And there she was with both naked feet resting on the Laotian's lap so any reaction that he might have in defense of her at this time, even if it were mere silence, seemed inane.
Escaping them entirely with his mind, he found himself trudging through a prodigious mire of memories which would have been better had they stayed in a diminished state, a staid frame of mind which would have made them more easily accepted if not appreciated. One particular memory began to percolate within him and boil over his rim. It began to be the sole activity of consciousness in a reality so vivid that it was as if he had fallen through a portal in time. He was with her again and she was exactly the same. "Kimberly, I should be painting that expression instead. What's wrong? You've seen that one of Noppawan a hundred times before." "I am just seeing it in a new way. You are the world to her. You can see it in her eyes—so much love for you and you are the one who painted that love so lovingly." "I'm drawing you now, aren't I, if you would stand still? Haven't I done plenty of you?" "Still, this painting makes me wonder what I'm doing with you. She is my friend." "Whom she chose to give birth to our child—yours, hers, and mine." "A son… the ultrasound showed it, you know..we'll be having a son—yours, mine and hers. Maybe your connection to me will be special for that reason, but you love her and I shouldn't be doing this." "You are in your fifth month. It's a little late to go in reverse now, wouldn't you say? As I've said a hundred times before it was her idea. She knew that I wanted you and that I was trying to repress it since the two of you were best friends. She wanted children through you, and this pregnancy is your gift as a friend to her. She enlarged marriage to include you in it so we are all married in a sense. There's nothing to feel regret about." Then this memory, which had seemed so vivid and concrete, dispersed as if it were sound, smoke and wind..
16
Thais with a disposition and willingness to scrutinize their own cultural suppositions were rare but for those who were so inclined to repugn family and Buddha, if only in outward aloofness and tacit pondering, little remained sacrosanct from intellectual dissection except for issues in reference to the king, for to cease to revere him would make one something other than Thai. That is what he thought at 8:00 A.M. as he heard the king's anthem playing at a distance from a passenger's radio. That was what he thought, and yet had the moment been different he would have thought differently. He knew that what he was, what he claimed to be, was merely from being in the particular situation where he found himself. Now in this car of the train among these strangers whom he did not particularly like, hearing that rather bland melody repeated, one more of the daily repetitions throughout the years, and as always feeling that strong inhibition which made him not able to even acknowledge to himself this blandness, his disposition grew a bit peevish and restless for he kept telling himself that every moment he remained here was aging him toward his forty-first year. Having one birthday in a train was bad enough, he told himself. He did hardly wanted another one. The moments seemed like hours, unmovable as boulders.
As Nawin heard the anthem he saw that the three food salesmen, in concert with everyone else, were deferentially erect and motionless in response, and noticed that there were no more strident cries or other such tonal annoyances of khao phat moo, phad thai jae (noodles and vegetables), and kauy-tiaw (noodles) with some sauce with a Laotian or northern Thai dialect name, at any rate shrieked beyond recognition. Noting that any delay in getting off the train would be a brief one and that the freelance food salesmen would be gone with the slightest forward thrust of the train, he pulled out sixty baht from his wallet so that he might quickly buy one container of each for himself and the two passengers whose space he was confined to. It was only polite to do so and any effort that he might make to give less credence to his feelings of disgust toward them would make the rest of the ride more agreeable. Besides, as feelings were so interlinked to perception of a given event in a given moment like attack dogs that were often standing in late evenings by the doors of banks and randomly barking at the scents and movements of passers-by and their shadows, they were not reliable gages for assessing reality and he did not give much credence to them.
The gambits of feeling, senses, and logic were even fallible when working together. To trust one exclusively over the others was a madness equivalent to an artist falling in love with his subjects, an inebriation of the myopic he had always tried to avoid in the hope of going beyond the "reality" of one's petty associations to an exposé of exploitation and tacit desperation in which the viewers would see the whores residing within themselves. This Earth was in one respect like a huge amniotic sac of impermanent quasi-reality in which he seemed to be a six billionth major cell of some inchoate but never complete organism that was being tossed therein. In another sense it was diametrically different and he seemed a complexity of contradictory feelings, logic, and sensory input like partly functional gages and gears that he manipulated and was manipulated by to move and assess movement in this nebulous terrestrial cloud or fog he found himself in. To some degree he was part of a cell if not an entire cell in the gestation of the making of a life and the Earth was merely a cluster of cells if not an entire organ in the inchoate organism called the universe; and yet to some degree it was as if he was a probe slowly feeling its way in a very small acreage within Martian darkness. One thing that was certain was the intricate and confusing number of switches and responses in himself. Even with logic, if a compassionate man had only this, he would continue to stay stationary in any situation he happened to find himself. It was feelings of pain that urged a man's extrication so that he might find situations and quests more worthy of his time. So he thought while hearing the ending of the anthem.
Inwardly having great humility and reverence toward King Rama IX, he nonetheless facetiously told himself that this opportunity to eat a scanty sustenance was provided by the king himself and that royal cuisine of this nature was not to be passed by. "khortoht [excuse me]," he said, raising his hand and motioning to the nearest salesman to come toward him. It seemed odd to do so, for he was feeling the desire to turn in the opposite direction toward the Laotian himself, so that he might say, "Phom tongkarn khun [I want you]" and "Phom gamlang ja pai gap khun [I will be going with you]." Odder yet, his mind itself retained the hauntings of Kimberly, who was even more similar to him than Noppawon in being a little of this and that, and belonging to no group or family for she was French-American, and he Thai American, or at any rate an American Thai, and, unequivocally, both were expatriates of this world.
As if it were not ironic enough to lack superstitions about ghosts and all else and yet have his mind so discomfited by the creeking, rattling, and shuffling of her presence in the dark corridors of his mind, he was possessed by inexplicable, ineffable desire for this individual before him who was of the same gender. The rattling chains of the former were feeling, instead of sound and, understandably, this rattling was from the stress experienced by remorse; but the latter was a burning sensation less explicable than the other as if he was possessed, although there was nothing to possess him but himself. Together the phantom of that tacit, gentle soul of a woman and the possessive fantasy of the rough and naughty Laotian were trying to overtake him. They were mental poltergeists and he was the source of his own haunting.
He had boarded this train in part because he was trying to flee Kimberly and yet were he to fly without cause or reason, he knew that she would go with him to Niamey in Niger just the same as Nongkai in Thailand or to Vienna the same as Vientiane for she was an ineluctable memory of myriad of these ineluctable memories that he would lobotomize in minor whittling of his brain with a pocket knife if only he could. Many times, marred and blurred as she often was, Kimberly and those not so far gone memories of youth which were equally hideous in their own ways, would detonate like a land mine inside of him when he was tired, causing him to falter into depression and the unconsciousness of deep sleep. Still, what could be done but to freefall in sleep, hit bottom, and awaken rejuvenated with the sun? One could not dispense with a mind the way he had his telephone. In a sense, of these apparitions from the subconscious, she was summoned from nowhere phantomesque, and yet like weeds thrusting from a rocky landscape without reason after a cool rain. As in that memory a minute ago which had acted an entire scene upon his mind, Kimberly, hybrid of weed and flower, was there in his mind's eye like rife dandelions. Even though now she seemed to be withering within him once again, and he was at least cognizant of his pull toward her, he seemed to be falling more rapidly and with greater force toward this rocky slope covered in dandelions and fog, compelled to fall into the lap of beauty and death while the final impact remained suspended from an incessant retreat.
Even now, he thought, she was more distinct than the smudges that came from the contrivances of conscious will when attempting to remember, but that image was diminishing with the seconds no differently than subsequent attempts to recollect her consciously garnered less than was exact with the passing days. As with other hauntings, he felt startled, and spent a minute or two trying to recollect himself within disconcerted thought but that was especially hard to do this time since his mind was crowded by that visceral, recent occurrence that was one more presence in the haunt of memory.
Strangely, even if done immediately after glancing at her photograph, or after seeing slides of a painting of her, which was an impression of her and him both, were he to try to remember her exactly it would be an act of abject futility. It would give him nothing but a blur. He could even concentrate on the specifics of her wearing that turquoise dress that he had given her, a combination of the color, green, that she liked most and the ethereal blue aqua vitae lakes of her eyes, and it would not matter. Attempts to consciously bring her back would extract nothing but smudges and visceral pangs of loss. The hauntings of memory hadn't any more reason to be than the screen door of the shed at his home (exclusively Noppowan's home now through his default in not exerting his innocence and in not shifting the blame back on to her, the proposer of their doom) which opened, closed, and banged around in the winds. But when she haunted the oblique corridors of his brain there was nothing opaque about her. Clear as reality, he was often able to remember not only her, but also a continuum of moments in their interaction together and, as now, the ensuing shock would cause him to stand for a minute or two lost in himself while trying to find a way back to the present moment and analyzing and reanalyzing this thought process as if hoping to find a switch to turn it off. So his mind droned on like this, as it always did after a deep thought of her image, until he was able to find enough of himself to make the choice to part from her.
Glancing out of the window for a few seconds with his hand still motioning toward the salesmen, he watched Thailand's vacant greenery, a pickup truck on a distant road, and a water buffalo standing in what should have been a modern rice farm. These images continued to peel and fold back behind the train no differently than the people and events of his life. This, above all, was why he had subconsciously chosen to come by train. It was an instrument for illustrating his impermanence so that he might accept that this was the natural course of all things even if human intellect knew that nature was vile and that this impermanence should be otherwise.
"Sorry, I got carried away," said the Laotian to no one in particular. It caused the girl to laugh and then look up at Nawin with a broad smile. As much as her smile could speak, it seemed to be saying that expletives were the norm. It was as if that smile were saying that profane and abusive names were merely a mode of expression, like bantering, that gave visibility to something as impalpable as a relationship, and that she enjoyed whatever he wanted to call her as well as Nawin's intrusion of silence which was meant to be a reproach against Boi. Thinking of how a smile conveyed language, it seemed to him that even the walls of the train were speaking if he would just listen to them. It occurred to him that if thinking so was childish, animistic, and all things Piaget, life was more meaningful with this chimera.
"Anyway, it doesn't look like it's hurt," said Nawin in an attempt to bring closure to the subject of the toe.
"Yes, I think you're right."
"Is Nongkai next?"
"It's the next stop—the last stop. Are we friends now?" he asked Nawin of the Thais who chuckled good humouredly in reply as if the earlier retort of surly silence had been from some other self. It indeed had been, in his opinion, for each minute, if not mentally connected to its predecessors, could be unique from all others and unpolluted in that sense. At least that was what he thought and so he laughed magnanimously. "Why not?" he said with fresh amusement in being with the Laotian. "Maw ni khrap" he called out to the salesmen pointing to all three and handing them each twenty baht. He distributed the food to his acquaintances and the young woman pulled herself up into his seat.
"Ambrosia, food of the Gods," said Nawin.
"The Gods must be cheap bastards or starving rice farmers to consume something like this."
Nawin laughed. His eyes became focused and dilated like those of a baby intrigued by the newness of life. Meeting an iconoclast in these parts was a sumptuous treat.
"That is his way of thanking you," said the girl. "You are so kind."
"Mai pen rai. Yindee torn-rub khrap." ["Think nothing of it. You're welcome"], he said fully, captured by her mellifluous sound and how the smile lit up her face right before the spoonful of rice was placed in between her two rows of teeth.
"Reunions are so nice—you and me and you and my sister, her Thai toilet friend. She's been talking about you, you know, ever since she passed you coming and going from the toilet—this handsome, middle aged man who is obsessed by his image."
"Sister?" He was stunned.
"Oh, yes my sister, not my girlfriend. You thought she was my girlfriend, didn't you? Well, not really. Are we boyfriends from chatting and drinking beer together?—not so much but who's to say not or never. Earlier when she passed you she was wearing a cap, a man's jacket, and what else?"
"Sunglasses," giggled the woman.
"Yes, sunglasses to hide herself from being noticed when she isn't as beautiful as she wants as if foreign laborers are likely to encounter a lot of important friends everywhere they go. We hardly know a soul here except other Laotians. I bet when she passed you, you didn't notice her any more than you would any androgynous clown walking the streets of Bangkok."
"A clown?" interposed the woman.
"A beautiful clown."
"Well," explained the woman, "I was in a hurry to get to the tracks. I hadn't washed my hair so that explains the cap. They don't have a station back there so I had to wait in the sun at the tracks. It was chilly. Do I really need to explain this?"
"Your hair's fine."
"Yes after washing it in the sink and blow drying it, but it is uncombed now."
"Beautiful, isn't she?" He knew that Boi's meaning was not fraternal and that that which should not have repulsed him but did was now being replaced by that which should repulse him but did not.
17
"Free of connections, free of clutter—unfettered—and happier for it, I suppose," he thought as if disconnectedness from others, freedom from circuitous movements around and preoccupation with people would free his thoughts rather than free him of thought. Thought was surely the material assessed in abstraction, but lustfully eating his food with the foreign acquaintances of that country of backward brethren he did not consider that issue consciously. To some degree he was like those who in the monotony of their circuitous movements around material possessions and a preoccupation with them came to remote areas like Vientiane to find more to themselves than the accumulation of money and objects, but his retreat was more from the loss of people than the dismissal of material possessions, and his departure was not out of choice but the circumstances that had brought about the need to extricate himself from inordinate pain. He did not so much want fairly empty rooms in a guest house but the totally empty realm of his mind. He knew that he would not be considering the subject of whether or not disconnection was propelling him to happiness unless something were amiss or lacking in his life. What was once the clogging of his brain with the mauled grammar of students' redundant essays in art survey classes, women whom he was involved with, and was obliged to attempt to make happy (such an inordinate amount of women, as his heart was a sponge of sorrow, caring deeply or loving adventitiously and incurring feminine wrath for it all, who were paintings of this life and mattered to him as well as mitigating those sorrows, the result of injustices), a futile effort that had ended worse than imagination had reach. Having students to maintain professional interaction with as altruism and being a benefactor allowed him to stretch closer to the ethereal realm of virtue and also gave him more tentacles for assessing reality, and the somewhat plagiarized and hastened research and cursory art coinciding with old themes that had been done to maintain his position at Silpakorn University had now been replaced with freedom to ponder vacuity. And vacuity he pondered unceasingly for, in this train, emptiness rode in him as he was riding in it. Vientiane, he derided, was not a destination any more than the Buddha's Lumbini forest. His time might have been better spent had he stayed in Bangkok seeking prostitutes to draw in the city's Lumpini Park (p for porn), and yet here he was for some reason going to that final destination of Nongkai, the sister city of Vientiane.
He was like an empty wrappers of those fruit filled cookies that in boredom he had gormandized the previous night for they had fallen from his bunk during his restless sleep to be, for a time, caught in the reigning randomness of the fan's winds. And yet contrary to the social animal that was man, placid acceptance of his disconnected state was in a sense a spiritual retreat; and it was, after all, as a spiritual retreat, more or less, that he, an atheist, was hoping to facilitate by coming to such a lackluster and lackadaisical city like sleepy Vientiane where there would be no distractions to cordon off this theme of vacuity.
Affluent and unfettered by property, which seemed at any rate to be entirely lost to him with his wife having changed the locks on the doors, he could go anywhere to become something different. In that sense he was truly free. He knew that and reminded himself that he should be grateful for it, but like any social creature he needed a mind stuffed with clutter to have the equilibrium that would deliver him from being random movements of an unstable, empty vessel lost at sea and unto itself. Whether he was on a spiritual pilgramage or being flushed down to Vientiane as defecation in a downward deluge of his own whims he did not know; but in either case he was free (free, that is, when not fully wracked in guilt about Kimberly's death and all that had led to that grotesque spectacle which he had no power to change) and freedom always felt good. To be humanized from mechanical actions, not that he had carried out many of those in the past year of his premature retirement, and denuded of pretensions by lusting after two or three young beings who had passed to the toilet, as well as the two seated before him, was in essence like being found; and they who were found were encompassed in thought like birds to air. It was good, even if much of the air was sordid and polluted and ineluctably so. Nothing was lonelier than the loss of thought and being compressed into the agenda of the day, the cluttered interaction of interconnectedness he only in part liked because of a loathing of it taking him from himself. If he were to work for a month in a factory like a dirt poor laborer (he was indeed swarthy as most Thai laborers and once of their class), return to the sidewalk restaurants which were his inception and, he posited, probably were his true destiny had he not been so insolent to repugn them, or even to return to Silpakorn University, such an experience of once again doing work would give him a fuller appreciation for what he had; however, even with this satiated and cloyed sense of leisure that often seemed perennial, his indolence seemed the preferable course. A flight into the World Trade Center towers of oneself might be in part a flight down to a sordid hell but he, an artist, although a retired one, would hardly repugn it if it were.
While eating with them he stayed silent. Was it so peculiar to scan each of these acquaintances respectively with circumspect glances, to do so apprehensively (more apprehensively and yet more often to the male than the female of this brother and sister combination as she, whom he barely knew at all, was nearer and the sexual interest would be more conspicuous), and to let the erumpent odors of both, imagined or real, send him on a molecular magic carpet ride away from the mundane and the tragic of this world? Was it strange to occasionally think of them as his friends when not really knowing much about them? It was probably, as he now lacked anyone in his life, a normal reaction. With his telephone thrown into the trash at the train station, he even lost the nurse whom despite his brokenness he was able to inveigle with tender caring questions and full attention toward the caregiver, a charm that wooed her as all who felt no one in this world listened to them. Was it so peculiar that he should feel comfortable in a brother and sister combination when it was quite apparent to him that they were intimate beyond sibling love? It was an intimacy that to most would seem repugnant but for those who were in one way or another abused, molested and maligned in youth, and whose thoughts were stuck in that mire of sediment and sentiment still (sentiment because, tragically, it was rarely all bad and thus stayed there like sludge slowing the victim's thoughts), they who were perhaps under a different name than now, who were once in their own brother's arms, witnessing perversion as he had in seeing this earlier foot kissing of siblings was a homecoming. To see that others were so engaged made the taboo subject a human tendency frequent in the subconscious though never, or at least rarely, in deed as this molesting of a woman who happened to be walking on a sidewalk. With the witnessing of such an aberration he was freer than he had ever felt before. For a moment he felt a rush of dopamine and serotonin that almost made him love the siblings. Was this "love" really for them any more than he was really "loved" by those who needed someone to listen to their ideas and truly care for them with no other motive than this? He supposed it was not "love" in any pure sense of the word. Still it was good that he was no longer having to persecute and banish memory and thought, or having to consider that part of the brain vile which was the trash receptacle of repressed thought and thus, he theorized, his body was feeling amorous in celebration with sexual feeling as if he were being tossed into the air like confetti. Perhaps a celebration, as all human actions and interconnection, was just the macrocosm of the innate chemistry within (in this case the party within). But what did he know for sure of the demented, or at least aberrational aspect of this brother and sister relationship? How did he know that his conclusions were warranted? He did not know anything for sure as little or nothing was known conclusively.
Once in those beginning stages of his molestation he had spoken to his mother. It was an oblique reference but the pain in his facial expressions (furrowed eyebrows, sunken eyes, and the slight and irregular quivers of the lower lip) were easily interpreted even for someone like his mother who was accustomed to some amount of pain always embedded into those features. She understood what was implied and flattened it vehemently by contending that "nothing had happened" and that he was "crazy." How was he to know now, twenty years later, with absolute certainty, that it had happened, as his vague memories recalled it, for memories were impressions dented onto the clay of the brain and were so easily defaced. Certainly memories did not become more real in time. And if he did not know his ability to know how would he know the relationship of a couple of relative strangers absolutely. Epistemology was the study of nothing for nothing could be known absolutely no matter how much the brain yearned for certainty. He could sense that the Laotian knew that he liked him as well as the girl. He could also sense that not only did the Laotian like her as well but that what he liked most was Nawin knowing that he liked her. It was all amusing to him. He sensed it but how he sensed it from a smile, a look, and the length of a look he did not know.
"May I have a sip of your water?"
"Sure," said Nawin as he gave him the container that was on the seat near his leg. The Laotian drank. "Do you want it?" he asked his sister in respite from quaffing the water, but without waiting for a response from her he once more drank voraciously and then tilted the bottle to her who bent forward toward it. He fed it unto her in what Nawin, ostensibly a neutral third party, was inclined to think of as an obscene gesture. It seemed obscene despite the fact that it was merely the drinking of water.
"Yes, my sister has been talking about you—well we have, really. She says that in going and returning from the toilet that she saw a handsome older man at a mirror. It had to be you, don't you think?"
"An older man?" Nawin mocked. "Not me then—impossible," he said facetiously with a contrived chuckle to disguise a sigh.
"Is that so?" asked the Laotian. "Maybe you just look like a well preserved older type. Anyhow, you were gone much of the morning. It hasn't given us much of a chance to talk."
Was the obscene truly so, he posited to himself, or was it just oversensitivity about doing something, or being associated with others who were doing something not considered the norm? If it were the latter then so much oversensitivity over something so insignificant as the kissing of a toe or the feeding of another water seemed crazy, but if it were the former why did he not just excuse himself to the toilet and remain absent until the train stopped or from some tenuous excuse withdraw to one of the many newly vacant seats?
Nawin nodded and smiled. Then he stared out of the window so as to have a pretense to turn to a woman's gentility. He glanced at her directly with a shy smile. She was no longer eating but wiping her mouth with a napkin and stuffing her Styrofoam container between the metallic cup holder and the window.
"Would you like some gum?" he asked the woman as he pulled out a stick from the pack in his pocket.
The woman smiled with closed lips and a childish, exaggerated shaking of her head.
"She's not supposed to talk to strange men let alone take things from them," said the Laotian with a grin. "However, you can send it this way."
"Sure," said Nawin. He gave the stick of gum to him.
"Thank you, kind sir," he said with a brief gesture of the wai and a quick denuding of his stick of gum.
With a more solidified judgment that their actions were obscene Nawin began a slow unwrapping of his own gum; and yet not wanting to judge precipitously on nominal matters where he could be mistaken egregiously, he decided that he would remain seated where he was and not leave them. And if obscene, why would he want to leave them when the obscene seemed so comfortable to him despite his moral objections of himself for it being such.
"'Kind sir?'" Nawin mocked with good humored bantering. "I'm not seventy you know."
"You are such a touchy person. Now 'sir' bothers you. Clearly you aren't twenty anymore," said the Laotian. "There is nothing wrong in admitting that. It is an exit we walk through briefly to join the majority who are thought old by somebody or another. My sister is twenty-one but that too will pass."
"Yes, age is a state of mind," said Nawin rather unprofoundly, smiling widely and readjusting his opinion of the Laotian who seconds ago he had pegged as a pachydermatous brute although perceived more erotically for it. As this issue was germane to him, he thought that nothing truer could have been spoken. He felt an attraction to this Laotian named Boi as a human being, and this attraction seemed to flush out the tense congestion of hormones in the traffic jam of his groins.
"As she could not use the sink where you were at, she primped where she could—at that nasty metal sink in the toilet. Since she primps for a long time that means that this man was primping for a longer time and she saw him—you, that is—still at the sink of the corridor when she was leaving. It had to be you as you still weren't here when she returned and woke me up."
"Maybe it was. What's the point?"
"No point, my friend. An observation. For the longest time we kept thinking that you would be back at any moment. My sister was so disappointed that she had to sleep off the depression. For me, I was just puzzled—kept thinking that you must be doing something strange back there but god only knows what. Your name again is Nawin. Right?"
"Nawin Biadklang."
He felt a chill in the spine of his back and a burning sensation in his face with this absurd and paranoid fear that the Laotian knew what he did privately in both thought and action in the toilet. "He doesn't know a thing, of course" he reminded himself. It was obvious that the Laotian had found a means to make him feel intimidated in generalized words, but laughter and a warm smile, he told himself, would burn away that fog.
He thought about his earlier name and the time he had changed it. At the age of sixteen a monk who had been concerned about the tragic implications of the name, Jatupon Biangklang, without much awareness about the circumstances of his life, had guided him toward a more fortuitous appellation; but now, as he was saying it, the fact that he had changed his first name and not the last seemed a bit surreal and disconcerting as if he had a different head placed on the his body or the same head placed on a different body (which, he was not sure). Still it was good that he had done it even though it had not been done fully. Unable to lobotomize memory, and being Thai, hardly able to repudiate the name of even his savage tribe, what other way did he have to separate himself from Jatupon, a wisp of air that in his mind still seemed pornographic? "Over two decades ago and none of it matters now!" he told himself. Still the cliché of the past not mattering belied reality. If the past, having founded the present, ceased to matter so would the present to the future which would mean that all would be immaterial.
"Remember me? Sabai dee mai?" said the woman to both men.
"Khrap. Sabai dee" Nawin said.
"This is Nawin Biadklang, a nice enough Thai, I suppose," said the Laotian to his sister. "Last night I gave him a beer that put him to sleep like a baby, but those ferocious socks of his roared on through the night stinking up the entire train. Still there isn't much point in detesting a man for his stink especially when I have to ride with him and he seems a good enough man even if he is Thai."
"Thank you for the meal, said the woman as she gave him the prayerful gesture of the wai."
"Mai pen rai" said Nawin with a returned gesture, a broad smile, and a few seconds of sustained eye contact.
"Don't mind my brother. He likes you or he wouldn't keep talking to you."
"I like a bit of bantering. It has made the trip less monotonous." He said this but in considering his time in the toilet it was a vast understatement.
"He tells it the way he sees it."
"Good. I like that sometimes—all the time really, as long as it is in limits—not stuck on the bad which is vicious nor on the good to obtain an advantage. Then I guess it is fine—fine for me. Did you came in at the last stop."
"Two or three back. Udom Thani. I was working in a women's garment factory there. Siam Pooying. Have you heard of it?"
"No."
"Maybe your wife has."
Nawin ignored the inquiry.
"He got laid off in his factory so I decided to quit and go back too."
"Where are you both going?"
"Our father's farm."
"What about you?"
"Taking a break—a vacation—needed some time away"
"A self appointed vacation," interjected the Laotian. "Must be nice. And what about that ugly brown wife who beat you up? Are you going without her."
"Yes of course. I rarely go on vacations with ladies who bludgeon me with iron frying pans."
"Didn't like you drawing nudes?"
"Something like that."
"He claims to be an artist," said the Laotian.
"You saw the slides," said Nawin.
"Yes, I did. Some naked beauties."
"There, you have it then, but whatever you want to think about me is okay."
"So if I think you are a boyscout—"
"Then I am."
"A southern terrorist with a bomb."
"The government seems to keep them from becoming menaces to the other provinces but if you want to think that I am one, and that I've come this far with a bomb, so be it."
"A pervert who shows naked pictures of women to strangers on trains?"
"Well, that would have a bit more of a foundation in reality wouldn't it but then would I really be showing slides?"
"Our mother's birthday is next week. If the two of us were not your distant cousins from the tiny former kingdom of Laos, now a bankrupt communist state of rural peasants, we might even pay you to draw her or for that matter my sister."
"No money," the girl laughed as she slumped down in the seat."Only rice sometimes."
"Is it expensive to do that?"
"What?"
"Commission a painting."
"Yes. Quite."
"A thousand baht"
"Sometimes times fifty."
"Are you that rich?"
"No, it takes a long time to paint and I don't do it much anymore."
"So, my sister will be your model and inspiration. Pay us money to draw her and you can sell it in Bangkok."
"A portrait is nothing. To make it into art is what takes time and I don't like going through that pain anymore."
"Why have the slides then."
"So they will be with me."
"She would be a beautiful model. This is no common face."
"Yes, but I still have to feel it, or want to feel it."
"You must draw her. You could stay with us while you do it."
"Let me think about it. I've got to go to the bathroom now, adjust my sling, take some pain killers."
"Sure," said the Laotian.
"Excuse me," he told the woman, took his bag from the upper suitcase rack, and left but thinking of a nude painting of the brown and white of the couple the whole time.
18
He was examining his mirrored face privately in the toilet as the train slowed down and then crept to the station with a jerky forwardness, as if it too were caught by a backward pull if not a penchant for backward inclinations. Hardly impervious to sensation, he did feel this slowing of the train, felt the thrust of the stop, and heard the jostling of bags and the eager voices of departing passengers. He was even aware of a few minutes of silence and then a less vociferous noisiness when train employees came into the carriage to stuff the linen into bundles and, through open windows, toss them onto the platform of the Nongkai train station. Still, hearing it all as he did, it did not dawn on him that he should leave.
He had come into the toilet to see his reflection via a mirror and to abscond from these Laotian siblings long enough that they would dismiss his friendliness and construe his absence to mean a disinterest in them as potential models even if, as odd as it seemed to him then, he was interested in them as such and more. If at moments feeling extremely solitary and purposeless in his indolent, terrestrial drifting, being dragged in the vicissitudes of life, and trying to catch his breath from it all, he told himself that he would rather asphyxiate than relinquish his undiluted leisure. Lonely despair might in certain moments make him want to cling to people, places, and routines instead of breathing them in and out in a natural context for a changeable world. Specifically, it might make him inclined to return to that excruciating labor of painting or sabotage a trip like this one by allowing people to clog up his brain and distract him from the void; but these were only desperate caprices and nothing more than this.
It was such a handsome face that was his own, and was now pleasantly seen to be staring back at him; and yet staring at it as he was, he was trying to isolate the specific changes a simple year had made to the contour of his face, and attempt with blurred memories of himself instead of numbers to somehow devise a measurement so that he might conceptualize what havoc a year into the future would do not only to himself but also to that of every man's face. That was attempted for he was dwelling incessantly on why for the first time on this physically and mentally painful day of his fortieth birthday someone had spoken of him as an older man. Still, to subdue a growing feeling of aversion and loathing of the day, as disheartened as he was by this insinuation of him being a middle-aged man, which of course he was, he tried to recall whether or not on the previous night he had told the Laotian that this day would be his fortieth birthday. Had he done so on that evening when the two of them had beer in their hands, the comment could be dismissed as mere bantering from a boorish buffoon and yet each time he recalled or exhumed this fresh corpse of memory it had nothing like this on it. Thus, to be corrigible to the self he concluded that as it was impossible for his face to have deteriorated significantly in just a day it was likely that a year had changed it ever so slightly and that these slight changes were exacerbated temporarily due to a lack of sleep. It was true that his sleep had been rather sporadic and inconsistent the previous night. This restlessness, however, was not only from lying stationary when he was unable to preoccupy himself from that pain and discomfort gained after his wife beat him with a frying pan, but also from his witnessing that horrific jump from the balcony and then Kimberly's mangled bloody corpse with missing arm, contorted neck, multi-lacerated face, and empty eye sockets along with the broken pieces of the metallic awning being extracted from the water of the swimming pool.
The fact that the train had stopped was an adventitious happening like a cloud out there hovering in the sky. It was something that he knew, but he did not seem to recognize as the awareness was scant and did not seem particularly associated with the self, which needed to see personal importance in matters for them to matter at all or for a given object or situation to instill a passion within him. Thus, finding no reason to leave he stayed to contemplate this loss of beauty if it was indeed lost.
Had his beauty depreciated significantly in one day, or even in one year, it would be one more comic incident in this tragic adventure of life. This was what he told himself; and smiling a little at that thought (the rational voice therein reassuring him and giving him smug confidence in the friendship of the self that no circumstance of life, apart from death, would take from him), he could not see why it mattered that he looked forty, and yet it did. He wanted to recollect exactly what he looked like 365 days earlier. It was not difficult to remember that birthday as it had been a particularly odd day spent with Kimberly and his wife. They had been drinking wine, eating the oddest of sautéed dishes, as cultured French cuisine demonstrated: with a bit of oil, wine, and cheese any part of a given creature could be successfully cooked and consumed with exquisite barbarism and taste, when he heard this odd proposal of having Kimberly become a surrogate mother hatch out of his wife's head and thud into the bread basket. With the proposal made and calmly deliberated by all, he had gone into the toilet of that restaurant, had gasped for a moment, teetered for another, and then had stared onto a reflection of his face for twenty minutes. Satisfied at seeing the same face as that of his thirty eighth year he had returned to the table where the topic had not been his age— only, all so indirectly, his sperm. Sitting there awkwardly, he had been drawn into suffering, that empathic piercing into another person's pain that seemed an unwanted obligation subjected onto one by the gods, if there were gods and he believed that there were none considering the smashing into pages and limited scope of man's story book understanding of things.
At that restaurant he had understood her fully: the requisite for an end to her neediness would only come from the neediness of a child of her own. From needing to care for one so needing to be taken care of she might be able to imagine a baby as caring exclusively about her since by needing her totally it would satisfy some of her needs for someone to care about, someone of her own, or at least allow her to have a distraction for forgetting her husband's philandering ways. Unlike an ocean, there was no means to measure the sadness of a wife. If it were greater or smaller than such a body of water, he did not know— only that it was large indeed.
Pondering why it was that people would think of him as middle aged now, when no one had ever done so before and why he might be considered old by some when at least to himself his reflection seemed the same youthful glimmer that it always was, a weariness in his features due to an irregularity of his sleeping patterns (a weariness that as weary as he was might have been impossible for him to see) still seemed as the best explanation.
"Am I really going to waste this trip painting them and then having to tote the final products back to Bangkok? I cannot think of anything more disagreeable," he reiterated to himself with what he hoped would be puissant and cogent reasoning. "What is the best way to get out of this thing?" he asked himself. Then it occurred to him that he did not need to devise any strategy since the train was obviously stopped, and all its content of beings dispersed like a flatulent gas.
He slapped some water onto his face. "Time to go," he told himself; but even with this assertion he was in a fusion of daydreams and faded memories that added color and exact details to his thoughts—a more poignant fusion than that experienced in trying to recall the facts of a given situation as they really were. He thought:
"She's beautiful isn't she?" asked the Laotian.
"Yes, I would say so," said Nawin. "You don't have to persuade me on that point. It is just the time required to do a painting —a real one with a theme, a mood, symmetry, perspective, things like this and I am on vacation. Anyhow…" Her dainty face looked like the nurse at Siriaj Hospital when he was recuperating from arm surgery; that same one from whom he had parried questions about the nature of his arm injury by posing innocuous questions about her own life in order; the one whom he listened to intently, and as a consequence was able to make her believe him to be the kind human that he was instead of the broken man that he was, or the flirtatious playboy, that he also was; the same one for whom he had swapped cellular telephone numbers to no avail.
"Taking a vacation from not working I guess."
"Exactly."
"Good for you. That is the life. So, you think she is pretty."
"Yes."
"Do you want her?"
"Maybe. Maybe I want you."
"What?"
"I mean to model. Not now, but maybe someday when you are in Bangkok. Both of you I think, although there is no way to know until some sketches are actually done or for that matter the beginning of a painting if we even get that far." Then the woman was there kissing the toe of the foot that rested on the seat and made up the phallic arch of a bent leg, and Nawin was looking at them with surprise and envy.
He opened the toilet door and then bent to pick up his bag.
"What are you doing in here? Mister, it's Nongkai. Time to go," said a train officer. Then to reproach a fellow officer who was responsible for the trash he ejaculated, "I thought that you said you checked the toilet. Why was someone still in here?"
"I did," the man responded. "Maybe he flew in through the window."
"Flew in through the window? Is that before or after you checked the toilet?"
"Of course afterwards." Both men laughed.
"I didn't notice that we stopped. I am going now, sorry," saidNawin as he exited the train and walked out onto the platform.
Then he was out of the tiny train station and walking on a paved rural road not sure where he was going or what he was going toward (a left for a couple kilometers would bring him to the center of Nongkai; to the right, past the border crossing and the Friendship Bridge, were the rural outskirts of Vientiane; and between these destinations, finding nothing worth doing and yet as creature of movement needing to do something, was the human mind—his at any rate); but he did not care.
The couple were obviously gone, evaporated like wintery early morning condensation on windows of hill tribe huts. They were gone as the mucus and saliva that was surely spat on this road by some of yesterday's passengers. This being so, he tossed his hands into the air as though now relinquishing his will to fate and circumstance that could raze elaborate plans as it would half-hearted good intentions like his own. Then he smiled. He recognized that he had achieved what he wanted in part. The primary reason for absconding to the toilet had been to apprehend such philanthropic tendencies; but sexual feelings and desire for intimacies or friendship aside, most of his reason for wanting to continue the association was to help them financially for he understood too well that to be poor and blown in different directions by injustices and random fate was an ineffable wrong.
How the male had caused memories of abuse, desire for love from the former abuser, and a whole hot stream of perverse fantasies to percolate through cracks in the surface veneer of consciousness he did not know. Still there it was—this need for love, this wish to immerse himself, if not into the arms, into sex with another being and surrender to this prevailing attitude that one was nothing without someone. He smiled again for his own peculiarities did not cease to amaze him and he was pleased that neediness did not overtake him completely when it could so easily do so during this difficult period of his life. From telling himself that sorrow was a universal rather than a personal issue these waves of neediness hit the sides of his boat with vehement force but did not capsize it. His need for love, his neediness, was not so great and from this fact that he was secure in the poundings, he found the inundations somewhat titillating. It was a macabre period in his life but one to be survived intact as the distinct individual that he was.
He avoided a pack of Tuk Tuk taxi drivers who were vying hungrily for his patronage and walked along the edge of the road as a cool breeze of the north pressed itself into him. He enjoyed this sensation with the appreciative response to simple pleasures that a small child entertained, the feel of tall and rich, verdant weeds poking the edges of his toes in his leather sandals, and the redolence of the morning air that increased with the rising temperatures of the fire of the sun, though that would be, by noon, over-baked and the air would have nothing in it but dry intensity, and empty space where thought would not grow but was confined like a climbing vine. Despite wistful tendencies to the contrary, he was relieved to be rid of the clutter of recent acquaintances from his thoughts. And if, he postulated, this were true of the Laotian, the nurse, and all of the myriad others, was it not true of Noppawan and Kimberly as well? Did he not want to get rid of all clutter? And while thinking this he inadvertently stepped on a dog, which made him stumble.
Before he gained his balance, the creature cried out and ran to the road but rather than begin immediate howls of imprecations it whined pitifully. "Hoop park, hoop park! nyiab," (shut your mouth, quiet) he told the dog with a softness that belied his harsh choice of words. As he bent down toward the creature he noticed its loss of fur, that its skin, seen through the multiple spots of barrenness, was flaking, and that its eyes were still and sunken.
"Sawadee and bonjour to you, Indonchinese pooch," said Nawin with a laugh and a quick nodding bow with his head which was then replaced with a stiffness in both movement and expression. He could not be amused by another's suffering. He could not be happy when cognizant of so much suffering in the world. The sensitive boy was within and no flippant levity on his part could shake him loose. Just because manhood had piled hard layers onto him did not mean that boyhood had been peeled away. "Poor thing!" he said while reluctantly patting the head of the filthy creature as though adverse to petting it fully while less reluctant sensitivities absorbed its sadness like a sponge. Bent as he now was to it he was emotionally and thus physically paralyzed; and if it were to take an hour or two for the creature to become disillusioned with him and to roam elsewhere, he knew that he would wait with it until such a time came. But for now, here it was fixated on him and wavering ambivalently between hope and belief that humans were the good, the god, the sustenance, and the deliverer—its cries as supplications of prayer. He kept thinking that as there was no god, god was an obligation to all humans who were in their own way, able to imagine such an abstraction and climb into its costume. It was their moral duty to ameliorate the suffering of smaller creatures, and to man himself; but the dilemma was not of one suffering creature on the precipice of life but an uncountable number of them and help of one was unjust. Furthermore, it seemed absurd to cease his own plans and prioritize a dog by getting it tranquilized, and put in a cage for a ride back to Bangkok, a long-term solution (as opposed to offering it food merely to delay the creature's hunger and ease his own conscience), but an impossible one, when in a sense he did not even have a home to take it to. To walk a long way to seek food of which he had none (not even one of his fruit filled cookies) was not much of a solution either; and yet all there was, was the suffering of the moment that he could take pains to counter no matter how many insects he trod on, or how many micro- organisms his immune system killed while he was doing so.
Telling the dog to stay, he went a kilometer or two through serpentine gravel and dirt roads until he found a raan aharn (outdoor restaurant under a canopy) to obtain some meat to assuage its hunger; however when he returned with the food, the dog was not to be found. His were merely good intentions that came to no avail in an intransigent world of changes. Had there been an obscure god whose oblique influence was in urging humans of means to help the weak and vulnerable, beneficence would have been a frequent activity instead of the rarity that it was. In this situation his attempt had not only been futile but it had exacerbated misery since now, somewhere, there was a dog that had been humbled by a god (a god who earlier had stepped on one of its feet and a tail) only to be reproached with a monosyllabic, "stay," and abandoned to stray away disillusioned.
This dog, suffering from malnutrition and lack of grooming, was prey to parasites. They laid siege on and within him. As all that were at a disadvantage, were neither the strongest nor the fittest, and had a vulnerability exuding from them that made their brief lives ambulatory carcasses that would fall with a brief amount of time, he believed he was like this. And it seemed to him that despite being immured in talents and wealth, that his vulnerabilities would bring him down like a sick hound; and so he suffered for the dog in that spot he had found him in. He was bent as though seated on the ground but with his buttocks never quite reaching the dirt and he stayed this way numb and thoughtless staring into nothingness.
19
The worn, gaunt dog had left him a half hour earlier and yet as if compelled to attend to it still, he remained in the same spot within the same squatted posture as before while his thoughts remained apprehended in remote, dark cells of his opaque mind. His actions (or a lack of, which in this perspective would be equally inexorable) were even peculiar to him, so more with a general feeling of apprehension rather than any specific isolated thoughts, he felt that he might be, rather than questioned whether he was, on the verge of a nervous breakdown, even though nothing like this had ever happened to him before— not that such a history had to be a prerequisite for frayed nerves in the incessant Heraclitus nightmare of shifting ground under his feet, or within the stress of life's chaotic disturbances, to make him impervious to the impact of tragedy.
Kimberly who, to her demise had been of tragic course his wife's friend and his special intimate, had plunged to an unequivocal death, despite that which he had power to imagine. Although he might envisage himself reaching out and blocking her from running to the balcony, thoughts of this nature, myriad natural but immaterial and inconsequential wishes, were an enormous amount of energy expended in futility all because of the sentiment of the human heart and the belief that human will, which could alter the jungles of the world by repudiating the natural forces and the limitations of man, could also alter death. And as for Noppawan: apart from being his wife and best friend, she had also been his attempt at creating the reality of a caring family to replace that which, except for certain times of resurfaced memories that were not easily extracted and were as brief and spurious as a child's nightmare, now (buried under layers of more immediate past the same as dirt) for the most part seemed to have never been, and as the former family—a family which the child within him once believed would continue forever—had been nothing but a civil war of sadists, should never have been. She, as his new family, had lasted longer than the first, and yet the longevity of caring rather than the brevity of cruelty had made her no more real than the first.
Each day, feeling as if being drowned in the cold numbness within that seemed to come from without, humans clung to the material: money, property, friends, spouses, families and positions. For in this spinning world where people and things could quickly emerge elsewhere or vanish from the planet outright, mankind's entire quest was for less ethereal realms in which to claim a firm reality. Thus with obdurate will a man's evaporating substance was patted as firm and solid as possible. For Nawin, however, the most plausible of the ethereal which he had taken bit by bit and pressed into this substance of "reality" was like a glacier that was fast breaking apart to the point of being sheathes of floating ice, and he was witnessing its enormous shards from afar. These enormous fragments were in a prodigious fog; and they included a vague recurrent thought that the dog was there with him, was coming to him, or would be there with him. The thought was circuitous but stalking, and whenever it reached that pentacle of the brain that was the true self which judged the merits of his own thoughts and actions as well as the intentions of the extraneous beings whom he interacted with, he almost believed that he was still with that creature—the dog with its small clusters of ochre fur, he with his ochre wisps of obsessive thought, both cognate in that sense; the emaciated dog, an innocent that from its starvation was prey to disease, he having been the prey of four sadists and one sodomite in a family which decimated if not entirely obliterated the joy of his youth, and would have a reverberating effect throughout his life, both cognate in that sense as well.
Artist of nude portraits of ladies of the night, a professional womanizer, a celebrated genius, a rags to riches story: was not the life of this indolent playboy prince of paupers enviable to those males who appreciated the esoteric field of art and knew of his name? And yet his was a damaged container, a broken jar, and with time there could be no other course for his wanton licentiousness but to spill from not just a few cracks but every crack, and in so doing spell his doom: so he felt and perhaps half pondered in a new modicum of nebulous thought. He feared that he and the dog were innocents that existed to be slaughtered and it would not be just a partial slaughtering of innocence from within to exist in the world, which all creatures had to do to survive, but a devouring of the gentle, the weak, the disadvantaged, and the maimed.
The catatonic was between an edge of sward and pavement leading away from the train station, between sluggish and futile conscious thought with its maelstrom of subconscious feelings, the disconnected randomness of fleeting images underneath, and complete inaction, and perpetually bent toward something when, except for insects, weeds, and dirt, there was nothing there. To him the tactile and the visual, the palpable, had to be there, only lost temporarily in the weeds like a dislodged contact lens, and yet nothing was there. His numbness made intake from the senses seem surreal and incredulous, since that which was recorded by the senses was adventitious and distant from a self that in his case was slipping away in its own right. The senses were becoming faulty instruments for receiving signals while this abstract form of sympathy, adhesive to nothing that was concrete, seemed burdensome and unshakable. This state of feeling deep sadness not only for the dog that had left him but the entire world was like being paralyzed by the pallets of a tranquilizer gun even though there was nothing halcyon or pleasant in being shot with sympathy unless, in more lucid seconds, it was in considering the fact that he should be grateful that it was not empathy. Nothing—not even the dog, the catalyst that it was—seemed the direct cause of the pathos which did nothing for anyone and made him in better moments look like a young tree with sagging boughs after a tempest, and in worse ones a defecating homeless transient or the distraught middle aged man that he was. Apart from this fulsome feeling, his was the full numbness of a shadow dragged about by some colossal and incomprehensible figure.
Dogging him no differently than the persistent fly that for whatever reason continually returned to that same puddle of oily sweat on his right temple only to sometimes be shaken away all so mildly with a brief thrust of his head, there was a persistent, distorted, and grotesque memory or daydream that posed as fact. He kept thinking, if it were indeed thought to be cognizant of so little, that he (as adventitious as he was at that moment) was around fourteen years old, swatting at flies, and pushing a cart of grilled pork down unknown streets in Bangkok. Scores of sparsely furred dogs began to follow. The further he went the more there were. And the more there were the more security there was for them in the communal mob, and the more aggressive were continually standing upon hind legs trying to attack the cart and rob its booty. Through this time of being chased by this desperate canine mob with its ineluctable barking of mute voices that howled the essence of the void which epitomized the planet, there was a background wall of a standing rack or trellis on which used shoes hung like vines for pedestrian purchasers; an occasional bloody limb dangled from one of the ragged sports shoes, and a gecko hung on one of the shoes' tongues. The gecko was many of one, omniscient and omnipresent, looking into his eyes knowingly. "The world has damaged you thus and thus you will be," it conveyed tacitly with those eyes and then by it or from subconscious thought he knew that it was a dent or crack in an item that gave it its feature even if the ungainly shape would lead it to be easily dropped from a maladroit grasp and break asunder into myriad fragments. Yes, he felt alone, with his cracked past he was doomed. He had hoped for interaction with the dog as benefactors did with the poor when needing nothing from them unless in a minute way to lesson injustice, to do something virtuous which might make one a bit more than merely another avaricious creature seeking more than mere survival and pleasures greater than comfort as means for its betterment, as well as to feel grounded in reality (one physical body making an impact on another); and yet before he could do anything to help it, the dog had vanished, like the flame of a candle in a puff of wind, and now all that was tactile, all that he could touch, was the air which was as ghostly as his thought. Whether his inaction came about from a brain so active in its meaningful albeit subliminal cogitation, or from an idiot who was foolish enough to stoop down to a presence that was no more, like revisiting the rubble of one's childhood home and expecting the pieces to reassemble themselves, he did not know or even ponder. He did not decry or rationalize it, but experience it and pass through it as one did any fog.
Ostensibly, he was bent toward that which he must have still imagined as the presence of the dog, and for his part would not have known any other reason for his squatted and sedentary posture, if any at all, than for its sake. More saliently, however, this positioning of himself in such a way was, in part, because of a deep melancholy over all those who were gone from his life and regret for all the experiences that they had given him—experiences that had accumulated and embedded carvings onto the walls of his brain until there were reliefs of inexpugnable, defunct memories, aggravating the past so that it was alive in him still. Most of all, he was in this posture because subconsciously he was still bent over the rubble of childhood, expecting the pieces to reassemble themselves. If there were gentle and sublime moments in the distant past, tiny shards of some shiny splendor in the rubble, to him it would almost seem impossible that they would not be eventually restored somehow. And to him any fragment of that which was love, that mutual delight in being in the presence of those whom one was familiar with, had to be salvaged but not knowing how this was to be done, he conceptualized the shards as having the innate power to reassemble themselves, as if those rare occurrences of some degree of familial harmony had power to resurrect and reshape anew a distant, unhappy past that had ended decades ago. Despite knowing that everything moved ineluctably forward with its tattered past being dragged behind, it was only natural to have moments of being mesmerized by those shards and fixated with fixing the unfixable.
For at this moment he was remembering, all so dimly, a time of awful sweetness in the bitter, a darkness tinged opaquely in light. It was a dinner in which he had been so nervous among his family and their sadistic barraging of him, the youngest, with disparagement that he had dropped a plate of food in the kitchen, had found himself threatened with a belt, since fumbling a plate like fumbling a ball would, to the pleasure of all the rival team, exact a penalty, had seen Kazem, the molester, impede their father from swinging his belt, and then had witnessed Kazem's custodial role of cleaning up the mess at the game's closure. No, there had not been any closures for, back then, it had been one game stretched out over the years with pauses in the action each night in the respite of sleep that was sometimes interrupted by a different game entirely. Had there been nothing but pain from this former family, it might have been easier for him to move forward with his own life than it was. His life would have been that of defying the members with every impulse. However, in doing so he would have found himself merely an irate puppet moving against the pull of the strings instead of conducting actions in support of the rational principles of man himself.
From a distance the waters of the canals flowing into the Chao Phraya River in Bangkok often seemed a pure bronze with sun and blue sky peering into the whole, but close up the diluted pollutants reeked of one identifiable odor. In the same way were the thoughts of a man's mind as they flowed into the consciousness that judged their merit. Once accepted they were part of a web of thought that often seemed brilliant in beauty and intricacy but when looked at closely was merely a refinement of man's sordid cravings. Would it have been better to look inside himself less than he did? Would he have not appreciated life more to feel and examine himself less? He had posed the question myriad times but the alternative in exaggerated form was one of choosing to be as unaware as an insect, and this was hardly the preferable route for a semi-rational creature.
Was kindness toward an animal or a human being possible without first feeling the suffering in the other and then wanting to appease if not extinguish it with his own actions, pursued not so much out of benevolence per se as from imagining any efforts as appeasement of his own suffering? He would have postulated that question brazenly had he been in his right mind but as he was somewhere in left field, stuck in sediment and sentiment, there was still merely unrefined thought and it consisted solely of raw feeling for feeling was all that he was capable of. By feeling so much, he exacerbated more by feeling a repugnance toward this effeminate trait of inordinate feeling.
When the thought of the dog was not present there was merely a trail of vacuity in his mind like the swaths of trodden weeds in a forest; however, when it came with regularity it vexed him and seemed to make an enormous rut or trench in his brain with its periodic passing, into which all his other embryonic thoughts, as nascent and inchoate as they were, fell. This was the source of his numb but all pervasive headache.
So here he continued to remain alone in this posture of a defecating dog, within this strange catatonic trance, and with a numb aching in his head. Still it was more comfortable than not for him to sit here for the retinue of weeds and his own shadow mingling restfully within them would not abandon him as long as he stayed where he was—at least this was how he felt. If now, a few hundred yards from the train station and in the open air, he was feeling lost, forlorn, and numb through the lack of purpose that epitomized his life, it was reassuring to think that the sky above him was an everlasting awning raised there to shield him instead of the receptacle that it often was for the urination of some obtuse god. Likewise, it was certainly pleasant to smell redolent fresh air after twelve hours of the rank agglomeration of repugnant orders in the train to which the fetid toilets were the main source, and it was more pleasant to think this than reside at the bottom of a god's urinal. Such was his state of mind and it was as peculiar as a stone cognizant of life growing from it, a bird trying to fly while feeling the memory of the ground tug hard at its talons, or an ambulatory man with a continual sensation of being paralyzed.
Much of what he saw around him was obscured in a thin veil of single memory. It was as if there were a faint light of a small excerpt of a movie, a scene repeatedly projected onto the blank walls of the brain and his intake of the outside world via his senses, in which Kimberly, most often kept free of the impact of the awning to the swimming pool, fell again and again torturously. Now, as with every moment since her death, it seemed that he continued to see concrete images of the world (the hospital room and the big Hualamphong train station in Bangkok, the Laotian siblings and the food hawkers, his mirrored face in the toilet and the big hole in the urinal leading to the train tracks, the rice fields and the wild grasslands, the water buffalo and the starving dog at Nongkai train station) through this single drak-filtered reel of translucent visual images. For many days now he questioned whether or not it was normal to grieve in this way but now with the collapse of thought there were no more questions.
It was certainly not normal to stay sedentary in this posture or to grovel for deliverance or resurrection from some unknown force that he imagined to be the caretaker of this field of broken dreams. To that he sensed or understood but not enough to be motivated out of his catatonic state for he had lost sovereignty and restraint of himself. A lack of a history of mental illness meant nothing for, had he been able to consider it, entire foundations of long established cities had fallen under enough visceral shifting of plates so why not his own? And as if this were not enough there was forty: the stiff broad shouldered female with the erect arms making her autocratic pronouncements to a tacit and obese zero of a man who stood beside her, and this couple had been his birthday present gained alone in the jolting movements of a train. Youth had recoiled or found itself resupinate from a collision with this single word.
He was startled by a driver beeping his horn and gesturing for him to also come into his blue three wheeled tuk-tuk taxi. The tuk-tuk was driving by with the last of a small group of foreigners who had straggled out of the train station later than he, but from the same train that he had. From the appearance of their wet and tangled hair when the tuk-tuk was slowly passing him by he assumed subconsciously that they had taken showers in the train station restrooms and, like him, were now probably on their way to Vientiane. Foreigners that they were, he was as foreign as they and then some not because of an American passport, which he had although having it, he neither lived in America nor from it traveled there, but because, even though not always feeling a connection to the world, he felt more that he was a citizen of it than a citizen of any specific country. In accordance with the mandates of travel guidebooks to see as many sites as possible regardless whether or not such brief exposure was in fact true experience, they would no doubt sightsee by day and then in evenings release their communal and sexual yearnings by drinking "Beerlaos" with their kind, eating western meals, frequenting nightclubs, and returning with partners to hotel rooms that were some of the most nominal within world capitals— that or some such agenda—before going to Luang Prabang and the Plain of Jars. As material as the tuk-tuk and its passengers were, in his mind that which sped away from him wavered between the palpable and impalpable like an incongruous quark. The vehicle sparkled iridescently, stopped, and started as if blinking though not of the irregularity of the visible but of the inconsistency of the real and the material.