Tangerine(48)

“Good.” John beamed at us, looking over his shoulder. “Now, follow me.”

I was the last to enter the back room, and it took a few moments of rapid blinking to adjust to the dim light, so that by the time I took in our surroundings—a floor mat of some sort, not quite bamboo, but not quite wood; walls so deeply stained with tobacco that in the dim light I could not make out the color; and finally, a few low tables, around which a handful of men in traditional djellabas sat, smoking from pipes—John and Alice had already claimed one of the low tables and were sitting cross-legged beside it. I quickly joined them.

“It took a fair amount of convincing to get you in here,” John said, his face serious, though his tone was self-congratulatory. “This is what would amount to an old boys’ club here, so strictly no women allowed. You’re both in luck that the owner of this joint owes me a favor—still, I promised him no more than fifteen minutes, a half an hour tops.”

“And what are we doing here?” I asked, eyeing the other men in the room. Most of them appeared to be well into their fifties, maybe sixties, and though they had turned to us with interest upon our arrival, a majority of them had already looked away, rejoining conversations that had stalled and picking up their slackened pipes.

“This,” John said, producing his own pipe, one that had apparently been stashed somewhere within the folds of his suit until then. “You aren’t afraid, are you?” he teased, waving the kif pipe nearer to Alice’s face. His smile seemed to alter, turning small and mean. Not the Pied Piper after all, I found myself thinking: more like the big bad wolf, tempting us off the path. It felt as though he wanted to poke, to prod—to turn us upside down and see what would fall out. He was nervous, I realized—of what I had told Alice about Sabine, of what, perhaps, had happened between us. I could see it—his suspicions, his paranoia—shimmering in the air around us.

Alice extended her hand and dutifully inhaled the smoking pipe, only to then cough and sputter, much to my amazement and John’s apparent delight. I hesitated when it was passed in my direction. While I had always liked cigarettes—from an early age when I had stolen my first pack from the corner shop and ridden my bicycle down by the creek to smoke them—this was something different. I pursed my lips, trying to decide whether or not it suited me, trying to decide what it was that was happening, the night already taking on a strange disorder that I could not figure out, could not reassemble into something familiar and known.

John, meanwhile, laughed loudly. “There now,” he proclaimed, snatching the pipe back from me. “That wasn’t so terrible, was it?”

I tilted my head, not entirely sure who the words had been directed at. And soon it was as if they had never been spoken at all. In fact, it was all becoming rather muddled. The drink we had sipped back at the apartment before heading out, and now the kif—all of it crowded and confused my mind. It began to seem as though we had been sitting there for an eternity, and yet I was certain that very little time had passed at all. I decided then I didn’t like it, if only for the way it seemed to swallow time whole. And yet I felt strangely emboldened, sitting in our strange circle of three. I thought of the words I wished to speak, prepared, I thought, to voice them at last if Alice would not. I looked over at her, to ensure that she felt the same, and found her slumped in the corner, her eyes glassy and distant. I wondered whether it was the kif, or whether she had looked like this before and I had somehow failed to notice.

I felt then as though the air had gone out of me. I stood, moving quickly toward the back door, leaning my body out and into the night sky. I inhaled deeply, slowly, grateful that the sun had already set, that some of the humidity had begun to leak out of the day. I grasped my head, willing it to stop spinning, to stop moving so swiftly.

I glanced back at the table. Alice remained still—like stone, I thought, impenetrable. John, sucking determinedly on the pipe, looked up and caught me staring. I tried to read what was there behind his eyes, but then he blinked and rose from his seat, asking, “Shall we go on?”

I heard a general chorus of agreement, though I had not spoken a word. Still, we followed him, Alice and I, traipsing after him once more like schoolchildren. Neither of us asked where we were headed, we only continued to walk, silently and obediently, our heads both bowed as we concentrated on the unleveled road beneath us, careful not to misstep in the darkness.

We had walked for some time in silence when John disappeared through a hidden doorway. It was darker than the place we had just left, so I stumbled a few times before finding a place to sit. Onstage was a group of older men, sitting in a semicircle, though the music they were playing was decidedly not jazz—even my uninitiated ear could distinguish as much. Instead a blend of Arabic and Andalusian music emerged from the instruments held by the men, their voices occasionally adding to the melody. They played often together, as a collective, and then there were moments where one of them paused and the others took over the music, each one seeming to anticipate the rhythm and flow of the other. I watched as one of the old men used this interlude to produce a kif pipe, tucked unceremoniously in his back pocket until then. The old man inhaled, a second or two stretching out into three or four.

I noticed the look of annoyance that passed over John’s face. “Wrong night, I suppose?” I asked him, fighting to keep the smirk out of my voice.

He ignored my comment. “So,” he proclaimed instead, looking back and forth between the two of us, as if deciding what route to travel down—whether to give in to the desperation or to cling to the illusion, the falsity, that everything was fine, that everything would continue to be fine. I looked away, not knowing which one I hoped for. Despite John’s jubilant tone, there was something hard, something rougher than there had been before. “Alice finally left the flat.”