Throwing Stones on Google Earth

At this very moment, a corporate imaging satellite is circling Earth in Orwellian orbit, spying the surface and publishing our photos in the grandest of larceny. We fall from Sputnik onto our own roofs, spot our cars, twist our bodies and spread our arms to catch the wind like wounded birds, pull back on air and howl recklessly in screaming descent to the safety of swimming pool suburban splashdowns.

If I looked better in black, I’d vote anarchist. But I like the way Google Earth makes the world feel smaller. I plot fantastically on the White House, hunt nukes in North Korea and prowl African plains in successive instants, grip Sumatra with Mickey Mouse kid gloves, spin the globe East, sail back to Denver and hover over my girlfriend’s apartment. If I had money, an ill-fated illusion I’m only now coming to terms with, I’d upgrade my membership to this planetary community, low angle a live shot and peer through her window to see if my clothes still pile the floor. As a freeloader, though, the picture simply goes flat in an awkward reminder that intimacy comes only to those willing to pay the cost. For now, I’m contented to know that I’m as far from home as I can get, drinking a beer with my friend Faraj in a Palestinian refugee camp.

Unlike me, Faraj didn’t choose Balata Camp. He came with his family from their own camp in Jordan just as the Intifada broke out. At a rally against the newly erected and now infamous Huwarra checkpoint, he bought his residency with a bullet to the hip and the legitimacy that blood on the street affords the foreign. A year and a half later, he was in an Israeli prison for harboring wanted men. Now, desperate to return home to his family, he’s stranded, a secret evidence security risk. Out of one prison and into another.

His friends call him Urdani, (Jordanian) and though he’s Palestinian through and through, I call him Ajnabi. It means ‘foreigner,’ and though it’s not intrinsically derogatory, there remains something harmlessly disparaging to be consistently addressed as an outsider. I would know.

Like a lot of the foreign volunteers here, I find myself embroiled in ceaseless effort to fit in and shed my strangeness. I smoke local cigarettes in harsh quantities and burn successive pots of Arabic coffee, an acquired art for which I have an obvious learning disability. I like that Faraj tells me straight when I’ve blown another attempt. I appreciate his teasing and the look on his face that assures me that although I am still ajnabi, in his flat, that’s a good thing.

Technically, you’re never really alone in a West Bank refugee camp. Twenty-five thousand people share a single square kilometer of cinder block oblivion. Narrow alleys jag across each other, kids pause marbles to pelt strangers in playful trauma, clothes drip from Little Italy’s memory and garbage smolders in the blank spots. It’s an incongruous sort of loneliness to wander the crowd without your friends, your shows, your jokes.

My speech becomes a silly aberration of subconsciously broken grammar. It’s the next best thing to actual Arabic, but regression nonetheless. "I live here since before three months," and so forth, peppered with ‘yanis’ in place of the ums… and proven phrases like Esh Ekbeer! (What’s up big guy!) These make people laugh, but I don’t have to do that with Faraj; he gets it. He gets me. There’s a reason the foreigners find him. We make him happy. Maybe we remind each other of home. But we leave, as foreigners do, one by one, uncertain if we will be blessed Israel’s permission to return. “I become don’t care,” Faraj says. He’s grown used to being left behind by friends, many forever, one by one. Our friends from California look at him, puzzled, and I laugh because to me, he makes perfect sense.

When I start to sleep through the gunfight nights and my dreams turn to television and Chinese food, I turn to my good friend Google Earth. Faraj and I spin the planet and look for his mother’s home, buried in a camp four times Balata’s size, somewhere near the airport between Amman and Zarqa. After seven years, it takes a few minutes to find his way back. He missed his sister’s wedding. He missed a lot of things.

We sail together over the Atlantic, to Colorado, to my mother’s home in Highlands Ranch, where white flights flourish and transplanted trees struggle through foreign soil. Manicured streets wind snaking in successive half circles toward a cul-de-sac at the bottom of the hill. As we fall from heaven toward suburbia, I brace for gasping disbelief at the size of our house. A British girlfriend toured our mansion once, sickened by splendor and awed by a garage door that lifted in magical intuition upon our arrival. Faraj was strangely comfortable with its appearance.

“They’re all in a circle, man. Like big family.” I admitted that of the seven houses within earshot of my mother’s home, I new the name of only one person, Max, the black guy, our own ajnabi. “The houses are so close together,” he said.

“Faraj, you’re a Palestinian. You’re telling me our houses are too close together?” He laughed. “You know,” I said, “people that live in glass refugee camps shouldn’t throw stones.”