He knows that he is beautiful and somehow this makes him ugly. — Damon Galgut

And maybe that is the true reason for this journey, by shedding all the ballast of the familiar life they are each trying to recapture a sensation of weightlessness they remember but perhaps never lived, in memory more than anywhere else traveling is like free-fall, or flight.

In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were.

All the images and impressions and countries and continents he'd vised had been erased. What you don't remember never happened.