“It hit me about a month ago,” Hand said.
A dog, rangy and shaking, was sniffing my feet.
“The permanence of it,” he said. “I know you’re supposed to know it’s permanent, but then you’re walking down the street—I was walking on a Sunday morning, past a church I think, everyone outside afterward, and I just stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and I said Holy shit. Holy shit.” He hissed the words.
“I know.” I was trying to slow down my breathing.
“There’s the time right after,” Hand said, “when you’re shocked and putting on your suit, and borrowing the right shoes and putting gas in your car on the way to the fucking funeral, getting the gas on your hands, using the gas station bathroom to wash it off, worrying—You know how worried I was of showing up smelling of gasoline? At a funeral like that, with everyone thinking about cars and everything?”
“I know.”
“But then there’s these months, when you live half-thinking it’ll be corrected. I had to renew the goddamned registration on my car a few weeks ago and I’m sitting there in the place and I started thinking that all I had to do was pay a fine on Jack. Like we were just overdue on payments on him and they’d towed him or something. I jumped a little in the line, because I was like, Fuck, I gotta go get the papers for Jack! Maybe they’re in the car! I get these thoughts all the time. Did you keep answering-machine tapes?”
“I couldn’t. Voice mail.”
“Well I saved a tape with a long message from him. He was drunk and was calling, just describing going down to the Lincoln Memorial with this woman he worked with. I guess there was some kind of youth chorus singing there at midnight, and he had this crazy night there, in the Lincoln Memorial, with some older woman he worked with.”
“Who was it?”
“Older woman. She’s separated. But I guess they went out to dinner and then drinks one night when her ex-husband or whatever was calling a lot. She didn’t want to go home so she and Jack went out.”
“He didn’t tell me that.”
“He did the whole story into my answering machine. I’ll play it for you when we get back. They ended up at the Lincoln Memorial and there were about a hundred teenagers singing gospel songs. ‘If I Could Just Touch the Hem of His Garment,’ right there at the feet of Lincoln. Will, shit. Your chest is going crazy.”
I tried to breathe in and slowly. A pair of sandals appeared beside my head and I was in the shadow of a man crouching.
“No, merci,” Hand said.
The man’s fingers were on my temples.
“No, no!” Hand said.
I shook my head free. The man stood and walked away.
—We’re so weak, Hand. We haven’t done anything.
—It’s too soon.
—We haven’t done anything.
“How does something like that happen?” I said. “I don’t know.”
“No one’s ever heard of something like that happening. Jesus, has that ever happened before? No one said that was going to happen. That wasn’t on the list of things that can happen, a truck just—”
“Wipe your nose again.”
I was still on the ground, my legs folded under me like I’d fallen.
“You ever think of his last seconds?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
—I know his last seconds, Hand.
“It was quick, you know,” Hand said.
“I know. We’ve talked about this—”
“If you have to have something like that happen, at least it wasn’t drawn out—”
“Hand. It’s not like that.”
“It was.”
“It’s not. I know we said he was at peace and everything, but Jesus, I don’t think of him that way. I don’t at all. Everything I see is different.”
“I know.”
“I lost grandparents before, and an uncle, but with them I actually pictured rest for them. I think of them dead and I picture them lying down. In the grass, in long grass, deep green. Infinitely comfortable. But Jack—”
“I know.”
“Jack I picture frozen under ice. He’s still awake, and he’s frozen there, under the ice. Somewhere else, fucking shocked under the ice, and he’s there alone. He’s always alone and that’s the hardest thing about it. That’s the fucking part that makes me murderous. That’s why I want that trucker’s head, because he’s alone under the glass or ice or whatever. He’s waiting.”
“Listen. Just—I don’t want that picture in my head, Will.”
“It’s not just that we won’t do the valley, all that shit,” I said, “it’s that there’s nothing like that anymore. It’s just not possible, anything like that anymore—”
“Meaning what?”
“You think I want to be here? I don’t want to be here. This fucking place is wrong, Hand.”
“Where? Here? Marrakesh? How?”
“It’s all wrong. You know it’s wrong. Everyone knows it’s wrong. This fucking place! It’s all wrong. We’re all here and we’re pretending it’s not wrong because we’re too fucking polite.”
We were at the car. Hand had dragged me off the ground and now he rested his palms on the roof, and his chin on the backs of his hands, atop one another.
“I’ll drive,” he said.
“No, that’s okay,” I said.
“I want to. Just tell me for real that you want none of this money when we’re done.”
“None.”
“Because I believe that you’d do it. If that’s what you’re proving—that you’d do it—then I believe you.”
“Not the point.”
“Fine.”
“I’ll drive,” I said.
“No,” Hand said. “I have another idea first.”
In a few seconds Hand was in a cab. There was a long line of cabs waiting for straggling tourists, and Hand had gotten into one. I followed him in.
Hand directed the driver around the cul-de-sac and back to our car. The ride took about eleven seconds. We stopped.
“Here?” the cabbie said.
“Yes.”
“Yes? Here?”
“Yes.”
The cabbie laughed. We gave him an American fifty.
As my face dried and cooled and my breath evened, we did this three more times. He got in another cab immediately and had him drive us around the cul-de-sac and gave him $80 in dirham. It was great. Once we went around the square, once the length of three cars. Each time we paid them extravagantly, each time they took it knowing we knew what we were doing. The cabbies, in contrast to the merchant, knew what was what, knew that none of it really meant anything, or meant everything but in a way we wouldn’t ever really understand. Each drove off grinning. Comrades!
The bike boys rode by again.
“Faggots,” they said.
We agreed to go to the mountains. We took one more cab, about a block this time, to our car, and headed in the direction we’d last seen the mountains. Where were the mountains? They weren’t visible from the city anymore; I drove us in the direction we thought them to be, past the buildings and the tall red walls separating the street from the compounds and castles and soon we were in a rural area, but we were lost.
It was midnight and we were lost in the wide flat land around the city. The air was cooling and the night was quiet. We drove back to the city, and soon found a cabbie, sitting on his yellow Mercedes hood in an alleyway, at a café’s outdoor checkered table, next to a group of men playing dominos.
We proposed paying him to lead us, he in his car and we in ours, to the mountains. He was skeptical. Hand grabbed a wad of bills from his thigh pocket and waved it near his ear. Idiot. The man raised a finger to us, asking us to wait, as he walked back to his table, where he conferred with the three men, all heavy-set and moustachioed. They looked over to us, all at once and then one at a time, then stared down at their hands, as the man continued.
“What are they talking about?” I asked.
&n
bsp; “Directions maybe,” Hand said, sitting on our hood.
The men went on, their discussions more heated now, staccato bursts of whispers hissed. One man pointed to another, who pointed angrily back at him. The first went through a doorway behind them, an eye on us, and emerged a minute later with a different jacket on. He walked down a side alley, without looking back, while our cabbie approached us, nodded, and got in his car and we in ours. I looked at Hand and he at me, and we both understood that something seemed not right.
Marrakesh is full of tiny alleys no wider than an elephant’s ass, and through those we drove, I drove, much too quickly. The walls were no more than six inches from the car. Our rims scraped twice against curbs, planters. It was like driving through the halls of an apartment building. Dozens of times I doubted we’d fit through this or that entranceway, that we’d get stuck like a truck in a tunnel too tight. We guessed and hoped and prayed for deliverance through the labyrinth, narrow and crumbling. Our car whined around the tightest of turns and squeezed through impossible corridors.
Residents stared from windows and doorways—did they? were those faces or?—and those on the street stepped out of our way. We didn’t see any other cars, this fact making our passage easier but more unsettling. Were we supposed to be here at all? We were the only two vehicles active in this part of the city, at this time of night.
Through the alleys we sped and then under an arch and suddenly we bled into a large square, high-walled but open. It was a hundred yards left and right, and there—holy shit—was a soccer game going on and we were driving through the middle of it, fifteen young men yelling, thin and high-socked, right in front of us, after midnight. We were in the game. Our car was driving through their midfield, straight through, our car following his.
“Did you see that?” Hand asked.
I did.
“We just drove through a fucking soccer game.”
“At one in the morning.”
“You are Ronin.”
“I am Ronin.”
Through a maze of high red walled avenues, precisely as through a maze, and—hell, this went on for half an hour, all this, the alleys, the narrow black stone streets with the men pushing carts, the men sitting on stoops, our two cars buzzing by, no more than two feet from their toes. It was exhilarating though I expected at any moment to be stopped and the car taken and both of us throttled or examined or both—
And now there was a car behind us.
“You see that?” I asked.
“The guy behind us? Shit. Yes.”
“Why would there be a car behind us?”
“No idea.”
“How many guys inside? Don’t look.”
“Two.”
“Who is it? Don’t look.”
Hand turned.
“One looks like the guy from the café.”
“Which guy?”
“The guy with the jacket. The one who went in and—”
“Okay. Fuck!”
“This is bad.”
—You fucking imbecile, Hand.
—I know. I know.
“They’re definitely following us,” he said.
They were. We were following one car and being followed by another. There were two men in the car behind us, and they were allowing about twelve feet between them and us. The car in front took half a dozen turns, and we took them with him, and the car behind followed. There was no mistake, no coincidence.
“Still there,” Hand said.
“I know!”
“They’re in it together,” said Hand.
“Who?”
“All of them. They’re taking us somewhere. To a dead end. We won’t be able to back up.”
“Shut the fuck up.”
My stomach felt grabbed and compressed. I had a fleeting stupid sense of relief that our French resister hadn’t decided to join us. Because the future now seemed set: at some point, in a narrow alley, the car in front of us would stop and the car behind would close in and we’d be trapped and killed and disappeared.
It had been many minutes now. Maybe twenty turns. The men behind, barely recognizable in the dark, made no gestures, gave no hints. This was business.
“I can’t believe this is happening,” Hand said.
“Maybe it’s not happening.”
“Of course it is. We’re the only three cars in this whole city. You see any other traffic?”
It was true. These two cars were here for us.
Hand rolled up his windows and pushed the car’s automatic door lock, the resulting sound a gun being cocked.
“Take a left somewhere. Get away,” Hand said.
“I know, fucker,” I said.
There was nowhere to turn. For all the choices we seemed to have, or the car ahead had, there were no choices at all. Every side street was a dead end.
“Wait till the last second and then—”
“Shut up, Hand.”
He grunted, and then was sticking his lower jaw out, rotating it like he was trying to get it back into place. I’d never see him do that. “Are you going to do it? I think we—”
“Let me think!” I said.
“Fuck it, man.”
“No, fuck you! You’re the stupid fuck who waved all the money in front of the guy.”
This registered with Hand. He had no answer.
“I didn’t say fuck you, I said fuck it.”
“Well fuck yourself anyway,” I said.
My hands gripped and regripped the wheel. My knuckles were not white, but red. I checked the mirror; they were there. I couldn’t decide it if it would be easier or harder to die with your closest friend. I wanted to die first, that much I knew—
There were other men on the street, walking in pairs and alone. Some pushing carts. I worried about running over their feet—we were that close. We passed a crack of an alley, oozing with mustard light, where two men were embracing, with others watching, twenty men, at least—
No, it was a fight. One with a knife to the other’s throat—
“You see that?” I asked.
“Fuck yeah I saw it.”
Everything was wrong all at once.
“Just keep going.”
The car behind hadn’t let up. There was no way to even slow down without them hitting us. But where were we being taken? The street opened up. Then narrowed again. I couldn’t deal anymore. My heart was humming, shaking. I almost wanted to stop, give it up. I began wondering if I was ready.
“Fuck,” Hand said. “I can’t believe this. You know what, though—I have to say, this is a pretty glamorous way to die. I mean—But will they shoot us or what?”
“Shut the fuck up.”
“I swear I’ll take one of them with me. What do they want? Our money, or the car? Both, I guess. Fuck!”
“Maybe we should turn off.”
“We’d be dead if Jack was driving.”
“That’s nice.”
Maybe I was ready to go.
I was so tired.
Maybe I wanted to be crushed, too. To be ready you need to be tired, and you need to have seen a great deal, or what you consider to have been a great deal—we all have such different capacities, are able to absorb and sustain vastly different quantities of visions and pain—and at that moment I started thinking that I had seen enough, that in general I’d had my fill and that in terms of visual stimulation the week thus far had shown me enough and that I was sated. The rock-running in Senegal was enough, the kids and their bonjours—that alone would prepare me for the end; if I couldn’t be thankful enough having been there I was sick and ungrateful, and I would not be ungrateful, not ever, I would always know the gifts given me, I would count them and keep them safe! I had had so much so I would be able to face the knife in the alley and accept it all, smiling serenely, thankful that I’d be taken while riding the very crest of everything. I had been on a plane! A tiny percentage of all those who’d ever lived would ever be on an airplane—and had seen Africa rushing at me like somet
hing alive and furious. I could be taken and eaten by these wet alleyways without protest.
The car behind seemed ready to ram us. It was so close we could hear its engine roaring over ours.
Suddenly Hand was yelling, almost crying.
“I hate this. [Hitting side window] I hate this! I feel closed in! I hate having no options!”
The turns were increasing.
—Jack I need—
—
“I hate being followed like this! I fucking hate it.” Hand was hitting the dash now.
“Easy,” I said.
“Fuck you, easy!”
—Jack.
—
“We could stop and get out and just run for it,” I said.
Hand mulled this.
“Okay,” he said, calming. “That’s an option. I like that. We could always just bang on the door to some house and get help.”
“Right.”
“How close are they now?”
“Still right behind us.” I looked into their faces, both with mustaches, both expressionless. I turned quickly back. This was very real. This was our lives, the whole of our relatively straightforward lives, concluding savagely on this bizarre note, someone splicing onto our happy safe Wisconsin lives the wrong, bloody ending. This is Hand’s fault. How? I don’t know. You’ll fight together. We’ll be led into some pitch-black alley, some warehouse. We’ll be stripped, robbed, beaten, flayed—You will disappear. You’re not afraid. I know. Why? You used to fear death so tangibly. When you were Robotman you would wait till dawn to ensure no one took you while you were asleep. You cried during the astronomy unit when Mr. Geoghan talked about how brief our lives were comparatively, how brief was all mankind. I know. I couldn’t hear it. When they talked about the imminent death of our sun, I lost it. And remember what he said, the first day of class? I do.
“Will.”
He said: “The only infallible truth of our lives is that everything we love in life will be taken from us.” He had just lost his wife. That was it. It was. He had lost his wife and came to class each day in a sweatsuit, royal blue with white stripes. He was a marathoner.
“Will.”
I remember. I remember it being somehow soothing.
“Will, motherfucker.”
“What? What?”