The Girl Who Fell to Earth (4 page)

“Yes, hello? Where are you?”

Matar looked around for a sign. The first one he saw he read out slowly, “I. Am. On. Speed . . .”

“Speed?”

“Limit. Sixty.”

“Is this a crank call? I'm sick of you yay-hoos calling here!” Matar tried to piece her sentence out slowly but couldn't decipher it. “Well?!” Matar could gather that her voice was welling up with annoyance but couldn't make any sound come out of his own mouth. “Damn it. Try it again and I'm calling the police!”

Matar winced at the clang of her hanging up. The dial tone seeped into his ear, a blank, featureless plane of sound that caused a mild panic to rise in his chest. He opened the box of cornflakes, expecting a crunchy snack, but all he scooped up was a mealy white-and-blue powder. He read the name on the box: “Tide.” Matar went into the quiet paralysis that comes with the understanding that you are helpless. Lightning raged over the empty street and he reassured himself—the best way to weather a storm was to wait in one place until it passed.

Panes of water rippled the windows of the booth and Matar waited for a path, a hint, a sign. His sign came in blue neon, a pair of eyes at the end of the block flashing on and off. The rain was still coming when he made for the buzzing sign, big blue eyes, and white-hot starbursts that sparked over the words “Bowling Lanes.”

3

GAMMA GEMINORUM  •  THE SHINING ONE  •   

On this particular night at that particular Tacoma bowling alley, a girl named Gale Valo was waiting for her cousin to get off work. She sat smoking cigarettes over a Formica table and flipping through a decade-old
Life
magazine. It was full of cockeyed photographs of the moon's crater under headlines like “The Eagle Has Landed.” Gale had just returned home to the Pacific Northwest after a brief stint in New York, where she had gone hoping to find a place in the leggy lineup of Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall, but failed. Gale was staring into the fishbowl of Buzz Aldrin's gold-plated visor and wondering if she'd ever get another chance to get out of this town.

That's when a “good-looking, kind of dark-skinned guy” slid into a seat a few booths down from where she was sitting. He was young and bedraggled, and looked very,
very
lonesome. Gale watched him through the smoke of her cigarette, leaving it to burn down to the butt. He looked frightened, eyes wide but cast down into a box of Tide laundry detergent. Gale recognized the look of shock: it was the stock-still stare of a spooked horse, eyes rolled and very still. She wondered what she could do to calm him. It took Matar a few minutes to notice Gale staring at him. When he finally did, she blushed and raised her whole head to the cigarette for a drag, “like a little goat trying to eat a tall tree,” Matar noted.

Someone put “Satellite of Love” on the jukebox over the rumble of balls and pins and waxed pine. The lyrics were simple. Almost simple enough for Matar to grasp the chorus as Gale mouthed it silently to herself, tapping her foot in time on the polished floor. She went back to her magazine while he earnestly studied her from across the room. She wore black clothing he'd never seen before, tight at the hips and low at the bib. Her hair was sandy yellow, like sixteen-karat gold dulled down in the fog of cigarette smoke. She had it folded into two loose plaits, reminding him of his boyhood dream girl, Samira Tawfiq. He concentrated on her mouth as she lip-synched the song. The words from the jukebox were hard to recognize, but when he read them from her lips they were clear, simple, comprehensible. “I
love
to watch things on TV.”

Gale felt Matar's eyes on her and kept a thousand-yard stare on her Marlboro. As the song trailed off at the end, she stabbed out her smoke and met the brown boy's gaze straight on.

A hyped-up group of jocks burst into the alley and headed toward the table Gale sat at. Without looking at them, she slid out of the booth and sidled over to the young man with long wet hair and pink bell-bottoms. “Mind if I sit with you?” she asked in a put-on kind of tough. Matar smiled dumbly back up at her. “What's the matter. Are you shy?”

This question flummoxed him.

“Never mind,” she said, tossing her copy of
Life
and her soft pack of cigarettes onto the table. Matar was dazzled by this
real
American girl, and he desperately wanted to talk to her. Just sitting down beside him, Gale had put Matar at ease for the first time since he had landed. At the table where Gale had been sitting, the crowd of rowdy guys in numbered shirts was hooting “Happy Birthday.”

“Today is . . . birthday, me,” he lied.

“Well, then, we'll celebrate!” she announced and trotted to the bar, returning to the table with two squat brown Rainier bottles and sitting back down across from him. Matar hesitated at the bottle. “Oh, crap. Did you want a glass? I'm sorry.” Gale went back to the bar for a cold glass. Her posture was one of a hostess, graceful and attentive, like his mother pouring coffee for her visitors. Despite the fact he knew it was alcohol, Matar couldn't refuse when Gale poured him a glass and raised her own bottle to him. “Welcome, stranger.”

He liked how she spoke naturally to him. Without globbing her words as if he were a deaf person. “So where you from? Are you Mexican?”

“Arab.”

“Oh, which country?”

“Only. Just. Arabia.” He smiled politely, not wanting to become embroiled in geographical explanation. This conversation was turning out to be much more complicated than Matar had anticipated. “English. Me.” Here he stabbed his pink waistcoat. “No good.”

“Well, that's okay, we don't have to talk.” Gale opened her magazine on the table and the two leaned over together to flip through the saturated color photographs of the Eagle landing on the moon and then leaving orbit again. Matar recognized the awed look on the faces of American kids laid out on living room floors in front of General Electric. He remembered Kuzahmiah's TV and watching the moon landing on the other side of the earth.

By the end of the magazine a wordless familiarity had grown between Gale and Matar. The rolling thunder of bowling-ball-on-pine was too loud to talk over anyway. Eventually, when the rain let up, they stepped out to the wet black curb and a deep orange sunset over the Cascade Mountains. An unlit cigarette hung from her mouth, and her blond hair caught the silvery neon of the sign.

“Hey, how old are you today, anyway?” She spoke thinly through curled lips so as not to drop the cigarette.

“Nineteen,” Matar answered.

Gale lit her smoke, hiding her surprise. “Most boys around here only have peach fuzz at nineteen.” She flicked her finger along his thick moustache and quickly looked out down Sixth Avenue toward the peak of Mount Rainier. “See that? That's my mountain.” She waited for him to respond, but Matar was too absorbed in observing how her light hair ruffled like a static halo around her face. “Do you have mountains like that where you're from in Arabia?”

Matar turned to look at the ice cream colors melting off Rainier's snowcapped peak. Of course there were no mountains like that where he'd come from, but he didn't have the words to explain what there was. It was too much, too big for him, too different from the terrain of his home.

Meanwhile Gale eyed him up and down. His suit was still damp. “We need to find you some better outfits. Where'd you get that nasty suit?” She poked at the horrible spongy polyester just like Matar's mother had.

Matar just shook his head, lightly drunk and unable to explain the morbid backstory. Instead he tugged a little at the strap of her overalls. “What is this?” he asked.

He reminded Gale of a foal nuzzling around for something to eat. “These are overalls.”

“All-overs?”

“Overalls. What the farmers wear. You know. No?”

Matar's eyelids were now drooping with exhaustion. Gale guided him back safely to the Ballard Motel, where she showed him how to open the minibar full of snacks. Matar opened and shut the refrigerator door in awe. All this food had been there all along.

“You're a weird one, you know that?” Gale said from the door. “Tell you what, how about I take you to see the mountain tomorrow?” She triangulated a link between the mountain, Matar, and herself to explain before making a driving gesture and pointing back at the fading peak. Of course his answer was yes.

That night, as jet lag kept Matar awake in bed, he remembered the first time he'd heard someone speak English in person. It had been in Kuzahmiah one winter, when a strange truck drove into town. Matar and Mohamed had been sitting in front of their house as a Land Rover pulled up beside the mosque. In it was the first white person Matar had ever seen
not
in black-and-white. He was surprised that he was in fact pink, the same color as the locusts that sometimes blew into their desert from Africa. He loved when they landed in huge swarms, because they were easy to catch, skewer, and roast, and made delicious snacks. The pink man was young and wearing a white
thobe
in the style of city people. He wore a hat to protect his face from the sun and had a leather camera satchel over his shoulder. Matar longed to look inside it. His Saudi guide stepped out of the truck and disappeared into the mosque to ask the imam for directions.

Matar's brother then stood up, long and tall in his charcoal winter
thobe
, and, puffing his chest out, declared, “Watch me speak English.” Mohamed strode across the street while Matar watched his brother attempt the dialogue they both knew from the their language-learning book.

Each word was punctuated by a full stop. “Hallo! My. Name. Is. Mohamed!”

Matar watched from a distance as the pink man and Mohamed pantomimed at each other. Mohamed returned with the man in tow and Matar brought out a thermos of tea. The man sat cross-legged on the reed mat, watching as Matar shoveled too much sugar into the already sweetened red tea and stirred nervously.

“Who is your father and your father's father?” he asked Mohamed and Matar in schoolbook Arabic. Mohamed recited their clan's provenance while Matar urged a glass of tea on the man, wishing it were already cold since he knew that's how the cowboys drank it.

The man took notes, excitedly writing the names down in a little notebook. Then he looked around in his bag for something to give the boys and produced a can of Pepsi, a blue pencil, and a blank notebook full of graph paper. He gave the notebook to Matar and the can of Pepsi to Mohamed. By now the man's Saudi guide was back in the truck and honked the horn, calling, “Mister Stark!
Yalla!
I'll take you to the Bedouin camp now.”

The pink man rose and said “
Ma'a salama
” to both boys, and just like that, the young anthropologist was gone. Matar sparked with a desperate wish to stop the Land Rover as it drove off. Later he would recognize the feeling as one that plagued everyone in the tribe. It was the urge to move on. Now as he lay in his dank motel room, tangled in superfluous sheets and an uncomfortably soft mattress, all Matar wanted to do was go back. The
khayal
from his boyhood returned, a ghostly smudge with its reflective face, standing guard in his periphery, holding a vigil until Matar slept and dreamed of his impossibly distant home.

 

Gale returned early the next morning to Matar's hotel room. He opened the door in his
sirwal
, wearing the thermal blanket as a cape and still looking like a very lost little boy. “I brought you these.” Gale invited herself in and heaved a pile of clothes onto the bed: Wranglers and Levi's and button-up cotton madras with pearly buttons. “You can get rid of that salmon disco ensemble.” She made a beeline for the refrigerator, picked out a can of Rainier, stuck her thumb in to crack the push-button top of the can, and sucked the froth off her thumb. Matar stood stunned in the threshold of his hotel room, half in and half out of more secondhand duds.

“So? You ready for your birthday present? Come on, let's go,” she said, pounding down the rest of her can and charging out to her gold Volkswagen Scirocco.

He wavered a few seconds before letting go of the horrible empty feeling that came when she left, and followed her out to her car. First she drove him down to the waterfront naval yards where cargo and battleships towered as high as the adjacent hills. Matar began to get panicky as she drove up close to the piers.

“What's the matter?” she asked.

“No. Water,” he tried to explain. She stepped out and walked down the pier, gazing out across the bay; it was clear and calm and the brimstone stench from the paper mill was mild that day. “Just have a look at it, will you?” she called to Matar. But he refused to look or even get out of the car. “All right, then, we'll head straight for the hills.”

They drove away from the shore, Matar calming down the farther they drove, eased by the peace of movement. She took the scenic route to the mountain. Windows rolled down, hair in the wind, a pair of leather driving gloves, and an 8-track of
Waylon and Willie
all the way. Gale stopped at the Indian reservation for more smokes, and Matar perused the cartoon-colored fireworks. She drove up and up into the hills, driving always toward the peak that never seemed to move from their view. The mountain was like Samira's TV eyes; no matter where he went, there it was, looming down at him.

“You. Drive. Good.” Matar gave Gale an approving thumbs-up.

“You are a good driver,” she corrected him and he repeated. “Why, thank you, sir. I am flattered,” Gale replied to his grammatically correct compliment.

The old cowboys' haggard voices sang in tandem again, “If you don't understand him, an' he don't die young / He'll prob'ly just ride away.”

After a while Matar gathered up a thought worth trying to explain. “Inside the airplane. I thought the sun, he was run away from me.” Matar illustrated his panicked in-flight anxiety with hand gestures for “airplane” and “sun” and “run away.”

“You were coming west. You were flying with the night.” Gale fisted one gloved hand and demonstrated with the other how the plane moved around it. Matar lurched to grab the wheel as they started to careen. She tried to pull the gloves off with her teeth to explain better and fanned her fingers out over Matar's lap. “Help me out here, will ya?” she insisted, using her other hand to steer. He obeyed, tugging at each finger of the glove gently and removing it. The elastic seams had left pink trails on her skin, crisscrossing blue veins, like a map.