Alex took a sentry’s place on his balcony far above the darkening medina, where night did not descend with grace. It overcame him there, a black bag wiping the stars from the sky and falling like grief onto the old city to suffocate the residents in the still air underneath, even as it rocked them to sleep with false promises of coolness and calm. It left the occupants gasping for breath on nights like this. Above, on his expensive balcony, the air was only marginally cooler where Alex sat alone, feet throbbing, lungs overused and tired. But these things he could easily ignore; other things were more difficult. His head crawled with the things he had seen—images painted in black. Sleep wouldn’t come, so he sat alone overlooking Fes el-Bali. Although only a centimeter of glass stood between the man and the relief of air conditioning, he found that he needed the heat and the smell of fires for a while longer. He didn’t remember falling asleep in the chair, but he was awakened an hour before the sun by the muezzin in the minaret of the small mosque below crying out in a hoarse and high voice that sounded ancient and fearful of his god. Soon others from the dozens of spires that pierced the endless sky soon joined the first in praise of Allah, and their strains mingled and rose and fell in ominous discordance. Within this sound, beneath him in that sprawling pit of rubble and humanity, Alex imagined old women working their looms, young men hustling and older men sweeping cobbles, others cutting hair and praying, all turning as one at the sound of the callers, then streaming slowly and silently through nameless alleys, moving toward the mosques as the muezzins wailed a song that to Alex’s ears suddenly carried anger for the infidel who even now eavesdropped on their sacred prayer.

            Then silence fell, and Alex slipped inside his cold room. After a moment of thought, he went out into the quiet corridor. It didn’t take long to find a lonely maid’s cart, and Alex quickly filled his arms with a dozen milled French soaps, a handful of hotel shampoos, minibar peanuts, a fluffy white towel with the hotel’s monogram in crimson letters on the bottom edge. Back in his room, he found a few cans of Coke in the fridge, and some other snacks he hadn’t opened. These went in the bag, along with a sack of toast-points he’d bought two days ago.

A little later, he emerged from the hotel, his pack hoisted high and eager to be Atlantic-bound. Once there, he would jump a shared taxi and go south, almost into Mauritania, in search of a small, deserted town uncluttered by crowds, devoid of shops, only a blue guesthouse and a horizon that stretched away forever in every direction. No leaning walls. No dung fires. No cluster flies. Open spaces.

As Alex stepped from the cloistered peace of the hotel’s courtyard, Asad jumped from the shade of a popcorn vendor’s cart and bounced over to him, unable to keep from smiling. “What do you want to see this morning, Alex? I can show you anything!”

            “How long have you been waiting here?”

            Asad shrugged, his bottom lip stuck out to convey that it didn’t matter. When Alex pressed the issue, more out of a morbid curiosity than anything else, Asad allowed that it might have been a few hours. He was wearing the same shirt as yesterday.

            “I’m leaving.”

Asad nodded. “I can guide you to the gare. The big station. Ten dirhams, no problem.”

Alex shook his head. “I know where it is. But here.” He extended the bulging plastic bag he had prepared that morning. On the way down the elevator, Alex also added five hundred dirhams, five times the official guide’s rate from the other day—a little traveling money to go with the train ticket to Marrakesh he’d had the concierge acquire last night.

Alex’s back was sore from the chair in which he had slept, and he scratched at the stubble on his face as Asad rummaged through the bag. Suddenly, he tied the top of the bag closed and screwed up his face. “Five dirhams, and I will show you the best restaurant in medina for your breakfast! Come!”

            Alex shook his head. His pack was heavy on his shoulders, and he felt exposed standing in the street with it. “Goodbye, Lion.”

Asad’s shoulders rounded, but only for an instant. Then he dove into the medina, the plastic bag flopping frantically at his side. The medina swallowed him up and he was gone.