Midnight (64 page)

“This way if you would like to see the exhibit, sir,” a friendly young white woman in uniform pointed.

“I want to have one of those pamphlets over there,” I informed her. She went behind the rope and picked it up. I flipped through it.

Akemi Nakamura is a sixteen-year-old artist born and raised in Kyoto, Japan. Her father is Naoko Nakamura, the Chief Executive Officer and owner of the multinational Pan Asian Manufacturing Corporation. Her mother was celebrated North Korean author Joo Eun Lee, who died young of brain cancer.

Akemi is an only child and a student at Kyoto Girls’ High School, an affiliate of Kyoto’s Women’s College, where her father serves on the board.

She is an artistic genius destined to make a tremendous mark on this wide world of art. Please allow her work to speak for itself.

Her exhibit, titled “Asia Celebrates Mother Africa,” is incredibly controversial, personal, detailed, and unrivaled. Her decision to present the everyday beauty of African life, as opposed to disease, famine, death, hunger, war, and poverty, places her at the vanguard of forward-thinking youth, a true, rare, and artistic visionary.

We entered the wing of the museum which held Akemi’s artwork. We were directed down a particular corridor where her work was carefully mounted on the wall and illuminated. I was amazed.

The first of seven pictures and paintings was mounted behind a glass frame. It was titled
“Mother Africa.”
It was a drawing of two female hands, palms facing up. The design of the henna work on the hands was incredibly royal. In fact, it was familiar. I looked at it up close. I stepped back and looked at it again. I went into my memory and saw the exact moment in the lobby of The Palace Hotel, where Akemi flipped my mother’s hands open and studied her palms. These are Umma’s hands, I told myself.

What kind of a great mind does it take, to take a picture with your eyes and reproduce it without a model or photograph? I began to see even more clearly now the beauty of Akemi’s mind and the talent in her hands as I saw the intricate lines she had drawn with her pencil, and the way she worked real Sudanese henna into her creation. I certainly understood the time it must have taken for her to do such incredible drawings. I understood why she needed to shut everybody down and close them out of her studio and go deep.

The second drawing, in which she used pencils, markers, and paints, was titled
“Sacred Modesty.”
It was also of Umma, peeking out from behind her veil. The way she drew the decorations on the veil Umma wore that day was precise, accurate, perfect. The way she captured the extreme beauty of Umma’s slim face, her big dark, beautiful, soft, concerned eyes and both the feeling and expression that Umma carried made the picture seem like a real live person, a “Mother Africa,” a queen. They were right. These pieces of art were unusual. They captured the true beauty of a slice of African life. Like the drawings inside of the African pyramids, which never told a
lie, and were never matched or rivaled by any other artistry, Akemi’s artwork was the truth.

The third picture was titled
“Humility.”
It was a drawing of an Islamic mother and son bowed in prayer to Allah. She captured with her pencil the posture of the prayer, along with the fold of the clothes that the mother and son wore while making the prayer. She saw so much, I said to myself. She was watching, even when we did not know she was watching. Even more, she was using everything in her environment to create her masterpieces. It was ninja-style, I smiled to myself. It was the ability to take what others take for granted or even throw away and make something useful and beautiful with it.

The fourth picture was titled
“Black Beauty.”
It was definitely Naja. It was an up-close drawing of my sister wearing her
hijab
proudly. It was the way she caught the look in Naja’s eyes, the confidence and inquisitiveness, which made the picture unique. There was no shame or regret in this Muslim girl child. There was no hostage in the
hijab.
There was no hunger or poverty or abandonment. In the drawing, Naja looked like she had the world at her feet and a bright balanced future where her beliefs were an asset, not a curse.

The fifth drawing/painting was titled
“The Young Leopard.”
It was me. It threw me back a bit. It was me in the winter the first day that she and I went out on a date. It was my
exact
face. The hair on my head in the drawing was my
exact
hair, which she had collected so quietly in the barber shop that day. I was sure of it. The clothes were drawn exact, my leather jacket and suede Polo shirt. My Lo jeans and even my kicks were the ones I rocked that day. She had poked life-sized holes in the painting and used real laces in the drawing of my Nikes. She even had them tied as I tied them then. This picture was tall, life-sized, about six feet tall and two feet wide.

The sixth drawing/painting was titled
“The Proof.”
It was
of five beautiful Sudanese women standing sideways in a line wearing beautiful bejeweled garments. They were all looking at something with excited eyes. I wondered what Akemi meant by “The Proof.” I thought about it. The familiarity of the art was in the third woman, who resembled Sudana. Yes, it was her. Every set of eyes on each of the young females in the drawing seemed to be focused on something they were all waiting for. It was as though the drawing had energy, even though it was an inanimate object. After staring at it for some time, I figured these were the young Sudanese women Akemi saw at the wedding who, like all of us, were in awe of the bride and the whole feeling of the celebration itself.

The seventh drawing/painting was titled
“Missing You.”
It stopped us cold, Umma and I.

“Look, it’s our father,” Naja whispered. “It is the same as the picture Umma has in her room. I know, because Umma only shows me one picture of Father.” Umma and I said nothing.

“And look, it says here that she made this painting using pencil, markers, paint, and cayenne pepper, cumin, turmeric, black cardamom, and coffee beans! That’s really nice. Don’t you think so?” I heard her, but I didn’t respond. I was connected to Umma’s feelings and her eyes were welling with tears.

We waited for her from five-thirty until seven when the museum closed. We were supposed to meet her at 6:00
P.M.
I was pressed because I had to get to Brownsville, change into my game clothes, and play ball for the league.

“She has probably gone to dinner with her family,” I said to Umma and Naja.

I called her Queens apartment and left a message on her voice mail.

I called her cousin and the phone just rang.

I decided that she definitely went out with her family to celebrate. They must have insisted and that was fine.

“We should go home. She’ll call,” I assured Umma.

In my mind, I was worried about Akemi trying to make her way to our Brooklyn apartment late at night, alone. She is bold like that.

We taxied to our apartment. I made sure Umma and Naja were safely inside. I wanted Akemi inside too while I played ball. I needed that for my comfort zone, and my concentration level.

I arrived exactly at game time, no warm-up, no strategy talks. Vega didn’t bark. He just pointed to the hundreds of faces in the overcrowded park, smiled, and said, “Make me look good.”

I sank the winning basket. As the crowd cheered and my team celebrated, and the Brownsville fans threw a tantrum and Bangs sat at the top of the bleachers with her girlfriends, I ran off the court. “Vega, I gotta go. I’ll check you later.”

Sunday it rained and poured, a welcome break from the unusually hot and dry month of April. It was May now and it seemed even the seasons were confused. After prayers, I threw down some tea and left. It was family day, yes. But I was going to get Akemi.

I arrived in Queens at her uncle’s house. I knew on a usual Sunday, he would be at work. No one was picking up the telephone there when I called from early this morning. I wanted to check.

I rang the bell, no answer. I walked around and tapped on the rectangular windows, which I knew led to her basement apartment, no answer. I walked into their backyard to the converted garage art studio. I had never been back there. It was impossible to see through the covered windows.

Drenched, I left Queens and headed to Chinatown to their family store. My clothes were dripping rainwater onto their store floor. I apologized, stepped out, wrung my clothes a bit, and stepped back in.

“Excuse me. I am looking for Akemi,” I said to her uncle.

He was colder than usual. Saachi emerged.

“Akemi’s not here,” the uncle said.

“Do you know where she is?” I asked.

“Her father took her back to Japan yesterday. She was crying a lot,” Saachi said. The uncle spoke rapid angry Japanese to Saachi, his young daughter. She disappeared behind the curtain.

“Is that true?” I asked him, but I knew it was true. My heart knew it. The uncle did not respond. I left.

I stood still in the open, while cups of pouring rain dropped down from the afternoon black skies. It seemed as if even Allah disapproved of what was happening today.

A police car rolled through, which almost never happened while I had been working on this block in Chinatown. The quick bleep of the siren switched on and then turned immediately off. It shook me to move on. I guessed that the uncle may have called the police because he felt threatened by what he thought I might do stationed outside of his store door.

Instinctively, I walked to Cho’s.

He had no customers in the rainstorm. He looked surprised to see me on one of my days off, but wasn’t really the smiling type. He walked over and placed his hand on my shoulder.

“Japanese girl leave letter for you,” he said.

“Akemi?” I asked.

“Not young pretty one who make bed in my basement, different lady,” he said.

“Young?” I asked, trying to know if it was Akemi’s cousin.

“Old chicken,” he responded. I took the letter, flipped it around, just thinking.

“Japanese girl drive you crazy!” Cho guaranteed me.

“Thanks, Cho. Do you mind if I go to my locker for a moment?” I asked.

“You don’t have to ask,” he said earnestly.

I put my three-carat diamonds on the jeweler’s counter.

“Diamonds are one thing you can count on through the years,” my father had said when he dropped them into the palm of my hand. “Use them when you feel trapped.”

“Give me a good price for them,” I asked.

“Where did you get them?” they asked.

“From Africa,” I responded. “How much will you pay for each of them?”

I had this same conversation with twelve jewelers before I accepted the price of fifteen thousand dollars for one of the diamonds. The two remaining ones, I wrapped back up and put away.

In the Manhattan travel agency, I purchased a ticket to Tokyo, Japan. With the ticket in hand, I could get my passport issued in three days. I also purchased a rail pass to Kyoto on the Shinkansen bullet train.

I could carry up to ten thousand dollars cash with me into Japan, without raising any suspicions or tax issues.

At the translator’s, I paid a rush fee to translate the letter which Akemi left for me. I wanted to know what it said. But it didn’t matter. Either way, I was going to Kyoto to get my wife.

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1.
ayat
= sentence/line

2.
sura
= chapter