by Todd Grimson
That night, Anthony checked out the sleazy discos he’d avoided when he’d been here before. They were located up in little alleys, and just didn’t seem very appealing to him. Garish, purple or crimson walls, outdated insane strobe lighting, some crooked Moroccan’s idea of Disco Inferno. Not one of the girls looked pretty to him.
Good Moslems don’t drink alcohol. These did, and smoked kif as well, the smell was overpowering, you couldn’t help but get slightly high just breathing the atmosphere, the fumes. And if belly-dancers were a possibility in the Islamic world, why not strippers? How far will you go? Anthony gazed, he watched the show, all of the light infected by the reddish, diabolical glow and sordid sepia-violet shadows, the anti-rainbows in the dark. It wasn’t likely, he never thought it was, that Lauren would take part in such a performance, but observing it was educational nonetheless. When some anatomical novelty is revealed, some trick that’s new to you but old, you know it’s old, you really only need to see it once.
Anthony felt in no hurry to leave Tangier. He rented a car and went out in the dry but not unfertile countryside, olive groves and grapevines, chicken and sheep, plaster and stone villages on sides of rocky hills, ancient Roman outposts in ruins; he went to Asilah and Quezzane, and back, keeping his cheap hotel room in Tangier. He took the crowded bus to Tetouan and wandered in the ancient medina, down twisted, crooked streets. Because he was black he was mostly left alone by the notorious hustlers and touts. They assumed he was a Muslim, an African, and so it seemed unlikely he had as much money as other tourists.
He slept from dawn to early afternoon, then took a late afternoon nap. He came close, not entirely unintentionally, to observing Ramadan austerity, keeping the fast but for noontime café au lait.
One day a lizard got into his room and clung to the wall, high up in the corner. It was a fairly big lizard. Anthony recognized it as a sign. He communed with it. It understood all.
After sleeping particularly hard, he woke up on a gray cloudy day, not sure at first where he was. It was a very plain, ordinary room. He could hear music, while he was still halfway asleep, distant music he could not make sense of, he tried to concentrate, he wanted to hear more. The theme of a symphony? Mahler? The early Rolling Stones? Maybe as broadcast through the fuselage of a jet plane taking off.
Anthony had not shaved for a few days. The water that came out of the shower was room temperature up to lukewarm. He put on a light blue t-shirt, “Coca-Cola” spelled in white Arabic script. His glasses, gold-rimmed, matching his expensive watch. He was big enough, he wasn’t especially frightened of anyone trying to rip him off.
He walked up a twisting, deserted street, until he came to a house that had been partly burned down. There was nobody around. The wind blew, gentle and warm.
There was so much that was irrational in this world. People were so superstitious, and rightly so, even if the forms of their superstitions might not necessarily correspond at any point to the actual mysteries which they were meant to pay homage to, or affect. In America, the land of magic materialism, there was a tremendous belief in irrational forces affecting the outcome of events – belief in the vagaries of luck.
Luck, and unseen forces, propensities and inclinations of the moment, like watching a basketball game on TV and influencing, through some incantation or ritual gesture, an outcry, whether your team wins, or someone makes a given shot. You went out of yourself in an instant of joy. Or on Wall Street, whether or not some stock performs, the numbers, the name of the entity, from there to a magic attached to some individual, personal luck, the cult of personality or self-made bandit tycoons, the worship of these people for their relationship with money, “hard-work” part of the mythical equation, necessary, yet nowhere near as important as personal luck.
Anthony had seen, many times, how in America you could criticize a politician, or a movie star, a sports hero, but no one wanted to speak objectively about the extremely successful businessman. It was a part of the unspoken, unacknowledged national ideology, the reverence for these men. They could cheat, and steal, and it didn’t matter. They knew how to make money. It was said straight out, so and so had “the magic touch.” It amounted to the manipulation of unseen forces, the invocation of what amounted to cultivated luck.
Akin to having God on your side.
Something invisible to connect with the symbolic numbers of wealth, the immaterial, spiritual realm of money, all these zeros and what they represent – an entirely made-up, invented, yet all-powerful world. Which people accept on faith. It’s all so far removed from how one imagined it used to be, in prehistoric days, it seemed a long way also from using cattle as units of wealth, like the Swahili, his cousins on the savannah, prey to their own fucked-up ideas and made-up gods, their own swarming invisible world.
Fictions, man. Anthony walked to the same little garage grocery and bought a wrapped-in-brown-paper beer, and considered going back pretty soon to his artificial, abstract world of TV, computers, and securities fraud. It was an aesthetic decision, really, what variety of made-up shit you found acceptable. What was the nature of his own personal luck? Did he feel lucky? Anthony wasn’t sure. How unlucky he was remained to be seen. The world was a mysterious fucking place.
That evening, in a much better mood, having maybe taken a certain train of thought as far as he cared to, and come back, Patrick Murtaugh the last thing on his mind, likewise Lauren, in the medina, buying cigarettes, he ran into Sara. She was wearing some kind of a gauzy, layered, cerise and apricot colored outfit, and Anthony didn’t recognize her at first.
Nor she him. She was with two handsome young Moroccan men, with mustaches, smiling, and a Dutch or otherwise Scandinavian couple, husband and wife perhaps, both soft-bodied blondes. When Sara did recognize Anthony, after he spoke to her, she acted as if they were good friends, as if they’d conceivably spoken on the phone earlier that day.
“Anthony. Nice to see you.”
“Sara.” Anthony collected himself. “I’d like to talk to you. How long are you here?”
“How long? I live here, Anthony.”
Anthony wanted to grab her by the throat. He didn’t like the way she said, “I live here.” She was playing with him. Naturally, all his wildest suspicions returned at once, inchoate but intact.
“Do you want to visit me tomorrow afternoon?” she said, after laughing at some murmured comment by one of the Moroccans.
“Yes. I would like that.”
“Good. Be at the Café de Paris at four o’clock. I will send someone for you. Okay? Does that sound fair?”
He nodded, and she smiled, off with her friends to unknown revels. Anthony considered following them, but the risk of being discovered in such an act seemed large. In any case, the opportunity for such espionage was soon lost.
At 4:00 the next day, having shaved, in a white shirt and muslin pants, Anthony followed a young man named Rachid, on a sunny day, warmer than usual, up past the Hotel Intercontinental, further, to what turned out to be an old apartment building, with an antique elevator, a smell of cinnamon and musk and myrrh. Up to the third floor of five.
Once Rachid had delivered Anthony to Sara, and she answered the door, Rachid excused himself and left.
“Will you have tea with me?” she asked, and Anthony said sure. There were large cushions to sit on, around a low table of ornately carved dark wood.
“Please have some of these sweets,” she said. “They’re very good. A friend of mine knows a baker, and he passed these on to me, but there’s more than I will ever happen to eat.”
Anthony ate a cookie, with his tea. Black tea. The cookie was indeed quite good. He hadn’t tasted one like it before. He was glad it wasn’t oversweet, like baklava.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” he said, “did I meet you one time in New York?”
“I don’t know,” Sara said. “Do you think you did? It’s possible. I’ve been there.”
She was wearing blue today, her wavy dark hair down, the first
time he’d seen her this way. It crossed his mind that she might want to seduce him. She looked more attractive to him the more he saw her, though he still found her accent affected.
“How long have you lived here?”
“Here?” she said, meaning the apartment, “Three years.”
Anthony saw how it was going to be.
“What do you know about Lauren?” he asked, watching her eyes.
Sara took a considerable quaff of tea.
“You mean that nice Jewish girl who disappeared last year?”
“Yes,” he said slowly, “that’s who we’re talking about. What do you mean, ‘disappeared’? The police assume she’s dead.”
“If you think that,” Sara rejoined, “why are you here? Tell me,” she said, with amusement, leaning forward, “do you think she was spirited away to some harem somewhere, and she’s become a sex slave? Do you think that’s the sort of world we live in, a world in which such things can take place?”
“I don’t know.”
“It might have happened,” she said, changing tone. “She didn’t seem to me to be so beautiful there’d be an urgent demand, but she wasn’t bad. What did your friend think?”
“You mean Patrick. What do you imagine he thought?” Anthony asked, falling into playing her game.
“I’m sure he believed in something like I’ve just described. Maybe that she was drugged, and taken to a secure place, and then shipped from there to—who knows? Saudi Arabia perhaps. In the realm of this sort of fantasy, anything’s possible.”
“And his death?”
“Oh, that must have been magic, some kind of poison, or perhaps simply a spell. That completes the picture, don’t you think?”
Anthony didn’t answer for a while, and then he looked into Sara’s eyes and said, “Sure. I suppose it does.”
She asked if he had ever read The Sheltering Sky. He said he had. They had a literary conversation then, of sorts. Sara talked and Anthony listened, although he wasn’t interested in the subject that much. Or at least not with her. She said she lived near the writer Paul Bowles. She saw him every day when his driver took him out to get his mail.
He was sure she was an American. She was the girl he had seen, at a party; and for some reason later on someone had gossiped about her to him. Anthony hadn’t paid any special attention at the time. People gossiped about everyone in certain strata of Manhattan.
“When are you leaving, going back home?” she finally asked. Sara was bored with him now.
“In a day or two.” He hadn’t known this until he said it, but now it seemed true.
“Well, I hope I get to see you again,” she said, and Anthony didn’t believe her.
When he walked out of the relative coolness of the building into the sunlight, the heat surprised him. This was the hottest day he had experienced so far in Tangier. It’s not like inland Morocco, like Marrakesh for instance, where temperatures regularly go above one hundred degrees. Usually, the sea breezes keep Tangier from ever getting much above the mid-eighties or so. There was no wind today, and the unmoving, dead heat was intense.
Anthony was not deep in thought in the sense of having one coherent complex idea lead him to other possibilities, considered systematically, linearly, but he was in a state of heavily-weighted, slowly-developing brooding, as if waiting for a revelation to assemble itself, or occur.
He walked away from Sara’s building without really paying attention to where he was going, simply heading back towards downtown. Even up here in a fairly nice residential neighborhood the streets curved, you had to make decisions, and he only realized that he had somehow gone around in a circle when he saw for the second time the same three Moroccans working and talking, looking at the engine of a dark car with its hood up. He crossed the street to avoid them. He was a little embarrassed they might notice him, think he was lost.
This time he was more careful, he turned left this time at a particular junction, he thought he knew more or less where he was and he would emerge past this high wall somewhere near the Hotel Intercontinental, he strode through waves of resistant, heavy air.
When he saw the three men and the car with its hood up this time, he felt suddenly afraid, and this time they definitely noticed him, he stayed on the other side of the street and walked past, faintly hearing them talk to each other—one laughed. He didn’t know where he had gone wrong. It seemed impossible that he could not get out of this neighborhood. The heat made it all worse. He was perspiring in rivulets. His shirt was stuck to him. The sun seemed unnaturally bright, the sky empty and dead. The landscape was baked. He was kicking sand. If he was lost on his own, with no one observing him, that would be fine, he could deal with it, it was a problem that could eventually be solved.
What he didn’t like was having strange Moroccans aware of him, able to see that he didn’t live here, didn’t know where he was. He now no longer knew where Sara’s apartment building was, his starting point. He walked along the same curving street past the same cement wall and this time it seemed like he came to a completely different, sand-swept intersection than before.
One of the town’s many small green beat-up taxis sped by, accelerating, no chance to hail it, someone turning to look at him from the back seat.
Anthony picked a new street to follow, watching his surroundings with minute attention, as though reality was not entirely dependable anymore. He came to a familiar street, went by the Hotel Intercontinental, but everything looked different to him now. Even as, in fifteen minutes or so, he found his way downtown, to the Grand Socco Square across from the Café de Paris, everything looked strange. This was how it all was, this was how it had to be.
They thought they had given him a lesson. But “they” did not realize precisely who he was, so the lesson was not taken in quite the same way as they may have meant it to be. It did not frighten him away, but rather served, in his present condition, as a kind of lure. The lure, such as it was, had absolutely nothing to do with the mysterious circumstances regarding Patrick and Lauren.
They misjudged him. They thought he had a sense of responsibility, a curiosity—but that he was a rational Negro, and that he would fear losing his rationality, this carefully constructed identity out of Yale and so forth.
Such a conclusion was wrong.
He could hang around for twenty years and learn nothing, and this might be something extraordinarily important to find out.
“Nothing. Nada. Rien.”
Yes, he thought he might discover much more in such a fate than they supposed. He would hire a car and drive to Fez, then down across the Sahara to Timbuktu. Forget about his job, his girlfriend, everything, all the contents of this unreal life.
Maybe one day he would see everything anew, right hand touching left hand mirror-self, door opening to revelation of old/ new eternal knowledge, all mysteries forgotten but revealed. He wouldn’t care—about the facts, ma’am, nothing but the facts.
He would ask no questions, tell no lies. Seek not lest ye shall find. That’s it, that’s coming close. Seek not, lest uh… ye shall find. My father’s house, his mansion, has many motherfucking rooms.
Mr. Right Hand, meet Mr. Left Hand.
I can see you’ve met before.
OOZE OUT AND AWAY
“SO I OPENED a door in his head and went in,” said Mahnoosh. “We lay there on the bed and contemplated our relationship. We possessed telepathy.”
“Wait… this is in the future?” Donya asked her friend.
“Yeah,” said Mahnoosh, then drank more raspberry-cranberry through a straw. The intense dark red now entering her inside matched the highlights of her hair as well as her leggings, more or less.
Donya moved slightly and said, “OK, what happened next?”
“What?”
“What happened next?”
Mahnoosh laughed and said: “I realized that I didn’t have the remote. I thought that it was misplaced somewhere in the pillows or the sheets there on the bed.”
“Those are those pillows… isn’t everything a leopard-pattern?”
“No, Donya, everything isn’t a fucking leopard-pattern. How can you say that? There are many varieties of leopard-pattern. There’s also cheetah-pattern, jaguar, tiger… sabre-tooth tiger, even.” But she giggled at that.
“I’m sort of distracted by this music I guess,” Donya said.
“Do you want me to turn it down?”
“No, it’s fine. I’m getting used to it. I like the beat.”
Mahnoosh’s lipstick was raspberry-cranberry only darker. Donya’s lips were some other, pinker, peachier hue. Glossy.
The big television screen had some actors talking in a hotel room back in the admirable if strange black & white shadowy America of maybe 1948. Mahnoosh looked at the sexysexy dress the actress was wearing while Donya found an old Zippo lighter in between the pillows and used this to light a filter cigarette. Mahnoosh thought she could maybe fit in a dress like that. People would look.
She noticed the smoke in the air and said, “I need one too.”
“This is the last one,” Donya lied. She was a liar sometimes.
“Why are you lying to me?”
“I don’t know. Here.”
Then, in three or four minutes, Donya said: “I’m bored.”
“Let’s go outside.”
“It’s the same as in here.”
“No it’s not,” Mahnoosh said, noting how spectacularly pouty Donya’s lips were now. If people were watching Mahnoosh would have kissed her then.
“Am I boring you?” Donya asked.
“You’re getting close.”
Outside in fifteen minutes some crows on wires observed them walking down the avenue and commented while Mahnoosh tried to call Farid on a small dark-green plastic phone.
They were across the street from a building which had that look buildings have a week or two after being car-bombed. Debris was still strewn about in a disorganized fashion and the big hole exposed nude iron girders which looked unstable though the architecture was normal enough given the circumstance.