- What are you doing, he had asked Noppawan one late Sunday afternoon after returning from his painting and philandering on the floor of his studio.
- Why all alone and in the dark?
- I am not all alone.
- Well, good. Who is with you?
She did not say anything. - Noppawan?, he asked mildly as if addressing a sensitive child.
- I have my lovers too. Can't you see? As withdrawn as she was, her words were barely audible.
- I see Basset on your lap. I see that she loves you just as I do.
- No, hers is different…real.
There was silence between both of them and he felt she was not real but a miniature spirit in a miniature spirit house that he needed to appease with gentle words of oblation. Still, there were questions to be asked: Why are you on a dining room chair in the middle of an empty room with the cat? Why is the room empty? he asked in slightly more critical tones but, as always, still gentle and circumspect with his wounded bird as with the angel and the madonnas. As an empathic man who knew what a landmine the personal life was, there could be no other demeanor for him for little did he want a battle of which rotting bodies and their stench would be the only outcome. - Why have you shoved all the furniture to the back of the room?
- I don't know. Comfort, said the reticent woman.
- Comfort?- A mirror- A mirror?
She said nothing until, like a drowning swimmer, words bubbled up from the disconcerting ocean of silence that she so cherished. - For the same reason you became involved with me, Nawin. You needed to marry someone who reminded you of what you were, how you were alone in your family, to remind you that the world was not right for someone else and it wasn't just you aching and mad in your own thoughts. So the furniture gets shoved to the back of the room, so I look into space.
- What?
- As a mirror.
- What does that mean…'as a mirror?'
For a few seconds she withdrew to the cat, petting it but with eyes that seemed to pass through that which she needed to neediness itself. Then she looked back at him—I don't find it lonely just to sit here.
- You should.
- Should I? I don't know. Being with you, not knowing what you think of me…you in these women's company constantly, and me in their shadows…Often I just want to be contained here in my space. Here I don't feel so inadequate to your women, or the need to deprecate myself so much for feeling that way…so inadequate to your disadvantaged, dirty women.
- I'm sorry.
- Inadequacies are fired onto me daily, you know, even if I do tell myself its inside me and that you do not pull the trigger…. No, it isn't the affairs. What you press against your body is none of my business. It isn't as if I need to inspect the underwear you plan to put on…if its cotton or silk, bikinis or boxers, clean or dirty…what you press against your body, who massages it, and how, I don't care.
-What can I do for you?
-Yes, strangely enough you are so decent. Husbands should at least be friends with those they have. I knew what you were when I married you. It's those inadequacies like going out in rags….If you like yourself before, you end up losing any sense of anything good about yourself in being with such a man….No, I can sit here for hours and not see anything so lonely in it. Its like Ban Chiang pottery locked in a glass display but at least in that container I have me. Out of it, with you, I lose me… at best, I have just an image of you from long ago in a special mirror nobody else sees.
-You don't look like my image. He chuckled awkwardly to lighten the mood, fully aware of conversation being an inept bridge to link any pair let alone the purveyor of pain with its victim. Not knowing what to say he changed the subject—Let's move the furniture where it belongs out of the corners. This was his response to silence.
- Why, people ask me are we, I, an archaeological anthropologist and you, a playboy artist, together. They feel sorry for me for they think it a graphic humiliation worse than rape. In ways I suppose it can seem that way when rape is such a private act…and this is not private. I brag about your latest paintings as if to say that what he does with his own body is his business; I don't tell him how and where to move his legs so why should I worry about his other bodily movements and functions; and I couldn't be prouder of a husband who explores the human soul through a vagina. I suggest it, although not in those words…not any words really. She began to cry. - There is no paint for me, Nawin. No canvas…just the clutter of a woman's home…countless things if she marries well…countless knick-knacks she has to move around and in which she has to reflect her thoughts, all in different parts of the house. She moves the furniture to see a world where the same pain exists elsewhere to prove to herself that it is the natural state so as to make all else bearable…I mean it is the natural state in a sense but for other husbands maybe not to these extremes or at least not so openly depicted. If natural, a woman can console herself that it is not just the insanity of aching in her own head.
- Are you leaving me?
- No, I'm not so courageous. It will always be more of the same for me. So I am sitting with this so called goddess of Bubastis, this cat on my lap, and as I do so it seems to me that a cat is good for cuddling but a man with his premature pecker is not a cuddler…just a lovemaker. That is what he is good at. The Egyptians were right about there being a woman in the cat and a cat in a woman, for the two creatures need to feel real within the propinquity of touch. There with another non-threatening suffering creature of this world, touching to feel real, maybe it is just another mirror—just a bigger love, a fuller love and perhaps a more selfish love than a man and a woman feel but this cuddling with a cat is better for a woman.
The memory reeled around and played so distinctly that he almost thought he was there with his wife; but how much of it he had distorted to make it more meaningful, dramatic, and aesthetic than it really was, he had no way of knowing. The brain was always rewinding bits of memory, analyzing them, and splicing them together like film; and as were two people walking down a sidewalk without looking at each other, who were and were not together, so was memory—it was and was not.
Were articles dating back fifteen years adulation about the artist of his youth that might have been true words then but little pertained to the man of forty, or were his works tremendous talent that did not hinge on the salacious biography of the artist and would live beyond his short eruption of ephemeral years? It seemed to him, nonsensically, that they both were and were not. Nonetheless, it was absurd to merely think that over the past few years he had aged so tremendously that critics and commissioners of his work alike had lost interest in him entirely. The art critics had been writing about him, albeit less frequently, until he ran out of inspiration for his redundant themes, irrespective of the surfeited forms of whores who came in droves, each with slightly different circumstances, and each with slightly different expressions. "I was a sensation until I lost interest in beating and stirring up such muck, and none of it has anything to do with turning forty," he told himself, but he knew that it was and was not true.
It was true that just four years ago he, the once eligible but continual playboy, was appealing enough to be referred to as "Naughty Nawin" with those English words in their headings proving that he had not turned into mushy and deciduous fruit in the little over three summers since; but it was not true that as unseemly as his life might be in view of the fact that he was a glutton of the personal life like a boy in front of a thousand cookies he was the same as any foreign business holidayer of the masculine gender looking for the nearest brothel. His was more of a spiritual decadence. "Forty is just a number. You are as handsome as ever," he thought as he looked at himself in the mirror. "You stopped painting and they stopped writing about you. It is as simple as this"; nonetheless he did not believe in simplicity.
He missed the hype organized by galleries. He missed magazines catering to those needing a celebrity from whom they could learn intimacies, tiny facts or rumors of facts about the personal lives of the gods. He checked himself. His mind was going in circles around the word, forty. The circles were more of a vortex as, on bad days, when he descended for some seconds or more into early family and abuse, which could suck him in fully were it not for his active vigilance.
Examining himself in the mirror for the umpteenth time with a refreshingly spry countenance there to befriend him once again, he gave thanks to the mysterious forces that had given him a life where he might make a living presenting his varied depictions of himself with his whores on canvas (a whore of every type from every angle), fervidly contemplative of life's decadent urgings. Like a schoolboy twisting in the grass, he blessed the fates that had allowed him time to revel in his spinnings. Free to contemplate the unequal plight of man (or woman as it was in his case), to see color in forms and feelings and thought, to mix with forms by allowing licentious whims to twist around the kite in accordance with natural mandates to reign in those turbulent skies, he basked in others perceptions of him as handsome, successful, and affluent. Like juicy fruit on the stem, his days in the sun, as an elated appetite of women and an envy of men—at least for those who knew something about contemporary Thai art—were embarrassing and awkward to the modest Jatupon that he was; but it was the very furthest of human plights. Selling his paintings at ever inflated prices because of their worth and his celebrity status as their decadent creator, he had the ideal life. The creature of pleasure had to concede as much as this.
Smirking at himself, the wry smile soon fell flat at the thought that even ugly pimps who were affluent from their brutish, sexual peccadilloes might be considered equally sexy; and he sighed at his bland fame. He had gained it from portraying the same models in the same redundant and stereotypical theme to which he knew no variation; and whether or not those guilt- ridden self-portraits of himself engaging with his whores as stiffly as a Buddha were an exploration of his models or an exploitation of them remained an unanswered question. He moved closer to the mirror and looked deeper into the image. The rot of forty, if it were a rot, was an internal degeneration that had not yet reached the surface of the apple except for a few premature wrinkles, which he had already stiffened out with Botox. He flexed his muscles into the mirror that like social interaction and painting reflected consciousness and reminded him of existing beyond the redundant actions of eating, urinating, defecating, reproducing, sleeping and all the other - ings.
Stepping out of the toilet as he was now doing, he posited that such banal and inconsequential movements as this were like copulation with a rife assortment of women, that movement provided men with a base physical consciousness that was indispensable to their overall welfare by making them appear more tangible to themselves than any images in mirrors could do. Still, while moving out of the toilet and pondering this new justification for male promiscuity within the corridor between the two cars, he inadvertently halted there before his image in a second mirror. "I am still a young man. Both mirrors say so," he lied to himself; and then began to wash his face at a sink. The tap water pulsated out in an extorted and convulsing trickle, pushing him a little into those turbulent memories of the recent past. Not wanting to think of Noppawan or the mangled angel who was no more volant and permanent than any pallid terracotta falling eleven or more stories (he had forgotten the exact number with the burgeoning thickets of neuron brush that were daily mutating the landscape of his mind), he looked into the image of his own eyes to reassure himself that they still had a young man's luster.
4
As he did this, combining the mirror's confirmation of forty with a sense of feeling no different than he had at twenty so that a nice conciliatory countenance of thirty stared back at him, he remembered another fragment of that earlier dream in a sleep that had been filled with such episodic starts and stops.
As the restless shifting of dreams like those he had experienced in the 'tenebrous tomb' were the chaotic composite of what the true self really was, they were also his idée fixe, for as an artist he knew that the true self was the only subject worthy of his delineation, his imagining, and that being awake was merely the desperate garnering of the true self's scatterings. In some sense being awake was a liberation from sleep, that anarchy of fleeting images, fears, and anxieties about the unalterable past which the subconscious lived over again and again in new arrangements like a news reel seen in various colored filters and in reverse of a young French and English teacher jumping from her balcony. It was a means by which, if not to erase or delete memory, to splice it, to fictionalize it, and to some degree begin again; and yet he judged consciousness to be even less real. Married one moment, separated the next, the boy was always growing out of his clothes or being stripped of them. And as the door of the fitting room by which people came in to wear him and be worn by him never seemed to shut well, allowing all whom he loved to briefly use him and be used by him to get a variant feel of themselves before going toward new entries, it seemed to him that the door might as well keep revolving. One might even stifle human growth if one were to try. This had been his supposition in maimed youth after his parents were jettisoned from their windshield by a Fate seemingly eager to part with superfluous human baggage, these burdensome nuisances, and he was too old to part from such inveterate conclusions now.
Being awake was a concoction of pasting together the fragments of subconscious thought. Whereas a biographer was a historian of superficial events, the artist was a cartographer; and it had always been his hope that collectively all artists (himself included if he were not retired) would in time be able to chart an accurate aerial view of the splendid, volcanic thrusts of the subconscious. He took a comb out of the pocket of his wrinkled pants and began to straighten his disheveled hair lovingly. Then in consort with his debonair image, his Siamese twin in the mirror, he put his palm on his forehead for it was aching numbly, and more numbly was his heart. And thinking of his own restlessness, he knew it would not end with ended sleep. He could tell this from the hammering taps of his present headache that were born of the travail of truly chaotic dreams.
He told himself that there was no reason to feel anxious; for what was a man if he were inwardly shaken by external vicissitudes? Many evenings before his self-declared retirement he would stare up into empty space from the bleachers near the lit sports stadium in that area where they both lived (an area convenient to Assumption University where his wife worked), sketch something, and feel warmth in the blackness and nothingness. A real man, he argued, could sink himself into blackness, knowing himself to be like a bit of top soil washed away in storm waters, and think nothing of it. So Kimberly was dead…so, he had a son by her in the hands of the wife whom he guessed that he was now separated from…so he was a forty year old man who briefly felt a queer amorous titillation of homosexual yearning and a phantasm of a tryst inside his head…so the tryst was for a Laotian in a train…so, like a poor man on a train, he was going to the capital of one of the most undeveloped countries on the planet…so, he was running away on this December 5th, the king's birthday (Father's Day), seemingly oblivious to any agenda about what he was running toward. It was all a sinking of his dirt in eternities of black space and he told himself that he was warm and content within it.
The link of associated thoughts that had brought him to recall this particular fragment of a dream while staring into the mirror with a preposterous sense of self-satisfaction was oblique at best. It began with him looking into his sparkling eyes and his clear white smile of multiple brushings and whitening solutions, followed by a second in which he very well might have used the English word "gay" to describe his image had that abhorrent word of myriad connotations to which the worst were dissonant to the pleasant characterization of himself as a womanizer and a lady's man not been repressed. Then, to further avoid summoning the word which he forcefully restrained into his subconscious muck like a Burmese refugee to a sylvan camp in one of those northern provinces, he stared into his mirrored eyes deeply. He concentrated on how these eyes seemed to gleam more in certain seconds and how his face looked even younger and more handsome than thirty in these evanescent blazes or vestige flashes of his former being, the boy whom he once was. The delusion of thinking of his appearance as that of a thirty year old man or as one much younger than this made him think of being thirteen, frightened by his first wet dreams and the accompanying stink of his body, which he then supposed to be some type of inception of death or body rot; but it also made him think of that day his mother bought him some goulashes for thirty baht and how proud he, that tiny boy, was that she would spend so much money on him. The goulashes made him think of being coerced to trudge around with his brothers along the edges of creeks and canals where they, guffawing sadists and martinets, made him abduct and mutilate crawdads to recognize that he was no better than any other creature of the natural order that gloated at itself as one individual in a species of myriad predators. And finally crawdad hunting in Ayutthaya, the home of his forlorn youth, made him think simultaneously of being with his brothers scavenging and pilfering refund cola bottles in the doorways of alleyways so as to buy a little candy from a local store, and wall crawling geckos.
In this earlier dream that he was now recalling a gecko crawled on a wooden cross that marked a mound near the trash barrel where a family cat had been buried in a shoe box coffin long ago. Then on the upper portion of the cross, the gecko became limp and stagnant, hanging on two of its arms like a dangling Christ. Hanging there inertly, it inadvertently pulled on it, this lever, opening a strange, familyesque commiseration of the parents and mourning of the brothers just as they had felt it together that time as young children long ago. But these odd, cognate feelings over the death of a pet were like distorted sound waves that bounced off the back of empty space and none of them were present—not even himself—just a gecko silently hanging on a cat's cross…feelings of loss…dross.
He sighed. In being awake or asleep in a state of mind that was literal or symbolic, everything that was known to his brain such as the certainty of having been abused by family, the certainty of any past event, who he loved and how much he loved her, his responsibility for the tragic outcome of a woman's life, and his own self-worth, which fluctuated based on the height of the wave it floated upon, registered merely as likely possibilities and vague truths. Any aplomb that he projected could only belie this frantic attempt to make sense out of his impressions of the world—impressions like indentations of a cookie cutter on his doughy brain, and impressions that were interpreted and warped within the pull of memory. He knew nothing of the world at all beyond loose impressions of incidents that were refracted myriad times off diminished memories, twisting into something other than what they initially were before becoming the subject of his discernment as to what life was and what it all meant.
While pasting the fragments of the true self into a reticulate and concocted whole following sleep, it seemed to him (who, in boyhood, had once been envious of a 12 year old friend for being told to leave home when there was, supposedly, not enough food for him to have his share), that for those like himself who knew the worst of family and had long lived as outsiders along its landmine strewn fringes, such dreams—surely not of geckos and crosses on cats' graves, but ones no less poignant in conveying the same grief of being bereft of family—were common on all Thai holidays. For it was on such days that happy or speciously happy groups burgeoned rife on sidewalks as a type of rank urban wildflower; and on these days in particular, pedestrians like himself could not walk down a sidewalk without using a hand like a machete against these impermanent but nonetheless hard and obdurate clusters of families. As gregarious as he was, he was often driven at such times by an obnoxious predilection to cut through the thickets of their obscene closeness and at the same time to take special attention to avoid the steps of shopping malls where the roots of these blooming and ambulatory groups more fully tangled his steps like seaweed washed on crowded shores. On holidays like this, families were everywhere except in fetid trains, like the one he was currently in, going to Nongkai. It was for this irrational caprice among others that, like a relatively poor man in this jiggling and forward moving box, he was absconding on an economical and flightless journey to nowhere. Although the train had couples bunked together, overall it was pleasantly exempt of family, and as such it was a bit of a refuge to Nawin. He laughed at himself for he found the self to be more comically intriguing than any other being.
It was on such holidays, as teenagers, that he and Noppawan, and the "they" that they both were, would go to the Siriaj Hospital Anatomical Museum to be with the dead freaks there, to sit on remote bleachers in tiny and obscure parks, to prop themselves on the ground against the side walls of public toilets near the Chao Phraya river with a small scattering of homeless individuals, and to loiter in other impromptu sanctuaries exempt of this urban seaweed known as family which both had an allergic reaction to.
He thought about how easily a man in these idle hours of a holiday could slip into a specific moment as a teenager or as a child. A boy always outgrew his pants and yet a forty year old man who was well educated, talented, and affluent would, at certain moments, find himself putting them on. In unblocked corridors memories could come to blast him with their spells and he would once again become a straggling boy fighting the pull of sadists on thin, stilted sidewalks along a canal. It was all very alarming and intriguing, and it prompted him to smile at the ironies of being human which totally confounded him in a most pleasant way.
Thinking not only about the dream but the family that once was, it seemed to him that any positive memories were a torturously slow and bitter sweet poison unjustly administered to him, someone who already resided fully as an inmate of his own brain; and that had he been totally bereft of love when he was young so as to be raised by absolute fiends, making him into one himself, it would have been almost preferable. It certainly would have been more liberating than just being confined in a memory chamber where periodically he could recall vestiges of family happiness enough to remember some specifics but otherwise only felt their deep residue. Having their intrusion did nothing for him apart from causing him to wish for what could never happen again.
But then what did he know? Without a good night's sleep, how were any of his ideas anything but minutely sensible at best? If anything was for pulling and clearing it was this weedy thicket of messy ideas in a landscape heavy in leanings toward sleep.
5
He was not exactly sure why, at the moment of contemplating this rather non-germinal seed of love that was there clogging space within his manhood, that this unpleasant recollection of his attraction to the Laotian suddenly interposed between the concept and the peaceful equilibrium that he supposed that he sought—an equilibrium that he supposed everyone sought when not bored with the tranquil and the blase. Still, it undeniably did, the way the subliminal thought of his dampened socks in the upper tomb still seemed to be aggravating his nose. He wanted to tell himself that the brief titillation, so clearly a phantasm of his own making, had not been real. It was easier than telling himself that Kimberly's death and his separation from his wife were not real; and yet he knew that even if he were able to successfully repudiate this one—this tenuous abstraction, this memory of such a queer feeling—as though it were merely the disconnection of a somewhat sleep deprived brain, such a repudiation could only be successful when he was at last off of this jejune train and out of its monotonous rhythm, and had other stimuli pumped into his orifices. Then it could be forgotten like evaporated dew on a warm, sunlit day. Until then, the stranger of the bottom bunk in underwear camouflaging an erection was tangled in the burring thickets of thought that permeated his mood as a mildew on the upper roots of a tree.
He felt disconcerted and a little anxious, and this apprehension was beginning to make him, he who had not had a shower for the past 24 hours, sweat odiously and stink as his elder brothers. He stopped himself thinking of them for beyond this point these uncultured beasts, long banished to the status of abstraction with years of no contact and diminished memories, were a forbidden subject of contemplation by the declaration of the monarch, Nawin, in the kingdom of the brain. This strange, disconcerted sense of himself was almost like a dizziness. It was as if in part he had momentarily slipped out of his body and brain to become an on-stage caricature whom he, an audience of one, was watching obtusely. He was watching himself, a mute who was trying to give a desperate soliloquy, through his only attribute of wordless, dilated eyes. He snorted and snickered at this discombobulated and confused state that was so unlike himself. His forehead somewhat furrowed in the contemplation of his puzzling idiosyncrasies. Then he wet his hand with a bit of tap water and massage-slapped his face with his fingers the way he spread his aftershave. The purpose was that of sobering himself from delusion; and he told himself that the headache was part of a slight fever. He convinced himself that he was cooling his forehead from it but this was not so. In fact the atheist (that same one who, once his child was born, had sat at an empty swimming pool contemplating what his role as father should be, but was interrupted by witnessing the manager bringing in her oblations of food, incense, and wishes for prosperity to the house of the spirits—a dollhouse on a pedestal, had inadvertently scrutinized her, and then filed the diminishing video footage into his mutating brain under the disparaging category of "S—superstitious Thai" and "T—things not to do") was now using tap water as holy water.
If in the past he thought it both amusing and peculiar that he, an artist who recorded moments in time, should perceive memory as such an assault he did not think it so strange now, for this particular recollection of the Laotian seemed like the hand of a minatory stranger smothering his face and he was somewhat frightened by it as he had been by the actual incident itself. At this particular moment he yearned viscerally for the Laotian, the stranger, to awaken and remove himself from the train at the next stop; and yet as the man was going to Vientiane, there was little or no chance of him leaving before the last stop of Nongkai. Nawin considered the fact that he could not spend an hour or two (whatever it took to get to the last stop) absconded in the bathroom, ostensibly hiding from him but really hiding from himself; still, he would play the moments of impulses in their respective order and for now the fetid metallic tiled bathroom with its metallic floor-based, urinal-shaped toilet was an oasis for the handsome lambent image of his that gleamed and scintillated from the mirror. He splashed a bit more of the water onto his face and felt better.
From non-germinal love hadn't the thought been of that stranger, his father, and then from the father had it not been of the stranger from Laos? Specifically, ruminations of being a kinder man than he wanted to be and obviously not succeeding at that to a memory of the father, and from the father to the Laotian: this, he supposed, was the chronology of his recent thoughts. He assumed that recollection of that titillation was preceded by a memory of his august but haggard restaurant-working father swaggering toward a second-hand reclining chair, telling him to scram, and seating himself with right foot resting on the left leg, thumping its smelliness into the air of what he always declared to be his home, his domain, like a judge with his gavel. Nawin was not all that sure of this being the cause, or how one would determine a cause of a most peculiar and perverted thought as this blown in with all the other perverse ideas of his subconscious when, for whatever reason, it was tossed a bit further on top of all conscious rubbish (of course, as always, he was for the most part successfully blocking out the copulatory sport of the second eldest, Kazem, and that one's playground). He may have hoped, even though he did not believe, that isolating it would be the means to an instantaneous cure from all perverse ideas not of the heterosexual variety; and for a moment he frantically unblocked most neurological corridors, no matter how stygian, until contemplating this senseless contemplation made him feel a bit nauseous.
He used humor to distance himself from this recollection of momentary derangement or crazed but inconsequential titillation by telling himself facetiously that the reason this incident was now being shot like darts into his realm of contemplation was as a form of dogged, fraternal torture inflicted by one sadistic part of the brain against the other; but as fraternal recollection could only exacerbate the headache with the introduction of more dull emotional pain, he tried to block off turbid memory and listen for the sounds of metal being kicked and folded, upper tombs going back into embankments, and seats being readjusted. Hearing none, however, he assumed that the officer who was in charge of the removal of linen and the return of the bottom bunks into seats was asleep. Being forty and not having the desire of the thirty-nine year old to make the awkward climb up the monkey bars to the upper bunk where he would once again stare into the walls of his tenebrous tomb until all elated sleepers were awakened and summoned to their descents, Nawin decided that he would loiter in this toilet, at least until someone needing to relieve himself procured his removal with a few hard and eager taps on the door. The titillation, he tried to pacify himself, was merely one more inconsequential item of rubbish blowing in subconscious gusts and like wondering if, across the aisle, a female passenger who was wearing the hijab was a southern terrorist, it meant nothing.
He had to admit that it was futile to ponder whether the barren and the fallow might be preferable to this annexation of space by a rather non-germinal seed of love that had been planted within him against his will. He could hardly extirpate it, and if the seed had stunted growth he knew of no inward manure that might cause it to grow any more. And as for manure, his thoughts jumped track within their locomotion so that he might change the persistent discourse in his solitary brain; it was peculiar that this substance should be the nutrient for growth just as it was peculiar that an instrument of urination should be the means of intimacy between a man and a woman or for that matter, a man and a man…a man and a man.
The unpleasant memory of his crazed but momentary attraction to the Laotian again returned to him as faithfully as a lover and as sadistically as a brother; and for a second he contemplated jocularly whether or not bad memories were merely shot as a fraternal infliction by one part of the brain to another. The query seemed even flatter and more pointless than before. With the same redundant churning of thought, he reminded himself that there was no point in quickly returning to his cubicle. He might as well dally until one of the officers of the train returned to remove the linen and readjust the seats or he would have to lie in the tenebrous tomb as dormant as the seed of love that existed within him.
As one of the Earth's honored higher creatures who could be consumed with a lick of nature like the 200,000 of last year's tsunami (thousands that at one time were pictured on posters dangling from bulletin boards, and pedestrian blockage rails near the Khao San Road police station and the National Gallery) it was apparent that the planet was non-welcoming of the higher guest. The world was a most peculiar place just as he was a most peculiar being within it. The fact that the peculiarity of both was rarely contemplated showed how base, inherent, and instinctual factors shaped the good and the conventional of all things. He chuckled in a couple latent, audible wisps of air at his strange mind (its creative intellect and its redundant recycling of old ideas) to which his white teeth within his brown face seemed to jingle and gleam in the mirror like ice- layered tree limbs shaking in the wind. He thought about how a man lived in his self-made shack believing himself to be a king in a palace and how his ideas were as laws that he assumed to be sanctioned by destiny, but when things went awry such a common man would in all likelihood say prayers to counter his bleak prospects. He would send them into the ether of Nirvana with the burning of his incense. Sound and sturdy atheistic ideas like those experienced by Buddha before Buddhism or Christ before Christianity could only be sustained by exceptional men as long as they had good health, the necessities of food and shelter, scant relationships at the very least, and some occupation to direct time and thought; for otherwise the scaffolding of higher and wiser vistas would teeter and break, thrusting a man who was trying to balance himself on this scaffolding of tiered thought into that abyss of perceiving the world as an amorphous blob that was continually being twisted by supernatural forces.
Still, he could not quell this concept or misconception that if only he had been treated with unrelenting contempt when he was a boy, as he very well had been but without these sweet respites, it would have "toughened [him] up" (meaning that if he had been granted nothing apart from the worst memories of his former family, he would have been as tough as a champion Thai kick boxer when not wearing makeup and a dress in the sense that no conscience would he have had to intrude onto his public and private life, no pathetic themes would he have seen in the eyes of women whom he intended to use for pure pleasure in the brothels, and no pain would he have encountered in simple walks along Bangkok's mendicant ridden sidewalks and pedestrian overpasses). He sensed that such a scenario would have been a liberation from the revolting non-germinal seed of love, and that liberation from it would be a license to use as he had been used in the sadomasochistic quid pro quo or bartering for pleasures that defined human interaction. It seemed to him even more clearly than ever that if he had been allotted the entirety of contempt when young he would not have known enough of love to miss it. It did not, however, dawn on him that such an escape, even if it did not lead him to a fated time of being locked up in one rat infested Thai jail or another as one more of life's anti-social miscreants, would have vitiated his humanity.
He made his erroneous conclusion as if even a conventional 9-5 job and TV to bed existence, which was willfully ignorant of the world at large, were better than someone seized by sorrow when trying to seek pleasures and nude discoveries in every seedy domain in Bangkok; and as if in this obsession to concatenate a frenzied body to the pleasure receptors of the lower brain and then to that upper brain that was empathic to human sorrow in so much horror, he failed to deliver anyone (for it was true that painting delivered no one to a better existence). However, in a field of serious endeavor, a discipline, he was able to see the flower in myriad events deflowered and plucked and beauty in the ugly. In a discipline he found empathy, an openness to the world, rather than apathy, uniqueness rather than replication, and in-depth understanding of himself that made him an individual, a complete being, rather than a speck in the mass, a human cow in a herd. It was not true that painting saved no one for it saved him to himself. And if he failed at being a good person for lack of role models throughout his life, it was through no fault of his own. Still, all in all, he thought of himself as a 'pretty good,' Patron Saint for those who had been treated perversely. Had he, Saint Nawin, not done his best all alone with the resources he had to build his cathedral and temple to atheism, Wat Nawin? He felt that he had.
He told himself that he was as obsessed by his colors now as when he was a five year old child; and that he was still imbuing his black and white world of early servitude with crayonic paint and chalk as if it had never ended. He ruminated on this early being whom he still was, in part or entirely—a being that existed regardless of changing years, names, and social-economic status. He could not recall anything much of those very early years beyond the residual traces of a boy being allowed to take periodic breaks from bringing bowls of noodles to the tables of his parents' customers. Those were still-life images of himself seeking crayonic ebullience that could glorify his and humanity's noodle shackles. Weren't those first images, he asked himself, undecipherable, waxy smudges on discarded paper that had been wrapped over meat? From his rather indistinct and diminished memories he supposed that they were, but the attempts were the same as now: to evince a moment in time and despite its bleakness to sense it as precious within form. And if his depictions then and now were imbued with more color than that which would have been a true rendition of the scenes, they were soft and sensitive aberrations of love that could be pardoned.
He looked straight into the irises of his eyes—eyes that, when not sparkling and jovial in social exchange or lustful and burning from carnal angels that set them ablaze, seemed, when sober, so inordinately tender. Those eyes were surely not just portals to a rather non-germinal seed of love within him; but even if they were such, and his love of women was little short of a vaginal sport (to the immature dabbler that he was who failed to be a he-man and a happy hedonist), still there was more love therein than a failed marriage could prove. No, he said to himself more resolutely, these were compassionate and suffering eyes.
He pondered his effeminate sensitivity. He did not want it—he never had—but there was nothing that he could do about it. If he were to pretend to be as insouciant and aloof as so many men, this rather craven fleeing from self would be an even more egregious departure from masculine virtues. Sensitive eyes did not entirely eclipse his joy. To women sensitive, boyish eyes were alluring. This fact was proven in his having had a plethora of them even in recent years. Most importantly eyes like these, he told himself, accentuated a youthful countenance, and for any man of forty youth was the breeze that set his dog scampering.
Then he recalled that portrait of King Rama V, Chulalongkorn, hanging in the National Gallery. The depiction of his Majesty was with eyes that sponged up human suffering. "Mine are the same," he told himself; and thus his own were majestic and august even though no royal blood was puissant within the undulations of his veins.
6
It seemed to him as if old ideas in slightly new arrangements, such as this obsession with an aging self and his ineptness at long-term relationships, were quickly, dizzying, and incessantly being repeated in his brain. He, another recycled being with recycled thoughts, was ostensibly a creature moving forward with the train but in reality a macrocosm of the ideas within him; and these old ideas continued to circulate around the edge of his brain like hamsters whose impressions were that with each push of the nose they would find exits leading to the vertical, the forward, as if there really were a forward within one's cage, within the ideas of one's head.
Had this particular car of the train felt like the rest instead of seeming cold enough to preserve his meat, he, this being who was constricted to the tight walls and smells of the train, would have blamed this peculiar dizziness that he was presently feeling not on the perennial chasing of old ideas nor on ideas mixed with the bad molecular smells of the toilet but, as he was sweating more than he was accustomed, on heat. In lieu of this, he told himself that his dizziness was from being drunk on the self, a plausible theory, and yet he continued to quaff his sumptuous reflection in spite of this conclusion.
The reflection was of a swarthy, handsome man, with tender, toasty eyes glazed in ideas as if spread with honey. Was the reflection an exact replica of what he looked like? The question troubled him for no matter how long he thought about it, the accuracy of a reflection was immeasurable and the subject was insoluble. All that he knew was that the reflection was of a much younger man than his actual age: that was the consistency, even if moment by moment in each barrage of new light, his age and appearance seemed to vary. And he would have stayed in the bathroom for a half hour more staring at himself in that same way in the hope of isolating an exact age for his physical appearance and to gain certainty that his youth and beauty would not submerge with the next emerging moment had a fierce loneliness not begun to consume him like fire.
So stark was it that, to some degree, it seemed that he too was on fire, that he too was plummeting as if from one of the infernos of the World Trade Center while gusts of wind were carrying to him the barely audible moans, screams, and demonic laughter of other fallers; it seemed that he too was flailing his arms against becoming a swallowed morsel cast down the vast expanse of the deep gullet of devouring skies, and obsessively- redundantly bewailing having jumped from a window at all. These torturous feelings and thoughts were beyond loneliness. It was as though the bogus concept of one's self-importance had slipped off of him entirely leaving him exposed to himself and acknowledging that he was naked and bereft of soul, a speck that was a billion times less important than a disregarded crumb flung off a kitchen table by a finger tip. He was merely a falling speck of minutiae that if not thudding unheard like a landing water balloon, smashing and exploding onto a rock in a desert, would finally decompose no differently than all other bits of matter.
He did not quite expect it and yet how could he expect anything other than that fierce loneliness would befall him? The fact that he was taking this aimless trip at all was evidence enough of sensing himself as a plastic wrapper that was being blown in miscellaneous winds. And here on board this random train, chosen for having a departure time coinciding so well with his arrival at the train station (a train instead of an airplane so that there would not be an inordinate distance between him and his wife; for if there were such a vast distance it would, for him, have been a sign of a near, looming, and pending divorce), movement was painfully curtailed when it was so desperately needed to curtail pain.
During the past few weeks since the tragedy and his wife's flogging of him with the frying pan, he managed the throbbing of his arm with pain medication, and his loneliness by filling his thoughts with feigned urgency and shuffle. He threw out canvas (completed paintings, partially completed, and blank for all did not matter), paint, pallets, and all other dirt, trash, and clutter of the space. He attempted to change the studio into an apartment by adding a bed, a couch, a refrigerator, a kitchen table, a microwave oven, and basic electric burners. He had a pharmacist fill a renewed prescription and engaged in mundane actions like grocery shopping that could belie the desperate surge of loneliness. At that time it was successful; but here on board this train taken randomly from all trains, there was no motion to hide behind, and just the obvious reminder that he was random, without destination, and out of control. Having no-one and yet as any mortal needing to cling to a consistent source to foster the illusion of permanence and worth within himself, how could the dark suffocating nets of loneliness not envelop him? How could they not? Even for such a man whose only sense of family was to look at it as a make-believe concept, a mere abstraction, which time erased or, if having something material within it at all that could be grasped, which was always snuffed away, washed out to sea as last year's tsunami victims, but needing to be washed away, vanished like Bonaparte, Hitler, Mussolini, General Phibun, and one day even the emperor Bush, but leaving its stain—a stain that would trouble the mind and upset a positive mood as any fading but never fully diminished nightmare. The stain was memory, a vague copy of barbarous family preserved in one's wretched thoughts, preserved like the male and female corpses at Siriaj Hospital who, despite their slit bodies acting the part of striptease artists of human entrails, had always seemed to him to resemble his own mother and father in their late thirties. How could they not? Even for a man who perceived all women to be programmed with urges for whoreish involvements to gain independence from the parents within the union of a man, to rob a man of the juice required for baby making and that occupational obsession of baby rearing, and foremost to gain a parcel of land to call one's own (a perspective Nawin, the empath of whores had gained from society overall and not so much from his mother and wife who both relinquished money for the love of poor men, although he himself was no longer poor having quickly ascended to the ranks of the affluent). More saliently, with this imagined tryst of himself and the Laotian being continually replayed inside his head, most ominously how, as much as an hour earlier, could he have been anything but certain that loneliness would soon be descending upon him in that dark, suffocating net? A middle aged man traveling alone on a train to nowhere, Nongkai, and then to the sister city of Vientiene, could hardly be exempt of internal lonely burnings any more than he could feel stable when twirling around in this chase within the self no matter how insouciant or cocky he seemed when reflected from others in a figurative mirror or himself in the literal one.
"I don't need a wife—certainly not one who blames me and not herself even though this surrogate mother arrangement hatched out of her egg and not mine" he told himself, but being so dizzy there was not much chance of him believing his insouciant thought. Latent ideas were supposed to be the real ones, but there was not much that was true in this thought clutter, hoisted up to convey a positive self-image, beyond attempting to persuade himself of masculine nonchalance and a wish to repudiate a vulnerable neediness that was sticking to him like glue to a boy's fingertips. And no matter how many times he tried to wash it away its grittiness was extant.
After so much decadent thought about the Laotian the implosion of his solitary tower was an inevitability.
For the most part he regretted having thrown his telephone into the garbage at the train station. He lamented it; but it was done, and had he not done this he would have humiliated himself both in the emasculate and the deprecatory sense. He would have spent the trip calling Noppawan incessantly, and if she answered he would have shown his true visceral remorse ingenuously, which she would have interpreted as an admission of guilt. He might even have begged that she let him pass through the same doors, his doors, that she had made anew with recently acquired locks during his in-patient time in the hospital. He could not think of anything more emasculate and self-deprecatory than innocently showing deep sorrow over the victims of events in which he had had an inadvertent role, and being perceived as pleading guilty because of the admission. It would cause him to suck in his bottom lip while thinking to himself, "As if she had not urged it on—as if I would have had this relationship with Kimberly, as much as I may have wanted it, without this being asked…twice having it pushed onto me..me who am weak when importuned twice on such matters…weak for beautiful women… not that I have ever had situations like this one presented to me before. That is right. I am especially weak on new and intriguing situations and this 'please impregnate my friend and make me into a mommy' bit was a completely new thing for me. Little in the world is really exciting and new so I succumbed. What can I say? As if the impregnation idea were not concocted by these schemers in some coffee shop or another a year ago…by their own admission it was." More alarmingly, if he had not thrown away his Nokia he would be calling Kimberly's apartment over and over again as if there were a possibility that he had tripped over his thoughts, that she was not dead, and that her alleged death was just one more item of rubbish blowing in his subconscious gusts.
7
Inebriated, he was a passive receiver of the sweet stench of human waste and of the residual cleansers and ammonia that seemed to dilute the former. It was just like in childhood when he was a passive receiver of the dual stench of family, this sanitized word also reeking of and under an ostensible cleanliness. And while he made the association of a literal stink to a figurative one, acknowledging the possibility that each could be exaggerating the other and thus proving that he did not have a clue what was real in this capricious self, he thought of that visceral yearning long ago to believe in family. As a child he wanted to believe in the purity of it and yet, having to justify the indelible somehow, all that he could do was to conclude that it was he who was wicked, that it was he whose ingratitude toward the family that conceived and sustained him made him unworthy of their association. Still the flame, the puff of smoke, and the stench of childhood had come and gone so quickly. It almost seemed to appear and vanish over night. And here he was like magic, a man materialized out of smoke and hot carbon residue, and his own august, tenacious, and still reasonably intact will—even if now he was in the toilet of a train, alone and obsessed by a hope of seeing the flame of youth in an aging self.
Familiar as family, and made fouler yet by that association in the mind, the toilet was an increasingly nauseous place for him, and he felt increasingly peculiar within it. He only felt marginally connected to the whole of himself for he was experiencing seconds of a fleeting self as if he were watching part of it on stage doing and saying nothing in particular while the partial audience of one continued to wait for a soliloquy that would not be forthcoming. It was a most disconcerting peculiarity, this inanimate and uniquely discombobulated show, as jejune and surreal as spinning his head dizzyingly while watching the lifeless dummy of himself the only prop on a barren stage. "Am I going crazy?" he asked himself many times but he knew that thought was merely a symptom of his thinking too much all alone, his sputtering like a car needing gasoline.
Believing that he had little ability to make sense out of life after Kimberly's death and perhaps even before that, yet needing life which was, after all, touch, a link beyond the self, he raised the dust tinted window to sun, greenery, and wind. The toilet tissue reeled out as a streamer and began to take off like the tail of a kite. Sun fell into the bathroom like confetti. He laughed in that ineffable joy of liberation from musty chambers of thought. "Is this true?" he said to himself. "Is it true that all anyone needs is a strong gust to slap across his face? Is that all?" for the wind was carrying light and levity to the cryptic and stygian corridors of his brain. For a moment, as he wound up the loose toilet tissue on the cylinder of the toilet paper holder, he was as convivial as one could be when in a party of one. "I guess so. All anyone needs are simple pleasures pouring into the orifices" he said; but as he stuck his head out of the window, allowing wind to massage him hard and orgasmically, he saw emaciated and barefooted monks in soiled saffron robes stepping outside a rectory that was near a temple. Then, there was a forest, and a few minutes later from a cleared sylvan embankment, the stench of billowing smoke. He saw a burning wooden "castle" that had been concocted around the departed to at least ensure a physical arrival in the ethereal when heavens and the spirit were just conjecture or faith, that adult fairy tale. He saw a family of mourners grieving as families were meant to grieve and meant to care, but all he knew of them moved faster than childhood in the rush of the train. All that he knew was from one glimpse. He thought about how quickly after the death of his parents in the car accident his brothers had sold off everything and had carried him, their slave by default, off to the big city of Bangkok. There had been no time for mourning and yet had he been given time to mourn, little reason to do so. He smiled ruefully since he felt that this equating of the fundamental human institution to a stench or other pejorative similes was a ludicrous misjudgment based upon conjectures from the stinted, pathetic, and sometimes perverse experience which made up his understanding. As his belief in family was slowly being restored he felt the sad yearning to be in that clan of what was no more, and to grow old and die among them like the departed. When it was his time to die he wanted to die in this manner, in love, with his unburnt bones sent out to float in the embrace of the river goddess. Instead, he was sure that, after a two hour, two thousand degree baking in a fancy furnace at a modern, westernized crematorium, his bones would become a gritty white sand which no one would care to keep in an urn; and that although his obituary would have the significance to become an insignificant news item, no one would mourn him personally. He closed the window and sunk into himself. He rationalized that his reason for shutting the window was to shut out the world, which to him was a bad place. It churned up the poor and the desperate, forcing them to feign a spiritual connection to get a bit of food in their stomachs, and it disposed of beings and generations of beings like a consumer throwing out beer bottles.
He knew, as much as one could know from the few tiny apertures leading to the cramped little cell of the brain, that it was in his best interest to leave his toilet theatre of one and loiter in the aisle of bunks. There he might wait for an opportunity to engage in a moment or two of small talk with staff members as they slowly materialized into vapid space to sweep and mop cursorily before passing into the next car of the train. Just a brief moment or two of feeling himself a real and solid presence in the company of others (if only in an inconsequential conversation of being asked to move from an area blocking the dust mop or being told that this particular car was smelling more and more like a locker room) would restore him to himself. There would no longer be the slight oozing away of the self or, at times, those marginally desperate eyes of one who, having a philosophy of needing no one, did not think that he had a reason to be desperate.
For a moment, the walls of the bathroom began to spin around with his mirrored face, and the faster they spun, the more the lambent reflection in flight became former diminished copies of a dominant trait of a mutating self that must have sustained cohesiveness in these former beings of what he looked like at various ages but was no more. For a moment he felt that he was imploding and he slapped more water on his face believing that he had to be suffering from a fever (surely not a nervous breakdown as his anxieties were not that acute) and yet, placing a palm against his forehead, it did not seem abnormally warm. He laughed. "Of course it won't feel warm when dripping from water," he said aloud. Then he thought of his laughter. What was it, really? It was being cognizant that one was a fickle, disorderly creature whose emotions and experiences made him into a different man with every new minute of his irrationality and his blind stumbling, and yet not being morose about it due to the fact that he maintained some degree of logic and awareness of himself.
He was certainly different from the man whom he had been as an undergraduate at Silpakorn University, young and herded into massage parlors after soccer games by his classmates' proddings and his own urgings. Thinking of his simple life then, he yearned for those former thrills that had once let him be purely free of the entanglement of barbed neurological connections of relationships. It did not occur to him that if he were to have casual sex now as he did then, such extreme pleasures would interfere with attempts at extension, this adding of scaffolding and stories to the mature mind of a mortal being. He was thinking about extreme pleasure not only from the wish to be detached of the entanglement of real relationships—not that he had any of his own now for he was still suffocating in the debris of what was before—but due to his present need for it to suffuse over his headache as cold as an ice pack.
"Something happened to me," he thought. "What was it?"; he thought for a few seconds and remembered. "I began to draw the sadness of prostitutes to compete with my peers—to show how clever I was. Then I married Noppawan to share my success… to confirm that it happened through her and for her to enjoy it…and then there was this mixing and fusing of selves like colors that could not be separated without destroying what they were painted on. Earlier, when I was still wet behind the ears, my life was certainly less complicated" —meaning that as an undergraduate in his late teenage years he had not yet gone astray from hedonistic aims.
Now in the little casual sex he had, eroticism found itself impaled in envisaging exploited frailties and male aggression behind the façade of the beer and chip gaiety of prostitutes and clients sitting around stages of dancing girls. It was pointless to determine whether or not the competition with peers or maturity itself were culprits or facilitators of more meaningful interaction, and it was pointless to determine if this artistic competition with peers had aggravated a dormant tenderness and empathy that might well have been left alone for a happier existence. He possessed the sixth sense of empathy now and it was not the type of thing one could discard. "So," he thought, "I've gotten older. It is surely better that way"—meaning something to the effect of, "So there is now this maturity with its yearning for connections to others, an aggrandizing of a petty self in union with another, making strangers of the night less erotic than they would have seemed in youth…so, there is empathy..so empathy of a former sufferer of this world to present sufferers is my lot…so I made some badly constructed bridges to women in the past as relationship building was new to me, maybe I can be a better engineer in the future."
Early into his career, he halfway believed that in his studies of the dejected Patpong whores, petrous automatons of suburbia, desperate homeless mendicants blowing bird whistles at pedestrians near the Chao Phraya river pier, and himself, an outsider inside the travail, the torture, the jailhouse of this unjust world, that he would somehow redeem all. He did pay the nude models who posed for and lay with him but apart from this, neither in amorphous smudges on tattered paper as a boy nor disciplined depictions of form on canvas as a man had he in the least contributed to the redemption of his thralls. And for all his money Jatupon was still there within him shining with tender King Rama V's Chulalongkorn eyes of suffering for his people. Those smudges helped no one but himself and for all his money he could not buy the thing that he wanted most—a hardened mask and protective gear similar to that which he had worn while fencing in his undergraduate days at Silpakorn University which might fortify him from being impaled by dejected beggars, peddlers and their carts, sidewalk restaurant workers, whores, and monks who were never given a chance. Suffering abounded—it scurried away from the heat of the sun like a legless mutant seeking the slippery shade of shadows on the sidewalks and it would be there through decades, centuries, and millenniums to come regardless of temporary external forms.
Had he been able to raise them to their full potential he would have been a missionary with a mission instead of the sordid, missionless man that he was, drawing the oppressed, but as they were connected to him really drawing the self. It was a self that was embedded in the personal life like a tree in its filth. It was obsessed by being besmirched and colorizing the besmirching. It was obsessed by dopamine, adrenalin, and serotonin within for all that he put on canvas—at least it was before retiring and giving himself to indolence, making Noppawan, perplexed at what she could converse about with her retired spouse apart from the names of the bimbos he was copulating with.
He slid down the bathroom wall into a fetal position on the floor as he was obviously imploding. For a couple moments he meditated into nothingness, and had no thoughts beyond a recognition of himself as fallen debris. It seemed real to think of his brokenness and that the pile on the floor was absent of self. He wanted to stay like this forever but thoughts, like muscles in a fresh corpse, began their spasms to be restored. They fought for redemption of the illusion of self despite his own will to shut down. He pulled a bag of cannabis, a lighter, and some rolling paper from his bulging pocket, assembled a joint, and smoked.
8
Seated in his fetid corner, he was tacit in thought, still in its fathoms like a corpse in a sunken and forgotten ship of long ago, and he stayed in this state of sediment and mire, nothingness and abyss, until startled by a sound of flapping and the stirring of more than the usual continuum of sharp wind. Startled, he turned toward this movement. In a split second he saw wings and then the hard eyes, head, and beak of a black bird sharply changing course when confronting itself in the mirror. Then a couple seconds later it was gone and there was nothing novel to see. It was just a reflection of himself staring back at him, this mere self. To him, a separated man without a relationship who was besieged by a redundant, torturous sense that all along, without being aware of it, the sordid grains of his life had been blowing incrementally out of his open hands and were now passing away with an exponential conspicuousness while he remained here absconding in a toilet of a train; it felt as though he were sitting in a collapsing sand castle waiting for an ultimate asphyxiation. "It was there—I am sure it was" he told himself (meaning the bird, that which was fleeting and had already fled) as if knowing the reality of something so inconsequential with absolute non-human certainty would prove that, despite doubts, his was a stable and sane sense of reality. And if a stable and sane sense of reality was not really possible in the skull-restrained jiggling of his jellified brain that told itself that it was more than all right, saner than the herds of men, he did not want to know of such things.
To calm his racing, startled heart beat and damn off the adrenaline that permeated and burnt through thought to the rigid ready-to-respond posture of his muscles in a spreading ethereal of flaming gas, he made the dark omen jocular. He told himself that the bird was the ubiquitous symbol of a man running from his own image figuratively while retaining a fixed stare at the literal one. He might have even believed that there had been no bird at all if it were not for his racing heart and the simple fact that the window of the toilet was open. The two together made the bird's existence more plausible (at least so the self said if it meant much in the mixture of inhaled cannabis smoke, swallowed antibiotics, and pain killers that had to be stretching and distorting perception by thwarting the natural flow of neurotransmitters into different speeds and in new spirals of circuitry and thought). And yet even if this copy of the bird that was branded or molded on a bit of his brain had diminished to the point where it was now as unrecognizable, weathered initials engraved on a tree, or an outline posing as form, that did not mean anything. Did not a year in the life of a boy ultimately vanish without even an outline? All that he could say for sure was that even if it did not happen, that which did not happen was gone now. He chuckled and found pleasure in tilted equilibrium juggling its lit torches of ideas. Then he thought, "Maybe I should have gone to a beach in Phuket the way I was thinking I should earlier at the train station. Watching the waves, I could have forgotten." It was a natural enough response as embedded as it was like an instinct. Intuitively one first sought large bodies of moving water, a tangible version of eternity, by which to compare and measure oneself. In so doing, his problems would become minute with the man; and this was what he meant, for the train ride out of Bangkok was doing nothing for him. "But really," he continued, "how long can one be immersed in waves unless washed out neatly with a tsunami and there is little chance of that happening again anytime soon." The main reason that he had not gone to a beach had little to do with fear of boredom. It was for fear of seeming to himself as one of "those old retired nobodies with money" who waited near the waters edge for death. To him those waiting for death who sought non-failing amusement in the waves which acted as their sedatives were a lost and lifeless abhorrence.
"Anyhow," he thought as he sucked in the smoke of his reefer, "about the bird, what am I thinking? Who gives a fuck about the bird? Why am I dwelling on this bird. If the bird came in or not it couldn't matter less. It does not even matter if I never know anything and just go from one belief to the next under the influence of whims" for it seemed to him that reality was the obsession that we were under in the immediacy of the moment. If the ultimate decay of one's exterior form made his existence dubious, he argued, the tenuous and watery interior life of a man's mind was even more that way.
With images of wings fluttering salient in his imagination, desire suddenly began to percolate within him, tingling the body like an intimate pot vibrating and ready to boil over with life, and soon he wanted a resurrection from his fetal position on the fetid floor. He wanted to fly and yet all that he could do was remove his clothes. At first, it was to be only the removal of his shirt for he needed to block the marijuana smoke from exiting through the crack of the door. Soon, however, his pants and underpants followed suit in this denuding. Soon they were there caulking the crack as well. And as wind of the open window swept over his nascent nakedness, dispersing the clouds of smoke enough so that he could see fuliginous figures within the world of his cramped toilet, he began to masturbate to the movements of smoke-clouds.
Within, he was seeing diaphanous geckos on top of the ceiling scurrying hurriedly out of the smoke of the toilet and through the other cloud he was ogling a loosely robed sheik of an olive Asian complexion who, fairly and most saliently naked in the most critical aspects of that word, sat on a rock.
Four of the geckos had appearances of his former women as much as geckos were able to resemble human beings. There was a dark, ugly one with spectacles like Noppawan. There was a white angelic one like Kimberly. There was one like the pretty white Thai, Porn, with black hair bowering to her buttocks. There was also that self centered one of childish exuberance radiating its face like a skipping five year old. This gecko was similar to Xinuae, whom long ago he had bestowed the nickname of "Chinese Karen" so as to commemorate the day in which he had learned that he was American by birth. Altogether the reptilian insects were also like these former girlfriends in carrying off his love with their eggs as they ran off to others who promised them an immediate fulfillment of biological urgings, for in reproduction there was not only the continuum of existence but womanly purpose in nurturing posterity, and such happiness had statues of limitation on it. It was not a literal smoke that they were fleeing from nor even the asphyxiation of being alone. He could tell this. It was a symbolic smoke of dying without purpose that they were trying to escape. They knew that the flaming impetuousness with its smoke cloud of being in love so as to beget children was as brief as the body's ability to replicate. They knew that nothing was more asphyxiating than a passing cloud that they had not breathed in. They knew of no grief worse than a barren existence in which they had not done the mating moves in a timely manner that were part of that illusion for meaning and purpose in their lives. To not see life as a rushed activity that one needed to bungee jump into and to run out of time to breed was a capital Sin-u-ae in organisms whose sole purpose was to reproduce a bit of the self that was a composite of replicating cells.
And as for the Laotian sheik, there he was sitting on a rock. Nawin, while masturbating, which he called "stroking the bone", paid most attention to him who had a voice that ripped through the silence. "Since you were about ready to go on your trip to the states, Nawin of the Thais with your American passport, we decided to delay you for a while and show you our cave. An hour ago we took the liberty of putting a nanotech bomb comfortably in your ass. Rest awhile and you should be able to get around tomorrow even if now there is a little pain. We had to seuter you with whatever we could find, you know—wild poppies for one. Don't worry—no plane cancellation for you and you will not feel any discomfort at all when sitting on this flight to Washington in a few days. When George Bush Junior puts the medal of freedom around your neck there will be an explosion never witnessed before. He and the entire capital will be a second and third Grand Canyon. But for now, as training, know me—my smells, my taste, the shape and feel of the contours of me. Know it as training!" It was then that Nawin ejaculated most volcanically onto himself and the wall. He did it with exquisite visceral pleasure and pain like a Thai elephant making his debut as an abstract artist. A minute later he was hand washing himself at the sink. Pushing down on the tab to get his dribble it seemed to him that every man was a dilettante artist.
9
From a hot Tuk-Tuk taxi ride leading to the train station to being a carcass in a refrigerated car, and then from thinking himself as a member of a couple with marital problems to one slowly sensing in his lone journey out of Bangkok that he was separate and separated, he was now journeying through the toilet of the mind that was as fetid as a brother's sock and as explosive and debilitating as the non-ending barrage of critical words from the miscreants he knew familiarly as family. He was being flushed down with the floating and volatile excrement of memory and where it all would lead he did not know. As such he thought,
- Nawin, what are you doing in there so long? [He was recalling his wife's callow voice from that first week of their marriage] Nawin? [As the marriage was new, her irritation was new; and novel and so it seemed to transcend the barrier of the door to mix sweetly with the falling waters and the rising mist of the steaming shower] You know, you did not marry the bathroom [It seemed a dulcet resonating warmth emanating to him from all directions].
He remembered how as he stood there listening to her voice and scrubbing his naked physique, he suddenly became preoccupied for the first time with wanting to isolate just why he had this belief that he was inordinately handsome when really he was as dark as dirt. The facial contours and muscular physique seemed a little better than average (whatever that meant) and he was "just right" in not being too tall or short with genitalia that were larger than ordinary, but not freakish or even extraordinary. What, he asked himself, made him special? His sullied attractiveness could even be perceived by some as mediocre were it not for the fact that this mediocrity of masculine symmetry was made extraordinary by his interactions with women and their numerous touches with which his mind had been filled over the years. Perhaps, he told himself, these women were aware of nuances that he, a male and the subject of the inquiry, was ignorant of. However, more likely, this being groped had nothing to do with being handsome at all. Perhaps he was merely a non-ugly entity glittering in a bit of fame and affluence that made one popular. In his case this surely meant being portrayed in the newspapers as naughty Nawin, the artistic savant who pursued his studies of common whores with the most uncommon diligence and when dressed, was regimented in fashionable attire that anointed the brown body of Jatupon and transformed into Nawin. So, in the bathroom he asked himself whether the gropings were really for his beautiful self or for characteristics that made these women feel beautiful in his presence. Wildly, he surmised that if he were a preserved, inanimate corpse like that in an anatomical museum this being handsome would be seen as something that was ugly so undoubtedly being attractive had little to do with physical appearance. A woman did not want an inanimate corpse of a man to stand in front of her bed but one to move with the symmetry of her movements and in public to make the unit of male and female gleam like the Emerald Buddha and scintillate like the golden roof of a temple as a hallowed luminous body. It occurred to him that subconsciously he knew this all along for it had not been the gropers whom he had married but she who knew him longest, she who had witnessed him in poverty when his dark skin seemed a revolting filth. He had married Noppawan for truth. Thinking this, with a bar of soap in his hands, he gloated in the marital bond and spoke to her.