- No, nothing comes before my wife. [he said the words in gargled mutterings distorted by his giddy softly cackling laughter] The bathroom is just my royal consort.
- What did you say?
- Forget it. He was basking in being missed, which was being loved; nonetheless, he could not help but that repeated dulcet tunes were cloying to any listener of music, that a repeated tune eventually became travail to the ear that required variety, and that love was no different from any other sweet, diminishing thing. Rinsing off the soap it seemed to him that surely love sustained itself briefly on finite fuel which was pumped from mutable rigs and that sooner or later when the energy was depleted, with much less that could be tapped to keep him dancing inside his head, he would see togetherness as the constricted space that it was. If a man were missed when he went into a bathroom and the bathroom was a subject of jealousy it was obvious that the one who missed him wanted warm, glowing, and perennial felicity and was dependent on him at all moments and that she would be pulling his leash to have him with her at every turn which made she and her male spouse, "them," as if they were handcuffed together. At any rate, that was his fear; for they who in childhood had spent so many years confined and tortured in a cell only to become adults feeling, despite amicable and gregarious facades, inwardly guarded and stiff with each new approach of another human being, an ability to rest in love's embrace was impossible.
At the mirror above the sink the fixed eyes recalled his own voice of youth on that day.—I am waiting for you to come in and wash me, he spoke loudly to transcend the bathroom door and the material world with thought.
- I am not that kind of woman, she retorted to feign an independence of her lover that was not hers. He chuckled at that which could not be believed for only he, her husband, understood that her wish for it was just that. Hers was the ingenuous voice of a romantic who believed that he brought the world to her for he was the new world, a real family replacing the dubiousness of a former one, which she had repudiated and dismissed as just a bad dream. In that sense they were both perfectly alike.
There in the bathroom, in this luxurious condominium overlooking the Chao Phraya river, the water he felt and could not seem to leave was not the water of a rich man pampering his longing for hot showers but the cold rain of June in which a much younger version of himself stood behind a food cart fettered in noodles and pork, a boy named Jatupon who served soup to customers under a leaking plastic canopy. In this state even the cognizance of his wife being outside the door faded. There was just the recollection of servitude under a cobbled leaking roof that was trying to fly off like a kite. For a few minutes his self- awareness remained as the poor servant he once was until he heard,
- Nawin?
- Okay Honey, getting out now. He turned off the water, wrapped a towel around himself, and exited.
- Nawin, she said a minute later as he came out dripping in a towel, why do you have large stacks of new underwear in the closet. She was laughing at him.
He smiled coyly. - You never know when you will need clean underwear.
- This one stack alone must have fifty and they are totally unworn with tags attached.
He smirked. - The idiosyncrasies of man, he said.
- Weirdness I would say; but he knew that she understood. As someone who had known him in adolescence as Jatupon, and had seen JatuPORN, as the fraternity called him, weep in the museum of preserved corpses for the wish to be as deceased as they, she knew the poverty that he was. He knew that she would assume the stacks of underwear to be a repudiation of what he was. He knew that she would not mention this, as indeed she did not, and he loved her all the more for it.
"What do you want?" he asked an enormous gecko that was staring at him, distracting him from inhaling a new cloud of smoke after exhaling the previous one.
"You" or "Youth" it said, [He was not sure which one the thing muttered] "I will eat" and it began to eat a long sheet of paper like a poster which had his photograph as a noodle worker on it.
"Stop that," he said but the recalcitrant monster continued to eat regardless of his wishes.
- I am not Panyaporn any longer, said one of his favorite models one day in his studio.
- Is that so? He smiled.
- You are not drawing the woman you think you are but a stranger of another name, she said.
- I don't mind strangers, he said. As they are strange they are full of unknown possibilities.
Besides, imagining someone as other than pathetically human is terribly erotic. Don't you think so?
- Why are strangers more erotic models, Nawin?
- You mean why are strangers more erotic creatures in general. I don't know, he said playfully. Human beings are quite lovable, you know, their painful journeys, their tragedies. At least I think so. But the first brush stroke or caress of a stranger is not love. It is different. It is uncomplicated, buoyant, and mysterious like melting into the flames of a goddess."
- Nawin, I think that you hide behind your canvas. I think that you are a pervert hiding deep in your paint so that women won't see you for what you are. They believe that you are different. They think that you aren't using them but admiring their beauty when really you are no better than any man who abandons his wife to come to women like me.
- Of course not. No different at all. All men feel the same in being with others. There is no love in it, no empathy, it is simply melting in a flame. Melting… and it is a melting substance that releases its enzymes and eats the source of the flame. Hold still while I draw your chin! That's right! Drawing prostitutes, fucking them, it is all in consuming and being consumed by beautiful flesh…flaming angels if you will. It lacks love because love is baneful to lust and making love… an obstacle to reproduction, you know. Illusions and delusions— life is dependent on them. So you are not Panyaporn. No, I didn't know this but then how would I unless you told me. I wonder why the face and voice are the same, the body, the long hair falling onto the breasts and burying them, and the salient nipples peaking out of the burial demurely.
- The name, Nawin, the name! The monk told my mother that it was an unlucky name and I needed to have it changed.
- I like your name. I cannot see anything unlucky in it. For what reason? Why do you need this name change?
- To escape bad luck.
- Yes but how? You are with me so I cannot see how are you unlucky. She shrugged her shoulders and he put away his brush and walked over to her. You look like a Panyaporn to me.
- Either you believe in the monks' intuition or not. My mother does so I have a new name to improve my life…to become more happy, wealthy, successful.
- Poor and ignorant men in orange cloth leading the nation of Thailand and the simpletons within it, he thought. Still he smiled, for the Buddhism of the Thais had such ineffable beauty the way a sunset was both true and lovely and he did not know why. He did not want to think but to devour his girlfriend's succulent skin in voracious kisses and he did just that until she backed away. What is wrong? You are with me. How much luckier can you be? Do you give your mother the money you earn here?
- Of course. She is happy to have it. She is pleased to sell my looks.
- You are lucky then. So do I still call you by the nickname of"Porn?"
- No my real name. My new one is best.
- What is it?
- It's too long to say. Let's just call me Bun. Porn is too much like my previous name.
- Like a bunny rabbit as they say in English.
- Take me out of here, Nawin.
- Here? he asked.
- This world. I want to go with you to another place.
- Rabboplanet, I bet. All bunnies like Rabboplanet. The gravity there is so light that in one hop a bunny can stay midair for ten minutes.
- Rabboplanet, she said in rapturous veneration as if contemplating a utopia. He looked up at her, contemplated her sincere wistful ecstasy at this contrived word, and guffawed. Then he knew love for her, that wish to give any resource that he had to deliver her to a better life.
He thought of leaving the bathroom again. It was different in the mutable mind that knew and remembered imperfectly.
- Nawin, you know that there is a closet back here? And in it is another one of your mountains of folded underwear. Why would anybody need so much underwear?
- A guy can never know. One day he might be shooting some balls on the court when suddenly his underwear falls from his hips down to his feet like a hoola-hoop and all in front of the other players looking down at his equipment.
She laughed, thinking it was a joke, for what did she know of poverty? She knew the grief of family which had aged, enlightened, and separated her to be bereft of the giddiness of youth and this was plenty. Pain sobered one to the injustices and suffering of the masses. But for he who knew the inordinate burden of both there was a twice-fold enlightenment that came to him. It was an emptiness like the vibrations of blowing into a hollow bottle and an ache as eternal as a mortal could know.
The marijuana had numbed his headache so for the most part he could ignore the lifeless aching. It was not all that different than the monotonous chants of Buddhist monks that were broadcast from speakers hanging in tree limbs of certain residential areas of Bangkok. The sounds of bees and nagging wives one might not be able to ignore, but a headache, active but flattened in cannabis, was a throbbing numbness that almost felt titillating. Still, mental pain could excel a bit of the lesser and more manageable, physical pain, even when one was lucky enough not to have both exacerbating the other. Thus, he felt the duress of loneliness making him slide deeper into disconnection as the stimulating and riveting air rushed through his hair.
Feeling more and more disconnected by the minute, he finally released the joint to the vacuum of winds outside the train. Then he waited a minute for a sufficient amount of zephyrs to flush out the odors of the smoke before grabbing his shirt from the crack, dressing completely, and stepping out of the toilet. A stranger who had been timid at knocking squeezed by and went into the toilet. A train officer who had been responsible for placing the linen on the bunks was now gathering it from the cots and stuffing a wad of it into a crevice beside the sink.
10
Leaving the toilet, he walked toward his seat, which was in the eleventh car. His movements were slow as if this shivering from the coldness that descended onto his carcass in the "refrigerated car" were the cause. He wanted the warmth that was in the other parts of the train but more wistfully, for a warmth that was less superficial. It was a yearning to be, if only in proximity, in some way connected to the lives of laborers within who were going home to meet family for the long weekend of Father's Day, the king's birthday. Before him a train official was removing the linen from the bunks of the passengers who were already awake and there was a mounting pile of blankets, sheets, and pillow cases on the floor as though for him an augury to a fallen but still scattering life. Suddenly stopping at a distance to wait for it all to be cleared away, Nawin wondered of the laborers in these other cars who were bringing their new families to meet the old ones. Were they not conscious, he thought, that the families manufactured from having "banged their cocks" in Bangkok were the only reality (a reality, such as it was, exponentially longer than the carnal devourings of flesh and pleasure that were the impetus for the conceptions of the offspring, but no less ephemeral)? Did they not know that upon leaving the reunions their extended families would be relegated to the faces of strangers in the foggy back alleys of memory in which they would exit as maternal, paternal, avuncular and aunt-like outlines of diaphanous faces and stick figures only to be restored a little from time to time with letters and telephone calls? Did these laborers not know that their own loin-begotten families conceived by emotional and physical frenzy were easily diminishing puffs of smoke that in a brief space of years would replicate into other puffs of smoke before entirely vanishing, and that the labor of ethereal man to keep a puff of smoke there in his clasped hands was to no avail? Never to be made sagacious by the wisdom of perversion, were each of these myriad aestivating dwellers of arid complacency to never experience as he had a rude awakening of fraternal molestation in cold showers from that only family member who genuinely cared about him and whose insertion of hard riveting love almost seemed true with brothers who knew and yet said nothing beyond the distortion of his name to Jatu-PORN or the equivalent thereof and with parents who knew and did nothing but to continue the usual mandates of errands and chores with more vitriolic contempt? No, fortunately for the masses of men they did not have his background. They were innocents content in their illusions as innocents did when innocence was bliss.
He smiled bitterly as he glowered into space. He realized that he was groping and swinging his aspersions madly as a blind man piercing the air indiscriminately with his stick and yet at the same time he was writhing in himself, eager to escape his own skin. He was curious about the family men whom he had seen many hours earlier walking contently enough to the "cattle cars" at the train station accompanied, demarcated, and limited by wives and children while at the same time censuring their perfunctory lives. If his thoughts were in part an iconoclast's blaspheme against the family unit, a group that comprised all groups, they were also full of regret that, beyond a work of art, a mortal man could not change into the livery of another's skin, of a child who was proud of his Biadklang name and the parents who owned their own rice and noodle cart that was part of their sidewalk restaurant, of being their son if but a slave who was reproached and disparaged most awakened minutes, and of being in a fraternity, an eternity of belittling words sported against him to get the grin, chuckle, or tacit endorsement of the father emperor who, when at home, crossed one leg on another in his recliner and thumped his foot in an erotic gavel. He abjured devoting so much thought in this vein; still, the high of the marijuana was at certain moments lifting his grave ideas like a magic carpet, allowing an exhilaration of uninhibited thought even if the turbulent ride was dependent on intermittent gusts.
Hydrogen clouds detonating into stars; stars exploding as supernovas and the debris congealing into planets; microorganisms of those planets that became extinct, stayed the same, or evolved; male life forms in some of these worlds disgorging bodily fluids within partners who would sometimes conceive new offspring; this expended energy producing offspring that was animated or still-born, born with health and beauty or defects and predispositions toward degenerative illnesses, and all was chance in this spewing forth of matter. Pondering this around ten feet from the toilet in a part of the aisle which was an intersection between the two cars of the train, he knew that even with this proclivity for imploding in his own black hole he too was a bit of an exploding star, a spewing mess unto himself going randomly forward.
Standing there, wanting the worker to suddenly finish his task so as to allow him to proceed to his seat or bunk, he could only sense an oblique and loose connection to himself in the obscure light. Eagerness for any activity was curtailed in a man whose self seemed to be oozing into his shadow, and he was no exception. As much as he was capable of, he wished repetitively for his expedited entry into the car but minute after minute it was blocked by this encumbrance of a train officer. His tepid eagerness was not so much for a return to the confines of a space that had been designated to him but to end a silence that was becoming more disconcerting with each passing moment and from a concern that the time of waiting there would sink him further into himself. He wanted to smoke a cigarette to have something to do. It was not nicotine or an oral sensation to clog the void of space and time that he so much yearned for but a mental conceptualization of himself with a cigarette in his mouth which when matching the reality of actually having one hang there would be equated as insouciance. Doubting that a relaxed mental outlook was really garnered with such an ineffectual drug as tobacco and theorizing that its efficacy in making one at ease with the world was not so much from the nicotine but the pleasure gained in graciously sticking out one's cigarette to the world, exhibiting nominal contempt for the planet by blowing smoke out onto one's miniscule sector of society, and concocting a sense of defiant and invincible imperturbability in a world that he knew one should be perturbed by. It occurred to him that imperturbability was really the aim of any smoker; and he posited that lacking a quality caused one to imagine a quintessential form of it, to stencil it onto the brain from the pattern of the ideal (man with cigarette, detached, and triumphant in a haughty and complacent indifference to all), and then to persuade himself that he was the paragon of that which he was lacking. This being so, the billboards in Bangkok showing images of the cigaretted man alone, felicitous, and nonchalant or felicitous and nonchalant with a felicitous and nonchalant partner smacked of an unreality slated for destruction.
Uncertain if it were at all permissible to light up a cigarette anywhere in the train, if he would be reproached and fined if he were to do so in this particular area that he was in, or if he even wanted to smoke at all, he floundered ambivalently before dropping the subject altogether. Still needing to have something to do, he re-combed the breadth of his unwashed hair and beyond that continued to stand aimlessly, inadvertently smelling the effluvium from his shirt which in the space of twenty hours had become its own unflushed toilet. Then there was a sudden need to defer to larger movements of the moment so he backed against a wall near a sink in the corridor to get out of the way of the officer who was now officiating over two large bundles of wadded linen that he was dragging toward a container near Nawin's feet.
He certainly could have easily felt better just being there with awakening, groping creatures of movement like himself and would have begun to do so in this moment of proximity to the train officer except for an unsettling feeling that was a precursor to the siege of memory. Being in this darkened aisle, he felt as if he were once again the adumbrated boy whom he once was. It was as if he were that being who was scared to advance beyond the back corridor leading to and from he and his brother's room at his parents home, for fear that his presence would be despised by all. He snickered at these craven impulses for a few seconds but this coarse and bitter fire of laughter quickly incinerated what was jocular within it. It occurred to him that the boy's perennial sadness had so fully overcome him that it was as if what he had been experiencing were nothing other than an attempted coup. Jatupon's thoughts had briefly usurped his mind; and even in repugning the advances and regaining this mental kingdom from the boy he was certain that Jatupon was probably still there hidden behind a hill of gray matter, wounded but waiting for an opportune moment to initiate a new attack. As he was forty now it was rather obvious that these insurrections would be ongoing throughout the entirety of his life, that the insurgent named Jatupon, whose suppressed, raw, mauled emotions and thought were as intransigent as his own will within these skirmishes, would attempt to control critical sectors and regions of his mind at unsuspecting moments, and that behind the scenes he would attempt to influence and discomfit key decisions in the mind.
When the officer was gone, he remained stationary for a few moments longer to allow, or ostensibly allow, the free passage of the toilet goer who was returning back to the car, and then for a glass bottle of Gatorade as empty and hollow as he was to roll quickly past the toes of his bare feet. More significantly, however, he stood there leaning against the sink to feel something solid beneath him as the train was seeming more and more like a jet in turbulence as if, for a social creature dwelling in the waves of his stagnant body of thoughts concerning his social relationships, there really were any turbulence beyond that which was there in one's own mind. Throughout the minutes of waiting in the aisle it seemed to him that conversation was becoming as imperative as air to breathe. He needed the vibrating air of speech to interpose between his thoughts so as to stabilize a ruminating spiral into self- destructive, non-sensical darkness where there was a risk of losing all that was tangible in himself.
Like with most strangers, in both of these brief encounters with the linen officiator and the toilet goer he had respectively greeted and smiled at each of these individuals at the moments of seeing them with a sawadee khrap and a gracious nod of the head in place of the wai. As a result of being high, the expressions that he had exhibited then were exaggerated and ludicrous and generated little reaction but eyes attempting to avert him. They had given him reciprocal greetings but they had been begrudging utterances of asperity and dismissal. Thinking of this now, his smile deadened to a bland and withdrawn expression as strangers, these treasure chests in which conversation could unlock knowledge and spontaneity, seemed empty and exhausted resources. It was not only true of these two men but of those he saw at a distance now awakening in the car before him (some who were seated lengthwise or dangling their feet from upper or lower bunks): they were all diminishing steadily to remote and alien presences.
Standing there as he was, for a moment he had to hold onto the sink for the physical world seemed to be turning into a gas. For a few seconds he imagined geckos flying low in an air born mist moving like low-flying, prey-seeking pelicans and then, as they receded from him, like squirrels hopping over the caps of the waves of a river as furrowed mounds of the dirt of a field. As the mist thickened into fog, they became less and less visible. The only thing that was salient was the immediate past impaled by feelings of regret and futility for that which could not be erased and redone. There was just the immediate past which could not be consumed, altered, or forgotten. Recalling it and reliving it again boosted his stress. It was as if he were there at the Italian restaurant with Kimberly and his wife. It was as if he were once again foolishly, gullibly, and jubilantly agreeing within the surreal flickering candlelight of the table to father Kimberly's child and this agreement was being done not only with the hope of releasing pent up sexual energy for this foreign woman who had been part of his moral code of unapproachables (concocted morality the equivalent of timidity and hardly a virtue at all) but also to have something from a life that was so unremarkable and indistinct when lost within a middle aged fog. Every man by getting married divorced himself from his parents, but it was only in having a son and making his link to the concatenated continuum of life that manhood was obtained; and whether or not his parents were alive, spirits, or nothingness beyond loose elements, a man had to commune with them and declare his manhood in this way. This is what he had done, more or less, in marrying sterile Noppawan, and completing fifteen years belatedly with Noppawan and Kimberly; and yet he could think of no battleground more deleterious than family. When he was a boy, had the Burmese been at war with the Siamese, like the elephant wars of yesteryear, he would have enlisted as a soldier, for to be impaled with metal blades was less of a travail than to be impaled with mental ones, these spoken words; but ironically here he was now in his own sad concoction of family as one diminishing plume of smoke begot another.
And there on hardened benches or pews with the dust of the open windows smiting their eyes were these laborers in something slightly more opulent than cattle cars. If they preferred to be in this air conditioned car that he was in with its padded seats which had folded out into sleepers the previous night, he, the laborer that he had been born as, would almost have been inclined to go in there and stay with them. And as giddy and light-headed as he was from that which he had smoked, he was tempted even further to go into the tenth car to randomly ask sundry individuals for invitations to one of their family reunions but that within him which retained logic and a sense of the socially acceptable and plausible was only moved to laugh until his body jiggled like Jell-O at the absurdities that ran through the human mind.
Shivering and immobile as he was in the "refrigerated car," he thought of himself as a half dead carcass with sexual energy and desire having been recently depleted in a bizarre, depraved masturbatory experience that had confounded him for being contingent on oogling and grazing over an imaginary version of the Laotian in his head, and regrets about Kimberly having churned and re-churned his thoughts into a liquidated mass. It seemed to him that he was as bereft of viscous thoughts sticking to the surface of the brain as his own readable perceptions of life. He told himself that he just wanted to return to his bunk, cover himself up, and return to sleep. His brain was on a descent from its high, but it seemed to him that even if he were to land gracefully in a field of his choosing he would be whipped around in the winds of this world regardless of what he were to do. Unless he were to return to the landing strip of family his whole life would be for nothing and yet that landing strip was on gaseous Jupiter and the strip was ethereal and waving as though a gas were being pumped into it from underneath.
He knew that even if he had a telephone, all his attempts to reach his wife would be futile. There would be the same perennial ringing in his ears as when he was at the hospital broken at her hand, in the driveway locked out of his own home, in the hotel room womanless, alone, forlorn, lost, and directionless, half hoping to become a nice couple's foundling at the train station. If he were to borrow a telephone and call her now it would be wasted, unrecorded effort at making contact as a scream in space reverberating forever through and for nothing; and yet he was reaching a hand into an empty pocket nonetheless, as if his mobile phone had not been thrown into the trash barrel at the train station. He was subconsciously bending his fingers as if they were clasping the Nokia 3660, and he was tapping imaginary numbers into his palm. Then he recalled the plausible which deflated hope and imagination to earthly things. He noted the possibility of never seeing her again. It occurred to him how the plausible and real were part of his daydreams. Even in them he could not shirk reality where calls to her would be as calls to the Nirvana that was Kimberly.
For a moment he felt that same intense nosocomial sadness and regret which had caused him to cry in front of a nurse a few days earlier. If she had judged him, it had been a judgment of tenderness; but for him the emasculate act of visceral mourning over Kimberly's death in front of this stranger had been so mortifying that it was worse than spilling the content of one's curved, plastic urinal onto the bed sheets. Thinking of it now, he decided that if ever again overtaken by the tragedies of this world, slitting his throat would be the only act of self- decency. That did not mean, however, that he expected suicide to be his eminent end any time soon for it seemed to him that he could make a distinction between the negative occurrences surrounding a life from life itself, and that two people, for whatever comity that they displayed in love, were volatile wills like tremors of changeable landscapes in which the suspension bridge of a relationship was tied. Sometimes things just fell apart.
Standing there in this back corridor that was permeated by the dulcet stench of the toilet, he spent a few moments breathing in and out as deeply as he could in his own dabbling of lay yoga. It was as though he were a vacuum cleaner in reverse regurgitating from his bag the filth of this world. Then he told himself that Kimberly's post-partum depression and her swift leap into the elements had not been his fault (fault not having yet been officially determined by Bangkok police officers who, in this ambiguous situation, were perhaps as circumspect, finicky, and slow to move as squatting, urinating bitches in Lumphini Park, enamored and distracted by some such bitches, or preoccupied with matters involving the location and use of drug pushers for target practice). He was not one who could divine evil events but merely a participant banging and being banged as one of life's billiard balls. In a further attempt to calm himself he rationalized in an analogy apposite to an artist that any ostensible relationship might appear as a fusion of color in all this mixing, but the color could recede and when it did there were just two individuals staring at each other in black and white from distant corners. All relationships receded in a world of impermanence, said the atheist bombastic to himself most piously.
He told himself that it was true that the present moment was the motion and commotion now registered to the senses with the past gone and the future not yet nascent. Then he told himself that although yesterday under logical scrutiny seemed the epitome of archaic and antiquated happenings and had no baring on the present, it propped up today the way the distant past depending on family background was a solid or unstable foundation that was the pedestal for yesterday. Then he concluded that although the past was unreal, it constituted the present and could never be repudiated successfully. And as for regrets, any sentient being had regrets over negative, adventitious happenings. Still, to expend one's rational powers trying to expunge the negative happenings of this life with intangible thought seemed the most absurd act of futility.
Now relaxed in an objective distancing of himself from prevailing emotions, he conceived an idea for a painting which he did not care to ponder. It was one which, even with the right artist, would not work well as a series, let alone as one image and yet there it was projected onto the canvas of his mind as if he were destined for it. It was story and images in which a hoary man with the appearance of the train officer was moving as one urban speck in a peripatetic herd of pedestrians when for a second his phlegmatic demeanor identical to those around him was altered by a spontaneous surge of despair, a feeling which in turn caused thought about the meaning of his life to imbue and pulsate from his face. Needing or desperately thinking himself to need the continuum of former friends, he grabbed his cellular telephone from his briefcase and called one, only to find that the man was now a stranger who was distorted in age and mental outlook from that which he remembered. Then he attempted to emulate his earlier stoicism but he kept seeing shadows of the form of his deceased wife stretching out as shadows in front of store windows. Abjuring the idea of dialing the telephone number of their former home together, he did it nonetheless as if there were a chance that she would answer and tell him that her staged death had been a practical joke. Hearing an automated voice telling him of a disconnected number, he cowered into the crowd and seemed to wither there. He envisaged this as if it could be transcribed into art and as if he, a retired has-been who had merely reproduced whores and slight thematic variations of them, were the right one to depict it.
As this was not a given second but a series of changes in a few minutes of a man's life, he soon saw these scenes in a chain of diminutive beads. Every other bead would reflect the present dilemma and alternate beads would portray a significant person in his life. The significant others would be mirrors and a light source that would give some visibility to a huge diaphanous face of the man that the entire chain outlined. He was, after all, a reflection of those whom he was trying to desperately contact and it seemed to him that they should make up every other monad and that their eyes would be attempting to look at the entirety of a face that they would never be able to see fully. As it would be an anecdotal work on a large canvas, each scene, each bead of this outline of the man's face, would be a punctilious and time consuming feat to render. He did not have a clue whether the motif was incandescent or prosaic and insipid. The only thing that he believed with some certainty was that if the painting was worth doing he was not the man to implement his ideas. For in comparison to a Caravaggio, a Titian, a Michelangelo, or a Da Vinci, he knew that his talents were the top of the bottom tier of dilettantes, and even a knowledge that he was able to render his own mediocrity with the splendor of originality was not helpful. The thought of his mediocrity was asphyxiating to him and he again pondered that he was merely a prostitute painter, a fetid and odious "nobody" within the demarcated self of a Nawin Biadklang that he could never transcend. He fretted about his place in the world as if the masses of men ever found a voice within themselves, as if his earlier paintings, which were still being collected, valued, and traded, had vanquished with him off the artistic scene, and as if his brief inclusion in an article about contemporary Asian art in Newsweek had meant nothing at all.
The train officer clanged each of the metallic ladders with the handle of a butter knife while repeating, "Nongkai in one hour. Breakfasts for those who ordered them." Then he began to pull down linen, shoving tenebrous tombs back into their embankments, and readjusting bottom bunks. Nawin relinquished the idea of returning to his seat anytime soon and sat down on a box of clean linen where he contemplated the article. He recalled: "Nawin Biadklang's paintings are almost like a hybrid of Montien Boonma's Buddhist sculpture with an amateur painter's penchant for easily obtained nude models in Bangkok's red light district. Biadklang's talents at present are clearly dwarfed when compared to his predecessor, the most important Thai artist of international significance; but then youth is often seedy and so are his works, studies of prostitutes that make up his oeuvre. The combination is a somewhat refreshing exhibition that succeeds as a study of the oppressed and the human condition." It was a passage that he knew by heart and yet one where the writer's meaning still eluded him.
Then without meaning to do so, the self was eclipsed and he was asleep in a nap with its expeditious transit into a percolating sea of images. He was deluged in raw feelings, the construction material of thought, which the movement of those images brought down upon him. Within one series of loosely concatenated images, one dream, he (he or something similar as one part of himself seemed to be an audience of one watching the Nawin debacle from an objective distance) was in his mother's car driving to her home. They were returning from a cemetery in which they had failed to commune with even the positive memories of the deceased. They were inadvertently deviating into that distant, solitary region of themselves where negative and defunct memories continually reverberated against bluffs of the mind as faint, unresponsive echoes. The short journey to her home seemed long and dull and thirty miles into it they both felt ill. She asked him to stop the car so they bought some fast food and turned into a parking lot along the Mississippi River. There they began to eat while looking out onto the sodden waters under darkening skies. There was a flock of pelicans flying overhead, and geckos trying to elude the birds by floating on top of the mist.
"Look over there," she pointed. "They must be making their nests under the bridge."
"What is?"
"What is?," she mocked. "The pelicans!"
He looked. "I don't to see any of them making a nest," he murmured.
"Well, maybe I need to take you to get some new glasses."
"No, that's all right," he said. He tried to look again but this time he was distracted by an eerie roll of thunder which sounded like the ambulatory movements on creaking floor boards of the residents of an upper apartment heard from one story below.
"To the left, under the bridge. Can't you see?"
"Oh, I see them now. I bet so," he lied blandly. "A lot of them seem to be clustered over there, don't they?"
"It's got to be nests," she said as she rolled down her window to gain fuller clarity. Sitting in there with his mother, it occurred to him that their relationship was merely a spoken list of adventitious occurrences recorded by the other's senses. On this day, it was ornamental designs engraved on tombstones, xanthic blooms of Magnolia trees, the flight of birds observed from the car, and now nests under a bridge. Yesterday it had been the number of buds on her rose tree, the clothes he had not brought with him and needed to purchase at Wal-Mart, sheets and pillow cases that she needed to buy there, grass that needed to be mowed, food that they wanted to eat, a bathroom that needed to be cleaned, and other incidentals that they happened to relay to each other. As such, there was nothing personal in it at all. Still, she had nurtured him when he was young. She had been the one who had fed and clothed him, made him soup and gave him a wet washcloth for his hot forehead when he was sick, had him get out of thunder storms, told him to never walk across the street unless in consort with the masses and only at green pedestrian lights or when incoming traffic was stalled at red lights, and given him a sundry of unrecalled, commonplace items that forged the early bonds of affection. Even though she was not interested in him now, she was his mother, and he wanted to at least feign an interest in her, for feigning often became believing if acted persuasively enough. Thais thought that altruism was the impetus of parental love, the purest of love, and he told himself that regardless of the veracity of the claim he should go on thinking it was true for if he were to cease believing in its goodness, all other forms of love would be instantly rendered as mendacious counterfeits. Also, the superficial evidence of words and facial expressions often belied the inner feelings and sensitivities that might be active within these guarded human creatures. He always felt her disapproval of him even in the most favorable situations, but with the intangible and often erroneous nature of feelings, how would he know that it was not his own imagination? Furthermore, how could he on any day, let alone a day of returning from a cemetery, look into her haggard countenance and pass judgment on her as unloving? If shopping, meticulous housekeeping, gardening, and commentary on nature were her only subjects of concern and her only crimes, it seemed to him that they were rather innocuous ones. If she fortified herself by clogging her mind with these activities it seemed to him that the impalpable self needed them for definition and that human beings had to clog the space of their brains with at least some nugatory issues in order to have any degree of sentience. And yet, in her curtailed life, which was so fortified by the distractions of the plants she grew, domestic chores that needed to be performed, and diurnal trips to and from Wal-Mart, he knew that she immured herself from self-reflection. She, an active defiler, had to know the stench of her former family and yet it always seemed to him that she pretended the rot and her role within it did not exist. And more importantly, the absence of a mutually agreed past left them bereft of a present, rendering talk on the most trivial matters arduous if not ineffable.
Silence overtook them until at last he concocted something to say. "You know, birds like that quickly abandon their newborn. They have so many of them that they can leave their survival to chance."
"What do you mean by that?" she asked pugnaciously, as if comments on the maternity of birds were an oblique critique of her role as a mother. Then, sensing the absurdity of the association, she tried to modify his perception of her. "I mean you don't know anything about pelicans, do you?"
"Just an article which I looked at before we left the house." He lied. He had not read anything. It was just that he did not know what to say to this human being who was reliving a former role as a maternal autocrat, a mother whom he had outgrown long ago. This had been his lie, his benign artifice, to connect with her somehow, although the benign contained its own acerbity.
"You always did like to read."
"Yes," he smiled.
"Books and paint but rarely doing any work. That's the way it has always been with you, hasn't it?"
"I am a famous artist now. I make more money than—"
"You are nobody. You are no better than the rest of us."
"No I'm not," he admitted and pressed his lips together into a contrived smile that hid his teeth. For a moment he was reticent to say anything at all, but fearing a worsening imbroglio if he continued his silence he asked, "You've never seen pelicans here?"
"No. I said that before. I don't remember even hearing of them in this area. They are normally from warmer places. Florida, the newspaper says. I guess all of them came out here from that area."
"With a road map and a desire to see the Midwest for their holidays," he added facetiously. It was an utterance meant to make their relationship congeal in levity and friendliness but he immediately sensed the sarcastic nuance within it and that he was as much stating his own displeasure at seeing her once again. He knew that he was making things worse. "Maybe they've been in the delta all along but migrate up the Mississippi River during abnormally warm springs."
"Whatever!" she responded biliously. They were silent for they were perplexed as to what they should say to each other so the woman and the middle-aged son whom she was ashamed of (at least the taciturn disposition, pressed lips. and sunken eyes seemed to be a suppressed animadversion of a being whom she wished that she did not despise) wondered about the ramifications of saying nothing at all.
"I wish that your father were here to see this with me," she said. Unmarried and living away, he was failure personified so why would she want to be seated inches away from him? Maybe she thought that he should never have come home. Maybe she thought that he should have run away before having his first wet dream at the age of twelve thereby allowing her, even decades later, to frantically hope for the well-being and return of that perennially missing child of her imagination. Even worse, he wondered, maybe she preferred for him to be dead instead; and yet he did not know those as her thoughts or how to know much of anything really.
This was their respite after seeing the marble stones that indicated where his brother, Kazem, and his father lay, but now he was as bereft of words as he had been then and he was straggling tortuously in his head the way he had wandered with a numb and aimless gait around the tombstones. He had returned from Thailand to restore a relationship and more importantly to once again be with his mother and hear her call his name and yet for this earnest effort how could he speak with her earnestly? How could he say that he was glad that at least some of his torturers were buried underground, or admit that his best thought toward the devil who was his father was that he should rest in peace. He could only nibble his hamburger, slurp his chocolate shake, offer to share some of his onion rings with her, his stout mother, which she finally did take, and remember, as no lobotomy or other expurgation of specific memories was yet in existence. Visiting a cemetery for a man was supposed to engender lachrymose thought rather than tears and vented memories tenderly spoken; but for him whose life was an aberration, it had merely evoked minced silence. And this, his silence at the cemetery, which had flagellated her with the unalterable past, now made him repugnant to her.
At last something good, the mellifluous and the true, began to trickle from his brain and pour in with the saliva of his mouth. "I'm here. I know it has been five years—you needing to help raise your grandchildren or whatever required your attention during this time—grandkids or not, it doesn't matter… I'm not blaming you—but finally you relented and we're here together, and I am glad…glad to be here with you." It was there, a harnessed wisp of liquidated air in his mouth, but as he believed that she would only despise him were he to release the words he replaced sentiment with the mundane, as strange as it was. "Did the newspaper explain the geckos? Their migration here seems odder yet. The fact that they float up there eating bits of the sky seems odder than any pelicans migrating this far north."
She got out of the car and went to them, her birds, as nearly as she could approach them at the edge of the river, that body of water that was distended in fish and sewage and barely able to move like a fat man after gormandizing at a buffet. When she returned she had him change positions, took over the driver's seat, started the car, and they drove away. By this time the air was thundering with such a noise of pelicans that they could no longer hear the creaking of the air under the weight of the geckos.
"I don't understand your hurry to get back"
"Your Aunt Helen and Uncle Jake will be waiting. I plan to eat ice cream and cake with them even if the guest of honor refuses to go."
"I did not refuse. I simply pointed out that the invitation was ten days belated and followed you giving them some furniture. You know that it is less of an invitation than a token payment to make sure that the giver keeps giving. How obvious can it be? They haven't communicated with me for twenty years, so why should they bother now? And as for this idea of yours that if I don't go I don't love you, maybe it successfully manipulates children but it is rather reprehensible to adults, wouldn't you say? If I were to go what would I say about my personal life? I'm forty years old, unmarried, and they are bound to ask. I can't exactly continue to stammer out some evasive nonsense to the question about my involvements: that I am still looking, or laughing uncomfortably and ignoring the question altogether— whatever I said or did last time. I really don't remember what I said. Maybe it was that I wanted to get my career in order first. Maybe I was silent like a mental and social retard."
"Don't go then!"
"What?"
"Don't go. I don't want you to be there. You aren't welcome."
"I want to know why in all of these many years you never even show the least interest in my life relationships, friendships, where I travel, where I live, what I do."
Her face cringed at the steering wheel and dashboard and he could see in it repugnance at what she believed to be the turpitude of his life.
"Why can't you ask anything?" he importuned.
"I don't want to know anything. Go back to Thailand and do God knows what. You don't even live with anyone do you? It is just sex. Your life is just filled with sex."
"You don't know anything. How could you with nothing ever asked or said. You make assumptions without knowing anything."
"What you do with your male friends—your sex life, I don't want to hear about it. It is private—your private business and I don't want my nose rubbed in it."
"What has your nose been rubbed in, Mother? I have a girlfriend and a child—a child. For God's sake, look at the pictures in my wallet!" he pulled out a wallet, unfolded it, and flipped the photographs randomly.
"Get them out of my face. They are the same ones that you sent to me—the ones I glanced at and mailed back to you. It's not your child. It has nothing to do with you and less to do with me."
"It's my child," he yelled.
"Don't you dare raise your voice to me. Don't you dare raise your voice to your mother." At this place that in youth he had referred to as home for lack of anything more substantial, he quickly packed his bags and thought of how concocted and sententious morality was. It seemed to him that it was the equivalent of timidity and hardly a virtue at all. It was seeing shadows and monsters in that which deviated beyond the boundaries of one's awareness and only this. There were clearly wrong actions, actions of hate, but these were not issues of morality but the loss of a logical restraint to instinctual passions of destruction for the sake of self- preservation. He told himself that he would and could break off the relationship for to not do so would make him the mimesis of the bad they thought that he was, and if he believed that he was bad he would relinquish self-control and in a turbulent rest allow himself to be overtaken in a vortex of destructive passions. He had gone through this much of his life without in the early juncture of his youth having constructive role models. Still he had concocted his own imperfect expression of love as others who had been mulled in family. As they did with the years of their lives, he also tried to fine tune what benevolent love existed within him and would go on doing so, sometimes even accomplishing it.
He woke to human contact. It was a nudge.
"What are you doing?"
"Oh," said Nawin while smiling. "I was just trying to stay out of your way."
"You can go back to your seat now, I'm done."
Nawin stood up and the dream, like flooding river water, receded back to its usual course. Deemed as unreal and untrue, it was relegated no differently than other repudiated and forgotten experiences within the continual shove of movements in time and by a consciousness which only accepted the reality of everything new that flowed into it (At this moment, for him it was what the senses were recording as the linen officer departing into another car, the drab and fetid qualities of the train, and his constricted space within it as he continued to flee his fumbled personal life, which he remembered all too well). He shook his head and scoffed at the dream where a dim sense of reality persisted. Pushed further into the past with every mounting moment, it still discombobulated his present reality with its magnetism. It had been a mere dream but when he was in it, the images had seemed so clear, motivation had seemed less cryptic, and he could not help but wonder if in sleep the awakened state would seem dreamy if dreams had cognition of such a state.
Contrary to the dream, he had never known his mother in adulthood and apart from being born in America and living there for a few years, possibly the bastard of an unknown father (at least that was his conjecture to explain his parents separation then and the degree to which he was flouted afterward over so many years) he did not know America. This was apparent by his conceptualization of the Mississippi River where motorized gondolas moved around high rise condominiums only to depart into a canal the way they did in Bangkok. Whether the dream attempted to indict him as a homosexual or depict sexual ambiguity, he could not see either one as exceptionally true at mirroring his image (truth being that—a mirror). He certainly was not a homosexual whatever queer caprices might come upon him—sexual energy merely flowing without direction or destination were it not for mores and a negative, positive, or hyper-inflated interpretation of one parent or both as role models which barricaded the momentum and, like crags, altered the flow. No, he told himself, he was no more queer than any heterosexual—it was just that what was most pleasant in one's bleak environment at a given moment became the playmate and intrigue in one's head to which innate energies were channeled in its favor. And of his relationship with his mother, as she had died when he was fourteen years old, there had not been enough time for a rupture. He recalled that this mother in the dream had not been his own but a macabre, ersatz face stolen from the naked, preserved corpse with the slit chest at the anatomical museum at Siriaj Hospital who the fourteen year old child, Jatupon, had rightly or erroneously believed in his grief and neediness to resemble his mother—the details of the face of his real mother having diminished like the engraving of a name in the sand after the first wave.
11
There was one second of thinking that the memory of his mother had neither dissipated in part nor whole but surely remained as something inappreciably more cohesive and tangible that was either lost or banished and forlorn within the present jungle- thicket growth of neurons, and caught in the weeds and brambles of failed possibilities. He thought that with sedulous and indefatigable will, even more paths could surely be trodden within his growing array of brambly chaotic connections; and that eventually from this somewhat circuitous trudging through memory and thought and being nearly blown away in volant whims of his biochemistry and penchant for pleasure, these paths would bring him nearer to those lost bonds of the past (not to her who, of course, was deceased and when alive and enervated from perennial work and exasperating children and who had despised him placidly within the ameliorating parameters of maternal instinct, but to a recollection of her the way she really was instead of the distortions of memory that had her as a weathered and defaced countenance like a featureless rock or, at other poor attempts at recollection, merely the ersatz of that preserved female corpse seen at the anatomical museum at Siriaj Hospital; to recall something like her face from those early and less bleak childhood memories when she would begrudgingly join him and his brothers as they played netless badminton and volleyball on a dirt road near their home; to let these memories of shared smiles and laughter, mutual pleasure that registered as "love" with such beings, permeate his consciousness as pleasure in its imprint of memory was the only perception of how close a relationship it had been, and whether or not he had to some limited degree been valued as an instrument of pleasure, and so in a sense cared been about; and to reluctantly acknowledge that he was one of those beings who was susceptible to love, that mixing and receding of color, a mere human even though to him this word neither defined nor demarcated him very well). The next second he was thinking of male Silpakorn University students whom over the years he had seen at various outdoor restaurants near the campus, each eating and laughing in his group indistinct from all others, but when solitary would often be reading a comic book and riveting one of the legs under a table though not in a queer sensuality toward comic books; the phallic gestures were a satiety of virulence that was innate in a man. The throbbing of legs was a venting of superfluous flowing energy that by its sheer force could be channeled one way or another or both to the objects of one's intrigues, these friends who possessed admirable traits that he lacked. Then, more probingly, it occurred to him how unlike the womanizing playboy artist that he was, that a truly unperverted mind had no sexual orientation at all: that for such a being the pleasure of intrigues, these soft and low beds of earth that from His affable magnetism surrounded Him, were the natural course from which His, an Unperverted Bisexual's liquids, would easily flow into. But for the perverted, like him, who for the most part allowed themselves to be channeled in one particular sexual orientation, their limited intrigues were not so much an interest in these intimate associations as they were a replication of the same parental model, or a finding of the antithesis to one or both parents or the reminders of mothers and fathers interaction with each other that such a mind cared to emulate or reject. Then he pondered how common he was (not that he, the supercilious one, believed it with fears of being a commoner ravaging his psyche and compelling him to contrive the august demeanor and beliefs that he had as all beliefs were contrivances and fortifications against one's fears). He pondered how when out of academic and artistic circles, as in this train of passenger-rustics and professionals who still clung to their agrarian roots of Nongkai or Vientiene, his presence was glanced at and dismissed like anyone else; and this caused him to wonder if he would even be remembered in artistic circles five years hence (not that, he being a part-time lecturer at Silpakorn University and full-time wastrel—one who had to some extent rid himself of art, relinquished himself to the void, and remained divorced of the artistic omphalos as well as the paint brush—to be followed by, were it to happen, a physical presence which might expunge him from the planet in some accident, there would need to be five years for public memory of his work to be forgotten). Then, to avoid thinking of man's insignificance, he returned to a sexual theme, that personal sanctuary, as ineluctable appetites constituted so much of his mental faculties and preoccupations. He thought of how the women he liked most were more often than not a docile antithesis to his mother with the notable exceptions of young, recalcitrant, and sexy martinets of selfish whims imposed as laws who when with that same draping and tangled curl of hair and the same totalitarian streak to squelch all males seemed just like his mother, or what little he remembered of her beyond his castrated will under her auspices. Present relationships were for all heterosexual and homosexual perverts based on the model of the parents who had been of an adequate, deficient, or excessive nature, as caretakers causing a given person to reject, accept, or fiercely need what had or had not been given to them. He had no sooner concluded his deliberation that one's choice of intrigues was in large part due to one's interpretation of failures and successes of parental and espousal models than, before he even knew it, he was at his seat and the Laotian was saying unto him a hello, which in the Thai- Laotian that they had concocted hours earlier was still "Sawadee khrap" with the accompanied gesture of the deferential wai.
"Sawadee khrap. Sabai dee mai? "
"Sabai dee. Where have you been all this time?"
"Above you, of course, sleeping."
"I mean since 5:30 when you thudded to the floor."
"Oh, sorry, did I wake you?" Nawin's concern in this matter was only marginally genuine. For the most part it was feigned for the sake of kindness and to thwart this voice of distraction from his subject of deliberation. He was preoccupied with a bigger worry that, prior to going to the toilet, the stranger had seen his eyes grazing his body. He was wondering what gestures or facial expressions might indicate that the man had seen him ogle his body, if he indeed had, and yet the reason for caring what another individual thought of him eluded him. Had not art, this flaunting of his portraits of female whores with his own whorish self-portraits to which both parties were portrayed as locked in self-degradation, and going to these exhibitions of his work with an arm locked in that of his best friend (legally a wife), Noppawan, shown that he was free to express his desires in his own mode without having to subscribe to another's moral ordinances regarding the energies that exuded from him? With such a force there needed to be rules of restraint so that one was not sucked into the vacuous oblivion of desire and did not lose rational cognizance in the meaningless frolic of sexual quests, which were the mere insatiable manipulating urges of an animal and could so easily be the sole and altogether forgettable essence of a man. This he knew from interaction with the inordinate array of bitches who pawed him with their love (their needy and myriad convoluted yearnings for no other reason than a handsome figure to admire their flesh and thereby gain the illusion of immutable beauty - a neediness dirty as their underwear which he more often than not successfully tugged off to be intimate in their flesh and their and his own selfish caprices). He needed restraint, but to him those ordinances should come from within himself, this prowler's own creative and logical prowess.
"Yes, definitely a loud thud; but it wasn't from the noise so much as that smell that cascaded down with your body."
"Smell?"
"Yes, but I don't want to think of it, thank you. No more of that. So tell me of your adventure this morning."
"What adventure?" he chuckled softly with a sotto voce of scoffing asperity as if there had been no earlier adventure on the metallic toilet floor. He said it for in a sense it had been unfitness, a secret aberration even to areas of his cognizance that could not accept anything but the thought of himself as a lady's man and womanizer, it was true.
"I don't know. As I have nothing better to do, tell me where you have been."
"The toilet, mostly," said the body ogler with an embarrassed laugh as if this trifle of where he had been (this masturbatory exercise in the toilet of the train) were not worthy of speech instead of being a paramount expression of repressed, latent forces that had been compressed within him for so many years. It was still his assumption that as a sleeping body was beautiful with its breath rising and lowering the chest rhythmically like a raft on an ocean, so an artist, the appreciator of beauty in the mundane, would have an artist's aberrations from the insensate throngs, and as such, such appreciative aberrations should not be judged as anything that was particularly queer or at any rate queerer than anything else. Just being on the planet at all, a successful conception from one of competing sperm spilled out in a moment of two people needing, from a transient mood, to subscribe to an illusion of intimacy in a physical experience, was queer enough.
"I suppose looking at that handsome but middle-aged face deteriorate in the mirror—I mean when you were in the toilet. Right?"
"Maybe. Something like that."
"Well, that's a bit odd if you don't mind me saying so. Even a woman would not dare to pee or stay in front of a mirror that long."
Nawin laughed. Like his expressions of love in his juggling of women that was and was not the love he claimed it as being, he had moments of a predilection for mendacity like a boy wanting to hide himself within the shadows of a field and to remain there indefinitely, never to be discovered. He spoke mendaciously and yet to him it was not really a lie. "I wasn't there all that long. Afterwards, I just waited outside the toilet for the seats to be readjusted. Just waited back there, wasting time." Of course "wasting time" had consisted of that adolescent masturbatory sport, which he had conducted earlier in that fetid toilet, a water closet that was more tin than tinsel; and as he thought of it once again with a mischievous grin, he thought of this use of the source of the fantasy for pleasure, the Laotian, without much compunction. Then he thought of himself as guilty for not feeling guilt until recognizing that these new sexual urges were as a volcano spewing out old molten churnings of lava. So of a volcano, he thought, so of a human psyche. He accepted this change to the contour of the surface for ultimately (according to his rationalization), as queer as it was, like everything else, there was nothing new or strange in it.
"And while waiting outside the toilet you were probably staring at yourself in one of the other mirrors, weren't you?"
"Yes, but how do you know that?"
"It would have to be a guess, wouldn't it, unless I can read minds, at least in some imperfect way. In this case it is not so much reading minds but faces."
"So what is in my face?"
"It doesn't matter what is in your face. I don't need to look at it all that much. All upper class Thai darkees are the same. Cleansed and made beautiful and white by money they are a vain lot—solitary cowards behind face fortresses. They are like the Chinese in that sense, and both Thai lightees and darkees with money pretend to be of a higher species. They try to avoid foraging, disease carrying primates like me. Their fortresses are built from fear that lack of money will make them have to acknowledge that they are merely hairless monkeys—no more special, no more potential to matter than any animal."
"You think that I am like that?"
"Well, each person is a bit different. You don't seem so bad. Let's just say that for now, you are a nice guy in a snobbish sort of way" (meaning that having been given a bit of money the previous night in that gesture of unbegrudging levity as if it had merely been the sharing of a bag of sticky rice, a smile from this giver, Nawin, since these Thai compatriots saw smiling as their highest attribute, and voluble conversation beyond the vouchsafed utterances given to a repugnant laborer from a country that was poorer than Thailand, he could hardly hate this particular Thai with that quick primeval xenophobia, in which hominoids reacted to those strangers of a different and potentially deleterious group). Nawin had to be put in a special category slightly different than the usual brand of rich and dark Thais of money. Nawin chuckled abashedly as he tilted his august face to the floor. Then he lifted his head and, in the way of the Thais, a morose, soft, and artful smile alighted on his swarthy countenance like a lambent shadow of a descending airplane across a naked field. He became aware of how much he needed other human beings, these jovial extensions to his limited domain, these pleasant respites from redundant churnings of thought and the hauntings of memories, and he knew that he would feign any interested smile to get the reprieve. "Did you have a good sleep?"
"No, not at all, if you really want to know, which I couldn't see that you would really. Personally, I've never minded a little stink: a sock here, a shoe there, even women smelling like raw, rotting tuna down where a man wants to go—I accept these things. Things that get used get smelly. But that which was stinking up there was of no use….unless one were to capture it, put it in a pill somehow, and sell it off as a cheap form of methamphetamines to truckers, bus drivers, and maybe even guys like me who want nothing better than to stare into space on a bunk all night instead of sleep."
"My socks?"
"Your monstrous socks!"
"Was it that bad?" asked this American Thai, Nawin, with an awkward laugh. He was feeling a sense of exhilaration at being with one who was unlike demure Southeast Asians' superficial demeanor. Like a Nawin Biadklang painting in being so wanton in declaring sordid reality as such, so seemed the man; and Nawin liked what was true and like himself.
"It was like drowning in molecules—at least a little. Still, I survived it all right, so it's okay. Morning came."
"How did morning make a difference?"
"The train official removed those rotting monsters with tongs."
"With tongs?"
"Tongs from the restaurant car."
"With tongs from the restaurant car?"
"Big tongs. Forceps, maybe. Well, something like that."
"Where are my socks?"
"Above you in your bag. I told him to bury them there. I hope that is all right. I hope that it didn't contaminate the rest of your clothes too much."
"Ground contamination is always the better of the two options," Nawin said as he sat down. His zipper which was still open from his bathroom adventure parted suddenly like the spreading foreskin of the V of a vagina. The Laotian looked down at the off-white pee stained hill of underwear within and yet the artistic demigod did not notice. "Airing out the old elephant, I see."
"What?"
"It can't always be happy to be kept away in its smelly stall, now can it? A little air can be just the thing for its mental health. Also a good airing out is as good as soap and water. That's always been my theory." The Laotian grinned mischievously, and then looked out of the window.
Nawin supposed that he was making reference to an elephant in a hamlet, one in a forest, or one in a field of a passing landscape. "Do they put elephants in stables?" asked Nawin with ingenuous naivety as he pondered the meaning of the Laotian's questions.
The Laotian burst out in a laughter which started out as a mild guffaw before burning away any acrimony against opulent Bangkokians, their ignorance, and more specifically, this rich Thai's obtuseness, to become a pleasant and embracing cacophony of good will.
Nawin noticed a blanketed entity at his feet that puzzled him and made the reason for the laughter cease to matter. Then the Laotian spoke and the blanketed one who was half on the floor and the two seats before the window was forgotten.
"So, a rich man like you doesn't know where elephants are kept but then why would you? I guess it wouldn't have been something that you would have studied in college." He waited for a response but all that he got was the artist's furrowed look of puzzlement followed by an aloof stare. Like a faithful childish protégé who was fascinated by the most mundane of motion and noise, Nawin, an animistic thinker even in this more than waning prime of life, began to listen to the fan that rotated above the luggage. At first he was merely wondering why the fan was now on, stirring the cold air, thereby making the air-conditioned area seem colder yet; but as he listened to its grating squeal he imagined that he was hearing the fan talk to him all so discreetly. It was whispering that the vibrations heard by the man who was supposing it to be the actual sound of the fan were fallacious. It was saying that, as with the sound of the fan, so was the Laotian's voice and all specious sound: that sound, by being heard indirectly if not vicariously, existed only as an adulterated sensation. According to the fan true sounds were unknown for one was not hearing what true vibrations sounded like inside a given source, but was merely hearing the air vibrating from its disturbances, or more obliquely one was hearing disturbed air from a vibration that then became disturbed and distorted once more in hitting the eardrums and this thwarted sound, correctly attributed as originating from a given source, was incorrectly attributed as being the real sound of that source. Likewise, said the fan, the Laotian's cologne and aftershave, like any smell, were a diffusion of higher concentrations of molecules to lower ones, so he was not smelling the scent of the man mixed with the artificial chemicals as they were on him, but the scent of him within his perfumed mixture as a less dense concentration oozing away from the man, leaving him and diffusing with other molecular scents, and the more one was at a distance, the less distinct this or any smell became. Sight was unabsorbed color that was exuded from a given presence although the mind believed it to be the filling in, the materialization, of the object's outline. All senses seemed fallible, and the world of the senses seemed like a voice echoing in a canyon, and no more real than that. It suddenly seemed to him that his own marriage, an abstraction concocted in his and her head, and then spilled as ink on a tenuous sheet of easily torn paper made hallow in ceremony, and by a deistic, bodily fluid overseer, imbued less sense than the nonsense the Laotian was speaking. This thought that a caring relationship grounded in many years could dissipate with such precipitancy by a mutual friend jumping off a balcony was proof of the vaporous quality of all things. It tortured him in one deranged second for all was a phantasm of the mind and the phantasmagoria of an impermanent existence. It made him feel his true proportions as a disintegrating speck in a microcosm of the galaxy.