Blue Magic

It was one of our last nights in Kathmandu, J was sitting on her bed writing in her travel journal and I was puttering away maniacally when I saw a silvery glint just next to her bed. 

“Hey J, did you lose some pills on the floor?”

She bent over and picked up a blister pack of small blue diamond shaped tablets. One was missing. “No, they’re not mine.”

“Are you sure?” I asked with no small hint of teasing slipping through.

“No. I don’t even know what they are.”

I had a good guess. There are some things, like Kardashians, you just absorb in our culture without ever intentionally paying attention.

“I wonder if they go with this?” And I reached into our closet and pulled out a blue plastic bag bulging with pill packages. J was flabbergasted. 

“Where did you get that?”

I noticed it in the closet when we moved in days ago, which J found bizarre. My dial for bizarre was set high enough that a big bag of pharmaceuticals sitting in my hotel closet upon check in didn’t even register. J found that a touch bizarre as well.

The packages confirmed my suspicions. Off brand viagra for the dysfunctional gentlemen of the world. And loads of, packages anyway.

J went through the bag but they were all empty. The only tablets were the ones found beside her bed. Buddy probably wanted to sample one to make sure his investment worked. 

Why such a huge bag? Either he intended to resell them or he was just very optimistic about his prospects.

The discovery put us both in a state of giggles worthy of a pre-teen sleepover and J was adamant that the hotel had to know something about this. I thought it more likely we had an entrepreneurial previous tenant and a not-so-thorough cleaner. I was unable to convince her to take one to see what it would do.

A line from a Jefferson Airplane song, White Rabbit, kept running through my head. One pill makes you larger...

The next morning, still full of the giggles, J marched the bag and remaining tablets down to the front desk with K, G and myself in tow like voyeuristic ducklings. She dramatically presented them to the gent at the reception desk hoping for an explanation but it was an anticlimactic, “thank you Ma’am. I can imagine the things that he has seen working front desk of a Kathmandu hotel. I wonder what it takes to rate on his bizarreness scale.