Wherever we go, it's the go-go bars, it's the go-go bars with red lights that fall on whore eyes and teeth and bare waxed arms dangerously, and drunk lovers (or people pretending to be) and a few awkward families stepping their way out of that, that jungle of penis jokes on t-shirts (3 for 45 baht) so look straight ahead (but they all read some and think, haha, must tell the friends) and walk quick, leave the beer gripping pink Europeans and their short skirted girls behind, stepping stepping over a puddle here a stranger's sneaker there, this awful mixed up clamour of tubelights hung on trees and shops under them selling fake things (fake promises that they'll work, too) and the cars glide silently by, below the sky train that flares orange suddenly in the night popped by skyscraper lights, and the wicked signs that say massage and mean sex, like the hotels penning in lovers (or people pretending to be).

We have no use for a purple hat. Not even one with golden strips around it and white net trailing from the back, but it lay so wizardly on the dim night pavement that we turned into enchanted children and picked it up. Now the people in dark coats in front of the pub smoke their cigarettes between shouts to friends across the street, and they look at the hat as we walk through the knotted crowd. It is a bit like possessing a secret thrill, like the evening we found the tower fenced off in a construction compound. It had been thick with gravity, a tower rising from a small castle bewilderingly by a road, crossed by cars with windows rolled up and people heading to the Starbucks some strides away. We had gaped, crossed the road and followed the fence all the way around to a place where we could poke our faces through a gap between two upright concrete slabs and watch the tower closely. A small plastic board said it was a high school's library.

The purple hat is also only a purple hat thrown away, now its conical inside littered with clumps of dirt. But we can't bring ourselves to fling it into a bin with crushed coffee cups and tissues people have blown their noses in. It could have been a magical creature, this one, and for the instant that we grinned stupidly and bent to pick it up from the road, it was. We leave it perched on a mailbox, grand and humble at once on the throne.

From our sunny sidewalk table, over creamy white pasta, we can see a man across the street. He touches the edge of his girlfriend's short skirt and urges it further up her thighs, while she laughs and poses flirtatiously under the palm trees at the street-edge of the beach. We look at each other, not sure whether to be shocked or amused. Smooth convertibles stroll past us, down the row of pastel hotels, lingering to watch girls in oversized sunglasses and shorts that reveal the crunch of the butt.

There is a different Miami too, a Miami with no fuss, swept into the corners of the clubbing, shopping, tanning city. We go there one evening, gliding in a car through the Cuban neighbourhood, Spanish on its stores and restaurants. Boards hang in windows, screaming low prices. We even cross a dollar store that looks like a warehouse, and I wonder what delightfully cheap discoveries dwell in there. There isn't very much delight outside. The houses look gloomy and unpainted, and a mute raggedness clings to the narrow street. Cars speed through the area, all on their way somewhere else.

We stop for dinner at a small Haitian restaurant in a darkly lit neighbourhood, on whose verandah some elderly couples with floppy hats and beach shirts chat. Inside, the room is a blast of colour. Tropical scenes crowd the walls, and tiny chairs and tables are stuffed into the remaining space. A fan groans, turning this way and that in a hot corner. Conversation circles each closed group of diners, and two Hispanic boys hurry about, bringing dishes and punching numbers on a computer screen. Tossing away familiarity, we take bites to explore the innards of fried mysteries.

Next afternoon, we go up and down several parallel streets, but we don't see it. Then, by an ochre house greeted by tall palms waving gently in the heat, the bookstore appears. It is an alternative bookstore my cousin is fond of. A small courtyard divides two halls of books, and we turn right for no particular reason. In a dark wood, carpeted hush, we step from shelf to shelf, from fiction to Jewish history, philosophy to American politics. I read a little here, a little there, flipping over books to read reviews on the back cover. I am tempted to buy, but I don't, hoping to find them in libraries at college. At the far end, in an enclave detached from the room, I hear someone talking in a speaker's voice. I smile to think, a lecture, probably, far from the extravagant gloss of beach parties, chihuahuas in purses and wine on glorious night streets.

Our sweatshirts thin and cold but the air so youthfully profound we hugged our bodies on the stone steps of the library, watching the night pinned to the sky with stars. Quiet spread across the grassy yard and the sleeping squirrels, to the church dark and old whose golden bell rang at intervals nobody understood.

That night we felt powerful, and small. I had decided to drop a concentration in English, and he had decided to drop college for a year. We wanted to abandon our undeserved comfort of brick walls and ivy, of classrooms polite and intellectual, and dash to those places of loss where they needed us. Why had we been granted fifty thousand dollars to argue and essay, when there were exhausted men and women silently bent over in mines and fields, collecting illness and less than a dollar? We knew, while we stretched our legs over several steps, we knew there were people handing over their lifetimes' savings for a chance to live in the first world, our world. Because in theirs, there were machetes and empty wells and homes with flickering lanterns, there were prejudices and worries and landgrabbing. We had class in the morning, English 10a, Major British Writers. But of what importance was it, really, the colour green in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight?

We go to Harvard, some say smartly, pumped with secret delight at the immediate awe they receive. But our pride is a wicked illusion if it springs from the self-indulgent achievement of attending a school. We will only know that we deserved this honour the day we choose to plunge into the wailing world, and leave our resumes behind. Not a day earlier.

The last sign said Montreal was 69 miles away, and soon after, Amanda's dad pointed out Canada on the horizon of a calm lake. I watched, absorbing as much as I could of the beautifully unknown place, though it was only vaguely brown and wooded. In the warm tangle of coats and sweaters on the backseat, I felt the enchantment of faraway drift alluringly close. Amanda fiddled with the radio knob.

The Mississquoi river is rich blue with banks of skinny trees that look like silhouettes of themselves. I don't know what's on the other side of the car because the sun flashes its dusk anger at the window when I turn to look. I think I see fields of scratchy brown grass fighting to be green. Geese fly in a wobbling triangle across the pink orange sky, and after nearly six hours on the road, Amanda turns to say we're there.

Little yellow lights are strung into awkward angels along the road in Malone. The evening is deep and wintry, I can tell by the sad lights of grocery stores and petrol pumps, and by the woman who nudges her chin into the folds of her scarf as she waits to cross the street. Low buildings stretch along the way, dim and quiet, until we turn away from the town by a bright Domino's. The grey road widens blankly, and Amanda's dad tells me the prison is to the right. I remember Amanda's jokes about Malone's population: 4000 civilians, 8000 prisoners, and a couple of thousand cows.

Outside my window, well away from the edge of the road, fences enclose a compound of glaring lights focused on clusters of cells. It is unsettlingly normal, the space between misshapen lives barred from living, and a car of Thanksgiving people with their favourite music and bottled water. When we turn the next corner, telephone lines swing across a canvas of dark sky like in a tritely pretty photograph.

We shoot straight down the road, flat and barren fields reclining on both sides, a cottage popping up warm and alone sometimes, and stop at a house with carved pumpkins withering on the porch. A little boy opens the door enough to peek through as we unload the bags, running away when we step into the warm, frayed room.

Cockroaches crawl among the heaps of potatoes, and dash by the drain where the blood of fish swirls. Nobody sees them, but from below the swish of cotton anchals and sprigs of coriander, I do. The bazaar is a weekend ritual, the click-click of an old rickshaw ending at dark rusty gates that swallow harried strangers. Fat women with folds in their soft bellies waddle, men with jute bags keep a sharp eye on the calculation of change. My mother asks me to follow her closely, and we step into the muddy pathways aglow with yellow bulblight. I watch everything, the squawking chickens in smelly cages, mounds of rich green vegetables, fish swimming in beat up tin tubs. I watch the moustached men unfold their lungi to retrieve rupees, wipe their hands on filthy red cloth, shake their heads and protest loudly at accusations of rotten fruit. They call out prices and call again if they are ignored.
I think I would be shy if I were they. I would be afraid, too, of the cockroaches hiding in my potatoes, and of not having very much time to read stories.

Deeply browned little children, how sad their lives. Lives lived in drooping huts among puddles of urine, on rationed food flung out of planes in the sky, and ended by a swing of the machete, perhaps.

A splendid story, that--which is why Africa is the prime character of any film that mentions it. It unsettles our dormant discomfort, urges our sympathy, uplifts our spirits with its openness to being held and hugged by benevolent Hollywood stars. Africa forces humility upon viewers, silencing criticism. It is no longer a film they discuss, it is a country. A disappointingly mediocre film, then, is welcomed as a glorious exploration of grave issues. Who dares say, but, you know, The Constant Gardener stumbled and scraped through its underdeveloped story, the characters clinging to barren sentimentality and, of course, many runny nosed children.

The boys chat on an unused pipe left by the road, their feet dangling. They talk in the needlessly loud tones of those who have adopted the street, calling to a shopkeeper here, a neighbour there. We walk by, pressed on to school, to work, to costly enjoyment. We look elsewhere, never at them, uneasy before street boys with hot eyes and opinions. Aren't they, or those like them--the grinning ones with junk chains around their necks, and their floppy hair and beastly long fingernail--aren't they the ones who whistle tunes at young girls, the ones who snatch cell phones and steal petrol from parked cars? But when we return, at night, they are shadows evading the streetlights, cigarette smoke twirling above their heads.

It's a yearning to be in those mundane places, those fields thick with crops that ripple under steel grey sky, those sudden red earth canyons whose pebbles crunch and slide as you step on them, those stations where dark, frowning villagers wait for trains that stop only a minute. In a city being's mind, they are deeply true in a way cities aren't. One dreams of being free and alone there, revelling in a joyous beauty their people can't see.
One is mocked for it, too.
A soft bed, restaurant dinners with the clink of cutlery and buzz of conversation, a car to go to gleaming malls in. Who can devote himself so completely to beauty and freedom as to sacrifice comfort? But we dream, occasionally stifled in our comfort, and we seek beauty in art--the beauty that breathes in too far villages and mountains, too strong and rough to bear.

Where is the sea? Not there, where the dark street dimmed by high up lights curves with the earth, and not even there, where men grip the neck of beer bottles with easy fingers and watch their mates play pool. Across the road, then, with a quick glance this way and that, for the cars are swift and silent as they chase the dips and hills of the road. A wide stretch of sand rolls away from the wall by the street to the black, frothing sea. We walk to the very edge of the wet, packed sand, and the waves, slithering to the shore like powerful snakes, collapse in a mess of bubbles at our feet. There is nobody else on the beach, and we say nothing to each other, glad only to feel small together, the massive ocean tenderly letting us be.

Poetry falters in my hands. The words withdraw into themselves, and nobody can lift them to meaning. They slip into forest paths that end in wilderness, lie by alluring rivers, traverse all the fields and lantern-lit huts between places. All the earth separating destinations is theirs to walk, and they do so leisurely, quickening as night sets its table in the sky. They stop then, aware of how far they have come, and sigh, knowing they have reached no new land. They fall, all of them, and nobody understands where they once meant to go.