The room has been thick with smoke, curling in lazy rings under the ceiling fans, the walls stained amber in the dim light. Tangiers has pulsed outside, the city flickering in neon, shadows shifting like restless ghosts. In the corner, beneath a cracked light, the boss has leaned back in his chair—Moroccan leather, worn with years, his fingers drumming on its arm. He has watched the young men across from him with a hard, steady gaze, reading them as if they’ve already confessed everything.
“You have thought I’m just another hustler,” he has said, a slow smirk pulling at his lips, “another man with hands in pockets, collecting my piece.” The men have been silent, their shoulders tight, but the boss has leaned forward, letting smoke drift from his cigarette. “You haven’t understood it yet, have you? What I do has gone far beyond money. Money has been only a shadow, an echo. What I have done here, it’s made something—call it order, call it peace, but it’s real.”
He has flicked his cigarette ash onto the floor, ignoring the tremor in the younger man’s hand. “If I hadn’t been here, things would have fallen to chaos. The souks, the ports, the whole rhythm of the Medina—everything would have unraveled. What I’ve built has kept this place together, ticked it forward like the gears in an old clock.” His voice has been quiet but sharp, cutting through the haze of the room like a blade.
“Now, maybe you’ve been thinking, if there’s no trouble, why would anyone need a man like me?” He has laughed, a low, rusty sound. “But that’s the trick, isn’t it? If I’m good at my job, then there’s nothing to see. No mess, no broken bones in the street, no blood on the walls. People start to believe there’s nothing wrong, that danger’s a myth.”
He has looked through the window, the lights of Tangiers spread below him like a map of possibilities. “But if something bad had happened? If I had let things slip even once?” His face has hardened, his jaw clenched. “Then they’d say I had failed, that I wasn’t worth the price. They’d forget the times I’ve stopped trouble before it had begun, the messes I’ve cleaned before they’ve spilled over.”
He has paused, smoke wreathing his face, an ancient calm in his eyes. “Do you understand the weight of that? To keep things balanced, never seen, never praised? To hold all the threads while people wonder if you’re even needed? That’s my trade. I’ve made sure that bad things haven’t happened. And that is my curse: the better I do my job, the less they see me, the less they understand what I’ve saved them from. But they come to me in the end, every time, because they have known—even if they forget in the daylight—how much worse it could be.”
The boss has shifted, leaning back as if to take in the whole room with one slow, sweeping look. The young men have sat tense, half-listening, half-staring at the haze of smoke. He has taken a deep breath, as though he’s about to let them in on some secret hidden in the foundations of the city itself.
“You see, people talk about technology as if it’s some kind of miracle, some guarantee of power,” he has murmured, voice like gravel rubbing against silk. “But I’ve seen the truth—no matter how powerful a technology becomes, it’s never more than an experiment. Always a test, always just a step out into the unknown. The fools in labs, the ones behind all those machines and wires, they don’t know what they’re playing with. They’re like children with matches, thinking they’ve mastered fire.”
He has laughed, cold and low, taking another drag from his cigarette. “Technologists think they’re gods, but they’re blind as anyone else. They can’t see the full picture, not until it’s too late. Every invention they’ve made, every so-called ‘solution’—it’s been nothing but a gamble. They’ve played with forces they haven’t understood, and by the time they’ve seen the consequences, it’s already out of their hands.”
He has looked each young man in the eye, holding them there as if weighing their souls. “Me? I’ve never had that luxury. I’ve had to see things for what they are, right from the start. Every move, every deal, every choice has had to be deliberate, no room for loose ends or blind experiments. The people out there,” he has gestured toward the city lights flickering through the window, “they think they’re safe because of some system, some clever design. But all of that, the order they take for granted—it’s only ever been real because I’ve made it so. Not machines, not technology, but flesh and blood, sweat and consequence.”
He has leaned forward, his voice dropping to a whisper, but with the weight of iron. “The men in labs can afford to fail. They learn after the fact, let their failures fall on others, make their adjustments. But here in Tangiers, in the streets, I don’t have that luxury. If I fail, the city burns. That’s the difference. Their power’s experimental; mine’s real.”
The smoke has lingered thick around them, the shadows pooling deeper as his words settled over the room like a warning. “So remember this,” he has said, a dark gleam in his eye, “whatever new marvels or toys they come up with, whatever promises they make—their games will always end in uncertainty. But what I’ve built, what I protect… that’s no experiment. That’s the line between order and chaos. And as long as I’m here, I keep that line.”
The boss has drawn a long, slow drag from his cigarette, and his eyes have softened, gazing out toward the window where Tangiers sprawled like a living tapestry. “This city,” he has said, voice a mix of reverence and resignation, “it isn’t some neat system, like those technologists dream about. No, this place… it’s like the wave and the electron. Infinite, changing, an experiment that’s always in motion, never fixed.”
He has looked back at the young men, holding them in the weight of his stare. “They think they can measure it, control it, like it’s some Western machine. But here? Tangiers is like the wind that rolls off the Rif Mountains, like the markets shifting each dawn, like the sea brushing at the rocks and changing a little each time. Everything here, it’s relationship, it’s the balance of people who’ve known each other’s families for generations. It’s not rules and systems; it’s baraka—the blessings, the weight of lineage, of blood and debt, of favors traded over tea, beneath the palm trees.”
He’s flicked his cigarette ash again, as though brushing off the technologists’ schemes, their neat little theories. “You see, in the North, they have their systems, their grids, their determinations. But here? Here, we have tajriba—a kind of knowing, a trust in the way things unfold, always close, never certain. And like the electron, everything depends on how you look at it, how you’re connected to it. You can’t hold Tangiers in your hand; you can only walk through it, move with it, be part of its rhythm.”
He’s paused, tapping his fingers on the table. “This place is indeterminate, like you said. It’s like the wave. One minute it’s a pulse of energy moving through the souks, the alleys; next moment, it’s gone, disappeared into the Medina’s hidden paths. It slips through your fingers like sand. And every day, every deal I make, every person I touch, it changes. Not in some simple, linear way—they don’t understand that. It’s like trying to catch a river in a cup. You only get a trickle, but the rest flows on, uncontained.”
He’s leaned back, letting his words settle over the young men, filling the room with a silence that has felt thick and heavy. “So they think they can impose their systems here? Control it from the outside? They’ll only ever see a shadow, a surface reflection, because they don’t have the connection, the roots. They don’t have the real understanding. You can’t build a city with formulas, with charts. This city’s made of whispers and debts, of hands clasped over coffee, of promises that outlast lifetimes.”
He’s taken another drag, and his eyes have drifted back to the cityscape beyond the window. “They don’t know Tangiers. They see the city, but not the experiment within it—the push and pull, the pulse beneath the stone, the spirits and ancestors, the ways that cross each other like the wind. And that’s why, in the end, this city is ours. Because we understand that it’s not a problem to be solved. It’s alive, like the ocean, like the mountain, like us. A living, breathing, shifting wave.”