You Shall Know Our Velocity

SATURDAY

In the morning we found an Avis and a man, inside, round and wearing the red jacket. That same red jacket. It was good to see him. We filled out the forms and on a phone he called for a car and soon was screaming at the man on the other end. He was doing so while banging on the desk with each syllable. "Ack {pound} nek {pound} rek {pound-pound}." He was so mad about something.

In ten minutes, a different flustered round man arrived in our car and we drove off; the car never stopped running. The little car had no tapedeck or radio but we took it anyway, driving around the coast. It was Saturday and everyone was out and the light was Californian. All around the Palace of King Hassan II – an enormous and glorious temple hanging over the ocean like a beach-house – there were men pushing daughters on bikes, and teenagers fishing over the guardrails. Further down the shore, along the Boulevard de la Corniche and thousands more, boys mostly, playing soccer and swimming, though the day was not warm – sixty degrees on the upper end. We got out briefly, finally, for the first time, knowing we were in Casablanca, examining its air, which was different than Senegal's – denser, lighter, brighter, dimmer – we had no idea. You couldn't go wrong with a name like Casablanca, we figured, and wondered if it carried such a tune in every language. A group of kids rode their bikes by us, boogie boards balanced above. This was suddenly Redondo Beach; they called it 'Ain Diab and it bore no resemblance to anything I'd pictured possible in Morocco. We thought briefly about staying and spending the day at the beach, helping small children search for crabs in the cracks of the huge rocks licked by waves. But we didn't because we had to move.

We drove through and on to Marrakesh.

Out of the city and past the dozen enormous gas stations, perfect and clean like lacquered boxes, and the country went flat and green. Marrakesh was a few hours' drive from Casablanca, we were told. The roadside was all farms, dotted with small crooked adobe homes. I was driving and was driving fast.

We were going about 95 mph.

We were passing cars like they were parked, or being pedaled, propelled by feet to the sound of xylophones.

"You will call me Ronin," I said. I'd probably never driven this fast. The speedometer said 130 kph.

"I will not call you Ronin."

"I drive like Ronin, you call me Ronin."

"I can't have you doing that anymore."

"You kind of -"

"Will. Stop."

"You kind of rev the first R, like rrrrrrRonin."

The roadside was an expansive and ripe kind of green and the soil was orange; it was exactly what we'd seen from above. We had about $4,000 in Moroccan money we'd changed in Casablanca. It would be up to Hand to do the giveaways. I couldn't do it anymore. It drained me.

"We can't give it away in Marrakesh," I said.

"Why?"

"Think about it."

We pictured Marrakesh mobbed. If we gave cash to one person there, word would get around and we'd die in a melee. Marrakesh would be a dusty overcrowded place with snakecharmers and kidnapped women hidden in rugs and baskets bustled through crowds of merchants and spies.

"Marrakesh is a weird thing, though," Hand said. "It was this total hippie stopover for a while. It was the drugs or something. There are like a million expats down here. It's like an exile community full of weirdos and artists, like San Miguel. But then they hosted the GATT treaty signing."

"Where'd you get all that?" I asked.

"A pamphlet at the hotel in Casablanca. The GATT part at least. Imagine if they tried to do that in the sixties. A world trade treaty signing in a place like Marrakesh."

The poverty was incongruous. Rural poverty is always incongruous, amid all this space and air, these crippled homes, all half-broken, most without roofs, standing on this gorgeous, lush farmland. It wasn't clear who owned the farms, or why these crumbled houses stood on these well-kept farms, and why none of the homes had roofs. Clotheslines, chickens, dogs, garbage. We rushed past families, bundled and huddling though the day was warm, on carts driven by mules. We passed, still going at least 80 mph, a group of women just off the road, bent over in the embankment, dressed in layers, heads covered with dull rags, large women hunched and gathering hay -

I pulled over. I gave Hand a stack of bills. I wanted him to do it; I couldn't get close to these women with the money – to get through it I would have to sort of walk backwards to them, and that wouldn't look good, would scare off anyone.

"What are you going to say?"

"I don't know. What should I say?"

"Ask them for directions."

Hand started getting out but was wearing huge silver sunglasses, shiny and with a series of round holes in the arms.

"Hand. Can you do it without the sunglasses?"

"No."

"If you get out in your nylon pants and Top Gun Liberace sunglasses, then it sends a weird message -"

Now the women, including the one with the scythe, were watching us as we sat in the car arguing. I grabbed a map and spread it in front of me.

"And just what is the message we're sending, Will? Are we sending a normal message otherwise?"

"Forget it."

"Can you just take them off? Please?"

He did, then threw them at my chest. I caught them but broke one of the glasses' arms, on purpose.

He walked down the highway shoulder to the women and up the embankment. Once within fifteen feet, and once they'd all paused in their work and assembled around him, he asked them something. Directions to Marrakesh maybe. Graciously, they all pointed the way we were already going. He then made an elaborate gesture of gratitude, and offered the stack of bills to them, about $500. I don't know how he chose which woman to give it to.

They took it and as he backed away, they stared, then waved, and he waved. I waved. We drove off as they gathered around the woman he'd handed the bills to.

"Were they nice?" I asked.

"What do you mean?"

"Did they smile? Were they nice?"

"I couldn't talk to them. They didn't speak French."

"But they smiled?"

"Sure. Nice ladies. Big. Burly. They were happy. You saw them. They were happy to help."

The sun was everywhere and the landscape went curvy. Green hills, red hills, then hills covered in thin-trunked mop-topped trees. Then a huge red city, to the left of the road, Benguérir, red like barns, of clay and stone, ancient, unchanged and terrifying, low-lying and endless. The land was the American southwest. Then it was wholly Mediterranean – olive trees, bare low hills. It was so green! Soft curves and such green. I had never lived anywhere with this kind of drama. Cities are billed as drama-filled but are in fact almost totally safe, are so like being constantly indoors – too many small lights and heavy windows and perfect corners. Yes there is danger from other humans hiding in dark triangles but here! Here there is swooping. Here there are falling rocks. Here are underwater sorts of lines covered in green. Here you picture tidal waves or quickly moving glaciers. Or dragons. I grew up obsessed with dragons, knew everything, knew that scientists or people posing as scientists had actually calculated how dragons might have actually flown, that to fly and breathe fire they'd have to be full of hydrogen, at levels so dangerous and in such tremulous balance that – I wondered quickly if I'd give my life so that a dragon could live. If someone offered me that deal, your life for the existence of dragons. I thought maybe yes, maybe no.

Then over a river, the Rbia, and the roadside now punctuated with men standing, selling fish, offering them to drivers, long wet fish on hooks. Then men and boys selling asparagus, holding a bunch in one hand and waving to cars with the other. Men selling small bundles of sticks.

I knew Hand wouldn't resist.

"Look at those…" he said.

"Don't," I said.

The taxis, out here, were Mercedes-Benzes, all of them chartreuse. Then it was the southwest again. The dirt went redder and bloodier as we approached Marrakesh, laid wide and flat below a mountain range that spread left and right. Churchill had loved these mountains, the High Atlas; it was the only landscape he'd painted during WWII. "The most lovely spot in the world," he'd said to Roosevelt when they'd met here in '38, planning the assault on Normandy.

– Mr. Churchill you were given a mission.

– Yes.

– I want to have been given your mission. I want your place in world events, the centrality of it. You were born in the cradle of a catapult!

– You are wrong. I found my mission.

– I disagree.

– If you must.

– I have to disagree to make sense of my place.

– I understand.

– Tell me: where is my mission? Where are my bunkers and trenches, my goddamn Gallipoli?

Now, on the approach, see the increasingly green hills, the preponderance of tall dark green pointy trees, see the sloping rivers, everything so lush. See the red soil. See the winery colors. See so many colors, working in perfect concert. See everything so lush!

We had no idea it would be this lush. A man on the roadside held up something, but not a fish – something bulbous and furry. As we passed it became not fur but feathers – a group of chickens hung on a hook. The man wearing a hooded brown dashiki. See us ten miles later stopped on the shoulder, Hand running across the road and across a field to a family with a horse, traveling, all with packs. See Hand ask directions, pop his palm on his head – Aha! - and then give them a stack of bills. See them offer him some figs, which once in the car he will take and chew and spit out and throw. See Hand give to a boy selling fish, and see the boy insist we take one, which Hand puts in the trunk, grinning and squinting at the boy, who looks like he expected us to eat it then and there. Hear Hand afterward:

"There is nothing bad about what we're doing! Nothing!"

"Right," I said.

"That one was fun. Good kid."

I sped up. We were at 120 kph.

"You need to call me Ronin," I said.

"You need me to thump you."

We debated briefly whether we were giving people false hope. That now the common belief around these parts, on this countryside, among the rural poor, would be that if one waits by the side of the road long enough, Americans in airtight rental cars and wearing pants that swish will hand out wads of cash. That Americans pay extravagantly to be told where to go.

The road was empty in the mid-afternoon. Only the occasional luminous Mercedes taxi, or BMW, or tour bus. There didn't seem to be any mass commuter transport in Morocco. Most of the people on the road, and on the roadside, were men, and most of them were wearing suits, dust-powdered and threadbare suits. Men in pinstriped suits tending flocks of sheep. Men in worn tuxedos holding bouquets of asparagus inches away from careening cars.

In a small city full of banks we stopped for something to drink. Nattily dressed men at café tables nodded to us and we walked into a dark cool restaurant and at the takeout counter we bought oranges and sodas. The sunlight over the clerk's shoulder was white and planed, and when he poured us glasses of water it was clearer than any water I'd ever seen. It was the unadulterated soul of the world.

Ahead, the mountains clarified themselves; their tops are white-capped. As we descended into Marrakesh, the billboards appeared, each for one of various resorts, for golf courses and cellphones. The road went from two lanes to four and there were scooters everywhere, whining when revving and jabbering while shifting. Condos left and right – so far it could be Arizona – and at the first travel agency we saw we stopped. Inside, there was a single employee and he told us, when we asked where we could go from Marrakesh, that night, that he handles only cruises and package tours for Danes and Swedes.

We were getting back in the car and a young woman wearing a burqa is walking with her mother. We catch her eye. Large dark eyes. She smiles and looks away. The mother sees us and they walk on, briskly. We are in love. We get in the car and pass them, both craning our heads and staring like boardwalk cruisers. She sees us and smiles again. We have something going.

"You see this?" I ask.

"We are connected!" Hand says, slapping the dash.

"We have to turn around."

I do, and we pass the girl and her mom again, this time heading at her. She knows it's us. She smiles in a coy and devastating way. Her eyes are so big.

"What should we do?" Hand asks. "She loves us!"

I park the car on the side of the road. We jump out and jog-walk toward them.

"Whatdowesaywhenwegetthere?"

"Ihavenoidea – MrsJonesyouhavealovelydaughter?"

We're ten feet from their backs, their burqas brushing the sidewalk soundlessly, when I stop. Hand walks a few steps, notices I'm not keeping pace, and comes back.

"What?" he says.

"Can't do this," I say.

"She loves us!"

"You go."

He runs ahead. I can hear him speaking to their backs. They say nothing, keep walking. Finally he runs ahead of them, positioning himself in their path. They stop. He says something I can't make out. He starts gesturing. They don't speak French.

There is a moment when he's just standing there, and they are standing, and all are waiting for something. For the sudden learning of languages, for a move that will solve this. Finally Hand smiles politely, salutes at them, and walks back to the car, where I'm waiting.

"I got stuck," he says.

"Something almost happened."

"Something small happened."

I hated that we loved her and she wanted to love us, or Hand at least, but that this would not happen, had no chance of happening and we'd be dust in decades or sooner.

The city is so red! The walls, which are everywhere, are everywhere red, the precise color of the scab bisecting my nose, a dull but somehow sweet maroon, soothing but vital. Minarets and medinas jostle with Parisian cafes, buildings of seven stories and iron balconies, the sidewalks bustling with fashionable people, and we sped to the airport as the sun was lowering and wrapping the city and desert in fine pink gauze.

Around the airport was a park, dirt and small trees, where dozens of families were picnicking, kids playing some version of duck-duck-goose.

Inside, in the cool white linoleum airport and at the airline desk:

"What flights do you have leaving tonight?" Hand asked.

A friendly and smooth man in a blue uniform: "Sir, where do you want to go?"

"We'll know once you tell us where your planes are going."

"Sir, we first need to know where you want to go."

"Just tell us where you're going."

"Just tell me where you are going."

The man had quickly jumped from amusement to something approaching rage.

"I asked you first," Hand added.

This went on for a while. It hasn't worked anywhere and never will. We learned that a plane is leaving for Moscow, via Paris, in three hours. If we could get to Moscow we could get to Irktusk, Siberia – we checked before, on the web with Raymond in Dakar, and those flights were constant and affordable – and if we could get to Siberia we can get to Mongolia, because surely there were shuttles between Irkusk and Ulan Bator!

We decided we'd be on the flight to Moscow. By morning we'd be there. The airline desk wanted cash, almost $1,100 for the two tickets. We were grinning. Flying! We would do this!

At the currency exchange desk, I added my name, swooping like mad, to twelve $100 traveler's checks and handed them under the glass wall to a glowering man with a thick and uncompromising moustache, a brush to sweep a pool table. The man, squat and angry about the wrongness of his flesh, the things he's seen, all the air in the world, wouldn't take them; my signature did not, he said, match my passport. He pushed them back under the window and grunted and waved us away.

I said please. I told him, yes, I changed my signature not that long ago, thus the mismatch. But he wasn't listening.

"I am allowed to change my signature!" I said.

He spoke no English. Hand tried French, without success.

Hand lost it.

"You can not do that! You must change the money!"

The currency man sat behind the glass, completely satisfied.

"You take these checks and you cash them!" Hand was now spitting on the glass. People were watching us. The man said nothing. Hand started again, now in French. Then reverted to his other English. "You are bad man!" he yells. "We have flight! Flight to Russia! We need this! You are bad man!"

Hand's eruption was sudden, bizarre, and not productive. Another man, behind us, told us to go to a bank, in the center of town – that they'd cash the checks. We had no choice and just enough time. As we were leaving, Hand yelled, pointing, shaking: "We come back to get you, bad man! You will see Americans again!"

We sped through the city, slowing, stopping, jumping, continuing. All the banks were closed. I got $500 from an ATM – all I could retrieve at one time – and then remembered another $800, in American cash, taped inside my backpack.

We now had twenty-five minutes to catch the flight; all we had to do was change the U.S. bills.

"Shit," I said.

"What?"

"We'll have to go back to that squat fucker."

"Right. But this'll show him. We've won!"

I agreed. He'd have to change the cash, and we'd beat him, we'd roll over his body, laid in our path, and he'd have to go home to his wife, he slump-shouldered and weak, unable as he was to make us unhappy – unable, today, to thwart the plans of innocents abroad. We had seven minutes to get there.

We drove around a turnabout in the center of town, almost cut off a scooter and were immediately stopped by a foot-cop in a yellow raincoat. He waved us to park on the side of the street. He was tall and also wore a thick black mustache. His skin was olive but cheeks ruddy from the sun. He was like the other man; he would thwart us.

He took my license and examined it.

"Chicago!" he said.

"Right," I said. He was different.

"Nice?" he asked.

"Very nice."

"Tommy Lloyd Wright!"

"Very pretty there," I said. "Big buildings. Lots of Tommy Lloyd Wright, right."

"I study architecture. Like Wright very much. You see?"

"Yes, much. The Robie house? Very nice it is."

Now I was doing the Hand talk.

"Very pretty there," I added. "Also very pretty in Morocco." I smiled confidently, strong in my love for his country and my belief in its future.

– If you stand in our way you're our enemy.

– See it as you will.

– It's inhuman to impede another's progress. Leaning over me, Hand tried to tell him about the plane we wanted to catch.

"Sir, we must to catch a plane! At airport! We can go?" Hand was making airplane gestures, his hand flying around the interior of the car, with sound effects. While Hand was having the plane take off amid various whooshes, the officer rolled his eyes and waved us off. We loved him.

At the airport, we abandoned the rental in the lot – we'd call the agency from Paris – and ran to the check-in desk, which was empty. In the airline office, adjoining, they were surprised to see us again.

"You're back! Where are you going?"

"Moscow! We have the money now."

I spread the money on the counter. It was obscene.

"Oh no, no," he said. "It's too late. See?" The agent pointed to window. The plane, a large AirFrance jet, was on the runway, visible, right there. People were still walking up the rolling stairway.

"Can you call them?" Hand asked.

They did. They wouldn't let us on. We were fifteen minutes early, but ten minutes too late.

"I am sorry," said the Moroccan man helping us. "They don't want you. Security reasons, they say."

"Call them!" yelled Hand.

"I cannot. They are French," the man said.

We paused long enough to realize we didn't understand.

We were stunned. Two hours we'd rushed around and now we would have to stay in Marrakesh for the night. It broke us. We couldn't get on the plane, which was right there, not two hundred feet away. There were people still climbing the staircase, from tarmac to jet, people still turning and waving to loved ones inside. One man had three golf clubs with him in one hand, a stuffed Goofy in the other. But we couldn't get on. This was an abomination. We couldn't stay in Marrakesh! We'd already seen it, and we'd been in Morocco for a full day, in Africa two days already, almost three, and here we were, grounded, stagnant. There were seven continents and we'd spent almost half our time on one.

I sat on the smooth cold airport floor outside the office as Hand continued to argue inside. He whined, and pretended to cry, then offered them vodka that he didn't have, Cuban cigars he'd never possessed or even seen – "I assure you sir these are of the highest quality, made by Castro's personal tobacconists" – and finally, having failed completely, asked about flights the next day.

The floor beneath me was cold but it was still and clean. The airport was immaculate. I tilted my head and squinted across the floor, thinking I could make my sight travel the floor like a low-flying bird. The floor shone in a dull lifeless way. I had a brief sensation that I was at O'Hare again, trying to leave for Senegal. I was alternately enraged and spread wide with great peace. Any thwarted movement was an affront, was almost impossible to understand. It was so hard to understand No. But with every untaken step a part of the soul sighs in relief.

Mo & Thor -

Everyone's got their own money. It's the first thing a new country does, it prints money. The money here's beautiful, as almost all money is everywhere outside the U.S. -- even Canada's is better than ours. Hand (you remember Hand. He told you how the hunters trap meercats, and demonstrated on you, Thor) says that in New Zealand, the money has little plastic see-through windows. Money is really the only tangible communication device we have, if you

"Let's go, dipshit."

Hand had emerged, laughing with the Moroccan airline man, who was dressed like a pilot and carried a similar suitcase. I put away the postcard and while outside our plane rolled away to Paris, we passed through the hissing airport doors and into the darkened clear cool night of Marrakesh.

We regained our car, feeling like we were stealing it – it was still there, we had the keys, but it was so odd – and drove back to the city to find a hotel. We'd check in and then head to the mountains, where we planned to find people, dwelling in the hills, living in huts, and to them we would come in the night – in the blackening sky there were already stars and a low moon climbing – and we would throw small bundles of bills through their open glassless windows and then drive off.

First, though, we would see the Djemaa el-Fna; we'd driven past it on the way to the bank and it was already insanity, thousands massing and growing, countless locals and tourists milling around outdoor shops and food kiosks in dashikis and Dockers, all eyes overwhelmed and ears dulled by the roaring murmurs. We checked into a bland hotel of glass and silver and for ten minutes watched, again, the Paris to Dakar race on TV. They now had a camera in one of the cars, and the driver passed village after village, all blurry homes and faces, leaving all behind, very literally, in his dust.

Hand, magazine in hand, stepped into the bathroom. "I'm goin in," he said, meaning half an hour at least – twenty minutes for the bowel movement, ten for the after-shower. Hand has to shower every time he dumps; I have no idea why.

I called my mom.

"So who got it today?" she asked "More basketball players?"

"No, now we're asking for directions."

"Where?"

"To wherever we're going."

"Don't you have maps?"

"Of course."

"So you know where you're going."

"Oh yeah, always."

"And they give you directions, and you give them money."

"Yeah. The way we're supposed to go is always pretty obvious. We're heading that way, we stop and make sure, unload some money, and keep moving."

"And they don't know you know?"

"We don't know. They might."

"I think they do. They know you know the way."

"Maybe."

"And then you give them money."

"Right."

"So it's all pretend."

Hand burst from the bathroom like he'd been feeding bears and they'd turned on him. His own stink had overtaken him and now threw itself around the room.

"I don't know," I said.

We had a beer in the hotel bar, called Timofey's. The bartender was a young woman who looked at my face and gave me a commiserative pout. I accepted this and smiled. We were alone in the room, except a very old woman, white with hair pulled back into a neat ponytail, at a table overlooking the lobby, with a glass of something clear before her, her small hands cupped around it.

"We should sit down with her," Hand said.

I knew he was right. But I didn't know people of her age. She could hate us. She was easily seventy-five.

Hand was already halfway there. I followed. By the time I made it to her table, Hand was sitting, leg crossed, ankle on his knee. I don't know what he'd used as an opening line. She held her hand to me. I shook its fingers, which were cold and the skin loose, a small leather bag full of delicate tools. She was French. We introduced ourselves; her last name (she gave us both) sounded like Ingres. Hand sat to her right and I across from her. She was a beautiful woman. Up close she looked younger, maybe sixty. Her nose was still aquiline, her eyes beaming. She sipped her drink through its tiny red straw.

"You two are lovers," she said.

Hand laughed. My eyebrows skimmed my hairline.

"Well, thank you," Hand said. "We take that as a compliment. But no."

She cocked her head and looked between us.

"You are brothers. One is adopted."

"No," I said. I realized I was grinning. I wanted her to keep guessing.

"I know nothing anymore," she said, pursing her lips in a dissatisfied sort of way. "I pretend at wisdom."

She was the oldest person I'd spoken to in probably five or six years, since my Mom's uncle Jarvis died, who she loved because he'd taught her to ride horses and tan hides. But Jarvis had never spoken like this. She was scanning my face now, her head pivoting like she was trying to see around me.

"Accident," I said.

"I think so," she said. "Something to forget, I think."

"I'm trying," I said. "Maybe, yes."

Hand asked why she was here. She said she'd come here with her husband just after they were married, and had come back with him every so often thereafter. He was dead five years now.

"This is our fiftieth anniversary," she said, smiling in an exhausted way. Her sentences trailed off, the last words like hats taken by a sudden gust? "What brings you to Marrakesh?" she asked. "Golf?" She looked at our clothes. "You do not look like golfers."

"We're botanists," said Hand.

God Almighty.

"You're lying," she said, then sipped her drink with her eyes still upon him. Ella Fitzgerald was singing from a small speaker over our heads. Maybe Sarah Vaughn. I worried briefly that they, Sarah and Ella, knew I didn't know the difference, and were angry.

"You lived through WWII," Hand said.

She laughed.

"Where were you?" he asked.

"Cernay," she said.

And they were off, together.

"Was that Occupied or Vichy?"

"Occupied."

He was leaning in. The more I watched her the more I thought she might be younger. Her cheeks were tight and full of color. Her features were delicate but strong, like a face of blown glass.

"We helped," she said. "My mother and I ran the farm."

"You helped the maquis."

"How do you know all this?"

"Am I right? You were near Switzerland maybe?"

"You're a fan of the war," she said, pointing at him with her tiny finger, wrapped in skin as with a loose bandage.

"I've studied it," Hand said. "Not a fan, a student."

"Me too," I said, thinking that my current reading of Churchill somehow qualified.

"Did your father fight?" Hand asked.

"He was killed in the first month of the war," she said. "He wasn't army. He was a truck driver, killed near Abbeville."

"Sorry," I said.

"His brother, my uncle, went to the hills," she said. "There was a forest above our farm, in a valley. He stayed there for years. With three Hungarians."

"Anti-fascists."

"Yes."

"Was your uncle a Communist?"

"No. Not at that time. No."

"How old were you?" I asked.

"When?"

"When what?"

"When they invaded France." I could never say the word Nazi.

"Nineteen," she said.

She and her mother had sheltered escaped POWs crossing over to Switzerland. They'd underreported farm production to the Germans and gave the surplus to those passing through and fighting from the hills. She had married one of the Hungarian soldiers.

"We're not botanists," I said. "We're just here."

"He's on a lightbulb," Hand said. She looked at me, smiling politely.

"He was the Number Two swimmer in all of Wisconsin," I said. We were such jerks.

"What did you two do after the war?" Hand asked.

"We left," she said. "We left France. My uncle was killed in the town square by French Nazis. He had poisoned their food, had killed six, so they flayed him and then shot him. It was a time… It was not very real after some time. Or perhaps it was.

She was trailing off again.

"You don't have to, you know," I said.

"I know," she said. "But it is so rare to be able to…" she laughed a little and wiped her mouth with her napkin. "To educate a few young Americans."

She sipped her drink. She was something.

"I remember it like a week… it was like you remember a time in bed, sick. When your head is…" She was throwing her hands around her head as if directing tiny winds, or weaving.

"The next year," she continued, "my mother died in 1944 of complications during labor," she said, and, registering our surprise, said, "she was forty-two and it was a priest, of all things. But that is another story. We had to leave the town. We could not stay."

They had moved to Amsterdam, where her husband, who she was calling Pipi, I think, resumed his work as an engineer. They never had children. Hand was staring at her watch, a simple gold trimmed piece held by a wide black band. A man's watch.

It was getting late and we had to go. We told her where.

"You should come with us," Hand said, in his magnanimous host sort of way. Then, realizing the quality of his notion, he blurted: "You should!"

"You won't find the people you want up there," she said.

"Why?" I asked.

"Maybe you will. I shouldn't discourage you."

"Come with us!" Hand repeated.

"To the mountains? It's 9:30."

"We're going to the Djemaa el-Fna first."

"Oh please," she said, her hand resting on Hand's. "You two will do your adventure without me. I've seen the mountains during the day. I can't imagine that could be improved upon."

– Hand, we should stay here with her. We will be her companions on this night. And her stories! They will be worth more than anything we could find in the mountains.

– But this is history.

– Exactly.

– This is not what you were talking about. We had agreed on speeding, not sitting and listening.

– I thought you would want to stay.

– I've heard enough.

"We need you, though," I found myself saying to her. "We really want you to come."

She looked taken aback. My urgency had reminded her of something else. We were no longer harmless.

"No," she said. "Say hello to the mountains for me." Her last words trailed off again, in a way that sounded like we were hearing them from far away, downriver and upwind.

We stood.

"Can we buy you another drink before we go?" Hand asked.

She nodded.

I strode to the bar and ordered another of whatever she was having. It looked like gin. I brought it to her and set it between her thin bony fingers. Hand bowed before her and took her small hand into his and kissed it, on the thin silver band around her finger. I bowed too, but my back cracked in a new way and I couldn't go further, and couldn't look at her again. I turned with my eyes closed and we jogged down three flights to the night air.

On the street it was still warm and at the car, our back left tire was flat. We both stood, mouths open, for half a minute. We had not been in a country without blowing a tire.

This time Hand and I could handle it, remembering the tricks of the savannah man with the obsidian cobweb feet. We left the car resting on four wheels as we loosened the bolts. In a few minutes a man's legs appeared in my peripheral vision.

He was about forty, successful seeming or pretending, wearing a white scarf. He shooed me from the wrench. I stood and handed it to him. I didn't know what he wanted. Finding the bolts already removed, he got to work on the jack, turning it around with great urgency.

"Whoisthisguy?" I asked.

"Ihavenoidea," Hand said.

Another man came and shooed the first man from the jack. The first man stepped aside and left the second man to finish it. We had no idea what was happening. We were perfectly capable of changing the tire, but now, including us, there were four men working on the tire, and two more were now watching. It was an American highway construction project.

"Thisiswhathappenshere," I said. "Everyonewantstochangethetire. Thisistheirfavoritething."

"Thisiseveryone'sfavoritething," Hand corrected.

Everyone wanted to help. Everyone wanted to help or be ready if their help was needed. This was the way of the world.

We were done the tire was new and we were worthy and we ate a Pizza Hut meal and felt at once shame and great joy with our pizza. The place was empty; the day had been so long; the food was real and warm. The Pizza Hut man brought our soft drinks to us, and then refills, for free. We looked like hell. We were tired, but there were only five days left, now. We had started with seven days and now we had five, four and a half, and had we used them well so far? We spent the dinner recounting the hours, the flight over, the time in Dakar, the prostitutes, the beaches, the cop, Saly, the basketball, the man by the water living in the provisional resort cottage -

"We're doing fine so far," I said.

"We have to move quicker," Hand said.

"We'll get better organized."

"You think we'll make it to Cairo in time?"

"Sure. Easy."

"After Mongolia even?"

"Sure. We've got time."

"I really have to get to Cairo. That's my main thing."

"I know."

"But if we head north, to Moscow -"

"We can do both," I said, not knowing a thing. The rest of the trip in my mind sped by with airplane speed and hovercraft grace. More water, more air – a balloon! A zeppelin! More boats, and monkeys and where was that wall again? the one the millions touched, set in the center of that golden square -

We drove to the Djemaa el-Fna. Past the interlocking streams of pedestrians in silhouette, we saw the crowd, a great low mountain moving against the darkening horizon: the heads of intermingling thousands. We didn't know, exactly, around what they were gathered. Some kind of flea market? We had not been told.

We parked and two boys on one bike offered to sell us hashish. We said no thanks. They begged us to buy some. We passed. Hand patted one on the back to wish them well.

"Faggots," said the boy.

We walked through the square, but already, while we were looking for a parking spot, the crowd had thinned. It was about 10. All the women were gone and the men were hungrier. In grumbles and whispers ten different sellers of hash made their presence known. We passed through them and around the monkeys handstanding by lanternlight – the crowds were for the street performers – and into the halls of shops.

We entered and shuffled through an ever-narrowing thicket of proprietorships, separated by makeshift walls and rugs hung, vendors barking, selling sneakers, backpacks, scarves, CD players, cameras, crafts, carpets, jewels and vases and anything one can make from silver- or gold-painted tin. We stopped in a tiny enclave, manned by a small quick-moving man with fast small sad eyes and great animal eyebrows. Every object we picked up or glanced at prompted a flurry of proposals and urgings. He called us his friends, and offered us student rates, and put his hand on Hand's back, patting it nervously.

"My friend," he said to me, grabbing my shoulder, "you had something happen to you so I have the thing." He retrieved a long sword, almost three feet long, curved and sheathed in an ornate case. "See how nice?"

"How much?" I asked. I liked the sword.

"For you one hundred dollars."

Hand laughed in a great burst. I moved onto smaller models.

The salesman kept talking. At first, we laughed when he spoke, while he did the My friend, My friend I help you out part, and then we tried to let him know that he didn't need to do the act with us, we knew better, we had the blue book and knew the real value, etc., but he continued, and we had to laugh more. We bargained with him halfheartedly. We wanted a couple silly things, a pair of knives, a small jewelry box, oval and studded with fake emeralds, which broke apart and became a bracelet, and we pretended to leave when he would not take our offer. He sighed. He looked around left and right and behind a burgundy curtain, to make clear that if he gave us this price, he had to do so out of earshot of his boss and God. Out of appreciation for his efforts and great comaraderie and fortitude, we bought from him five things – two decorative knives, two of the small jewelry boxes and finally a small tin plate, engraved.

"See you my friends!" he said to our backs when he realized we were leaving. "You want nice chess set? For you beautiful student rate!"

But we were gone and had more elaborate plans. We walked back into the square and looked for a new merchant-alley. But we had wasted too much time. Most of the shops were now closed. Their metal gates had come down, or their proprietors were packing up.

"Fuck."

"No, there's one."

On the outskirts of the square, a large shop was still open, just an open garage really, but bright and full to the ceiling, sixteen feet up. In front of it, a stray dog foraged through an enormous pile of garbage and human waste.

We greeted the portly store owner as we stepped up and among the bright overcrowded shelves of dishes and rugs and boxes, platters and knives. It was, this store, in its tins and brasses, blues and reds so bright, enamel on tin toys, more ravishing than almost any painting I'd ever seen or had likely ever been made – it was an intricate medieval tapestry and a hundred perfect Dutch still-lifes together melded but brighter lit – the accumulated care and craft put into these objects, each bauble, was surely equal to almost anything more celebrated artists had done or could do, as is any aisle in any grocery store, as is any decent toyshop – but these places would never be recognized as such, nor would a casino so -

Among the tea sets and chess sets and tiny chests for special things, I looked for and found the smallest, cheapest and least desirable item the store held. It was a keychain anchored to a small white animal, probably a sheep, crudely carved from a smooth milky material looking like lucite. I held it, I caressed it, I presented it to Hand, posing as my knowledgeable dealer in precious objects, with a rumble of approval. He came to me and touched it and purred his interest.

"It's incredible?" I said.

"It's almost painful," he said.

Our interest was made clear. We turned to the portly man and asked him, in French, how much.

He spoke no French. He scurried to a desk in the back and returned with a lined piece of paper, folded to a fourth. On it he wrote:

60DH.

Sixty dirham, about $3.

I looked at the paper, then at the keychain. I frowned. I shook my head slowly. This is where the trick would come in. I asked for the paper and pen. He handed them to me and on his paper, under his 60DH I wrote:

150DH.

Then I gave it back in a stern but hopeful way.

At that moment, many things could have happened. He could have burst out laughing, getting the joke, thinking the joke funny. Or he could have scratched his head, briefly bewildered, then pointed out my mistake. There was also the possibility, odds not too small, that by reversing the forces of bargain-logic, we were pulling on the universe's loose threads, and by doing so might unravel everything from money to love to the double-helix-tremors felt from Bombay to Akureryi. But none of these things happened. What happened is that the man looked at the paper, cocked his head a moment, squinted, then nodded his head once quickly.

"Okay!" he said, grimacing. It was a deal. We had taxed his patience, but a hard bargain had been won; he was a fair man.

It was spectacular. It was better than we could have ever hoped.

Hand stepped closer. I showed Hand the paper, and indicated that this good man had agreed to my hard-driven terms. Hand, though, was not to be so easily satisfied. He asked to hold the sheep keychain. I put it in his palm. He held it and weighed it in his hand. He ran a finger along its length. He examined, closely, the keyring, clicking it open and shut as if fidgeting with a carabiner. Then he shook his head and took the pen and the paper and under the 60DH and under the 150DH he wrote:

250DH.

Here I thought we might have gone too far. The man would laugh. The man would see the gag.

Not a chance. Instead, again, the man took a long hard look at the proposal, fist to chin… and slowly agreed with a slow nod. My knees were shaking.

I took the sheep again. Now I held it to my face and rubbed it. I kissed it softly, and looked into its tiny black eyes. The price was not right.

"Two-fifty?" I said to Hand. "That's an insult."

I took the paper from Hand and wrote under it:

1800DH.

I handed it back to the salesman, at this point truly expecting him to throw up his hands and laugh. We were insisting on paying about $120 for a keychain priced at $3.

But the man didn't flinch. He was a titan. He touched a finger to his mouth, either gauging our sanity or pretending to mull our newest offer, and after a long perfect pause… again acquiesced. I was having probably the best time I could remember ever having.

But Hand turned to the man, shook his hand, said "Good," and paid him. It was over.

We left. The square was almost empty.

"How come you didn't keep going?" I asked. I was pissed. "We were just getting started."

"Come on. We had to quit before he caught on."

"He wouldn't have stopped. I guarantee it."

"He's not stupid."

We passed two men disassembling their food booth, dumping the ice back into a rolling cooler, packing their fish.

"I was so happy there," I said. "I really thought we were doing something there."

"But so we did it. There wasn't any point in going on."

"But there was! Just to see. Didn't you want to see?"

"It was pointless."

"It wasn't," I said.

"Will, it's all kind of pointless, don't you think?"

"What is?" I said.

"How far do you really want to go with this?"

"Till the end."

"Seriously."

"I am serious, fucker. That's what we're here for."

We stood. A small crowd near us roared about something. A monkey had done a trick.

"C'mon. Really. We've got about $14,000 left. Why not just get rid of $2,000 or $3,000 more and call it even?"

"That wasn't the original idea, Hand. Jesus. What about the staging ground? You remember? We were there, we had perfect control over that moment. We were creating art there -"

"Are you talking about that woman in Saly, the head lady?"

"Annette."

"She was insane. Staging ground? Fuck you. The problem with that idea is that you have to see these other people as – well, how do they figure in? How does that guy in the shop figure in? Is he part of it, or part of the scenery?"

I thought for a second.

"He's in the chorus," I said.

"Right. In the chorus."

A tall man strode by, face dark under a hood the color of bark.

"Hashish," he whispered. Then "Crystal," and was gone.

"Listen," Hand said, "fuck the original idea. I could use that money."

"Why are you doing this now? You didn't say anything about this earlier."

"I just didn't think you were that serious. I figured you'd get your shit together at some point and we'd save the rest."

"You don't have a right to do this, especially now."

We stopped. We stood in the middle of the Djemaa el-Fna. There was a hotel on the far end of the square, and on a balcony a man seemed to be watching us.

"Maybe we should go home," Hand said.

He didn't mean it.

"I'm not going home," I said. "You can."

His hands were on his hips, his head hung.

"I just don't want to -" he started. "I just think.this has something to do with everything else, and that's fine, but you're not telling me why, and then I have to be reminded constantly, because every time we give some away I think it means something to you – But even then I don't get it."

"There's no connection," I said.

Hand's head was slung to one side, defiant.

"There isn't," I said.

"Well why the fuck not?" he said.

"You want there to be some connection, but there isn't. We're here. We were in Senegal now we're here. Let's go."

"I'm not going," he said.

"Good," I said, "Jesus," and sat down. The ground was cold.

Now I didn't want to go. I wanted to make Hand cry. I couldn't make that fucker cry.

Hand stood, hands on his hips, watching the people leave the square. He sighed. He closed his eyes. He opened them after a moment, looking like he would say something – his eyes again had that unblinking and wild stare and I expected his jaw to start churning – but he closed his mouth and eyes again and now tilted his head so his ear met the roof. He whistled a few notes of nothing.

I leaned back until I was lying flat, staring up. The smoke from the grills striped the black starless sky. I couldn't see Hand, but his shadow dimmed my right eye's view. My body became heavier the longer I lay. I felt huge, sluggish, limitless in mass. It would take me hours to get up. I might never move again. I could become this landscape. I could fade into this pavement. I could watch as a mountain would watch, as a man on a balcony would watch, the people and their transactions, their hissed offers and threats, myself amused and without obligation. From a balcony, even twelve feet up, there was enough distance. There is movement below but it's not your movement, these people are not your people. Who are my people? My people are fumbling and not listening.

My eyes were hot and full with water. The water ran down either side of my face, into my ears, cooling in the black air.

"Will."

"Oh fuck," I breathed.

He was standing near my shoes.

"Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck."

"What? Will, talk."

"Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck."

The tears made the smoke overhead into crystal, surging and bursting. I dragged the mucus back into my nose and closed my eyes and pushed the water there out, spreading it down over my bones and to the ground.

"Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck."

Hand's shadow threw itself over me. He was sitting now, arms holding his knees.

"Holy shit," I said. "Holy shit holy shit."

I was hiccuping now. I could sense people walking by, slowing, walking on. I was the only person lying on the pavement of the Djemaa el-Fna.

"Slow down," Hand said.

My eyes hurt. The water was being pulled from me and the strain was incredible. My forehead was tight, a pressure above my nose. My throat jerked and coughed. I couldn't remember crying this way. It was pathetic.

"Fuck," I said.

"I know."

"Six months holy fuck."

Hand breathed out.

Six months meant it was in the past. We'd lived all these months since and we didn't know why. Had we decided to do it, had we decided that this was what we wanted, to wake up and work, as I'd been doing, in my pajama bottoms? Who had told me that I should, as I had just a month ago, spend a full week sitting in the SRO section of Wrigley, watching the maintenance men replace broken seats? That I should, as I had, bring Mo and Thor a half-dozen times to the lake in November and December, showing them where the boats would be if it were warmer, showing them the tall twin buildings that looked like flasks, running through the slush by the dead fountain, hoping my feet would freeze. I couldn't think of anything I'd done in six months that brought me anywhere new or proved in any way I'd been there, that I'd been taking air from the world and using it to any justifiable end.

We just hadn't decided yet, any of us. I know Jack's dad hadn't decided. We hadn't yet made a conscious decision about what we would and wouldn't do. We were standing and blinking and waiting to be told.

There was a tapping from within me, something tapping my breastplate from within. I was hyperventilating. Extra firings, a surge in the Bundle of His. A man stopped and said something to Hand in French. Hand stood and thanked the man and sat back down again.

"None of this was supposed to happen," I said.

"I know."

"I knew what he'd look like when he was fifty." Hand said nothing.

"You know he'd get fat," I said. "He'd look like his dad, bald and with that big fat ass. You know he was headed there. Fuck."

Hand said nothing. I could hear someone nearby dunking something in water, removing it and tapping the excess on something made of wood or plastic, a table or bucket.

"I was always serious about that valley," I said.

"I know you were."

When Jack had moved to D.C. and Hand was in St. Louis, I'd gotten the idea that even if we lived in different states for a while, eventually we'd buy land together, maybe near Phelps if Jack could telecommute, since he was the only one with a more permanent sort of job. We were very serious. Or I was serious, and the other two said We'll see, but you could tell they wanted it, too, especially if I did the work. I didn't need to meet all that many new people. I was set with these people; I didn't think we could be improved upon. We didn't want our kids playing with some randoms with lice or Lipnicki hair when they could be playing with Uncle Jack's kids, Uncle Will's, Uncle -

We were planning some kind of less sinister name for Hand. The land would be on the lake, but if not, a valley. A small valley, unpopulated, wooded, not too steep. We'd get a few acres each, and I was sure we could afford it, the land up near Phelps wasn't priced too bad, and I'd do the plans for each, and Hand and I would guide the construction and hire local crews, and Jack and Hand would help, and we'd get all three built in one summer.

If our wives had similar hopes the valley would hold their friends, too, of course – all the better, and their husbands, kids, dogs. We'd have a motherfucking shitload of dogs! Horses. Peacocks. Oh to live among peacocks. I'd seen them once in person and they defied so many laws of color and gravity that they had to be mad geniuses waiting to take over everything. Mudskippers, ocelots, tree sloths and hanumans – we'd have all the most ridiculous animals. And it made sense that we'd stay together, and have this valley, and it made sense that our kids would feel at home in any house, and know every inch of that valley, would roll down the sides in the fall when the leaves had fallen and were brittle and red. We'd hear their yelps from our third-story windows, where we were buildings skylights and painting old furniture new.

The smoke of the market cleared over us and a few weak stars were visible. They did nothing and meant nothing.

"It hit me about a month ago," Hand said.

A dog, rangy and snaking, was sniffing my feet.

"The permanence of it," he said. "I know you're supposed to know it's permanent, but then you're walking down the street – I was walking on a Sunday morning, past a church I think, everyone outside afterward, and I just stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and I said Holy shit. Holy shit." He hissed the words.

"I know." I was trying to slow down my breathing.

"There's the time right after," Hand said, "when you're shocked and putting on your suit, and borrowing the right shoes and putting gas in your car on the way to the fucking funeral, getting the gas on your hands, using the gas station bathroom to wash it off, worrying – You know how worried I was of showing up smelling of gasoline? At a funeral like that, with everyone thinking about cars and everything?"

"I know."

"But then there's these months, when you live half-thinking it'll be corrected. I had to renew the goddamned registration on my car a few weeks ago and I'm sitting there in the place and I started thinking that all I had to do was pay a fine on Jack. Like we were just overdue on payments on him and they'd towed him or something. I jumped a little in the line, because I was like, Fuck, I gotta go get the papers for Jack! Maybe they're in the car! I get these thoughts all the time. Did you keep answering machine tapes?"

"I couldn't. Voicemail."

"Well I saved a tape with a long message from him. He was drunk and was calling, just describing going down to the Lincoln Memorial with this woman he worked with. I guess there was some kind of youth chorus singing there at midnight, and he had this crazy night there, in the Lincoln Memorial, with some older woman he worked with."

"Who was it?"

"Older woman. She's separated. But I guess they went out to dinner and then drinks one night when her ex-husband or whatever was calling a lot. She didn't want to go home so she and Jack went out."

"He didn't tell me that."

"He did the whole story into my answering machine. I'll play it for you when we get back. They ended up at the Lincoln Memorial and there were about a hundred teenagers singing gospel songs. 'If I Could Just Touch the Hem of His Garment,' right there at the feet of Lincoln. Will, shit. Your chest is going crazy."

I tried to breathe in and slowly. A pair of sandals appeared beside my head and I was in the shadow of a man crouching.

"No, merci," Hand said. The man's fingers were on my temples.

"No, no!" Hand said.

I shook my head free. The man stood and walked away.

– We're so weak, Hand. We haven't done anything.

– It's too soon.

– We haven't done anything.

"How does something like that happen?" I said. I was still on the ground, my legs folded under me like I'd fallen.

"I don't know."

"No one's ever heard of something like that happening. Jesus, has that ever happened before? No one said that was going to happen. That wasn't on the list of things that can happen, a truck just -"

Hand was silent.

"You know how hard it is to even use that word, die, in the same sentence as Jack? That's the fucked up -"

"Wipe your nose again."

"I never thought it would be him."

"I know."

"There are so many other people."

"I know," he said.

"Will."

"I would take that truck and swallow it whole," I said.

Hand exhaled through his nose in a burst.

"You ever think of his last seconds?" he asked.

"I don't know," I said.

– I know his last seconds, Hand.

"It was quick, you know," Hand said.

"I know. We've talked about this -"

"If you have to have something like that happen, at least it wasn't drawn out -"

"Hand. It's not like that."

"It was."

"It's not. I know we said he was at peace and everything, but Jesus, I don't think of him that way. I don't at all. Everything I see is different."

"I know."

"I lost grandparents before, and an uncle, but with them I actually pictured rest for them. I think of them dead and I picture them lying down. In the grass, in long grass, deep green. Infinitely comfortable. But Jack -"

"I know."

"Jack I picture frozen under ice. He's still awake, and he's frozen there, under the ice. Somewhere else, fucking shocked under the ice, and he's there alone. He's always alone and that's the hardest thing about it. That's the fucking part that makes me murderous. That's why I want that trucker's head, because he's alone under the glass or ice or whatever. He's waiting."

"Listen. Just – I don't want that picture in my head, Will."

"It's not just that we won't do the valley, all that shit," I said, "it's that there's nothing like that anymore. It's just not possible, anything like that anymore. I mean, none of this was supposed to happen in the first place."

"None – none meaning what?"

"You think I want to be here? I don't want to be here. This fucking place is wrong, Hand."

"Where? Here? Marrakesh? How?"

"It's all wrong. You know it's wrong. Everyone knows it's wrong. This fucking place! It's all wrong. We're all here and we're pretending it's not wrong because we're too fucking polite."

We were at the car. Hand had dragged me off the ground and now he rested his palms on the roof, and his chin on the backs of his hands, atop one another.

"I'll drive," he said.

"No, that's okay," I said.

"I want to. Just tell me for real that you want none of this money when we're done."

"None."

"Because I believe that you'd do it. If that's what you're proving – that you'd do it – then I believe you."

"Not the point."

"Fine."

"I'll drive," I said.

"No," Hand said. "I have another idea first."

In a few seconds Hand was in a cab. There was a long line of cabs waiting for straggling tourists, and Hand had gotten into one. I followed him in.

Hand directed the driver around the cul-de-sac and back to our car. The ride took about eleven seconds. We stopped.

"Here?" the cabbie said.

"Yes."

"Yes? Here?"

"Yes."

The cabbie laughed. We gave him an American fifty.

As my face dried and cooled and my breath evened, we did this three more times. He got in another cab immediately and had him drive us around the cul-de-sac and gave him $80 in dirham. It was great. Once we went around the square, once the length of three cars. Each time we paid them extravagantly, each time they took it knowing we knew what we were doing. The cabbies, in contrast to the merchant, knew what was what, knew that none of it really meant anything, or meant everything but in a way we wouldn't ever really understand. Each drove off grinning. Comrades!

The bike boys rode by again.

"Faggots," they said.

We agreed to go to the mountains. We took one more cab, about a block this time, to our car, and headed in the direction we'd last seen the mountains. Where were the mountains? They weren't visible from the city anymore; I drove us in the direction we thought them to be, past the buildings and the tall red walls separating the street from the compounds and castles and soon we were in a rural area, but we were lost.

It was midnight and we were lost in the wide flat land around the city. The air was cooling and the night was quiet. We drove back to the city, and soon found a cabbie, sitting on his yellow Mercedes hood in an alleyway, at a café's outdoor checkered table, next to a group of men playing dominos.

We proposed paying him to lead us, he in his car and we in ours, to the mountains. He was skeptical. Hand grabbed a wad of bills from his thigh pocket and waved it near his ear. Idiot. The man raised a finger to us, asking us to wait, as he walked back to his table, where he conferred with the three men, all heavy-set and moustachioed. They looked, over to us, all at once and then one at a time, then stared down at their hands, as the man continued.

"What are they talking about?" I asked.

"Directions maybe," Hand said, sitting on our hood.

The men went on, their discussions more heated now, staccato bursts of whispers hissed. One man pointed to another, who pointed angrily back at him. The first went through a doorway behind them, an eye on us, and emerged a minute later with a different jacket on. He walked down a side alley, without looking back, while our cabbie approached us, nodded, and got in his car and we in ours. I looked at Hand and he at me, and we both understood that something seemed not right.

Marrakesh is full of tiny alleys no wider than an elephant's ass, and through those we drove, I drove, much too quickly. The walls were no more than six inches from the car. Our rims scraped twice against curbs, planters. It was like driving through the halls of an apartment building. Dozens of times I doubted we'd fit through this or that entranceway, that we'd get stuck like a truck in a tunnel too tight. We guessed and hoped and prayed for deliverance through the labyrinth, narrow and crumbling. Our car whined around the tightest of turns and squeezed through impossible corridors.

Residents stared from windows and doorways – did they? were those faces or? – and those on the street stepped out of our way. We didn't see any other cars, this fact making our passage easier but more unsettling. Were we supposed to be here at all? We were the only two vehicles active in this part of the city, at this time of night.

Through the alleys we sped and then under an arch and suddenly we bled into a large square, high-walled but open. It was a hundred yards left and right, and there – holy shit – was a soccer game going on and we were driving through the middle of it, fifteen young men yelling, thin and high-socked, right in front of us, after midnight. We were in the game. Our car was driving through their midfield, straight through, our car following his.

"Did you see that?" Hand asked.

I did.

"We just drove through a fucking soccer game."

"At one in the morning."

"You are Ronin."

"I am Ronin."

Through a maze of high red walled avenues, precisely as through a maze, and – hell, this went on for half an hour, all this, the alleys, the narrow black stone streets with the men pushing carts, the men sitting on stoops, our two cars buzzing by, no more than two feet from their toes. It was exhilarating though I expected at any moment to be stopped and the car taken and both of us throttled or examined or both -

And now there was a car behind us.

"You see that?" I asked.

"The guy behind us? Shit. Yes."

"Why would there be a car behind us?"

"No idea."

"How many guys inside? Don't look."

"Two."

"Who is it? Don't look."

Hand turned.

"One looks like the guy from the café."

"Which guy?"

"The guy with the jacket. The one who went in and -"

"Okay. Fuck!"

"This is bad."

– You fucking imbecile, Hand.

– I know. I know.

"They're definitely following us," he said.

They were. We were following one car and being followed by another. There were two men in the car behind us, and they were allowing about twelve feet between them and us. The car in front took half a dozen turns, and we took them with him, and the car behind followed. There was no mistake, no coincidence.

"Still there," Hand said.

"I know!"

"They're in it together," said Hand.

"Who?"

"All of them. They're taking us somewhere. To a dead end. We won't be able to back up."

"Shut the fuck up."

My stomach felt grabbed and compressed. I had a fleeting stupid sense of relief that our French resister hadn't decided to join us. Because the future now seemed set: at some point, in a narrow alley, the car in front of us would stop and the car behind would close in and we'd be trapped and killed and disappeared.

It had been many minutes now. Maybe twenty turns. The men behind, barely recognizable in the dark, made no gestures, gave no hints. This was business.

"I can't believe this is happening," Hand said. "Maybe it's not happening."

"Of course it is. We're the only three cars in this whole city. You see any other traffic?"

It was true. These two cars were here for us. Hand rolled up his windows and pushed the car's automatic doorlock, the resulting sound a gun being cocked.

"Take a left somewhere. Get away," Hand said.

"I know, fucker," I said.

There was nowhere to turn. For all the choices we seemed to have, or the car ahead had, there were no choices at all. Every side street was a dead end.

"Wait till the last second and then -"

"Shut up, Hand."

He grunted, and then was sticking his lower jaw out, rotating it like he was trying to get back into place. I'd never see him do that.

"Are you going to do it? I think we -"

"Let me think!" I said.

"Fuck it, man."

"No, fuck you! You're the stupid fuck who waved all the money in front of the guy."

This registered with Hand. He had no answer.

"I didn't say fuck you, I said fuck it."

"Well fuck yourself anyway," I said.

My hands gripped and regripped the wheel. My knuckles were not white, but red. I checked the mirror; they were there. I couldn't decide it if it would be easier or harder to die with your closest friend. I wanted to die first, that much I knew -

There were other men on the street, walking in pairs and alone. Some pushing carts. I worried about running over their feet – we were that close. We passed a crack of an alley, oozing with mustard light, where two men were embracing, with others watching, twenty men, at least -

No, it was a fight. One with a knife to the other's throat -

"You see that?" I asked.

"Fuck yeah I saw it."

Everything was wrong all at once.

"Just keep going."

The car behind hadn't let up. There was no way to even slow down without them hitting us. But where were we being taken? The street opened up. Then narrowed again. I couldn't deal anymore. My heart was humming, shaking. I almost wanted to stop, give it up. I began wondering if I was ready.

"Fuck," Hand said. "I can't believe this. You know what, though – I have to say, this is a pretty glamorous way to die. I mean – But will they shoot us or what?"

"Shut the fuck up."

"I swear I'll take one of them with me. What do they want? Our money, or the car? Both, I guess. Fuck!"

"Maybe we should turn off."

"We'd be dead if Jack was driving."

"That's nice."

Maybe I was ready to go.

I was so tired.

Maybe I wanted to be crushed, too. To be ready you need to be tired, and you need to have seen a great deal, or what you consider to have been a great deal – we all have such different capacities, are able to absorb and sustain vastly different quantities of visions and pain – and at that moment I started thinking that I had seen enough, that in general I'd had my fill and that in terms of visual stimulation the week thus far had shown me enough and that I was sated. The rock-running in Senegal was enough, the kids and their bonjours – that alone would prepare me for the end; if I couldn't be thankful enough having been there I was sick and ungrateful, and I would not be ungrateful, not ever, I would always know the gifts given me, I would count them and keep them safe! I had had so much so I would be able to face the knife in the alley and accept it all, smiling serenely, thankful that I'd be taken while riding the very crest of everything. I had been on a plane! A tiny percentage of all those who'd ever lived would ever be on an airplane – and had seen Africa rushing at me like something alive and furious. I could be taken and eaten by these wet alleyways without protest.

The car behind seemed ready to ram us. It was so close we could hear its engine roaring over ours.

Suddenly Hand was yelling, almost crying.

"I hate this. [Hitting side window] I hate this! I feel closed in! I hate having no options!"

The turns were increasing.

– Jack I need -

–

"I hate being followed like this! I fucking hate it." Hand was hitting the dash now.

"Easy," I said.

"Fuck you, easy!"

– Jack.

"We could stop and get out and just run for it," I said.

Hand mulled this.

"Okay," he said, calming. "That's an option. I like that. We could always just bang on the door to some house and get help."

"Right."

"How close are they now?"

"Still right behind us." I looked into their faces, both with mustaches, both expressionless. I turned quickly back. This was very real. This was our lives, the whole of our relatively straight-forward lives, concluding savagely on this bizarre note, someone splicing onto our happy safe Wisconsin lives the wrong, bloody ending. This is Hand's fault. How? I don't know. You'll fight together. We'll be led into some pitchblack alley, some warehouse. We'll be stripped, robbed, beaten, flayed – You will disappear. You're not afraid. I know. Why? You used to fear death so tangibly. When you were Robotman you would wait till dawn to ensure no one took you while you were asleep. You cried during the astronomy unit when Mr. Geoghan talked about how brief our lives were comparatively, how brief was all mankind. I know. I couldn't hear it. When they talked about the imminent death of our sun, I lost it. And remember what he said, the first day of class? I do.

"Will."

He said: 'The only infallible truth of our lives is that everything we love in life will be taken from us.' He had just lost his wife. That was it. It was. He had lost his wife and came to class each day in a sweatsuit, royal blue with white stripes. He was a marathoner.

"Will."

I remember. I remember it being somehow soothing.

"Will, motherfucker."

"What? What?"

We had to slow past a group of men, and one pounded the car.

"I hate this shit! The not knowing! Why the fuck are they banging?"

There were a lot of butchers for some reason, men in white bloody aprons, pushing tin carts, knives and cleavers hanging from the cart's handle.

"This just makes no sense," Hand said.

"I know."

"The fact that we're not already dead is the most totally illogical thing. We should have been dead by now."

"If there was any sense to anything, we wouldn't be here at all. We have to just wait."

Hand snorted.

"I'm not here to wait," he said. "Where are they now?"

"You look."

Hand turned around.

"They're gone!"

"What?" I looked in his rear-view mirror. "Holy shit." I looked again. "They're gone. That is amazing. Why are they gone?"

We were out of the narrow road, the walls spread; we were again on the open road, the sky open and proud.

"I really thought we were in trouble there," Hand said.

"You know, I actually think we were."

Seconds later the cabbie stopped his car. We pulled up to him. I was still jittery, half-expecting some kind of ambush. He didn't get out. He just pointed up, with his whole arm, like semaphore – this road, he indicated, all the way.

Hand paid him $100, even while we wondered if he'd intended to kill or rob us moments before. We drove a mile in silence and finally stopped on the shoulder. I rested my head on the side window. The car wheezed. I turned it off.

"Sorry," I said. "I thought -"

He stared out for a minute.

"Forget it," he said.

"You still want to go?"

"We should. I'll drive."

We got out and the air was cold and the hood hummed. We switched seats and Hand drove. Toward the mountain another ten minutes. No people anywhere, no movement.

"What did you think would happen?" Hand asked.

"I thought we'd watch each other die," I said.

The air was cooling more. The road inclined.

"I'd want to die first," he said.

"Let's not do this," I said. I must have killed those men a hundred times in those minutes. "I'm worn out."

We went on, in a few minutes stopping for gas at a brilliantly lighted station staffed by a huge blue-overalled black man – the first and only black man we'd seen or would see in Morocco – and with his mustache he very much looked like a walrus, a walrus wearing a blue jumpsuit. I went in to use the restroom and inside were three men watching TV. One said something as I left.

"What'd he say?" Hand asked.

"I heard the words 'America' and 'whore.' I think. Add a predicate and I think he insulted us."

"This is just a weird thing, this night."

"You still want to go?"

"We should."

So we went up the mountain.

We switched seats, Hand driving now, but this wasn't the poor part of town. We kept thinking it would get poor but instead the road – as much as we could see in the unlighted road – was lined for twenty miles with perfect trees planted neatly, and high walls just beyond, left and right. Gated compound after gated compound, a few clearly marked as resorts, and dozens more that were either immense private homes or military bases or huge hidden dens of intrigue – sex camps or subversive training centers or fantastic new labs where humans were being made from stem cells and extractions from ice-age holdovers. It wasn't clear to us, none of it, while speeding past, on the other side of their high and endless walls.

Then we were climbing, the road was and we with it, our path winding and without guardrails. We knew we were in the mountains when the air went cold and when our headlights illuminated the tops of trees, their brittle leaves peaking from below road level, grey photographs of branches in our passing flashes.

In the quiet dark hollow of our car, Hand was talking about the origin of AIDS, something about a truck route in Zaire. It all started with truckers, he said. The truck drivers were delivering some kind of cloth, terrycloth, he thought, up and down Zaire, and were stopping in brothels, as truckers do, thus facilitating the spread of the virus. We found ourselves over a bridge and knew we were very high above whatever we were crossing-water or dry chasm, we'd never know.

At the other side of the bridge, at one in the morning in these frozen black mountains we came upon two men in uniform, thumbs outstretched, hitchhiking. Their uniforms, different but familial, looked like military.

"Should we?" I asked.

"Man, I don't know. We've had too much tonight."

We passed them full of conflict and shame and drove up around six or seven more bends, the air getting so cool the car's windows seemed to stiffen and the sky tightened and shrank. But we saw no one. There were no shanties, no tents or tiny crumbling adobe homes. There was no one up here. There was no one living here at all, really – no one, at least, visible in the black taut overnight – no weak fires warming peasants, no clotheslines strung between hovels.

We parked on the shoulder and got out. It was twenty degrees colder up here, maybe forty degrees, and we had no jackets. With fifteen feet between us, we could barely see each other. Hand stood, fists in his pants, warming them. I stood, fingers entwined and resting on my head. We had no idea why we were here. There was no moon, no stars.

"We could drive over the side," Hand said.

"I thought of that," I said.

"If we picked the right place," he said, "the worst that would happen is we'd wreck the car."

"I know."

"It would be something to do. We'd run down a ways, hit a tree, get out, maybe meet up with those military guys and hitch back with them."

It sounded intriguing. Only laziness prevented us from doing it. We stood for a minute and I noted that there was no sound. There were no animals, no people, not even wind pushing through trees. We stood on the mountain, what we figured might be the top of the mountain, and for a second I thought I heard water, but then didn't. There was nothing. We got back in the car.

We turned around and descended and drove quickly, back over the bridge high over the river canyon, past the military men again, still standing where we'd passed them, on the cusp of the bridge, and we rolled and down and down and they stayed there and we didn't know how they could stand the cold.

In fifteen minutes we reached level ground again and were blowing through a flat road lined with trees straight perfectly spaced.

"There's a guy," said Hand.

I slowed down;

"Where?"

"Back there, a guy walking with a huge staff in his hand."

I backed up for a few hundred yards until I could see him. A man in the snug wool clothes of someone who lives outdoors and hikes constantly – completely self-sufficient, but carrying next to nothing. His backpack, leather, was small, mall-girl decorative. We stopped. The man stopped. I gave a stack of bills to Hand.

"You do it," he said.

"No. Please. I feel so weird."

"Well, stop feeling weird."

"He'd be scared of me, anyway."

"Fine."

Hand got out, carrying about $500 in Moroccan cash. He approached the man and asked directions to Marrakesh. The man looked at Hand like he was mad, or an apparition. There was only one road to Marrakesh from whence we came, and we were on it; we were obviously heading straight for Marrakesh. Hand did the thing where he pointed down the road, as if to say, If I understand you right -- and I think I do -- we just follow this road and we'll hit Marrakesh, like you say. The man nodded again and made a javelin of his arm, aiming it toward Marrakesh.

Hand pulled out the bills. For some reason – the dark? – he held them up in front of the man's face, as if the man had never seen money before, or was far-sighted. The man refused the bills and tried to walk away. Hand stepped in front of him and insisted. The man took the wad like he'd been asked to carry someone's trash. Then he continued walking.

Hand jogged back to the warm car.

"That seemed weird," I said.

"Yeah, he didn't even count it or anything. He just put it in his pocket and kept walking."

"He'll use it."

"I don't know. I don't think he'll keep it. He seems like the kind of guy who'd give it to someone else. He was like someone out of Middle Earth – a man and his staff, walking through the countryside in the middle of the night."

I thought of the man's brain, of the uninterrupted hours of time inside his head, without distraction, without dialogue.

– I don't know how you do it, sir.

– Will, you had this peace of mind and you might again.

– That much I know is not true.

"We're almost back," I said. "What time is it?"

It was a little after 2. We'd started the day in Casablanca sixteen hours before and we'd almost died – we were almost butchered in the alleys of Marrakesh – or possibly not. But it felt so real. It was the closest I'd ever come to feeling so near to the end. No seizure or flurry or fainting had come so near.

We were parked now, in town, on the main strip. The road was wide and stray cars sped past with groans and whinnies and shushes. Hand's head was resting on the side window, and he was looking up at the moon.

"Is that full or almost-full?"

"Almost full."

I was ready for sleep. It was 2:30. We drove toward the hotel and stopped at a light; the hotel's vertical sign, neon, was visible two intersections ahead.

A car pulled alongside us. Four people in their mid-twenties, three women and a man, were crowded into a silver compact. The light went green and we drove. At the next light they stopped next to us, on the left of our car. The woman in the passenger seat leaned out, urging Hand to roll down his window. He did.

"Bonjour," she said. She was Moroccan, magnificent. Next to skin like that, ours seemed so rough, like burlap woven with straw.

"Bonjour," Hand said.

"You're English," she said.

"American."

"Oh! Good. Where are you going?" Her English was seamless. Everyone's was. I had sixty words of Spanish and Hand had maybe twice that in French, and that was it. How had this happened? Everyone in the world knew more than us, about everything, and this I hated then found hugely comforting.

The eight eyes in their car were watching, faces close to the windows. It was a small car. The light turned green. No one moved.

"Home," Hand said. "We just came from the mountains."

"The mountains? Why?"

We were talking in the middle of the road.

"Long story," Hand said.

"What?"

"Never mind."

The light was red again.

"So what are you doing now?"

"I dunno. What are you doing?"

"You should come out!"

"What? Where? Where are you going?" Hand was leaning out now, arms draped out the window. I think my mouth was wide open. This was unbelievable.

The woman ducked her head back into the car. Inside there was a quick and animated debate. She re-emerged.

"Club Millennium," she said.

Hand turned to me. I had a surge. It felt good. We told them we'd follow. We knew we had to. We'd been up for twenty hours maybe but it felt so good to say yes. Where had they come from? In all my life I'd never been approached this way, the car pulling up, the Where you going? It was something I wish had happened hundreds of times. I was a looker – someone who looked over at every car at every traffic light, hoping something would happen, and almost never finding anyone looking back – always everyone looking forward, and every time I felt stupid. Why should people look over at you? Why would they care?

But these people do. They threw out a line and I felt like I was living a third or fourth life, someone else's life. It felt like regaining, in the morning while slowly waking, the ability to make a fist. I'd been so close and ready for the end – closer and more ready than I'd ever been before – and now I wanted this, all this, I wanted everything that would happen:

We would meet them there, and get out, and would be happy to be out of the car.

We would be ashamed of our clothes, of our Walgreen's sweatshirts, of our strong personal smells.

We would pay for everyone, $100 in cover charges, while knowing – really being electrically conscious of the fact – that that money could perhaps be better spent.

We would walk down a slow dark burgundy flight of stairs, everything rounded – the inside of an aorta – and at the bottom, get assaulted by flood of mirrors, glass, chrome.

The place would still be busy, the clientele half Moroccan and half European, all of a powerful but lightly-worn sort of wealth, the place dripping with what I guessed – I'd never seen it in person – to be decadence.

While I would wait for the drinks everyone, all five of them including Hand, would bound off to the dancefloor, holding hands, like a string of kids connected, cut from folded construction paper.

I would want to dance. I would be too sober, and would be watching the purses. I would sink into the booth, grinning for them, soul scraping me from inside.

I would note that I was often too sober, watching the purses.

When they would rest, I would try to talk to the Moroccans, but the music would overwhelm us, like talking through wind and rain. Two of the women would be in law school, wanting to be judges.

I would try to explain how we had been in the mountains, looking for people to give money to – and where are your poor, by the way? Why none in the mountains? – but they wouldn't hear me, or would maybe just pretend at incoherence.

Hand would dance with one of them, in silver snakeskin pants and radiant in shape, while the other three would leave, smiling and shrugging at me, as I worked on a fifth vodka-soda.

Hand would do the shopping cart.

Hand would do the sprinkler.

Hand would do the worm. Hand could do the worm.

I would know that in any city, at an hour like this, there are people sleeping. That most people are sleeping. But that in any city, in any cluster of people, there are a few people who are awake at this hour, who are both awake and dancing, and it's here that we need to be. That if we are living as we were this week, that we had to be awake with the people who were still dancing.

Even if I couldn't loosen my head enough to dance myself.

After an hour we would find ourselves in a booth with half a dozen Germans – four men, three women, all in their mid-thirties, on a company retreat, we would learn. "We are here to reep it up!" one would say, then snuff a lit match with her tongue.

Hand would look over at me.

"You okay?" he would say.

"I'm good," I would say.

"You look better," he would say.

And I would know I was different for a while. We had beaten death yet again and we were now beating sleep and it would seem like we could do without either forever. And I then would have the idea, seeming gloriously true for a flickering moment, that we all should have a near-death experience weekly, twice weekly – how much we'd get done! The clarity we'd know!

"I want to keep going," Hand said. It was four o'clock, and we'd left, dropped off the last two women we'd danced with, at their home, a condo complex looking like grad-student housing. He was driving, and had stopped the car a block away.

"No," I said. "Where?"

"Fez. It's only four hours. Less maybe."

"We can't. We fly tomorrow. Later today."

"I know. Still."

I had come crashing down. My eyes hurt.

"Let's sleep," I said, letting us both down.

"Sleep is boring. We go to Fez and come back in time."

He was right but I couldn't let him know this. I could barely talk I was so wrecked.

"We have to sleep," I whispered.

"You don't know that. Not for sure."

"I do. Right now I do. I can't even see."

"We could keep doing this. Stretch it out. We still have $10,000. That would last us month maybe, at least. Two."

The car was clouding with our words.

"That girl tonight, the first one – she was the most ridiculous woman I've ever been that close to."

"I want to stay so badly."

"You just said you wanted to move."

"I do. Maybe we go to Siberia but come back."

"We'll never come back," I said.

We found a parking spot in front of the hotel.

"I know," he said.

"You see the rest of the world, then you come back."

"I know. Okay."

We slept.