Vendela Vida - The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty

At 7 P.M. the sides for the following morning are slipped beneath your door. A note scrawled on the envelope says: Wardrobe says you didn’t return the wig. Please remember it tomorrow. You don’t know whose handwriting it is.

You open the envelope. Pickup in the morning will be at 8 A.M. and filming will take place at the American embassy. Impossible! You think of Susan Sontag. Will she be there? Your worries begin all over again. You’ll be wearing the wig, so there’s a chance she won’t recognize you, but what will you do if she does?

You try to watch a movie on TV but soon discover it’s about a woman who gets arrested. You turn it off. You fall asleep with great difficulty, wake repeatedly, and rise early.

There’s still no word from the practical secretary. You can only assume this is good news. You get dressed and put on the wig so you don’t forget it. You’re afraid of Susan Sontag and need to make sure you arrive at the embassy in some sort of disguise. You remove your money from the safe, divide it into two, and place a stack in each cup of your bra. You have half an hour before the producers will be meeting you in the van. You go to the hotel’s business center so you can get online and confirm that the photo hasn’t gotten out.

You type in the famous American actress’s name and search for any news. The computer shows that two minutes before, the photo of you at Rick’s Café was posted by a British tabloid. The headline is HERE’S LOOKING AT YOU, KID. You can only assume that the tabloid offered so much money that the bottom-feeding lawyer didn’t come back to the practical secretary. You assume she will be as surprised as anyone to find the photo posted. You know something went horribly wrong.

You study the photo. In it, you are taken aback by how much you look like the famous American actress. Your hand is outstretched, trying to block the photographer, but this only makes it more convincing that it’s a photo of an actress accustomed to fending off paparazzi. Leopoldi is standing behind you, trying to help you up. It’s clearly him.

You refresh the computer. Before your eyes the number of news stories has multiplied — the photo’s been linked to by thirteen sites. When it’s been picked up by twenty-one sites, you turn the computer screen off, as though that will prevent the photo from spreading further.

You are dizzy, your stomach a volcanic pit, as you sit on the bench outside the hotel, waiting for the van. You know what scandal the producers will be talking about today; you know what everyone will be talking about. You wonder if the producers will know it wasn’t the famous American actress in the photo.

If the famous American actress was about to tear into you yesterday, you can only imagine what she’ll do today, now that the photo has been published, linked to, commented upon. You’re afraid she’ll publicly accuse you of not being who you claim you are. And she’ll be doing this on set at the American embassy. It would be insane for you to put yourself at that kind of risk of exposure. You cannot continue working on the film. You cannot remain anywhere where the famous American actress or the practical secretary could find you.

While you’ve been sitting on the bench outside the hotel, tourists have been boarding a large white bus. You recognize it as the same large white bus that was outside the hotel on your first day of work as a stand-in, when you mistakenly thought the bus was your transportation to set. You see the same tour guide with his silver clipboard at the stairs to the bus. Where did he say the tour went?

You stand and walk as casually as you can toward the bus. “Meknes?” he says. You nod, and he tells you he will be collecting the fare on the bus. You board.

Three dozen men and women are already seated on the plush seats. Most of them are couples in their sixties. The women wear long pants and open-toed shoes; their husbands look like they’ve shrunk in recent years, their bodies condensed with gravity and age. Even their collared polo shirts look a size too big.

You quickly find a seat in the middle. The tour guide is coming down the aisle and collecting money and marking numbers down on his clipboard. You try to see how many dirhams everyone else is giving him so you can remove the appropriate amount from your bra. As he approaches you, you hand him what you have discerned is the correct payment, and then turn to look out the window. You see the young American producer and the Indian producer get into the van. Their eyes are searching the front of the hotel; they’re most likely looking for you.

You instinctively take off the wig and move to the other side of the bus and sit by the opposite window. Two women board the bus. One of them looks vaguely familiar. She speaks English with an American accent and she has dark hair with thick, blond highlights. You glance at her shoes, fearing you’ll see puffy white Reeboks. Instead, she’s wearing blue Converses, with zippers on the side. And she’s not wearing glasses or a Florida State University sweatshirt, nor is she traveling in a large group of women on a college reunion tour. You tell yourself to relax: you’re being paranoid. What are the odds that she’s on this bus? You arrived in Casablanca on the same flight over a week ago. Or maybe you didn’t — you are beginning to believe you imagined the nurse’s presence on the plane. You have not been yourself lately.

The tour guide comes up the aisle from behind and stops by your row. Apparently you didn’t pay him enough money because he’s asking for more. You remove the bills from the cup of your bra and hand them to the guide. He looks away, as though embarrassed about what he’s seen. You stare straight ahead: you’re afraid that if you look out the window of the bus you’ll see the pale practical secretary’s face searching for yours.

You contemplate being free of the actress and the practical secretary. This is of foremost importance. All you need to do now is get to Meknes, and you’ll figure out your plan from there. You take inventory of what you’ve left in your room — a suitcase full of clothes you don’t like. A toothbrush. The only thing you’ll regret leaving behind is the foundation you bought from the man in the Casablanca beauty shop. You tell yourself you can stop by there again when you’re back in Casablanca, but you already know you’ll never come back. You wait for the bus to start. You need it to leave. Until it’s departed you can still be found.

Finally: the hum of the loud engine. The bus begins to slowly roll out of the Grand Hotel’s parking lot. Once it’s made its way onto the main street, and passes by a gas station that says LIBYA OIL, you lean your head against the window, close your eyes, and fall asleep.

When you wake Casablanca is far behind you. You pass olive groves, small farms. A few wiry dogs run alongside the bus, barking, until they seem satisfied the bus is leaving their territory and cease their chase. It’s brighter out than it’s been since you arrived in Morocco. The sun stretches out its rays long and wide, as though it’s been trapped in tight quarters and is finally free to expand.

For the first time since you arrived in Morocco, you wish you had a camera to document the terrain. You want to remember all of this — the bright sunlight, the smattering of red flowers, the small houses, built of dark wood.

You think of the expensive Pentax camera you purchased toward the end of the pregnancy, to document your belly, to document the birth. You had photos on that camera of you and the baby, photos you never backed up because you didn’t have time to read the instructions before your trip. Now you have no photos of you and baby Reeves together. You noticed that your sister and her husband didn’t take any of the two of you. At the time, you told yourself it was an oversight. So you took a series of photos of you holding the baby. You held her cradled in one arm and stretched out the other arm and kept your finger on the camera’s button until she started to cry from the flash.