Untowards | Alexander T. Damle

                We’ve moved into the post-everything age: a post-modern, post-colonial, post-racial, post-humanist, post-pubescent age. Me? I’m post-intellectual. If intellectualism is all about smart people knowing everything about everything and always talking and thinking about all of it, I’m all about knowing nothing about anything, and never thinking about any of it.

                These thoughts stroll leisurely through my mind, as I roll out of bed. They then slam the door on the way out as I feel the piercing buzz of last night’s hangover. I look to my dirty window, layers of grime and dead insects caked up over years of this place being inhabited solely by alcoholics and other wastes of oxygen, writers and artists all trying to re-enact Hemingway without the shotgun finish.

                Outside the window is Tangiers, a city well past its prime, architecture largely unchanged for hundreds of years, the whole place straining at its ropes, buildings beginning to crumble, streets and alleyways narrow and claustrophobic, people routed around, rats in a maze. It’s a city of tourists and expats, where all the real people hide themselves away, oppressive sub-tropical air, thick with the broad unease of a future lost to the mythic past.

                Bars and nightclubs fizzle and burn against all the old architecture and older culture, stars in a tar black sky, places where the booze flows and people are as liberated as in any global city. It’s a tense liberation though, a malaise hanging about in furtive glances, drinks poured carefully, voices all a little too low or a little too loud. I make my money off these places, tourists shown around to a bit of the city’s “real” nightlife, every item on the itinerary premeditated by money slipped across sticky bar tops.

                I’m good at this job - I have the basic understanding of how to herd a group of drunks such that no one gets lost, plus the global tourists like getting led around by an American ex-patriot. Everyone’s read Hemingway, or at least everyone who chooses to come to this shit hole.

                Eventually, realizing it’s almost three o’clock in the afternoon, and I’ve now managed to waste a good part of my day rotting in bed and drinking, I pick up a t-shirt off the floor, pull it over my head, and start downstairs. I live right above a bar, which can be useful, given my profession.

                I sit down on a barstool, and the bartender ambles over to me. He doesn’t even need to ask what I’m having because, the way my nights usually go.

                “You look like shit.”

                “Thanks man, that’s always good to hear.”

                “You know me.” I drink down the water and my head swims, that waking dream in whence you feel like if you don’t figure out where you are soon, you’re going to up and float away. Like that waking dream, with the addition of a piercing headache.

                I stumble out of the bar into the afternoon light. We’re not far from the sea here, and I have a good view of the water sparkling in a warm blue, stark contrast to Tangiers’ white and tan architecture. I appreciate the heat and sun for a few moments, before the simple pleasure of the beautiful weather turns into a piercing headache. A few doors down from my place is a kebab shop, from which I get my breakfast/lunch/it may actually be now late enough to call this dinner.

                I stroll down to the beach, sit at water’s edge, take off my sandals, and let the waves lick at my toes. It’s warm and comforting. Clean. I lay my head down in the sand, feel myself sink a few inches. I stare up at the sapphire sky, feel the warmth of the summer burrow deep inside me and threaten to take another few waking hours.  

               

                As the sun sinks low in the sky, I find myself on my tour route a little early, it being an hour still till I need to meet tonight’s shambling horde. I wander into a nightclub called “The Bittersweet Life,” or something approximating that, printed in French in a curling font, colonial ghosts mixed into the mortar.

                The furniture, the wallpaper, even the carpet, it’s all luscious and beautifully old, out of a 1950s Hollywood film, right when color was new and still thought of as something luxurious, to be revered. She stands on the stage and croons into a microphone in Spanish. This place is a contradiction of nations, a Mexican singer in a French club in a Moroccan city. She’s not much different than me, lost in this world but for her passport, transience as an excuse against the static rigidity of waking life. She was one of the first people I met when I moved here. She’s beautiful, tanned and tall, long dark hair and delicate cheekbones, hazel eyes reaching deep into the dark heart of my memories, some girl I left behind when I got bored of wherever I was living way back when.

                She smiles at me, but goes on singing. I’ll bring whoever’s signed up for tonight’s bullshit back here later, but I like to hear her when its just me and a few locals, in before the tourists show up. It feels like it means something that it never does when the walls are quivering and the carpet is crawling with the multitude of drinks and excess of people.

                I meet my charge for the night at a little restaurant on a square dating from the French occupation. The architecture is trying to be Paris because, afterall, this is Tangiers, where everything living is masquerading as something long dead. It’s the usual collection of young couples looking for something a little more exciting than the standard tourist attractions. I notice a guy, maybe late twenties, looks American, maybe German, standing off on his own at the edge of the group.

I introduce myself to the crowd, hoping my constant exhaustion doesn’t wear through. Or maybe not, maybe I want it heard, maybe I want people to complain, maybe I want to get fired. It’s time to move on again, time to find another city, another country. Another singer in another nightclub to pine over. Another sea to stare at longingly. Another squeaky bed, mouldy carpet, peeling wallpaper shit hole. Another life. Every few years from now since then on to infinity or death, whichever comes first, always another life.

                As we walk under the phosphorescent lights of the city, our faces and shadows cut at weird angles, illuminated with a certain kind of privilege, I look to all the young couples, the way they hang on each other, as their everythings, all in ignorance of the sea and the distance, in utter rejection of the drift and flow, the natural falling in and out of that which we dream of in terms like love.

                The first bar of the night is an old school jazz joint. The man singing on the stage is short of stature, and rather pale for a Moroccan, but there is a throaty, confrontational intensity to his voice, such that it fills every nook and cranny of the room, demanding attention. I give my speech about the place’s imagined history, then go to the bar, and I’m poured a drink without hardly asking. The whiskey burns its way down my throat, thermite through a cell door. I swirl the glass slightly, watch the pale auburn liquid float about with a heavy, hazy disregard for the night. I notice again the guy standing on his own, and I wander over to him. Misery loves company, I suppose.

                “Hey, how’s your night going?” He makes a noise in my direction that a more optimistic man might term a grunt. “You enjoying the tour?”

                “Sure man. Whatever.” He’s American, and clearly in no mood to talk. I give him space.

                Our second stop of the night is the sort of trendy, hedonistic, hell hole you can find in any city, beautiful young hipsters spouting armchair philosophy and unsolicited advice, drinking drinks in colours I don’t know the names of. The whole place is lit up with a throbbingly bright white light, obfuscating any attempt at reason or thought. Here I drink a double and without even a moment of hesitation or consideration order a second. Music plays at a volume I’m not sure whether to term altogether too loud or too quiet, built as it is of an endless baseline, with none of the requisite soprano contrast. The American is standing a few feet away from me, pressed up against the bar, looking out straight ahead, his eyes spotlights against the darkness, seeking out... something. I order him a drink, and he turns to look at me.

                His eyes are furrowed in on themselves, and though he meets my gaze, I can tell the light bouncing off his corneas isn’t making its way any deeper, he isn’t seeing or hearing any of it, no, I can see reflected off the water’s surface images of a life that could have been, bounced off his ear drums the sound of a woman’s saccharine voice, the promise of children’s laughter.

                “Hey man, you doing okay?” He stares at me for a time that edges my mind into recollection of 80s horror movies.

                “No. No, not really.”

                “Well, uh...” I’m a tour guide for fuck’s sake.

                “I wasn’t supposed to be alone tonight. I wasn’t supposed to be alone, period, I guess. I wasn’t this morning.” I order him another drink, and he looks into the glass of liquid just a little too clear, the harsh chemical smell of good vodka drifting up from the glass and passing unfiltered into his head, with a near imperceptible curl of his nose. He drinks it down anyway, and he cringes ever so slightly. He’s not me, then. He’s not yet learned to embrace the pain in the name of killing the hurt.

                The third stop is familiar already in my brain’s immediate consciousness, the woman on stage needing no further introduction. As expected, the thick red carpet is crawling like ants up my wavering vision. I push back the scene’s encroaching sibilation with another drink or two, the burn of the whiskey now a slick honey sliding reassuring down my throat.

                For the fourth time tonight, I notice my single charge. He’s staring longingly at the girl on the stage, and I feel an edging annoyance at his internalized presumption, being as it is a mirror onto my own dark night of the soul. Still, though, the thought has a surprising lucidity in amongst the hazy, smoky air, my drunken stumble, and that salted caramel voice playing loud like Nancy Sinatra. I try to push it back into the recesses of long and oft forgotten self-knowledge.

                I order two drinks and bring one over to the man who’s name I still don’t know. He stares at it for a long moment of eyes crashing down out the bottom of the glass into the pit of his own misery, before looking up to me. He sips quickly, and I can tell he doesn’t really know how to drink whiskey either. No, this is the sort of man who hasn’t drunk anything but beer and wine since he graduated college a decade and ten million miles ago.

                “I don’t think I caught your name?” He looks like he may not bother with my hanging question, but in the end he decides to take my hook and run it out to the fifty yard line.

                “Jonathon. Never Johnny. You know, I booked this tour for both of us? At the end of the night, I was going to propose to her, find some pretty spot overlooking the city and the ocean and... you know, somewhere romantic. And then I was going to ask her to marry me. This morning, she found the ring in my bag. I came out of the shower and she was just... looking at it, you know? Like she’d found... I don’t know... drugs or something. She looked up at me and it was just like... it was like she was scared. Her beautiful blue eyes... they were terrified. Wouldn’t even talk to me. She just packed her clothes and left, without a word. She’s ignored all my texts and emails and phone calls and... Jesus Christ.”

I order him another drink, and at the bottom of the glass I see refracted in golden brown a life lived out long towards old age, kids and a dog and a big suburban home, first words, first steps, college, retirement, but in the end all I see is lying alone in a hospital bed,  computers quietly beeping out the death notice.

I’ve no response to this man I hardly know, in the midst of what will likely be the great personal tragedy of his life. I’ve built an existence on running away from pain, and in his eyes, the shake in his hands, the tired tremor hovering just at the edge of his voice, I’m reminded why. It’s hard to have your heart broken when you never love in a distance longer than minutes.

In the midst of all this, with a tired sort or irony that lives in the very atmosphere of places like this, the woman on stage begins to croon out “My Baby Shot me Down,” and I decide it’s time to move on to our last stop of the night. This hell hole is at serious risk of being the death of at least one of us, going off the thousand yard stare Jonathan is cutting through Sunny Bono’s eulogy to the left behind.

The final stop of the night, the easy one, is a nightclub no different from a million others all the world over, a hundred, two hundred young people blissed out on booze and sometimes pills, listening to the simplest distillation of the noise of the time, holding on to each other for fear that, should they let go, they’ll fall backwards and pitch long into the void of non-existence and irrelevance. I bid a good night to the group, for here I let them on their own and make my way off to whatever bar will still let me in, to drown out the rest of the night with five drinks too many.

Tonight though is different, as all tonights are. Jonathan stares listlessly over the crowd, at the blissed ecstasy of perfected group thought, at dozens of pretty women and handsome men, all clinging desperately to one another, and I see reflected in him myself before I stopped caring, when I still believed I could be a part of all this, I see it and I want to help him because the worst fate you can wish upon another is that they become you, for we all know our own shit is the worst.

I walk over to him and he stares listlessly at me, the look of a dead man.

“You don’t want to be here man, not now.” I tell him, not totally confident in that particular assertion.

“Where, then?”

“It’s a big world, plenty of options.”

“Most of them closed.”

“Says who?”

“I’m an American. We’re ill suited to movement.”

“I figured it out.”

“Did you?”

               

                Eventually I get him out of the club. The sticky, sweaty air was starting to creep up on me, threatening to suck me into the dancers like I still had a hope for that kind of thoughtless joy. The salty, spicy Moroccan air is a welcome contrast, signs of real life already beginning to stir in amongst the early morning - bakers and butchers and all the rest of the mechanisations of this place, seeping out of the woodwork in these few hours safe from the expat wastrels and lost tourists. In this life I see hope, the simple beauty of normal, routine existence, if not for me, then for Jonathan.

                Now, though, he just looks tired and dazed and a little drunk. Despite my best attempts to the contrary, I’m already feeling a little sober, and I really wish I wasn’t. I steer Jonathan down to the beach, hoping the lapping of the waves can offer him the same freedom and release as it offers me.

                In the night, with the backlight of the city, the sea looks black and endless, but it is onto that which we cannot see that we write hope. Jonathan takes his shoes off with a surprising amount of care, socks too, and walks out a few yards, until the water pushes and pulses at the bottom of his bermuda shorts. He stretches his arms out and the image of Christ is more than subtle.

                “I could just keep walking, you know?” He sounds happy as he says it.

                “You could. I did.”

                “And you didn’t drown?”

                “Every night, only to awaken the next day my hurts all the stronger.”

                “So what do you suggest I do, then?”

                “Go home. Back to your job, back to your life.”

                “What about her?”

                “What about you?”

                There he stands for hours, arms now at his sides, watching the sea, me on the sands behind him, trying to keep my eyes open, in the off chance I have to play Hasselhoff, or try to, rather. The sun stretches and yawns up slowly above the distant horizon, the sky illuminated in brilliant blood and orange and gold, light reflecting off the water with a glittering wit, and behind us the city languorously awakens, the sounds of people beginning another day in the endless saga of repetition, day in, day out, on and on, that which we call life. As I watch Jonathan, I consider I’ve had enough of Tangiers. I need another city, another promise of a life worth holding on to. Maybe Sao Paulo or Cape Town, somewhere far away, a new language, a new culture, new people and bars and restaurants, a new job, a new girl in a new nightclub. As my mind ponders life in Brazil, I hear the ringing of a phone. I check mine, and it’s silent. I look to Jonathan. He takes his phone out of his pocket, hesitantly, looks at the screen.

                “It’s her.”

                He lets his hand come to rest by his hip, turns his eyes back towards the sun, it now just over the line of the blue horizon, then, all at once, he raises his hand behind his head, twists his body, then, in a violent flash of movement, wrenches his arm forward, relaxing his grip as he does so.