In this guest house in the city of Nongkhai, this was what he had to have, and it was now his. Whether he would have to pay for it with money or time remained to be seen. It seemed to him that there were just these two payments, each a type of direct or indirect pleasure. If the stranger asked for money, then it would be proof that a contract of brief employment had taken place in which he was hiring him not to be his master but a slave. If this were true, the nature of the relationship would be unambiguous enough: it would be that of hiring someone to do a bit of drudgery which they would not want to do or would not think pleasurable enough to do if the pecuniary rewards were not there, and after receiving the sum, departing from his life like a pizza delivery boy. This, Nawin thought, would be best for his own purposes. However, if no money was transferred he might be thought of by this one as a female surrogate who by one intimacy made an implied contract of continual intimacies as the sole favored supplier of pleasure.
The intimate stranger looked irritated. Then he smiled bitterly."Sure, something like that. I like being kind to the elderly."It was a delayed response to Nawin's flippant comment of "I'msure you will always be there for me."
"Elderly?"
"Khrap" he said with a wai. "Can you tell me your age. I mean how old are you honestly?"
"Thirty something." Honesty did not always come out despite being summoned.
"Elderly, as I said. How old do you think I am?"
"I'd hate to know."
"Seventeen."
"Seventeen, really? Hmm." He pursed his lips thoughtfully."Single, and barefoot free. I am married, you know."
"Married? Well, married men have to get it too."
"I suppose so." Nawin sniggered mutedly while feeling both amusement and aversion at being in this guest house and in this company, this effeminate role to which he found himself in, and of becoming so old despite feeling youthful physically even with all this distorted emotional stretching over the past month. He sensed that the stranger knew that he was trying to sabotage the possibility of their intimacy becoming a relationship and he felt compunction over it. Still, to sabotage and extricate himself from debauchery thick, viscous, and onerous to his spiritual pursuit (although he did not believe in the spirit) seemed the wisest course of action, and so he could hardly disabuse himself of such an idea.
25
At first the word "elderly" seemed, if not ludicrous, exaggerated and distorted, an irascible utterance of the intimate stranger that a playmate twice his age would not be a more gullible victim of scheme and schemer. But then he questioned his judgment on this matter as well for as he could not think of anything that he knew absolutely, how could he trust his own conjecture about one whom he was not familiar with beyond some scant words and vacuous physical intimacies and had no intention to try to know by speech or the intercourse of minds, beyond that which was thrust upon him? Considering the fact that every morning when a man slipped on his pants, usually after one sordid nocturnal adventure or another, he also put on a belief that he really did exist and was himself and not someone else (in his case that which he called Nawin, this free and thus debauched libertine-artist, not that he was so hard- pressed for entertainment that this issue of absolute knowledge that he existed, this epistemological speculation more comfortably set in humor than horror and resembling a confounded baby playing with his fingers, should be much of a subject of speculation) he then thought how little he knew with absolute certainty and how frightening this really was. He smiled at his friend with that strange, contemplative longing that introverts projected to belie their disdain for the outside world, withdrew, and looked away.
Then that which was thought to be mendacious and absurd seemed to be true in the perennial mutating, albeit perhaps, in terms of truth, non-evolving thoughts of the mind. Even if the exaggerations of the youth were noted and culled from memory and perception one truth would be irrefutable: Nawin was undoubtedly forty which made him marginally but undeniably a middle aged man; and if not old now he soon would be, just as he already was within the perception of his definition of youth. Loss of what he once was, just as loss of who he once was when with others who once were, was the inexorable forward movement of it all, toward what aim no intellect could even begin to guess and to which, apart from death, he knew of no escape. Nine seemed an insurmountable age to one who was five, and of a forty year old boy an inordinate amount of humanity would think of as near the precipice of old age and death; but, he told himself, he did not live by others perception of him, or if he did, he did unwittingly and it was as ineluctable as day meets night, there was surely solace to be found in not having one strand of grey hair on his head or elsewhere and in being without a single wrinkle. In the judgment of the mirror skewed by that which he wanted to see there was a collaborative work of biographical fiction not so far from reality and given credibility from the obvious fact of feeling physically no different than he ever had. According to this collaborative fiction, little had changed over the past twenty years except the increasing amount of people who came and went from his life so vertiginously.
Body conceived and mounted on the barren rock of the planet; mind peopled like speckled icing on a rich boy's birthday cake so as to have meaning; meaning that was stripped and denuded in change; and for all his consternation in this dizzy state it did nothing to redeem or resurrect them to his life once again. All came and went leaving only diminished, diminutive copies of themselves clustered there in the brain as furtive shadows digressing the reality of the present into that which once was. And even if Kimberly were to de-decompose with cremated remains reassembling to allow her to rise from the dead with all continuing as before there would be the knowledge that she had chosen death to separate herself from him ineluctably, and this alone would thwart what they had into perfunctory roles of financial provider and taker. How she could jump like that as if he had never been there for her or any of his entourage of women, he did not know. He may have wanted to be thought of as a nonchalant playboy to the outside world, as newspaper articles smudged him as being, but if one were to examine the portraits of those women whom he both played and portrayed it would be clear that solemn grey empathy, the only real love there was, sullied the reds and oranges of his passions into the pain of empathy—not that with each day of adulthood he did not find bits of his sensitivity chafed and weathered away in time like an image of a face sculpted in a mountain.
Despite both women having concocted the plan and being signatories to this document agreeing to surrogate motherhood, he was an adulterer according to both, not so much for the other women that he had been with, but by being the natural father and husband of one and the legal husband of the other. Thus they provided him with evidence that "adultery" was just a perception like everything else and from it that a homosexual encounter was, as his brother had called their activity together, cheap dates more aligned to sport. Relationships of this nature were not acts of adultery any more than masturbation in the shower was adultery with water. At least, he told himself so to feel less guilty and the words were a successful analgesic. And as for Kimberly and his wife whom he as philanderer nonetheless had many years of shared friendship, how could he be domesticated and exclusive to either one when exploration of the study of the sadness and rapture of human existence still beckoned him? These were tenable arguments that passed successfully through the scrutiny of his mind permeating all regions and though he had not isolated it completely his beliefs were: 1. that he was born the sole owner of his penis and twenty years after his birth, when he signed a marriage certificate that was deliberately spilled ink on paper meant, as strange as it was that spilled ink meant anything, to show enduring friendship toward Noppawan and a wish to have a shared life together, he had not sold his anatomy to her; 2. that conversation with a female friend at a coffee shop (in the past this usually being a student or colleague at Silpakorn University on those rare semesters when he was not on a sabbatical) could be much more intimate than half hours of ecstasy which were not intimacy but a delusion of intimacy in which, when innate hungers were subdued, the man would at least in thought return to his wife and then the following day be able to pursue real intimacy with her; 3. that sex was exercise and just as he did not need permission from his wife to exercise at a fitness center he could think of no reason he would need permission to exercise his penis and be exorcized of his primitive hungers that would take over his higher thoughts and agenda if not released; 4. that a man was programmed to, as the Bible declared, "be fruitful and multiply" and so one could not oppose his basic biological urges; 5. as it would take so much energy to restrain instinct, this coerced restraint was a wasted resource that might be used more constructively, and 6. that the only reason a woman got angry at a man for his nocturnal adventures was because in antediluvian times a woman was scared that she would lose her hunter, for clearly back then women were not physically capable of hunting, nor were they able to even gather fruit from trees or berries from vines if they had to take care of their babies, and thus they became angry and jealous of a man's other sexual encounters because they were threats of losing their economic provider. Humans in these 30,000 years did not change so if it was true in earlier times, it would have to be true now no matter what memory-bugaboos of the past spooked him to cling to another by a more common and domesticated lifestyle—bugaboos that made him now see outlines of ominous forms in the corners of both the room of the guest house and in its amorphous darkness.
He might question whether the mirrored image of himself that he saw daily was real or refracted light made into a roseate image of the mind, but at the very least his face, unlike many middle aged men he knew, did not look like a squished shammy that he used to burnish the shine of his Mercedes Benz GL sports utility vehicle, that same vehicle which he had abandoned in the drive a few weeks ago for that emergency taxi ride to the hospital.
He thought of how he had importuned her, this stoic wife of his, to drive him to the hospital, of her obdurate refusals even when she had been the perpetrator of his broken arm and spintered clavical, and how it was from guilt his silent recriminations had mutated to hate in that taxi ride to Siriaj Hospital, that hospital that in youth they had gone to be with the abused dead of the anatomical museum.
Then he tried to channel his thoughts from hate filled digressions to how in the vicissitudes of life among so many shammy faced people a face like his maintained a fairly stable look. He smiled, amused by himself and the peculiarity of being here within this sordid black adventure in a guest house in Nongkhai. Then he sank himself in the depths of sullen night and sullied denouement.
He wanted to sleep off whatever time lapsed until the stranger left. His wallet was in a drawer of a night table near his side of the bed. He was a light sleeper when circumstances dictated, so any noise would awaken him unless it were that accompanying a fatal blow, but this was not America. The opulence of Bangkok might entice poor school girls in uniform to become whores of old Chinese-Thais and straight men to be serpentine prostitutes, but few were the Buddhists who would kill their servants of their pleasures. Still, even with the probability of being snug and secure in his den of decadence, the croaking of those incessant frogs outside ensured that no sleep was possible for a city dweller who deemed traffic to be a purr when hearing the harangue of the jungles.
At one moment, he wanted the creaking ceiling fan that was turning incessantly to peel with the plaster so that the metallic arms might fall and embrace them both mincing them and this scene into pulp. At another moment, however, he thought about how good it was to be here with the distraction of another being on such a day as Father's Day, a day that diced people like him in the wistful sentiment of early family. That family had never been more than bits of stinking scraps of sweetness tossed out to his scoffed, kicked, and abused existence; but starved, emaciated dog that he at that time was, he had been given enough that was kind to keep the hateful experiences of childhood embedded in his head while reminding him that he was born one of a countless litter of dogs trashing the sidewalks of time. Dysfunctional families might be more prevalent in Thailand than most people believed but their members could ignore this fact unless they belonged to extreme cases, and under the "good deeds beget good deeds" philosophy of the Buddhists a wretch like him must have done something monstrous indeed to know nothing but the breaking of family. With virtually everyone paying homage to fathers and all genuflecting to majesty there was such loneliness for members of extreme cases on such a day.
Telling himself that he should not treat the intimate stranger with indifference, he half-slapped, half-clasped, the foot of his companion as though shaking hands with him. It was a gesture no less awkward than any of his other tepid nonsexual attempts to relate to him and came from a nervousness at parting from his masculine ways and returning to effeminate ones, and from thrusting his will to allowing himself to be a pawn to the will of another. Then he returned to the freedom of darkness and silence.
If by this encounter he profaned his wife, if she were still anything other than proscribed by legal document alone, so be it. If his actions were adulterous, it seemed to him that, as they were undertaken in sport, they were mildly so (his brain, being a large circular mass had thoughts that went around in circuitous orbits as if nothing were ever resolved) and thus his private parts were not to be circumscribed to pacify the jealous instincts of women who long ago in antediluvian pre-history feared the loss of a provider. If ethical, he told himself, a man should be mildly self-restrained allowing some movement of the libertine, without allowing all actions and thought to degenerate to appetite alone. This was logical restraint.
26
To be male: to have this perennial sexual appetite and its feasting for pleasure, dominance, and self-preservation; and the release of such the surfeit of tension through the explosion of liquid shrapnel; a discharge all the stronger and more accurate for the apparatus not having been used for some time; potent and inimical fertilizing springs like long suppressed geysers shot out potential life through nature's hand and bidding but as such arsenal all the same; live weaponry shot from a missile launcher that could not be said to be possessed or manipulated by any other force than that of the given man himself, a being who with enough experimentation was eventually cognizant of sexual relations as an illusion of intimacy and yet was pressured beyond restraint nonetheless by urges and promptings of appetite and titillation and for personal sensation that might awaken a sense that he could be more than the tedium of whatever redundant tasks he was assigned as work that provided him with sustenance, or free of monetary bondage altogether, to break from the vacuity of his shell (earlier, both of them had stepped into the room only to sit down on edges of the bed in an awkward state where words were nascent, catatonic wisps of air, stillborn fetuses of pneumatic thought, decomposing on lips; and at this time, before a removal of articles of clothing in which all was removed except the fear of the unknown euphemized as moral conscience, he would have been disingenuous had he told him to leave… now, however even with not having had any sexual satisfaction of his own from this encounter he could tell him to go and mean it as with him gone he would be free to go himself and how difficult could it be just to state what was really in the foremost part of one's mind, to unfold and spread out one's will upon the second of its mental conception as one would in deliberately casting his reflection onto waters and with the sincerity and tackless artlessness of a child?… and if this potential utterance of candor were done, articulate albeit lacking an adult's sophistication for subtle and separate, antithetical layers of that which was said, logically meant, and yearned for, this triple entendre of politeness and deceit, he would find it liberating to be such a simpleton but he was unable to say that which he meant so all that he could do was to lie and prevaricate…he could attest that as it was Father's Day he needed to leave and see his own family (who would believe that someone of forty would not have one), that shortly there would be a reunion in which he and his wife would surprise his father, (dead as he was) by showing him their infant grandson… but then for such words to be plausible, he would have to be here in Nongkhai with a wife instead of as a single, solitary traveler; he would have to be in a more domestic setting than a guest house for foreigners and their whores; and in a coupling other than wet, fetid nakedness with another male…to be hypocritical enough to even say such a thing, how could he be thought of as anything but a middle aged man who did not know whether to fire or be fired upon, or if an experience was to be enjoyed or feared, a child ignorant and uncomfortable in self and the world at large, which, questioning everything as he did, he supposed that in actuality he was); attractions made all the more so by the magnetic pull of some vague feeling that was a composite of odors, sights, voices, attention, and interaction which seemed to emit and reek of the diminished, mostly forgotten blur of early family; to be so possessed by that which was long ago that it should be the conduit and thrust of succulent sexual truculence, and yet not know the specific memories that were behind it all.
In this present circumstance of not only failing to satisfy himself but existing as an obsequious and passive body there to be manipulated by another what he had done, this effeminate role that he had engaged in, was of this male instinct and yet a clear aberration of it. Only months earlier he had been a sequacious adherent of it as an incorrigible womanizer, and yet now his actions were more impotent than a misfiring and his manhood was debunked by being sodomized.
Still, by becoming something less than a man did it not allow him to reemerge as a human being? Such was to be hoped for when witnessing that the limited self in art and in life could not change the world for the better and that, in the race to make a success of himself before his short time on the planet expired (money and fame sought and pursued relentlessly after a youth debased in poverty and abuse), his sensitivities hardened so that now he could bypass a beggar on an overpass without giving a baht or feeling much more than an instant of empathy or compunction.
It was his hope with this sojourn to the sister cities of Nongkai and Vientiane to resurrect himself. He thought about how different he was from the boy who would extricate trapped insects from a window sill. He was losing bits of his humanity all the time with every assertive darting walk through the crowded sidewalks of Bangkok.
In certain ways it seemed that in the deviation from normal instinctual male drives he was becoming free of pretensions of being anything more masculine than a mere man, a vulnerable, needy creature who often articulated a wish for an extension of manhood and an introvert's desperate need for at least a minimal physical connection to fellow man, although in his case now it was an encounter with a male who looked like his brother, Kazem at 18 when he was 14. Just as that which was past was ineluctable memory and stored in him still, and this storage of the replicas to the incidents of his life could never be made right as it was all distant and unalterable and as feral as brothers running along the banks and sand bars of the Chao Phraya River, he would always be under impulses to avoid the painful past by clogging his mind in amusements or urgencies of interaction with other beings. And for whatever activities he might devise as distractions from his thoughts, fears of the vacuous nature of existence would always be man's ineluctable truth, and without agenda vacuous truth was his in excess.
If his thoughts were a quagmire what else would they be especially in this room and in this uncomfortable company whom he would not part with so easily?.. could not part, or part assertively, as doing so would be rude not only to the stranger but to himself as well since, like it or not, this surrogate brother, this lover, was a distraction from being without family on Father's Day and to some degree he needed him or he would not have had him here.
He existed in memories as all of his experiences in the days of his life were nothing other than past incidents; and so for those who reproached a man for living in the past (as that beautiful nurse at Siriaj Hospital had done after overhearing him talk in his sleep—a woman who despite this scolding might heal his brokenness yet were her number saved on a sheet of paper instead of into a telephone that did not have the possibility of being retrieved from the trash receptacle at the train station) they at least meant well by their errant intrusions on such bitter sweet memories. If only mandates to turn off memory like tap water were so simple then he would not be seeking to rehabilitate recalcitrant corpses that refused to decompose.
Here confined to this room as long as the intimate stranger remained on the bed, there was at least thick textured darkness and silence that for him provided an inscrutable sense of comfort, a vast open sky and sea where a solitary man could find some liberty in his ruminations like a child enamored by the flexible manipulations of his body while at the same time obscuring how constricted he was within both the room and the company. Thus it was the only blanket that he had. Still he knew that he could not stay despondent forever and judged that it was time to once again speak. He asked, "What is your name again?"
"Boi."
"Boi?"
"It's a nickname."
"Yes, of course it's a nickname. It's just that when I was coming here I met someone on the train who was also calling himself that. I guess it is often used around here."
"Maybe."
"You're from here?"
"Where else would I be from?"
"Couldn't you be from somewhere else?" Nawin chuckled more warmly than a snicker but what came out was still a fusion of both.
"Poor people don't change to better locations. They remain trapped where they are. What is Bangkok like?"
"You've never seen it?"
"No except clips from television news."
"Polluted, congested, opulent and slummy; a mess [thinking but not saying, "all making it rife for nights not unlike this one"] but mess with promise."
"You don't like it there?"
"It has its moments. You surely know someone besides me who lives there."
"Why would I?"
"Okay, why would you?"
"What do you do there?"
"Nothing really…live, be."
"You dress fancy, live in a city and you don't do anything."
"Hard to explain, but essentially that's right."
"You a rich businessman?"
"Artist."
"Artist?"
Nawin laughed and gesticulated an artist drawing something.
"From a background of rich businessmen. Noodle workers. Dirt poverty. But if you work hard, have talents, use them commercially and invest wisely Bangok or any other large city can liberate a man." He resented even having to divulge this and kept asking himself why the man did not leave and why when the communication of bodies, the illusion of intimacy, had passed, he and this man or any two people were compelled to forage for scraps of words to assemble a bridge of ideas that would link them, two distant and alien islands. Words merely verified the fact that their intimacy was a mirage.
The activity had ceased, the pleasure had been brought to him and had been his alone. All that there now was, was anti- climactic small talk. He told himself that a good guest would show his gratitude by getting dressed quickly and making a swift departure so as to not inconvenience Him. He told himself that all he needed to release from his lips were two basic words: please go.
He thought of the pejorative word, 'elderly,' that the intimate stranger had used against him and resented his presence even more. As bantering as the intent of this word might have been it seemed particularly offensive on a day after his own birthday and a Father's Day at that. True, he was much older than the teenager (he glanced at the face; it was a perfect fusion of boy and man; smoking its cigarette and creating a synthetic fog of smoke onto his life). Only by contrast to the other one's youth would he think of himself as old and then he was not merely old but old as the hills and with so many memories to be excavated therein. It was merely feeling and perception and it meant nothing. It was a mere feeling like all feelings, mirages really. Even family could seem for a time like "solid ground" until one witnessed it become a series of vapors. It was he who had chosen to be with someone so young so if he felt old to be near him. It was a problem of his own making and he told himself that he could not blame anyone other than himself for the boy had not materialized in this dark room on his own.
And of this being used for his sperm and disposed of, he had unwittingly bastardized his own offspring unto the world, one more illusionary human form, a piece of himself, which he might never see again. But as Buddhists say the world is an impermanent place.
After Kimberly's suicide, and the loss of "stable" human presences he judged that being reminded of his age was particularly impudent and ruthless. At worst, he was middle aged and even that should never have occurred nor should it ever occur to anyone of such a youthful profession. A person like him, a womanizer and painter of uniformed school girl prostitutes and pathetic tramps, an artist with conscience about the exploitation of those he was exploiting, should stay young forever. How flawed nature was in this and every other respect.
"Still you can't exactly be rich, I guess, to stay in places like this."
"I suppose not," he said while thinking a contrary idea altogether. One could, for behind fenced areas of expensive Malaysian beach resorts, on lounge chairs of grassy acreage, in the shade of palm trees, there with waiters beckoning him with cocktails, parachute rides at various intervals in the day from fast moving boats as exhilarating as being born, luxurious rooms and ensuing business class flights back home with champagne on his tray, he, the retired artist, had tried affluent ways before and they were all stale to him. A guest house or even a night under the stars with the base of a stupa as his pillow would be preferable.
"Maybe you just like guest houses in foreign areas or something." Nawin did not say anything so the youth continued. "If you are trying to hook up with a foreigner why did you choose me?"
"Why you? I don't know—to see what it would be like not that I care to…what did you say?.. hook up with someone?"
"Yes."
"Well, I don't. Besides, it is really best to give oneself to a discipline of study, the sciences or the arts, which will always be there—smart men give themselves to knowledge at least in some small way—building stability around ideas instead of changing people. People can just twirl around their feet like empty bags blowing in the breeze, amusing for some minutes, gone, and forgotten."
"So, for you I am an empty bag blowing in the breeze?" the boy asked and laughed. Nawin did not say anything and then they fell into silence as thick as the lifeless darkness which governed them.
"Someday I'll go there."
"Huh?"
"To Bangkok."
"Then go," said Nawin indifferently. He was meaning more the boy exiting to his home than a departure from Nongkhai that could link the youth to him as inextricably as blood sucking ticks or bacteria and the ensuing infection gained from a water monitor's mouth (these crocodilian reptiles, frequent inhabitants at the Nakhon Pathom campus at Silpakorn University).
"Who would I stay with. I don't know anyone there except you."
"Do you live with your parents?"
"Yeah."
"What do they do?"
"Mother's a nurse, father's paralyzed. The story goes that soldier's thought he was one of a group of drug smugglers coming across the boarder and shot. He's been that way since I was young."
"You don't like it—staying with them?"
"Working part time at the Seven [Thai for 7-11] and then taking care of him so that she can go to work? Hardly."
"You won't stay there forever. Everything passes." He was half thinking about the strawberry and jasmine garden at his mother and father's home that he loved so much in his boyhood, of hawking jasmine rosaries in streets within stalled traffic and strawberry drinks in transparent plastic cups from sidewalks. He was thinking of the words mother and home that a child thinks of as permanent as the sun.
27
Despite, if not because of, the wind and rain and this room being on the third floor of the guest house, he could nonetheless hear, he supposed, the growls, vicious howling, and snarling with hissing rolls of saliva (perhaps imagined; after all, his aim had initially been to drive to the sea, to see and hear the harmonic continuum of wave upon wave slamming its froth against the shore, and yet it had been an aim that could not be achieved with one arm in both cast and sling nor even facilitated via train or bus to Phuket, Pattaya, or Cha-am with all tickets sold out for the holiday) of two dogs in the parking lot: noise that they directed at each other or perhaps really toward darkness itself. Novel and urgent utterances to them, it was part of myriad redundant and inconsequential skirmishes in the existence of canines that would continue perennially to the specie's extinction. Malnourished strays with furless spots that they probably were, they, for being in ineluctable misery and unable to understand the fates that they were subjected to, could merely rail against shadowy form and the paucity of distinguishable matter in darkness and project their antipathy against members of their kind that were most vulnerable to the insulting tones of their wordless vitriol, soft targets from which to measure having an impact of their latent screams. These other animals were microcosms that were composed of the same appetites and temperaments as man whose larger but negligible intelligence was scarcely able to break the force of most waves that inundated the tenuous levee of rationality which was supposed to deliver one from innate, instinctual chaos.
The paramour blew his clouds of smoke into the darkness like mist floating above a noxious lake and this lethal haze hid the nocturnal snake that was attached to his form, making obscure all that Nawin had been able to see in the darkness. And yet if nothing really existed more than mere supposition that it was so, surely emotions should not even be accredited with the supposition of reality. If he had more will, he told himself, it would not seem so disconcerting that he, injured and aloof in tragedy, had chosen this ersatz of taking a man over a woman to this particular venue. Was it really an ersatz at all? In terms of intimacy and reproduction, it was; and yet in terms of this bit of wrestling, this sport, it was pleasure and pain that was distinct from all others to which he might as well ride or be ridden and learn to enjoy its inconsequential levity the way one preferred male rivals in matches without scrutinizing whether or not it was fair to exclude women from such sport. It was pleasure and pain which made him feel more alive in his numbness.
And if from this manhood he was so easily toppled so be it. Who was to say that such a tenuous, artificial structure of shoddy construction was worthy of being had if it continually needed to be propped up with extra 2x4s of heterosexual experiences as reinforcement, and that one would not become more of a human being to be less of a man? This, he told himself, this was merely a borrowing of youth and beauty to compensate for the years of a slight diminishing of both, and this wearing it for a time, was not homosexual overall, any more than, from time to time, wearing a costume in bed to accentuate an aspect of the self heretofore surreptitious was complete madness (how august he was in the pointed crown; how apposite it was by the catalyst of obdurate orbs of arrogance and a slight pushing of a given woman's head downward that she should fall to his feet before subtly raising from the kow-towing gesture to become his subject in an osculating worship of his body).
Then there was the sudden screeching of one of those animals in pain; and although its movements were neither seen nor heard, from its receding and diminishing cries, its scampering could be perceived through the imaginative compensations of the mind which concocted the plausible the best that it could when lacking sensory indicators to address the uncertainties of reality by prompting understanding and action, if not verisimilitude, that had a higher probability of being right. On the bed he was experiencing a slight bout of melancholy as though reproaching himself for his infidelity, not that his adulterous adventures had bothered him all that much in times past. And while recognizing the absurdity of a belated attempt to be circumspect now when this untoward, alien exchange had come and gone with whatever fodder and fuel had been essential in the incendiary night he still felt a wariness that dark instinctual craving should pull him toward an insidious happening. In ways it was to him as though this sexual encounter had not yet occurred and were it to happen would be of importance to the world at large, so he inanely felt, concerning an interaction that had already taken place.
He listened but did not hear anything outside but the occasional howling of traffic and wind. He concluded that this particular union in another species of animal had been cleft into fractious bits. To him it was another reminder of the passing away of life's myriad social interactions and the respective parties so engaged. Salient and engrossing society of the moment would always be replaced with the eternal purity of silence were it not for the desperate need to seek meaning and ascribe significance to the interactions of man. When existing on a cold planet in the grandeur of the black but light-speckled universe with its surfeit of random stars and a plethora of void, what could humans do but cling to each other for warmth and attribute, meaning and merit in this desperate coagulation? Thus there was the noise of clanging men, boisterous merry making, and adhesion of like to like not that he, an artist, or he, a man in grief, saw himself cognate with anyone or anything.
For a loner, interruptions of the human mind, noisy as it was, were less of harangue than all the interaction exuded in doing a job and fulfilling one's minor role in society (in his case that of a prurient artist or an artist of prurience and when not on sabbatical, an overburdened Silpakorn University art survey lecturer at that, roles which had surely been replaced by younger and less effete male artists than himself) were only bearable in short durations. As the shallow and gregarious needed a similar extension of themselves and could only stay inward briefly, so rich inward men and they who were plagued by grief could only make outward connections briefly especially when needing to be left alone to pick up the pieces of their lives. But he too was a being of his species and needed humans especially now. So he thought, for the man who had leisure and money to experience it all including the sense of ennui that was its corollary thought inordinately.
He was just thinking that despite the incessant competition for resources and self-worth within the societies of man and dog, a being needed to interact with its kind more than just for the snippets of time that were the totality of his particular interactions. How strange, he thought, that in tragic loss of significant others and an inveterate routine of pleasant association that such a person needed to interact more and yet interacted less. He told himself that after he completed his spiritual retreat (a retreat that would begin once the licentious one had ended) he would work part-time as it was dangerous not to do so with the identity, purpose, and sanity of man as tenuous as it was; that his actions here had no moral value, positive or negative, beyond any which he by his own volition, ascribed to them; and that it was no "sicker" being engaged in this liaison than choosing to sit next to the beautiful and thin rather than the fat and ugly on a BTS sky- train—one reminding him of vigor and the other weakness and infirmity. Physical intercourse when the mental bridges between the distant islands of man had all collapsed was best alloted to one in this imperfect world.
"If a man isn't functioning as one he shouldn't live. He shouldn't make anyone else live that way," said the youth.
Nawin coughed. "That's not a cigarette is it?"
The young man passed it over to his senior who smoked the cannabis, inhaling it fully. "Maybe that was what I needed too. Shouldn't live? Isn't that a bit harsh."
"I'm bad, aren't I."
"No. I think that anyone would feel that way; and if you tell yourself you are bad you will be finding yourself in a deeper fog. You'll be lost in guilt wrestling with yourself. Far better to feel hateful sometimes, appropriate times, and then refine the feeling into thought and understanding."
"What thought?"
"I don't know. It will come. Just accept your feelings as natural, not good but natural, and you'll see things clearer. He passed the joint to his friend."
"One day I'll go there."
"Where?"
"Bangkok. Will you take me?"
"No," said Nawin and the two resumed their silence. To really learn of a being instead of using one to smother the void in amusing noise was an edifying and exhausting endeavor of pure sadness not to be pursued by a man in grief, and he just wanted the intimate stranger to leave.
"She is unhappy—my mother. Lives dazed in a television when she isn't working or taking care of him" said the boy. It was superfluous knowledge that sprayed out with his spit into the cloud with no reaction. "I need to go," the intimate stranger said, and the words, cold as a BTS sky-train, traveled up the rails of his spinal cord in unexpected alarm. Reverberating hollow, the words almost seemed to ache as they battered the inner layers of the walls of his brain. Dogs with furless sores littering the sidewalks now did the same to his thoughts, deformed children begging in the streets pressed against his mind with weighty themes of injustice as had happened in the early days of arriving in Bangkok with his brothers, and he could imagine fruit, meat, and noodle workers at their carts disassembling their concocted makeshift restaurants and returning home weary and with stiff, aching limbs. He had yearned for these words so many times during and immediately after the pain ridden intercourse which had been a violation he had invited upon himself as a solitary old man might invite a society of gangsters and thieves into his home so as to hear human voices reminding him of family—voices other than his own.
28
The unseasonable thunder and lightning continued relentlessly. For a few minutes the paramour's naked physique, as his own, kept rematerializing more and more saliently before reverting subdued into passive darkness.
"You've never been there before, Really?"
"No, just seen glimpses of it from TV news. I want to go. Someday. Someday I will, someone will take me. Tell me what it is like."
"Hard to say. Each has his own reaction to it I suppose. I can't explain myself let alone ten million others. And when you live somewhere your habits are embedded in it There is nothing romantic or visceral: just day to day life."
"Don't you like it?"
"It has its moments, I guess."
It was a snippet of conversation copied and recopied and from it blurred in inaccuracies. It played repeatedly like a redundant song to a mind in or moving toward the void. It was a void created from fear of the loss of physical contact with this nameless intimacy whom he could barely speak with unless in semi-imagined, quasi-remembered dialogues of the mind.
"And you don't have an opinion?"
"Well, for me it's like walking through noxious clouds of car and bus exhausts and the more you walk through it the dirtier you become in everything and although you know it is not good, or know that it doesn't feel particularly good, externally, at least, it seems real and you find yourself doing more and more filthy acts to be in the heart of understanding life, becoming a true libertine. And even though enlightenment is found to be mostly endarkenment you know that you aren't pretending to live ideals taught to you out of bias and fear but the good and bad of what it really is, and appreciating it the best you can despite its imperfections. You feel the pulse of life and that from touching it, it has extended and altered you and, again, even though it isn't what you want from yourself—not idyllic or pure and it isn't what you really want to be—you know that you are not cowering within, making moral judgments on what you fear and don't understand.
Forgotten lines were filled in by imagination, the script amended for the insertion of earlier stifled thought, and there was true communion in place of circumspect utterances called conversation. It is that which is good for the fecundity of an artist's oeuvre, not nature and beauty. What else should he say: a modern world capital with the same poverty as its surrounding area and yet, condensed, it looks like it is more impoverished. When you can see them, I suppose, it would seem that on every block there are skyscrapers, malls, and dogs to the left and temples, dogs, and ghettos to the right, sidewalk restaurants and hawkers everywhere, but with world commerce and movement of a lot of people…fashion with smelly socks, so to speak… it is opulent and slummy… and if you don't harm anyone it is morally uninhibited and free…all making it rife for nights not unlike this one.
"Rife for nights not unlike this one? I don't know what you mean."
"I don't either, nothing, mai pen rai."
It reeled once again across his mind at the instant of watching the intimate stranger pick up his scattered clothes and go into the toilet.
"Go?," he asked loudly toward the closed door. "So soon? It won't be light for another two hours."
"Before she comes back," rejoined a somewhat muffled voice.
"Your mother?"
"My mother."
"And if you do not return right away."
"Then she'd pay for someone to take care of him until she returns from work."
"I see. You should not let that happen."
Then there he was again: fourteen or fifteen years old, holding hands with Noppawan in the anatomical museum. It was a day like many of that first summer together in which, extant among preserved, contorted bodies, the two oddities procured a brief but diurnal retreat away from the war of family and the indentured servitude that for him was inlaid and inextricable in the design allotted to impoverished sons and orphans. And there she was disappearing behind shelves of canisters containing fetal abnormalities and bloated testicles as though sickened by it all and yet returning to him from the toilet nonetheless with a ring braided in strands of her hair. On his finger as material branding in her being and then in gold her rings wedded him in empathy and friendship which they believed would last with the longevity of their symbolic tokens.
They had cared about each other so fully then: a strong feeling of euphoria beat and saturated them like a hard rain and a singular perception of the other as the extension, the heretofore missing half of the whole, possessed them. Was it love? He hesitated to use this word for to him it was delight in another and, for a while, even his mother found delight in her ambulatory dolls. Had they just given themselves over to the curator, stepped into a joint formalin filled glass casket, and drowned themselves there; wouldn't they have thought this engrossing form of felicity in another as perennial as eternity? Had they died together, neither of them would have known the dissolution of second families or the temporary nature of all human actions.
He returned from the bathroom fully clothed.
"Your belt is over here," Nawin said, pointing to the shelf."
"Okay," the intimate stranger said while taking it and sliding it around his waist like the way he might a girl's arm. To go, to leave, to not come again; could his sanity tolerate any more ruptures and departures? Still, wasn't it this which he wanted? It was and it wasn't.
Earlier he had thought about saying, "I'm not used to this sort of thing. I'm married so maybe we should just be together this one time" which might have caused him to say, "So I'm the bad one. You brought me up here mister." And paradoxically, as much as he feared losing him at this moment in time, he wanted to say it now but it was impossible to say such a thing with him so eager to go. As unperceivable as it was from his stolid, phlegmatic expressions, his thoughts were in a panic. He told himself that life was ever emerging stories on the skyscraper of man in a downtown that was modernizing and changing faces; he told himself that to feel so disconcerted by a being whose proper name he had not even cared to learn was absurd. He said these things to himself but he felt he was rolling toward the precipice of disconnectedness. He told himself that as taxing as it was in his state of mourning to converse with another being he could have tolerated conversation and interlocutor for a time and that had he made him feel less like an imposter, perhaps he could have had a cherished companion from which to ride out some delicate hours. It seemed to him that other people did not think so much. They socialized and made friends without noticing it as clinging to others for meaning that it was. They obeyed feelings and socialized naturally but for him he analyzed it and such unsavory behavior filled him with repugnance. It was far worse than his effeminate role in this intercourse of bodies which was pursued to gain intimacy when the intercourse of minds seemed so futile and perilous.
"I'll need money for taxi and everything."
"A taxi shouldn't be more than a hundred baht. However I've never seen a charge for everything."
"Well it isn't free."
"As it's everything, I wouldn't think it would be. How much?"
"Three thousand."
"You're out of your mind."
Nawin's eyes hardened against all screams of dogs and men, hustlers who sold their youth for as long as it lasted no different than any other marketable product, and against all life forms floundering helplessly like fish in nets.
"Don't look at me that way. Its for my father. Of anything I get, half will go to him and half so that I can leave. If you have it why shouldn't you give it to me. I let you escape your pathetic middle aged life for a while. Now you can help me."
"Well consumer beware, but it's certainly cheaper than being a benefactor providing college education to every creature who needs it."
"You didn't mean it."
Nawin heard him. He was silent for he did not know.
"See. And yet I am bad for needing."
"And I for having and not giving it away. Here." He pulled out his wallet from the drawer."
"Here's five thousand, ten times the going rate and my business card. Maybe my earlier offer lasted as long as my sympathy; maybe this time it is done so that I won't feel insincere in my earlier offer; maybe I will want to forget you as soon as you leave here; who wants to pay for sex or even give large quantities of money to a needy stranger when coerced to do so? Still, take the card. It has my address on it. Send me a detailed letter explaining logically where you want to study and why it is important for me to help you and maybe I will see the fairness in doing so. Besides it is more sincere than doing it out of feeling sad for you."
The intimate stranger flicked the card as though he were a primitive sensing music in the mundane but not knowing what to do with it.
"No, I won't contact you for that but I'll keep the card" which was short for "…because you're a good fuck and pay for it." Nawin then read his thoughts and the intimate stranger saw that he understood: he could set him up in Bangkok. It was the least he could do. He understood and said nothing for the boy reminded him of his brother and it was for this reason that he brought him here.
Nawin pulled out a hand full of raisins from a bag, slowly chewed each, and waited for belated exuberance and thanks until it occurred to him a minute later that it would not be forthcoming. "Want some," he asked but it did not garner a response. The youth picked up his bag and left as though he had never been, a testament to the insignificance of interaction.
As Nawin continued to eat the raisins, one at a time, it occurred to him that the real reason eating animals was wrong had nothing to do with maintaining the sanctity of life. The society of dogs was to them reality, and the world in an environment of oblique human presences. And as all creatures were myopic with similar perceptions and concluding sentiments their reality and world was in the social interaction of their species. As he would not wish to be the protein fueling their hegemony, why should it be thought that the innate value of pigs, cows, and chickens was to be domesticated so as to be easy viands of human consumption.
The society of man was no more real than that of dogs, he told himself. Society was a delusion of respective animals needing a greater external meaning for their lives; and yet, the Buddhist introvert that he was, he yearned for the return of this human presence until his head ached, he wished for the viand of his phallus, and he wanted the pain of being sodomized.
29
When perceived in terms of his proclivity for avoiding social interaction and for his loss, negligence, and failure at roles which he had once ascribed to himself—artist, womanizer, lecturer and that most ephemeral role of paternal ersatz who sometimes changed diapers so Noppawan could sleep—he, a god was relegated to an irrelevance equivalent to nothing. He knew this for it could not be otherwise with the world valuing action as much as it did, action which apposite, was too finite and inadequate a means for appraising an individual of his scope. And their interaction, he thought to himself in another strange supercilious thrust of validation beyond his grief, was pursued so fervently to evade an alarming and discombobulating sense of their own irrelevance for human creatures would have no sense of being alive at all were it not for witnessing the mobility of their shadows intermingling with other moving adumbrations. But cremated, the deceased did not cast shadows; and as exempt of people and roles as he was, his was definitely a figurative extinction. A retiree from the art of doing, a demigod who chose the reality of being marooned in his own thoughts, he stayed steadfast in the immobility of his empty shell, a state dearth of role and impetus. He, who was nonetheless human in his godhood, remained intrepid in trudging into this rather unbearable and disconcerting sense of the inconsequence of being. To look at nature, to melt into true being under a cloud by relinquishing one's grandiose claim as an integral being in the temporary and changeable interactions of man, to be exempt of role and its alleged significance on a small corner of contemporary society at best, and as a divine particle revere life as opposed to absconding from it through interaction, only a god would tolerate such torturous but exquisite enlightenment. His mission, the purpose of His trip, was to further Himself as deity by no longer needing to be confirmed by others as a presence on the planet, to no longer need to gain approbation through social interaction, and to find himself fully able to separate from craven mortals whose only sense of being came from doing and whose viscous neediness precipitated even more interactive clinging and all the concocted meaning therein. Deemed by serendipity and evolvement gained from his education to the status of demigod and no further than this, he could never succeed completely in self contained intellectual asceticism, for how could he retreat into the thickets of fecund solitude without becoming more and more desperate to rest his head on the pillow case of human flesh as he ran around in sinuous stretches circuitously lost in reason and emotion. Still, he would travel inward and explore what was there for as long as it was bearable. At least so he said in silent thought, with only partial belief.
The gecko, barely visible in the smoky fog of marijuana, reaffixed itself on a portion of wall above the night stand. It remained there above the clutter of archaic connections: a telephone that kept ringing—at least inside his head—and a post card on which he had merely written "Dear Noppawan, I hope that you've been well despite everything that happened" before striking two lines through the sentiment and tossing it back onto the night stand. And this diminutive animal deemed him to fall into the doom of those opaque, glassy domed eyes and he did fall as Kimberly had fallen through the metal and plastic awning of the swimming pool to be an eyeless corpse; he fell as any man would through tenuous self image at the loss of women of the present to the molestation of the past. Truth, if it existed, was a state that was sedentary; but movement was meaning and this man sought it. It was his emulation of the universe and it went straight forward even if sentiment caused it to bend and deviate slightly toward that which was past. So, he thought, avowing a new position entirely.
"No, that's not entirely true," said the gecko.
"No?" asked Nawin as he once more inhaled the smoke of his marijuana.
The gecko shook his head plaintively. Nawin understood: he had done fellatio, he had swallowed, and had subsequently allowed himself to be sodomized so that he might feign belief that, without anything to grasp in his empty hands, there was a permanent entity in the impermanence permeating his life and yet if humans did not have the delusion of sexual intimacies there would be no contemplation at all for an understanding of true being was brought forth in copulative intermingling. Despite the revelation, he felt rather lithe in his fog until the gecko metamorphosed into a man pointing at his genitalia. "You smoke me here. Me don't want smoke. You do. Foreign smoke, Foreign pays. Foreign give more money. Me seventeen. Me tell. You go to police."
He collected his thoughts the best that he could in his state of dreaminess and brief hallucinations in the dark, blowing mustiness of the confines of the empty room. He considered how quickly odd, erratic ideas could spill out onto all regions of the brain like paint from leaking tubes, mix grotesquely, amalgamate in beings, and spread their diminutive warped presence in insurrections begetting hegemonies of the mind. With this recent association and its disconnection pressing so fully onto his mind he could not stay here, the venue and embodiment of their activity together. It made his head ache worse than his buttocks, arm, and clavicle. The fact that one's DNA, one's sacrosanct blueprint, was disseminated randomly in ejaculations seemed to him inordinately peculiar; that it was emitted from an instrument of urination which when erect was a pistol of a sadist forcing his pleasure and will onto others a sickening but laughable peculiarity; still it made him so amorous that he could not restrain himself any longer and thus he masturbated and then took a shower.
Considering that if he were to check out formally he would have to confront smirking faces and laughter at the front desk once one of the housekeeping crew reported the soiled disarray of his sheets, he decided that he would not check out at all. He had paid for three days, so it was of no consequence. Abandoning the key on the bed, he left through the fire exit to avoid speaking to night attendants and all things human, and went out into the dark streets of Nongkai. Telephone booths seemed to call her name out to him and to a limited degree he wanted to enter one to converse with her, and would have done so (momentarily if she were to hang up on him or if for longer, it would be to engage with her with, hostilely or civilly, with the neediness of love or the indifference of a stranger, he could not predict) but for the aching reminder of the multiple bone fractures she had rendered unto him. With enough vibrations the china cabinet of a woman's heart would break and its varied fragments could not be organized let alone mended into some whole, such was the integrity of a man when ripped apart beyond suture.
It was later than he thought and for a few moments the emerging bristle of morning light was fused into a dark mound of cloud before attempting to surmount it in the struggle of a morning freeing itself to be born. The view was a layered mélange of golden crème and whisked effervescent void that was as succulent as taffy. He wanted to loiter in time and stare at it without blinking in the hope that constancy would keep it there unchanged. It was the same type of thought that had prompted him to stop painting altogether a few years ago, and now he could hardly remember the feel of a paint brush in his hand.
He got into a tuk-tuk and asked the driver to take him to the Buddhist Sculpture Garden. The first movements of the three wheeled vehicle made him shudder and utter equivalent interjections.
"Yes, it's cold!" said the driver who was wearing a jacket and shorts, "That odd rain in winter! I met you before, didn't I?" yelled the mirrored mouth through wind and the roar of the motor.
"I'm from Bangkok. I wouldn't think so," yelled Nawin even louder.
"Sure I have. At the train station. The train officer had me give you a message."
"Oh that's right. The telephone number."
"Did you make the call?"
"No. I'm an artist, so people always give me their numbers hoping I'll pay them to model. I guess that's what it's about. I don't know. Anyhow, thanks again." It was close enough to the truth without the tedium of details for one who was a stranger to him and needed no more than a stranger's cordial trifle.
"No problem," said the driver. "You looked sick when I saw you there squatting on the ground."
"Train sickness I guess. Sickness of everything generally" offered Nawin with a feigned chuckle.
Near the sculpture garden was a 7-11 and he bought some coffee, milk, and a box of corn flakes, sat down amidst purposeful and less temporary form, and ate the cereal from the box as he had when he was five years old in America. To be here in so much empty space among stone carvings and to be the only one around appealed to him. If nothing else having been abused gave him this: the desire to pour color on paper and entertain himself alone, self-contained, in any empty space he could find. However, this solitary behavior was only pleasant for a few hours and then self-containment seemed particularly vacuous and the blessing a curse. He read a book on Etruscan art for a few hours before his already aching buttocks began to hurt from the position on the ground. He got up, swallowed some pain killers for his arm with no assistance but his saliva, and waited for a bus to take him back to Nongkhai. A kiosk selling soft drinks, Buddha statuettes, and cotton candy was already open. In front of it at one table was a typical jasmine rosary salesman who also sold balloons, some of which he blew up and shaped into replicas of Hindu and Buddha emblems, and others he inflated with helium.
"How many helium balloons would it take to float a lightweight piece of metal into a different county or country for that matter?"
"I don't understand you. Do you want some balloons?"
"Yes. I would think six should suffice."
Nawin bought them, removed the stifling wedding ring from his hand, tied it with the six strings, and released the gestalt of colored rubber, metal, and diamonds into the airy realms of the unfettered and the lost.
30
Within this ambivalence how was he to know that his obdurate stance would not crack and that he would not relent, allowing neediness to surge over him like lava, incinerate him and heave residuals homeward? If he relented by calling her at a pay telephone booth and by a miracle fortuitous, dull, or moribund, he was made to believe that some type of reconciliation was possible as economic provider or more, it would be better that it were done there where he could buy a ticket immediately than to experience a breakdown of His integrity while stuck uncomfortably in Vientiane. Thus, as the sun pulled ever tighter over the hand of the world, memory seemed to encompass him tighter than the burdensome wedding band ever had, and having played in the wounds of old intimacies it now seemed like the desperation of an old man opening his door to strangers. Preferring to allow the possibility of being murdered than to continue in the meaningless domicile of his empty shell, he told the tuk-tuk driver to take him to the train station instead of the border.
It was a cold ride to this area where a day earlier his debased posture had no doubt alarmed train officials that here was someone, who if not a southern terrorist, was suffering from a nervous breakdown on government premises (and yet were it not so, and to most Euro-American foreigners it would not be with the day's temperature for them equivalent to a balmy spring day, still by Thai accounts as well as his own, it was a frigid morning with moments of impaling breeze that made the dogs in the corners of parapets surrounding temples shiver and his blood run cold; but then, as he had already ventured out without anywhere in particular to return to, the peripatetic libertine continued with the journey, tolerating the blowing inundation of wind like one holding his breath until arriving at the train station.)
There was only one ccurse, the forward course in which a supernova would eventually devour the Earth like a piece of kindling wood, and so he walked to the junction that was on the border—the right side of the road an entry point to Thailand, the left, eventually, to Laos (specifically, he kicked a rock repeatedly for several hundred yards until losing it, skidded and etched lines into the mud with his feet, eventually moving west to the intersection that was the border—the right an entry into a land not of his birth and inhabited predominately by philistines who suffered from a lethargy no different from other denizens of warm societies under the mesmerizing intensity of the sun—the left an entry into an altogether insular and comatose nation). Obtaining a Laotian visa for a thousand baht; another payment albeit a nominal one, he stood on a small bus like a Siamese twin conjoined to eighty or more bodies, all going in the same direction, each having his or her own objective as he did albeit the others surely with more clarity than he had. He took a bus ride with myriad others across the Friendship Bridge of the Mekong river, filled out his entry card at this extended checkpoint, his passport eventually being stamped in a line of waiting and moving but seemingly going nowhere, he paid a new monetary charge, the cryptic exit fee then shared a tuk-tuk for a forty minute ride to the city, sometimes witnessing exaggerated gestures and hearing jocular comments about how cold it was from Laotians and Thais, some in both shorts and hooded jackets, though not from westerners who didn't seem to suffer any distress outside of blowing strands of disheveled hair. He bypassed fields and water buffalo, feeling the exhilaration of the wind, cold as it was, and suffuse with a sense of regeneration he sensed the present immerse him whole into its prodigious depths and believed he was traversing into something new which would whitewash his negative memories in amnesia. Arriving in the city of Vientiane, that little bit of Paris with a lot of dirt that wind occasionally scraped and twirled as if it were a field, he observed a department store (arguably more than a hybrid of store and barn with its outlying outdoor market), morning monks with emaciated frail bodies seeking alms in tawny saffron robes soiled in Laotian dust, businessmen receiving the laying on of hands and the wai in the hope of making their lives propitious, two school girls in blue uniforms on a bicycle, more motorcycles than cars but more of both with each moment of the waking morning, and a man pulling a food cart on the side of the street. Nawin looked directly into the man's incarnadined, sun burnt face and his furrows of coarse wrinkling skin, and the old man, though abashed, grinned and nodded once as if grateful that the younger man not only acknowledged his existence but saw his worth in it. Neither sunrise nor sunset was as beautiful as this.
It had been a similar acknowledgement three years ago that had been the catalyst of his self declared quasi-retirement. He had gone on sabbatical from Silpakorn University to get a doctoral degree before realizing that scholarly pursuits were inimical to creativity (not that he was attempting to create anything at that time) and that these simultaneous states of mind if not joint ventures would be deleterious to each other. They were wasted years if measured in action and accomplishment but constructive in terms of disassembling pretensions and so it did not matter.
Now he was able to repudiate the grandeur of self unflinchingly. Extirpating himself of those institutions and beings that facilitated the feeding of his instinctual neediness, departing from his nation and the circumscribed roles which he had there, and having relieved himself of hungers for food and sex earlier this morning, he was now able to appreciate of the sfumato of society and nature and could just be…Just be! What a romantic he was: at least so he chided himself. Unfathomable suffering existed under the most lush of lives. It was beneath every superficial, jovial exterior, and to think that in a land probably without much of that exterior layer he would experience any enlightenment beyond encounters with deeper veins of suffering than any he had experienced heretofore seemed preposterous. Just this morning after the prostitute had given Nawin an indignant look and then had gone away leaving him there alone in his pile of clothes, he could not, for some minutes, even fasten the buttons on his shirt so overcome was he with suffering. It had seemed so acute and pervasive in all beings and all matters that he, a forty year old man, did not know what to do other than murmur ever so quietly, "meh" (mother). He had wanted the resurrection of that woman who had not only looked away as the abusers did their dastardly deeds but made him out to be the culprit who had instigated it all. He had called out for her like a child hoping that she would lead him back to beginnings of chasing balls and butterflies. He had yearned for a state of innocence in which he would be ignorant of sexual jostling from instinctual hungers and but not of the love that was the conception of all animal life. He had wanted this resurrected "meh" to end the suffering which permeated the lives of all things and to make knowledge and understanding more than vicarious suffering. Perhaps he was too sensitive for this world but here he was and so, to use an Americanism, he needed to see things through "rose colored filters." Thus his first impression of Vientiane Laos was that of an intricate tapestry of life. All he had to do to appreciate it was to simply open his eyes by abjuring agenda and accomplishment and melting into true being.
31
Everywhere he went there seemed to be metallic signs on poles to power lines. Each sign was in the international language of pictorial symbols and each illustration the same: a sinuous electrical current striking a stick figure that fell back as though electrocuted. He could have detoured to an area along a different stretch of road and walked elsewhere where there were not these signs of warning were it not for his proclivity to continue walking on such a narrow sidewalk in which a stumbling foot could cost him his life. There was a definite morbid curiosity and courting of death in his actions, his feelings elated by travel to someplace new, but his thoughts were macabre and fixated on the vicissitudes and impermanence of one's life, the attempts to belie those with money, property, family, and notoriety as if one could solidify one's effluvial existence to a statue's, despite the permanent inevitability of one's demise. Knowing this, and rich enough that he did not need to work another day in his life, nor as corollary become obtuse to this truth by engagements in mundane routine, he was not sure what to do with himself. Other men were also used for sperm and as economic providers to family but they saw their sons who grew with the years and whose growth would measure how far they had degenerated into the years, mirrors to see aging, ghastly, and lackluster reflections of themselves (for him, he would never see his son again, or at least that was Noppawan claimed on that day she battered him with an iron frying pan, not that he necessarily wanted to see his time on the planet in the hour glass of a changing boy). Likewise, they had their roles as procurers of meat so that their women might enjoy playing with live dolls (for him whose investments made money unto themselves he could be of no personal use to family even if allowed back into it, and when was a man included in the joys of child rearing anyway?).
His cheek inadvertently brushed against an extended vine of green bananas dangling above the sidewalk near a French colonial building used by a Laotian government ministry. Although a normal, reflexive reaction would have been to feel startled especially after having noticed the signs and fearing the next touch of the unknown to be his ineluctable death, he just smiled. If fate, the God of all Atheists, had deemed it a pole of a power line instead of bananas that his cheek had touched, him electrocuted, stricken down to sear the ground with his incinerating fall it would be of no major significance to anyone but himself if even that; furthermore, he thought, continuing to synthesize more ideas to remain stimulated and happily self- contained in his own company, this second of consciousness being irrevocably extinguished might be a rather pleasant experience despite its brevity. In it he would be on an enlightened transit before the void swallowed him entirely, an omniscient second of wisdom in which egregious Buddha-gods and heaven-and-hell aberrations of the ideas of the Buddha, who surely was not a buddhist, would be known to not exist. To know something with absolute certainty beyond the realm of supposition (like the amount of love a bludgeoning spouse once had toward him, the degree of selfishness and altruism that constituted emotion and cognition, and so much else unknown to him) would be particularly refreshing after a lifetime spent in the glimmers of truth. It would be as refreshing as those times that as children, he and his pauper brothers stripped to their underwear and from piers dove into the Chao Phraya River to escape the blistering heat of April.