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.
That night, high up in the mountains, they lay back on the hood of Gale’s gold Scirocco. A full moon was rising over the zigzag outline of pine forest that stacked the foothills. There was no light pollution up here and the stars came out, though not as brightly as they did in the desert. Matar pointed out the names of stars in Arabic to Gale, and this time she repeated after him.
“Al-Dheeb.”
“The Wolf.”
“Gumar.”
“Moon,” Gale returned. “Can you see the man’s face in the gumar?”
“No. He is the rabbit,” Matar disagreed matter-of-factly.
“Honey. I hate to break it to you, but that is a man,” retorted Gale, angling her elbow up on the windshield and turning to look at him.
“It is the rabbit,” he insisted, and the gold hood of the Scirocco dented under his weight. Many things were new and confusing to Matar, but of the big bunny in the moon he was sure.
“What if it could be both?”
Matar remained sitting upright, wound up at this contradiction to everything he knew to be true. Gale lay back, tickled by how upset he’d gotten, and winked to calm him down.
Matar’s gut jumped and he fought the urge to look behind him to make sure she was winking at him and not his brother. “Yes. It can,” he decided. “You see that star?” he asked, and pointed out the steady prick of light, westernmost in the First Leap. “This star, she is belong to me.”
Gale slid closer to him on the hood of the car and leaned in close. “I’ve got a mountain and you’ve got a star. Now all we need is a rocket ship and we’re good to go!”
4
ETA ERIDANI • THE HATCHING PLACE •
Gale had grown up on a farm in the Puyallup Valley. Her mother, Sophia Valo, still lived on the farm, cradled between two hills rowed with thick stands of black-green Douglas fir. They were flanked on all sides by a ripple of kept raspberry tines and wild blackberry brambles; the thorny lattice of roots and briars were all that held the dirt from washing away in the drench of Northwest rain. After a several-month-long road trip together, Gale finally invited Matar to visit the farm she had grown up on. Playing pool in roadside taverns and learning how to navigate the big freeways of the Northwest turned out to be far more educational than any language class could have been for Matar.
The fact that Gale’s mother and his own mother, Safya, had such similar names was an odd bit of serendipity, and because of it he wanted to pay Sophia appropriate tribute. He decided a lamb would be most appropriate for the occasion, and bought one from a farmer in the nearby hills. Strapped into the passenger side of the Scirocco, the lamb blinked and sniffed around the leather seat. Matar patted her head while she strained against the safety belt and bopped her muzzle on the glass landscape whizzing by. He was looking forward to eating kepsa as much as he was to impressing Gale and Sophia with his mother’s recipe. Before presenting the lamb to Sophia, Gale tied a shiny yellow ribbon around her neck. He thought it was strange, but he’d seen dogs with sweaters and cats with jewelry since coming to America, so he accepted that a lamb with a ribbon must be some bizarre local custom.
“What a sweetheart,” Sophia exclaimed, lifting the sniffly little thing up into her arms. “You did good,” Gale whispered to Matar while Sophia rocked the little lamb in her arms and took Matar on a tour of the house. She showed him the toolshed full of bow saws and sickles, the cellar full of raspberry preserves and pickles, and the out-of-tune pump organ she had saved from the neighbor’s chicken coop.
For Matar, Sophia and Gale’s home was a cave of wonders. It was full of interesting things to look at, and even though it was spare by American standards, Matar was overwhelmed with the amount of stuff Gale had grown up surrounded by. There were shelves full of books, and a clock in every room. There were two freezers: one for preserving excess berries and one for normal use. The hearth over the fireplace was covered with Space Needle souvenirs, a fully rigged ship in a bottle, and a pretty stone globe marked 1915 at its base. Among all these mementos, pride of place was given to a portrait of Gale’s father and Sophia’s husband, Charles, or Kaarle, as he was known when he arrived in America. At fourteen he’d left Finland as a cabin boy. Four years later, after four trips across the equator, Kaarle went ash
ore at San Francisco to attend the World’s Fair and never went back to sea again. In the photo over the hearth he was eighteen years old and about eighteen years late to the gold rush, posing with pan and shovel before a sign bearing the tourism slogan “Klondike or Bust!” Sophia didn’t put the lamb down until she went to bed, when she reluctantly tied her to the porch rail.
The next morning Matar woke early to prepare his gift. He unknotted the rope from the cast-iron railing where Sophia had tethered the lamb. Her knobby knees wobbled in the mud as he strode easily across the tractor ruts of the field in the direction of the river. Sophia was boiling a pot of coffee at the kitchen window when she caught sight of a streak of yellow disappearing at the border of the field. She went to wake Gale, worried someone was stealing her lamb. When he reached the sandbank, Matar removed the ribbon from around her curly neck, closed his eyes, and, pointing his thumb, guessed at a line to Mecca. Then, in a few expert swoops, he laid the lamb down on her left side, hand over her eyes, knees holding down her legs. He held the back of her neck in a strong grip for a few moments, then said, “BismAllah. AllahhuAkbar,” and slit the lamb’s throat along the bottom of her skull. He waited a minute or two, letting the blood pool in the sand and dribble down into a sinkhole by the river. When the blood slowed down, he hacked the rest of the way through the muscle and spine at the neck and the little body went into convulsions, nerves ending across the body.
When he came back up the hill and across the field, Gale and Sophia were both standing on the porch. They reminded him of his mother perched on a desert cliff waiting for him to return with the goats. She’d always seemed to him like a great black bird when she kept this vigil, watching the horizon for her herd to appear. As he approached, Matar saw the horror on their faces. Sophia took one look at the limp lamb over his shoulder and went inside, slamming the porch door behind her.
“I know you meant well,” Gale said as Matar wiped his bloodied hands in the grass. “Heck, Mom used to break chicken’s necks by swinging them over her head. Who knew she had such a soft spot for lambs?” An exclamation of blood squirted out of the lamb’s open neck as if to punctuate her sentence.
Gale disappeared into the house to comfort her mother. Matar set about the skinning; he wasn’t going to leave the job half done. He tied the body upside down by one leg from the porch rail and lifted the membrane to make small, loosening cuts. The skin came away from the muscle easily and he wound the hanging piece of skin and wool around his hand as he pulled it away. For the first time since meeting Gale, he felt lost.
After starting out on the wrong foot with Sophia, Matar was determined to make it up. When he proved incapable of certain gardening tasks—how did she expect someone from the desert to know the difference between weeds and vegetables?—he started driving her around town on errands. He and Sophia made an odd pairing as they appeared together around Puyallup in Sophia’s Ford Galaxie. The car hadn’t been taken out in almost a decade, and in recent years Sophia had become increasingly reclusive, so her sudden arrival with a foreigner piqued the interest of people in town. Sophia was prim, hair teased up in a soft white permanent, and Matar was young, dark, and floppy-haired. At the store Matar took the stern of the metal basket while Sophia led him around the wide aisles by its prow. Purse over arm and scribbled list in hand, she navigated the supermarket efficiently, handing cans and jars back to Matar so he could practice reading. After his Tide mistake, he was very keen to learn to identify food by its packaging. Since he’d grown up foraging for breakfast, the cereal section gave Matar vertigo. Strolling through Piggly Wiggly was the starkest reminder of how far he was from home; the bounty of the supermarket overwhelmed Matar.
As they pushed past the meat refrigerator, yellow light on bloody Styrofoam, Sophia prodded at him with a hint of vindictiveness, “So. What do they have for dinner where you’re from? Besides innocent baby lambs, that is.”
He thought better of telling her about camel, lizard, or locust. “Rice.”
Sophia poked at a ham through its plastic and chucked it into the cart. “So, no pig, then?”
“No,” Matar confirmed, eyeing the meat in the basket. “The pig, he is not clean.”
They passed an open door where a butcher was carving up and weighing pieces of a hog. The countertop was thatched with cleaver marks and gritty with gristle and guts. Sophia had walked by this scene thousands of times, but she could see Matar was disturbed at both the meat and the method. She placed the honey ham she’d selected back into the open fridge. “I have a hankering for some fried rice tonight,” she declared.
Matar and Sophia continued to forge a bond over the following months. Twice a week he visited Sophia, and they watched Mork and Mindy together. The running joke between them was that if he could comprehend Robin Williams’s fast talk he could understand anyone in English. Most of the jokes went over his head, but he learned the rhythm of the humor and how to laugh on cue.
One afternoon Matar noticed that Gale’s car was gone from the carport, nothing but an oil spot marking the place it should have been.
“Where is Gale?” he asked just as Mork put in a call to Orson for his weekly report. Sophia turned the TV down.
“She’s gone for a checkup at the doctor. She’ll be back soon.” She patted her fluffy hair, which reminded him of unspun wool, and sighed loudly. “You got brothers and sisters, Matar?” she asked. This was the first time she had asked him directly about his family.
“Yes. Eleven.”
“Well, I’ll be.” Sophia slumped back in her chair, amazed. “Your poor mother!”
Matar caught a piece of drift from his memory. It must have been before his family had stopped moving, before they lost their way and stopped being nomads. He was small, three or four years old, and he could not sleep for his mother’s screaming. She heaved down over the great lump of her pregnancy, and all that separated her from her frightened children was a thin flap of tent wool. Matar’s father, Jabir, came in and out of the tent with clean sand gathered in the skirt of his thobe and dumped it between his wife’s legs. Blankets and fabric were hard to come by, so sand was the most practical way for him to sop up the blood. Jabir mounded it into a sort of sand-cradle for the baby to fall into. A rope swung from the tent pole, and Matar saw her crane up, wrists wrapped to whiteness in the coils as the new baby passed downwards, head crowning in the sky over the miniature dunes heaped between Safya’s thighs. Though this early memory was vivid and clear, Matar had no words to speak of it . . . in any language.
“You all right there, Matar?” Sophia put her hand on his shoulder.
The conversation was now trumping the alien in rainbow suspenders. Mindy sent Mearth, their half-human, half-extra-terrestrial offspring, upstairs to bed and Sophia switched the TV to PBS, where Carl Sagan was handing photographs from the Voyager 1 spacecraft out to a classroom of kids.
“Do you ever think about having children yourself?”
Matar sensed a certain seriousness in her question, but the answer was simple. “Of course,” he said. Having children was an obvious inevitability to him, as was marriage, Hajj, death, and resurrection on Yawm Al-Qiyamah.
Sophia seemed pleased with this affirmative answer and reached out to pat his hand. “You and Gale come from different worlds, but just so you know, you’re okay with me.”
Matar wasn’t sure what these sudden proclamations of fondness were about, but he was on the cusp of guessing. Even though this was small talk on a night just like their other evenings spent watching the spaceman who hatched from an egg, there was something in the weight of Sophia’s hand that was giving him a very clear hint. But before Matar could piece it all together, they heard the Scirocco lurch into the carport, alerting them in unison like a nervous pair of prairie dogs. Gale burst in the back door and put her hands on her hips.
“Well, guess what?” It was a rhetorical question. Matar and Sophia both knew what she was going to say before she said it. “I’m pregnant.”
5
BETA PERSEI • THE GHOUL •
The fact that I am a bastard child was kept from me and probably would have remained a secret if I hadn’t found photographic proof. The incriminating picture was taken on my parents’ wedding day. We are clustered together on top of the Space Needle. Gale, my mother, wears her silver silk wedding dress with a baby’s-breath wreath; Matar, my father, wears a blue suit and has a beard. My newlywed parents cradle me between them as if I were a chubby flightless bird, diapered and plumed with an impressive display of lace. My tiny brown face is frozen in an ugly twist of discomfort that probably had as much to do with trapped wind as it did with the cold gusts on the observation deck. Matar’s and Gale’s eyebrows are raised in wild grins. This desperate amazement makes them look like they just won me in a game show. In the bottom right corner is an orange date stamp; it took me a minute to notice it was a year later than I’d been led to believe. This evidence of my illegitimacy was shuffled into the bottom of an unmarked box with old passport photos, landscape doubles, water-damaged paperbacks, and old movie ticket stubs. Someone had obviously tried to make it disappear.
Apparently I was a fussy baby, and around the time of their marriage, my parents discovered that the enveloping darkness of the movie theater was a very effective way of putting me to sleep. How they managed to figure out the soporific effects of surround-sound Vangelis is a mystery. Whatever the story, we attended many of the hits of the day as a family, including Tron, Blade Runner, and E.T., as well as reruns like Jaws, Westworld, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind that played for half-price on Monday nights, according to the stubs in the box I found. Ma had seen Close Encounters when it first came out in 1977 and had loved it. But having a child in her arms the second time around heightened the abduction scene for her.
The Girl Who Fell to Earth Page 3
