Ed. Note: This article originally appeared in the debut issue of Last Exit on 9/15/07.

I.

Tan Tan, Morocco

It had been a mistake to arrive early. Although it was Saturday, the high school where I had agreed to meet my interview turned out to be in session, and I was making a spectacle of myself standing in front of it, scanning the sparse eucalyptus forest for the lanky young man I’d met protesting in front of the governor’s office two weeks before. With each minute he didn’t arrive, a circle of teenage girls in headscarves and tracksuits tightened around me. Eventually, their politeness could no longer contain their curiosity and they started firing questions in impressive classroom French: “Are you married? How many children? Can I have your email address?”

Everything but their scarves clashed strangely with the Biblical scene behind them: the dusty road winding through the mottled shadows and the dun-colored hillside where someone had arranged white stones into Arabic letters proclaiming allegiance to God, country and king. A 10-minute walk down the road brought you into the center of Tan Tan, a desert outpost at the southern edge of Morocco near the disputed territory of the Western Sahara. It was to talk about this dispute that I had arranged the interview.

But he was late, and I was becoming a freak show. The boys kept their distance, leaning against the trees and staring, but the girls’ questioning was becoming aggressive. Eventually, one of the older, more astute girls decided the show had gone on long enough. She suggested my “friend” had played a mean trick on me by suggesting such an exposed meeting place, and led me away from the crowd in search of a public telephone. We were halfway to the central souk when Zouine Khalifa overtook us, wearing a soccer scarf tied like a Londoner and a cloud of cologne.