Nawin smiled widely. "Are you going to Vientiane?"

"Yes."

"To do what?"

"Partying there. You?"

"Sure, partying with you."

"Might as well have an early one then." The stranger raised a

beer up to Nawin who put it in his hands and gave the prayerful

gesture of the "wai" even though it was upside down. "How long

can you hang that way?"

"Don't know," said Nawin.

"Don't try drinking it that way. I don't want you to dribble on

me."

"Yes, of course, khorpkhun khrap [thank you]. Are those guys you

were sitting next to earlier going to the party too?"

"Of course. Guests of honor, you know. They have overcome

servitude in the Japanese owned/Thai co-signed sweatshops.

Independence, you know. They will be facing starvation in Laos

shortly. Early death is like being a marathon winner, don't you

think? Guys who starve to death are the true winners because

they get to the finish line first. Yes, a party for losing jobs

and visas. Games too. My favorite is who will be the first one

to dunk his head the longest in sunk drunkenness. And yet I am

also partial to another game: which of life's losers will join

the high ranks of the monks for a bite to eat and which ones

will marry their sisters."

Nawin laughed out a spray of saliva but immediately regained

self-control the best he could when upside down and having

drizzled in public. "Oh my, so sorry, forgive me." For a

moment he deliberately sobered his rolling caprice of laughter

with the thought of the bleak scenario beyond the bold and

refreshing honesty of the Laotian's words. "You've lost your

jobs?"

"We have. Business slowed and our use is over. We will drift

elsewhere in other temporary experiences. Don't worry about us.

Don't worry about me. Why are you going to Laos?"

"For a while," said Nawin evasively. "I guess I should give

you back your beer."

"Keep it. If I run out of beer later maybe I can ferment wine

from some of the rotting day old rice I was trying to eat

earlier and whatever you have stinking up your ass."

Nawin chortled uproariously until the saliva began an internal

strangulation. Feeling as if he were choking he coughed for a

couple moments. However refreshing this acrimony so unencumbered

by Thai-Laotian etiquette was, it was not worth dying for; and

so he retreated for a few moments on his bunk until dangling

once again with an opened can of beer.

He thought again how this stranger defied the obsequious norm

with a refreshing brashness that was like having cold water

thrown into his face. But like a fish that was suddenly snagged

on a hook, images of himself in poverty, which he did not care

to recall, caught him within. His pleasure in the stranger waned

as impressions of beings and beings themselves waned. He

countenanced a mere smile which altered further into a wry,

contorted, and ungainly expression that expressed little beyond

the awkward fidgetiness of wanting to withdraw from social

interaction. Tightened into the hook of memory, he unwillingly

recalled the hysterical deprecatory laughter, guffaws, and jeers

on that one mortifying day in gym class when, at the age of

eleven, his loose underwear fell through the legs of his shorts.

From that point forward he did not oppose his family's will to

have him toil along with them as a noodle worker in their

restaurant. At that time he preferred serving food to being a

viand for those who gormandized oddities. In this mundane world

one who suffered from a peculiar bout of misery more dramatic

than others (like underwear falling onto the floor of the

gymnasium) was cannibalized as an inhuman freakish joke that fed

their appetite for joyous contempt. At that age of eleven he

just wanted to serve obscurely and enter the world of

implausible comic book scenarios shortly before sleep. Back then

noodles, comics, and sleep had given to him a varied but unaware

extension of himself.

He considered pulling a few thousand baht from his wallet to

give to this Laotian. Then it occurred to him that he would need

to give the same to all of these marathon contenders, but he did

not have that much money in his wallet nor was he so inclined to

give what he had to one let alone the countless many. If it were

unethical to know the suffering of an acquaintance and be

unmoved to assist him, he rationalized, giving special favors to

one with no regard to the masses did not seem any more ethical.

So, as always, he horded what he had; and indeed he was one of

those who had an abundance being a purveyor of turpitude as well

as art which together was popular with both wealthy

intellectuals and idiots alike. Such a trivial dabbling of

philanthropy, he further argued, would more likely than not be

money thrown into the whirlwind of drugs, liquor, or other

exacerbated vice from which a self-deprecating fool more easily

annihilated himself. And if he wanted to believe the false

presage that such a nominal act would cause perpetual kindness

the way a rock thrown in a creek begets one ripple that begets

another it would not matter. He would not be able to

successfully delude himself for long; at best he would be

engendering a short time of ever diminishing ripples.

"Besides," he thought, "if this guy is so badly off, he should

not be riding in an air conditioned car." It was a rather harsh

judgment given his knowledge that the poor sometimes treated

themselves to a bit of middle class opulence to make themselves

connected to the society that they served and to sense that they

could thrive rather than merely live. He repeated to himself

that he would not pull out a few thousand baht and give it to a

stranger who would resent him regardless of what he did or did

not do. This was his conclusion in a sleep-deprived head that

had too much crammed into it.

He then considered that sleep was a diminishing reduction of

memory (a zipped file in a computer) but one where the zipping

weathers away the details. He considered that, given enough

hours over a period of evenings, sleep could even dilute the

memory of Noppawan repeatedly swinging the frying pan against

his arm--an arm that was still throbbing and itching in the

cast.

Giving a thousand baht would imply having a lot to give and

giving nothing would imply snobbishly holding back from giving

what little he could, so he handed the man a hundred baht. "I

can spare this. Keep it as money for transportation when going

back to Vientiane."

"Sure, why not, thank you" said the man.

Nawin felt satisfied by his decision to give little. It was a

compromise between wanting to ignore the sotto voce of thought

that told him to give what he had and that which made him into a

culprit for wanting to keep it for himself. And yet between both

extremes there was the constant cynicism that the poor were

merely pigeons and the more one threw crumbs to them the more

they would come to eat. It was a way of not examining that the

years of his life were pyrrhic: that they had given to him

affluence but at the cost of diminution of his humanity--that

each year he was becoming more pachydermatous than before with

an inability to empathize with others which made them as

disconnected to his life as a passing cumulous cloud. Only the

storms, the headlines of the masses that he read in English from

the Bangkok Post, would get his attention. A female beggar on an

overpass with a child that she nursed under her shirt was no

different than someone sitting on a fire hydrant as he waited

for a bus. Still, he thought, this was what he would try to

correct by a solitary wandering into Vientiane.

He noticed some lint on his shirt and flicked it off but really

it was the stranger whom he now wanted to flick away.

"What will you do?" he at last asked.

"Starve," said the Laotian. Nawin saw envy and resentment in the

stranger's face even though few things were absolute when being

conceptualized upside down. If his were envy and resentment it

was no different than the way many of his Thai friends often

looked at him when finding out that he had an American passport.

But then, everything was relative. Perhaps a Somalian would look

at a Laotian in the same way.

"How did you hurt your paw," asked the Laotian

"An old war injury," sighed Nawin.

"In Thailand?' That sounds a bit peculiar. You are a bit

peculiar, aren't you? An accident that you don't want to talk

about--some type of fight with a guy where you acted like a

coward or a civil war in your own home that-"

"Hard to explain," interrupted Nawin.

"Okay, whatever. Now tell me what you are going to Laos for."

"Again for a while--a few weeks or so," said Nawin in jest but

seriously believing that there was comfort in friends and

acquaintances alike remaining strangers.

"Wanting to have fun with a Laotian girl?"

"Do you have one in mind for me?"

"I will sell my sister at a special discount for you if it

doesn't cause more war injuries." These were mere words,

flippant wisps of air to fill the vapid moments of time while

confined with undesirable others on a train. They were of no

more serious intent than the earlier conversation but the idea

of selling a member of a family, or selling them out, was

something too close to home. It was repugnant enough to make

this paragon of honesty transformed grotesquely into an

inordinate abuser--such were the fathoms of childhood trauma

that a facetious play with words meant that devils could be made

instantly from gods, and that gods were made from the muck of

childhood sensitivities like any sand or snowman. He wanted to

end the conversation abruptly but needed to find a graceful and

amicable exit that would keep the one disliked clueless of this

fact.

"You don't say? No, probably not. I've become spoiled by taking

whiter meat."

"I saw your marriage ring when you first began babbling. Are

you married to a European?"

"No, a Thai woman who is darker than us both. That is another

story."

"Why did you marry her if she is so dark and ugly and likes to

hit on you?"

He became more conscious of the barely bearable itchiness under

the cast. It seemed to him that it would be a handy excuse for

absconding to his bunk. And there he could rummage through his

bag for a hanger from which to scratch with.

"Don't keep me waiting all night for an answer."

"It's morning now. She's not all that ugly and she is a good

communicator. Well, my arm is itching. I need to get some powder

or something, and besides I've kept you and perhaps others up

long enough. I thank you for the beer. It is already making me

drowsy. Excuse me, the blood has gone to my head."

"Okay. Whatever."

Nawin slunk back into what he amusingly considered his

"tenebrous tomb" not that he found such retreats into himself so

odious. Neither society nor solitude seemed to him as being all

that commodious and so throughout every waking moment of his

life he paced the two rooms of himself like a member of the

Burmese National League for Democracy under house arrest. Having

exhausted the reserve that fueled what extroverted

characteristics he possessed, he just lay there finishing his

drink and waiting for the liberating force of sleep to deliver

him.

2

A prodigious, big boned figure of a woman with stiff raised arms

that were erect, gesturing boughs waited for her man, not as a

doting woman but as a martinet; and four times she demandingly

called his name, 'Zero', and four times there was nothing.

(If his brainwaves were water flooding into his hard skull boat

and the air-conditioned drafts that he tried to escape by

bundling himself within his blankets were the battering

inundations of oceanic waves, then it would seem that he was

foundering in both the depths of himself and the world for every

minute his restless, lopsided head shifted to the other side of

his pillow. In the middle of the particular dream he was now in,

he turned sharply on his left side and he would have fallen from

the precipice of his bunk most judiciously in recompense for

Kimberly's death were it not for plastic black straps that

allowed him to be restrained there to his sentence of dreams--

suicidal dreams periodically jolting the body but having little

to do with her.) At last a man as fat as a tub and as sequacious

as a child wobbled toward this woman, 'Four'; but, according to

the feelings of the god, Nawin, that drenched the ground that

they stood upon lugubriously, the two were not meant to stand

together. No, the four and the zero were not meant to stay

together and the zephyrs of the god blew strongly upon them to

obtain their separation. But those winds were futile as a device

for prying away such an inspissated couple for once they were

together this man and woman babbled to each other a mutually

pleasurable one word jabberwocky despite the fiercely driven

rains, hail, and the flash flood at their feet. The drone of

these distant voices was of forty, and each repeated it to the

other forty times. Forty was eighty times redundantly beaten

onto his head as if it were a drum; and with a slight headache

Nawin awakened.

He instantly realized that he was forty; and although he told

himself that he did not feel any different, and that he surely

looked no different than he had some hours earlier at the age of

39, and that to have had the span of years needed to

successfully rise from what he was, was more of a blessing than

a curse, the idea that he was a half rotten apple hanging

loosely and purposelessly from a tree made him cringe and wish

that he were not at all. Light and flippant, jocular and yet

terribly morose, this self-destructive mood was nonetheless

powerfully upon him for he could not stop himself thinking that

forty was an end of virility, and that an end of virility was

the end of manhood, the end of all. This suicidal taunting that

was implanted in his brain from a dream snatched as a theme of

fears in overall consciousness was, he knew, the result of

turning forty in this tomb. Not wanting to confront the

morbidity of this attack, he retreated back to sleep as if it

were the sanctuary from negative ideas instead of being their

crucible.

The gecko did not favorably view Nawin unzipping his skin and

lying down in his tenebrous tomb in such a manner. A man

behaving like this, instead of fleeing from its formidable

presence was nothing like it had ever witnessed before, and it

found the situation extremely puzzling. As preoccupied as Nawin

was in escaping his carnal flesh and emulating those carcasses

he and his wife were so partial to (particularly the slit middle

aged husband and wife of a car crash in Ayutthaya who basked

peacefully in the lighting of their glass and formaldehyde

coffins in the anatomical museum at Siriaj Hospital), he did not

notice that the gecko was glowering with its forty eyes--

glowering at the man for being so inert when he should be

fleeing from the reptile and for having undressed from his

besmirched outer layer of flesh with such a crude, complete, and

unnatural disrobing. The museum was an anniversary site Nawin

and his wife had in fact gone to on a number of occasions to

commemorate their youthful meetings there, and to see the

freakish human pottery of tawny-brown or tanned ochre that had

been of such comfort to them as teenagers. Back then, before

finding the dead people and each other, each of them had been

wandering respectively through an asphyxiating smoke that was as

inescapable as a labyrinth and more confusing. But within it

they retained a faint hope that the smoke would eventually

disperse from the battle ground of family and that one day this

abstract word, family, with nothing concrete in it would

altogether vanish--vanish intellectually and emotionally the way

the river goddess of Loy Khratong diffused through a child's

years until the abstraction was gone from the mind as

yesterday's smoke. With 'family' being a word marring their

worlds, it was only natural that their hopes should be revived

in these preserved entities of Siriaj Hospital. Once alive but

now the smallest of freaks jarred on shelves, and the largest

grounded in containers, they were a reminder that there was a

stage of mangled life, of death, of being put on a shelf, of

being displayed as a museum piece, and myriad other unknown

possibilities. As it was with them, so family was a battle that

would end as all battles ended. Battle grounds could become

verdant again but this was not so of the battle ground of family

and they smothered in each other wistful thoughts of a return.

As a married couple they would occasionally take the Chao Phraya

river boat to the museum so that they might reminisce about

those meetings of their youth, thank the preserved specimens

that had saved them from life, and maintain a lexicographical

stance that words like "death" should mean precisely that

despite the vehement denials, neologistic concoctions of a

heavenly overture, and anthromorphic self-made mythologies of

the masses. In some respects, despite the enormity of his size,

Nawin was like any raw meat that the gecko had caught before;

but never before had any of its prey skinned itself and by its

own volition lay before it as inanimately as any torn, half

uneaten comestible. The gecko watched Nawin who was poised like

a reclining Buddha and staring at the ceiling that hindered the

welkins. Although the skinless nude lying there was a bit like a

boy praying after slipping out of his clothes, forgetful of

getting into his pajamas, the gecko was not able to make this

connection. It just assumed that the skinned and fairly

inanimate human was playing dead to save itself from becoming

its meat. But as time went by the inert human creature became so

wholly opprobrious to the gecko, who valued a good hunt, that at

last, as the small ceiling fan continued to turn arthritically,

churning an unnoticeable, fetid draft of warm air in the

direction of the man and the beast with a wobbling, scraping

sound like cooks in sidewalk restaurants mixing fried rice but

instead mixing these myriad, noxious odors of the train, it

informed Nawin of his freakish obscenities with its tacit

baleful eyes and scrolled tongue.

When he woke up his headache was worse. "A second commute is

never good," he told himself (meaning the commutes to and from

sleep that were as two onerous trips to and from Ayutthaya

within a day). He pressed his palm against his forehead where

his thoughts were taut and moved incrementally like the

lethargic cold blooded reptile of Bangkok's traffic. Painful as

his headache was, he told himself that it was just. It was a

well deserved "mental flagellation" (meaning an excoriation of

disturbing dreams for the sins of Kimberly's death, Noppawan's

separation, and the general muck that epitomized his personal

life). He told himself that he did not suffer enough in his

waking hours so a higher arbiter than will seemed to be his

judge and executioner, and it was all just.

But was he really dreaming anything about them even in an

indirect way? No, he had to admit, he was not having nightmares

about the women he cared for--and he cared for them all with

these two specially mixing in himself as paint, their pleasures

and sorrows his tenebrism. He was not even having nightmares

about being all alone, separated, and on a train trip bound for

nowhere. Instead, he was personifying forty and being nibbled by

a gecko.

It was darkly hysterical and he released a tacit, tickled guffaw

in a strong exhaled breath, circumspect to stifle noise that

could awaken the other passengers. The dream of forty was rather

unequivocal but the meaning of the other was not so obvious. His

best explanation was that geckos ate mosquitoes; in his youth,

when snorting glue and swallowing amphetamines back in those

days when his parents had died and he was working along with his

brothers in a sidewalk restaurant and being molested as a "cheap

date", he used to hallucinate about talking mosquitoes; so if

the mosquitoes were Jatupon's only companion, they symbolized

the self, a child of poverty that his name change to "Nawin"

could not consume. For whatever his external changes and

whatever label he gave himself, Jatupon, an abused and forlorn

child was within. At least that was his version of the

syllogism.

Amused by himself as he always was, he was much too curious at

witnessing his sudden desultory moods of asphyxiating stagnation

and foundering desperation within to ever be seriously suicidal.

Still, he needed movement--the sensory details of the here and

now--to override his ideas, to change him from what he was with

every passing minute, and to prove that instead of being a man,

he was merely an unfixed, impressionable, and amorphous blob. To

air out his musty, old mind became more urgent with every

oppressive moment in which he was increasingly discontent to

stay within the hole in the embankment of the Pullman car that

at times seemed a coffin or a drawer at a morgue, and at other

times like a coffinless rot in a crevasse within the walls of a

mountain. And finding that there were no more fruit pastries in

his box to obtain oral pleasure--pleasure giving man a sense of

being more cognizant than an automaton of space dust moving in

vacuous time eating, drinking, urinating, defecating, and, given

the chance, copulating (although there was little chance of that

in the train)--he felt claustrophobic and climbed down the

bolted metal ladder of the sleeper with the idea of going to the

bathroom. As he did so he heard the Laotian snoring as

uproariously as a siren and yet as mellifluously as the enticing

song of a Siren.

It was indeed strange that the disheveled being who was shooting

fetid wisps of air as sonorously as a bagpipe should be both

enticing and repulsive all in the same reeking breath, and Nawin

smirked at the sight of his acquaintance. He feigned disgust,

and this action mixed with amusement in a contorted, clownish

countenance until the odd smile finally flattened for there was

a peculiar sensation within that at first he did not readily

acknowledge. To evade the cognizable he again ruminated on how

odd it was that, now feeling as refreshed as he could be when

waking from rolling turbulent dreams that wrenched his brain

with a pain like the sprained of leg of a child fleeing a bully

(albeit that the bully in his case was the deprecating voice

within himself that censured him for being entirely lost at

forty), he should not be able to decipher appeal or repugnance

over something so simple as the pleasure factor behind the sound

and smell of a man's loud breathing--cacophonous mutterings of

a hominid or something quite orphic? This was his jocular

deliberation so as to stay hidden from himself behind a wall of

thought. Ultimately, however, there was a scaling of the wall

and the coward was ferreted.

"Am I really feeling this way?" he asked himself. He knew that

he was, for his body tingled with the titillation of one wanting

sex. He thought how consternating and queer it was that after

leaving his brother, Kazem, over twenty years ago without ever

thinking of him or any man in much of any sense (including "that

way" except in the most fleeting manner), that this man, this

unshaven and uncomely Laotian, should seem sensual to him now.

No, he thought, with a new idea repudiating the old, the only

peculiarity was that as a casualty on the battle ground of

family he should live so well and so long without having to

continually purge himself of memory that could continually

discomfit the present with its stench, rubbing its foul wounded

body in recidivistic and wanton desire.

Still, he reassured himself consolingly; it was not so "queer"

for an artist to love the beauty of form. In this world of

lackadaisical automatons who never appreciated the here and now,

the beauty of the human frame was there to be shown by

discerning artists. He posited that his own artistic

proclivities in conjunction with all the trauma of the past

month (Kimberly's suicide, Noppawan's beating of him with the

frying pan, and being locked out of the house when returning

from the hospital) were putting him in a dust storm no more

nebulous than that which he felt instantly at taking a shot of

whiskey or when spinning one of his madonnas on a dance floor.

It was merely a minute of temporary derangement that was quite

natural in life, a game of musical chairs in which the chairs

also moved. He further averred that a moment or two of confusion

when waking up from nightmares was totally understandable and

natural in life's craziness. But, he then asked himself, why

would any artist have this obsession in conveying the beauty of

form unless he were painting over the background that tainted

him? Perversion had the transitive root 'to pervert', and it was

rooted deep with the years: it was familiar, it was going home,

it was a homecoming to the illusion of that former family that

could be argued to have never existed at all were it not for

that almost impalpable stain that the perverted wore unknowingly

like a light jacket.

Desire: what was it really? It was mad hunger for what one

lacked. It was emaciated Haitians attacking a UN storehouse and

a mind loose and spinning of its own accord like a top; and

disconcertedly, he argued to himself in an alloy that was both a

question and a statement, the encroachment of desire was surely

a possibility only when the consciousness approved it with its

reluctant nod. "Isn't this so?" he asked the mind which knew

nothing but questions.

As much as these titillations toward the Laotian repulsed and

frightened him and despite a tepid attempt at eschewing his

feelings, he wanted the man, like a spellbound warlock whose

spells, even when having a life of their own, went contrary to

the intent. As abashed as he was by his compulsion to stare,

there was nothing to stop him. No one was awake but himself.

Uppers and lowers, they were all ensconced in tiny train domains

behind their brown curtains. He was quite alone enough to

elongate a momentary voyeurism to more. The burly stranger

wearing only sufficiently bulged underwear was both handsome and

ugly depending on one's perspective; and it was perspective by

which all judgments lied. To understand the level of

desirability or repugnance of a given thing (whether or not the

Moslem woman sleeping in an adjacent bunk across the aisle with

partially opened curtains was "with child," "knocked up," or a

southern terrorist in disguise, or whether the train ride, one

that every young boy would yearn to go on, was pleasant or not

for the man he had mutated into) an overall mood was needed, a

background color for the canvas based on faded memories falling

through the mind as softly as leaves or as revoltingly as trash

blowing on the ground.

Beams of light were able to slide through the myriad rectangular

slits of the metallic awning that had been pulled down the

window as a screen; and when somewhat blocked by forms in the

environment the passing southerly trains became oblique.

Obliquely, they changed the appearance of the man and in so

doing changed the perspective of him. At one moment the light

accentuated blemishes visible on his face and at another moment

it diffused onto the whole countenance making it sleek and

mysterious like tenebrous silver.

When the face was ugly its foul breath was fouler, and when

handsome the snoring was a nice inebriating gust that picked up

Nawin's kite; but in both perspectives the brazen Laotian in his

impoverished vulnerability reminded him of Jatupon. There in

tattered dirty clothes Jatupon, whom his brothers derided as

'Jatuporn,' was a vermin he could never entirely escape (scaling

the prison walls of the subconscious as the boy did), no matter

how many thousands of dollars in baht he was commissioned to

paint his whores. For a moment he was scared of the Laotian as

if having stumbled into a den of sleeping terrorist cells but it

was the self that was his only terrorist. It was the self that

filled him with stiffened, cold dread. Fortunately, with the

walk to the bathroom, the attraction passed him entirely almost

in the same moment it came upon him: Jatuporn was apprehended,

and the self was placated as if this particular feeling were as

inconsequential as all the other wind driven debris of the mind

that had gone before.

If he believed that anything which overtook rational thought and

equanimity in such a temporary, all pervasive and engaging

burning, lacked legitimacy (and in a way he might have for he

knew passion to be like the slight bitter aftertaste of too much

cloying chocolate), it was of minor consideration being the

Patpong prostitute depicter that he was. With lovely scented

women (especially those in ovulation, which was every man's

Venus Flytrap unless punctilious enough to carry a nosegay of

multi-colored condoms) sensuality was wild flowers of searing

energy popping up after a shower making the landscape anew.

However, any titillation regarding a man was tremor and

mudslides. It was his shaky world tearing apart, falling down

the sores of its cracks, and being buried alive within the fall

downward. Because of this, all he wanted was departure: in this

case, to depart from the man, the spell, and the train, and as

this was not possible, to again retreat into his once solitary

bower.

Even with passion waning with every step toward the bathroom in

a salvation of movement, his mind was preoccupied by wanting to

reclaim the window and seat from the window and seat thief, so

that he might let morning and movement pass through the orifices

of his eyes to obstruct memory--a morning with shanty stations

as gateways to shanty towns, rice fields and banana orchards

with coconut trees occasionally spewed in, thickets of verdant

weeds and knee high grass, sickly palm trees and two-story

shacks where the bottom halves had such high earthy foundations

and the true houses were the upper portions where drying laundry

hanging from ropes were the only ornaments apart from distant

glimpses of vehicles and amorphous motorcycle taxi drivers on

the main street of some rural town or another. Until he could

escape the man and the train entirely, until he could walk away

and clog his mind with other things, there would be a window

with which to take in various scenes to obstruct memory--an

annexing weed of consciousness to idle eyes. And the window

would be his were it not for the Laotian's sprawling body

clogging his space.

He imagined himself shaking the Laotian, kicking him on his

hairy behind, and dragging him out of this annexed space. He

smiled and internally laughed at such an absurd caprice. The

mind was littered with such protective mines, which soared

through the weightless space of ethereal consciousness. By his

laughter such evil was not claimed and thus it did not make him.

This was his enlightened thought in a partially refreshed brain

granted by a nocturnal sleep which had also slugged him with a

headache, made his clothes wrinkled and smelly, and left him

with the need to urinate.

Chemical fixations and caprices went out of him entirely with

his liquids. Urinating in this metallic East-Asian urinal

embedded within the floor of a toilet sandwiched between two

cars, he facetiously told himself that the fetid little space

was his friend. Even though he did it with humor it was the

stuff that Jatupon was made of. It was the animistic thoughts of

a child. Feeling relieved to relieve himself of fluids and

issues, he could have allowed the matter to stay there, but he

wanted a guarantee that nothing like this would happen to him

again. The dilemma was not knowing who the guarantor was, so he

sunk himself into the Buddhist myths of his culture. Ubiquitous

superstition, the guardian against creepy crawling memories,

came upon him. He said a bit of a prayer, as much as any atheist

could, to exorcise homosexual inclinations from his brain. The

prayer, if it could be called such, was not conscious or

subconscious thought but a type of semi-autonomous space-garbage

moving in quick orbits within the mind.

Through deliberately imagining it to be so, he made a spell that

transformed Buddha into a god even though there were no gods in

Buddhism (at least not in Buddha's Buddhism), no netherworld of

heavenly creatures, and no guardian Seraphs and cherubs--only

the deadening of desire, in the soft strangulation of this

illusion of self to engender a harmony that defiled the essence

of being alive. It was a toilet Buddha-god to whom he could

offer no oblation beyond urination and potential defecation.

Deep in his "soul" he knew that even if there were a distant god

beyond the gods made in man's image, men were mere cockroaches

before it, scurrying away from the vibrations of the foot with

no understanding of the foot being a foot let alone as part of

the limb of a body to a conscious behemoth entity. Such was

man's ignorance of God or gods, of which the most intelligent

believed nothing and the most ignorant believed the myths that

made their besmirched flesh hallowed enough to be at one with

them. He scolded himself for wanting a deliverer who would save

him from the fleeting whims that haunted the mind, moving it

like an empty ship navigating mysteriously by the mandates of

erratic winds and caprices. He knew how opposed to the intellect

such beliefs were when there was no evidence of intervention by

the deities in life's barbarism and injustices, unless it were

in the injustices themselves of gods favoring some and letting

others perish which would be the same as the traits of any of

the monsters of men; and yet he summoned his Buddha nonetheless.

Such superstitions were normal in these vulnerable and tenuous

corpuses and he was no different. He laughed; he amused himself

like no other.

He looked at himself in the mirror. It was the same handsome

face. It was not a half rotten apple hanging loosely from a

tree--at least not yet. It was the same brawny body that had

amorously begotten another male in the phantasmagoria of this

world. He thought of this child whom Noppawan was no doubt

jubilantly nurturing and pampering at this moment as if he were

her own. Should the separation seem permanent a few years from

now, Noppawan would no doubt tell her son a story in which, for

some families, there were no daddies. She might say that in such

lucky families children were delivered to mommies by the

assistance of an angel named Kimberly who was quicker with her

deliveries than any of the motorcycle delivery boys who worked

for Pizza Hut. It was a mean thought against meanness done to

him, but he decided that he would not berate himself for it.

After all, he could not figure out how there could be any sin

unless it were theirs. Disposing of guilt for a moment, he could

see the obvious: it was Noppawan's idea for him to father a

child through her friend; and prior to the affair how could he

have known that it would lead to Kimberly's possessiveness and

that in her post partum depression she would leap off of her

apartment balcony at Assumption University? Like every affair of

any nature one engaged unknowingly, so a beating with the iron

frying pan had been totally out of order. He sucked in his lips

angrily and told himself that he did not hate them which was not

entirely true.

Having begotten a child made him feel that his use had been

filled and that his virility had been smashed out of him most

intimately by the hands of two women attempting to quench their

maternal thirst with his apple juice and the seeds that were

rife within it. He was a mushy half-rotten apple that they had

squeezed most mercilessly to garner the seeds within his juice.

In a sense they had raped him; and he argued to himself that

rapes of the handsome, talented, and affluent types were the

most common cannibalism in this modern world.

3

He thought about a Bangkok Post article which, three years

earlier, had referred to him euphemistically as "The

distinguished benefactor of rural girls in an urban profession."

Back then, at the age of 36, he, Nawin Biadklang, had considered

the sardonic comment both humorous and exhilarating, for every

article allotting time and space to an examination of his self-

absorbed ruminations on decadent living, no matter how critical

and regardless of the domestic nature, like this one in point,

was to him, then, like the first lick of succulent success.

As with all reviews, at the time of this article's publication

he considered it, which now was the most recent critique of his

oeuvre, as another exhilarating current of air enabling him to

soar without much effort. Back then, he had been volant within

the dopamines and endorphins of his own head, anticipating a

maturity, a growth into the fit of his decadent skin, which

would allow him, as much as a serious artist was allotted, to

strut his succulence more fully on life's propitious catwalks of

fame. That had been the initial impression that had come about,

to some degree, from a rather inconsequential review published

in Thailand; and it had been an impression and reaction not at

variance to the impressions and reactions of all earlier

reviews.

And yet a year later when the drawing of all his escorts seemed

banal and jejune enough to be replaced by a celebration of the

ordinary (a painting, for example, like a photograph in a

locket, of his then platonic angel in the driver's seat of her

car but from a perspective of looking at her through the

exterior of a windshield and through the interior of a dangling

jasmine rosary that hung from the rear view mirror; another one

of his pedantic wife at a distance sitting on a bench outside

the Assumption University library while sipping through a straw

the juice of a coconut as she read a book through her heavy

spectacles; an odd if not grotesque painting of Noppawan with

the perspective from the forehead looking onto the dark, leaning

moled hills, and blemished declivity of her face; "A

Conversation on Surrogate Motherhood," as one painting was

mentally entitled in which both women were at a coffee shop, and

despite their restrained if not tranquil demeanor the room was

filled with their unrestrained, desperate thoughts flying

through the air in sundry shades of every color; and others

seeming to him more insignificant and raw stylistically than the

three aforementioned), he told himself that he was worthless as

a painter. He became determined to remove his paint and canvases

to a closet and to forswear art altogether. He averred inwardly

that all his studies of aching prostitutes who were quickly

manufactured off the assembly belts of this world, which

stretched decades, centuries, and millenniums toward the past

and the future, would not help one of them, being dead and

unborn as they were; and for those escorts in his immediate

present whom he gropingly attempted to befriend, to sooth their

jealous reactions toward his unwillingness to divorce his wife

and marry them, and occasionally tried to set up as beauty shop

proprietors, owners not merely of sidewalk restaurants but of

the open garage variety so common in Thailand, supporting them

financially while they sought a high school degree or other

certificate, and other futile attempts at empowerment, it

appeared that what he had succeeded in doing for the dead and

unborn whores was infinitely more. He had delivered no one to

their higher potential. Art, he said, was a frivolous

embellishment by those who were weary of enduring the ordinary.

It was lavish and empty like a string of heavy jewels locked in

a safe, or the accumulation of wealth to give specious dignity

to the tenuous body of carbon called man. It did nothing for

anyone.

It was then that, because of the article, the word,

"distinguished," began to snag his consciousness. The word, when

used sarcastically, suggested that one was a dirty old man, that

acme of all depravity. 'Depravity' was an all inclusive word in

which both playboys and bloodthirsty tyrants were erroneously

locked in as cell mates. He had not even climbed far into

sensual decadence, a different mountain entirely, with play for

the playboy tearing his crepe paper heart the inwardly

lachrymose and outwardly debonair way that it did, with these

bouts of sensing a woman's genitalia as vapid holes being banged

as empty drums from inside by a man's stick; these conclusions

that sex was just a bored erumpent man banging on any tin trash

can in reach for a bit of sound and vibration, and brief moments

of total, pellucid understanding called enlightenment as to the

absolute absurdity of an instrument of urination being used for

intimacy.

He knew that if viewed alone, without the disparaging meanings

pretentious and sanctimonious art critics gave to it, the word,

"distinguished," was more good than bad. Still, he did not

like the elderly connotation of it in reference to himself and

he did not think that he was accomplished enough to be

considered "distinguished." Nobly and decadently, he had spent

many years chasing lurid themes and nasty girls merely because

he, from personal experience, could empathize with innocence

being snatched away by the hungry wolves of this world--or

rather, the more complex commonality of not really being

snatched by those fangs, but innocence, in the form of a thigh,

being eagerly given to the waylaying wolves so that the whole

body could survive. By being tossed morsels of the good life

from the beloved abductor in exchange for a thigh, the body

could survive and the brain would be more than empty space for

it would have someone to love.

Regardless of whether the innocent were considered victims or

volunteers, innocence was nonetheless baited and devoured. As a

forlorn younger brother who was hated by all except for the one

who would use him as a "cheap date," he knew. He knew that

corrupted innocence was a perennial ache, which would ensue for

as long as there were hungers. And for Nawin, this Jatupon

(merely "Jatuporn"), it was an insoluble theme haunting him

with many blissful nights and compelling his days to be

slavishly spent in pouring color from tubes into imaginary holes

on canvas.

Fine as it was in youth to vindicate injustice by painting his

tragic madonnas, one could not exactly grow old that way and

seem inwardly wise or outwardly respectable, not that he

accredited the latter as having so much importance. Still it was

a rather repugnant thought that he who wanted to become wise and

enlightened once he entered old age would instead become just

another distinguished patron of massage parlors, obsessed by

vibrant youth, and having found no awareness from all his days

beyond his sexual rhythms. From this conclusion he retired from

art with a second and more puissant conviction.

Now he, this forty year old birthday boy in a toilet of a train

and the stench thereof, was once again trying to recall this

same article for he was wondering if the writer had really meant

all along that he was an immature painter whose use of the lurid

could only sustain him in his youth. For all these years he had

been gloating in all things written about him as if none of it

were critical or vatic; and it had never occurred to him that

perhaps, by behaving so, he was making himself ridiculous.

He tried to recall it as best the copying and projecting

apparatus of the human brain allowed so that he might

reinterpret the critique, but the lethargic crawl of memory

wobbled like an overweight, arthritic dog kept at a distance,

and only that salient collar: the word "distinguished," snagged

it a little within the thickets of thought that made up the

illogic of his consciousness.

Somewhere into this third time of looking up at himself in the

mirror for reassurance that he still possessed the same handsome

face, he imagined something like an older man within scraping

the vestige of his claws through the inner layers and then

through the surface skin of his Botox starched face. The hoary

phantasm of the stark, ugly possibility of self and the

probability of one day finding himself no more distinguished

than any old beast fornicating with youth made him once again

reel on this, his first day of being a forty year old man.

Suddenly, a plethora of other articles published about him

reeled through his mind like microfilm, but also in a most

diminished and faded state. Some of these articles might have

merely been the hype of writers at the insistence of gallery

owners or independent actions of newspapers and magazines to

give readers what they wanted: sleaze about a minor celebrity

whom through his paintings and tabloid gossip they could learn

more about than any snapshot of a movie star in bed with someone

other than his wife. From tiny facts or rumors of facts about

this exhibitionist god on canvas, the populace who were bereft

of significant involvements could gossip about him to make

friends with others equally bereft.

"No, my works are not salacious crap--well, not crap anyhow,"

he told himself, and laughed at his hyper self-criticism for it

was he who had been the youngest artist in Thailand to have an

exhibit of his work (a decade in retrospective) dangling nude

with legs marginally wide open in the temporary art museum. His

adulthood had been good indeed, he told himself; and he knew

that he could go on savoring his success if only he could find

an inspiration to probe the ordinary as profoundly as he did the

carnal. "Strange," he thought, "that the carnal is ordinary but

that the ordinary does not seem to be carnal," and he dwelled on

this paradox that he created for himself until memory intruded

on his game.

- What are you doing, he had asked Noppawan one late Sunday

afternoon after returning from his painting and philandering on

the floor of his studio.

- Why all alone and in the dark?

- I am not all alone.

- Well, good. Who is with you?

She did not say anything. - Noppawan?, he asked mildly as if

addressing a sensitive child.

- I have my lovers too. Can't you see? As withdrawn as she was,

her words were barely audible.

- I see Basset on your lap. I see that she loves you just as I

do.

- No, hers is different...real.

There was silence between both of them and he felt she was not

real but a miniature spirit in a miniature spirit house that he

needed to appease with gentle words of oblation. Still, there

were questions to be asked: Why are you on a dining room chair

in the middle of an empty room with the cat? Why is the room

empty? he asked in slightly more critical tones but, as always,

still gentle and circumspect with his wounded bird as with the

angel and the madonnas. As an empathic man who knew what a

landmine the personal life was, there could be no other demeanor

for him for little did he want a battle of which rotting bodies

and their stench would be the only outcome. - Why have you

shoved all the furniture to the back of the room?

- I don't know. Comfort, said the reticent woman.

- Comfort?

- A mirror

- A mirror?

She said nothing until, like a drowning swimmer, words bubbled

up from the disconcerting ocean of silence that she so

cherished. - For the same reason you became involved with me,

Nawin. You needed to marry someone who reminded you of what you

were, how you were alone in your family, to remind you that the

world was not right for someone else and it wasn't just you

aching and mad in your own thoughts. So the furniture gets

shoved to the back of the room, so I look into space.

- What?

- As a mirror.

- What does that mean...'as a mirror?'

For a few seconds she withdrew to the cat, petting it but with

eyes that seemed to pass through that which she needed to

neediness itself. Then she looked back at him--I don't find it

lonely just to sit here.

- You should.

- Should I? I don't know. Being with you, not knowing what you

think of me...you in these women's company constantly, and me in

their shadows...Often I just want to be contained here in my

space. Here I don't feel so inadequate to your women, or the

need to deprecate myself so much for feeling that way...so

inadequate to your disadvantaged, dirty women.

- I'm sorry.

- Inadequacies are fired onto me daily, you know, even if I do

tell myself its inside me and that you do not pull the

trigger.... No, it isn't the affairs. What you press against

your body is none of my business. It isn't as if I need to

inspect the underwear you plan to put on...if its cotton or

silk, bikinis or boxers, clean or dirty...what you press against

your body, who massages it, and how, I don't care.

-What can I do for you?

-Yes, strangely enough you are so decent. Husbands should at

least be friends with those they have. I knew what you were when

I married you. It's those inadequacies like going out in

rags....If you like yourself before, you end up losing any sense

of anything good about yourself in being with such a man....No,

I can sit here for hours and not see anything so lonely in it.

Its like Ban Chiang pottery locked in a glass display but at

least in that container I have me. Out of it, with you, I lose

me... at best, I have just an image of you from long ago in a

special mirror nobody else sees.

-You don't look like my image. He chuckled awkwardly to lighten

the mood, fully aware of conversation being an inept bridge to

link any pair let alone the purveyor of pain with its victim.

Not knowing what to say he changed the subject--Let's move the

furniture where it belongs out of the corners. This was his

response to silence.

- Why, people ask me are we, I, an archaeological anthropologist

and you, a playboy artist, together. They feel sorry for me for

they think it a graphic humiliation worse than rape. In ways I

suppose it can seem that way when rape is such a private

act...and this is not private. I brag about your latest

paintings as if to say that what he does with his own body is

his business; I don't tell him how and where to move his legs so

why should I worry about his other bodily movements and

functions; and I couldn't be prouder of a husband who explores

the human soul through a vagina. I suggest it, although not in

those words...not any words really. She began to cry. - There is

no paint for me, Nawin. No canvas...just the clutter of a

woman's home...countless things if she marries well...countless

knick-knacks she has to move around and in which she has to

reflect her thoughts, all in different parts of the house. She

moves the furniture to see a world where the same pain exists

elsewhere to prove to herself that it is the natural state so as

to make all else bearable...I mean it is the natural state in a

sense but for other husbands maybe not to these extremes or at

least not so openly depicted. If natural, a woman can console

herself that it is not just the insanity of aching in her own

head.

- Are you leaving me?

- No, I'm not so courageous. It will always be more of the same

for me. So I am sitting with this so called goddess of Bubastis,

this cat on my lap, and as I do so it seems to me that a cat is

good for cuddling but a man with his premature pecker is not a

cuddler...just a lovemaker. That is what he is good at. The

Egyptians were right about there being a woman in the cat and a

cat in a woman, for the two creatures need to feel real within

the propinquity of touch. There with another non-threatening

suffering creature of this world, touching to feel real, maybe

it is just another mirror--just a bigger love, a fuller love

and perhaps a more selfish love than a man and a woman feel but

this cuddling with a cat is better for a woman.

The memory reeled around and played so distinctly that he almost

thought he was there with his wife; but how much of it he had

distorted to make it more meaningful, dramatic, and aesthetic

than it really was, he had no way of knowing. The brain was

always rewinding bits of memory, analyzing them, and splicing

them together like film; and as were two people walking down a

sidewalk without looking at each other, who were and were not

together, so was memory--it was and was not.

Were articles dating back fifteen years adulation about the

artist of his youth that might have been true words then but

little pertained to the man of forty, or were his works

tremendous talent that did not hinge on the salacious biography

of the artist and would live beyond his short eruption of

ephemeral years? It seemed to him, nonsensically, that they both

were and were not. Nonetheless, it was absurd to merely think

that over the past few years he had aged so tremendously that

critics and commissioners of his work alike had lost interest in

him entirely. The art critics had been writing about him, albeit

less frequently, until he ran out of inspiration for his

redundant themes, irrespective of the surfeited forms of whores

who came in droves, each with slightly different circumstances,

and each with slightly different expressions. "I was a sensation

until I lost interest in beating and stirring up such muck, and

none of it has anything to do with turning forty," he told

himself, but he knew that it was and was not true.

It was true that just four years ago he, the once eligible but

continual playboy, was appealing enough to be referred to as

"Naughty Nawin" with those English words in their headings

proving that he had not turned into mushy and deciduous fruit in

the little over three summers since; but it was not true that as

unseemly as his life might be in view of the fact that he was a

glutton of the personal life like a boy in front of a thousand

cookies he was the same as any foreign business holidayer of the

masculine gender looking for the nearest brothel. His was more

of a spiritual decadence. "Forty is just a number. You are as

handsome as ever," he thought as he looked at himself in the

mirror. "You stopped painting and they stopped writing about

you. It is as simple as this"; nonetheless he did not believe in

simplicity.

He missed the hype organized by galleries. He missed magazines

catering to those needing a celebrity from whom they could learn

intimacies, tiny facts or rumors of facts about the personal

lives of the gods. He checked himself. His mind was going in

circles around the word, forty. The circles were more of a

vortex as, on bad days, when he descended for some seconds or

more into early family and abuse, which could suck him in fully

were it not for his active vigilance.

Examining himself in the mirror for the umpteenth time with a

refreshingly spry countenance there to befriend him once again,

he gave thanks to the mysterious forces that had given him a

life where he might make a living presenting his varied

depictions of himself with his whores on canvas (a whore of

every type from every angle), fervidly contemplative of life's

decadent urgings. Like a schoolboy twisting in the grass, he

blessed the fates that had allowed him time to revel in his

spinnings. Free to contemplate the unequal plight of man (or

woman as it was in his case), to see color in forms and feelings

and thought, to mix with forms by allowing licentious whims to

twist around the kite in accordance with natural mandates to

reign in those turbulent skies, he basked in others perceptions

of him as handsome, successful, and affluent. Like juicy fruit

on the stem, his days in the sun, as an elated appetite of women

and an envy of men--at least for those who knew something about

contemporary Thai art--were embarrassing and awkward to the

modest Jatupon that he was; but it was the very furthest of

human plights. Selling his paintings at ever inflated prices

because of their worth and his celebrity status as their

decadent creator, he had the ideal life. The creature of

pleasure had to concede as much as this.

Smirking at himself, the wry smile soon fell flat at the thought

that even ugly pimps who were affluent from their brutish,

sexual peccadilloes might be considered equally sexy; and he

sighed at his bland fame. He had gained it from portraying the

same models in the same redundant and stereotypical theme to

which he knew no variation; and whether or not those guilt-

ridden self-portraits of himself engaging with his whores as

stiffly as a Buddha were an exploration of his models or an

exploitation of them remained an unanswered question.

He moved closer to the mirror and looked deeper into the image.

The rot of forty, if it were a rot, was an internal degeneration

that had not yet reached the surface of the apple except for a

few premature wrinkles, which he had already stiffened out with

Botox. He flexed his muscles into the mirror that like social

interaction and painting reflected consciousness and reminded

him of existing beyond the redundant actions of eating,

urinating, defecating, reproducing, sleeping and all the other -

ings.

Stepping out of the toilet as he was now doing, he posited that

such banal and inconsequential movements as this were like

copulation with a rife assortment of women, that movement

provided men with a base physical consciousness that was

indispensable to their overall welfare by making them appear

more tangible to themselves than any images in mirrors could do.

Still, while moving out of the toilet and pondering this new

justification for male promiscuity within the corridor between

the two cars, he inadvertently halted there before his image in

a second mirror. "I am still a young man. Both mirrors say so,"

he lied to himself; and then began to wash his face at a sink.

The tap water pulsated out in an extorted and convulsing

trickle, pushing him a little into those turbulent memories of

the recent past. Not wanting to think of Noppawan or the mangled

angel who was no more volant and permanent than any pallid

terracotta falling eleven or more stories (he had forgotten the

exact number with the burgeoning thickets of neuron brush that

were daily mutating the landscape of his mind), he looked into

the image of his own eyes to reassure himself that they still

had a young man's luster.

4

As he did this, combining the mirror's confirmation of forty

with a sense of feeling no different than he had at twenty so

that a nice conciliatory countenance of thirty stared back at

him, he remembered another fragment of that earlier dream in a

sleep that had been filled with such episodic starts and stops.

As the restless shifting of dreams like those he had experienced

in the 'tenebrous tomb' were the chaotic composite of what the

true self really was, they were also his idée fixe, for as an

artist he knew that the true self was the only subject worthy of

his delineation, his imagining, and that being awake was merely

the desperate garnering of the true self's scatterings. In some

sense being awake was a liberation from sleep, that anarchy of

fleeting images, fears, and anxieties about the unalterable past

which the subconscious lived over again and again in new

arrangements like a news reel seen in various colored filters

and in reverse of a young French and English teacher jumping

from her balcony. It was a means by which, if not to erase or

delete memory, to splice it, to fictionalize it, and to some

degree begin again; and yet he judged consciousness to be even

less real. Married one moment, separated the next, the boy was

always growing out of his clothes or being stripped of them. And

as the door of the fitting room by which people came in to wear

him and be worn by him never seemed to shut well, allowing all

whom he loved to briefly use him and be used by him to get a

variant feel of themselves before going toward new entries, it

seemed to him that the door might as well keep revolving. One

might even stifle human growth if one were to try. This had been

his supposition in maimed youth after his parents were

jettisoned from their windshield by a Fate seemingly eager to

part with superfluous human baggage, these burdensome nuisances,

and he was too old to part from such inveterate conclusions now.

Being awake was a concoction of pasting together the fragments

of subconscious thought. Whereas a biographer was a historian of

superficial events, the artist was a cartographer; and it had

always been his hope that collectively all artists (himself

included if he were not retired) would in time be able to chart

an accurate aerial view of the splendid, volcanic thrusts of the

subconscious. He took a comb out of the pocket of his wrinkled

pants and began to straighten his disheveled hair lovingly. Then

in consort with his debonair image, his Siamese twin in the

mirror, he put his palm on his forehead for it was aching

numbly, and more numbly was his heart. And thinking of his own

restlessness, he knew it would not end with ended sleep. He

could tell this from the hammering taps of his present headache

that were born of the travail of truly chaotic dreams.

He told himself that there was no reason to feel anxious; for

what was a man if he were inwardly shaken by external

vicissitudes? Many evenings before his self-declared retirement

he would stare up into empty space from the bleachers near the

lit sports stadium in that area where they both lived (an area

convenient to Assumption University where his wife worked),

sketch something, and feel warmth in the blackness and

nothingness. A real man, he argued, could sink himself into

blackness, knowing himself to be like a bit of top soil washed

away in storm waters, and think nothing of it. So Kimberly was

dead...so, he had a son by her in the hands of the wife whom he

guessed that he was now separated from...so he was a forty year

old man who briefly felt a queer amorous titillation of

homosexual yearning and a phantasm of a tryst inside his

head...so the tryst was for a Laotian in a train...so, like a

poor man on a train, he was going to the capital of one of the

most undeveloped countries on the planet...so, he was running

away on this December 5th, the king's birthday (Father's Day),

seemingly oblivious to any agenda about what he was running

toward. It was all a sinking of his dirt in eternities of black

space and he told himself that he was warm and content within

it.

The link of associated thoughts that had brought him to recall

this particular fragment of a dream while staring into the

mirror with a preposterous sense of self-satisfaction was

oblique at best. It began with him looking into his sparkling

eyes and his clear white smile of multiple brushings and

whitening solutions, followed by a second in which he very well

might have used the English word "gay" to describe his image had

that abhorrent word of myriad connotations to which the worst

were dissonant to the pleasant characterization of himself as a

womanizer and a lady's man not been repressed. Then, to further

avoid summoning the word which he forcefully restrained into his

subconscious muck like a Burmese refugee to a sylvan camp in one

of those northern provinces, he stared into his mirrored eyes

deeply. He concentrated on how these eyes seemed to gleam more

in certain seconds and how his face looked even younger and more

handsome than thirty in these evanescent blazes or vestige

flashes of his former being, the boy whom he once was. The

delusion of thinking of his appearance as that of a thirty year

old man or as one much younger than this made him think of being

thirteen, frightened by his first wet dreams and the

accompanying stink of his body, which he then supposed to be

some type of inception of death or body rot; but it also made

him think of that day his mother bought him some goulashes for

thirty baht and how proud he, that tiny boy, was that she would

spend so much money on him. The goulashes made him think of

being coerced to trudge around with his brothers along the edges

of creeks and canals where they, guffawing sadists and

martinets, made him abduct and mutilate crawdads to recognize

that he was no better than any other creature of the natural

order that gloated at itself as one individual in a species of

myriad predators. And finally crawdad hunting in Ayutthaya, the

home of his forlorn youth, made him think simultaneously of

being with his brothers scavenging and pilfering refund cola

bottles in the doorways of alleyways so as to buy a little candy

from a local store, and wall crawling geckos.

In this earlier dream that he was now recalling a gecko crawled

on a wooden cross that marked a mound near the trash barrel

where a family cat had been buried in a shoe box coffin long

ago. Then on the upper portion of the cross, the gecko became

limp and stagnant, hanging on two of its arms like a dangling

Christ. Hanging there inertly, it inadvertently pulled on it,

this lever, opening a strange, familyesque commiseration of the

parents and mourning of the brothers just as they had felt it

together that time as young children long ago. But these odd,

cognate feelings over the death of a pet were like distorted

sound waves that bounced off the back of empty space and none of

them were present--not even himself--just a gecko silently

hanging on a cat's cross...feelings of loss...dross.

He sighed. In being awake or asleep in a state of mind that was

literal or symbolic, everything that was known to his brain such

as the certainty of having been abused by family, the certainty

of any past event, who he loved and how much he loved her, his

responsibility for the tragic outcome of a woman's life, and his

own self-worth, which fluctuated based on the height of the wave

it floated upon, registered merely as likely possibilities and

vague truths. Any aplomb that he projected could only belie this

frantic attempt to make sense out of his impressions of the

world--impressions like indentations of a cookie cutter on his

doughy brain, and impressions that were interpreted and warped

within the pull of memory. He knew nothing of the world at all

beyond loose impressions of incidents that were refracted myriad

times off diminished memories, twisting into something other

than what they initially were before becoming the subject of his

discernment as to what life was and what it all meant.

While pasting the fragments of the true self into a reticulate

and concocted whole following sleep, it seemed to him (who, in

boyhood, had once been envious of a 12 year old friend for being

told to leave home when there was, supposedly, not enough food

for him to have his share), that for those like himself who knew

the worst of family and had long lived as outsiders along its

landmine strewn fringes, such dreams--surely not of geckos and

crosses on cats' graves, but ones no less poignant in conveying

the same grief of being bereft of family--were common on all

Thai holidays. For it was on such days that happy or speciously

happy groups burgeoned rife on sidewalks as a type of rank urban

wildflower; and on these days in particular, pedestrians like

himself could not walk down a sidewalk without using a hand like

a machete against these impermanent but nonetheless hard and

obdurate clusters of families. As gregarious as he was, he was

often driven at such times by an obnoxious predilection to cut

through the thickets of their obscene closeness and at the same

time to take special attention to avoid the steps of shopping

malls where the roots of these blooming and ambulatory groups

more fully tangled his steps like seaweed washed on crowded

shores. On holidays like this, families were everywhere except

in fetid trains, like the one he was currently in, going to

Nongkai. It was for this irrational caprice among others that,

like a relatively poor man in this jiggling and forward moving

box, he was absconding on an economical and flightless journey

to nowhere. Although the train had couples bunked together,

overall it was pleasantly exempt of family, and as such it was a

bit of a refuge to Nawin. He laughed at himself for he found the

self to be more comically intriguing than any other being.

It was on such holidays, as teenagers, that he and Noppawan, and

the "they" that they both were, would go to the Siriaj Hospital

Anatomical Museum to be with the dead freaks there, to sit on

remote bleachers in tiny and obscure parks, to prop themselves

on the ground against the side walls of public toilets near the

Chao Phraya river with a small scattering of homeless

individuals, and to loiter in other impromptu sanctuaries exempt

of this urban seaweed known as family which both had an allergic

reaction to.

He thought about how easily a man in these idle hours of a

holiday could slip into a specific moment as a teenager or as a

child. A boy always outgrew his pants and yet a forty year old

man who was well educated, talented, and affluent would, at

certain moments, find himself putting them on. In unblocked

corridors memories could come to blast him with their spells and

he would once again become a straggling boy fighting the pull of

sadists on thin, stilted sidewalks along a canal. It was all

very alarming and intriguing, and it prompted him to smile at

the ironies of being human which totally confounded him in a

most pleasant way.

Thinking not only about the dream but the family that once was,

it seemed to him that any positive memories were a torturously

slow and bitter sweet poison unjustly administered to him,

someone who already resided fully as an inmate of his own brain;

and that had he been totally bereft of love when he was young so

as to be raised by absolute fiends, making him into one himself,

it would have been almost preferable. It certainly would have

been more liberating than just being confined in a memory

chamber where periodically he could recall vestiges of family

happiness enough to remember some specifics but otherwise only

felt their deep residue. Having their intrusion did nothing for

him apart from causing him to wish for what could never happen

again.

But then what did he know? Without a good night's sleep, how

were any of his ideas anything but minutely sensible at best? If

anything was for pulling and clearing it was this weedy thicket

of messy ideas in a landscape heavy in leanings toward sleep.

5

He was not exactly sure why, at the moment of contemplating this

rather non-germinal seed of love that was there clogging space

within his manhood, that this unpleasant recollection of his

attraction to the Laotian suddenly interposed between the

concept and the peaceful equilibrium that he supposed that he

sought--an equilibrium that he supposed everyone sought when not

bored with the tranquil and the blase. Still, it undeniably did,

the way the subliminal thought of his dampened socks in the

upper tomb still seemed to be aggravating his nose. He wanted to

tell himself that the brief titillation, so clearly a phantasm

of his own making, had not been real. It was easier than telling

himself that Kimberly's death and his separation from his wife

were not real; and yet he knew that even if he were able to

successfully repudiate this one--this tenuous abstraction, this

memory of such a queer feeling--as though it were merely the

disconnection of a somewhat sleep deprived brain, such a

repudiation could only be successful when he was at last off of

this jejune train and out of its monotonous rhythm, and had

other stimuli pumped into his orifices. Then it could be

forgotten like evaporated dew on a warm, sunlit day. Until then,

the stranger of the bottom bunk in underwear camouflaging an

erection was tangled in the burring thickets of thought that

permeated his mood as a mildew on the upper roots of a tree.

He felt disconcerted and a little anxious, and this apprehension

was beginning to make him, he who had not had a shower for the

past 24 hours, sweat odiously and stink as his elder brothers.

He stopped himself thinking of them for beyond this point these

uncultured beasts, long banished to the status of abstraction

with years of no contact and diminished memories, were a

forbidden subject of contemplation by the declaration of the

monarch, Nawin, in the kingdom of the brain. This strange,

disconcerted sense of himself was almost like a dizziness. It

was as if in part he had momentarily slipped out of his body and

brain to become an on-stage caricature whom he, an audience of

one, was watching obtusely. He was watching himself, a mute who

was trying to give a desperate soliloquy, through his only

attribute of wordless, dilated eyes. He snorted and snickered at

this discombobulated and confused state that was so unlike

himself. His forehead somewhat furrowed in the contemplation of

his puzzling idiosyncrasies. Then he wet his hand with a bit of

tap water and massage-slapped his face with his fingers the way

he spread his aftershave. The purpose was that of sobering

himself from delusion; and he told himself that the headache was

part of a slight fever. He convinced himself that he was cooling

his forehead from it but this was not so. In fact the atheist

(that same one who, once his child was born, had sat at an empty

swimming pool contemplating what his role as father should be,

but was interrupted by witnessing the manager bringing in her

oblations of food, incense, and wishes for prosperity to the

house of the spirits--a dollhouse on a pedestal, had

inadvertently scrutinized her, and then filed the diminishing

video footage into his mutating brain under the disparaging

category of "S--superstitious Thai" and "T--things not to do")

was now using tap water as holy water.

If in the past he thought it both amusing and peculiar that he,

an artist who recorded moments in time, should perceive memory

as such an assault he did not think it so strange now, for this

particular recollection of the Laotian seemed like the hand of a

minatory stranger smothering his face and he was somewhat

frightened by it as he had been by the actual incident itself.

At this particular moment he yearned viscerally for the Laotian,

the stranger, to awaken and remove himself from the train at the

next stop; and yet as the man was going to Vientiane, there was

little or no chance of him leaving before the last stop of

Nongkai. Nawin considered the fact that he could not spend an

hour or two (whatever it took to get to the last stop) absconded

in the bathroom, ostensibly hiding from him but really hiding

from himself; still, he would play the moments of impulses in

their respective order and for now the fetid metallic tiled

bathroom with its metallic floor-based, urinal-shaped toilet was

an oasis for the handsome lambent image of his that gleamed and

scintillated from the mirror. He splashed a bit more of the

water onto his face and felt better.

From non-germinal love hadn't the thought been of that stranger,

his father, and then from the father had it not been of the

stranger from Laos? Specifically, ruminations of being a kinder

man than he wanted to be and obviously not succeeding at that to

a memory of the father, and from the father to the Laotian:

this, he supposed, was the chronology of his recent thoughts. He

assumed that recollection of that titillation was preceded by a

memory of his august but haggard restaurant-working father

swaggering toward a second-hand reclining chair, telling him to

scram, and seating himself with right foot resting on the left

leg, thumping its smelliness into the air of what he always

declared to be his home, his domain, like a judge with his

gavel. Nawin was not all that sure of this being the cause, or

how one would determine a cause of a most peculiar and perverted

thought as this blown in with all the other perverse ideas of

his subconscious when, for whatever reason, it was tossed a bit

further on top of all conscious rubbish (of course, as always,

he was for the most part successfully blocking out the

copulatory sport of the second eldest, Kazem, and that one's

playground). He may have hoped, even though he did not believe,

that isolating it would be the means to an instantaneous cure

from all perverse ideas not of the heterosexual variety; and for

a moment he frantically unblocked most neurological corridors,

no matter how stygian, until contemplating this senseless

contemplation made him feel a bit nauseous.

He used humor to distance himself from this recollection of

momentary derangement or crazed but inconsequential titillation

by telling himself facetiously that the reason this incident was

now being shot like darts into his realm of contemplation was as

a form of dogged, fraternal torture inflicted by one sadistic

part of the brain against the other; but as fraternal

recollection could only exacerbate the headache with the

introduction of more dull emotional pain, he tried to block off

turbid memory and listen for the sounds of metal being kicked

and folded, upper tombs going back into embankments, and seats

being readjusted. Hearing none, however, he assumed that the

officer who was in charge of the removal of linen and the return

of the bottom bunks into seats was asleep. Being forty and not

having the desire of the thirty-nine year old to make the

awkward climb up the monkey bars to the upper bunk where he

would once again stare into the walls of his tenebrous tomb

until all elated sleepers were awakened and summoned to their

descents, Nawin decided that he would loiter in this toilet, at

least until someone needing to relieve himself procured his

removal with a few hard and eager taps on the door. The

titillation, he tried to pacify himself, was merely one more

inconsequential item of rubbish blowing in subconscious gusts

and like wondering if, across the aisle, a female passenger who

was wearing the hijab was a southern terrorist, it meant

nothing.

He had to admit that it was futile to ponder whether the barren

and the fallow might be preferable to this annexation of space

by a rather non-germinal seed of love that had been planted

within him against his will. He could hardly extirpate it, and

if the seed had stunted growth he knew of no inward manure that

might cause it to grow any more. And as for manure, his thoughts

jumped track within their locomotion so that he might change the

persistent discourse in his solitary brain; it was peculiar that

this substance should be the nutrient for growth just as it was

peculiar that an instrument of urination should be the means of

intimacy between a man and a woman or for that matter, a man and

a man...a man and a man.

The unpleasant memory of his crazed but momentary attraction to

the Laotian again returned to him as faithfully as a lover and

as sadistically as a brother; and for a second he contemplated

jocularly whether or not bad memories were merely shot as a

fraternal infliction by one part of the brain to another. The

query seemed even flatter and more pointless than before. With

the same redundant churning of thought, he reminded himself that

there was no point in quickly returning to his cubicle. He might

as well dally until one of the officers of the train returned to

remove the linen and readjust the seats or he would have to lie

in the tenebrous tomb as dormant as the seed of love that

existed within him.

As one of the Earth's honored higher creatures who could be

consumed with a lick of nature like the 200,000 of last year's

tsunami (thousands that at one time were pictured on posters

dangling from bulletin boards, and pedestrian blockage rails

near the Khao San Road police station and the National Gallery)

it was apparent that the planet was non-welcoming of the higher

guest. The world was a most peculiar place just as he was a most

peculiar being within it. The fact that the peculiarity of both

was rarely contemplated showed how base, inherent, and

instinctual factors shaped the good and the conventional of all

things. He chuckled in a couple latent, audible wisps of air at

his strange mind (its creative intellect and its redundant

recycling of old ideas) to which his white teeth within his

brown face seemed to jingle and gleam in the mirror like ice-

layered tree limbs shaking in the wind. He thought about how a

man lived in his self-made shack believing himself to be a king

in a palace and how his ideas were as laws that he assumed to be

sanctioned by destiny, but when things went awry such a common

man would in all likelihood say prayers to counter his bleak

prospects. He would send them into the ether of Nirvana with the

burning of his incense. Sound and sturdy atheistic ideas like

those experienced by Buddha before Buddhism or Christ before

Christianity could only be sustained by exceptional men as long

as they had good health, the necessities of food and shelter,

scant relationships at the very least, and some occupation to

direct time and thought; for otherwise the scaffolding of higher

and wiser vistas would teeter and break, thrusting a man who was

trying to balance himself on this scaffolding of tiered thought

into that abyss of perceiving the world as an amorphous blob

that was continually being twisted by supernatural forces.

Still, he could not quell this concept or misconception that if

only he had been treated with unrelenting contempt when he was a

boy, as he very well had been but without these sweet respites,

it would have "toughened [him] up" (meaning that if he had been

granted nothing apart from the worst memories of his former

family, he would have been as tough as a champion Thai kick

boxer when not wearing makeup and a dress in the sense that no

conscience would he have had to intrude onto his public and

private life, no pathetic themes would he have seen in the eyes

of women whom he intended to use for pure pleasure in the

brothels, and no pain would he have encountered in simple walks

along Bangkok's mendicant ridden sidewalks and pedestrian

overpasses). He sensed that such a scenario would have been a

liberation from the revolting non-germinal seed of love, and

that liberation from it would be a license to use as he had been

used in the sadomasochistic quid pro quo or bartering for

pleasures that defined human interaction. It seemed to him even

more clearly than ever that if he had been allotted the entirety

of contempt when young he would not have known enough of love to

miss it. It did not, however, dawn on him that such an escape,

even if it did not lead him to a fated time of being locked up

in one rat infested Thai jail or another as one more of life's

anti-social miscreants, would have vitiated his humanity.

He made his erroneous conclusion as if even a conventional 9-5

job and TV to bed existence, which was willfully ignorant of the

world at large, were better than someone seized by sorrow when

trying to seek pleasures and nude discoveries in every seedy

domain in Bangkok; and as if in this obsession to concatenate a

frenzied body to the pleasure receptors of the lower brain and

then to that upper brain that was empathic to human sorrow in so

much horror, he failed to deliver anyone (for it was true that

painting delivered no one to a better existence). However, in a

field of serious endeavor, a discipline, he was able to see the

flower in myriad events deflowered and plucked and beauty in the

ugly. In a discipline he found empathy, an openness to the

world, rather than apathy, uniqueness rather than replication,

and in-depth understanding of himself that made him an

individual, a complete being, rather than a speck in the mass, a

human cow in a herd. It was not true that painting saved no one

for it saved him to himself. And if he failed at being a good

person for lack of role models throughout his life, it was

through no fault of his own. Still, all in all, he thought of

himself as a 'pretty good,' Patron Saint for those who had been

treated perversely. Had he, Saint Nawin, not done his best all

alone with the resources he had to build his cathedral and

temple to atheism, Wat Nawin? He felt that he had.

He told himself that he was as obsessed by his colors now as

when he was a five year old child; and that he was still imbuing

his black and white world of early servitude with crayonic paint

and chalk as if it had never ended. He ruminated on this early

being whom he still was, in part or entirely--a being that

existed regardless of changing years, names, and social-economic

status. He could not recall anything much of those very early

years beyond the residual traces of a boy being allowed to take

periodic breaks from bringing bowls of noodles to the tables of

his parents' customers. Those were still-life images of himself

seeking crayonic ebullience that could glorify his and

humanity's noodle shackles. Weren't those first images, he asked

himself, undecipherable, waxy smudges on discarded paper that

had been wrapped over meat? From his rather indistinct and

diminished memories he supposed that they were, but the attempts

were the same as now: to evince a moment in time and despite its

bleakness to sense it as precious within form. And if his

depictions then and now were imbued with more color than that

which would have been a true rendition of the scenes, they were

soft and sensitive aberrations of love that could be pardoned.

He looked straight into the irises of his eyes--eyes that, when

not sparkling and jovial in social exchange or lustful and

burning from carnal angels that set them ablaze, seemed, when

sober, so inordinately tender. Those eyes were surely not just

portals to a rather non-germinal seed of love within him; but

even if they were such, and his love of women was little short

of a vaginal sport (to the immature dabbler that he was who

failed to be a he-man and a happy hedonist), still there was

more love therein than a failed marriage could prove. No, he

said to himself more resolutely, these were compassionate and

suffering eyes.

He pondered his effeminate sensitivity. He did not want it--he

never had--but there was nothing that he could do about it. If

he were to pretend to be as insouciant and aloof as so many men,

this rather craven fleeing from self would be an even more

egregious departure from masculine virtues. Sensitive eyes did

not entirely eclipse his joy. To women sensitive, boyish eyes

were alluring. This fact was proven in his having had a plethora

of them even in recent years. Most importantly eyes like these,

he told himself, accentuated a youthful countenance, and for any

man of forty youth was the breeze that set his dog scampering.

Then he recalled that portrait of King Rama V, Chulalongkorn,

hanging in the National Gallery. The depiction of his Majesty

was with eyes that sponged up human suffering. "Mine are the

same," he told himself; and thus his own were majestic and

august even though no royal blood was puissant within the

undulations of his veins.

6

It seemed to him as if old ideas in slightly new arrangements,

such as this obsession with an aging self and his ineptness at

long-term relationships, were quickly, dizzying, and incessantly

being repeated in his brain. He, another recycled being with

recycled thoughts, was ostensibly a creature moving forward with

the train but in reality a macrocosm of the ideas within him;

and these old ideas continued to circulate around the edge of

his brain like hamsters whose impressions were that with each

push of the nose they would find exits leading to the vertical,

the forward, as if there really were a forward within one's

cage, within the ideas of one's head.

Had this particular car of the train felt like the rest instead

of seeming cold enough to preserve his meat, he, this being who

was constricted to the tight walls and smells of the train,

would have blamed this peculiar dizziness that he was presently

feeling not on the perennial chasing of old ideas nor on ideas

mixed with the bad molecular smells of the toilet but, as he was

sweating more than he was accustomed, on heat. In lieu of this,

he told himself that his dizziness was from being drunk on the

self, a plausible theory, and yet he continued to quaff his

sumptuous reflection in spite of this conclusion.

The reflection was of a swarthy, handsome man, with tender,

toasty eyes glazed in ideas as if spread with honey. Was the

reflection an exact replica of what he looked like? The question

troubled him for no matter how long he thought about it, the

accuracy of a reflection was immeasurable and the subject was

insoluble. All that he knew was that the reflection was of a

much younger man than his actual age: that was the consistency,

even if moment by moment in each barrage of new light, his age

and appearance seemed to vary. And he would have stayed in the

bathroom for a half hour more staring at himself in that same

way in the hope of isolating an exact age for his physical

appearance and to gain certainty that his youth and beauty would

not submerge with the next emerging moment had a fierce

loneliness not begun to consume him like fire.

So stark was it that, to some degree, it seemed that he too was

on fire, that he too was plummeting as if from one of the

infernos of the World Trade Center while gusts of wind were

carrying to him the barely audible moans, screams, and demonic

laughter of other fallers; it seemed that he too was flailing

his arms against becoming a swallowed morsel cast down the vast

expanse of the deep gullet of devouring skies, and obsessively-

redundantly bewailing having jumped from a window at all. These

torturous feelings and thoughts were beyond loneliness. It was

as though the bogus concept of one's self-importance had slipped

off of him entirely leaving him exposed to himself and

acknowledging that he was naked and bereft of soul, a speck that

was a billion times less important than a disregarded crumb

flung off a kitchen table by a finger tip. He was merely a

falling speck of minutiae that if not thudding unheard like a

landing water balloon, smashing and exploding onto a rock in a

desert, would finally decompose no differently than all other

bits of matter.

He did not quite expect it and yet how could he expect anything

other than that fierce loneliness would befall him? The fact

that he was taking this aimless trip at all was evidence enough

of sensing himself as a plastic wrapper that was being blown in

miscellaneous winds. And here on board this random train, chosen

for having a departure time coinciding so well with his arrival

at the train station (a train instead of an airplane so that

there would not be an inordinate distance between him and his

wife; for if there were such a vast distance it would, for him,

have been a sign of a near, looming, and pending divorce),

movement was painfully curtailed when it was so desperately

needed to curtail pain.

During the past few weeks since the tragedy and his wife's

flogging of him with the frying pan, he managed the throbbing of

his arm with pain medication, and his loneliness by filling his

thoughts with feigned urgency and shuffle. He threw out canvas

(completed paintings, partially completed, and blank for all did

not matter), paint, pallets, and all other dirt, trash, and

clutter of the space. He attempted to change the studio into an

apartment by adding a bed, a couch, a refrigerator, a kitchen

table, a microwave oven, and basic electric burners. He had a

pharmacist fill a renewed prescription and engaged in mundane

actions like grocery shopping that could belie the desperate

surge of loneliness. At that time it was successful; but here on

board this train taken randomly from all trains, there was no

motion to hide behind, and just the obvious reminder that he was

random, without destination, and out of control. Having no-one

and yet as any mortal needing to cling to a consistent source to

foster the illusion of permanence and worth within himself, how

could the dark suffocating nets of loneliness not envelop him?

How could they not? Even for such a man whose only sense of

family was to look at it as a make-believe concept, a mere

abstraction, which time erased or, if having something material

within it at all that could be grasped, which was always snuffed

away, washed out to sea as last year's tsunami victims, but

needing to be washed away, vanished like Bonaparte, Hitler,

Mussolini, General Phibun, and one day even the emperor Bush,

but leaving its stain--a stain that would trouble the mind and

upset a positive mood as any fading but never fully diminished

nightmare. The stain was memory, a vague copy of barbarous

family preserved in one's wretched thoughts, preserved like the

male and female corpses at Siriaj Hospital who, despite their

slit bodies acting the part of striptease artists of human

entrails, had always seemed to him to resemble his own mother

and father in their late thirties. How could they not? Even for

a man who perceived all women to be programmed with urges for

whoreish involvements to gain independence from the parents

within the union of a man, to rob a man of the juice required

for baby making and that occupational obsession of baby rearing,

and foremost to gain a parcel of land to call one's own (a

perspective Nawin, the empath of whores had gained from society

overall and not so much from his mother and wife who both

relinquished money for the love of poor men, although he himself

was no longer poor having quickly ascended to the ranks of the

affluent). More saliently, with this imagined tryst of himself

and the Laotian being continually replayed inside his head, most

ominously how, as much as an hour earlier, could he have been

anything but certain that loneliness would soon be descending

upon him in that dark, suffocating net? A middle aged man

traveling alone on a train to nowhere, Nongkai, and then to the

sister city of Vientiene, could hardly be exempt of internal

lonely burnings any more than he could feel stable when twirling

around in this chase within the self no matter how insouciant or

cocky he seemed when reflected from others in a figurative

mirror or himself in the literal one.

"I don't need a wife--certainly not one who blames me and not

herself even though this surrogate mother arrangement hatched

out of her egg and not mine" he told himself, but being so dizzy

there was not much chance of him believing his insouciant

thought. Latent ideas were supposed to be the real ones, but

there was not much that was true in this thought clutter,

hoisted up to convey a positive self-image, beyond attempting

to persuade himself of masculine nonchalance and a wish to

repudiate a vulnerable neediness that was sticking to him like

glue to a boy's fingertips. And no matter how many times he

tried to wash it away its grittiness was extant.

After so much decadent thought about the Laotian the implosion

of his solitary tower was an inevitability.

For the most part he regretted having thrown his telephone into

the garbage at the train station. He lamented it; but it was

done, and had he not done this he would have humiliated himself

both in the emasculate and the deprecatory sense. He would have

spent the trip calling Noppawan incessantly, and if she answered

he would have shown his true visceral remorse ingenuously, which

she would have interpreted as an admission of guilt. He might

even have begged that she let him pass through the same doors,

his doors, that she had made anew with recently acquired locks

during his in-patient time in the hospital. He could not think

of anything more emasculate and self-deprecatory than innocently

showing deep sorrow over the victims of events in which he had

had an inadvertent role, and being perceived as pleading guilty

because of the admission. It would cause him to suck in his

bottom lip while thinking to himself, "As if she had not urged

it on--as if I would have had this relationship with Kimberly,

as much as I may have wanted it, without this being

asked...twice having it pushed onto me..me who am weak when

importuned twice on such matters...weak for beautiful women...

not that I have ever had situations like this one presented to

me before. That is right. I am especially weak on new and

intriguing situations and this 'please impregnate my friend and

make me into a mommy' bit was a completely new thing for me.

Little in the world is really exciting and new so I succumbed.

What can I say? As if the impregnation idea were not concocted

by these schemers in some coffee shop or another a year ago...by

their own admission it was." More alarmingly, if he had not

thrown away his Nokia he would be calling Kimberly's apartment

over and over again as if there were a possibility that he had

tripped over his thoughts, that she was not dead, and that her

alleged death was just one more item of rubbish blowing in his

subconscious gusts.

7

Inebriated, he was a passive receiver of the sweet stench of

human waste and of the residual cleansers and ammonia that

seemed to dilute the former. It was just like in childhood when

he was a passive receiver of the dual stench of family, this

sanitized word also reeking of and under an ostensible

cleanliness. And while he made the association of a literal

stink to a figurative one, acknowledging the possibility that

each could be exaggerating the other and thus proving that he

did not have a clue what was real in this capricious self, he

thought of that visceral yearning long ago to believe in family.

As a child he wanted to believe in the purity of it and yet,

having to justify the indelible somehow, all that he could do

was to conclude that it was he who was wicked, that it was he

whose ingratitude toward the family that conceived and sustained

him made him unworthy of their association. Still the flame, the

puff of smoke, and the stench of childhood had come and gone so

quickly. It almost seemed to appear and vanish over night. And

here he was like magic, a man materialized out of smoke and hot

carbon residue, and his own august, tenacious, and still

reasonably intact will--even if now he was in the toilet of a

train, alone and obsessed by a hope of seeing the flame of youth

in an aging self.

Familiar as family, and made fouler yet by that association in

the mind, the toilet was an increasingly nauseous place for him,

and he felt increasingly peculiar within it. He only felt

marginally connected to the whole of himself for he was

experiencing seconds of a fleeting self as if he were watching

part of it on stage doing and saying nothing in particular while

the partial audience of one continued to wait for a soliloquy

that would not be forthcoming. It was a most disconcerting

peculiarity, this inanimate and uniquely discombobulated show,

as jejune and surreal as spinning his head dizzyingly while

watching the lifeless dummy of himself the only prop on a barren

stage. "Am I going crazy?" he asked himself many times but he

knew that thought was merely a symptom of his thinking too much

all alone, his sputtering like a car needing gasoline.

Believing that he had little ability to make sense out of life

after Kimberly's death and perhaps even before that, yet needing

life which was, after all, touch, a link beyond the self, he

raised the dust tinted window to sun, greenery, and wind. The

toilet tissue reeled out as a streamer and began to take off

like the tail of a kite. Sun fell into the bathroom like

confetti. He laughed in that ineffable joy of liberation from

musty chambers of thought. "Is this true?" he said to himself.

"Is it true that all anyone needs is a strong gust to slap

across his face? Is that all?" for the wind was carrying light

and levity to the cryptic and stygian corridors of his brain.

For a moment, as he wound up the loose toilet tissue on the

cylinder of the toilet paper holder, he was as convivial as one

could be when in a party of one. "I guess so. All anyone needs

are simple pleasures pouring into the orifices" he said; but as

he stuck his head out of the window, allowing wind to massage

him hard and orgasmically, he saw emaciated and barefooted monks

in soiled saffron robes stepping outside a rectory that was near

a temple. Then, there was a forest, and a few minutes later from

a cleared sylvan embankment, the stench of billowing smoke. He

saw a burning wooden "castle" that had been concocted around the

departed to at least ensure a physical arrival in the ethereal

when heavens and the spirit were just conjecture or faith, that

adult fairy tale. He saw a family of mourners grieving as

families were meant to grieve and meant to care, but all he knew

of them moved faster than childhood in the rush of the train.

All that he knew was from one glimpse. He thought about how

quickly after the death of his parents in the car accident his

brothers had sold off everything and had carried him, their

slave by default, off to the big city of Bangkok. There had been

no time for mourning and yet had he been given time to mourn,

little reason to do so. He smiled ruefully since he felt that

this equating of the fundamental human institution to a stench

or other pejorative similes was a ludicrous misjudgment based

upon conjectures from the stinted, pathetic, and sometimes

perverse experience which made up his understanding. As his

belief in family was slowly being restored he felt the sad

yearning to be in that clan of what was no more, and to grow old

and die among them like the departed. When it was his time to

die he wanted to die in this manner, in love, with his unburnt

bones sent out to float in the embrace of the river goddess.

Instead, he was sure that, after a two hour, two thousand degree

baking in a fancy furnace at a modern, westernized crematorium,

his bones would become a gritty white sand which no one would

care to keep in an urn; and that although his obituary would

have the significance to become an insignificant news item, no

one would mourn him personally. He closed the window and sunk

into himself. He rationalized that his reason for shutting the

window was to shut out the world, which to him was a bad place.

It churned up the poor and the desperate, forcing them to feign

a spiritual connection to get a bit of food in their stomachs,

and it disposed of beings and generations of beings like a

consumer throwing out beer bottles.

He knew, as much as one could know from the few tiny apertures

leading to the cramped little cell of the brain, that it was in

his best interest to leave his toilet theatre of one and loiter

in the aisle of bunks. There he might wait for an opportunity to

engage in a moment or two of small talk with staff members as

they slowly materialized into vapid space to sweep and mop

cursorily before passing into the next car of the train. Just a

brief moment or two of feeling himself a real and solid presence

in the company of others (if only in an inconsequential

conversation of being asked to move from an area blocking the

dust mop or being told that this particular car was smelling

more and more like a locker room) would restore him to himself.

There would no longer be the slight oozing away of the self or,

at times, those marginally desperate eyes of one who, having a

philosophy of needing no one, did not think that he had a reason

to be desperate.

For a moment, the walls of the bathroom began to spin around

with his mirrored face, and the faster they spun, the more the

lambent reflection in flight became former diminished copies of

a dominant trait of a mutating self that must have sustained

cohesiveness in these former beings of what he looked like at

various ages but was no more. For a moment he felt that he was

imploding and he slapped more water on his face believing that

he had to be suffering from a fever (surely not a nervous

breakdown as his anxieties were not that acute) and yet, placing

a palm against his forehead, it did not seem abnormally warm. He

laughed. "Of course it won't feel warm when dripping from

water," he said aloud. Then he thought of his laughter. What was

it, really? It was being cognizant that one was a fickle,

disorderly creature whose emotions and experiences made him into

a different man with every new minute of his irrationality and

his blind stumbling, and yet not being morose about it due to

the fact that he maintained some degree of logic and awareness

of himself.

He was certainly different from the man whom he had been as an

undergraduate at Silpakorn University, young and herded into

massage parlors after soccer games by his classmates' proddings

and his own urgings. Thinking of his simple life then, he

yearned for those former thrills that had once let him be purely

free of the entanglement of barbed neurological connections of

relationships. It did not occur to him that if he were to have

casual sex now as he did then, such extreme pleasures would

interfere with attempts at extension, this adding of scaffolding

and stories to the mature mind of a mortal being. He was

thinking about extreme pleasure not only from the wish to be

detached of the entanglement of real relationships--not that he

had any of his own now for he was still suffocating in the

debris of what was before--but due to his present need for it

to suffuse over his headache as cold as an ice pack.

"Something happened to me," he thought. "What was it?"; he

thought for a few seconds and remembered. "I began to draw the

sadness of prostitutes to compete with my peers--to show how

clever I was. Then I married Noppawan to share my success... to

confirm that it happened through her and for her to enjoy

it...and then there was this mixing and fusing of selves like

colors that could not be separated without destroying what they

were painted on. Earlier, when I was still wet behind the ears,

my life was certainly less complicated" --meaning that as an

undergraduate in his late teenage years he had not yet gone

astray from hedonistic aims.

Now in the little casual sex he had, eroticism found itself

impaled in envisaging exploited frailties and male aggression

behind the façade of the beer and chip gaiety of prostitutes and

clients sitting around stages of dancing girls. It was pointless

to determine whether or not the competition with peers or

maturity itself were culprits or facilitators of more meaningful

interaction, and it was pointless to determine if this artistic

competition with peers had aggravated a dormant tenderness and

empathy that might well have been left alone for a happier

existence. He possessed the sixth sense of empathy now and it

was not the type of thing one could discard. "So," he thought,

"I've gotten older. It is surely better that way"--meaning

something to the effect of, "So there is now this maturity with

its yearning for connections to others, an aggrandizing of a

petty self in union with another, making strangers of the night

less erotic than they would have seemed in youth...so, there is

empathy..so empathy of a former sufferer of this world to

present sufferers is my lot...so I made some badly constructed

bridges to women in the past as relationship building was new to

me, maybe I can be a better engineer in the future."

Early into his career, he halfway believed that in his studies

of the dejected Patpong whores, petrous automatons of suburbia,

desperate homeless mendicants blowing bird whistles at

pedestrians near the Chao Phraya river pier, and himself, an

outsider inside the travail, the torture, the jailhouse of this

unjust world, that he would somehow redeem all. He did pay the

nude models who posed for and lay with him but apart from this,

neither in amorphous smudges on tattered paper as a boy nor

disciplined depictions of form on canvas as a man had he in the

least contributed to the redemption of his thralls. And for all

his money Jatupon was still there within him shining with tender

King Rama V's Chulalongkorn eyes of suffering for his people.

Those smudges helped no one but himself and for all his money he

could not buy the thing that he wanted most--a hardened mask

and protective gear similar to that which he had worn while

fencing in his undergraduate days at Silpakorn University which

might fortify him from being impaled by dejected beggars,

peddlers and their carts, sidewalk restaurant workers, whores,

and monks who were never given a chance. Suffering abounded--it

scurried away from the heat of the sun like a legless mutant

seeking the slippery shade of shadows on the sidewalks and it

would be there through decades, centuries, and millenniums to

come regardless of temporary external forms.

Had he been able to raise them to their full potential he would

have been a missionary with a mission instead of the sordid,

missionless man that he was, drawing the oppressed, but as they

were connected to him really drawing the self. It was a self

that was embedded in the personal life like a tree in its filth.

It was obsessed by being besmirched and colorizing the

besmirching. It was obsessed by dopamine, adrenalin, and

serotonin within for all that he put on canvas--at least it was

before retiring and giving himself to indolence, making

Noppawan, perplexed at what she could converse about with her

retired spouse apart from the names of the bimbos he was

copulating with.

He slid down the bathroom wall into a fetal position on the

floor as he was obviously imploding. For a couple moments he

meditated into nothingness, and had no thoughts beyond a

recognition of himself as fallen debris. It seemed real to think

of his brokenness and that the pile on the floor was absent of

self. He wanted to stay like this forever but thoughts, like

muscles in a fresh corpse, began their spasms to be restored.

They fought for redemption of the illusion of self despite his

own will to shut down. He pulled a bag of cannabis, a lighter,

and some rolling paper from his bulging pocket, assembled a

joint, and smoked.

8

Seated in his fetid corner, he was tacit in thought, still in

its fathoms like a corpse in a sunken and forgotten ship of long

ago, and he stayed in this state of sediment and mire,

nothingness and abyss, until startled by a sound of flapping and

the stirring of more than the usual continuum of sharp wind.

Startled, he turned toward this movement. In a split second he

saw wings and then the hard eyes, head, and beak of a black bird

sharply changing course when confronting itself in the mirror.

Then a couple seconds later it was gone and there was nothing

novel to see. It was just a reflection of himself staring back

at him, this mere self. To him, a separated man without a

relationship who was besieged by a redundant, torturous sense

that all along, without being aware of it, the sordid grains of

his life had been blowing incrementally out of his open hands

and were now passing away with an exponential conspicuousness

while he remained here absconding in a toilet of a train; it

felt as though he were sitting in a collapsing sand castle

waiting for an ultimate asphyxiation. "It was there--I am sure

it was" he told himself (meaning the bird, that which was

fleeting and had already fled) as if knowing the reality of

something so inconsequential with absolute non-human certainty

would prove that, despite doubts, his was a stable and sane

sense of reality. And if a stable and sane sense of reality was

not really possible in the skull-restrained jiggling of his

jellified brain that told itself that it was more than all

right, saner than the herds of men, he did not want to know of

such things.

To calm his racing, startled heart beat and damn off the

adrenaline that permeated and burnt through thought to the rigid

ready-to-respond posture of his muscles in a spreading ethereal

of flaming gas, he made the dark omen jocular. He told himself

that the bird was the ubiquitous symbol of a man running from

his own image figuratively while retaining a fixed stare at the

literal one. He might have even believed that there had been no

bird at all if it were not for his racing heart and the simple

fact that the window of the toilet was open. The two together

made the bird's existence more plausible (at least so the self

said if it meant much in the mixture of inhaled cannabis smoke,

swallowed antibiotics, and pain killers that had to be

stretching and distorting perception by thwarting the natural

flow of neurotransmitters into different speeds and in new

spirals of circuitry and thought). And yet even if this copy of

the bird that was branded or molded on a bit of his brain had

diminished to the point where it was now as unrecognizable,

weathered initials engraved on a tree, or an outline posing as

form, that did not mean anything. Did not a year in the life of

a boy ultimately vanish without even an outline? All that he

could say for sure was that even if it did not happen, that

which did not happen was gone now. He chuckled and found

pleasure in tilted equilibrium juggling its lit torches of

ideas. Then he thought, "Maybe I should have gone to a beach in

Phuket the way I was thinking I should earlier at the train

station. Watching the waves, I could have forgotten." It was a

natural enough response as embedded as it was like an instinct.

Intuitively one first sought large bodies of moving water, a

tangible version of eternity, by which to compare and measure

oneself. In so doing, his problems would become minute with the

man; and this was what he meant, for the train ride out of

Bangkok was doing nothing for him. "But really," he continued,

"how long can one be immersed in waves unless washed out neatly

with a tsunami and there is little chance of that happening

again anytime soon." The main reason that he had not gone to a

beach had little to do with fear of boredom. It was for fear of

seeming to himself as one of "those old retired nobodies with

money" who waited near the waters edge for death. To him those

waiting for death who sought non-failing amusement in the waves

which acted as their sedatives were a lost and lifeless

abhorrence.

"Anyhow," he thought as he sucked in the smoke of his reefer,

"about the bird, what am I thinking? Who gives a fuck about the

bird? Why am I dwelling on this bird. If the bird came in or not

it couldn't matter less. It does not even matter if I never know

anything and just go from one belief to the next under the

influence of whims" for it seemed to him that reality was the

obsession that we were under in the immediacy of the moment. If

the ultimate decay of one's exterior form made his existence

dubious, he argued, the tenuous and watery interior life of a

man's mind was even more that way.

With images of wings fluttering salient in his imagination,

desire suddenly began to percolate within him, tingling the body

like an intimate pot vibrating and ready to boil over with life,

and soon he wanted a resurrection from his fetal position on the

fetid floor. He wanted to fly and yet all that he could do was

remove his clothes. At first, it was to be only the removal of

his shirt for he needed to block the marijuana smoke from

exiting through the crack of the door. Soon, however, his pants

and underpants followed suit in this denuding. Soon they were

there caulking the crack as well. And as wind of the open window

swept over his nascent nakedness, dispersing the clouds of smoke

enough so that he could see fuliginous figures within the world

of his cramped toilet, he began to masturbate to the movements

of smoke-clouds.

Within, he was seeing diaphanous geckos on top of the ceiling

scurrying hurriedly out of the smoke of the toilet and through

the other cloud he was ogling a loosely robed sheik of an olive

Asian complexion who, fairly and most saliently naked in the

most critical aspects of that word, sat on a rock.

Four of the geckos had appearances of his former women as much

as geckos were able to resemble human beings. There was a dark,

ugly one with spectacles like Noppawan. There was a white

angelic one like Kimberly. There was one like the pretty white

Thai, Porn, with black hair bowering to her buttocks. There was

also that self centered one of childish exuberance radiating its

face like a skipping five year old. This gecko was similar to

Xinuae, whom long ago he had bestowed the nickname of "Chinese

Karen" so as to commemorate the day in which he had learned that

he was American by birth. Altogether the reptilian insects were

also like these former girlfriends in carrying off his love with

their eggs as they ran off to others who promised them an

immediate fulfillment of biological urgings, for in reproduction

there was not only the continuum of existence but womanly

purpose in nurturing posterity, and such happiness had statues

of limitation on it. It was not a literal smoke that they were

fleeing from nor even the asphyxiation of being alone. He could

tell this. It was a symbolic smoke of dying without purpose that

they were trying to escape. They knew that the flaming

impetuousness with its smoke cloud of being in love so as to

beget children was as brief as the body's ability to replicate.

They knew that nothing was more asphyxiating than a passing

cloud that they had not breathed in. They knew of no grief worse

than a barren existence in which they had not done the mating

moves in a timely manner that were part of that illusion for

meaning and purpose in their lives. To not see life as a rushed

activity that one needed to bungee jump into and to run out of

time to breed was a capital Sin-u-ae in organisms whose sole

purpose was to reproduce a bit of the self that was a composite

of replicating cells.