Midnight and the Meaning of Love

  As I lay on my back beside her, she wrapped her whole self around me, curled into me, saying nothing, but I knew. She was saying that she had never wanted to be separated from me in the first place, and she never wanted to be separated from me again. I stroked the hair on her head now, and even this excited her. She placed her pretty toes beneath the band of my sweats and played in my pubic hairs. She used one foot to undress me.

  I entered her so powerfully I could feel her opening—opening and wrapping around my dick, like a tight elastic and strong suction.

  As I thrust up and into her, there were feelings mounting on top of emotions. The inside of her felt so good to me, I kept grinding. She kept moaning. My mind was gone and my body a network of nerves experiencing a feeling too intense to place into words. As I moved her and tossed her and bent her, I could feel her nails scratching into my back and I liked that shit. I welcomed it. I passion-marked her neck and body with my mouth because she is mine. She marked me with her nails because I am hers. We mashed, moved, and pumped, and grinded like that until our own bodies could not take the pureness of it anymore.

  She is my girl, my woman, my wife who cums over and over again and keeps cumming. My every touch brings down her Victoria Falls. I once even believed that she was cumming from being aroused by only my stare into her eyes. There is this look that she has at that precise moment of orgasm, when all of her energy is released. There is extra moisture in her eyes, as though she is about to cry, but she isn’t. She bites her own lip and then releases it and quivers. I knew for sure that she was not a woman to be left unattended and unguarded. I was the first and only to create that feeling inside of her. And I knew that she wanted and needed me to do that, to create that powerful feeling in her constantly. I wanted it also.

  She was teaching me many things about myself that I never had the opportunity to learn from any other woman. First, it was not just the fucking. It was something particular about this girl. She raised up a feeling in my heart and in my body so extreme, her every movement moved me. Simply her sitting or standing, and the beauty of her joyful tears, which came so rapidly and streamed so softly and fell so silently. Her smile and cleverness—her art, her body, her language, her complete admiration of me—she had me locked, naturally, locked up with no cuffs or prison or warden, simply locked into, specifically, her. I learned about myself also—that I love intensely beautiful things. It could be a finger or a neck, toes or even some mean-ass shoes or exotic eyes and skin that glows. I love pretty fingernails and pretty pussy hairs or even the way a beautiful girl rocks a beautiful handbag made of crocodile and crafted well. And my love for genuinely beautiful things, pure things, and clean things is both extreme and exclusive. Akemi is a beautiful thing, my beautiful thing.

  I found my lips pressed against her left ear breathing warm breath. “Two o’clock today at Roppongi station, bring everything that you can’t leave behind.” She flipped off the strange lamp and the globs of polka dot patches disappeared. She crawled upwards on my body, her hair touching my neck and said “Two, Roppongi station, Akemi, Mayonaka isho-isho (forever).” She kissed me in my ear and set it off all over again.

  * * *

  We lay glued onto one another. Her thighs were still wrapped loosely on me. I flipped her around, laid her down, and checked my watch. It was four o’clock in the morning. There was one hour left to sunrise. I felt around in the darkness for my clothes and eased into them. I looked around the crazy tilted tent with my penlight. I was thinking to myself that I should have known that this tent belonged to Akemi. Who else would have placed a rickety hut on top of a sturdy, attractive, impressive, million-dollar Roppongi Hills home and prefer to live there? I imagined that she sat in here when she needed to feel that kind of isolation that made her create such powerful drawings and paintings. In fact she had one mounted on her little easel right then and there.

  It was a drawing of various sets of eyes. The magnificence of it however was that I could recognize in the drawing her eyes, Umma’s eyes, Naja’s eyes, and even my own. I smiled. I was glad I hadn’t seen the details of the drawing while I was loving her. It would have been real strange to see Umma’s eyes watching me giving it to my wife with no restraint. And those eyes that I was seeing with the help of my penlight were definitely my mother’s. Akemi’s skill was that great. She filled her drawings with so much emotion that each set of eyes let off a unique energy and contained the story of its owner’s life. Aside from these four sets of eyes, there were three more sets. The eyes at the center of her canvas had to be her father’s. The drawing of his eyes contained different feelings—anger, control, coldness, and even concern, which she conveyed by the strokes and shadings of her pencils and brushes. Down to every detail including the eyelashes, their precise shape, length, and width, she captured it all, amazingly. Oddly, though, there were only eyes, no faces or eyebrows, no head, hair, or chin. It was a drawing that felt to me like it came from her soul and not her hands.

  I caught sight of a pretty ceramic teapot and one cup, as well as a box of sesame crackers off in the tent’s corner. I drank her leftover tea and crunched a couple of her sesames. Then I closed her robe over her pretty, petite body. I didn’t wake her. I wanted to, but I wanted more that she not see me leaping across the rooftops and jumping onto the branches as I left the same way that I had arrived. But of course she was awake. She said softly, “Mayonaka, two, Roppongi station, hai,” and was so smart she didn’t move to watch me leave. I pinched her butt and I was out.

  Chapter 6

  CLOSE

  Chiasa was in my bed; she looked asleep, but I wasn’t so sure. Was she sleeping or pretending to sleep? She was wearing all her clothes, a new outfit from yesterday. I stood behind my now-closed door, not wanting to get too close to her revealing my private scenario and scents.

  “Thirty-five minutes to sunrise,” she said, shifting. “I brought you some food.” Without turning and looking at me, she raised one arm and pointed toward my desk. There was a box, wrapped in a silky scarf, and a canteen.

  “You found her?” she asked. I didn’t reply. “No refunds,” she said softly.

  After my swift, thorough, hot shower, I ate one rice triangle and a few spoonfuls of peanut butter and drank water. Chiasa had green tea in the canteen. When I didn’t drink it, she did. She stood now outside on the terrace at sunrise as I made the prayer.

  “Wait for me,” I told her. “I have important work for you to do with me today.” She agreed.

  Seated in the window with Chiasa seated on the fire escape, I told her, “I’m going back to New York, either tonight or tomorrow. I’ll need your help at the travel agency to change my ticket and to buy another ticket as well. But the most important thing is, I need you to translate for me and my girl at two o’clock sharp today at Roppongi station.”

  Chiasa sat quietly for two whole minutes. “How did it happen?” she asked.

  “How did what happen?”

  “You and her, without understanding one another?”

  I smiled. My whole body was relaxed now and my mind at peace. “We understand one another. We just don’t speak the same language.”

  Chiasa stared at me. Her pretty eyes were searching me with a deep curiosity. I turned my eyes from hers. She inhaled and said softly, “That’s so fucking cool.”

  “I gotta sleep some,” I admitted.

  “Me too,” she said quietly. “I was up all night.”

  “How come?” I asked her. She ignored my question. This made me think she wanted me to ask her again. Or maybe I really was curious. “How come?” I asked again.

  “I read through all those papers from the Nakamura building searching for clues. Finally I found out the name of Ikeda-san’s hometown. I went there to his house. I walked around there, must have been twenty-two times—waited in an alley behind his house for you,” she said.

  I didn’t say nothing. I just sat quietly thinking. A wave of feeling came over me, like it does sometimes when a female rev
eals her admiration for me. I was grateful toward Chiasa, deeply grateful.

  “Do you want me to meet you at your house later, or would you rather us meet up at one forty-five in Roppongi at the station?” I asked her.

  “No, I’ll sleep on the floor right here. You sleep on the bed. When we wake up, we gotta go to Shinjuku. You have to check out of there this morning,” she said.

  “I don’t have nothing over there and I paid them up front,” I corrected her.

  “Yes, but I left my jacket, remember?”

  I stood up from the windowsill and invited her in. This would be me and her last day together. So I decided not to worry if her feelings would grow.

  “You sleep on the bed, I’ll sleep on the floor,” I told her. She lay down, her back facing me. I sat down on the floor, my back against the wall. It was 6 a.m. We slept.

  * * *

  Harajuku’s streets were jammed. In addition to the strange things that normally went on there, someone for some reason had trucked in a plastic slice of strawberry shortcake twenty feet tall and ten feet wide. The Japanese crowd of teens seemed fascinated by it. They gathered around in hordes to take pictures of it, lean into and pose up close on it, and linger around it. Japan is weird, I thought to myself. And for once in my life—perhaps because I had only been here for two and a half days, I could not tell by listening or watching what was going on in their minds or culture.

  Chiasa’s electric-blue Kawasaki Ninja 250R was mean and pretty. It was parked on a street behind the Shinjuku hostel. She swung her leg around and mounted the deep-blue leather seat. If she were in Brooklyn, Harlem, Queens, or the Bronx pushing this, she would’ve had all the hustlers sweatin’ her hard. I was glad she was in Tokyo where the males didn’t seem to notice or distinguish the beauty, elegance, and exquisiteness of one female or the other.

  “See, it’s perfect. No one even touched it,” she said, smiling and surveying its body. She hopped off then, opened a seat compartment, and pulled out her blue leather riding gloves and her goggles. Then she put them right back. Her helmet was there on the bike unbothered. She left it there. I guess she had made her a point.

  When we reached the front of Shinjuku Uchi, Chiasa reached up and pulled a coin from the top of the cement gargoyle. “You see it’s still here.” She smiled and laid the coin in my palm. It was a Japanese coin worth five dollars. “Japanese people don’t steal,” she emphasized sweetly.

  We collected her jacket, which was lying on my old bed the same way she had tossed it. The room with no lock seemed undisturbed, but I was still glad I had moved out. As we left, the front desk attendant, who I had not encountered before, presented me with an envelope.

  “Thank you berry much.” He bowed some. “Inside is your receipt and you have one message.”

  “Thanks,” I told him, and forgot him the same second.

  I pulled the papers out of the envelope until I found the message. It was written in Japanese on otherwise blank stationery. As Chiasa and I pushed out into the noon Shinjuku sun, I handed her the paper. “Read it to me,” I told her.

  “Meet Akemi in Shibuya at two at Hachiko on Tuesday,” Chiasa translated. “Who’s Akemi?” she asked.

  “Who signed the message?” I questioned.

  “No one. I guess it’s from Akemi, right?” she asked, trying to connect the dots.

  “Is there a date and time on the message?” I asked her.

  “No, nothing else,” she said, flipping the small square of stationery back and forth. “I can go check it out.” She did a turn and went back in the hostel. She returned and said, “The front desk clerk said he wasn’t the one who received the message. He just clocked in at eleven this morning. He said that since no employee signed or dated the message, it must have been hand-delivered.”

  The sun had erased every trace of morning mist. The streets were dry and clean as if it hadn’t rained in Tokyo in months. With the noon sun massaging me, I stood thinking, my eyes squinting for protection and Chiasa’s big eyes just slits as she squinted also, then placed her hand over her eyes to block or lessen the sun’s significance.

  It was impossible for my wife to know where I was staying when I first arrived in Tokyo. How could she? Only me … and Chiasa … and customs knew where I would be staying. My suspicions began to intensify. Scenarios of every kind were lining up in my mind.

  Perhaps Iwa’s phone registered the return number to the pay phone in the Shinjuku Hostel. She called the number back, some resident answered, and Iwa said, “What location is this?” The resident answered her truthfully. Afterward, Iwa told Akemi where I was staying. Akemi had hand-delivered the message yesterday. She was so excited to meet up with me that she forgot to sign it or explain anything else. That’s why when I saw her early this morning in Roppongi, she seemed to have expected to see me, although not in her bedroom window.

  The second scenario taking place in my mind: Iwa Ikeda told her father that I was here in Tokyo after she discovered that I was in Narita Airport. Her father told Akemi’s father and Naoko had this note delivered to draw me out to a location of his choosing. It was a trap. Or a more deadly possibility, Naoko knew now that his daughter had allowed a man, an unexpected, unwelcomed son-in-law into his home and into her. Furious, he pressured his daughter to reveal our secret, and she sent someone to Shinjuku to change the meet-up place. Maybe it was Iwa who delivered the message. Maybe Iwa never told her father or Naoko where I was staying—if she knew. Maybe Iwa was really for our love and marriage and not against it.

  Nine scenarios had lined up in my mind, split into two, and became eighteen. If this dilemma had involved myself and Umma, I would have known exactly what to do in less than a second. Umma and I always do exactly what we promise to do, exactly as we stated it to one another. And we let no one interfere or interrupt or confuse any words we say to one another, mother and son. That was our way.

  But Akemi and I are newlyweds. Our first month of marriage had been interrupted, manipulated, and stolen. Now I was certain of my movements, but not of hers.

  Chiasa’s golden skin baked more brown in the sun. She was silent, patient, waiting for instructions, my sentinel and a sharp one too.

  “What did you see at Iwa’s house last night?” I asked her suddenly.

  “It was a quiet and residential neighborhood in Kichijoji.”

  “Kichijoji? How far away is that from here?”

  “About seventeen minutes on the Chuo line,” she responded. “I mean Kichijoji has plenty of nightlife, restaurants, and stores and shops and everything. But where Ikeda-san’s house was located, it was dark and quiet. Oh, yes, the pretty car drove right by me when I first got there about twelve thirty a.m. It pulled out and left way before me at about one thirty,” she reported.

  “The Japanese Bentley, right?” I asked.

  “Hai, that one,” she confirmed.

  I stood thinking. “I need you to get to Shibuya by one forty-five,” I announced.

  “It’s almost one. Shibuya’s close, four stops from here on the Yamanote line,” she said.

  “Are you riding your bike?” I asked.

  “No, Shibuya is crazy. There are so many people there! The train is easier. What do I do at Shibuya?” she asked.

  “Go to Hachiko just like the note says. What is that anyway, Hachiko? Is it a café or a restaurant?” I asked.

  Chiasa laughed. “No, it’s a dog!”

  “A dog?”

  “It’s a famous statue of a dog. Everyone in Japan knows it. Also it’s a meet-up spot for lovers and people all around the world looking for new lovers.” She monitored my response. My jaw tightened at her description. Yet the good thing about her words was that now I felt sure that Akemi had not left that note.

  “Go there and film at that exact location. If you see a Japanese girl there waiting, sixteen years old, wearing the most expensive shoes available in Tokyo, carrying a mean-ass handbag and with a smile that is only second to her beautiful eyes, that’s her. Introdu
ce yourself and tell her you are the translator for Midnight and that she should meet me in Yoyogi Park. I’ll be there at three p.m.” I planned aloud as I spoke. I was fairly confident that I would be bringing Akemi to meet Chiasa in Yoyogi Park and not the other way around.

  “Where in Yoyogi, at my house?” Chiasa asked.

  “On the bench in the park outside your house,” I told Chiasa, whose eyes were also intense and lovely, although I had the feeling that no man had ever told her so. She hesitated for some seconds and then we both walked, headed to Shinjuku station, where we separated and went in different directions.

  Thoughts about the power, range, and reach of Naoko Nakamura raced through my previously calm state of mind. Still, I was at ease feeling that I had gotten the better of him. Only thirty hours after my arrival at Narita Airport, I had invaded his territory and didn’t have to snatch or seize his daughter the way he had. She came eagerly, passionately to me, separating herself from his idea of me. She had chosen me over him, again. Besides, I knew his address, and now that I had seen Akemi, I could climb into her tent anytime. So I suppressed his name and face from my mind’s eye.

  In Roppongi early, I played with the idea of getting a haircut. I had not even powered up the clippers that Ameer’s father gifted to me. My last cut was four days ago before game time. But when I leaned my face against the barber’s window and saw a place packed with exclusively Japanese heads and four elderly Japanese barbers, I decided against it. Maybe tomorrow. Why experiment and fuck up my head right before meeting my wife in the brilliant Tokyo sunlight?

  * * *

  Pink pumps, I recognized her shoes. She was not my wife, but she was wearing the pink pumps that had been outside my wife’s house last night. So I paid attention. She seemed nervous, took quick glances my way, and then dropped her head down and continued to walk in my direction as she appeared to be watching her own feet. It was five minutes after two. She passed me by. As I watched her, I caught her looking back. She tried to play it off but soon turned back toward me. Now she looked up at me and then toward the café situated behind me. She walked past me again. My eyes followed her into the café. I looked around the outside to see if Akemi was approaching from any direction. But she wasn’t.