When the plane begins to descend into Casablanca, you organize your belongings inside your backpack. You will need to get off the plane without making contact with the FSU woman in the white puffy Reeboks. The businessman next to you wakes with five rapid blinks. He smiles at you and you smile weakly in return because you are envious of the sleep he has slept. When the plane lands, it veers left, then right, and then finds its way into a straight line. Your fellow passengers roar with applause. The cockpit door is closed, so they’re not clapping for the pilots. They are clapping because their existence persists, because they are not aflame on the tarmac, because they did not disintegrate over the Atlantic. The scattered applause seems too muted a celebration of living, so you choose not to clap.
Now, as everyone stands, waiting to disembark, the children’s cries are loud and the parents have given up on comforting them. When the doors to the plane open, there’s a palpable, collective thrust of passengers toward the front. Everyone who has not yet stood, rises. As you gather your things — your blue suitcase and nondescript black canvas backpack that doesn’t demand any attention, both of which you bought yesterday, for this trip — someone from the row behind yours tries to cut in front of you. This is the way of air traveclass="underline" fellow passengers applaud because they didn’t die, and then they cut in front of you so they can exit four seconds earlier.
Unlike the women on the college reunion tour, you don’t have to wait for your checked luggage, so you can pass them and progress through customs. Plans have been made for someone to pick you up, and you’ve been told the driver will have a sign. You see him right away, a thin man in black jeans holding a piece of yellowed paper with your name scrawled upon it. He spells your name the French way; of course he would. You studied French at your all-girls school because a Parisian heiress started the school and French was required of its students. Now as you speak this language of your youth you find yourself remembering words you didn’t know you knew, and making mistakes that you immediately recognize as mistakes. You ask the driver how long it will take to get to the hotel (thirty minutes), how the weather has been (rainy), and after that there’s not much to talk about. He asks where you are from and you tell him Florida and he tells you he’s been to Idaho to visit relatives. You smile and say it’s beautiful there. “C’est beau là,” you say. He agrees. You have never been to Idaho.
Outside the window of the van the sky is white, the grass green. You pass by vacant lots, billboards for cellphone companies and cars, and then the tall cream-colored buildings of Casablanca shoot up suddenly, all at once, in the distance. You see young men hitchhiking, and the driver tells you that they’re trying to get to school, to college. Isn’t there a bus? you ask. Yes, he says, but they don’t want to wait for the bus.
The traffic is bad in Casablanca and the driver tells you it’s always bad. You wish you had listened more closely when he introduced himself because now it’s too late to ask him again what his name is, and you have no idea. At a stoplight, a man on a motorbike with a camouflaged-patterned trunk on the back slams into the side of the van. He was trying to get ahead in the traffic. Though you’re in the middle of a road, the driver stops the van and steps out and they argue in the street. They yell and the driver gesticulates dramatically, then he gets back into the van, and you drive on with sudden, stuttering stops.
The streets seem wild to you now — so many trucks and so much smog, and the potential for motorbikes to bump against vans. The buildings around you are ugly. They once were white but now are dusted with soot. There’s nothing to look at through the window except traffic. You can’t wait to check into your hotel room.
You pass by an upscale Regency Hotel, an expensive-looking Sofitel, and when the driver says your hotel is close, you’re happy because you think your hotel might be on par with these other tall, glassy buildings. You’ve been told your hotel, the Golden Tulip, is comfortable, and you’ve been looking forward to this comfort on the plane and in the van, but as you approach you’re disappointed. The Golden Tulip has a glossy black entrance with two long banners, one advertising its restaurant and another advertising its pool. It looks like a typical tourist hotel, the kind that large groups might stay at for two nights before going to the next city on their itinerary. As the driver pulls up you see and hear American and British tourists emerging from the front door. You’re deflated but what did you expect? That it would be full of locals? It’s a hotel.
The driver opens the side door of the van and retrieves your suitcase from the rear. You tip him in U.S. dollars because it’s all you have. You took out $300 at Miami International because you’ve learned from your travels to countries like Cuba and Argentina how valuable it can be to have U.S. cash. You tip the driver with a twenty-dollar bill. Later, you will wonder if this was your initial mistake.
You pass through a security portal as you enter the hotel — the kind you go through at an airport — but you keep your backpack on, and hold the handle of your suitcase. Bellboys offer to take your bags, and you tell them you can manage. Or rather: you smile and say, “No, it’s okay. I’m okay.”
A long black bench runs along the side of the lobby wall, but other than that there’s no place to settle into — no comfortable-looking couch or chair. This lobby is not a place for lingering. You walk to the front desk, and wait behind another couple. The lobby isn’t busy, so you don’t understand why the two desk clerks, both in blue-gray suits, are so frazzled.
As you stand at the desk, you notice there’s an ATM to your right and you decide you will get Moroccan money there later. When the couple in front of you has moved out of the way, you approach the desk. You tell the desk clerks that you have a reservation. One of the two men says your room is not ready and you argue that when you made the reservation you were guaranteed early check-in. One of the men goes into the back office — it’s unclear whether he’s verifying this fact or if he’s avoiding you. The remaining clerk looks at his computer. “Housekeeping is there. It will be ready in five minutes.”
“Five actual minutes?” you ask. Time is not how you know it, but how the country knows it.
“Five American minutes,” the man behind the desk says. He pushes a sheet of paper toward you. On the paper you’re supposed to write down your passport information. The man disappears to the back office. You assume he’s gone to check on the room.
You stare at the passport information form. You take your passport from your backpack. You have your new blue suitcase in front of you and you place your backpack on top of it and lean over the suitcase and the backpack and start to fill out the form. Your name, place of birth, passport number, nationality. When you’re done you call out to the clerk: “I’ve filled out the form.”
He returns to the counter and shows you a list of names on a computer printout, and says, “Which one?” Your name is halfway down the list, which you assume must be a list of people checking in, and then he crosses out your name so thoroughly, so violently, that there’s no trace of it. You are given a key to the room that is now available, and you reach for the handle of your suitcase, which is still parked in front of you.