I woke up as the pilots were urging our seatbelts on again. I flipped through a magazine called African Business, featuring a profile of Sierra Leone's Charles Taylor; in one picture, he was wearing Keds and a visor. We descended into Morocco. Which was green. As far as we could see, from the air, it was green.
"Isn't this a desert – the whole country?" Hand asked, leaning over the aisle and toward me. Everywhere, squares of farmland stitched together with orange thread. That Hand didn't know more about Morocco – that it was green, for starters – demonstrated the great gaps in knowledge that occur when one gets most of one's information from the internet.
"I thought so," I said. "But the same thing happened with Houston. I always figured Houston was all dry and brown, but it's trees in every direction, for a hundred miles."
"We thought Senegal would be green."
"We got it backwards. Or they did. Senegal should be green, Morocco brown."
"It's gorgeous down there," Hand said.
"It really is."
"Man, I hope we meet some Tuareg guys."
"What guys?"
"The Tuareg? You know the Tuareg."
"No."
"The Tuareg? They're the blue men?"
I wanted to throw rocks at his head.
"Tell me," I said.
"Blue men. I think that's what the word means. Blue men. These guys were badasses. They're like nomadic trader-thieves, who would spring out from the Sahara and rob caravans. They were insane. Blue eyes, blue skin and everything. Scariest people ever. Twelve feet tall."
I squinted at him, wondering how I'd get along if I ditched him in Casablanca.
"You don't believe me?" he asked, offended. "Ask anyone in Morocco about the Tuareg. Or the blue men. Say blue men and watch them run in terror."
At customs in Casablanca our new Congolese friends were stopped and searched and because Hand didn't really want to be without his walkman for the rest of the trip, we took off.
We got on a train to the city. The passing country was an electric green and studded with grey jagged rock outcroppings. Crumbling stone everywhere; children dressed like medieval peasants ran along the tracks and threw rocks at dogs and each other. Shanties and tents and broken brick homes tied in place with clotheslines.
"Jesus," said Hand. "This isn't what I expected. I expected Tunisia, desert, that kind of thing. This looks like the Balkans."
We watched, from our window on a passing train, one boy throw a rock at the head of another, hitting him.
"What do think the Balkans look like?"
"This. Right? The crumbly buildings, the people with the earthtone garb, everyone walking around, the fires everywhere? This is cold-weather poverty; it looks like it was hit by tanks."
But it was so green. Was the country as poor as it looked? On the plane we'd been afraid this was a too-middle-class sort of country, that we'd be giving money to people like us, but now, here, the women in shawls, the boys and their rocks, the tent-cities -
Hand turned to ask, in French, a young guy behind us on the train, how much longer to Casablanca.
"Where are you from?" the man asked Hand, in English.
"Chicago," Hand answered.
"Oh Chicago! Is it very dangerous?"
I waited for the inevitable:
"Oh yes – very," Hand said.
I laughed. Every Chicagoan uses this. The man was sitting with two friends, backs to us, who now turned.
"Smashing Pumpkins – from Chicago, right?" the man said.
"Right," said Hand.
"I am their greatest fan! I'm in the music business. I produce rap records. French rap."
He and Hand talked music. Apparently French rap was huge in Morocco. The greatest! said the man. Out the window the country receded and the buildings became larger, neater and more square. To the right, across the aisle, the Pacific appeared, rough and dark, whitecaps rushing at the walls of Casablanca. To the left, the city grew in view and gleamed; the buildings, so much glass, were glowing afternoon-golden in a hazy, perfectly somnambulant Los Angeles way. We passed into the trainyard and to the right, now, within the outer corridor's walls was a series of tents, twenty in a row, circular, fires adjoining, the hides of the tents stitched and patched.
Behind me Hand and the record company man were talking about Falco, and Right Said Fred, and RunDMC, and the possibility of a comeback for one or all of them, at once or, better yet, sequentially.
"What about the Tuareg?" I asked, over the seat, interrupting them. I figured these guys were as good as any to prove Hand's inability to leave any fact unbent, any truth unmolested. "Do they exist?"
The man's eyes hardened. "You're not looking for the Tuareg, are you? I must advise you to run from this mission. Is this indeed your mission?"
"Yes," Hand whispered with urgency and intrigue. "Are they killers? I have heard word of this – they are the blue men and are slaughterers, with none of the love of humanity."
"Well," the man said, leaning forward, "they have been known to kill everything, anyone who sees them. No one has returned after seeing them face to face. Only rumors live. They reside in the desert, the lower Sahara, and are legion in number, and are without mercy. They are smarter than us, but stronger. Some say they are eight feet tall, and have hands with six fingers -"
Hand turned to me, smug like crazy.
"Tell me more," he said to our new friend, while looking at me. Then he turned to the man. "Is this all true?"
"Of course not," the man said, roaring. "I am yanking on you, stupid person!" Two of his friends were cackling. The third was not an English speaker, was just watching.
I was dying. I couldn't believe how good this guy was. He was a monster. Hand was rolling his eyes, his tongue tight between his teeth, bobbing his head around like a marionette. "Nice," he said. "Are you finished?"
The Moroccans were still laughing.
"Not yet?" Hand asked.
They couldn't speak. They shook their heads. Not yet.
In the train station we blew past the fingers of grasping families and in the parking lot we lowered ourselves into a small red cab.
Hand asked the driver, in French, to take us to a Hertz outlet. The man didn't understand.
"Rentacar," Hand said, in English.
The man nodded and drove us along the shoreline and up into a residential area, just past an ancient battle fortress, cannons peeking through great stone walls. The driver stopped and made a call on his cellphone.
"What's he doing?" I said.
"I don't know."
"I don't like it."
I wondered how it was that we could land in a city many hundreds of miles from the last one, thousands more from our home, and hand our fate to a stranger simply because his car looks like a cab and because the cabs we have known have been, overall, safe. There was an irrational amount of trust in this world.
We had no guidebook, and until two days before, I'd figured Casablanca was primarily a tourist place, small and quaint, like Carmel or Mystic – a few shops and a cardboard cutout of Humphrey Bogart on bakery signage and on the walls of the delis. But this was a city, a great bright airy sunny city, with hills and bordered by water. Did I know Casablanca was on the water? Now I can't remember.
Hand asked the driver why we were waiting at the battle fortress. The driver, who we now knew spoke no French, showed us his palms, begging for patience. A few seconds later, a portly small-footed man bumbled down from the upward sloping street and opened the door and sat in the front seat. He and the driver began chattering.