Request for an Extension on the Clarity

Sofia Samatar

Dear X,

I am writing to request an extension on the Clarity. I would like my term extended for twenty years. I’ve received two other extensions—one for two years and one for ten—but I’ve never managed to get a twenty-year term.

I’ve decided to contact you directly instead of going through my supervisor, in the hope that, once you’ve heard my reasons, you will grant my request.

Now you’re thinking: well, this is unconventional! Keep in mind that you have not hired me to do a conventional job. You have hired me to live almost alone and I live almost alone and my work is excellent. The Clarity has run for thirteen years without a pause. She is my boat and my cottage and my cocoon. Cocoon is not the right word. Coconut? Coffin? That was a joke.

Dear X, I wish I could see you. I wish I knew your name. But you are veiled in the obscurity of the highest rung of the Program. So I make do, despite my disadvantages, despite the fact that I know nothing about you while you know everything about me.

 

Tap the screen. Look at me. Here is what you will see:

One subject, female, black, 41 years of age.

Height 1.75 m, weight 62 kg.

Subject wears orange.

Subject stretches, eats, performs equipment check, plays with cats.

Subject feeds cats.

Subject reads, writes, eats, evacuates, showers, stretches, performs equipment check.

Subject waters terrarium.

Subject sleeps.

Earth outside the window, sweetly curved. The stratosphere like cream.

 

Do you really know everything about me? What do you read in these fingers tapping, the pause for a neck-rub, the clearing of the throat? What do you read in the stars? Did you know that God is a potter? Our moon is a pot encircled with white copper. God turns it one quarter at a time.

You might hear me whisper: “Potter, copper, quarter.” This is normal. Solitary people grow sensitive to the rhythms of language.

God’s name is Amma. As I perform the daily equipment check, you might hear me murmur: “Amma. Om. Home.”

 

I know, of course, that God did not make the Clarity. Humans made her to receive transmissions from our distant ships. The Clarity circles the earth like a small bright moon. Inside, I keep her healthy, monitor her functions, sometimes send out a request for parts. The parts are sent up in a pod with my food and supplies. A low chime sounds when it connects, and the cats prick up their ears and mew. My tabby cats, Crick and Crack. When I open the door and climb down to open the pod, they crowd against me, they want to jump down inside. “Get out, get back!” I say. They know there are treats in the pod: liver flavor, their favorite. I haul everything up. “Santa’s here!” I tell them. The cats spool around me, beside themselves. We open everything at once. There’s a mess on the floor, boxes everywhere. I am singing.

Singing inside this moon. This copper pot.

Dear X, I am never lonely. That’s why I’m perfect for this job. I heard all about the loneliness when I was in training: workers screaming, scratching themselves, even hurting the cats that were put there to keep them company. People talked about loneliness as if it were something alive and it could get you. But loneliness is something dead, it’s deadness. Lonely people are slowly dying people. SO ALONE WISH I WAS DEAD, I once wrote in a notebook, but it wasn’t true. I wished I was alive.

 

The opposite of loneliness: Nommo. Nommo are two things, two beings, a pair, the offspring of Amma and the Earth. You can say “Nommo is” or “Nommo are.” Nommo is water and copper. Their enemy is the jackal. Their number is eight.

 

I know this because I read it in a book.

When I was in college, I took every class about Africa they had. Anthropology, history, art. In those classes I used to feel more alive, but also a little bit shy and strange, as if I were spying on my parents. I read about the Dogon of Mali, who deduced the existence of Sirius B. I read about Nommo, who multiplied until they were eight. After spending eons in the celestial regions, they returned to earth in a flying granary powered by the sun.

The seventh Nommo is a woman spinning.

A man wrote a book proposing that the Dogon had been visited by aliens from outer space. How else could they have known about Sirius B? How did they know that its orbital period is fifty years? How did they know to call it “the heaviest star”? I read this man’s book and I read other books. I read that the Dogon had discovered the atom. I read that the ancient Egyptians knew about DNA. These are not books you quote in your papers for college. You read them in corners, on buses, balanced on the bars of an exercise bike. These books bear stains of sweat and coffee-mug rings. They are gray and musty, you find them in junk shops, hostels, old people’s basements, the bedrooms of people pretending to be artists, you download them from garish websites flanked by pictures of flashing dashikis, riddled with pop-up windows that set off your anti-virus software. THREAT DETECTED. The files print out strangely, a torrent of different fonts. Sometimes twenty or thirty blank pages in the middle. The tone of these works is insistent, hectoring, relentlessly positive, the narrative voice part preacher, part poet, part emcee. BROTHERS AND SISTERS I WILL INITIATE YOU INTO THE MYSTERIES OF THE DOGON A TRIBE OF BLACK PHILOSOPHERS CHARGED WITH KEEPING THE SECRETS OF THE VOID. The edges of the pages are turned down, crumpled: reading them on the bus, you curl them to make sure nobody sees the print.

The curving pages make a private space. It’s a space of adventure, shameless bravado, sumptuous paranoia. WE WERE ALL KINGS AND QUEENS UNTIL THE WHITE MAN CUT US DOWN MY BROTHERS AND SISTERS! HE ENVIED OUR SKIN LIKE SATIN AND OUR HAIR LIKE LAMBSWOOL! Do you understand, dear X, that it is possible to regard such words as nonsense, and also to discover in them a source of strange, life-giving energy? To shove the pages into your backpack, to get off the bus at the college feeling somehow tougher—not freer, not taller, but more tenacious.

 

Nommo are human beings from the waist up, serpents from the waist down. Their eyes are red, and their bodies are covered with short green hair. Nommo have forked tongues. Their speech is a vapor that makes a sound. Like Nommo, all beings are double. Crick/Crack. All except the jackal.

 

Do I sometimes fear that I am the jackal? Of course, dear X, of course. SO ALONE WISH I WAS DEAD, I wrote that afternoon. I had just given a presentation in my college class. On the way back to my dorm a brightness, searing. Dead squirrel in the snow.

But I don’t wish I was dead. Not anymore. And, as you can see from my profile, I never really did. There was never a “plan.” It was more that I didn’t want to bother with living, I didn’t wish to take steps of any kind. Most of all, I didn’t want to fight with anyone. So I got out of bed when the resident assistant told me I really had to, and I went to the doctor like she said, and the doctor said “Tell me why you won’t get up”, and I said “I did get up, I came here,” and he gave me some pills, and I took the pills at the right time every day and went to class and walked back to the dorm in a fog and did homework until I fell asleep at the table, and I woke up and got some water and went to the bathroom and ate some crackers and went to class again. I graduated with honors.

That’s one of the reasons I’m supposed to desire something more than maintenance work on the Clarity: I am supposed to be too smart. Most people with my gifts, I am told, are ambitious. When I was in training, they called maintenance work the Bridge: it was just a step toward something better. My family can’t understand why I keep doing this job. My mother says: “You should be out of there by now. You’ve paid your dues.” She complains: “You’re just going in circles.” And my father, who once sneered at my supposed ambition—“Sure, go to space, never mind the rest of us suffering on earth!”—my father says, “Come back.”

 

“Come back to us. Come home.”

But where is home? Look, I’m in college, giving a class presentation. I stand up and say: Anthropology. I talk about the loss of African voices under this other, louder voice, the voice of the anthropologists. My professor is an anthropologist, a white man. He says I have been too dismissive, too quick, I have failed to consider what anthropology saved. He tells me that there are many things Africans themselves only know about their cultures because they have read about them in books.

My professor has been to Africa. I have not.

In Africa, my professor takes pictures. He takes pictures of some wooden stakes on a beach. Prisoners were once tied to these stakes and shot. My professor takes pictures of a castle made from bricks that arrived as ballast on the slave ships.

When the aliens appeared to Sun Ra, they told him to drop out of college.

THREAT DETECTED.

After my class presentation I walk to my dorm in the snow. A squirrel has been hit by a car. I stop, my boot almost touching the body. Snow falls, masking the blood. I stand there for a long time.

 

In Africa, my professor takes pictures of schoolchildren with ringworm. He takes pictures of passengers on the roofs of buses. When he shows the ringworm pictures in class, everyone tsks sadly. When he shows the bus pictures, everybody laughs.

Years later, I go to Africa, too. The word “Sudan” comes from Bilad al-Sudan, which means “The Lands of the Blacks.” I go to the lands of the blacks. In markets, people try to sell me masks and malachite beads. I pretend I’m not frightened on the buses. The idea is to avoid the good hotels, to look for the worst hotels you can find, so as not to be too American. In Nairobi, I am sick. I drink at the Gypsy Bar, where the foreign journalists go. I am American. I am lonely.

I don’t take enough pictures. When I get home everyone will say, But where are the pictures?

I try to bring back tastes. Goat meat, coffee with cardamom. Home again, I spend lots of time talking about the food. The taste of fresh mangoes, you can’t believe it! I sound like anyone.

In Alexandria, some boys on a balcony shout down at me: Monkey! I am American but not American enough.

I am sick in Alexandria. A pharmacist gives me a shot. She tells me to look at the saint on the wall, a nimbus of gold under oily glass. There, says the pharmacist, finished. She pats my arm, a superfluous tenderness, she says, it’s ok now, why are you crying?

Homeless. At the Ramses Hotel nobody asks for my passport. They think I’m there to carry the white tourists’ bags.

Well, I thought, if I can’t go home, maybe I can leave. And I trained with the Program only to become, as my mother says bitterly, a kind of extraterrestrial janitor.

 

But just think: I’m always visible from somewhere. I’m a star!

That was a joke.

After I make it through training, there’s so much happiness. Our daughter is AN ASTRONAUT! Even my father gives me a grudging hug and says: “Well done.” My mother’s so giddy she makes four kinds of pie. Later, at the end of my first extension, she makes her pies again. At last I am going to do something with my life. When I tell them I’ve extended my term for another decade, my mother throws a whole key lime pie in the trash.

I am an astronaut, but not astronaut enough. I’m never photographed. I’ll never be famous. I don’t explore. I’m too close to home.

Home: a cloudy brilliance, a nimbus of gold under oily glass. It looks so fragile out there, a soap-bubble breathed by God.

 

The seventh Nommo spun the thread to guide the celestial granary to earth. Where the craft landed, it created a pool of water. Nommo descended into the water, which is their element. In their vaporous tongue, they began to speak of mathematics.

 

Dear X, if I had twenty years here I would write a book. I’d like to write a book called The History of the Circle. In this book there would be people who went from Africa to the Americas and then back to Africa and then back to the Americas. There would be a girl who treaded water and almost drowned. For her, the sun would rise like a round white pill. This girl would have a twin somewhere, although she would not know where. Everyone in the book would have a twin.

Tap your screen. Watch me perform the ritual of the Clarity. Click hum, press hum. These days I can do it almost like a dance. The monitor records the action—Subject performs equipment check—but cannot grasp the meaning that fills each gesture. I dance the pull of gravity, the steady embrace of home. The cats sit and watch, paws crossed, like pieces of Egyptian statuary. My jade and jasper familiars. I bend down, I stand. Click hum. Lights spin around me, signs that everything is well. The Clarity is alive and so am I. I turn and turn again, not dead, not sick, not a jackal and not alone. We are twins, the Clarity and I. We are going around the earth. At this distance, everything’s clear. I know where I’m from.

 

When I returned to the U.S. from Africa, I took the airport shuttle to the train station, and there a man came up to me. He thrust his wrinkled face into mine. “SISTER! HOLD ON, SISTER!” Did he recognize me somehow: my huge backpack, my torn jeans, my traveler’s stink? For a long time I thought he knew me for one of his own, and the thought terrified me. When I was in training I’d wake from dreams of him, heart pounding. His clumped white hair, the impossibly tattered pamphlet in his hand, against the wall his nest of blankets, his cardboard bed. Homeless, he’s homeless. He sleeps here in the vastness of the station, among the booming announcements, the unrelenting light. “SISTER! HOLD ON, SISTER! I’M HERE TO TELL YOU ABOUT AFRICAAAAA, AFRICAAAAA LAND OF PROPHETS LAND OF GOLD.” “I’ve just come back from there,” I say quickly, trying to get rid of him, but it doesn’t work, he doesn’t hear me, not because my voice is too small, but because his Africa, this AFRICAAAAA of the long melancholy falling note, exists on a different plane from the place I have been. There can be no communication between the Gypsy Bar in Nairobi and this AFRICAAAAA of the gleaming palaces built from blocks of salt, where men and women in indigo robes walk slowly up and down the steps, carrying scrolls that map the farthest stars. “WE WERE NOBLE SISTER IN AFRICAAAAA WE WERE RICH SISTER IN AFRICAAAAA WE HAD KNOWLEDGE THAT WOULD MAKE THESE UNIVERSITIES TODAY LOOK LIKE A KINDERGARTEN! I WANT TO GIVE YOU THAT KNOWLEDGE,” he bellows, pushing his pamphlet into my hand, this wad that looks dredged up from the bottom of a lake, this disintegrating book. “I DON’T WANT MONEY,” he adds, because I’m trying to give him a dollar, I’ll do anything to get away, I’m nodding at everything he says. But he takes the dollar. And I take the book. “GO IN PEACE AND POWER,” he yells at my retreating backpack. Rumbling and shrieking around us, the trains.

 

I never opened that book on planet Earth. But I brought it with me here, to the Clarity, along with all the old print-outs that helped me survive college, the embarrassing paperbacks with the cheap, ugly covers. The pamphlet from the man in the station has been written out by hand in ballpoint pen. Inside—well, of course there’s no astounding revelation, dear X, what did you think? There’s a circular argument, rambling, ranting, outrageous. It’s just what you’d expect. Here on the Clarity, it’s my research. It’s a book you can only understand from space.

 

Sometimes at night I wake up and feel so light, so light, my shadow buoyant under me. No, I will not be the one to discover life beyond earth. But perhaps I will be the spinner, or the thread that guides them home.

 

Please consider my request for an extension.