His entire array of thoughts, despondent and almost unknown to him, seemed emaciated and aloof like the white water buffalo that an hour earlier, from the train, he had seen standing dumbly and staring back at him bewilderedly along the tracks. So numb he was in his own despondent realm with such minimal awareness of the prowess of his internal and external faculties that rational scrutiny of action and motivation was not readily possible. Recognition of himself was a witnessing from afar as on a distant bank on the Laos side of the Mekong River. It was merely a stranger seen acting out his peculiar extemporaneous role from at a distance.
Within a nebulous understanding of where he was at and what he was doing and the abnormality of it all, the catatonic was able to recognize the fact that this perennial squatting would seem to others as though he were a homeless and disoriented beggar trying to defecate along the road. No matter the gentility of his intentions in waiting there in this odd manner, by the experiences of squatting in traditional Asian toilets a witness to his execrable posture would ineluctably link it to excrement. Had it garnered the cynosure of security guards at that present moment it would not have been much of a surprise, not that had he lost his mind and found himself instinctively performing more natural toilet activities in the open his actions would have been innately vile for primitive actions of primate forefathers had led to the present. Civilization and all that was refined was constructed on the backs of those barbarous corpses.
Understanding immediate happenings based upon those further in the past, scheming about probabilities of the future based on past events, and floating on hopes while dragging along the weighty past, the present "reality" was only seen in glimpses. Crazed action was merely ceasing to glance at or assess the material world around his physical presence. As for posturing as if to defecate along the road, surely any restful position was no better or worse than others if blood circulated well enough through one's limbs. And as for actually formulating an actuality about something by unequivocally defecating along the side of the road, it would not have been all that different than the elimination that dropped daily out of the open holes of the floor based Asian stools in the toilets of Thailand's trains. It was true that, unlike a man squatting toward the ground in the open air, under the weight and impact of a moving train exhaust of this nature, was desiccated and blown asunder as a vapor, and many times in the twelve hours of confinement he had watched the freedom of his own stream fall upon a metal rail and imagined or witnessed—he was not sure which—it vaporize instantaneously before him. Sedate as waves of an ocean hitting the shore, so the stream of urine falling onto the hot metal relaxed and rejuvenated him for to see, and what was more, to accept the temporary in the natural order was a respite from human will which tended to oppose it and believe it could thwart what was Heraclitean in all things.
If he did not think his behavior odd, he certainly felt its peculiarity nonetheless, and thus he found himself disconcerted and spinning ever so slowly in a thick and viscous void. If there were hot flares of blood rushing into his face warning him that his vastly peculiar and mortified state was on the precipice of insanity they were not cogent enough to motivate him to stand and walk on; but then why would they and why would he reject this petrifaction within for, despite his wealth, he was no better than a disconnected, homeless transient himself; and if feeling was raw material to be refined into thought, what he was mining within his lethargy might only be ostensibly inconsequential.
If, when impeded from performing services or playing his meager role in the production of goods to be sold to insatiable consumers he found himself unemployed and eventually reduced to a beggar who did not even have two baht to pay for the use of a public toilet, there would be less urgency for refined means in conducting natural tendencies. He would do his natural business on the streets; and with frequency and in the company of others of the same meager resources, that which was once base would become the norm. When the individual was desensitized further in compounded experience these natural activities and the natural means of doing them would become reflexive actions once again which would evoke little or no thought. Eating and eliminating wastes were necessary functions so the human mind refused to consider them abhorrent and animalistic. That which was judged was how he did them, but even this changed when deprived of the tools of so called refinement. Prisoners with no utensils other than bolted bowls would not find them humiliating after some time. So he thought most dimly—he was actually thinking and was aware that there was a vague he from behind who was monitoring these thoughts. He smiled. The smile was in part because such an entertaining idea, even though he did not register its content beyond recognizing it as amusing, had brushed against him lightly; but mostly he smiled for knowing that thought was now turned on and from it self-awareness was forming.
Leary of the peculiar, a security guard and one of the train officers who witnessed and scrutinized the man in this posture of one defecating with pants still up, made occasional orbits around him like Mars in its closest rendezvous with the sun. Whether the odd one was insane by having been overcharged with an excess of dopamine, or lethargic as of those who had been smashed by bereavement, they would not have known. Separately, they suspected the individual as chemically dependent and entertained the idea of seeking police involvement, but now lacking evidence for any conclusion they continued to observe him from a distance. Then a second security guard appeared out of nowhere, materializing with the sounds of his portable transmitter and receiver in nebulous static blaring from his hip. Less wary, he meandered sinuously until he made his way close to Nawin who was thinking: "Those foreigners in the tuk- tuk must be in Laos by now—going to Vientiane as I am." He smiled at the guard, staring at him with deliberate eye contact in order to project lucidity, which was after all a director's projection, a concoction, when man was a strand of knotted strands of chemical impulses, feeling, thoughts flowing down and dashing upon the banks of memory. "Sawadee khrap," he said with a wai. "Sorry, I guess I got lost in my thoughts. I Just broke up with my wife. A lot to think over."
"You broke up with her or she broke up with you?"
"Maybe the other way around. Anyway the better half is gone."
"Where are you going?"
"Well, I am debating that actually. Nongkai has a Buddhist sculptural garden, doesn't it? Vientiane too."
"I guess so. I've never been to either one. Never stepped intoLaos."
"You never wanted too?"
"Not really."
"Why is that?"
"I don't know. Too much trouble to do it I guess. No passport.No particular wish to see people who are poorer than here."
"I see. Well, I need to make a left I guess and then walk straight ahead for a while. Will Vientiane be to the left or the right?"
"Right."
"Can I walk there?"
"To the border yes, but you will need a taxi to get anywhere else."
"I'll walk for a while and follow what looks good. Thank you."
He began walking. He was almost at the juncture when he heard the beep of another tuk-tuk.
"Are you Nawin?"
"Yes."
"Somebody left this at the train station. The officers have been asking people they happened to see if its for them. You slipped by so one of them said to bring it to you. Are you Nawin Biadklang?"
"Yes."
Nawin took the sheet of paper. It was the telephone number of someone called Wichian. In parenthesis it said "Boi."
20
As another inconsequential member of this species riding the promptings of caprices toward that which was most pleasant, a pleasure in its own right, as with the activities that were deemed as pleasant, most of his choices could not be anything other than irrational. And of these irrational and erratic choices, he thought further, most were often made from antithetical impulses to which one was not measurably any more pleasant or worthy of being followed than its alternatives. He was seated at a table in a restaurant of a guest house, wondering obtusely why he was there. It was, he mentally noted to himself, a most peculiar feeling to have come somewhere, to know oneself to have done so, and yet to remain clueless about the aim. It almost felt as if, while in reverie, he had been snatched from his idiocy at the train station and placed here in the city of cognizance without his consent when in fact he had walked three kilometers before tiring and then succumbing to being swallowed in that blue cockroach shaped vehicle, the tuk- tuk, which had then driven him further into the center of Nongkhai.
And so, restless, he stirred the foam back and forth in his hot Cappuccino, hoping without knowing why to soil all parts of the inner embankment of the cup, and only taking occasional sips as he became increasingly pensive. He thought to himself that had he cared to do so, which of course he had not, the money that he was spending on the coffee alone could have bought two or three meals for those who scarcely ate anything on a given day. He began to think about how peculiar the world was with its interdependent members that made up units of one entire whole; and that interaction of one species with another was merely for the need to gain sustenance outside the unit, that the frenzied propagation of a species to ensure its continuum was kept in check by voracious predators; and that individual persons, considering it an enjoyable sport, incessantly tried not only to sustain themselves but also to thrive by hording avariciously or seeking pleasures gluttonously at the sake of others within the unit, striving for even more so as to think of themselves as successful in partaking of the good. He thought of how this showed life for what it was: not that of laudable creations overseen by a creator, or at least forlorn entities of a godless universe interacting with benevolent energy, but of comestible viands seeking to elude predators. The whole thing seemed an ineffective and barbaric system of incongruous, animate bits seeking some means to barely coexist, and as such life was not so laudable—neither of god nor of goodness—even though in every culture, and every religion, he supposed, common practitioners believed in both to create a pleasant perspective of themselves and their place in the world. Even Buddha, who did not believe in god became such as a statuette more rife than a crucifix. The morning stimulant was not so hot that he had to barely sip it, and yet he did for cognizance of the rife and innate selfishness of man seemed to constrict his throat. It was a constriction as slight as his compunction; and the subject was forgotten entirely as he poured maple syrup on his pancakes.
Eating a bit of one pancake, he looked out onto the traffic with its lethal confetti of exhaust fumes which, when moving closer to the buildings, diffused and nominally enveloped pedestrians on a nearby sidewalk. He once more pondered that he did not know exactly why or from what impulse had led him here. The inexplicable nature of it all was like that subway ride to the Hualamphong train station. There, clearly for him, it had been a wombed departure from the travail of interconnectedness with those strangers within seeming to him as a family of distant and tacit, insular beings who were cognate in their desire to arrive in a train which would take them from all that was painful—such had been his need to flee from suffering that the faces of strangers, no matter how happy or bland their expressions, seemed comrades of exile; and yet there, most opaquely, he had chosen to sit down. It had been next to a boisterous woman holding a cellular telephone talking of some poor soul's uneventful dating experiences. He could not have known anything of her beyond this and yet of the two vacant seats available he had chosen to be next to her instead of sitting beside a middle aged woman whose face was sunk toward a book; and the reason for sitting in one seat over another was as inexplicable as now. And so, assuming that all was not destined and man had choice about all matters, he had chosen to check into this guest house in the center of Nongkai instead of going straight into Vientiane. To some degree it had been because of the weight of the backpack. It had become increasingly heavy against his shoulders with every kilometer of that long walk. Confusion also had had its bearing. Not knowing what to do or where to go, with each possibility seeming equally insipid, he had selected a place to rest and think out some contrived purpose for himself. If not able to formulate a plan and purpose for his travels, here at least he had a place to rest physically when swimming frantically against this mental eddy. For all his disconcerted strokes, his itinerant meandering, he told himself that even though he did not know when it would happen he was certain that he would wash ashore eventually and when he did he would have contrived something to do, some urgent matter to pursue, some purpose for himself.
He pulled out that sheet of paper from his shirt pocket. He glanced at the name and the telephone number and recalled the faces of the Laotian and his sister as they rode next to him. Was he really to end an uneventful retirement for the sake of these people? Was he, for the sake of seeming a compassionate human being to himself and not merely another selfish being on the planet, to pay them for a miniscule part in posing for some portrait that he was neither inspired to draw nor inclined to tote back to Bangkok? Where would he even obtain paint and canvas? In Laos? Well no doubt they had both within the capital city. If prehistoric man could find ways to dye a cave, Laotians, people of a very similar linguistic and cultural distinction to Thais, could not do less. He could do sketches of them. It would not take long or be much of a burden to carry around and he could leave the family a couple of hundred dollars, which would mean the world to them and be a negligible and hardly noticed loss to himself. It might even restore him to himself; but then did he want to be restored? A restoration of a thoughtful pornographic artist from a third world country was not such a gift to civilization. He would never equal the great artists of the world and of prostitute painters he was one of myriad in contemporary Southeast Asian art alone. The sister was beautiful by his standards of beauty—youth unblemished with skin the pallor of fresh snow; a background of dirt and poverty, a subject he could relate to, and yet unlike those of a swarthy complexion, not appearing as such, with hair that was long and dark as the void, subdued eyes neither scintillating of inexperience nor petrified as ancient granite, absent of bra, nipples that pointed and teased their way toward every curve to which the imagination slid down like a hand to remote and sodden reservoirs. But it was not her beauty that called unto him, but an intrigue with the perverse so that he might know if his suspicions were warranted, and more saliently, to know the economic deprivations and desperation that made siblings into lovers, if indeed they were that. He folded the paper and stuffed it into his wallet against a condom.
Maybe he had diverged into the center of Nongkai and had checked into this guest house to divert and check, if not totally restrain, an inordinate curiosity about the perverse. This trip, the best he understood it, was meant to have a spiritual element—at least to the extent an atheist whose wont of thinking had denuded god from a vast being cloaked in the sacrosanct was capable of. Being bereft of agenda or aim did not necessarily mean being bereft of an overarching theme founded in malaise; so if not sidetracked, he had (for lack of a better term) a spiritual theme that if pursued with aim could easily surpass the agenda of a monk. After all, and of course he would never openly disclose this most secret assertion, a monk was merely a poor man seeking education, food, and an end to loneliness, and all other nakedness under a saffron robe and a sacrosanct Buddha was not even the physical substance of a needy monk. Nawin told himself that his time here, if not perverted and aptly spent on the spiritual, would allow him to step out of the egocentric, crumbling tower that he was in. If nothing else he could watch ants use twigs as bridges and freeways and in so doing become aware of the existence of a tiny fraction of the 90 percent of all life that was smaller than a chicken's egg. He could then appreciate a cognizant activity and social order other than that of his own or his own dominant species. If he could lean against a stupa and be in awe of the sun baking his face like a brick or appreciate the titillation of wind caressing his head like that of a Cambodian child-beggar patted by a foreigner, he would at last be alive.
Still that had not been his main reason for taking a room. It seemed to him that there was no main reason at all—only the pull of some tremendous gravitational force, that ineluctable void which had influenced him to take his wife's best friend for a mistress and bearer of a child and all for reasons that were only in small part to fill the barren heart of a wife of a fallow womb—a void that had prompted his subtle rejections of Kimberly as his main wife, for how could he have left Noppawan behind or renew himself from the philanderer that he was—a void that had been a catalyst of the ensuing consequences.
To have a child! Regardless of their education or the significance of ideas that bred in their heads, women needed those replications of their physical beings to feel complete. This was exacerbated in marriages, since in thought, if not in deed, marriages were with philandering men who were replicating creatures no different than them albeit ones obsessed by impulses for pleasure in wet disgorging with the multitude. It was no wonder that with the void as immense as the universe itself and the final surrender to it inevitable in death, one sometimes had delusions of it as the lap of a long lost grandmother and found herself/himself plummeting into that lap from one's balcony.
Long ago Nawin, who at birth was labeled Jatupon, had been a teenager caught in currents and countercurrents of his own. Back then, he had needed his new Bangkok friend, Noppawan, desperately; and so by taking her, at the age of fourteen, to meet his osseous, ochre friends, the dead corpses at the Siriaj Hospital Anatomical Museum, he in a sense had thrown up his arms to indicate a need for love. She by embracing him despite his wish to seem intrepid before death had shown an understanding of what boys could not say in words. So like a blossoming bud she had opened her arms to him and let him fall into the petals of her embrace. So, while surrounded by the shelves of these dead beings basking in formalin, he had cried in her embrace remembering, an hour earlier, Kazem's use of his body, a type of interactive gesture or embrace which he had sometimes called a "sport" and at other times a "cheap date."
Twenty five years later at certain moments of weakness, he still needed love even though the neediness in the content of the word abhorred him. Were couples who stayed together for forty or fifty years to be so commended? The neediness of people in mutual dependency was worse than newlyweds addicted to the pleasure-highs of being in proximity to their spouses, the extensions of themselves; it all was like the monstrosity of a one right legged man and a one left legged woman walking together and it sickened him.
Nawin got up and went to the coin operated telephone. He dialed his home telephone number numerous times and then his wife's mobile telephone number. He did this in the hope of expressing something—admiration, sentiment, respect, gratitude, he was not sure what, but certainly not love, as he had a pure aversion to that word—he did not know what to say, and it did not matter. There was merely that recording telling him that the numbers were disconnected. And so he felt disconcerted as if he were now walking through the gravitational force of a different planet. He went back to the table and drank the rest of his orange juice. It was to be expected, he told himself, as nothing was permanent. He took a deep breath and then breathed out fully. He felt disheartened, but not all that desperate. If a wonderful person, one who had gone out of his life, and who was so salient in such a critical time at his youth, had gone for good reason, he had no reason to question it. He had been blest to have her save him from the abyss as well as providing him with the ensuing friendship of marriage years later. She now had his money, his child, and her independence and he would bequeath these things unto her unconditionally; and so, he told himself that he must release her, exhaling her and breathing in others like respiration. He stuffed the five baht coin into his pocket. No, if he had loved Kimberly and Noppawan at certain times this was enough love for him in a lifetime. If he had experienced one malevolent family early in his life, this should have been enough of an augury for him that long ago he, Nawin Biadklang, should have forsworn a second round of it and vowed to maintain a single and original life thereafter. He was an artist: compassion, ideas, exposure to new people, licentious impulses, and the inspiration of dead geniuses on canvass must override this anti-Heraclital wish to cling to stable objects.
In the petty routines of man it was rare that one was impacted profoundly by some being other than one if the volumes of dead sages, and yet she had done this for him. Even though this incident had happened long ago he still admired and even loved her for it. He told himself that with time he would become even more professional and accomplished at compassionate portrayals of life in his paintings and his interactions, even if it were to take thirty years, when his testosterone levels had finally plummeted. And for those who never had anyone there, for them, he, at least in theory, wanted to be there the way Noppawan had been there for him in his youth. Maybe, he told himself, he would visit the Laotians. He was not sure.
Thus, here he was sitting in the restaurant of a guest house watching a pirated DVD on a big screen television and eating his pancakes with maple syrup. For whatever inexplicable reason, he had chosen to check into a guest house in the center of Nongkai and here he—Nawin, Jatupon, or whatever label he gave himself —was baffled by his choice. He could merely speculate and eat his pancakes the same as any Western foreigner, but with the voracious enthusiasm as he had when, long ago, devouring them in America as a four year old child.
He was eating pancakes rather than the French Toast that he was more inclined to order for the sound of the French in the toast made him feel queasy. When he finished eating and was bored with the movie he plunked money, faces of the king, under a salt and pepper shaker and without saying "check bin [bill, please]" or waiting for the waitress to pick up his money or bring back the change, he left the guest house as irresolute as when he came.
A cloud came and past; followed by others, darker and more voluminous. On the sidewalk, near Soi 43 where he happened to be passing, lightning refracted from the pavement and his sad solitary figure on this King's birthday/Father's Day was lit in flashes of eerie spotlight. There were strong winds animating the inanimate, which gave the already animate that sense of flutter making him, for a time, feel an elated sense of being that surpassed reality but this, like the lightning and the cloud that had been the precursor of the storm, were illusory and passed as well. His loneliness was weighty but the winds made the gravity of it all insignificant. Then there were sheets of rain pouring from the sky, he had tried to escape under an awning, but a hole in the center caused this miniature waterfall and made those under the awning cluster closer together to avoid it. He went into a shop. A rack was full of postcards with photographic images of Nongkhai's Buddhist sculpture garden and the Friendship Bridge between Nongkhai, Thailand and Vientiane, Laos. He could write to Noppawan, he told himself. He bought several postcards but he could not think of several friends to send them to—he had acquaintances by the droves but friends? Minus Kimberly, there was only Noppawan. He returned to his table at the guest house and ordered another cup of Cappuccino and a croissant. He took out a pen from his wet pockets but it would not write. He laughed. No, neither rain nor lugubrious tragedy would wash away the gloss that covered his cracks for he never ceased to be amused by the incredible, the ironic, and the peculiar of everyday experiences.
Looking out the window and thinking how peculiar such a rain was in December he turned toward the movie and in so doing noticed a young man in tight wholly jeans and jacket waiting at the door. He did not know why but he knew what he was there for and without thinking he raised his hand and snapped his fingers augustly, but it did not get the man's attention. "What on Earth was I thinking? What a relief," he thought. He chuckled at his droll existence of near misses and the twisting turns of fate. A woman seated at a nearby table pulled out a laminated photograph of King Rama IX. "What a simpleton," he thought, and smiled at her as if she were a child carrying around a doll. His heart was palpitating less, his blood seemed to be cooling, and his thoughts seemed to be less obsessed by the sexual and the peculiar. Then someone sat next to him. Unlike himself or the one in the denim jacket who both had a golden brown complexion, his was a muddier, more turgid tone. He was also more muscular just as he remembered was his brother, Kazem.
"Sawadee khrap," he said.
"Yes, what can I do for you?" asked Nawin.
"Just thought I'd come here and talk with you. You looked lonely. Thought I'd cheer you up if you needed cheering. You snapped your fingers but the other guy didn't hear you. I've heard and have come."
"What will you do to cheer me up?" asked Nawin with a sheepish grin.
"Better not say in words but I snap. You do what is pleasant for me and it will please you."
"Free?"
"Give me a 500 baht gift afterwards if you want."
Nawin paid the bill and led him to his room.
21
He listened to the frequent gusts assail the window panes. They were a hybrid of breath and force. They were muddled articulations in brawn. In that respect, he told himself [at that second he was thinking of his own childhood as a reference, since the centripetal domain of his myopic existence was all there was], the howling in the denigration of night was figuratively no different from the diatribe of human speech, and yet being literally both it felt entirely strange. He listened intently for whatever else there was for him to do as a unit in this barren room of post-sensual darkness inside his own head; scatter and drift with the wind? The gusts of this peculiar storm in the middle of the dry season seemed to be attempts at conveying meaning, ineffable sounds from without transforming to thought that smote recriminations within, and this he listened to as well even as he smiled wryly to think how superstitious he was to attempt to augur some cosmological significance to his petty existence from adventitious happenings. Smell equally condemned him: sweat evaporating from chafed skin of bodies reft from a union of friction; underwear tainted by residual liquids and reeking that odor sweetly; and, for him, immured in a poorly ventilated room of a guest house, it was nighttime and there was the saccharine stench of rotting male flesh everywhere.
Circumspect, he was unable to trust that there was safety in falling asleep [he could not feel otherwise with his wallet there in the top drawer of the bed-stand near that body], and thus there were long minutes of darkness made darker yet by being awake with eyes closed; mind somewhat assuaged by what it could repudiate from illuminating visual sensory input; thought, nature, and a connection to both seeming more acute despite the fact that he felt tired; and all of this a less pessimistic perspective garnered in certain seconds only to be lost in others. For his was an episteme of concurrent antitheses where, from the impact of human will, bits of knowledge like a mixture of adulterated pollutants that comprised the canals in Bangkok, were thrust into composite waves and counter-waves of ferment; but when will sped elsewhere it all reverted to its stagnant origin as waves of cogitation and cognition like waves of water resumed their former states.
All that he could know absolutely of himself within his droll, droning thoughts was that the perspectives he was trading shifted from variations of mood like different or seemingly different selves kaleidoscopically making it so he hardly knew a consistent self at all. All that he could know outside himself was that right now, perceived with gravity but variable nuances of optimism and humor, he was definitely in this room and, as much as he might wish to extricate himself, he was not alone.
Stretched out stiffly on the bed like a cadaver (Why so rigid? Why at all negative? he asked himself), he did not have to see the objects of the room again to feel a cold, surreal, and alien remoteness in their presence nor did he have to be deceased and within a state of rigor mortis to be so inert. Yet! (fuck!), he thought in Thai for that expletive implied how intimately disconnection could be felt; and as life, more than thought, was allowing oneself to be besmirched by the saturations of feeling, validating it with action, which then was the catalyst for more feeling, he asked himself whether or not after the massage that he had rendered like a slave to another's sense of pleasure and this being riveted for such a lengthy and hellish twenty minute duration which had just ceased a few moments ago, he were really living life. He was, he told himself, and what was more, by this one intimate act with the man and the void he was connecting himself atavistically to that antediluvian period of early self in which he had been sodomized so hard as to rupture childhood irreparably and to be condemned to this morbid repressed pain his atheist's soul, his all-too human, mind—a mind which even early on had been a refuge to a harmonious and familiar voice within.
This pain was for so many years seldom thought of, but now that it was thawed like a creek, it flowed it's bane as microbes and water. Pain, once necessitated, was now necessitating the diminished memories of the diminutive boy whom he had once been— diminutive as the creature had been banished and repudiated all of these years from the belief that only a man's appetites and actions within the present moment were real. Back then he had not bothered to postulate that a present bereft of foundation was like a cleft chunk of a planet floating aimlessly as an asteroid; and that if fully connected to himself; the boy might not be a diminished fictional character any longer while the man might become more than a tailless lizard with a regenerative head. Thus, this being bedraggled and besmirched in painful intimate sport was for him a homecoming.
There were so many voices of the past in the wind. They were distinct in themselves and yet, swallowed and digested by the wind, they were part of its reeking breath: brothers, parents, extended family, evanescent friends of youth, distant cold bits of memory less than specter and dust; Noppawan and Kimberly, his only two portions of love, which, as a self-contained being, he never needed but delighted in ravenously as one who lacked and was in love with those who engendered such lovable feelings (the feelings of being in love being that which were loved most); so many female models, so many desperate, delectable whores with defunct eyes of hopelessness, dead embers with a slight wistful glow for possible deliverance for which men roved like the dimmest of spotlights; so many relationships; so many desperate others no different than the whores (was there a male or female who got involved, let alone married, to worsen one's lot or to become best friends with the self, brazenly riding through loneliness on a solitary raft? No, never!). There was snoring. There was putrid breath, sweeping the side of his face. There was effluvium from the individual lying next to him and this was a type of wind as well.
No matter whether it was done as perpetrator or willing victim, no matter what the particular genders involved were, or the positions of riding or being ridden, the sexual union of two people was in his conclusion a mallet lunging its mass forcefully into dark, dank, and constricted space, a club forcing entrance into narrow passages not designed for its presence, and an overpowering of a being to devour but also to inflict servitude and pain while obtaining that apogee of pleasure, the brevity of orgasm, which could be gained in no other way. A mélange of croquet and billiards, polo and wrestling, this sport and aggression performed in the heterosexual role could cause the conception of a child more readily than it could cause venereal disease, but deviant sexuality was conjoined for sexual desire of every kind was definitely a crude and barbarous means of getting a specie to interact physically so that under an obsessive and specious sense of rapture and intimacy and a wish for extension of self by annexation of another being or being annexed by him, different apertures would be explored at various times and from human curiosity and experimentation, pregnancy might ensue.
Yes, he told himself, by being amenable to pleasurable promptings in an intimacy with a male half his age, and finding himself himself suddenly middle aged and needing to become enmeshed and invigorated in his beauty, he was living life as animals were meant to live it. Infidelities of every kind within this godless universe gave men, even gentry like himself who were cloyed by leisure, a rapturous respite from their roles as automatons and thus they were an essential sport of man. For the naive this conduct led to some months of being in love but for a worldly adulterer like himself it was minutes of indispensable intoxication. He continued to listen to the howling wind. It seemed to inveigle and beckon him and he found himself wistfully and sequaciously summoned to its cryptic codes. Did the wind not entice him to make his naked form denuded further so that he might become as amorphous as it, to be amalgamated with wind, and to slip into it wholly? It did; and yet it seemed such a grotesque hybrid of breath and force with these continual elated, muddled, and ineffable articulations in brawn. Yes, he reiterated, in that respect the howling was figuratively no different than the aspersions and diatribe of human speech. By that, although perhaps not consciously thinking it, he was nonetheless meaning that war called family which happened so briefly in the history of a life as if it had never been, though undoubtedly had occurred for, he assessed, there was an expanse or large swath of charred, fallow, and contaminated brain therein where, to the present day, little grew but a sense of desertification. Living in the centripetal domain of a myopic existence as everyone did he supposed that his hapless childhood would always be his point of reference, his vantage point, and also the multi-pointed obstacle of his life. Generalizations, skewed and concocted from the sordid past that were their antecedent, extruded from his fissures in an incessant cursive lava flow of amicable contempt. The howling was as undecipherable as the cries of a forlorn child. It was eerie as though a million such children with their muffled cries were being slammed into the windows with each new gust.
Lying there, a cohabitant of the darkness of this relatively unfamiliar room, the howling then seemed more fierce than before. It literally was brawn and breath. As such it was worse than the acerbity of humans (not that his father excoriating him for retreating to his "cage," that cage he willingly absconded to as a casualty of a sadistic sport in which he needed to shoot and denigrate before being shot and denigrated himself, and once hit to seek the prey more aggressively in the hope of being seen as the master of disparaging wit, or the father being as rustic and ungrammatical as a wild boar, did not howl yet in memory) and made the evening seem all the more surreal and peculiar if such a thing were possible.
"Where am I?" he asked himself absurdly, as if it could be anything other than that same room at the guest house in Nongkhai. "What happened to me?" he asked with feigned innocence which caused him to chortle and spray saliva that was like the froth of a wave upon a breaker, the cluster of rocks that was his smile. He had to admit, despite himself, that this being violated, by his own volition, had been quite a ride. It had been an internal roller coaster physically; but more it had been a ride into an abyss within, not merely from the physical sensation of this odd womanly role he found himself in or the pleasure of being free of aberration as creatures of variation loved aberration if social constraints were slackened (and slackened they were not only in Bang-cock but to some degree in the whole of Thailand as the Lord Buddha did not envisage gods, rules, and the dogma of coercion), but most saliently in these years as a womanizer overturned with this stranger's slight push of his body toward the bed.
Even with eyes closed and sedulous efforts made to concentrate on the wind to avoid thinking of the raw, anal soreness and all that transpired which was as confusing for the libertine as it was liberating, he knew. He listened intently. He listened scrupulously. How superstitious he was to equate the wind with a specter and yet he did it nonetheless. The smells of the room did not seem as acrid as a fully evaporated area over a recent urine-saturated pavement near a park or stadium in Bangkok or as repugnant as a room littered with his brothers fetid socks and other equally if not more reprehensible articles of attire peeled off the bodies of these anathemas but still, as small as the room was, nothing was impervious to it. If the curtains and the carpet were all permeated by a redoubling of these male odors, he would not have been surprised—not that surprise, or any other human emotion could have been registered all that readily in his impassive state. His was a naked mind, like that of his body, except that his body was wrapped loosely in a used mildewed towel and his mind in a bawdy numbness which he labeled the void.
He sneezed and opened his eyes. He rubbed his nose against his shoulder, careful not to make any more precipitous movements against the broken arm in the sling, since it was hurting worse than before, as of course it would from the earlier sport. There was no point in closing his eyes again. He would not be able to rest any more than before. With a mind needing debouchment more than his body needed to relieve itself in the toilet he stayed where he was, which was where there were windows. The circumfluence of the fetid, enervated air beneath the incessant creaking of the ceiling fan; creaking as if it were not only grating against the torpor and stagnancy of the air itself but against the melee of all, for all was restrained in the time and space of what now was and in a circulation and deciduous draping of those same odors caught to which the windows were permanently sealed to keep out the rain.
22
Gained as an unintentional wooer of women by dint of an opalesque smile, a mellifluous voice, a successful name, and a handsome albeit swarthy and sodden appearance which made him, for them at least, a semi-deluctable presence, and years of venial sensual licentiousness, a recompense for empathic suffering in his thoughtful studies of prostitutes and injustices of the world at large, it was his inveterate perspective of himself as delusionary as it may have been. It was disconcerting to think of it as gone; and yet, he told himself, as emasculated and denuded as he now felt, were he to continue to mature this way, to climb the precipice of old age, while still acting callow enough to be obsessed by the exquisite release of his body (love making out of the tension of repressed urges towards the many and, as a cumulative exhortation of fantasies vented on a specific one, an act of adultery when making love to her, as it was love of himself, his own gratification), partaking of blithe experiences with female strangers under societal approbation and with youthful lewdness, needing to restrain his behavior very little, scrutinizing it no more than this, and having nothing to show for his life other than wanton appetites dragging him into every damp and unseemly hole open to him would he not eventually become more obscene than the hole he was at this moment in time? Would it not be worse than now to end his life no more master of the self than that and to have made sexuality the sole subject of study and preoccupation as he had done for decades? He was not sure, although to feel better about himself he averred it silently as if he were so. He told himself that there was nothing to feel guilty about. It was the clay of life. Human will might choose to misrepresent it as ethereal as a cloud but it was not so. From the first regenerative microbe it was an experiment, and so of course there would be experimentation now. If obscene, was it not even more obscene that this, which was an inception of all, was all there was?
The carnal scholar that he was, did he not seek to understand life pedantically, partaking of it mostly with prostitute models instead of those of affluent means? Whatever small, favorable outcome it did for them financially he knew all too clearly that it was exploiting the exploited whatever august and sententious aim he might entertain. By seeking the omniscience of a god and showing the injustices of life as they really were (or as accurate an account as one could do within his tiny scope of experience and knowledge) his was to know both the parts of the exploiter and the exploited. What other reason did he have to enjoy them than to enlarge his study to the perpetrators of exploitation themselves when there was such a smorgasbord for free, or at least as free as women got? So many years of praised debauchery had embedded that self perspective of himself as a wooer of women ("Naughty Nawin" as articles often called him); and it had seemed as impregnable as granite when really it was a thin outline of a self that could easily be smudged and erased.
Lying on his half of the bed, the thunder, lightning, and wind from outside seemed to diffuse into that porous and amorphous outline of a defunct self. For half an hour he was cognizant of nothing but the storm and the faint, subdued murmurs and indistinct featureless shapes of early, distant memories set in a rather subconscious mental fog, scampering away at a distance as though seeking to allude him. Without thinking so, he felt that large amalgamations of his character, the daily sensory input of a constant, non-threatening environment, and his fond attachments to others gained from shared pleasant experiences together, which together he called himself fell from him annually. He was deciduous, but unlike a tree, he suffered a loss of most of the trunk of his entire being: the full love of a child for his mother that would never come again; the family that damaged and then vanished almost as quickly as one was conceived, gestated, and delivered as a member into its cell of sordid and clandestine activities; an infatuation with a girl that once seemed garish, all-consuming, and eternal as the sun; and the full pleasure of feeling those awesome gusts of wind hit against his face as a boy would, smelling the pile of winter leaves that he once jumped into as they began to suffocate him, and appreciating the significance of the simple delights of the ordinary as a child's mind did, and to which no vacation to Vientiane as an adult had the hope of restoring. He was merely what he sensed from the storm and for some time he stayed this way soughing skidding around with it in his mind like a severed and desiccated old leaf.
Manhood, this summation of himself as masculine force and presence, had nothing tangible in it and could vanish quicker than the toppling of a house of cards. With so many years of incessant layers of thought it had seemed ossified so how could he have known that this perspective—one that was endemic to such a profession of contemplative decadence and decadent contemplation and had seemed myriad as the shore's self- flagellation of waves—would be so evanescent? As his nose was beginning to itch he rubbed it with the back of his hand. From the gesture he found himself returning to a self which, regrettably, could not be discarded entirely. How strange, he thought, to be washed up on new shores. He thought this as if there were something so new in it, and as if sodomy, and in his case fraternal incest at that, were totally unknown to him. It was not so strange a shore as he wanted to believe, he had to admit, and he would only be alone and marooned there if he saw himself as such. The fecund, dark soil of a less familiar shore could only be foreign, ominous, and grave if he stated to himself that it was such.
"So, I am with a man! What of it!" he thought; but guilt continued to reverberate, as those eerie lamenting calls to worship that, from a nearby mosque, thrice a day rolled off of the black sheen of the waters of the canal and trespassed into his Bangkok estate bypassing a wall and gate meant to fortify him from possible theft, and more generally to barricade him from the ignorance and poverty that were his past. If this perspective of himself as an inadvertent wooer of women and debonair presence, were a wall to memory meant to keep himself from considering the peculiarity of his perverted and twisted past and the walls of his estate were meant to fortify himself from poverty and misery both of them failed unequivocally.
Guilt, like the wind that he was now listening to, wailed on. Self flagellation like thunder and lightning piercing the room, did so under the aegis of his closed eyes. And there, correcting examinations in her favorite seat in the living room with eyes perusing paper behind thick glasses, and fighting back parts of the disheveled hair that obstructed the process, was a spectral and indistinct image of his wife. He judged that she was no different from the rest, already well into diminishing to the state of former friends and family like his deceased girlfriend, his infant son, and his paternal obligations.
There they would become part of a blotch of nebulous memory that might have its pull like a poltergeist against the organization of his thoughts but would nonetheless seem to have never been.
If he were to accept the defining components of marriage as the masses defined it, he was never married at all. The signing of a marriage certificate long ago had been done as a lifelong pledge to prioritize one individual and one bond above others and not as a renunciation of social interaction or forfeiting the ownership of his genitalia; and what was true throughout the marriage was surely no less true now. Noppawan, the anthropologist and professor whom he gained such delight in, which was love, once said that there had to be a reason that jealousy was such an embedded instinct. She said that it no doubt had its origin in primordial man. Perhaps, she said, female Australopithecus africans needed to ensure that the providers did not abandon them and their prodigy and their primordial male counterparts wanted to ensure that those offspring whom they were providing for were really their own.
Did ideas and attitudes of cognizant beings ever evolve at all? he wondered, for sexual fidelity was still thought of as such an important factor to marriage when really it should be a contract of a union of best friends. Facile measurements of this nature would legitimize the most indifferent partners as well as relationships where obtaining monetary or social status was the objective. Contracts of faithfulness and appeasing a partner's jealous propensities by suffocating the self unlovingly could exist just as the facile measurements of what a marriage really was could materialize (all had the right to measure, define, and live as they judged apposite in obtaining some degree of happiness) but, he thought, that surely did not mean that he had to subscribe to it himself. All who signed marriage certificates did not have to do so with the same motivation and none ever signed documents to which there was a likelihood of their present state remaining as it was or worsening. As an aberration of a liberal man who from being fragmented by pain was able to design himself anew, why should it matter what the masses believed? By the momentum of one free to be dissolute he, a libertine, had a short time earlier worn away one more restriction; but as it was one of consenting adults; was it all that necessary to build dams and reroute the currents of a river that ran both ways? He thought not, when the damn was such an unnatural barrier.
He wondered what Noppawan was doing at this moment. Awakened by the baby, was she warming the bottle of milk and combing that thicket of long hair as he had seen her do before. Was she even able to sleep very well nowadays with the infant's hourly crying? Was she able to sleep at all with Kimberly's passing? Did she think of him at all? Did she feel regret over breaking his arm with the frying pan, changing the locks, tossing his clothes onto the drive, and refusing to answer the telephone? Despite making him culpable she had in fact arranged it all. Kimberly's post-partum depression was no doubt exacerbated by those two months of shared motherhood and espousal husbandry that barren Noppawan had conceived, but none could have foreseen the denouement. The world abounded in spills and mess and yet it was miraculous that, at least for many, it came together so well before finally going awry, dissipating as dew, life, the decent and debauched of it.
He opened his eyes. Everything was there as before including that body. He sat up; embraced the mesa of his legs within the multifarious sands of the desert of his mind; admired those various shades of color in the sand, perspectives made so by the variations of mood; and looked down. Consternated, he stared at a mattress cover dappled like a constellation from his soiling, and he laughed nervously. "But then why should it not be so with the extent of it," he thought. He was meaning the twenty minutes or longer of being sodomized, that roller coaster within which eventually prompted bowel movements in a futile attempt to excrete the intruder. Not knowing what he could do as he could hardly remove the mattress cover then and there, he pulled down a package of cigarettes from the mantle of the bed. He put a cigarette into his mouth but not able to find the lighter from the groping of his hand on the mantle, and seeing that it was not on the bed stand, he just let the fireless cigarette dangle in his mouth.
Experience (he smiled again, for as much as this ceaseless analysis of the intricacies of his life might seem morbid to others were they to have them their head, he found postulating potential reasons for his actions beyond the superficial an amusement park where the variation and length of the rides was infinite—it had always amused him to do so; and prior to this whole Kimberly affair he was in action if not thought as shallow and concave as the next person, and more hedonistic than most), there was nothing ugly or disdainful in a given experience but what the mind associated as positive or negative from social conditioning or from paranoid fears of possible ramifications from a little pain. Did some anal pain presage that he would ineluctably contract a disease from this man? No, it did not, nor had each of his myriad raptures of vaginal penetration in his sordid past indicated that the ecstasy he was experiencing in his groins would transcend into a meaningful companionship beyond sexual gymnastics.
Having forgotten to close the curtains there was a warped, oblong silver bar of refracted light on the floor in front of the bed. It was light from an adjacent street lamp that was molded and cast down onto the darkness of the floor. There was a slight sway of a mirror hanging on the wall with reflections of blurred and severed shapes seeming to appear, disappear, and reappear within its sway. What they were he did not know for sure. One was possibly a part of a corner of a wall and a bit of a footstool; another was possibly matte flanks of bed and flesh; less dubiously it seemed that there was a partial foot or severing of that foot, but whatever was being reflected was done so as a rearranging mélange. A cactus, a telephone, and a postcard in which he had only written, "Dear Noppadon, I am here in Nongkai thinking of you and everything. I want—" were yoked together on the bed stand. With every reopening of his eyes they seemed to command the turning of his face toward them not so much from the fact that his wallet was there in one of its drawers but more to suggest that his life was barren and he needed to contact someone. The inanimate which could not copy and transmit impressions of the world or one's relation to it, were to him, at that moment, capable of an empathy and directive that bypassed words. At least it seemed to be so of the items on the bed-stand, and he waited for them to mandate who he was to contact (the beautiful nurse at Siriaj Hospital, his swarthy wife with intellect as thick as the lenses of her glasses, or the sodomy division of the local police office—"hello Mr. Policeman. I would like to report the fact that a stray dog is stuck in my crevasse. You will sir. Thank you, sir. You are such a nice man. I will prepare a nice treat for you and your partner when you come"). He gasped in a muted chuckle.
"What are you doing?" asked a gecko that was crawling on the wall near the bedstand.
"Sitting here. Fornicating. Experimenting."
It engulfed him with glassy eyes that were unmoving oceans, even stagnant universes, and he knew that everything lacked purpose beyond being an object tossed out for pure animation. To not go forward was completely meaningless.
"Huh? What are you doing?" asked the man.
"Wanting to smoke but I can't find my lighter," said Nawin.
23
There were consecutive sneezes to which a forth was as incomplete as muffled sound. Then there was the wiping of his nose on his arm, a few seconds of an intolerable facial itch, which he scratched incessantly (such a plethora of pleasures there were in discomfort, or acclimating to this life as one was compelled to do, just an adequate amount concocted within an entity to keep it, in most circumstances, from cutting its throat or kimberlying downward) and his cigarette, still dangling loosely in his mouth, lit and allowed to disperse death unto him inexplicably. "Are you happy?" the intimate stranger asked him, but before any potential response could be uttered Nawin sensed his cigarette being extracted from him and, a second later, saw it wedged in the other's mouth for his long inhalation.
Nawin laughed at the filching during his elongated interjection of reproach. As he was most often his own adventitious source positing potential truths to the intense contemplative domain of his multi-tiered mind, which, at top levels, sought life's riddled viands voraciously; at first he did not register the question as coming from any interlocutor other than himself. He was preoccupied with trying to find an exact correlation between burning cigarette phalluses and the afterglow of sexual relations, conceptualizing it the way he would were he to transpose it to canvas with traditional gender substitutes, wondering if the masses of men really felt that pleasurable corporeal sensation + union with another was happiness, and if it really was so why he did not ever feel it.
Why, he asked himself in a bout of hubris, had this insolent creature, who a couple minutes earlier had been buried in sleep, reassembled his parts and spoken to him? He had not granted him permission to do so. It was merely this one's part to transport him home to the abuse that was the foundation of childhood. This he had done fully; and as it was concluded action subsequent cohabitation, to his mind, would be superfluous. By those painful, pleasurable thrusts of intimacy edifices, property, prosperity, verility, invincibility, relationships and stature, all that one made of a life by repudiating everything that one once was, were now seen as the sandcastles that they were and he himself as the ravaged spoils of dirt there to be bulldozed by others' wills as before, to sense the suppressed cries of childhood as before. He did not know how, after these ravaging trespasses of bodily entanglement he could maintain an amicable conversation with the invited violator and yet he did not know how he could avoid an attempt? He could not ask him to leave when he had, by desire if not volition, asked him to come here.
Was it not a standard belief, and a rational one at that, that conversation was the means to further intimacies, that sexual relations with strangers were inverted intimacy and sexual relations with men were perverted or at least distorted, inverted intimacy?; and yet even in heterosexual relationships, he said to himself, the normal sequence of mental divulging leading to the ribald, the carnal, and the bestial seemed its own desultory and discomfiting mess. Was it really unnatural for men to be together in this way? More than he might fear that it was, he feared that it was not. What could be more natural than competitive fencing and impaling another man with one's vibrating, titillating sword with a vibrant force far greater than women could take? Was it not vile for a married man to profane his relationship with his wife in such a way? Yes, he conceded, it was. Did he have compunction about his action? For what good it did anyone, yes he did; and yet this action was as natural as condoning or sanctioning killing itself; it was natural for the immune system to kill microorganisms, for a child, despite sentimental attachments, to grow up and out of all which he once thought of as dear, and for family to evaporate like morning dew.
Talk of love belied the innate desire to experience a workout, to at last turn off thought and respond as an animal should by instinct, to be released from desire tickling incessantly like the crawl of a line of ants on one's skin, and to release a surfeit into a hole with the instrument of urination, an intimate and exquisite release. Likewise, thoughts repudiating the naked truth that killing was as ineluctable and natural in a being as its own breath, contravened any degree of understanding of the life that the fates circumscribed man to have.
And as for being with a woman and begetting children with her, whether it be action that was virtuous or not, it was natural without equivocation; and yet when a marriage certificate, an artificial piece of paper, was signed, it became an instrument for self-deceit by fostering an illusion of permanence while a means to sanctify what was natural by saying that without legitimacy in ink and paper this carnal and emotional bond was debauchery. Thus by refining nature it contravened it. In his case, he only had nominal passion for Noppawan. To him they were two intellects clinging to each other, after family had dissipated from their lives like dispersing smoke from a conflagration. What could be more of an unnatural contrivance than this? And if not only the sport of man on man, but all unions of naked intimacy were illicit and vulgar without paper and ink contrived unions of prehistory predating and leading to both, the present generation would make vile bastards of all. At least that was what he thought or was thinking at the time. He might have thought of himself as self-contained despite at times feeling distraught over this incessant reign of impermanence deluging him; he might have thought of love as neediness and that, personally, it was emotional bonding that, like teddy bears, he himself was beyond as he was beyond Buddhist statuettes, jasmine rosaries, and the intervention of a Buddha god theistically; and yet he loved Noppawan nonetheless. What else could it be but love?
Unable to share experiences that he found himself in, even when certain that they would be pleasurable to a given person now lost to him the mind conjured its ersatz. On the train ride here she, of course, was not with him and yet, hauntingly, she was; and if he had gone in a second or third class carriage she would have particularly enjoyed this train ride with him more than she had: windows down, redolent smells grafted in the hard breeze and wafting the aisle of the car. When he was glancing at post cards so that he could send one to her, oddly in an eerie way, she was there with him urging him to find one for herself that more accurately depicted the history of Nongkai. Every time he thought of going straight into Vientiane she expostulated that it would be better to bypass the city as much as possible so that they might spend more time in the Plain of Jars. She was the plausible what might have been. and as he could not give to reality he would give to the hollow mirages that replicated therein. This, if not the entirety of the neediness called love, epitomized the good that was there.
He continued to think: …and with solidity breaking into smaller and smaller pieces like bits and sub-bits of glaciers and then rearranging, the conclusiveness of conclusions controverted, and impermanence rife in all, was it not natural to need someone—even that he should be here—
"So, what is it?"
"Huh?"
"Yes or no?"
"Yes or no what? Am I happy? Is that what you asked?"
"Yes."
"Don't worry. I'm okay," responded Nawin indifferently.
"You didn't enjoy it?" asked the stranger. His voice was groggy in partial sleep.
"I guess I did," admitted Nawin "—as much as one can in that position. It was different."
"Different good, or different bad?"
"Different. I don't know. Why do you ask?" There was silence in which both men did not know what to say, and in it Nawin reproached himself for making the situation more awkward than it had to be, and then reproached himself for finding anything awkward in it at all. As though it were justified to be cautious upon finishing intimacies with a stranger he did not approve of or to be apathetic with an undertone of supercilious, sneering antipathy, any more than to partake of the carnal episode itself. Still he could not conceptualize anything innately wrong in activity with another man. Beings were attracted elements, compounds that enjoyed times of coupling as double compound entities; and cathartic releases of physical desire toward one or the other gender, like medicine to illness, restored one toward a more logical inquiry of thought. But, he told himself, he had gained no such release. His paramour had him spellbound and made him no more than a galley slave rowing the master's carnal euphoria. Perhaps, he thought, moral dilemmas were not on moral grounds at all. Perhaps they could be reduced to such basic factors as sexual frustration. He forced himself to reciprocate a feigned interest in enjoyment although he was not able to extricate himself from the phlegmatic tone that spewed from his mouth bearing his thoughts. "What about you?" he asked.
"I love you. Do you love me too?" Nawin looked away and did not say anything. Whether this question was an artifice contrived for monetary gain or a real neediness he did not know. It did occur to him that having this man really interested in him (a suitor of sorts) might be more disadvantageous for him economically than a brief tryst—not that the prodigal son needed to retrench his life with fewer mistresses and zero misters, and he was still contemplating the addition of a nurse at Siriaj Hospital to his intimate menagerie. Worse, he thought, if the neediness of this other party was one of emotional rather than financial deficiencies, he himself, a married man, might be dogged if not stalked by this undesirable, desired being, this being who might desperately need to register himself into a companion's brain. What was worse than to be with someone who needed to be needed, who needed another person to be wistful and yearn for him, and who needed to etch himself personally and as indelibly as one could onto the adventitious, impermanent putty of the human mind? It was not easy to be compassionate and extract oneself from such parasites. He could not believe anything that was linked to such an amorphous word as love, which only had one consistent thread within it and that was what all love was, a neediness within projected onto that which was without.
"Are you in pain? Did I tear you up?"
"Did you what? Did you tear me up?…Well…since you ask sitting is a bit painful but as much as I can tell, I guess that I am not torn up, as you call it. By the way, I am not used to this sort of thing and…to tell the truth…it is rather embarrassing to say this…with the action and all I think…I think I soiled the bed sheet."
"Soiled?"
"Soiled. What other word do you want me to use?"
The paramour laughed mildly. At first Nawin appreciated that the dry laughter was so terse and restrained. Then the fact that he had laughed at all seemed as inordinate insolence. "Maybe you should get up and I'll remove the sheet," he said irascibly.
"No, I'm going back to sleep. If it didn't bother me the first time I can sleep on it again. Leave it for the maids. It makes something new in their days."
"You're going to go back to sleep?"
"Soon. I did you long and hard but if there's no blood you aren't torn up."
"Okay, good; now can we talk about something else?"
"If you want. What were you staring at when I woke up?"
"I don't know—a post card I didn't finish writing; the telephone; a gecko crawling above the bed stand; the corners of the room which are filthy—the room must be infested with insects." Nawin smiled abashedly, chuckled, and then stared directly into the face of the paramour with a baffled expression. "You keep grinning. Why?"
"I'm happy."
"Happy?"
"The happiest. The happiest I've ever been."
"Well, good for you…I mean if you were happy before you've got more of it. If you weren't I guess you have less of it…unhappiness that is, negated negatives."
The paramour laughed. "You're a comedian. I love that; I love you," he said as his fingers slid into the elastic of Nawin's underwear. Nawin laughed incredulously careful not to release a cynical laugh out of fear that, although unlikely, the paramour could possibly mean that which he said.
"Don't you think it is a bit early to feel that way. It's certainly too early in the morning to say a lot of nothing."
"It's not nothing," he said, snapping the elastic—he himself wearing nothing but his grin. "No, that's not how I think. You just have to do things. If there is a good feeling ride it fully, you just have to throw yourself into it and live it. If you stand back and pick things apart because you don't know 100 percent you might as well be dead because what you're living isn't life."
"Is that so?" Nawin said. It was cogent enough to him who would have had the need and thus the gullibility to believe such things were it not for the countenance, the melodramatic tone of he who promulgated this holy maxim, and the circumstances that went contrary to the putative sentiments.
24
Sensing that a bit of enlightenment could accompany a binge of debauchery and provide him with not only wind but ablution into the cellar of his musty mind, he was given a reason for intimacy, not that this reason or any other would have to prevail in creatures so prone to irrational caprices as he now concluded that he was. So a man would seek less alien companionship with another man after a girlfriend had jumped from the eleventh story of a university building and a wife who had subsequently broken his arm with an iron frying pan now kept him locked out of their home—this attributing of men as less illogical and more steady presences, rightly or wrongly, and identifying solely with them was reasonable enough; but to succumb spellbound to the brevity of frenzy, knowing well such intimacies to be spectacles as brief and garish as the puffs of aerosol he and a college roommate used to spray and light so that they might experience an inferno of the air, to know and yet to do it nonetheless, was inane.
Now seated and stationary on this bed in this room and in this mind, groping for contours of objects in dark and curtailed space among antithetical thoughts and caprices, putative reality seemed nothing but the most tangible of the intangibles. As a result he became even more reticent, pondering what the right combinations were to live life fully: inward versus outward explorations; feeling versus logic; work versus leisure; silent reverie versus boisterous revelry; digressions into the future and the past; savoring the present moment as in lying on a bench at Wat Arun watching clouds overhead, sensing the breath enter and leave his frame, and feeling a sense of awe that he was even cognizant of all this; conversely, doing and having agenda and purpose about the affairs of man, interaction which allowed one to avoid the intrusiveness of too many unwanted, distracting thoughts, all of which confirmed his inconsequence even in the here and now. There had to be a harmony of these incongruous elements but he did not know how or to what degree.
"And I suppose you will always be there for me," Nawin asked with a sardonic smile on his face. He now wanted levity and the substance of sound, even his own, to dispel, or at least obfuscate the longevity that was in each and every minute to distract him from the realization of the hours until sunrise, and to preoccupy him during the time, still unknown, until departure of this intimate stranger.
He, the womanizer he once was, reproached himself for being here with this man in a chagrin of manhood, a mortification and yet a mortification of what he could not say. Perhaps there was no reason for mortification at all, he countered in a retort of thought. Perhaps this was a cleansing and a freeing of himself from a false sense of what manhood should be. Still, he had all these explosions of intimacy in the knowledge he would feel this vacuity afterwards, and that upon feeling it any moment could make him a perpetrator of indifference who rudely discarded this delusion rather than built a multi-story make-believe castle upon it; intimacy bedazzled him for a time before his return to a more subdued and substantive state; this time in an effeminate role of mute intercourse not to his liking but which he needed nonetheless; exacerbated sexual tension abated but not entirely extinguished in post-sexual melancholy. To know such matters and yet to interact this way regardless like any biologically programmed automaton thwarted by early childhood experience was an inane life.
So he concluded and re-concluded, with his thoughts becoming increasingly redundant, twisted, and plaited. To gain some solace and respite he hummed the melody of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Thinking as he did so that the whirlwind he would create by repeating it thrice therein should clear away all dross he instead found that the debris remained even as it dragged circuitously although less tediously in music.
"And I know that you will always be there for me," Nawin remembered himself saying facetiously. It occurred to him that this lover, this sprawled figure so near to him, was like a dog he had seen recently near Gaysorn Department Store lying on its back at the base of a Brahma statue, its genitalia an oblation to that deity. At that time, while he was chuckling at a deity aptly profaned and pondering how our pantheistic awe of nature had been overtaken by these artificial weeds of dogma, false stories and tradition, as with the alleged bones of the Buddha that were enshrined in a temple near the Silpakorn University branch in Nakhon Pathom, he was re-entering Gaysorn intent on purchasing a 38,000 baht watch so as to have it shine opulently upon his handsome albeit dark dirt-brown skin.
Shopping was only adjunct to the instinct that prompted the switching on of one's breath. Of course he would do it naturally for man's energy was not to be self-contained, but instead was continually changing in changeable containers, and in desperate moments he would barter what he had for intimacy—barter with what he had. And if he knew not what he hoped to gain from a spiritual journey already thwarted in activity similar to the perversity of his youth, all he needed to do was to look at the obvious. From it, there could be no other interpretation but that he wanted to be taken back to a feeling of ravaged youth when he had perverse hopes that the physical penetration would stop while at the same time he would be recognized as permanently married to his brother. Being taken back home to a foundation of dilapidated innocence, but an ingenuous foundation nonetheless, he sought a return to himself that was the ends and not the means.