Koh Samed Island

Prudent Morgan laid down to sleep after most of the whiskey was gone but the intern and I resolved to see this thing through to what end may come. We drifted down to the beach. There was a thin and high cloud cover but the light was good enough to see where the sky met the sea and the sea, the land. We stood in the surf and the intern rolled a hog leg cigarette. He's got a very technologically advanced cigarette holder that filters tar and actually turns the cigarette into a substantial health benefit.

The water washed warm around our ankles. Behind us, lanterns hung in trees and strings of white lights ran along roof lines and down poles. Music drifted up the beach with the wind. A polluted blend of house thump, Jack Johnson and Elvis Costello. In front of us in the distance; a boat. The intern is stoic in English but becomes quite animated with laughter and inflection when answering a phone call in his native tongue. We worked on the whiskey and I spoke with deep regard for the ocean and her cold indifference for life and death and her constant supply of both. The intern muttered solemnly in agreement and tilted his head back back back until he was face to face with the sky.

The whiskey being gone, we decided on a constitutional toward the lights. A soup counter was open late so we sat down and ordered 2 bowls. I finished up a bag of cheese and onion chips. A stray dog with festering, gaping sores stood by like a ghost. His dead eyes bled and watched us with no emotion. This poor beast was ambivalent to even his own hunger. Should we give him some chips, I asked the intern. He took them and scattered the last few chip shards on the cobblestone. Everything has a right to eat here in Thailand, Aut said. The soup was hot and fine.

This morning the Intern and Morgan went for some light nature walking aerobics through the jungle, in search of a ping pong table. It was always a game ill-suited to my god-like stature and I elected to stay behind. Besides my hands and arms had become painfully distended with vampire mosquito venom and I decided the morning would be best spent in the pursuit of some type of antibiotics or a doctor competent enough to perform a double amputation. I met Gar and his girlfriend out on the deck. We had two Heinekins and I tried not to look at a group of British thru-hikers as they tried not to look at us. We hopped a truck taxi to the center of town which is about a mile down a bombed out donkey path from tranquil Samed Villas. Morgan called and told Gary they were lost in the mountains in the central part of the island. I sat down in the dim clinic. On the other side of the desk a pleasant man nodded at me. I showed him the massive welt on my forearm and he nodded and said in heavily accented English that I had a tropical disease, and laughed. I was not familiar with this type of humor. The fever kicked in a little by now and I saw the rash was spreading as he examined it with a flashlight. I had no patience for the language barrier and had resigned myself to whatever he slid over the desk. Then, from nowhere, a voice over my right shoulder. Aut the Intern had descended from the jungle with all speed to oversee this transaction. After a brief exchange we walked out with two bags of pills and a tube of arm toothpaste.

At night you can sit on mats on the beach and have plates of food brought to you. In the throes of my recent ailment, I've taken to wearing pants and long-sleeved shirts dipped in a bucket of bug spray, and ordering things like chicken fingers and french fries. When you're sick in a foreign country, familiar food becomes instinctual and essential. While you eat, people walk around with big tissue paper cylinders. They have a delicate wire frame and they're open on the bottom. For 200 Baht, you can buy one and write a message on it. The Intern said it's common to write the name of a dead friend or relative on there and send it up into the sky, express mail. The guy lights a wax torch and the whole thing is illuminated quite beautifully. It flickers and drifts up over the ocean and you can see it fade for some time. Then with a final twinkle, it's gone. I'll see you again in another life old friend, when we are both cats.