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I once cooked away a bad memory.

Skip to next paragraph Enlarge This Image Lars Klove for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Jill Santopietro

I’d just been through a difficult breakup with my boyfriend. Over the course of our 10 years together, he’d given me the gift of travel — he took me to Costa Rica once and Italy six times — and now, to show my fiery, post-split mettle, I’d decided to take myself on a trip someplace exotic and adventuresome. Someplace he’d never been. I wanted an experience that would be transporting and perhaps even sublime.

Morocco.

My guidebook said that, when sightseeing in Morocco, never hire an unofficial guide, as they are illegal. But the first thing I did upon stepping outside of my hotel in Marrakesh was to hire an unofficial guide. Mohammed, sporting a djellaba and a huge smile, had a lot going for him — he said he knew the best place to buy spices in the outdoor market, and he wanted only for showing me around. This augured well.

We walked to the spice market, a labyrinthine jumble of open-air stalls and dark corners. Suave and twinkly-eyed, Mohammed combined worldly know-how with a lot of dramatic hand gestures — Omar Sharif for the deaf. I bought cellophane sleeves of turmeric and cumin, thinking of the fabulous tagines I would make when I got home. When a grim-looking vendor had me smell a tiny vial of orange-blossom oil, or neroli, I had a spasm of near-synesthesia — I could almost see orange blossoms. Not really knowing what the oil was used for, I bought the vial for about .

Mohammed next took me to the Majorelle Gardens, the luxuriant park just outside Yves St. Laurent’s home. He said that I should go in, and that he’d meet me at the entrance at 12:30. But at 12:30, there was no sign of Mohammed. I asked several other guides if they’d seen him and explained that I hadn’t paid him yet; they had not. I waited for half an hour. Mohammed was nowhere to be found.

Back in my hotel room, I grew uneasy. Mohammed knew where I was staying: La Mamounia, the opulent, four-star hotel that I’d treated myself to as my Marrakesh entry point. There were several witnesses to the fact that I had not paid him. Would he and the police show up at my door? Then I looked at the spices and the oil. The vendors I’d bought them from were clearly in financial cahoots with Mohammed, as is often the case with guides and vendors.

Suddenly my unease metastasized into panic. Oh, my God, I thought, the spices are drugs! Maybe it’s Mohammed’s M.O. to plant drugs on innocent-looking tourists staying at pricey hotels and then extort money from them! Only in my feverish imagination has the word “turmeric” ever called to mind the word “shakedown.” The chain of illogic and anxiety kept ramping and ramping up, threatening to burst from my head like the elevator in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”

I grabbed the spices and the oil and walked for about five minutes to the most remote part of the hotel, where I found a canister-style ashtray. Biting into the cellophane sleeves to open them, I dumped their contents into the ashy sand and swirled it around: paranoiac Spin Art. Why I thought I needed to empty, rather than simply discard, the sleeves is unclear to me now, but at the time it seemed the only option; it was as if my fear were a free-floating virus and I was its human host.

When I opened the vial of orange-blossom oil to empty it too, though, I smelled it again and thought, No, I cannot throw this away. It seemed so pure and goldeny. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it smelled like, and then it struck me. It smelled like the gift soap in Heaven. I put it back in my pocket.

I did run into, and pay, Mohammed in front of the hotel the next morning — it turned out he’d been arrested outside the gardens for unofficial guiding — but when I saw him again, he looked about as threatening as a pair of socks. That he kept calling me sir after I asked him several times to call me Henry seemed only to underscore how deluded a gringo I’d been. Nevertheless, the anxiety and stress of my spice-jettisoning cast a slight pall over the rest of my trip, barring my entry into the sublime. Ten days after the Spice Incident, having sniffed the oil with a frequency bordering on the abject, I spirited it into my luggage for my flight home. The most redolent thing I’d ever smelled in my life was now synaptically connected to one of the more embarrassing moments in my life.

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Henry Alford has written humor essays for The New Yorker, The New York Times and Vanity Fair.