Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
“So he spoke, and the bright-eyed goddess, Athene, was pleased that she
was the god he prayed to before all the others. She put strength in his
shoulders and knees, and set in his heart the daring of a mosquito,
which, though constantly brushed away from a man’s skin, still insists
on biting him for the pleasure of human blood.”
—The Iliad
Homer
Book I: Palaver
Chapter 1
They, with their driver, went down Ramkhamhaeng Road singularly in the
scope of their thoughts but conditioned into repudiating their
aloneness. It was an early Bangkok morning with a new day tripping over
the corpse of the earlier one the way dogs on the Bangkok sidewalks
were walked on. It was early in the relationship of the two passengers
and this nascent association contained the complex and awkward
ambiguity of not being clearly professional or personal and he and his
prostitute-model were tripping into each other. When she put her hand
on his leg he would stiffen and both his legs would slightly slant away
from her but when she removed her hand and kept it away from him for
some minutes he would put it back there closer than ever to his thighs.
Even he had to admit his actions made no sense given the fact that he
flaunted her, and others like her, wherever he went; but it was part of
the game of being desired. Although he wasn’t even conscious that such
a game was being played, she was fully cognizant of these subliminal
calculative moves and how a woman was played. She knew that she was
desiring him more as a consequence. She also knew that being desired
required adhering to the rules of withdrawing from the neediness of
wanting to be linked to a man and of transforming herself into the
metamorphoses of self-contained fantasies that he would desire.
Despite Thai’s reverence for royalty, the three of them went down
Ramkhamhaeng Road without even thinking about the king behind the name.
He, his whore, and perhaps the faceless one at the steering wheel as
well, thought of themselves as a unit albeit an insignificant one. They
had that sociable tendency to chat at each other to reduce the drone of
one’s solitary and melancholic thoughts but it was less the case with
the pensive passenger, Nawin (formerly Jatupon) who, Aristotelian and
poised as a Garuda, was a surly contemplative despite lordly
debauchery. Through being whirled in vicissitudes he felt that he could
withstand anything fate had to offer. Unlike the others, he did not
need to escape his thoughts as much as a bull from a corral. Instead,
he befriended his morose tendencies.
Basking in the grandeur of his new stature, the back seat Nawin was
dwelling on himself continually in the concern that his fame, isolated
as it was, had not happened totally from the merit of his work. He
wondered how much the licentiousness of his life and the salaciousness
of the subject matter were the real color of what could be marginal
talents. He wondered if he should change his subject matter proving
himself as an artist even if it reduced the virility he felt as a type
of swarthy Thai sex symbol. How strange it was, he thought to himself,
that despite the fact that being dark was never an attractive trait in
Thailand where the lighter, Chinese skinned Thais were thought to have
more material success, sensuality, and beauty, he who was not
particularly handsome from being dark as a shoe’s heel should be sexy
from his wanton disposition. Likewise, his thoughts were dark in a land
of frivolous irresponsibility. To Thai’s the word “serious” had a
negative connotation and he was that. Unless one was a monk, being
contemplative was a tacit violation of laws in the Land of Smiles. He
had become the rescuer of whores humanizing their sorry plight. Their
only sins were to be born poor and to be loyal enough to not pull out
of the loose fetters of family obligations. They continued to remember
shadowy figments of obscure rural relatives whom they needed to feed.
Still being a hero was burdening him with a singular motif and he
continually shot this thought through his neurological circuitry until
the taxi driver spoke, parting his thoughts like Moses and the Red Sea
or Buddha sabotaging a bit of the recycle factory of the human soul.
“My son flew into Chaing Mai recently. I’ve been wondering about
airplanes ever since-just thinking about how things get off the ground.
Have you ever wondered that?”
“Ka,” meaning yes, the woman in the backseat croaked like a crow. “I’m
trying not to question it. Wondering such things would make me scared
that they don’t stay up in the sky,” she laughed. Her name was Jarunee
but her nickname was Porn. “This will be my first plane ride soaring
off with the birds.”
“Thais don’t often fly,” he said. His idea was tinged with a bitter
undertone as if poverty turned one’s bones to lead and he found that
his idea put him back in the solitude of his thoughts for only silence
ensued. He decided to sound happier. “You sound excited.”
“It has been my dream.” She leaned her head against Nawin’s shoulder.
“Flew off to Chaing Mai. He lost his job during the financial meltdown
of 96. 3000 baht. That’s what the family lived on each month for a good
many years. Then she was pregnant and laid off from the restaurant and
they stayed with us for five or six months. Of course they could have
stayed longer. After all, they are family.”
“Yes, of course. You sound like a good father. I’m sure it will get
better for everyone soon,” responded Porn as she looked up at the old
face in the mirror hoping with softness to make the tenor of the
conversation gayer.
“Krap,” he said meaning yes although he wasn’t in agreement. “No, he
continually got more depressed and then no matter how many job
interviews he went on, he came up empty handed. Then she took their
children to her parents. He came up there a bit later. The in-laws had
him but didn’t want him. He hadn’t been trained at anything but working
in the factory. He didn’t know how to plant rice or maybe he was too
depressed to learn. It wouldn’t seem there would be much to learn. You
just put them into the ground. Anyhow, he was walking around in a daze
all that time. That’s what she claimed they said about him. Soon he
returned with us but before we knew it off he went to Chaing Mai. I
don’t know why. I got a post card from there. It didn’t say much other
than he had taken his first flight. Can you imagine just buying a
ticket, leaving, and not saying a word.”
“Ka, not really. I can’t imagine anybody doing that...unless he just
didn’t want to worry you. Maybe he didn’t want to worry you about if
the idea was right or wrong financially. I bet he has friends there and
they’ll help him to locate work.”
“Yes, it is the best thing. I’ve been going to the temple to give food
to the monks and blessings will follow. I’m sure of that. I’ve never
gone on a flight. Where are the two of you going?”
“To Montreal.”
“Where’s that?”
“To Canada.” She smiled but the word, favorable as it was, didn’t have
the flavor of Paris or cities in America.
“What will you do there?”
Nawin wondered what she would be doing there. She had escorted him
around galleries, parties, and auditoriums where he gave speeches.
Bangkok gossip columnists had sometimes even mentioned her presence
with him. What would she be doing in Montreal while he attended
post-graduate classes? That was a fundamental question he had no answer
for. He had granted unto her a new profession where she didn’t have to
spread her legs to anyone but him. He had rescued her from stripping
and whoring in a bar in Patpong but perhaps that would not be enough.
Nobody was content. Like any animal, a human always yearned for more.
They were trying to build up on themselves so that they were free of
all discomfort. A woman was more that way than even a man based on his
judgments and to be left alone in an apartment in a foreign country
would be one major discomfort she would not tolerate. He began to miss
his wife: she didn’t need anything—not even sex with him. She was free
to love other things than him—higher things and he was free to love
higher things than her as well as the lower things like Porn. It was
for this reason that he loved her but he didn’t desire her so much
except as an intellectual companion. This one he desired and that love
certainly had more thrust than the former one. At least it appeared to
be stronger.
The sky had tubes of light paint oozing out into the darkness and the
sky could not ascertain if it wanted a moon or a sun in its presence.
The ride was just beginning and yet it was monotonous in the darkness
and the light of the street lamps that refracted glaringly. The three
of them still remained as little conscious of the moon or, dependent on
the limitation of their eyes, the corona of the moon, that they
happened to glimpse as accompanying them on their early morning
departure as they were of the monarch, Ramkhamhaeng, that was the
source of the road’s name. The taxi driver was near-sighted so to him,
as most things at a distance, the reality of it all was begotten as a
blur.
The back-seated Nawin with the cigarette fuming and the legs sprawled
out and thumping to his portable CD player and his model or whore with
her hand again on one of his legs had their thoughts parted once more
in the kinetic movements of linguistic moans.
“What airline will you be flying out of?” asked the taxi driver.
Following patriarchal social etiquette he was addressing the man
instead of the girlfriend despite not liking the smoke. The man was
more than a customer but a member of the more affluent class and this
by Thai, although not Buddhist standards, was well revered. How swift
one’s encroaching aloneness was purged and thwarted in the retreat
engineered by the batons and water cannons of one’s linguistic moans.
The whore, whose self-image had been disparaged by the unconventional
positive endorsement of her activities by the wife, was grateful to
gain the parting of her thoughts from the driver’s voice. She was
pleased to be once again hearing anything—even the least little
unenlightening fact-about their trip. She smiled. After all, it was the
land of smiles.
“Thai” mumbled Nawin’s voice from the back seat.
“Domestic or international?” asked the taxi driver as if amnesia had
wiped away a whole section of memory. Porn released an alien chortle
that made Nawin think that he was sitting on the back seat with some
type of mythological, hybrid animal he was in the process of taking on
an overseas journey. How quickly she had gone from seductress to a
callow calf and kid. He smiled at the man’s ignorance without laughing.
He felt that his girlfriend was ugly and noticed how mutable the sight
of anyone was: at one-time ugly and at another time beautiful, at
one-time virtuous and another point wicked, and at one point victim and
another time slut. It was not only the physical dimensions that could
vary from moment to moment. The perception of a whole being could
change. He moved himself to the window to get away from her hand and
feigned a curiosity with the world outside. He rolled down the window.
At that moment they both had a similar jejune feeling of the repetition
of old things and new things not fully connecting. It was indescribable
to them both. Porn kept asking herself if she was doing the right thing
in forsaking her responsibilities with her clients for the unknown of
traveling with him.
“You look like you are car sick,” said the driver. “My son always got
that way even a kilometer down the road when he was a boy. Matter of
fact that happens to him now—not quite as bad, though. I can’t think
how he survived the flight to Chaing Mai. That I’ll never know.” Nawin,
to show proper deference to an older man and to prove to himself that
he wasn’t churlish, looked toward the mirror and front windshield and
gave the whole frontal world a nod. The boy born of the name Jatupon
was bleeding inside him. His brain waves wiggled around like noodles.
He was no better than this man. They both had been born poor with
limited opportunities. He couldn’t laugh at him for any reason.
“Are you going international or domestic,” asked the driver of the
twenty-five year old. Again there was a chortle. “Why does that
question seem to make her laugh,” asked the taxi driver. “That is very
strange. That is a strange young lady.”
“Krap,” said Nawin gruffly, “I don’t know why she is laughing.” “We are
going international. Eva Airlines. Eva Airlines, an international
flight to Japan,” reiterated Nawin. He kept it simple. He didn’t even
want to think about Montreal. The thought of accompanying an animal, of
sorts, to the other side of the world was too much. No sooner had he
said it than she reminded them both of the fact that she would be going
to her home first. Nawin had fallen into his own pensive inclinations
but unlike them he wanted the completion of his thoughts. He was
scanning his mutating neurological circuitry for a possible answer to
the enigma whom he called his wife. Noppawan’s flippant comment that
the stoplight wouldn’t get any greener as she smiled and shut the door
on him and his whore troubled or inveigled him. One’s driveway wasn’t
exactly equipped with a stoplight so that one sentence bordered on
sarcasm. Her placid demeanor was like plastic and how she behaved
belied everything so how was he to know if she was discontent with this
arrangement if not jealous of it.
It was the first time that he would be leaving her to travel abroad. He
had offered to delay the trip by a week or two until she had submitted
her grades at Assumption University, which Thais called A-back. Maybe
having his Porn stay over at their house the previous night was
disrespectful to his wife but nice or offensive behavior was based upon
one’s guesswork on how society would interpret such situations and
unique situations like this were all the more impossible to judge. His
wife was definitely different. That was for sure; but she was still a
woman down deep even if she denied it just as his American passport and
name-change made him abstain from bits of himself. A woman had
instincts at suspecting a man’s activities. A woman had jealous rages
and seductive lures that had a chance of keeping a man with her:
genetic programming from hundreds or thousands of female ancestors who
had experienced the promiscuity of husbands and were afraid that they
and their children would not be properly taken care of. But there was
certainly no chance of children. She slept with him a few times as
husband and wife in a motion of fulfilled and completed consummation
never to be repeated. Then she went in to get herself sterilized. Why
she needed to do both was unclear. She was a mystery and steadfast in
committing herself to that vow they had made to each other when they
were 14 or 15 years old to not live petty lives. Such was the gray in
the gray matter that enveloped them. Life with Noppawan had the
insatiability of an itch to a mosquito’s bite and contained the same
pleasurable discomfort.
“Taking a trip to Japan” thought the taxi driver sarcastically. He
wasn’t certain how anyone could afford to go there. He was stuck to the
boundaries of the car and he resented it; although from it, despite its
limitations, he was always introduced to people so different than he
was. They were the favored ones whose ideas were not curtailed to
traffic jams exacerbated by infuriatingly influential traffic lights
and accidents. Traffic accidents were such chaos because smashed cars
could not be moved until insurance agents came to the scene to make
their reports. Traffic policemen, who could easily be bribed, were
never to be trusted. The favored people did not have everyday to roam
the streets like homeless but highly mobile mendicants, their every
movement enslaved and dictated by the pronouncement of street names
called out from the back seat. “Do young people like you have money to
go off wherever you wish?” The words pierced out of one who was
pierced. The ache tore open like a tenuous newly heeled scar with the
blade coming up to slit others. He knew that he had behaved contrary to
social instinct but he hadn’t been able to stop himself.
“Don’t you know who this is?” asked the whore with arrogant vehemence.
The taxi driver looked in the rear view mirror at the brown-faced Nawin
or Jatupon and asked, “No, should I know you?”
“No you shouldn’t. Neither one of us should know the other one. Just
drive!” said Nawin although again he winced from his darker alter ego
that only became him when he uttered its thoughts. He wasn’t totally
devoid of societal programming of right and wrong no matter what he
claimed to Noppawan. Being respectful to one’s elders and giving the
prayerful gesture of the “wei” (pronounced as “why”) to one’s superiors
did exist in him at certain times. He would always stand up for the
tribute paid to the king prior to a movie although that was more from
the idea of not offending the sensibilities of others around him or,
less altruistically, getting himself possibly thrown out of the movie
theatre. Furthermore, the Jatupon who had brought cups of ice to
customers when he was a boy, the uneducated slave who had found himself
spun up in noodles of sidewalk restaurants until he was 15, often began
to stretch like a 26 year old fetus locked up in a heavily fortified
placenta. He would feel how disparaged Jatupon often felt. He would
feel guilt when he disparaged others that seeped into his veins while
ghosts of yesteryear suddenly vexed him making him feel numb and cold
inside.
He too wanted to stop thinking and he wished that his thoughts could be
intruded with conversation. “I just mean that I’m nobody important. I
paint a little. I’m going to Montreal for that reason.” The taxi driver
was reticent. “Do you have many hours left driving today?” Nawin asked
him. Still there was no answer. He threw the cigarette out of the
opened window. “Do you want a stick of gum,” he asked the girl.
“I have a tick tack in my mouth now but I’ll take your gum and save it
for later. You might not offer it again.” She giggled and he smiled at
her with the tightness of his closed lips. She had lost her animal, and
there she was as his seductress. He kissed her and returned the
headphones over his ears. The savory taste of her mouth was in him.
Chapter 2
The acceleration that took them out of Huamark and through other
adjacent sections of the city eventually led them to her area. He did
not remember the name of it: Bangkae, Bangplad, Bang-something. He paid
little attention to what his mistress said. Her voice often seemed the
strident spluttering of burning fuel in an engine that couldn’t produce
motion. King Ramkhamhaeng was a bygone entity. As soon as his model
picked up some of her things that she had forgotten to bring with her
the previous day and they had some breakfast, then Thailand would be a
thing of the past too. For how long he didn’t know. He was married but
it was one signature on many sheets of paper. The significance of
spilled ink could not be read unless, like many superstitious Thais, he
were to seek a fortuneteller-mendicant sitting on a sheet or straw mat
on a sidewalk or in a park.
Noppawan had her chance to go with him. He had asked repeatedly. He had
tacitly exhorted (mostly with his eyes) but she had refused him. Maybe
she needed him to command her presence. Maybe in this nebulousness of
strong selfishness and altruism called a personal relationship, so
immediate and personal like finding oneself enveloped in smoking and
fiery dust, she needed constant reminders that he cared about her more
than any other entity selfishly and altruistically. That would be the
woman in her if there were such a woman.
He tried to contemplate what love was like for normal people. It was
surely a dust storm one invented in one’s mind to escape loneliness but
then it became intertwined in more neediness and consciousness of the
other’s feelings and thoughts so as not to be vanquished to aloneness.
An individual who was able to overcome the grief of the loss of
dopamine in the ephemeral and moribund high of being in love would
cling to his former pleasure-inducer as a source of meaning in life’s
vicissitudes. He and Noppawan had done the same but they were less like
individuals finding themselves separately cast onto lifeboats in an
ocean of random waves for they found oceans of thoughts within
themselves that seemed more navigable to solid chunks of reality. They
needed each other less; or so he thought.
Thai women generally had obsequious crying bouts in their rafts, but
Noppawan, he argued, was not a woman. She was female without womanity.
She was a female who advocated overcoming petty human existence for a
love of ideals, compassion, and the attempts at understanding the human
predicament. He couldn’t see into the future to know if he would be
returning to Thailand anytime soon to be peered at through his wife’s
thick dark framed glasses. At present there were only the wills of
three individuals cowardly seeking meaning for themselves in a unit.
There were only these socialized wills rolling along on a road in
marginal darkness under the specious assumption that there really was a
destination. The sensory input of traditional Thai music was coming to
them from the front and back speakers of the car that was their
confinement. The radio music, no matter if interpreted as harmonious or
strident by the three individuals, was a levee helping to block their
pervasive inundation of self-absorbing, mordant thoughts and reminded
them (the patriot and the pending expatriates) of their commonality as
Thais.
They passed a mall where he and Porn had gone shopping a month earlier.
That day they had spent together there was the levity of the stroll and
the shiny flash of credit cards in this Thai way of forgetting one’s
impoverished roots. Feeling on top of the world, he comported the male
gesture of having one arm clutching the other one behind his back. It
was a gesture of affluence in the stroll of the shopper’s quest. At
least twice when he encountered friends of his from Silpakorn Art
University with bags in their hands he would talk to them for a half
hour and somewhere into the talk he used another male gesture of
affluence. He would slip a foot from a sandal and then slap it onto the
floor loud as a firecracker. The sandal would hit the floor like a hand
slapping against an impoverished peasant.
They stopped in an alley smaller than a side street called a “soi.” It
was in between many Mom and Pop businesses and there, crowded within,
was her apartment. He knew rooms like this well. They were rented out
for fifteen or twenty dollars a month (600 or 700 baht), barren, hot,
and unventilated as an attic. When she had gone in to get her bags he
felt less lonely to be momentarily rid of her. Even now at age 26 but
with thoughts at certain moments suffering and dragging like a man of
50, there was just himself, the real unit of one, and delude himself
all he pleased he knew that he could not find anyone more significant
than that. The only thing next to his heart, in the pocket of his
shirt, were the slides of his art depicting the naked and dejected
whores of Patpong that had ejaculated him into fame and puffed up a
latent ego in himself that thought that he was a higher being than
other Thais. He was keeping them there that day because he wanted to
momentarily hand them over to airport authorities so they would not be
harmed in airport security. When she returned with an added bag that
the taxi driver plunked into the trunk the two men smiled at her and
she smiled back. After all, Thailand was the land of smiles and every
infant understood the advantages of smiling. To bypass his surly
temperament and increase friendly relations, Nawin offered more breath
fresheners or chewing gum for everyone. No Thai would refuse such
friendly gestures and the two of them took from his hand greedily like
tamed birds. Then he began his old contemplation of why 2 was greater
than 1 or why 3 was greater than 2. It was an old argument of his wife.
The first time she posed it to him they both were 16 years old. He had
made the mistake of asking her to a dance. “Why do two things coming in
close proximity to each other have greater value?” she asked. His only
response had been “A le nah?” meaning “What did you say?” Neither one
of them went to the dance but straight to their bedrooms and their
sullen thoughts.
Porn was, according to his thinking, an “all right whore.” She didn’t
cause him any problems at all and it was for this reason that he
carried her along with him as a personification of his intellectual
decadence thereby increasing public intrigue with him. She was the
pretty doll he could swing about as a reminder of his one-man school of
art. He, Nawin Biadklang, could flaunt her around as the premier
example of the dark vision in his mind and the sexual slavery of his
nation all meshed together. He would have to draw a lot in Montreal and
sell everything he painted to pay for any expenses the scholarship
would not cover. She preferred her title of model. He was not so
heartless to deny her this euphemism. She successfully relieved him of
the tension of his body and to be emitted of it like a squeezed
tangerine in such a good rhythmic fingering would well compensate for
the stress level of having to spend so much time with her. He desired
her a lot of the time so by most accounts of love he did truly love
her. Foremost, Noppawan did not object to her. Matter of fact, she
wanted Porn to relieve him. She wanted him squeezed. She wanted the pus
squished from his brain without having to get dirty. She wanted to
continuously wear the glasses that caged her tepid orbs and to not
succumb them to rapturous non-Buddhist primal yearnings. She did not
care to dodge the aloneness of her thoughts through a rapturous
delusion that she was one partial being made whole in sex and love. And
yet by her account she did not want to mandate his awareness. It was
only by tripping on shadows and feeling vapid equanimity that came
after having absurdly given oneself over so entirely to the sensation
of pulling on one’s genitalia that a man actually knew anything.
This whore was and was not his typical whorehouse girl. On the day of
their first meeting he had been sketching runners and trees at a
stadium near Assumption University where his wife taught. His head was
resting in a fog until she materialized. There she was casting a shadow
onto the sun that was sedating him and wrapping him into himself in
sleep. There she was questioning him on his art and pointing out her
mommy, a skinny and frail thing, sitting on the other set of bleachers.
He found out that she was a dancer. There was no surprise there. Her
flirtatious gestures and the presence of her frail mommy looking over
at them and hoping the purchase would take place were tacit but
undeniable clues that she was poor and wanted a male companion. That
was no surprise either. Yet beyond this calculated small talk or
artifice was an ingenuous mouth that glistened in guileless desire. She
was a money girl. That was obvious, and yet there was more. There was
infatuation and an accompanying mommy who was like an SOS. Porn was a
whore, but if he hadn’t been married, she could have been more. Except
for Noppawan, who was a flagrant novelty, he couldn’t quite decipher
how whores and wives were all that different. Both baited the man for
the fecundity of prosperity and progeny. It was a survival response
that was selfish in base primeval instincts. It was human and
beautiful. It was filled with womanity.
She turned up the volume on her tape recorder and repeated,
“Excusez-moi; au revoir; oui; toilletes; papier hygienique.”
“Was that the main reason for coming to your apartment: for the tape
recorder?” he asked.
She turned off the machine without the least concern about a
distraction deferring her scholarship. “Oui,” she said, “but also my
favorite blouse, jeans, a necklace-see, isn’t it beautiful—lots of
things. A tape recorder is rather important, I think. You don’t want me
to be unable to talk.” He nodded his head as he frowned wishing that
she couldn’t speak at all. She would have been all the more beautiful
mute and deaf. He had proposed getting up early initially to compensate
for his slow, pokey movements but not as early as this and he resented
having lost sleep for such knicknacks. He didn’t feel that he should be
subject to listening to her palaver in Canada. His nod was that of
acquiescence the way the King Ramas had agreed with planned activities
of the imperialists to divert their attention. He, however, was trying
to divert a headache. He looked at the booklet that was on her lap. She
was unsuccessfully trying to imitate a product published in Thailand as
he had guessed a minute earlier from the fact that the speaker on the
tape sounded Thai. It was the blind leading the blind, he thought.
“You do know some English, don’t you?” he asked.
“No,” she said. He could imagine the palaver she would be saying on the
streets of Montreal and he yearned for his wife, Noppawan. He got the
taxi driver to turn right and park on the side of a street. His eyes
were fixed on a barren serenity of gravel and weeds that was in the
vicinity of a pier. The sun was now rising fully and aided by a golden
roofed temple on the other side of the river, there was a silvery and
golden glaze in the waters camouflaging the sooty sediments that were
diluted within. He wanted to go to the gravel and eat along the side of
begging dogs of which the bodies were deflating like tires. He wanted
to sit at one of the red metallic tables on a plastic stool among a
group of saffron robed monks, with the scents of rice or noodles
penetrating his nostrils. He had to smile that such an aversion as
twenty baht meals still called to him pleasantly because they were the
foundation of memories that constituted his verdant youth.
“What are we doing?” she asked
“We’re eating,” he said. “Come on, it will be fun to act like common
people,” he chuckled.
“Common. I know common. Common is having a treat of eating fried
insects on the dirt road, Nawin. Common is sleeping on a rug because
you don’t have a bed. Common is praying for the opportunity of having
one’s sandals fall apart or getting them trapped deep into the soil of
the rice field so as to have an excuse to get out of the hamlet.
Occasionally we paid an arm and a leg to the owner of a truck who came
once a day ten miles down a muddy road to pick people up. Common,
Nawin, is collecting rain water in those big ceramic tubs that sit in
front of the house, being stingy with every drop of water when you wash
your body, and then go to bed exhausted without even eating dinner.
Common is getting up at 5 a.m. to feed the water buffalo so that at 6
a.m. your father can use it to plow the field. You don’t know anything
about the word.”
He did know. He bled from knowledge but he frowned and for a moment he
was taciturn fighting back anger and memories. “Well, do whatever you
damn well please. I need out of this car and that is what I’m doing.
You can feast on what remains of the breath fresheners. I for one am
dining out. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”
“When do we need to get on the plane?”
“There’s plenty of time,” he said. “Plenty of time to eat another meal
in the airport before departing. You’ll get a high price western meal
at the airport. I guarantee it.” He left the taxi and sat down
meditating on the river flowing at a distance. Soon the anger dissolved
and his memories were imprisoned.
The idea of paying on a taxi where the meter continued to rise without
his presence enthralled him. Having lots of money was a novelty and
flaunting this novelty to patrician and plebian, proletariat and CEO
alike still engrossed him. Thais were culturally programmed to give the
“wei” to the Buddha and the monk but in their hearts that steamed with
greed as they cooked their food on the streets, sold their trinkets
from their sheets, worked in office jobs, were government officers,
part of an educated middle class, and a million other activities,
classifications, and identities, this traditional greeting with the
folded hands in front of the face was deeply given in the secret
regions of subconscious ideas for those whom they thought of as rich.
And as he ate his pork laden noodle soup while the meter ticked on he
picked out the pork to feed the dogs; but in so doing he glimpsed
someone. Past the gravel were sidewalks and stores and further was a
department store. Next to it, beyond the gaunt old woman on the sheet
selling and squeezing rubber duckies in the hope of selling a few and
having money to eat, a man clanging bells with handless hooks above his
cup, shoe repairmen fixing soles, a kiosk of a key maker, and a blind
mendicant with a speaker and a microphone singing a strident folk tune,
was someone. It was a person who turned him to stone, froze him like an
iceberg, mortified him, and pulled out his wounded child. It was a
strange composite: at one moment appearing a bit like his brother,
Kazem, and at one moment like the youngest of his elder brothers,
Suthep. For a second or two as he saw this cook at a distance, he
couldn’t remember the name of Suthep-he who had been so innocuous but
in his apathy had harmed him the most. Ten or eleven years had gone by.
He wondered how he was supposed to know anymore: was this man one or
the other or neither of them. Another blind beggar began to sing a song
in a microphone linked to a portable speaker. He was being led by his
wife. They came to his table singing a louder song more stridently than
the one he heard at a distance. The sun was feeling hot and it made him
dizzy and mad as Akhenaten in Ancient Egypt. Nawin, the legal alias of
Jatupon, was feeling a weight death. His whole ideas and feelings were
discombobulated. He took out twenty baht wedging it under the canister
containing vinegar and peppers. He walked quickly to the car and
cowered himself in the back seat in movement toward the airport.
Book II: Many Lifetimes Ago