Midnight and the Meaning of Love

  Oh, but I had messed up already, I knew. I had done something stupid, a mistake that my father would not have made, because his father also didn’t. I should’ve known to keep my intimacies with each of my women separate. I should not have asked Akemi to call Chiasa for me, even though Akemi enjoyed calling Chiasa on her own and for herself. I should not have tried to have an intimate conversation with Chiasa while finger-fucking my wife and becoming overwhelmed by a powerful desire. This incredible urge could also be brought on by Chiasa. What if I was in the midst of and the thick of that urge toward Chiasa? Would I make the same mistake and hurt and disappoint Akemi? A real man had a duty to make his women feel good all over. But it should be done in a private space, one wife receiving all of my attention and desires at a time. A man who disturbs the peace in his home is a fool. Only a fool would disturb his women’s peace, because their peace is his own.

  If I had the urge without the love, it would be nothing to me. It would be easy to avoid, resist, and forget. While ignoring the sexual urges I definitely have toward Chiasa, the love and feelings that I had for her were mounting instead of lessening. By not seeing Chiasa or calling her up repeatedly, I was avoiding the fact that when and if I saw her again I would definitely make her mine.

  I got up from my student seat to ease out to the phone booth. I would use my phone card to call Chiasa and apologize and set things right. I wanted to listen first and hear from her what she wanted. Maybe I was bugging. Maybe she would say, “Yeah, I felt a little something for you, but I gotta go fly my planes, ride my horses, and fight. I’m a solider for hire, remember? I’m not leaving Japan, what for?”

  “Yes, very good, class. I want to introduce you to someone. We have a guest today,” Professor Dong Hwa announced. All fifty-seven students turned to look back my way.

  “Tell them your name, please, my young friend from America. Don’t worry, they all speak at least basic English and will enjoy the opportunity to practice the language with a fluent speaker.”

  On the spot, off guard, and under close observation, I ran my hand over my Caesar.

  “Step down to the front, please,” the professor asked me in the form of an announcement.

  I stepped down to the front.

  “Your name?”

  “Midnight,” I answered. The students began to murmur.

  “Where are you coming from?” he asked.

  “I came to Korea from Japan,” I answered.

  “Are you Japanese?” he asked sarcastically. The entire class burst into laughter and a more relaxed feeling began swirling in the air.

  “Nah,” I said, and cut the professor a mean look.

  “Well then?” he said, enjoying his position.

  “Before Japan I came from Brooklyn, New York,” I said.

  “Do you mind answering some questions?” the professor asked.

  “It’s too late to ask me that,” I said, and the students laughed again. “So go ahead,” I told him.

  “I mean for my students to feel free to ask some questions,” he said in English and then spoke some Korean. “Okay,” he said, and pointed to a female student. She stood up.

  “Do you know Whitney Houston?” she asked me. The class laughed. One male student scolded her in Korean.

  “Not personally,” I responded.

  “What about Eddie Murphy?” another student asked me. Then the same male student who scolded the other girl said, “No, you idiots. Midnight is not an entertainer. He is an athlete. What sport do you play?” he asked me.

  “Basketball,” I answered.

  “Are you any good?” another male asked me.

  “I can take on any of you, no problem,” I said. It was true but I was really joking with them, since they were joking with me. Oohs and ahs and two guys jumped up. “Challenge!” one of ’em called out.

  The professor interrupted sternly. “This is university-level history! I meant for my students to ask you smarter questions. I am sorry to you, my friend,” he said sincerely.

  “It’s no problem,” I told him, eager to ease out of the spotlight. But the professor began scolding his students in Korean first, and then he switched to speaking in English.

  “What about the Challenger, which blew up at the beginning of this year? This had a deep effect on America and American science. Isn’t anyone interested in hearing comments about that? What about the Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion that leaked active radiation into the environment? How do South Korean students feel about the nuclear threat and the nuclear arms race coming from even as close as North Korea? And what does our guest Midnight, think?

  His class became completely silent. “We could’ve seized the opportunity to have meaningful conversation,” the professor said in English first, and then swiftly switched to Korean, I assume to translate the same thing.

  “Every Korean male will have to perform his military service. South Korean men will serve a mandatory three years. North Korean men will serve a mandatory ten years. These are the issues that will affect all of you, that we discuss each time that we meet here for classes. What about the very recent bombing of the North African country Libya?”

  But the professor had no takers. Upset, he dismissed his class. A line formed before him of bowing, apologizing students. One by one they stepped up in a display of respect for their teacher. Meanwhile, a small crowd of students formed around me.

  “Do you have Nintendo?”

  “Which is better, Super Mario or Zelda?”

  “Not Nintendo, Sega Genesis. It’s American-made. Nintendo is from Japan,” one student said.

  “What’s your favorite movie?”

  “What’s your favorite song?”

  “Do you have a girlfriend?” one bare-legged, pretty Korean girl in a short skirt with killa eyes asked me aloud. Then everyone stopped talking to listen for my answer, even the professor.

  “I have a wife. I’m married,” I said. They all began to clap.

  “Is she American?” another girl asked.

  “No, she’s Korean,” I answered, surprising myself. There was a chorus of oohs and low murmurs.

  “She’s Professor Dong Hwa’s niece,” I added, purposely to show him not to put me on the spot unless he wanted to be exposed and placed on the spot himself. I’m not one of his students so the professor should stop testing me.

  The students all looked toward their professor for confirmation. “Songsehneem!” they all shouted. He was looking back at them, and for the first time he was without words, basic ones or fancy ones.

  “And I love her a lot. She’s beautiful,” I told them, then turned to the professor and said, “Uncle Dong Hwa, I’m stepping out to find a phone booth. I’ll be back.”

  “I’ll walk you,” the pretty girl offered me, and began to move my way. Then two males escorted her, escorting me. Now, I knew where the phone booth was located. However, the students never left my side, and three turned into six and six turned into nine. Not one of them asked me any of those current events, history or science questions that Professor Dong Hwa had urged them to ask. Instead they asked about Run DMC.

  In the back of a building ten male students eagerly showed me their break-dancing moves. They battled one another, pumping “Apache” and “Dance to the Drummer’s Beat,” and got more lively on a track that I’ve never heard before called “Hot Potato.” They were nice with their skills. I checked one kid so nice it seemed like he had defeated gravity as he held his pose midair. I thought of the boys on my Brooklyn block and in all the boroughs of New York. I thought about DeQuan and his brothers too. Could they ever know how their style and art was moving across the globe so strong that these kids were at least as good as any hood cats?

  The leader of the break-dancing crew named himself Black Sea. After they rocked, he shot straight over to me and introduced himself. He said, “Midnight, great name!” After he ran a style check on me, he followed me around. Rather, he showed me around as he followed me. I asked him what he was studying.
He answered, “Physics, third year,” and made me lean back some. “It goes together, physics and break dancing. You see what I mean?” he said.

  In the huge, spotless gym we got a game up. The dancers broke out and the ballers stepped up. They were eager and unafraid. I liked that.

  After game time, they offered me food and water in their immaculate cafeteria. When I refused, they gasped. I sat down with them. It seemed like they thought it was the thing for me to do. They ate and talked a lot, to me and among themselves. When their questions led to me telling them “I’m Muslim,” a silence fell on the table. When I explained about Ramadan, they gasped and moaned and one girl said, “You must be really hungry!” Then one girl stupidly added that she heard that all Africans were starving like that.

  “He’s not African,” one male student called out. “He’s American!”

  Then someone else shouted those two down. “He’s African-American.”

  Certain things caught my eyes and ears. How the students cliqued up according to their year—freshman, sophomore, junior, senior. Also, how the Korean males interacted and got along. When I was chilling with a handful of seniors, about fifteen freshmen flew by, stopped in their tracks, and bowed down to their seniors. There was no joking or laughing on those matters for them. There were levels that everyone respected. Joke among their same-age peers, but bow down to their elders, even if they were only one year older.

  They asked my age. I didn’t tell them, made them guess instead, and refused to confirm either way.

  We ended up in the weight room with Black Sea and nine other guys who weren’t around when we first started out. We had a push-up competition and it was hilarious watching their arms, legs, and chests collapse, no competition whatsoever.

  When Black Sea showed me the way to Professor Dong Hwa’s office, there was a small crowd of female students standing outside. That same girl, the pretty one with the miniskirt and tight tee and heels and the killa eyes, was among them. She approached me and Black Sea. I moved past her and went in to check with the professor.

  “Long day,” he said.

  “Yeah, are you working late?” I asked him. It was 5:00 p.m.

  “I’ll be wrapping up soon. We can share some dinner together?”

  Black Sea and the pretty girl knocked and entered. “Dinner and karaoke?” Black Sea offered.

  “Listen, let’s set that up for tomorrow night, same time. Hope you don’t mind, that would be better for me. I have to take care of a few things,” I told them.

  “Do you know your way back?” the professor asked me.

  “I’m good. I’ll stop by to check my wife later. Is that alright with you?”

  “Okay, see you then. Be sure to eat something. This is Korea. We don’t eat alone!”

  Black Sea showed me to the shuttle. I was out.

  I wanted to get back to Bada Ga to clean myself up for the Maghrib prayer after this afternoon’s unexpected workout. I was looking forward to arriving back just at the right time for breaking my fast properly and alone, and of course taking my run on the beach.

  Chapter 6

  NOT A DREAM

  I ran my regular route even closer to the sea. The Friday night crowd was out, many of them stargazing. Some were lovers, or after-workers breaking open a bucket of chicken while gulping beers. The party boats were on the sea, all lit up in the distance. The daily ferries were carrying people from the pier to the other side of the deep waters. Certain boats were returning from one of the many small Korean islands out there. All I knew was it just felt good to me.

  Another runner was coming up from the rear. I could hear his kicks on the damp sand. I was used to being the only runner out here during the tourists’ dinner hour. He pulled up on my right side. I glanced at him and nodded. We were both blacked out—black sweats, black kicks, black T-shirts, and black wool hats. I picked up my pace, not wanting to feel like I had a running partner.

  Another runner pulled up on my left, keeping pace with me, and the one I left behind pulled back up on my right. Maybe it was some ego shit, but I decided to race ahead of them both, leaving them behind in my dust. So I did.

  Two people up ahead were shaking out a blanket in the blackened sky. I swerved to run around them. They tried to move out of my way at the same time, so we clashed. When I stepped back to run around them, they advanced, forcefully bagging me inside their blanket like a shark entangled in a net.

  What the fuck? I was pushing against the blanket, angry that these two were so clumsy. The second man was already behind me. Instead of unraveling the damn thing, he was wrapping me in it. I caught on. Now I’m swinging and pushing. The blanket became more taut around my body. The men held it firmly in their grip. Ropes were being strung around my ankles, which were already unable to move. When my feet became immobile, the rope was wrapped swiftly and professionally around my calves and thighs. As I fell to the right, like a tree that had received its last whack of the axe, another rope kept me from hitting the sand. They pulled me back up and tied it around my chest. They pushed me over. I heard some clips snapped shut. I was lifted sideways. Now I was being carried like cargo on the backs of three runners. I began shifting my body to at least put enough pressure to cause my attackers to lose their balance. But I knew it was futile. A rope tied properly can bind its victim even further if he tries to maneuver his way out.

  My neck and head were covered by the blanket but not roped. However, there was not even a centimeter of space between my face and the heavy, abrasive material that was scraping against my face with each movement, mine and theirs. The air was coming in only through the tiniest invisible openings in the fiber of the cloth as well as the opening they left above my head. Since they made it possible for me to still continue breathing, I knew that they weren’t trying to kill me. Or they at least had a temporary reason to keep me alive.

  Killing comes easy to a killer. If that’s what they truly wanted to do, it would’ve been done in seconds, I knew.

  Use the time against them, I told myself. The more merciful they were to me, the more they laid the path to their own destruction. But how would I accomplish it?

  I heard the clips again before I was tossed like a load of laundry into some type of metal container. I knew it was metal because of the way I hit the floor and the vibration it sent through my bones. Then I heard the door close. It sounded like the closing of the metal security gates that Brooklyn business owners use to make sure their goods are still in the store in the morning. I heard and felt the engine turn on. It began rumbling. So I knew it was a truck, not a storage bin. There was no talking between the drivers up front, at least I couldn’t hear anything but the engine and the vibration of the metal and the roll of the tires.

  As I searched out the origin of each sound, I sensed that there was a man posted in the back where I was, holding watch over me. Even through the blanket and ropes I felt his presence.

  While my options were none, I thought about my enemies. Number one, Naoko Nakamura, of course, a man I’d easily pushed into the recess of my mind over the past week. Why not? I had evaded him, captured his daughter, my wife, and eased out of his country and into Korea, where he had natural enemies just because he was Japanese.

  My mind raced ahead. Wait a minute. Maybe Dong Hwa the professor had pretended to be Nakamura’s enemy and I had naïvely bought in to his act. The professor had set me up, planned for my wife to sleep over at his place for the weekend while he and Nakamura conspired to kidnap me. I tossed the thought around.

  Nah, Dong Hwa wouldn’t, not because of any love for me, but because of his disgust for the Japanese and for the years of emotional stress that his wife had suffered, not to mention his sister-in-law Joo Eun, who he had never met. Besides, Nakamura was wicked enough to conjure up this whole thing on his own. His pockets were deep enough to buy up as many hands, bodies, and souls as he needed to use.

  Then Akemi’s Korean father came to mind. Heavy-handed Jung Oh. He was mad vexed the other nig
ht and never got no relief from it. He was definitely capable and strong enough to carry me on his back, but I watched him move so slow last time and get faked and dodged out so easily that I was one hundred that he wasn’t one of the runners out there on the beach. I thought further. He wasn’t rich either, or he didn’t look it. So I ruled him out and settled on the obvious choice, Nakamura and his underground army, Omote Tora and them.

  The truck, which was riding more like a Jeep, began pulling up steep hills. That didn’t mean nothing, I thought to myself. It didn’t reveal any significant geographic location. Busan is a beast of a thousand steep hills engulfed in green mountains and sitting on pretty waters. How could I tell one from the other, bound and blind?

  A forty-minute rough ride, then I felt the truck stop. The driver turned off the engine and there was silence. Instead of yelling to attract attention after I heard both front doors open and slam shut, or struggling to move around, I lay limp. If these men were ordered by Nakamura to bring me somewhere alive, I would use a ninja technique of slowing down my heart and playing dead to give the one riding back here with me the impression that he had fucked up and allowed me to lose consciousness or worse.

  A heavy boot kicked me. I controlled my reflexes. He had confirmed his presence. The problem was, these men must have been ordered not to speak. The fact that no one was speaking threw me off. I had no way of knowing how many of them were guarding me or what language they were using. Were they hired Korean hands or Japanese Yakuza operating on Korean soil? Could any of them speak English? Or were they all gonna communicate with me with only their hands and feet, knives and guns?

  I felt the heat from a high-powered flashlight. It appeared as a very dull beam through the thick blanket covering my face. Purposely I peed to give my guard the impression that I had even lost control over my bodily functions. Then the heat was gone. I could no longer see the beam of light. He must have switched it off or laid it aside. Then he yanked the tight rope that was tied around my chest and confining my arms. I remained motionless. When he released the rope, my body slammed back down to the floor. He must’ve panicked. I felt him grab the chest rope again without lifting me. I felt the ropes loosen. I knew he had cut them. Still I didn’t move.