1
He assumed that in being exhausted from sporadic fits of sleep
and wakeful spans of dull, hypnagogic thoughts matching the
inertia of his confinement he would finally become ensconced
there, in this train jostling him around, and at last fall
asleep. This was his hope; but in the meantime there was a
languid battle with insomnia and inordinate time that he, from
his "exalted tomb," disdainfully sullied. A god watching the
cookie wrappers that he was emptying into his mouth from the
upper coffin glided downward like the leaves of a deciduous
tree; he was remembering happier times and in this confined
space it was taking him to the edge of madness. It seemed to him
that society lied about it all: motherhood as the continuation
of playing with dolls, manhood epitomized by competition and
money, and old age the enjoyment of spending time reliving the
incidents of the past. Children were not nice neat dolls to
which one claimed ownership, manhood had to be more than having
a heart attack from the stress of making a living and leaving
all to one's widow, and old age, if it came, had to be besieged
with problems of the present, which would be less painful than
recalling happy times that fleeted by and had no chance of being
resumed once again. This moving world that he was in was like
the 67,000 mile an hour projectile of the Earth, and he sullied
it (definitely the floor of the Pullman car, but perhaps the
world as a whole) with the crumbs of his fruit pastries. He just
lay there with the hours like a corpse in a morgue, eating and
filling dead space with his crumbs. Sometimes, to occupy
himself, he would continue the same game that he had pursued
three hours earlier before the seat-and-window thief left his
friends and crossed over, annexing his space and engendering his
expulsion. At that time, when he had been alone looking out of
the window at the tussling shadows of trees and their
counterparts, the light, on the rich verdant fields and on the
rough and uneven wooden strips of the rotting platforms of the
train stations of all these small towns, he had listened to
sounds. Then a game of exhilaration instead of a game of the
mundane, it had been an inane guesses that the particular car he
was in would hit those coupled metallic bumps of the rails while
on this incessant trip to Nongkhai, moving faster than both the
train and the Earth combined, even if the movement was a
desultory caprice with all this continual shifting of itself in
present and past tenses as well as its futuristic daydreams, his
mind tried to slow this weltering; it invented its games of
distractions, its clutter.
Numb in numb thoughts, even though he was extremely cold in the
air conditioned car he did not notice it all that much with his
face warm and flushed by thought, which kept trying to suck him
in and flatten him in its black hole of memory--memory as of her
falling from a balcony; a woman's form, white and light--to him
as beautiful as an angel--that seemed speciously able to rapture
into a billowing cloud overhead. He knew that it was not merely
crumbs that he was trying to sweep from this form but guilt, for
numb as he was he had that much awareness lying there with head
propped on a pillow. The crumbs on the blanket and the flimsy
mat were merely a nominal discomfort to him, so it was not
imperative to sweep away or shake off their substance; and yet
to sense something else also so incongruous falling through
space and time seemed reassuringly cognate. With the memory of
that light, white American, Kimberly Debecrois--or something
French--pulling away from his grasp of her hands disconcertedly,
half blinded in tears but intentionally jumping, falling all
those fourteen stories, and crashing through that plastic and
metal canopy over the swimming pool at Assumption University, he
needed his reassurance. To witness the sporadic dry showers of
crumbs falling onto the recently mopped but still noisome floor
seemed cathartic. These actions were undeniably childish, but
given the fact that the train personnel had mandated the
passengers, as naughty children, onto upper and lower sleepers
regardless of their will as paying customers, a marginal degree
of contempt seemed judiciously appropriate. To eat and to sully
was the quest of a man when caught on moving earth. He, Nawin
Biadklang, ate slowly and pensively, making the condensation of
crumbs and its showers less frequent than they would have been
otherwise, for to consume anything was somewhat nauseating with
the odor of toilets linking between cars permeating all and
making all a drought.
And yet there was an even more salient stench. What he believed
prior to sleep to be the fetid tennis shoes of this "sloven
individual" of the lower bunk, this thief of window and seats
(presumably Thai like himself although as sloven as he was, he
thought, he might be Laotian), was merely the effluvium of his
own damp socks hanging in a tiny net of one of the inner walls
of what he labeled in his mind as his "tomb." Hanging there,
these two strips of a cotton contained bits of his flayed soles
from the friction of his life's stumbled movements and were now
the bacteria's banquet; but, smelling their rot, he did not know
that he and nature's interaction with him were the source. The
smell often sent him on a molecular movement bumping and
bouncing off the stored rubbish of his mind, so it was not
entirely disagreeable. In many ways it besot him like orphic
sound to a musician, or the tenebrisms of artists (Carvaggios
like himself); but nonetheless he continued to project blame at
the bearded anathema beneath him, and he still glanced down
periodically at the floor hoping to find the putative agents of
the odor, evidence to bolster his bilious conclusions, being in
full denial of himself. "It's those shoes," he thought,
imagining that the sloven beneath him, this seat-and-window
thief, had kicked them opaquely under the seats that were now
this bottom bunk, for imagining and knowing were the fusion of
random bits of the fanciful, the real, and the probable in this
overall perspective of what is true, and they were most often
blatantly wrong. He knew this too.
He sighed unnoticeably. He compressed his lips firmly and tried
to stifle the thought of slapping the head of the fetid one with
his magazine, "Revealing Babes," which lay at his side. The
title was in English but the nude women and what little writing
there was within it were unequivocally Thai.
Once so titillating, a surfeit of the same fulsome images now
made them numbly and insensibly bland like a familiar wife:
illusory in intimacy and bewitchingly intimate in the illusion,
the photographs in the magazine and the yearning engendered by
them, like sex itself, were as pungent to his senses as his
dirty socks; but only the molecules disgorging from those socks
had consistency and longevity in their impact upon him. They
mildly aggravated and stimulated without having the effect of
flattening in frenzy--not that the subject of the ephemeral and
unreal aspects of such a frenzy would vex him, having been such
a glutton himself for silky, perfumed girls whose unique scent
(this hybrid of perfume and sweat ) seemed to riddle him
pleasantly like tiny beads of shrapnel. Yes, he told himself,
dirty socks were a more consistent, and thus a more veritable
stink. Even with the prior knowledge that engaging in sexual
activities would soon lead him into a vacuous afterward of
having to stay with such a woman, such an exhausted presence,
longer than the illusion warranted, and that experiencing such
an exhilarating penetration of shrapnel would soon reopen all
wounds of unfulfilled hopes for true intimacy, the hound was
still inexorably obsessed with defecation, and the soldier was
implacably enthralled with the excitement of being shot at by
his female subjects even when he knew it to be specious.
To him there was little merit in the magazine now, outside of
seeing it rolled up firmly and allowing the meretricious tool to
conjure plausible scenarios of itself being used as a weapon.
No, he thought, he did not seriously dislike this fetid sloven
beneath him. He did not know him. He had not spoken to him, and
by this time his dirty and hairy face with its certainty of
being the rightful proprietor of the area of the window below--
an area obtained with the aid of officers on board the train--
was experiencing the ablution of fading memory. Still, the
repellent fetidity had a familiar, fraternal theme that reminded
him of his belittled, abused, and forlorn youth. The familiarity
of a stink that he equated to his brothers was like going back
in time, going home, and being in an antediluvian state within
Jatupon (his former name and being) who was a vestige to him now
as his fingernails were the vestige to claws. It was a time of
being included in a group of home boys that he was excluded from
and of feeling the pangs of loneliness that only prisoners of an
institution felt.
The stranger was surely amusingly human, a caricature as all
were, and hardly worthy of serious fixation. Engagement with him
would be jocular levity and merely that. He tried shutting the
curtain that slid around his "exalted tomb" but for an obvious
reason that eluded him it only increased the odor. Deciding to
relax there, and to be at one with the odor that no reticent
grievance locked within his mind could rectify, it became him
amusingly the way the peculiar smell of defecation would at last
be agreeable to the noses of hounds. For a moment his brain was
free enough of the images of Kimberly falling and his wife
saying, "You should have jumped and not her," but restraining
herself enough to bludgeon his arm repeatedly with a frying pan
instead of the original target of his face, that he was able to
isolate the culprits of the odor: those socks. Suddenly
rebounding from his half hour of petulance in his typical good
nature, Nawin Biadklang chuckled quietly at his irascible hubris
and abjured this moodiness that was part of the curse of his
insomnia. The silent giddiness soon wore off with the itchiness
of the skin of his broken arm under the cast. All his firing
neurons once again became a cluster of pensive rumination.
Had all these years of being a celebrated artist of dejected
Patpong whores gone to his head to the point where he could not
remember having been as impecunious as a mendicant and poorer
than the fecundity of dirt? And for the hound that he was who
sniffed every one of his models, his Patpong whores, preceding
and following his marriage to Noppawan, why, he asked himself
should he object to odors? Dogs sniffed, claimed territory by
the spills of their urine, and growled at each other, but which
of them actually killed one of its kind? Which of them concocted
plans that brought on the suicidal wishes of another, a more
indirect and sophisticated form of murder, and by its
disingenuousness a worse form. In a visceral objurgation, for
one whose brain was being aspersed by sleep and yet could not
sleep as if it were being drugged and dragged through an exit
and then up to a second door that sleep could not open, he
repudiated his earlier thought lackadaisically. He was guilty of
nothing more than pursuing a human involvement. She had been
part of his personal life, disturbing the whole, but an
imbroglio as indispensable as being able to take a shower for a
positive perspective of the day. No, he thought again, she
sullied him or he sullied himself with her. As a pig wallowed in
mud so did a man in a personal life. The physical aspect of
intimacy was rapturous and easy. A man and a woman in the
friction of bodies became one, but a one that was a different
entity altogether--a fire of physical ebullience and pleasure.
Had facile sex not existed, he would have sought intimacy solely
in feelings, a thorny stem to hold if there ever was one. And
had it not existed intimacy would not exist at all. There would
have merely been the chiseling of ideas onto hard marble brains.
He told himself that when a young woman broke free from a man's
hands, ran onto her balcony, and jumped off it, she was, in that
last moment, the ultimate sovereign of her fate no differently
than she had been in other aspects of her life. Kimberly might
have found the environment upsetting, felt depression at the
loss of a body departing from her and into Noppawan's hands,
with chemicals amuck in her body and brain, and jealousy ready
to fulminate, but she was as responsible for her last claim upon
herself as she was for the formation of her life-- "No," he
told himself, "this is not right either." An internecine
battle for a dominant perspective or a logical merger of the two
variant types of ideas fought within him. How could he have
saved her apart from a dismissal of his wife's ill conceived
plan to begin with? And yet how could he not be culpable? It was
an insoluble dilemma that frustrated his ability to live with
himself.
A being's finality, he argued, was reproduction and death; and
the factors that elongated or expedited this plan of nature
could not have been in his control unless he had used some force
on her, and that never happened despite what the police officers
first believed. If he were indirectly responsible for
manslaughter, his wife, Noppawan, was the indirect murderess.
Barren Noppawan, marrying him, this celebrated container of
lust, and having to justify his infidelities all these years in
the name of art, decided that she might as well utilize the
natural state of man for her own benefit rather than be forever
victimized by what was beyond her capability to change. It was
she who proposed that he paint Kimberly, her colleague and
friend from the university. He did this; and behaving like a
good boy, he feigned a professional detachment toward his study
so successfully that he began to believe it himself. On canvas,
distorting the French-American into an Asian half-breed and a
lady of the night, he brought to his model vague Asian features
and his notoriously whorish sense of dejection.
But Noppawan was as dissatisfied with this platonic aberration,
if not deviance, as she had been with all earlier affairs. It
was she who proposed this madness of him begetting a child.
Begotten by the father and conceived by the friend, in a valid
sense the child would be a production of all three and,
according to this plan of hers, hers to raise. All three would
be more or less active parents with Kimberly as a visiting one.
And of course, she would be married to the biological father who
made ten times what she did on a good month; his paternal role
would be that of the "provider" as was the role of all fathers
before him. Had they thought out a hundred ramifications to such
a scenario it would have been hard to envisage any favorable
outcome. But the maternal professor, wistful for that feel of a
baby in her arms, scooted the glasses down toward the tip of her
nose and espoused the most libertine ideas for a spouse. So
obdurately fixed on a mental conceptualization of some type of
truth her eyes scintillated and they, these sinners of the
heart, became mesmerized believers in the idea that being free
of the fetters of self restraint would be for the good of
Noppawan.
Tiring further, cognizance seemed as the jammed teethed gears
and wheels of a mechanical clock--it seemed so...as tired as he
was everything merely seemed. In his last conscious moment as he
faced the tidal wave that he hoped would claim him fully into
sleep--instead of those smaller waves whose prehensile
inundations formed such an ineffective grasp--he wondered if,
as a wave or waves, whether their undertow led to fathoms of
heretofore unknown reefs, whether sleep was formed of waves at
all, and whether, as a jammed clock, it jammed so that something
in the subconscious more worthy than a record of time or mere
sentient essences of the present could be measured or expressed.
Ideas shifted around in his head like loose tectonic plates.
They were a phantasmagoria in a sleep deprived mind. They had
little consistency apart from the inundations of wanderlust of a
nearly middle aged man on his inexplicable, cowardly journey to
Laos. Sentience had its limitations; so why sleep seemed like a
jammed clock for a few seconds, a wave for a few more, and then
an edge of a cliff, a precipice, that intersected with the
ethereal was as insoluble as why man in all this impermanence
could master his fears enough to go out and forge his destiny.
Numb in his tenebrous tomb, it seemed to him that time was a
man-made concept erroneously believed as fully real and tangible
because of all the clocks and calendars, made to measure
mortality, and things known to have already passed away. As the
religious measured the ethics of their actions by those of the
characters in their scripture, so was time (its tattered
relationships, its solitary and jejune rides in coffins on board
trains) a fiction to mark individual and collective
progress.
But then, he told himself, he was not traveling to Laos to
progress but to degenerate. It was a cynical assessment posed
from a lack of self awareness of what he was in fact doing -
that he was wanting to revert or abscond to a more callow and
ingenuous foundation inside himself: to plausibly sully his body
on the ground near an ancient stupa, prop his head against its
stone spiral, and stare out into clouds and distant space. If in
doing so he were to be perceived as another wealthy and indolent
foreigner (usually German or French but not always so) suffering
and despondent because of a katzenjammer from a previous night
of quaffing Laos Beer, so be it. What would it matter to him?
Perception was more fleeting than even the beings who were
perceiving. For the man who would lean against a stupa and
unresistingly watch the worms and fire ants, more electrically
charged and shocked clay no different from himself, crawl onto
his body, the gods and Buddhas would obsequiously hover around
in mid-air.
Sleep deprived, he was, of course, losing it. His stance on the
world, that concatenated state that gave him a sense of being
grounded, was now showing its disarray. The foundation that he
stood upon had been but miniscule shifting bits of plates, brain
recorded sensory input all along, and he was succumbing to the
vacuous, timeless illogic of dreams where the cohesive bits
broke off and synthesized into something less real than awakened
perceptions. Sleep was this remote alter-clock, this remote
function of the brain deemed as less real and less cognizant
than the other but that was in fact more cognizant within its
fiction. This thing that he called himself, liquidated or became
a gas that shot through a circuit causing him to fall into some
type of a quasi-sleep.
He who was named 'Jatupon' on his birth certificate, he whose
fetid brothers had called "Porn," --those brothers who in his
early years had often made him terrified to move by swinging,
striking, and brandishing their sticks; he who was never called
a profane name from the shaking taciturn angel who silently
recognized that he could not leave his wife for her, he whose
wife called him "You prick!" on overcoming the shock about what
had happened to her friend, was and was not in sleep.
His dream silence, which was even more asphyxiating than the
carbon exhaust fumes permeating the heavy traffic that moved in
slow increments down the street was a fog that was embedded in
all living things and all moved through it. An elderly woman was
walking alone near some type of a hybrid of Sukhumvit and Silom
roads. Sensing that she was being observed, she paused between a
salesman's ice chest of coconuts and bottled water and a woman
stringing together jasmine rosaries from a small table. Looking
around the sidewalk in both directions, she did not sense
anything unusual; so dismissing her earlier thought and
questioning her ability to assess situations accurately, she
trembled at senility's brief chafing and purchased a yellow
rosary which she then stuffed into her purse. The rationale
behind the purchase had been to arrest fleeing sanity and, if
anyone had witnessed this early, disconcerted behavior, to have
that moment of senility's waning be expunged from human minds.
Her intentionally looking aplomb into the rosary saleswoman's
petrous countenance as she paid the money to her was a feigned
attempt to project composure and went unnoticed. Indifferent in
perfunctory movements, taking money and threading her flowers,
the saleswoman was as pachydermatous and robotic as the old
woman and everyone else was. Telling herself that the only means
to forfend senility was to be actively engaged in mental
diversions, she nonetheless sought any diversion that she could,
to ignore, if not discomfit, this paranoid erosion of sanity.
She went into Watson's Beauty and Health Care Store while trying
to ignore this feeling that something was walking behind her,
following the brackish, permed scent of that head of hair, as if
an ocean of harmony lay within it.
Something slightly tangible; something partially impalpable with
some of the thought, feeling and memory of this thing called
Nawin was indeed following the luminary whom he thought of as
'grandmother', as if she were the setting sun. He halted and
waited for her to come out--she who had as swarthy a complexion
as he had with features so resembling his own, but with the
particular habit of sliding her glasses down her nose like his
wife, and examining buildings of an uncertain destination
pedantically.
When she came out with her bag of goods she faced a gigantic
television screen of video animated advertisements on the wall
of a building across the street that flashed 'You prick,'
'Murdering philanderer,' 'You son of a bitch,' and 'Porn, your
brothers are watching your ass' at the bottom of the screen.
Nawin's life--his myriad faces of lost forlornness, the hes of
many ages--was the background to advertisements about soap,
beer, condoms, and cars. Repulsed by the foul language, she was
transfixed by it nonetheless, until feeling the acidic rain that
fell through polluted skies and the putrid city fall onto her
skin. Opening an umbrella against the rain, she noticed that
there really was a faint translucent man watching her. She
grimaced at what she interpreted as a glowering figure and
quickened her pace to escape him. Passing California Fitness, 7
Eleven, Robinson Department store, and a Haagen-Dazs ice cream
parlor, she paused briefly at the Temple of the Descending Sun
(Wat Kham) to pull up the umbrella that was briefly turned
inside-out from a strong gust. Then she continued to quickly
walk away. He stood there watching the shrinking form.
"Grandmother," he thought, "Where are you going?" He tried to
get the words out but all was mute including himself. He felt a
sense of consternation to see her fleeing from him. He thought,
"Why on Earth are you running from me now--why are you not
making it up to me now;" but he had not brought her into
existence and thus she was not his to possess. Whatever brought
him into existence, he thought, was the sole claimant. Still
there was a fusion of a being in love and this "grandmother"
who was diminishing beyond the unassisted eye to register.
Ambivalent between the emotional response of running after her,
a sacrilege against the gods, and a logical response, a
blaspheme against this positive mixing called love that was the
only sense in being on this planet in its forever of affable and
lethal associations, he just cried internally, silently.
Hesitant in a life clogged in these conflicts that engendered
ambivalent waffling and wallowing in futile rumination, he let
her pass away. Immobile because of a cold rush of dread, he let
the filthy acidic rain sully his head the way his thoughts were
sullied in desperation.
Ruminating, he thought about how each year for his birthday she
had fixed her American born, but not raised, angel food cake
burnished in icing, and brought him to fairs to shoot the moving
plastic ducks. Once she had taken him all the way to Bangkok for
no other purpose than to allow him to see the sedentary reptiles
there. He would often crawl through the window of her porch
where shelves were cluttered in Avon bottles shaped in animal
figurines, and when she saw him she would just chasten him
mildly with, "You, yo-yo, get out of there. What are you
thinking?" When he crawled onto her lap he felt the rugged
velvety silkiness of her legs in panty hose and he would stroke
them.
How cold her home was in summers with that air conditioner in
the window of the living room on early into early morning
chilling the house like an American winter, and he would snuggle
deep under a saffron monk-colored blanket that was as stiff as
it had been starched and ironed. Within that room where he would
sleep there was a picture in black and white showing her in
thick glasses with pointed silver rims on the frame and a long
dress as she held him in a fulfilled and satisfied sense of
pleasure. The image of the two of them--he a tiny child, but
both of them children lost in time--was just a weathering
photograph, a jaundicing pallid image lost forever, as a web
page with an address that was indefeasibly and indelibly
forgotten by all in time's thicket of images. It was one
sentimental but insignificant moment lost in the compiling
images of time--And here she was again, the one who had
absconded away from them at their parents deaths in a Bangkok-
to-Ayutthaya automobile accident, walking away from him
hurriedly and as she did so passing the Temple of the Descending
Sun.
"How foolish you are. Grandmother. And a rich grandmother at
that, living in an air conditioned house instead of a broiling
shack on stilts in the sylvan area of Ayutthaya. "Not yours,
buddy; not yours," said a gecko that was crawling around his
tomb within the train. "What?" asked Nawin, whining
ingenuously. "The only panty hose that you have ever stroked
are the ones you take off as a precursor to your copulatory
sports." The gecko stuck out its tongue. "Brackish succulent
skin of an edible silky velvet are always the way one likes it
as long as they are young with tender meat and best of all, all
vanillaly caucasian as an angel--and then the sand paper tongue
strokes inside and out to get its salties and sugars. Young
succulent skin whose scents, especially in their far from
flowery holes, make silly male creatures repeat the delusion of
intimacy time and time again like their fathers, grandfathers,
and so on--young succulent skin as a varied brunch and dinner
delicacy." The gecko released a dry acrimonious chuckle.
"Speaking of eats, have you seen any mosquitoes in this smelly
train?" "No," said Nawin. "Not a one." "What a pity,"
said the miniature, khaki colored lizard of the Chakri dynasty.
The gecko glowered at Nawin with appetite and fixed interest as
if he were an esculent appetize--the gecko crawling on the
railing of the BTS Skytrain station looking down at the small
womanly morsels and traffic below and amorous Nawin doing the
same but as he glanced up dizzyingly at the facade of the
colossal Intercontinental Hotel with its eerie pale-blue light
diffused throughout, he felt like he was falling into a deep-
blue eternal space. His soul, this odd inexplicable word that
may or may not have a physical counterpart beyond the letters of
the word, was falling into this alien, colossal structure with
its lambent bluish light.
Then the edible Nawin woke, instantly realizing that his
grandparents had died long before he was born and that here he
was, just a few hours from turning forty himself (he was going
to consider himself 39 for as long as he could), arm broken,
relationship with a wife broken, and girlfriend deceased most
horrifically, cowering from his sullied personal life on an
upper sleeper of a Pullman car in a train bound for Nongkai and
nowhere. He realized that he who had gained his acclaim as a
painter of Patpong prostitutes, and had burgeoned from poverty
by his dismal themes and color, was all dried up in themes now.
Creativity and life were, for him, veritably exhausted. Was this
the middle life crisis that was so ubiquitous to man? He did not
know.
"Hey guy! Sawadee khrap [hello]," he said with face lowered
toward the bunk beneath him. He wanted diversion from any
stranger who could plant him outside his own thoughts.
The stranger chortled at the face hanging upside down before
him. "What?" he asked.
"Why are you upside down?" asked Nawin innocently.
"I am, am I? Khrap, khrap [yes, yes], I guess so that you would
ask me why I am upside down."