The Girl Who Fell to Earth (7 page)

“Do all the A/Cs have to be on at once?” Ma stomped into the darkness and turned off the rumbling air conditioner. Her astonishment at the size of the flat turned to suspicion as she saw that the room was lined with floor-to-ceiling mirrors. “Matar. How can we afford this? You could fit
two
families in here.”

It was not the reaction he'd been hoping for. “Bah. Don't worry. I have it all under control.”

But Ma knew by his sheepish lack of eye contact that he most definitely did not. The cavernous rooms and creepy stillness of un-lived-in living spaces dampened the thrill of being with our father. Ma investigated further, flicking the lights on and off in each room as if to check if something might be lurking. We went into the living room, which was dominated by a huge pane of glass framing a view of the water. Light from the construction cranes dimly frosted the room. Ma and Baba stood together in silhouette beside a large telescope. Ma bent to have a look at where it pointed: a rig out at sea. She lifted me up to see the red flame glimmering in the scope. It was shockingly detailed, the ripples on the water, the jutting trunk of the rig, and the flame itself. It was like looking closely at a perfectly rendered miniature.

“That's where Baba works,” she said to me.

“I go back tomorrow morning,” Baba announced.

“But it's Saturday!”

“Yes, the weekend is Thursday and Friday.”

Exhausted from the journey, she didn't have it in her to mask disappointment.

“Don't worry. Your new family will be here to visit in a few days.”

Ma slumped into a chair. “We came an awful long way for you to leave us again.”

Baba changed the subject. “I have one more surprise for you!” He coaxed Ma out of her chair and took us back to the elevator, which took us to a mezzanine floor. “This had better be good if you're going to strand us,” Ma said, following behind us as we came out to an open rooftop lined with plastic sun chairs.

“Pool!” I yelped, and ran for the kidney-shaped hole in the middle of the seventh-story patio.

“For swimming lessons,” he said, and Ma softened a little as he hugged her to him.

We spent the following week settling in. Ma locked the extra rooms. The longer they remained locked, the more dread gathered around them. They were like the forbidden attic of some neo-Gothic romance set in the Gulf, neglected ghosts lurking in the brightly lit wings of our glass castle. She filled the shelves with the books she had brought for us, including the Laura Ingalls Wilder books and a mini-library of abridged, illustrated English classics:
Treasure Island
,
The Swiss Family Robinson
, and
The Jungle Book
among them. On the top shelf she kept a medical dictionary full of explicit photos of rashes and parasites, alongside which she kept her copy of Frank Herbert's
Dune
for her own amusement. We spent a lot of time at the pool in the early mornings, where Dima bobbed in water wings and Ma instructed me on how to dive with as little splash as possible into the pool.

“Tuck your head in!” she'd call from her umbrella, where she watched me show off my headstands and push Dima around the little blue hole with her water wings and inner tube.

At night Ma swiveled the telescope on its tripod and squinted out at the horizon. She reminded me of a queen from one of our illustrated classics, trapped in a turret, surveying her new realm. We took turns looking out at the little candle on the sea. The water of the Gulf was often still, like silver jelly. The only spots of ripple were where three-meter concrete jacks were being dumped into the shallows to build new islands shaped like pearls and palm trees. Beyond the gravel barges, past the rot-bottomed dhows and the nets that kept hammerheads away from the beach, was the unfocused quiver of flame where our father worked. But that little flame in the night was tantalizingly close after we'd traveled so far.

Baba's schedule was such that he would get one week onshore for every three weeks offshore. We would spend those three weeks in a strange limbo watching Grendizer, the translated Japanese space robot, on television and going for walks on the corniche, a waterside promenade studded with fountains and star-shaped gazebos. Efforts to green the city were ambitious but failed to stop the encroaching desert. Grass parched out after a single afternoon without water, trees died still girdled in their shipping mesh, and the army of migrant laborers brought to repot sunburned petunias were as unsustainable as the gardens they were hired to plant. At sunset we sat in the shade of dying trees and watched the Indian gardeners dig a shallow grave for a freshly shipped rosebush. “You know those won't root that way,” Ma called out.

The men looked up at her, terrified. They'd been gelded by gossip and horror stories of sheikhs' wives who entrapped workers into speaking with them, only to cry rape to their husbands. Ma got up, strode over to them with her cigarette, and squatted down to give them a hand. “You have to dig a
wider
hole,” she tried to explain, cigarette still between her teeth. The poor gardeners looked at each other, dropped their tools, and backed away from their plot. They looked about ready to make a run for it. Ma picked the little spade up to show she meant no harm and dug out a hole big enough for the plant. When she'd finished, the two gardeners timidly returned to the job like scavengers who'd been chased off by a lion. The sight of the doomed bushes briefly blooming against the toxic neon of municipal coveralls was sad. “Poor things,” Ma commented, though it's difficult to know if she was referring to the plants, the men, or us.

The next Friday afternoon, envoys from Al-Dafira arrived. The day of their arrival Ma had buttoned us into matching pinafores and doused us with her Ysatis eau de toilette, so at the very least we'd make a fragrant impression on them. We were watching from our window when several trucks rumbled up to the entrance of the building. The last of the lineup was a 1979 Suburban, the Bedouin equivalent of the kids' table at a grown-up dinner party. It came bearing a troop of cousins for Dima and me to play with. Ma smoothed our hair and pinched our cheeks to give the illusion of a healthy glow just in time to welcome the women into the house.

When we opened the door, a pack of kids came bursting in and surrounded us. Some of the shy ones hung back near the door, eyes wide and staring at Ma. One of the smaller kids dashed up to her, tagged her leg, and then skittered back off to a safe distance where he could safely observe her. The standoff between Ma and the children broke when she spoke, and although her language was strange, her tone was understood: “I'm not from outer space. I promise.” Then, like Ewoks to Leia, the kids gathered around, taking turns touching the cobalt silk of her dress and her thin white hands.

My uncle Mohamed's daughter Alia was closest in age to me, and so we identified one another and immediately fell into cahoots. Despite our language barrier, we communicated in a babelogue of rowdiness. As we got to know one another, the playdate with the other cousins escalated into a riot, and I joined in with the rest in razing the flat. We crowded onto the master bed and leaped for the ceiling, each spring bouncing us higher together. The littlest ones got hurt, tangled in the sheets, or trampled. Somewhere in the savaging of the bedroom we tore the curtains down, we soaked the carpet with the
shadafa
while sword fighting, and I managed to break my own glasses. The liberation of being in a mob didn't last. In the end, I wasn't anonymous enough to escape blame, and Ma snared me out of a skirmish by the nape of my neck and in her deepest, most threatening voice scolded, “You know better than that! What is
wrong
with you!?”

But I was so emancipated by the chaos that I felt no shame. Now that I knew there were two authorities in my life, Ma's rules and the tribe's rules, assimilation equaled rebellion. I bolted with the pack to the door, where we all made off on different bearings, using the stairwell like monkey bars, jumping in the elevators, and scratching graffiti in the wooden doors of neighboring flats. We made it down into the lobby, where the entrance of the building had been converted into a temporary
majlis
by our uncles for the visit. They had rearranged the leather sofas in the waiting area and now sat in a row, tribunal-style, on the black marble floor.

Ma approached the group of men, trailed by the pack of cousins, who emerged from the elevator in a swell and pushed us in close to the men. Dima and I trailed behind her. “
Salam alaikum
,” she greeted them in her wide-voweled Arabic.

“
Wa alaikum salam
,” the men murmured back. They seemed as apprehensive and even bashful as she did at this meeting.

The men watched silently as she found a perch on the edge of the white leather couch; Dima and I flanked her like cherubs in our fancy dresses and stared back. “Come on, Sophia. Go say hello.” Ma pushed me off my seat like she was sending a little boat out into a current.

I went as I'd been bidden to the first man, who offered me his beardy cheek for a kiss, and made the rounds of the room this way, pausing at each person and leaning in for an itchy kiss. Stranger after stranger asked me, “Do you know who I am?” Of course I didn't have a clue and so smiled dimly and nodded “yes,” waiting to be passed on to the next man.

Dima, who was still barely toddling, had been watching the whole scene. Normally she wouldn't leave the skirt-clinging radius of Ma, but suddenly and completely on her own she waddled several meters across the carpet toward the row of aged Bedu kings and fell into the arms of a particularly gruff-looking one with an orange beard. “Hi!” she said, and stroked his bright facial hair, fluffing it as though it were a Muppet's fur. Tears welled up in the old man's eyes. “Don' cry. Don' cry,” Dima lisped, and patted him on the shoulder the way she would a big gentle dog.

“Dima, you know who that is?” Ma asked.

“Grampa,” Dima answered, and the lobby fell silent with surprise.

Despite the fact that he had helped to midwife twelve of his own babies into the world, our grandfather Jabir couldn't seem to figure out how to hold Dima while she carried on chattering to him in English, speaking more to him than she had ever spoken at all.

That night Ma called Puyallup, and we listened in close. “How was company?” Gramma asked.

“It looks like a hurricane hit in here—when they landed I didn't know what was going on. There's nothing left in the house. It's all broken or eaten or just gone.” Gramma laughed on the other end, and Ma continued, “I feel like I'm just this white woman living on the outskirts of the reservation raising a couple of kids that belong to the tribe.” She paused for Gramma's reply, but if she said anything it was lost in the switchback byways of AT&T's pinched veins. “I keep thinking this is how it must be for astronauts. All cooped up for months on end, not knowing which way is up.”

Gramma's voice came through, but it was shredded and unintelligible. Ma rattled the receiver and hit it against her palm like a plugged saltshaker, as though the static could be knocked out. “Mom?” she asked softly. “Are you still there?” When no answer came she kept the phone to her ear for a long time, listening to the dial tone, before she hung up with a sigh.

7

OMICRON
²
ERIDANI  •  THE BROKEN EGGSHELLS  •   

We remained in a sort of suspended animation while waiting for Baba to come back from the rig. When Baba wasn't with us it was as though time ceased,
we
ceased, and every day in the apartment was just a dream in his periphery. Despite visits from the family, calls to Gramma, and the company of the telescope, Ma was lonely. She tried making friends with a Pakistani guard and a Filipino seamstress and once even lurched at a blue-eyed woman in a
niqab
at the fish market in hopes she might speak English. But she soon found that these people were as foreign as she was in this improbable city. Every week there was a new road, more dust cresting off the construction sites, and higher floors added to the grove of young skyscrapers shooting up around us. It made me dizzy to look up at them from our thirteenth-floor window. I began to fear heights and had dreams of falling: first of plummeting to the ground, then of plunging up into the sky.

Other than trips to the vegetable market and our morning swimming lessons in the tower's pool, we rarely ventured out. Bored senseless like a caged animal, I laid tracks in the carpet by scooting from one end of the window to the other in an office chair. I imagined myself as an astronaut floating along an observation deck. When I wasn't doing this, I sprawled on the floor basking in front of the TV until the carpet had matted into my shape like a nuclear shadow cast by cathode ray.

Around this time I began to lose my baby teeth, and ripping milk molars out became a hobby of Ma's. Unlike many other perks of motherhood (the hunting of lice or the popping of zits, for example), the pulling of teeth allowed her to assert herself
culturally
. “If there's one thing I'm going to give my girls it's a mouth full of healthy
American
teeth!”

She developed an array of baroque extraction techniques: for example, she'd tie an offending tooth to a doorknob, back me up the appropriate distance, calculate the force required, and slam the door, leaving me blubbering in a puddle of drool and tears. When Baba
did
visit, his method was much more
halal
. He would set me down in front of a cartoon on TV and vise my neck in his hand so I sat up straight like a doll in a display stand. This gave me a false sense of security. Then he'd wait ten or fifteen minutes until Princess Sapphire had fenced off the bad guys, by which time I'd forget I even had a wiggly tooth. Then, before I could even shout out or struggle, he'd be holding up a bloody molar for me to see. “Throw it at the sky and the next one will be better,” he told me, and pushed open the window just a crack for me to toss the jagged little tooth up into the air and watch it disappear downward into the construction site below.

The weeklong stretches when Baba did come back were always highly anticipated. While Ma waited for her driver's license, Baba's visits were the only times we ever dared to venture far from our isolated little capsule. On one visit about nine months after our arrival, Baba came home from the rig and told Ma to pack.

“But you just got here!” Ma exclaimed.

“And
now
we're going.”

“Where? Why?”

“The desert.”

Ma stuffed Dima roughly into a onesie, straightening her out with a brisk shake as if she were bagging a pillow. It was just after
maghreb
when we headed out to Baba's rented Land Cruiser. Ma's face was as pale as a porcelain doll with her black
hijab
pulled down tight; Dima dozed against her chest. Baba opened the back of the Land Cruiser and boosted me up inside. As we left the city, I watched the westbound road scroll out under us through the back-door windows—a hypnotic wake of dark concrete pulling me to sleep.

When I woke it was to the idling engine. We had stopped somewhere barren and very dark. I sat up from my nest among the blankets and spare tire. A tall, thin man with a wooden staff came from the night into the red brake lights. As he approached, his eyes darted toward me, though his head stayed still. I ducked back down into the blankets until Baba stepped out and greeted the tall man. They spoke in Arabic. Ma watched suspiciously in the rearview mirror, adjusting her veil nervously.

“
Yalla, Sophie, hawli
,” Baba said, swinging the back door open and reaching to remove me from my nest in the trunk. Dima and I were both wary of the stranger, but Baba reassured us. “He's okay. Go play.” We didn't need to be told twice after weeks of playing indoors. We plunged into the fine sand, rolling around like chinchillas in a dust bath. We paused only to prick up our ears at the tense exchange that began between our parents.

“I have to go back to the city for a few hours. I'll be back.”

“Why did you bring us out here?”

“Don't worry. He is here to protect you,” Baba said, thumbing in the tall man's direction.

Ma's face went long and solemn. “Is this some kind of a joke? Who is he to you? He's a stranger!”

“He is not a stranger, he's Bedu from Sudan.”

“I don't care who he is! You're not leaving us here!”

Baba was already perched back in the Land Cruiser,
thobe
stretched taut across his knees, one foot in the car and one foot on the sand.

“You'll be fine.”

He shut the door and Ma bared her teeth at Baba through the driver's side window. “Don't!” Ma bellowed, swear words straining behind her clenched teeth.

She was too proud to get hysterical but was mad beyond words, hissing at him as he rolled the window up and drove away.

When the lights of Baba's Land Cruiser disappeared, the stars seemed brighter and the sky more vast. I hung close to Ma as I looked up at the sky, suddenly afraid that without her as an anchor I might fall up. Ma gave the tribesman a wide berth as she stomped back over to the nest, dusted us off, and drew us close. The Sudanese tribesman stared straight ahead, limned in starlight, unmoving. He and the American farm girl kept eyes askance on each other until a silent truce of mutual distrust was reached and Ma turned her attention safely to us.

“The stars are different here,” she said aloud. The light was blue on her pale face, gray on my brown arms. Dima peered sleepily out from under Ma's armpit, where she had burrowed close under the blankets, and Ma rubbed the melted starlight into her cheeks like cream.

“Where did Baba go?” I asked. I kept my head down to avoid the feeling of reverse vertigo I got from the stars.

She drew the points of a constellation in the sand to change the subject. “Can you find the Big Dipper?” I followed her finger while she ran a line between the stars in the sand; this seemed to ease my astrophobia. “Find that one,” she ordered.

I tried, but had to squint to avoid feeling dizzy. The sky astigmatized into a bright lacework of light and before I could find the constellation, I was off in a comforting deep sleep.

At some point late in the night, Ma woke me. A meteor shower of rosy gold and silver was passing in the sky. I rubbed my eyes and hugged her close. She squeezed me back. “Sophia, I'm going to have a new baby,” she said.

“Will it be like you or like Baba?” was my first question.

“Both of us, of course, honey.”

“Will it be a boy?” was my second question.

“We'll see.”

“What are the chances?” I asked.

Ma didn't answer as I hugged her belly, enlivened with the idea of a new sibling, and put my eye to the taut, heavy barrel where our new baby lived. I imagined it was a window through which I could see the transparent body of my new brother or sister, backlit in orange and pink. It smiled at me: infinitely wise, alien, imaginary.

“You cannot tell your father. Do you understand?”

I nodded solemnly as she curled me back against her belly. The shadow of the tribesman stood sentry at the top of the dune all night long.

When light broke, the desert was damp, sand still cold with traces of the winter moonlight. The tribesman remained in the same spot and it was only when the camels craned to the east at the sound of an approaching truck that he relaxed his leg and went down to the herd. Baba's Land Cruiser appeared over the dune with a rev that made Ma sit upright from our bundle of blankets, already working her anger up into wrath. By the time Baba pulled the truck up and rolled down his window, all Ma could do was let out a little peep of steam: “That's it!” Baba placed Dima and me in the car without saying a word to her. Ma let him do it, waiting for an apology. But Baba refused eye contact. Ma drew her arm back, first balling it into a fist, and then slapped him.

“God damn you! Goddamnit! How could you leave us? How could you leave us here? How?”

Her voice sounded like it was shredding her throat. But Baba maintained the dead air between them. We drove away from that place without an answer. It would be many months before we got one. I looked back out the rear window of the truck as we drove back toward the city; our guardian, the silent tribesman, stood watch with the camels all around. I waved at him until we were out of sight.

 

Almost five months after our night in the desert, Baba still didn't know Ma was expecting, and the rift between them seemed to be growing. When he called from the rig, he started making an effort to speak to Dima and me in Arabic. To Ma, this seemed to be a way to exclude her and a sign of his wavering allegiance. Whenever he called and said “
salam alaikum
” instead of “hello,” she hung the phone up on him. There was finality in Ma's movements when she did this, as though she knew it was over before anything was said. She also knew as she harbored the new stranger in her womb that if it were a boy, he would change everything for us, especially within the tribe. Our presence, which for now was at the periphery, would become more central. A boy—a brother—would draw our presence in bolder blood. She wasn't sure what Matar would make of this news. And she didn't tell him until it was too late.

“I felt like if I didn't say it out loud to you it might not be true,” she told Baba as he rushed her, miscarrying, to the women's hospital.

Once she was admitted, he was unable to go with her into the “Female Only” maternity ward. Kept at bay by a very aggressive lady security guard, Baba returned to the building, where Dima and I were playing in the lobby under the watch of the Filipino seamstress who ran a shop on our floor.

“You're going camping,” he told us.

“But where's Ma?”

“She's sick. She just needs a little rest.”

“Can't we stay with her?”

“No.”

He packed our clothes and some blankets and that same night took us to the Saudi border, where our uncle Mohamed was waiting to take us away. We arrived long before morning, and were transferred from Baba's Land Cruiser to the rumbling Suburban
garumba
full of kids, thermoses of coffee, and carpets. Border guards waved us through the checkpoints, preferring not to deal with the rabble. They knew no contraband would be safe in a truck full of feral kids anyway. I recognized Alia and some of our other cousins from the familial summits at our apartment. We fell fast into loud clapping games, and gorged on Vimto and Aladdin chips, bursting off the cracked cement of Salwa Road and into the unpaved Jafoorah Desert—a track of djinn-haunted land no one dared cross unless they started in the morning and could ensure making it across by dusk.

As soon as we went off road we hit a dip. All of us piled in the back hovered over the rusted-out floor of the trunk. Just as the tires hit the ground and we hit our heads, the back doors of the Suburban swung open wide like French doors in a thunderstorm. Dima and I clung to each other, but it didn't seem to bother the other kids at all. Uncle Mohamed drove like a daredevil; he went into a sort of Zen trance, matching gears and speed to the individual personality of each erg. We broke the top of an ordinary-looking dune to find our camp hidden behind it. Consisting of ten large “hair-houses,” or tents woven out of wiry black goat fur, they were so black against the white land that the opening of each looked as though it were the entrance to a deep cave.

A small Nissan pickup appeared beside us on the top of the dune. The bed of the truck was full of scraggly firewood and at the wheel was our aunt Falak, her twin brother, Faraj, in the passenger seat. She flashed the lights at Uncle Mohamed and guided us down the almost vertical slope into the camp. Falak and Faraj were only about fourteen years old then. I remember being impressed with the two as they stepped out of the truck and came to greet us. Falak wore a fluorescent pink and yellow
jalabiya
, with a black
hijab
tied loosely around her head that had fallen off the back like a hoodie. Our uncle Faraj wore a
thobe
, and his
gutra
covered his face. Falak put me at ease and Faraj scooped Dima up to tickle her. Despite their youth they were both strangely grown up, as was the case with many of the older boys and girls. Once they had passed the rabble-age (from toddling to about ten), they helped take care of the young stragglers like us.