The marathon tourists

I was confused.

All I knew for right now was that I was riding in a rickshaw, a bicycle rickshaw, going up a very large hill, and it was about a hundred and fifteen degrees out. In the back of my mind I was making plans for what to do when the driver collapsed of a heart attack. I'd been up for three days now, and I didn't feel tired at all. I just felt incapable of remembering the smallest things.

"Are we going back to the hotel?" I asked Bart.

"Honey, we don't have a hotel, remember?" he said. I swear Bart was as bad off as me, but his inability to tolerate not being a know-it-all gave him the extra motivation necessary to get his lump of gray matter working. "We're going to the temple."

"Is the temple open right now?"

"He says it is." Bart nodded at the driver, whose hair was as wet as if he'd just stepped out of the ocean.

"Remind me what we did today."

Bart struggled for a moment, then pulled out his camera and flipped through the images. Us at a street market... I suppose I remembered that... us at the beach, us next to an unsmiling monk, me on a hill in front of the sunrise. I had no memory of that sunrise.

"It's almost eight o'clock," he said. "Let's take the pills." And I washed the tiny white thing down with his bottle of water because this was how we planned it. You had to jump through a lot of hoops to get these pills in the United States. But in Thailand? Heck, they wanted you to have them. Developed for the military fifteen years ago, they were now ready for the consumer: sleep in a bottle, or sort of. Not only would they keep you awake, they sidled around many of the inconvenient side effects of sleep deprivation: poor judgment, depression, hallucinations. Whatever the body did with itself while you were asleep, the pills allowed it to happen while you were awake. Except for one thing.

"Honey," I laughed, "I have no idea where the hell you took that picture."

I stared at my own image. It might as well have been someone else. My brain's ability to preserve new memories was operating at a severe handicap. Yet that was part of the plan too. It was all part of the plan. Skip the hotels, stay awake for a week, see everything we could and never go back to Thailand again. And the memories? What memories? Live for the moment, we said.

"Neither do I," he said, as the rickshaw began to coast down the other side of the hill. "Isn't it great?"