The Girl Who Fell to Earth (21 page)

When my pavement-pounding didn't turn up a home, I finally caved and allowed a very pushy
simsar
named Ahmed to assist me. He promised he'd find me something “sooberdalucks,” by which he meant “super deluxe,” by which he meant it had hot water and wasn't a bug colony. Many of the flats were both charming and foreboding, as was Ahmed, for that matter. He looked commandingly into my eyes as if he were trying to use the Force: “You
will
love this one.” Before entering each apartment he would pause to say, “For real, miss, this apartment.” He pinched his fingers before his lips and kissed them into a blossom—“Sooberdalucks!”

We had come to the end of a long day's search, and setting my purse down on a sideboard in a hallway, I let Ahmed show me around yet another place.

“Satellite! Washing machina! Balcona!”

He took me into the inner chambers of the apartment and opened the bedroom window to reveal an inaccessible dead space looking into the windows of the adjacent block. Fallen laundry and soda cans littered the ground below, and above were ten stories with a hexagon of sky barely visible beyond the protuberant butts of air conditioners. The rest of the flat was furnished in a pan-cultural retro-maniacal mishmash: a golden Louis XIV couch squatted defiantly in the middle of a spare living-room set. Zebra-skin carpets lined the room wall to wall, a clock in the shape of the mosque at Medina rang the hour, and the walls were covered with ugly papyrus souvenirs and bucolic paintings of the English countryside. This apartment was more confused about its identity than I was.

“I'm sorry, it's super, but just a little too deluxe,” I said, turning to address Ahmed.

But the room was empty, silent but for a dusty wind blowing in through the fly screen and ruffling the potpourri flowers. I rushed to the sideboard where I had left my purse—gone! I imagined the passport inside the secret compartment of my bag. Everything that was officially me on paper had vanished. It had happened in a flash, just like that. I skidded down the stairs of the apartment building and out into the busy street, where I paced from one end to the other half-shouting to no one, “Help!” After my previous trouble at the police station, I knew I'd get no sympathy there. Ahmed was long gone and, for all official purposes, so was I.

I reported the theft to the embassy but they just advised me to wait a few weeks before undergoing the whole process. Maybe someone would turn my purse in, they assured me. I doubted it. With my rental possibilities severely impaired by the fact I had no valid identification, I reconcentrated my search on under-the-table sublets. After many shady dealings, I finally found a landlady who would exempt me from the tenant registration required by law if I paid a premium rate and kept to myself. It was a precarious situation in more ways than one. The landlord could ask me to leave without notice, and it so happened that the room she had to offer me was on a houseboat. She led me across the river from her chintzy Zamalek flat to her properties off Kit Kat Square, then farther down to Imbaba. This is where the banks of the Nile were moored with decrepit pastel houseboats full of ready-to-let, no-questions-asked, cheap rooms available for junkies, expats, and all type of wayward strays and suspicious persons who I guessed were now my people.

I wrote an e-mail to Suhail letting him know I was moving. He hadn't written in at least a month, and I veered between pining for and hating him. While he was absent from my regular days, he was still a real presence as important as Ma or Baba. After all, Suhail had helped to shape the way I saw myself and my future. Still, the only thing that made his silence bearable was the idea of nesting down on my own in a new life where no one knew me or would bother me about where I was from. I could reinvent myself in a room of my own, begin from a blank page, like enjoying the moments before writing in a fresh notebook full of virgin paper. I moved into the tiny space and made myself my first home, which floated in a river running through a city that, for all its frustration, brought me the closest I'd yet felt to being free as it sprawled between whatever East was and wherever West began.

20

ETA CANIS MAJORIS  •  THE MAIDENHEAD  •   

Seedy would have been a compliment to describe my new houseboat home. When the river was low, the pilings anchoring it into the silt looked like the spindly legs of a man who'd been depantsed. It was more like a paddle-less double-decker Mississippi steamboat than an idyllic Norfolk fen barge. Toilet-blue paint warped along the mildewed waterline, and it was so full of holes it would sink if anyone were ever dumb enough to try to float it. When I arrived at my new home, the combination gardener and
bowab
, Hanafi, bounded up the stairs to meet me. He relieved me of my baggage while I haggled pointlessly (an unflattering habit for a foreigner) with the cabdriver in the street. By the time I'd gypped the driver out of about fifteen cents, Hanafi was already across the gangplank and depositing the suitcase in my little room. That night I lay awake, freaked out by distant wails coming from somewhere farther upstream than I'd ever ventured. The scuttle of river rats under the floor planks and the creaking of the wood between me and the water eventually dipped and swayed me to sleep.

The next morning I awoke at sunrise to a loud thumping noise outside my window. I rose to find the face of a man at the window staring in at me. He was standing floating in a boat, knocking a stubby wooden oar against the outer helm of my bedroom. His wife and children nestled in the little skiff, pulling in a web of blue-green netting. I drew the dust-caked curtains but kept a slit open to peek through. The mother wore a peasant-style
hijab
tucked back; the kids were small and bedraggled enough to be of unidentifiable sex. Their tools, pans, and laundry were arrayed around the tiny, self-contained vessel. As they bobbed away down the side of the boat, still knocking to scare the fish out from underneath, I could see the name of their boat in bright yellow paint: “Sunny.” The boat started to lurch, dragged to the side by the net, which was caught somewhere underneath the stilts of the houseboat. The woman was fast and she flashed a paring knife out. She began cutting parts of the net away and letting it sink back into the river. In moments they were free again, the whole family back adrift together. I thought of Ma and Baba and Dima, all of us cast to far-off parts of the world, and wondered if we'd ever be in the same boat together.

I'm not sure it's possible to be truly alone in a city like Cairo. Although I felt alone, between the rats under the floorboards, the fishing families on the river, and my upstairs neighbors, I definitely wasn't. The upstairs apartment was a scene straight out of the houseboat in the Mahfouz book (and famous Adel Adham film) we'd read in class the semester before,
Adrift on the Nile
. The second-story apartment was host to a revolving set of young Egyptian men in various stages of religious devotion and hedonistic rebellion. They were journalists, law students, Sufis, and junkies, and many of them went by nicknames like Freetz, BonBon, and Turbo. I lay awake listening to their chitchat most nights with my balcony door open. They were smart but pompous, clouded with hash, quoting Sayyid Qutb and Michel Foucault in the same breath. They listened alternately to Adaweya and Pink Floyd, and although their musical taste irked me, their voices were a comfort on nights when the horrible wailing echoed down from upstream.

Resentment of Suhail's silence was threatening to grow over me like a dark mold in that dank little room, so I spent the winter vacation in the library hovering close to the Internet in wait for word from him. I staked a computer out for myself on the third floor, and to pass the time between refresh clicks and concerned e-mails from Ma and annoying Arabic chain mail from Baba, I burrowed through the university's stacks. The American University in Cairo's library was one of the best in the Middle East: it gave me access to rare books on pre-Islamic poetry, the Egyptian avant-garde of the 1940s, and the eternally outlawed
Lolita
, which was certainly not available at libraries in Doha or Puyallup. I even found out in the cultural anthropology section that the strange wailing was peasant women hired to theatrically mourn when a person died.

This area of the library was overgrown with outdated anthro-esoterica and had evaded pruning for at least thirty years. After nine months at AUC, I had been dropped into the center of the then very vogue political debate about the future of Arab identity and American foreign policy. Although I might have been both Arab and American, I still felt I had no place in the discussions. While waiting for Suhail in my granite tower, I cultivated a taste for the Orientalist curiosities and out-of-print accounts of “native peoples” that sheltered in the metal racks of Dewey Decimal 301. If my classmates like Magda or Mohamed had known I took pleasure loitering in the politically shady vines of the pre-post-colony, I'd have been pariahed for sure. But in a way I think it was an unintentional punk gesture after months of circular complaint about the disparaging portrayal of Arab men in American films and the offensive attire of Princess Jasmine. I didn't give a fuck anymore about what Edward Said said—I just wanted to look at turn-of-last-century nude photographs of tattooed Ouled Nail tribeswomen.

As far as I was concerned, the fewer the readers who had bothered to come that way before me, the more likely the book was to be interesting. One example of a prize find was a 1941 first-person diarization of a feral child. The book was called
Wolf Child, Human Child: Being a Narrative Interpretation of the Life History of Kamala, the Wolf Girl
, and was written by an imaginative pediatrician, Arnold Gesell. He ventriloquized his subject's memoirs with great care to detail. He described to dreamy effect the rutty scent of Kamala's wolf-mother's den. There was a plucky description of her fierce spirit as she learned to run on all fours and a plaintive passage about how she so wished to howl at the moon like the other cubs in her pack. How Kamala had managed to dictate her life story to Gesell was never touched on in the book. The pictures of Kamala and her little sister, Amala, were amazing and sad. They stared up at the camera uncomprehendingly, with shredded chicken feathers dusting the ground of their new home in the yard of a nunnery. They looked miserable and out of place, but I doubt they would have looked any more healthy had a photo been taken of them in the den.

The library closed at 8 p.m. every night. It was a time I'd dread, as I had to go back out into the streets, hail a cab, and get back to the boat. I'd get back and sit up with my phone on the balcony overlooking the garden on the bank and prepare to spend my evening dialing and redialing with a supply of international phone cards, trying to get through to Suhail, who just never seemed to be in his apartment.

Sometimes I'd get so lonely I actually resorted to calling my parents. Baba was always in a
majlis
somewhere full of loud men. He pressured me to pray and start wearing
hijab
. He had never been pushy before, but he told me about a new sheikh who had come to town and was helping him get back to the “original” Islam. I evaded answering his questions about the particulars of my living situation, and when I brought up the possibility of going to New York City he always offered the same chant of discouragement, “Qatar is your home. Your family are here. This is where you belong.” I knew the only reason he said this was because he was more afraid of New York than he was of Cairo. Sure, in comparison to the Gulf it was dangerous and dirty, but that's what I wanted.

Ma, on the other hand, didn't want to hear anything about Egypt or my living situation. Instead she wanted to talk about September 11. “Honey, you don't know what nine-one-one was like here,” she said, voice almost cracking with the media-stirred emotion. Where once the glittering green of air raids over Baghdad had filled her with undue anxiety for Baba, now she was howling in the light of the rocket's red glare. I could follow the changing lexicon and vocabulary of U.S. television news in our increasingly strained conversations. How unlike my independent-thinking, hypercritical mother this was. At some point I stopped calling them. I was as alienated from my mother's newfound patriotism as I was from my father's new conservative streak. But if these conversations threw the distance between my mother, father, and me into sharp relief, the lack of communication with Suhail made me feel even further adrift.

It was on an evening in the spring as I sat out trying to call Suhail that a person I'd never seen before stepped into the gate off the street. Judging by the Vans on his feet and the serious headphones haloing his head, I guessed he was an American. His arms were covered with scars and branding, and the tip of a large tattoo peeked out of the neck of his shirt. Despite all the attention-grabbing body modification, his eyes were the most striking thing about him. They flickered back and forth without ever looking away. When they settled on me, feet up on the rail, scratched out phone cards scattered around me like fallen leaves, I had the feeling he was rapid-scanning everything about me. The wailing started again up the river a ways, a haunting noise rising from behind the black silhouette of palm trees.

His name was Si, and as I had guessed, he was from America, a little town called Cloudcroft, New Mexico. Like many young people disenchanted with America after September 11, Si was a recent convert to Islam. Friendship was immediate and easy between us, the kind that might only happen when two unlikely people meet way off their usual courses. He had moved in upstairs with the Egyptian boys and was in Cairo to learn Arabic so he could read Quran.

As the months wore on, I spent more and more time avoiding my own tomb-like cabin full of unsent letters to Suhail and unspent phone cards by hiding out in Si's room upstairs. He was an amazing distraction, full of gripping anecdotes about the bums, cage fighters, and rural radio DJs he had grown up with. He reminded me a lot of Joey and came from the same world of squats and railroading before he'd gone straight-edge and then Muslim. I pried from him every detail of his three-year journey hitching his way up the West Coast to Alaska while he bused tables at greasy spoons and diners. He regaled me with stories of his old girlfriends: shaved-headed hippie chicks, bottle-blond cougars, L.A. punkettes, and Detroit strippers. It sounded like a catalogue, but every woman on his list had her own love story, an elaborate drama that I listened to in awe. The concept of falling in love more than once was liberating. The idea that my identity might not be yoked up to my tribe or my father or my first love made me secretly crow with the possibilities. Maybe I didn't have to be so faithful and obsessive about the ever-receding Suhail. I remembered Ma's long, lonely days in Apartment 1303, and how contagious her sadness had been. In all likelihood, I decided, Suhail had forgotten about me; now was the time to give him, or at least the idea of him, up. This is when Suhail waned further and further from me as Si and all his stories waxed brightly in the foreground.

In all the months I'd spent up at Si's apartment, hanging out in mine had ended up becoming an unspoken taboo. I felt hotly self-conscious when we finally lay together on my bed one evening watching the river run past the open windows. We'd had dinner together and I'd spilled all the lingering confusion about Suhail out in one tearful sitting.

“I'm
tired
of waiting,” I complained, hearing uncomfortable echoes of Ma's voice in my own. “It's like he's this refrigerator hum in my mind. Always there.”

I moaned at Si and flopped down on the bed like a plank.

“What if he never even comes back?”

Si lay down beside me and stroked my hair. “Just go to sleep. You'll feel better in the morning.”

But I didn't feel any better in the morning, I woke from a nightmare of drowning, gasping in the early morning light that spilled through the shutter slats. I looked over at Si, cheek smooshed against the pillow, snoring lightly. I wanted to be free of everyone's expectations, including my own. In that angry moment all I wanted was to get on with my life and to stop living in this limbo Suhail had perhaps unwittingly plunged me into. With that thought, I did something I never would have expected. Removing my clothes, I crawled back into bed with Si and I hugged him. Si smiled in his sleep and stretched. He reached his hand out to my belly and woke when he felt me naked. His expression shifted from surprise to confusion to fear back to surprise, and before he could say anything, I planted a klutzy kiss on him.

The last thing you want to think about when you're losing your virginity is your parents. But I suspect more often than not, we do imagine their judgment at that moment. I had to remind myself repeatedly that this choice had nothing to do with anybody but me. I knew that even if Suhail did come to Cairo, he would inevitably leave me again. To strip this rite of passage of its emotional tumult would mean that I was free. I bled a small, oblong heart shape onto the sheet. Afterward, Si took me to the bathroom and washed me off carefully with a rag. We sat in silence for a while listening to the nasal muezzin calling Kit Kat to prayer, and Si put his cheek on my knee and said, “Thank you.”