This will be best for my daughters to be surrounded by the right kind of culture.

  “But for now, there is trouble in the Sudan, political trouble. And political war is a bad time for earning money. No stability, unless you are the man selling the weapons to everyone on all sides!” He smiled.

  On that point I became silent. There was no way for me to discuss Sudanese politics without mentioning my father. And eventually, anyone from the Sudan discussing the details of politics would have to mention my father too. I wasn’t prepared for this side of the conversation. This is the reason I rarely asked questions, because when it came my turn to give up answers, I would refuse.

  He finally struck the match. The fire burned down almost to his fingers before he actually lit his cigarette.

  “You are more mature than I was at your age. You are already a businessman. I can tell that whatever you want, eventually you will have it.

  “Islam is good. In fact, there is nothing better. But here in America, you have to have two faces if you want to succeed. One you show them. The other you show only to those whom you love.”

  Riding in the car reviewing his words, I could catch the cracks in his story. Easily, I could point out his contradictions. But I liked the fact that the things he said seemed to be what he really believed, based on some experiences that he actually had. And he didn’t try to cover up his flaws.

  26

  SENSEI

  Hyped up real strong, that’s how Ameer and Chris showed up at the dojo.

  “My whole team is crazy,” Ameer said. “You should see these guys at practice tryna fuck each other up while we tryna run a practice game. We got three East New Yorkers, and a couple a dudes from ‘the Hook.’ They be tryna settle beefs on the gym floor. I be telling them, ‘Look sons, we on the same motherfucking team. How we gone get this paper if y’all keep brawling?’ ” Ameer had his arms stretched out. His eyes were excited. He loved that type of chaos even though he knew it wasn’t a winning strategy.

  He continued, “Finally, Coach just told some bench riders, ‘Go guard the doors. Don’t let nobody in.’ Then he made the East duke it out with the Hook. These kids was beating
the shit out of one another, slamming each other around like it wasn’t nothing. I was straight laughing. I said this ain’t no fucking basketball team.

  “Later, the three kids from the East posted me up in the rusty ass locker room, talking ’bout, ‘You a motherfucking perpetrator,’ like I was supposed to jump in and hold them down ’cause I’m from the East too. I told them straight up, ‘I ain’t got no beef with the Hook.’ Everybody in the East knows that out here on these street, unless we bonded by blood or money, it’s every man for himself.”

  “Oh, so we three is only bonded by money?” Chris challenged.

  “We brothers. We family. Y’all know how that go,” Ameer said.

  “How’s your team looking?” I asked Chris.

  “We a’ight but we need that spark, that fire, you know?” he said.

  “Then you gotta bring the heat. You be the spark. Let them rally around you.” I amped him up truly believing that he did have what it takes to hold his own in a leadership position.

  “Word to life,” Ameer agreed.

  Ameer borrowed twenty-five dollars from me. “I’ll give it back to you on Thursday night when we take the girls out,” he promised. “It ain’t nothing,” I told him.

  “Yeah, I’m tryna get where you at. Where twenty-five dollars ‘ain’t nothing,’ ” he smiled.

  “You could’ve borrowed against our car fund,” Chris said, like a real banker.

  “Yeah, I could always borrow from our car fund, but the three of us can’t fit on a minibike together. If I keep borrowing from the car fund, that’s what it’s gon’ be, a motherfucking tricycle or a minibike.” We all cracked up laughing.

  Later that night I practiced throwing my shuriken against the corkboard in my room. I wasn’t sure if Sensei was planning to test me at weapons training the next day. But if he did, I planned to be well prepared.