The Girl Who Fell to Earth

by Sophia Al-Maria

  “Now I know you all heard about the war on the news, and maybe your parents talked to you about it . . . has anyone seen the big army airplanes in the sky lately?”

  Most of the class murmured yes to this question. By now I was now kneeling on top of my desk, waving my hand in the air.

  “Yes Sophia. What is it?”

  “It’s not the Persian Gulf. It’s the Arabian Gulf!” I corrected breathlessly.

  “Can you explain to me why on this map it is the Persian Gulf and on the news they call it the Persian Gulf? Pretty official.”

  “I don’t know! It just is.” I was glowing from the warmth of my conviction. Impertinent and cranky, I jumped up and ran to the map, took a moment to find Qatar, and pointed at the little thumb jutting out into the Arabian Gulf. “This is where I used to live. My baba, I mean my dad, is from here,” I exclaimed, taking care to use the American term for father.

  Mrs. Newton was about to respond but was interrupted by Bri Barker in the back, “Hey, railroad mouth! Is Saddam your dad?”

  I leveled a death stare from over the construction on my face.

  “Is that how come Sophia don’t know the Pledge of Allegiance? Cause Saddam’s her dad?” Crystal asked, half-ratting, half-curious.

  “Enough!” was all Mrs. Newton had to offer in my defense, and she changed the subject. “Everyone, take your earth science books out. This week we’re going to start reading about Pangaea!”

  11

  EPSILON BOÖTIS • THE LOINCLOTH •

  With Ma’s various temp jobs stacking up, she was home less and less of the time. By now I was beginning fifth grade and I know breasts were a major concern of the time, because I began keeping a journal and wrote about them a lot. I kept monologues on cup sizes and other profound thoughts in a notebook with a holographic cover. My entries were vague, but the project of mapping out my own private hinterland was explicit. I poured into it my secret pubescent thoughts and opinions about all of the strange new world that was opening up to me. Cable TV, adult magazines in the corner store, and the conversations of my ten- and eleven-year-old classmates filled the notebook. Class chat was all rumors trickled down from older siblings and misheard lyrics from songs on the radio. Although I was never included in these discussions, I recorded my observations as meticulously as a Victorian explorer drawing diagrams and explanatory footnotes. I desperately wanted to have a window into the exotic world of sex and learn its language, customs, and costumes for myself.

  I wrote these concerns down into the book in incriminating block letters of plain English, even though I knew somewhere in the back of my mind that these were 1984-style thoughtcrimes. The notebook was full of damning evidence manifest in the form of questions I shouldn’t have been asking. I wrote about what I imagined lurking inside the little store’s Saran-wrapped copies of Hustler or beneath the glowing scramble of Spice TV. The diary became increasingly incriminating as I drew bizarre illustrations of body parts and disguised them in code—ice creams topped with cherries were my visual slang for “boobs,” lightning bolts burst from jeans to represent “penis.” One ballerina had labia that hung down so low from under her tutu I bound them up in pink slippers to make them look like an extra pair of legs. I approached my explorations in a spirit of scientific inquiry. Somehow I hoped this would pardon me should anyone find the journal. Then one day, a partial answer to my questions about adult anatomy came. Nestled in with a bunch of windowed bill envelopes, bank ads for personalized dolphin-art checkbooks, and Columbia House ads was a Frederick’s of Hollywood catalogue, my Rosetta stone to a cartoonishly commodified world of sex! I dropped the boring mail onto the buffet and went straight to the bedroom, where I spent the rest of the afternoon Sharpie-ing hijabs onto the heads of the almost all-nude girls. Fantasy trumped all in this colorful compendium of glossy, posed female sexuality. The models reminded me of My Little Ponies, each with a special outfit of lacey dressage, manes over withers, round rumps, and plasticky, powder-soft skin. But while the boxes of My Little Ponies came clearly labeled “KEEP AWAY FROM SMALL CHILDREN,” the Frederick’s catalogue had no warning of any choking hazard. I decided it was mine to keep.

  Obsessed by my new discovery, I catalogued and mapped the hieroglyphics, learning to identify different kinds of lingerie (teddy, romper, waspie) and copying down their attendant constellation of adjectives (strappy, dentelle, crotchless). Within a few weeks I’d absorbed all the charge out of my secret catalogue. I began slicing the models up into little pieces and repurposed the mutilated bodies into collages of half-nude mermaids and centauresses, à la Fantasia. Using the bits of body to create fleshy chimeras in the diary, the girl in pasties became a half-zebra, and the blonde in red lace ended up an orange mermaid. But once I started collaging with the risqué photos, the evidence scattered in the garbage and on the floor was a giveaway to Ma. And the fact is, diaries inevitably get read. Usually by the last person in the world you would want to read them. Coming home from school one day, I knew something was wrong. It felt as though the pressure had dropped in the house, and I found her, red-faced, in the closet where I’d hidden my diary. It was a lesson learned, she said, for both of us. Then, in true thought-police form, she ordered me to rip every page with anything haram, or forbidden, on it out of the diary. By this time, Islam had become a convenient tool for Ma to keep us in line.

  In most parenting matters Ma was self-sufficient. Now she spoke to other parents and even consulted Baba about the right line of action to take with me. “I don’t understand where it is coming from!” she fretted over the phone to him. “It is disturbing to me, Matar! Maybe it’s all this stuff she sees on the TV, just the environment she’s in here. Kids these days are just different.” Baba prescribed a variety of remedies, including an increased intake of Quran and the possibility of another relocation to Doha, where I could live with Umi Safya. I was barely eleven, Ma pointed out, and she could never let me go on my own. My twinkling of sexual curiosity had obviously spooked her deeply. By the end of fifth grade our relationship had disintegrated into a permanent standoff. “It’s only a phase,” Gramma reassured Ma. But my “phase” wouldn’t go away.

  Ma’s vigilance only drove me further underground and sharpened my moody conviction that I was being unfairly persecuted. Even after the school year had passed, I wanted nothing more than to get away from the scene of my thoughtcrime and wished Baba would scrape the funds together to buy me a ticket to Doha. I began writing everything in the diary out phonetically in Arabic script, my own private language even Dima couldn’t read, my own evasive Navajo code.

  During this time I passed into middle school and entered the sixth grade. This was the official end of childhood, American public school’s exile from the nursery. Whatever molten hormones run in the veins of preteens were running hot in mine when school started that year. At that age there is a nonvolition, an unknowing of oneself that causes actions to come out inexplicable and divine. I moved, spoke, and acted without meaning and without meaning to; my fights with Ma, Dima, and even Gramma became frequent and caused everyone to walk rhythmlessly around me for fear of an attack. While cage-fighting with Dima usually ended in bloody wounds, and spitting at Ma only got me a slap across the face, I didn’t mean any of it.

  I started to fill my time after school loitering at the public library. I noticed that most people came to the librarians with missions. They needed a particular episode of Red Dwarf or wanted to search this new thing called the Internet. I didn’t know what I was looking for until I found it.

  I must have paused ten times or more on The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars before I decided to check it out. I took it home and promptly forgot about it in the bottom of my backpack full of library swag. It wasn’t until one lonesome lunch period while pretending to be busy cleaning my bag out that I found it again. I locked myself in the bathroom (the most private place on campus), and pressed play. By the second song, it was “Soul Love,” and by the time I’d
committed “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide” to memory, I was long gone (and so turned on). My devotion to Bowie was immediate and earnest and fervent, in the way only twelve-year-old virgins can truly love a pop idol. Of course I was decades too late to freak out in his moon-age daydream, be one of his young Americans, or put on a pair of red shoes and dance the blues, but I still believed this album was made for me. The spangled guitars, the piano romps, and the emotional sway of that voice going from a low crackle to a shrill howl gave me the kind of all-powerful shivers in the groin (even off that crappy cassette tape) that made other girls at my school scream and faint over Garth Brooks or Boys II Men. Vising the metal band of my headphones onto my ears and disguising them around the house under a beanie, I wrapped myself into a clinging embrace with the album and didn’t let go until it was overdue.

  The way Bowie emancipated a word like “sparkle” from being a boring marketing term aimed at girls in my age bracket, turning it into a sexy secret, inspired me to start writing in my journal again. The possibility of subverting my mother’s all-seeing eye and making up new and obscure innuendos was my new goal in the writing. At the back of the book I carefully took dictation from the tape, copying down the cut-up sublogic of the lyrics into my expurgated diary. I alternated my set of Japanese glitter gel pens for a rainbow effect and drew a pink star for words I either couldn’t decipher or didn’t want Ma to read.

  I suppose it was the idea of a concept album that was most mind-boggling to me, as were the possibilities of creating an alter ego or curating one’s own personal mythology. For all homely, zit-faced, graceless people, the notion that a different, unrecognizable, other version of yourself might be possible is both the most liberating and the most seductive of beliefs. David Bowie went from the gross codpiece-wearing goblin prince in Labyrinth to my spiritual icon in the course of a few weeks. I couldn’t let the album just go back into public circulation! I had to keep it with me—always. I took one of Baba’s Quran cassettes and taped the songs of darkness and dismay right over the top of Surat Al-Baqara, and the more I listened, the more fervent my devotion became.

  I set about building my own alter ego from the sale racks of Value Village and the suitcases of old clothes from Doha. Where I had previously paid acute attention to the cliques I might fit into—preps, hillbillies, skaters, D&D gamers, and so on—by spring I had built a remarkably unflattering wardrobe of secondhand crap and had split all of Dima’s old jalabiyas at the seams by trying to wear them as shirts. The closet was a mixture of ninety-nine-cent tropical sunset shirts, wrinkled old hijabs, pin-on epaulettes, broken sunglasses, and polyester leisure suits. My most precious acquisition had been a pair of American flag Converse—striped on the sides in red and white, blue tongue speckled with white stars—which I wore with a pair of slouch-crotch sirwal with thick silver cuffs embroidered up to my knees. The first time I wore them outdoors we had already walked halfway to school before Dima observed, “Those pants make you look like you pooped yourself.”

  Still disturbed by my diary, Ma now found a new source of disgust in my clothing. The glitter-grunge-via-Gulf look gave her cause to tell me on repeat that she hadn’t worked long and hard to clothe me in perfectly good new clothing from K-Mart just to have me turn around and wear dirty hand-me-downs on purpose. She took it as a slap in the face to her efforts and took special offense to hair experimentation involving peroxide, egg white, and the ultimate contraband: Manic Panic.

  “You look ridiculous,” Ma growled, snapping the elastic bands off my head. “You need to keep a lower profile,” she warned. “There are predators on the lookout for girls like you!” Ma believed that all the pedophiles in the county were waiting for us just beyond the property line and that they were somehow organized and monitoring the routes to and from our school with walkie-talkies. “Are you trying to draw attention to yourself?” Of course I was, though I wouldn’t admit it. She tugged at my glow-in-the-dark alien guitar-pick necklace and broke the mint dental floss I’d used to tie it around my neck. “You want to look like a freak?” Duh, I thought to myself, and answered, “I’d rather look like a freak than look like you.”

  She froze with a look as though I’d just stabbed her in the heart. I shrank back as Ma cast around for something of value to me. Her eyes locked on my box of tapes. I lunged to protect them, but she was too quick. She fingered through my carefully curated collection of mixtapes from the radio and pirated copies from the library. She picked out Ziggy and held it up as an example to me, then hooked her finger under the magnetic strip. I screamed, falling instantly into hysterics as she pulled out a long strand of tape as she unwound the album, brown tape glimmering as she spooled it round her fist and ripped it out at the reel.

  “You want attention from dangerous men? Okay! You want to end up cut into pieces and dead in a ditch? Be my guest!” Ma had grown up in an era (and an area) where dressing like a hippie tramp was less liberating than it was dangerous.

  She moved on now to my other cassettes: Nirvana’s Unplugged in New York, One in a Million by Aaliyah, a copy of Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds broadcast from the local PBS station. All the while she was clenching her teeth and swearing under her breath. Something about “no daughter of mine is going to turn out a freak.” She finished off, leaving only the tapes she had bought me for my birthday, Wolf Songs and Wagner’s Die Walküre—perfect for the howling fugue I had worked myself up into.

  Then, with a calmness that seemed maniacal to me, she concluded, “You’re not going to be able to get a job dressed like that.”

  “I’m not trying to get a job!” I choked through my snot while I wept over the mangled tapes on the floor.

  “You’re going to need one if you’re going to stay under this roof!”

  “But I’m twelve!”

  “You want to keep buying this garbage? Fine. But I’m not paying for any of it!” We eyed each other tensely, each waiting for the other to move. Tears were now trickling down over my crumpled chin. “I’d been earning my keep for years by the time I was your age! Now go clean yourself up.”

  In that unfortunate moment, I got up from my nest of dead cassettes and I wiped my snot and tears and the makeup I was expressly forbidden from wearing across my cheeks.

  “Is that mascara?” Ma roared.

  Sniveling, I made a rookie error and lied, “No!”

  That was it. Busted.

  “Just for lying to me, you are going to go into this closet right now and throw out every piece of junk you’ve collected.” Ma dragged out a mound of my Salvation Army artifacts and began plowing through it.

  Her anger and my hysteria escalated as she discovered the extent of my horde. An electric-blue bowling bag, a silky Chinese restaurant delivery jacket with a dragon embroidered on the back, moldy Camelot 3000 comic books from the ’80s, some cheap plastic costume jewelry from Saudi, and all the rest of my fledgling hipster paraphernalia were stuffed into a Hefty bag. Ma carried it out to the trash and forced it in, spraying the hose into the garbage can so I wouldn’t go through it trying to rescue anything.

  That night, after Ma had gone to work, I stayed awake well past midnight watching MTV to spite her. I didn’t hear her engine approach outside, didn’t hear the brake crunch or the car door slam, or any of the Pavlovian triggers that usually warned me to turn the radio down and change the channel. For these occasions I kept a Cosmos tape in the VCR, so if I were watching anything verboten I could switch back to our approved TV chaperone, Carl Sagan, and Ma would never know. But getting caught was an inevitability under Ma’s surveillance, and just as Æon Flux somersaulted across the screen in her bondage harness, legs spread-eagled, tits like two stiff torpedoes, I felt the rocking chair pull back. I knew it was over before I had time to switch to Carl’s model of a tesseract. That night Ma was on the phone to Baba arranging a ticket for me to leave.

  12

  BETA COLUMBAE COLUMBA • THE WEIGHT •

  The flight from SeaTac Airport to Amsterdam Schiphol too
k half a day, and then it was another seven hours to Abu Dhabi and forty-five minutes to Doha. Hemmed into Schiphol’s international nowhere land of travel-size cosmetics and mutant Toblerone chocolate, I felt free. Riding miles up and down the terminal concourse on a walkalator gave me my first taste of autonomy. But my blissful float was tainted by the knowledge that I was en route to a place where privacy amounted to five minutes alone in the bathroom once a day. Yes, the airport of Amsterdam was the one place I was going to have the chance to transgress consequence-free.

  I went into the news kiosk with my twenty emergency guilders and hovered timidly near the brink where Art/Lifestyle dropped brow into Men’s Interest/Porn. I emerged with an oversized European fashion magazine full of nightlife photography and interviews in a language I couldn’t read but whose subjects were fabulous beyond words. The portraits were variously taken in lofts and luxury hotels; floor-length windows revealed views of city skylines I pretended I might be en route to. I parked myself at a gate bound for Paris and leafed through the thickly glossed pages. It was most precious for its dazzling color and surreal imagery, suspending me for hours while I waited in the terminal. There were models posed to play random female icons: Elizabeth I in a brocade pantsuit, the Virgin Mary in a red maillot and blue beach towel, Joan of Arc chrome-clad in Mugler body armor.

  I knew this magazine full of scantily clad women would be contraband and, therefore, our time was limited together. Self-censorship had become habitual after the journal incident in fifth grade, so I decided not to try to bring it into the Gulf and set about rigorously memorizing the delicious details of each photograph. Time folded around me, and before I’d made it halfway through the magazine, boarding was announced. Final call came over the intercom while I hunched deeply over the last spread, titled “Grow Up” in English. It was shot on a playground; women in couture slid down slides, rode seesaws, and climbed trees. The last image was of a model captured midair as she launched from a swing. I left her on my seat reluctantly, where she stayed permanently suspended and artfully akimbo in a slit red dress.