The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty

by Vendela Vida

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Excusez-moi,” he says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Shay-billy?” you say.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Everyone around you is waiting for the prince himself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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