other|matters

The earth rests in a net of grey-blue lines, suspended like the yolk of an egg. I pause the video to study its shape. It is lonely and perfect. Whole. I am not used to this view.

It took the Air Force to produce this picture. Reading the Washington Post online, a stray click brought me here, to Air Force Cyber Command. I think of moving away from the site, but find myself curiously stuck. I remember my father. Physically, I am surely his daughter. I am tall like he, and our eyes have the same shape. We are pale, with dark(er than my mother’s) hair. I am the same weight as his mother was before the war. Both of them were slender in those days.

My father (Air Force) and his father (Air Force) and my mother’s father (Army) were all veterans. The women in my family always teach. The men in my family always go to war. I cannot help, as I look at screen, imagining that I am one of them.

I pretend that I am flying. I course through the black sky, at a rate exceeding the speed of sound. I whisper a greeting to Boston, but my words fall behind. The bird moves beyond the realm of the syllabic.

It is this view of the earth, from above, that I want. I try to pull myself away. This is a marketing video, I say to my heart. The Air Force is trying to make this attractive to you, because its leaders perceive benefit for themselves. They show you the world like an egg in soup for the same reason that restaurants show you photographs of plastic food. They are trying to make you hungry.

I press play on the video program. “Do you believe in Cyber War?” a disembodied voice asks. The image on the screen changes. Dark-haired people of uncertain origin wail. Their images multiply. Here are men with guns. There, a woman sitting. Crowds lobby around a burning car. We face, the headless voice says, new, uncertain foes. The danger could be anywhere.

I cringe. Enough. Whatever benefit there may have been in this site for me is passed. In a click, the browser is gone. I am left with an open desktop, with just a black and white picture of the Western Hajars. In it, one can see shadows of faraway peaks through a dusty sky. Even so, from this height, the world’s roundness is lost. By comparison to the Air Force globe, surrounded by space, my photograph is flat.

The bones under my eyes ache. When will I get to soar around the world again? “What of your parents?” asks my heart. “Except for the war, they have never left the States. They are content with where they are. Why can’t you be, too?” The taste in my mouth, remembering home, is like sucking on pennies.

I lived in Iowa when the farm economy collapsed. Even my Grandma McCallum, the definition of grace, would swear when she spoke of the Reagan years. In ‘83, our corn rotted. My uncles became sharecroppers for Pioneer. Other farmers out by Clear Lake turned their reserves of fertilizer to meth. By the end of 1984, my family lost its last farm. Fresh food disappeared then: no more juice, home bottled, pink with floating grapes. No more tomatoes sliced with cream. One food group at a time, we became culinary migrants. The government started to bring us white butter and cheese.

Then my mother, my sisters and I were hired to pick raspberries at Carole Tetmeyer’s house. She was our ballet teacher: a solid, graceful woman in her forties, with two grown daughters and a high-schooler. Her house was set back from the road along the highway to Ankeny, on acres and acres of green. I loved Carole and her wrap-around pink sweater. I loved her ballet slippers, so much bigger than ours, and the sound they made tapping the floor.

Raspberries grow between thorns. We wore long, old white Oxfords and faded jeans. The brambles left white scratches on my arms, even through the shirt. The air was thick with the kind of muggy heat that can only be found in a land of rivers. Sweat bees and black flies scared off the mosquitoes. We wore hats, under which my ears throbbed.

Sometimes, when we picked the raspberries, we ate them. In this manner, we enjoyed fruit. At noon, if Carole were not at home, we would swim in her pool. It was a large round thing, with plastic sides, perhaps six feet deep. I sat at the top of its slide, looking down at the water. My skin itched as the chlorine dried, and my bug bites swelled up pink. The scratches smarted up and down my arms. I stopped loving Carole then.

We stopped at the second-run bakery on the way back to Des Moines. There Mom bought bread for home, and tiny Korean animal biscuits for us. Nothing was spoiled and nothing was stale, but nothing was quite right.

Our meat was a different story.

The winter I was eight, driving back from Grandma and Grandpa’s house on Christmas Eve, my parents hit a deer. The front left side of the car caved in. When they pulled over, Lucky ran out. They turned the car around, and drove back to Cedar Rapids. There they rang the doorbell, and Grandma got us out of bed. “Girls, Lucky’s dead,” my Mom said first. “We hit a deer, and she got out of the car when Dad went to check it out.” She paused, and her eyes were dry. “She got hit by a car, and her back was crushed.”

Sarah and Erica sucked their thumbs. I stomped to the fireplace. “What did you do to her?” Dad looked at the floor as he answered me. “She was suffering badly, Anna.” He put his hands down at his sides. “So I cut her throat.” We were silent for a few seconds, before the girls started to cry. Too mad for this just yet, I pushed my mitten closer to the fire with my toe. A spark landed on it, and burned a neat black hole through the nylon. My mother spoke again.

“Dad got the deer,” she widened her eyes. “It is strapped to the roof of the car now.” She looked at her mother. “We tried calling highway patrol, and they said they’d send someone to get it. But they were just going to throw it away. Or send it to the dog food factory.” Erica wailed into Bunky. “We can clean it at home. Dad checked and made sure it was okay to eat.” I prayed that she would not elaborate on this. She pulled her hat down tight. “We’ll freeze it.” Grandma nodded. No one spoke. “We just wanted to tell the girls,” Dad said finally. “We’ll be driving home now.” I do not remember walking them to the door.

It is an hour until Maghrib. I think about migration.

Hafsah found me after the halaqa on Sunday. “Would you want to leave the country?” she asked. I didn’t need to consider my answer. “Yes.” She looked surprised, and waited. “It’s the manners, mostly.” I found it easy to complain. “I can’t take the non-Islamic manners anymore. Especially not in my own house.” I blushed, ashamed of whining. “Astghfirullah.” Hafsah’s voice came very softly, and her eyes were full. “But, Anna….” She rubbed my arm. Her affection made my mouth ache. “It isn’t just the non-Muslims, either,” I said to floor. “Subhan Allah.”

Three days later, I decide that I feel better having told her the truth. Ya Allah, I cup my hands, make it easy for me to move someplace Muslim. Or at least someplace mixed. Ya Allah, please don’t let me be stuck. Please let me live with good Muslims, my God. I wipe my face with my palms.

My stomach rumbles again. I take dates from the box on the dresser. One by one, I strip them with my teeth. With the sugar comes patience. I try to think of what it is that makes Boston worth keeping.

I remember Saturday. Asra and I drove across the bridge into Boston, down to the new masjid. We arrived just in time to catch the tour group leaving. Thirty-five brothers and twenty sisters walked in two groups behind a guide.

From room to room we wandered, like air through the cells of a body. At last we came to a ladder, in a corner of the library. “You can go up and see the minaret,” the brother leading the tour invited.

I let Asra convince me to climb. We waited for the brothers we did not know to go ahead. After one ladder’s distance, we reached the lower roof. After two, an open expanse, crowned with a wide, round dome. There, atop the masjid, a swell of clouds burned gold and pink. The hem of my dress caught under my shoe, and for a moment I had to stand still.

In every direction, Boston unfolded. Houses gave way to colleges, and the streets to the Riverway. Downtown was tiny under the sun. Mission Hill, crowned with trees, ran along a thunderhead’s edge. Behind me, down Columbus, spilled a bubble bath of clouds.

The vastness of the perspective would have induced a feeling of falling had it not been for the place from which I took my stand. I have never, ever, atop a roof, felt as safe as I did just then. As the lightning began, I climbed back down. Time to eat and to pray.