AD.

I’m lying on Smith’s lap. It’s been an exhausting day.

“Do you want me to close the door? Then I’ll give you my leg back.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Steve looks hurt. “It doesn’t matter?”

“I mean, your leg matters, but the door doesn’t. Not to me, anyways.”

“But they’re both made of matter, therefore they must matter.”

“Does matter matter?” I ask.

“Only to Auntie Matter. Uncle and Auntie Matter.”

“I’m looking across the street at that apartment building. Only two lights on.”

“Do you see any people in the rooms?”

“Oh, someone watching TV for sure. And possibly a person in the other window, I don’t know. I wonder what those apartments are like compared to this. And why are only two windows occupied? Are people away from home?”

“Well, the others are shuttered. And I don’t see anyone opening the shutters. I think the building’s mostly empty.”

“I don’t understand it,” I say. “And I don’t understand our building. It has the character of an old building, but it’s definitely only two years old. The workmanship is so sloppy that it seems like an old building. Just look at the wall around the door. Big gaps, sloppy cutting. The door doesn’t close all the way. And the plastic panel above the door looks like it is dirty, dingy, old. And the paint job is new, but it’s like there are no regulations here. I don’t think they sanded down the walls before they painted. But it is a new paint job; it’s not dirty. The light fixtures are surprisingly elegant, though. And there’s beautiful molding around the ceiling. And marble countertops in the kitchen and bathrooms. But then there’s the elevator. It’s so old-looking. I’m afraid of that elevator. I can see getting stuck between floors.”

We often have to coax the elevator to close its doors. It’s temperamental.

“No, it’s a friendly elevator,” Smith says. “That’s all. It’s not a dangerous elevator.”

“I wonder where they got it. They must have salvaged it from an old building. It can’t possibly be a new elevator, can it?”

* * *

“It’s so cool that our power supply was fixed.”

“Yes.”

“I like this third world *can do*.”

Smith’s computer’s power supply failed, probably due to the marginal vagaries of Moroccan electricity. Mohammed took it to a friend. He fixed it for 100 Dirhams, about $12.

People are skilled here. Hundreds and hundreds of craftsmen live and work in the medina. Carpenters, weavers, tanners… all kind of industry hums away. One of my favorite activities is to follow Hamid through the workshops. I gather scraps of discarded metal crafts for collage. It’s a sin that such skilled people make so little money. They sell leather wrapped handcrafted lamps for as little at 3 bucks. I think they could be sold for $200 in upscale US markets.

I bought a small percussion instrument. It’s a drum that I can twirl so that beads whip against it. It’s got a hand-cut dowel rod, a leather drum face, and it’s painted.

I asked Hamid, “Why does this cost only 15 dirhams?” Fifteen dirhams is $2.

Hamid said, “Oh, it only took them three minutes to make that. They just threw it together. Not much work went into it.”

But I appreciate its beauty and the delightful sound it makes.

I wonder about the cost for surface mail from here to the US. I could support local craftsmenship, send some nice things to my family.

* * *

“I’m looking at my legs and they seem fat to me. But not unattractive. Just, I can see where the fat is.”

“I’m wasting away. Soon you’ll be with the Ghost of Smith.”

“I’m wondering now how other people see us.”

“I don’t think about that much.” Smith’s accustomed to going his own way, heedless of others’ opinions.

“Well I used to think about it more, but not so much lately. I wonder what the Moroccans think about us. I think not much. I think our age disparity is normal here, not a stigma.”

“I think they see us mostly as white people. That’s what they notice.”

“We *are* watched…”

“(Probably by the FBI…)”

* * *

“I notice that since I started understanding spoken French, my self respect — no, my self esteem — has improved.” I have more handles on reality.

“Self respect is a sort of like self esteem, isn’t it?”

“Well, I think a lot of people questioned our relationship in the beginning. Some people were pretty verbal about it. But by now we’ve proved that it’s the real thing.”

“Oh, no doubt about that. I’m going to rent you out to them. They’re all jealous. They can get five minutes of Kathy.”

“What’s the rate?”

“The rate?”

“For five minutes of me.”

“Five thousand dollars and an ounce of hash.”

“An ounce of hash would be a lot.”

“And a different colored hash each time.”

“This hash seems to be brown.”

“This is brown hash. Brown moroccan hash. There’s black hash, there’s blonde hash, a couple different shades of green hash. Did I say blonde?”

“Yeah.”

“I think we had black and gold in Amsterdam. We also had black gungy hash. There’s black hash, and then there’s also black gungy hash which you can press. It’s soft. It’s got opium in it.”

“Actually, I think my self esteem improved once we found drugs in Bezier.”

“Oh yeah. That was cool. We scored on our own… without help.”

* * *

“Do you want to see my wooden mouse?”

“OK, sure.”

“See, it’s got one eye here and one eye there.” Steve points to the inlaid pattern on the side of a table. “And here where this wood hangs down, it’s got a little wooden mouse nose.”

“No, I think it’s a titty table.” I grab the mouse nose and make milking motions.

“No, it’s definitely a mouse, some large rodent.”

Furniture seems novel to me now. I appreciate the luxury of a good couch and bathtub. I used to own five couches in the house I owned with my first husband. Now such materialism makes me want to vomit. My exhusband and I tumbled into engineering careers in the ballooning IT industry of the nineties. I left him in 2002, and lost my job a month later. I started my City Poetry zine that summer. Smith started his web site as well.

When I think about the future, it’s with a sense of vertigo. When Smith and I move back to the US or perhaps Mexico, what are we going to do? I gave everything away. I have no furniture, no home. I have artwork in storage, but that’s all. I don’t have any clothes in which to do a job interview. I have 30 pounds of possessions, really.

We’ll have to move to a major city because we have no car. To have to use a car regularly is repugnant to us. The world is worse with a car.

One of my fears is the dollar’s devaluation. Over the past five years, I think the Euro has gained 50% against it and the British Pound has doubled. Speculators recently started to prefer Euros to dollars. Wall Street’s percentage of the international market trading is declining. China has recently talked about selling its US debts.

I’d like to get a bank account in Euros for the short term, but that won’t help us in the future. Social Security is paid in dollars. I think the reason for this devaluation is that our government prints beaucoup extra currency to pay off its creditors.

In Croatia, we learned that when people lose faith in their currency and banks, they invest in real estate. It’s a kind of tangible, semi-permanent investment. They buy lots and construct houses. Morocco has a lot of new apartments. Most of them seem uninhabited.

Smith says we’re going to be poor. He’s taking early social security next year when he turns 62. It seems that he expects I won’t go back to work.

I think the memoir has a chance of success. We have over 200 pages from Smith’s previous life. None of it is filler material; it’s all solid good stuff like stealing cars, doing drugs, committing armed robbery and prison. The first half of Smith’s life will probably be 300 pages once I edit it on the next pass. It will expand because I plan to rewrite the material to put it in present tense, adding reconstructed conversations. We also have 915 pages of blog material. We can construct our recent history from the best of the blogs for the second half of the book. I imagine the finished memoir could be more than 500 pages long.

But if the memoir fails, I plan to work again. It’s too risky to rob banks, and anyways I don’t want to hurt anyone.

I have rigorous daily habits. I’ve maintained and probably improved the discipline required for a career. I spend sometimes 12 hours a day or more writing or doing art or learning languages. Now that we have a bathtub, I spend the first hour of the day in the tub studying my French dictionary or conjugation tables.

I spend the next two or three hours editing my blog or other writing and photos for the blog. In France where we had constant Internet access, I read the news from commondreams. And then I’d keep up with everyone else’s blogs. And after that, I’d do some other web development work. No time to do that here in Morocco, though.

In the evening we spend about four hours talking and writing. I smoke on alternate evenings, because if I do more than that I get too fuzzy.

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