Oliver Benjamin
until she was lying in my lap, facing me. I lowered my head and
kissed her. Soon, we were groping each other in the sand and I found
myself trying to determine the right moment to ask her if she would
come back to my bungalow with me. As we kissed, I couldn’t help but
imagine that she was someone entirely different—someone I once
knew not too long ago, who surreptitiously tried to take the
frightened, flightless fowl in me and make it beautiful.
CHAPTER 13
The next day, Hugo and I were feasting on the “American Breakfast”
at the Shaky Bakery. It was in this bakery that you could commiserate
with the party victims of the previous night and share a greasy, high-
protein breakfast—and you could do it all before three p.m. if you
were determined to get up that early. The blatant misnomer of the
“American Breakfast” intrigued me, because in reality we inherited
the “recipe,” as it were, from the British, and there were clearly more
British than Americans on Samrin island anyway. At first it seemed
like a marketing error, but then I decided that since the term
“American” was synonymous with big and fat and unhealthy, the
particular appellation may have in reality been an appropriate
choice. In any event, my head hurt when I tried to think about it, so
I returned to the assault on my eggs.
Hugo was complaining to Boy, the Thai man who owned the
Shaky bakery, that he had ordered the special Irish breakfast, not the
American breakfast he had been served, and a minute later Boy fixed
the problem by returning and pouring a shot of whisky into Hugo’s
coffee.
It was just then that a strange fellow came to our table and
handed us a flyer. After glancing over it I realized that it was
advertising a meditation session by a new religious group on the
scene. The heading said that it was sponsored by the Juddhist
Meditation Society, but gave no indication of what Juddhism was. I
invited him to sit down at our table for a minute and explain.
First he asked me what my religion was, and I explained that I
was entirely non-religious, but that my mother was originally a
Catholic, and my father a non-practicing Jew.
“Great! We love diversity! Plus, we employ many elements of the
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