WALKING ON THIN ICE

What goes on inside my head is a sountrack to Popeye, where I am Olive Oil — attractive if I’m the only woman my age around — and where I say, “Oh yeah? Oh-oh-oh,” just like Olive.

I have fears of many Brutuses. Or if plural, is it Brutii? Or just Fear of the Brute.

When we first got here I found a capsule in the toilet. I thought that they dropped knock-out meds into our fizzy water.

The apartment had FOUR balconies. None of the doors would lock closed. I imagined Spidermen crawling up the sides of the building, or shimmying down the roof, or hiding in the basement stairwell in the night, waiting to creep up the stairs and force their way in to MY specific apartment. I imagine the concierge putting a bull’s eye in invisible ink right on our door.

So we’re in our last night of our Marrakech apartment. No one has cheated us out of our rent. The owner turned out to be no film noire villainess, but a wonderful woman who offered to let us come back for free in December.

The “avocat” turned out to dig poetry and art, and we’ve developed a friendship with him.

The concierge would not take a tip from us in a gesture of integrity. And I’d feared him taking the computer. Imagine that. When I look into his face, he beams and it’s a like I’m talking to a friendly Chesire cat. The smile is what remains in the afterburn as Smith and I walk down the street.

Our guide’s hand is doing well (he’s missing a finger in a carpentry accident.) The bandages are off. No blood, no infection. He’s receiving medical treatment.

Not only that, in the time we’ve stayed here, he’s added a room to his house. Houses go UP here. There’s the apartment wall, which is really just a fortress against the outside forces. And then people build new floors inside their chunk of building.

He employed three men for his house. So I’m feeling good. It was expensive to have him help us, but I still feel I didn’t pay him enough (even though we can not afford to do something like this all the time.) I figure we paid him $5/hour, and the average hourly wage for Moroccans is $1.63/hour.

The bulk of his work was as a guide. He showed us the tanneries, the workshops. He found our apartment for us. He cheated us out of small change. He took us to two other cities. He built canvasses for my art (there are no art stores here.)

Our guide offered to let us stay in his house before we leave the country, as did the avocat.

“Logan looks like my mom. Same smile, same beautiful silver hair.”

“They didn’t have enough unique molds to go around for all the artificial extras.”

“So my mother has clones?”

“No, they’re not real. You don’t think there’s really 4 to 8 billion people on Earth, do you? They can’t afford to manage them all at one time. So the rest of the people are artificial sense droids, made out of little molds…”

“Artificial sense droids?”

“Yes, sometimes in the sunlight, if you stand just right, you can see the mold ridges, where they didn’t quite sand it right. Also if they sand it TOO well, you see this odd piece of nothingness. It’s really scary when you’re having sex at night with people you can’t see, and as you’re caressing them, you either feel that ridge in the dark, or that extra SMOOTHness.”

“I think you’re a genius.”

“Actually, I’m a genus. I’m the only one in my phylum. That’s why I’m surprised YOU wanted me. Most folk feel uneasy around me. Probably because I keep comparing them to the size of my freezer.”

“Oooh… So there aren’t any droids of YOU?”

“No, they can’t figure out how I work. When you first showed up, I thought you might be working for them, trying to find out more. Cuz you were too good to be true. But now I figure even if you WERE working for them, you’ve defected to MY side.”

“What about that panel in your head?”

“We haven’t been together long enough. Besides, I don’t want to expose myself any longer to this sun then I have to. Maybe in the dark of the night, I’ll give you a peek sometime. You’ll be able to see because it has this soft, phosphorescent glow.”

“Like a cauliflower brain?”

“No, it’s more like one of those lava lamps. More plasmatic.”

“Ah, cheap special effects.”

“Yeah, just like in the Frankenstein movies. All those little things going BWEEP, BWIP. More like a Tesla coil.”

“It was really you I was writing that poem about. You’re the next manifestation.”

“Of? Actually, I’m an infestation. The next infestation. I’m the early infrastructure for the next infestation affecting the nation.”