The fleshy splash, thick and wide, corralled his left, untouched eye, clinging to his cheekbone as a weeping crescent moon, like clown’s makeup gone forever wrong.

About him, within the cabin of the wide-bodied 747, passengers carried on to the steady whine of the engines. Some read, others listened to headphones amongst scattered napping between movies and meals. Somewhere trays clattered.

Truman looked fast, something else to think about. This was his second time flying. The first frightened him worse, days before, delivering him to his group’s staging in Seattle. Truman, with twenty-two other Americans, having joined the United States Peace Corps, was headed for the tropical heat of Malaysia, with oodles of more fun in the sky to come. This flight for Tokyo, then on to Hong Kong, to rest to rise to fly again, bound for bustling Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s much discussed, sweltering capital city.

The pretty flight attendant smiled above the mishandled trays. A passenger, a man, helped her.

Truman looked back to his notebook. The aircraft’s laboring Rolls-Royce engines whined steadily as he wondered why he was even doing what he was doing. He peeked out his small window. Clouds spread out far below. He marveled again at his promised two years of service. He’d be twenty years old, a sentence self-imposed.

By the time he and his party of twenty-two others touched down in the dark heat of a Kuala Lumpur night, Truman’s three-ring binder was tucked into his carry-on luggage. Its first entry read:

July 10, 1980

I guess I’m having trouble with this thing—I feel talked into it—

July (I’m not sure—dateline thing?)