You Shall Know Our Velocity (22 page)

We were passing cars like they were parked, or being pedaled, propelled by feet to the sound of xylophones.

“You will call me Ronin,” I said. I’d probably never driven this fast. The speedometer said 130 kph.

“I will not call you Ronin.”

“I drive like Ronin, you call me Ronin.”

“I can’t have you doing that anymore.”

“You kind of—”

“Will. Stop.”

“You kind of rev the first R, like rrrrrrRonin.”

The roadside was an expansive and ripe kind of green and the soil was orange; it was exactly what we’d seen from above. We had about $4,000 in Moroccan money we’d changed in Casablanca.

The poverty was incongruous. Rural poverty is always incongruous, amid all this space and air, these crippled homes, all half-broken, most without roofs, standing on this gorgeous, lush farmland. It wasn’t clear who owned the farms, or why these crumbled houses stood on these well-kept farms, and why none of the homes had roofs. Clotheslines, chickens, dogs, garbage. We rushed past families, bundled and huddling though the day was warm, on carts driven by mules. We passed, still going at least 80 mph, a group of women just off the road, bent over in the embankment, dressed in layers, heads covered with dull rags, large women hunched and gathering hay—

I pulled over. I gave Hand a stack of bills.

“What are you going to say?” I asked.

“I don’t know. What should I say?”

“Ask them for directions.”

Hand started getting out but was wearing huge silver sunglasses, shiny and with a series of round holes in the arms.

“Hand. Can you do it without the sunglasses?”

“No.”

“If you get out in your nylon pants and Top Gun Liberace sunglasses, then it sends a weird message—”

Now the women, including the one with the scythe, were watching us as we sat in the car arguing. I grabbed a map and spread it in front of me.

“And just what is the message we’re sending, Will? Are we sending a normal message otherwise?”

“Forget it.”

“Can you just take them off? Please?”

He did, then threw them at my chest. I caught them but broke one of the glasses’ arms, on purpose.

He walked down the highway shoulder to the women and up the embankment. Once within fifteen feet, and once they’d all paused in their work and assembled around him, he asked them something. Directions to Marrakesh maybe. Graciously, they all pointed the way we were already going. He then made an elaborate gesture of gratitude, and offered the stack of bills to them, about $500.

They took it and as he backed away, they stared, then waved, and he waved. I waved. We drove off as they gathered around the woman he’d handed the bills to.

“Were they nice?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Did they smile? Were they nice?”

“I couldn’t talk to them. They didn’t speak French.”

“But they smiled?”

“Sure. Nice ladies. Big. Burly. They were happy. You saw them. They were happy to help.”

The sun was everywhere and the landscape went curvy. Green hills, red hills, then hills covered in thin-trunked mop-topped trees.
Then a huge red city, to the left of the road, Benguérir, red like barns, of clay and stone, ancient, unchanged and terrifying, low-lying and endless. A few miles later the land sprouted hills, olive trees—it was so green! Soft curves and such green. I had never lived anywhere with this kind of drama. Cities are billed as drama-filled but are in fact almost totally safe, are so like being constantly indoors—too many small lights and heavy windows and perfect corners. Yes there is danger from other humans hiding in dark triangles but here! Here there is swooping. Here there are falling rocks. Here you picture tidal waves or quickly moving glaciers. Or dragons. I grew up obsessed with dragons, knew everything, knew that scientists or people posing as scientists had calculated how dragons might have actually flown, that to fly and breathe fire they’d have to be full of hydrogen, at levels so dangerous and in such tremulous balance that—I wondered quickly if I’d give my life so that a dragon could live. If someone offered me that deal, your life for the existence of dragons. I thought maybe yes, maybe no.

Then over a river, the Rbia, and the roadside now punctuated with men standing, selling fish, offering them to drivers, long wet fish on hooks. Then men and boys selling asparagus, holding a bunch in one hand and waving to cars with the other. Men selling small bundles of sticks.

I knew Hand wouldn’t resist.

“Look at those….” he said.

“Don’t,” I said.

The taxis, out here, were Mercedes-Benzes, all of them chartreuse. Then it was the southwest again. The dirt went redder and bloodier as we approached Marrakesh, laid wide and flat below a mountain range that spread left and right. Churchill had loved these mountains, the High Atlas; it was the only landscape he’d painted during WWII. “The most lovely spot in the world,” he’d
said to Roosevelt when they’d met here in ’38, planning the assault on Normandy.

—Mr. Churchill you were given a mission.

—Yes.

—I want to have been given your mission. I want your place in world events, the centrality of it. You were born in the cradle of a catapult!

—You are wrong. I found my mission.

—I disagree.

—If you must.

—Tell me: where is my mission? Where are my bunkers and trenches, my goddamn Gallipoli?

Now, on the approach, see the increasingly green hills, the preponderance of tall dark green pointy trees, see the sloping rivers, everything so lush. See the red soil. See the winery colors. See so many colors, working in perfect concert. We had no idea it would be this lush. A man on the roadside held up something, but not a fish—something bulbous and furry. As we passed it became not fur but feathers—a group of chickens hung on a hook. The man wearing a hooded brown dashiki. See us ten miles later stopped on the shoulder, Hand running across the road and across a field to a family with a horse, traveling, all with packs. See Hand ask directions, pop his palm on his head—
Aha!
—and then give them a stack of bills. See them offer him some figs, which once in the car he will take and chew and spit out and throw. See Hand give to a boy selling fish, and see the boy insist we take one, which Hand puts in the trunk, grinning and squinting at the boy, who looks like he expected us to eat it then and there. Hear Hand afterward:

“There is nothing bad about what we’re doing! Nothing!”

“Right,” I said.

“That one was fun. Good kid.”

I sped up. We were at 120 kph.

“You need to call me Ronin,” I said.

“You need me to thump you.”

We debated briefly whether we were giving people false hope. That now the common belief around these parts, on this countryside, among the rural poor, would be that if one waits by the side of the road long enough, Americans in airtight rental cars and wearing pants that swish will hand out wads of cash. That we pay extravagantly to be told where to go.

The road was empty in the midafternoon. Only the occasional luminous Mercedes taxi, or BMW, or tour bus. There didn’t seem to be any mass commuter transport in Morocco. Most of the people on the road, and on the roadside, were men, and most of them were wearing suits, dust-powdered and threadbare suits. Men in pinstriped suits tending flocks of sheep. Men in worn tuxedos holding bouquets of asparagus inches away from careening cars.

In a small city full of banks we stopped for something to drink. Nattily dressed men at café tables nodded to us and we walked into a dark cool restaurant and at the takeout counter we bought oranges and sodas. The sunlight over the clerk’s shoulder was white and planed, and when he poured us glasses of water it was clearer than any water I’d ever seen. It was the unadulterated soul of the world.

Ahead, the mountains clarified themselves; their tops were white-capped. As we descended into Marrakesh, the billboards appeared, each for one of various resorts, for golf courses and cellphones. The road went from two lanes to four and there were scooters everywhere, whining when revving and jabbering while shifting. Condos
left and right—so far it could be Arizona—and at the first travel agency we saw we stopped. Inside, there was a single employee and he told us, when we asked where we could go from Marrakesh, that night, that he handles only cruises and package tours for Danes and Swedes.

The city was so red! The walls, which were everywhere, were everywhere red, the precise color of the scab bisecting my nose, a dull but somehow sweet maroon, soothing but vital. Minarets and medinas jostled with Parisian cafés, buildings of seven stories and iron balconies, the sidewalks bustling with fashionable people, and we sped to the airport as the sun was lowering and wrapping the city and desert in fine pink gauze.

Around the airport was a park, dirt and small trees, where dozens of families were picnicking, kids playing some version of duck-duck-goose.

Inside, in the cool white linoleum airport and at the airline desk: “What flights do you have leaving tonight?” Hand asked.

A friendly and smooth man in a blue uniform: “Sir, where do you want to go?”

“We’ll know once you tell us where your planes are going.”

“Sir, we first need to know where you want to go.”

“Just tell us where
you’re
going.”

“Just tell
me
where
you
are going.”

The man had quickly jumped from amusement to something approaching rage.

“I asked you first,” Hand added.

This went on for a while. It hasn’t worked anywhere and never will. We learned that a plane is leaving for Moscow, via Paris, in three hours. If we could get to Moscow we could get to Irktusk, Siberia—we checked before, on the web with Raymond in Dakar, and those flights were constant and affordable—and if we could get to Siberia we can get to Mongolia, because surely there were shuttles between Irkusk and Ulan Bator!

We decided we’d be on the flight to Moscow. By morning we’d be there. The airline desk wanted cash, almost $1,100 for the two tickets. We were grinning. Flying! We would do this!

At the currency exchange desk, I added my name, swooping like mad, to twelve $100 traveler’s checks and handed them under the glass wall to a glowering man with a thick and uncompromising moustache, a brush to sweep a pool table. The man, squat and angry about the wrongness of his flesh, the things he’s seen, all the air in the world, wouldn’t take them; my signature did not, he said, match my passport. He pushed them back under the window and grunted and waved us away.

I said please. I told him, yes, I changed my signature not that long ago, thus the mismatch. But he wasn’t listening.

“I am allowed to change my signature!” I said.

He spoke no English. Hand tried French, without success.

Hand lost it.

“You can
not
do that! You must change the money!”

The currency man sat behind the glass, completely satisfied.

“You take these checks and you cash them!” Hand was now spitting on the glass. People were watching us. The man said nothing. Hand started again, now in French. Then reverted to his other English. “You are bad man!” he yells. “We have flight! Flight to Russia! We need this! You are bad man!”

Hand’s eruption was sudden, bizarre, and not productive. Another man, behind us, told us to go to a bank, in the center of town—that they’d cash the checks. We had no choice and just enough time. As we were leaving, Hand yelled, pointing, shaking: “We come back to get you, bad man! You will see Americans again!”

We sped through the city, slowing, stopping, jumping, continuing. All the banks were closed. I got $500 from an ATM—all I
could retrieve at one time—and then remembered another $800, in American cash, taped inside my backpack.

We now had twenty-five minutes to catch the flight; all we had to do was change the U.S. bills.

“Shit,” I said.

“What?”

“We’ll have to go back to that squat fucker.”

“Right. But this’ll show him. We’ve won!”

I agreed. He’d have to change the cash, and we’d beat him, we’d roll over his body, laid in our path, and he’d have to go home to his wife, he slump-shouldered and weak, unable as he was to make us unhappy—unable, today, to thwart the plans of innocents abroad. We had seven minutes to get there.

We drove around a turnabout in the center of town, almost cut off a scooter and were immediately stopped by a foot-cop in a yellow raincoat. He waved us to park on the side of the street. He was tall and also wore a thick black mustache. His skin was olive but cheeks ruddy from the sun. He was like the other man; he would thwart us.

He took my license and examined it.

“Chicago!” he said.

“Right,” I said. He was different.

“Nice?” he asked.

“Very nice.”

“Tommy Lloyd Wright!”

“Very pretty there,” I said. “Big buildings. Lots of Tommy Lloyd Wright, right.”

“I study architecture. Like Wright very much. You see?”

“Yes, much. The Robie house? Very nice it is.” Now I was doing the Hand talk. “Very pretty there,” I added. “Also very pretty in Mor
oc
co.” I smiled confidently, strong in my love for his country and my belief in its future.

—If you stand in our way you’re our enemy.

—See it as you will.

—It’s inhuman to impede another’s progress.

Leaning over me, Hand tried to tell him about the plane we wanted to catch.

“Sir, we must to catch a plane! At airport! We can go?”

Hand was making airplane gestures, his hand flying around the interior of the car, with sound effects. While Hand was having the plane take off amid various whooshes, the officer rolled his eyes and waved us off. We loved him.

At the airport, we abandoned the rental in the lot—we’d call the agency from Paris—and ran to the check-in desk, which was empty. In the airline office, adjoining, they were surprised to see us again.

“You’re back! Where are you going?”

“Moscow! We have the money now.”

I spread the money on the counter. It was obscene.

“Oh no, no,” he said. “It’s too late. See?” The agent pointed to window. The plane, a large AirFrance jet, was on the runway, visible, right there. People were still walking up the rolling stairway.