Cameron stared down at the list in his hand:

1) Credit cards
2) Significant others
3) Friends
4) Influence
5) Academic respectability

It was a list of five extremely circular things, five things that had 
passed him by. Having spent his late teens and early twenties in the 
wilderness (both literal -- India, Laos, and regions in between -- and 
figurative -- removed from Western civilization), upon his return to 
America, he found that he was at a loss. Without any credit history, at 
twenty-seven, no one would give him a credit card. With no experience 
dating, no one would date him (he was astounded to discover that, 
apparently, a movie starring a funnyman he had never heard of was based on 
this premise -- he briefly wondered if Steve Carell was that guy who made 
those movies in the nineties, only to discover that that guy was Jim 
Carrey, who furthermore was married to an object of his adolescent desire, 
former Playmate of the Year Jenny McCarthy), and without any friends to 
start a tendrilled search into the space of people, he had no seed for a 
social life. Finally, although this was of lesser import, he had no 
influence in any sphere; no connections, of course, which rendered him 
consigned to the vast, anonymous majority with no chance of getting a book 
deal or becoming a local assemblyman or -- item five -- getting into 
graduate school, this last thing also compromised by the fact that Cameron 
had no academic record to speak of.

There was a sixth thing that he couldn't figure out how to add to the 
list. His parents had found him a therapist, who, blind squirrel-style, 
turned out to be quite helpful, but lately Cameron was feeling a paradox 
there too; if his mental state improved, then of course the therapy was 
working, and if it didn't, then of course he still needed therapy. He 
could not see how he would ever get out of this situation.

For most people who exiled themselves during that period of their life, 
there was a community waiting for them upon their return: Mormons. 
Cameron, however, was entirely unreligious. He had faked being Catholic 
for his childhood, and developed a strong antagonism against the faith; 
indeed, he traveled to these regions to attempt to bring secular humanism 
to the unclean masses, as he remembered one particularly acerbic priest 
describing them. Unfortunately for Cameron, not only did this iconoclastic 
mission not come with a benevolent organization behind it, but it also 
didn't work very well on graduate school applications (Cameron did not 
feel that undergraduate life could possibly be relevant to him). College 
after college was perfectly understanding of the Mormons returning from 
their missions, to the extent that many of them assumed he was Mormon; 
inevitably, though, once they discovered that his motivation was one of 
pure humanity and not religious fervor, they shied away from him.

Cameron was getting nowhere.

All of this explained why Cameron was standing on the edge of a cliff 
staring across the Pacific Ocean, with the list in his hand. Somewhere out 
there, after all, was the land where he had spent what for most people was 
their prime years. Cameron never regretted it; he had turned many people 
away from religion, and improved people's lives. An astonishing number of 
people in the small Indian village he had spent a couple of years in had 
ended up at one of the highly competitive Indian Institutes of Technology, 
so much so that Wired magazine ran a story on the village, which he read 
with bemusement while on a discount airline to Cambodia years later. The 
article, of course, did not mention Cameron, even in passing.

Cameron, for all his diligence, was not a particularly charismatic man. He 
didn't have a loud voice, or piercing eyes; he had mediocre skin and was 
slight in stature. What he did have in spades was motivation and in 
particular a talent for what most people considered drudge work. In these 
backwoods villages, he quietly offered up heapings of science while also 
plumbing the pipes and digging wells where there were no pipes. He was a 
one-man infrastructure, but no one would call him powerful, which is part 
of why the local rulers welcomed him with open arms. In Thailand, he 
traded on the currency of 
recommendations from the small village chiefs, worth something only in the 
loosely connected jungle; he smiled ruefully as he contemplated the 
prospect of submitting these to Princeton, written as they were in their 
tortured grammar. (At first Cameron thought that their dysfluency was a 
result of his general incomprehension of Thai, but later he realized that 
this was simply not a literate people. It wasn't that they didn't value 
intelligence; in fact, the chief was generally chosen from among the smart 
ones. Indeed, the chief's knowledge of a rudimentary system of written 
communication was quite rare among the people, and this was one of the 
main criteria by which he was chosen.)

And so it was that the man who had laid perhaps more of the infrastructure 
in the muggy swamps of Bangladesh than anyone else, including the 
Bangladeshi government, was thoroughly unremarkable in his native 
homeland, both in a social and a professional sense. Standing at a vista 
point along Highway 1 in California, a road that (amazingly) is built into 
the side of the cliff, Cameron was entirely alone; an observer levitating 
100 feet above the ocean, 100 feet from the shore, would have seen an 
unassuming man against a backdrop of rock. It was a stunning sight, and 
the brilliant ocean in front of Cameron was its flip side, an endless 
succession of waves and sunlight and sparkles. 

Cameron wasn't exactly sure where to go from here.