The Spooky Taste of Thai Delirium

June 2005
A Train
A Guesthouse
Chiang Mai, Thailand

The curry we eat at the Bangkok marketplace is delicious. The fruit is luscious and vibrant, jewels from some unnamable palace that were shaken loose and put in baskets to soothe us after a long day of baking in the Southeast Asian sun. We buy three large Singha beers and sip them gluttonously as we wait for the train that will take us north to the province of Chiang Mai.

The train is spacious and cool. We spy a young mother and her breathtaking baby daughter seated in the berth next to us and can’t help but make silly faces. Night has fallen and we fold our seats into cots and get ready for sleep.

My eyes shoot open. I have been sleeping for many hours. There is daylight in the train. My clock says 1:30. There is a fluorescent bulb that drenches the train in an artificial glow. I try to fall asleep. I cannot. I am freezing. The white blanket is thin. I wake up. No time has passed. I am sweating. I try to sleep. I am dizzy. I shut my eyes and hope we arrive soon.

In the morning, I am woozy. I totter gingerly behind Daniel and Simon, my traveling companions. We arrive at our guesthouse. We are offered coffee and tea. I sip some water with effort. We get to our room. I lie down and sleep for a bit. Daniel and Simon go off to explore the town. I sleep, feeling feverish. I get up often to go to the bathroom. Always the same, hot liquid pours from my bowels.

It is dark. Daniel and Simon are away. I am asleep. My mind cooks with fever.

My body ceases to have substance and my consciousness expands. Through the power of my delirium, I am able to comprehend all of the numbers that have been and will ever be. As laborers toil over plows and architects manipulate angles, I see equations and formulas spring into being. History ceases to be the linear arrow, piercing ever forward but is a three-dimensional globe with infinite threads and points of entry. All things are numbers. Matter dissolves to reveal its component parts: proofs and variables, trigonometry and algebra.

The world, according to my fevered eyes, is not unlike that of The Matrix. I was never particularly strong at math so my number world was rather elementary. But you must understand that, at this moment, my consciousness was totally immersed in this vision and all of its surreal implications.

My physical body is in complete disarray. It is scared and nauseous, boiling and freezing. I feel myself get up out of bed and move around the room. Sensation now is no longer limited to my eyes, thus my number fingers stretched out toward the number walls to feel its number vibrations.

Since all things now are absolutely infinite and absolutely collapsible, my fever logic convince me that I can walk from Chiang Mai, Thailand, back home to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And this is exactly what I set out to do. I open the door to our room, slump down the stairs, all the while listening to myself whimper with sickness, and find myself at the edge of the guesthouse gate. If my foot crosses this threshold, my integer-laced mind tells me, I will keep walking until I reach home. But, by some stroke of corporeal self-preservation, my tissues take over and force me back upstairs into my room and into bed.

I awake a second time. Everything is the same. My fever cries out, “Go home! Run to Milwaukee.” My delirium convinces me that this is possible. But my body resists. Again, I stumble down the stairs into the courtyard of the guesthouse. I hope that Daniel or Simon will see me and bring me back to my bed. They are not there. My legs take me to the front desk area, where there is a bank of computers. Dazed and shirtless, I watch my fingers check my email as if this exercise will snap me back into a state of normalcy. No new email and no normalcy. I teeter back up the stairs, feeling strangely better, and collapse back into bed.

I awake a third time. Same matrix world. Same homeward drive. But this time, something is different. There is a benevolent force at work. Something is demanding my mind to order itself, to return to a rational realm. My body-as-sense-organ turns to face it. I am sitting up in bed, and Simon’s cell phone is flashing a red light at regular intervals. I wave my hand over the light and my hand watches it intently. With each pulse, my body is calmer. This light leads me slowly out of my delirious state and I fall back to tranquil, sick sleep.

I will always be grateful to the LED light that showed me the way.