Excerpt from "On the Ride to Marrakech"

Sunlight entered through the window and into the compartment where Elizabeth sat looking at the mounds of red dirt heaped between the tracks and the hills from which crumbled stones made their way along the tracks to piles of rusted metal. The train flashed past a boy bouncing up and down on the edge of a beam, while next to him two old women stared.

At the station outside Casablanca, Elizabeth had seen women who shared these same expressions, gazing without curiosity in her direction as if they were staring past her at the brilliant white buildings resting in the station's stillness. Harold had been drinking coffee at the station café, watching Elizabeth from the window. The only other passengers waiting for the train to Marrakech were two thick-bearded men who dozed against the café wall. Wind pushed through the station, rising and falling, drawing in breaths and trailing into silence, a benign emptiness like a bath waiting to be filled with water.

She did not now know how long they had been riding. She fanned herself with the guidebook she'd brought in Newark, trying to ignore the stifling air. A pain in her stomach rose to her throat and into her head until she tasted a dribble of bile in her mouth.

"It's pretty hot," she said to Harold, who was dozing off.

He jerked up. "What?"

"It's hot," she said, louder.

Harold sat up and rubbed his eyes. His hair hung over his forehead

"I could use a beer," he said.

"They don't have alcohol here," she said.

"I saw some at the airport."

"Those are for the tourists. Muslims don't drink alcohol."

"I bet some do."

"You bet some do," she repeated.

"Sure. It's hard to go without, if you've had it and enjoy the feeling."

"It's a beautiful culture, isn't it? That they aren't allowed to drink alcohol?"

"I couldn't do it," Harold said.

"You could if you had to," Elizabeth said, taking the magazine from her purse. She started fanning herself again. "I mean, if you really wanted to you could do it."

"Not touch another drink in my life? I'd rather die," Harold said, laughing.
She looked out the window.

"It's lovely out there," she said. "Can't we open this thing?"

"Sure. I don't see why we didn't before." Harold stood up and pulled down on the window latches, but nothing happened. Trying a second time, he pulled down harder, still unsuccessfully. "It must be sealed shut or something."

"Forget it then," she said. "I'll go into the corridor. I need to go to the bathroom, anyway."

"Be careful," Harold said, smiling. He closed his eyes and leaned his head against the window. He was always sleeping.

continued...

__On the Ride to Marrakech____