December, 2000

Mid-December, another Saturday night Marwa wasn’t going anywhere, she was home babysitting for Joey, her parents out at a holiday party, and of course Sharif was in Alexandria with their maternal grandmother and aunts for his winter break. The phone call between New York and Alexandria, which Marwa had walked in on after school — the last day of classes before the holiday so there were no afterschool activities — all in Arabic, had sounded fast fingers on a keyboard, click-click-click. Then the sounds rounded, melting from ice into water, globules of sound she could taste in her mouth like the water in Alexandria, carrying alien, not unpleasant, minerals.

Marwa could have been at a party Judy was going to with a lot of other friends, or at a movie with Marcus Silbercoff, a classmate who wasn’t bad-looking, and Marwa did like him. It was likely that they would both be accepted as summer interns at the Brookhaven Lab on Long Island, but if they had to choose, Marwa figured Marcus would get it, and she pretty much knew she’d get the spot at Stony Brook doing genetic research because her Intel advisor was friends with the woman whose lab she’d work in.

At this point, experimental physics or genetic research was a toss up of interests for Marwa. She loved when her physics teacher called all of them Stemcell like it was a one word nickname. But Marcus could feel numbers in a way Marwa knew she didn’t. She had more of a feel for living things. She wondered if she had a feel for Marcus. She’d known right away with Prix.

In the elevator when they were alone, Prix had invited her to his apartment, “Just to see it,” he said.

Of course she had said no. But he had noticed she wasn’t wearing the hijab.

“Do you miss it?” he asked.

“I didn’t lose it,” she said.

“Hey, hey,” he put up his palms. “It was just a question. You rejected me.”

But he said it with such a smile of disbelief and disinterest, Marwa knew he didn’t really have a feeling for her. She thought she knew. She knew she didn’t have experience enough to know.

Lack of experience inevitably resulting in error had been the basis upon which she and Judy were able to stay friends. Because Judy had apologized for what she’d said about Al-Lat and Allah, Marwa had told her about Prix. It felt causal: if-then, because-therefore.

Judy had pretended to pull out her own hair as Marwa related the elevator event.

“I know he doesn’t really have a feeling for me,” Marwa said. “I think I know. I know I don’t have enough experience to know.”

“‘Twere to consider too curiously, to consider so.’”

“I’m not Hamlet,” Marwa said.

They were reading and seeing the play in AP.

And I’m not Zohra, either, Marwa thought to herself, from Mahfouz’s MIRAMAR, currently her favorite book. She was struggling to read the original her mother had given her, but she also used the translation she’d ordered online from Alibris, one of her online My Favorite tabs.

She had copied out the Arabic and then the translation of her favorite scene when the poor servant, Zohra, is offered a marriage she refuses. Translated, it read:

“The man said to Zohra, ‘You deserve to be killed!’”

And then Zohra discussed her decision with the narrator-like old man in the small hotel in Alexandria.

“Zohra said, ‘What do you really think I should do?’

‘I wish you could go back to your village.’

‘Go back to misery?’

‘I said — I wish you could — that is, go back and be happy.’”

Zohra said, “‘I love the land and the village, but I hate the misery… Here is where love is. Education. Cleanliness. And hope.’”

The problem was, Marwa knew, she was not a peasant girl from Alexandria in the ‘60’s which Marwa thought of in terms of the Beatles since Judy had these Beatles posters up in her bedroom. The problem was also that her mother had given Marwa the Mahfouz book — in Arabic — for it to have the entirely opposite effect than it had.

Instead of a party and/or a date with Marcus, Marwa was babysitting for Joey, which she enjoyed. She liked competing with her mother’s influence on Joey. Marwa was looking forward to watching the second two hours of a movie she had stumbled onto the night before when she didn’t realize it would end with that annoying cliffhanger ‘To Be Continued.’ At least they were showing the second half the next night.

The characters were up in a jumbo jet, and the world was literally disappearing behind them, in Time. They had to escape the airport in Bangor, Maine, that was being eaten up by these time-eaters called Langoliers. It was from a Stephen King story. Marwa hoped to get Joey pretending to be asleep in the bottom bunkbed..

So she tried to get him into her 4th level Sims, but he vastly preferred blowing things and people up. Joey often exploded himself from his swivel chair in mock injury, with sound effects. He launched himself off the top bunk and falling on a wide cushion perfectly positioned for his landing. Marwa found that dropping pillows on him increased his fun, which evolved into a pillow fight between them whose level of action Marwa deftly controlled. Tire him out, but don’t get him wild.

Then they built a city with blocks and wiry-magnet links that allowed for three-dimensional vehicular movement, and Joey explained to her how his city worked. Marwa interviewed him as if on TV news with “Mayor Joey”, and she loved his sober answers to her questions. Joey was doing a perfect imitation of his father and his older brother Sharif. Marwa thought he was hilarious, and Joey was delighted (though never breaking out of somber character) to impress his sister.

“And here –” Joey pointed, “is where Alexander the Great is buried.”

Marwa took the imaginary microphone back and said, “I thought he was buried somewhere in Alexandria and no one knows where exactly.”

“Oh, my archeologists found him and as a reward Alexander the Great is in my city which is the greatest city in the whole world.”

“And what is the name of your city, Mayor Joey?”

“It is JoeYork on Planet Al-Hal,” the little mayor said.

“And how many citizens live in your great city, O Mayor?”

“They are invisible citizens so it is hard to say. It varies.”

“Ah, it would have to, wouldn’t it. Let me ask you this, Mayor Joey. Why do citizens without bodies require buildings?”

Joey filled up his cheeks and turned his lips into a tight, rectum-shaped orifice (just like Sharif when he concentrated). Joey couldn’t resist the opportunity it gave him to force the air through his protruding lips with a mouth-fart.

Then Joey answered, “They honor the past by building buildings they do not need. They like to fly around in them though.” He dropped out of Mayor character and asked, “Wouldn’t they crash into each other, flying invisible?”

“Invisibly. Maybe they evolved sensors.”

“Invisibly sensors to see invisibly fliers!”

“Invisible fliers fly invisibly,” Marwa said, but it was lost upon Mayor Joey, whose arms were wings as he flew around his bedroom, attempting to bank out the door and stay up later. Marwa blocked his exit.

“I can see you,” she said, and lifted up the little boy, who leaned his head against her chest.

Joey begged one book out of Marwa, but he was asleep, thumb tightly in his now only quietly snuffling mouth, before she finished reading it. Her little brother’s nightlight was a rotating image on his computer screen.

The only TV in the apartment was in the living room’s dining L. The walls were three-quarter window, looking mostly north east. It wasn’t a good view of anything but other buildings, but her parents had traded view for three bedrooms. Marwa made herself a cup of cocoa, settled on the low, floral-upholstered couch, and clicked on the wide screen to the Sci-fi channel. The movie had a few minutes to go before starting, so Marwa muted the sound and sipped her hot chocolate and felt content.

She looked past the image-crowded screen into her Stare World, thinking about the invisible, bodiless citizens of JoeYork. What could we be, she wondered, without bodies? We quite literally are invested in them and know ourselves and the world through their changes. What utter nakedness invisibility would confer! But would naked have any meaning there?

Then Marwa’s Stare World included the unfocussed buildings out the window, and she thought: ‘Catal Huyuk’. First of all, what a great sound the two words made, like gargling and gulping. It was the name of a Stone Age city in Turkey. She’d seen a show about it on the Discovery Channel and then at their website. Catal Huyuk was the earliest known paleolithic city on planet Earth. They had this wall painting in Catal Huyuk of what looked like another city with twin volcanoes in the background.

The archeologist voiceover had explained that, as you flew over Catal Huyuk and looked north, you saw another mound site with those volcano peaks right where they were in the wall painting 100 kilometers south. So the paleo-archeologist said that the wall painting in old Catal was probably the community’s memory of where they had come from, older Azil Huyuk.

Marwa’s journey to Stare World ended as she saw the recap was finishing up; her last thought about the Huyuks, Catal and Azil, was how wonderful to live in a world beforethe existence of all the religions: Moslems, Jews, Christians, Hindu, Confucius, Buddha, Shinto … and there were some African words she knew as well. She didn’t know any South American, or Arctic. There was a time before the labels and the laws. There would be a time after. Now it was time to settle back and watch the Langoliers eat up the past.