Nawin fell asleep in the suds of his bathtub and when he woke up his
thoughts were frothy. Melancholy dripped from the shower nozzle and
from time to time hit his head (the contents of which emulated the slow
and sad repetition of the dripping). A year earlier it had been in such
a bathroom at an artsy party at a friend’s house near Silpakorn
University that he went away from the crowd to sit on the edge of the
tub and weep with the fatuous wrestling of personal pain. Noppawan came
into the bathroom to find out what was wrong. She sat on the edge of
the tub next to him and heard about the crash of the United Airlines
jet. Without words she took one of his hands. Without trying to absorb
the sadness of his face in the emotion of sympathy, he could tell that
she was imagining details beyond his relationship with his deceased
uncle or the explosion of the plane. Seated there, quickly overcoming
personal loss in favor of a more philosophic stance, he believed that
America was a self-centered bully and the Moslem world would continue
to attack her for being so opulent in a famished world, controlling
world policies without giving smaller nations a voice, cuddling the
Zionist entity of these self-professed “Chosen people,” and for having
the dominant culture of individual freedoms that went contrary to their
Islamic tyranny. The couple looked out into nothingness with similar
thoughts. Both knew the naturalness of hate in recreating civilization
and that destructiveness in society was no different than the kinetic
universe as a whole. Both knew that only hope came in recoiling in
one’s passive intellectual pursuits. At that time he felt sick like
when one hadn’t eaten for days: people who should have been important
and salubrious spun around in his head as hollow as all the others.
Only his uncle, a man who did not love him and had no particular
self-interest in the boy had saved him. Only Noppawan, during his time
of mourning, kept him from complete despair. He wiped off his hands and
arms and made his call on the telephone as his body leaned stiffly to
the edge crushing through frothy embankments of his bubble bath.
“Piggy?”
“Yes?”
“Piggy, is that you?”
“Yes, Nawin.”
“Piggy, I feel tongue tied here. This shouldn’t be a question a husband
poses. I...I don’t know what to say. We are married technically.
Technically, and emotionally from my standpoint, that is the case so as
a husband don’t you think I’d be curious when my wife is going to start
making love to me?”
“I have, Nawin, but there isn’t much I can do with us on different
sides of the planet.”
“Well, you should be here and she shouldn’t. I asked you to come.”
“And I said that I had papers to grade and research to do.”
“I understand all of that. Nobody is to blame. I’m not even talking
about that. I’m talking about three times before we got married. 2 1/2
times afterward. We’re newlyweds. I need for you to need to smell my
feet, massage my back, do womanly things I can’t talk about on the
telephone. I need you.”
She thought to herself that appetites were not the substance of memory.
She wanted to lecture him but only muttered, “Did Porn leave you?”
“No, she is here. But that is not the point. The point is figuring out
if you will ever need me like a wife.”
“The way Porn does? Honey, she is a businesswoman. I’m sure she enjoys
you immeasurably but you would go broke paying for both of us.” She
laughed. She was fully amused by herself; but then she noticed that she
had caused him to retreat in silence. “Hello?” she said uneasily. She
picked up the poetic story, Thao Nok Kaba Phuak (The Nightjar) that was
on her bookshelf. She opened the book, which had his name and address
on it when he was 14 years old and her name since he had dedicated the
book to her. Her fingertips caressed the illustration of the Nightjar
on the cover page.
“Yeah, I’m here. You continued to encourage me to have my relationships
after we were married. It was crazy but I went along with it. I thought
it was a game: playboy artist encouraged by his wife to continue to
draw saddened whores. I even went to the airport with Porn thinking you
would come there and stop us.”
“Surprise, surprise!” she said. She laughed lovingly. “Men explode,
Nawin. They get it out of their system for a few hours but a woman
percolates romantically throughout the day. She loses all sense of
reason. She does everything for the sake of that relationship. She
loses herself.”
“So-no one wants to reason 24 hours a day. You can’t think that people
get married to stop sexual intercourse. If that was your idea I wish
that you had told me before we got married.”
“Nawin, the reason I married you was not to percolate nor was it to be
a recipient of your explosions when you can’t get any temporaries to
service you. I realize that temporaries are more erotic than wives,
Nawin, the same as temporaries are probably more erotic than husbands.
Anybody new will not be like stinking socks kicked off under the sofa.”
“Is that what I am?” He remembered the stench of Kumpee. She couldn’t
have chosen a more grotesque image. He again felt like the ugly dark
skinned Jatupon with his pimples.
“You understand what I mean.”
“I don’t understand you at all. I don’t understand what we are,
honestly. Do we even have a relationship? Do you know?”
“Of course, we’ve known each other forever. We’re just trying to figure
out some new movements-our own ways of behaving.”
“I just want us to behave like normal couples do.”
Both of them were silent, digging deep into their brains for memories
of what normal families and normal couples did. They couldn’t find what
they were seeking. Both exhumed half-dead children of themselves whose
eyes were blinded by pain and too much exposure to darkness. What did
they know of families, couples, and what normal people did?
“We have a relationship but it’s a peculiar thing. It is one of those
rare finds based on understanding and admiration. One great thing about
you that I admire is that, despite your moral turpitude, I don’t have
to worry that you will someday become a bitter old man who hates life.
Bitter old men, Nawin, tend to be that way because they resent young
men off having pleasures when they can’t engage in them any longer. You
have your art, your permanent window on the world. You aren’t just
wasting your life on the next thrill-I mean not completely. You’ll have
something to show for your life.”
“I need intimacy with my wife.”
“Isn’t what I’m doing now intimacy?” she spoke with a bit of anger.
“Isn’t going to an art museum even a higher intimacy? Isn’t being an
artist or in my case sharing my research on zoology to a conference
intimacy at its highest degree. You’re ignorant but you aren’t stupid.
You’re not even so ignorant: just a victim of too much testosterone
clouding over your senses.”
“I need tender love.”
“Tender love isn’t in a man’s lexicon. You think you need women to be
tender enough to let you bang away on them. Pleasurable banging, and
one or two women as your permanent trophies: that’s your need. I don’t
think it is much of a need. Wanting the right people is good. Needing
them isn’t.” She paused and waited but his voice was not forthcoming.
“Nawin, are you still there?.”
“I’m still here. Piggy, you haven’t contacted me in weeks. I was
beginning to think that you were filing for divorce.”
“The line was too large at the lawyer’s office” she joked. He chuckled.
“Are you okay, Piggy?”
“I’m fine, Nawin. Thanks for finally asking. How are you and Porn? How
are your classes?”
“The class on the influence of Caravaggio is useful. All of the classes
are fine. Noppawan, I think that Porn hates being with me now. I think
she is disappointed being here with me.”
“Why?”
“I’m too busy to take her wherever she wants to go.”
“Where does she want to go?”
“I think anywhere but here-New York mostly.”
“Why don’t you go? It is just a day’s journey, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” he sighed. “Piggy, I’ve tried to call you twenty times.
Why are you at your sister’s?”
“Oh, Nawin, that is a good question. You know how the landlord let four
Chinese students rent out an apartment near us.”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember that we always heard that sizzling sound of them
frying food in their woks.”
“Yes, so—”
“Well, they fried most of the apartment building. The sprinklers didn’t
turn on. No one was hurt fortunately. You had only a few canvases. I
took out your paintings and my computer and ran out before the flames
reached our door. Our ideas are safe.”
“Thank God! Thank God, no one was hurt.” He imagined the horror of
having all his canvases in that location and his image emblazoned in
light, heat, and smoke. What a way of setting his reputation on fire.
What a way of enlightening the world. And yet, in accordance with Zen,
burnt canvases would nip his ego and remind him of the true traceless
aspect of being. If this had happened, to which his whole being poured
out praise to whatever forces of the cosmos intentionally or
unintentionally caused it to not occur, it would have taught him the
awareness that permanence was an illusion. It would have taught him an
acceptance of fate and an appreciation of the simple pleasure of just
being. He thought of the time that he and Noppawan were in a Songkran
Festival water fight in Banglampool. Both were unlucky enough to have
both sides of their faces shot with water containing some form of
caustic chemicals that burned lacerations which later changed into
black eyes. For a few weeks the friends had been freaks but then they
were always freaks, and at the age of 14 or 15, the inception of their
friendship, they had attended the natural science freak museum at
Siriaj Hospital. In Thailand no one told the truth. They were careful
and obsequious with their “wei,” their traditions, and their buried
tongues. They were in favor of just getting along. To Thais, he and
Piggy would be perceived as intractably strange. The couple couldn’t
claim to be comfortable as freaks although freakishness was their
natural order.
“Also, the monkey, the cat, and the parrot: I got them out too.”
“Noppawan? Noppawan Rongthang” he said timidly in the fog of
self-doubt.
“Jatupon Biadklang” she mocked him and laughed at his insecurity.
“Why didn’t you move into the condominium?”
“My sister’s apartment is near the university.”
“I’m feeling lonely,” he said while laughing at himself. “I love you
but I’m doubting if you love me.”
“Feelings come and go, Nawin. We have a commitment to each other as
friends and we’re married. The way I look at it that is more stable
than what most people have. There is me and there is you and from those
two important things we create us. Where’s Porn at now?”
“She went to her language class.”
“Oh, is she now trying to learn Thai?”
He laughed victoriously choking on his saliva. He coughed. “You are
jealous!” he said gleefully. “You do love me. You are jealous out of
your mind.”
“Dream on, Nawin.”
“Piggy is jealous.”
“In your dreams, Nawin.”
He stopped laughing. “Piggy? I want to tell you about something.”
“Are you whining, Nawin?”
“Well, I was ready to.”
She felt that husbands used women to rape or as confidants for the
release of their suffering boys. She found it vertiginous and a bit
nauseating.
“Yes,” she said coldly, “What is it?”
“I just want to tell you something that happened...I think I saw my
brother-one of them when I was leaving for the airport.”
“The one who beat up on your face when I first met you.”
“Yeah. Maybe. It’s nothing. It is just on my mind.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“No, just saw him from a distance.”
Hanging up, he got dressed and, paintbrush in hand, he returned to his
dreams: dreams of people in movements imitated from their fathers and
forefathers-those in traditional marriages and traditional jobs who
were in their movements as perfunctory and dead as noodle workers. He
swept color on his canvas. He made imagined forms of those who had not,
in their early childhood been maimed in this mechanical apparatus
called family. For selfish reasons, like those tiny salamanders
clinging to windows during a storm, he thought that he should spend
time with Porn, know her in more detail, listen to her, and understand.
In part he was able to click into that tender inquisitive probing and
non-judgmental listening called empathy, but the thing that clicked his
brainwaves in this circuitry was often selfish. He knew that he, his
wife, and his Porn were all maimed ones. They were indeed a family.
They were part of him and he did not want to lose them. Both brought
him pleasurable respites from himself who was often attuned to the pain
that was rife in all things. When Porn came home he went to her. He
asked how her day was. He listened to her complaints. He paused and
waited. He understood her isolation. Still he did not promise to take
her to New York.
Impermanence was in all things. Galaxies collided or were pulled into
joint oval orbits. Planets were sucked into those suns in the
realignment. The suns themselves eventually flared up into supernovas
consuming all planetary bodies orbiting their realm and died. Long ago
while the senator was in his first year of law school his sister had
become one of the hundred women on a given day that sought to get
traveler’s visas at the German Embassy escorted by their boyfriends so
as to begin a departure that would keep them in exile. His parents were
now beginning to act the parts of invalids and leeches. To his parents
he had failed them by being divorced and not having children that would
have fostered the illusion of continuum. They also thought he had
failed them by not inviting them into his home. The result was a
continual stream of their calls on his mobile telephone where the
mother and father diagnosed themselves and each other, listing all
symptoms and proposing materialistic requests and more time together
that would alleviate or distract their mental and physical suffering.
Women whom he had thought of as having permanent relationships gained
new perspectives from the intake of new information. They also gained
more immediate and dominant feelings engendered by newer relationships.
They went on and became something different without any way of relating
back since, like the expanding universe, it all needed to go forward.
With aging parents and relationships awry came the growing daily
awareness of the limits of his lifespan making him all the more
glutinous to have money, status, and women who could produce for him
children. But with each year of impermanence his identity of himself
fell on its own weight like a black hole and he did not know who he
was. The loving neediness of wanting that special woman who would take
care of his sexual needs, give him children, and not extort him of
finances with a divorce grated against him stridently. There was no
security against another mishap especially at his present age of forty
when his physical attributes were diminishing and a woman would not be
likely to marry him for how he made her feel.
Jatupon wanted to be an aristocratic bum. He wanted to commune with
inner voices within himself and to have the relationship of green
blades of grass firmly poking into the crevices of his toes when he ran
about barefoot in a park. He wanted to return to that state of knowing
perfectly what to say when others asked him, at age five, what he
wanted to become when he grew up. “I want to become a tickle-man,” he
would always tell them and then he would try to tickle them before they
tickled him. A decade later, this old long-lost game with Kazem in
particular could not be surpassed. He still couldn’t think of a better
vocation than a tickle-man.
Outside of the continual wish to have an aristocratic life free of the
specious ambition to either sustain himself as a working class slave or
by the stretch of his imagination a CEO slave, a doctor, or a senator,
Jatupon’s inward feelings were beginning to subtly change away from his
love of his brother, Kazem. His ideas and feelings were shifting toward
impermanence with each letter he received from Noppawan Piggy. Finally,
he had a friend although for the past few years Jatupon had virtually
had none. As much as new manhood awakened old instincts deep in
cellular memory for the odor, the touch, the pleasure and the pounding
of any type of sexual activity where the differing force of the thrusts
and the stirred waves of his hormones all whizzed him in a unique
frenzy for a brief time, he yearned more for Noppawan. He yearned for
her ideas and her presence.
He considered his need for her one time as the two brothers lay naked
immediately after a sexual encounter under a ceiling fan that was newly
installed. He watched the blades chopping through the musty air and in
a very minute sotto voce of his thoughts he yearned for destruction. He
wanted for the wobbly fan to fall and guillotine his head. For the most
part, however, sexual acts like this one were his rocket fuel to
Nirvana. It always brought him into a religious state that he couldn’t
duplicate in any other way. That one moment after his brother’s sexual
act and his own masturbation, he was free of wanting anything. At such
times he just lay there breathing in the oxygen deeply and feeling
fully satisfied with being. This too he yearned for and only his
brother was able to grant him Nirvana.
At last he had a friend. This relationship gave him more meaning to the
days than even the rain. Sustained reflexes as an assistant cook had
caused the days to stumble along on deformed feet so uneventfully after
his parents’ death. Now it wasn’t so bad. After the washed-plate
monotony of late evenings he would often pull out of his back pocket a
letter that he had read many times before. At both restaurants Kazem
and Suthep individually razzed him about his new girlfriend but they
believed that he did not know anyone. To them the girl had to be some
remote villager wanting to learn about life in Bangkok by advertising
for a pen pal in the back of the comic book pages. On one night of one
particularly troublesome week without a letter he went to sleep from
his banal world at an empty table and dreamed his anything but banal
dreams. Within Jatupon’s sleep there were at first tire swings and
butterflies nestling on succulent flowers but then on the flowers there
was the perfidious couplings of mosquitoes. He smelt the pheromones
that the male had emitted to make the female believe that it was
following a whole army of male hunters who had procured food when
really there was just that one male poised relaxingly waiting for the
ovulating specimen to come to its perch. The female was as white as
Kumpee’s Chinese girlfriend and she hated and loved the guile as much
as the deceiver in that unique mix that makes sex such a delight. Then,
after finishing its frenzy, the mosquito was back with him.
“I don’t understand this delay in meeting” he dreamed of himself
telling the mosquito.
“Still, after nearly four months in this city, you think that the
senator is really trying to fit you into his schedule of dinner guests
and your sweet mother and father are going to return from the dust.”
“Something like that. I don’t want to be forgotten. If Mother and
Father are really dead in the true sense of the word I won’t be able to
see them again.”
“Dear me, when are you going to shake your boyish Thai ways? Being
respectful to a couple morons who accidentally conceived you in their
sexual frenzy is too preposterous. Regarding death, I can’t see
anything wrong in just plain death. You kill enough of us when you do
your laundry each week. I see you emptying out puddle-remnants of the
previous week’s water from your plastic buckets where we are laying our
eggs and then pouring in new laundry soap and water. You attempt to
flatten us with the palms of your hands. You never seem to consider
death such a tragedy in those circumstances. I can’t see why any
being—mosquito or human—would want to continue on for thousands of
years anyway. A being continually growing from the same old bud in an
environment not all that conducive to growth becomes as fallow as the
world around him. So much negativity from all of those disillusioned
experiences withers one in ennui-I can’t think of anything more horrid!
Then comes petty greediness to have something; and no one is pettier
than old men whom you give the “wei.” Thais extend this deference to
these beastly wrinkled beings as if age makes such grumbling,
maundering creatures continually thinking of their mortality and their
aches and pains enlightened beings. I can’t see that it would be good
to live forever. It is better to die off completely and let the energy
come back as something totally different. This new being will dance its
dance and celebrate the novelty of the world before adulthood hits him
across the face with a mallet.”
When they got home it was sleep again so that they would wake up with
energy and motivation to do more work. Before Jatupon awakened
naturally to the sun-god (the night having deadened his soul and put
him to sleep as any ancient Egyptian laborer long ago believed of his
own life), so Kazem in darkness came to his startled awakenings with an
alarm clock as well as the alarm of and in his own brain that yearned
for sustenance and more which always came from money. With no love oil,
and no rimming, he took Jatupon with maximum thrusts engendering within
him the inclination, if not the incitement, for violence. Jatupon’s
first thoughts of the morning were that he wanted to slit his brother’s
throat. He wanted to cut off Kazem’s head, stuff it, and put it on a
bookshelf had they purchased a bookshelf. It was no wonder, he thought,
that this one had no girlfriends. Who would care to have one so
large-so large! As the lovemaking subsided, it tossed Kazem back into a
nap like the soothing backward movement of the tide. Jatupon felt that
he was bleeding and so he went to the toilet and sat on the stool
feeling beneath him from time to time to see if there was blood. There
wasn’t any. He sat and sat virtually thoughtless until the idea
returned that he could kill him. He wanted to kill him veritably. He
could take one of the new television sets that Kazem had purchased for
he and Suthep and smash his head while he was sleeping. He could spray
paint the walls with air freshener and light a match. The whole room
could be set ablaze like a funeral pyre. He got up and dressed. He
needed to escape. He needed to run away to the street people before his
actions matched his thoughts. He needed to be with the street people.
He told himself that he loved them veritably. He scavenged money from
Kazem’s pants and took a taxi to an abandoned railway station with its
severed tracks where weeds or moss grew a little on most of everything
and homeless, crippled dogs with one or more smashed paws found a
respite. He purchased some amphetamines from one of the street people
and, done in sync with his glue, his head began to spin. Beethoven’s
Ninth Symphony, which he was exposed to from a movie on the television
earlier that week, played in his head and the dogs with their mangled
paws began dancing. Plaid or corrugated he thought two things
intermittingly as the dogs continued to dance: * Kazem, when he thought
of Kumpee, wanted to twist off his head like a crawdad-he who had
stolen their money and put them in this hole. Then his anger subsided
by again recalling a good thing that had come out of it. He, as yet,
did not have to pay for rent or utilities. Also the two of the siblings
were gone allowing him to be liberated. The idea of being a teenager
free of mother and father had been intriguing to him. As much as he
mourned the deaths of his parents, their deaths had seemed to him
liberation to manhood and his own sexual fulfillment. The same was true
of Kazem and Suthep. He didn’t resist Kumpee’s plan to replant them in
the modern sordid capital of Bangkok. He sensed all along that Kumpee
would leave them and he didn’t murmur a word. His opposition to
Suthep’s departure was mostly a show. He wanted to pursue that
liberation with impunity. He went to work . * “I can’t stand the
boredom of everything around me” “But you have to survive,” said the
mosquito. “All animals have to survive.” “I am declaring a day off.
Besides, when I see you I can’t do anything else.” “Aren’t you the
lucky one?” said the mosquito. * Kazem liked how obscure his petty
actions were in the city. No matter what one did here it was obscure.
Here no one pretended to care-so absorbed they were in making sure that
their own sordid activities were kept inside that they didn’t need to
feign being shocked or to gossip about human anomalies all which were
as old as the species. * “Why aren’t you sitting. You are just leaning
against the building, staring across severed train tracks.” “I’m in
pain. I can’t sit.” * Long before light or orange robed monks made
their alms he hauled his cart from a lot where he stored it for a fee.
Hauling it on the edge of the street like any other hapless ones,
occasionally he met gaunt dogs, salesman of real stores helping the
deliverymen get their produce off the trucks and dragging the boxes to
the sidewalks, ice-cream salesman on tiny bicycle-driven stores, and
the glass aquarium fruit cars with their gravel of ice that other
hapless ones pushed along the street; and from it all it was hard to
feel alone. Sound and motion beat off the cruel static morbidity of his
own thinking that had the compunction of criticizing him for his
actions with the youngest brother and saw no future outside of monthly
drunken vigils with fellow restaurant workers and those rare occasions
when he went off with Suthem to ladies of the night he paid for.-is he
thinking about me, thought Jatupon. -as he sets up the restaurant, is
he thinking about me? * “And taking that makes you feel less blue?” “At
least less alone.” “Maybe you are an addict.” “I don’t think so. It is
recreational.” “Sounds like a venereal disease. It sounds American.” *
He liked being unmonitored. Sure, there was adrenalin gained from the
hunt of a woman but more came from the more forbidden pleasures. A man
with money was more alluring to a female who needed this more
vehemently than sperm for the making of offspring. What did he have to
give a woman. He had dated before. He was big. It fascinated but
repelled them. * “I told you. I was feeling blue; and I like how the
world turns around like a carousel of caricatures when I mix the glue
and the pills. Tracks, dogs, and the old abandoned railway station seem
to be breathing. I don’t have anyone else. Sometimes I like hearing
from you.” “How kind!” said the mosquito stoically. * Suthep’s apathy
had come from the acceptance of something deeply sordid in himself.
Policemen were paid their paltry sums and had bigger crimes to corner
than family perverts. His was a business so meager that it retained a
tax exempt status by the nature of no status at all, a business
existing with no address although this oversight was compensated for by
a policeman who came to extort money from Kazem weekly. Being sordid
was a type of wisdom. From it he was cognizant that such instincts to
conquer sexually were part of the sadistic imaginings of the creative
force or the pragmatic cause and effect that engendered the floundering
of human existence and he was hardly the god for redesigning it
all-especially he who rarely thought of it as being essentially wrong
in theory despite feeling nominally guilty. * “Do you think that he
loves me?” “What definition of love are we using now?” “The real one.
I’m older now-almost 15. I know. Do you think he loves me like someone
with a great sickness inside of him who desperately seeks medication or
a yearning to slam himself into me fully like one entity?” “Okay, I’ll
grant you that one,” said the mosquito and then it guffawed. * And so,
unchaining the tables from beneath his cart, pulling out the plastic
stools underneath, and kicking away a few sleeping dogs that were lying
there to be tripped over like disheveled rugs, alone he started his
business. He chatted with those he encountered and felt the light
commotion of an awakening world fill him with its harmony before
routine tasks dominated over him. * His father had tried to squash him.
He was excoriated for standing, sitting, combing his hair, where he
parted his hair, the food he ate, the meat he abhorred, and the clothes
he put on. He couldn’t do anything. He wasn’t anything. * Stirring a
pot of rice deep memories ran by him in glimpsed ghostly passing
stirring up raw negative feelings that created the hard product of his
thoughts. His father had been an aggressor at all times who never
mellowed any to his death. For many early years Kazem’s ears had been
pulled daily. He had been dragged by the hair. He had been forced to
sit daily on a little red footstool next to his father as punishment
for not only youthful exuberance (youth which ran around on two feet
whereas he had to flounder with a cane) but for the intractable
insolence that would interfere with his punishment of the two
“suck-calves” of the youngest brothers whom he hated. Kazem still had
the scars of cigarette burns in his brown skin as palpable and tangible
proof that the man had really existed.-No, more than that. His love for
me is more than just a sickness although it has that in it, said
Jatupon to the mosquito.
He couldn’t tell where he was. Faces of his parents, Kumpee, the aunt
and uncle, the monks at the temple school, and that boy he had been
friends with for so many years (the one who had been with him begging
in front of the Dunkin Doughnuts shop and, a couple years ago, had
allowed his feet to slip from an open window that time they had made
their petty attempt into major thievery on that runaway trip into
Bangkok) all were without faces but wandering around like ghosts in his
thoughts. He could see the forms of these people in his head but only a
few of them had the slightest trace of a face. He had somehow defaced
them. Time had defaced them. Memory was fading. As the hours passed
uncomfortably he became more aware of himself. He forced himself to be
more rational. He was hungry and tired. He wanted to go home. He told
himself that he’d kill his brother the next time he did something like
that. And yet, when he was about ready to be put in jail that time in
Bangkok it had been Kazem who had stolen money from their parents. It
was Kazem who had paid off a police officer.
Nawin reflected Porn’s feelings. “So, you don’t feel purposeful. You
are in a relationship with a man who spends his time with his paints
leaving you alone in the cold of Canada without feeling purposeful. You
got so sick of washing dishes that we’ve now gone to paper plates.” He
chuckled. She smiled. “ I care about you. I’m glad you are here with
me. Regarding purpose, we’ll work on that. I’ll see if I can get you a
job on campus. I’ll definitely stop things from now on anytime you want
to talk. If you want to go out to a movie, I’ll go out with you.”
“I want to go to New York City.”
“That is something to be considered too,” he said evasively. He changed
his cynical ideas. It seemed to him that empathy was love.