He once again recalled Noppawan's summary of an incident that should have been an augury to them both. It consisted of facts bloated in an imagined scene. Momentarily distracted at hearing the window sliding on a sill, she was unconcerned and returned to typing her handout at the computer in her office at Assumption University when a premonition suddenly shot a cold and macabre sensation through her mind and body. Running to the back of the office, she saw Kimberly in a black rectangular hole of the open window. She saw her in that empty black hole of the self fluttering loose, tattered, and free like a banner on the fade of the university building they were in. "Oh no, Kimberly. Come down from the window. Please." "I want to die," "No, you don't. There are so many people who care about you. You don't want that!" "No one cares. Not really." "Oh, you know that is not true. Unlike me, you have a ton of friends and close friends in me—Nawin too. He would be here in an instant if he knew that you were so unhappy. We didn't know it was so bad, Kimberly. It's late. Come down and go to bed. Things always seem clearer in the morning when emotions burn down in sleep." "I'm just a hole to men here—nothing else." She was crying but her weakened voice undulated loudly with strident, random words. "A pearly white sperm receptacle here and there, in America and France, just a woman, another one, with nothing special in her. I'll never find anyone to spend my years with, the way you have with Nawin. I'll never have someone like him." "Please Kimberly, life isn't easy for any woman. You think living with him is easy? All these women he paints and pants after. Come down Kimberly. We are the same, you and I." "It's different. You have him. I just have all these others whose only use in me is to make claims on my body for to them I am only a tool for pleasure." "Sometimes I wish that someone would claim me. He is not mine, you know. I just share him in these compromises of marriage." "You do share him, don't you? Will you?" "What?" "Share him with me…not like them but like a marriage—the three of us." With a display of their desperation and sometimes given conscesions in love, such people never committed suicide. That was what he and Noppawan told themselves immediately before and during Kimberly's impregnation and pregnancy: that she would never really kill herself: that had been the belief.
These voices (in large part his own imagining but plausible and faithful to the outline delineated by Noppawan's narrative) resounded in his brain and, in consensus with his own verdict on himself, they condemned him. Still he snuggled up to them for a middle aged man with no one was naked and discomfited in purpose. Holding tight to what had passed away he believed that he was less lonely even though conversely this snuggling to imagined abstractions with female bodies, facsimiles of what was that was distorted into what was not, made him feel even more lonely than he would otherwise have felt. He imagined these voices of the past and the dead, and yet for all their distinct clarity, they were at best half-imagined impressions, half concocted indentions in the damp putty of his brain. In reality they were as behind him as the township of Udon Thani that the train had now passed through. They had parted with him and fled like the bird that had witnessed his homosexual solo-eroticism in the fetid toilet of the train. How alone he felt; and the thought of the three of them shopping for baby clothes together, watching DVDs, or roasting marshmallows on the ends of sticks held over a barbeque grill near the swimming pool of his estate made him queasy. He continued to query himself incessantly with what-ifs. If he and Noppawan had invited Kimberly into their home, he wondered, would none of this have happened? And yet it seemed that something else could have taken place. Had this invitation been made and accepted she might have drowned herself in the pool. Who was to say she would not have done so? He excoriated himself for appeasing his guilt with such a morbid thought. Maybe tomorrow a mega-sized typhoon of global warming dimensions would pass over Bangkok and clean the slate of people like himself, obscene drawings of human denizens; but then he was going northeast to the sleepiest of the world's comatose capitals, Vientiane. What could happen to him there? Only if he were to ignore the illustrated signs of a man being electrocuted that graced the whole of Vientiane, and grab a low electrical wire would an end come to him there. Only then would he end his umbilical connection to this immoral world where existence could be so randomly and arbitrarily obliterated to some, as life's gluttons watched it as entertaining news from their television sets, and where under the wrong circumstances a good man might become a looter, a thief, a prostitute, or a beggar.
"I said, if you weren't listening, that I guess it wouldn't have been studied in college. Why would you know if an elephant is kept in a stall in the back yard, tied behind a tree of a neighbor's penthouse, or kept in a neighbor's wife? Elephant studies can be confusing to any novice especially when he doesn't make a distinction between the two species of elephants. Honestly, I think that with both breeds, the figurative and the literal elephants, there are stalls for them. It is certainly true of the figurative when they can be tamed enough to stay in stalls."
"You know, I don't have a clue what you are talking about. You are rambling shit like a crazy man."
"You don't?"
"No, but I'm okay with that, really. I'm just listening to your amusing nonsense and not caring particularly whether or not there is anything at all sensible in it."
The Laotian laughed until the point where he had difficulty swallowing his saliva. Then he coughed, and regaining his voice, he cleared his throat. The grave expression of gagging on his saliva as if were as gaggable as ox tongue, roasted duck gizzards, and fried cockroach in burnt rouge cream at a Laotian restaurant attempting to emulate French cuisine, only lasted a moment and then he smiled, putting at ease disconcerted Nawin who was now rising from his seat as if being called on to perform the Heimlich maneuver. "That's good. More people should do that—not be so serious all the time… just realize that you are fucking around with your time, keeping your life from being entirely meaningless with a personal…" He could not find the word.
"Experience?"
"Yes but more. 'Titillation'—titillation here and there; but I think that we did have a subject. We were talking about elephants if I remember correctly." His words did not come volubly. They were forced and contrived like one intent on seeming educated. The sentences were spoken slowly like one in search of latent words that were once heard somewhere but, because of social-economic privation, stagnated in unfamiliarity. "I have noticed that in this, your country, rural compatriots sometimes bring elephants into large cities in the hope of selling their fine fodder to the pedestrians so that they might have the experience of elephant feeding."
Nawin was amused at the strained efforts the Laotian underwent— with some formality of diction—to impress him. "Yes, in Laos too, I would suppose."
"I don't know, really. I haven't seen people pay money to feed them in Vientiane, if they do, but that doesn't mean that they don't. But it would make more sense doing it in someplace where the people are filthy rich, and I guess seeing large literal animals is a bit of a novelty in cities like Bangkok where they are so used to the open exhibition of the figurative breeds. I'm just trying to imagine those silky hands of yours scooping up elephant dung off sidewalks. I am trying to imagine how someone like you would cope in being a beggar pulling an elephant down the streets."
"No better or worse than other beggars. What would give you the idea that I am from a privileged background? Believe me, I am a self- made man and these "silky" hands, as you call them, have done a lot of things. Do you have a name?"
"Boi."
"Tell me something, Boi, I'm curious; do the beggars with their elephants just sleep with them randomly on sidewalks? Where do they go after shoppers go home and man and beast need to sleep?"
"It's a mystery," said the Laotian and then grabbed one of Nawin's hands. "Thai silk. Just as I thought; if these things were not so large or so strong, or at least stronger than the average woman, their texture…"
"The silkiness?"
"Yes, the silkiness—the silkiness might seem to some like that of a woman's hands. Fortunately you are darkly complected. That makes you more masculine in a pretty boy, middle aged man sort of way." Nawin chuckled at the absurdity of someone making a study of his hands. "You haven't exactly used these things very much in hard labor, have you? Yes, if they were not so large and strong they would pass off as women's hands. What is it that you do for a living, anyhow?"
"I am an artist."
"An artist? That would explain hands like these. What do you draw?" he asked while returning the hand.
"Naked women."
"And people pay you for that?"
"They seem to."
"Do they pay well?"
"Yes, of course. I am a rich man according to you."
"In Thailand, one finds both the calloused and the silky types but in Laos even some of the higher government officials are workers in their secondary vocations. They all have the damnedest hands."
"What? Do you study the hands of government officials too?"
"A brief survey, I guess. I wouldn't think of it as a study."
It seemed to Nawin that the two of them were merely crows cawing at the night to give texture to the air and all vacuous substance in order to make themselves and their world seem real. It seemed to him that small talk and bantering were, as the Laotian said, titillations to make something personal in the void of time and space. "How do you know that I'm a loafer?" asked Nawin with a laugh.
"Did I say that you were?"
"I don' remember. Maybe not exactly like that but you implied it anyhow. How do you know that I am a loafer?"
"I don't. I just guess that you are."
"I am, you know."
"Are what?"
"A loafer. Not much of an artist now. Retired."
"Retired?"
"Uninspired. They are synonymous words."
"Why would anyone want your paintings? That is what I'm trying to figure out. Video porn… DVD porn for those with computers, okay. They are closer to the real thing, aren't they?" Nawin smiled widely. He felt reaffirmed and grounded in the inconsequence of vain, lofty pursuits and his retirement finally felt good. Then the Laotian said, "There is some real porn that I am witnessing right now. It is too bad it's just that of any locker room scene" and then he pointed down at Nawin's open zipper.
Nawin looked down and smiled widely. He was before the Laotian in an unzipped state after having masturbated to an image of him in his head (the same type of illusion that a man had in copulating with his wife to keep illusory human existence on the planet at all) and yet he felt no particular compunction for what he had done or what a man tended to do with his own body in the privacy of his mind, or in the intimacy of a real embrace. In all cases it was the massage of his own body to ease himself from the stress of thinking, knowing, and having to live in a world of illusions. It was the massage of one's body which one rightfully owned if anyone did (certainly not one's partner) and thus this acknowledgement repudiated, and rendered inane words like adultery and perversion.
12
Left to himself for a moment, he slipped into a brief sleep where, once again, he was with Kimberly. He too was a prey of gravity, and they were falling rapidly from the balcony of her apartment in the Queen's Tower at Assumption University. The two of them, morsels down the gullet of skies, seemingly torn by winds active as enzymes, pummeled the air futilely with desperate, flailing limbs in an attempt to swim through the air from whence they came but could never return. Hardly an occasion for declaring mai pen rai, still there were scarce traces of hope; and as hope was consciousness, there were scarce traces of the latter as well. If, as scared as he was, he was cognizant enough to have a group of interrelated thoughts beyond the perennial wish for "God", which redundantly played in his head, to save him, it was in reference to a belief that there were some actions that could be reversed. It seemed to him that as a change of one's mind could cause a departure to become a homecoming, so there was a remote possibility that this action could also be reversed. Maintaining hope and consciousness, wisely, it did not occur to him that such a return was physically impossible since beings plunged through life just once. Shrieking as they punctured two large holes that made one prodigious gulf in the thin metallic tiles comprising the awning over the swimming pool, they plunged together, splashing into a fiery inferno of loneliness before the last of their inevitable, lethal descent.
He woke, fully startled to find himself in wakefulness. Concentrating on where he was to allow the excesses of the saturation of sleep, a more temporary reality, to be shaken from his sodden neurons like wetness from an animal's fur, he then did nothing further. He merely allowed it to slowly evaporate from consciousness. It seemed odd to him that in all these diurnal commutes between wakefulness and sleep that the mind should continue to allow either of these two states to overwhelm the other. It seemed odd that after so long it would continue to be sequacious to trust what was experienced in either of the chemically induced realms but then, he asked himself, what choice did it have? Was not sand layered by wind and waves? It was; and so the human brain was molded with whatever energy and force happened to be applied to it. Then, in the next second of thoughts, it did not seem odd at all; and conversely, he speculated that perhaps most individuals considered both states specious and succumbed, like prisoners, to the coercion in apathetic numbness.
Was it not so in this city of Bangkok where incense was snagged in carbon exhausts and its residents were engaged in amusements to escape their small speck on this rock of the planet? They were a lackadaisical ethnicity and their amusements were definitely petty—the young chasing balls and finding the extent of their physical prowess; carnal youth in sexual peccadilloes; the worker ants who, when not at work, and no longer succumbing to that role that gave some structure to their existence, spending time in evening revelries about owning their own businesses; elderly women engaged in Tai Chi and their husbands in Chinese checkers on park benches; the poor along the canals, clustered in evenings near their neighbors' shacks for beer and cigarette pilfering, sometimes the men comic book swapping and always musing the day's pettiness amusingly; the rich speculating on how to invest and have more, seeking large flat screen televisions and the fastest computers at Panthip Plaza, the most fashionable clothes in the best of malls, and exchanging tips on how to improve their landscapes and gardens; but which of them, in the thickets of men, felt or thought deeply about the world? They were as wild vines that grew with the rest of nature on the rock of the planet and sprawled human entanglements and preoccupations thoughtlessly upon it.
It was only from the constancy of waking in the same bed in which he went to sleep, waking to the same issues that he went to sleep with, and finding himself next to the person he fell asleep with the previous night, that sleep was considered sleep and not wakefulness, and wakefulness was considered wakefulness instead of sleep; and yet knowing this did nothing for him. He felt discombobulated as though this dream were of more substance than dew over the eyes that he would eventually dry from, a sandstorm within the self where, were it not for his own angst, that same regret that he felt a dozen yesterdays ago and was a constancy that would commandeer a lifetime of perennial guilt- ridden tomorrows, he would not know reality if it were to swallow him. "I feel a constancy of pain and therefore I am," he thought satirically.
For a couple of seconds he noted how, from where he was positioned inwardly and outwardly (pinioned inside himself as he remained seated a few feet from the window) the swath of fields and outlying roads of small towns hurried past him in an incessant green and grey smudge of flat images. Even though they fleeted by incessantly, they were like pop-ups from a children's book; and for a few additional seconds he began to withdraw into a self that was deflating surreally into a diminutive and flattened form in an imagined land of stationary pop-ups where the unreal was still and preserved instead of the seemingly real, which was always wide-open and fleeting. Then this too, this relinquishing oneself to the void to cease this expending of one's energy in sifting through all of these illusions in illusionary existence, formulating "reality" based upon garnering the most plausible of the illusions, ceased with hearing the loud yawning of this stranger named Boi. Glancing at him, Nawin displayed the notorious Thai smile which was always feigned and hospitable with the genuine warmth of wanting the recipient to like him if not of needing to be liked. He did it almost like any reflexive jerk, a physical retreat of the body, as he ruminated on this word, stranger.
When, he asked himself, did a person cease being a stranger? Had he not known Noppawan since he was fourteen years old (as if years meant anything)? Had they not become soul mates for the reason that each of them had possessed empathy for the other innocent being charred in the torturous hells of family? He had and they had; and yet upon gaining a child from him she had treated him with indifference as if, having obtained what she had always wanted (one of her husband's sperm fertilizing an egg and allowing her a son even if it was through her best friend), he was now irrelevant and made all the more so, weeks later, at Kimberly's demise, when she locked him out physically as well as psychologically. He had not even known her. In all of these years of marriage on top of those comprising their friendship of youth he had not known her any more than one did the strangest of strangers.
"Still tired," asked Nawin.
"Of course," said Boi. "There is little sleep for a man bunked under another man…especially when under a man like you and with socks stinking like that, like an elephant's breath…not that the socks were the entire problem. Those were finally taken away in the morning when I couldn't bear it anymore. They didn't bother me after that. It was…" He stopped.
"It was what?" asked Nawin with a relieved chuckle, grateful for flippant conversation to interpose his silent ponderings. The idea that a Thai and a Laotian could not engage in conversation without an elephant trudging through it almost tickled him to tears.
"I don't know," he smirked knowingly. "I am used to sleeping in the mornings so after they came and removed those contaminated articles of yours I could have fallen back to sleep. For a while I attempted to wave away the remaining cloud of stink so that I could do just that. I rested quietly enough after a time. It wasn't as if I was asphyxiating from those smells any longer. The cloud was still there… extant as they say… but I could have slept were it not for this weird feeling that somebody was looking at me—looking at my body. Have you ever felt that way?"
"No."
"Not at all?"
"No, I don't think so. Not really. I mean with my wife. Maybe at times she watched me when I was sleeping. I wouldn't know."
"You wouldn't know?" he mocked. "And these models that you say that you paint, would you know it if one of them watched you while you slept?"
"I wouldn't know."
"You do paint them?"
"Yes."
"And get butt naked with them, I guess, if you paint them as nudes. Who wouldn't, or at least who wouldn't attempt it unless he was 100 percent gay?"
"Of course I am intimate with my models. That goes hand in hand."
"Do you ever watch them as they are sleeping?"
"I guess, maybe once or twice. Well, now that I think about it, I've painted a few in restless positions while asleep. This is an odd question to be asking me."
"Why? We are friends, aren't we? A friend can be one of hours and not years, and it is still a friendship, isn't it?"
"I suppose so," he said. It was the same question that Nawin had postulated silently in his own head and he felt even more inclined to call him a friend for this affinity to his own private ponderings.
"If it were me I would not get any sleep at all. I'd be staring at them continually. I think it is the same for you if you are a painter of naked beauties; but then maybe they are more cute and handsome than they are beautiful."
Nawin smirked and then grimaced. "I'm not sure what you mean by that," he said but he knew, or at least sensed, an attempt to deface his masculinity with homosexual innuendos and thus he manipulated his words and actions accordingly. "Anyhow, most men would consider them quite beautiful, think what you want." Having said this, and glad that he had, he still was not content for the Laotian to think what he wanted and so he pulled out a wallet that contained some slides of his favorite paintings that were there with some of his favorite condoms. Deliberately pulling out the former and dropping one of the latter, he showed some of the slides while stuffing a condom back into his wallet. Boi held each of the slides up to the light of the window and squinted. "Well, what do you know? You are an artist. What are these beauties that are your subject matter?"
"Ladies of the night. Patpong professionals for the most part."
"Beautiful."
"Do you think so? But then what is beauty? An overweight middle aged man can be considered appealing to an anorexic and her thinness, sadness, and youth can seem beautiful to him if both lack qualities that the other possesses, or have qualities mirrored in the partner which makes them feel less alone. That is my theory, for what it is worth."
"You are a deep one, aren't you?" asked the stranger.
He thought of his own limited sex symbol status. In this decade and a half of being glossed onto covers of esoteric art magazines and the photographs of him with articles being emblazoned on the back pages of Sunday newspapers, this married but eligible hedonist with a sensitive stroke was considered handsome and debonair, luminous in sensuality, jaunty and recalcitrant, and an empathic sufferer for those whom he studied and represented. He was alluring for these qualities and most importantly for being fully comfortable with himself as such. He, "Naughty Nawin," was a luminosity in artistic circles who was more desirable for having been desired by others; and yet in all this time he sensed it for the inferior illusion that it was. In a world of complete illusions, a plausible reality was really the thing that was most desired and clung to and so he had clung to Noppawan, a girl who hated family as much as he did, and yet by clinging he had made a family with her. He had forfeited bachelorhood, as much as a Patpong artist could, and had slipped himself into their union only to find that the woman he was married to could not conceive a child and that by her being infertile his days of bachelorhood (except at least on a legal piece of paper) would be as perennial as the wild flower days of his life. He knew illusions so well, for they were his art to convey truth in fiction and reality in abstraction. He liked producing color on canvasses that would act as a mirror of indictment on this world, where the weak were depicted as abused and falling prey to illnesses like the dogs that were born in the streets, kicked, starved, mange-ridden, and dead early and hideously. He saw this perennial cycle of victims going on forever and only nuclear bombs falling like cleansing rain stopping it. He knew how like a magician he could cast a spell on others through his canvass, but he also understood the potency of words and by words he might now circumvent any suspicions about his sexuality which, the way he saw it, was "straight" and intact, despite a few strange caprices that blew in here and there.
"Supermodels and actresses are considered universally beautiful but I don't think it has much merit. I think that beauty really is in the eyes of the beholder for the earlier reasons that I gave. It is only because of the extent of their physical curves of femininity which are beyond the normal range for most men to find in a partner that supermodels and actresses are depicted and believed as some type of a universal beauty. They would only be considered slightly more beautiful were it not for their fame. The fame makes their style of beauty become embedded into minds as something supernatural. In most cases, I think, beauty is just what we lack. As I am a man, I lack the tender touches and graces of a woman, those gentle curves and scents, and responding like a man I want to thrust myself into that gentility whose hands worship a man's physique. I want to rivet and devour." He knew that his words would be considered outlandish in Thai society where everything was done with maximum freedom but never spoken, and he knew that his turgid words, spoken as if he were the professor of beauty, would bore the most pedantic. Still, that was the aim: he wanted to take the stranger on a meandering path of circumlocutions that would shake him from earlier thoughts and deposit him in this concept that he, Nawin Biadkang, the prostitute artist, was and forever would be a lady's man. "Women are the viand of a man's eyes, the fruit for the bon vivant." He used French words that were retained in English without being Anglicized to give puissance to what he thought of condescendingly as his befuddled mother tongue. In that respect he was no different than any supercilious upper class American or Englishmen who required superior utterance even though to most of the contemporary world's populace the elite language was base English itself. Then he glanced toward the aisle and surrounding seats for although not really embarrassed by his words, ensconced as he was in his role as a libertine, he was deferential enough to worry that he would inadvertently bludgeon a listener with his peculiar thoughts. He then became inexplicably reticent although no one was listening.
With conversation continuing to seem cogent, moving on stretched, unraveled ends, Boi was on the verge of accepting Nawin as a womanizer and might have possibly done so were it not for the artist's cowardly withdrawal into himself which befuddled the befuddlement. Nawin had turned away and was staring at the fan clipping speedily at the air. There could be no other interpretation other than that this Nawin (on the birth certificate, Jatupon, a word that still thrust a cold chill down his spine as cold slackened his pace, freezing him to danger), feeling uncomfortably seated on exaggerated truth, was becoming fixated on these rotating blades dicing the air the way the second hand of a clock seemed to suggest the dicing of a man's life incrementally. Due to the extent of his boredom, to Boi he was a suspicious character, an ambiguous puzzle needing to be solved and a landscape of contrasts to set his claim upon. Nawin sensed this intrigue but gained no satisfaction from it. All that he wanted, he told himself, was to relax and not think so much when thinking was such morbid drudgery like an impoverished gold seeker sifting through mud and obtaining merely that. "Wasn't my reason for coming here to purge people from my life, and live purely in complete empty space without needing others to plug up my loneliness," he thought. "And yet here is one more bit of dross stuffing my gutter."
He realized the impression that he was making and so he smiled and looked into the stranger's face. "So, did you like the paintings? —not that as slides held up to the light anyone could see them all that well."
"They were done well."
"Unlike you who have probably gained a lot of various skills in your labor, I don't have many practical skills. I can't fix anything. Not even a drawer that is ajar in a night table. Never learned to cook anything but noodles from my parents' restaurant and my brothers' noodle stands. But I know how to draw naked whores. That is for sure. I guess it is my gift."
"If those slides are your own work, you do, my friend. You draw them so well, so exquisitely, so astoundingly with all the feminine curves and wiles just right; and I am sure that after you paint and love them they sometimes like to watch you sleep and you like to watch them sleep. But that was not the nature of my query. I am meaning someone whom you don't know all that well looking down on you. Like I was earlier this morning, you are not quite asleep and so you hear him—yes a man, as it is a man's breathing that you hear. Earlier I was lying alone here in my bottom bunk drowsy but not asleep when I swear I heard someone drop from an upper sleeper and got the sense that he was examining my body, wanting it. Strange, huh?"
"I would imagine that it would be," said Nawin.
For a moment he was stunned to have these crevices of opaque light so heavily and obliquely invade the filthy corners of his mind, the dark enlightenment being alluded to, both parties seeming to peer onto it (he himself undoubtedly so and this smirking of the Laotian and his eyes that seemed to pierce his soul so knowingly could not have equivocal interpretations). He kept debating whether he should stay or go and found himself, due to his indecisiveness, floundering in desperate ambivalence. Clearly he wanted to move to a different seat so in that sense of knowing his own dominant yearning and witnessing it unopposed by contrary yearnings he was not ambivalent at all and yet, he asked himself, how could he just go? To go so precipitously would be rude even if done with the obsequious gesture of the wai (although even this was complicated by the fact that he was the older and vastly more affluent of the two parties and should not be the one initiating such gestures); and to leave for one of the now vacant seats would only aggravate suspicion. The idea of the Laotian having proof of his decadence would dog whatever specious tranquility he hoped to have in a vacant space of his own. He could stay. True, it would be uncomfortable but then, he told himself, there was not any option for solving any problem that was ever entirely perfect. He was uncomfortable now, and would surely be even more so with the passing moments. Such discomfort would sprawl like a dark vine onto the minutes, strangling them like a rope, or in excessive growth smothering them like a baby buried in its foam bath. And yet if he were inordinately resolute if not obdurate in staying where he was, would not the tempestuousness pass away easily by acting the part of a god? Zeus-like in shooting his thunder bolts, albeit thunder bolts of conversation against that soft epistemological core of a man's mind which realized that nothing was known absolutely, he could easily impart the venom of doubt. He could lead the conversation into inconsequential matters such as the latest news about these Moslem separatists in the South or the seventy year old saffron frocked monk who mistakenly pulled out glue from the medicine cabinet, inserted it into one of his eyes, and then allowed a colleague to remedy it by applying paint thinner into his hallowed orbs. Anything believed to be known, could be doubted as illusory when the possibilities of the present were continually supplanting those of the past. By continuing to talk it would become more real than the Laotian's vague recollection of him staring at his body. Still he did not know what to say, and feeling that discomfort, he wanted the closure of all communication with a stranger who knew him more than his own wife.
These homosexual feelings had swept out of nowhere, and they had put him in an inferno of desire, which only masturbation in the toilet had been able to douse (this particular desire all the more savage for being so alien to adulthood). Still with the appropriate undaunted response such a caprice and aberration did not need to brand him in the Laotian's mind or his own. And yet this chill that seemed to drip onto his spine like water from a leaky pipe in the tiled ceiling of the bathroom, was incessant; and perennial was the trepidation that the Laotian should know the cryptic depravity that lived in the messy far reaches of his brain, and the latent whims that gushed out from his childhood memories. For a few seconds Nawin was able to stare at his curious rival with a resolute confidence and a lambent smile but it did not last, and so he stared out of the window and withdrew back into himself. He once again began to romanticize those cars of laborers with their families. It would be there, to them, from which wafting scents of dirt, rice, and wildly lush and weedy greenery, lost molecules from the whole, would pour into open windows. It would be there in poignant rushes of wind slapping their faces that, complacent or even content, these laborers in shared travels to the homes of extended family would find meaning in their relationships. From the illusion of desire and love, of transient rushes of feeling, the families existed and became the boundaries and summation of themselves—accidents and stumblings from that which in ignorance begat the unions and material presences to which they tolerated, and to some degree cared for, as they were extensions of themselves, their fate.
The bundle (the feet on the Laotian's seat and head leaning against the edge of his own) began to move and like a decarpeted Cleopatra her face became visible and it was beautiful.
13
Throughout these moments of the conversation she, whoever she was, had been at his knee all along even though, oddly enough, her presence had registered in his brain with the vaguest of awareness. Now that he was fully cognizant of her, he perceived this oddity of having overlooked her earlier as a somewhat amusing anecdote in a listless, perennial train trip largely in need of even the most dull amusements, a fact which was droll to him in its own way; and yet outwardly he hid his smile and tried to restrain himself from glancing downward. He told himself that he did so out of Thai modesty which mandated some degree of reticence, or at least a bit of a reluctance, to broach questions (being installed by cultural indoctrination this was the most frequently used program which, when lacking an operator's manual for one's life, even iconoclasts like him would switch on reflexively in an effort to make an appropriate social response before reconsideration and subsequent action). Indeed that did have some bearing, but for the most part his silence was in the hope of keeping her there longer.
Clearly, she was now exhaling her warmth onto one of his knees so, he argued to himself, why not patiently allow the query of who she was to emerge slowly with her presence when waking would at last tear open that cocoon. As bereft of women and relationships as he now was and as confused as he was by what had transpired inwardly immediately before and during his odd release in the toilet, it was quite pleasant to imagine her as a more docile and devoted member of his long throng of scattered harem over the years and now, at the age of forty, decades of adulthood. He knew that this desiring of a woman to stay on his knee was not all that different from the previous night when with beer in his system and insecurity at being chased by the 4 and 0 which were almost as tangible as stalkers, he had hugged a pillow to secure some limited sleep. He knew it, and he knew that this repugnant human weakness suggested that the peace of mind he hoped to obtain by a Buddhist trip into Vientiane could be easily ravaged by wild desires as random and pointless as the landscape of weeds and sedges about the train, for desire was innate as the yearning to breathe. This wild mono-homo incident, he somewhat cogently told himself from the more than nominal truth that was therein, had merely been a release, a mechanical need to discharge a full load of semen rather than a desire for one of the same gender; and he fervently yearned for the obsequious knee doter to stay where she was for as long as it lasted, not that he would have disturbed her repose if it were not intertwined with his own pleasure as well as a need for a secure sense of self-identity. Was not that, he asked himself, what made the distinction of a kind man from the rest of the predatory male animals: a patience and tolerance of others' happiness, and a willingness to invest time to secure it even at the cost of one's own discomfort? If so, kindness was the virtue of the former he, Jatupon, who, in lost, forlorn boyhood, when not wanting to disturb sleeping cats allowed them to lay hours at a time on his lap. He guffawed silently in his own mental chamber at such sanctimonious, thrasonical ravings, for childish behavior of long ago was not evidence for his untenable claim of being a kind man and thus a good one. It had no relevance to his barely nominal interaction with the beauty that was sleeping at his knee. Furthermore, he recriminated himself, his fame came in depicting the exploitation of others which was in itself a type of exploitation even were he to reside in the deepest squalor as an expose journalist, a Mother Theresa, or some other paragon for ending injustice and suffering. Had not his whores sought deliverance for themselves and their impoverished families because of him? Had not jejune sojourns been made to the homes of their respective rural families where he had to eat with them as one of their members? Had not a belief that he would leave his wife for them and an innocent expectation that they would be redeemed by this deliverer burned within their breasts, hearts, and clitorises? "Am I a good man? I rather doubt that I am," he disparaged himself. He even doubted goodness. One never interacted with anyone unless pleasure was in some way associated to it. A human, even the best of them, was hardly the making of a saint. Clearly, were they not so soft and his need for love so great, he would not have stayed in that uncomfortable posture on a tree stump outside his parents home, long ago, to allow cats to sleep upon him.
This idea that pleasure was interconnected with all pursuits, a viand of a thought, could well have become a repast if not a banquet for discernment; and as an artist's dissertation was done on canvas, ideas for a painting, now raw feeling boiling to the rim, were on the verge of being shaped in his mind. And yet, he dismissed them. He repudiated them by telling himself that he would never rank as a great artist, that he was void of color, theme, and technique.
A knee doter—he could barely hold back his laughter (how easily he was amused by himself, a wonted practice from the vestige of childhood along those banks of the Chao Phraya river in Ayutthaya when solitary play with the elements inherent in air, rain, and dirt and the chase of an idea scurrying through a mind which was barely aware of its presence, brought him peace from the incessant barrage of disparagement meant to stomp upon him, their cockroach, in that war called family). The verdant landscape, now near Nongkai and her sister city of Vientiane, came incessantly toward the passengers as the train moved through it. It came intimately. Every minute of a man's life that was not in sexual intercourse, he thought, was in an intercourse of a very different kind, in union with circumstance and thereby impregnated with new thought that made him a new man. A knee doter, he inwardly chuckled (once again he was pondering how easily he was amused by himself, a practice he had become accustomed to from the vestige of that hell called family in which, if one's sensitivity was intact enough to not laugh at a sundry of crude commentaries such as the father's daily repetition that it did not matter what a woman looked like as she could be denuded and a sack put over her head, and these manly attempts at being the most clever one at belittling the other (mostly aiming for him, that easiest and most sensitive of targets) these rudimentary and vulpine or wolfish members of the pack would attempt a full annihilation of him in words—all of them that was but his brother and tacit protector, Kazem, whose hard eyes were his fort, but whose gun would discharge later in his rectum). He found this peculiar idea of her as the obsequious love slave, as much as the source behind it, not only amusing but arousing. It had always seemed to him, fettered as he once had been in ideas and paint, obsessed with transforming sordid memories and thought into color as he inexplicably gazed at a barren wall of canvas, that one never made love to a woman but a facsimile of one in one's own brain which that brain distorted to meet the orgasm it longed for. It always seemed to him that the craving for women was merely for a spark to stimulate fire in the vacuity of the brain so as to liberate it from catatonic list, the result of boredom, and thus orgasm was merely for oneself even if by chasing illusions of "love" a real child materialized along the way. Thinking it now, it was nothing new for him, for to him, Jatupon, who was once in love with his brother and scrutinized the validity of human emotions thereafter as Nawin, feelings were gossamer threads of chemicals prompting puppet man to breed and breed elsewhere. Marriage had at least taught him that tempestuous feelings of love and despondency could pass if one gave them little credence and by being unmoved by their promptings one could at least have some years of success in obtaining a consistent uxorial presence in his life. Love at first sight that was felt from brief encounters was merely a neediness for an interesting presence to stir up one's passion for life and end loneliness. It was always transferred to a conceivably obtainable sense of beauty by which to obtain immortality in a DNA continuum. For even love from a sexual encounter, to have any substance of reality, had to be a reciprocal neediness ground in years of friendship. And yet a woman was a whore whose penchant for a parcel of land and a branch of a tree to build her nest was an instinct that was as fulsome as the worse of human hungers. His mother, to get her few scanty goods, had closed her eyes to his suffering. His wife, now that she acquired his child, took over his domain and changed the locks. Ironically, here he was lusting after a woman once again for did not every man require intimacy like butter that would melt and fuse him and his sausage onto the woman and her egg? Did he not secretly want a woman's bypassed stares in the minutes of anger to diminish him into the dissolved umbrage of her shadow like slinking into shadows of an alley to taunt thieves and cutthroats to have some limited intimacy with death?
He allowed his ruminations to quickly shuffle through his mind once more, for they amused him tremendously. Then he redundantly centered on one in particular. Throughout this nascent conversation with the Laotian, whoever this man was, who perhaps used a nickname-alias of Boi as an easily worn but also easily removed one word summation of himself, this pallid, young female with flowing hair, just as he liked them, had been inches near his thighs and he had barely even noticed it, as he was preoccupied with this bizarre homosexual caprice that had rushed upon him an hour earlier as zephyrs from the subconscious, and thinking of ways to repudiate any judgment of him as a homosexual that might be in the mind of the Laotian. Eagerly succumbing to desire for the girl, and perhaps even exaggerating any desire that he did possess to feel masculine within himself, he deliberately glanced down at her even though he was once trying not to do so. She looked like that nurse at Siriaj Hospital who had been responsible for catering toward him whose wife had broken his arm with a skillet and his heart with those words, "The son that you and Kimberly brought into the world should not have a hateful person like you as his father! Get out! We're through!" For ongoing emotional comfort and to set up dates for caresses he would be calling that nurse, smitten as she was for his good looks and his marginal celebrity status. He would be doing it now at this moment were it not for having thrown away his telephone at the train station.
14
Although more clinch than original, an idea as trite as an aphorism ruminated in his head. He told himself that ideas were nothing unless one acted upon them; and yet from a less cognizant mélange of disorganized feelings which had not been refined into thought he was really meaning that fervent, peculiar whims prompted all pleasurable acts and that unto themselves these saccharin gusts that bate were of no substance unless, in opposition to society at large, one partook of them fully by allowing them to saturate to fulsome, insatiability in behavior that was in complete accord with their perverse dictates. In the brief space of that moment he repeatedly averred this facile idea silently in his mind. He willed belief into it like pumped air into a holey inner tube which, like in his filthy boyhood in the still filthier Chao Phraya river in Ayutthaya, for a brief time of escaped labor, he would ride.
Ideas are nothing unless one acts upon them: the thought was not at all novel even if this particular context for it was. It seemed to him to have Buddhist or Biblical implications which he supposed as having been transmitted to him long ago through someone affiliated with a temple or a church, although he was not exactly sure how or when such an idea had been passed to him or how it had become so embedded in his brain even if brains were, for the most part, mere sponges. Oddly enough, there it was, even in such a man so unfettered by moral restraints as he was. It was like a blood-sucking mosquito but quaffing away analytic and synthetic processes of idea making, aggravating placid delusions in fever, and muddling the mind in an amphigory of simplistic human nature, which when unchecked, was really more carnal, multi-dimensioned, and beastly than anyone would care to presume.
His prudish behavior on this day was diametrically opposed to the Nawin of old who on virtually every other day of his adult life but this one, from influences of feelings and underlying thoughts which he hardly recognized, had followed his carnal whims with women inordinately. A being, after all, did the tricks that nature prompted him to do for the sweet bait of pleasure and so from the perspective of carrying out those functions that biological creatures were meant to, the physical and perhaps only basis of morality, his own behavior was exemplary. In the seats of his car parked around forested areas within Bangkok's outlying roadside parks (the woods therein avoided because of the bigger probability of the brambles of "queers" accosting him), in forests far from the city, against walls of women's toilets in gas stations, in discotheque parking lots, in hotel rooms, empty upper staircases, in boyfriends' and husbands' beds when they were out, several times, under banana and durian trees in one particular father's orchard, once in a pimp's bedroom when he was out, many times in the villagers own bedrooms while they slept on living room floors eager to take advantage of his copulatory pleasure to get a bit of financial support for their families and fame for the daughters' whose beauty he, the surrogate husband, would preserve on canvases, abandoned buildings and tall skeletal structures that were never quite built after the 1996 financial meltdown, once backstage with a Russian ballerina after a performance of Swan Lake at the Thai Cultural Center, several times between two enormous trash bins at a stadium and once under its bleachers, never in his and Noppawon's home unless occasionally with Noppawan herself but very often in his studio, he had released his snake to a mostly strange and less than angelic array of females who too were victims of poverty and exploitation. Both them and a smaller second set as well (a set to which each respective woman behaved as both friend and lover until invariably insisting that he obtain a divorce from his wife, a strident and resonating demand that despite his wishes to the contrary, always caused an avalanche of debris to fall upon them both in a closure of the relationship that turned as black and mordant as light sucked into a black hole and that was as indelible as death) he would massage as gently as wind since, according to him, the Nawin massage was more effective at loosening inhibitions and making the body malleable to sexual positioning than the pryings and twistings of the Thai variant, listen intensely to their troubles during pillow talks in which he reflected their feelings like a psychologist, and kindly ejaculate into them the venom and bite that were the gifts of his body.
With today perhaps being the exception; throughout his life it always seemed to him, the exponential adulterer that he was, that carnal caprices should not at all be repudiated when they were all. Every rare, sublime thought that managed to get through the savage millennia did so because of sordid, procreative energy which manufactured the generations despite imperfect performances of maladroit sperm missing their targets, the targets most times missing, and even the walls of the missing targets sometimes being some other type of wall, a wall like his own wall, a man's wall.
If from a Christian source, the idea must have originated with his aunt on his mother's side who had once dabbled in his life with feigned love back in those early days of Jatupon when he believed that this bit of extended family, this refined lady of an exceptional marriage who was blood of his blood (which she had willingly sold by buckets to a hoary senator with age blemishes) would at last tug him back from the precipice or at least intercede when he was foundering in the abyss of family. Back then there was a belief in deliverers who would reach for him while uttering charming, mellifluous words which all of the family members would accede to. Back then there was a belief in forgiveness, the righting of wrongs, that a time would come when both mother and son would feel comfortable enough in each other's presence to almost be able to speak openly about what was happening to him in this monstrosity called family, that there would be a time of not having to fear losing any remnant of the maternal instinct for love which she still possessed and occasionally demonstrated in brief tacit glances of commiseration, that a day would finally come for this open admission of the truth (although now he believed that it probably never would have occurred even if the parents had not died so early in that fatal automobile accident, which had led to his subsequent indentured status as a noodle worker behind his brothers' food cart and the late evenings/early mornings of becoming, even more gratuitously, his brother, Kazem's "cheap date," his "free hole"), and happy endings for this putative, perennial propinquity called family which he had once thought of as an everlasting substance that would one day satiate him with meaning, and like a tsunami drown and bury his tiny, forlorn existence in its eternal watery mass. His youth had cowered in the corners of the shadows of family, and he had stayed within them complacently, cognizant that every cockroach that was not smashed sooner or later found a more preferable exit, and that although it would seem forever, this time of the impermanent first family would just be a brief space of years within one's lifetime.
Art had been his way of taking umbrage. It had been his way of committing that monstrous deed of giving a voice to the miniscule cockroach by inserting a man's vocal cords within it. How in early boyhood could he have known family to be merely half-remembered battles, and diminished faces of long known and scarcely understood combatants that the memories and critical intelligence of an adult would present to him? He had believed in the magical restoration of it then, child that he was, as if self-interest were not a priority in human beings. Integrity was rare and integrity for his sake rarer yet. Should he have expected something greater from his aunt? To her he had been cute, and so not having children of her own, she had dabbled in a love for him, pampering him for a time with her neediness. She was, after all, a human being seeking her own happiness as he was; and unlike him, she probably never had a clue what happiness was really. However, he did know despite often living contrary to its precepts.
By his account happiness was seeing meaning in the blowing branches of a tree on a murky, partly cloudy day that was as ambiguous in weather as purpose, and expecting nothing greater from his environment or fellow men than ambiguous and random happenings on such a gloomy day. To find a bit of pleasure in what was and not expect anything more: this was seeing innate value instead of creating ideal scenarios, which were bound to not happen and lead to disappointment.
The mystery of obtaining happiness was not so confusing but sexuality, that ever changing river, was. As many times as he pondered again this recent event, his ruminations churned up vacuity and uncertainty for he still did not know whether or not this mono-homosexual experience of masturbating one time to the image of a male in a toilet of a train on a day of panicking over having turned forty constituted a thought that was acted upon, and so the aphorism did nothing for him. If meant to liberate him from guilt or cure him of sexual depravity this nostrum had less efficacy than a placebo.
It was not only them, whomever they were, but he himself, whoever he was, that seemed to meander on the outside. He was lost like an insect crawling on a seat of a roller coaster ride which, designed for thrills as it was, lacked purpose. This ride on and of the world in forty rotations around the sun, which had changed him both physically and mentally since his birth, seemed to him now as meaningless as a pail of water being twirled around forty times in centrifugal force. The Earth had bore him as another product cursorily begotten on an assembly line. A product did not transform a factory, he thought, nor did a man change the world, or even leave any indelible sign of himself before being dumped in the landfill.
Images of a stern female four with a broad boned body and a balding and obese zero with one arm taunted him in his, arguably, depraved imagination. They were salient neither in nightmares as it was not night, nor daydreams as this word only had positive connotations, but in a sense, daymares. In them the couple were walking through the rain toward their home. In his mind's eye zero was still scrambling for his keys when they, the husband and wife, arrived at the doorstep. "You are so disorganized," she reproached. "God, I hope that you did not lose them again," she excoriated. Forty times the zero quietly stomached the abuse as he continued to inspect all of his pockets for the fortieth time. He knew that she had married him for his purchase of a parcel of land to which she could build her nest, for union with sperm from the only man who had exhibited some interest in her, and for a financial provider for her birdies. He knew that, altogether, she had used his body because of an instinct to seek happiness in that which would place her on the throne of maternal monarchy, and so her insults not only seemed unwarranted but particularly contemptible. Furthermore, he could not understand why, when she knew the reactions that getting drunk and shouting her invective as intense as imprecations would cause, that she continually insulted him. More times than not he would be provoked to beat her, pull her around by the hair, and continue to slap their forty children from time to time for caring about the shallow smackings of the mother instead of the mental flagellations that she rendered unto Him. Despite the bruises and black eyes that he gave them, he knew that she would never take them away, for a woman, if anything, was a prostitute of a bird. Obeying instinct, she would do anything for a parcel of land to have and maintain as her nest. Was this, as some type of a singular image, he asked himself, the subject for an abstract painting? It was for someone else, he retorted.
He thought, "Have I, Nawin Biadklang or whoever I am—whatever I call myself, done anything remarkable within all these forty years?" He posited this question as if this subject were now a relevant matter to deliberate, and as if, after having scanned through a quick shuffling of vapid memories, a self-judgment had not already been rendered on this matter. Actually, before posing the question his feelings had already concluded that although having risen to upper middle class from dire poverty as an accomplished artist he had not even made one single painting that was so unique and extraordinary that no one else could have made it exactly as he had done. Feeling had rendered in him the decision that he had failed at anything beyond making himself more affluent than most, and so the question held no purpose. He was just a man with a brief and puny life, and as with all men he ate and expelled, sought pleasure and reacted reflexively against threatening stimuli no differently than any common, self-preserving cockroach. It was true that in a man there was self-awareness more keen than in other animals, but from it one could not help analyzing his own insignificance which he would then have to repugn by absconding more fully in the professional and personal domains. Fabricating illusions of grandeur in ambitions and love, he could keep his life busy and fortified from encroaching questions.
For all of Nawin's messy colors in art and living life brightly (his playboy activities, the television commercials, and a month on a soap opera, which came about from his slight fame as a renowned artist and an attractive presence) he had not become a Leonardo Dicaprio let alone a Leonardo Davinci—not that Davinci would have necessarily known his own greatness. He was discontent with himself as being so was endemic in mortal, human creatures who at best could leave no greater legacy than their own puny thoughts, and at worst found their voices mere echoes of the environment, and their only means to halfway preserve themselves was to have offspring partly begotten from the lust of their loins.
He, in his lifetime, was not as much of a renowned painter as Montien Boonma or Chamas Kietkong were in theirs. For meaningful Thai art of international appeal one turned to them and not him. His works were a familiar leitmotiff of sordid, dejected whores to which ideas and representation of forms were, for critics and buyers alike, secondary considerations. This suggested to him a deficiency in the technical mastery of his craft and made him yearn for other pursuits. At certain times he had been obsessed by having celebrity status and at other times he had loathed it, but overall he had resented its intrusion much more than grading art survey compositions at Silpakorn University for commercials, and the daytime melodrama sidetracked the continuum of his life as an artist by keeping him from scholarship and his own creative achievements. Thus, he had done what pathetic, impotent males of the second category often do: he had fathered a child.
It seemed to him that whereas mildly abused individuals added links to ancestry, homosexuals, from the severity of the abuse committed on them as children, or from good common sense, became broken links and thus remained unchained. In that sense, he was definitely not "queer." At least that was what he told himself. Then it seemed to him that there was a certain heroism in being a childless presence, stopping the replication of a damaged element and accepting fully his impermanence. However, he was not heroic in that way either. He was a mere womanizer upon whom his wife had urged a full, unprotected sexual union with her friend to gain a child. Even in considering all the scores of women whom he had had protected sex with through the past two decades of his life he would hardly be a record holder of this marathon either—not that spilling body fluids to say that one existed would, he judged, have been all that less significant than spilling paint.
At a station immediately before the destination of Nongkai the train stopped and a door opened to three villagers who were selling their fried rice and pork in Styrofoam containers. "Khao pat moo. Som sip baht [Pork fried rice. Oranges, ten baht]" they proclaimed on both sides of the aisle, and like bells their voices summoned him out of himself. The Laotian was still seated in front of him as before, but with a furrowed forehead and a smirking countenance as if puzzled not by what to say but on how best to say it. The woman, still seated in part on the floor, was now stretching her arms. Seeing that she was awake, the Laotian's furrowed field of a forehead became smooth, and the subject of contemplation he was fixated on seemed to vanish. He raised his naked foot, and with a profane toe denuded his partner's bangs and began to massage her forehead. This continued for some minutes until she bit the toe.
"Bitch! You're really vicious. Look what you've done. It's probably bleeding now."
Nawin's jaw lowered with his mouth slightly agape. In disapprobation of his culture he sat stiffly for a moment in tacit and obdurate silence, but with glances down at what was beneath him. What was beneath him was beauty.
15
Even if he were to say that it was a new beginning for himself and, unlike other nocturnal prowlers, that he was now a nascent creature capable of appreciating the simple pleasures of the day in a more abstemious lifestyle, there was the immediate past to repugn the assertion. There was that nurse at the hospital, whom from earlier exchanges of smiles, looks, and brief conversations, he was able to obtain her telephone number shortly before being discharged from the hospital—a woman he would be calling now had he not thrown away his mobile telephone or "moh-toh" as Thais (though not him, the inwardly surly, cultured man that he was and an American Thai at that) called such devices. Was he not still a glutton for intense thrills? Was he not always at least nominally enraptured by someone or something different than the other intrigues that had come before? The women of the past had proven that he was as had that which had happened to him less than an hour earlier.
Disagreeable for the source of its arousal and made vulgar and fetid by the association of having been done in such a filthy toilet, this experience had been a particularly odd and abhorrent intimacy with fantasies that he was not accustomed to entertain. The fact that these fantasies had opened the gates to his ejaculation in the toilet of a train was for him an unpleasant reality, not that intentionally trying to avoid thinking of it was, in his judgment, such a wholesome act either for it did not make it less part of his own thoughts and experience to stuff it into the sockets of his brain like one's dirty socks being shoved by a foot under the bed at the knocking of his door and he would not be much of a man to cower away from himself so easily. It was still disconcerting since it was both odd and distantly familiar simultaneously, a combination that made him feel flushed down the toilet portals of ineluctable memory. Masturbating privately wherever he wished was for him as inconsequential as scratching the area of his pants that covered his scrotum when experiencing a particularly strong itch, and yet this carnal escapade was different. It was deviant more for him in the sense of diverging from the mainstream than anything significantly pejorative. Still, it was for him a most sordid encounter with himself even if, to his satisfaction, performed in the purest of form—being free from the self-delusion of love. To him, all sex was making love to oneself but coupled naturally with a woman it did not seem so sordid, even though it perhaps was, while being impure enough as to seem as if he were really making love only to her when the contrary was true. Thus to him making love to a woman was more sordid as a consequence.
In this morning encounter with a fantasy and a hand had he not, despite himself, been enraptured by that dark and bearded male partner of the exquisite, pallid creature beneath him? He had. It was not possible to repudiate it as much as he might want to, given the fact that, despite the earlier release, a cool titillation that had never quite left him was once again reasserting itself by soaring and tightening his groin and it was not for the girl—at least not yet, although he hoped for transference—but for this Laotian boy, Boi himself.
This "sick" experience, he argued, had been in large part from insomnia, and the insomnia from visceral loss in his life and from the numb pain of his broken arm. Also in part it had been from the jerky movements of the train after being "a bit sick" to his stomach in the wake of having drunk that watery Laotian beer -with its strange pungent punch like consuming a liquid version of French cheese which always bit back- that Boi had fed to him in his bunk. This had to a lesser degree discomfited his composed mental state as had the acknowledgement of having turned forty. These factors had made him "sick" or a little offset from his mental equilibrium and yet it seemed that he was not over his sickness. He was sick even now.
With women he just wanted to be mildly tipsy and never quite inebriated, and so he would be slightly infatuated with one after another. Even though he wanted the continuum of each one's friendship and to learn to appreciate each as the unique visual, social, and sexual creature that she was, finding no ultimate beauty, the quest for it always seemed to facilitate the making of them all into ephemeral entities in his life when impermanence was making him dizzy. These fleeting figures were sunsets which he never quite wanted to catch when cognizant that there was new light waiting on the outskirts of the horizon. Thus they were as amorphous and mutable as the pursuit for beauty itself. He knew; and if, he postulated, all organisms on the planet were in some respect lovely and loveable, an excitable reverence for the perfection of their forms (even the oldest and most decrepit human, or a single cell microorganism was perfect in contrast to the debris of dark free flowing elements of space), why then did he judge a given person as being beautiful or ugly? It was an unjust contrast to something else more or less visually appealing and it seemed to him both procrustean and ludicrous when every entity was worthy of portraits and every organism on the planet held the potential to excite him in love. It seemed to him that he should be unendingly rapturous to all beings of the world, and yet if one were amorous for all clearly the brain would experience overload. Perhaps the reason one person, two, or three, for a while, became a man's myopic fixation and were thought more beautiful than all others was so that the brain would not experience this overload at recognizing that all forms were equally luscious. This might well be the meaning of a man's fixation on one or a single small group of "beautiful" women—a protective mechanism to stop brain overload. Within one's vicinity and propinquity, an individual registered a finite array of physical traits and characteristics not quite like his own until a next batch would catch his eye.
So that liaisons of sometimes two each day had not become four, causing all aspects of the man to be extinguished but the ragings of appetite, Nawin had taught, for many years, art survey and drawing classes at Silpakorn University, graded papers in the teaching lounge that was exempt of pretty young things who were such ugly distractions to a man who was hoping to seek higher realities than visual and tactile stumblings, pursued jogging, swimming, art, and scholarship, and each week loitered near the golden Thai pavilian or "sala" overlooking the lake at the Bangna campus at Assumption University. There, he would wait to pick up his teacher wife, watch the stretching of geese assert a land based prowess after floating toward him and his bread crumbs, and attempt to once again appreciate simple pleasures. A journey there once or twice a week, like sports and art, helped him to find peace of mind by focusing an aspect of himself less connected to innate appetites and filling Noppawan's mind with an illusion that she was the only one despite the many, an illusion both appreciated as indispensable in congealing and solidifying their relationship.
In loss and tragedy so great that all life seemed a lugubrious and murky haze he knew that at any second he could fall to pieces and yet here he came anyway. On this train moving toward Vientiane Laos, this world capital no different than a country town, this little bit of Paris with a lot of dirt that was the sister city of Nongkai which he had seen once before. His aim was the same: the restoration of self. He was traveling here to find that life was still good despite poignant loss, to part from what-ifs, remorse, guilt, and shame, and to find himself in simple pleasures that he believed were the foundation for appreciating life. He did not know, but it seemed to him that higher pleasures were synthetic, built from tenuous material on a sturdy foundation, and most of the tower had crumbled down and he was there on its foundation, its base, bruised, lacerated, bleeding, and literally with a broken right arm in its rubble. Alone, he wanted to journey to Nongkai so that, undistracted, he might enter Vientiene to contemplate the song, squawk, and flutter of his own thoughts. When simultaneous to some similar song and rustling from the birds themselves it would be reassurance from nature that the fleeting essence of matter and the personal loss he was experiencing at Kimberly's suicide, and the subsequent separation of his wife after beating him senseless with a frying pan were natural. It would also be testament that life was bigger than his myopic perspective of it, beset, as he was, by tragedy. However, on this train, as everywhere, there were palatable humans who continually discomfited hi peace of mind like the chocolate fan poochai (fantastic male) and his vanilla fan pooying, who he supposed was his girlfriend, seated there in the confined space before him.
It was his wish to go on a solitary journey where he might be in the vicinity of itinerant others like himself for reasons like his own, while staying aloof from them by a peripheral association of glances. He might sit dreamingly for hours at a time at a sidewalk restaurant or on the ground before a stupa in Vientiane, eat vegetable and cheese baguettes (the American cheese variety of course) and watch Europeans go by on their rented bicycles. From these glances he would be part of them without allowing them to disrupt his Buddhist contemplation; however, knowing which of them were cultured, and which were merely backpacking hedonists might be hard to determine with mere glances, and if he felt that only the latter were there, he would think that he might as well return home for Bangkok was the prime bivouac for such characters. For what he knew, this rustic Paris might well be the dernier cri for such lost souls like his or, conversely, a Mecca for middle-aged men fantasizing about Laotian men's erections. In either case, or nothing of the sort, he was going there by train as if he were not able to pay for a plane ticket as easily as the average man could pay for a ride on a city bus. Of course this particular car was air conditioned, and riding in it, despite its coldness, was certainly more comfortable than the "cattle cars" linked from behind; but coming by train at all was an attempt toward simplifying his life and it was as close to the Jatupon whom he once was that he cared to ever be again.
He knew it without dwelling upon the point for the latter activity would separate him from others even further: despite an impoverished and savage childhood, he was a refined man although hopefully demure enough not to believe it too intensely or allow it to exude into his interactions beyond a surly air softened in a warm smile. He could have taken an airplane. Refined men always did but here he was in this particular car of this particular train hoping to find balance after falling into the stone and dust rubble that intense pleasures had brought upon him. And yet, he told himself, if his own experiences immediately before, during and after his ejaculation in the toilet portended stygian events to come that would have him wallowing in base instinctual drives, so be it. He smiled and thought how his life was an unpredictable series of unconnected episodes. It was as if he were at a sanuk packard (amusement park) and torturous suffering was mixed into the thrill of every ride. Although seeking and favoring "sanook" in all matters like any great hedonist, realistically he hoped to learn something within these vicissitudes.
So the Laotian called his partner a bitch. So she bit his toe, kissed it, and now had her own foot on his lap. Why should any of it matter to him? They were not subjects under the dictates of his sovereignty, and who was he to be didactic, he who looked at a given moment as an experiment of the convergence of people and thought? He was sovereign of nothing. The two women of his life, his major connections in this existence, had in part due to his own actions, evaporated like all lost essence of family so what sententious dogma did he have to pontificate? Clearly the Laotian woman was not bothered by these mere wisps of vibrating air, so why should he be? He knew that he should not be so irascible. He knew that he should not be brooding about a pejorative word used on this woman, a creature who seemed to flourish in the word and for all he knew might be well suited and defined by it. Still tension of his own making about how wrong the Laotian was to have uttered his pugnacious, rude, chauvinistic, and socially inappropriate word seemed to alter the air so that it was viscous and palpable. True, as a minute or two wore on the tension seemed to be diluting slightly in the strong daylight which was pouring through the windows but still, as confined with them as he was there within this small space, breathing seemed to be a more arduous task. Tension seemed to also sully the floor which was already fetid enough due to whatever stench the train officer's random spot mopping with ammonia earlier in the night had not covered.