“Isn’t this a desert—the whole country?” Hand asked, leaning over the aisle and toward me. Everywhere, squares of farmland stitched together with orange thread. That Hand didn’t know more about Morocco—that it was green, for starters—demonstrated the great gaps in knowledge that occur when one gets most of one’s information from the Internet.
“I thought so,” I said. “But the same thing happened with Houston. I always figured Houston was all dry and brown, but it’s trees in every direction, for a hundred miles.”
“We thought Senegal would be green.”
“We got it backwards. Or they did. Senegal should be green, Morocco brown.”
“It’s gorgeous down there,” Hand said.
“It really is.”
“Man, I hope we meet some Tuareg guys.”
“What guys?”
“The Tuareg? You know the Tuareg.”
“No.”
“The Tuareg? They’re the blue men?”
I wanted to throw rocks at his head.
“Tell me,” I said.
“Blue men. I think that’s what the word means. Blue men. These guys were badasses. They’re like nomadic trader-thieves, who would spring out from the Sahara and rob caravans. They were insane. Blue eyes, blue skin and everything. Scariest people ever. Twelve feet tall.”
I squinted at him, wondering how I’d get along if I ditched him in Casablanca.
“You don’t believe me?” he asked, offended. “Ask anyone in Morocco about the Tuareg. Or the blue men. Say blue men and watch them run in terror.”
* * *
A train brought us to the city. The passing country was an electric green and studded with grey jagged rock outcroppings. Crumbling stone everywhere; children dressed like medieval peasants ran along the tracks and threw rocks at dogs and each other. Shanties and tents and broken brick homes tied in place with clotheslines.
“Jesus,” said Hand. “This isn’t what I expected. I expected Tunisia, desert, that kind of thing. This looks like the Balkans.”
We watched, from our window on a passing train, one boy throw a rock at the head of another, hitting him.
“What do you think the Balkans look like?”
“This. Right? The crumbly buildings, the people with the earthtone garb, everyone walking around, the fires everywhere? This is cold-weather poverty; it looks like it was hit by tanks.”
But it was so green. Was the country as poor as it looked? On the plane we’d been afraid this was a too-middle-class sort of country, that we’d be giving money to people like us, but now, here, the women in shawls, the boys and their rocks, the tent-cities—
Hand turned to ask, in French, a young guy behind us on the train, how much longer to Casablanca.
“Where are you from?” the man asked Hand, in English.
“Chicago,” Hand answered.
“Oh Chicago! Is it very dangerous?”
I waited for the inevitable:
“Oh yes—very,” Hand said.
I laughed. Every Chicagoan uses this. The man was sitting with two friends, backs to us, who now turned.
“Smashing Pumpkins—from Chicago, right?” the man said.
“Right,” said Hand.
“I am their greatest fan! I’m in the music business. I produce rap records. French rap.”
He and Hand talked music. Apparently French rap was huge in Morocco. The greatest! said the man. Out the window the country receded and the buildings became larger, neater and more square. To the right, across the aisle, the Atlantic appeared, rough and dark, whitecaps rushing at the walls of Casablanca. To the left, the city grew in view and gleamed; the buildings, so much glass, were glowing afternoon-golden in a hazy, perfectly somnambulant Los Angeles way. We passed into the trainyard and to the right, now, within the outer corridor’s walls was a series of tents, twenty in a row, circular, fires adjoining, the hides of the tents stitched and patched.
Behind me Hand and the record company man were talking about Falco (though hadn’t he died?), and Right Said Fred, and Run-DMC, and the possibility of a comeback for one or all of them, at once or, better yet, sequentially.
“What about the Tuareg?” I asked, over the seat, interrupting them. I figured these guys were as good as any to prove Hand’s inability to leave any fact unbent, any truth unmolested. “Do they exist?”
The man’s eyes hardened. “You’re not looking for the Tuareg, are you? I must advise you to run from this mission. Is this indeed your mission?”
“Yes,” Hand whispered with urgency and intrigue. “Are they killers? I have heard word of this—they are the blue men and are slaughterers, with none of the love of humanity.”
“Well,” the man said, leaning forward, “they have been known to kill everything, anyone who sees them. No one has returned after seeing them face to face. Only rumors live. They reside in the desert, the lower Sahara, and are legion in number, and are without mercy. They are smarter than us, but stronger. Some say they are eight feet tall, and have hands with six fingers—”
Hand turned to me, smug like crazy.
“Tell me more,” he said to our new friend, while looking at me. Then he turned to the man. “Is this all true?”
“Of course not,” the man said, roaring. “I am yanking on you, stupid person!” Two of his friends were cackling. The third was not an English speaker, was just watching.
I was dying. I couldn’t believe how good this guy was. He was a monster. Hand was rolling his eyes, his tongue tight between his teeth, bobbing his head around like a marionette. “Nice,” he said. “Are you finished?”
The Moroccans were still laughing.
“Not yet?” Hand asked.
They couldn’t speak. They shook their heads. Not yet.
At the hotel’s smooth chest-level desk, mahogany and older than us, a trio of American girls, all about twenty-four. They were sighing and scoffing. There was some problem with something, many problems with all kinds of things. They could not believe they were in Morocco and there was this problem. A credit card was not being accepted. The card company had to be called and this was just the worst. Yes they would sign the fax to authorize the transferral of information, if that’s what it takes. By all means, whatever it takes to get things done around here! Next they’ll want a note, ha ha, from my mother! Things were impossible and travel so very difficult.
They were the first tourists we’d seen in Casablanca. We hated them. They had their organizers on the counter and were blowing their bangs from their foreheads. They made phone calls using the reception’s phone. They begged to be despised.
We asked the desk people, while they awaited the results of the American girls’ fax, about renting a car. Hand and I had decided that the plan would be to rent a car, from this hotel, go to the shantytown near the train station and give cash to the men in the tents, then sweep around Casablanca, eat dinner quickly, and drive to Marrakesh, getting there by midnight. Then a day in Marrakesh tomorrow, but with the idea to leave at six the next morning, for Moscow, then on to Siberia.
The hotel people were not helpful, as hard as they tried to help us. The hotel didn’t have a car-rental agency, and the two desk women didn’t understand why we wanted to drive to Marrakesh tonight. “Why tonight?” the older one asked. She was big. Next to her a smaller, thinner, younger and glowing one shot a smile to Hand and looked down. Her English was shy so she let the large one talk. The large one was large but not my type.
We tried to explain the need for us to move. Hand made motions with his hands implying lots of movement, circling, spinning. They stared at him. We borrowed their phone book. There was a Hertz listed and we called but they were closed. Outside it was already gone black and I couldn’t believe how quickly the night dropped around us. We asked if there was a train that left for Marrakesh tonight. They didn’t know; they suggested we go back to the station and find out. We were trapped.
Some don’t know, and those who do always forget that there’s electric
ity firing within us. I’m too dumb to know why it’s electricity and not some other kind of power source—why not nuclear fission on a submolecular level?—but there you have it. Electricity firing synapses, electricity triggering motions of the heart. And mine’s somehow not right. I’ve got some extra muscle there, and apparently we with WPW have an extra pathway, and while normally the signals are sent through something called the Bundle of His, our extra pathway picks up electrical impulses in the ventricles and sends them abnormally back upward to the atria. I saw a movie about it once, in Dr. Hilliard’s office, and it made sense then, but never since. I’ve come to love the idea, though, of the necessity of electricity to the heart, and its unreliability, its outages and surges. I was remembering an experiment I did when I was younger, involving an old battery and two of Tommy’s roach clips—I have no idea why I was remembering this. There’s this very old and strange payphone in the lobby of the hotel and it brought me to the battery and—
We walked out and down the street and debated.
“Do we want to stay here?” Hand asked.
Men in the next door café were watching soccer on TV. All in tweed, browns and tans, smoke above shifting like water.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Even the guys on the train recommended going to Fez or Marrakesh.”
We kept walking. Another café, more men in tweed watching soccer on TV, vague in umber smoke.
“It must be a big game,” Hand said.
“We should leave.”
“We can’t go.”
“We could go back to the airport and find something leaving.”
“But why did we come here?”
“To spend a few hours and move, right?”
“I’m exhausted.”
With great shame, we checked into the Hotel Casablanca. The room had a linoleum floor and no towels. Hand reached up to turn on the TV. There was coverage of a skiing competition in Aspen. Then:
“Holy shit. Look,” said Hand.
The race, the Paris to Dakar road rally.
“I can’t believe it—it’s on TV here.”
“Morocco. Wow.”
We watched as the SUVs cut through the Senegalese savannah at 90 mph, bouncing on their huge tires like kittens pouncing on yarn. The camera, above on a helicopter, implied that someone else was remote-controlling these cars—but who?—as they dusted through settlements and fields. But who? There were shots of villagers watching while drawing water from a well, shots of villagers crowding around a car that had lost its left rear wheel. The driver of the car was apoplectic—the camera swirls from the helicopter above, soundless, as the man tore his helmet from his head and threw it on the ground; it bounced high through the golden grass. A boy ran to pick it up.
In the room there was no soap. The room was cold. In the race, on the screen, motorcycles were flying through the desert like wasps. We were in Casablanca, and the TV hung from the corner, and Hand was standing below it, immobile, fists in his pants.
I showered and put the same clothes on, hiding cash, folding, rolling and crinkling in the same pockets and socks. We’d both been alternating our two T-shirts, and now both were unwearable. I filled the sink and lathered shampoo on my spare shirt, leaving it in the grey water. When I stepped out into the cold room, Hand still had his hands in his pants, watching the rally.
“Can you smell me?” I asked.
“From here?”
“I guess.”
“No.”
I could smell me. Not a bad smell, not yet, but a distinct one, one with something to say. On the street we looked for food. We passed a streetside butcher presenting passersby three whole cows, hanging from hooks, behind which whimpered, under glass, an array of meats and sausages, crowned by a row of small brains, perfectly intact, the color of purple popsicle juice. We walked on.
A man, squeezed into an undersized sportcoat, caught pace with us and assured us he saw us in the hotel and that he wanted to ww-wel-w-wel-elcome us to Casablanca did we l-l-li-like it. A hustler with a stutter.
We told him we liked Casablanca, but not some of the people. Some of the people, said Hand, were kind of pushy. The man agreed readily and kept with us.
Where were we g-g-g-oing? he wanted to know. I had never heard someone stutter in another language, much less stutter in his second language. It was kind of great.
To eat, we answered. “G-g-go to disco later?” he asked.
“No thanks.”
“You like the disco! Very good the disco!”
“Thanks though.”
—You have a choice, stuttering man.
—I do not.
—Then we have a choice.
He changed tactics.
“You you have to look out around here,” he said, “boys will come and grab from your pockets,” he said, and while he said this, he pulled on Hand’s pockets in a way unnecessarily graphic.
A car full of teenagers passed us yelling something lewd about the French; they thought we were French, which we didn’t know how to take. We lost the stuttering hustler and passed empty Chinese restaurants and more cafés full of men and their coffee and tweed and soccer and smoke.
We ate in a diner with a door open to the street and a TV yelling the game. Morocco vs. Egypt.
“Jesus,” said Hand. “No wonder.”
We pretended that people cared we were in the diner, but they did not. We ate some kind of chicken and rice dish we guessed at on the menu, which was printed in Arabic. The city, here, looked like Chicago’s North Side, in the oblique angles of the intersecting streets, the neighborhood bars, the homogeneity, both comforting and discomfiting. It was cool, about fifty degrees, and the food was good. We’d forgotten to eat all day and here we were. It was my first meal without my left back second molar and the vacancy was chasmic and wet and thrilling. Across the aisle from us, two boys, brothers of ten and twelve, had their mouths open, tongues bobbing, showing each other their half-chewed food.
I’ve done stucco, a little bit of it in my job, applying the goop to a bathroom or two and once in a tall hall with a ceiling of apple-cinnamon, and I pitied those who had to live within it. Why we’d want walls that broke skin when scraped—these people, of the apple-cinnamon hall, had kids!—is beyond me. But these Moroccans like their stucco, their textured wall surfaces. Everything is given some pronounced epidermis, something that comes back at you, and it was starting to get to me.
Ten blocks away we passed through a door of beads and into the darkest of bars, long and narrow, full of men and more tweed, more soccer—a kind of Moroccan sports pub. We ordered beers, small and in green bottles. Everyone was drinking from the small green bottles.
We stood and glanced at the jukebox; everything in Arabic.
“Bonjour,” said a man at a table by my waist.
I said bonjour. Next to him were nine empty green bottles, neatly arranged in two rows. I looked around and this was custom—the bottles drunk were kept and arranged, as proof.
“You are not French,” he said.
“No,” I said.
“American,” Hand said.
“Ah, AmeriCAHN,” he said, grinning. “AmeriCAHN pop music, yes yes! Eagles!” he said, then went into a credible version of the guitar part from “Hotel California.”
Hand clapped and the man smiled.
“And Pink Floyd! I like! We dunneed … no eddjoo … kayshun!” He was really going now. “Yeah! Wedun needno eddukayshen!” He was banging the table. Then another guitar solo, but not, unfortunately, one found in that song.
—I want you to come with us.
—I’d like that.
—You’ll come with us to Cairo.
—Sounds like a dream.
—But we won’t. We don’t have that kind of courage.
“You still want to go?” I asked Hand. We were walking through the quiet city, along a park, dark and extending forever. He said he did. We could get our stuff from the hotel and leave.
“Where?” I sai
d.
“Somewhere. Marrakesh.”
“Now?” It was 11:30.
“There’s got to be an overnight train going somewhere.” He paused and while we were standing, at a stoplight in a large intersection, a car flew by, there was yelling, and someone threw a half-empty plastic bottle of Sprite. It grazed my leg.
“What’d they say?” I asked.
“Something nasty, I think. Anti-French. Maybe we should go.”
“Yeah. We’re not moving fast enough. And we haven’t gotten rid of much. How much you think?”
“Maybe $8,200 or so.”
“We have to be quicker.”
We walked toward the hotel, planning to pack and leave.
We passed a woman, a baby in her arms and toddler sleeping on her lap, sitting in front of a movie theater offering Schwarzenegger in End of Days. Above the entrance was a huge poster of Casablanca, the first sign of that movie we’d seen in the entire town. The woman held out her hand and we passed. I hated mothers who brought their children to the streets.
—You should not bring them here.
—What would you have us do?
—There must be homes. What did you do to your family that they won’t bring you in?
—You will not know.
—You are using these children.
—You are ignorant.
—Then I will walk by.
—But anyone who asks for money needs it. Your mother said that. Your mother said anyone who begs must need. That is why there is the word beg.
—At least wash their faces somewhere.
—I will try.
I ran back and gave her all the American cash I had—maybe $350—though I couldn’t look at her as I did it. I leaned down to her and her baby wrapped in brown plaid, and found her hand and stuffed the money in, my eyes closed as if reaching into a crevice to catch a salamander. I jogged back to Hand.
“Let’s get off this street,” I said.
“Why?”
“She can still see us.”
He looked at me and squinted.