The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty

THE DIVER’S CLOTHES LIE EMPTY

When you find your seat you glance at the businessman sitting next to you and decide he’s almost handsome. This is the second leg of your trip from Miami to Casablanca, and the distance traveled already has muted the horror of the last two months. What’s to stop you from having a conversation with this man, possibly even ordering two vodka tonics with the little lemon wedges that the flight attendant will place into your plastic cups with silver tongs? He’s around your age, thirty-three, and, like you, appears to be traveling alone. He has two newspapers on his lap, one in Arabic, and the other in English. If you get along well enough, you could enjoy a meal together once you get to Casablanca. You’ll go to dinner and you’ll sit on plush, embroidered pillows and eat couscous with your hands. Afterwards, you’ll pass by the strange geometry of an unknown skyline as you make your way back to one of your hotels. Isn’t this what people do when they’re alone and abroad?

But as you get settled into your seat next to this businessman he tells you he plans to sleep the entire flight to Casablanca. Then, with a considerable and embarrassing amount of effort he inflates a neck pillow with his thin lips, places a small pill on his outstretched tongue, and turns away from you and toward the oval window, the shade of which has already been shut.

As the flight takes off, the inevitable cries of babies start up and you absentmindedly flip through your guidebook to Morocco. You read: “The first thing to do upon arriving in Casablanca is get out of Casablanca.” Damn. You’ve already booked a hotel room there for three nights. You should be annoyed with yourself for not reading the guidebook before reserving and paying for your room, but instead you direct your annoyance at the guidebook itself for telling you your first three days in Morocco will be wasted. You stuff the book deep into your backpack and remove your camera. It’s a few months old, and though you’ve used it, you’ve kept it in its box with the instructions, which you have not yet read. You decide now is a good time to read them and figure out how to download the photos of your newborn niece onto your laptop. You turn the camera on — it’s a Pentax, a professional camera that’s nicer than you need — and study a photo of your niece on the day she was born. You feel your eyes start to well up and you turn the camera off.

The plane has still not reached a comfortable cruising altitude and the seat-belt sign has not yet been turned off, but this doesn’t prevent a Western-looking woman across the aisle and two rows ahead from standing up. Wearing a dress patterned with autumnal leaves even though it’s spring, she removes her carry-on suitcase from the overhead compartment. Then she sits down, places it on her lap, opens it, shifts a few items of meticulously packed clothing around to a different position within the case, closes it, and lifts the suitcase back up to the overhead compartment. A flight attendant briskly approaches and reminds her the seat-belt sign is still illuminated. The woman in the autumnal dress sits for five minutes before she is unable to control herself and stands once more to retrieve her suitcase, place it in her lap, open it, and rearrange the clothing before restoring the suitcase to the cabinet above her seat.

Your fellow passengers — half of whom look like tourists, and half like they might be Moroccans returning home — make eye contact with you and with each other and pupils are rolled. It’s collectively understood that this woman is suffering from an obsessive-compulsive disorder. When the woman in the autumnal dress stands for a third time, the passenger seated in front of her, holding a book and wearing glasses, abruptly turns around to stare. She is part of a group of women who have been traveling with you since Miami. Judging by their Florida State University sweatshirts and their approximate age, you assume they attended FSU together almost forty years ago, and are on a reunion trip.

There’s something familiar about this bespectacled woman who’s now turned and looking back, and as you lock eyes for a moment, you sense she’s maybe wondering if she recognizes you from somewhere. You spot one of this woman’s sneakers, turned outward in the aisle — a clean, puffy white Reebok — and you immediately know where you last saw her. Your heart races the way it does when you’ve had too much caffeine. You avert your eyes from hers and concentrate on the seat back in front of you. You pull down the tray table and place your head on it. You do not want this woman to recognize you, to ask you questions.

You are careful not to peer out into the aisle again, no matter how many times the woman in the autumnal dress stands up and sits down, no matter how many times the flight attendants come down the aisle to confront her and remind her that she must remain seated. You order a glass of wine from one of these flight attendants and you take a Unisom. You know you are not supposed to mix alcohol with this tablet but you’re suddenly afraid of passing the duration of the flight awake and anxious, of arriving in Casablanca feeling ragged and wrecked. You close your eyes and think of sex, which is what you think about when you have trouble sleeping. You see flashes of body parts and scenarios — some that you’ve seen in films, and a few you’ve experienced. You think of the sunscreen-smelling boy you kissed in a hammock on the beach when you were eighteen, the man from Dubrovnik who accompanied you to an Irish bar when you were twenty-five, a scene from an Italian film with Jack Nicholson and a foreign actress whose name you don’t remember. You think of the girl with the green eyes at the loft party whose hand brushed over your breasts. She looked back but you didn’t follow.

None of this helps: you cannot sleep. The children on the plane are screaming, especially the little girl across the aisle from you who is sitting in her mother’s lap. Her hair is braided into multiple plaits, secured with bows. Usually girls in braids make you tender — they remind you of your own childhood, of how your mother came into your room every morning at six and wove your hair into two tight braids. At the ends she tied bows out of short pieces of thick fraying yarn, usually red or yellow in color to match your school uniform. She did all this while you slept because she needed to be at work before 7 A.M. Even if the strokes of her brush or the rapid motion of her fingers roused you, you were careful not to reveal you were awake. You knew she would be upset with herself that she had deprived you of sleep, so you kept your eyes shut and mimicked the slow breath of slumber.

You attended an expensive all-girls school on scholarship and not many of the other mothers worked, so she wanted to say to any mother who was watching (and they were always watching): Yes, we are middle class, yes, I work, but my daughter isn’t the worse for it — look at her neat, tight braids. For reasons that were never clear to you at the time, your twin sister was not given a scholarship to the school and attended the public school near your apartment building. Not that you will ever pity her: she was always prettier (you are fraternal twins, not identical) and more outgoing. The result of this combination meant she was more frequently in trouble. She wore her hair cut short even when it wasn’t stylish, but usually it was. You, on the other hand, had braids until you were in the seventh grade.

The girl with the braids sitting across the aisle from you in her mother’s lap repeatedly startles you out of your dips into sleep with her shrieks, which are followed by her mother’s attempts to quiet them. Her mother is almost louder in her soothing, as though to reassure everyone around her—look, I’m doing my best. You squint at her with judging eyes, though you know if you ever have children of your own you will do the same — you will soothe too loudly. One thing you observed at your all-girls school: half of parenting is a performance for others.

When the plane begins to descend into Casablanca, you organize your belongings inside your backpack. You will need to get off the plane without making contact with the FSU woman in the white puffy Reeboks. The businessman next to you wakes with five rapid blinks. He smiles at you and you smile weakly in return because you are envious of the sleep he has slept. When the plane lands, it veers left, then right, and then finds its way into a straight line. Your fellow passengers roar with applause. The cockpit door is closed, so they’re not clapping for the pilots. They are clapping because their existence persists, because they are not aflame on the tarmac, because they did not disintegrate over the Atlantic. The scattered applause seems too muted a celebration of living, so you choose not to clap.

Now, as everyone stands, waiting to disembark, the children’s cries are loud and the parents have given up on comforting them. When the doors to the plane open, there’s a palpable, collective thrust of passengers toward the front. Everyone who has not yet stood, rises. As you gather your things — your blue suitcase and nondescript black canvas backpack that doesn’t demand any attention, both of which you bought yesterday, for this trip — someone from the row behind yours tries to cut in front of you. This is the way of air travel: fellow passengers applaud because they didn’t die, and then they cut in front of you so they can exit four seconds earlier.

Unlike the women on the college reunion tour, you don’t have to wait for your checked luggage, so you can pass them and progress through customs. Plans have been made for someone to pick you up, and you’ve been told the driver will have a sign. You see him right away, a thin man in black jeans holding a piece of yellowed paper with your name scrawled upon it. He spells your name the French way; of course he would. You studied French at your all-girls school because a Parisian heiress started the school and French was required of its students. Now as you speak this language of your youth you find yourself remembering words you didn’t know you knew, and making mistakes that you immediately recognize as mistakes. You ask the driver how long it will take to get to the hotel (thirty minutes), how the weather has been (rainy), and after that there’s not much to talk about. He asks where you are from and you tell him Florida and he tells you he’s been to Idaho to visit relatives. You smile and say it’s beautiful there. “C’est beau là,” you say. He agrees. You have never been to Idaho.

Outside the window of the van the sky is white, the grass green. You pass by vacant lots, billboards for cellphone companies and cars, and then the tall cream-colored buildings of Casablanca shoot up suddenly, all at once, in the distance. You see young men hitchhiking, and the driver tells you that they’re trying to get to school, to college. Isn’t there a bus? you ask. Yes, he says, but they don’t want to wait for the bus.

The traffic is bad in Casablanca and the driver tells you it’s always bad. You wish you had listened more closely when he introduced himself because now it’s too late to ask him again what his name is, and you have no idea. At a stoplight, a man on a motorbike with a camouflaged-patterned trunk on the back slams into the side of the van. He was trying to get ahead in the traffic. Though you’re in the middle of a road, the driver stops the van and steps out and they argue in the street. They yell and the driver gesticulates dramatically, then he gets back into the van, and you drive on with sudden, stuttering stops.

The streets seem wild to you now — so many trucks and so much smog, and the potential for motorbikes to bump against vans. The buildings around you are ugly. They once were white but now are dusted with soot. There’s nothing to look at through the window except traffic. You can’t wait to check into your hotel room.

You pass by an upscale Regency Hotel, an expensive-looking Sofitel, and when the driver says your hotel is close, you’re happy because you think your hotel might be on par with these other tall, glassy buildings. You’ve been told your hotel, the Golden Tulip, is comfortable, and you’ve been looking forward to this comfort on the plane and in the van, but as you approach you’re disappointed. The Golden Tulip has a glossy black entrance with two long banners, one advertising its restaurant and another advertising its pool. It looks like a typical tourist hotel, the kind that large groups might stay at for two nights before going to the next city on their itinerary. As the driver pulls up you see and hear American and British tourists emerging from the front door. You’re deflated but what did you expect? That it would be full of locals? It’s a hotel.

The driver opens the side door of the van and retrieves your suitcase from the rear. You tip him in U.S. dollars because it’s all you have. You took out $300 at Miami International because you’ve learned from your travels to countries like Cuba and Argentina how valuable it can be to have U.S. cash. You tip the driver with a twenty-dollar bill. Later, you will wonder if this was your initial mistake.

You pass through a security portal as you enter the hotel — the kind you go through at an airport — but you keep your backpack on, and hold the handle of your suitcase. Bellboys offer to take your bags, and you tell them you can manage. Or rather: you smile and say, “No, it’s okay. I’m okay.”

A long black bench runs along the side of the lobby wall, but other than that there’s no place to settle into — no comfortable-looking couch or chair. This lobby is not a place for lingering. You walk to the front desk, and wait behind another couple. The lobby isn’t busy, so you don’t understand why the two desk clerks, both in blue-gray suits, are so frazzled.

As you stand at the desk, you notice there’s an ATM to your right and you decide you will get Moroccan money there later. When the couple in front of you has moved out of the way, you approach the desk. You tell the desk clerks that you have a reservation. One of the two men says your room is not ready and you argue that when you made the reservation you were guaranteed early check-in. One of the men goes into the back office — it’s unclear whether he’s verifying this fact or if he’s avoiding you. The remaining clerk looks at his computer. “Housekeeping is there. It will be ready in five minutes.”

“Five actual minutes?” you ask. Time is not how you know it, but how the country knows it.

“Five American minutes,” the man behind the desk says. He pushes a sheet of paper toward you. On the paper you’re supposed to write down your passport information. The man disappears to the back office. You assume he’s gone to check on the room.

You stare at the passport information form. You take your passport from your backpack. You have your new blue suitcase in front of you and you place your backpack on top of it and lean over the suitcase and the backpack and start to fill out the form. Your name, place of birth, passport number, nationality. When you’re done you call out to the clerk: “I’ve filled out the form.”

He returns to the counter and shows you a list of names on a computer printout, and says, “Which one?” Your name is halfway down the list, which you assume must be a list of people checking in, and then he crosses out your name so thoroughly, so violently, that there’s no trace of it. You are given a key to the room that is now available, and you reach for the handle of your suitcase, which is still parked in front of you.

But where is your backpack?

You look on the floor. Not there.

You touch your back. You turn around, while touching your back, as though you might get a glimpse of it over your shoulder. You tell the man behind the desk you don’t have your backpack. You look at the bottom edge of the desk, which does not extend to the floor. You think it might have inadvertently slid beneath. The hotel clerk looks down at the floor on his side of the desk. Nothing.

You are growing increasingly panicked — you are in Morocco and you don’t have your backpack. You think of everything in it — laptop, wallet with credit cards and all the cash you took out at Miami International. A three-month-old camera. Your library book. Your toiletries. A pair of small coral earrings. As the list of inventory of lost contents increases, you forget to breathe.

You try to explain to the unhelpful hotel clerk what’s going on. He suggests that one of the bellboys might have taken the backpack up to the wrong room. He talks to the young and clean-cut Moroccan bellboys. The bellboys suggest you left it in the van; they tell you the driver is still parked outside. You don’t think you left it in the van because you took your passport out of the backpack at the reception desk, didn’t you? Maybe you already had the passport. You are so exhausted, so frazzled that you’re no longer certain of anything. Everyone else’s narrative seems more likely than yours.

You follow one of the bellboys out of the hotel. People pass you on the street — this is a crowded city — but you don’t register faces. A color, red, there. A yellow hijab there. When you get to the van, it’s locked, so you look through the windows. Nothing on the floor of the van. Where is the driver? Maybe the driver took the backpack and came looking for you. Maybe he’s looking for you in the hotel.

You run back inside the hotel. The driver has been located and is waiting for you. He says he doesn’t have the backpack. He walks outside to the van with you and unlocks it and the backpack is not there. You return to the hotel. The driver, looking very worried, speaks in Arabic with the bellboys and security guards stationed at the front door.

“They say you wear the backpack when you come in,” he tells you in English. Why were you trying to speak French with him? “They say they remember you had it.”

You wonder for a moment why they were looking at you so closely that they recall this, but you don’t have time to wonder: you’re half relieved that they remember. Your exhaustion is a curtain you cannot part.

You are beckoned to the luggage room. Someone has the idea that perhaps your backpack was moved to the luggage room, where people store bags when their room isn’t ready, or when they’ve had to check out hours before their flight. Two hotel employees stand at the entrance to the luggage room as though they’re flight attendants welcoming you on board a plane. You enter and see it’s a small room with shelves, stacked with a dozen dark and travel-worn suitcases. A child’s car seat. No black backpack.

You exit the claustrophobic room and walk up and down the gleaming white floors of the lobby, wondering what the hell you’re going to do. A man behind the check-in counter tells you not to worry — is it the same one who was purporting to help you, or his friend? You can’t tell. You can’t remember anything anymore. He says there are security cameras. He points above the check-in desk. “You will watch and we will see if you had the backpack when you came in. We will look and see if the bellboy took it to someone else’s room. You will look and we will see,” he tells you.

“Okay,” you say, wondering why these cameras weren’t mentioned before. Hope expands within you, as hope does. “How do I see?” you ask.

“Wait here,” he says.

“Where?” you ask.

He points to exactly where you’re standing.

While you wait, you watch others checking in. You want to warn them. But warn them about what? The fact that they might have left their luggage somewhere?

A young hotel employee with hunched shoulders enters the lobby and the man behind the desk says something to him. To you he says: “He will take you.”

You follow this hunched man past the ATM machine and into the elevator and you descend to the basement. He leads you into a small room where a large screen covers a cinder-block wall. The screen is divided into four quadrants and you can see that, in fuzzy black and white and mostly gray, it’s currently showing what’s happening in four different areas of the hotel — the front desk, the black bench in the lobby, a stairwell, and a roof. In the quadrant showing what’s happening at the front desk, you can see the couple that’s currently checking in. The couple you wanted to warn.

“You sat here on black bench,” the man says in rough English. He points to the screen that shows the black backless bench that runs along the side of the wall, perpendicular to the check-in desk.

“No,” you say. “I was standing at the check-in desk.” You point to the screen where the check-in desk is being shown.

“Okay,” he says. He tries to click on the box but nothing happens.

He tries to type something onto the keyboard but nothing happens.

“I need password,” he says.

The hunched man gets on the phone and calls someone and asks for the security password for the computer. He types the password on the keyboard and nothing happens.

He asks whoever is on the other end of the phone to repeat the password and he tries again. You hear frustration in the form of yelling coming through the receiver.

Five minutes ago, when you were in the lobby and learned of the existence of the surveillance cameras, you had great faith they would reveal which bellboy or hotel guest mistakenly took your backpack. But now your confidence plummets.

Two other men enter the small room. One of them has a beard and you guess this is the same man who was on the phone because he shouts out the password number again. His rage is evident.

Finally the hunched man succeeds and is logged on to the computer.

The bearded man who knows the password turns to you. “You were sitting on the black bench?” he asks, pointing to the image on the screen of the bench in the lobby that runs along the wall. The bench is vacant.

“No,” you say, and explain that you were at the check-in desk. You stand and point again, just to make sure there’s no misunderstanding.

The bearded man instructs the hunched man to play back that camera. The hunched man sits at the computer but doesn’t know how to make it work. The bearded man barks something at him, but to no avail. Three more men enter. Now there are six men in the room. Not one of them knows how to play back the video.

“Excuse me,” you say from the back. “I might be able to. . May I?” It’s a small room and the men part ways so you can sit at the wooden chair in front of the computer. You have no expertise in surveillance, but this does not seem as complicated as they’re making it. You use the mouse to drag the curser to the camera focused on the front desk. Then you press the rewind button and you scroll back.

The video player shows a time—10 A.M. — but it’s not yet that time. “What time is it?” you ask. Everyone has a different answer. It’s explained that there was a time change the day before. No one has updated the time on the recording equipment.

You can’t rely on the time. You continue to rewind, slowly. You stop when you see someone who looks like you but whose hair is darker, more dramatic-looking than your own and whose white shirt looks brighter. But it’s you. The monochrome surveillance camera dramatizes every shade. You appear a relic of another era. A daguerreotype; a cameo in an old locket.

You rewind the video slightly further until you don’t see yourself at the desk and then you press play. You and the six men in the room observe the video in silence.

You watch as you arrive through the security portal wearing the backpack and dragging the suitcase to the front desk. The bearded man points to the camera and says something to the other men in the room. You assume that he’s saying, “Look, she had the backpack when she entered the hotel.” You yourself are relieved to see this: you didn’t leave it in the van; it wasn’t taken while going through security.

You watch yourself arguing with the unhelpful man at the front desk about your room and how it was supposed to be ready. You watch him slide the passport information form across the desk. You watch as you remove your backpack from where it hangs on both shoulders and place it on top of your suitcase, which is standing upright on its wheels in front of you. You fill out your name, place of birth, passport number, and nationality and then you return your passport to its secure place in your backpack. You push it down inside, so it can’t fall out, or be taken, from the top. You call for someone from behind the desk to help you. You see your mouth move: “I’ve filled out the form.”

At exactly this time, on the surveillance video, you notice a figure that’s been sitting on the black bench in the lobby. He’s a chunky man in a suit with a lanyard and a badge; he was not there when you first arrived at the hotel. He stands and takes a diagonal and deliberate path toward you. You see him stop beside you, to your right, while your head is turned toward the left as you try to get the attention of the man behind the front desk. Then you see the chunky man’s fingers inch toward your stomach. His hand passes in front of you as he gently and slowly lifts the backpack straight out from where it’s resting on the suitcase.

Watching the video, the men in the small cinder-block room start shouting and pointing, and one man grabs his head with both hands as though his favorite soccer player has missed a tie-breaking goal.

On the video, you watch the chunky man in the black suit stand beside you for ten seconds, as though in disbelief of what he’s gotten away with. Or perhaps it’s another tactic: he doesn’t want to make any sudden movements. For a brief second, it looks like he’s regretting what he did, and is going to return the backpack to its original position on top of your suitcase. But then, rapidly and with determination, he pulls a strap of the black backpack up over his shoulder, walks efficiently but not too quickly toward the exit of the hotel with his head up, passes by the security men and through the security portal, turns right, and is safely on the street.

You hear a sound coming from deep inside you — a strange, guttural yelp — and you stand up. The hotel security crew are all pointing at the screen and rewinding the surveillance video and exclaiming things in Arabic. Your mind is rioting now that you know for sure your backpack is gone. You see no way out of this. You want to go home. You have just arrived in Morocco and your backpack, your identity, has been stolen. Everyone has forgotten about you; they are all turned to the screen. They are getting more excited, pointing, replaying the crime — they’ve finally figured out how to play the video on their own. You turn so you’re facing the filing cabinets in this tiny room that is a mockery of an office. You think you might cry. Don’t cry, you tell yourself. Don’t cry. And you know you won’t. A strange adrenaline, a forceful calmness overtakes you. You have been in situations like these before and you feel this tranquillity, the green-blue of an ocean, wash over you.

You turn back around. “I need to cancel my credit cards,” you tell the bearded man who knew the long and complicated password. He says they are calling the police, and you nod. “They will come here?” you say.

“Yes,” he tells you.

“While I’m waiting, can I make some phone calls?”

The hunched man is assigned to escort you to an office on the second floor. To get there you have to go up one elevator, and walk across the lobby to another. You pass the long black leatherette bench against the wall. It’s a narrow, backless bench where no one is intended to sit for long.

On the way to the other elevator that will take you to the second floor, you see the driver of the van that transported you from the airport to the hotel. He is animated and happy. “I told you backpack not in my van,” he says. “I said you have backpack when you come into hotel.” You see how relieved he is that he’s not responsible. So happy that your backpack was stolen by someone else!

You nod and continue being escorted to the second-floor office. A plump man in a gray suit stops you. He introduces himself as the head of security at the hotel. Where was he before? Not just when the backpack was stolen, but when the six men who couldn’t figure out how to access the security videos were shouting passwords at each other and you were having to show them how to click the arrow on the computer. Where was he then?

The head of security is barrel-chested and his mustache is thick. He reminds you of the man on the Monopoly board game. The banker. He seems proud to be in charge. Even more than that: he seems proud that a theft has taken place in the hotel and that he will have to talk to the police chief. “We have called the police chief and he is on his way,” he tells you. He’s smiling when he says this. What is wrong with him? He’s beaming with excitement and pride and doesn’t apologize or say he’s sorry about the loss of your backpack and its contents. He just stands there smiling, and then he tells you to relax. “Go to your room and relax. We are here,” he says.

“I can’t relax,” you tell him. “I have to cancel my credit cards.”

“Just relax,” he repeats. “The police chief is coming.”

You ignore him and take the elevator up to the second-floor office. “He seemed really happy about the whole thing,” you say to the hunched man escorting you, forgetting that his English is not good.

“You are happy?” the hunched man asks, confused.

The elevator doors open and you exit without correcting him.

You are led to a desk in an office that has a computer and a phone. Two other people are in this office, answering phones and, you realize, taking reservations. One of these men is likely the same person who told you early check-in would be no problem. You sit down in the empty swivel chair, and as the hunched man turns and leaves the office you begin searching the Internet for phone numbers to your banks. You call your credit-card company and Christy in Denver says she will help you. You don’t know your credit-card number by heart, so Christy in Denver has to access it by your name and ask you a number of security questions. When she agrees that you are who you say you are, you ask about recent charges. The last thing Christy in Denver sees being charged to your credit card was a meal at the airport in Miami.

“Great,” you say, and then ask: “Are you sure I should cancel it, then? If it’s not being used?”

“Do you know for a fact the card was stolen and not misplaced?” Christy asks you.

“Yes,” you say. “I saw them play back the surveillance camera. It was definitely stolen.”

“Then you should cancel it,” she says.

So you do.

You know as you hang up that you will have to call back the credit-card company and ask what their insurance policy is for stolen items, but now is not the time to do this. You are briefly overwhelmed by the amount of phone calls you already know you’ll have to make in the coming weeks and months. You are certain paperwork will be involved.

You call to cancel your bank card. Vipul in India says he can assist you. First he needs you to answer security questions, which you do. Then he asks you how much money, approximately, you have in your account.

You look to your left, toward one man taking reservations, and you look to your right, toward the other man. Neither man is on the phone at the moment and so you know they are listening to your conversation. You know their English is good because you’ve heard them taking the reservations.

“I’m in a public place right now,” you say.

“I understand,” Vipul in India says, “but I need an approximate number.”

You are embarrassed to say the amount aloud because it’s considerably less than someone like you, someone who is thirty-three and in a foreign country, should have in their bank account.

Finally, you whisper the amount, and Vipul in India cancels your card and tells you a new one will be issued and mailed to the Florida address they have on file for you.

“It will arrive in three to five business days,” Vipul in India tells you.

“I’m in Casablanca,” you tell him.

“It will be in Florida when you return,” he says.

You are done with your calls, and only then does it hit you that you have no way to get money or to pay for anything. Fuck, you think, and imagine spending your entire time in Morocco in this shitty hotel. You sink deep in your chair. You try not to swivel.

The young, hunched man who can’t use a computer enters the office. “I have good news,” he says.

You blink rapidly, taking this in.

“The head of security just watched video. He knows man who took the bag. He talks with him this morning at breakfast. He stays at this hotel. He is doctor at conference we are having here.”

And he hasn’t checked out? Does he want to get caught? You imagine the man as a kleptomaniac who steals because he wants to be found out and diagnosed. Or else he’s a psychiatrist and the theft was part of a test case.

You are relieved. Your backpack will be returned. The head of security, who disturbed you because he was good-humored and telling you to relax, is now your friend. A hero.

You regret canceling your credit cards. You wonder if you can call Christy in Denver and Vipul in India again before you meet with the head of security. They must be able to reactivate the cards within five minutes of cancellation. There must be some law, some statute about that, you think. You hope.

“He waits for you downstairs,” the hunched young man says.

“Okay,” you say, and let him escort you down to the lobby.

The head of security is ecstatic. The two sides of his mustache, the left and the right, are forming their own smiles.

“You watched the video? You know the man?” you say. You can hear the excitement in your own voice, which sounds like it’s coming from a different person than the despondent one speaking on the phone a few minutes ago.

“Yes,” he says. “If I saw him I would know him. I saw him as closely as I am seeing you right now.”

“Where is he now?” you ask.

“I don’t know where he is this moment. He came to me this morning and asked where he could get breakfast. He asked in English, so he’s not Moroccan because why else would he ask in English?”

“So you don’t know who he is?” you say, more defeated than before your hopes were raised.

“He was wearing a badge. That means he’s part of a conference of doctors at this hotel right now.”

“Have you checked?”

“Well, no, because they are all meeting upstairs right now and I can’t just walk into the room and start accusing doctors. I have to wait until the meeting is over.”

“But what if he’s not part of the conference? What if he was pretending to be?”

“I saw the badge. He’s part of conference,” he says, this time with less certainty. You both stare at each other. You know it’s only now occurring to him that the badge might have been fake. “You should go relax and rest and we will get him,” he says.

“Please stop telling me to relax and rest,” you tell him. This comes out sounding louder than you intend it to. You sound exactly like the kind of person who needs to relax.

“The police chief is coming soon,” he says. “We will put your bags in your room.”

“I only have one bag now,” you say. You are reluctant to leave your suitcase anywhere, so you’ve been dragging it around with you.

“Oh,” says the chief of security, spotting something or someone over your shoulder.

“What?” You turn to follow his startled look. “Is it him? Is it the thief?”

“No, it’s the police chief,” he says.

You turn. The police chief has a dark mustache and his eyes are serious. “I’m very sorry for your loss,” he tells you as he shakes your hand.

You like him right away because he’s apologizing and not acting like the theft of your backpack is cause for rejoicing.

The police chief assures you all forms will be ready for you when you show up at his office. You don’t know why you have to go to his office when he’s here now, but you’re sure there’s a good reason and he gives you one: “It will only take fifteen minutes when you come,” he says. “All the forms will be ready.”

You wonder how he knows that you don’t like filling out forms, but you appreciate that he understands this about you, that he’s intuitive.

“We already have policemen on the street and in the markets looking for the man.”

Of course they’re scouring the markets. That’s the first place the thief would go. To the markets to sell the computer, the phone, the camera.

“How many policemen?” you ask.

“Seventeen,” he says.

Seventeen policemen. You try not to show how impressed you are. But seventeen policemen! The police chief is a serious man. But why not eighteen policemen? Where’s the eighteenth policeman?

“They are of course also looking for the property that was stolen from you.”

“Thank you,” you say, wondering how the seventeen men know how to look for your property when no one has asked you what was inside your backpack. They only know from the surveillance video that your backpack was black and it was full.

“It’s really important to me that I get my backpack back,” you say. “It has my passport and my computer.”

He nods. You have the feeling he has heard this complaint before. Crime in Casablanca must be common. You have faith in this police chief, but you have little faith that in a city of three million your backpack will be returned.

Desperation comes over you — there must be a hundred tourists right now who have filed police reports in Casablanca about stolen goods. You are just another one of them. Not distinguishable in any way. You are not even staying at one of the upscale hotels, where you’re sure the victims of crimes are treated with more attention.

You hear the lie coming out of your mouth before you even have time to think it through: “I’m a writer for the New York Times,” you say. “I’m doing a travel story on Casablanca. I really don’t want to have to include this.”

You stare at him. He stares at you.

“The what?” he says.

“The New York Times,” you say.

He takes out a little notebook, the same kind of small pocket notebook detectives use in movies, and he starts to write something down.

“The what? How do you spell?” He hands you his pen.

You write down the words New York Times in his little notebook.

“And this is a company?” he asks. “What kind?”

“It’s a newspaper,” you say.

He thanks you and closes the notebook.

“How likely is it,” you ask, “that you will catch this man, that you will find my things?”

“I am one hundred percent confident,” he says.

“Wow,” you say. You don’t tell him that you were putting the likelihood at more like 5 percent. “One hundred percent,” you repeat.

“Yes, one hundred percent,” he says.

You’re impressed he didn’t say 99 percent. He could have given himself some leeway.

You shake his hand good-bye enthusiastically. Only after he’s left do you realize he hasn’t asked you your name.

You remain standing in the lobby once again with your blue suitcase and the head of security. He asks you if you would like to sit at the restaurant and have some lunch.

“No,” you say. “I’d like to go to the police station.”

“Yes,” he says. “Someone from the hotel will take you there in a few minutes. But the head of police wants to make sure he gets the papers ready.”

“Yes,” you say. You don’t want to be with this man anymore. His smile is disturbing you. His mustache is disturbing you.

“Why don’t you go put your suitcase in your room, and when you come back downstairs someone will take you.”

“Okay,” you say.

It seems like days have gone by since you were given your key card. You’re almost surprised you still have it. You have to look at the room number written on the small accompanying sleeve to see what floor you’re on.

You enter your dark room, and place your suitcase on the suitcase stand. The stand’s straps are worn out from bearing the weight of the luggage of past travelers. Out the window you have no view except for the back of another hotel.

Before leaving your room, you move your suitcase so it’s under the bed, out of sight. You can think of nowhere else to hide it.

As you walk to the elevator you pass a room-service cart that’s waiting to be ushered back to the kitchen. On the top of the cart sits a basket of bread rolls of various sizes and shapes, seeded and unseeded, light and dark. You consider stashing a few of them in your purse before you remember you have no purse, no backpack. You are carrying nothing. All you have is the key card in the pocket of your skirt. You grab a seeded bun. By the time the elevator lets out onto the lobby floor, you’ve eaten it.

A young man in a plaid shirt and clean sneakers has been assigned and paid by the hotel to take you to the police station. You have no idea what his affiliation is with the hotel — he’s not in uniform — but he has kind eyes, the green of an old leather atlas, and you trust he will get you where you need to go.

He opens the backseat of the car for you and you get in. You see, on the floor of the seat next to yours, a pair of leather shoes, and you wonder what they’re doing there.

The car’s clock says that it’s already after 2 P.M. How did it get so late? Is that the right time or yesterday’s time? You know there was a time shift. You think how odd it is that they change times in the middle of the week here, not at 2 A.M. on Sundays like back home. You try to remember which day is the day of rest here, and you consider asking the driver. But instead you look out the window at the traffic surrounding you, and when you tire of all the cars and faces and gray exhaust swirling out of mufflers, you roll up your window and stare at the shoes.

“You know Paul Bowles?” the driver says, out of nowhere. Because you’re staring at the old leather shoes, you think for a brief moment he’s going to tell you that they belonged to Paul Bowles.

“Yes,” you say. You know who Paul Bowles is. You devoted a paragraph or maybe even a page to him in a college essay you wrote about post — World War II bohemians. You had no prior interest in the subject, nor any sustaining interest for that matter; you signed up for the class because the professor was intriguing to you. She was a burn victim, and two-thirds of her body was scarred, but this made her more beautiful. You weren’t the only one who thought this: the class was filled with young male theater majors and aspiring poets. You were the sole athlete in the class. When you met with her in her office to discuss your mediocre essay, she obsessively rubbed a potent-smelling vitamin E lotion onto her shiny red wrists, her lavender-hued elbows. She kept a large tube of the lotion on the corner of her desk, where others might place a colorful paperweight. Each time she loudly squirted the lotion onto her palm, you silently marveled at the framed photos of her swimsuit-clad children, their skin impeccably unflawed.

“Everyone knows Morocco because of Paul Bowles,” the driver says. “My father read for Mr. Bowles.”

“Read for him?” You are certain that Paul Bowles could read.

“At end of his life, Mr. Bowles cannot see well. My father lives in the same building and sometimes Mr. Bowles asks neighbors to read for him and so sometimes he asks my father.”

“Cool,” you say because you can’t think of anything else appropriate.

“Yes,” the driver says.

You are both silent again, watching the traffic not move.

“Is it always this bad?” you ask.

“Casablanca traffic is the very most bad in Morocco,” he says.

You can’t even see the road ahead of you because there are six large trucks.

“So many trucks,” you say inanely.

“Yes, very many trucks,” he says.

Your head is heavy and you realize you’ve nodded off. The clock in the car now says it’s 3:06.

“I’m sorry. I fell asleep. Are we almost there?”

“Yes, five minutes,” he tells you.

In twenty-five minutes he parks the car. The neighborhood has narrow sidewalks and many shops. Dozens of people are on the street, talking with friends, parking their cars. The driver carefully reads the signs and is sure to put the proper amount of money in the machine.

“Sorry. I don’t have any money,” you say.

He smiles grimly as though you’ve left him to face an impossible task alone.

The two of you walk down the crowded sidewalks. The sun is out and it’s warm but you can tell this is still cold for Moroccans: many men wear leather jackets and all wear long pants. You don’t see any women your age, only young girls and old women. Your generation of females is missing on the street.

“They said the station is next to the big grocery store,” the driver says. You pass a large grocery store, with a number of people smoking outside, next to the display of small fruits.

“Here it is,” he says.

You look at the decrepit building, the Moroccan flag waving from the top.

You enter the building and walk up two flights of stairs. You pass a man and a woman carrying a stroller with no child. You try not to wonder or stare. You and the man in the plaid shirt peek into a room and you see shelves of old shoe boxes, one labeled A-Be, the next: Be-De. This continues all the way through the alphabet. A child’s version of a filing system.

The driver exchanges a few sentences with the policeman sitting behind the desk in the room with the shoe boxes. The driver seems upset.

“What is it?” you ask.

“This is the wrong station,” he says.

“What? How did that happen?”

“The hotel told me it was the police station next to the big supermarket.”

“We saw the supermarket,” you say.

“Yes, but there is another police station next to a big supermarket. That’s where the police chief is waiting for you.”

You return to the car. The only good news about this is maybe the other police station is better organized. Maybe it doesn’t use shoe boxes for filing its claims.

You drive through stifling Casablanca traffic. You nod off again. When you arrive at the other police station near the big supermarket you are told it’s after 5 P.M. and the police chief has gone home for the day.

You ask if you can report the theft to someone else. You don’t want another night to pass.

You are told that that’s not possible; the police chief is personally handling your case.

The driver returns you to the Golden Tulip. In your room you are somewhat surprised to find your suitcase still under your bed. You change into your pajamas and order room service. When the man from room service knocks at the door, you don’t open it. Instead you instruct him to leave the tray on the other side of the door.

The chicken is an entire carcass. You eat a few bites and put the tray out of sight and crawl under the floral bedspread. It reminds you of staying at your grandmother’s house — you would stay with her without your sister once a week, on Fridays — in her guest room with its cumbersome bedspread. It took so much effort to make the bed on Saturday mornings. You would fold the bedspread down before placing your pillow on top of the crease, pull the bedspread over the pillow, and tuck the ends down toward the headboard. The grandmothers of your friends didn’t work, had never worked, but your grandmother worked as a cashier at a department store. You visited your grandmother at the high-end store and watched her in the back office efficiently counting dollars and expertly entering coins into small paper tubes that expanded from flat to round. When she put you to bed on the nights you spent at her house, her fingers smelled of dirty metal. Placed purposefully around her small home were expensive items she only owned because the store gave her credit every Christmas in lieu of a bonus. She usually selected bowls of orange glass, or porcelain ducks, which disappointed you. The store she worked at sold so many brighter, shinier objects, slathered in gold.

In your hotel room at the Grand Tulip you watch TV — reruns of American shows you’ve never seen — and try to sleep. You turn off the lights and stare into the darkness.

You wake up. You had been dreaming of the surveillance camera. Your dreams are usually in color — or so you think — but this dream was distinctly in black and white. In your dream the surveillance tape is backed up to earlier in the morning, 8 A.M. — before you arrived — and the hotel staff is talking with the man with the badge who robbed you. You wake not in a sweat but rather in full composure and clarity: the staff at the Golden Tulip was in on it.

You were set up. How did you not realize this before? Of course it was noted that you overtipped with a U.S. twenty-dollar bill. Of course your room at the Golden Tulip wasn’t ready. Of course you were not attended to. Of course the desk clerks were distracted, otherwise occupied. Of course no one knew how to operate the security cameras. Of course the head of security seemed peculiarly thrilled.

But you don’t blame the head of security. His behavior was so strange it suggests he was not in on the plot. He was just excited to have a security issue on his hands. His position was most likely on the chopping block, but now that a theft occurred at the hotel, he is ecstatic: he has a reason to be there. He couldn’t care less about the retrieval of your bag.

The clerks at the hotel only care about not being implicated in the crime, which you are now sure they participated in. You don’t know what to do with this information. Should you tell the police? Were the police in on it? Why were you taken to the wrong police station? You’re not yet sure whether you will tell the police chief your suspicions. You are in a country not your own, and you have to be careful. Could the conspiracy go all the way to the top? You get a brief mental picture of the police chief enjoying your camera and phone. You imagine him taking a photo of himself in swim trunks, holding a fish he’s caught without a net.

One thing you know for certain: you need to get out of this hotel. You are a target here. They got away with the theft and are now emboldened. You are scared of what will happen next here. You rise from the bed and make sure the hotel room door is locked and bolted. You turn the bathroom light on. You go to the window to make sure there’s no possibility of anyone climbing in. You wonder what you’ll do if someone does come in; you can’t call the front desk. What is the number for the police station? In the desk drawer you find a phonebook for Casablanca. It’s in Arabic and of no use to you.

You think of the gleaming, grand-looking hotels you passed when coming to the Golden Tulip. The Sofitel. The Regency.

You wait for morning to arrive. You cannot sleep. Silence takes on its own sound.

At 6:30 A.M., you call the Sofitel and ask if they have a room for tonight. You are told they are booked because of Jazzablanca. You say thank you, as though you know what Jazzablanca is.

You call the Regency and ask if they have a room for the night. Yes, they say.

“Do you have a room for a week?”

“How many people?” they ask.

“Just me. Just one,” you say.

They have a room.

The woman on the phone takes your name and then tells you she needs your credit card to secure the reservation.

“I’ll have to call you back with that,” you say.

She goes over a few more details about the hotel and says that your passport and credit card will have to be shown at check-in.

“Of course,” you say, and hang up.

You know the reservation will be canceled. You have no credit card or passport.

You think of who you could call back in America but it’s the middle of the night there. You don’t call your father because he’s busy with his new wife and their three small sons, and you don’t call your mother who now lives in Arizona, because you’ve chosen not to tell her about the theft. Your mother was recently fitted with a pacemaker and she waited five months to tell you this. You were strong when she told you, but that night you sobbed. You haven’t told your parents about what happened before your departure, why you and your husband are divorcing.

At nine in the morning the same driver comes to meet you in the lobby. Yesterday he wore a plaid shirt and white sneakers but today he’s wearing plaid sneakers and a white shirt.

In the car Paul Bowles’s shoes are gone. The backseat feels lonely, but the traffic is better today. You pass by the Regency and stare at it longingly. If only you could stay there one night; if you could feel safe enough to get a good night’s sleep you know you will be able to think clearly about what to do. You will be able to make a plan. There’s a part of your brain that you cannot access, that you’re not rested enough to get to.

You arrive at the police station within half an hour of leaving the hotel. Again, the driver uses the machine to carefully pay for the parking ticket, and then returns to the car to place the ticket on the car’s dashboard. Again, you apologize for not having any money.

You pass a sign in the lobby that is in Arabic, French, and English. The sign says POLICE STATION, NEXT FLOOR. The sign has been laminated — this is encouraging. But when you get to the top floor you panic: Has this been a ruse? The hallway is filled with mismatched chairs, all facing different directions. The police station looks like it’s just been moved into, or is about to be vacated.

The plaid-sneakered man whose father once read to Paul Bowles talks to another man with a mustache and you hold your breath. This man’s mustache is thin and it appears a small comb has been used to coerce the hairs to point in the same downward direction. You are convinced you’ll be led back downstairs and to another police station across town.

But the mustached man nods, as though they’re expecting you. The driver looks relieved. He tells you he’s going outside to have a cigarette. You can smell that other people on the floor are smoking inside, so you know it’s just an excuse to take a break. Maybe he wants to check on the status of his parking meter. The mustached man leads you into a room with four desks, one of which has a computer. Two other men, also with mustaches, enter the room.

You are ushered to a chair on the other side of the desk with the computer. On the desk is a box holding paper clips and erasers and thumbtacks. On the side of the box there’s a calendar; the calendar is three years old. The ceilings are high and the eggshell paint on the walls is peeling. The room has a photo of a man who you assume is the King of Morocco. On top of a beige filing cabinet sits a bouquet of fake flowers. You imagine the flowers were brought in by a secretary or one of the detectives’ wives who wanted to add some color, some semblance of cheer to the empty room. At some point somebody must have decided they didn’t like the flowers — too pink, too prissy — so the vase was relocated to that spot above the file cabinet where you imagine they’ll remain for eternity.

One of the detectives is seated at the computer and the two others sit atop bare desks. They sit like detectives.

“We are all here to listen to details of crime,” one detective tells you. “We saw video. We saw what thief looks like. We do not think he was part of the conference. We think his badge was. .”

He can’t find the word.

“Fake,” you suggest. You notice there’s an echo in the room.

“Yes. You are not surprised?”

“No,” you say. You are not surprised.

“We also see from video he has two people he works with. They both have badges too. One outside the hotel, the other also in the lobby.”

“There were three people?”

“Yes.”

This makes you feel better. You were the target of a crime ring. There was probably little you could have done differently. They had fabricated badges and were going to rob someone, so they robbed you.

“Do they do this at other hotels? Make badges and rob people?”

“No, we have not heard of this before,” another detective says. “It is first time.”

“Oh,” you say. You’re not sure you believe this.

“We will start with entering information,” says the man at the computer.

“Okay.”

“What was your grandfather’s name?”

“My grandfather?”

“Yes, it is a formality here. We have to fill out the forms.”

“Anthony,” you say. You have not thought of your grandfather in years. He died when you were five, and he was not such a good man. The last time you and your sister saw him you stood in front of his reclining chair, dressed in matching blue jumpers, patterned with Raggedy Ann dolls, and holding your parents’ hands. Only years later did you realize you were all there to say good-bye.

Now you are giving his name to a Moroccan detective. It takes the detective five minutes to type the name. The computer or the keyboard — maybe both — are giving him trouble.

“What is your father’s name?”

“Gian-Carlo,” you say.

He spends five minutes typing it. He has difficulty first with “Gian,” then with the hyphen, and then with “Carlo.”

“Listen,” you say, “I’m wondering if we can get to the part where I tell you what was stolen? I’m afraid I’ll never get my computer back. . I’ve already lost a day.”

“You lost a die?” one of the detectives asks. “What is a die?”

“No, I lost a day. It’s an expression,” you say. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Was it a Dell?” another detective asks.

“No, a day.”

“The computer was not a Dell?”

“Oh, a Dell computer!” you say.

“So it was a Dell.”

“No, it was an Apple.”

The three men look at you blankly. “An Apple Macintosh?” you say, slowly.

The phone rings and the detective at the desk stares at it, startled.

He says a few words into the receiver, glances at you, and is off the phone in twenty seconds.

“It’s the police chief,” he says. “He wants you to come to his office. He has development.”

You are directed across the hall where a door is open.

The police chief beckons you in and asks you to close the door behind you. In contrast to the three detectives who were thin and nervous-seeming, the police chief seems even larger than he was yesterday, and his office could not be more different from the spare, beige room you just left. A plush burgundy rug expands to the edges of the room, and a blown-up map of Casablanca takes up one wall. The curtains are burgundy as well and cascade to the ground in thick folds. There’s the same photo of the King of Morocco, but this one is framed in ornate gold.

From a coatrack in the corner hang two dry-cleaned suits and at least three shirts, all in plastic bags. A tie that’s already been tied hangs from a hook.

“We have found a black backpack,” the police chief says.

“That’s fantastic,” you say. You are stunned. You were wrong to question him when he was 100 percent confident it would be retrieved. This man radiates competence.

“Not everything is in it, but it has a passport and a wallet with credit cards. Thieves here are never interested in credit cards.”

You wish you had known this before you canceled all of yours.

He produces a black backpack from behind the desk where he’s sitting. It’s not your backpack. You know it’s not your backpack but you don’t have time to say anything because he’s already unzipping it and pulling out a dark blue American passport. With a snap of his wrist, he places the passport on the desk before you, as though he’s a blackjack dealer giving you your last card.

“I imagine everything will be easier if you have this,” he says.

You open the front page of the passport and see that while the photo resembles you — the woman has brown straight hair and bright wide-set eyes — it is not your passport. It belongs, you see, to a woman named Sabine Alyse.

The chief of police places a red wallet in front of you.

“They took the cash from the wallet but it still has the credit cards.” You wonder if these credit cards, like yours, have been canceled. You imagine using these cards to check in to the Regency and ordering everything on the menu before sleeping all the sleep you have not slept.

It strikes you as relevant that the police chief has not asked you for your name, that he has been careful with how he describes the backpack, wallet, and passport. Here is the backpack, here is the wallet, here is the passport. Not once as he called any of them yours.

You stare at the coatrack, at the expensive-looking tie that’s already tied. Shaped like a noose. You do not have many options. You know this. The police chief is suggesting you claim something that isn’t yours. And you’re not sure what will happen if you protest. You stare at the map of Casablanca on the wall. The city is large and overwhelming, its many rectangular piers jutting out from the rest of the city like large teeth.

You now know you will take the backpack and the passport and the wallet and check in to the Regency. Once you’re in the Regency you will feel safe. You need to feel safe to sleep. Once you’ve slept you will go to the American embassy and tell them it was a mistake, that the police returned the wrong bag to you. That is the plan.

For now, you need to get out of this police station. You need to get out of the Golden Tulip. You will not tell the police or the Golden Tulip where you’re going.

You glance down under the desk and see that the chief’s shoes are to the right of where he’s sitting. He’s taken them off while talking to you. He’s become more comfortable; you’ve grown more tense.

“So everything is finished,” he says.

You consider bringing up the fact that your computer and many other belongings are still missing. But the words he uttered—“So everything is finished”—was a statement, not a question.

“Yes,” you say.

“Good,” he says. “Then you can put that in your article. How good the police are here in Casablanca,” he says.

“Yes,” you say. You’d almost forgotten about your New York Times lie.

“I just need you to sign a document here saying that a backpack was returned to you along with a wallet and a passport.”

“Okay,” you say.

He slides a form across the desk and hands you a pen. On the form you sign the name you saw in the passport.

You sign “Sabine Alyse.”

The chief of police doesn’t look at the passport to compare the signatures.

“I do need one thing, though,” he says.

You panic. This is when he’ll arrest you for pretending to be someone else, for claiming someone else’s belongings.

“I need to get this paper stamped.”

Before standing, he shifts strangely in his seat. He’s slipping his shoes back on beneath the desk. Then he gets up and leaves the room.

You stare at the closed passport. You don’t open it. You glance around the room once again, and study the King of Morocco’s eyes. It’s taking the police chief a long time. What is he doing? You tell yourself that when he returns you’ll say it was a misunderstanding. You don’t know why you acted as if someone else’s backpack and passport and wallet belong to you. You’ll explain that you haven’t slept in days.

The door opens and he comes in with the paper you’ve signed with Sabine’s name. It now bears a large bloodred stamp. A circle with Arabic words in its center.

“Here’s your paper,” he says. “Your proof.”

Finally something is yours. You put the paper in the black backpack and zip it closed. The police chief extends his hand, and you take it. He shakes it firmly and with meaning: you understand he is communicating that a deal has been made and you are to uphold your end of it. You feel a wart on the side of his thumb press into the side of your own thumb. After what seems like a full minute, he releases your hand. You walk down the stairs of the police station nervously, your shoes loud on the stone steps.

Outside, the driver is checking the dashboard of the car to see if he got a ticket. You run toward him as though he’s a lost friend.

“Let’s go,” you say.

“You got your backpack!” he says. He looks surprised. “So we go back to the hotel?”

“Yes,” you say, and your mood dampens.

You place the backpack beside you on the backseat and unzip it carefully as though worried about disturbing its contents.

You open the U.S. passport and take a better look at Sabine Alyse. To be more convincing you could cut your hair. You notice her smooth complexion. You had acne as a teenager and it left raked lines across your cheeks and chin.

You flip through the passport, taking note of the countries Sabine has been to: Switzerland, Germany, Norway, Japan, and now Morocco. Until recently she has traveled only to countries that operate with the precision of expensive electronics.

You look through her wallet: Blue Cross insurance card suggesting she has a job, AAA insurance card meaning she owns a car, store credit at J.Crew that gives you an idea of the way she must dress. Crisply. Cleanly. Never too daring or dark.

Next you pull out her notebook, a red Moleskine. On the first page is a line where the owner is asked to write their name, and another line where the owner is asked to state the reward for finding the notebook in the event that it’s lost. The reward Sabine has indicated is “Happiness.”

You flip to a random entry, dated a month before. You see the words “I tried to tell them it wasn’t dangerous.”

You close the journal. You have already done this girl enough harm by claiming her things. Reading her diary makes it worse.

“Everything is okay? Everything is returned to you?” the driver asks. His voice startles you. You had almost forgotten he was there, that you were in his car.

“Not everything,” you say.

This quiets him.

“I need to stop at a shop soon,” you say. You know that before you check into the Regency you will have to confirm that Sabine Alyse’s credit cards work, you will need to find out whether they’ve been canceled.

“What kind of shop?” the driver asks.

You are at a stop sign and out your window you see a narrow store with a pyramid of body lotion on display in the window.

“This one is good,” you say. He pulls over on the next block.

“If okay with you,” he says, “I wait in car so we don’t get ticket.”

The short, older gentleman who runs the shop ignores you when you enter. He continues talking to his friends, also older men, also short. You are still without toiletries. You pick out a toothbrush, toothpaste, a hairbrush, face wash, and a pair of scissors. Would you really cut your hair to look like Sabine Alyse?

You bring everything to the glass counter. Through the top of the counter you see makeup below. The lipsticks and blushes are displayed on a deep blue velvet material, the way a fine jeweler might showcase rubies or emeralds.

The shopkeeper’s friends leave, and he finally turns his attention to you. His smile is kind, sudden, as though he’s an old acquaintance.

“Welcome! I have perfect makeup,” he says, looking into your eyes.

Since you were a teenager and developed your first bout of acne, makeup consultants at Nordstrom’s and MAC have bestowed advice on you. “Bring attention to your eyes and away from your skin,” they’ve instructed as they rainbow eye shadow across your lids. “Bring attention to your mouth with a bright color,” they’ve told you, swiping alarming red over your lips.

Distract, distract, distract is everyone’s advice.

But this shopkeeper, wearing a green sweater vest, tells you he has the perfect makeup for you, and because he’s not looking worriedly and disapprovingly and judgmentally at your skin, you trust him.

“Let me show you,” he says. “May I?”

Yes, you nod.

He applies a thin layer of foundation. “You want it thin,” he says. “No powder.”

“You’re right,” you say. “Everyone always wants to do powder and that accentuates it.”

“Too fast,” he says. “I don’t understand. Can you say again, please?”

“Good,” you say. “You are right.”

He applies a makeup brush over your face and you close your eyes.

“Look,” he says, and you open your eyes. He’s holding a handheld mirror up to your face, and you have no choice but to look. There’s still the palimpsest of acne, but for the first time in fifteen years, your skin looks almost smooth.

“Can I take this to the window?” you say, carrying the mirror toward natural light.

You have consulted a number of unhelpful dermatologists over the years and have discovered a secret from a portly shopkeeper in Casablanca who looks into your eyes instead of frowning at your skin. You tell him you’d like to buy a bottle of the foundation, and then tell him you’ll buy four. And two brushes. You want the magic to continue. You hope the credit card works.

The man tallies up your purchases by hand on graph paper and gives you a discount for each item. You hand him one of Sabine’s credit cards and you wait. You are suddenly convinced it will not go through. It’s taking a long time. But then the man at the beauty store tears off the receipt and hands you a pen. “Please sign.”

You smile so broadly your face almost hurts. He sees your pleasure and hands you his business card and requests that you tell your friends about his store. Yes, of course, you say, you’ll tell your friends when you get back to the U.S. the address of a narrow and nondescript beauty shop in Casablanca that sold you toiletries at a discount and charged a credit card that was not yours.

You return to the car and maybe it’s your imagination, but once you’re on the road again, the driver continues to sneak looks at you in his rearview mirror. He notices something is different.

The driver takes you back to the Golden Tulip and you thank him. You tell him you wish you could tip him, and he too looks dismayed that this is not an option. You flee the car quickly, wanting to escape his disappointment. You go to your room, which has still not been made up — the bedspread is contorted into an unwieldy bundle at the foot of the mattress — and pack up your things.

You take out the scissors you purchased at the beauty store and cut your long brown hair to shoulder length, like Sabine’s. You place all the hair you’ve cut onto a long piece of toilet paper that you’ve stretched across the sink counter. When you’re done you roll up the tissue with the hair inside and flush it down the toilet. You flush again.

You leave your key card on top of the television set. You walk through the lobby without informing anyone you’re checking out, without looking in the direction of the clerks at the desk. You exit through the front door with your luggage, and the black backpack over your shoulder, and turn right.

Something about this seems familiar to you. You remember that this is exactly what the thief did when he left the Golden Tulip. He pulled the backpack onto one shoulder, exited the front door, and turned right.

You walk down the boulevard, called Place des Nations Unies, dragging your suitcase, and you immediately sense your error. There are no other Western women walking down the street alone. You keep your eyes on the Regency in the distance and you move quickly through the crowds. The sun is high in the sky and it’s hot on your skin and too many faces are turning toward you. You half expect to see someone wearing your backpack.

When you arrive at the Regency, a doorman in a suit opens the door for you, greets you with “good afternoon,” and then stares out at the distance to see how you’ve arrived — by limo or van? You are pulling your suitcase and wearing Sabine’s black backpack and you realize that you’re probably the only person who’s arrived at the hotel by foot. You pass through a security portal and enter an enormous lobby. Its sofas are mocha colored and deep and plush. The kind of sofas that are easy to relax into, and difficult to rise from. White orchids are staged artfully throughout the lobby and Lauryn Hill music pulses softly through the speakers. Everyone is dressed as though going to a business meeting in London or an upscale lunch in New York. No one is dressed as though they are in Morocco — they are not dressed in long skirts and scarves and sandals, the clothes you imagined yourself wearing here.

To your left is the reception desk. The area in front of the desk is large and vacant and there is nowhere to sit. A theft would not happen here because there’s no place for a thief to linger, to watch. Two women stand behind the desk, available for anyone who might want to check in. No women worked behind the desk at the Golden Tulip.

You approach the kinder-looking of the two women, the one with long hair who smiles with her eyes, and tell her you don’t have a reservation but you called this morning and understand there’s room at the hotel. She studies the computer and confirms this. You give her Sabine Alyse’s passport and her credit card.

“I may want to use a different credit card eventually,” you say. “So I can get frequent flier miles. .” You congratulate yourself on giving a valid explanation. “Is it okay if I switch credit cards when I check out?”

She says that’s fine. She barely glances at the passport, but slides a form across the desk. You open Sabine Alyse’s passport and scribble down the relevant information.

You are asked if you would like help with your luggage and you decline politely.

As you wait for the elevator to descend from the tenth floor, you watch the numbers decrease 3-2-1, like a countdown to your fate. The elevator doors slide open smoothly like stage curtains and a young woman emerges. You do a double take because there’s something familiar about her. She looks at you too. Is it Sabine? Is that why she’s staring at you? Should you run away or approach her and say you’ve been looking for her to return something she’s lost? But it’s not Sabine.

You enter the elevator and study the woman’s profile as she walks across the lobby. You both have olive skin (but of course her complexion is better; everyone’s complexion is better) and dark brown hair. Her hair is longer than yours — it’s the length of hair you had before you cut it this past hour. You’re both around the same height and build, though she’s younger and her stomach is flatter. In America, you probably wouldn’t notice the resemblance, but here you do.

Your room is mostly white, with fluffed pillows and a light down comforter and white bathrobes and towels all awaiting you. You sit on the bed, you sit in the desk chair and swivel around. The view out the window is of the main square below. People are traversing the square and a band shell has been set up. It’s vacant now and you don’t know if the concert has already happened or if preparations are being made.

There are two bathrooms in your hotel room — one with just a toilet, far from the bedroom, and one with a bathtub and shower and sink. The light in the bathroom must be flattering because you don’t look like you haven’t slept for days and you have been robbed of almost every possession you care about and have spent the morning at the Casablanca police station.

Your face is thinner than when you left Florida, as though you’ve lost a pound or two since taking flight. As soon as you see this, you are ravenous. Hunger takes over you suddenly and completely, like fear. You scan the menu and decide on an omelet. You call room service and they greet you with “Good afternoon, Ms. Alyse.” You consider ordering in French but decide you have been through enough challenges for one day. You order your food. You wait. You lie on the bed for a moment. You are so tired but you are so hungry and you cannot sleep until you have food.

You awake to knocking. You look at the pillow. You have been drooling. You look at the clock. You have been passed out for precisely six minutes.

You open the door and you’re touched to see a flower on the room-service tray. You know all room-service trays at this hotel must come with a small vase with a single white rose, but you still wish to believe that someone has sent it just for you. When you sign the bill, charging it to the room, you write in an extravagant tip for the gentleman who brought you the food and the rose.

As soon as the door closes your fork hits the plate. The omelet is delicious. Cheese and mushrooms — you ordered only food that would be well cooked and you believed would not make you ill. You had visited a travel clinic before your trip to Morocco to get hepatitis and typhoid shots, and while there you also purchased loperamide in the event of stomach issues. But these items were in your black backpack, so now you can’t take any risks. You had never prepared for a trip as well as you had for this one — you even bought gum, a travel-size toothbrush and toothpaste kit, a small bottle of hand lotion, wet wipes, and an orange luggage tag for your new blue suitcase. You used a black permanent marker and neatly filled out the luggage tag with your name and address, and secured it onto the handle. As you were exiting the plane after everyone was clapping — was that only yesterday morning? — the new orange luggage tag fell from your suitcase. The man behind you handed it to you and you thanked him and stuffed it in the small pocket of your new black backpack. Now you own nothing with your name on it.

You have to force yourself to slow down as you tear off pieces from the baguette that accompanied your omelet, which has already disappeared.

Soon you are so full, so good; you lie down on the bed. But the moment you do you are fully alert, your toes pointed. You tell yourself you are exhausted and need to sleep. You tell yourself that if you’re not asleep in ten minutes you can get up.

When you wake you see it’s 3:14 P.M. You’ve been asleep two hours. Now, with your mind rested, the reality of what you’ve done settles in: you’ve taken someone else’s credit card and passport. You have shaken hands firmly with the police chief, accepting his not-above-the-table offer.

What have you done? This is a major crime. This is a State Department issue. What will they do to you?

You need to get to the embassy. You will explain. You were afraid of not taking what the police were offering you; it was of paramount importance that you get out of the Golden Tulip, that the hotel and the police might have been in on the scheme together. Your life was in danger.

The embassy will forgive you. You’re sure everyone there will forgive you.

You shower and douse yourself with the small bottles of shampoo and conditioner and soap provided by the hotel. The fragrance is strong, herbal, unisex. As you towel off you notice that you smell like someone else, and it’s not entirely unpleasant. You take note of the two white bathrobes hanging on either side of the bathtub. Their belts are tied loosely around their midsections as though a very thin person is inside each of them. You carry one bathrobe to the closet and hang it where you won’t have to see it.

You dress in the most presentable outfit you have packed, a pleated skirt and a silk blouse and a light scarf. It’s a combination you’ve never worn before. You bought the skirt because you wanted something demure for your trip, something you could imagine wearing when touring mosques.

The document from the police chief is lying flat on the desk. You will need to show the document to the embassy. You need proof that the police gave you Sabine Alyse’s passport and credit card, that you didn’t steal them. The document is everything. You can’t lose it. In fact, you should make copies. You will go to the business center and make copies.

In the lobby you ask the long-haired woman who checked you in where the business center is, and she points you down a corridor to her left. You pass a currency-exchange booth, where another woman is working behind glass. The existence of the currency-exchange booth reminds you that you have no money, and no ability to access cash. You only have a credit card and no pin number.

You enter the business center and find the copier. The copier requires a prepaid card, so you return to the long-haired woman at reception.

You tell her you would like to use the copier and she asks how many copies you’d like to make and you tell her two. She casually hands you a card that allows you to use the Xerox machine. “Is it okay if I charge the copies to your room?” she asks.

“That’s fine,” you say casually, with the air of someone who has a choice.

You make your way back to the business center, again passing the currency-exchange booth, where the woman working behind the glass is now licking her fingers, counting money, as though to taunt you. An hour ago it was food that you desired, food that made you greedy; now it is the sight of money that makes you want a lot of it. You avert your gaze.

Inside the business center, you place the document the police chief gave you in the Xerox machine and make one copy to test it before making more. The paper that comes out is blank; you didn’t place the original facedown. You take the blank piece of paper that the copier slides out of the machine (not unlike the way money slides out of an ATM, you can’t help noticing) and fold it and place it in the pocket of your pleated skirt. You want to hide your mistake from. . whom? You start over. You place the police document facedown on the machine, which emits a strange, stovelike smell.

The door to the business center is thrown open, and startles you. It’s a businessman, probably in his thirties. Maybe French.

“Excusez-moi,” he says.

“It’s okay,” you say. He sits down at a computer station and places his cell phone beside him. It’s the latest incarnation of the iPhone, and almost instantaneously it starts to ring. The man glances at who’s calling. A woman’s face appears on the phone. She’s holding a child. You can see this much from your vantage point. The ring is a techno beat you’ve heard on radio stations you pass over while driving, the kind of thing played at a disco at three in the morning. But instead of answering the phone, or turning it off, he lets it ring until the call goes to voice mail.

A second later the ringing starts again, and the iPhone flashes the same photo of the woman with child. Again, the Frenchman takes a look at his phone, ignores the call, and without turning off the ringer, returns his attention to the computer.

The sound is driving you mad. The business center is the size of a small bathroom and the phone must be set on the highest volume. You’re tempted to grab the phone, answer the call, and tell the woman calling, the woman who is most likely his wife and the mother of his child, that her husband is calmly ignoring her urgent calls.

You exit the business center feeling brittle and claustrophobic and you return to the lobby. Through the glass doors at the front of the hotel you see a mass of people in black, bathed in bright lights and surrounded by complicated-looking machines. If you were anywhere but a hotel in Casablanca you would think a movie was being filmed. You walk closer. You see cameras and trolleys. A movie is being filmed. You stop and stare for a moment, and while standing, squinting, you’re approached by a man in an expensive-looking suit who introduces himself as the manager of the hotel. He welcomes you to the hotel and asks your name.

“Sabine Alyse,” you say. You are proud of your lack of hesitation. You haven’t slept much in thirty hours, fifty hours — you’re too tired to do the math and you know that doing the math will make you more tired. But you’ve remembered your new fake name.

“I am so very sorry for the disturbance,” the manager says. You are momentarily taken aback — is he apologizing for what happened at the other hotel, the Golden Tulip?

He continues. “They are shooting a film here in front of the hotel. It’s a Moroccan film company, very respected, but we did not anticipate. .”

He searches for the words. You have no idea what he’s about to say. You stare at his mouth.

“We did not know that the film crew would be dressed so shay-billy.”

“Shay-billy?” you say.

“Yes, with their pants hanging down on their hips and their hair not combed. .”

“Oh, shabbily,” you say. “They’re dressed shabbily.”

You are merely repeating what he said, and correcting the pronunciation in the process, but he takes your utterance to mean that you are in agreement: the film crew is a disgrace.

You don’t think you have ever worn a pleated skirt and a tailored long-sleeved blouse and scarf before, but you decide at this moment that you will do so more often. Usually the way you dress is not so different from the way the film crew is dressed, but now you see that the world — as represented by this manager at the Regency Hotel in Casablanca — sees you and treats you differently when you dress like this and apply makeup to cover the ridges of your skin. You are apologized to for things that don’t merit an apology.

“We are trying to ask them to dress more appropriately for a hotel such as ours,” the manager says, “but in the meantime I apologize for the inconvenience. Please let me know if I can be of help to you.”

You stare at his face, memorizing his features: caramel eyes, a straight nose. You know that you might need him.

“Yes, thank you very much,” you say. As you shake his hand to thank him for his offer, one of the crew members who is indeed sloppily dressed approaches the manager.

The man speaks in French to the manager and says there’s a problem. You can’t make out much else except for the word drapeau. Your brain picks out a definition you didn’t know you had: flag.

There seems to be an issue with the flag flying outside the Regency Hotel. You notice you’re lingering, so you walk away and approach the concierge desk, where an older gentleman in a crisp suit stares out at the lobby as though he’s standing at the helm of a boat, observing an unextraordinary view.

You ask the concierge for directions to the embassy and he unfolds a small map. He circles the hotel, and circles the embassy, and hands you the map. You’re relieved that the embassy appears close because you have no cash for a taxi. You will have to walk.

You step out of the hotel. No filming is currently happening. Men and women, dressed shabbily, are moving monitors around and adjusting wires while smoking dense, heavily packed cigarettes.

You walk in the direction of the embassy. The area surrounding the Regency is not much of a neighborhood; it’s a grid of wide streets where people sell goods, many of which appear to have been stolen. You search absentmindedly for signs of your computer, your camera, still in its box. But this street is for the selling of stolen items that no one wants. An elderly toothless woman sits on an upside-down crate and displays a used and cracked asthma inhaler. A young man sells mix cassette tapes, their labels handwritten, some with hearts.

You walk to an enormous square and find hundreds of people gathered around. You ask one of the many guards what’s going on. “Qu’est-ce qui se passe?” you say. But he doesn’t understand the question. You question your French. You know you said it correctly. So you ask again. Still, he looks at you as though you should know.

Red Moroccan flags are everywhere — flying from every flagpole in the square, jutting out from buildings, hanging from balconies. You stand behind the rows of men in black leather jackets — they are almost all men — and a few children, who wait with eight-by-ten photos. You catch sight of one of the photos: it looks like a younger version of the king. Of course. Le prince. The prince.

Everyone around you is waiting for the prince himself.

Now you see a row of dignitaries lined up and you realize they too are there for the prince. You decide to remain where you are for a minute to see if you get a glimpse of him, before you keep moving.

You begin to feel stares as you stand there, the only Westerner in sight who’s waiting for the prince. And the only woman. Where are the women? From your neck you remove your deep orange scarf, a scarf that you packed because it seemed Moroccan to you, or at least the shade of a Moroccan spice. You take it and wrap it around your head, covering much of your face. You dressed for the embassy, for the Regency but not for the street.

The scarf around your head cuts down on some of the stares, but still you are female. You wish you had an umbrella with you — it looks as though it might rain, and besides, an umbrella would allow you to hide. You decide to keep walking. It’s almost 4 P.M. and you assume the embassy closes at 5. You don’t have time to wait for the prince. You consult your map: the fastest route would be to walk across the square in front of you, but it’s now blocked off for the prince’s arrival, so you make your way around the large city block.

The neighborhood is in disrepair — benches are missing their seats, or tipped to the ground, the sidewalks are uneven. Grass is spotty and rare and no flowers have been planted. The people lingering in the streets where you walk are homeless or appear drunk. They don’t seem to be aware, or else it doesn’t mean anything to them, that nearby hundreds of people are awaiting their prince.

When you’re almost all the way around the block, it starts to rain — first lightly, and then thrashingly. You duck under the canopy of a storefront for cover. Two men in leather jackets sprint out of the rain and under the canopy as well. They light cigarettes. The prince has still not arrived. More people are gathering and the guards are beginning to prohibit pedestrians from crossing the street.

Barricades have been erected, indicating down which streets the prince and his cavalcade will drive. Throngs of people stand in front of the silver railings. When the rain stops, which it does as suddenly as it started, you try to continue on your way to the embassy, but there are roadblocks everywhere.

You cross one street and take a right, only to find a barricade that forces you to retreat and take a different route. You endure the stares of people taking note of your skin, your body. Even an elderly grandmother holding the hand of a young boy gives you a stare that says, You should not be here.

You squeeze between two barricades and a policeman whistles. You raise your hand apologetically and move on. You need to keep moving.

Finally you make it to the embassy. It’s 4:40. You’re still wet from the rain. You should have brought an umbrella. A psychiatrist friend of yours once told you that a telltale sign of a mentally unstable person is she’s never dressed appropriately for the weather. You decide to wait outside under the awning for another couple minutes to allow yourself to dry off even a little.

When you enter the embassy, you’ve never felt so happy to see the American flag. You pass through the metal detector, and you’re given a number. You sit in a folding chair waiting, surrounded by families and couples. You are the only one there by yourself. The room is small but regal, with flags and portraits. You stare at the photograph of Obama on the wall. He seems to care about you. Or is his look one of mild disappointment?

When your number is called, you approach window number three. An American woman in her forties, with a Sontag-gray streak in her dark hair, greets you. “How can I help you?” she says.

You find her formidable, and probably attribute more intelligence to her because of her Sontag streak, her streak of Susan Sontag.

“I’m an American citizen,” you say. “I live in Florida. Usually. My passport and computer and everything were stolen by someone wearing a badge when I was checking into my hotel. The Golden Tulip.”

“They were wearing a badge?” she says.

“Yes, but that was just a front.”

“Have you been to the police?”

“Yes,” you say. “They gave me another backpack that wasn’t mine to replace my backpack. I mean, they thought they were giving me the right backpack. Or maybe they didn’t think that. Anyway, I got the wrong backpack back. So now I have someone else’s backpack and passport.”

“Why would the police give you someone else’s backpack?”

“I don’t know,” you say. “Maybe they were in on it.”

“In on it with whom?”

“With the hotel.”

“You’re saying the Casablanca police and the Golden Tulip were in cahoots to steal your backpack.”

It sounds ludicrous coming from her mouth.

“Yes,” you say, suddenly less certain of anything, of everything.

“Can I see your ID?” she says.

“That’s the thing: I don’t have any ID. I just have this other backpack and passport, which I left at the hotel for safekeeping.”

“But why would you have someone else’s backpack and passport?”

“Because the police gave it to me.”

“Can I see the police report?” she says. “With your name on it.”

“I don’t have a police report.”

“You don’t have a police report,” she says in disbelief.

“I have a document from them,” you say. “With a red stamp from the police chief.”

“Can I see it?” she asks.

You reach into your skirt pocket and extract the paper and unfold it.

It’s blank.

You turn it over.

The other side is blank.

You feel your ears pop and widen, as though your sense of hearing will help you locate the document.

“I think I left it. I left the document at the hotel,” you say, speaking slowly, trying to calm yourself down.

“And it has your name on it?”

“Yes,” you lie, because you cannot believe you’re in a situation where you have nothing with your own name on it.

“Can you get that document and bring it back here?” She is speaking to you like a child. Susan Sontag is speaking to you like a child.

“Yes,” you say. “I’ll get the police document and I’ll bring it here.”

“Bring it tomorrow,” she says. “In the meantime, do you want to tell me whose passport and backpack they gave you? They were American, I assume?”

“Yes, she’s American,” you say.

“Her name?” she says.

You panic. If you give up Sabine Alyse’s name you will have nothing.

You decide to lie because you have no choice: “I don’t remember. I’ll have to go back to the hotel and get that too,” you say.

She looks at you skeptically, taking in your features for the first time. You imagine her describing you to someone else, perhaps the police, the ambassador, the secretary of state, the president. He will be so disappointed.

“You said you’re staying at the Golden Tulip?” she says.

“Yes,” you lie. “The Golden Tulip. I’ll be there until this all gets resolved.”

She scribbles something on a paper in front of her, a paper you cannot see. You imagine it’s a list of suspicious persons, people she and the president are disappointed in.

“What time will you be back here tomorrow? What time can we expect to see you?”

“First thing,” you say. You know you need to be agreeable. She suspects you of something and you need to be agreeable.

“Nine A.M.,” she says.

“Perfect,” you say.

“I’ll take down your name so we’re sure to have the appointment booked. What was your name again?”

She says this so casually that you know she suspects you, that she’s trying to trap you. You give the name of a woman who helped you at the baggage store in Florida. You noted her name on the receipt. “Megan Willis,” you say. It’s the only name that comes to mind. Megan Willis is the one who suggested you purchase the basic black backpack, and that, when you really think about it, was the first true mistake. This all started with Megan Willis.

You walk casually out of the embassy door, and once you’ve exited you move quickly. Fuck, you think. This latest lie will be yet another thing you will have to explain when you return. You have no money to take a cab or bus, so once again you must walk. You wind through streets and pass through a small square where several policemen wearing dark black vests surround two groups of people. In the center of one circle is a woman; in the center of the other a man. The woman is crying and she’s pointing at the man, and though you can’t understand what she’s saying, you know some sort of violation occurred. She gesticulates, using her hands to show the way the man fondled her rear. Two policemen are listening to the woman and another is holding the man by his arm. You watch and then, as though reminded that you too are a woman, you move on.

As you continue to walk to your hotel, you think of how fortuitous it was that Sabine Alyse didn’t cancel her credit cards. And then you wonder why a woman who has a AAA card in her wallet and shops at J.Crew and strikes you as a fairly together woman wouldn’t cancel her credit cards when she discovered her backpack with her wallet and passport were missing. You got the backpack this morning, so she’s been missing it for at least that long. You canceled your cards within an hour. You contemplate what might have prevented her from making the calls you made to Vipul and Christy. Maybe Sabine is somewhere where she can’t make calls. She’s been kidnapped. You picture her blindfolded. She could be dead. And what if the embassy knows she’s dead? What if the embassy finds you, and her backpack on you? Wouldn’t they assume you did it? Wouldn’t they assume at the very least that you stole her possessions?

No. No. This is madness. She’s not dead. And you have a document proving the police gave you her possessions. The document is everything. And it’s back in the hotel.

As you approach the Regency you see a line of people formed as though they’re protesters, but they’re not shouting anything; they’re just staring. It’s the prince, you think. He must be at the Regency.

But as you get closer and make your way through the line, you see filming is now taking place at the entrance to the hotel. You explain to a guard that you’re a guest at the Regency, and he informs you that you’ll have to wait a few minutes before you can enter. He apologizes.

You move closer to the entrance of the hotel and join other guests who are watching the filming. You are vibrating, almost jogging in place. You need to find that piece of paper with the red stamp. But instead you are forced to watch the filming of a movie.

The scene being shot involves a woman on an old bicycle as she rides up to the front entrance of the hotel and disembarks. Then she does it again. And a third time. Lights are adjusted. Cameras are pulled forward and back on a trolley.

You find yourself enjoying this. Its repetitions are soothing. And now you are sure the document is on the desk, in your room, where you left it. It’s in the Regency, and all is safe within the Regency. The director says, “Cut!”

After the woman disembarks for the fourth time, she takes off what you realize is a long, dark black wig with bangs. Beneath the wig her hair is brown, like yours, and pulled back into a tight bun. You recognize her. She’s the young woman you saw emerging from the hotel elevator when you first checked in. You had no idea she was a movie star. She doesn’t look like a movie star. She looks like you: same height, same plain face. She disappears into the hotel and the bike is rolled out of view, back where it came from. Seconds later, another young woman is on the bike.

The cameras start rolling but now it is this other woman with black hair who is on the bike, cycling up to the front of the hotel. She disembarks. You see that this woman resembles a famous American actress. And then it hits you: this is a famous American actress. Her face has been on the covers of so many magazines, and yet, even at this distance you can tell she’s more beautiful, more delicate, more bizarrely perfect in real life.

She retreats and a crew member walks the bicycle out of sight. A minute later she rides up again. Everyone on set is more focused, more engaged now that it’s the famous American actress on the bicycle.

She does three takes and on the fourth take her foot falls off the pedal and the pedal spins and she laughs. A makeup woman wearing a short, brush-filled apron, rushes out and uses a wet wipe on the famous American actress’s leg, removing any grease. Another woman who is so elaborately dressed you guess she must be from the costume department emerges from the side of the set and adjusts the right fold at the bottom of the movie star’s pedal pushers. A crew member walks the bike back to the starting point. Then the movie star rides up to the front of the hotel again and this time doesn’t send the pedal spinning. When the scene is finished, she raises her hands in the victory sign — she can ride a bike without messing up a scene! The crew around her claps, and she gives an exaggerated and theatrical bow.

You have read a few magazine profiles about this famous American actress and now you think that they haven’t done her justice. In real life she is more beautiful, yes, but also very human, very funny. She is capable of making fun of herself, of her mistakes on set, and the crew applauds this. You haven’t been on any movie sets before, but you are fairly positive that everyone on this set is in awe of the famous American actress, and everyone likes her more than they expected to. There’s an earnestness in the way they surround her afterward. The director approaches and puts his arm around her in a fatherly way.

Filming appears to be done for now, at this location at least. The famous American actress is ushered into the Regency, but a transformation has occurred: she’s no longer a girl biking up to the entrance of a hotel; she’s an American movie star once more, and now she’s surrounded by two men who, if you’re not mistaken, must be her bodyguards. They whisk her past the onlookers in the lobby and into an elevator that is miraculously waiting. Is there a third bodyguard inside who timed it so that the doors would open just when she appeared? The swiftness with which she enters the lobby and is lifted up to what is surely the best room is so well orchestrated it makes everything that happened on the film set look like it was done by amateurs — shabbily dressed amateurs.

You take the next elevator to your room. You can picture the document on the desk. You made copies and brought them back to your room, right? You cannot remember the order of the settings of the day’s events: embassy, business center, police station, Golden Tulip, Regency. They’re just images on a scattered deck of cards.

A bottle of champagne sits in a bucket of ice on your desk. You read the card, which is addressed to Sabine. “Wishing you a pleasant stay,” the card says. “Warmly, your grateful manager.”

You search the desk for the document. It’s not on the desk. It’s not near the desk, under the desk. You throw the comforter from the bed. You open and close the curtains. You look behind the television, in the closets, in your suitcase. It’s not in the room.

You sit in the desk chair defeated. You eye the champagne. You want a glass to calm your nerves. You struggle with the cork. There’s something wrong. You turn the cork toward you and study it. You pull at it and it hits you in the chest and the champagne follows, dampening your blouse and skirt.

“Jesus!” you say aloud. You hold your hand to your chest. You feel like you’ve been shot. Your hands are sticky and your clothes are wet. You can smell the dried rose scent of the champagne on your scarf, and you untangle it from your neck. Your blouse clings to your skin as you take it off, and you unzip your skirt and let it drop to the floor. You rummage through your suitcase for whatever is available and easy. You pull on a dull, wrinkled T-shirt, some black spandex exercise pants.

You try to think. A phone rings in the room next to yours. You remember the man and his annoying cell phone ring at the business center. That’s where you left the original. It must still be there. You slide on your sneakers and pick up your key card.

The elevator ride is interminable. It seems to stop at every floor to let in another hotel guest. The guests are inevitably well dressed, and carry suitcases or purses of fine leather. The purses are bright-colored citron or red; gold Chanel or Hermès logos dangle from their zippers.

You should never have bought a simple black backpack. You should have picked a fluorescent knockoff Hermès bag with metallic charms hanging from its multiple zippers. Then the thief would never have been able to walk out of the hotel so casually, the black unisex backpack flung over his shoulder.

You exit the elevator and go straight to the business center. You lift up the top of the copier. No paper is inside. You check the mouth of the machine for the copy.

Nothing. You never pressed copy. Or did you? You made one copy but it was blank. You turned over the police report. The man with the phone distracted you. And you left. Now the police report is gone.

You flee the business center; the door slams behind you.

You approach reception, and the long-haired woman standing behind the desk says, “Are you looking for the fitness center?”

“No,” you say, confused, until you understand that the only possible explanation for your attire is that you’re going to work out.

“Actually,” you say, because saying that word calms you down, makes you not — you hope — come across as frantic as you feel. “By mistake I left a very important document in the copy machine earlier today, and now it’s not there.”

“You are sure you left it there?”

“Yes,” you say. “Has anyone turned anything in?”

“I don’t think so,” the long-haired woman says. She rummages below the reception desk. “Nothing here.”

She calls over to a short-haired woman working one computer down from her. The short-haired woman looks at the desk area around her and shrugs.

“No,” says the long-haired woman. “Nothing’s been turned in.”

“Is there a lost and found?” you ask.

“A what?”

“A place that people put things that are lost? So other guests can find them?”

“This is that place,” says the woman.

“What about housekeeping?” you say. “Do they clean the business center?”

“Yes, but they shouldn’t take anything.” Before you have to ask her to do so, she calls housekeeping. You feel she’s on your side.

She speaks in Arabic and waits. She moves the phone away from her mouth. “They’re checking,” she tells you.

You wait for two minutes while they check.

She speaks into the phone and hangs up.

“No, nothing,” she says.

You go back into the business center and look at each computer station. You peer under the lid of the photocopier: nothing.

You pass by the woman working at the currency-exchange booth. You have an idea.

You approach the glass window. “Have you seen anyone come out of the business center carrying papers this afternoon?”

“Pardonnez-moi?” she says, leaning in closer to the glass.

You repeat yourself, speaking louder.

“You are asking me if anyone left the business center carrying papers?”

“Yes,” you say.

“Everyone leaves the business center carrying papers. That is where they print their papers.”

You have never liked the currency-exchange woman and now you actively loathe her.

You decide to find the manager. He knows you and will understand your predicament.

You walk to the front of the hotel, where he is in conversation with the sloppily dressed crew member again. He does not look pleased. The crew member looks more shabbily dressed now than he did earlier.

You stand near them, lingering. The manager must feel your gaze because he looks up.

“The fitness center is that way,” he says, and points.

“Thank you,” you say. “I actually need help with something else.”

“One moment, please,” he says, and continues a heated negotiation with the crew member.

“You cannot film in the lobby on Monday,” the manager says. “We have a very important conference checking in on Monday and your film crew cannot be the first thing they see when they enter the Regency.”

The crew member starts to protest.

“You can do it Tuesday, but not Monday,” the manager says. “We will have explained the situation and the relaxed dress code to our guests by then.”

The conversation ends and it’s your turn.

“Thank you for the champagne,” you say.

He stares at you, evidently not recognizing you in your spandex.

“You had champagne sent to my room.”

“Oh, yes,” he says. He seems to be questioning why he bothered.

“I have a bit of a situation,” you say. “My belongings were stolen at the Golden Tulip yesterday. I was originally supposed to stay there.”

“You were going to stay there instead of here?” He questions your judgment, your taste, your budget. Your wrinkled and faded gym attire isn’t helping.

“Yes, and my backpack was stolen and I went to the police station and they gave me a report with a red stamp. A very important red stamp. I went to make copies in the business center and I must have left it behind because I don’t have it now. I’m so tired. I just arrived yesterday and so much has happened. .”

“You are looking for a piece of paper?” he says.

“Yes.”

“What is your name again?”

You give him Sabine’s name.

“If we find a piece of paper with your name on it, we will call you immediately,” he tells you.

Back in your room you check the champagne bottle to see if there’s anything left. A quarter of the bottle. You fill your glass and finish it quickly.

Your thoughts become slower, more orderly. You lied to the embassy woman. You told her you were Megan Willis. You told her you had a document from the police, but now you don’t. It seems impossible to go back to the embassy without your own identification, with only the possessions of Sabine Alyse. And having given Susan Sontag a fabricated name. But without the embassy what can you do? You cannot return to the police station: when the police chief pressed his warted thumb into your thumb you knew he was saying that you were to never see each other again. You doubt he will defend you if you return to the station. You will have to continue to be Sabine Alyse, here at the Regency. You will have to eat here, charge everything to the room. But how long will that last? How long before Sabine Alyse’s credit-card charges are traced to you?

You stand in front of the window, looking out at Casablanca as it presents itself below. A modern tram snakes through the city. You pour yourself the last of the champagne and stare out at the clock in the distance: it’s 10 P.M. You stop noticing anything new. You simply focus on the patterns pedestrians make as they crisscross through the square below. Unlike your sister, whose brain is a beehive, and who has excelled at continuously plotting her next step, you have always been good at staring out of windows for long periods of time. You try not to calculate how much of your life you have wasted doing exactly what you are doing now.

In the morning you shower and wash your hair, using the small hotel bottles. Yesterday they made you smell like someone else but today they smell like you. At home you wear something floral. This new scent you’ve adopted smells of tangerines and honey. The robe is back on a hanger, its sash tied at the waist once more. As you untie the belt you feel as though you’re undressing someone else.

You are too hungry to wait for room service. In the lobby you approach a waiter and ask where you sit if you want food. He says anywhere. He tells you one side of the lobby is nonsmoking, the other smoking. There’s no wall between the two.

You order coffee and an omelet, and look around you, catching shards of conversation. Businessmen chatter over cappuccinos in French, Portuguese, and Arabic. Five women dressed in high heels and showing bare calves have arranged themselves around another table. If you didn’t know better you would think they’d come to Casablanca to celebrate one of their fortieth birthdays. But you know better. No one comes to Casablanca to celebrate anything. Your guidebook to Morocco (also in your backpack) was right: the first thing you should do upon arrival in Casablanca is get out of Casablanca.

Which is what you’re trying to do. But you’re not sure where you’ll go. Your plan was to go to Fez, to Marrakech, to the desert, but these places no longer have appeal. You try to imagine when they did have appeal. You try to remember the person you were when planning this very trip.

Across the lobby, in the nonsmoking section, you see the woman who slightly resembles you. The stand-in for the famous American actress. She’s not wearing the wig. She’s sitting with two other people you haven’t seen before. The woman is older; she is pale, professional, precise. She wears practical but expensive shoes that have low square heels, and her hair is cut short in the style favored by women who don’t want to make a fuss, who don’t want to present themselves as overly feminine. She is perhaps fifty. The man sitting with her is an unlikely match: he’s wearing black jeans and a white shirt and has tattoos on his arms. The stand-in appears to be crying.

The tattooed man and the pale practical woman seem agitated with the stand-in. They are reprimanding her, and you assume that their words are the cause of her tears. What has she done? Who are these people causing her to sob? Still, as she buries her head in her hands it’s clear why she’s a stand-in and not an actress; her gestures are dramatic, obvious choices.

You are two tables away and wish you were closer. You wonder what is happening. Witnessing someone else’s troubles right now is a very welcome distraction.

The waiter approaches with your omelet and coffee. You stare at the basket of bread and scoot yourself forward on the chair. The waiter steps away for a moment and returns with an oversize suede pillow from a nearby couch and places it behind you so that you can comfortably reach the table, so you don’t have to sit on the edge of the seat.

“Merci,” you say.

With the first sip of coffee your mind begins to work through your options. Is going to the embassy out of the question? Yes, you have no police document. You could be under suspicion the moment you walk in. Susan Sontag made note of you. She could have obtained your photo from the security cameras.

By now, Sabine Alyse’s credit cards have probably either been reported, or if she’s suffered a fate as terrible as you fear she might have, you are certain that there will be inquiries about what happened to her. You should not be staying at a hotel under her name. You cannot stay another night at this hotel.

As you finish your coffee, the waiter comes and refills your cup. You start thinking that it’s madness to be in this lobby at all. Every minute that you’re sitting here increases the likelihood that if anyone’s looking for clues as to what happened to Sabine Alyse, and to her backpack, they will find you here. At the very least, you will be charged with stealing her possessions. At worst, you will be charged with playing a part in whatever happened to her.

The tattooed man seems to be repeatedly glancing over at you. Why is he staring at you? He looks as though he could be a security guard. The stand-in gets up and leaves. The tattooed man talks intensely to the pale professional woman, and now she’s looking at you too. She looks like she could be in the CIA. No one else in the lobby wears shoes like hers, no one else wears their hair in the style she does.

Something’s wrong. They know something about you and Sabine Alyse.

You tell yourself you’re being overly suspicious of them. You tell yourself to look down at your food for ten seconds. You tell yourself that if they’re still staring at you when you look up then they are onto you. If they’ve looked away, you can relax.

You stare at your plate. You count the seconds. When you look up they are staring at you more intently than before, while having a very serious discussion.

You have to leave the restaurant. You have to leave without paying. You can’t sign Sabine’s name again. You need to go to your room and pack your things and get out of this hotel.

You try not to run as you make your way across the lobby and up the elevator to your room. You place the backpack — the evidence — inside your suitcase, and throw your clothes and toiletries on top. You zip up the suitcase and make your way to the elevator.

But you can’t go downstairs. The pale professional woman and the tattooed man are there. The manager is there. By now they might have all figured out who you are — or aren’t.

Inside the elevator you see the button for the rooftop pool. You’ll go there, wait an hour or two until the people who were so interested in you have left the lobby.

The elevator opens directly to the pool. You walk out with your suitcase. The pool is a blue square without a diving board. You sit on a chaise longue. The sun is not yet warm enough for sunbathers and there’s only one swimmer in the pool, a woman. She stops swimming and looks at you. You can see she’s wondering what you’re doing there, fully dressed with a suitcase.

You think quickly and find the door to the women’s locker room. You wait in there. Then you realize how strange this is. The woman in the pool could report that there’s a woman who entered the changing room and never left.

Your only option to appear as normal as possible is to swim. And besides: swimming has always soothed you. You remove a dark blue one-piece from your suitcase. You didn’t bother packing a bikini because you feared it would only mock your body in its current condition. You pull on the blue swimsuit and hoist the front up over your chest, and adjust the elastic down over your rear. You stash your suitcase under a massage table that for some reason is in the changing room. Maybe they bring it outside on nice days for poolside massages.

You dive from the edge of the pool where it says NO DIVING, and swim underwater to the other side, not once coming up for air. The water is a good temperature, neither too cold nor too warm. You are not a casual swimmer. You competed on swim teams starting when you were eight, and you attended college on a diving scholarship. You swim quick laps and realize that you are following the other woman, that you’re too close to her feet. You slow down your strokes so it doesn’t appear that you’re chasing her.

The woman gets out of the pool. She goes into the changing room and a minute later leaves the pool area via the elevator.

You swim twenty more laps without stopping. You relish your turns, the way you glide as you push off from the edges of the pool. You’ve always gained speed on turns; they’ve long been your secret asset as a swimmer. You can feel your mind being cleared. Water does this to you.

You towel off your shins and arms thoroughly, the way you did with a shammy before your next competitive dive. When you look up you see two other hotel guests exiting the elevator. As they approach, both fully dressed in pants and shirts, your heart seizes. It’s the couple from the lobby, the pale practical woman and the tattooed man.

You glance around to see if they could possibly have another objective than to talk. Nothing and no one is around you.

“Hello!” the practical woman calls out. You see her face change to a smile. You realize she’s performing for you.

“Hello!” the tattooed man shouts.

You wave hello. A smooth motion of your hand, as though you’re wiping the front window of a car.

You pull the towel around your chest, tucking one edge into the top of the other so the bulk of your body is concealed. It seems strange to be wearing a swimsuit while they are clothed. And why are they approaching you? You consider fleeing to the locker room. Was there an exit there? You can’t recall.

The unlikely duo sits down on the chaise longue next to yours. “Sorry to interrupt your swim,” says the pale practical woman, not seeming at all sorry.

“Yes, our apologies,” says the tattooed man, seeming a little more apologetic. His tattoos bear words in Arabic and one, DESTINY, in English. He speaks with a slight British accent. Your guess is he studied in London as an exchange student. Now it all makes sense. They work for Interpol. You eye the elevator door, assessing whether if you run, you can escape. But the tattooed man looks athletic. You have no chance.

“We saw you downstairs,” the pale practical woman says. “Did you see us?”

What is the right answer? The pale practical woman is American. Maybe she works for the embassy. She’s one of Sontag’s minions.

“No,” you lie. “Maybe.”

The tattooed man says, “We were in the lobby. We noticed you across the room. Are you staying here in the hotel?”

This is a trap. You need a lawyer. You shouldn’t answer any of these questions.

“Yes,” you say. You need to end this conversation. “Excuse me, I’m in the middle of my laps. . I was going to go back in.”

“I’m sorry,” the pale practical woman says. “We’re being so cryptic.”

“We’re making a movie,” the tattooed man says. “You might have seen our crew?”

Could this be true? Could these two be members of the film crew instead of intelligence operatives? You begin to relax.

“I think so,” you say.

“It’s a medium-budget film with a major American movie star,” the pale practical woman says.

“What’s your name?” the pale practical woman says.

What is your name? Sabine Alyse? Megan Willis?

“Reeves Conway,” you say. It’s the name of your sister’s baby. She is two months old. You feel closer to her than anyone else in the world.

“Nice to meet you, Reeves,” the tattooed man says, without introducing himself. “What brings you to Morocco?”

“Vacation,” you say.

“How nice,” the pale practical woman says. You can tell she doesn’t think much of vacations; they’re probably a waste of time for her. “Are you here alone?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re from the States? Canada?” the pale practical woman asks.

You still have no idea what they want from you.

“Florida,” you say, telling the truth.

“How long will you be out here?” the pale practical woman asks.

“I’m not sure,” you say. You were supposed to go back in ten days, but now you really don’t know how that will happen.

They look at each other and the pale practical woman nods. A decision seems to have been made.

“We have a proposal for you,” the tattooed man says.

“A proposal?” you say. It sounds illegal as you repeat his words back to him.

“A job offer,” says the pale practical woman. “Please hear us out.”

“Okay,” you say, tentatively. You have no money and no ability to access money. You had not thought of getting a job, but now it seems logical, necessary.

The woman clears her throat, as if about to say something very discreet, very important. “I am the personal secretary to the actress starring in the film,” she says.

She waits for you to say something, for you to be impressed.

“Okay,” you say.

She studies you as you say this, and the calmness of your response seems to please her.

The tattooed man jumps in. “I’m not sure if you know much about how it works with a film, but with the big stars we have stand-ins. The stand-ins help us block the scene so that we can make sure the lighting and the camera angles are correct before we bring the star out. This helps with several factors. Firstly, we make sure the star does not exhaust himself or herself. . in this case clearly we’re making sure that she does not exhaust herself. Secondly, we limit the number of onlookers who have time to spread the gossip that the star is appearing. If the star comes out first, then it gives every person standing on the street the chance to text and tweet and before long”—he snaps loudly here—“we have a mob situation.”

The pale practical woman is looking at him disapprovingly, impatiently. This appears to be the natural state of her face. When he glances over at her she smiles at him.

You are wondering what any of this has to do with you.

“You are probably wondering what this has to do with you,” the pale practical woman says.

You shrug, as though you have been enjoying a story and have no concern or intrigue as to why you are being told this story.

“The young woman, Ivy, who has been playing the stand-in has had an emergency and has to fly home,” the tattooed man says.

“It’s unlikely she’ll be returning,” says the practical woman.

“We are a Moroccan crew and don’t have anyone who resembles the movie star in skin color, height, or size, but we think you might be right,” says the tattooed man.

“Should we continue talking?” the pale practical woman asks.

“Yes,” you say.

They both look relieved.

“Great,” the tattooed man says. “I can imagine how bizarre this must all sound to you. We were just getting desperate and we saw you alone and—”

The practical woman cuts him off. She has no time for stories of desperation, especially now that she senses a possible solution.

“Can I ask how tall you are?” asks the practical woman.

“Five foot seven,” you answer.

The tattooed man looks at the practical woman. She tells him that the actress is five foot six and a half. “So that’s. .” The Moroccan man uses his thumb and forefinger to try to measure how big a gap half an inch is.

“Less than that,” says the practical woman.

He, who is not used to measuring outside of the metric system, brings his thumb and forefinger together.

“That’s okay,” he says to the practical woman.

“Yes, I think so,” she says.

She turns to you. Suddenly you are involved in their conversation again. “You will have to wear flats on set.”

“And a wig,” says the tattooed man to the pale practical secretary. To you he says: “Your hair is a little short, not dark enough. Also the movie takes place in the sixties. It’s a period film. The wig will help.”

“Yes,” the pale practical secretary says, “she should just use Ivy’s wig. I’ll make a note of the wig for the costume department.” She takes out her iPhone and makes a note of it.

“You probably have some questions about the job,” says the practical woman.

You have no questions. You want this job.

“Yes,” you say. “I have a couple.”

They stare at you, expectantly.

“When would the position start?”

“You’d probably meet her this afternoon. Just to get to know each other,” the pale practical secretary says. “Unfortunately I don’t know if you’ll meet the director today. He’s attending to some personal business.”

The tattooed man glances at her, and smiles. She does not smile back. You wonder about the nature of the personal business he’s attending to.

“You’ll meet the security guards,” the practical secretary says. “They’d have to get to know you.”

“You may have seen them with her around the hotel,” the tattooed man says.

You nod. You want to ask about pay, when and how much, and are about to ask, when the practical secretary preempts you.

“You’d be paid in cash. Long story,” she says.

Your mouth drops open. You close it.

“You’ll be paid five hundred dollars a day, at the end of each week,” the practical woman says. “This week will be prorated given we’re almost halfway through it.”

She must have misread the expression on your face as one of alarm, of concern, because the practical woman says, “And of course we’d cover your accommodations.” Then she frowns. “Unfortunately we don’t have it in the budget for you to continue staying at the Regency.”

“Where would I go?” you say. You cannot return to the Golden Tulip.

“There’s a hotel next door called the Grand,” says the tattooed man. “It’s not so grand but it’s where the crew stays. We have a whole block of rooms.”

Your mind is strangely sharp — you attribute this to your swim — and you find yourself working two steps ahead. You know you cannot check into this new hotel under Sabine’s name. You cannot check in under Reeves’s name. You have no way to check in under any name — not without a passport. You can’t even meet anyone at the front desk. But the stand-in who is leaving surely has a room, and has surely vacated it.

“This is a lot to take in,” you say. “So I’d have to pack all my things up, leave this hotel, go through the whole check-in hassle?” You widen your eyes, as if all this would surely overwhelm you — you must make them believe you are a woman of leisure for whom all of this moving and working will be an unfamiliar hardship.

The practical secretary takes the bait. “We’d have someone come grab your bags. And they’d just bring them to Ivy’s old room. Which would be cleaned up of course. No check-in, nothing. The hotel’s been very good to us. They leave us all alone.”

No check-in, you think. This is a relief on a dozen levels.

“You’re probably wondering how many days your services will be required before you can go back home, or wherever your next destination is,” says the practical woman.

It has not occurred to you to wonder about this. “Yes, of course,” you say.

“Filming is scheduled for three more weeks,” the tattooed man says.

“Some nights go very late, but you will get two days off a week,” the practical woman adds.

“Three weeks,” you repeat absentmindedly.

They stare at you. You are their last hope. You know you should up the price, but you have nothing; you’re not in a position to barter.

“That works for my schedule,” you say, as though you have a schedule.

“Great,” says the tattooed man. He is elated.

“Now, let’s make sure you two meet and that she feels she can work with you,” says the pale practical secretary. She glances at her phone; she scrolls. “Oh, wow. Something just changed. She could meet you in twenty minutes in the tenth-floor lounge.”

“The tenth-floor lounge?” you say.

“It’s on the tenth floor,” she says. “It’s private,” she adds, and rises. She’s short in her practical heels.

You stand, still wrapped in your towel. You wipe your moist palm on the towel before shaking hands with each of them.

You go into the dressing room, and lie down on the massage table, facing the ceiling. You are happy for the time to think.

You needed to stop using Sabine Alyse’s name and credit card. This job allows you to do that.

You needed to get out of this hotel, which was going to be difficult without identification. This job satisfies that.

And you will be paid.

You roll off the massage table. To secure the job you should try to make yourself resemble the famous actress in whatever way possible. You noticed the previous stand-in, the one you will be replacing, the one you saw crying — why was she crying? — dressed in jeans and a blouse and heels. You realize she must have been shorter than the famous actress, so she needed heels to replicate the famous actress’s height; you need anything without a heel.

You select metallic sandals from your suitcase (you packed them in case you ended up in the desert, or on a beach), jeans you didn’t think you’d be wearing in Morocco, and a black cotton blouse. You’ve noticed the famous American actress often wears black. She was in edgy independent movies when she started her film career, and she seems to want to remind the public of that fact.

You dress and then stand in front of the mirror to apply the makeup you bought at the Casablanca beauty store. Your skin. If only the marks were small pits that together could form a star. That might be interesting, even. You would settle for that. Instead: there’s a reason that for most of your life you’ve run and swam. There’s a reason why you finally arrived at diving as your competitive sport. With diving your face was virtually unseen. It was all about the shape your body made in the distance as you dropped from a high board and disappeared deep into the water. By the time you came up for air, the judges had determined their score. It had nothing to do with your face.

When you are finished dressing you look in the mirror. First to make sure your clothes look right, then a second time to make sure you appear sane. The third time to see how much you resemble her. You pull your hair back in a ponytail, so there’s less of it, and because you saw Ivy wearing her hair in that style. She wore her hair pulled back so the wig could easily go on and off.

You practice saying your niece’s name twice in front of the mirror. “Reeves Conway. Reeves Conway.” Then you use it in a sentence. “Hello, I’m Reeves Conway.”

It suits you. More than your own name does.

You stash your suitcase under the massage table because you don’t know where else to put it. You take a towel from a stack and drape it over the suitcase.

You exit the dressing room and wait for the elevator. When it arrives, you step inside and press ten.

The elevator doors open and the lounge is in front of you. With low couches and an enormous TV and international newspapers set out, it’s a miniature version of the lounge on the first floor. But the only person in the lounge is a bartender. He stands before a bar lined with large backlit bottles and oranges in vases.

The bartender greets you in English and in French. You ask for a glass of sparkling water, and sit down on one of the plush sofas and wait. You worry you look too desperate, sitting there facing the elevator doors, as though waiting to pounce the moment they open and the famous actress emerges. You move to another couch.

The bartender brings you a tall narrow glass of sparkling water and it tastes so refreshing you already know you want another one. This is how it is in these countries — the glasses are so small and you are always thirsty. At the home you shared with your husband your cups were bowls, but your thirst was never satisfied.

The elevator doors haven’t opened but now the famous American actress is in the lounge. She must be staying on this floor, you realize. Suddenly she is before you. She is radiant, as though she has swallowed a light, a sun, and is glowing from within. She’s small-boned, tiny. Her eyes are the green of damp moss; her hair darker than it’s been in other films. The fringe of bangs is new — you assume it’s been styled this way for this shoot. Her cheeks are wide and her nose narrow. You have to work to not stare.

“Hi,” she says.

Just like that. Hi.

You stand up, and as you do so, you hit your knee on the glass coffee table. You act as though you didn’t.

You shake her hand and you say your name is Reeves and she says her name, which, momentarily, strikes you as funny. There are few people in the world who don’t know her name.

Her bodyguards are close — one is already standing by the bartender, the other by the elevator. They are so stealthy they appear suddenly, like magicians in a trick. One is Latino and the other pale with red hair. They don’t look at you head-on, but out of the corners of their eyes, they are watching you. The famous American actress doesn’t acknowledge they’re there. You assume they have been with her for years.

She flops down on the couch, elegantly. You have seen her image a million times and still this is new. You understand, instantaneously, what it is to have presence. You can’t keep your eyes off her features — so much smaller than you would have expected — and her skin, so much smoother than any skin you’ve seen. She doesn’t have a single indentation on her face, except for a dimple below her left cheek when she smiles her endearingly lopsided smile. Her dimple is famous. You wonder if she’s had it insured.

“Where are you from?” she asks.

“Florida originally, but then I went to New York, and now I’m in Florida.”

“I love New York,” she says.

“What about you?” you ask, though you know she lives in L.A.

“L.A.,” she says.

You nod as though this is new information you’re taking in.

“I’m so fucking exhausted,” she says.

“Late night of work?” Now you’re talking. The two of you are just talking.

“Yeah, we went until one A.M. And then I come home and this fucking possessive boyfriend of mine wants to argue.”

You know who the boyfriend is, of course. You wonder if she should be telling you this.

“I’m sorry,” you say. “That’s the worst.”

“It is, right? Are you involved with anyone right now?” she asks.

“Um, no,” you say, taken off guard. “I’m the opposite.”

“Bad breakup?” she asks. She pulls her legs up onto the couch and leans into you. She looks like an actress in a movie who’s acting interested. You can’t separate how genuine her interest is, or how much she’s playing the part of someone who’s interested. It occurs to you that maybe she can’t tell the difference either. Maybe for her the line is very thin.

“My husband and I are splitting up,” you tell her. “I decided to leave him.”

“How long ago?” she asks.

“Two months ago. . or so. I’ve lost track.” You know it’s been exactly nine weeks.

“Are you definitely divorcing?”

“Yes,” you say. “I’ve filed the papers. There’s no way we’ll ever. .”—you search for the polite word—“reconcile.”

“Wow,” she says. “That’s so impressive that you’re leaving him.”

“I hadn’t exactly thought of it that way,” you say. “‘Excruciating’ is the word that comes to mind.” Even that word does not come close to describing the intensity of pain you feel.

She crosses her legs in the other direction. She leans in again to ask her next question: “Did you have kids together?”

“Together” is a haunting word. You did little together.

“No,” you say, knowing she’ll say that’s a relief.

“Well, that’s a relief.”

You nod, and think for a moment of your sister’s baby. Reeves.

“You’re getting divorced, you’re surviving. It’s part of your story now,” the famous American actress says.

“I guess so,” you say. You don’t volunteer that on most days you don’t feel like you’re surviving. “I wish I didn’t feel so fucking angry at him. What he did makes me feel like I failed at something enormous. In the minds of people who knew us — and even people who didn’t — I failed. It’s horrific and humiliating on so many levels.”

“Humiliating? No. If I were getting divorced, I’d go around saying, ‘Hey, guess what, I’m only in my twenties but I’m getting divorced! And I’m alive. Take that, motherfuckers.’”

You are reminded that you have read about her filthy mouth.

“Take that, motherfuckers,” you mutter, under your breath.

She laughs. It’s a genuine laugh. And a terrible one. It’s a cackle. You don’t think you’ve ever heard it in her films. You would have noticed.

“Think of it this way, Reeves,” she says. “Everyone’s scared of getting divorced but you’re doing it. You’re getting it out of the way and now you can move on with your life.”

“I can move on with my life,” you repeat.

“I might get married just so I can get divorced and get it over with,” she says.

You laugh, instinctively, genuinely. The famous American actress is much more interesting than you thought she’d be.

“You have a point,” you say.

“If I were you I’d get married again as fast as possible so that I could get divorced a second time.”

She looks over your shoulder, and stares at something. You turn to follow her gaze. She’s staring at the bartender, who’s Moroccan, maybe twenty-five. He’s polishing a glass that already looks polished and is placing it back on the shelf.

“He’s pretty cute,” she says.

“Not bad,” you agree. “You think he’d marry me?”

“Totally,” she says. “Can I throw a lingerie bridal shower for you? I fucking live for lingerie. And cotton grandma panties. Depends on the day.”

The pale practical secretary enters the room, and sees you laughing and the famous American actress cackling. You wonder if the pale practical secretary has grown accustomed to the actress’s terrible laugh. You wonder if it’s ever possible to grow accustomed to it.

“Am I late?” she asks, looking at her watch. She answers her own question. “You two were both early.” She looks distressed.

She sits down on a chair between the two couches where you and the famous American actress are seated.

“Would you like something to drink?” she asks the actress.

“A small coffee,” she says, and the practical secretary waves the bartender over and orders two coffees.

“Are you feeling better than you were this morning?” the practical secretary asks. She is at least twenty years older than the famous American actress, and it’s somewhat disconcerting to see her catering to someone so much younger than herself.

“Still exhausted.” The actress looks at you and offers an explanation. “That fucking boyfriend.”

The practical secretary shoots the actress an admonishing look.

“What?” the famous American actress says. “I already told her all about it.”

The practical secretary’s face tightens.

“I trust her,” the famous American actress says.

“Thanks,” you say, because it does seem like a compliment.

“You’re welcome,” says the actress, and laughs her strange laugh.

You smile because you’re afraid if you don’t your face will express your alarm at her terrible laugh. In return, she smiles her big, notorious smile and you feel like you’re in one of her movies. Whenever she smiles like that on-screen, the person she is smiling at is instantly charmed.

The pale practical secretary clears her throat. “Did either of you want to talk to her?” the practical secretary asks, looking at the bodyguards.

You had almost forgotten about them. Now you understand how the famous American actress can act as though they don’t exist.

The bodyguards lock eyes with each other and appear unsure, but then the one with the red hair says: “Yes.”

The pale practical secretary and the famous actress move to one side of the couch and the secretary pulls out a schedule she wants to run by the actress.

For a moment you’re alone. But then the bodyguard with the red hair comes over and sits across from you. He’s not a large man; he wears a puffy brown leather jacket and you’re sure he wears it to give him more heft. The other bodyguard keeps watch on the elevator doors, on the bartender, on you.

The red-haired bodyguard stares at your naked left hand and asks if you’re married.

You tell him you’re getting divorced.

He asks about the man who you’re divorcing and you tell him that he’s still in Florida, that you’re the one who moved out.

“No pets?” he says, revealing he’s heard the conversation about kids; why else would he jump to the topic of pets?

“I used to have a turtle,” you tell him. “But I had to feed it a salad every day for lunch. It was a lot of food preparation.”

He nods. “I’m studying turtles right now. Galápagos and Darwin and evolution.”

“You’re a Darwin fan,” you say.

“Oh, I wouldn’t go that far,” he says, as though you really have pushed a boundary. “People assume Darwin was right about evolution being gradual, but I’m intrigued by radical speciation.” He looks away but has you in the corners of his eyes.

“What’s that?” you say, not because you’re necessarily interested, but because you want to do well at this interview and you believe that this entails having a conversation that makes this man feel intriguing.

“It’s also known as punctuated equilibrium,” he says. “Does that sound familiar?”

It doesn’t. “Maybe,” you say. “Can you remind me?”

He sits up straighter on the couch, like he’s being interviewed for a documentary. “There are these periods in evolution when species are in stasis because there’s no need for change. But then, usually because of a change in their environment, they have to adapt rapidly. That’s how new species come about.”

“What kind of environmental change?” you ask. As a twin, you’ve always been interested in nature versus nurture. Also, if you keep him talking about this he won’t ask about you.

“I’m glad you asked. I’ll give you an example,” he says, and then pauses, as though deciding which one to give. “Say there’s a species of birds — there are these beautiful ones I’m interested in right now. They’re tropical-looking in color, their wings have orange, white, and blue in them. Anyway, they existed for thousands of years, and took shelter in a particular kind of tree. I can’t remember the name of the tree right now,” he says, and his hand makes a fist.

“That’s okay,” you say. “Go on.”

“So the tree where they build their nests and lay their eggs gets suddenly infected by this bacteria. And the trees start to die. So what do the birds do then?”

You realize he’s posing this question to you.

“Find another tree?” you offer.

He points at you, as though he’s been lecturing a class and you’re the pupil who called out the right answer.

“But what if these new trees are taller and the birds need to be able to fly higher up to lay their eggs. Then what happens?” he says.

You open your mouth but realize that this time he doesn’t want you to answer.

“They have to adapt,” he continues. “They have to have greater wing strength. The birds that don’t have it die off, and the others adapt and the species selects to have greater wingspans so they can reach this tree and lay their eggs and have their babies.” He looks out the window of the Regency’s tenth^-floor lounge, as though he might see one of these orange-blue birds flying by.

You follow his gaze, and look out at the smoggy, birdless sky.

“Extreme circumstances require radical change. If you want to survive at least.”

“Fascinating,” you say.

The bodyguard stands up.

“Did I fail the interview?” you ask.

“Not at all,” he says. “I know people. I can tell you’re a forthright person, Reeves.” You don’t know if you want to laugh or cry at this statement, but given that this appears to be the end of the interview, you simply nod.

“Well,” says the practical secretary, never one to admire silence for long, “I have a room key.”

“Oh, good,” you say, as casually as you can muster.

“She’s taking over Ivy’s room,” she explains to the actress. She hands you the key card and tells you your room number at the Grand. You place the key card in the front pocket of your jeans, and push it in deep. You want to make sure there’s no chance it could fall out. “Can one of you walk her over?” the pale practical secretary says to the security guards. To you she says: “Maybe you want half an hour to pack your things?”

Your suitcase is already packed and stashed under the massage table in the poolside dressing room.

“That should be enough time,” you say.

You take the elevator back to the pool area, and you retrieve your suitcase from under the massage table. You’re relieved it’s still there. You sit dressed by the pool for twenty-five minutes, and then meet the redheaded bodyguard in the tenth-floor lounge. He takes the handle of the suitcase; it has wheels but he chooses to carry it. You don’t check out of the Regency. Instead you just leave. If the hotel ever receives any inquiries about the charge on Sabine Alyse’s card, they might remember you as a woman who disapproved of the film crew’s attire and was sent champagne.

You walk across the street and into the lobby of the Grand, the bodyguard carrying your suitcase all the while. He leads you up to your room, and opens the door for you.

“Thank you,” you say. You want to make sure he leaves. You don’t want to talk about evolution anymore.

The room is standard, without the luxuries of the Regency. Outside the window you have a better view of the band shell you could see from your last hotel room. You realize the band shell is part of the Jazzablanca Festival. A jazz trio is playing something experimental, and the stage is surrounded by a small crowd of men in leather jackets and girlfriends holding their arms. Everyone seems unsure of whether they should be dancing, so they slightly sway this way and that. You turn your attention back to the hotel room. Housekeeping has come, so there’s no sign of Ivy. You wish you knew something about her. The wastebasket, of course, has been emptied.

Waiting for you on the desk is a large envelope with the name “Reeves Conway” on it.

You shake out the envelope and find a small packet. It seems to be a script, but printed and sized in miniature. It’s one-fourth the size of normal pages, as if for a movie being made by tinier people in a tinier, other world.

The top page says: A Different Door, which you didn’t know until now was the name of the film. A “call time” is listed for each member of the cast and crew. You search for your name. It’s not there. You go through it again. Then you see your sister’s baby’s name is there. Strange, you think. The name you must start recognizing as your own.

“Transportation” will greet you at 7 A.M. outside the Grand and you will be taken to “California, Casablanca.” The famous American actress will not be showing up until 2 P.M., and that will be for makeup.

The hotel phone rings as you’re flipping through the pages.

It’s the secretary to the famous American actress.

“Did you get the sides?”

You have no idea what she’s talking about, but glance at the small stapled pages in your left hand.

“Yes?” you say.

“Good.”

“So you know you’ll be picked up at seven tomorrow.”

“Yes, and I’m going to. . California?”

“Isn’t that funny,” she says, sounding very serious. “There’s an affluent neighborhood in Casablanca called California where the homes are Beverly Hills — big and there are palm trees and all that.” She could not sound more bored as she tells you this. “They couldn’t find this site until a week ago, but the house is perfect for A Different Door.”

After she’s hung up, you flip through the small pages that you now know are called sides. It occurs to you that you have no idea what the movie is about apart from what you’ve observed so far: a young American woman entering a hotel. The sides don’t provide much illumination. They tell you that in the first scene that’s being filmed the next day the main character, Maria, arrives at Kareem’s family home in Casablanca.

You have no idea who Kareem is.

In the scene, Kareem’s mother greets Maria and it’s a somewhat tearful encounter. You can’t say for sure but your guess is that Maria and Kareem were dating in America, and now — for reasons that are unclear to you in the small sampling of the script — Kareem is dead. Then Kareem’s best friend comes for dinner and there’s an attraction between him and Maria that they have to hide from Kareem’s mother.

You read the sides twice. You can see why the famous American actress took the part. It’s a good role for her, and one that will surprise audiences since she’s returning to her more independent-film origins. You once read a film critic’s opinion that a film can never be better than the script, but you were never sure if you agreed with that. Which is why it stuck with you. In this case you think the film might end up being better than the script. She’s a good actress.

You look out the window of your hotel room, at the plaza below. Tonight’s show is ending. People are radiating out in all directions from the central stage. From where you stand, they form a flower, blossoming. A firework, exploding.

Tomorrow you will go to California.