“This is where I live. I want some water, wait here, okay?”

            “Show me.”

            Asad shrugged, a sign that the man took to be an affirmation. He followed Asad inside and found himself in the center of a two-story covered courtyard. Unadorned spaces that looked like disused stalls lined the bottom floor. Tumbledown doors hung from broken hinges and dotted the upper section. Boys and teenagers loitered about, backlit by shafts of light made thick with dust motes. Two sickly twins hunched over a game of dominoes, their whispered chatter silenced by the Alex’s presence.

            He called out an Arabic greeting, his voice unintentionally loud in the musty air. None responded. The boys moved slowly—some got to their feet slowly, others sat down slowly—and everything had a neglected, dusty patina, as if time itself had run down here long ago. Asad said something to them and most returned to their preoccupations.

            “What is this place?” 

“It is a caravanserai. In Mohammed’s time, it was a traveler hotel. The camels and donkeys go there.” He pointed at the spaces on the bottom floor, where cots littered with pathetic human bedding stood instead of animals and straw. “The men slept on the other floor. Now we sleep where we want.”

            “Who?”

            Another shrug. He went into a stall and pulled out a yellowed plastic bottle, presumably full of water. “We sleep down here when it is hot, like now. In winter, the top is better.”

            “Where are your parents? Your eight brothers or sisters, like you were going to tell me about back at the tanneries?”

            Asad shook his head, his eyes shiny in the darkness. “It is only my mother, and she lives in Marrakesh.” He pronounced it “M’roksh.” “I come to Fez because the guiding is better. M’roksh medina is too small. I send her money when I have it.”

            He tried to brush by Alex, back into the flow of foot-traffic, but Alex stood in his path. “When were you last in Marrakesh?”

            Asad looked at Alex as though he had betrayed him. “Two years ago.”

After fixing Asad with his gaze for a second more, Alex moved quietly aside.

            Asad’s face regained its happy mask once more, and he asked the man if he still wanted to see the metal-smiths. The man shook his head in the half-light of the caravanserai. The traveler’s hotel.

            “Palais Jamaï, Asad. It’s time to leave.”

The Palais Jamaï was a last-day-in-Fez-so-what-the-hell splurge, a shameless wallow in granite and marble and imported whisky sipped upon a bed that was an altar to opulence made of silk. The arctic blast rose shivers from the base of Alex’s spine as he brushed past four doormen dressed in red who looked past his soiled clothes and into his white face, dispensing smiles for which he had paid with a sack of greenbacks. Alex went to the bank of elevators, and summoned one. While awaiting it, he caught sight of Asad through heavily tinted glass. He was drifting back into the medina, back into another time. The doors slid open but Alex didn’t step through. Instead, he returned to the front desk. The concierge smiled as Alex delivered his request.