The Girl Who Fell to Earth (8 page)

Falak led Dima and me to a big tent at the edge of the camp. This was the collective storage tent where everyone piled their bedding during the day. The ground was covered with foam bed pads all sewn into psychedelic floral prints; the edges were stacked with cushions, forming a fortress that was filled with mounded multicolored quilts. Dima and I fell into the soft quilts and fell into a deep sleep from exhaustion, confusion, and a little bit of fear at being so far from our parents.

When I woke it was dark outside. “I have to pee,” I whined to the darkness. Nothing. “Wake up!” I prodded at Dima. But her wheezy little snores were all I got. The tent had been emptied of all the bedding by now, but for the blanket we were bundled in together. I rose and peeked out the flap at the other areas of the tent cluster. The stars and moon were bright like a black light and made the white sand glow ultraviolet. I steered clear of the shadows and snuck around the back of the camp facing up against a dune and fashioned a little dugout for myself. All around was silence, and the stars were even brighter than they had been the night in the desert with the tribesman. The only light came from one of the open tent flaps, and the silence was suddenly broken by the wail of a baby.

I hopped away from my puddle in the sand and walked toward the light. A flap of black wool flickered in the breeze, and a baby bawled from inside. I remembered Ma and wondered if she and our baby brother were feeling better yet. I thought maybe I should go back to Dima, and then I realized I didn't know which of the identical black wool tents I'd left her in. The baby cried again, and now I could make out a gas lantern hanging on the main post in the middle; underneath this I saw the figure of an old woman. She drew me in like a tractor beam, and I startled when I got close enough to see that she was watching me. Her body was wide, and she sat flat with legs akimbo. Her
jalabiya
was dark calico, her gray braids were red with henna, a black
berga
covered her face, and her underwear was long, with a ringlet of embroidered starbursts circling her ankles.

I hung shyly at the door. “Do you know who I am?” she asked.

Although I never knew the answer when anyone else asked me this question, somehow I
did
know this was my grandmother, Umi Safya, my Arabic namesake. But I was too terrified to answer her for fear I'd be wrong. She lifted the corner of her
berga
and offered her smooth cheek for me to kiss, then held me by the shoulders and sat me down roughly beside her. She grasped a loom between her toes, a stick knotted with the ends of rough camel-hair yarn she was weaving into some kind of rope.

“How's your mama?” she asked and offered me a piece of sour, salty cheese. It was about the size, shape, and consistency of a sand dollar, and had the indents of her fingers in it like a fork across our other grandmother's peanut-butter cookies. “Did you come to see your brother?”

I didn't understand what she meant. Ma and my little brother were in Doha. How could they be here? And if they were
here
, why hadn't anyone told us?

“Ey! The little stranger came to see her brother,” Umi said to someone I hadn't noticed in the corner of the tent. She directed me with a rough push toward the shadows and went back to braiding her sling of yarn into rope.

The woman's body in the corner was a sea of black but for the white island of a boob, spilling over the neckline of her
jalabiya
and into the mouth of a little baby. “Come here.” She beckoned to me. Her voice came harsh through her veil. “His name is Badr,” she told me. I looked down at the tiny brown baby suckling at her black areola.

“Badr,” I repeated dumbly, still puzzling over why Umi had called him my brother.

“It means full moon.”

She then propped him against her knee, his legs akimbo on a pile of blankets like a helpless specimen, so I could get a good look at him. I studied this little human she was presenting to me. His tiny fingers balled up and pawed at the air like a turtle on its back, and his tears were stained black by the kohl powder around his eyes. He had a thick black tuft of hair waving straight up from his head like Astro Boy. His snot glistened, mixed with tears in the dim light, and when I touched him his face clenched in displeasure and he began howling again.

“Can't you see he needs winding?” Umi Safya commented from the sidelines.

“Take him to your grandmother,” the woman ordered.

He blinked up at me with his wet eyes. I didn't understand who this little person was to me.
How
he could be my brother? I held him at the armpits, unsure what to do with him, and carefully picked my way through the colorful tangle of blankets on the ground. He had a scrap of fabric filled with cardamom and other spices called a
khomra
. It was effective at warding off bad spirits, less so at preventing gas. Umi Safya slung Badr's tiny body over her knee as casually and roughly as picking a kitten out of the basket by its nape. Then, patting him in rhythm with the rocking of her knee, she calmed his tears by howling at him in a mock baby's cry: “
Lebaay! Lebaay!
” until he fell silent and then asleep.

 

Back in Doha, Ma was alone in the women's hospital while Baba was trying to bribe his way in to see her. But by the next morning she had lost my brother, propelling his little body from hers. He never made it to oxygen, fading as he passed through the birth canal like an asteroid burning up on entry into the atmosphere. When she woke a few hours later, all she wanted was a smoke. She struggled up, rummaged through her purse, shuffled to the bathroom, and lit a cigarette. She was dizzy and when she looked down she found she was also bleeding. The blood didn't surprise her—she had just had a miscarriage. However, when she fell to the floor in a faint and was found curled around the toilet in her green hospital gown, cigarette doused in a pool of her own blood, the nurses assumed the worst. A delegation of doctors came from all points of the hospital: Syrians, Indians, Russians.

When Ma awoke her legs were pushed up, knees-to-ears, and they were examining her. “Get off! Leave me alone! Where is my husband?”

Ignoring her, the doctors came to a unanimous guess: “She is bleeding internally!”

Ma popped the IV out of her arm and tried to get out of the bed, screaming for help.

“Perhaps we ought to put the patient under mental observation,” suggested one of the doctors.

But nothing makes a person crazier than being told she is crazy. They had to get six nurses to hold Ma down until the tranquilizers kicked in, her intensity diluting as the sedatives entered her bloodstream. She was still awake when they rolled her into an operating theater for the unexplained “emergency operation.” She described it later as a mad scientist's lab. Despite the fact that her own husband couldn't pass through the wards, she found that men were huddled all around her, most in surgical masks but some in suits. They covered her eyes and that was the last thing she remembered until her reentry into the outer rings of consciousness, brought painfully into focus by an intense burning sensation spreading up her arm. She cast around, wanting to scream at the masked men. But they were gone, and now only Matar sat by her side while a nurse squeezed a big bag of blood into her veins.

A few days later Dima and I returned from the desert. Ma was still in the hospital. She was whiter than usual, and she seemed to be suspended in a web of transparent tubes. Her eyes fluttered open, and she patted a patch of the white sheet for us to climb up on. I scrambled up ahead of Dima, my purple dress shedding sand all over the bed.

“You girls are filthy. Where have they been?” she asked.

“With their family,” Baba answered for us, and pulled up a rolling office chair alongside the bed.

“Oh, that's nice. What did you kittens get up to?”

I launched into a rapid-fire rundown of our adventures, dumping the specimens I had kept from our travels onto her blanket. I displayed a snakeskin, a sand rose, a shiny chip wrapper, and the dry goat poop and white pebbles for sand tic-tac-toe to illustrate. I was reveling on the bed in my stash of treasures when I excitedly added, “Oh, and guess what? I met our little brother!”

Baba tensed, and Ma pulled herself up gingerly into a sitting position. “Oh, kitten. I'm so sorry.” I didn't understand the commiseration as she pulled me to her, planting a long kiss on the part of my matted braids. “I need to tell you something. There's not going to be any little brother.”

“Why? Where's he gone?”

“Just gone.”

I didn't protest, comforted by being back in Ma's arms. But as she rocked Dima and me back and forth in the cradle of her IV tubes, I saw a shadow darken Baba's face, a tiny hint at the shattering disaster about to make deep impact on our little world.

8

DELTA ARIETIS  •  THE LITTLE BELLY  •   

Ma's pale skin showed the blotchy red rash of the infestation first. The burrowing mites weren't as evident on our darker skin until the pruritus left us squirming, rubbing our backs against the spiny Astroturf alongside the building's swimming pool. The pregnant females had burrowed under our skin and let loose with trails of their microscopic eggs.

“This looks like scabies,” Ma said, holding a magnifying glass up to her skin and then back down into her circa-1950 reference book of children's maladies. “Either you girls got them in the desert or I picked them up in the hospital,” she concluded.

The doctor gave us a prescription salve and we underwent a routine quarantine in our little flat in the big city like astronauts returning to earth. He instructed Ma to boil all fabrics, stuffed animals in particular. So Dima and I sat by in the kitchen letting the hot vapors scald our cheeks while we whimpered in protest as our stuffed animals were plopped into the boiling cauldron like plush lobsters.

The scabies rash was still visible the week Baba was due for his land leave from the rig. We hadn't seen him since Ma had come home from the hospital, and she did her best to make us presentable, wrestling us into our best dresses and ruffled socks. She seemed nervy that morning as she trammeled me by my ponytail and dragged the brush down through the tangled mess.

“You're killing me!” I howled, certain I was
actually
dying from the pain.

“It hurts to be beautiful.” She punctuated the truism with a pitiless yank.

“Cut it off!” I shrilled.

Unsympathetic, Ma finished ruthlessly plowing my hair into rows.

“Don't talk like that, most girls would die to have nice thick hair like yours. Besides, your Baba wants his girls to have long hair.”

She finished banding me into the braid and I stationed myself as far away from her brush as possible at the window to sulk. That afternoon the sun seemed to hover at half-mast forever as I pressed my tear-stained cheeks against the glass. Construction had just begun on the office tower across from us when we arrived in Doha, and we had watched its rebar and cement hatch from the ground like crocuses in the spring. Now it had almost matched the height of our own building. I looked across at it, my lips suctioned against the glass of the window, watching dimly, like a goldfish.

The first thing I noticed was the shade cast over the sun by a sudden plume of dust. Then our whole building wavered like a stack of books, and Ma dragged us under the dining room table in case we went down too. After the quake had settled, Ma crawled to the window and looked out. “Oh, no,” she started repeating to herself. “Oh, no!” and held Dima and me back from looking. The entire tower that had been under construction kitty-corner to us had collapsed on itself. Later we learned that the workers had accidentally walled a bulldozer into the building and tried to drive it through the unreinforced lobby doors to get it out. I morbidly craned the telescope down from its usual coordinates and scanned the mess, looking for blood or guts or any color at all in the mealy gray rubble. But all I spied from my perch before Ma pulled me away from the telescope were the remnants of a red-checkered
gutra
.

By the time Baba finally arrived that afternoon, the ambulances had come and gone. The construction accident had shaken Ma. It seemed like a bad omen of things to come. As Baba entered, she held back in the living room like a dog straining at its leash. He was uncharacteristically somber. He kissed me without a word and didn't seem to notice the scabies rash or the fishbone braids I'd suffered for. Ma lifted Dima from the floor and put her to bed, then she led me into the bedroom and bundled me in. I pouted and threw the covers off.

“Stay down,” she warned, and went back out to the living room.

But the twang of the TV turning on drew me out from the covers. I snuck to the open bedroom door and peered out to where my parents sat. Baba slouched on the floor cushions, flicking through the channels on the TV. All I could see of Ma was the ripple of gold hair draped down her back. I went back to bed and fell asleep to the comforting sound of television fuzz. Then at some point in the night Ma came back into our room, silhouetted in the darkened hall. I knew something was different but couldn't recognize what. Shock seeps through in the strangest ways. A tight staccato of realizations hit me, and I saw her holding fistfuls of her own long, blond hair, like she'd scalped Rapunzel. She crawled into the bed with us and lay still.

“What's the matter?” I asked, frightened. Her silence seemed dangerous, a volatile kind of hush.

But she was silent, just staring in the darkness. Then Baba came into the doorway; Ma hurled the fistful of hair at him. He caught it out of the air and curled it around his hand like a bandage. “What you want me to do?”

He seemed to shrink in the doorway, but he was really just walking away. The apartment door slammed behind him and Ma lay down in a fetal position between Dima and me. “Your baba has another wife,” she sobbed. I remembered the breastfeeding woman in the desert. We really did have a little brother after all.

 

Most people who hear the following part of the story think our father was being cruel. But in reality, he was just clueless. He brought his
other
wife, Flu, with him the next day. She was indeed the woman I'd met in the desert, and she carried our little brother, Badr, with her. Baba announced that Flu would be staying with us and moved her suitcase into one of the bedrooms. He said he was worried about Ma being here all alone, that Flu could help her around the house and take care of us. “She'll teach the girls Arabic,” he offered. But Ma was too shocked at his utopian delusions to answer.

“You're crazy if you think I'm going to live like some fucking hippie on a commune!” she shouted and corralled Baba into the kitchen, where she slammed the door. Meanwhile, Dima and I watched Flu. Baba's big secret sat in one of the unused bedrooms, a specter in black
berga
, nursing Badr silently on the bare mattress. Down the hall we could hear Ma crying through the walls of the kitchen. Baba went through a long explanation detailing
his
story: Flu was his cousin from Saudi, and his brother Mohamed had convinced him to marry her because she needed help. She lived on the outskirts of a little town in a shack with her sisters and widowed mother. All of them had ended up becoming second wives because they were so poor. She and Badr lived there still in her mother's un-air-conditioned, running water–less hut while he was on the rig.

“You said yourself the flat was big enough for two families!”

“I can't
believe
you twist my words in my mouth!” Ma blew the door open and stomped to where we waited near Flu. Ma grabbed Badr from Flu and lifted him like she was weighing a piece of meat. “How old? Six months?” she barked at Flu. She calculated the approximate time of our castaway night in the desert with the tribesman, and then put two and two together. She pointed at Flu and the baby without looking at them. “So
that
is why you left us in the desert that night? Don't lie.”

Baba went into the bathroom and locked himself in. Ma went to sit in the living room. Flu followed and sat across from her on the swiveling office chair. Ma ordered us to her. “Come 'ere, girls.” She lit a cigarette (which she
never
did indoors) and drew us to her, creating a united front against the
other
female encroaching on her territory. Sweaty metal bangles slid up and down Flu's hairless arm while she waved away the thick Marlboro smoke Ma was blowing in her direction.

Dima hid behind the armchair, peeking out at the heavily perfumed woman. No sound from Baba in the bathroom. Flu adjusted her
berga
with a tug, like an old man pulling his beard. Ma sat stiffly in her armchair, her expression shifting from devastation to hysteria to hatred. She offered Flu a crystal cup of tea, a plate of wilted grapes, a smoke. Flu made a clicking noise of no from under her veil each time. Not to be refused, Ma pushed me forward.

Flu took my hand in hers. I looked at Ma for approval, but she was back to watching the bathroom door and wasn't listening anymore.

Flu swept me up and forced my locked knees until I was sitting on her lap. I struggled in her grip; the coarse embroidery on her
jalabiya
made my rash itch even more. Still no sound came from the bathroom. What would be the right etiquette for this situation? An all-out brawl probably would not have been frowned upon. They could have scratched each other's eyes out, throttled, beat, maimed, or—as Al-Dafira tradition goes for the settlement of such disputes—disemboweled each other. Instead they sat at the table while the tea leaves sank and listened together for the toilet to flush.

What seemed like an hour passed before Baba emerged, sheepish, giving a fearful look to Ma and a pitiful one to Flu. This was my chance to get away. I wriggled off Flu's lap, relieved of shield-duty protecting her from Ma's evil eye. Flu showily kissed my forehead before Baba took her back into the bedroom where Badr was asleep. Ma said nothing as the sun set into night. No sound came from the bedroom. She fixed us a dinner of canned tuna and pocket bread, plotting all the while what to do. In the end, the silence coming from the room drove her to germ warfare.

After she'd washed us up for bed, Ma gave me a kiss on my prickly-rashed forehead. “I want you to go sleep in the room with Baba,” she said, and opening the door a crack, she nudged me into the dark room. “I'm sorry, kitten,” she whispered in my ear.

I didn't know what she was sorry about and felt my way toward the bed, where I could barely make out two dark heaps under the sheet. “Baba?” I asked of the dark figure in the bed. No sound came from the heap. I crawled up, doing Ma's bidding like a smallpox-infected blanket sent straight to Chief Pontiac. Baba pulled me up and nestled me in between him and Flu. Badr squirmed beside me. I could see his puckered lips suckling at the air, dreaming, as I imagine babies do, of big tits in the sky. Flu was snoring steadily, every third breath ending in a snort. I concentrated on the rhythm until I too fell into sleep, waking only occasionally to scratch.

 

The next morning Ma dressed in the blue morning-glory outfit she had bought to meet our family. The monochrome was broken only by the dots of pink rouge on her cheeks, efforts at a healthy glow only drawing attention to how weak and tired she actually looked. After the surgical nightmare she had become practically translucent, and I had become obsessed with tracing the topography of her blue veins through her skin. Dima was spacing out in front of the living room window chewing a cocktail sausage. Ma's recovery meant we'd been living off canned food, triangle cheese, and juice boxes for weeks. Ma had packed the suitcase with our few possessions that had
not
been gifts from Baba. Depending on his movements this morning she would make an executive decision about our future as a family unit. By the time we left the apartment, the light in the window was tinted with an orange, martian glow. A sandstorm was approaching. Baba stepped into the hall just as we left and watched us get into the elevator. They said nothing to each other and within minutes Ma, Dima, and I were in a cab driving into the darkening storm.

“How will Baba know where we are?” I whined from the backseat.

“He'll know,” Ma said in her emergency voice, the deep one that warned us not to argue.

Visibility was so low on the roads that the cabdriver had to inch forward as we passed into the eerie billows of the sandstorm and finally came to the corniche where the apex of the Sheraton Hotel rose over the dashboard. The massive ziggurat of the Sheraton was even more impressive to me now than it had been in Baba's video. It squatted low on its reclaimed pilings like a broken-down spaceship caught in the earth's enchantment. We passed through a series of automatic doors, each sealing us off further from the storm—closer to sanctuary, hermetically sealed from the confusion of our culture and our family. Entering it was like stepping into a gigantic, glamorous terrarium from the future. The soft hiss of chlorinated spray misted from tiled fountains, teacups clinked on their saucers, the concierge smiled.

As long as we stayed inside this temple to unreality and out of the sandstorm, we could suspend belief and forget the fact that our father had married another woman and that she had been the one to birth a brother. Ma checked us in under a false name and, having no money, gave them our passports as collateral at the desk. Someone would have to bail us out of the hotel if we were ever going to leave. A bellhop led us into the elevators. The doors were brass, the ceiling mirrored with triangles of colored glass. A full view of the patterned fountains sprawled below us as the elevator rose and a double-breast of buttons glowed out of the side panel.