Gradually the reality of her surroundings became more concrete. She was in Marrakesh. She had been planning to meet Helen for dinner last night, but she must have slept through it. And today they were driving to Semat.
Florence took a shower and dressed in the first clothes she found at the top of her duffel bag: jeans and a wrinkled T-shirt. In the hallway, she listened at Helen’s door but heard nothing. She looked over the railing into the courtyard below. She spotted Helen at a table under an orange tree, a black coffee in front of her. She was wearing a crisp black linen dress and leather sandals that wound up her ankles.
Florence sat down heavily across from her.
“I thought you were dead,” Helen said cheerfully.
“So did I.”
“It really would have ruined my plans.”
“Ha, ha.”
“Coffee,” Helen said, pointing at the silver urn on a buffet table laid out in the shade.
Once Florence had returned with a cup, she apologized. “I don’t know what happened. Did you end up getting dinner?”
Helen ignored her question. “I thought before we leave town today we could hit El Badi. I was talking to Brahim again this morning and it really does sound spectacular. El Badi means ‘the incomparable’—isn’t that fabulous? It’s apparently one of Allah’s ninety-nine names, which makes me feel quite impoverished, having only two. Let’s go right after breakfast, then you can go get the car.”
When they were planning the trip, Florence had suggested hiring a driver to take them to Semat, but Helen had insisted on renting a car. “Arabs can’t drive,” she’d said in the same matter-of-fact tone someone might say, “I grew up in Boise.”
After breakfast, they both went back to their rooms to get a few things and then met again in the corridor. Helen held out her wallet, cell phone, and cigarettes to Florence and said, “Do you mind? I don’t feel like carrying a bag.”
“Oh. Sure.” Florence stuffed them into her already full purse.
It took some time to find their way out of the dark maze surrounding the hotel. The walls were too high to allow much sunlight in and so close that Florence could touch them both at the same time. Some of the buildings, she noticed when she looked closely, were covered in a synthetic wrapping printed to look like stone.
Brahim had assured them that El Badi was only a short walk from their hotel, but they hadn’t counted on how long it would take to orient themselves. They eventually came to the large intersection where their driver had dropped them off the day before, which sprouted wider, busier roads. Cars, mopeds, pedestrians, and donkeys all competed for space. The donkeys looked skinny and miserable, pulling nearly identical carts of construction materials—bags of concrete, bricks, and long rods of rebar that hung down and scraped the dusty ground behind them. A few taxis, old ochre-colored Mercedes sedans from the ’80s, stopped for them, but they waved them on and kept walking. It was barely 9 a.m. but it was already hot. Florence wished she hadn’t worn pants.
Many of the stores they passed had laid out their wares on the ground outside, and these too tumbled into the clogged streets, an odd mix of the exotic and the pedestrian: live turtles, plastic-wrapped socks, children’s umbrellas, sacks of pigment and spices and beans, diapers, sunglasses, glistening piles of raw meat. Everything was overseen by somber men in djellabas. A cat darted past them with a bird’s head in its mouth.
By the time they reached El Badi, Florence was overheated and on edge. They paid seventy dirhams—around seven US dollars—to enter and found themselves in a large, open-air complex that was shockingly silent and still. The palace had just opened, and they seemed to be the first people there apart from the guards.
Florence read from a pamphlet they’d been given with their tickets and summarized it for Helen: “The palace was commissioned by the sultan in 1578 and finished fifteen years later. A hundred years after that a new sultan stripped it and used the materials to build his own palace in Menkes—no, wait, sorry, Meknes—in the north.”
Helen snatched the pamphlet from Florence’s hand and began fanning herself with it. “It’s hot as blue blazes in here,” she said.
“It’s the chergui,” Florence replied.
Helen walked away, toward a sunken garden in the center of the courtyard. Florence retreated to the high walls where there was a sliver of shade. She ran her hands along the rough surface, which was pocked with the same large holes as the walls of the medina. Here, though, they were filled with cramped, huddled pigeons—hundreds of them. Their cooing had the aggressively soothing tones of a nursery rhyme in a horror movie. A few pieces of straw floated down to the ground in front of Florence. She looked up. Huge storks stared down impassively from shaggy, shedding nests they had erected on top of the walls. There was bird shit everywhere.
Florence turned down a set of steep stairs into a series of destroyed, roofless rooms with cracked tiled floors. The birds were even louder in here. She found a recess in the wall that was shaded from the sun and pressed her cheek against the surface. The stone was surprisingly cold. A few moments later, another tourist entered. Florence was not immediately visible to him. When he moved farther into the room he saw her and jumped.
“Christ,” he exclaimed. “You scared me.”
“Sorry,” she said, moving out of the shadows.
“Hiding?”
“Just from the sun.”
“Yes, he’s a bastard today.” The man had the accent and toothy look of an Englishman. “On holiday?”
“Not really,” Florence said. “Working.”
“Oh yes? Let me guess.” He looked her up and down slowly. “Archaeology student,” he pronounced, pointing a long, spindly finger in her direction.
“Novelist,” said Florence. The man raised his eyebrows. “Oh, well done,” he said. “Brilliant.”
After lying, Florence had the same feeling she got when she stepped past the point in the ocean where you can still run from the waves, so deep that you have to rush headlong into them. She felt, absurdly, that he might begin to quiz her.
She moved abruptly away from him and climbed back up into the brightness. She crossed the complex, past the sunken gardens of orange trees and the algae-covered pool. On the opposite side, she found another staircase leading downward. She took it and found herself alone in a series of dark passageways. She entered a room with display cases filled with primitive-looking chains and neck shackles. On the wall hung faded black-and-white photographs of prisoners hunched over in despair. She hurried back up into the sunlight.
Helen stood peeling a small orange in the shade, her resin bracelets clacking in time with the motion.
“Where did you get that?” Florence asked.
Helen nodded her head at the orange trees in the sunken garden.
“You just took one?”
Helen shrugged. “Why not? Who’s it for, the storks?”
Florence looked enviously at the juice running down Helen’s wrist but she lacked the temerity to pick one herself. She glanced at one of the guards, an acne-scarred twenty-something tapping at his phone. He seemed to sense that he was being watched and looked up. Florence abruptly turned away.