Geography Lessons

When the man lets go of my arm and slips into a cracked door at the end of the alley, I don’t run.

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I was never good at geography. My husband and I play Wii Jeopardy and curse at Katie, the computer avatar with bad highlights, who sweeps the category from us both.

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I keep walking, jostle through the streets of Morocco draped in my roommate’s gear for the day, his camera tucked into an army green messenger bag. I militarize myself, dial in and charge toward the pink lights three blocks ahead. My brown map-print purse raps my hip with each step. The antique fabric warns HERE THERE BE MONSTERS in a tea-stained swath of sea that doesn’t help me here.

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When I was six, my godmother bought me a desk and topographic globe. Every country was a different color. I ran my finger over the mountain ranges, lingering over the soft bubbles where the land rose up like a keloid scar. After, she sent my mother postcards from Mississippi, Missouri, but I never saw her again.

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“I’m meeting someone,” I say to the man, “Someone is waiting for me.” It’s not a lie. I’d dropped my roommate at the Turkish bath and planned to reconvene at the coffee shop after his sweat and scrub. I lug all our gear for the day, alone in a crowd of strangers who do nothing when the man hooks his arm in mine.

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In seventh grade, I won the class Geography Bee because the boy behind me whispered all the answers in my ear. Sherwood Forest. Boomerang. I moved on to compete against the school and lost. No one was there to help me.

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For half a block the man holds on in broad daylight, our elbows deadlocked against each other as I try to outpace him. The moment our feet leave curb for cobblestone, he tugs and tows me from the crowd. My bags hula hoop my hips in the alley where a door is propped open. Four fingers and a foot are waiting.

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My sister and I used to rest our finger on the equator and spin. Wherever our fingers landed, that was where we were supposed to live. She landed on Moldova. Djibouti. I always seemed to end up in the middle of the ocean, my finger adrift in a flat span of blue.

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When my roommate asks, “Who wants to go to Morocco for break?” I volunteer because it sounds romantic. My sister jokes, “Don’t let him trade you for a camel.” I laugh and look up Morocco on the map. My finger scans three continents to find it.

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Early cartographers were explorers trying to make sense of the world. They gave shapes to the surface of things to document a navigable path, a dangerous route. I can’t even be sure of which city this happened in.

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The cities are steeped in deep blues and reds and greens. The hues of earth and water. The guidebook is color coded. My roommate carries the book. He buys a fistful of saffron and carries the bag the color of clay from Fes to Meknes. If you touch it, the saffron stains everything like rust that won’t rub off.

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In Marrakech I enter the medina squinting. My blue-tint lenses fail to filter the sun. I don’t notice the snakes until someone shouts when I almost step on a spool of black scales. Triplet cobras, their bodies scrolled on red earth and a charmer in white, three upturned baskets by his side. But this is some other city. This is not Marrakech.

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I make it back to the coffee house where I drown in pink lights and svelte Coke bottles I save and, ten years later, display on the same bookshelf as my wedding photos. My instinct is to persevere through preservation.

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The world is divided into snakes and charmers. It is often difficult to tell what is before you until it is too late.

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Now that I’m a mother, there are stories of my life I’m not supposed to tell, parts of the world I am supposed to shade over as if they aren’t there. This is one of them. Still, I want to map out all the alleys where worlds close behind doors, where someone else is waiting, not just for the man who disappeared, but for me too.