The Beach

by Alex Garland

Maybe to have a memory, you need time for reflection, however brief, just to let the memory find a place to settle.

Fucking New Guy? Yea, though I walk through the valley of death I will fear no evil, for I am the evilest motherfucker in the valley.

I had ambiguous feelings about the differences between tourists and travelers—the problem being that the more I traveled, the smaller the differences became. But the one difference I could still latch onto was that tourists went on holidays while travelers did something else. They traveled.

But soon loneliness turned into paranoia.

Escape through travel works. Almost from the moment I boarded my flight, life in England became meaningless. Seat belt signs lit up, problems switched off. Broken armrests took precedence over broken hearts. By the time the plane was airborne I’d forgotten England even existed.

There’s this saying: In an all-blue world, color doesn’t exist. It makes a lot of sense to me. If something seems strange, you question it, but if the outside world is too distant to use as a comparison, then nothing seems strange.

If I’d learned one thing from traveling, it was that the way to get things done was to go ahead and do them. Don’t talk about going to Borneo. Book a ticket, get a visa, pack a bag, and it just happens.

Collecting memories, or experiences, was my primary goal when I first started traveling. I went about it in the same way as a stamp collector goes about collecting stamps, carrying around with me a mental list of all the things I had yet to see or do. Most of the list was pretty banal. I wanted to see the Taj Mahal, Borobudur, the Rice Terraces in Banave, Angkor Wat. Less banal, or maybe more so, was that I wanted to witness extreme poverty. I saw it as a necessary experience for anyone who wanted to appear worldly and interesting.

I don’t keep a travel diary. I did keep a travel diary once, and it was a big mistake. All I remember of that trip is what I bothered to write down. Everything else slipped away, as if my mind felt jilted by my reliance on pen and paper. For exactly the same reason, I don’t travel with a camera. My holiday becomes the snapshots, and anything I forget to record is lost. Apart from that, photographs never seem to be very evocative. When I look through the albums of old traveling companions I’m always surprised by how little I’m reminded of the trip.

Too familiar to be strange, and too exciting to dread. Before long, impossible not to enjoy.

It’s a funny thought that if today—for some inexplicable reason—I wanted to track down any of the people I once knew on the beach, I’d have no better clue to work from than a nationality and a fading memory of a face.

I smoke a little dope. I got my thousand-yard stare. I carry a lot of scars. I like the way that sounds. I carry a lot of scars.