Matar’s first pair of trousers belonged to a dead man. They were not quite what he’d imagined for himself, but Western clothes were hard to come by in the Al-Hasa market. He bought a used polyester suit from a widow whose husband had been fond of going to Cairo’s cabarets and mingling with bell-bottomed shaabi singers like Ahmed Adawiya. The outfit for his journey west was dusty pink and three pieces: pants, waistcoat, and jacket. Matar pulled off the road on his way back to Kuzahmiah to try them on in private. He headed down the road past the derricks and parked behind a jagged boulder big enough to hide the truck. He didn’t want anyone to see him; it was indecent the way his legs would show.
Parked behind the monument, Matar pulled the salmon pink slacks on and wrestled himself into the top. He had been bare-bottomed as a baby and shoeless until he was twelve; now he was eighteen and wearing pants for the first time ever. They were tight, very tight, at the crotch, and he was used to the easy breeze of loose cotton sirwal under his thobe. He imagined this might be what his sisters felt wearing abayas for the first time: embarrassed, clumsy, and uncomfortable while figuring out how and where to fold, button, and tuck. Matar angled the side mirror on the GMC up and down to catch small glimpses of the overall effect. Silhouetted against the sunset, he looked pretty good. His hair was long and straight to his shoulders; he had a sleek, black mustache; and his skin was dark and smooth. But even in the dead man’s duds he looked nothing like the Americans he’d seen on television.
Matar was illiterate in English, but that was an easy dune to scramble up compared with the mountain of cultural difference he would have to climb. He packed a few pairs of sirwal in his briefcase, along with a palm-sized green leather Quran that zipped up on the sides. He didn’t make any official good-byes to anyone but his sisters and mother. Bedouin bid farewell casually if at all, a habit from traveling paths so tightly woven that a hello was never far from a good-bye. He kissed the foreheads of all his sisters and then his mother, Safya, who patted at the lapels of his strange clothing and commented disapprovingly on the pink, spongy material: “This looks like a goat tongue.” He could see she was worried from the sliver of furrowed brow that showed between her berga and her braids.
“I’ll be fine,” he said as much for his own benefit as hers. “They’ve sent many others before me,” he lied.
Still, even if she could not understand how far into the unknown her son was about to go, she had known from the time he was a child that this moment would come.
They all gathered and waved him off as he climbed into the truck, duded up like a dandy and feeling foolish alongside his father, who sat silent in the driver seat. Matar and his father made their way off-road to the highway leading over the border and to Doha. They pulled up amid the bustle of the airport. Matar stepped out and walked around the truck to his father’s open window, where he sat, engine idling alongside the sunken curb, long gray beard ruffling in the exhaust as he squinted through the heat at his son.
“Estowda’a Allah al lethi la yethia’a wada’ai,” he said, which in English translates roughly to “I entrust my treasure to Allah, the only one who never loses precious things.”
And with that, he swung the pickup around and drove off, leaving his son to fly into the sunset, secure in the belief that whatever fate befell him would be Allah’s will.
Matar traveled with the edge of night to a point so far and so different from his home it might as well have been another planet. He thought vague, celestial thoughts as he rested his head against the window in the plane. He craned his eyes to the sky and picked out his star, remembering the nights wedged against his mother’s breast in the Empty Quarter. The flight was long and uncomfortable, and the dead man’s suit pinched him everywhere, exacerbating the situation. He sweated right through it with anxiousness, fretting in his delirium after the tenth hour of darkness that the sun might not rise again. At JFK airport he wandered from gate to gate following arrows, unable to decipher anything but logos and numbers.
Finally he matched the Pan Am logo with his ticket and went to the counter, where the stewardess squinted at his Arabic itinerary and turned to her supervisor. “This one thinks we read Chinese. Oh brother.”
“Where. Are. You. Go-ing?” the supervisor asked. Matar grinned at her. He didn’t know what to do but be friendly. She waved her hand in front of his face, pointed at the ticket, and asked an exasperated “where?” by putting her palms up to the sky. Matar did his best at reading the transliterated name for her, “See-Tull.” The supervisor and the stewardess both listened carefully until something clicked. “Seattle!” Matar almost clapped at the breakthrough.
“Send him on the next flight out to SeaTac. They’ll know what to do with him there—just get him out of our hair,” said the supervisor. And within an hour he was on his way again.
Matar had never been truly lost in his life until he exited the airport in Washington State and found himself in a torrential rainstorm. In the desert he could orient himself by the stars, the sand, and an internal compass so well aligned to magnetic fields he’d never had to use the handheld kind. A cab pulled up, and Matar ducked to the window.
“Hotel? Sleep?” The cabby knew a fresh-off-the-boat when he saw one. He cupped his hands together and closed his eyes in a blissful expression indicating rest. Matar got in.
Once deposited in a budget room in the Ballard Motel, Matar slept for a day. It was dark outside again when he awoke around 1 a.m. Here there were no stars, only dull light reflecting off a low canopy of gray clouds. The landscape could not have been more alien to him. Tacoma’s mayor at the time described what had once been known as the City of Destiny as looking “bombed out like downtown Beirut.” The smelly old paper mills, the crumbling brickwork of Union Station, the lurkers, the lounge cats—it was a seedy place that had been in decline since the eureka in the Klondike.
Matar was hungry, but he was also afraid to leave. He sat at the window and looked out onto the still road running outside the hotel. A wino weaved in and out of rowed streetlamps. A distant freight train whistled in the misty dark. He turned on the TV and was dimly comforted by Star Trek reruns. Dawn finally came, but the sun didn’t rise with it. Instead the clouds lit up, changing their color from night to periwinkle blue. Matar was unable to ascertain the direction of the Kaaba with clouds obscuring the direction of the sun. He finally guessed a position and laid out a hotel towel in place of a prayer-rug on the ground, hoping he’d be forgiven if he missed his target.
The next afternoon, when Matar woke, he found the phone number for the school in Seattle. Dialing out from the hotel was frustrating. From Tacoma, Seattle was long distance and so required a certain native knowledge of the U.S. telephone service. Aimless and starving, Matar went into the street, determined to figure it out. He stopped at a gas station and bought a bottle of Pepsi and what he thought he recognized as a box of cornflakes, the lettering of which was a close match to cornflakes back home. Pushing his purchases over the counter at the attendant, he hang-tenned his hand into the international symbol for phone. The teenager behind the till pointed out at a booth across the road and doled him out a stack of quarters just as rippling gray sheets of clouds rolled off the Puget Sound and opened a precision shower overhead. Matar bounded out across the road, soaking his polyester, and skidded into the booth. He pulled the folded paper from his wallet and read off the comforting Arabic numerals, matching them to the American number buttons.
The phone rang three times; a woman picked up. “Seattle Language Center?”
“Hallo!” Matar, overexcited, yelled into the receiver, “I. Am. Matar.”
A pause.
“Hallo!”
“Yes, this is the Seattle Language Center.”
“I. Am. Study. Inside. In. You . . .” He paused, searching for the right word, while the woman on the other end, used to foreign students, just let that one go.
“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 he
rself 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 Girl Who Fell to Earth Page 2
