Please respect our intellectual property rights. Do not distribute any of these documents, or portions therein, without the written permission of Robert Higdon or the Iron Butt Association.
Written by Robert Higdon
Evening at the Hotel Saroya
Puerto Angel, Mexico
Friday, 11.10.95, 1900
There is fever, of that there is no doubt. Whenever it visits, I know it, for it acts with mathematical predictability: I lose the ability to think. Nothing else, not even blind drunkenness, can produce such a synaptic vacuum. And I sweat.
The heat is torturous. I lie naked on a hot, narrow bed, watching the electric fan blades knock fetid air and dust motes about. I can't move. I am too sick. And I am frightened. It is the opening scene of "Apocalypse Now."
Nausea. Headache. Stomach cramps. Muscle tenderness. Chills. Disorientation. What is this damned thing? I can't think. The fever stops me from discovering why I am febrile at all.
At the very least it is a bacterial dysentery, maybe amoebic, maybe both. Malaria? Dengue hemorrhagic fever? God, don't let it be that. It's incurable. Maybe it's something I can't even spell or an atonement for a sin I don't even remember committing. I don't know.
Across the inlet a luxury hotel overlooks the Pacific from high atop a hill. I should have gone there. And I would have gone there had not I mistaken in my confusion the awful Saroya, itself clawing to a small hill, with the paradise across the water. I stopped because I wanted the Saroya to be the real thing, because I was sick, and because I couldn't go any farther anyway.
And when I realized the Saroya was just another hole in an endless line of holes into which I've burrowed at day's end, I didn't have anything left to get back on the bike. One day it will be revealed to me that I can always go farther and that there is always something left.
Jim Rogers would have kept going. When people scoffed at his five-star hotel list in "Investment Biker" --- Hammurabi Hilton, Sahara Sheraton, etc. --- they didn't understand that the cost of such lodging is trivial compared to the price exacted day after day by beating yourself senseless on an even more senseless motorcycle ride that has no more chance of a salubrious ending than does the perpetual voyage of the Flying Dutchman.
Isadora Duncan was right: When in doubt, stay at the best hotel. Rogers knew that. He was right, too. Sometimes the cost is higher tomorrow for not having paid enough today.
The nuclear ripple begins at the exact top of my shaved head and cascades south. This is the unmistakable notice of an appointment in Samarra, one that I cannot ignore. Rolling onto my side, I let a knee drop to the floor. The other follows. My face is in the mattress. I shove backward into a kneeling position where, if I could form the words to pray at all, I would pray that tonight some blessed Barabbas would filch the motorcycle from the parking lot and end this cursed ride forever and forevermore. Amen.
I lurch awkwardly to my feet and point myself to the bathroom. This is the part I hate, because before I sit down I'm going to have to turn on the water to the commode. If I leave it open, it will shortly produce an inch of standing water on the floor. And I don't want to know what is in that water or how it got there. And I don't want to bend over to open the tap after I have delivered what is in me, the dark green waters, to the welcoming arms of the porcelain throne.
I navigate back to the bed. For a fleeting moment I believe I can discern an indentation on the sweat-stained mattress where I have lain, an eerie Shroud of Puerto Angel. The impression is not nearly so dramatic as the ruts left in the bed of Norman Bates' mother, but it will do.
No screens shield the windows or balcony door. I dare not open them for fear of attracting something into the room that has not already bitten me. It is just as well. I don't want to look at the Xanadu across the harbor with its happy lights and frosted air conditioning evaporators. I don't want to see any happy people eating clean, happy food and going to the bathroom without first and last having to crawl around on their hands and knees like a common dog. I don't want even to imagine I can hear from a distance of two miles the tinkling of purified ice cubes in a frozen banana daiquiri.
I lie down again, stare dully at the rotating fan, and await the bell that signals the start of the next round. A drop of sweat rolls into my eye. I blink.
It hurts to blink.
In the last three days I have made but 584 miles. A ripping flu has joined its sister infirmities in me, a gift of the cold mountains and the searing lowlands. I have room for nothing more inside. I am mortgaged to the hilt in disease.
A spear of dawn light slips through a seam in the window, bounces off a metal strip on the wall, and hits me between the eyes. I groan and turn away. Nothing can make me move more.
I am wrong. Now the dark green waters have arrived in the bed. For an instant I believe I am in the midst of a hellish childhood nightmare. I am not.
Hands shaking, fighting tears of humiliation, I try to clean up. Then I pull out the sleeping bag and lie on the floor.
In his dimly lit office Dr. Julio Ricardo Aceituno takes the envelope from me. His soft, watery eyes look away as he gently opens it. Everything he does he does gently.
"I know what it says," I murmur. "I already read it." I can read Spanish. I can even read the writing on the wall.
He nods and scans the thin laboratory report. Then he gets to the good part at the bottom: "No se observaron parasitos." He looks at me with a trace of a smile on his lips.
"You understand this?" he asks in English.
"Si," I say. "No amoebas. Just bacteria and other trash."
"Yes. And you are taking the antibiotics I prescribed?"
"Si."
"If you are not better in three days, you must tell me."
I hate being around sick people. Their illness reminds me of my own frailties and the veil, no greater than the diameter of a protozoa, that separates me from them. I hate myself when I'm sick, and stay morose until I feel better. Control freaks are not compassionate people, even with themselves.
The prospect of amoebas insanely splitting by the hundreds of millions in my clonic gut had been unhinging me. Bacteria were bad enough. But at least those bastards weren't alive, not in any sense I'd grant, building their filthy walled cities in me.
The doctor and I shake hands gently. He cautions me to be careful. If I knew how, I thought, I'd do just that. But travel and health will never be better than a dice throw. The last time I was down here was a skate. This time they know where I am. Hope for the best; expect the worst.
Two days later the diarrhea stopped. I know Julio Ricardo Aceituno didn't smash it. Biochemists from Merck and Squibb and Pfizer did that. But he touched me gently and charged me $9.00. No wonder people occasionally mistake him for God and occasionally in doing so make no mistake at all.
© 1995, Iron Butt Association, Chicago, Illinois
Please respect our intellectual property rights. Do not distribute any of these documents, or portions therein, without the written permission of Robert Higdon or the Iron Butt Association.
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