The Girl Who Fell to Earth

by Sophia Al-Maria

  THE GIRL

  WHO FELL TO

  EARTH

  A MEMOIR BY

  SOPHIA AL-MARIA

  CONTENTS

  Epigraph

  Prologue: Oh Eye, Oh Night

  1. Lambda Leonis • The Glance •

  2. Xi Ursae Majoris • The First Leap •

  3. Gamma Geminorum • The Shining One •

  4. Eta Eridani • The Hatching Place •

  5. Beta Persei • The Ghoul •

  6. Beta Cephei • The Flock •

  7. Omicron2 Eridani • The Broken Eggshells •

  8. Delta Arietis • The Little Belly •

  9. Gamma Andromedae • Hug The Ground •

  10. Epsilon Orionis • The String of Pearls •

  11. Epsilon Boötis • The Loincloth •

  12. Beta Columbae Columba • The Weight •

  13. Eta Ursae Majoris • Daughters of The Bier •

  14. Upsilon Scorpii • The Sting •

  15. Mu Draconis • The Dancer •

  16. Eta Boötis • The Solitary One •

  17. Lambda Ursae Majoris • The Second Leap •

  18. Epsilon Canis Majoris • The Virgins •

  19. Delta Virginis • The Howler •

  20. Eta Canis Majoris • The Maidenhead •

  21. Delta Geminorum • Middle of The Sky •

  Glossary

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  EPIGRAPH

  Greetings!

  May time bring us together.

  —Arabic recording on the Voyager Spacecraft Golden Records

  PROLOGUE

  OH EYE, OH NIGHT

  This story begins with a winking star. Dusk is falling across the Arabian Gulf and with it comes Maghreb prayer. Only after the sun has set and the shoulder-angels have been greeted will the stars come out on the television. The year is 1969, and the Lebanese songbird Samira Tawfik prepares to perform live from a studio at Kuwait TV. “Look to him,” the director orders, gesturing to the cameraman. “Right there into his lens.” Samira obliges, raising her veil and fanning her lashes slowly at the big, black pupil of the camera. The director scurries back into the control room to survey the effect from an ellipse of black-and-white monitors. He smiles. The illusion is working! Samira’s faces are shining down on him like a dozen silvery moons, and just like a fixed star or a portrait painting, no matter where he moves she seems to be looking at only him. In a few minutes on televisions all across the Arabian Peninsula, Samira will appear to look, with loving attention, into the eyes of each viewer.

  The orchestra sits politely across from the singer, arrayed on a bandstand painted to look like a cosmic keyboard stretching infinitely into the backdrop. Even standing on her raised plinth, Samira’s sequined gown columns clear to the floor. Her hair is both beehived and braided for the appearance, a clever combination evoking Bedouin girl and modern city lady at the same time.

  “You gazelle! Ya Samira! Somewhere out there is a boy who’ll have his heart broken tonight,” the director jokes through the talkback loudspeaker. The orchestra chortles, the cameraman nods his approval. It’s true.

  The metal microphone juts at attention under Samira’s chin, straining up to catch the sound of her breath as she holds it in wait for the distant athan to finish. “I can’t sing a love song without at least one broken heart,” she mews, shrugging with coquettish indifference.

  The call-to-prayer falls silent and the countdown-to-live begins. The TV cameras wheel through their orbit into position. Samira closes her eyes and whispers just before her cue, “Ya ain, ya layl”—“Oh Eye, Oh Night”—and the airways open to her song.

  1

  LAMBDA LEONIS • THE GLANCE •

  Eighty miles out of Al-Hasa oasis in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, a Bedouin boy named Matar was flicking the knob of a portable General Electric television on and off. He was waiting with a crowd of other kids for Maghreb prayer, when the sun would set and the imam would finally turn the generator on. Only then could their night begin and with it, the TV! Or al-tel-ay-veez-yawn, as they affectionately called it. Like the watering well, the long-drop outhouse, and everything else in the tiny settlement of Kuzahmiah, the TV was for communal use. But unlike the other shared utilities of the town, it commanded pride of place in the courtyard of their one-room mosque, much to the disappointment of the devout young imam. The imam had moved from the big city to the Bedouin settlement hoping to find a pure Islam, untainted by modernity. But the spiritual authenticity he sought from the members of the Al-Dafira tribe was a fantasy made most obvious to him by their love of the TV. Attached by wires to an antenna of steel ribbons artfully bent into the rough onion-shaped spire, the town’s boys had strung the latticework of jury-rigged wires up alongside the minaret on the mud roof of the little mosque. This vexed the imam, who often complained to the patriarchs of the tribe at Friday prayer about this. “Your television tower is taller than the minaret! Do you think this is acceptable?” But no one seemed to care about these details as long as they didn’t miss an episode of Lost in Space. “Your children are being tempted away right under your noses,” he warned. But the practical people of Al-Dafira were unbothered with the symbolic blasphemy the imam saw in a few inches of wire.

  Every night an illuminated title-card of Quran shone coldly from the screen, silencing the children, who were transfixed in wait for the moment they’d be treated to a song or a cartoon. On this particular night, it was the beaming face of Samira Tawfiq that appeared to them. Her voice was beckoning and plaintive as she began with a modest mawwāl: “AaaaA-AaaaA.” Her wordless melody peaked across the airwaves and the crowd of barefoot children in the oil-field wasteland scrambled to get closer. A little boy named Matar watched. And his heart soared, then dropped, in unison with the warbling voice as Samira sang, with a cheeky grin, of returning to an abandoned abode. “Yesterday afternoon I went by where he lives. But I found nothing. Only sadness.”

  Matar noticed the deep dimple in her cheek when she smiled and wondered why she was so happy when this was supposed to be a sad song. But his critical thinking was halted when something new happened: Samira looked directly into the camera—directly at Matar. He froze in her headlights; she winked! The string section swept upward to take the reins of the song, and the little boy went supernova with delight.

  “She saw me! She winked at me! She loves me!”

  He was jumping mid-crow when his older brother Mohamed cuffed him flat. “She was winking at me, retard,” he growled.

  Mohamed then trapped Matar easily in a sunset flip, shoulders pinned by knees until Matar fell limp. He knew his bear of a brother would lose interest if he played dead—he just hoped it happened before Samira’s song was over.

  It was around this time that the ten-year-old Matar began keeping a diarized account of his life in an old book of graph paper. He took detailed notes in blue pencil of his quotidian: what time he woke, how many times he prayed, how far they traveled—how long that took, how many times his brother Mohamed picked a fight, and columns to track who won. Matar wrote all about what he ate and how it tasted; what he watched on TV and how it rated. It was as though he were afraid of leaving anything behind—and that was strange for a Bedouin boy.

  The following is the sequence of programming on Dhahran TV as remembered by Matar. The schedule, from what he understood, was calibrated by the Saudi Aramco Oil Company. At the time he was moved into the Kuzahmiah settlement, it ran something like this:

  18:00—Looney Tunes or Popeye. Olive Oyl was translated into Arabic as Zeitoonah, and this is what Matar nicknamed his lank
y, cow-hocked older sister Moody.

  18:30—Children’s hour: Mr. Ed, Lassie, or both. A few years later came Little House on the Prairie, which was a runaway hit. The settling traumas of the Ingalls girls struck a chord with Bedu kids being relocated to villages like Kuzahmiah from scattered camps that had been caught in the drill lights of oil derricks.

  19:30—News, with auspicious tidings of the king’s good health as the lead item; once Matar remembers seeing American astronauts bouncing on the moon.

  20:00—Asha prayer, more Quran.

  20:15—Perry Mason, Rawhide, or Star Trek. Being the town Trekkie, Matar kept particularly detailed anthropological notes of the alien tribes and cultures in the show.

  21:30—An Egyptian comedy, an Indian musical, or an American western.

  But the imam usually cut the generator early, whether or not the film had ended. Even though the imam was an intelligent and educated young man, he was also deeply suspicious of the television broadcasts. Were they meant to make Al-Dafira children prize the deserts of America over their own? The crowd of kids would groan in such bitter disappointment when the cowboys lost. And he resented that the children had to watch Robert Mitchum stride into a saloon, gulp a shot of whiskey, and then growl in classical Arabic: “Hey, partner, thanks for the cold tea, I needed it.” The broadcast would fizzle into static with cool finality and the imam would break the gathering of sleepy kids, wading through the pool of boys and girls, long braids spread over bare feet, and send them home. The older kids usually took his cue out of respect and slung their younger siblings onto their hips to leave. But while they scattered into the dark doorways of their homes to dream of cowboys and border collies, Matar remained stubbornly in front of the TV fantasizing about space travel. He furiously noted all the action down in blue graphite. It was only when he caught a glimpse of the imam’s reflection smoldering from the darkened screen that Matar would rise and shuffle reluctantly along the treads of the one truck in town to his home. As he stumbled along the dark path strewn with goat turds, he often saw, through bleary eyes, a faceless figure float toward him. It would bounce in the dust, as weightless as a man on the moon. This khayal, or shadow, followed him, keeping watch from behind its mirrored visor, a mask that reflected a bowed version of Matar’s world back to him, letting him see things he couldn’t alone. But the khayal always disappeared when he reached the standard-issue government hut where his family slept. Then Matar would crawl into his bed of wool blankets and jumbled siblings and stare up through a crack in the ceiling just wide enough for him to make out a few weak stars.

  Matar was old enough to remember a time before his clan had gotten situated into settled life. Back then, their nights were longer. He had spent very little time with his father, Jabir, who was a wilderness detective for the police and had become famous for his tracking abilities. Able to tell if a missing woman was pregnant by her footprints and to intuit the moves of a criminal on the run “like a hawk to a snake in the open,” Jabir was the last of his kind. Matar had managed to pick up some practical desert skills from his father—which cracks in the sand might bare truffles, as well as more uncanny skills, like how to tell a storm was coming by the patterns in the sand. But all matters to do with the sky he learned from his mother, Safya.

  Safya had married Jabir when she was fourteen. Like everyone back then, Safya and Jabir were cousins. He had taken her from a tough family of the larger Dafira tribe who kept within the borders of the Empty Quarter, an infamous desert where the night sky was laden heaviest with the Milky Way.

  When Matar was little, they still kept far from Doha or Al-Hasa, where the city light smeared an electric haze on the atmosphere. After long days of travel, Safya bunted her hungry children and talked them to sleep, teaching her first three children, Mohamed, Moody, and Matar, the names and shapes of all the stars and constellations she knew. Curled at her sides, shielded from the wind by the saddle-matted hump of their mother’s camel, they’d repeat as she pointed:

  “Al-Firq.”

  “The Flock.”

  “Al-Anka.”

  “The Phoenix.”

  And “Al-Difdi.”

  “The Frog.”

  When they came to an antiquated or explicit name like Al-Maraqq (the Genitalia), she would say “that bit between the belly and the legs,” translating the meanings she knew for them and wondering to herself about those she didn’t. It was an effective pacifier for the long nights in the deep desert. But even when folded under their blanket of sky, Matar was often unable to sleep for the wattage of the stars.

  Then one night when Matar was sick with fever, Safya stroked his sweaty forehead and distracted him from the chills: “Choose a star and it’s yours.”

  Matar squinted up from his misery at all the twinkling possibilities. They were extra vivid from the fever, changing from silver to pale pink and back again. He felt rich and spoiled for choice at all these shimmers in the sky, appearing like the shiny pieces of metal his mother sewed onto her woolly black winter cloak. Head cradled in his mother’s lap, Matar settled on the westernmost of the two stars known as the First Leap. She smiled because he had chosen west, the direction of Mecca: “Someday you’ll go and I’ll be proud of you.”

  But Safya could never have guessed how far west her son would want to go, or what destiny was manifesting itself for him there.

  2

  XI URSAE MAJORIS • THE FIRST LEAP •

  Over the years, the pale tungsten glow of Al-Hasa continued to spread over the sky to their north, bleeding its uncolored light farther and farther into the desert. The brighter it grew, the more difficult it was to see the stars. Compared with the poverty they were used to on their travels, not having to carry your weight in water was positively luxuriant. But convenience and security had a price, paid largely by Safya and the women of the tribe, who began a long, slow retreat into the concrete domesticity of modern sedentary life. The girls of Al-Dafira, who were used to herding and foraging and riding long distances in the sun, were now napping in the shade. In the desert they wore bright calico dresses and pierced their noses and wore long braids plaited into threes, out in the open without veils. Where they used only to cover their faces they now covered their whole bodies in black, a new custom invented to protect their honor (and identities) now that they lived in closer proximity to neighbors with forked tongues.

  Military service emerged as the best option for boys like Matar and Mohamed. With reputations as tough, loyal fighters, Bedouin boys from Al-Dafira were sought after by the Saudi government as well as surrounding emirates. When he turned sixteen, Mohamed enlisted in the air force of the nearby emirate of Qatar. There he was given the benefit of citizenship and was trained to be a jet pilot, eventually racking up enough flying hours to be the first to fly an F-16 Fighting Falcon. When Matar came of age he wanted to distinguish himself from his brother and went in for the navy. However, unlike the majority of his company, who had grown up in villages along the rocky coastline fishing and pearl-diving, Matar couldn’t swim. Up until the first week of training he had never even seen the sea, let alone been in or on it. He lasted a total of five seasick days before his commander took him aside and said, “Stick to the sand, Bedu boy.”

  Matar returned home after his dismissal and, feeling humiliated by his failure at sea, resolved to prove everyone wrong by going far beyond where any of the tribe had ever been. He wasn’t sure just where that was yet, but he knew it was somewhere else. Then one day as he idled the family’s GMC truck in Al-Hasa waiting for his father to finish haggling with a herdsman over a pair of goats, the radio picked up an official announcement that Qatar was giving scholarships for young men to go to “the America.” He took down the information and began making a plan. The next week, Matar shaved, bought a clean thobe and a pair of aviator mirror-shades, borrowed the GMC, and headed to the big city of Doha.

  He spent three days waiting in the limbo of random corridors at the Ministry of Education, a leaflet for an En-gli
sh school in Seattle, “Home of the Space Needle,” folded into his chest pocket. On it was a color photograph of rolling mountains and in the foreground what looked like a giant rocket ship. It reminded him of a hazy boyhood memory of a shadow who used to visit him at night, the silver man, the Astronaut. When his interview came, Matar showed the pamphlet.

  The bureaucrat who oversaw scholarships was surprised. “Don’t you want to be in a big city? New York? Los Angeles? Dearborn? There will be more Arabs there. Friends!” the man urged.

  But Matar had heard of none of these exotic metropolises. The bureaucrat shook his head and took Matar’s papers. “As you like. You Bedu boys are strange.” He had a look at the leaflet for Seattle and flipped through it doubtfully. “None of our students have gone there yet. You’ll be on your own. Alone. Do you understand?”

  Matar nodded, though he didn’t really comprehend any of it. He was already rapt in a fantasy of riding a rocket through the snowy mountains, bellying up to a bar and ordering cold tea from a glass bottle with Robert Mitchum.

  Within a week, it was all arranged. Matar returned to Kuzahmiah with a briefcase full of his tuition in traveler’s checks and a newly minted passport declaring him a Qatari citizen.

  “Where are you going?” his mother asked as he sat visiting with her and his sisters inside the hut while they spun camel hair into large spools of frizzy yarn.

  He showed them his plane ticket, written by hand in Arabic, bound for “New York, JFK” and continuing on to “Seattle, USA.”

  “How far is it to drive there?” Safya asked him matter-of-factly.

  “Too far,” he said. Why mention the thousands of miles of sea and mountains? It would only worry her.

  Safya seemed satisfied by that answer, the wise matron who had traveled more miles on foot than most humans ever would in a lifetime, remarkably innocent of how far “far away” could really be.