by Vendela Vida
You study the photo. In it, you are taken aback by how much you look like the famous American actress. Your hand is outstretched, trying to block the photographer, but this only makes it more convincing that it’s a photo of an actress accustomed to fending off paparazzi. Leopoldi is standing behind you, trying to help you up. It’s clearly him.
You refresh the computer. Before your eyes the number of news stories has multiplied—the photo’s been linked to by thirteen sites. When it’s been picked up by twenty-one sites, you turn the computer screen off, as though that will prevent the photo from spreading further.
You are dizzy, your stomach a volcanic pit, as you sit on the bench outside the hotel, waiting for the van. You know what scandal the producers will be talking about today; you know what everyone will be talking about. You wonder if the producers will know it wasn’t the famous American actress in the photo.
If the famous American actress was about to tear into you yesterday, you can only imagine what she’ll do today, now that the photo has been published, linked to, commented upon. You’re afraid she’ll publicly accuse you of not being who you claim you are. And she’ll be doing this on set at the American embassy. It would be insane for you to put yourself at that kind of risk of exposure. You cannot continue working on the film. You cannot remain anywhere where the famous American actress or the practical secretary could find you.
While you’ve been sitting on the bench outside the hotel, tourists have been boarding a large white bus. You recognize it as the same large white bus that was outside the hotel on your first day of work as a stand-in, when you mistakenly thought the bus was your transportation to set. You see the same tour guide with his silver clipboard at the stairs to the bus. Where did he say the tour went?
You stand and walk as casually as you can toward the bus. “Meknes?” he says. You nod, and he tells you he will be collecting the fare on the bus. You board.
Three dozen men and women are already seated on the plush seats. Most of them are couples in their sixties. The women wear long pants and open-toed shoes; their husbands look like they’ve shrunk in recent years, their bodies condensed with gravity and age. Even their collared polo shirts look a size too big.
You quickly find a seat in the middle. The tour guide is coming down the aisle and collecting money and marking numbers down on his clipboard. You try to see how many dirhams everyone else is giving him so you can remove the appropriate amount from your bra. As he approaches you, you hand him what you have discerned is the correct payment, and then turn to look out the window. You see the young American producer and the Indian producer get into the van. Their eyes are searching the front of the hotel; they’re most likely looking for you.
You instinctively take off the wig and move to the other side of the bus and sit by the opposite window. Two women board the bus. One of them looks vaguely familiar. She speaks English with an American accent and she has dark hair with thick, blond highlights. You glance at her shoes, fearing you’ll see puffy white Reeboks. Instead, she’s wearing blue Converses, with zippers on the side. And she’s not wearing glasses or a Florida State University sweatshirt, nor is she traveling in a large group of women on a college reunion tour. You tell yourself to relax: you’re being paranoid. What are the odds that she’s on this bus? You arrived in Casablanca on the same flight over a week ago. Or maybe you didn’t—you are beginning to believe you imagined the nurse’s presence on the plane. You have not been yourself lately.
The tour guide comes up the aisle from behind and stops by your row. Apparently you didn’t pay him enough money because he’s asking for more. You remove the bills from the cup of your bra and hand them to the guide. He looks away, as though embarrassed about what he’s seen. You stare straight ahead: you’re afraid that if you look out the window of the bus you’ll see the pale practical secretary’s face searching for yours.
You contemplate being free of the actress and the practical secretary. This is of foremost importance. All you need to do now is get to Meknes, and you’ll figure out your plan from there. You take inventory of what you’ve left in your room—a suitcase full of clothes you don’t like. A toothbrush. The only thing you’ll regret leaving behind is the foundation you bought from the man in the Casablanca beauty shop. You tell yourself you can stop by there again when you’re back in Casablanca, but you already know you’ll never come back. You wait for the bus to start. You need it to leave. Until it’s departed you can still be found.
Finally: the hum of the loud engine. The bus begins to slowly roll out of the Grand Hotel’s parking lot. Once it’s made its way onto the main street, and passes by a gas station that says LIBYA OIL, you lean your head against the window, close your eyes, and fall asleep.
When you wake Casablanca is far behind you. You pass olive groves, small farms. A few wiry dogs run alongside the bus, barking, until they seem satisfied the bus is leaving their territory and cease their chase. It’s brighter out than it’s been since you arrived in Morocco. The sun stretches out its rays long and wide, as though it’s been trapped in tight quarters and is finally free to expand.
For the first time since you arrived in Morocco, you wish you had a camera to document the terrain. You want to remember all of this—the bright sunlight, the smattering of red flowers, the small houses, built of dark wood.
You think of the expensive Pentax camera you purchased toward the end of the pregnancy, to document your belly, to document the birth. You had photos on that camera of you and the baby, photos you never backed up because you didn’t have time to read the instructions before your trip. Now you have no photos of you and baby Reeves together. You noticed that your sister and her husband didn’t take any of the two of you. At the time, you told yourself it was an oversight. So you took a series of photos of you holding the baby. You held her cradled in one arm and stretched out the other arm and kept your finger on the camera’s button until she started to cry from the flash.
In an hour the bus approaches the small city of Meknes. You see the long ocher wall of an old city, a green minaret in the distance. The tour guide, who has short black hair and a compact body, looks around thirty. He stands with a microphone, and after telling you that he has a degree in history, he begins a lecture about the history of Meknes: how it used to be the capital of Morocco, how the sultan Moulay Ismaïl, who reigned in the seventeenth century, was known as the Sun King of Morocco. He built everything on a massive scale, surrounding the city with walls and bastions and protecting it with monumental gateways. You stop listening and stare out the window. Though the walls are high, the city looks small and manageable next to the chaotic expanse of Casablanca.
The bus stops in a large parking lot, next to other tour buses. You descend from the bus and your group of three dozen forms a bloblike shape in the dusty lot. A half-dozen men in caftans, some with vertical black stripes and others a solid oatmeal color, hold small, squat stools and offer to polish shoes. The tour guide barks at them, driving them away. Then he makes an announcement that you will start off touring the Sun King of Morocco’s former palace and stables before walking through the souks. He warns you that the streets are mazelike and confusing and emphasizes the need to stick close together. He tells you he will be carrying a large green umbrella so you can follow it if you get lost. As he announces this, he opens the umbrella and holds it up so you can see what a large green umbrella looks like.
While you are listening to the tour guide who once studied history, and seems intent on telling you everything he once learned, three white vans pull up. Fourteen or so men and a few women emerge from the vans. Many of them are wearing vests, some are carrying tape recorders and cameras. The average age of the group is twenty years younger than your tour group. If you’re not mistaken it’s a press pool—the journalists are surrounding a man who appears to be some kind of dignitary. They’re taking photos, writing down what he says.
The shoeshine men approach them, and are again promptly dismissed.
/> “What’s going on there?” one of the shrinking husbands in your group asks the tour guide. The guide looks over at the press pool.
“I think it’s the ambassador from Nigeria,” he says. “I read in the paper that he would be in town with his entourage. We will let them go first. Not that we have a choice. They always get to go wherever they want. I’ve heard they don’t even need passports since they fly on private planes.” The tour guide looks as though he would spit if it didn’t make him look undignified.
You are envious of how quickly the press pool seems to move. They don’t need to stand outside the palace being lectured about how they will be following an umbrella. The press pool moves together with energy and zest. They make their way into the palace quickly, and are out of sight.
Meanwhile you are still standing in a dusty parking lot with a group of elderly Americans being lectured about the Sun King of Morocco. The tour guide tells you the king had six hundred wives from all over the world. Half of your tour group makes some sort of exclamation. “Don’t get any ideas, honey,” one of the women says to her shrinking husband. Everyone in the group laughs.
“He also had countless children,” the tour guide continues. How many children might he have had with six hundred wives? You do the math. You don’t think you’ve ever heard the word “countless” used so correctly. You wonder how often the king would visit each wife. Once a year? Did he have a favorite? He must have had a favorite he returned to over and over again. You imagine how the other wives felt toward her.
You quickly learn that this must be a very cheap tour. Your guide doesn’t lead you into the palace’s rooms, but instead escorts you to the stables, which are now a series of drab walls with arches. “Arab historians claimed that the royal stables could hold a cavalry of twelve hundred horses,” the guide informs you. The walls are crumbling, the architecture plain and, aside from its immensity, unremarkable. Everyone in your group takes photos, hundreds of photos.
You are already tired of the group, of its glacial pace. It gets worse when you exit the stables and move into the souks.
The narrow, twisting alleyways of Meknes cannot accommodate a tour group of this size. You follow the group through multiple arches. Shoes for sale dangle like mistletoe. You look up and are afraid of a sole slapping your face, so you immediately bring your head down again. You pass a small narrow shop where a man dressed in white weaves an ivory tablecloth with incredible speed. His hands are moving so quickly you can barely make out his fingers. The man’s young son stands several feet in front of him, his short young arms extended, each hand holding an enormous spool of thread for his father.
As the group squeezes through the narrow alleyways you’re ashamed to be part of a tour. You’re ashamed of the guide, who carries an opened umbrella above his head though there’s no chance of rain and speaks loudly, too loudly. You try to tune in to other sounds. Around you chickens squawk though you can’t see them and tourists barter with shopkeepers. You inhale the scents of meals being cooked in the apartments above. You smell saffron, garlic, lamb. You are suddenly ravenous. It’s approaching lunchtime.
Several members of your group want to stop in a shoe store. “There’s a better one ahead,” the tour guide says. “We’ll be there in a few minutes.” You suspect that the tour guide has an agreement with some of the shopkeepers, that he gets compensation for bringing his group to some vendors rather than others.
You pass silversmiths hammering away at small black sculptures of gazelles. You come face-to-face with the head of a stag for sale. You pass dozens of rug shops, the rugs displayed on walls like tapestries. They smell of sour heat, like clothes that have just been removed from a dryer after remaining wet for too long. You pass a fruit stand with oranges stacked in a triangle, apples in a miniature hill.
As you make your way through the narrow maze, following the ridiculous umbrella, your group forces all other humans to the walls. There are other tourists, yes—some of them dressed in caftans—but also local men, women, and children trying to get on with their day, trying to return to their homes that sit behind the short doors that line the streets. Men carrying crates and stools, and women weighed down by heavy plastic bags filled with groceries and fabric, turn sideways to squeeze past your group. You see the frustration and annoyance on their faces, and you understand. You and your group are an obstacle. You’re tempted to run away from the group but that would serve no purpose: the marketplace is so labyrinthine and tight that you’re afraid you’ll become lost; you’re afraid that as a single traveler alone you’ll be more conspicuous. As it is now, the locals’ hostility can be directed toward a tour group and not toward you. You stick close to the group as you navigate the cobblestoned streets. Every few minutes, a member of your group trips.
The guide leads you into a shoe shop and greets the owner warmly by name, confirming your suspicion that he has an agreement with this one. “These shoes are called babouche,” the tour guide says. “They are for men and women. My friend here makes beautiful ones.” The shoes are pointed leather slippers. They come in turquoise, lime green, and the bright colors of berries. The heel of one slipper is tucked into the other, and they’re displayed on the wall in an organized pattern. Not unlike decorative tiles, you think. No space of the wall is left uncovered. The small shop smells of leather, and now that it’s been taken over by your group, the leather scent has been combined with the stench of body odor. You buy a pair of orange slippers for your mother.
You exit the shop and wait on the street outside. Above you are signs instructing you to VISIT HERE. Everyone wants shoppers to visit their store but they give no description of what their store sells. You don’t want to deviate from the group but you can tell they’re going to take a while. You buy a yellow square of candy with almonds inside, and eat it right away. You buy a bright blue and white caftan for your mother from a man wearing an argyle sweater vest over a white cotton polo shirt. He tells you that the caftans for women are called djellabas, and shows you that the one you bought has a blue hood. From this same man you buy a small basket to use as a purse for your purchases—the slippers and djellaba. He seems relieved that you don’t try to barter with him.
Clothes hang around you and float above you like ghosts. Men’s pants, women’s djellabas, soccer shirts for boys that say MESSI. Almost immediately after purchasing your djellaba you see a green one that your mother would like more, and regret purchasing the one in your basket.
It takes a good twenty-five minutes for your group to exit the shoe store. The guide holds up his umbrella and instructs everyone to follow him for lunch. He leads you back to the bus.
At first you don’t understand why you didn’t eat in the souks, but once you’ve all boarded the bus, the tour guide explains. “We’re going to drive five minutes to a very good restaurant. My friend owns this restaurant and he will give you a good deal.” Of course you are going to his friend’s restaurant. You are confident that the tour guide is getting a good deal as well.
The tour guide counts heads and then counts again. Then he counts a third time. He makes his way down the aisle of the bus, pointing his index finger at each passenger’s face as he counts everyone on one side of the bus. Then he repeats the process on the other side of the bus, pointing to each person and mumbling numbers to himself. When he walks up to the front again you notice he walks faster. He says something to the bus driver. Then he takes out the microphone and makes an announcement: “We are still waiting for someone to return to the bus, so we will stay here for a few more minutes before moving on.”
You sit and look out the window, waiting to see if the missing person is approaching. You don’t know if the person is male or female, so you just stare. You see a car with a young Italian-looking couple pull into the parking lot. They park and then get out of the car. They look around for signs to see if they’re allowed to park where they are.
A middle-aged Moroccan man in a thobe has been watching them. He approaches the couple
and you assume he’s saying they must pay him for parking in the spot they have chosen. The Italian man reaches down into the lower thigh pockets of his cargo pants and extracts a few coins. You doubt that the man who charged them the fee has anything to do with the parking lot.
The tour guide speaks with the bus driver again. Then he exits the bus and stands by the door, as though the stray passenger is like a dog that will come running if his owner is in sight. You half expect the tour guide to whistle.
Fifteen minutes have passed. Your fellow passengers are getting restless the way people do in vehicles that aren’t moving. You’re all sitting facing forward, but not going anywhere. A few of the others stand up to stretch or to retrieve something from a purse or bag that’s stored above their seats. Some start passing around items they purchased in the souks, the way soon-to-be brides pass around presents at a shower.
Outside, the tour guide makes a call on his cell phone. You imagine it’s to his supervisor or someone at the tour bus headquarters. When he boards the bus again he looks like he’s trying to mimic the expression of someone who’s in control. His head is lifted, his jaw firm.
He makes an announcement. He is going to break everyone up into groups of two or three and ask everyone to return to the market to find the missing passenger and help lead them back. He emphasizes how important it is that you stick together in teams so that another one of you doesn’t go missing.
There is murmuring. The electricity of an urgent task.
He walks down the aisle and assigns you to a group: you are with the two American women in their sixties who boarded the bus after you.
You’re about to stand when it occurs to you that you don’t know what the missing person looks like. You say this to the women who are to be your partners.
“You’re absolutely right,” says the woman sitting closer to you. “We haven’t even been told who to look for.” She laughs. “It’s not a funny situation, someone being lost in that labyrinth, but it’s very funny that this entire bus is about to go looking for someone without even knowing a description!
