The Girl Who Fell to Earth

by Sophia Al-Maria

  The weeklong stretches when Baba did come back were always highly anticipated. While Ma waited for her driver’s license, Baba’s visits were the only times we ever dared to venture far from our isolated little capsule. On one visit about nine months after our arrival, Baba came home from the rig and told Ma to pack.

  “But you just got here!” Ma exclaimed.

  “And now we’re going.”

  “Where? Why?”

  “The desert.”

  Ma stuffed Dima roughly into a onesie, straightening her out with a brisk shake as if she were bagging a pillow. It was just after maghreb when we headed out to Baba’s rented Land Cruiser. Ma’s face was as pale as a porcelain doll with her black hijab pulled down tight; Dima dozed against her chest. Baba opened the back of the Land Cruiser and boosted me up inside. As we left the city, I watched the westbound road scroll out under us through the back-door windows—a hypnotic wake of dark concrete pulling me to sleep.

  When I woke it was to the idling engine. We had stopped somewhere barren and very dark. I sat up from my nest among the blankets and spare tire. A tall, thin man with a wooden staff came from the night into the red brake lights. As he approached, his eyes darted toward me, though his head stayed still. I ducked back down into the blankets until Baba stepped out and greeted the tall man. They spoke in Arabic. Ma watched suspiciously in the rearview mirror, adjusting her veil nervously.

  “Yalla, Sophie, hawli,” Baba said, swinging the back door open and reaching to remove me from my nest in the trunk. Dima and I were both wary of the stranger, but Baba reassured us. “He’s okay. Go play.” We didn’t need to be told twice after weeks of playing indoors. We plunged into the fine sand, rolling around like chinchillas in a dust bath. We paused only to prick up our ears at the tense exchange that began between our parents.

  “I have to go back to the city for a few hours. I’ll be back.”

  “Why did you bring us out here?”

  “Don’t worry. He is here to protect you,” Baba said, thumbing in the tall man’s direction.

  Ma’s face went long and solemn. “Is this some kind of a joke? Who is he to you? He’s a stranger!”

  “He is not a stranger, he’s Bedu from Sudan.”

  “I don’t care who he is! You’re not leaving us here!”

  Baba was already perched back in the Land Cruiser, thobe stretched taut across his knees, one foot in the car and one foot on the sand.

  “You’ll be fine.”

  He shut the door and Ma bared her teeth at Baba through the driver’s side window. “Don’t!” Ma bellowed, swear words straining behind her clenched teeth.

  She was too proud to get hysterical but was mad beyond words, hissing at him as he rolled the window up and drove away.

  When the lights of Baba’s Land Cruiser disappeared, the stars seemed brighter and the sky more vast. I hung close to Ma as I looked up at the sky, suddenly afraid that without her as an anchor I might fall up. Ma gave the tribesman a wide berth as she stomped back over to the nest, dusted us off, and drew us close. The Sudanese tribesman stared straight ahead, limned in starlight, unmoving. He and the American farm girl kept eyes askance on each other until a silent truce of mutual distrust was reached and Ma turned her attention safely to us.

  “The stars are different here,” she said aloud. The light was blue on her pale face, gray on my brown arms. Dima peered sleepily out from under Ma’s armpit, where she had burrowed close under the blankets, and Ma rubbed the melted starlight into her cheeks like cream.

  “Where did Baba go?” I asked. I kept my head down to avoid the feeling of reverse vertigo I got from the stars.

  She drew the points of a constellation in the sand to change the subject. “Can you find the Big Dipper?” I followed her finger while she ran a line between the stars in the sand; this seemed to ease my astrophobia. “Find that one,” she ordered.

  I tried, but had to squint to avoid feeling dizzy. The sky astigmatized into a bright lacework of light and before I could find the constellation, I was off in a comforting deep sleep.

  At some point late in the night, Ma woke me. A meteor shower of rosy gold and silver was passing in the sky. I rubbed my eyes and hugged her close. She squeezed me back. “Sophia, I’m going to have a new baby,” she said.

  “Will it be like you or like Baba?” was my first question.

  “Both of us, of course, honey.”

  “Will it be a boy?” was my second question.

  “We’ll see.”

  “What are the chances?” I asked.

  Ma didn’t answer as I hugged her belly, enlivened with the idea of a new sibling, and put my eye to the taut, heavy barrel where our new baby lived. I imagined it was a window through which I could see the transparent body of my new brother or sister, backlit in orange and pink. It smiled at me: infinitely wise, alien, imaginary.

  “You cannot tell your father. Do you understand?”

  I nodded solemnly as she curled me back against her belly. The shadow of the tribesman stood sentry at the top of the dune all night long.

  When light broke, the desert was damp, sand still cold with traces of the winter moonlight. The tribesman remained in the same spot and it was only when the camels craned to the east at the sound of an approaching truck that he relaxed his leg and went down to the herd. Baba’s Land Cruiser appeared over the dune with a rev that made Ma sit upright from our bundle of blankets, already working her anger up into wrath. By the time Baba pulled the truck up and rolled down his window, all Ma could do was let out a little peep of steam: “That’s it!” Baba placed Dima and me in the car without saying a word to her. Ma let him do it, waiting for an apology. But Baba refused eye contact. Ma drew her arm back, first balling it into a fist, and then slapped him.

  “God damn you! Goddamnit! How could you leave us? How could you leave us here? How?”

  Her voice sounded like it was shredding her throat. But Baba maintained the dead air between them. We drove away from that place without an answer. It would be many months before we got one. I looked back out the rear window of the truck as we drove back toward the city; our guardian, the silent tribesman, stood watch with the camels all around. I waved at him until we were out of sight.

  Almost five months after our night in the desert, Baba still didn’t know Ma was expecting, and the rift between them seemed to be growing. When he called from the rig, he started making an effort to speak to Dima and me in Arabic. To Ma, this seemed to be a way to exclude her and a sign of his wavering allegiance. Whenever he called and said “salam alaikum” instead of “hello,” she hung the phone up on him. There was finality in Ma’s movements when she did this, as though she knew it was over before anything was said. She also knew as she harbored the new stranger in her womb that if it were a boy, he would change everything for us, especially within the tribe. Our presence, which for now was at the periphery, would become more central. A boy—a brother—would draw our presence in bolder blood. She wasn’t sure what Matar would make of this news. And she didn’t tell him until it was too late.

  “I felt like if I didn’t say it out loud to you it might not be true,” she told Baba as he rushed her, miscarrying, to the women’s hospital.

  Once she was admitted, he was unable to go with her into the “Female Only” maternity ward. Kept at bay by a very aggressive lady security guard, Baba returned to the building, where Dima and I were playing in the lobby under the watch of the Filipino seamstress who ran a shop on our floor.

  “You’re going camping,” he told us.

  “But where’s Ma?”

  “She’s sick. She just needs a little rest.”

  “Can’t we stay with her?”

  “No.”

  He packed our clothes and some blankets and that same night took us to the Saudi border, where our uncle Mohamed was waiting to take us away. We arrived long before morning, and were transferred from Baba’s Land Cruiser to the rumbling Suburban garumba full of kids, thermoses of coffee, a
nd carpets. Border guards waved us through the checkpoints, preferring not to deal with the rabble. They knew no contraband would be safe in a truck full of feral kids anyway. I recognized Alia and some of our other cousins from the familial summits at our apartment. We fell fast into loud clapping games, and gorged on Vimto and Aladdin chips, bursting off the cracked cement of Salwa Road and into the unpaved Jafoorah Desert—a track of djinn-haunted land no one dared cross unless they started in the morning and could ensure making it across by dusk.

  As soon as we went off road we hit a dip. All of us piled in the back hovered over the rusted-out floor of the trunk. Just as the tires hit the ground and we hit our heads, the back doors of the Suburban swung open wide like French doors in a thunderstorm. Dima and I clung to each other, but it didn’t seem to bother the other kids at all. Uncle Mohamed drove like a daredevil; he went into a sort of Zen trance, matching gears and speed to the individual personality of each erg. We broke the top of an ordinary-looking dune to find our camp hidden behind it. Consisting of ten large “hair-houses,” or tents woven out of wiry black goat fur, they were so black against the white land that the opening of each looked as though it were the entrance to a deep cave.

  A small Nissan pickup appeared beside us on the top of the dune. The bed of the truck was full of scraggly firewood and at the wheel was our aunt Falak, her twin brother, Faraj, in the passenger seat. She flashed the lights at Uncle Mohamed and guided us down the almost vertical slope into the camp. Falak and Faraj were only about fourteen years old then. I remember being impressed with the two as they stepped out of the truck and came to greet us. Falak wore a fluorescent pink and yellow jalabiya, with a black hijab tied loosely around her head that had fallen off the back like a hoodie. Our uncle Faraj wore a thobe, and his gutra covered his face. Falak put me at ease and Faraj scooped Dima up to tickle her. Despite their youth they were both strangely grown up, as was the case with many of the older boys and girls. Once they had passed the rabble-age (from toddling to about ten), they helped take care of the young stragglers like us.

  Falak led Dima and me to a big tent at the edge of the camp. This was the collective storage tent where everyone piled their bedding during the day. The ground was covered with foam bed pads all sewn into psychedelic floral prints; the edges were stacked with cushions, forming a fortress that was filled with mounded multicolored quilts. Dima and I fell into the soft quilts and fell into a deep sleep from exhaustion, confusion, and a little bit of fear at being so far from our parents.

  When I woke it was dark outside. “I have to pee,” I whined to the darkness. Nothing. “Wake up!” I prodded at Dima. But her wheezy little snores were all I got. The tent had been emptied of all the bedding by now, but for the blanket we were bundled in together. I rose and peeked out the flap at the other areas of the tent cluster. The stars and moon were bright like a black light and made the white sand glow ultraviolet. I steered clear of the shadows and snuck around the back of the camp facing up against a dune and fashioned a little dugout for myself. All around was silence, and the stars were even brighter than they had been the night in the desert with the tribesman. The only light came from one of the open tent flaps, and the silence was suddenly broken by the wail of a baby.

  I hopped away from my puddle in the sand and walked toward the light. A flap of black wool flickered in the breeze, and a baby bawled from inside. I remembered Ma and wondered if she and our baby brother were feeling better yet. I thought maybe I should go back to Dima, and then I realized I didn’t know which of the identical black wool tents I’d left her in. The baby cried again, and now I could make out a gas lantern hanging on the main post in the middle; underneath this I saw the figure of an old woman. She drew me in like a tractor beam, and I startled when I got close enough to see that she was watching me. Her body was wide, and she sat flat with legs akimbo. Her jalabiya was dark calico, her gray braids were red with henna, a black berga covered her face, and her underwear was long, with a ringlet of embroidered starbursts circling her ankles.

  I hung shyly at the door. “Do you know who I am?” she asked.

  Although I never knew the answer when anyone else asked me this question, somehow I did know this was my grandmother, Umi Safya, my Arabic namesake. But I was too terrified to answer her for fear I’d be wrong. She lifted the corner of her berga and offered her smooth cheek for me to kiss, then held me by the shoulders and sat me down roughly beside her. She grasped a loom between her toes, a stick knotted with the ends of rough camel-hair yarn she was weaving into some kind of rope.

  “How’s your mama?” she asked and offered me a piece of sour, salty cheese. It was about the size, shape, and consistency of a sand dollar, and had the indents of her fingers in it like a fork across our other grandmother’s peanut-butter cookies. “Did you come to see your brother?”

  I didn’t understand what she meant. Ma and my little brother were in Doha. How could they be here? And if they were here, why hadn’t anyone told us?

  “Ey! The little stranger came to see her brother,” Umi said to someone I hadn’t noticed in the corner of the tent. She directed me with a rough push toward the shadows and went back to braiding her sling of yarn into rope.

  The woman’s body in the corner was a sea of black but for the white island of a boob, spilling over the neckline of her jalabiya and into the mouth of a little baby. “Come here.” She beckoned to me. Her voice came harsh through her veil. “His name is Badr,” she told me. I looked down at the tiny brown baby suckling at her black areola.

  “Badr,” I repeated dumbly, still puzzling over why Umi had called him my brother.

  “It means full moon.”

  She then propped him against her knee, his legs akimbo on a pile of blankets like a helpless specimen, so I could get a good look at him. I studied this little human she was presenting to me. His tiny fingers balled up and pawed at the air like a turtle on its back, and his tears were stained black by the kohl powder around his eyes. He had a thick black tuft of hair waving straight up from his head like Astro Boy. His snot glistened, mixed with tears in the dim light, and when I touched him his face clenched in displeasure and he began howling again.

  “Can’t you see he needs winding?” Umi Safya commented from the sidelines.

  “Take him to your grandmother,” the woman ordered.

  He blinked up at me with his wet eyes. I didn’t understand who this little person was to me. How he could be my brother? I held him at the armpits, unsure what to do with him, and carefully picked my way through the colorful tangle of blankets on the ground. He had a scrap of fabric filled with cardamom and other spices called a khomra. It was effective at warding off bad spirits, less so at preventing gas. Umi Safya slung Badr’s tiny body over her knee as casually and roughly as picking a kitten out of the basket by its nape. Then, patting him in rhythm with the rocking of her knee, she calmed his tears by howling at him in a mock baby’s cry: “Lebaay! Lebaay!” until he fell silent and then asleep.

  Back in Doha, Ma was alone in the women’s hospital while Baba was trying to bribe his way in to see her. But by the next morning she had lost my brother, propelling his little body from hers. He never made it to oxygen, fading as he passed through the birth canal like an asteroid burning up on entry into the atmosphere. When she woke a few hours later, all she wanted was a smoke. She struggled up, rummaged through her purse, shuffled to the bathroom, and lit a cigarette. She was dizzy and when she looked down she found she was also bleeding. The blood didn’t surprise her—she had just had a miscarriage. However, when she fell to the floor in a faint and was found curled around the toilet in her green hospital gown, cigarette doused in a pool of her own blood, the nurses assumed the worst. A delegation of doctors came from all points of the hospital: Syrians, Indians, Russians.

  When Ma awoke her legs were pushed up, knees-to-ears, and they were examining her. “Get off! Leave me alone! Where is my husband?”

  Ignoring her, the doctors came to a unanimous gue
ss: “She is bleeding internally!”

  Ma popped the IV out of her arm and tried to get out of the bed, screaming for help.

  “Perhaps we ought to put the patient under mental observation,” suggested one of the doctors.

  But nothing makes a person crazier than being told she is crazy. They had to get six nurses to hold Ma down until the tranquilizers kicked in, her intensity diluting as the sedatives entered her bloodstream. She was still awake when they rolled her into an operating theater for the unexplained “emergency operation.” She described it later as a mad scientist’s lab. Despite the fact that her own husband couldn’t pass through the wards, she found that men were huddled all around her, most in surgical masks but some in suits. They covered her eyes and that was the last thing she remembered until her reentry into the outer rings of consciousness, brought painfully into focus by an intense burning sensation spreading up her arm. She cast around, wanting to scream at the masked men. But they were gone, and now only Matar sat by her side while a nurse squeezed a big bag of blood into her veins.

  A few days later Dima and I returned from the desert. Ma was still in the hospital. She was whiter than usual, and she seemed to be suspended in a web of transparent tubes. Her eyes fluttered open, and she patted a patch of the white sheet for us to climb up on. I scrambled up ahead of Dima, my purple dress shedding sand all over the bed.

  “You girls are filthy. Where have they been?” she asked.

  “With their family,” Baba answered for us, and pulled up a rolling office chair alongside the bed.

  “Oh, that’s nice. What did you kittens get up to?”

  I launched into a rapid-fire rundown of our adventures, dumping the specimens I had kept from our travels onto her blanket. I displayed a snakeskin, a sand rose, a shiny chip wrapper, and the dry goat poop and white pebbles for sand tic-tac-toe to illustrate. I was reveling on the bed in my stash of treasures when I excitedly added, “Oh, and guess what? I met our little brother!”