The Girl Who Fell to Earth (3 page)

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-glish 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.

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.