the van is unmarked, I am in Morocco, it is 3:35 a.m., and they are chasing me

the medina

It is 3:30 a.m, which is too early to be doing much of anything. Too early to let the mind wander much further than a couple of steps down the narrow brush path- the balance goes quickly after the yawning begins, and who knows into which hateful roadside dishes of self-loathing a man might fall when it is three a.m. and too early to be doing much of anything? Too early to observe one’s surroundings; 3:30 a.m. is that hawkish, obscure time when the features of your environment haven’t fully rendered, at least not into the realm of reasonable belief. Too early, certainly, far too early, to be standing here, on a corner, tucked among the narrow streets of the medina of Marrakesh. Indeed, the thought does cross my mind for a second as I perch myself on a wide pole for a ten-to-fifteen-minute wait for a taxi cab that I really, truly should not be here. But it is 3:30 am, and it is too early to be doing much of anything, and included in this “anything” is the practice of sound judgement. It is 3:30 a.m., and at 3:35, an unmarked van will arrive, and I will be chased through these narrow streets. But it is 3:30 a.m., and I am twenty years old, and it is far too early to know much of anything.

I put on my headphones and let my vision slide from empty car to empty food stall, from empty food stall to lamp post, and from lamp post, upwards. Briefly. Light pollution is here, too- the stars don’t exist unless I make a conscious effort to remember that they are the only thing to ever be guaranteed. They’re just as guaranteed tonight as they were last night, when, separated by an eight-mile bus ride and 90-minute camel ride from this place, my friends and I found ourselves sandwiched between uncountable grains of Saharan sand and uncountable pinpoints of pale light. 

My vision wanders back to the ground, and I cannot choose whether to overtly observe a small kitten eating trash or to covertly (perhaps problematically) observe the only other person who seems to be awake in the entire city: a man cleaning off in a nearby basin of water. I opt to do neither, and my mind casts itself back to the desert and to a question that seizes a man when he knows he is dancing in the shadow of the imitation of the appropriation of the false reflection of a transcendent memory of a transcendent ceremony that once meant a great deal: Is there a way to visit the desert to ride camels and dance with Amazighs that isn’t just super culturally weird? 

Here’s what I know emotionally. I know the beauty of riding high on the massive hump of a massive mammal with my best friends as we are led through deep-orange sands away from the setting sun. I know the smell of chicken tajine, and I know how much better it tastes when you feel alone, blissfully alone, in the heart of a foreign culture in the middle of a foreign desert a thousand miles from home. I know the beat of Amazigh drums, and I know how one wants to dance around an Amazigh fire. I know the strained looks of hope between fortunate travelers as each silently begs the other to shed the fear of embarrassment so they may too and this moment may be enjoyed without self-admonition. I know the religious experience of sitting in unfamiliar terrain under the blanket of the night, which is of course the only time where we really exist and the only time where we really don’t have to. Just allow yourself to be there, authentically there, really, truly, there. The stars are above, and they have seen it all; as long as you take the time to at least ask them a question, you’ll get an answer you can tuck into the sand-filled pocket of your cheap jeans.

But I also know, emotionally, the feeling that creeps from the back of your mind; it is the feeling that none of this is real. You are being sold a cultural experience which is not a genuine cultural experience, but rather a tourist half-dream of the perfect orientalist fantasmagoria. Because here is what I know materially. The tour guides and drum players and hosts do not normally wear these head dresses at night (as they are doing now). They learned to play the drums for their job. And, as you pop over to Morocco for a quick visit and revel in the strength of your mighty American or Western European purchasing power, they are living in a country which was a French and Spanish protectorate within the last 75 years. 75 years. Your grandfather is probably older than that, and even if you don’t have a grandfather, then I can guess that (statistically speaking) you’ll probably be older than that one day. These “great” western powers occupied the country, leeching it of raw materials and intentionally intensifying an ethnic divide between indigenous Amazigh Berbers and ethnic Arabs to reduce opposition to colonisation. Everyone in my group was studying abroad in Spain or France, lounging around in countries developed on the backs of a hundred Moroccos, Algerias, Bolivias, Colombias, and Palestines. And now we were here, dancing a euphoric dance, replicating the shadow of a culture sold solemnly to tourists reveling in the shadow of empires which died once they got what they were looking for. 

But I would go again, and I would tell you to go, and my reason goes beyond the fact that the desert tour industry is now important for the economy (whatever may have happened before) and relies on visitors from the West. My reason is that there was something real there- there was a real experience to be had, resting at some middle point between complete, deafening awareness of the awful irony of your appropriation of culture in a country still suffering from colonial affects and complete, foolish enjoyment of a “collective effervescence" which only exists insofar as you are willing to ignore that irony without any misgivings. It isn’t real because you are with your friends and “authentic Amazighs”  having an “authentic cultural experience” in an “exotic” place, but it is real because you are with your friends and your fellow human beings, many of them Amazigh, in a beautiful desert, making a genuine attempt to connect. Even better if you take time to understand (but not be paralyzed by) the irony at the heart of it all. 

This thought fades, and my vision wanders to the cat, who appears to be full. He is behaving as cats do. I think I have seen this one before- once in the streets of Paris in the early morning, once on the streets of Rabat, and certainly perched late at night on some box or buildings in Queens, which I miss like hell. One cannot help but miss Queens, which is the melting pot of all melting pots and may have more cultural threads weaved into its beautiful tapestry than the entire world outside of its borders. So while I am not even from Queens, I think of Queens briefly now, because Marrakesh is of the world, it is 3:33 am, and there is a taught thread, visible only in the light that accompanies this startling North Africa moon, that runs between the Queens I know and the Marrakesh I am learning. I do not look at the man. He is cleaning himself off in the basin, and we have all been there. 

A taxi cab pulls up to the street corner, and I wonder for a moment if it is mine. It looks like the one in the photo I was sent. I signal to the driver to stop so that I may check the license plate, but he drives away. Perhaps he is not here for me. Perhaps I am in the wrong place to be picked up. I briefly wander ten steps away from the corner to check if he has stopped. He has not. He is far away by now. I will wait. I have more Thoughts to Think. 

When I return where I was standing, two teenage boys wander by me. They look around 15 to 16 years old. They are both wearing Jordan brand slides without socks. One has a t-shirt, a down jacket vest, and long basketball shorts. He is mildly tall and wearing glasses. The other is tall, with sweatpants and a sweater. They are talking. I have seen these kids before, in my home town and my friends’ home towns. These are home town kids. 

One of the boys sees me standing alone, and they change their course to come a bit nearer to me. I often look out of place; honestly, in my twenty years of life and twelve or so years of genuine consciousness, I have found that, if you really take the time to digest, all people look out of place most of the time. But I have genuinely never looked more out of place. They know I am American, and they know I am not supposed to be here. They know it is 3:34 am. One asks me: “Do you know where is the hotel?” I am confused by the question, at first- as the answer leaves my lips (“I don’t know which hotel you mean”), the fact that they probably think that I'm lost begins to dawn. But something else happens as I answer. 

If you have read any book with an action sequence, tragedy sequence, or really any plot points involving split-second events of any kind, then you’ve probably heard the cliche that there are moments in life where time stands still. What you can only learn from experience, though, is that there are also moments where time is held and pressurized, momentarily; where time is the water held back by a dam in a moment of quiet stillness where the only noises are the terrifying pops of poorly-welded seams; where Time says: “Run. I am coming.”

As I answer, a white, unmarked van peels into a small parking space across the street. I barely register it, but this mental paralysis lasts only for a moment, because it is now 3:35, and Time is coming. The boys sprint away, immediately dashing into a nearby alley. Four men get out of the van, which I would be able to describe with intense poetry if the fog of my recollection permitted me to sift through the terrified haze which has settled over this story. 

The men are wearing street clothes. 

The men are wearing black and gray. 

The men are silent. 

The men are running at me and reaching out. 

And the boys, who very much live in this city (while I very much do not), have instinctively bolted. 

Therefore, a thought emerges from my reptilian mind, a thought which can only be birthed by the sight of an unmarked van and men in street clothes in pursuit and which I think is quite rational given everything that has transpired up to this point.

“This is happening. 

Run.”

So I do. I run down the street of this medina, in this city of Marrakesh which I have visited in my touristic glee to glimpse a moment of the Real which I have been told is the Real by the formulated collective effervescence of the desert and the history books and the Hollywood depictions of the Arab world. I run because I must be five missteps from a kidnapping, and because all I know in this moment is that the van is unmarked, that the men are chasing me, and that I would very much like to be home right now. 

I shout for help as I run. My voice is hoarse, and, while I am shouting quite loudly and quite repeatedly, there are still absolutely zero signs of life among these boarded-up shops and cast-aside cardboard boxes. It’s a funny thing, shouting for help when no one answers- you can be as loud as you’d like, but if there’s no one to answer, then you are silent. A cry for help without an answer is a long night’s restless, quiet, dreadful sleep. I am shouting, I am stumbling, and I do not know where to go. The men are completely silent, and they have been on this street a thousand times before. My mind tells me: “This is happening.” My voice tells the world: “Somebody help me.” 

And then I am cornered, because I have never in my life, not once, been either predator or prey. There is nothing that guarantees your downfall quite like the freedom from ever having to face your downfall. There is a car and a wall, and I am at the corner between them; before I can even register what this means, there are arms on me. Strong arms. They turn me around. 

The men are still silent. They look extremely confident- bored, even. Some are wearing hoodies and jackets, while the others are wearing regular long sleeve shirts. There are four in reality and one thousand in my memory. 

“What is happening?” I shout. One heart beat of separation and a deep breath. A millisecond of pause. A prayer for a soothing reply. Nothing. “What is happening? What is happening? What is happening?”

The breeze floats by my ear. The stars answer my question the same way they always have: Shimmers, pinholes of cosmic brilliance, and a heartbreaking mystery wrapped in the obscure cloak of a devastating silence. 

“What is happening? What is happening? What is happening?” I am desperate now, and for some godforsaken reason, I am shouting in a stereotypical North African accent. Perhaps my subconscious mind is playing out a mildly problematic joke, or perhaps it genuinely thinks that these men will suddenly communicate with me if I make my voice sound exactly how I would imagine theirs might sound. One raises his finger to his lips, and says, “Shhh.” It is dark- the medina is made of brown concrete and rammed earth, but the sky’s deep, dark blue seems to have oozed into the coloration of the nighttime atmosphere itself. Through this haze glimmers the shocking, angry silver of handcuffs. The deafening silence is punctuated (aside, of course, from my absurdly panicked demands for information) by the clinking of metal on metal as my right wrist is enclosed. 

I change my line, invoking the weakest, most pathetic character in any poorly written episode of Homeland or CSI that’s ever been produced. “I have money,” I shout. 

A blue sedan pulls up, and the driver asks the men a question in Arabic. The man responds briefly, and the driver abruptly drives away into the night. One turns to me and says, with the same almost bored attitude from before: “Police.”  Suddenly mixed into an ocean of fear is a singular drop of hope that this could be anything other than the nightmare I was preparing myself to dream for the duration of the great, pathetic sleep to come. But these men do not look like police, they have not spoken to me, they’re wearing street clothes, and they’re driving an unmarked van. 

And I am terrified. 

“Badge?” I stammer. 

No response.

“Badge?”

“Badge?” 

A quick shushing motion. The handcuffs have still only been placed on my right wrist. Another drop of hope. I am walked back to the van by the man grasping my wrist as I panickedly try to make a phone call to anyone I know. 

Now parked alongside the van is a larger black taxi cab, which I recognize as the car I have been waiting for. The driver’s name was Yaseen, and at this moment he is the greatest, most important, most singularly beautiful person I have ever met. Yaseen realizes that he is to pick me up, which I confirm by showing him my WhatsApp message exchanges with his company. He explains to the men who I am, and tells me that they are police, which has become at this point obvious (if only it had been obvious as I ran for my life through the darkness). I show them my passport, and the officer grabbing me lets me go.

The teenagers are standing in handcuffs next to the van. Through the driver’s translations (Oh Yaseen, the light of my life), I am asked the question which I will be asked several times over the next thirty minutes: “What did they say to you?” My answer is always the same. I am asked the questions which make my heart sink in realization: “Did they take anything? Did they hurt you?” My answer is always the same. They did not seem to want anything. It does not matter. The officers toss them a barrage of questions, and their vision fixates on the floor as they shake in fear and respond in short, loud sentences. Everything is in Arabic, which does not matter because right now my life is written in neither English nor Arabic nor any other language conceived by the tongue of man. At this moment, my life is written in the language of a very specific panic, and there is only one idea that this language is built to convey: I would very much like to go home now. It has dawned on me by this point, and it is confirmed by the contextual translations of the driver, that the officers had seen the boys speak to me on the CCTV cameras and thought that something may be occurring. When the van arrived and the three of us bolted, they thought that each of us must be involved in something wrong, leading to the pursuit. Actually, I guess all of us are people who constantly are involved in something wrong. But not in this sense.

Inside the police station ten minutes later, my vision rests on a “wanted” poster of a man who looks quite unhappy to be on a “wanted” poster. Or, at least, I think it’s a “wanted” poster. My life is back in English now, and this poster is in Arabic. Funny how that sort of thing happens. I listen helplessly to the men asking the teenagers questions, and respond the same response every time they ask me what happened. 

“They asked if I knew where my hotel was,” I say. “They did not ask for anything. I did not feel threatened.” Embarrassingly, my reptilian, American brain instinctively thinks in the patterns of a 70-year-old man living in the suburbs: “Perhaps these teenagers are known for being up to no good. Perhaps they were going to kill me. Perhaps the officers know something I don’t.”

I look at one of the boys at three forty-seven a.m. He is wearing flip flops and staring hollowly at the ground. The other is praying and pressing himself into the wall. Both are shaking. I make eye contact with the boy of the hollow stare, and it lasts for what feels like hours. Then with the other. Days. Maybe thirty seconds pass in total. The other asks me something. It is obvious what he needs. 

Three of the officers walk into another room as one stays behind to process my passport. I ask my driver what is happening. He says the officers are unsure, and he says he does not think the boys were trying to hurt or mug me. I don’t think so either, and it truly dawns on me for the first time that I have a moral responsibility to make this known. 

I ask them (through my driver): “Were you going to do anything?” 

The stars respond via their tantalizing visibility through the window: “No, you idiot.”

The boys respond: “No. We weren’t.”

I make this known.

Several minutes pass. Time is flowing right past the rubble of the dam now. There is no more slowness in its passage. There is only Time, and it is impatient.

The police are relaxing, and the boys seem to have moved from despair to panic and fear. I am exhausted. 

Existential truths do not exist. They are the whisper of something real which can  only be perceived through whispers; they are the drops of dew on the grass of true universal beauty which will unfortunately retreat into the ground the moment you reach out your hand, leaving only that dew and the impression that something real was here once. As you can guess, then, I love looking for existential truths. This matters in the context of the police station only because the past thirty minutes have been the first thirty minutes in a long, long, time where, if asked, I would say that I completely could not give less of a shit about existential truths. I care about existential emotions, particularly the existential dread of my footsteps down the street. I didn’t know that existential dread was strong enough to replace the desire for existential truths. And if I feel that existential dread in my bones, think about how these boys must feel at this moment. 

This story is not about me. I have no motivations or goals here, at least not deep ones. I was waiting for my taxi and then ran out of well-founded fear. Neither do the boys. They were walking and thought I needed directions. Neither do the officers. They are told to protect, and once they knew I was a tourist, their instinct was to protect the vulnerable traveler from their own young citizens. Such is the dynamic of the night, and I do not think I need to say much more about the macropolitical and macroeconomic motivations that you can probably guess would drive this level of protection of a tourist from Moroccan teenagers  (by this point confirmed innocent by police). We just happen to be three parties caught in a net, and, at this moment,  the net just happens to fucking suck.

I have learned nothing on this trip. Well, that isn’t true. I have learned more about what I don’t know. 

Before, I knew that I didn’t know how to “do it right”- travel morally, travel in a non-performative or non-self-indulgent or politically sensitive way, etc. But I also thought that I was on my way to learning how to do it right- to learning to live in the world in interdependent revelry while also being completely free from the world’s tangled net of overlapping intensities. In a few days, I have learned that I am not on my way to learning how to do it right. I have learned that I might not be able to learn at all. Here I realized, perhaps not fully, that the net is always there, and I will always have to negotiate within its knotted weave to retain personhood. Particularly in the vulnerability to reality imposed by truly traveling, but really anywhere within the vulnerability to reality imposed by everyday life, one is exposed to the horrifying and raw demands of the net. 

I am cleared to go, and I begin to walk out of the station. I make eye contact with the teenager who was praying, and crack a smile. For a brief moment, he does too. I do not feel like chuckling, but I do it anyway, because what else can humans do together when this is the wall between them? The teenagers do not feel like chuckling, but they do the same. After a moment, the boys both fall silent and their faces return to a tired, numb sadness. I would like to speak to them both.

“I am sorry,” I say. 

It is four a.m. 

“I didn’t know.”

As I walk out of the station, the stars respond.

before, obviously