Vendela Vida - The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty

But where is your backpack?

You look on the floor. Not there.

You touch your back. You turn around, while touching your back, as though you might get a glimpse of it over your shoulder. You tell the man behind the desk you don’t have your backpack. You look at the bottom edge of the desk, which does not extend to the floor. You think it might have inadvertently slid beneath. The hotel clerk looks down at the floor on his side of the desk. Nothing.

You are growing increasingly panicked — you are in Morocco and you don’t have your backpack. You think of everything in it — laptop, wallet with credit cards and all the cash you took out at Miami International. A three-month-old camera. Your library book. Your toiletries. A pair of small coral earrings. As the list of inventory of lost contents increases, you forget to breathe.

You try to explain to the unhelpful hotel clerk what’s going on. He suggests that one of the bellboys might have taken the backpack up to the wrong room. He talks to the young and clean-cut Moroccan bellboys. The bellboys suggest you left it in the van; they tell you the driver is still parked outside. You don’t think you left it in the van because you took your passport out of the backpack at the reception desk, didn’t you? Maybe you already had the passport. You are so exhausted, so frazzled that you’re no longer certain of anything. Everyone else’s narrative seems more likely than yours.

You follow one of the bellboys out of the hotel. People pass you on the street — this is a crowded city — but you don’t register faces. A color, red, there. A yellow hijab there. When you get to the van, it’s locked, so you look through the windows. Nothing on the floor of the van. Where is the driver? Maybe the driver took the backpack and came looking for you. Maybe he’s looking for you in the hotel.

You run back inside the hotel. The driver has been located and is waiting for you. He says he doesn’t have the backpack. He walks outside to the van with you and unlocks it and the backpack is not there. You return to the hotel. The driver, looking very worried, speaks in Arabic with the bellboys and security guards stationed at the front door.

“They say you wear the backpack when you come in,” he tells you in English. Why were you trying to speak French with him? “They say they remember you had it.”

You wonder for a moment why they were looking at you so closely that they recall this, but you don’t have time to wonder: you’re half relieved that they remember. Your exhaustion is a curtain you cannot part.

You are beckoned to the luggage room. Someone has the idea that perhaps your backpack was moved to the luggage room, where people store bags when their room isn’t ready, or when they’ve had to check out hours before their flight. Two hotel employees stand at the entrance to the luggage room as though they’re flight attendants welcoming you on board a plane. You enter and see it’s a small room with shelves, stacked with a dozen dark and travel-worn suitcases. A child’s car seat. No black backpack.

You exit the claustrophobic room and walk up and down the gleaming white floors of the lobby, wondering what the hell you’re going to do. A man behind the check-in counter tells you not to worry — is it the same one who was purporting to help you, or his friend? You can’t tell. You can’t remember anything anymore. He says there are security cameras. He points above the check-in desk. “You will watch and we will see if you had the backpack when you came in. We will look and see if the bellboy took it to someone else’s room. You will look and we will see,” he tells you.

“Okay,” you say, wondering why these cameras weren’t mentioned before. Hope expands within you, as hope does. “How do I see?” you ask.

“Wait here,” he says.

“Where?” you ask.

He points to exactly where you’re standing.

While you wait, you watch others checking in. You want to warn them. But warn them about what? The fact that they might have left their luggage somewhere?

A young hotel employee with hunched shoulders enters the lobby and the man behind the desk says something to him. To you he says: “He will take you.”

You follow this hunched man past the ATM machine and into the elevator and you descend to the basement. He leads you into a small room where a large screen covers a cinder-block wall. The screen is divided into four quadrants and you can see that, in fuzzy black and white and mostly gray, it’s currently showing what’s happening in four different areas of the hotel — the front desk, the black bench in the lobby, a stairwell, and a roof. In the quadrant showing what’s happening at the front desk, you can see the couple that’s currently checking in. The couple you wanted to warn.

“You sat here on black bench,” the man says in rough English. He points to the screen that shows the black backless bench that runs along the side of the wall, perpendicular to the check-in desk.

“No,” you say. “I was standing at the check-in desk.” You point to the screen where the check-in desk is being shown.

“Okay,” he says. He tries to click on the box but nothing happens.

He tries to type something onto the keyboard but nothing happens.

“I need password,” he says.

The hunched man gets on the phone and calls someone and asks for the security password for the computer. He types the password on the keyboard and nothing happens.

He asks whoever is on the other end of the phone to repeat the password and he tries again. You hear frustration in the form of yelling coming through the receiver.

Five minutes ago, when you were in the lobby and learned of the existence of the surveillance cameras, you had great faith they would reveal which bellboy or hotel guest mistakenly took your backpack. But now your confidence plummets.

Two other men enter the small room. One of them has a beard and you guess this is the same man who was on the phone because he shouts out the password number again. His rage is evident.

Finally the hunched man succeeds and is logged on to the computer.

The bearded man who knows the password turns to you. “You were sitting on the black bench?” he asks, pointing to the image on the screen of the bench in the lobby that runs along the wall. The bench is vacant.

“No,” you say, and explain that you were at the check-in desk. You stand and point again, just to make sure there’s no misunderstanding.

The bearded man instructs the hunched man to play back that camera. The hunched man sits at the computer but doesn’t know how to make it work. The bearded man barks something at him, but to no avail. Three more men enter. Now there are six men in the room. Not one of them knows how to play back the video.

“Excuse me,” you say from the back. “I might be able to. . May I?” It’s a small room and the men part ways so you can sit at the wooden chair in front of the computer. You have no expertise in surveillance, but this does not seem as complicated as they’re making it. You use the mouse to drag the curser to the camera focused on the front desk. Then you press the rewind button and you scroll back.

The video player shows a time—10 A.M. — but it’s not yet that time. “What time is it?” you ask. Everyone has a different answer. It’s explained that there was a time change the day before. No one has updated the time on the recording equipment.

You can’t rely on the time. You continue to rewind, slowly. You stop when you see someone who looks like you but whose hair is darker, more dramatic-looking than your own and whose white shirt looks brighter. But it’s you. The monochrome surveillance camera dramatizes every shade. You appear a relic of another era. A daguerreotype; a cameo in an old locket.