NONFICTION

The Airport Hotel

By Courtney Ann LaFaive     VOLUME 59 No. 2

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The airport hotel is where you end up after the train ride from Marrakech to Casablanca on your sixth day in Morocco. After the Moroccan women buy you snacks from the train attendant, the black coffee lurching over its lid, the croissant leaving oily crumbs, the woman to your right teaching you her favorite word in Arabic: lazeeza. You repeat it to her, Lazeeza, as if you’ve never heard it, as if the man on the street didn’t chase you with such terms the day before: Delicious. As if he didn’t go through his roulette of English, French, and Arabic, trying to find the language to humiliate you best. You didn’t correct him as you ran—you never said he didn’t have to say anything to degrade you. He did it with his hands pawing, lips wet, intentions clear. You never believed things like this happened in the daylight: a stranger chasing you to stick his tongue past your teeth and unzip your pants. He pursued you for blocks, blisters searing at your heels.

In the train car, the woman says it to you again, Lazeeza . . .  American girl? You understand?

Please, you whisper, teach me something else.



Six days earlier, on your first day in Marrakech, you ask the concierge, Rahim, about the billboards you have seen around town. They seem to be public service announcements. Rahim is in his early thirties and grew up in the Middle Atlas Mountains, an eight-hour drive away. He tells you, We have problems in Marrakech. The shopkeepers want to sell their merchandise and are very . . .  He pauses, looking for the word. Persuasive.

What do you mean “persuasive?”  you say.

Maybe it is the wrong expression . . .  Covid was bad for us, he says. Now, they feel they must make up for the money lost when there were no tourists.

You are confused. You had taken a photograph of the billboard on your phone and now show it to him. He whispers the translation, Don’t harass the tourists!

You chuckle.

Rather than a warning—an indication that there is so much harassment of tourists the city has to put up signs to remind citizens not to do it—you take it as a comfort, as though everyone will abide by the billboard, as though you can walk in the streets without fear. You’ve come here alone; your lover back home, who had visited Morocco previously, stayed there. None of your friends wanted to join you. You thought nothing of it. The word harassment feels like something you can handle. Is your confidence really arrogance? Oblivion? Naivete? Maybe all of it. You do not consider the weight of the word, harassment, how it sits heavy in your mouth, a rotten pit to spit.



You book the airport hotel on your fifth day in Marrakech after the man corners you in the alley behind the rug souk. His body forces you to the wall. His lips chapped. His face no more than twenty—maybe eighteen. You are thirty-four. You feel like screaming it, as if your age would help you, as if it would inexplicably shame him, but to yell it, of course, would be meaningless. You chastise yourself. You tell yourself you shouldn’t have come here. You tell yourself you’re foolish. His mouth tastes like hash and yeast. You break your mouth free to yelp, Enough—enough! His palms are concrete against your arms. You don’t know what to do. How to get out. Your mouth tastes like his mouth. Your mouth tastes like blood. You are aware of your cheeks between your teeth. You want to vomit. He stares at you, his mouth parted. Is he surprised he got you here? That he didn’t give up? Has he done this before? The sun is so bright; you feel sweat crust and break beneath your heaving breath.

You think about punching him. About spitting in his face. He goes to kiss you again, and she appears: a white woman with a British accent who looks to be about your age, asking if you are okay. Asking what is going on. Asking why you are sobbing. The man releases you, pretending he hadn’t just pursued and pinned you against a wall in the medina. He screams at you, asking you why you are crying as if he weren’t the reason. The woman asks you if you are okay. No, you gasp.

The man lies to her. He says he was only helping you find your way through the medina. I am a guide, he says, wiping his hand across his wet mouth. He says you are lost.

By now, other men, shopkeepers, have gathered, yelling in Arabic at the man. You want to believe they are chastising him, but you have no idea what they say. He turns to the woman and claims that you need his help. This lady is fine, he says, pointing to you and your damp, pink face.

The woman tells him to get the hell away from you, grabs you by the arm, and pulls you through the medina. He never goes the hell away. He hollers as you walk away, saying you are going the wrong way; the British woman’s grip is firm against your limp elbow.



The airport hotel is unlike the place you stay in Marrakech. This place in Marrakech is, as Rahim tells you, a classic riad: a traditional Moroccan house built around a courtyard or garden. It is a manicured experience. There are lace curtains and turquoise tiles. Rahim shows you the oils they perfume the hallways with and introduces you to the cleaners who shoo the street cats away. He shows you where they cook the dinners of chicken and liver in a tagine. He tells you that they do not invite the sparrows in, but they come anyway.

Sebastian—the owner--does not like the birds, Rahim says, staring at one that swoops in from the open roof and onto one of the lounge chairs around the pool.

I like them, you say, your arms resting on the front desk, your eyes watching Rahim watching the bird.

I like them too, Rahim says. I let them stay.

You stare at Rahim, and you never considered if you are welcome in this city painted in pink, to this country far from your home. Why did you come to Morocco? You don’t have a good reason. Maybe you didn’t need one. The word invitation is something you take for granted. The word invitation is something you must see everywhere.



The airport hotel was once a novelty.

The first airport hotel opened in Oakland, California, in 1929: the Oakland Airport Inn. You could catch Amelia Earhart selling her autograph at the hotel bar for five dollars, get a shave and a haircut at the barber shop, or eat oysters in the restaurant and gaze at the dirt runway. Some initially flocked there to see the new concept. Yet after a year of operation, the hotel sat empty. Tourists didn’t see the value in an airport hotel, so the owners courted those already accustomed to seeing airports as alluring: pilots and students from the Boeing School of Aeronautics.

Other airport hotels arose, catering mostly to pilots and crews. The Skyport Inn served Memphis International from 1972 until 2012. Most of the rooms lacked windows (save for skylights). Did the airport hotel already know it was associated with impermanence? Who needs a window if guests only stay one night? The Honolulu International Airport once had the Airport Mini Hotel that offered guests a space to nap for less than ten dollars an hour. The rooms were small, the bathrooms acceptable. Perhaps this was the epitome of the airport hotel: something so fleeting it could be rented by the hour. The airport hotel is not the place to take photographs, buy souvenirs, or send a postcard. It is mere utility, a thing that occupies a subordinate position: the prelude or afterword to the main event of your travels.

Your seventy-year-old father works at a hotel now. It is not an airport hotel but a highway motel: the place where travelers stop when they cannot drive any farther. He is a janitor and handyman. Each week, he calls you on the phone and regales you with the things that visitors do to the hotel rooms. They punch holes through the drywall and trail garbage down the hallway. They rip down curtains and create nests for sleeping. Once, he said, a woman left a hotel room covered in feces. She smeared it on the walls and floors. Your father expresses astonishment at the guests and their actions. To you, it makes sense. We are often careless with what is seen as momentary. Of course, there can be bliss in the ephemeral. Isn’t all of life fleeting? But a temporary situation can invite a kind of violence that the appearance of something more permanent does not. We do not take seriously the overture to where we really want to be.



The airport hotel is not what you think of when the British woman, Anna, takes you to her brother’s unfinished riad. Instead, you think you are the luckiest woman in the entire world to have been saved by this woman. You do not yet think of leaving Morocco, cutting your trip short. You only consider the coffee she puts before you, the digestive biscuit she implores you to eat, the cigarettes she and her brother smoke, and the theories she has: that foreign women are harassed here in such abundance because there are no repercussions. Your brother or husband are not going to come looking for the man that assaults you. You return to your home country and only have your story of the man that followed, groped, or raped you. That dick is as good as anonymous to you now, she says, taking a drag.

Your mouth is all blood and his tongue thrusting. You think that, yes, there is no punishment from the foreigner, but that does not mean Moroccan women are not harassed. You walk to the pool, dip your empty coffee cup into the water, and stare into the cup’s clear expanse. You want to drink it. Maybe the chlorine would kill the taste of him. Maybe it would poison you, and you could sleep for hours. You theorize aloud that chlorine isn’t toxic when ingested. You say that it would freshen your breath. Anna must know you are plotting, going somewhere dark and strange. She walks up to you and bats the coffee cup out of your hand and into the pool. She tells you you’re mad, gets a glass of water, and proceeds to dump half a shaker of salt into it. You watch her, your hand raised as if the coffee cup were still there. She hands the glass to you and commands you to gargle, and you do. You spit into a potted plant, the salt stinging your bitten lips.

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COURTNEY ANN LAFAIVE is an essayist, educator, and author of two books. Her latest book is Follow the Signs: Searching for Linda Goodman, America’s Forgotten Astrology Queen (University of Iowa Press, 2026). Her essays have been listed as notable in the 2020, 2021, and 2023 editions of The Best American Essays and can be seen in Literary Hub, Missouri Review, and Worms Magazine. Her work has garnered her a Fulbright Fellowship to Riga, Latvia, and support from the American-Scandinavian Foundation, Kunstnarhuset Messen (Ålvik, Norway), the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, USF Verftet (Bergen, Norway), and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Courtney is an assistant professor of English at the University of North Dakota.


VOLUME 59 No. 2