The Girl Who Fell to Earth (5 page)

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 ashore 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.

“This is spookier than I remember it,” she said, shifting uneasily in her seat at the movie theater. “Can we go?” But Matar wasn't listening, and just patted her hand. “I left with you when you wanted to leave
Jaws
,” she hissed at him vindictively. Someone in the darkness shushed her. “I'll be in the car.” She picked me up and followed the pinprick lights up the aisle and back out into the daylight, leaving Matar, his mouth hanging open as Melinda Dillon went screaming into a field, colored lights disappearing into the rolling sky.

The second daylight hit my face I woke up and started to bawl. The only other way to get me to sleep was to strap me into my car seat, put a hat on me, and drive. Whenever Ma pressed the brake I'd start up the wailing again, so she kept the Scirocco in motion, circling the crowded parking lot and waiting for the movie to be over. She turned on the radio to distract herself. A talk show came on the air about the subject of kidnapping. One of the guests was a woman from Texas who was invited to tell the frightening account of her son's brutal kidnapping by his father.

A drawling voice on the radio said, “Well, me and Ali were running together a few months and then one day, outta nowhere, he just disappeared until a few years later, when I ran into him with some of his old friends. By then my little boy Frankie had black hair and looked just like his daddy. It was obvious.”

The woman started to sob, and Gale rolled down the window for a cigarette.

“He says he's here to take my little Frank to his
real
family. That he's going to be a prince over in Arabia somewhere.” Ma's cigarette burned down to the stub and blew off without her noticing. “They said that because I wasn't married to Frankie's daddy I had no right over his custody. I dunno, maybe if I'd married him I'd be a queen somewh—”

Gale killed the radio. In a few years, Betty Mahmoudy's
Not Without My Daughter
would cause a buzz and the “Invasion of the Muslim Baby Snatchers” would climax briefly as a hot topic on daytime talk shows. Gale's instinct had never been to marry Matar. Until this story, she had assumed her hand was the upper one in the relationship. She had wanted children. That was all. Only now did she reflect on how little she knew about Matar's family, or how little he'd been able to articulate in English about the world he came from. And that had been just fine—until now. Perhaps things would be more complicated than she'd planned for us.

For all she knew, Matar could be part of some larger genetic conspiracy to spawn with blond American women and then rob them of their offspring. Thoughts like this began circling Gale's mind like paranoid vultures. She drove in a circuit outside the cinema, waiting for the aliens and the Americans to have their cosmic jam session. She had smoked a whole pack of Marlboros by the time Matar emerged from the theater, squinting. White American families poured out around him, talking animatedly in a shared language about the possibility of making contact with the other worlds. To Gale, Matar couldn't have been stranger.

“Doo. Doo. Doo. Dee. Doo.” Matar whistled the interplanetary jingle as he slid into the passenger seat. He leaned over, smiling, to kiss Gale.

“Don't do that!” she snapped. “Have you told your family about us?”

This question blindsided Matar. “Why you make problems? They don't know where I am, even.”

“Good,” she said and began to drive through the herd of townsfolk exiting the theater.

Matar quietly buckled his seat belt and checked that I was strapped in as the car lurched and braked with Ma's agitation. “Why you are asking these question?”

She gassed it around the back of the cinema along the river. “What would your family say if they knew about us?”

“They would want to see our daughter.”

“Would they want to see
me
?”

Matar paused, measuring how to say the wise thing. “Yes, if you became a Muslim and we got married. Why not?”

“And if I was not a Muslim?”

“Why you are thinking like this way?” She parked the car again, having just driven a large circle around the cinema and come back to where she had started.

Then, like gentling an upset animal, Matar leaned across and held the back of her neck like he did when calming a lamb. “Will you marry me?”

 

Matar had wanted an Islamic wedding presided over by an imam, but that was a tall order in Puyallup. When there was no one to marry a Bedouin couple in the desert, they just circled a tree, commanding it three times with the words, “You! Tree! Marry us!” and then got down to business. So Matar agreed to a trade-off with Gale: in exchange for a simple nondenominational ceremony, Gale would quietly convert to Islam and raise their children as Muslims. In the end, the marriage consisted of a civil ceremony performed by a notary public in the kitchen of the farmhouse, and, later that evening when the newlyweds were alone, a private circumnavigation of a lilac bush in the backyard.

Having a child out of wedlock or even marrying outside the tribe might easily be forgiven, but marrying outside the religion was bound to pose an issue for Matar. If he got Gale to say the
shahada
, just two little statements, it would change everything. The only problem was that, like the kiss of true love breaking the spell on a sleeping beauty, if Gale was going to say “
La ilaha ilAllah wa Mohamed al Rasul Allah
,” she was going to have to not only understand but also
mean
the words “There is no God but God and Mohamed is his prophet.”

He set about composing instruction cards with the different
rakat
for Gale to perform during the five prayer times and recorded himself reading Quran on cassette tapes. Now their roles were reversed. Gale had been Matar's guide to America; Matar was now stepping in to guide her toward Islam. Eventually, Gale grudgingly agreed to try to pray if Matar agreed to learn to swim. To Gale, being able to float was a survival skill necessary for fatherhood, just as being Muslim was an essential part of motherhood to Matar. It seemed like a fair and equal trade to both parties.

It was around this time that Gale found she was pregnant again. This pregnancy came with two recurrent ordeals. The first was a tormenting anxiety dream about alien abduction in the wake of watching
Close Encounters
; the second was a craving for pickled pigs' feet, which Matar found repulsive. She would sit upright in the night, eyes jabbing the back of her lids, thrashing in the sheets, and grab for me to make sure I was still there. Then she'd shuffle to the kitchen, root through the refrigerator, and fish a hoof out of a jar of brine with her fingers. Matar would catch her there in the cold light, confiscate the jar, and lead her back to bed.

“When you are afraid, recite the Verse of the Throne and you will feel brave,” he said.

Gale rebuffed him and shoved a breast into my face for my morning feed. “It's simple, darling—when you learn how to swim, I'll learn how to pray.”

The Puyallup pool belonged to the valley's high school and was relatively empty on Sundays. “Where is the life-man?” Matar asked nervously as they padded barefoot across the damp tiles.

“Lifeguards are off Sunday. We have it to ourselves!” Gale sat on the edge of the pool, baby bump protruding far over her thighs as she dipped me in and out of the tepid water like a biscuit. “Come on, sit down here next to me,” she coaxed Matar. He just flicked at the water with his big toe. “Don't be stupid. Get in!” She tried wrestling his leg with her free arm until he climbed timidly down the ladder and slipped hip-deep into the pool.

Walking Matar through all the basic lessons—how to breathe out under water, how to float, how to tread water, and how to kick—Gale coaxed him to the deep end.

“Okay, now swim back. No wall!”

But Matar refused to leave the wall of the pool, bobbing along the length of the twenty-five-meter lane with his hands on the ledge. “
Khalas!
I am finish!” Matar called back.

Fed up, Gale stood and hoisted me onto her hip over where Matar was clinging to a railing, trying to catch his breath.

“Do you know how my father taught me to swim?” she asked. Matar shook his head and blew his nose. “Like this!” My mother tossed me into the deep end of the pool, a little over a meter from where Matar was hanging on for dear life. I bobbed easily to the surface, and by the time my father had reached me I was floating comfortably on my back.

He barely made it back to the side of the pool and handed me up to my mother. “You crazy?” he sputtered, and it echoed off the bleachers.

Ma ignored his sputters and toweled me off.

“You wants your daughter she drown?” Matar was losing his proper English skills in his fury.

“It's fine, darling. She knows how to swim. Babies are born with it.”

Matar refused to believe Gale and would not be pacified even when she showed him my infant back-float skills in a full bathtub. Even today when the story of Ma letting me drop into the pool comes up, my father gets angry.

That night he kept his back to her in bed.

“You still want to teach me how to pray?” she asked in an attempt at making up.

His stony shadow softened, and he turned over to spoon her. “You frighten me today.”

“But you faced your fear. That was the right thing.”

Matar leaned in to whisper into her ear, in Arabic, “I seek refuge in Allah from the outcast Satan.”

Gale repeated after him, “
Authu Bi Allah min al Shaytan al rajim
,” stumbling on the hard consonants and mispronouncing words, but Matar didn't correct her or explain to her what she was saying. Instead he gently continued this way until the verse was completed.

“Do you feel more safe now?” he asked her, noticing that the rise and fall of her breathing had slowed. She said yes with a sleepy silence and guided his hand to a spot on her abdomen where a little foot was straining against the skin.

They lay together like this for a long time until Matar felt the time was right. “There is no God but God and Mohamed is his prophet,” he said softly into her ear.

“
La ilaha ilAllah wa Mohamed al Rasul Allah
,” Gale repeated. Matar basked in his triumph and went to kiss his newly Muslim wife, but was instead he was greeted by a soft snore as she drew her next breath.