Albert Jefferson died during the Vietnam War, although he was the only one to notice. His family never knew; certainly the Marines had no idea, or they would have shipped him home in a box not an airliner seat. But he was dead just the same, had in fact died the moment he first set foot on Vietnamese soil, fresh from the humiliations of Camp Lejeune. The figure flying home on that troop transport wasn't really him. It was an alien in his shape, hiding, waiting for its first opportunity to run back to South East Asia, where the soul of his true self remained.

It took time and sacrifice to get back (taxicab driver, mortician's assistant, trucking company bookkeeper, divorce, second divorce, court ordered therapy, the money literally saved under the bed) but it didn't matter. The thing that had once been Jefferson felt cut wholly adrift from any semblance of its earlier life and identity, and the effort to reconnect with it was both too strenuous and not enticing enough to consider.

He took a new name: the Somalian, a moniker bestowed on him by a long dead older sister lost in some nebulous Oakland gangland scrape during his second tour. She called him that because he was dark skinned and because his Afro was loose and moist and not like a "regular" Brother's, and because she'd seen a young man in a movie who looked like him and he was from Somalia; in her ignorance, she took to calling him this as an insult. He'd always liked it, even as a boy, and now he felt completely at home in the name. It fit him better than any military uniform ever had.

But names and the past and the War were of no concern to him now. A life of ease and untrammeled pleasure, or whatever came closest to it, was, and he felt sure that he'd reached as near to his goal as someone might reasonably expect. Phnom Penh--the currents of his post-Death drift had washed him up on this city's traumatized shores five years ago--was hardly Edenic in its charms, but for a man like the Somalian, it was just this earthly side of Paradise.

Take that afternoon as an example.

Seated on his balcony, in his comfortable rattan chair, the air underneath the ceiling fan pleasantly cool; the monks and beggars sprawled along the winding, silted slipper of the Tonle Sap River, its banks parched and low, miniature islands of grass emerging stillborn from its dry need; a glass of iced lemon and sugar sweating easily in a tall glass at his side...

...and the sun an ancient globe dying softly with each instant's progress toward the brief moment of tropical dusk...

Slowly, as he always did in these perfect Phnom Penh afternoons in the early days of the dry season, before its vitality-sapping swelter banished him to the darkened air-conditioned inner rooms, the Somalian carefully rolled a cigarette. He used a special blend of Tunisian tobacco, laced with apricots and cardamom, which he bought at considerable expense from an actual Somalian whose name he made sure never to ask but who sold all manner of necessary items if one could find him in the brothels or the markets. He added a thumb-sized slug of chocolate-colored opium he bought for next to nothing from one of the cyclo drivers in the alleyway. He lit it.

And then yes...

...the sweetness of the apricot-scented tobacco, followed by the richer, distantly herbal seams of flavor as the pockets of opium smoked and flared and gave way; the flitting shapes of black birds in the red and gold sky; the mystery of shadows cast by the palm stands across the river; and beyond, the ceaseless expanse of land where peasants and bandits played their eternal games of rice cultivation and violent death...

The hoarse rumble of diesel engines and the syncopated whine of rusted cyclo wheels melting into one smoothly ebbing and flowing wave of non-sound; and the distant raindrops of gunfire from some remote, nameless hell-pocket in the city's impenetrable core; a baby crying nearby; its scolding mother; children playing at War with plastic sticks; drunk men arguing, fighting...

And yes again...

But no. No. Not at all. The Somalian is wrenched back to full awareness by the sound not far off of a man groaning with some considerable pain. With great effort, he stands and sees a representative specimen of Khmer wretch, his face the color of a seasoned leather knapsack, his clothes the tattered threads of a jungle fighter's uniform, his prosthetic leg wrapped in mud-caked duct tape, carrying a pink plastic alms bowl half filled with riel notes and rice porridge. He is squatted in the sewer, pants down low, hands on his hips, shriveled penis dangling like a twig, his face creased with effort as he squeezes out link upon link of thin, wet brown feces.

The Somalian stumbles away from the balcony railing, half-falls into his chair and shuts his eyes. Visions of elephants, reclining Buddhas cast in bronze, rivers of coconut milk, dancing mosquitoes, oceans of green rice shoots swaying in a light wind, yellow serpents sliding on moist red mud, come to him as he fishes his cigarette from the ashtray on the table and pulls it back to life.

Ah well, he thinks as he puffs and regrets. Isn't that just the way of things in Cambodia, his home: someone always shitting on the Promised Land.