The Sahara Lies

I want to tell you about the biggest lie I ever told, and how it almost cost me the best week of my life. But I have to back up a little first.

My name is Abi. I'm thirty-three years old, and until this past spring I had never left the United States. Not once. I grew up in a small town in Ohio, moved to Chicago at twenty-two, and I've been waiting tables at the same family-owned Italian place in Wicker Park for nine years. I like my job okay. I like my apartment okay. Everything in my life was okay, and that was kind of the problem.

So when my lease renewed and my best friend Zoe asked me for the hundredth time if I was ever going to actually use my passport, I booked a trip. Two weeks in Morocco, solo, on a mid-range group tour I found after three nights of comparison shopping. The kind where they pick you up from the airport and you don't have to figure out trains on your own. Safe. Predictable. The exact opposite of what I told Zoe I was doing.

"Abi, that's so cool, so spontaneous," she said on the phone. "You're so brave."

I said thanks. What I didn't say was that I'd picked the tour because it had a 4.8 rating and included airport transfers.

I landed in Marrakech on a Tuesday, and the heat hit me the second I walked out of the terminal. Not Ohio summer heat, not even Chicago in August. This was a wall. A taxi driver from the tour company took me through streets that got narrower and narrower until the car couldn't fit, and then a boy with a luggage cart led me on foot through an alley to a riad, which is like a guesthouse built around an open courtyard. Orange trees in the middle. A tile fountain. Birds somewhere up in the roof.

My room was on the second floor, small and dim, with a bed under a carved archway and a bathroom the size of a closet. I sat on the edge of the bed with my duffel bag unopened and just listened. Someone was running a hose in the courtyard. A moped whined past somewhere beyond the walls. It all sounded like nothing I had ever heard before.

That was the moment it started, I think. That little itch in my chest. Because sitting there on the bed in my wrinkled travel clothes, with my sensible walking shoes and my fanny pack, I felt exactly like what I was. A waitress from Chicago on a guided vacation. And I had come all this way wanting to feel like somebody else.

I'll admit something here that I've never said out loud. When I was twenty-one, in a summer program at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, I invented a boyfriend. I told my classmates I had this older boyfriend named Sal who worked in finance and took me to nice restaurants, and that I'd been to Italy twice before. None of it was true. I'd never been anywhere. I let it go on for six weeks and then the program ended and everyone went home and it didn't matter anymore. Except apparently it did, because that girl with the fake boyfriend was still living somewhere in me, and the second that Marrakech air hit my lungs, she woke up.

That first night I ate dinner alone on the roof terrace of the riad. Chicken tagine, bread, mint tea that was so sweet it made my teeth ache. An older British couple at the next table asked if I was traveling with anyone. "No, just me," I said, and then, without any plan at all, I heard myself add, "I usually travel with my boyfriend but he couldn't get away from work this month."

The woman smiled and asked his name and what he did. "Sal," I said. "Finance." Sal rose from the dead, twelve years later, on another continent. I finished my tea and felt sick and thrilled at the same time.

The next morning was the official start of the tour. There were eight of us in the group, which I gathered was small. A honeymoon couple from Australia, two retired sisters from Texas, a German guy traveling for work who'd tacked on the tour, a mother and grown daughter from Canada, and me. We met in the courtyard of the riad at nine, and that's where I met Eric.

He was standing by the door with a clipboard, which somehow made him look less like someone leading a tour and more like someone who just happened to have a clipboard. He was tall, with dark skin and a shaved head and a short beard, wearing a plain blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Maybe thirty-four, thirty-five. He greeted everyone in French first and then English, and his English was so easy and unaccented that it took me a second to realize he was actually Moroccan and not just some American who'd moved here.

"Welcome, everyone. I'm Eric, and I'll be with you for the next seven days. We're doing Marrakech, the Atlas Mountains, and then the Sahara. If you have any questions at any point, you ask me. If I don't know the answer, I'll make something up and tell you I'm joking." Everyone laughed. He didn't smile big when he said it, just a little at the corner of his mouth, and somehow that made it funnier.

We did the medina that first morning. The souk streets were narrow and loud and completely overwhelming, every stall crammed with lamps and spices and slippers and olives, guys calling out to us from doorways. I kept losing track of the group and Eric kept finding me. Not in an annoying way. He'd just appear at my shoulder and say something quiet, like "The tanneries are this way, if you want the smell." And I'd say yes, I wanted the smell, even though I did not want the smell.

At one point, crossing a square full of snake charmers and orange juice carts, he asked where I was from. "Chicago," I said. "You?"

"Here and there. I studied in the States for a while. Wisconsin, of all places."

And something flickered in my head. A face. A study lounge with bad lighting, somewhere in the Midwest, a quiet guy who was always in the corner with a textbook. I couldn't grab onto it. It was like a word on the tip of your tongue that won't come. I let it go. It was twelve years ago, and I'd met a hundred people in that program, and this man had a shaved head and a beard and lived on a different continent.

We stopped for lunch on a terrace overlooking the square. I ended up seated next to him because the honeymooners wanted the corner table with the view. He asked what I did back home, and here's where the old habit kicked in, smooth as anything.

"I'm between things right now, honestly," I said, stirring my tea. "I did a lot of consulting work the last few years but I needed a break. My ex and I, we travel a lot, so I figured I'd keep it up on my own."

"What did you consult on?" he asked, and he wasn't being nosy about it, just genuinely curious, the way you'd ask a friend.

"Marketing," I said, because it was the first thing that came out. "Mostly for restaurants, funnily enough."

"Restaurants," he repeated, and nodded slowly. "So you know food, then. Tell me if this tastes like what you'd get in Chicago."

The tagine came and it was lamb with prunes and almonds and I honestly could have cried, it was so good. I told him it beat anything in Chicago, which was the truest thing I'd said all day, and he laughed for real then. His whole face changed when he laughed.

"So," he said, "marketing consultant, world traveler, terrible liar."

I stopped with my fork halfway to my mouth. "Excuse me?"

"You said you travel a lot with your ex. But in the courtyard this morning you told the sisters from Texas it was your first time out of the country. They mentioned it on the walk over." He shrugged, not unkindly. "It's fine. I just wondered which story was the real one."

I felt my face go hot. Twelve years of nothing and that invented boyfriend still biting me. "The first one," I said, quietly. "The travel part, I mean. First time out of the country. The rest was..."

"Decorating," he said.

"Decorating. Yeah."

He nodded like this was a completely reasonable thing a person might do. "Okay. So what do you actually do, Abi?"

"Waitress," I admitted. "Same place, nine years."

"Good tips?"

"Sometimes."

"Then you're doing better than a consultant between things." He picked up the bread basket and offered it to me. "Eat. We have the tanneries after this, and you'll want your strength."

Later, walking back down through the souk with the group strung out behind him, I caught myself watching him from a few paces back. The way he moved through the crowd, calm, like the noise couldn't touch him. The way he answered the sisters' million questions without ever looking tired of them. And that flicker again, faint, at the edge of my memory. A study lounge. A corner seat. Somebody laughing at something quietly, mostly to himself.

I dismissed it. I was wrong to.

The next morning we hit the souk proper, the real one, not the tourist strip we'd walked through the day before. Eric had warned us at breakfast. "Stay close. If anyone grabs your arm, do not buy anything out of fear. Just walk." I thought he was being dramatic. He was not.

It happened fast. The group stopped at a spice stall and I drifted three steps away to look at a table of brass mirrors, and a man appeared at my elbow like he'd been waiting there all morning. He was short and broad and he had a wrist full of silver bracelets he was already sliding off.

"For you, mademoiselle. Silver from the south. Real silver. You are American? American girls love silver." He took my hand before I could pull it back and pushed a bracelet against my wrist. "Special price. For you only today."

"Thank you, but I'm just looking," I said, in the voice I use at the restaurant when a guy won't stop telling me about his crypto.

But he wasn't a guy at a bar in Wicker Park. He didn't move. He kept talking, faster, the price dropping with every sentence, and his fingers stayed closed around my wrist, and I felt that stupid familiar thing happen in my chest where I go polite instead of going loud. Twenty years of being a woman who doesn't make a scene, working exactly against me.

"And this, this one, look, for your husband. You have a husband? A boyfriend? Then he needs this, for you."

"Really, I'm not..."

"Abi." Eric's hand landed light on the merchant's forearm, just two fingers, and he said something in Arabic that I could not follow at all. Whatever it was, it wasn't friendly. The man let go of my wrist so fast the bracelets jingled. He answered, half laughing, half not, and Eric said one more short sentence and the guy actually stepped back, picked up his bracelets like nothing had happened, and turned to a Japanese couple passing by.

"Hey," I said, shaking my hand out. "Sorry. I froze."

"Don't apologize. He does that to every woman alone. Now he will leave you alone for the rest of the market." Eric looked at me. "You could have pulled away, you know. He has no right to hold you."

"I know. I just go polite instead of mean. Bad habit."

"It is a very American habit," he said, and steered me back toward the stall where the sisters were haggling over saffron like their retirement depended on it.

The thing is, standing there with my pulse still up, I felt that old pull again. The one from Madison, from every first day of anything. The itch to be the kind of woman a bracelet merchant wouldn't try. Somebody who has been grabbed before and handled it. So when Eric asked, later, walking past the dyers' lane, whether my ex had taken me to markets like this, I heard myself say, "All over. He was Italian. We did Istanbul, Buenos Aires, the Amalfi coast twice. He was big on markets. He'd argue about prices just for fun."

"An Italian who argues," Eric said. "Unusual."

I laughed. It came out normal, thank God. Inside I was doing math I didn't want to do, like how long before he asked a question I couldn't decorate my way out of.

The Atlas day was two days later. We drove out of the city while it was still dark, and by nine we were on a trail above a Berber village, following a mule loaded with water bottles. The air was thin and clean and the mountains went up and up, brown and pink and then, near the top of the high ones, still white with snow. I was wheezing on the switchbacks and the mother from Canada, who had to be pushing seventy, was breezing past me.

Eric walked at the back with me, mostly, I noticed, because I was the straggler and somebody has to walk with the straggler.

"How do you end up doing this?" I asked, when I could talk again. "Guiding. Did you always want to show tourists around?"

"No," he said. "I wanted to leave. I studied in Wisconsin, business. I thought I would stay in the States, get a job in Chicago maybe, or New York. Send money home." He stepped over a rock and offered me his hand for the next one, and I took it. "Then my father got sick and I came back for what I thought was a summer. He got better. The family riad needed somebody who spoke English and could handle bookings, and then guiding, and here I am, twelve years later."

Twelve years. My stomach did a small quiet drop, the way it does when you miss a stair. Twelve years ago I had been twenty-one, in that summer program, and there had been a Moroccan guy in it, a quiet one, and I had...

I stopped the thought right there, the way you slam a drawer on something. It was nothing. Lots of guys study abroad. Lots of guys end up in the Midwest. My face was hot from the climb, that was all.

"Did you like it out there?" I asked. "The States?"

"I did. It was hard, the first months. Everyone was so friendly and I understood maybe half of what was happening." He smiled at the trail. "There was a girl in my program who used to feed me at the study lounge. She worked at a pizza place and she'd bring in leftovers."

"A girl," I said, extremely casually, staring very hard at a mountain.

"She had a boyfriend she talked about. Sal, I think. Finance."