Guapa Read online

  I had thought that by setting foot in America I would immediately transform into someone else, like one of those people on television, and I was saddened by the realization that I was still the same person here as I was back home.

  I dropped my suitcase on the bare mattress and called Teta. Her voice seemed far away, it was as if she was speaking to me from another world.

  “Hamdullah, Teta, the trip was very smooth, very easy … The subway wasn’t too expensive … No, I didn’t have to bargain, they have the prices on the wall … Yes, it’s very organized, you know there’s even a shuttle bus from the airport that’s free if you show them your boarding pass, and as soon as I arrived at the university I registered and they gave me the keys … No, just a deposit … Yes, it’s fine, I paid with the cash you gave me … They gave me a receipt, yes … Of course, first thing tomorrow I will go buy a good coat, I promise … My room is very nice, I have everything I could want really … a bed and a desk and a closet with coat hangers … There’s a lightbulb … I’m very excited.”

  There was a silence.

  “The apartment feels very empty,” Teta whispered.

  The tears came and there was nothing I could do about it. “I want to come back,” I sobbed into the phone.

  “Be a man, Rasa. Don’t you want to make your father proud?”

  Yes, yes, I did. But in coming to America I had another goal in mind: to explore this unknown world of gayness, to observe it and try it on for size and see if it really was for me. I had arrived in America as me, but I was determined to transform into something better, like someone from the television, and in that first week I studied and observed this new world: the girls in tiny shorts parading down leafy streets, punks with piercings and tattoos and rainbow-colored hair checking out dusty vinyl records in secondhand shops, burly frat boys drinking gallons of beer on couches perched on front yards, with barbecue grills so large they could cook a human body. I studied the rules, customs, organization, precision, I observed with a degree of excited trepidation the gluttonous celebration that existed within it all, and as soon as I could I bought myself a George Michael poster and hung it above my bed to remind me of the real reason I was here.

  The money Baba had left us was enough to get me to America but not enough to keep me there, so my first objective was to get a job. The university library was hiring, so the day before school began I walked into the large, menacing limestone building and handed my application to the head librarian, a bald man with a beach-ball belly.

  “You don’t have any previous work experience,” he said as his eyes scanned my application. “No work in high school?”

  I shook my head.

  He looked up from my application and pursed his lips. “You’re foreign aren’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “Well … we do have a quota to fill …”

  The next morning I found myself in the basement, two floors underground, shelving volumes of art history journals dating back to the late nineteenth century. The job was menial but required concentration. The head librarian had warned that a misplaced volume might never be found again, and the fear of forever losing something so old, weighted with history and memory, meant that I took longer than most to shelve the stacks of books. The bookshelves in the basement, particularly the old and disused periodical shelves, were so dusty I had to take regular breaks to wash my hands and eyes. Occasionally I flipped through them, feeling their brittle pages worn down by the years and the students who had consumed their knowledge.

  I emerged from the library by midafternoon as if from a deep tomb. I squinted in the sunlight. The campus was deserted. I walked to my afternoon class as a peculiar disquiet settled around me. The class was empty. On the chalkboard someone had scribbled a note in white chalk.

  DUE TO TODAY’S EVENTS THIS AFTERNOON’S CLASS HAS BEEN CANCELED

  I walked across the empty campus back to my dorm, my mind deep in thought about whether I would have the courage to attempt the washing machine in the basement laundry room. I was so dazed from the hours of shelving books that I nearly walked straight into the chunky girl who lived in the room next door. She had pale skin, jetblack hair, and a ring that looped through her nostrils. I could almost hear Teta whisper in my ear “Ring through the nose, like a cow.”

  “I’m sorry,” I mumbled, taking a step back. Her eyes were red and wet. “Are you okay? What happened?”

  “What do you mean what happened?” The girl sniffed. She looked at my confused face and let out a surprised guffaw. “You really don’t know what happened? Oh my God. You of all people should know.”

  Another person who lived down the hall from us, a wiry guy with black nail polish, came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her. I watched as they held each other in silence, his chin nestled in the corner of her neck, thinking to myself that I had never seen a man wear nail polish before. What would people say?

  After a few minutes they were still holding each other. I became bored so I headed toward the common room. A crowd had gathered around the television watching the news. Footage of smoke and fire, only a few seconds long but shown on a loop. I watched it about six or seven times. No one spoke. I went into my room and phoned Teta.

  “Maybe you should come back,” she suggested softly, her voice faraway and afraid.

  “Why would I come back?”

  There was a knock on my door. A girl popped her head into my room. She had long blond hair like in the movies.

  “I’m collecting blood donations for the victims of the attacks. Would you be up for donating blood?” she garbled through her braces.

  “No,” I said. She flashed me an awkward smile and shut the door behind her.

  “What are you doing?” Teta screamed from the other side of the phone. “Make up an excuse if you don’t want to donate! Don’t just say no! They’ll think you’re a terrorist.”

  “People here aren’t like that.”

  Another knock on my door. It was the girl again.

  “Look,” she said, “I just want you to know that no one blames you for what happened.”

  Unsure how to respond, I nodded and thanked her. She gave an apologetic smile and left.

  “Listen to me, boy,” Teta said on the line. “If you feel something is not right you come back immediately, okay?”

  “What do you mean ‘not right’?” I asked. Everything felt not right.

  I did not leave my room for the rest of the day. That night I dreamed the police came to get me. I heard the sirens blaring through my bedroom window, the flashing red-and-blue floodlights lighting up my dark room. The girl with the blond hair and braces flung open the door and pointed to my cowering figure in bed. “That’s the one,” she cackled, her silver teeth like knives in her mouth. Policemen with large machine guns burst through the door and dragged me away. They threw me in a giant barbecue in the front yard of one of the frat houses. The hot coals burned my skin. Frat boys surrounded the barbecue. They watched me burn and chanted the college football anthem as they cheered one another with red plastic cups full of beer.

  In the morning I woke up with a fever. I stumbled to the dining hall for breakfast, my bones aching. The mood in the hall was somber, the few people who were there walked like zombies through the hall. Avoiding eye contact, I grabbed a green tray and headed toward the food shimmering under the halogen lights. Limp fried cubes of potato, sickly yellow scrambled eggs, oily pink bacon. My stomach lurched. I dropped my tray and scurried back to bed.

  I woke up in the late afternoon with a pounding headache. My forehead was still burning but I did not want to go to the doctor. Instead I headed to the campus pharmacy and walked through the aisles aimlessly, not recognizing the packaging of all the products, a million options for the same thing. I turned to the cashier, a pasty-skinned man with a pencil mustache.

  “Do you sell any antibiotics?” I struggled to get the words out.

  “You’ll need a prescription for that,” he said, not looking up
from the crossword puzzle he was doing.

  “Do you have any medicine?” I asked. “I’ve got a fever, sore throat, headache …”

  He sighed, reached behind the counter, and dropped a series of different-colored boxes in front of me. Without looking at them I bought them all, spending two weeks of my allowance, but it was worth it to not be in there one more moment trying to choose between thousands of products all claiming to address the same ailments. I returned to my room and swallowed a combination of the pills and went back to bed, only to wake up an hour later and vomit it all.

  The next morning, feeling even worse, I finally went to the campus clinic.

  “You have the flu,” the nurse said. “Go back home and get some rest, honey.”

  “What flu?”

  “The flu.”

  “Is it serious?”

  “Get some rest and drink lots of fluids. If you’re not better in a couple of days come back and see me.”

  “Listen,” I rubbed my face. This was a terrible dream I was in. “I’ve never felt this bad in my life. I think I’m dying. If you’ll just prescribe me some antibiotics —”

  “You don’t get antibiotics for the flu.” She chuckled, drawing out each syllable in the word antibiotics. “Besides, we don’t just hand them out willy-nilly. Humans will build a resistance to them and soon we’ll need truckloads of that stuff to cure a paper cut.”

  “But I’m sick now,” I said. This was not the time for a biology lesson. “I’m not asking you for willy-nilly, I’m only asking for one prescription for a few days.”

  “If you’re not feeling better in a few days, come back. Bye.”

  She was right of course, and after sweating through my first experience of the American flu, I emerged from my room fully recovered three days later. Stepping into the cafeteria for breakfast, the eyes of the other students followed me as I piled food on my plate. Something was different.

  Over the next few weeks there were rumors of Arabs and Muslims being taken away for questioning and then deported. Headlines appeared in campus newspapers, stories of Muslims chased off campus by rowdy students. I looked at my dark skin, watched the worried glances whenever I rolled the r in my name during class. For so long I had felt different from everyone else. Now I was lumped together with an anonymous mass. An Arab. A Muslim. I was one of “them.”

  “You’re from the Middle East? Super jealous,” remarked a girl in one of my classes. “Your life must have been so interesting.”

  “It wasn’t, really.”

  “I grew up in Ohio,” she said by way of explanation. “We don’t have war and politics and all that stuff. Where you grew up must have been ten times more interesting than where I grew up.”

  Those first three months in America I did nothing more than go straight to class and then straight back home. On some days I worked shifts in the library shelving books, and in the evenings I tried to make sense of how others reacted to me. I began to understand events in my life as plot points in a narrative of war and oppression, painted across my history with the brushstrokes of innocently asked questions and pointed statements. Why do you force women to wear the hijab? Why is your culture consumed with hate? Why do you produce terrorists? Do you wear Jesus sandals? Why? Was it an Islam thing? Was it because you didn’t have freedom or was it because you hated freedom? And why did you hate women so much? Why did you do this to us, they asked. Why do you hate us, they lamented. Why why why?

  Like piranhas in the water the questions picked me apart, picked “us” apart. In the evenings, exhausted with these questions, I sat in front of the television in the common room and watched pundits scream at one another as they discussed my home in ways I had never heard of, as if squabbling over puzzle pieces while looking at the wrong picture.

  Oftentimes I would not be able to handle the television for very long, choosing to pace my tiny dorm room as fuzzy thoughts somersaulted in my head like the linty tumble dryers in the basement. I was terrified to set foot outside lest someone ask one of their questions. I tiptoed everywhere, lost in my thoughts. This Arabness. This Muslimness. This was all new. A new marker of difference. A “thing” I had been my whole life. A thing to which I had previously not given a second thought. But this was not just any old thing. No. This was a thing that killed and maimed and destroyed. I was no longer someone with thoughts and dreams and secrets. I was the by-product of an oppressive culture, an ambassador of a people at war with civilization.

  I had come to America preparing myself to be like a character on those television shows. I was going to be Blossom’s best buddy. I was going to have a coffee-shop gang like in Friends. More than that, America was going to offer me the space to examine myself in something clearer than the foggy mirrors in Teta’s bathroom. At the very least, I had hoped America would give me the space to set free the birds in the cage in my mind, to sift through the memories of taxi drivers and POLSKASAT images that I had been diligently filing away. But I was instead confronted with something completely new: my Arabness. I wanted to scrub my skin off, my name off, my accent off, anything to deflect the suspicious looks.

  The secret cage in my mind remained locked. I watched as men held hands on campus and students discussed their sexual escapades with ease, and felt even farther away from them than I had felt when I was a young boy watching George Michael on television.

  Stuck in my head, I paced around my tiny room, listening to the drunken laughter of the other students in the halls outside. I thought about my life, digging through my roots to understand the way my branches grew. My Arabness, this new identity foisted upon me. Was that also kept hidden from me, like my father’s death and the whereabouts of my mother? Was there more to being Muslim than I had been told?

  One evening, walking home from the library, I passed a homeless man sitting on a corner. The man was dressed in black jeans and a dark blue hoodie. He had long, straggly black hair and an unkempt beard.

  “Got any spare change, buddy?” the guy asked.

  I reached into my pocket and handed him a few dollars.

  “Bless you, my man.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said, beginning to walk away.

  “Where’s your accent from?” the man called out.

  “Not from here,” I said.

  “Hey, hey, I get it. We’re on the same dance floor, baby.”

  On the rest of the walk home I thought hard about the differences between home and America. One of the most obvious ones was that at home I spent months visiting and revisiting the video store down the road from Teta’s house, checking to see if pirated copies of the latest Hollywood movie had arrived. Those movies secretly filmed in a cinema far away. The shaky footage often had people getting up and walking across the screen right when the action would begin. In America, cinemas screened complete, uncensored, up-to-date movies. Instead of just reading the reviews I could actually go and watch the movie.

  Here, the television beamed the latest episodes of all my favorite shows straight into our dorm’s common room. There were hundreds of channels, with clear schedules that never changed. All the comedy shows you could dream of were only a click away. Back home I had spent countless summers fiddling with the antenna of the television set, hoping to catch a glimpse of Miss Universe competitions so that Doris and I could cheer for Miss Philippines, and even when I was lucky to have stumbled onto Omar’s games room, the episodes aired were still at least six months behind the real thing.

  But perhaps best of all, in America there were books. Shelves and shelves of them. Any book you could ever dream of! All at the tip of your fingers. No more begging visitors from abroad for obscure books, or obsessively scanning the four shelves of English books in the bookstore downtown.

  And it was the books that helped me understand. By the end of my first year I had read all of Amin Maalouf and Karl Marx and Partha Chatterjee and Edward Said. If America and my part-time library job gave me anything, it was the solitude to explore these texts, interrupted onl
y by the odd student looking for coursework or needing to check out a book.

  The first time I read Marx felt like the first time I watched POLSKASAT. Marx was a taboo I had heard about but never had access to, and reading his words stirred new parts of me I didn’t know existed. Reading the first lines of The Communist Manifesto, the imagery and assuredness of Marx’s voice spoke to me in a way that other authoritative texts had not.

  Maalouf spoke of identity as malleable and subject to the whims of society. According to him, an individual identified most strongly with the aspect of their identity that was under attack, and indeed in America it was not my gayness but my Arabness that was abject. Edward Said taught me how to think. His writings were compassionate and honest, patient and powerful. His words conveyed the intensity of an intellectual who had dedicated his life to speaking on behalf of the underdog and unmasking the deceptions of oppressors, like a vigilante opening the back door to a magician’s cruel tricks.

  Chatterjee made the theories of some Western writers seem like the wild ideas of a science-fiction story presenting fantasylands as if they were fact. The identity of a nation, what was that if not Western imagination exported to the colonial world? If so, what is left for us to imagine? If the students I encountered imagined a fantasy world where we hate with all our hearts and have dedicated our lives to terror, what is the alternative to such an illusion?

  In the past I had worried that with the option of being happily married denied to me I might not have a reason for living. And now, confronted with my American isolation, I felt very close to nonexistence. With no one to speak to me of familiar things, there was nothing to stop me from sinking into a bottomless well of loneliness. Yet to have come upon these powerful ideas was like having a group of mentors guiding me out of my despair.