The Girl Who Fell to Earth

by Sophia Al-Maria

  I knew she wouldn’t be satisfied by this answer, either. “My American family calls me Sophia, and my Bedu family calls me Safya.” I was beginning to realize that somewhere along the line (I’m not sure where) the name thing had morphed into a serious psycholinguistic problem.

  Kawthar’s chin jutted under her veil. “Girl, no wonder you’re so confused. Your stars were cast too far apart,” she said mysteriously, and flipped the spiral of batter that had now burned into bread.

  “Can you do that again?” I asked her to repeat the performance of bread-making for the camera, and this time I made sure to shut up.

  The next morning we set out for higher ground, farther up in the mountains. Kawthar wanted to check on some date palms her husband had laid claim to the year before. A few of us took a detour up into a thin crack in the rock while the drove of goats stayed down below. We climbed up and up the sandy gravel into a little valley surrounded on all sides by steep rock walls. The vegetation was so thick we had to wrestle through the boughs and tall grass. I wondered how many other pockets like this there were in the barren cliffs we had wandered through. It would be invisible from anywhere but above.

  “How do you find places like this?” I asked, in awe of the secret oasis that had appeared from the middle of what looked like barren rock.

  “By fate,” Kawthar replied with conviction. She had already hacked her way through the tall grass to the far end of the little valley. “Someone’s been here!” she yelled back to the rest of us.

  We broke a path down to the water and looked across to where Kawthar stood at the stump of a fallen palm. It and several of the largest trees had been burned down and had collapsed into the pool. Their ash filled the water that had collected there, the charred-black trunks flaking away.

  That night around the fire the ladies got to talking. Someone had picked up a radio show from Saudi briefly on her portable radio. It was a call-in show during which you could anonymously ask a venerable Muslim scholar about your deepest concerns. As soon as we’d quieted down, a woman’s voice came on and asked the cleric a very deep question indeed. “What should I do if my husband wants anal sex?”

  A roar of laughter went up around the group of women; some of the goats spooked at the cackles as they echoed around the canyon. Marwa, Kawthar’s fourteen-year-old daughter—the one whose red G-string we had discovered a few days before—was confused about the terminology.

  “What are they talking about? What’s that mean?” she whined to her mother and aunts, but none of them bothered explaining to her, as they were too wrapped up in opening their own conversation about their men.

  The banter was becoming very raunchy when, without solicitation, they turned to me. I froze in the headlights as they hassled me to fess up about the men in my life. Before I had the presence of mind to turn the camera off, I was giving them the dish about the double whammy of Si and Suhail. I hadn’t spoken to anyone about it yet and so I told them everything, about the sneaking around in Doha, about the waiting around in Cairo, about the blood from the butcher’s, and even about jumping into the river. I swallowed the choke that rose in my throat with the thought of either boy. By the time my cathartic confession was over, I’d worked myself up into fat tears that felt greasy mixed with the layer of sand on my cheeks. I fully expected a stern silence and perhaps a long walk back alone, but Kawthar and the women surprised me. If they were appalled or scandalized, this last bastion of true, traditional Bedu life didn’t show it. Instead, they laughed at me. Some were so hysterical they had to walk away to catch their breath.

  “Who do you think you are, Qais and Laila?” Kawthar scoffed, referencing the tragic characters of Arabic poetry’s own Romeo and Juliet. “Jumping off the boat? What is this, a film Hindi?”

  I tried hard to screw up a smile that would hide the sheepish, stunned look frozen on my face.

  “Anyway, the real question is what’s the white guy’s thing look like?”

  That evening I was comforted by hearing the various stories of their wedding nights. Marwa and I listened, silent and dopy as kids eavesdropping on grown-up talk at the dinner table. The women all took turns describing their nuptials, whether they’d gone to bed willingly or not.

  “I was so scared that night, these two rolled me up in a blanket and threw me into my new husband’s tent,” Kawthar spat while her sisters-in-law rolled around laughing.

  “It was like feeding a chunk of meat to a lion!” one of them snapped back at Kawthar between wheezy little hoots.

  Kawthar delivered her comeback deadpan: “Why didn’t you take me to a real lion, huh? Should have taken me to a different tent.” There was a twinkle in her eye as she stroked her daughter’s hair. “Anyway, that night is always just the beginning,” Kawthar added, and winked at me from across the fire.

  With that wink, I felt absolved. My fears of having fucked up irreversibly then began to erode with each wave of confession.

  We spent another week in the mountains grazing the goats. The last night, Kawthar agreed to recite some of her father, Anez Abu Salim’s, poetry from his time in prison. She began,

  “The world endures, the sky moves by plan,

  Fate’s rope ensnares us wherever it can.”

  My heart sank. I’d used my tapes up. Kawthar saw I was upset about something and stopped. “Let it go,” she consoled me as I rifled through the camera bag for a tape I could record over. “Ya what’s-your-name, some things are not meant to be kept. Forget it.”

  Still crestfallen at my failure to record anything useful, I left the next afternoon. Kawthar’s husband gave me a ride to where the night bus to Cairo would pick me up. He was blasting Mohammed Abdu out the rolled-down windows of his truck, the same make as Faraj’s in Doha but with wood slats fencing the back to hold in all the goats. He dropped me off at the unmarked bus stop and grinned out the open door at me.

  “I figured it out.”

  “What?”

  “Where you’re from.”

  I sat down on a big rock and squinted back into the truck at him. “Go ahead.” I nodded.

  “We’ve agreed you’re not Turkish or Israeli or Spanish. You’re not an Arab. You’re not an American. The way I see it, you must be an alien!” he declared with a cheeky grin.

  Why disappoint him? “Yes. That’s it.”

  He seemed bizarrely satisfied with himself, and I wondered if the joke I’d assumed he’d just made was intentional.

  “Safe journey.” He raised his hand in the air for a few seconds as he passed and honked twice, two universal signals of acknowledgment, whether between islanders passing on rafts or great cargo ships passing in the night. I was still sitting on the boulder when he disappeared back up the seaside highway in the direction from which we’d come.

  With almost an hour before the bus was due, I stuck a tape into the camera to have a look. For most people, hearing your own voice on tape is like fingernails on a blackboard. But hearing my voice over this tape was bad. Every single tape of Kawthar and the others was ruined with my babbling voice-over. I hadn’t realized how much talking about myself I had done to the poor woman who was supposed to be the subject of these tapes. My narcissism was repulsive to me in hindsight, and Kawthar had systematically turned my questions to her into a question about me. Somehow, I had ended up being the anthropological subject. She reminded me of David Bowie being playful, flipping an interview around on reporters with monosyllabic answers. “No.” “Yes.” “Sometimes.” “Oh. Average.” She grilled me about things I never thought about, deflecting every one of my timid inquiries about her stories and songs.

  “So you went to Qatar. What were you looking for?”

  A crippling cringe gripped me as my voice answered, “I guess I wanted to find myself.”

  It was just too embarrassing. Worst of all, there was my entire confession about Si and Suhail and all the private talk that came afterward. I couldn’t give these tapes to Dr. Stark. Kawthar was right. Some things really weren’t me
ant to be kept. I stacked them out in the road for the next truck to run over and planned what I was going to use as my excuse.

  Somewhere about dusk it started to dawn on me that the bus to Cairo was probably not coming. In a panic, I tried hailing the next lights I saw. It took a few tries before a big tourist bus with rearview mirrors jutting out like antennae stopped.

  “Where are you going?” the driver asked.

  “Cairo.”

  “We’re stopping for the night at Jabal Musa, then on to Cairo.”

  I wavered for a few seconds, considering trekking back to Kawthar.

  “Well? You want on?” the driver asked impatiently. “It’s this or sleeping out here. We’re the last bus to Cairo tonight.”

  Convinced, I stepped up into the bus, paid him, and then collapsed into a window seat, taking my place alongside all the drowsy, sunburned tourists. The bus waved in long, smooth turns up into the mountains. The rocking motion put me to sleep, and I fell fast into dreams after weeks of fitful sleep on the rocky ground.

  We reached our destination around midnight; a sign marked it out in Arabic, English, Hebrew, and at least ten other languages. Mount Sinai was a formidable-looking peak in the moonlight as it rose up from Saint Catherine’s Monastery, a cluster of ancient stone buildings set off bizarrely by the surrounding acreage of pristine, freshly paved parking lot. A crowd of guides swarmed the exit, so I waited for the other passengers to get off before I made my way out into the aisle.

  “Where is the bathroom?” I asked the bus driver; he pointed toward Saint Catherine’s.

  The monastery was already full of people when I crossed the vast parking lot full of buses. I followed signs down one of the corridors to where a group of Midwesterners had gathered around a freakishly large, unhealthy-looking desert shrub growing from a crack in one of the walls. A plaque beside it read “I am that I am” in ostentatious Copperplate Bold.

  “They expect us to believe that is the burning bush?” one of the tourists asked in my general direction.

  “That’s what it says.” I shrugged and squeezed past her to get to the toilets.

  The lady snorted disapprovingly and turned to pluck a few leaves off as souvenirs.

  On my way back across the parking lot, I looked up at the shadowy mountain behind me. A luminous spiral made up of hundreds of lanterns, flashlights, and mobile phones lit an LCD/LED route all the way up the mountain. The spectacle was like a shiny lure to a fish; I decided to follow. Despite the moon being almost full, the trek up the mountain was dark. The path began wide and gentle enough for several people to ride on camelback, but halfway up it dwindled into a thin and gravelly path instead of the majestic ascent most were prepared for. At this point the way turned into a manic zigzag to the top of the mountain’s treeless lip. I passed many types of mountaineer as we pecked our way up through the darkness toward sunrise. There were German students, Filipino nuns, and all manner of people making this pilgrimage. All for their own health, historical, or spiritual reasons.

  I was one of the first to summit, after a Japanese man with a typical khaki vest full of camera lenses. We had the little plateau at the top to ourselves for a few minutes, and I watched him while he framed up a time-lapse photo of the night sky. Not wanting to interfere with the shot, I found a place hidden a few meters away looking down into a deep valley. First I sat facing east to see the sunrise, then west to catch the stars for a while longer. Even in the desert in my childhood, or the night the tribesman had watched over us, I’d never seen the stars quite so close or the Milky Way so heavily laden.

  First, all I noticed was a blinking light, a wink, a streak. Shooting star was my first guess. But it didn’t disappear like a piece of space junk fleeting through the sky; it stayed steady on its track. I relaxed my eyes and then I saw it flicker at me brightly. The photographer cursed under his breath about the satellite. A glowing scratch torn through the middle of his carefully framed heaven had ruined his photograph.“Racka fracka flipar rip.” It sounded like Yosemite Sam’s nonsense cussing.

  From here it was just a sweet pink flash against the bluing sky, but if it was a satellite it was probably broadcasting Star Trek episodes and terrorist threats and the rerun voices of old stars like Samira Tawfiq live to millions of color TV sets in the region. I watched it as it passed subtly from one end of the constellation to the other. The Japanese man was now huffing in annoyance as he tried to fend off an Indian family who had brought up our rear and was now strolling cluelessly in front of his tripod. The silence we had been enveloped in for those first few minutes was now broken by a large group of Nigerians bursting into tongues at the door of the little church, and by the Americans from the burning bush loudly exclaiming, “Well, would you look at that!” at the view.

  I caught a glance of the moving light again at the corner of my eye and turned back to it. Somehow each individual prick of yellow, orange, and white seemed to be moving on its own, and therefore I concluded aliens. Even if it was a man-made object, puny and pathetic beside the great fixed stars, the colors of the lights on it were very impressive. It reminded me of looking into the sky and seeing the stealth bomber for the first time. Then I recognized that this thing was much closer than a satellite and much more complicated than any military craft I’d ever seen from the air base in Puyallup. Its movements were not on any set course and the lights were strange, illusive; it was almost as if I couldn’t look at them head-on but had to look in my periphery. I sat there hugging my knees to my chest, not wanting anyone else to see what I saw as I cast my eyes out at these strange lights now swinging over the valley.

  That old, nameless urge rose into an ache in my chest. It was an almost hysterical desire to be beamed up with the passing lights, to disappear like some crazed Heaven’s Gate fanatic. I grasped for a view of myself, trying hard to get the scheme of things. What I needed most now was to reach escape velocity from myself. I’d already left the orbits of Ma and Baba before I felt the effects of their gravity, of their influence. In fact, neither of their worldviews made sense to me at all; they were just a couple of grand delusions in a universe of chaos and pure chance. Neither Ma’s pragmatic ideals of manifest destiny nor Baba’s deep belief in the precision of Allah’s intention offered any comfort as I sat there quivering on the mount in the middle of my identity crisis. I had been shaped by these opposing polar forces, but I wasn’t governed by them anymore, and it took climbing a holy mountain I’d never planned to summit before I could understand that.

  My longing to ride up with the lights dissipated as the orbs seemed to dislocate from the craft and fly off, radiating different colors in all directions. A few others saw them but seemed less impressed; intakes of awed breath rippled briefly across the crowd before they turned back to the main event: sunrise. As it rose, the sun dissolved the shadows from the cliffs and trenches all around us. When the others began their descent, I stayed behind a little while. I felt dizzy, hoping deliriously for another display of lights.

  That was when I grabbed at the earth to catch myself, like waking from a falling dream. I didn’t care anymore where I came from or where I was going; all I wanted was to be on my way. After all, the universe, this planet, my two homelands, and even I would come undone. From politics to particles, everything that made me in every most profound sense was on a constant, polarizing drift, stretching farther and farther apart.

  What were the odds? I asked myself, and remembered the long night spent in the desert when we were so small. I stayed on a few more minutes, watching in case the unidentified flying object might signal me again from the setting night sky. But when no more came, I got the message. The possibilities of this life were simply too rare and precious to spend another moment or a million light-years floating around weightless and wayward in the wait. I pulled myself up and, taking giant leaps, made my way down the small steps off the mountain.

  GLOSSARY

  Abaya—A long cloak-like dress worn by women in the Arabian Gulf. Sartorial cou
sins to the floor-skimming garments of Batman, Darth Vader, and Neo.

  Accesswarat—English-Arabic pidgin for barrettes, hair ribbons, and other accessories.

  Ajera—A large club with a knob on the end for clobbering (see Fred Flintstone).

  Asha—Dinner (also refers to evening prayer).

  Athan—The call to prayer.

  Berga—Bedouin face veil with a vertical thread hung between the eyes; not to be confused with the burkas of Afghanistan.

  Bowab—Doorman to residential buildings in Egypt; equivalent to a super in a New York City apartment.

  Burra!—Get out! Scram!

  Djinn—A genie closer in look and character to a gremlin than to Robin Williams.

  Dukkan—Bodega, corner shop, minimart, superette.

  Fajer—Dawn (also refers to morning prayer).

  Fatiha—The opening verse of the Quran.

  Film Hindi—When a minor drama spirals into a major show of emotional pyrotechnics.

  Garumba—An affectionate name for a dilapidated car. English synonyms: beater, jalopy, rattletrap.

  Gutra—Male headdress.

  Halal—Permissible foodstuff or activity.

  Halawa—Body wax often prepared in the home. Ingredients vary from country to country; however, almost all recipes consist of sugar, lemon juice, and a liberal dose of de Sade.

  Hawli—Get down/out/off!

  Hijab—Your common garden-variety veil.

  Imam—leader of prayer in a mosque.

  Jalabiya—Loose-fitting indoor dress of women in the Gulf, not to be confused with the Egyptian galabiya; similar in function to a muumuu.

  Kaaba—The black cuboid building Muslims pray toward.

  Kepsa—Fine Bedouin cuisine.

  Khalas—Enough!

  Khaleeji—Adjective to describe something of or from the Arabian Gulf.

  Khayal—Shadows/imaginings.

  Kuss umak ahmar—Mighty swear meaning “Your mother’s cunt is red.”