"Hey, if someone is threatening to kill you two, why don’t you guys have some of them?" I asked.

"Caltex likes to keep a low security profile," he said.

"Very comforting. How low?"

"We take it very personally."

Greg didn’t seem overly concerned with the security issue, so I chalked it up to a colorful story meant to throw the newcomer a little off guard, a scenario that seemed much more likely when Greg told me he had brought his family here. But then I looked at the outriders, the machine guns, and thought, on the other hand this guy did not seem like the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree. Greg later confirmed this when he told me that one of the main reasons he pulled his family out of South Africa was concerns about security.

As we approached the center of town, traffic began to pick up. We pulled out of the back streets and onto one of the main streets, currently named Monyvong by the latest regime. Traffic, like everything else, takes on a Darwinian approach in Phnom Penh.

There are three traffic lights in this city of one million, but they are useful only as landmarks for giving directions - all of the streets have been renamed at least three times by successive governments, so a location is given as "across from Heng’s house" or "behind the old post office" or "at the traffic light". The traffic lights are on the same electric grid as everything else, so they’re actually on only when the government is having an especially good day. There are some major thoroughfares where the traffic does not stop or even slow down for miles.

Phnom Penh is a stately city of wide boulevards in a radial pattern based on the design of Paris, which must have been lovely before it was thoroughly neglected, rationalized, collectivized, decentralized, and blown to bits over twenty-five years of genocide and revolution. The same thing happened to the local culture, so traffic rules are the least of Cambodia’s worries. The only thing that prevents total mechanized carnage is the sheer volume of mopeds, moto rickshaws, bicycles, tricycles, horse drawn carts, and yes, even cars, that jam the roads. The Brownian motion of the traffic pattern never really lets anything get up to a good speed because you’re constantly dodging the thousands of other randomly moving particles on the road (which could be a guy on a scooter somehow carrying two women passengers riding sidesaddle, or old man cycling 50 live roosters to market.) When you get out on the road, the only thing that can get you where you are going quickly is to be bigger than everyone else (the latest SUV will do nicely) and to look like you genuinely could care less if you arrived at your destination with 50 rooters and grandpa permanently frescoed on your front grill. Jimmy, Greg’s 24 hour driver, demonstrated the finer points of this technique when he casually drove two guys on a moped carrying a television onto the sidewalk, right through a flock of plastic lawn chairs outside of a street café.

Greg took me to the Hotel Intercontinental, which towers majestically over a city of buildings typically two or three stories tall, and is a compound of Western comfort in the Grand Hotel tradition, which means that everything necessary for civilization is provided in isolation from the surrounding urban dustbowl. Just completed before I arrived, it could as easily have been in Manhattan. White marble, towering ceilings, and lots of Cambodian bellboys in spotless uniforms, which include pith helmets. Greg pointed a limousine in the driveway out to me. "That belongs to the owner. He lives on the thirteenth floor. He’s a bit of a gangster, so the security is very good here."

"Gangster?"

"Well, one time he was flying on Royal Cambodiana Airlines" - the national airline of Cambodia – it has one airplane – "and he didn’t like the service so he went out onto the tarmac and shot one of the front tires of the plane. Put them out of business for a few days."

Greeeat. Let me sit next to him. "You know him?"

"We have lunch sometimes. He wanted us to supply his fuel for his generator. I’ll see you at the office tomorrow."

Aside from the lack of traffic control in Phnom Penh, there was also a fairly unreliable supply of water (it literally stank out of the tap), an electric grid which was used by some to hang the clean washing, and a phone system which only worked when the power did. Everyone used cellphones, had their own generators, water purifiers, and owned a 4x4 to handle the "streets". Everyone rich, that is. Everyone else drank sewage and survived as best they could. It was almost as if there were no city here at all, just a collection of a million autonomous entities all living in close proximity.

Caltex was a multinational oil company, half owned by Texaco and Chevron, but really the Pacific Rim brand of Texaco. Based in Singapore, their headquarters contained a lot of Americans and Brits, many of whom had dreamed of greater adventure in mysterious southeast Asia as ex-patriots than the Singapore experience was ever going to give them. These men (being a Singapore flagged multinational there was no need to disguise the male dominance of the company as they would have in America) after loosening their tongues over some beer or scotch or whatever, would talk of the heads of Caltex Cambodia and Caltex Vietnam, who were both the stuff of corporate legend, ruggedly carving marketshare in the capitalist wilderness and having a jolly good time of it. The head of Caltex Cambodia was a fifty-year-old Scot named John Raeside who as legend had it arrived as a corporate prospector in this fertile new frontier some two years before in a sports car with an Uzi as his passenger.

The office of Caltex was still under construction, and did not yet have air conditioning, making the May heat inside the office stultifying. Greg and I sat down at his desk and John came out. He was not the Sean Connery knockoff that I expected - a short, slight graying man in large glasses, with large cunning grey eyes, the overall effect being a little like the grandmother/wolf of Little Red Riding Hood. Whatever scots was in him was masked by the "I say" kind of English public school accent. He described people as "good chaps".

My company, NeuroCorp had worked in Cambodia before. We did not exactly have a stellar reputation here, or anywhere else in Caltex territory. Two years before, the project had been a complete debacle, with our data about the local market hopelessly wrong. The stated purpose of our fieldwork this time was to a) create a digital map of the roads and regions of town, with traffic and demographic information respectively b) plot all of the gas stations (there were something like 96 in metro Phnom Penh, but I’m still not sure of that number, and I don’t think anyone really is) c) do a 6 page survey on each. This survey overflowed with questions like "how many meters wide is the forecourt", "at pump 1, how much is a liter of premium?", "rate the appearance of the attendant’s uniforms", "rate the attractiveness of the lighting", and so on. We really could have replaced it with one question – "Is the station a decrepit grayish brown piece of shit of local creation which looks like it is subsiding into the local dung from whence it sprang, or is it a recent creation of a foreign oil company which looks as out of place as if it was dropped by aliens from orbit?"

Back in New York we made a market model with a digital map interface, all wrapped up in a pretty Windows installable program, with customized reports. When we finished John Raeside could click on any point on the map and get a prediction of how much a gas station could make at that location – based on algorithms that were developed for the US, Australia and Singapore and were essentially bullshit here. The real reason we were doing this in Cambodia is my former boss, Mike Berland, is chummy with a lot of the guys in Caltex, and they throw us work as a sweetner to our parent company’s market research. The head honchos in Singapore decided that Caltex Cambodia was getting this whether they could use it or not.

However, once we made the project the Caltex men in Cambodia could complain to their superiors about it for the next year, which would ruin our chances of doing the other far more profitable countries in Asia. This made my true main goal to repair our relations with Greg and John and get out unscathed. Three people from my company had been through the Cambodia office, either doing a project or training the Caltex boys on how to use the end result. Two had wound up seriously damaged in the Caltex world by John Raeside’s harping on their incompetence to other heads of countries. I was determined to present myself as very knowledgeable about both the market research and the computer theory behind the neural net modeling and get some good words back from him on my expertise and professionalism, which would make my life much easier elsewhere. The third, however, had gotten burned because the Caltex boys considered him boring – didn’t drink, didn’t get in any trouble. My boss related this to me and said "Now I know I don’t have to worry about you, Tim."

Our initial conversation went something like this:

"Tim – a pleasure to meet you at last." We’ll see if you last any longer than the others.

"John, the pleasure is all mine – I’ve heard a great deal about you." They must have been wrong about you - you don’t look capable of dealing with a gin and tonic, much less a gun.

"Todd – good chap, but he seemed to have problems with his computer - spoke very highly of you." While I was crucifying the poor bastard during his presentation last month he kept trying to call you at for help.

"Todd is unfortunately no longer with the company." Motherfucker woke me up at 3am, but I wasn’t able to talk him through it. Mike fired him for that.

"That’s a pity. Well, what do you have planned?"

I then went into great detail about how we were going to organize our own team of researchers, supervised by one of my people to remain onsite through the four weeks we estimated the project would take, and conduct a demographic survey as well as a study of traffic and the stations themselves. He listened politely.

"Have you made any great strides in resolving some of the concerns regarding the map that existed in the previous project?"If your fucking program predicts our best proposed new location as being in middle of the Mekong River, the way it did last year, I’ll have you sent home in a bag.

"In addition to supervising the data collection process, I am also NeuroCorp’s GIS expert. I will collect all of the necessary materials while I am here to build a new digital map from the ground up, which will correct any existing inaccuracies. However, I believe there were also some training issues last year which I intend to correct while I’m here." Blah, blah, blah.

"My main concern is that the model be able to accurately gauge the kind of growth that we expect in this market." I want the black box to spit out good numbers so the accountants in the Singapore office don’t realize this place is a money pit and shut us down.

"Our models in the last year have met or exceeded the growth expectations of every local Texaco and Caltex opco where we’ve done this project - " No problem. "- we just need a good base of historical data on which to build the model." Give me a sample of the numbers you want to see.

"I think we can provide that, right Greg?"

I went back to my hotel at noon, since I had to report back home on my initial meeting and prepare for our first day of real work. The room was pristine, air cool enough to hang meat, satellite TV, tasteful rosewood furniture, deep carpeting, a large well appointed minibar covered in marble. A perfect cocoon. One thing my job had taught me, was that I should grab any opportunities to see the real country I was in that I could get, otherwise I’d be left with memories of a lot of HBO. After a quick bout of room service, I set out from my hotel to see the local market, just two major avenues away. I figured since it was diagonally across a huge traffic circle from the hotel, there wouldn’t be any real danger involved in going there alone, since the hotel would always be in view. The major danger I hadn’t counted on was the traffic. The first street I luckily got through during a lull. The second, however, was six lanes wide and jam-packed. So I watched for a minute. I figured there could be some method to this. After careful observation, not only was I sure that there was no method, I was worried about getting splattered on the first road even if I turned back.

I decided to watch this Cambodian grandmother make the attempt, and follow her lead. She made it two lanes in, thought the better of it, and scurried back for the sidewalk, narrowly missing getting clipped by a moped in the process. I looked for someone perhaps a little more spry (and with less knowledge of their own mortality) and watched this man and his children calmly walk all the way across at a deliberate, constant speed without ever stopping for anything in the continuous stream of traffic. This was a leap of faith that took a minute of preparation (I consulted my beliefs and found out I still didn’t have any), and I walked straight across and the motorcycles and even cars parted around me with nary a honk or upraised middle finger. No one slowed down, but everyone managed to avoid each other - and me - and keep on going.

The secret, I realized, was not to hesitate.

When I was a bike messenger in Manhattan I had once nailed a pedestrian because he randomly walked in front of me from between two cars. I was still a good distance away when he finally looked and saw me, and then thought the better of it. He then headed back to the sidewalk as I began steering around the place I had calculated that he should be. He saw me change direction and faked left, then right just as I mirrored his actions, so that in the middle of an empty Sixth Ave we collided spectacularly and ate pavement. The lesson here was the same; whatever you do don’t change direction, pretend that your typical Cambodian had some clue of how to drive, close your eyes and start walking.

The market itself appeared to be a single building from a distance, but as you got closer it was really three main corrugated roofs and then dozens or hundreds of shacks that bound them together. This place truly brought together the best elements of Stalinist design with the atmosphere of plague torn Europe, with a neglible Asian influence. I circled the place, which was a few blocks in size, looking for a main entrance, but it seemed the only way in was to push between the stands that circled the exterior. As I approached on the right side, in the street next to the market women bought and sold produce, in an amazing variety of types, colors and states of decay. The place had no refrigeration and the heat and humidity made breathing difficult. Everything was on blankets, unless it was just on the pavement itself. Since there were no fixed paths through the area it was like walking on a crowded beach, trying your best not to step on anything. The ladies were out here every day, and what they were no longer able to sell the previous day had been thrown into the gutter and had made the pavement slick with unidentifiable brownish green organic slime. One of the fruits, a yellow melon like thing with spikes on the outside, cut through the complex odors of decay and made itself known as by far the most putrid thing around. This turned out to be a durian – on the Singapore subway system the signs that say "No Smoking" also say "No Durians". It’s supposed to taste great, but I never got close enough to find out. After making my way through sugarcane, melons, leafy greens, yellow fruit with spikes on the outside, and assorted other vegetables and fruits, I came to the edge of the market complex itself.

I seemed to have accidentally found the part that dealt in meat. The produce section had been an absolute delight in comparison. Here, at least, there was shade, but the flies, smell and heat in the darkness made it seem even more claustrophobic than it really was. Women crouched on the ground, chopping, grinding, pounding away at unidentifiable parts of mercifully unidentifiable animals. Some of the parts I did identify – the pack of still bloody pig snouts impaled on a hanging cluster of big steel hooks through one nostril was a sight that I didn’t need at this point. I decided to move on, thankful that the fish were all dried.

The market had a dairy section – what appeared to be a pyramid of mudballs four feet tall in a huge wicker basket actually turned out to be eggs, once I saw one cracked open. I never figured out whether the mud was there for packaging against the shock of travel or for flavor. In the very center of the market were places that sold what would be considered cheap electronics elsewhere, as well as clothing material for making your own, and some cheap finished clothes of the Knicks t-shirt variety. I worked my way through the durable goods, cigarettes, and walked right into a gun market. The purveyor had proudly laid out several different makes. $20 would get you an AK47 in workable condition. But there were also arms that looked much more modern – funny given that the TV’s looked 10 years old. Spoke volumes about the economy. It turned out that I had really missed out, because another worker from my company later picked up a large collection of hand carved, elephant ivory opium pipes, probably half a century old, by picking through the market a little more carefully.

The fieldworker from my company had arrived from Thailand. Matt Turkin is a former, minor star of the record industry – call him a brown dwarf – possibly a refugee of the Studio 54 days, who is now plump and balding. Because of the graying beard and the lines behind the ubiquitous dark sunglasses I had a hard time believing it when I learned he was under 40 – drugs can indeed work wonders.

I saw him in a suit once, but in the field he almost always was in shorts and sandals. I also saw him straight once, when he hadn’t found any weed yet in South Africa. The previous year we had him working in Bangkok and the east coast of Thailand, and he disappeared for about two weeks. Turns out Santana was staying at his hotel, the Central Plaza, and he met them backstage and spent some time touring with them. The project was supposed to take 2 months – it took almost a year. Meanwhile our client was as furious as Thai culture permits one to show.

This kind of thing was trait that all of our fieldworkers of this era had in common. Somehow my boss kept hiring people who were druggies and sending them to the Golden Traingle. Turkin had originally been a supervisor in our company’s phone room, but then the guy he was working for realized he was paying him a lot and he wasn’t doing anything, so being sharper than my boss he had palmed him off on us a year before. Turkin was surviving on solely on personality, which counted for as much as competence in pre-crash southeast Asia, especially when dealing with ex-pats. And he had a great personality. We had a great time partying together. Nice guy. I just dreaded working with him.

Turkin had been waiting in the hotel only a few hours and already he had a potential connection – one of the bellboys. Drugs are plentiful, and although Cambodia, as one of the legs of the Golden Triangle, proudly boasts of being one of the largest suppliers of quality smack to the world market, the local pot crop is impressive as well. This was the only sector of the free market economy that was thriving with no advice, incentives or intervention from the UN or other outside forces (actually, despite the advice, incentives and intervention.) The local English daily had at one point a list of the top ten things to do before leaving, a topic very current in August of ‘97. This included among other activities buying a pound of pot and burning it on your living room table just because at a few dollars a pound, why not? According to John Raeside, marijuana is also considered a cooking ingredient (called something like "giggling cabbage" in Khmer) and has been used often without comment or warning at state dinners – which explains a lot about local politics. Turkin also let me know that when you purchased here you could walk out into a plantation of the stuff and have someone pick up two five foot stalks and let you take your pick for $5, after which they would dry it and deliver it to your hotel. Service with a shit-eating grin. Of course, this won’t last if Cambodia wants the trappings of international legitimacy. A lot of America’s foreign policy machinery is geared these days to putting pressure on poor drug producing nations to shut down this industry in return for loans and other forms of American largesse. The Opium War sure has changed in the last century.

That night Greg took us was a barbecue hosted by another ex-pat. Like the other ex-pat estates in Phnom Penh his townhouse was not very large or especially impressive, but it was separated from the avenue by a large steel gate with a small guard booth manned 24 hours a day. Greg left his 4X4 among a variety of other SUV models, many recently stolen across the border in Thailand (the telltale being that the steering wheel was on the right side). We entered into a party in progress, perhaps even in decline if the advanced state of the guests was any measure, and walked up to his house bar. There were a collection of English speakers of all varieties – Brits, Aussies, Kiwis, Greg representing the Afrikanners, and myself and Turkin being the token Yanks. I would have to talk to the Company Men for a few hours - there was no way around it. The life of a consultant is half built on personal charm, and I tried to muster some. "So good to see you again!" Have I met this guy before?

There were also a representation of Cambodian underlings. You have to hand it to the British – after centuries of imperialism they are totally unperturbed by treating the Natives like they are unwelcome in their own country, in a way that usually takes American expats much longer to get comfortable with.

After making some good natured fun of them in English, which many of the Khmer speakers were struggling with, the two groups separated and we fell in with the host at his bar, a great big hunk of woodwork, hand-carved, the kind of work that ex-pats are quick to point out "you just can’t get back in…" – what they mean is "I could get it, but I couldn’t pay the carpenter in candybars." It was carved out of tropical mahogany, another thing "you just can’t get back in…" Gary, our host, was wobbling around behind the bar, passing out beers to everyone including the help. He had three opened himself because he kept losing track of them.

"Try this. Angkor, the local tipple. Really lovely," Gary said.

"Mmmmh. Mmmph." My cheeks were full of the stuff - I hadn’t yet decided whether to swallow or spit. It tasted like stale chemicals, with a slight tinge of that tingly almost-flavor that you would get when you put your tongue on the terminals of a nine volt battery when you were a child. Gary already had a Heineken open. "Not for everyone…" he mumbled as he tossed it half full in the garbage, amid the laughter of the others.

"The guy who owns this brewery is the one who made that map you want," Greg said. There was a map I had seen at Caltex that was the best street map to the city I had seen before. It was made by a German or Austrian who had created it primarily as an advertising vehicle for his restaurant. It had since ballooned into a profitable venture in its own right, selling the right to advertise their locations to a dozen other bars and casino/brothels.

Gary was the local rep for Unilever, which is one of the great corporate puppet masters of the world – a conglomerate which sells household goods - everything from shampoo to kitchenware to – of course, cigarettes, the product that continues to sell itself. Gary and Greg engaged in a passionate discussion about the 4 story tall backlit sign hawking 555’s on the Avenue Confederation de la Russie and the wonderful marketshare it was creating in the local population, who until recently had been too poor to eat, much less smoke. Given that Caltex was using our advice to put in new leaded gas stations I didn’t feel real justified in getting moral about this.

Greg then told us about his discoveries in the local culture. Greg was pretty good natured for a white South African when he wasn’t making disparaging comments about "The Bush" (which is how the less sensitive white South Africans tend to refer to everything north of Johannesburg and south of London), and he was making something of an effort to get down with the Khmers. First he told us the story of the fortune teller that he had gone to who had given him a tea leaf reading with promises as sage and mystical as Ed McMahon’s personal message to you from Publisher’s Clearinghouse. She told him he would have several women (possibly because it was common knowledge that Greg had followed John Raeside’s lead in finding comfort while their wives were in Singapore). She had really sold him by predicting his next child would be a boy. I didn’t intend to start counting, but the word uncanny escaped his mouth over twelve times.

The topic turned to cuisine. Greg had just tried deep fried beetles. The joke in the ex-pat community went that dietary rules in southeast Asia only allowed you to eat what once crawled, flew, swam or slithered. Greg took pains to explain his reaction. "I mean, it’s not the idea that turns me off, really, it was the taste."

"Well - what else would it be?" I said, a little puzzled.

"No, I mean I don’t mind eating bugs if they taste good."

I figured if I said anything, he’d rephrase and repeat once more, so I dropped it. This led directly into a oneupmanship over who had eaten the strangest things. Turkin told them about the street that specializes in dog in Ho Chi Minh City, and I was left with only my lame experience of having tried lambs tongue in a restaurant in Queens, and the blood pudding that every Irish child has to suffer through.

The next subject, over dinner, was the local golf scene. The golf course, I have learned, is an element of business infrastructure far more important and basic than a telephone system. Phnom Penh already had two, although one of them was temporarily out of commission because there had recently been a problem with a caddy going to fetch a ball from a rough and instead blowing his leg off on an unexploded mine. In the words of Gary, "Fore!"

Whenever trapped among the corporate decision-making set I usually take pains to hide my deep and abiding hatred of golf, but my lack of knowledge was exposed, and this led somehow into the take-the-piss-out-of-the-Yanks session. I noticed Turkin and two of the others had disappeared in the direction of the kitchen, so I was on my own.

"So how do you like Phnom Penh so far?" Gary asked. Gary had hit the scotch straight up and was now getting a back rub from his "cook".

"Beats Singapore," I answered, figuring that all present would share the sentiment. They did.

"Just wait til we get you Out In The Bush," Greg said.

I was waiting for the "What You Americans don’t understand…" conversation, and I was not disappointed. Gary explained to me the naivete of American policy ("You Americans…") towards Cambodia - I think the phrase "They’ll be ready for democracy in a hundred years" was actually spoken verbatim, in a serious and ostensibly intelligent manner. A lot of this centered around the Coup which had not happened yet, but was yearned for by the ex-pats for the order that it would bring.

The ex-pats were in the meantime living it up in a kind of "Year of Living Dangerously", "Apocalypse Now" way. The crucial difference was that in the uni-polar world of the 90’s, after we’d invaded Panama because their thugs roughed up some honeymooners, most dictators had no inclination to touch Americans. In Cambodia this meant all white people of whatever nationality (but not American nationals who looked like Khmers) were sacred cash cows.

Cambodia has been the victim of many social experiments over the years, all by helpful people from other countries. If the road to hell is paved with good intentions Cambodia is missing some superhighways. There is still on display at the Killing Fields museum a wall map of Cambodia made up of several hundred human skulls and thighbones, originally the possession of Pol Pot, who killed 1-2 million of his own people (say one in every six) on the way to a agrarian communal paradise. He was at first supported by China, and in reaction to our carpet bombing the Viet Cong in their country the Cambodians let him take power. Later (in the late 80’s and early 90’s), after he and the Khmer Rouge had already committed genocide and then been driven into the jungle, he was also helped by the United States. Pol Pot was at that time part of a coalition against the Vietnamese controlled government, and Vietnam was in turn supported by the USSR. The old "the enemy of my enemy, even if he’s a fucking genocidal lunatic who kills people for wearing glasses, is my ally" logic.

The thing about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, was that although everyone said they wanted to get rid of them – and Vietnam invaded in 1979 ostensibly to do this – all of the many factions, including the "democrats", had once been allies of Pol Pot’s at one point or another. For a while everyone thought (hoped) he might be dead. He hadn’t been seen in public for 10 years. Then a journalist and photographer found him in 1996. The US suddenly talked about rounding him up and sending him to Canada, because Canada has a law against genocide and the US does not. The Canadians said "Huh?" The Cambodians were publicly saying "Great!", but privately trying to make sure he didn’t arrive alive to his trial to tell tales. The most ridiculous part of this farce involved Madeleine Albright arriving at the airport to negotiate America sending in marines to remove him. She refused to go into the city (citing probably valid security concerns). The two prime ministers refused to go the airport. She eventually took off again. Nothing was resolved for a bit. There was the Pol Pot shell game, kind of like Elvis sightings for the international section of the New York Times. His own men took him captive, then the rumors as to whether it was indeed Pol Pot went back and forth. Then - somehow - Pol Pot mysteriously died under house arrest, of natural causes. What a shock. As the Daily Show put it, "Pol Pot died today. He is mourned by his wife and… that’s about it."

The latest reengineering of the Cambodia from the outside in the early 90’s involved the UN doing some "nationbuilding". This was an expansive, generous, democratic, guilt assuaging idea, which involved pumping in billions of dollars in conscience money, holding a vote and then forming a government that would include absolutely everyone. Even people who got no votes were adequately represented, mainly because no one had wanted to commit the heavily armed troops necessary to take their guns away. One of the neighboring countries is Vietnam which is political poison for the Americans and French. So the Cambodians got not one new government but two – the Communists, who had been put in place after the Vietnamese invaded in 1979, led by Hun Sen, and the royalist/democrats who were led by Ranariddh Sihanouk, the son of the king. (The Khmer Rouge were still hanging out in the jungle.) They formed parallel governments – and they were bribed with a lot of cash to pretend to be friends, at least while the UN was still around. The UN peace keepers left, and the cash with it, the guns were still there. The Western businessmen had a clear preference for an orderly dictatorship over a confused democracy. It was getting annoying having to bribe two or three times for a single transaction.

Turkin reemerged from the kitchen looking serene, along with another Unilever guy, and collected a generous dinner together out of what was left on the table.

"Want a little of this?" Gary asked him, nodding to the scotch.

"No thank you. I don’t drink," Turkin replied, a little piously, pupils only slightly dilated.

"I’ll have a little of that." I poured myself one with no ice.

Gary reacted well to the fact that I was a scotch drinker. We convinced Greg to join us. The ex-pats got along best with other Real Men like themselves. They had a hard time trusting those who didn’t share their vices. On the other hand, if you got drunk with the Old Boys and were enteraining, you could get away with being pretty incompetent for a long time. If you actually managed to be competent you were a made man.

Cambodia was one of the few remaining spots in the world where the wives weren’t safe, and this made it a popular place among middle aged execs who’d already fallen off the promotion track. At least the "taxi-girls" were cheap.

The next morning Turkin and I met at the elevator to the lobby.

"Morning Matt."

"Morning Tim."

"This is going to be a fun day."

"Yeah. How’s your head?"

"Not too bad. You?"

"Well I wasn’t drinking."

I glared at him. "Right. Guess we’ll start with trying to find the map corrections, then hit the UN office for demographics."

"Sounds good." We watched the elevator’s display of red numbers descend for a moment.

"You hear the gunfire last night?" I asked.

"Yeah. It sounded close."

"Know what it was?"

"No." We didn’t say anything for a floor or two.

"Seemed to go on for a while. Lots of automatics."

"Yeah. And a kind of low thud."

"Just checking."

The doors opened to the lobby.

We waited until one of the Caltex drivers showed up. We couldn’t find him at first, because he was waiting at the start of the driveway, afraid to hand out in the alien environs of the Hotel Intercon. We got in the SUV with him, and he took us on a tour of the stations that had been picked by Greg and John for us to base our survey on. We started by going over the Japanese Friendship Bridge. This was a clever piece of infrastructure diplomacy on the part of the Japanese – a bridge that had been destroyed during the Vietnam era, probably by the US, which they had just paid to rebuild a few years before. The Japanese also sensed potential market share here, and they had a lot of work to do repairing their relationship with everyone in southeast Asia due to World War II. Not really necessary for the Khmers though, because the Japanese were way down the shit list after the Vietnamese, Chinese, the French, both America and Russia indirectly… everyone who is anyone has given the Cambodians the shaft at one time or another.

The bridge led us over to the east bank of the river that runs through Phnom Penh, which was still farm land. The gas stations we were looking at seemed to be raised about 25 feet above the surrounding land on huge dirt platforms that were level with the road. I saw a few houses on the other side that were on stilts.

"Is this because of flooding?"

"Yes. Every year the river floods almost up to this road."

I realized that the gas tanks for these stations were probably buried in the earth berms that the stations were on, which meant that they were going to be leaking gas into the river during the rainy season in a few years. Leaded gasoline, because as the wealthier nations banned leaded gas, Caltex and other oil companies decided to simply divert the products of their leaded refineries to other less environmentally concerned nations. These floods would wash over the rice paddies. Caltex was still in the process of constructing one of these while we were there.

The next day one of the guys took us to the roads planning office for the planning minister of Prince Ranaridh’s government and asked him if they were planning any major highways that I should integrate into the computerized road map I was making of Phnom Penh.

"I have this," he said, showing me a map of a Pan-Asian highway – a pipe dream stretching from Singapore to China through a few hundred miles of landmine strewn Cambodia not entirely controlled by either the government(s) of Cambodia or the Khmer Rouge. I thought, y’know, I’m much more interested in things that actually have a slight chance of getting built.

"Anything large, or paved in the area of Phnom Penh?" Most of the streets in Phnom Penh are unpaved and strewn with craters big enough to lose a car in. A lot of them started to subside after the Khmer Rouge blew up the sewer system during their stewardship of Phnom Penh’s municipal affairs. "Well, we are not planning anything major… but I cannot speak for other elements of the government."

He was elliptically talking about the Hun Sen faction, the other half of the government. "Ok, I’ll check with them too. Thanks for your time."

"Here, take a copy of this." He handed me a pamphlet written in Khmer that had the Statue of Liberty on the cover. The guy with me from Caltex explained that the road minister had translated some excerpts from the U.S. constitution, Thomas Payne, and others into a short Khmer book about functional democracy. My contact then took me over to the "other elements", who were located on the other side of town not suprisingly on a military base. Everyone was armed with that must-have third world accessory, the AK-47. Take a guess at who ended up running the government.

Later that day, we went to the UN office that had been essentially running the country before the elections (called UNSCOM or UNIVAC or UNHLPFL or some other alphabet soup.) The office was a typical UN mixture of career bureaucrats from a variety of countries who had started long ago as idealists. The UN office was not exactly business friendly (and knowing who the business community was at this point, I could hardly blame them.) What I needed from them was demographics. This nice young Japanese woman with circles under her eyes listened to my request and looked at me as if I was on drugs. Her English has not been very strong at first, but I guess we had given her inspiration - "You want consumer habits? Ok. The people here eat rice, when they can get it. The main luxury item is the bicycle. There is a growth industry in artificial limbs."

In order to give us a proper view of the market, John decided to drive me and Turkin over to one of their flagship stations. This was a 100 meter square monstrosity that dominated the intersection of two of the largest avenues in the city. 100 meters is a lot of space, even by the American standards that Caltex was importing to Cambodia. John explained that this land would be used for ancillary profit centers – to start with a car and bike wash, and a convenience store, and eventually a quick serve restaurant. (Quick serve restaurant - or QSR – is the new euphemism in the industry for fast food. I’ve just seen a Wendy’s refer to itself this way, and I expect to see it again.) The ultima thule for the gas industry at this point was to turn a station into "a destination", which might include several QSR’s and perhaps even a video store, creating a micro-village unto itself. But given the surroundings, the gleaming white concrete of the station, its space age canopy, and the futuristic gleam of the store, this went beyond that into holy shrine status.

The StarMart was at the center of this strategy, and Greg’s shining achievement in Cambodia. While total overkill given the state of the local economy – in fact Caltex upper management had been fairly opposed - they expected the StarMart would make Caltex identified in the minds of local consumers with progress, with truth, justice and the Cambodian way. I had seen Texaco do something similar in Ivory Coast, with the result that the convenience store ended up becoming a center for imported luxury goods - the only people who could afford to buy anything there were rich, and while they were selling them American shampoo they could also sell fine French wines.

This StarMart had a triangular floor plan, and the cashier’s counter was a rounded battlestation with an enormous overhang for storing cigarettes, all done in blindingly cheerful blue, yellow and orange. The rest of the place was still a shambles, being assembled by a group of workers, half western, half Cambodian. Over by a magazine rack was a westerner, who by the way he was standing was not involved in any of the frenetic activity around him even at the level of a supervisor. John went over and had a conversation with him for a few minutes while I took a tour with Greg and Matt slipped away to the back somewhere.

"Who’s that?" I asked Greg. There weren’t more than a few hundred westerners in the city, and I had already picked up on the fact that all of them knew each other.

"Ainsworth."

"Shit!"

Ainsworth was the guy who had done the data collection for our company the year before, although it was more like committed fraud against us. He was the only game in town for data, and he was part of the Old Boy network. I had told Greg and John that there was no way that we were going to use him again this time. We had spent months trying to "clean" the data he had given us, and had ultimately reached the conclusion that he had not visited many of the places that he had given us data for. Of course, my company was a bunch of crooks also, so he had spent most of the year attempting to get paid for his work. Finally John Raeside had intervened and forced us to pay him as a prerequisite for doing the project again this year. I’d never met him before but I’d screamed at him over the phone.

"This is Ainsworth. His mother is a lady."

I leaned in to him, leered, and said under my breath "My grandfather was a terrorist."

To my surprise, John roared at this, and clapped me on the back. He went over to repeat the exchange to Greg. I exchanged pleasantries with Ainsworth and drifted away.

One of the guys working there was from Sweden. His company had been contracted by Greg to come over to Cambodia and assemble the Start Marts from the kit that had been containered in. There were a few things that they had considered buying locally, but Caltex had extremely stringent standards, and for instance for the signage Greg didn’t feel that they were able to match the light electric blue color accurately, so everything was bought at great expense and flown in. This Swedish guy whose name I forget – call him Olaf – was assembling the motion detector for the automatic doors. The doors to the front were to be double sliding glass doors, making the parallel to the world of Star Trek complete. Olaf was finishing up with a Khmer trying to hand him the correct tools and often as not getting it wrong, since Olaf kept reverting to Swedish. In theory the Khmers were going to learn from this experience to build the rest of these for Caltex, but I had the feeling that Olaf would be back.

We decided after this that we were done – done for the day, and for me for good. I was due to leave as soon as I felt I had the project running and I told my boss in a two minute phone call at $9 a minute that everything was fine. I had some paper maps, and we decided we were going to create our own demographics. It was time to celebrate the auspicious launching of the project. John took us out first to a casino/brothel. We went into a room with a glass window which separated us from tiered benches on which sat women – really girls – with numbers on them, about 35 or so. John picked two and he delegated the other two to let Turkin pick two. John had them sent to a private room. The room itself was a horseshoe shaped velvet couch, cheap wood panelling, dim lighting – a room in a Queens basement was the first thing that came to mind. The girls came in, sang karaoke with us for a little while, and tried to eat as much of the spread of food that was laid out on the table as they could while keeping us entertained. Then John told them to strip, and they did so efficiently and artlessly. They moved anemically more or less in time to the music, and then sat down with us and we sang some more karaoke. and then danced with them, while they tried to remove our clothing. I let them take off my shirt, which I thought was only fair. I noticed some kind of weird look from John – like this was crossing some line between the exploiter and the exploited, taking away some of his power. I ignored him and danced with one of the girls to some Vietnamese classic.

Next John took us to the Manhattan Club.

John looked out of the 4X4 into the darkness. "One of the crucial things to know about Cambodia is that it is a truly lawless society, eh? Nothing is illegal - per se."

"Is it really dangerous here?"

"Depends on which faction is mugging you. But we’re westerners, eh? The cash cow. The big crooks stop the little crooks from doing anything to the businessmen."

The Manhattan Club looked like Miami on the outside and sounded like a disco on the inside. The greatest resemblance to its namesake was the prices of the drinks. The bar was immaculate stainless steel, with only top shelf liquor for sale. As was typical of Asia, good scotch was apparently more popular here than in Scotland. Over the booming dance floor was a giant hemispherical disco ball at least 6 feet across. The music was a techno track that I’d heard recently in Germany but hadn’t heard yet in the US. While I was still sizing the place up John found his way onto the dance floor with one of the girls.

When he returned I nudged him and said "This place is incredible. I’ve never seen a club with this many women."

"They’re hookers."

I nearly did a spit take as I looked around quickly. "Which ones?"

"All of them. They’re all brought in from Vietnam, see. The only khmers in here are the bartenders and I think some of them are Vietnamese too. It’s not a brothel – you only meet them here." John then introduced me to his "friends". He seemed well known here, and his relationship with them was illustrative of the nature of the human gratification business in Cambodia and Vietnam, which was far more personal than it is elsewhere (before and after.) Turkin had told me stories about his girlfriend in Thailand. After he showed me her photo, I was a little puzzled since she was rather beautiful and 20 years younger than him. I really didn’t think much of until someone told me about his enormous "laundry charges" on his hotel bill. The nature of the beast was not necessarily a one night stand – it might be companionship over a week or two – I guess the women went for this because there were meals and a place to stay.

One of the women hanging onto John dragged him towards the dance floor, and I was slightly depressed by the fact that John Raeside with a son my age was a better dancer than I was. Another one of his flock, sizing me up at our table, leaned over to me and said "John good man. John fucking crazy man. Sometimes John fucking crazy, sometimes John fucking crazy woman!"

"I can see that."

The next morning Jimmy was driving me to the airport and true to my usual form I had thirty minutes to be on the plane when I checked out of the hotel. We managed to go from the right lane of the right hand side, (where legend has it you are supposed to drive) to the left lane of the left side, on a six lane road, in under half a minute - all the time playing chicken with oncoming trucks and buses that suddenly came into view in the maelstrom of traffic and dust at 50 miles an hour. The side of the road you drive on is merely a cultural convention, one that the majority of Cambodians felt free to ignore when it suited them. I arrived at the airport longing for the safety of Vietnam Air’s Soviet-built Tupolov aircraft that was going to get me out of here. Cambodia is actually one of the few places where I would never drive. Either I’d get myself killed, or I’d really like it.

When a Vietnam Air flight went down in Phnom Penh in July, most of the bodies were looted and the agents of VA had to buy back the black box flight recorder from a low level official in the Hun Sen faction. (I found this out flying on that same route from Phnom Penh to Ho Chi Minh.) Rumor had it that the flight had been shot at, but this turned out to not be true. Nevertheless, it made everyone watching with any interest even more jittery.

There were news reports of "gang" fights, which were really the paramilitaries of both sides sizing each other up. Someone fired a grenade into a square that I had been in, killing a few people for motives that were unclear outside of creating an atmosphere of terror. Matt was collecting data and getting stoned, not necessarily in that order.

Back in New York, I was getting drunk in a bar with some friends. One of the guys I had brought into the company, who later pulled one of the better scams done to Penn&Schoen as he became the head computer guy, had a friend he wanted me to meet.

Kevin told me about his friend Matt Doenitz. The two of them had been expat brats together in Saudi Arabia in their teens, and then Matt had gone off to hotel school in Switzerland for a few years. He was currently employed as a concierge at a hotel off of Central Park South, but was looking for something new. We needed an admin assistant, and I figured if he worked out we could move him up to be a fieldworker. He definitely sounded like he’d be able to survive overseas by himself. Kevin assured me that he was smart and hard working, so I’d already decided to hire him.

I was more than a little wobbly when he showed up, and he and some other guys had already gotten off to a good start elsewhere.

So we wound up talking at the bar over shots.

"I hear you’re looking for a job."

"Yeah, Kevin mentioned that you might be looking for someone." He had one of the strangest accents I had ever heard – my first guess was Dutch. I had asked Kevin about his citizenship – we had hired someone from Bosnia and he never failed to get harassed going in and out of the US, and I wasn’t eager to repeat that.

"Where are you from again?"

"Oklahoma."

"Huh?"

"It’s a long story," he said, and laughed.

"Well, what we’re looking for right now is an admin assistant. But after we got you trained and familiarized with the business, it’s likely you would become a field worker. That probably would not happen for at least six months though, so I wouldn’t take the job just because of the travel."

"No, that sounds good."

"Do you drink?"

We were both pretty much sprawled on the bar. "What do you think, eh?"

"Do you smoke?" Myself and one of my friends had this idea that if we hired all smokers we could legally make our part of the office a smoking zone. We had pretty much done this already, but occasionally people complained, and we felt that there would be safety in numbers.

"Sure."

"You’re hired… uh… welcome to the team. Bartender…"

Matt spent a confusing two weeks in our office, learning whatever someone had a spare minute to teach him. At the beginning of the third week my boss told me that we were starting a round of new projects in Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines and asked what we were going to do for a new fieldworker.

"Matt – do you have a valid passport?"

For six weeks I was commuting from a "home base" in Singapore. So around the first weekend of July, when the coup went down, I was in the same time zone and trying to find Matt Turkin. Turkin and I had talked about the situation there before I left and it was agreed if things started getting bad he’d get out. There had been some shooting and bombings the previous week. A reporter Turkin knew had gotten shot outside the Foreign Correspondents Club. All of us were getting a little edgy. And Turkin had been there for seven weeks already, instead of the four we had anticipated at the beginning. Data was failing to appear in New York. We didn’t know what was going on, but all around I figured it would be best to get him out, whatever our boss said. We didn’t need to finish anything this badly. But the coup preempted us and for three days we could not find Turkin. CNN was filled with coup related stories, Thais stranded at the airport, buildings being blown up. CNN loves wars – the Gulf War virtually made them. They had only just started airing their "Cambodian Coup" theme song and graphic (ala "Crisis in the Gulf"), and I imagine they were rushing to get James Earl Jones into a studio to do his voiceover, when the whole thing came to a abrupt end - with the Prince’s faction fleeing into the jungle near Thailand. I’m sure they were more than a little disappointed.

I already had the Vietnam trip planned, but now it seemed like a very good idea because Ho Chi Minh is the closest foreign city to Phnom Penh. Not that I had any idea what to do when I got there. I thought the guys at Caltex Vietnam might have some ideas about getting their own out. I called Caltex House in downtown Singapore and talked to Jim Hawn, an American and one of the very big guys in the organization. "Oh – would you like to talk to John? He’s down the hall."

Turns out that both Greg and John were conveniently on vacation in Singapore. John had left only a week before. He hadn’t brought Turkin with him though. So much for the man, the myth, the legend. John picked up the phone.

"Y’know Tim, all of this means nothing really."

"The coup?"

"Yeah, it’s a load of rubbish."

"Good, good, that’s good to hear... where’s Turkin these days?"

"I don’t know. But he’ll be fine."

"Yeah. Well. Enjoy your vacation. I’ll say hello to everyone at your office for you."

Embarrassed silence followed. We got off the phone.

The next day I went on to Vietnam. I had been unable to get in touch with Mike Berland, the head of our company, despite urgent calls to the hotel he was staying at in Florida. I felt somewhat disgusted with all of the older men I was dealing with. The vice president of our company, Paul Duke, who at 5 years my senior was all of 32, talked to me on the phone about the situation and we went at it with all of our combined worldly experience. I had far more than Paul did, and I convinced him that the situation was probably not as bad as CNN made it seem, but I was going anyway.

Surprise number two – I walk into Caltex Vietnam (only three blocks away from the famous old American embassy – the one the choppers took off from in 1975, which at this point was the Museum of the People’s Revolution) and Mark Armstrong, my contact there greeted me and said "We have one of yours here." Turkin had left Cambodia five days before for his birthday. He stuck around to celebrate the 4^th of July in Ho Chi Minh. That weekend, the coup happened. "You’re one lucky bastard", I said.

We headed that night to a bar called Apocalypse Now. An expat bar, where above the ceiling fans some joker had painted upside down American helicopters, making the fans look like their rotors. The owner also had a bar in Cambodia, called the Heart of Darkness. They catered to the delusions of many of the expats who had seen Casablanca one too many times. In short order that night, we got drunk and Turkin got angry. Our boss, Mike Berland, Asshole Extraordinaire, had showed zero concern over his fate and had never returned any phone calls.

"Matt – why didn’t you call us in Singapore or NY? We were looking for you."

"That’s not the point. I’ve known that motherfucker for five years. I knew him before he was a partner – back when he was an intern. He never called me back. I could have been dead." This was true, I had to admit. This left me in the bizarre situation of trying to prevent his firing, which I’d been hoping for for some time.

"Ok, we’ll talk to him about it in the morning. Not now."

"No, I’ve got to talk to him now."

"Don’t do this."

"Do what – I just want to talk to him."

"Yes, but you’re angry and drunk. This can’t go well."

"It’ll be fine."

"Let me talk to him for you."

"Tim, I’ve got to do this," then suddenly calming down and looking reasonable, "It’ll be fine. He knows me." We both knew it wouldn’t be fine. But this was something he needed to do. They had a good fight. Mike told Turkin to stay put and wait – for what we had no idea. There wasn’t anything for him to do. Turkin said he was going home. In one of my less proud moments, I told Turkin to go to Singapore and replace all of his stuff, relax, wait for Mike to cool down and then go home. Nothing doing. He went home, threw a chair at our accountant (who was also a weasel) and was fired a week later, thus continuing my company’s glorious tradition of firing the right people for the wrong reasons.

I started seriously thinking about quitting for the first time. I didn’t really have any respect for the whole corporate thing, and I saw what we were doing as ripping off the people who were ripping off everyone else, in the name of market research. I had worked out my little Tom Sawyer rationalization - I figured using the deep pockets of Caltex to travel the world was not such a bad thing – some people join the military for the same reason, and I didn’t have to worry about being sent off to kill people. I once heard it said that a market researcher is someone who will borrow your watch to tell you what time it is. When you’re doing this to a big oil company, and you’re fairly certain your advice is doing them as much harm as good, what the hell. The reality was, though, that we were going into some genuinely dangerous places, and far enough from the main cities to be in real danger – Nicaragua, Cambodia, the West Bank in Israel. And when the chips were down, we had no plan for protecting our people. (I found out later we did not even have travel insurance.)

Seemed like the same thing was happening with our clients. Within Caltex and Texaco, there were plum overseas assignments, and to get to them when you started out as an ex-pat you could volunteer for somewhere really bad first. It worked much the same way as it is in the military - to get promoted quickly you needed to see combat. Within Texaco, the hardship post was Nigeria. In the Caltex half of the world, it was Cambodia. That explained what Greg was doing there. John, on the other hand, was one of the ex-pat types who relished being sent to the craziest places because it let them get away from the boredom of the corporate world. They wanted the feeling of the wild west. When push came to shove, however, they didn’t really want to be in the wild west. I guess they had all bought into the "End of History" concept, that with the end of the Cold War and the "triumph of the democratic-capitalist system" that soon the Cambodians like everyone else in the world would be soon be peacefully lining up at their local McDonald’s. This was one of the last savage places on Earth and they wanted to get in on it before it became the next Korea or Thailand. As the baht and the won went into freefall that summer, that seemed a little less likely.

For a little bit we thought that Caltex Cambodia was just going to pack up and go home. But John had all of his chips down in Cambodia and had enough pull remaining in Caltex to get them to stay there for another year. Finally, that fall Caltex requested that we send someone back to finish the job, and I ended up sending Matt Doenitz, who John christened Matt the Second.

I’d call Matt II every now and then to check on how he was doing.

"Greg pulled out his family and moved to Zimbabwe. John’s wife just left her advertising job in England and has come here – I think so she can keep an eye on him. He’s complaining that he can’t have any fun."

"That’s a damn shame."

Matt told me he drank the still warm blood of a cobra that had been drained out of the poor snake as it was flayed alive and spiked up against a tree, mixed with brandy by its still beating heart with the olive – the pineal gland – thrown in for good measure. Matt would never loose the Strangest Thing Eaten competition again.

Another night he was out with Greg, when he was dipping the gas tanks at some of their stations to check the level to be sure no one was stealing gas.

In a few weeks he had redone all of the data and completed the project and was back in New York. We built out model and constructed the software, and I was on my way there shortly after Thanksgiving.

"The place looks about the same."

"You didn’t think it was going to look worse?" John asked wryly.

"Touché."

"So John, how have you been?"

"No complaints. Things have been quiet here. My wife’s in town."

"Cuts down on your social life, I guess."

He leaned over, putting his hand on the table and said "I’ll tell you, I can’t have any fun these days."

"I heard you had some looting during the coup."

"Right, they took all of the metal. Off the pump, off the canopy, everything."

"Someone’s roof by now, I take it?"

He shook his head.

"We’ve also had some robberies at our stations, eh? Two this week. These ex-soldiers come up, tie up the attendant and take the safe."

"What, blow it?"

"No. They take the entire safe." He looked a little tired.

I had a vision of guys on bicycles trying to make off with the safe. But apparently, they used an SUV.

I presented our findings, and installed the software. "Tim, I’d like to introduce you to our computer guy. Tek Man."

You’ve got to be kidding me. "Uh… Tek your first name? Or family name?"

The guy couldn’t have been more then seventeen. He looked at me earnestly and with profound confusion. "Tek," he said with emphasis.

"He’s not so great with the English but he’s great with computers."

"John, that’s not his real name is it?"

He smiled as he walked into his office and didn’t answer me. I spent the next few hours instructing the new operators of the software on how it worked. Both of them were Khmers, which seemed like a kind of progress, since this meant that they might actually be involved in making decisions at some point. As I was going down the hallway to the bathroom I looked out the window, and saw monkeys scurrying along the metal roof of the next building. John walked up behind me. "They’re all rabid you know. Just so you don’t get the idea of trying to get them to come over here."

"What are they doing there?"

"They infest the roof of the building. Someone was raising them for tourists for a while."

"Oh yeah. All of those tourists."

I watched them jump around for a bit. "So are you going to actually get a chance to use our program?"

"It can be used to decide how to reduce a network also, right?" We both laughed. "We actually own the stations here, and we don’t in Vietnam, so probably they’ll pull out of Vietnam this year and stay here."

"Well, that’s good. We didn’t do all of this for nothing then."

Jimmy had been promoted to the office after he helped keep the office from getting looted during the coup. John’s new driver was waiting for me at the driveway of the Intercon, and had been for 20 minutes because John had told him to come for me early and wait until I was ready to leave. I felt a twinge of unease at the older man waiting for me at my leisure but I hadn’t known so I dismissed the thought and threw myself and my luggage across the back seat.

"The airport?"

"Yeah." I was exhausted, and watched the city go by, happy to bid it farewell. I noticed the driver studying me in the rear view mirror.

"How long have you been working for John?"

"Two month," he stated tersely. I waited but he didn’t elaborate.

"What did you do before?"

"I was graduate student. History."

"Really… that’s what I studied. I was thinking of going back to grad school."

"Good to know… bad for work."

"Exactly. It’s the same in America." We laughed.

The conversation lulled for a few minutes.

"My family live in America, in California. Two brothers, two sisters."

"Your mother and father live here, though?"

He smiled ruefully and shook his head. "No. They died. Do you know the Killing Fields?"

"Yeah… I’ve heard of it."

"They take them away. We never see them again. Pol Pot kill one – thousand thousand… no…"

"One million."

"Yes, maybe two million… next time you come, go to museum, see his art. That is where my parents are." He was talking about the map of Cambodia made of human skulls, now in the Killing Fields museum. I had nothing to say, but he mercifully continued.

"I live in Phnom Penh then, but we move to camp."

"Everyone in the city?"

"All but soldier. City empty. Then after Pol Pot we come back. For a long time, nothing to do but live. I go to school. Then I get this job."

"So are you going to work for Caltex?"

"No. I work then I want to go to California."

"Will you return to Cambodia later? When you retire?"

He shrugged. "Nothing to come back to."

We arrived at the airport, and he unloaded my bags from the back, then said "See you next time."