The surprise of bananas brushing against his cheek made him smile wryly—smile at witnessing a banana tree in the heart of a city, smile wryly as the surprised encounter was imbued in the rustic as well as the bucolic, and thus was both repulsive and quaint. Understanding it to be both made him postulate that in a broader sense every given entity or event was rarely one attribute exclusively but the polarity of two antithetical thoughts. Even the calcifying antipathy and repugnance toward sex, which were now steadily building up inside his mind were at times stymied in ethereal fantasies of burnishing the silky leather of human flesh and a hunger for beauty that suddenly came over him like a consuming and growing flame before being subdued and partially extinguished in the gravity of his all- too-human thought, which wanted reality even more than fantasy the best it could find it. Glancing at clothed buttocks, covered thighs, and other appendages of a female here and a male there, it was as though his constitution could mutate from solid to vapor at random despite human will. This was what he gleaned from his cheek brushing against a bunch of unripe bananas while journeying onward with sights and sounds satiating consciousness, sketching impressions of the mind that one could only appreciate in foreign travel.
Closer to the market there were numerous people in a row like sequacious ants, all seeking bits of a distant morsel, but unlike ants these people sought for themselves and, even here, with their wallets as feelers. A few minutes later he was among them, eventually buying a dangling earring for a left lobe, a solid gold necklace to adorn his swarthy complexion so that the deep dirt and poverty that he once was remained hidden from himself and from anyone whom he encountered, and a pocket pc/cellular telephone, which he needed but had no occasion to use. In the outdoor market he watched someone seated on a small couch at a kiosk under a huge umbrella, get a tattoo. He wanted an eagle tattooed on his biceps and to other regions as well to demonstrate that he was as an apostate, Nawin of Thais, but the conditions here did not look urbane or sterile, and he backed away until he was in a parking lot filled with tuk-tuks.
A conventional two seater took him to a temple with his traveler's guide gospel in one hand and suitcase in the other. It was a temple, outside of which a sign informed readers that the building, which appeared more like an attic and junkyard than a museum and temple, once housed the Emerald Buddha. He stayed inside wandering around various sized wooden and stone buddhas dating back to early periods in history and as such often having parts of arms and faces missing from their dilapidated forms. There, relaxed, he melted into true being.
It was good to be there unfettered of obligations to others, and with no whore to distract him from keeping the deeper self company of his ruminations. He was synthesizing some peculiar notion he only half grasped (something to the effect of "a person comes into the world for no apparent reason; perspectives mutate in changeable physical existence; a person's ideas change due to the changes around him, changing so as to withhold some level of verisimilitude to which sanity is entirely dependent…" ) when the women of his life suddenly came upon him unexpectedly. Others might have thought exhibitions of buddhas would be of interest to all foreigners and especially to someone like Kimberly who was an accomplished amateur sculptor herself, and yet he knew that Noppawan would have enjoyed it more. Unable to share the experience with her, what could the mind do other than impose a facimile? Many times he almost believed that he was really pointing out smaller statuettes hidden behind the larger and more salient ones and that she was going to them, thoroughly examining each one that he pointed out to her like a collector of religious antiquities. How odd that he was so close to releasing words from his lips as if she were really there. No, neither homosexual encounter nor this sending of a wedding ring into oblivion had freed him from memories.
Another tuk-tuk outside the gate of the museum; another blue cockroach driver eager for twenty baht (this one specified that he wanted Thai baht and not Laotian kip)—and, once agreed upon, a quick trip to the communist history museum. Inside there was an archaeological exhibit which he skimmed briefly. Noppawan knew so many inordinate details for it to be of interest to her, and for Kimberly it had always been amusement parks, French wine, and Debussy and Ravel performances at the Thai Cultural Center. But in one corner on the second floor, near the staircase, there was an assortment of traditional clothing that he knew she would have enjoyed seeing and he wanted to take her in his arms, behind that particular exhibit, and impart a visceral kiss, which if unable to pump the air of life back into her would at least convey how dear she was to him before the return to the great beyond which was in fact cessation and vacuity. She was not alive so what could the mind do but resurrect her or something like her briefly? It could do nothing else. Traditional instruments were in one far corner but most of the museum seemed to be a diatribe without words, a deprecatory pronouncement against Siam, French, and American imperialists in photographic images, uniforms, and guns. The museum was more of an anti-imperialist manifesto than a communist one and partitioned walls made court rooms for evidence and indictment. Being a Thai-American with a girlfriend who had been French, his was a triple indictment—at least so he postulated to himself humorously.
He could have gone to the States, the land of his birth. Not knowing anyone there would not have deterred him. In boyhood, each day before fulfilling his indenture as a poor son he would wake up early and leave the house so that for a half an hour, diluted under a cloud in some empty area along the river, he could become little more than the nonstop movements of serving food. Loneliness was not something that he was so desperate to lose. He could have gone there and procured a second set of x- rays and a second opinion from an orthopedic surgeon in Los Angeles or elsewhere. A second set of x-rays was rarely taken in Thailand, and so if he had to have a practical reason for returning to the United States this could be one. He had plenty of accessible money for his travels. Not all of his money was in joint accounts for he was too knowledgeable of the changeable tectonics of family to believe that joint ventures of any kind were lifelong. He might have gone there to travel for a period of months without having to work at all. To melt into the prodigious Grand Canyon, and to have it melt into him would be well worth any expense he incurred and it had always seemed to him that if he went far enough and long enough he would be out of the pale of memory. That too would be a practical benefit. However, it was a haughty land of religious zealots who believed its hegemony was a mandate to dictate world affairs, its growing military bases police boxes, its wars an extension of democracy and human rights, and its intolerance morality itself. It was foundering in its debt as a dying empire and the entire country sickened him.
But then, he thought, he himself was a reprobate and any moral pronouncements that he made would be hypocritical and ridiculous. Was he not living the disreputable life of the great Artist, Caravaggio? Maybe he just wished to be compared and contrasted to the man so that his work would seem to have some international and everlasting significance. Still, compare he would! As Nawin he was poor no longer, although under his former name, Jatupon, he had been that and more. He had not killed anyone—at least not deliberately; and it did not seem particularly Caravaggio-like to not have the intention. He was not a homosexual fleeing murder but a bisexual fleeing interconnectedness. These were mere incidentals that could be argued in various ways and they did not delineate a man. Both men had given beauty to the world and this alone surely disproved them as having disreputable natures, but then, how was he to know?
32
The drab stones of the stupa were probably erected in the nineteenth century and through the prodigious span of years, he thought, the unadorned city surrounded it in languid increments like the moss that had annexed its crevices. The encroachment no doubt diminished the distinct identity of the monument, making it less remote and secluded, like human life. That was what he thought, and it was a more concrete and definitive explanation than any other he could provide himself with. Of his own life, he did not know why he wanted to slip away unto himself as he did, to be forgotten personally as well as publicly, to be altogether expunged like the public persona of artistic decadence which he once maintained, and to be further ensconced under the blanket of himself if that were possible without suffocating to annihilation and oblivion. It was as mysterious as the primordial desire of sex, communion, and connection which had driven him spellbound into contact with the flesh of the paramour hours ago.
A block away, a part of the main street abutted this once silent area, fomenting it with traffic along a stretch of businesses catering to foreigners. There were guest houses and Internet cafes. Men were unloading a shipment of supplies to one of the closed bars. There were foreigners on bicycles, or coming in and out of souvenir shops, baguette restaurants, hotel rooms, and apparently Vientiane's only convenience store, or worse its only supermarket. A couple held hands whistling as they passed the monument for a side street in which, according to a sign, a guest house was located. It was noise which he disliked, as distant and muted as it was, but as inclined as he was to romanticize the quaint rusticity around him, he did not yet despise it. In the new environment, positive but neither overly elated or ebullient, he felt that the energy exuded around him belied the gravity of the consequences of action, as if the strutting movements of youth were not dances in a graveyard, when in fact the whole Earth was nothing but a necropolis, and any laughter which he heard seemed to scoff at his new disfigurement. Often tourists would come to the stupa posing for pictures at its base. They seemed to come only in pairs to compound the quasi-reality of the experience of foreign travel into something more solid, for as pairs the dopamine was doubled for these mundane presences, leaving him alone in deprivation within the capsule of the rocket of the mind. They came to this nameless rock, but as it was less of an attraction than That Louang; the few who came did not stay for long. The stupa was the same one pictured in his guide book, the same one he had thought of wistfully when he was on the train, and sexual inclinations had not been the entirety of his yearnings there-at least so he wanted to believe. In leaning against this particular stone relic towering above him, it was not that he was seeking to be a non-worldly aspirant feigning ignorance of a world of suffering masses kimberlying downward from one type of post-partum depression or another to which the gods were of complete indifference, or admitting as much, but that this deity or deities designated greater plans that entailed human suffering and tragedy. He did not want false repudiations of the human condition of suffering but acceptance of it so as to be transmuted into it so deeply that he could imagine the experiences of others more richly and would cease to take his allocation of suffering personally.
He was seated in the bit of grass that was there, his head leaning against this towering icon more uncomfortably than he thought it would, head remaining against hard stone, neck aching, and having to slap and decimate a second set of fire ants that got onto his book and into his sandals stinging his feet. He did not like this flawed design of species competing to sustain themselves and using him as the ammunition available to them so he scattered a piece of bread for some pigeons at his feet to perform an expiation. Thinking about this world of species, each trying to exist comfortably at the expense of others, he knew that there was no spirit in a being and nothing spiritual—just recognition of contentment in simple pleasures, the foundation for all tenuous others, which were not subject to life's vicissitudes. This was the only spiritual journey that a realist and atheist might undertake.
There was a puddle of water from the previous night's inundation of rain at one of his feet. He was inclined to seek his reflection a second time within it, and would have done so (especially since he had not even bothered to go into the bathroom to shave in front of a mirror, or take a shower, in his need to make a swift exit from the guest house) were it not so turbid, with a dark taffeta sheen no more able to reflect a gray hair, a wrinkle, or the doleful intensity of a sagging, aged countenance any more than seeing his diaphanous reflection in car windows. Whether or not he had gotten visibly older over these past twenty four hours, which had entailed a fortieth birthday on the train and a half catharsis/half reopening of the wounds of his abused youth by the intimate encounter with the paramour—a paramour who looked like his brother Kazem, or at least how he remembered Kazem so many years ago—was wasted speculation. One would not have aged significantly in such a brief time unless the paramour were God and he Moses. Still, he wanted a mirror nonetheless, for he knew that tragedy and grief had maimed and distorted him over the past few weeks. Obviously he was now taciturn, and disliked the cloying exuberance of youth that clawed against the concentrated walls of his deliberation, although deliberating what he could not say, as he sat there leaning his head against the stupa with eyes resting on the clouds, if indeed he was in a state of rest. And if he were so prison pent, he thought, a touch of those electrical poles would open up whatever portal Kimberly had gone into with him, with her disappearing into it and it disappearing into the oblivion of itself.
He was ruminating that love was not an actuality, but merely humans finding no exterior meaning and seeking solace and artificial meaning in each others company, when he was suddenly accosted by a Caucasian woman. She was middle aged, had sinuous black hair, and seemed attractive as best he could tell, as she was wearing a round brimmed white hat and dark sunglasses that covered some of her face.
"Pardonnez_moi pours vous faire savent le Francais?" she asked.
"J'ai étudié là pendant un certain temps. C'a été il y a des années," he said, "but you are safer in the international language. I was only in Paris for six months."
"Oh, then you are fluent, as French is the international language," she said with a laugh.
"No, the language of fucking is," he thought, startled by how close the words were to his lips. Had he spoken them he would have been truthful. His brief time under a scholarship grant had been more of sexual rendezvous than anything more substantive. It had been his language of choice as no one there seemed to want to speak in English. And had he spoken those words he would have released a belligerent inner burst of misogyny from a long dormant maternal source aggravated nowadays by his wife having beaten him with a skillet.
"What did you study there? French?"
"No, fucking," he thought but he held tightly to the reins of the tongue, his restive beast. He did not want to disparage another person for his own proclivities toward freeing himself of any female captors. He vented a sigh of relief for having managed to stay quiet and thought how close the words were to his lips before dissipating like everything else, and in this case leaving him defenseless against his good looks.
"Painting."
"Painting?"
"A grant…. It was a grant from your country—a cultural exchange with accomplished artists… I was one of the applicants who won." His words were slow and laborious as he wished not to divulge anything.
"How wonderful! A famous artist of this area. Are youLaotian?"
"I'm American," he said. It was the second most offensive word that he could think of.
"Are you here on vacation?"
"Yes," he said curtly, not bothering to reciprocate, and the two strangers fell into silence.
"I'm here with my sister," she spoke at last with less certainty than before." We were trying to find a royal palace. We saw a sign but got lost in some backstreets and did not know where we were going."
"Oh," he said. "Well, did you ask around?"
"Yes, but I guess Thai would be better than English."
"Yes, I suppose it would, but you don't speak it do you?"
"No but you do, don't you? It certainly would be great to go with someone who knows his way around, or even if you don' t; two women traveling together begin to argue if they are alone too much."
"You argue?" he tried to restrain his smile. He knew how his gentle and probing eyes of sustained interest and a luminous smile made women love him, and so he looked away.
"How old is your sister?"
"Forty. She's older."
"No sisters sixteen years old or younger?" It was the vilest set of words beyond 'fuck' and 'American' that could be spoken to a French damsel, and he was startled to hear them spill out of his mouth. It was a slap against women for losing their beauty with increasing years, and a shallow and blatant disregard of the inner worth of a being. It was chauvinistic and repugnant, and it got him what he wanted.
"No, no younger sister. I've got to go!" As she was leaving him, she suddenly stopped and turned toward him abruptly. "You are ugly and pathetic. You know why? You went to America and America took over your thoughts. You are Asian and yet just like those war criminals. Why don't you just leave here and go back to America or better just go to hell." Then there was perennial solitude once again.
Irritated by the stings of the ants that had crawled up his legs, and feeling a sense of compunction for having been so rude, he felt that he was now lost and wandering through the miasma and malaise of himself. It was so unbearable that he wanted to move away from the stupa and out of his inner self. If he made a left to Main Street and then another left, he would be on the road that went near the Morning Market and toward the Arco de Triomph replica, Patuxay. To the right, he would be where he was—that plaintive temple museum that seemed to still be in mourning over the loss of the Emerald Buddha. Eventually, further in that direction would lead to government buildings, which were in the French colonial architecture, and then to the river; at least that was what the map indicated.
By the time the time the Patuxay monument was clearly visible, it had begun to rain heavily and he dashed toward it for shelter. Once there, he shook the water from his hair and clothes, and stared down at some flowers growing in a square pot at his feet. Feeling less fettered by the dampness, he then looked up at the deviant kinnari and Ramakien giants that were shaped intricately into the arched doorway, and scraped the mud off of his sandals. He remembered when he was five years old in America the faux pas of wiping his feet on a neighbor's doormat that had gotten him into trouble. He had believed then that that was what doormats were for. He again postulated that perhaps there really was no love—just people who having no extrinsic value in the universe at large clung to each other for meaning. Then he suddenly heard in a Thai-Laotian dialect, "It's the Thai artist. Do you remember me."
33
The Laotian made the prayerful gesture of the wai which Nawin reciprocated. Then he said, "In the train, man. Remember?" He was trying to pierce through the fixed, glazed expression to pry into another mind and loosen the memories therein. His words could only be insolent if they were contemptuous, which they were not, and flagrant if he considered the age of the interlocutor, which he may not have done, and overall, the informality of it made Nawin feel equal instead of superior which was equivalent to a sense of being young once again. He remembered and smiled at his acquaintance and found himself amused at the fluctuation of demeanor in a given moment of time.
"Yes."
"I gave you a beer."
"Gave?" Nawin sneered playfully before a more cordial tone replaced it to patch over a stretch of silence. "I suppose you did in a way."
"Did or didn't?"
"Okay, you did."
"So here you are."
"Yes."
"You're a bit wet."
"Yes, I am."
"Are you cold?"
"No."
"You look tired. Are you tired?"
"Not really."
Boi guffawed at the lucid and hesitant utterances of the withdrawn, distrustful being and looked amused as though it were a game to him. "Well, I suppose you'll dry quickly enough when you're back inside. Do you have a hotel room?"
"Not yet."
He was ambivalent whether or not the Laotian meant to say, "Dee" [good] in response. As the Laotian scrutinized the Thai, so Nawin did him. It seemed to him that a word had percolated from the Laotian's thoughts and yet the mouth bore nothing. The pursed lips seemed to incarcerate sound and the only thing to materialize was an imagined utterance and his own irritation at not even knowing such an insignificant item in the social sphere of man with absolute certainty. It was odd but useful, he thought, that the mind was able to distinguish that which was and was not real, especially when both were unreal in the objective measurement of passing time, and that the mind noticed distinct positive attributes in each, rarely confusing the two. In this case, however, he hardly knew whether it was a twitch of lips or a suppressed word. If the latter, he did not really know the word that it would have been but he still strongly believed the unspoken word if it were such to be "dee".
"My sister mentioned you many times. I said that you would probably never call and might not even cross the border." Nawin wondered if certain words were being withheld while others selectively released, but if so he could not see that this was different from anyone else, man or woman. And of a woman, her love might be proclaimed but never the whore within her that yearned to improve her situation in life as the most virtuous married status and money in one sense or another. Was he not missing life by analyzing everything, or was he giving weight and meaning to fleeting experience by the anchor of his ruminations? To live life fully, how much should be spent in the inward exploration of thought and outward action without being macabre or flippant and in both cases superfluous? This he hardly knew and also pondered.
"I almost returned to Bangkok this morning." He did not know why he was saying this. Like a model who would soon allow herself to be denuded there was something inside him wishing to strip off inner layers and be known to others as though knowledge of himself was not enough—as though even the palpable sense of himself in movement and thought was diminished and not reaffirmed by human interaction. Rocks moldered away and would do so all the more quickly if not reinforced by sediment; so, he said to himself, he could not be exempt of the same fate.
"You only arrived in Nongkai a day ago. Why were you thinking of returning?"
"I don't know" he said, and from the prevarication seconds of silence ensued with the discomfort of it, like the sweat, humidity, and filth of the open air clinging to his skin. As discourse was the only tangible means to gain an outline of another and the projected intertwined adumbration, the thick shadow of relationship that was the two, it was impossible to stay silent, refusing to disclose bits of himself; and as the present was at times a prototype for what would follow, an extension of the present that could be the pattern of his whole life. Needing to part the silence he said, "To see my wife if you must know."
"I must. The one who broke your arm?"
"And clavical. The same." The emphatic must enticed him and he smiled begrudgingly.
"You know what I think?"
"No, why would I?"
"That she doesn't exist."
"A le nah [huh]?"
"She doesn't exist."
His smile dissipated. Then he tilted his head down and his taut countenance became empty like the void in his head. "That's more or less what I decided and so I wandered here," he said dolefully.
For, oddly enough, he, as rich as he was, had come to this place of all places like an impecunious, malnourished refugee seeking any parlous state that might save him from starvation. Since Kimberly's death he could not find even scant viands or morsels of hope anywhere; and as all humanity competed for this resource, a prodigious amount was needed to feed their ambulatory corpses for the continuation of their hauntings, which would end in final stumbles. If there were a search light piercing a sliver of darkness for his sake in the solidity of his grief, the one hard substance in the random and furious changes of his life, how would he who was buried alive inside himself see it? And why would anyone else, busy in his or her solipsistic role, find enough humanity to save him?
If any light came to him now or had emanated heretofore, he was not aware of it. The border leading back to Thailand seemed a dark and opaque one-way journey sealed off to retrospective deviants. Thus, he was stranded in this swamp of Vientiane, Laos, without any chance of return. He was here in front of the Patuxay monument, this Archo de Triomphe created from money that the Americans had alloted for an airport.
"Lost?" There was only one object, himself, that was the meaning of this word, for the Laotian's eyes seemed to be peering into him with murky beams of light.
"Not entirely lost, no. Detached, I think, which makes me less lost really. Who knows? It feels different though—different from how I see it… not that you need to know that," he said condescendingly with a chuckle, believing that his ideas would not readily permeate into the obtuse mind of the laborer. Then he countered this claim by doubting if intelligence was innate. It was in part the result of human will for transcendence, and in part provided by education fueled by money like everything else. The Laotian seemed to be sagacious enough to know his situation or perhaps this loneliness was so inordinate that he wanted to believe him as such. To be known was a vulnerability to be exploited especially when man's feelings wanted to avow friendship with he who saw him denuded, but to shy away from people was rather weak and craven.
"You should express yourself freely to your friends."
"Friends?" Nawin laughed. The laugh was mild with mild sarcasm, but it shook his body, reawakening the dull pain of his broken limb and this acute sense of falling from a precipice into an all engulfing abyss.
"What?" retorted the Laotian irascibly. "Are you laughing at me?"
"Well, yes, I'm sorry, but we don't hardly know each other."
"That could change."
"Why should it?" He was critical and cautious, but then he did not know what else he could be. There were less mendacious illusions like a marriage that lasted for some years and deliberate fraudulent ploys by calculating self-centered beings wanting to improve the circumstances of their lives more expeditiously. Both, with any real touch, would fall like a wall of sand so one had to be careful of what he leaned on, who he associated with, and what he believed if he believed in anything at all. It was a world of impermanence, a world where men married women for solidity and a sense of completion as an adult, and women had their babies (or in the case of Noppawan, a friend's baby) as though grounding oneself in the mundane would make the continual shifting of the ground stable and themselves as everlasting monuments. But, he countered, what did he know? Artists might be introverted and anti-social by nature or just inclined to justify their enmity towards the world at large.
"Why shouldn't it?" said the Laotian [meaning why shouldn't their acquaintance become closer]. Nawin could not think of any reason to oppose this particular friendliness any more than to favor it, and so he stood there neutral to the dictates of fate. If he had been more of a non-anthropomorphic deist or anthropomorphic atheist, he would have believed in the significance of this coincidence of finding him here and it would have pressed into his mind with as much religious fervor as the secular could hold. Still as lonely as he was, although adverse to admit it, he just felt its significance without giving it credence.
"Do you still have my number in case you need it? You might when traveling in Laos."
"I Threw it away," Nawin admited regretfully. And as he said this, ashamed of his own conduct, compunction bit into him like a rabid dog, and he felt friendlier towards the Laotian for accrediting him with a liberty that would not entail obligations to paint him or his family. Such moral obligations done to feel the injustice of the world and to allot money (in his case to pay them to model for a painting he did not care to draw out of a sense of pity).
"And yet we are here together. How strange. Sit down. Neither of us will be going anywhere in the rain." Nawin sat down on the wet bench next to the Laotian who wrote his telephone number out for him once again. Around them both was the mesmerizing sound of rain, now a more steady, less vehement pounding in the muddied inundation that surrounded Patuxay. With each new minute it was more like a lake instead of the elongated puddles he had seen minutes earlier.
There in the arch of the monument to the French replica, within the overarching sounds of the falling rain, he heard the sotto voce of a rotating squeak of a bicycle, the swishing of a boy's saturated sandals, and the solitary howl of a roaming stray dog. He watched the oval ripples reverberating around patches of random grass, the bathing of pigeons, the crawling of a worm at his feet, and that dog reaching out with two stretched paws to the solid overflow in the trash bin. It all seemed to him quite beautiful, sad, and fleeting.
Aimless as a transient, his was a melting of self into life and a conscious recording of that which imbued his senses. At this moment his life felt more replete in purpose since he was in the present moment, casting away the hopes and anxieties of the self entirely. Nawin breathed out, smiled and stretched as much as he could without touching the Laotian, content and relaxed in the inconsequence of existence. If there was meaning, he thought, it lay in the montage of what fell into one's senses and it did not need to be any more profound than this. He was thankful for money which was needed to provide for him in this transmutation as a homeless transient and observer of life but without stigma and free of onerous thoughts of what was needed for survival.
"It's me. In the train? Remember? I sat next to you I was—"
Nawin smiled warmly. "You were on the floor at my feet."
"That is not the best way of being remembered but yes, it was me. Please sit down." Nawin sat down on the damp bench.
"It is hard to find a comfortable position on a train, isn't it?"
"I didn't sleep well the night before."
"Why?"
"Financial worries, change, the thought of returning here. The two of you had a good time of it the night before. Sleepers and my brother's beer from what I heard."
"His beer? I wouldn't call it a gift. I gave him money afterwards."
"It didn't hurt you, did it?—I mean giving him something."
"No, I guess it didn't."
"It helped him. It helped us both to get back. What was left he gave to our parents. He would not have felt good about coming back if he had nothing to give."
"I understand. I didn't mind, really. It was a wonder that you slept at all."
"Why?"
"I think my feet were stinking. I even wanted to walk away from me." He lifted the pants legs on the foot that rested on his left leg and sniffed his sock. "Better now." She laughed and then he continued more somberly to reduce the chance of awkward silence. "Is there anything to see in this monument?"
"You can go to the top and look out over the city."
"Is it a nice view?"
"I don't know. I've never gone in. It would have to be better than from the ground. The stairs go to different levels outside but they might be rather slippery in the rain."
"Maybe not then." He had enough broken bones without taking on more risks. If only she had flaxen hair like Kimberly's, he thought, then he would not hesitate a moment. He would swoop her up in one hand and carry her up to the highest cloud.
"Will you go north to Luang Prabong?"
"I don't know. I am not really here to sightsee. Just here to simplify existence, relax—"
"Drink beer?"
"Wine preferably." Peace of mind was often facilitated this way. A Singha, a Leo, a Budweiser, a Heineken, and especially that most odious Beer Laos which he had drunk the other night which reminded him of his Barbarous brothers and father. He imagined them with cans in hands as they tried to stomp on his diminutive being while that which was maternal and good pretended it was not happening to him. Thus, in most situations, he eschewed the elixir of farmers and laborers.
"So, why are you sitting here?"
She tossed him an apple from the bag and bit into one herself.Then she smiled. "The Morning Market."
Maybe she had gone there but that did not explain why she was here. Maybe she was soliciting but then, he thought, in one way or another we all were. To do anything was to seek something from it discontentedly unless one lost himself in the present moment. She was a whore. They all were. But then when did he object to whores. They had been the holy light in his paintings, the instruments of his success. As the male beast was not any better than the female there was nothing for him to say. He just silently bit into her apple as though it were her nipple.
"Don't your parents grow any apples?"
"No, it's a rice farm. Only that."
"Are you staying with them now?"
"Yes, I didn't feel like I should continue to work in the factory when my brother lost his job."
"What will you do back here?"
"I don't know."
"Maybe we should go someplace else to talk. There must be a coffee shop around here."
"There isn't."
"Anywhere?"
"None that I have seen. This is Laos. But we can sit over there."
"There? You will get wet."
"I want to get wet."
They sat down at a bench in the rain away from the crowd that was cuddled in the arch.
"I've been thinking about hiring a personal secretary."
"Really?
"What would you want one to do?"
"Right now not so much," he said as he bit into the stiff and the sweet, "as I haven't been doing anything really. But I'll paint again. There will be phone calls from galleries, bids that need to be recorded, negotiating prices so everyone makes some profit, messages from students if I give classes—but the only thing is that getting a visa for that might be difficult." An umbrella salesman came by. "Yes, two," said Nawin.
"One is enough."
"What is your name?"
"Porn."
"You have a beautiful smile," he said right before feeling his pockets in a rather desparate floundering. "Oh no," he said, "I think I left my wallet in the hotel. I need to go back."
"I'll go with you."
"Okay," he said and they ran hand in hand in the downpour. And when they were in the room at the Paris-Laotian Hotel they removed each other's wet clothes, he kissing those lips that had fostered such smiles and their bodies coupled in comfort and unified motion—
The daydream had come over him like the flash of Garuda passing, leaving him here with this Laotian male. Overall he did not want to speak with him. He did not want to be sociable for the sake of being nice with those who were envisaging some use for him. Human entities by their own solipsistic notions, tried to come in, take up root, to fill the space within others brains and grow within the fertile soil of money; and yet they existed in the world too, they were sentenced to this earthly prison the same as he, they too sought meaning and hope in others when there was nothing else to gain personal meaning from, and it was not as if he were pressed for time and was unable to socialize because of some great task that awaited his attention. Was it such an imposition to provide a bit solace to others ever so minutely in human discourse even though the need for money drooled out of their eyes more than even their mouths as was the case with this one?
34
The gods had been misers and humidity like an over-packed storehouse continued to overflow onto the mortals of the deep— at least so the atheistic artist envisaged it for his own amusement while wondering why one had to personify abstraction to be amused. He ignored the answer seated next to him, the answer that this was all there was, that no idea could be personable, that being smiled upon incredulously was better than being banished in his brain. He looked up at a few dark clouds that seemed to shove out of the amalgamated unit to hover as separate entities beneath the mass. There was for him amity to be found in the effectual independence of this part of the sky that sought its own distinction. Within it there was a reflection of his own earlier struggles to extricate himself from poverty, conformity, and obscurity as if the cessation of all three would bring unto him happiness, whatever that was. Colors as vivid as those of the first crayon marks in boyhood had transmuted his black and white existence by allowing his transcendence into imagination; happiness was merely a contrast to the misery that preceded it. It was the type of pleasure gained at being saved from a near drowning, and in his case it was, in his ineffable sense of loss while wandering like a mute in foreign lands, a respite, which would make drifting, befriending clouds, and the wordless discourse of being raped in male sport, the only bearable intimacies.
At the jerk of his arm to avoid a persistent fly that seemed to want to go into a crevice of his cast sharp pain flared through his arm, and the whole of his right torso. He tried to suppress the pain to retain a phlegmatic countenance before the Laotian and he tried to suppress too, the misogynist thoughts that came upon him when reminded that his brokenness had come about because of women. In trying to separate himself from the brute impulses which were his protective aversion to pain, he realized that logic alone could not cull such feelings completely for despite his intention, women were already becoming for him an equal source of derision as men and, as they were women, surpassing them.
"What are the chances of meeting like this?" asked the Laotian as smoke propelled by a gust of wind came upon them in a gaseous fog. It was smoke from chicken and pork grilled at the hands of a sidewalk restaurant worker who, stiff and decrepit as the monument itself and a reminder, prescient and otherwise, of the type of man Nawin might have been had opportunity and success not come upon him (and the Jatupon he would one day be if only in thought within the last moments of his life), stood at the other side of the arched entry. It was smoke that he imagined to one day be his own cremated smell as if living in a city, the most advanced odorless furnaces in a temple would not be available at his expiration—smoke that should have been of Kimberly's cremation according to her wishes had her parents not ordered the encoffining and refrigeration of her remains on a flight to Orleans—smoke of his mind.
The whole insoluble subject of human relations was baffling to him. Pursued as extensive involvements, these joint, often waning shadows of mutable beings mystified and overwhelmed him. Pursued as shallow engagements in small talk with strangers, concepts, at least for now, eluded him as he tried unsuccessfully to exhume words from his mind to talk with someone whom he had no inclination to know. Nawin shrugged his shoulders.
"One in a billion," said the Laotian answering his own question.
"Is that a fact?" asked Nawin diffidently for even those limited words had to be found and forcefully educed from him and as such they fell upon each other in a stutter.
"Yes, one in a billion."
"One in a billion, okay," said Nawin and the Laotian laughed.
"You act like you've just seen light after being pulled out of a box."
"I've been alone a lot in recent days."
"Why?"
"I don't know. I need to get away from people."
"Maybe you just need to get away from the old people."
"Maybe. Anyhow…"
"Anyhow, one in a billion."
Nawin laughed. "If you want to see it that way: manipulation of all natural forces to ensure our reunion." He spoke flippantly with a smile. Arrogant and jocular, his was more than contempt of the concept of pre-destiny in relationships, it was also derision for the human vulnerabilities of needing companionship altogether as though he were beyond it. But he too was born of the herd. He, even more than most, had to climb onto the backs of laborers to get his physical needs taken care of so as to have the leisure to see ethereal beauty. Why, he chastised himself, was he trying to repel human contact? Such behavior, he thought, was as unnatural as was the proclamation of a self- declared retirement in a still robust and virile being.
Society equated the worth of a man with doing and most specifically involvement in the generation of a commercial product for what other purpose did man have on the planet than to work toward making the world a more comfortable place? He remembered Noppawan's initial reaction to his retirement. It had been favorable enough for to her. It meant a cessation of these perennial sessions with nude models. And yet with the days, weeks, months, and years of Buddhist melting in which he wandered back from a park or stadium for dinner or more frequently walked around his acreage and sat in lawn chairs to dispense with the hours, often without a book in his hands, what could be said to him? He was reticent for not having any terrestrial concerns to impart and so he was a cockroach on her plate, an ant in her salt shaker. He remained such except in fulfilling what she importuned from him most: studding her friend, Kimberly, so that the three might have a baby.
Surely his success had not been her only motivation for marrying him. When in adolescence that which was barely alive in him fell into her life, onto her shoulders, she closed him in her arms at that freakish friendship hall, the anatomical museum at Siriaj Hospital, and years later at their marriage, the girlish pathos for a troubled friend was within her still. However, as even more time went by so her life became inextricable with her sense of his success and it could not be any more comfortably extracted than that of her teeth.
"Are you waiting here for someone?"
"If someone comes, yes."
"And if no one does?"
Boi smiled. "Then I would eventually leave, wouldn't I?"
"I suppose so."
A couple of workers began to sweep water out of both sides of the arched entry. As Nawin watched these automatons and their redundant strokes he remembered one time when he went into the stadium to jog and dabble in studies toward a Ph.D. which he had no real interest to complete. There he saw a group of workers cutting down a small tree, sawing large portions into more manageable pieces, and carrying those pieces to a pile. The workers looked like an entire family with the variety of their ages and sexes. Two of the adults who were moving the pieces cajoled a small boy into believing that he was instrumental in removing the branches for as each was being lifted he would hold onto a bit of the center and they would praise his efforts. They were determining his fate by brainwashing him with positive reinforcement but at least, Nawin thought then, he would be content with his station in life. Who was to say that the boy when grown would not feel sorry for people like himself who did not know what to do with all the days of their lives.
A sales mendicant came by with a dozen or more umbrellas in his hand. "Do you want one?" Nawin asked.
"All of them. Then I can stand out here all day and have something to sell." The voice was not earnest and it engendered no sympathy.
"Two umbrellas please—any color, I don't care."
"100 baht," said the salesman. Nawin paid the money and handed one to the Laotian.
"I think you are selling something already."
The Laotian grinned. "Really? Are you wanting to buy?" He was. Ashamed of himself, Nawin looked down at the green sheen of water that now surrounded the monument. Its reflection seemed to sway and careen in the harmonious bombardment of the pellets of rain. More fluid than reality itself, the reflection would for a time seem permanently unsteady before evaporating entirely.
"No, maybe not," he said vaguely.
The Laotian chuckled. "No, Man, I'm here just because I got caught in the rain like you did."
Maybe it was true. Maybe the perverse fabrications of the mind when imparted by speech altered the intentions of the other party, distorting the fabric of probable outcome.
"Where is your sister?"
"On the farm planting, cleaning, cooking, getting water from the well, I don't know, I don't care, but she's probably thinking of you. Do you like her?"
"I don't know her. I don't think I have any real opinion." He paused thoughtfully and then said, "How do you mean?"
"I mean for a painting—of a country girl, rural life.
"I'm not sure."
"What about me?"
"For what?"
"For whatever."
"Whatever?"
"Whatever. A friend, maybe if you need one. I think that you do.You seem lonely."
"Who isn't? I'm okay with it."
"For a painting then. Will you draw me?"
"Okay, but remember commissioning a painting takes large sums of money. I don't think that's what you want. You just model and I'll get a gallery in Nongkhai to buy it when its done if art supplies can be bought here."
"It's the capitol. We have. Now tell me how."
"How what?"
"How would you paint me?"
"How do you want to be painted?
"If you were to choose."
"Nude?" He phrased it as a question for had it been a statement it would have shown him as possessor of perverse inclinations he did not want him to know. It would have compelled him to be perceived as having the interests of an artist and natural proclivities of a man but with one or the other designated as the main ingredient. Judged favorably or otherwise, it would have been a predominant issue, altering roles and distorting the potential outcome of the interaction.
"I'm okay with it," he said. He was mocking Nawin's circumspect neutrality with a smile.
"I'm just kidding. What about your sister? I mean would she care to pose nude if you and your family don't have any objections to it?"
"Try. My sister, me, the water buffalo, and the chickens: you can draw us all nude if you like as long as my parents see something else instead. You don't need to pay us anything. Just come and stay for a while. Laotian hospitality."
"I don't know."
"Is traveling alone so much fun?"
"No, maybe not."
"There's so much road construction when it doesn't rain, dust in the air instead of smog, a small capitol instead of a very large one, but still a city. You've probably never even visited rural areas in Thailand, have you?"
"Not much."
"What happened to your wedding ring?"
"It was raptured from my finger, so to speak."
"Did you lose it?"
"It lost me."
"I think that you need company right now."
"Sure, what the hell," said Nawin. "Maybe I'd like to see you nude."
"I know you do," retorted the Laotian.
His discombobulated and desultory mind made his eyes alternate in momentary gazes between the rain and the flooded land beneath until, for variety, he looked at those who were within the arched entry of the monument as he was. He supposed that he should begin to see more of a commonality with those in his proximity than he did for he was feeling loneliness impale him albeit the loneliness of being in communion with another when not wishing to be so rather than that of a lone traveler to Laos, needing the company of others. It was the only salient loneliness that he knew, and the sudden recognition of this oddity or perhaps the coldness of being so wet made him shudder and want to believe in them as cognate beings which they undoubtedly were in the strict physical sense. But demigods and men all had heads and faces, torsos and limbs. Regular men even had feelings and thoughts in some proportional quantity even if it were a degraded quality that was at the dictates of their myopic needs and agenda at the time. So, although similar in that sense, he thought scornfully, there was little that was so remarkable in it.
35
List written for him; 5000 baht relinquished to him (2000 would not be enough, at least so the Laotian had claimed, as though he would know something about this matter; and the equivalent in kip, he said, would be confusing, which was undoubtedly true); the departure executed with the figure of the Laotian at a vanishing point around the Morning Market where supposedly he would obtain paint, brushes, canvasses, a sketch pad, charcoal pencils, an easel, and other material items so vital for painters obsessed in depicting the inner world that was demotically and mistakingly referred to as the "soul" and was inconsequential to the world at large. As body, the material produced inner consciousness, "soul," perceived in the glint of the human eye, so base materials like those that the Laotian claimed that he would obtain produced "art" of an equally perishable substance, art of a relative, dubious quality that should not come from him, no not him, and especially now.
A man penetrating the virulence in the licentious might be thought of as sagacious when young but for an older man as he, to continue to draw these incessant, dirty pictures with their redundant themes, was foolish in its like of discernment even if, and by his painting he proved, that this was all there was. And yet he had agreed to paint him but the reason for doing so no facade of innocence could belie. He should be sitting next to that famous Phra Thuat Luang Stupa constructed in the year 1565 for the wisdom that might emanate from its gold and simplicity instead of hoping for—did he dare to admit it himself?—a ménage a trois.
But what was there to be wise about? That even a homeless dog needed recognition and extension, that ants summoned each other to carry a moth carcass up a tree, that creative inspiration was sexual, and philosophical ruminations were the morbid ponderings of the inconsequential and the brief, and that one wanted to live life fully and yet if rides, interaction (professional and personal), and reflections were the only ingredients he was not sure of the appropriate mixture.
If the unlikely happened as it sometimes did, and the Laotian were to return to this monument there would be the logistical problem of them getting the material to his parent's home; but no, there would be no chance of him buying the material and returning with it. He was no doubt running off with the money. Why wouldn't he be especially when it was so obvious that he wanted him to do so for otherwise he would have gone with him to obtain the supplies or would have obtained them by himself had he known where to go. By saying, "Well, if you want it that bad you can get it and I'll go up here" (meaning inside the copied French monument) both had made a contract that the fraud or casual, personal, embezzlement was permissible and that the Laotian could take the gratuity and do what he wanted with it.
If nothing else, giving this tiny bit of money had been a nominal act of redistribution for a principle of equity, and the Laotian merely an initial vehicle for transport. The money would be injected into their economy and so if the Laotian were to spend it on booze and women or seeds for the next crop it would be of no concern for him—at least so he told himself.
With all the whores he had drawn and played with by going into with a mental microscope and a condom a bit like a marine biologist scuba diving with an underwater camera in his hand he knew the ocean of human suffering inside and out, and drawing it he fed off of it symbiotically. If those around the monument now had jobs in 7-11 stores like those in Thailand (almost no convenience stores here, no nothing for sure) wouldn't they be happy? To forfeit 4000 baht, a hundred dollars, borrowed from various sources to pay the owner in the event of stealing something, an impossibility with video monitored stores, breaking something, as though a carton of milk had such a price, or running away, which of course they could do as modern day slaves with the power to walk away but no predominant will to do so, to work 14 hours a day for a mere five dollars, 170 baht; to be paid only if the acting manager liked his or her job performance and signed a document in Thai attesting this fact, they would be elated to gain such an opportunity.
Still seated on the now half-vacant bench of the monument, he was foundering inside himself in a melancholy that contaminated his bounty as an oil spill a lagoon. He loathed the inner vulnerabilities of the human creature that needed the ersatz of others for companionship (or at least confirmation when beyond the need of extension, and when thinking himself beyond confirmation still needing sexual contact to feel grounded in reality especially when spending so much time in his own head), and yet was amused by it all the same.
The relative silence was interrupted by plaintive, orphic sounds of a flute played by a uniformed high school student who sat stiffly on the steps leading into the monument. Sometimes stridently off key the music was made all the more euphonious for the errors. Truer than inadequate words at reflecting thought, the tune was pure feeling like a Moslem call to worship and it seemed to slither onto the athiest's soul comfortably enough as though that which was desolate and discordant in mortal man who lost everything and everyone Heraculutously including innocence and the various stages of development that trod upon it was a ubiquitous leitmotiff, a black light one had to bask in for his own good, human bondage not executed onto him alone but done uniformly and impersonally to all.
It seemed to him odd that unlike Bangkok, this Communist bastion seemed to be conspicuously absent of overt beggars. He had expected the same maimed, exploited mendicants whom gangsters, eager for profit that could be coerced by sympathy, mutilated by cutting off limbs and tortured by subjecting these dysfunctional amputees of body and mind to the hopelessness of begging on the streets. Still in smaller quantities there was no paucity of human misery here: separately older men without vocation and with glazed eyes gazed onto rain that, for the most part, they probably did not consciously register; salesmen stood aimlessly behind fruit and noodle carts that were instruments of servitude and sustenance they were invisibly chained to; and hack tradesmen from shoe repairmen to homemade broom salesmen sought refuge from the rain not only for themselves but for that which they were peddling. It occurred to him that in some ways he had wanted to see unprecedented misery and that this was why he had come here instead of picking up his airline ticket and flying into San Francisco as he had planned. Perhaps this was why he had forfeited a return to a country of which he entertained a vague childish memory not of love in family but of hope that there was such a thing. The early times of stripping to his underwear and diving off piers into the Chao Phraya river with his brothers had proven the concept of family to be ever so brief.
Friendship—an act to seek out one like himself for confirmation of his ideas and behavior as correct or having some consistency in the world at large—this was that which he had hoped for when he bought the ticket to Nongkhai. He believed that here he would witness unprecedented suffering and in that sponge of his heart he would absorb it and burst like the clouds above. It was his belief that it would be better to die of a heart attack with eyes wide open instead of bit by bit by withdrawing into his shell of pachydermatous affluence and indifference as he moved about in this world of suffering. He watched the dark billowing clouds not from above but below reflected in the turgid green sheen of the expanding puddles that in this perennial rain formed of the ground a lake. He listened for reflections in the deluge and the inundation of water he stared into. It croaked surreally with no visible evidence of that which produced the sound, as if the water itself were transforming into toads—but then this was a reflection too, another distortion of the mind.
No, he did not expect him to return nor did he want him to but that was from wanting him to so badly. If he did not return there would be but the self, he and his thoughts droning on unnoticed to others like scrapings on the wall of a cell of solitary confinement, graffiti under a rock, thought under the rock of the skull that closed him off like the tomb did Christ. No, there was not a chance in the world of seeing him again and it was as he wished it to be—at least that which was rational in him wished it to be.
And again, if instead of using the money for more constructive purposes the Laotian were to buy beers and whores with it, the money would be in circulation in this communist bastion of basic sustenance and mild deprivation instead of being an inconsequential part of an astronomical sum in his savings back home, a vehicle for some degree of equity in this world where one would be better off to pluck out his eyes to stay ignorant about such matters. Loss of this money would be an invisible extraction from his savings, an easy riddance.
This rational element schemed was as pretentious an affectation as the clothes he wore—or any clothes for that matter. This boy, the Laotian, whom he mentally labeled as Boi 1 (to make a distinction with the other) was another self delusion, another lie. Both were bodies and he had an inexorable yearning to see this Boi 1 naked, to devour and be devoured in wetness, unity, and sensation with him.
He could say all he wanted as justification for giving him that money. He could claim the pretension that from giving it he hoped it would expiate him of the gross insensitivity of being affluent in this world of suffering and doing nothing about it, but really he wanted him to return, he wanted the paint ordered and delivered, he wanted an excuse to draw him and record his beauty and his nakedness, to shut out the world in bliss with him, to be in a ménage a trois with him and his sister in a euphoria of gluttonous devouring.
36
If the Laotian were to return with the supplies or a receipt for them, a scenario he could hardly imagine, it would further solidify a contract begotten of seemingly inconsequential words and bits of paper currency, the substance of contracts; they would be in this union and its ensuing obligation of him to paint one or another of the members of this rural Lao family even though the subjects and themes this would pertain to were yet unknown to him. He would stay with them until he completed his task, rural, sodden and destitute as they were, no doubt sleeping on the planks of a wooden shack if not on a dirt floor once again, drinking boiled tea colored tap water or worse mixed with lemon juice, eating once a day as they did, consuming rice with fish sauce or salt sometimes mixed with an ant egg curry and a few boiled vegetables purchased cheaply as they were on the verge of rotting, somtam, chicken, noodles, boiled eggs, sticky rice and mangos of the more wealthy almost as exotic as French cuisine, and out of respect to them ostentatious, flickering gold would no longer adorn his brown skin to replace his slave collar of plaited noodles and in lieu of the yellow plastic wrist band of mindless King Rama myrmidons who also wore yellow T-shirts with royal insignias on Mondays and Fridays the thousand dollar wrist watch would have to be deposited obscurely into his luggage. But were this stranger to desert him, should he in his loneliness be desperate enough to conceptualize it as such, there would be the continuation of this freedom from others, expectations of him just as he wanted, despite any neediness to the contrary, an uncompromised, unadulterated self in surfeit, in which even the painting of internal and external worlds was perceived not as expression but as a blurring or smudging of the true self by form and colors; and there would be more of the same unbearable loneliness, and emptiness. He thought this as he heard thunder in the distance of the passing storm and in an undercurrent of thought recalled explanations of thunder and lightning posed by adults, those pleasant lies of childhood that after all this time he had for the most part forgotten, memories unused that without imagining the way they once were, fell apart with pieces scattered in disarray and sometimes lost entirely, unable to be found again, void recollections of the mind.
If left alone he would be a cactus flowering obscurely touched by nothing except the ravaging sandstorms within, an ascetic monk whose insights would languish within the intact internal life of a temporary being, a fetus barely alive in a dead woman's body—if this were really what he wanted. If the Laotian did not return he might continue to have the pleasant company of his thoughts provided he held reign over their restive movements and they were directed mostly toward some external aim instead of a constant churning of old redundant ideas and ghosts of memory haunting him with their illusionary palpability as though that which had been could be grasped still. Alone here in Laos, a foreign land, there was plenty that was novel to explore and by being a sole traveler, his will, his uncompromised agenda, would be exactly as he wished it to be. And if in this solitary journey he were to become unbearably lonely, wishing to do god knows what with this family and unable to do so, his consolation would be that he had given money to those who no doubt needed it. But apart from putting into practice an egalitarian principal which gave him some satisfaction (pleasure always being the positive reinforcement of an action never to be pursued unto itself but giving personal meaning to virtuous action) there was nothing so personal in it.
No, he sought only to draw his base nakedness and feel that erect body against his own. He wanted to be intoxicated by the molecular exchange of kissing a man like yearning for a bite from a water monitor, an animal that was rife at the Silpakorn University campus in Nakkon Pathom, and to ride and be ridden to launch his sensations out of his mundane, incarcerating, gravity-bound subjugation.
There was more of the distant thunder. It was like a homeless bottle collector pushing an unwieldy cart away from him or, if it could be transmuted to sound, that of a man repudiating his own impecunious past. Hadn't that faded memory of a mother once told him that thunder was a diamond falling from some goddess when struggling in the heavens against a diminutive monster?—he could not remember any of the specifics; hadn't some uncle in the United States of America, the country of his birth, once told him that thunder was the sound of Thai monkeys angrily tossing coconuts from coconut trees in the hope of getting to the bananas? He remembered that in his naivity and love of his nativity he had fused the two stories together. He smiled ruefully as all variety of family was now gone from him, its ephemeral nature expedited by circumstance and choice. It occurred to him how quickly the child within could penetrate the veneer of a man, and by resurfacing, claim hegemony over adult thoughts. It might give way to them altogether were it not for the need to make a living in a role that in some minute way was a propulsion of human existence—not that seated on park benches or the equivalent for the past three or more years of his self- proclaimed retirement, tolerating his wife's looks of disrespect and thus bonding all the more with Kimberly in due course, he had performed many roles over the past few years…he had merely fathered a son. But of 6 billion people on the planet, how would he know that his assumptions of self were applicable to them? He could not even prove the dominant child trapped in the veneer of manhood for himself, let alone others, when from one minute to the next he was a different being entirely thinking different thoughts or seemed so as any object in variant angles of light. Maybe this assumption just related to those whose childhood, despite some sublime moments, was overall harrowing, or maybe it was merely his own idiosyncrasies.
Nawin was gazing out to a sidewalk that was across the bifurcated street that veered into many directions around the Arc de Triomphe replica, and he was ready to move toward it. He was just about ready to stand up and walk away. As the Laotian would not be returning there was no need to sit here further. Furthermore, he was hungry and wanted the steam of coffee to make him into a new man. Then he suddenly felt a tap on his shoulder, human warmth, the sense of belonging to this sorry specie. The Laotian handed him a receipt. "It should be delivered by tomorrow afternoon."
"All of it?"
"I think so."
"To your home?"
"Yes unless you want me to have him deliver it to a hotel room.You don't have one?"
"No. I was thinking about checking into the Paris Laos Hotel. I saw it earlier in passing. Any change?"
"No."
"It came to 5000 even?"
"Its on the receipt."
"That doesn't mean much."
The Laotian smiled. "I didn't write the receipt. Did you go up into the monument."
"No, just stayed here. What's up there?"
"I don't know. What's up there? Poor people trying to sell their trinkets, souvenirs if you want to call it that. Junk for westerners to remember their trip to Laos. All of it is the same as in Thailand. Nothing that would interest you unless you want a little better view of the city."
"I see. Then I guess not."
"You don't want to be a spectator of poverty?"
"No, I've seen plenty of that and I guess I'll be seeing more ifI stay with you."
"Of course. Let's do it."
37
A third person, an older man with a handkerchief on his head, trudged hurriedly by. Had it been Bangkok, this individual would have needed to shove through umbrellad cell phone using laggards jamming pedestrian movements, but here in this village of the national capital there was nothing to curtail his movements so, even as decrepit as he was, he disappeared as dirt down the makeshift gutter that was the declivity of the entirety of road. Then there was a forth, a monstrosity of four animated legs walking toward them, a bodiless unit of Siamese twins under a sole umbrella that in passing was shown to be of separate beings, male and female counterparts, much younger than he was, and, in a state of subdued happiness, much more naïve than he could ever recall being.
Even happiness like this will not last, he thought solemnly with a sense of sympathy for these distinct individuals beginning to prevail over a bit of jealousy at the innocence of youth which had glimpsed him with his cynical countenance and he them before receding behind him, the memory relegated to the region of the brain where all inconsequential sensory input was assigned. Then despite his intention he vaguely recalled that ingenuous sense of a belief in euphoric, all-pervasive love emanating from the attraction of two beings, that feeling he could not entirely repudiate, a feeling he once had toward his brother. After this particular perversion (all sexual acts a perverse blend of imagination and the tactile and so the more usual of them also perverse but not a perversion in the usual meaning of the word, or so he justified it to himself), he had not felt it since. But then as one who had perpetual notoriety as a womanizer, a provocative offense and humiliation to any wife, he had to admit that he did not know of the longevity that might be maintained in a relationship—he who thought that marriage to an anthropologist whose features were buried under thick glasses would be beyond the atavistic jealousy of troglodytic females waiting anxiously for the hunter to arrive with his meat, baby's bone marrow, and bananas, and his penis that should only be hers, he who did not know that every woman was also a woman in instinct and reaction.