Then, again, there was just the two of them continuing to walk silently on a stretch of vacant sidewalk cleansed of the litter of dogs, each under separate umbrella aegis, each in his own direct or askance manner watching the energy of the pellets of rain reverberate in oblique and diminished circular ripples in puddles near their feet. Still independent, he had ample opportunities to say that he had changed his mind and that upon consideration he had decided that he should not forfeit his travels for the laborious task of painting rural life, which had not been part of his agenda but that which he, the Laotian, had imposed upon him and he himself had accepted to seem amiable to him and less anti-social to himself. That was a cluster of words that if spoken would have made the contract of earlier utterances void, allowing immediate freedom from obligation. The words came to his mouth and languished there until death. He could not open the prison gates and release them. No, he yearned for him too much.
He was not part of the four legged monstrosity under a sole umbrella, nor hand in hand at this early stage of their acquaintance (not that with a male he would have found that acceptable at any stage, for to be seen to be free to be queer would allow the public to pigeonhole him, exacerbating that which was in him as it had before to the painter of prostitute studies) and yet he was wishing for the implausible nonetheless. If holding hands belied the existence of two separate entities, belief in such a fusion, a more plausible delusion in heterosexual relationships where one might have proof of a merger on a sheet of paper and a baby byproduct as the burden of bouncing on bedroom mattresses, was vastly less credible than one of naked sportsmen at a bit of wrestling.
For in this plain of existence where all was an illusion, one could only use logic to maneuver himself into the most plausible of situations. He did not know what he was thinking as he walked beside him past the morning market and the Paris Laos hotel which he had passed before. They would not become nude sportsman at a bit of wrestling for the victory of pleasure rather than the pleasure of victory, which was the norm for the clothed players. As far as he knew, this was a brother and sister whom he met on a train and whose only interest in him was platonic. They just wanted to earn a little money by becoming models. That was a rather innocuous wish, which he was in part fulfilling because he was not absolutely sure that doing nothing all the years of his life was any more constructive than the motions of birds in flight, tires of vehicles rolling, and sorry herds (even outdoor custodian sweepers pulling plastic trash barrels on wheels toward a destination) consumed in roles and agenda which gave artificial meaning to their lives.
No, he wanted him. He wanted to be in the Laos Paris hotel with him. There were so many irrepressible whims that came over a man blinding him within a blizzard of heat and titillation. Overhead the sky seemed to be clearing. Various lower clouds which seemed to have the outline of vultures within them were eager to move ahead of the dissipating mass. Like individuals shoving through the crowds to swoop in the descent of agenda, so were the lower clouds and so it seemed to him now was the Laotian. He seemed eager to take him someplace.
"Is your home very far out there?"
"Rather. No. I don't know. It depends on what you mean. We'll try to get there before darkness overtakes us." But what if darkness and rusticity was what he wanted. Surely murders happened in communist countries, and if so, it seemed to him that they would occur most frequently in rural desolation when military police or some such comrades were not watching. His gold should have come off neck and wrist before he crossed the border. It should have come off his earlobe before he got on the train. For a man to turn forty and yet to continue to try to appear half that age was absurd. An earring in a young man was a symbol of rebellion against the world, and an expression of latent homosexual impulses yearning for an opportunity to exude; it was somewhat acceptable in one who was experimental and lacking self-knowledge yet bold in his attempts to gain it—one who, dissatisfied with the world, had not yet made his own world.
"And what would you get from it: a painting or money?"
"Why not both?"
"Why not the moon. Life doesn't work that way."
"If you think the painting is good and you can sell it, pay the models. If not, don't. Draw a little something for my mother to make her happy—it being her birthday and all. Besides, for cooking and washing your dirty underwear that seems like the decent thing to do."
Nawin smiled. To merge into a family, to have a home when he except in extraneous matters of documents averring him as proprietor, was homeless, was that which he sought and wanted to hear. But then there were the bodies and the odors that exuded from them, questions as to whether one loved the bodies or the molecules that they emitted, quandries and riddles for a man, that like it or not, stank in multiple forms of neediness fetid as his brothers strewn socks, the scent of monsters that fluttered all about in his brain.
38
Friend, acquaintance: he was not quite sure which word he should categorize him under, or if the relationship were more than superficially amiable. For what he knew, walking as he did beside him when less flooded pavement permitted, and behind him when situations warranted, he was being led into outlying areas for ostensible reasons that belied the plan of shooting, stabbing, or bludgeoning him to death, which he would have invited upon himself. As touching poles warning of imminent electrocution had been a temptation earlier, so now, he concluded, he was stroking death from a more gregarious angle and no one would be to blame but himself if his early demise were to occur because of it. A gilded collar on a dog of burnt umber was still a dog and a collar. Absurdly in coming here, gold still hung from his neck, dangled from a right earlobe and as the thousand dollar Swiss watch that adorned his wrist. Like a billboard flaunting opulence and reminding others of inequalities the culprit would be the billboard itself rather than the man who brought it down. And all to undo the dog by flaunting a glittering symbol of savoir-vivre. Now that he considered it, it was a wonder that he had gotten through the previous night intact only having to pay a thousand baht salary, penitence for his soiree with an underage male who had been the stranger of his strange, intimate encounter. He did not know this individual whom he was walking with, but then he obviously did not know the childhood friend whom he had married and who had bludgeoned him with an iron skillet. People were such amorphous blobs that changed shape with the years and when confronted with the brevity of their own lives. That did not totally displease him. It made them more the pitiful mysteries that were the subject of his art and empathy. From humanism to materialism, their digressions and mutations were simply a need for permanence and significance. His wife, a scholar, had maternal instinct as her quest for permanence, her art and if for years now she had been building her empty nest, he had never blamed her but handed over money for these perennial renovations that gave her happiness in the midst of her sadness.
Friend or acquaintance, potential lover or murderer, it did not matter as the situation of enjoying the company of another was pleasant and merely being with someone irrepressible to one in such a somber state of mind. If crimes did occur in this communist country it seemed to him that they would happen in bucolic surroundings far from the scrutiny of the officers sitting in tiny police boxes on every corner of this village capital, and that if his demise were to occur at human hands it would be no different from the Pyrrhic viruses and cancer that killed incidentally, or even the immune system which was a killer in its own right. It seemed to him that there was little point in concerning oneself with the inevitable and the ineluctable; and it was indeed ineluctable for a man continually slipping and falling under the weight of retrogressive memories to seek companionship at some stage of despair within his self containment rather than to tolerate one more minute in solitude and thought. It occurred to him that he was in a state of needing to be befriended by a serial killer and he laughed.
"What's funny?"
"Nothing." He smiled.
"What?"
"Just the crazy thoughts in one's head. That's all," he responded evasively.
The two men closed their umbrellas, and each jumped respectively onto a large rock that nudged out of a turbid, fetid pool on a sunken area of sidewalk, and then made a second and broader leap to drier pavement. Straws in small bags of coca cola that each had in his right hand jiggled with phallic looseness as did their singular and murky reflections in passing over the inundated sidewalk. He could now see at a distance the bald muddied area of the bus terminal with its dilapidated secondhand buses that, according to the travel guide, had been given by the Japanese government to the retarded capital as a gesture of friendship, buses that would take them outside Vientiane albeit for him without any good reason for except for this sharp prodding feeling of needing to be with someone. It seemed that he was receding into an earlier Thailand and an earlier self, and that after so many weeks of travail (so many years really), that he was now happy that he was dirty, poor, and free as a seven year old boy in the company of brothers at a pier.
Then they saw two dogs and themselves. Two dogs dogged by cravings and two men suddenly in rapt attention around the copulating beasts. It was the mating of common four legged creatures and yet they did not seem to mind: sexuality was the mounting of another form for pure pleasure (conquest of pleasure and the pleasure of conquest) that would be exempt of suffering and thought, the forced intimate exchange with a female, the forced intrusion and annexation of a cave, a feminine domain by which in sexual contact, the male animal, having nothing and bereft of all, asserted a declaration of ownership against a weaker mortal, a fertile being of obdurate will from which there was an exciting possibility of fertilized union and untoward pregnancy; and even from outside in witnessing another species and the action performed by it, it was a ubiquitous reminder of real life denuded of brand name pretense and mesmerizing for this fact alone. This bitch was still alarmed by the swelling and gyrating of the body part still extended into and locked within her, and she continued to jerk in various futile positions in the hope of extricating herself from this peculiar alien fusion, which before ejaculation, insemination, and probable gestation—with a new alien hijacking her body—was impossible. It reminded him of those that he had seen in a more willing communion a few weeks earlier on Pinklao Street. Cars and motorcycles had swerved around them, those varmints that had been using their instruments of vile urination for pleasure, and in so doing inadvertently achieving for themselves nominal immortality amongst tortuous shoppers like him who had come out of Central Department store off an opulent cloud of various exits to the bathos of the gritty and the pornographic. For him it had been amusing and, while going to the parking garage, there had been a sheepish grin on his face. Like any male he had gazed at the exhibitionists and the duality of rapture beyond that of any female counterpart leaving the mall; like any artistic mutant of a man who from his own abused childhood pursued brothel studies as though he were an astrophysicist on the verge of a singular theory. He had gazed at the varmints and their apotheosized obscenity, vile and natural, until its completion, far longer than other men exiting the mall.
And yes, he who had an affinity for dogs left to reproduce in Bangkok streets and obviously elsewhere in Southeast Asia so gratuitously, an affinity for them that perished with the overseers' knowledge and without the least compunction, would wish to see them in drooling rapture rather than in grueling rupture. Both scenes, then and now, reminded him that instinctual cravings were such a compulsion in man and dog that for it, this frenzy, this euphoric escape, they would risk death. Such was the insanity of it all—all this programming to replicate beings with no purpose beyond replication itself, unless it were the animation of inanimate elements that they neither saw nor wanted to see, as they each, in separate moments, lowered their umbrellas to jump onto a rock when the rain was a mere sprinkle and continued their destined walk, this movement toward open body bags, coffins, and urns that waited patiently for them in their myopic and only half-believed sense immortality.
"Nice, isn't it?—one of the best sites that we in Laos pride ourselves on, and show to all our rich travelers—dogs doing it."
"Well, its rife in life. I couldn't expect anything better—here or elsewhere."
"Good, then its impossible to disappoint you. There's not much here, I must admit. La Prabang is better. Maybe I'll take you to a few temples and stupas in Vientiane—La Prabang even—before you return to Bangkok."
"It's okay, I don't mind. Seeing sites—it's not what I'm after."
"What are you after if you don't mind telling me? Why did you want to come Vientiene, anyway?"
"That's Complicated," he said ineffably for how could the wish to escape inordinate grief be expressed? He merely stood there not from bravery but from the confusion of a mute animal, numbly feeling this hot iron branding of the forehead, this incommunicable set of feelings, and these memories fading to abstractions with every new day, but there at this distance beckoning him nonetheless. The number he was, the more he could function, not that bereft of agenda, he needed to do anything apart from engaging in a departure that he hoped would bring him peace of mind.
The Laotian kissed him on the cheek taking in the sides of the lips and transferring his molecules therein.
"My new brother," he said ironically. "He keeps wanting to sweep up a pile of dirt that blew away long ago. Forget your past. You are a guest in my home and I usher new beginnings for you."
He tried to thank him but the words would not come out. How could he thank someone for this betrayal of his intention. Although an invitation to the possibility of fraternity, family, and a consistency of human presence which for sanity he was deemed to need, his body yearned not for true intimacy but true illusion. He wanted him as his lover, the lever for the fuel of his testosterone, dopamine, adrenalin, and serotonin which would be extinguished at ejaculation like the falling of a bottle rocket. Thus he stayed silent.
He sensed that this imparted kiss was deliberate in its ambiguity; that his stare was a spotlight; and that his grin was one of gaining satisfaction from not disclosing all that he knew. He sensed, although he was not quite sure how, that his thoughts were being discerned: that this friend knew of his womanly sensitivity, knew of the desperate scraping on the walls of the cells of his brain, of the outlines of faces of family and friends lost to him—an action like art to compensate for diminishing memories, of his unsteady scaffolding on the verge of imploding from the loss of entire foundations of youth, of this resistance of selfish impulses that compelled lesser men to father child laborers and others sons that would be extensions of themselves at their demise, of the perception he had of women as obsessed to have a nest in which to breed birdies that once grown would in the best of circumstances cause the second dissolution of family, of this conviction that the male entity was always being used by women, and even more, of nature itself, which coerced a man in the lure of replete pleasure and the barely manageable impulses that were its precursor. Just as on the train he believed that the Laotian ad his sister knew of his attraction toward him, so now he was reading his deeper thoughts. Maybe it was the sagacity to notice the slightest expressions in a countenance that was under the influence of mood. Maybe when a man was not given an opportunity to learn from books, his scholarly pursuits were merely to gain the skill to accurately judge the essence of a man for his own use. Nawin on impulse, wanting to do rather than think, and yearning for a contract with another being rather than the circumspect reticence and insular freedom of being alone was willing to risk opprobrium rather than having to play more of this game of the straight and narrow, opened and tilted his umbrella over the Laotian and kissed him fervently. He was not sure after these brief seconds were complete if the lips of the other party had at any point pressed into his own reciprocally or were just that of a victimized passive agent compelled into action by the rape forced upon them. Aloof and disconcerted, amused and perplexed, the Laotian smiled at him wryly. In so doing it made this fraternal role seem feigned.
"You don't mind?" he asked him.
"I don't mind anything," the Laotian said
"Here's a hotel room. We could stay together until morning."
"You and I together?"
"If you want?"
"I want. I really want. But another day. I want to get you home."
39
Except for brief durations, he had not slept much the previous night. He had been preoccupied by belated concerns over his actions with the intimate stranger and an obsession to purge the travail of abused childhood by placing himself in similar scenarios so as to anoint the visceral wounds with seething pleasure. He had been besieged with worries about the possible theft of his wallet from the drawer of the night stand in the room of the guest house, and yet now he would willingly give away the money he had and the bands of gold that he wore which separated him from others of the swarthy, befouled herd, for an opportunity to sleep. He had this strange, recurrent idea that everything he had with him and all of his material possessions, assets, and estates in Bangkok were irrelevant. The idea resonated with a drowsy philosophical truthfulness that belied an organism's necessity to thrive at the expense of common laborers. It seemed to him (not that as tired as he was he could trust his ideas) as though, in a world of poverty where the true crime lay in the paucity of theft, such possessions were not his to begin with. If in being taken into the country he ended up murdered, his throat slit and that which he had taken from him, in some ways it would be a justified hypercorrection.
His sensory impressions did not seem to be fully registered, making every few minutes of "reality" shift around on their own Teutonic plates. The sensory input which made its way to the printmaker of the mind to be copied and filed in memory for future reference (ideas and situations unclear to be sketched in artfully, deceitfully, self-delusively, and credulously with his own fabrications) were, in this state, the faintest of reproductions and made him have difficulty seeing and understanding let alone embellishing, believing, and categorizing content. His consciousness awry, at certain seconds the world seemed to have become an ethereal haze and he sensed himself on a slippery precipice of the declension of the foundation of self, which one only feels in the asphyxiation of loneliness. Twice he stumbled as he walked. The second time he did so the Laotian laughed.
"You all right, old man?" he asked.
"Yeah I'm fine. Tired but okay—except for that comment."
"You don't like it?"
"No, not particularly. I mean for my taste its all right—unique (of course, when reconsidered and taken less personally he who mentally referred to King Bhumibol in English as "King Booby"— he who has become affluent by exploiting the inner worlds, the souls, of prostitutes in his nude "studies"—would hardly be one to espouse etiquette).
"But not respectful?"
"No, not respectful." East Asian society, in public so deferential of age, in private hearts expressed a more human reaction. It was the same repulsion for mental and physical deterioration, lack of stamina, and loss of beauty, essences of life that vanished with the years.
"Not a thing to do to a guy who is still sensitive about having turned forty, of having experienced his birthday all alone on a train."
"A birthday boy? Why didn't you tell us?"
"I don't know. Didn't I?" he spoke indifferently. "I don't remember. At any rate you gave me a beer on the train. That was like a gift I suppose. I could go for some coffee now. They have that here?"
"Where?"
"Laos. Vientiane."
"We're not jungle monkeys," said the Laotian. Nawin smiled warmly. Of course they were but how pleasant that they were endeavoring to be more.
"Forty, are you? So young," continued the Laotian. "And if we had known we would have made you a cake. We would have, you know?"
"Would you have? And how would you have made one in a train?"
"I don't know. There were stops. I could have scraped together something. Kemiga and I used to make mud pies when we did the baby thing together."
"Your sister's name?"
"Yes. You liked her, didn't you?"
"She's pretty. Do you do the baby thing with her now?"
"The baby thing?" he scoffed, turned red in embarassment, and became reticent with face looking downward as if the breeding dogs that they had seen in passing were still before them.
"Playing around upon occasion, sure, but no baby things. We've outgrown that. Anyhow we better hurry. Its getting late."
At first the conversation brought Nawin reassurance. The relationship was amicable enough and he was content to be in company that kept him sheltered from being denigrated and reviled in his own thoughts, which rained down upon him. Then he thought of the abrupt petulant shift of the conversation to a tacit moodiness and the Laotian suddenly seemed grotesque and alien to him; the scenario of leaving the city limits with him vastly peculiar; that peculiarity seeming as if it were happening to someone else or viewed from a staticy television broadcast; and although acknowledging that all strangers remained such, unless communicated with and entrusted to be more, he wanted to flee the unknown cravenly and return home on that train which had taken him here.
It was the obdurate will of man that feigned reality to begin with and the weathering forces of drowsiness that loosened the elements allowing their essence to scatter like an empty shell smashed and falling through a fist. This was the quintessential truth of or lack of reality. And yet as he was beckoned to return home by ghosts of the past, corpses now resuscitated and moving to the foreground of his brain as if alive and relevant after so much time and so many changes, he was still gravitating forward toward the Laotian.
Conclusions about the world had subtly assembled in the back of his brain in the course of his life, conclusions repudiated at other times for the need to think positively and to make the world his home for lack of a choice of another, slipped through barriers of his mind to the forefront of his brain. His thoughts were in anarchy; and if drowsiness allowed tiny viral thoughts to enlarge and escape the subconscious, the weary consciousness of the mind exaggerated the extent of the mutation, the brain looking at individual thoughts as mirrors from an amusement park. He saw sparse motorcyclists, drivers, and pedestrians as their true figurative form of human vultures, and yet he did not mind for, as insular as he now was, to have his corpse clawed, scraped off, and devoured by beasts would be a most welcome act of intimacy.
He did not understand the reasons why he continued on this journey with the Laotian (this train stranger's lure of him, or the vulnerability that made him succumb to his will and agenda as if social contracts were always done in weakness and human relationships always pursued with the objective of attainment in mind), and yet he walked with him all the same. Was it simply for cock sweet on the sweetened cock vine? he posited derisively. Maybe there was the hunger for the sensual and the molecular in the attraction but for it to be only this would be a vast oversimplification. In part he was invigorated as much as a sleep deprived man could be by having crossed over the border, with his life just hours earlier seeming closed off to him now; in part it was to be with someone who could look beyond the playboy contrivances of art and life to see the soul of the atheist, the abused child beneath the man—yes, that was the lure over him but as with all things, such firey hungers came from within and were not ignited by extraneous forces without. Early childhood experiences were the arsonist, and the tower of his manhood would burn to a final implosion hoping for one who could fan ebullient flames or put him out entirely.
And of this second Boi, the Thai from Nongkai who claimed that he had come into the restaurant of the guesthouse because of the heavy rain, this unknown boy who already seemed as a passing dream, a wet dream, an evaporated being or residual abstraction oozing out of the furthest corners of memory, would he, Nawin, really have paid for his education? Overall he believed that if a letter, an email, or a phone call were to come to him resurrecting the abstraction into a living being once more, he would help him. But without sleep he hardly knew anything about himself for sure—he was like some piece of discarded trash bobbing superficially on weltering waves. He surely would help him as he had done for ladies of the night and other women whom he drew, rode, and drew once more but that fact alone did not speak well of him. Doing something pleasant for that which brought him pleasure seemed only a means to keep the pleasure coming. No, he retracted, his motives were not as bad as this. He might not be the greatest altruist or philanthropist in the world but as a man who knew it all, had suffered it all, and could easily imagine the travails of the inner lives of others, it was his obligation to correct injustices where and when he saw them. Only a lunatic sought injustices to paint or rectify, but if one alleviated the suffering that came before him and his adumbration, his life would have true worth. But what phone calls would he receive? He had thrown his telephone into the large trash can at the Hualamphong train station, so it was not as if he would get any telephone calls. Address? He was homeless. Deeds that he owned were merely paper, joint property due to hid marriage license, or so he assumed, not that attempting the eviction of wife and son had ever entered his mind. To think of them ensconced eased his mind. Email? As an artist and lecturer, he had allowed one of his students to maintain these secretarial duties. Now his account at Silpakorn University, home of the Silpakorn University Swamp Monster, the roving land and water monitor, had email galore to which he would never be able to get through all alone even if he cared to try.
What did he know? He hardly knew anything—just that he was walking with the Laotian, that a bus depot of some sort was before them, that the possibility of an amorous interlude had fallen behind some moments earlier like a handkerchief from his back pocket, and that from nigh to nay that which could be dissolved into location had become nothing. As all things in the course of time weakened, diffused, and were absorbed by the next behemoth event, so was rapacious emotion, more illusory and immaterial than anything else, and instinctual hungers that were corporeal delusions of intimacy to, more times than not, foster pregnancy, would be all the more fleeting. Now the nearest hotel was blocks behind them, and here they were.
It was like a fallow pasture for the grazing of these mountable but crippled mammoths. They were used busses that were supercilious hand-me-downs from Japan to a world capital bereft of so much. Often there needed to be multiple attempts at the ignition key to get them started, but once revived, these monsters constantly exuded and spewed their noxious and intoxicating flatulence.
He entered deep into the underbelly of one that would take him to the poverty and destitution of the masses out of city limits and illusions. If Bangkok was an opulent deception of rural life he hardly knew what would lie before him away from the antiquated, rustic capital of Vientiane; but he knew that it would be rife in life, and something far truer and more pervasive than his impoverished existence as the son of a sidewalk restaurant proprietor in Ayutthaya. He did not know of any reason for what he was doing; but at least he was living life by actually doing something. And whether or not he would find it more of a positive experience than a negative one, as encounters with women opening up their reeking legs for him, was yet unknown.
It was an adventure to which the outcome was uncertain; but as it was an adventure; at least it had the pleasantry of this component, which was sought most ardently by those who could not rest in their own company, if nothing more substantial. But then with so much that was deceased around him, meaningful relationships decomposing on the mound of earlier rot, he would have to be truly pachydermatous to not feel an impact from that which might seem extraneous. And when the inside was shaken with all in rubble, of course he would have to leave his domicile. He had mistakenly believed that during most of his time in Laos he would be sitting in some park or another reading a volume of essays on Buddhism or art, and when glancing up at the sky he would hear nothing within and without but the gentle rustling of pages turned by the fingers of the wind. Instead he heard evacuation sirens within the city of the mind.
And here he was exiting Vientiane. It was hard to believe that he had actually been in the capital. The city had monuments and a few signs in English elucidating Laotian history, but signs of international commerce or even signs in Laotian prompting capitalism on a local level, seemed scarce. These people were not competing but sustaining themselves and thus there was little thriving on the backs of others. There were no elite artists—no arts at all outside that which impoverished students sold along the river to French tourists.
Standing in this crowded bus of upright mangled bodies twisted around each other, he tried to free his mind as best he could. He contorted his head toward a window and angled it diagonally to look up at the gargantuan sky clogged in floating masses of clouds. It seemed to him that all futile prayers ended in the ethereal bellies of these livid beasts. Still, they looked thick and real whereas he and those around him seemed, in his sleep deprived state, to be disappearing like vapor.
Why not one more stifled yearning? If he got what he instinctually craved, he would be but inflamed instinct with all the days of his life subject to hedonistic impulses, continually needing others, he would be forever incomplete. It was good that the hotels were behind him and that that inexplicable feeling for the desideratum had died down to a few burning cinders.
"He's bound to stop for a beer somewhere between two bus routes, slit your throat as a fruit vendor would a watermelon from his chilled glass cart, mince you into pieces, dump you from the Friendship bridge, and watch you, in pieces, float down the Mekong river," said a gecko. The reptile was hanging from a rail on the bus, its form grotesquely large for a gecko and resembling a Silpakorn swamp monster in miniature, with a head like a four legged dinosaur, a tongue like a snake, and a body like an alligator, but a gecko it was nonetheless. "It's your destiny and you cannot escape it. Why look so frightened? Don't you like that which circumvents etiquette?"
"Maybe."
"Maybe? Exploiter of whores, splattering their filth on canvas in your colors, your rebellion against this land where naïve belief in the goodness of the Chakri dynasty is supreme, belief that Taksin the Great after his wars with the Burmese had suddenly gone mad, that the bludgeoning of his body and the execution of his son in Cambodia had been done at orders other than that first Chakri, Rama I and that Rama IX did not arise by the assassination of his brother, the Eighth, belief that father, the abuser, knows best. You are drawn to those who do something avante garde. Why be afraid. It's ineluctable?"
"Ineluctable?"
"Ineluctable as day meets night. And you want it to happen—this ruining of you at other hands. Admit it."
"I do; but I don't know why."
"The smearing of paint, the smearing of blood, there's no difference. The murder of a rich man to get his gold, the impaling of a whore with your cock, its all mixing to get the most poignant colors on the palette. He will get you drunk. People of that type always like to drink and to do so at their friend's expense. He will notice your gold and stay silent about it as though it does not interest him at all. People of that type always do."
"And the means of doing it?"
"A rusty pocket knife with a dull edg,e but with enough muscle and unflinching will even the dullest object can puncture another. But I wouldn't give it any concern; it's no different than the wallowing explorations of the pig-like whores you are so fond of, all for the thrill of exploitation and impaling. He will be intimate with your blood and as he does so he will never forget you."
"Sit down. Over there," said this Boi. A woman had just left the back row of seats. Feeling enervated, Nawin obeyed.
40
They had gotten off one bus to wait along the road for another which, he assumed, would take them to other hamlets or rural scatterings possibly more remote than this—assumed, for what did he know waiting perennially, or seemingly so as he was, and shaking his head from time to time to keep himself on top of the internal waves and not be overtaken, not be absorbed by them- waves which came upon him voraciously like inundating tongues, polysemous tsunamis of a muted, mutating language cryptic to him, not of volition and thus adventitious in a sense, but still of his own making. The gecko/water monitor-hybrid was still whispering from the tips of the tallest of weeds, "He's brought you out here to kill you," even though it seemed to him that if the Laotian were to do this he would have done it by now; that, barely glancing at him, as preoccupied as the younger man now was with this new pastime of murmuring into his telephone while scratching and pinching his crotch, activities pursued almost as fervently as playing with his blades, that his intent was innocuous, or as innocuous as it could be for one more of the naked and purposeless human animals for which manipulating the environment to serve one's sense of pleasure and to repudiate by acquisition that which he was, was always a salient motive. So he thought, and wearing a gold chain and a thousand dollar watch as he was, so he needed to believe; and thus he justified his actions to his nebulous and somewhat effervescent self that was surreally disconnected like a half severed limb.
Looking at him from the dense, weeded patch where he stood a couple yards behind—it was, surely, this first Boi, the one in the train, and not the other; or maybe they were manifestations of the same: the wounded and the wounding—he sought an objective appraisal of him, this migrant laborer who skid around like a leaf; this individual who had given him a beer in the train but now often wielded a knife, this peculiar man whom he had seen touching his sister's feet and from a mere glance had interpreted or misinterpreted a look of lust toward her, a desperate and impoverished predilection that he knew too well, this intimate stranger of his mind whom he believed (but did not know) to have noted his own homosexual proclivity, which he had mentioned in oblique jocular sagacity, an individual with an appearance like his brother of long ago, or what he remembered of him, who could well have been soliciting himself at the Patuxai or just sitting there insouciantly as though accepting his and humanity's own naked, futile state, which acquisitive attempts even by the most affluent ultimately belied, this male who perhaps had little or no sexual interest in him ( a fact which would have negated his own feelings quickly had the teasing not exacerbated them), and was using him somehow although he did not know exactly how or care all that much for he wanted to be of use so as to discover something useful in himself.
No, the Laotian was not one whom he could objectively surmise when yearning for intimacy with and salvation for him. Already there was a taste of loose molecules of him in his mouth and the smell of him, or an emission of him, which was not him really, rolling in his nose—or more logically, he contravened, the memory of the smell and taste of others mixed with his smell which by his imaginative reveries he ascribed to him; and he wanted to deliver him the way he did of 7-11 clerks and food cart restaurateurs in his worthless good wishes but with slightly more personal emphasis and effort. It was no major hardship to forsake his retirement for a brief time, to paint the family not in time-consuming and arduous "art," if his could be called such, but as quick smears that magically conveyed a superficial essence, and to pay them a few thousand baht for sitting still and posing before him—creatures of movement expanding with time but made silent and inert deserved compensation, although what he would do with the final products, he did not know. Dragged to Bangkok to be stuffed in a closet of a home he had yet to possess in his new life as a sole bachelor, they would never see the light of day (they could not be known for it would depreciate his own commercial worth). Still, it was irrelevant.
A bus came…a seat where he could be sleeping and from a nap recovering, understanding what he was doing more rationally; but then it went by and they continued to wait as though it had not come at all. The telephone was now folded and put into a pocket and the Laotian was once again opening and closing the blades of his knife as before without even looking at the bus that was now disappearing into the distance.
He could jump the blade wielder if he so pleased, take away the knife under the impulse of the moment (maybe escalating or degenerating into making love to him in the sodden grasses like a pleasure-seeking wild boar if attitude could be wrenched from him with no more difficulty than the knife), and demand an answer for this long wait. But then he would have to be rather certain that his own thinking was clear, and he knew that it was not; that the wait was inordinate instead of seeming such—he was not sure exactly how long they had been waiting; or if he was in fact being threatened in some way instead of entertaining the possibility of being threatened (anything was possible). To jump him aggressively or to even outwardly accuse him of something only to find his own reasoning egregiously and mortifyingly false would make him the miscreant. It was his judgment that there was more of a probability that his own need for sleep was making him suspicious, if not paranoid. He decided the Laotian's behavior was not indicative that he himself was the desideratum, the target of execution—but, even of this, what did he know with the reasoning ability he had sloshing around in drowsiness and drowsiness speaking so incessantly with its reptilian voice murmuring that he, Nawin, would be stabbed (to use the exact word in Reptilian, impaled) and that he wanted it that way; and perhaps he did want it that way, he speculated about his wish to be impaled intimately, his natural death wish that would be unnatural if not opposed strongly by a zeal to live. The extent of his zeal to live (surely the more pervasive and predominate it was the more healthy the human psyche) he was uncertain of in such an exhausted state with inordinate muck, the black dust and fabric of the brain, in all sectors animated and taking on primitive life like a mass of prions rising from nothing recalcitrantly, clogging his mind with their movements, his will, his sensibility lost to them that were no more than adumbrations of forgotten aspects of his life…lost.
Lost…how much more, especially when in this sleep deprived state, could he tolerate this standing idly at the edge of the highway and, in each sound of an emerging truck, anticipating, or coercing a feigned anticipation of, the emergence of a bus futilely, but in thought expecting that it would never come most perspicaciously? How much more could he tolerate all this: these prodigious moments of fighting the pull of sleep; people rift from him; increasing age transporting him further and further from the sensitive child whom he once was, a sheen of innocence that he once had and could have maintained to some degree had there not been a need to survive on the streets and to rise above them economically; his naïve wish to be loved; and his hunger to use others for sexual gratification, all of which compelled him to mutate—a groping primate of sorts dangling on a limb to avoid putting his feet directly on the sordid ground, as if that which he garnered from the earth, his money, were clean. Lost, it was a part of him that he could not keep, a ragamuffin whom he wanted to reject and reclaim simultaneously and yet could do neither one well.
But, in accepting the mutation—there was little choice but to accept it and as he had always flaunted himself in the livery of his manhood there was no point in reversing the trend now—how was he to know that the man he now was was the man he was meant to be? Who was to say that one was meant to be anything at all but atoms attracted to each other loosely and reverberating off each other in temporary mass, an agglomeration less solid, less real, than a rock, and more equivalent to a gas? Who was to say that man evolved personally let alone socially? He just let the old foundation crumble and sordid experiences caulk into and harden over the holes stinking like excrement.
Perhaps one did not evolve any more than the word "love" had substance beyond its four letter content and the amount of time and energy expended to gain this concocted abstraction which by being believed, managed, as a corollary, to patch the void and perpetuate the species—a species of monetary, intellectual, and physical disparity whose only ablution would come in a rain of nuclear bombs.
The postcard which he had picked up for her in Nongkhai he had forgotten in his room at the guesthouse. A maid had no doubt thrown it into the trash by now; but then it matched the telephone and life which he had thrown, as well, into the trash receptacle at the train station—yes, two negatives were better than one because the odd was never harmonious and even. What did he want of that telephone anyhow, as possessing it would not bring women back, not even the cute nurse at Siriaj Hospital, for the wound had been reopened and a reopening a vile hole he must fall through.
At this time she, Noppawan, was no doubt there in their home with his child, and so he could return to Vientiane, find a decent hotel—the few that there were—and give her a call. Better, he could boldly return to her who had been the salvation of his youth; but now they were not the same as before—their relations would be like returning to an empty house after it had been repossessed by the bank. He, the Nawin of ten years hence, would just be another variation of this thing that he called self, constructed substantially of recent memories, and erected broadly on distant general impressions of largely diminished and forgotten accounts. His true self was the self of the moment and it would only be real for a time if his colors did not blur into the colors of everything else—but then one did not live without interacting and diluting. Was not his sojourn here, this atheist's retreat, futile if he did not interact with others and mix himself in them, hoping to learn and be enhanced beyond his musty, circumscribed domain?
Why, he asked himself, was he here? If he had gone to Chiangmai, he could have been hang-gliding, or Pattaya, para-skiing, action where, for a time, being isolated, diluted, vanishing, not even a professional selfless entity, a cog in the social-economic apparatus, ceased to matter. Who could blame those who dissolved themselves fully into the mindless purity of action, the substance of the expanding universe? In the brevity of motorcycle rides and the attendance of football games he did it on a regular basis himself…but then he would always return to that unfathomable, pensive self that others muffled gregariously with the noise of companions—a pensive, mellifluous dirge sought after and found most fully, for him, in broad empty spaces.
Now, to not be all alone, separated from this mad world he meant to separate himself from, to not hear so clearly the inner voice which, in a change of attitude, he now did not want to hear fully, to not think of himself as an affluent but still aimless drifter or a delinquent parent in a fatherhood that had come about from this game of massage and ejaculation concocted by two women yearning for a child, to not be a broken aching man with a broken throbbing arm and clavicle, the gifts of a wife who despised him, to be free of that recurrent guilt-ridden memory of a girlfriend suffering from postpartum depression who leaped from a balcony to elude him, that nightmare of a mutilated corpse always fresh in his thoughts, and to stand in the eternal compass of love without a diminutive man-made version that was broken fragments in his hands, would be his ultimate rapture.
Nawin—of course the word was a name change, a mere alteration of a label from that hapless creature, "Jatupon," fleeing the past of noodle servitude to his brothers and whoredom to one of them—no, not a sex slave per se, as he had been with him from volition with all that serotonin, adrenalin, testosterone, dopamine, naivety, inexperience, youthful trust of feelings, and all the rest making him madly in love (mandates and mastery by chemistry, so hardly slavery in the traditional sense of the word which would imply an external factor); and it was done because a Buddhist monk had advised it to be done. So why, with women let alone anyone else, should he want to feel this spurious emotion of "love" once again? A time and a half had been more than enough.
"So you're not groveling back to your wife, wounded and wanting her tender mercies. I had you all wrong—good for you," he daydreamed the Laotian as saying and himself providing the response of, "No, with any violent altercation or, at least a conclusion in my mind that neither party is any good to the other—the wife to the husband and the husband to the wife, my allegiance changes."
"To a different sex than what you are involved in?"
"Why would you think that?"
"I have my reasons. Come on, all pent up in your head with no one to talk to, wouldn't you like to confess to one person?"
"Not really."
"All right. So be it; if you want to stagnate that way. It's entirely up to you."
"Well, if you have to know, it can change or be for none at all.I'm not afraid."
"Of what? Me?"
"Of disengagement. Of saying my goodbyes."
"But you followed me here" he laughed incredulously. "Why's thatPree [older brother] Nawin?"
"Yes."
And he remembered that in the last year or two she, Noppawan, would mutely convey that most indifferent of yeses to him, her retired, worthless husband who no longer had the stamina to pussy-hunt beyond the domain of his two women, and did not even have the virility to raise a paintbrush as, he concluded, his paintings did not have either enlightened vision or the titian colors of the Greats, and that he was a commercial whore more than an artist—wives of course always wanting money and possessions, always buying and making plans for the renovations of their nests (empty with infertility as they might be), and the buyers of his canvases whom he catered to needing their luscious prostitutes to exude testosterone throughout their stiff cadaverous bodies to transport them from the mundane. And when he tried to share the poignancy of the seemingly blasé and inconsequential of a given day of his leisure and meditation at the zoo, various parks, and at park benches (the patterns of clouds, the black diamond sparkle of shadows of leaves on the ground, the lofty fan of bold pigeons perching on his table to steal his Styrofoam container of rice, wind carrying the smell of rejuvenating blades of grass—that same perennial and eternal smell he remembered from 35 years ago) often she, Noppawan, would continue to make dinner in silence, mutely conveying that most indifferent of yeses to him, pony tail nodding indifferently against the nape of her neck in affirmation of nothing.
He needed to urinate and obviously so did the younger man who was no longer looking at the road but toward the land with forest behind them, and a pasture with free roaming emaciated water buffalo at a distance. Unzipping his pants, the Laotian aimed the release of the arch of his liquids to nature and to the exhibition of all passing cars.
"How long are we going to wait out here?" complained Nawin in his somniloquy. That which he was hearing did not seem to come from himself at all but an invisible presence with the utterances of his own voice projected like an actor off screen, and the Laotian an alien performance put in front of his face, so as to be more real than any real being, a surreal and magnificent presence, magni-real in a sense. To be able to stare at him justifiably, words had to supply a pretext, and so the complaint spilled out of a mouth of a man who wanted to see another male's nakedness.
"Until it comes. Glad to know that you aren't dumb and mute after all," he said—he who went under the nickname of Boi. Whether this one was really Boi 1 or Boi 2 would depend on perspective; but, in either case, he judged that it did not matter. If there was something that mattered it was that these traumas he had experienced in Bangkok were making him transfixed by boys.
"I speak occasionally; but there isn't much sense in rattling nonsense so that everything seems less empty, is there? Besides, I like to think and be quiet."
"Why?"
"I don't know. It makes me feel alive."
"To not say anything to anyone?"
"Yes. To not be in the commotion of others too much. It's a trade off—which voice seems most important at a given time. But I know that it comes from affliction, early pain and reticence I never overcame. Seeking color in darkness. What are you doing?" Nawin smirked.
"What it looks like."
"Yeah, well I mean, out here?"
"Looks like I'm shutting it down with some wanks. Do you need to piss?"
"Yes."
"Then pull it out. Who's stopping you? There's no five star hotel around the corner where you can do your nasty business. Look around you. What you see is the entire country—nothing."
Nawin smiled painfully. Space and nature and Jatupon whose only essence could be found here and, in part, within this impecunious stranger, were the only allure. .
As the two men admitted by action that they were no different than beasts of early man urinating freely without repressions, restraints, and repercussions, neither of them feeling that they had been a detriment to environment and morality, each regained manhood. It was restored unto them in the flooding of their small respective areas to the demise of a few insects and vegetation. As they did this Nawin wondered how it came to be that a shirt removed in casual situations meant nothing while two penises dangling out in the open were such an ignominy and he felt a further sense of exhilaration as though in this petty, untoward action he were being launched to a different side of the galaxy. Superfluously, the Laotian multi-jerked himself once more. Was it to interrupt the last trickle? Was it to interrupt this spiritual retreat of him who did not believe in a spirit?
"I wish one of those straw hat milk maidens from one of the dairy farms would come by for a bit of my wet sausage," he said.
Nawin smiled awkwardly at the words that gave proof to an impalpable conjecture and made him assess how trite human interaction was. Unworthy of the god of the human animal, still it was exhilarating. Relinquishing the mind and plunging into human interactions, it was as if he were at last experiencing a bit of life, here across the boarder, and no longer needing to atone for his sexual liaison in Nongkhai and elsewhere. Caught in the predicament of opposing thoughts and emotions, he said nothing. Perhaps, he thought, this was the real source of his reticence.
"Do you hear me, Mute?"
"Yeah man, I hear you. You want a milk maiden to milk you. What do you want me to do about it?"
"That's right. What do I want you to do about it?" he chuckled.
Nawin waited in brief silence for an answer that was not immediately forthcoming. How titillated he was by so little; and for a moment he dwelt on the fact that such petty and banal interactions brought ribald pleasure, and the ambiguity of motives a sense of suspense to life's limited beings.
Now he was yearning for permission to become the animal that he was—permission to follow the mandates of initial impulses which were essential to salubrious man free of the conflicting venues of attempts at self restraint. As coupling had to be done as that, a couple, he needed him to pointedly say that he wanted sexual relations with him, although mentally he hoped to have nothing of the sort. His feelings and refined feelings, thought, were moving around each other in contrary motions, pulling him tautly while twisting him into knots that he recognized as the essence of civilized man, and this too he wanted no part of.
"I'm not all that particular—A police woman in her communist uniform making rural rounds; a coca cola driver pulling off the edge of the road, coming to stretch his legs and finding himself hungry before he remounts his beast and drives away. That would be fine. Then I can't think of anything more that would be needed and so wouldn't have to do a thing—just watch it go down. You think you can do that?"
Nawin wondered of the ambiguity of language. Was it such because it was inadequate in conveying intentions, that the motivations of a man were multifaceted theses and antitheses, or that to keep motivation and the inner workings of the mind safe, replies were obfuscated? In any case it seemed dubious that the grunts of language were really the best attribute of man.
And he imagined, daydreamed, or dreamed that a man shaped like a zero was being sodomized in the weeds by the stiff broad boned four of a female; that on this most garish of days, Father's Day, King Booby's birthday, when all were supposed to dress in yellow attire to commemorate him (dare he mock the kingly puppet god of the military who nodded silently in the earliest of days when they knocked off his brother, and from it was deified on the condition of staying perennially silent? It was the first time he had done so even in his thoughts, but recent tragedies and experiences had unctioned his mind and under garish cynosure made all normal ways of behaving known as the artificiality of man-made-rules that they were), he and this second stranger were interlocked in a naked embrace on sodden Laotian earth bereft of yellow flags, were coupled together fetid and wild as stray dogs—a product of nature and uninhibited will denuded of pretense. And he dreamed that he was in communion with a reptile ("Listen," he imagined himself saying to the indeterminate specie, "If one doesn't hold onto his own breath why should he hold onto people? Why should he be afraid that more will not flow in? No specific one is needed, although it might seem as though he were; interaction is needed (be it with a person or dog), an outside stimulus to dilute the intensity of one single group of accumulating thoughts foundering one to extremes, but this is all. And if I can dismiss a wife after she broke a clavicle and an arm with a frying pan, I can do it of a stranger—this stranger." "No you can't," said the creature, "for she was the stitching of the wound that could be undone in time. But the train acquaintance is a resemblance of the wound itself, the wounder, and wounding, the trinity, and it possesses you—the erect cock, the blade that will pierce your death intimately." "He's not even playing with his knife any longer. He's no danger to me. He knows me now." "When your guard is down he will strike, and then you will have your intimacy.").
Then a second bus passed them by but the Laotian seemed as wholly impervious to the sensation as before. It was a bus (the right one?—that he did not know—but a bus nonetheless) so raised head and attention askance would only have been natural.
"Why didn't we get on that one?"
"It's not the right one," he said.
Nawin finally admitted to himself that there might not be a right one, and suddenly, at least in feelings, he ceased caring all that much. All that he wanted was to lie in the stink of the earth. Now there was a butterfly fluttering about his feet. If he were to lie down it would fan away the sweat that was collecting at his brow, there would be beauty in the sordid, and there, without compunction he would plunge into dreams thumping as the voices of frogs at a distance.
"Come here," he told the Laotian. Boi came over to him. "So young," he said as he touched a wisp of hair that stuck out over the boy's ear and was salient in his sense of beauty. "You remind me of someone I once knew. It's like the world recycles the same stuff. What do you want from life? I mean not what is real and before you but what you really want."
"What point is there in that? I'm here. My sister's here. When the crops are bad we get jobs elsewhere for as long as we can and then we return. I guess when I was younger I wanted to be a pilot for what it's worth now."
"A pilot?"
"Once upon a time."
"Once upon a time," repeated Nawin thinking of a time when family was an eternal concept in a young boy's mind and one's life was rife in possibilities. He felt sadness, the eternal sadness, reflected in this one who called himself Boi and he knew that he loved him. He tried to kiss him but the Laotian feigned a laugh and pulled away.
"Quit that, you joker. Save your kisses for beautiful Laotian women. I know what you want. You wouldn't be much of a man if you didn't. Thais with money are no different than other sex tourists that come to this country for a piece of Laotian pussy. All those paintings—you must be a real ladies man. Well, it looks like we will be here for a while. We might as well be comfortable as we wait. Let's cross over there and sit down." He pointed to a small shack and an awning at a distance. "You buy the drinks and we'll motion for the bus to stop when it gets here."
"You mean we have been waiting on the wrong side?"
The Laotian laughed. "Well, not exactly. There's a different way. There always is. It's sort of like a bus." Nawin felt ill at ease but did not say anything as the two crossed this infrequently traversed highway where a dead possum lay before them on the edge of the road.
"People deny that they are going to die by looking forward to a new day that brings them closer to death. It's most ironic," said the gecko-monitor as it rode on one of his pant legs. It was a non-sequitur that he could not place in the context of what was happening but then, as such, it seemed no different from anything else. And although he was not terribly alarmed, he questioned whether or not the man crossing the road with him was in fact the Laotian, but as everything changed anyway he could not see that being accompanied by someone else really mattered.
They sat at a second table behind two middle aged men. "Sabaidee mai?" he heard the acquaintance say to them and they reciprocated with the same greeting. If sabaidee was their sawadee he was not sure how he would understand these Laotians in all this shifting of semantics. He understood the acquaintance to say, "He's the Thai I told you about" to which one of the strangers said a word like benefactor in something to the effect of, "Does she like your benefactor." "I'm her brother," the Laotian responded. "She'll do as she is told." Then, as though conscious of him, there was a lot of small talk in which the acquaintance asked about where they worked and lived. Then the conversation changed to that of a football game at the university and, to him, it all seemed staged on his behalf. The acquaintance said, "Drink, you are on vacation. Loosen up" and so he drank two shots of whiskey that appeared in tandem before him. As both head and body heated up, and the stationary environment began to wobble, he tried to reassure himself that although everything changed it did so one moment at a time. He then noticed a bald spot on his acquaintance's scalp. It seemed to be floating hurriedly in the ethereal like a satellite and the biological structure of Nawin cringed at this defective counterpart. The train acquaintance, if he were such, now seemed older than before, and the liquid blueprint, which he was subconsciously yearning for, a less viably transferable product. This Boi asked them other questions in the Laotian tongue that he could not comprehend at all on the fourth shot of whiskey and their furrowed faces answered him although the substance of this he could not determine firmly.
And as they imbibed beer ever more gluttonously and he quaffed more shots of whiskey, becoming the sensation of an entity aflame, the substance of fire, he became conscious that he would be the one who would pay for all these drinks. Thus his hand began to flounder into various pockets for his wallet until finding it in his shirt pocket but with nothing inside its dark brown lining.
"My money—there's nothing there," said Nawin.
"Is that a fact?" said the Laotian.
"All of my money is gone."
"You are my friend. I am concerned for you and I am keeping your wallet so that you don't lose it. Also we have to pay these guys to take us to the farm. No more busses going that way this late." Then to the owner who was now attempting to refill the glass from a whiskey bottle he said, "No, enough. Nothing more for him." The gecko, sitting on his shoulder, imparted a long melodramatic look of consternation and worried skepticism which also seemed staged. The reptile was stirring the puddle of his eyes, watching the ripples and it continued to do this until they were outside and the truck was turned on. Bored, it too needed to make more from the rock of the planet.
One of these drunk companions deliberately skidding the vehicle on dirt roads to provoke reactions within the clouds of dust; wet patches where the pickup labored more than once to get itself out of a rut; then, after this long journey of front seat revelry, back seat asphyxiation, the arrival at a shack stilted like a cabin; and inside an extended family eating som tam, mangos, and sticky rice on a barren floor. Was it merely this he had unwittingly yearned for all this time—a gift of a surprised and welcoming smile from her whom he had met once before on the train? Through all the expended energy of his own version of spirituality and standard decadence it was just this expression that he had wanted all along—an expression which could make and remake a diminutive man. Alacritous, she served to him his share placed on a banana leaf that was on a bamboo placemat. The rest of the family was nice enough. Why wouldn't they be with a rich man of humble sensitivities there to be exploited, a man who was spinning out of his mind while the food was making him sick. Boi put him on a scattered blanket inside a dark bedroom. There he heard the continual barking of dogs through the window. Here in this cockroach infested room, to think of something not so painful, not so dreadful, he imagined the women cooking insect curry and roasted frog and the males smoking in the main room. The barking of dogs was mordant to his thumping head, and it took a half hour before he was asleep—the cascading of sleep only interrupted when the pallid sister poured him tea, squeezing a lemon exclusively into his glass, serving unto him while he was lying there.
"You don't have to do that," he said.
"I want to," she said as she tilted a glass toward him.
"You've come here to see us and now you are sick because of us."
"Not so sick. And certainly not because of you. It's my own foolishness in drinking."
"I think this will help. Mother's remedy."
"Thank you. I shouldn't be taking someone's room. Whose is it?"
"It's mine. It does not matter."
"Where will you sleep?"
"I'll find a place?"
"Where?"
"Where you want me to."
"Where I want you to?"
"Yes."
Helping him off with his clothes after the tea was drunk there was a kiss and a reciprocal denuding—he was being set up as nothing was this easy, but he did not care. "All for you," he imagined the Laotian saying to him as he noticed her lower body slightly distended. Still, he did not care for he needed a release. Feeling the body, entering it, ravaging it, he groped for the end of impermanence and acquisition of human flesh, and for family to cover his nakedness.