CHACHI AND WINKLER AND THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT (AND I FEEL FINE)

I've just read that Scott Baio has replaced Henry Winkler as the lawyer on the television comedy Arrested Development, a show I've sporadically caught a time or two here in Cambodia, and this decision, this changing of the comedic guard, has me convinced that some kind of shift in the basic fabric of the space-time continuum has just taken place.

Let me back up.

The single funniest comedic bit I've ever seen features pint-sized, bug-eyed comedian Gilbert Gottfriend musing to himself about why, exactly, Scott Baio from Happy Days got his own sitcom spin-off, Joanie Loves Chachi, but Henry Winkler didn't. He imagines a group of TV executives pondering the possibilities:

"Chachi, sure, but Winkler...not so much."

"Chachi, yeah, but Winkler..."

"Chachi, sure, but Winkler...not so much."

And so on.

(To find this funny, life-changingly funny, you have to a) think Gilbert Gottfried is, quite possibly, Christ returned, or b) just be, like, really, really weird. I am both of the above, and just remember -- if the above bit wasn't funny at all to you, it's because he does it on stage so much better than I do it in words, and, like I said, I'm kind of weird.

Back to the present.

What I'm thinking is: What are the odds that Scott Baio would once again bump Winkler out of the spotlight? I know, I know -- apparently Winkler left for another gig, a new gig, on a new sitcom. But still. Arrested Development is apparently getting all the critical props, if not the viewers. Baio will be back in at the forefront of our collective human consciousness. Chachi will be on everybody's lips, not the Fonz. And, even more than the above reasons, the really odd thing is that Gottfried's timeless, legendary joke still works in this new situation. Just imagine a bunch of studio execs rationalizing their decision to hire Chachi over the departing Winkler, and you can use the same damn lines.

Which proves, you ask?

I mean, do you really need to ask?

It proves that Gottfried was on to something, that's what. It proves that he, Baio and Winkler are part of some unholy cosmic alliance that somehow is able to not only influence the comedic mindset of an entire generation, but are also incredibly, painstakingly patient. The gap between Gottfried's initial Baio/Winkler joke and the latest news is well over a decade and a half. It's all adding up. The signs are here. The Bible Code is in place.

I'm telling you, this is equivalent to Indiana Jones finding the lost ark of the covenant, or Charlie's grasping of the golden ticket that led to the chocolate factory, or Steve Guttenberg deciding to do that fourth Police Academy flick, the one with the Citizens on Patrol. It's that earth shattering, is what it is.

Don't believe me?

Just think.

When was the last time you heard of this kind of close connection between a comedian and two stars of a seventies sitcom beloved by millions?

Never, that's when. It hasn't happened. Until now.

The Apocalypse is upon us, folks. Lock the doors and put the kids to bed. Say your prayers and count your blessings.

As for me, I'll be pondering the eternal question that man has grappled with for millenia: Does Joanie really love Chachi?

NO NEED FOR SUBTLETY

A few years back when I first came to Cambodia I was chilling at Steve's Steakhouse, seated at the bar, munching on one of his homemade burgers made from his own grain-fed cows that he keeps in a pasture outside of town. Sports was on the TV. Jim Croce was on the stereo. Life was good.

"I used to listen to Croce back in Philly in the seventies," the man next to me at the bar said. He was middle-aged, stocky, solid. American, no doubt.

"Were you working in Philadelphia?" I asked.

"No," he said. "I was in the veterans hospital they had there for a year."

And so began an interesting conversation, the kind of conversation and the kind of person you can only meet when you are in a place like Cambodia. I remember because yesterday I watched again Oliver Stone's Born On The Fourth Of July, and this particular gentleman had had both of his legs blown off in Vietnam, knew both Oliver Stone and Ron Kovic, the subject of the biographical film, and now worked all over the world for the Vietnam Veterans Association of America, helping people with no limbs get limbs. He lived in Colombia, strangely enough. There was plenty to do here; thousands upon thousands of people still get limbs blown off every day, scrounging for scrap metal in the fields while ending up being blown up by the remnants of the literally millions of land mines that still litter this country.

Is there a better movie than Born On The Fourth of July? I know there is, somewhere, but boy is that a film. It is not just a mind-blowingly heart-wrenching exploration of what the Vietnam war does to one's psyche, a vivid and sympathetic portrait of a boy raised in the small-town, mom and apple pie ethos of America who gradually, gradually realizes that he has been sold a bill of goods that he paid a terrible, terrible price for. It is all of this, yes, but it is also, quite frankly, the most emotional film I've ever seen. Each scene operates on a number of different levels, and as the movie progresses so much anger and hope and fear and confusion escalates and accumulates. It is a film about growing up and leaving home and realizing that the world is a harsh and fucked-up place. It features the best performance that Tom Cruise will ever give. It is designed to make you feel, and how many movies really, really make us feel, well, anything?

For Stone's detractors, it is chock-full of things to criticize: overblown, overdramatic, didactic. Yes, yes, yes. Give me more. Give me it all in equal measure, than pour me a bit more for the ride home. Stone makes films that are pulsing with life. In Cambodia I sat beside a guy who had both legs blown off in the war, who was a dumb kid from West Virginia who signed up for 'Nam because his government told him to, and his lucky reward was a year spent in a veterans hospital and a lifetime's worth of rage that eventually found an altruistic channel helping other people in foreign countries who had also been wounded by war's lack of mercy. Born On The Fourth Of July makes me feel for that man at the bar; it makes me understand, as much as is possible for a schmuck like me, what he went through. It is unapologetic, that film is, and because of that, the human experience is widened, and so am I.

It also contains what are quite possibly two of the greatest scenes ever put on film: 1) Ron Kovic, played by Cruise, returns to his childhood home after two tours in Nam and one year in a veterans hospital in the Bronx. He and his father are in Ron's old bedroom, trapped in time, the room and them. The father is explaining how he's fixed up the bathroom. Ron is looking at a framed photo of himself as a high-school wrestler. The father sees him looking at the photo. The father embraces Ron, tightly, breaks down, then stands up and starts to walk out of the room, in tears, talking about more home renovation as Ron puts the photo down, face-down. That scene says it all, about everything. The pain of time lost. The pain of Ron's injury. The past that is gone. The love between the father and son. It's all there, and it lasts less than a minute. I've seen that scene a dozen times, and it gets me every time. 2) Near the end of the film, Ron and Willem Dafoe are stuck on a highway somewhere in Mexico, thrown out of a taxi for arguing with the driver. Both Vietnam vets, both in wheelchairs, the two begin to argue about who did worse in Vietnam, who did the most harm, who killed the most babies. They yell and spit and scream and grapple with each other, before toppling down the side of a hill, bouncing out of their wheelchairs, lying helpless under the hot Mexican sun. The anger, the confusion, the sheer symbolic potency of this scene is something close to perfection.

Those who accuse Stone of being obvious and lacking subtlety are missing the point. Life is not subtle, and life is far too obvious. Pain is real and rage is real and so are the deeper, stronger, more humane emotions. Stone's films rejoice in the ferocity of such human expressions. They understand that in a world where it is possible for people to have their legs blown off in foreign lands, there is sometimes no need for subtlety.

YOU NEVER GET A SECOND CHANCE...

We were talking about first impressions, my class and me. A textbook unit, an ESL unit, one of many. "You never get a second chance to make a first impression": trying to explain what that meant, watching their young faces puzzle out the strange and melodious logic of American expressions. It's not just people, I was saying. You can have first impressions of buildings, cities, even countries.

"So what was your first impression of Cambodia?"

Good question. Interesting question. When you live in a foreign country, you get asked all the time, daily, sometimes hourly: "What do you think of (insert country name here)?" You are a guest in the country, so you have to say good things, positive things. Nobody wants to hear you slag their homeland, and I wouldn't want to do so. There's a time and place for everything, and a classroom full of teenagers do not want to hear that their country is majestically fucked up.

So. First impressions? Like, first first impressions?

When one lands in Cambodia for the first time, excitement is tempered by anxiety, bordering on panic. At Pochentong Airport in Phnom Penh, a seated line of grim-faced workers in grim-green suits sit behind a counter that greets you after stepping off the plane. They want your passport. They need your passport. You hand them your ten, twenty bucks for a visa, along with a passport-sized photo for the visa, and then they make you wait. The passport is passed along from soldier to soldier, while you wait and wonder just what the hell you are doing in Cambodia in the first place. (Okay, they're not soldier soldiers, but they sure as hell look like it.) After they've deemed that your money is valid and your purpose is valid you are allowed to pass through customs. After that, well, you are on your own. You are in Cambodia. Holy fuck, you think. (Or I think, anyways. I'm from St.Catharines, Ontario, after all. They didn't cover this kind of shit in my Geography classes. Sputtering, skipping, newsreel-like films about the Russian economy from the 1970's, shown to the class while the Soviet Union was in the midst of falling apart, rendering all the information moot and void, introduced by my apologetic-but-not-really teacher? Check. How to survive in a third world country on your own? Um, no. Missed that class. Maybe had a race that day or something.)

Three years ago, when I first came here for a week of English teaching, there was no taxi service run by the airport itself. There were taxis, yes, but they were outside. Problem was, not only were there taxis, there were also taxi drivers.

Why was this a problem? Because the moment you stepped out of the aiport ten, fifteen taxi drivers descended on you like crows on carrion. They all shouted "Sir! Sir!", grabbing you, trying to lead you towards their car, their taxi, their meal ticket for the day. They were short and thin and chubby and tall and male and female. They were poor and you were not.

What to do, what to do, what to do. I sure as shit didn't know what to do. What if I picked one and the others got royally pissed? What if they ripped my arms off and gnawed them like chicken wings? (Such are the thoughts of an ignorant traveller.)

So I did what I had to do, which was pick a taxi-driver, and he looked happy, and the others looked pissed. But that was it. As soon as I chose one driver with the magic-wand of my outstretched finger, the others let out a small moan of disappointment, then dispersed. Instantly. They didn't give me a sour look. They didn't fight with each other. There was some kind of code at work which I did not understand, but I did recognize, instantly, that perhaps this place, this land, was more civil than I expected. (Crazy, yes, fuck yeah, but civil. In its own, outrageous fashion.)

My first impression, then? That out of some kind of chaos came a small and precise form of civility.

Now, it's different. Now, at the airport, taxi drivers no longer linger to grab you and pull you and beg you to feed them for a day. There's a tidy little desk with a tidy little man who will book a car for you, arrange a driver for you, handle all the details.

That's nice. It's easier.

But still. I remember that first hot day, those initial surreal moments in Cambodia. Those tugging, insistent drivers. Their dejected but calm acceptance of my disoriented rejection. Looking back, it was, in the end, a good first impression, all things considered. It was very strange and real and indicative of what would follow in the following two years. Madness tempered by grace.

LIGHTNING WITHOUT THUNDER

Lightning without thunder has its own special grace. Flashing across the sky, in subtle streaks or golden brush strokes, but absent the onslaught of echoes and bowling-pin strikes -- in this manner, with those shimmering, almost elegaic tints, even lightning can seem benign.

(Especially while running by the river shortly after five, watching the light poke and prod at the fading black night, feeling the faint but steady patter of rain on one's head, shirt, shorts.)

At such times, this land seems peaceful, almost serene. But then I read the paper, and I see that Cambodia has a received a ranking by the World Economic Forum that places it near the bottom rank of competitive nations, 112 out of 117, ahead of only Benin, Paraguay, Guyana and Kyrgyzstan in terms of risky places to invest money, and I see, in local news, that a teen accused of robbery was hacked to death with a machete by an angry mob, that a drunken man was arrested at the temple for scaring worshippers with a fuck-you sword, that two men have been arrested for furthering the illegal-monkey trade that is (apparently) rampant in this country, and, to top it all off, I learn that a 'Khmer Rouge-style' restaurant has opened opposite the Tuol Sleng torture museum, where diners can dine on rice gruel identical to that served in the Pol Pot regime, where the waitresses wonder why they've had only two foreign customers in two weeks.

I read that, all of that, and I wonder if it's true, if Cambodia is nothing more than 'an insane asylum with beer', as an expat friend of mine once creatively dubbed it.

I wonder.

It's something to think about, though. How wounded and strange and tilted this land can be. How full of human dimensions -- squared, cubed, sideways and skewed. This whole country is like lightning without thunder, I've come to think -- flashes of electric madness and despair in ragged streaks, but absent of any lasting echoes. Everything distant, nothing audible.

What am I doing here? I wonder. More importantly, what are they doing here, all of them, the people of Cambodia? Where will I go and where will they go?

Things to think about at other times, on other runs, as I watch the light do its relaxed but kinetic dance across the darkened sky.

A MOVEABLE, ROTATING FEAST

Over here, even when it's cool it's hot. The rainy season is reluctantly drawing to a close, sporadically, in sloshy spurts, and soon the late-afternoon showers that have become a familiar midday treat will disappear. Just like that. No more water descending from above in the hours before dusk, falling and swaying in drippity-drops or extended sheets, like natural, liquid licorice, minus the red. No more temporary respite from that savage sun, how it daunts me so.

Even in the Cambodian cold, the heat. Just think: One can wear nothing more than a t-shirt and shorts all day, every day, year round. No exceptions necessary. Flip-flops, every flippy, reliably floppy, are footwear of choice in these here parts. (At work, of course, one must don the tie and the pants and the shoes shined black, but in a simple, rural land like this, such attire seems foolish, even arrogant. In old countries, poor countries, one feels ridiculous wearing more than the bare necessities of life. A country that was once the focal point of Southeast Asia, that developed its own language, whose people labored for decades to build temples that rival Egypt's finest monuments -- in this ancient place, of what real use is a well-tucked shirt, a slick taut tie?)

Such are one's thoughts on an average day, for what is commonplace in Cambodia would be considered a sign of bereavement anywhere else. (And what would we mourn over here, you ask? Dark clouds threatening snow. Early-morning frost on dew-slicked windows. That howling winter wind, that icy shriek, primal and midnight and bellowing.)

Reliable reports state that elsewhere, somewhere, autumn has arrived, complete with falling leaves and cross-country races run through winding trails in hidden forests. Could these electronic accounts be authentic? Difficult to determine, when here the sun stays high, the air hot, the blades of a fan alive in constant, rotating motion. In other lands, the temperature is checked daily, if not hourly. Its continual ascension and decline must be monitored and assessed, for what is at stake is nothing less than the emergence of turtlenecks and gloves, scarves and slippers. (How cold those Canadian kitchen floors can seem on a frigid February night!)

There is something almost tragic in the daily loss of one's own, remembered weather, as if the very cadence of life itself had decided to subtract a few errant, useless beats. Consolation comes with the gradual realization that the heat -- still mysterious and intricate t0 a sweat-sodden western soul -- has its own unexpected, beneficial allures. A day of sun. Perpetual sun. Tranquilizes the soul, it does, in its own bludgeoning way. It trivializes the mere notion of melancholy, eliminating all self-indulgent emotional artifice. How can one embrace a melancholic view of life while steeped in such sweat? The messy liquidity negates such dramatics. Leave such glum and gloomy notions for Russian winters and Scandanavian nights. Here, the sun assumes its position, daily, and one must accept its radiant, overbearing personality.

Which is easier than one might think (the aforementioned histrionics aside). After all, even over here, the sun must set. And when it does, wrapped in the dark cloak of night, we wait, patiently, till morn, confident it will return. In Cambodia, one cannot count on much, if anything. But the sun is a moveable, rotating feast that is loyal and true.

MAILER AND ME: A MEMOIR OF LUCK GIVEN, LUCK RETURNED

News that Norman Mailer, American novelist, has recently received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Foundation reaches my ears only one day after I finished rereading, for the first time in years, Mailer’s masterful account of the ‘Rumble In The Jungle’, that epic boxing match whereupon Muhammad Ali regained his Heavyweight Championship belt by defeating the towering force of nature that was George Foreman in his ferocious prime. At last! The luck that Mailer had effortlessly passed on in person to me over ten years ago had been returned. Our psychic paths again had crossed, I thought.

To conceive of this news as some form of coincidence is egotistical at best, delusional at worst; how many others around the globe were reading Mailer’s works when they, too, heard of his recent honor? Just because I finished The Fight, his Ali book, does not mean that any psychic forces were at work, or at play, in the nature of the universe. After all, in my more rational moments, I can rest assured that such a distinction given to Mailer was decided weeks, if not months ago; my recent reading of his words had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with his honor. To think otherwise is to give oneself a place in the cosmos that is tantamount to a Queen Bee at the centre of the hive, directing minions of masses to do her bidding.

But one cannot be sure. Perhaps our individual souls hold far greater sway in the accounts of others than we at first care to admit. After all, was it not Mailer himself who drunkenly climbed, or attempted to climb, between his balcony and the one next door while staying in the hotel in Zaire all those years ago, before I was born, waiting for the injured Foreman to heal so the fight could finally commence? The sheer momentousness of the fight that loomed before Ali deserved an action of equal daring by Mailer, his fervent supporter. A drunken hop by a fifty-year old man from room to room may not seem rational to you or me as a means of implanting victory in a thirty-year old prizefighter, but Mailer is not you or me, and nothing if not a mystic at heart.

To read Mailer is to believe that there are larger forces at work in the universe, and only authors as talented as he, as daring as he, allow us to consider that we, too, may have the opportunity, if not the obligation, to bend luck towards ourselves and those that we root for and care for and live for. Who else but Mailer could gain fame as the best young novelist in America (circa 1948) for his autobiographical war novel The Naked And The Dead, only to shift spiritual gears completely in the coming decades, helping to create the ‘new journalism’ whereby the reporter himself becomes as central to the narrative as the events he describes? Who else but Mailer could write interpretive biographies of such disparate American icons as Marilyn Monroe and Muhammad Ali and Lee Harvey Oswald, not to mention Pablo Picasso? Who else but Mailer could conceive of such staggering fiction whose range extends beyond the narcissistic confines of a writer’s usual domain – his own psyche, his own life: Ancient Evenings, set in the Egypt of the pharaohs; Harlot’s Ghost, his mammoth attempt to unravel the mythic resonance of the C.I.A. in American life; The Executioner’s Song, his Pulitzer Prize winning ‘non-fiction novel’ of love and murder that obliterated the critics’ view him as a show-boating blowhard by creating a masterpiece of lean, minimalist prose that would even have made his idol, Hemingway, blush with envy. And who else but Mailer, a non-observant Jew, could have the cojones a write a novel like The Gospel According To The Son, told from the first-person point of view of the most famous Jew of all, Jesus Christ. Nobody but Mailer.

To enter into Mailer’s mind is to understand, if only briefly, that the parameters of life of man could be more accurately described as parabolas, whose borders touch us all. So who is to say that my return to Mailer after such a long absence did not, in fact, hasten the award that was announced only hours after I finished The Fight? Absurd, such influence I’m claiming! I concur, and I dare say that Mailer would, too. We recognize our own illogical impulses best in others, simultaneously rejecting then embracing them.

Using such logic, I could very well say that the one and only encounter I had with Mailer himself, at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto in 1995, changed the course of his life. Ridiculous! As mentioned long ago on this blog, after watching Mailer’s presentation of the life of Pablo Picasso, complete with pictorial slides, our intrepid chronicler somehow found the courage to take hold of the microphone during the Q and A to ask: “Did you see any similarities between Lee Harvey Oswald and Picasso?” A question only an unsuspecting nineteen-year old could ask, followed by a response that only a collection of wealthy, pampered prigs could provide. I heard every last one of their titters, felt every single smirk, smelled every grating whiff of expensive perfume and fuck-me cologne. The question did not seem absurd to me; Mailer had recently spent a year immersed in the life of Picasso, and even more years investigating Oswald’s life, even traveling to Russia to investigate the alleged assassin’s past even deeper. Surely there were points in common between the two biographical subjects. (And besides, I thought, you hoity-toity motherfuckers, I had the balls to stand toe-to-toe with Mailer and ask him a question, while you sat in your seats and flicked the lint off of clothes designed to impress the indifferent whims of arrogant strangers. And I at least have read his book!) Mailer answered my question thoughtfully and carefully. Aha! Here is a mind as strange and agile as my own, I thought. (Again, the ego of adolescence! To compare myself to Mailer!)

Later, while waiting in line for Mailer to sign my copy of his book, a kind soul approached me and said: “ Actually, I thought yours was the most interesting question asked.” Somebody had spotted my embarrassment, and thought to console me. Emboldened by such generosity, when my turn came to talk to Mailer I asked him for advice for a young writer. He told me; I listened. (And I still remember it.) He then signed my book, adding a phrase after the scrawl of his signature that I could not recognize, prompting me to ask his assistant to interrupt him in the midst of signing the book of his next fan. “What does it mean?” I wanted to know. “Sverta,” he said. “It means ‘good luck!” (Is it Jewish? Yiddish? No matter.)

So! From his mouth to my soul. If luck is a tangible thing, then it was passed from him to me that fateful night, and perhaps, just perhaps, my recent return to his prose nudged something in the fabric of the universe. Perhaps the luck he passed on had lodged itself carefully into the lodestone of my psyche, and perhaps, just perhaps, I was able to, unknowingly, hand it back to him.
Such are the thoughts one has when encounter Mailer – in person, in prose. If reading is the most intimate act of all – the sharing of one’s private thoughts with another – then reading Mailer is enough to make one believe that such communication not only has a purpose and a trajectory, but also a mystical necessity, a vibrancy, that lies at the core of who we are and what we can become. Luck may not be tangible, nor transferable, but even Mailer’s conception of such a concept, the potential of it, makes me wonder if the Gods that rule us all work in prose.

PONDERING FLIGHT

Let us go deeper, as the day grows long and the clouds begin their familiar drift across the landscape of the sky. The girl, the girl who I run past on my daily runs down by the river, the teenage girl, the teenage girl whose name I can never seem to recall, the teenage girl whose name I can never seem to recall wishes for me to give her money, sixteen dollars, cash, American. Not for drugs or food, no, of this I am certain, but for school.

Outside of my old apartment as I waited for the van from work to pick me up, I would sometimes see her and her friends stroll on by, dressed in white shirts and blue skirts, and I would joke with them in English. To understand humor in a foreign tongue is a simultaneously heady and innocuous ordeal. If one can laugh at another's nonsensical utterances, empathy results. To do so while listening to such words in a language other than one's own, one both alien and unfamiliar, is to allow oneself that random, learned luxury of believing that such a connection may be proof of a common emotional conduit that links human to human. They say that laughter is universal; it may also be primordial.

Such are one's thoughts while conversing with a fourteen, fifteen year girl on what passes for a cool day on those particular Cambodian mornings. Those other days and times were long ago and for now there is the matter of sixteen dollars. There is humor, yes, as always, but laughter not only has its own time limit and place but also its own sense of security. There are difficult locks that need to be massaged before mirth can emerge once again, carefree and fluid.

To be a Cambodian girl by the river selling guidebooks and travel books is proof of either a God or a Devil at work in the world. For no identifiable future exists for such a girl. If she is poor, poor enough to see books on the banks of the Tonle Sap, then she is certainly poor enough to soon become a prostitute. Perhaps not this year, or next year, but there certain limits of time and place in life and this young girl may very well reach hers sometime soon. If she is selling books, daily, she is not able to learn any kind of marketable, manageable skill, and if she is unable to acquire such a skill then it is quite possible, if not certain, that around the age of twenty, if not sooner, uneducated, her future will have been decided for her. This is not certain; there are garment factories and other modules of enhancement that exist in the dusty fringes of this world. But still. One must project. I do not know if a God or a Devil plays a hand in determining fates like this one. I suspect not.

(But what if I am wrong -- how lonely it must be for God and the Devil! To be the perfect embodiment of grace and wisdom is a burden that must make even a perfect God shudder at times. One imagines such an entity longing to embrace his most wicked counterpart, because who else but the Devil himself could conceive of such an awesome responsibility. For the Devil has his own inverted responsbility, lest we forget, one that is no less momentous. To be wicked, continuously. Even the Devil must have days and nights when he no longer wishes to tantalize Cambodian teenagers with the darkening prospect of a live lived in seedy rooms on spunk-stained sheets. At such times, the Devil must reach out, upwards. Would God find within him the strength to embrace the Devil himself? Think what sparks, what energy, novalike in intensity, would ensue from such an encounter! The concept is too large for a mind such as mine to pursue further. It is akin to imagining one's own creation, attempting to isolate within the soul of one's own psyche and memory why this sperm chose that egg. Best to retreat into the safer, familiar confines of the agnostic and atheist. Best to image the lives on these lean and mean streets guided by their own hands, not those of isolated, enclosed lords on either end of our spiritual scale.)

Sixteen dollars, to this we return. What would it do, peform, enable? A month at school. Education is not enforced only within the scholastic confines a too-hot classroom, no, but one does not need to explain this to a fourteen, fifteen year old Cambodian bookseller. She has had enough of the real world. Give me some white shirts and blue skirts once again, her eyes implore, if only for a month. At least for a month.

Oh, the sway and grind of one's own intentions. At a certain point, it is inevitable that benefactors will fall short of their recipients expectations. Such providers will leave for home, or, even worse, here, be diluted of cash. At that point in time the real world will once again reach between the ivory (piss-yellow?) walls of one's scholastic cell and drag her, possibly kicking, certainly screaming, back into the bright and dusty day with a fierceness that would certainly do the Devil proud.

Is it better to learn now and remorse later? One cannot say. A handful of American bills can alter the trajectory of one girl's life, but who is to say that a boomerang is not lurking within the psychic parameters of such an ambitious act? Spiritual decapitation could result for both the girl and the benefactor.

At a specific point in time -- ten, twenty years hence -- a cloud will drift across a bright blue sky, aimless and puffy. A young woman will spot that cloud and for no reason all recall an offer made years before, a loan enacted, a textbook bought, a room brightly lit. Whether that memory, fleeting and sweet, bordering just this side of bitter, is false or true, one cannot say. Not yet. One wonders if God and the Devil -- should they exist, should they emerge -- can balance the future on the widened palms of their outstretched hands the way a tiny, wounded bird ponders flight. And, if so, can we mortals do the same?

Regardless, at a specific point in time -- ten, twenty years hence -- a Cambodian woman will see that cloud, wipe a lock of hair away from her sweat-stained brow, remember an offer, a chance, a gate. The cloud will drift on. The moment and memory will pass. And she will return to whatever the day has left to offer.