And as for the Laotian sheik, there he was sitting on a rock.

Nawin, while masturbating, which he called "stroking the bone",

paid most attention to him who had a voice that ripped through

the silence. "Since you were about ready to go on your trip to

the states, Nawin of the Thais with your American passport, we

decided to delay you for a while and show you our cave. An hour

ago we took the liberty of putting a nanotech bomb comfortably

in your ass. Rest awhile and you should be able to get around

tomorrow even if now there is a little pain. We had to seuter

you with whatever we could find, you know--wild poppies for

one. Don't worry--no plane cancellation for you and you will

not feel any discomfort at all when sitting on this flight to

Washington in a few days. When George Bush Junior puts the medal

of freedom around your neck there will be an explosion never

witnessed before. He and the entire capital will be a second and

third Grand Canyon. But for now, as training, know me--my

smells, my taste, the shape and feel of the contours of me. Know

it as training!" It was then that Nawin ejaculated most

volcanically onto himself and the wall. He did it with exquisite

visceral pleasure and pain like a Thai elephant making his debut

as an abstract artist. A minute later he was hand washing

himself at the sink. Pushing down on the tab to get his dribble

it seemed to him that every man was a dilettante artist.

9

From a hot Tuk-Tuk taxi ride leading to the train station to

being a carcass in a refrigerated car, and then from thinking

himself as a member of a couple with marital problems to one

slowly sensing in his lone journey out of Bangkok that he was

separate and separated, he was now journeying through the toilet

of the mind that was as fetid as a brother's sock and as

explosive and debilitating as the non-ending barrage of critical

words from the miscreants he knew familiarly as family. He was

being flushed down with the floating and volatile excrement of

memory and where it all would lead he did not know. As such he

thought,

- Nawin, what are you doing in there so long? [He was recalling

his wife's callow voice from that first week of their marriage]

Nawin? [As the marriage was new, her irritation was new; and

novel and so it seemed to transcend the barrier of the door to

mix sweetly with the falling waters and the rising mist of the

steaming shower] You know, you did not marry the bathroom [It

seemed a dulcet resonating warmth emanating to him from all

directions].

He remembered how as he stood there listening to her voice and

scrubbing his naked physique, he suddenly became preoccupied for

the first time with wanting to isolate just why he had this

belief that he was inordinately handsome when really he was as

dark as dirt. The facial contours and muscular physique seemed a

little better than average (whatever that meant) and he was

"just right" in not being too tall or short with genitalia that

were larger than ordinary, but not freakish or even

extraordinary. What, he asked himself, made him special? His

sullied attractiveness could even be perceived by some as

mediocre were it not for the fact that this mediocrity of

masculine symmetry was made extraordinary by his interactions

with women and their numerous touches with which his mind had

been filled over the years. Perhaps, he told himself, these

women were aware of nuances that he, a male and the subject of

the inquiry, was ignorant of. However, more likely, this being

groped had nothing to do with being handsome at all. Perhaps he

was merely a non-ugly entity glittering in a bit of fame and

affluence that made one popular. In his case this surely meant

being portrayed in the newspapers as naughty Nawin, the artistic

savant who pursued his studies of common whores with the most

uncommon diligence and when dressed, was regimented in

fashionable attire that anointed the brown body of Jatupon and

transformed into Nawin. So, in the bathroom he asked himself

whether the gropings were really for his beautiful self or for

characteristics that made these women feel beautiful in his

presence. Wildly, he surmised that if he were a preserved,

inanimate corpse like that in an anatomical museum this being

handsome would be seen as something that was ugly so undoubtedly

being attractive had little to do with physical appearance. A

woman did not want an inanimate corpse of a man to stand in

front of her bed but one to move with the symmetry of her

movements and in public to make the unit of male and female

gleam like the Emerald Buddha and scintillate like the golden

roof of a temple as a hallowed luminous body. It occurred to him

that subconsciously he knew this all along for it had not been

the gropers whom he had married but she who knew him longest,

she who had witnessed him in poverty when his dark skin seemed a

revolting filth. He had married Noppawan for truth. Thinking

this, with a bar of soap in his hands, he gloated in the marital

bond and spoke to her.

- No, nothing comes before my wife. [he said the words in

gargled mutterings distorted by his giddy softly cackling

laughter] The bathroom is just my royal consort.

- What did you say?

- Forget it. He was basking in being missed, which was being

loved; nonetheless, he could not help but that repeated dulcet

tunes were cloying to any listener of music, that a repeated

tune eventually became travail to the ear that required variety,

and that love was no different from any other sweet, diminishing

thing. Rinsing off the soap it seemed to him that surely love

sustained itself briefly on finite fuel which was pumped from

mutable rigs and that sooner or later when the energy was

depleted, with much less that could be tapped to keep him

dancing inside his head, he would see togetherness as the

constricted space that it was. If a man were missed when he went

into a bathroom and the bathroom was a subject of jealousy it

was obvious that the one who missed him wanted warm, glowing,

and perennial felicity and was dependent on him at all moments

and that she would be pulling his leash to have him with her at

every turn which made she and her male spouse, "them," as if

they were handcuffed together. At any rate, that was his fear;

for they who in childhood had spent so many years confined and

tortured in a cell only to become adults feeling, despite

amicable and gregarious facades, inwardly guarded and stiff with

each new approach of another human being, an ability to rest in

love's embrace was impossible.

At the mirror above the sink the fixed eyes recalled his own

voice of youth on that day.--I am waiting for you to come in and

wash me, he spoke loudly to transcend the bathroom door and the

material world with thought.

- I am not that kind of woman, she retorted to feign an

independence of her lover that was not hers. He chuckled at that

which could not be believed for only he, her husband, understood

that her wish for it was just that. Hers was the ingenuous voice

of a romantic who believed that he brought the world to her for

he was the new world, a real family replacing the dubiousness of

a former one, which she had repudiated and dismissed as just a

bad dream. In that sense they were both perfectly alike.

There in the bathroom, in this luxurious condominium overlooking

the Chao Phraya river, the water he felt and could not seem to

leave was not the water of a rich man pampering his longing for

hot showers but the cold rain of June in which a much younger

version of himself stood behind a food cart fettered in noodles

and pork, a boy named Jatupon who served soup to customers under

a leaking plastic canopy. In this state even the cognizance of

his wife being outside the door faded. There was just the

recollection of servitude under a cobbled leaking roof that was

trying to fly off like a kite. For a few minutes his self-

awareness remained as the poor servant he once was until he

heard,

- Nawin?

- Okay Honey, getting out now. He turned off the water, wrapped

a towel around himself, and exited.

- Nawin, she said a minute later as he came out dripping in a

towel, why do you have large stacks of new underwear in the

closet. She was laughing at him.

He smiled coyly. - You never know when you will need clean

underwear.

- This one stack alone must have fifty and they are totally

unworn with tags attached.

He smirked. - The idiosyncrasies of man, he said.

- Weirdness I would say; but he knew that she understood. As

someone who had known him in adolescence as Jatupon, and had

seen JatuPORN, as the fraternity called him, weep in the museum

of preserved corpses for the wish to be as deceased as they, she

knew the poverty that he was. He knew that she would assume the

stacks of underwear to be a repudiation of what he was. He knew

that she would not mention this, as indeed she did not, and he

loved her all the more for it.

"What do you want?" he asked an enormous gecko that was staring

at him, distracting him from inhaling a new cloud of smoke after

exhaling the previous one.

"You" or "Youth" it said, [He was not sure which one the thing

muttered] "I will eat" and it began to eat a long sheet of paper

like a poster which had his photograph as a noodle worker on it.

"Stop that," he said but the recalcitrant monster continued to

eat regardless of his wishes.

- I am not Panyaporn any longer, said one of his favorite models

one day in his studio.

- Is that so? He smiled.

- You are not drawing the woman you think you are but a stranger

of another name, she said.

- I don't mind strangers, he said. As they are strange they are

full of unknown possibilities.

Besides, imagining someone as other than pathetically human is

terribly erotic. Don't you think so?

- Why are strangers more erotic models, Nawin?

- You mean why are strangers more erotic creatures in general. I

don't know, he said playfully. Human beings are quite lovable,

you know, their painful journeys, their tragedies. At least I

think so. But the first brush stroke or caress of a stranger is

not love. It is different. It is uncomplicated, buoyant, and

mysterious like melting into the flames of a goddess."

- Nawin, I think that you hide behind your canvas. I think that

you are a pervert hiding deep in your paint so that women won't

see you for what you are. They believe that you are different.

They think that you aren't using them but admiring their beauty

when really you are no better than any man who abandons his wife

to come to women like me.

- Of course not. No different at all. All men feel the same in

being with others. There is no love in it, no empathy, it is

simply melting in a flame. Melting... and it is a melting

substance that releases its enzymes and eats the source of the

flame. Hold still while I draw your chin! That's right! Drawing

prostitutes, fucking them, it is all in consuming and being

consumed by beautiful flesh...flaming angels if you will. It

lacks love because love is baneful to lust and making love... an

obstacle to reproduction, you know. Illusions and delusions--

life is dependent on them. So you are not Panyaporn. No, I

didn't know this but then how would I unless you told me. I

wonder why the face and voice are the same, the body, the long

hair falling onto the breasts and burying them, and the salient

nipples peaking out of the burial demurely.

- The name, Nawin, the name! The monk told my mother that it was

an unlucky name and I needed to have it changed.

- I like your name. I cannot see anything unlucky in it. For

what reason? Why do you need this name change?

- To escape bad luck.

- Yes but how? You are with me so I cannot see how are you

unlucky. She shrugged her shoulders and he put away his brush

and walked over to her. You look like a Panyaporn to me.

- Either you believe in the monks' intuition or not. My mother

does so I have a new name to improve my life...to become more

happy, wealthy, successful.

- Poor and ignorant men in orange cloth leading the nation of

Thailand and the simpletons within it, he thought. Still he

smiled, for the Buddhism of the Thais had such ineffable beauty

the way a sunset was both true and lovely and he did not know

why. He did not want to think but to devour his girlfriend's

succulent skin in voracious kisses and he did just that until

she backed away. What is wrong? You are with me. How much

luckier can you be? Do you give your mother the money you earn

here?

- Of course. She is happy to have it. She is pleased to sell my

looks.

- You are lucky then. So do I still call you by the nickname of

"Porn?"

- No my real name. My new one is best.

- What is it?

- It's too long to say. Let's just call me Bun. Porn is too much

like my previous name.

- Like a bunny rabbit as they say in English.

- Take me out of here, Nawin.

- Here? he asked.

- This world. I want to go with you to another place.

- Rabboplanet, I bet. All bunnies like Rabboplanet. The gravity

there is so light that in one hop a bunny can stay midair for

ten minutes.

- Rabboplanet, she said in rapturous veneration as if

contemplating a utopia. He looked up at her, contemplated her

sincere wistful ecstasy at this contrived word, and guffawed.

Then he knew love for her, that wish to give any resource that

he had to deliver her to a better life.

He thought of leaving the bathroom again. It was different in

the mutable mind that knew and remembered imperfectly.

- Nawin, you know that there is a closet back here? And in it is

another one of your mountains of folded underwear. Why would

anybody need so much underwear?

- A guy can never know. One day he might be shooting some balls

on the court when suddenly his underwear falls from his hips

down to his feet like a hoola-hoop and all in front of the other

players looking down at his equipment.

She laughed, thinking it was a joke, for what did she know of

poverty? She knew the grief of family which had aged,

enlightened, and separated her to be bereft of the giddiness of

youth and this was plenty. Pain sobered one to the injustices

and suffering of the masses. But for he who knew the inordinate

burden of both there was a twice-fold enlightenment that came to

him. It was an emptiness like the vibrations of blowing into a

hollow bottle and an ache as eternal as a mortal could know.

The marijuana had numbed his headache so for the most part he

could ignore the lifeless aching. It was not all that different

than the monotonous chants of Buddhist monks that were broadcast

from speakers hanging in tree limbs of certain residential areas

of Bangkok. The sounds of bees and nagging wives one might not

be able to ignore, but a headache, active but flattened in

cannabis, was a throbbing numbness that almost felt titillating.

Still, mental pain could excel a bit of the lesser and more

manageable, physical pain, even when one was lucky enough not to

have both exacerbating the other. Thus, he felt the duress of

loneliness making him slide deeper into disconnection as the

stimulating and riveting air rushed through his hair.

Feeling more and more disconnected by the minute, he finally

released the joint to the vacuum of winds outside the train.

Then he waited a minute for a sufficient amount of zephyrs to

flush out the odors of the smoke before grabbing his shirt from

the crack, dressing completely, and stepping out of the toilet.

A stranger who had been timid at knocking squeezed by and went

into the toilet. A train officer who had been responsible for

placing the linen on the bunks was now gathering it from the

cots and stuffing a wad of it into a crevice beside the sink.

10

Leaving the toilet, he walked toward his seat, which was in the

eleventh car. His movements were slow as if this shivering from

the coldness that descended onto his carcass in the

"refrigerated car" were the cause. He wanted the warmth that was

in the other parts of the train but more wistfully, for a warmth

that was less superficial. It was a yearning to be, if only in

proximity, in some way connected to the lives of laborers within

who were going home to meet family for the long weekend of

Father's Day, the king's birthday. Before him a train official

was removing the linen from the bunks of the passengers who were

already awake and there was a mounting pile of blankets, sheets,

and pillow cases on the floor as though for him an augury to a

fallen but still scattering life. Suddenly stopping at a

distance to wait for it all to be cleared away, Nawin wondered

of the laborers in these other cars who were bringing their new

families to meet the old ones. Were they not conscious, he

thought, that the families manufactured from having "banged

their cocks" in Bangkok were the only reality (a reality, such

as it was, exponentially longer than the carnal devourings of

flesh and pleasure that were the impetus for the conceptions of

the offspring, but no less ephemeral)? Did they not know that

upon leaving the reunions their extended families would be

relegated to the faces of strangers in the foggy back alleys of

memory in which they would exit as maternal, paternal, avuncular

and aunt-like outlines of diaphanous faces and stick figures

only to be restored a little from time to time with letters and

telephone calls? Did these laborers not know that their own

loin-begotten families conceived by emotional and physical

frenzy were easily diminishing puffs of smoke that in a brief

space of years would replicate into other puffs of smoke before

entirely vanishing, and that the labor of ethereal man to keep a

puff of smoke there in his clasped hands was to no avail? Never

to be made sagacious by the wisdom of perversion, were each of

these myriad aestivating dwellers of arid complacency to never

experience as he had a rude awakening of fraternal molestation

in cold showers from that only family member who genuinely cared

about him and whose insertion of hard riveting love almost

seemed true with brothers who knew and yet said nothing beyond

the distortion of his name to Jatu-PORN or the equivalent

thereof and with parents who knew and did nothing but to

continue the usual mandates of errands and chores with more

vitriolic contempt? No, fortunately for the masses of men they

did not have his background. They were innocents content in

their illusions as innocents did when innocence was bliss.

He smiled bitterly as he glowered into space. He realized that

he was groping and swinging his aspersions madly as a blind man

piercing the air indiscriminately with his stick and yet at the

same time he was writhing in himself, eager to escape his own

skin. He was curious about the family men whom he had seen many

hours earlier walking contently enough to the "cattle cars" at

the train station accompanied, demarcated, and limited by wives

and children while at the same time censuring their perfunctory

lives. If his thoughts were in part an iconoclast's blaspheme

against the family unit, a group that comprised all groups, they

were also full of regret that, beyond a work of art, a mortal

man could not change into the livery of another's skin, of a

child who was proud of his Biadklang name and the parents who

owned their own rice and noodle cart that was part of their

sidewalk restaurant, of being their son if but a slave who was

reproached and disparaged most awakened minutes, and of being in

a fraternity, an eternity of belittling words sported against

him to get the grin, chuckle, or tacit endorsement of the father

emperor who, when at home, crossed one leg on another in his

recliner and thumped his foot in an erotic gavel. He abjured

devoting so much thought in this vein; still, the high of the

marijuana was at certain moments lifting his grave ideas like a

magic carpet, allowing an exhilaration of uninhibited thought

even if the turbulent ride was dependent on intermittent gusts.

Hydrogen clouds detonating into stars; stars exploding as

supernovas and the debris congealing into planets; microorganisms

of those planets that became extinct, stayed the same,

or evolved; male life forms in some of these worlds disgorging

bodily fluids within partners who would sometimes conceive new

offspring; this expended energy producing offspring that was

animated or still-born, born with health and beauty or defects

and predispositions toward degenerative illnesses, and all was

chance in this spewing forth of matter. Pondering this around

ten feet from the toilet in a part of the aisle which was an

intersection between the two cars of the train, he knew that

even with this proclivity for imploding in his own black hole he

too was a bit of an exploding star, a spewing mess unto himself

going randomly forward.

Standing there, wanting the worker to suddenly finish his task

so as to allow him to proceed to his seat or bunk, he could only

sense an oblique and loose connection to himself in the obscure

light. Eagerness for any activity was curtailed in a man whose

self seemed to be oozing into his shadow, and he was no

exception. As much as he was capable of, he wished repetitively

for his expedited entry into the car but minute after minute it

was blocked by this encumbrance of a train officer. His tepid

eagerness was not so much for a return to the confines of a

space that had been designated to him but to end a silence that

was becoming more disconcerting with each passing moment and

from a concern that the time of waiting there would sink him

further into himself. He wanted to smoke a cigarette to have

something to do. It was not nicotine or an oral sensation to

clog the void of space and time that he so much yearned for but

a mental conceptualization of himself with a cigarette in his

mouth which when matching the reality of actually having one

hang there would be equated as insouciance. Doubting that a

relaxed mental outlook was really garnered with such an

ineffectual drug as tobacco and theorizing that its efficacy in

making one at ease with the world was not so much from the

nicotine but the pleasure gained in graciously sticking out

one's cigarette to the world, exhibiting nominal contempt for

the planet by blowing smoke out onto one's miniscule sector of

society, and concocting a sense of defiant and invincible

imperturbability in a world that he knew one should be perturbed

by. It occurred to him that imperturbability was really the aim

of any smoker; and he posited that lacking a quality caused one

to imagine a quintessential form of it, to stencil it onto the

brain from the pattern of the ideal (man with cigarette,

detached, and triumphant in a haughty and complacent

indifference to all), and then to persuade himself that he was

the paragon of that which he was lacking. This being so, the

billboards in Bangkok showing images of the cigaretted man

alone, felicitous, and nonchalant or felicitous and nonchalant

with a felicitous and nonchalant partner smacked of an unreality

slated for destruction.

Uncertain if it were at all permissible to light up a cigarette

anywhere in the train, if he would be reproached and fined if he

were to do so in this particular area that he was in, or if he

even wanted to smoke at all, he floundered ambivalently before

dropping the subject altogether. Still needing to have something

to do, he re-combed the breadth of his unwashed hair and beyond

that continued to stand aimlessly, inadvertently smelling the

effluvium from his shirt which in the space of twenty hours had

become its own unflushed toilet. Then there was a sudden need to

defer to larger movements of the moment so he backed against a

wall near a sink in the corridor to get out of the way of the

officer who was now officiating over two large bundles of wadded

linen that he was dragging toward a container near Nawin's feet.

He certainly could have easily felt better just being there with

awakening, groping creatures of movement like himself and would

have begun to do so in this moment of proximity to the train

officer except for an unsettling feeling that was a precursor to

the siege of memory. Being in this darkened aisle, he felt as if

he were once again the adumbrated boy whom he once was. It was

as if he were that being who was scared to advance beyond the

back corridor leading to and from he and his brother's room at

his parents home, for fear that his presence would be despised

by all. He snickered at these craven impulses for a few seconds

but this coarse and bitter fire of laughter quickly incinerated

what was jocular within it. It occurred to him that the boy's

perennial sadness had so fully overcome him that it was as if

what he had been experiencing were nothing other than an

attempted coup. Jatupon's thoughts had briefly usurped his mind;

and even in repugning the advances and regaining this mental

kingdom from the boy he was certain that Jatupon was probably

still there hidden behind a hill of gray matter, wounded but

waiting for an opportune moment to initiate a new attack. As he

was forty now it was rather obvious that these insurrections

would be ongoing throughout the entirety of his life, that the

insurgent named Jatupon, whose suppressed, raw, mauled emotions

and thought were as intransigent as his own will within these

skirmishes, would attempt to control critical sectors and

regions of his mind at unsuspecting moments, and that behind the

scenes he would attempt to influence and discomfit key decisions

in the mind.

When the officer was gone, he remained stationary for a few

moments longer to allow, or ostensibly allow, the free passage

of the toilet goer who was returning back to the car, and then

for a glass bottle of Gatorade as empty and hollow as he was to

roll quickly past the toes of his bare feet. More significantly,

however, he stood there leaning against the sink to feel

something solid beneath him as the train was seeming more and

more like a jet in turbulence as if, for a social creature

dwelling in the waves of his stagnant body of thoughts

concerning his social relationships, there really were any

turbulence beyond that which was there in one's own mind.

Throughout the minutes of waiting in the aisle it seemed to him

that conversation was becoming as imperative as air to breathe.

He needed the vibrating air of speech to interpose between his

thoughts so as to stabilize a ruminating spiral into self-

destructive, non-sensical darkness where there was a risk of

losing all that was tangible in himself.

Like with most strangers, in both of these brief encounters with

the linen officiator and the toilet goer he had respectively

greeted and smiled at each of these individuals at the moments

of seeing them with a sawadee khrap and a gracious nod of the

head in place of the wai. As a result of being high, the

expressions that he had exhibited then were exaggerated and

ludicrous and generated little reaction but eyes attempting to

avert him. They had given him reciprocal greetings but they had

been begrudging utterances of asperity and dismissal. Thinking

of this now, his smile deadened to a bland and withdrawn

expression as strangers, these treasure chests in which

conversation could unlock knowledge and spontaneity, seemed

empty and exhausted resources. It was not only true of these two

men but of those he saw at a distance now awakening in the car

before him (some who were seated lengthwise or dangling their

feet from upper or lower bunks): they were all diminishing

steadily to remote and alien presences.

Standing there as he was, for a moment he had to hold onto the

sink for the physical world seemed to be turning into a gas. For

a few seconds he imagined geckos flying low in an air born mist

moving like low-flying, prey-seeking pelicans and then, as they

receded from him, like squirrels hopping over the caps of the

waves of a river as furrowed mounds of the dirt of a field. As

the mist thickened into fog, they became less and less visible.

The only thing that was salient was the immediate past impaled

by feelings of regret and futility for that which could not be

erased and redone. There was just the immediate past which could

not be consumed, altered, or forgotten. Recalling it and

reliving it again boosted his stress. It was as if he were there

at the Italian restaurant with Kimberly and his wife. It was as

if he were once again foolishly, gullibly, and jubilantly

agreeing within the surreal flickering candlelight of the table

to father Kimberly's child and this agreement was being done not

only with the hope of releasing pent up sexual energy for this

foreign woman who had been part of his moral code of

unapproachables (concocted morality the equivalent of timidity

and hardly a virtue at all) but also to have something from a

life that was so unremarkable and indistinct when lost within a

middle aged fog. Every man by getting married divorced himself

from his parents, but it was only in having a son and making his

link to the concatenated continuum of life that manhood was

obtained; and whether or not his parents were alive, spirits, or

nothingness beyond loose elements, a man had to commune with

them and declare his manhood in this way. This is what he had

done, more or less, in marrying sterile Noppawan, and completing

fifteen years belatedly with Noppawan and Kimberly; and yet he

could think of no battleground more deleterious than family.

When he was a boy, had the Burmese been at war with the Siamese,

like the elephant wars of yesteryear, he would have enlisted as

a soldier, for to be impaled with metal blades was less of a

travail than to be impaled with mental ones, these spoken words;

but ironically here he was now in his own sad concoction of

family as one diminishing plume of smoke begot another.

And there on hardened benches or pews with the dust of the open

windows smiting their eyes were these laborers in something

slightly more opulent than cattle cars. If they preferred to be

in this air conditioned car that he was in with its padded seats

which had folded out into sleepers the previous night, he, the

laborer that he had been born as, would almost have been

inclined to go in there and stay with them. And as giddy and

light-headed as he was from that which he had smoked, he was

tempted even further to go into the tenth car to randomly ask

sundry individuals for invitations to one of their family

reunions but that within him which retained logic and a sense of

the socially acceptable and plausible was only moved to laugh

until his body jiggled like Jell-O at the absurdities that ran

through the human mind.

Shivering and immobile as he was in the "refrigerated car," he

thought of himself as a half dead carcass with sexual energy and

desire having been recently depleted in a bizarre, depraved

masturbatory experience that had confounded him for being

contingent on oogling and grazing over an imaginary version of

the Laotian in his head, and regrets about Kimberly having

churned and re-churned his thoughts into a liquidated mass. It

seemed to him that he was as bereft of viscous thoughts sticking

to the surface of the brain as his own readable perceptions of

life. He told himself that he just wanted to return to his bunk,

cover himself up, and return to sleep. His brain was on a

descent from its high, but it seemed to him that even if he were

to land gracefully in a field of his choosing he would be

whipped around in the winds of this world regardless of what he

were to do. Unless he were to return to the landing strip of

family his whole life would be for nothing and yet that landing

strip was on gaseous Jupiter and the strip was ethereal and

waving as though a gas were being pumped into it from

underneath.

He knew that even if he had a telephone, all his attempts to

reach his wife would be futile. There would be the same

perennial ringing in his ears as when he was at the hospital

broken at her hand, in the driveway locked out of his own home,

in the hotel room womanless, alone, forlorn, lost, and

directionless, half hoping to become a nice couple's foundling

at the train station. If he were to borrow a telephone and call

her now it would be wasted, unrecorded effort at making contact

as a scream in space reverberating forever through and for

nothing; and yet he was reaching a hand into an empty pocket

nonetheless, as if his mobile phone had not been thrown into the

trash barrel at the train station. He was subconsciously bending

his fingers as if they were clasping the Nokia 3660, and he was

tapping imaginary numbers into his palm. Then he recalled the

plausible which deflated hope and imagination to earthly things.

He noted the possibility of never seeing her again. It occurred

to him how the plausible and real were part of his daydreams.

Even in them he could not shirk reality where calls to her would

be as calls to the Nirvana that was Kimberly.

For a moment he felt that same intense nosocomial sadness and

regret which had caused him to cry in front of a nurse a few

days earlier. If she had judged him, it had been a judgment of

tenderness; but for him the emasculate act of visceral mourning

over Kimberly's death in front of this stranger had been so

mortifying that it was worse than spilling the content of one's

curved, plastic urinal onto the bed sheets. Thinking of it now,

he decided that if ever again overtaken by the tragedies of this

world, slitting his throat would be the only act of self-

decency. That did not mean, however, that he expected suicide to

be his eminent end any time soon for it seemed to him that he

could make a distinction between the negative occurrences

surrounding a life from life itself, and that two people, for

whatever comity that they displayed in love, were volatile wills

like tremors of changeable landscapes in which the suspension

bridge of a relationship was tied. Sometimes things just fell

apart.

Standing there in this back corridor that was permeated by the

dulcet stench of the toilet, he spent a few moments breathing in

and out as deeply as he could in his own dabbling of lay yoga.

It was as though he were a vacuum cleaner in reverse

regurgitating from his bag the filth of this world. Then he told

himself that Kimberly's post-partum depression and her swift

leap into the elements had not been his fault (fault not having

yet been officially determined by Bangkok police officers who,

in this ambiguous situation, were perhaps as circumspect,

finicky, and slow to move as squatting, urinating bitches in

Lumphini Park, enamored and distracted by some such bitches, or

preoccupied with matters involving the location and use of drug

pushers for target practice). He was not one who could divine

evil events but merely a participant banging and being banged as

one of life's billiard balls. In a further attempt to calm

himself he rationalized in an analogy apposite to an artist that

any ostensible relationship might appear as a fusion of color in

all this mixing, but the color could recede and when it did

there were just two individuals staring at each other in black

and white from distant corners. All relationships receded in a

world of impermanence, said the atheist bombastic to himself

most piously.

He told himself that it was true that the present moment was the

motion and commotion now registered to the senses with the past

gone and the future not yet nascent. Then he told himself that

although yesterday under logical scrutiny seemed the epitome of

archaic and antiquated happenings and had no baring on the

present, it propped up today the way the distant past depending

on family background was a solid or unstable foundation that was

the pedestal for yesterday. Then he concluded that although the

past was unreal, it constituted the present and could never be

repudiated successfully. And as for regrets, any sentient being

had regrets over negative, adventitious happenings. Still, to

expend one's rational powers trying to expunge the negative

happenings of this life with intangible thought seemed the most

absurd act of futility.

Now relaxed in an objective distancing of himself from

prevailing emotions, he conceived an idea for a painting which

he did not care to ponder. It was one which, even with the right

artist, would not work well as a series, let alone as one image

and yet there it was projected onto the canvas of his mind as if

he were destined for it. It was story and images in which a

hoary man with the appearance of the train officer was moving as

one urban speck in a peripatetic herd of pedestrians when for a

second his phlegmatic demeanor identical to those around him was

altered by a spontaneous surge of despair, a feeling which in

turn caused thought about the meaning of his life to imbue and

pulsate from his face. Needing or desperately thinking himself

to need the continuum of former friends, he grabbed his cellular

telephone from his briefcase and called one, only to find that

the man was now a stranger who was distorted in age and mental

outlook from that which he remembered. Then he attempted to

emulate his earlier stoicism but he kept seeing shadows of the

form of his deceased wife stretching out as shadows in front of

store windows. Abjuring the idea of dialing the telephone number

of their former home together, he did it nonetheless as if there

were a chance that she would answer and tell him that her staged

death had been a practical joke. Hearing an automated voice

telling him of a disconnected number, he cowered into the crowd

and seemed to wither there. He envisaged this as if it could be

transcribed into art and as if he, a retired has-been who had

merely reproduced whores and slight thematic variations of them,

were the right one to depict it.

As this was not a given second but a series of changes in a few

minutes of a man's life, he soon saw these scenes in a chain of

diminutive beads. Every other bead would reflect the present

dilemma and alternate beads would portray a significant person

in his life. The significant others would be mirrors and a light

source that would give some visibility to a huge diaphanous face

of the man that the entire chain outlined. He was, after all, a

reflection of those whom he was trying to desperately contact

and it seemed to him that they should make up every other monad

and that their eyes would be attempting to look at the entirety

of a face that they would never be able to see fully. As it

would be an anecdotal work on a large canvas, each scene, each

bead of this outline of the man's face, would be a punctilious

and time consuming feat to render. He did not have a clue

whether the motif was incandescent or prosaic and insipid. The

only thing that he believed with some certainty was that if the

painting was worth doing he was not the man to implement his

ideas. For in comparison to a Caravaggio, a Titian, a

Michelangelo, or a Da Vinci, he knew that his talents were the

top of the bottom tier of dilettantes, and even a knowledge that

he was able to render his own mediocrity with the splendor of

originality was not helpful. The thought of his mediocrity was

asphyxiating to him and he again pondered that he was merely a

prostitute painter, a fetid and odious "nobody" within the

demarcated self of a Nawin Biadklang that he could never

transcend. He fretted about his place in the world as if the

masses of men ever found a voice within themselves, as if his

earlier paintings, which were still being collected, valued, and

traded, had vanquished with him off the artistic scene, and as

if his brief inclusion in an article about contemporary Asian

art in Newsweek had meant nothing at all.

The train officer clanged each of the metallic ladders with the

handle of a butter knife while repeating, "Nongkai in one hour.

Breakfasts for those who ordered them." Then he began to pull

down linen, shoving tenebrous tombs back into their embankments,

and readjusting bottom bunks. Nawin relinquished the idea of

returning to his seat anytime soon and sat down on a box of

clean linen where he contemplated the article. He recalled:

"Nawin Biadklang's paintings are almost like a hybrid of Montien

Boonma's Buddhist sculpture with an amateur painter's penchant

for easily obtained nude models in Bangkok's red light district.

Biadklang's talents at present are clearly dwarfed when compared

to his predecessor, the most important Thai artist of

international significance; but then youth is often seedy and so

are his works, studies of prostitutes that make up his oeuvre.

The combination is a somewhat refreshing exhibition that

succeeds as a study of the oppressed and the human condition."

It was a passage that he knew by heart and yet one where the

writer's meaning still eluded him.

Then without meaning to do so, the self was eclipsed and he was

asleep in a nap with its expeditious transit into a percolating

sea of images. He was deluged in raw feelings, the construction

material of thought, which the movement of those images brought

down upon him. Within one series of loosely concatenated images,

one dream, he (he or something similar as one part of himself

seemed to be an audience of one watching the Nawin debacle from

an objective distance) was in his mother's car driving to her

home. They were returning from a cemetery in which they had

failed to commune with even the positive memories of the

deceased. They were inadvertently deviating into that distant,

solitary region of themselves where negative and defunct

memories continually reverberated against bluffs of the mind as

faint, unresponsive echoes. The short journey to her home seemed

long and dull and thirty miles into it they both felt ill. She

asked him to stop the car so they bought some fast food and

turned into a parking lot along the Mississippi River. There

they began to eat while looking out onto the sodden waters under

darkening skies. There was a flock of pelicans flying overhead,

and geckos trying to elude the birds by floating on top of the

mist.

"Look over there," she pointed. "They must be making their nests

under the bridge."

"What is?"

"What is?," she mocked. "The pelicans!"

He looked. "I don't to see any of them making a nest," he

murmured.

"Well, maybe I need to take you to get some new glasses."

"No, that's all right," he said. He tried to look again but this

time he was distracted by an eerie roll of thunder which sounded

like the ambulatory movements on creaking floor boards of the

residents of an upper apartment heard from one story below.

"To the left, under the bridge. Can't you see?"

"Oh, I see them now. I bet so," he lied blandly. "A lot of them

seem to be clustered over there, don't they?"

"It's got to be nests," she said as she rolled down her window

to gain fuller clarity. Sitting in there with his mother, it

occurred to him that their relationship was merely a spoken list

of adventitious occurrences recorded by the other's senses. On

this day, it was ornamental designs engraved on tombstones,

xanthic blooms of Magnolia trees, the flight of birds observed

from the car, and now nests under a bridge. Yesterday it had

been the number of buds on her rose tree, the clothes he had not

brought with him and needed to purchase at Wal-Mart, sheets and

pillow cases that she needed to buy there, grass that needed to

be mowed, food that they wanted to eat, a bathroom that needed

to be cleaned, and other incidentals that they happened to relay

to each other. As such, there was nothing personal in it at all.

Still, she had nurtured him when he was young. She had been the

one who had fed and clothed him, made him soup and gave him a

wet washcloth for his hot forehead when he was sick, had him get

out of thunder storms, told him to never walk across the street

unless in consort with the masses and only at green pedestrian

lights or when incoming traffic was stalled at red lights, and

given him a sundry of unrecalled, commonplace items that forged

the early bonds of affection. Even though she was not interested

in him now, she was his mother, and he wanted to at least feign

an interest in her, for feigning often became believing if acted

persuasively enough. Thais thought that altruism was the impetus

of parental love, the purest of love, and he told himself that

regardless of the veracity of the claim he should go on thinking

it was true for if he were to cease believing in its goodness,

all other forms of love would be instantly rendered as

mendacious counterfeits. Also, the superficial evidence of words

and facial expressions often belied the inner feelings and

sensitivities that might be active within these guarded human

creatures. He always felt her disapproval of him even in the

most favorable situations, but with the intangible and often

erroneous nature of feelings, how would he know that it was not

his own imagination? Furthermore, how could he on any day, let

alone a day of returning from a cemetery, look into her haggard

countenance and pass judgment on her as unloving? If shopping,

meticulous housekeeping, gardening, and commentary on nature

were her only subjects of concern and her only crimes, it seemed

to him that they were rather innocuous ones. If she fortified

herself by clogging her mind with these activities it seemed to

him that the impalpable self needed them for definition and that

human beings had to clog the space of their brains with at least

some nugatory issues in order to have any degree of sentience.

And yet, in her curtailed life, which was so fortified by the

distractions of the plants she grew, domestic chores that needed

to be performed, and diurnal trips to and from Wal-Mart, he knew

that she immured herself from self-reflection. She, an active

defiler, had to know the stench of her former family and yet it

always seemed to him that she pretended the rot and her role

within it did not exist. And more importantly, the absence of a

mutually agreed past left them bereft of a present, rendering

talk on the most trivial matters arduous if not ineffable.

Silence overtook them until at last he concocted something to

say. "You know, birds like that quickly abandon their newborn.

They have so many of them that they can leave their survival to

chance."

"What do you mean by that?" she asked pugnaciously, as if

comments on the maternity of birds were an oblique critique of

her role as a mother. Then, sensing the absurdity of the

association, she tried to modify his perception of her. "I mean

you don't know anything about pelicans, do you?"

"Just an article which I looked at before we left the house." He

lied. He had not read anything. It was just that he did not know

what to say to this human being who was reliving a former role

as a maternal autocrat, a mother whom he had outgrown long ago.

This had been his lie, his benign artifice, to connect with her

somehow, although the benign contained its own acerbity.

"You always did like to read."

"Yes," he smiled.

"Books and paint but rarely doing any work. That's the way it

has always been with you, hasn't it?"

"I am a famous artist now. I make more money than--"

"You are nobody. You are no better than the rest of us."

"No I'm not," he admitted and pressed his lips together into a

contrived smile that hid his teeth. For a moment he was reticent

to say anything at all, but fearing a worsening imbroglio if he

continued his silence he asked, "You've never seen pelicans

here?"

"No. I said that before. I don't remember even hearing of them

in this area. They are normally from warmer places. Florida, the

newspaper says. I guess all of them came out here from that

area."

"With a road map and a desire to see the Midwest for their

holidays," he added facetiously. It was an utterance meant to

make their relationship congeal in levity and friendliness but

he immediately sensed the sarcastic nuance within it and that he

was as much stating his own displeasure at seeing her once

again. He knew that he was making things worse. "Maybe they've

been in the delta all along but migrate up the Mississippi River

during abnormally warm springs."

"Whatever!" she responded biliously. They were silent for they

were perplexed as to what they should say to each other so the

woman and the middle-aged son whom she was ashamed of (at least

the taciturn disposition, pressed lips. and sunken eyes seemed

to be a suppressed animadversion of a being whom she wished that

she did not despise) wondered about the ramifications of saying

nothing at all.

"I wish that your father were here to see this with me," she

said. Unmarried and living away, he was failure personified so

why would she want to be seated inches away from him? Maybe she

thought that he should never have come home. Maybe she thought

that he should have run away before having his first wet dream

at the age of twelve thereby allowing her, even decades later,

to frantically hope for the well-being and return of that

perennially missing child of her imagination. Even worse, he

wondered, maybe she preferred for him to be dead instead; and

yet he did not know those as her thoughts or how to know much of

anything really.

This was their respite after seeing the marble stones that

indicated where his brother, Kazem, and his father lay, but now

he was as bereft of words as he had been then and he was

straggling tortuously in his head the way he had wandered with a

numb and aimless gait around the tombstones. He had returned

from Thailand to restore a relationship and more importantly to

once again be with his mother and hear her call his name and yet

for this earnest effort how could he speak with her earnestly?

How could he say that he was glad that at least some of his

torturers were buried underground, or admit that his best

thought toward the devil who was his father was that he should

rest in peace. He could only nibble his hamburger, slurp his

chocolate shake, offer to share some of his onion rings with

her, his stout mother, which she finally did take, and remember,

as no lobotomy or other expurgation of specific memories was yet

in existence. Visiting a cemetery for a man was supposed to

engender lachrymose thought rather than tears and vented

memories tenderly spoken; but for him whose life was an

aberration, it had merely evoked minced silence. And this, his

silence at the cemetery, which had flagellated her with the

unalterable past, now made him repugnant to her.

At last something good, the mellifluous and the true, began to

trickle from his brain and pour in with the saliva of his mouth.

"I'm here. I know it has been five years--you needing to help

raise your grandchildren or whatever required your attention

during this time--grandkids or not, it doesn't matter... I'm

not blaming you--but finally you relented and we're here

together, and I am glad...glad to be here with you." It was

there, a harnessed wisp of liquidated air in his mouth, but as

he believed that she would only despise him were he to release

the words he replaced sentiment with the mundane, as strange as

it was. "Did the newspaper explain the geckos? Their migration

here seems odder yet. The fact that they float up there eating

bits of the sky seems odder than any pelicans migrating this far

north."

She got out of the car and went to them, her birds, as nearly as

she could approach them at the edge of the river, that body of

water that was distended in fish and sewage and barely able to

move like a fat man after gormandizing at a buffet. When she

returned she had him change positions, took over the driver's

seat, started the car, and they drove away. By this time the air

was thundering with such a noise of pelicans that they could no

longer hear the creaking of the air under the weight of the

geckos.

"I don't understand your hurry to get back"

"Your Aunt Helen and Uncle Jake will be waiting. I plan to eat

ice cream and cake with them even if the guest of honor refuses

to go."

"I did not refuse. I simply pointed out that the invitation was

ten days belated and followed you giving them some furniture.

You know that it is less of an invitation than a token payment

to make sure that the giver keeps giving. How obvious can it be?

They haven't communicated with me for twenty years, so why

should they bother now? And as for this idea of yours that if I

don't go I don't love you, maybe it successfully manipulates

children but it is rather reprehensible to adults, wouldn't you

say? If I were to go what would I say about my personal life?

I'm forty years old, unmarried, and they are bound to ask. I

can't exactly continue to stammer out some evasive nonsense to

the question about my involvements: that I am still looking, or

laughing uncomfortably and ignoring the question altogether--

whatever I said or did last time. I really don't remember what I

said. Maybe it was that I wanted to get my career in order

first. Maybe I was silent like a mental and social retard."

"Don't go then!"

"What?"

"Don't go. I don't want you to be there. You aren't welcome."

"I want to know why in all of these many years you never even

show the least interest in my life relationships, friendships,

where I travel, where I live, what I do."

Her face cringed at the steering wheel and dashboard and he

could see in it repugnance at what she believed to be the

turpitude of his life.

"Why can't you ask anything?" he importuned.

"I don't want to know anything. Go back to Thailand and do God

knows what. You don't even live with anyone do you? It is just

sex. Your life is just filled with sex."

"You don't know anything. How could you with nothing ever asked

or said. You make assumptions without knowing anything."

"What you do with your male friends--your sex life, I don't

want to hear about it. It is private--your private business and

I don't want my nose rubbed in it."

"What has your nose been rubbed in, Mother? I have a girlfriend

and a child--a child. For God's sake, look at the pictures in my

wallet!" he pulled out a wallet, unfolded it, and flipped the

photographs randomly.

"Get them out of my face. They are the same ones that you sent

to me--the ones I glanced at and mailed back to you. It's not

your child. It has nothing to do with you and less to do with

me."

"It's my child," he yelled.

"Don't you dare raise your voice to me. Don't you dare raise

your voice to your mother."

At this place that in youth he had referred to as home for lack

of anything more substantial, he quickly packed his bags and

thought of how concocted and sententious morality was. It seemed

to him that it was the equivalent of timidity and hardly a

virtue at all. It was seeing shadows and monsters in that which

deviated beyond the boundaries of one's awareness and only this.

There were clearly wrong actions, actions of hate, but these

were not issues of morality but the loss of a logical restraint

to instinctual passions of destruction for the sake of self-

preservation. He told himself that he would and could break off

the relationship for to not do so would make him the mimesis of

the bad they thought that he was, and if he believed that he was

bad he would relinquish self-control and in a turbulent rest

allow himself to be overtaken in a vortex of destructive

passions. He had gone through this much of his life without in

the early juncture of his youth having constructive role models.

Still he had concocted his own imperfect expression of love as

others who had been mulled in family. As they did with the years

of their lives, he also tried to fine tune what benevolent love

existed within him and would go on doing so, sometimes even

accomplishing it.

He woke to human contact. It was a nudge.

"What are you doing?"

"Oh," said Nawin while smiling. "I was just trying to stay out

of your way."

"You can go back to your seat now, I'm done."

Nawin stood up and the dream, like flooding river water, receded

back to its usual course. Deemed as unreal and untrue, it was

relegated no differently than other repudiated and forgotten

experiences within the continual shove of movements in time and

by a consciousness which only accepted the reality of everything

new that flowed into it (At this moment, for him it was what the

senses were recording as the linen officer departing into

another car, the drab and fetid qualities of the train, and his

constricted space within it as he continued to flee his fumbled

personal life, which he remembered all too well). He shook his

head and scoffed at the dream where a dim sense of reality

persisted. Pushed further into the past with every mounting

moment, it still discombobulated his present reality with its

magnetism. It had been a mere dream but when he was in it, the

images had seemed so clear, motivation had seemed less cryptic,

and he could not help but wonder if in sleep the awakened state

would seem dreamy if dreams had cognition of such a state.

Contrary to the dream, he had never known his mother in

adulthood and apart from being born in America and living there

for a few years, possibly the bastard of an unknown father (at

least that was his conjecture to explain his parents separation

then and the degree to which he was flouted afterward over so

many years) he did not know America. This was apparent by his

conceptualization of the Mississippi River where motorized

gondolas moved around high rise condominiums only to depart into

a canal the way they did in Bangkok. Whether the dream attempted

to indict him as a homosexual or depict sexual ambiguity, he

could not see either one as exceptionally true at mirroring his

image (truth being that--a mirror). He certainly was not a

homosexual whatever queer caprices might come upon him--sexual

energy merely flowing without direction or destination were it

not for mores and a negative, positive, or hyper-inflated

interpretation of one parent or both as role models which

barricaded the momentum and, like crags, altered the flow. No,

he told himself, he was no more queer than any heterosexual--it

was just that what was most pleasant in one's bleak environment

at a given moment became the playmate and intrigue in one's head

to which innate energies were channeled in its favor. And of his

relationship with his mother, as she had died when he was

fourteen years old, there had not been enough time for a

rupture. He recalled that this mother in the dream had not been

his own but a macabre, ersatz face stolen from the naked,

preserved corpse with the slit chest at the anatomical museum at

Siriaj Hospital who the fourteen year old child, Jatupon, had

rightly or erroneously believed in his grief and neediness to

resemble his mother--the details of the face of his real mother

having diminished like the engraving of a name in the sand after

the first wave.

11

There was one second of thinking that the memory of his mother

had neither dissipated in part nor whole but surely remained as

something inappreciably more cohesive and tangible that was

either lost or banished and forlorn within the present jungle-

thicket growth of neurons, and caught in the weeds and brambles

of failed possibilities. He thought that with sedulous and

indefatigable will, even more paths could surely be trodden

within his growing array of brambly chaotic connections; and

that eventually from this somewhat circuitous trudging through

memory and thought and being nearly blown away in volant whims

of his biochemistry and penchant for pleasure, these paths would

bring him nearer to those lost bonds of the past (not to her

who, of course, was deceased and when alive and enervated from

perennial work and exasperating children and who had despised

him placidly within the ameliorating parameters of maternal

instinct, but to a recollection of her the way she really was

instead of the distortions of memory that had her as a weathered

and defaced countenance like a featureless rock or, at other

poor attempts at recollection, merely the ersatz of that

preserved female corpse seen at the anatomical museum at Siriaj

Hospital; to recall something like her face from those early

and less bleak childhood memories when she would begrudgingly

join him and his brothers as they played netless badminton and

volleyball on a dirt road near their home; to let these memories

of shared smiles and laughter, mutual pleasure that registered

as "love" with such beings, permeate his consciousness as

pleasure in its imprint of memory was the only perception of how

close a relationship it had been, and whether or not he had to

some limited degree been valued as an instrument of pleasure,

and so in a sense cared been about; and to reluctantly

acknowledge that he was one of those beings who was susceptible

to love, that mixing and receding of color, a mere human even

though to him this word neither defined nor demarcated him very

well). The next second he was thinking of male Silpakorn

University students whom over the years he had seen at various

outdoor restaurants near the campus, each eating and laughing in

his group indistinct from all others, but when solitary would

often be reading a comic book and riveting one of the legs under

a table though not in a queer sensuality toward comic books; the

phallic gestures were a satiety of virulence that was innate in

a man. The throbbing of legs was a venting of superfluous

flowing energy that by its sheer force could be channeled one

way or another or both to the objects of one's intrigues, these

friends who possessed admirable traits that he lacked. Then,

more probingly, it occurred to him how unlike the womanizing

playboy artist that he was, that a truly unperverted mind had no

sexual orientation at all: that for such a being the pleasure of

intrigues, these soft and low beds of earth that from His

affable magnetism surrounded Him, were the natural course from

which His, an Unperverted Bisexual's liquids, would easily flow

into. But for the perverted, like him, who for the most part

allowed themselves to be channeled in one particular sexual

orientation, their limited intrigues were not so much an

interest in these intimate associations as they were a

replication of the same parental model, or a finding of the

antithesis to one or both parents or the reminders of mothers

and fathers interaction with each other that such a mind cared

to emulate or reject. Then he pondered how common he was (not

that he, the supercilious one, believed it with fears of being a

commoner ravaging his psyche and compelling him to contrive the

august demeanor and beliefs that he had as all beliefs were

contrivances and fortifications against one's fears). He

pondered how when out of academic and artistic circles, as in

this train of passenger-rustics and professionals who still

clung to their agrarian roots of Nongkai or Vientiene, his

presence was glanced at and dismissed like anyone else; and this

caused him to wonder if he would even be remembered in artistic

circles five years hence (not that, he being a part-time

lecturer at Silpakorn University and full-time wastrel--one who

had to some extent rid himself of art, relinquished himself to

the void, and remained divorced of the artistic omphalos as well

as the paint brush--to be followed by, were it to happen, a

physical presence which might expunge him from the planet in

some accident, there would need to be five years for public

memory of his work to be forgotten). Then, to avoid thinking of

man's insignificance, he returned to a sexual theme, that

personal sanctuary, as ineluctable appetites constituted so much

of his mental faculties and preoccupations. He thought of how

the women he liked most were more often than not a docile

antithesis to his mother with the notable exceptions of young,

recalcitrant, and sexy martinets of selfish whims imposed as

laws who when with that same draping and tangled curl of hair

and the same totalitarian streak to squelch all males seemed

just like his mother, or what little he remembered of her beyond

his castrated will under her auspices. Present relationships

were for all heterosexual and homosexual perverts based on the

model of the parents who had been of an adequate, deficient, or

excessive nature, as caretakers causing a given person to

reject, accept, or fiercely need what had or had not been given

to them. He had no sooner concluded his deliberation that one's

choice of intrigues was in large part due to one's

interpretation of failures and successes of parental and

espousal models than, before he even knew it, he was at his seat

and the Laotian was saying unto him a hello, which in the Thai-

Laotian that they had concocted hours earlier was still "Sawadee

khrap" with the accompanied gesture of the deferential wai.

"Sawadee khrap. Sabai dee mai? "

"Sabai dee. Where have you been all this time?"

"Above you, of course, sleeping."

"I mean since 5:30 when you thudded to the floor."

"Oh, sorry, did I wake you?" Nawin's concern in this matter was

only marginally genuine. For the most part it was feigned for

the sake of kindness and to thwart this voice of distraction

from his subject of deliberation. He was preoccupied with a

bigger worry that, prior to going to the toilet, the stranger

had seen his eyes grazing his body. He was wondering what

gestures or facial expressions might indicate that the man had

seen him ogle his body, if he indeed had, and yet the reason for

caring what another individual thought of him eluded him. Had

not art, this flaunting of his portraits of female whores with

his own whorish self-portraits to which both parties were

portrayed as locked in self-degradation, and going to these

exhibitions of his work with an arm locked in that of his best

friend (legally a wife), Noppawan, shown that he was free to

express his desires in his own mode without having to subscribe

to another's moral ordinances regarding the energies that exuded

from him? With such a force there needed to be rules of

restraint so that one was not sucked into the vacuous oblivion

of desire and did not lose rational cognizance in the

meaningless frolic of sexual quests, which were the mere

insatiable manipulating urges of an animal and could so easily

be the sole and altogether forgettable essence of a man. This he

knew from interaction with the inordinate array of bitches who

pawed him with their love (their needy and myriad convoluted

yearnings for no other reason than a handsome figure to admire

their flesh and thereby gain the illusion of immutable beauty -

a neediness dirty as their underwear which he more often than

not successfully tugged off to be intimate in their flesh and

their and his own selfish caprices). He needed restraint, but to

him those ordinances should come from within himself, this

prowler's own creative and logical prowess.

"Yes, definitely a loud thud; but it wasn't from the noise so

much as that smell that cascaded down with your body."

"Smell?"

"Yes, but I don't want to think of it, thank you. No more of

that. So tell me of your adventure this morning."

"What adventure?" he chuckled softly with a sotto voce of

scoffing asperity as if there had been no earlier adventure on

the metallic toilet floor. He said it for in a sense it had been

unfitness, a secret aberration even to areas of his cognizance

that could not accept anything but the thought of himself as a

lady's man and womanizer, it was true.

"I don't know. As I have nothing better to do, tell me where you

have been."

"The toilet, mostly," said the body ogler with an embarrassed

laugh as if this trifle of where he had been (this masturbatory

exercise in the toilet of the train) were not worthy of speech

instead of being a paramount expression of repressed, latent

forces that had been compressed within him for so many years. It

was still his assumption that as a sleeping body was beautiful

with its breath rising and lowering the chest rhythmically like

a raft on an ocean, so an artist, the appreciator of beauty in

the mundane, would have an artist's aberrations from the

insensate throngs, and as such, such appreciative aberrations

should not be judged as anything that was particularly queer or

at any rate queerer than anything else. Just being on the planet

at all, a successful conception from one of competing sperm

spilled out in a moment of two people needing, from a transient

mood, to subscribe to an illusion of intimacy in a physical

experience, was queer enough.

"I suppose looking at that handsome but middle-aged face

deteriorate in the mirror--I mean when you were in the toilet.

Right?"

"Maybe. Something like that."

"Well, that's a bit odd if you don't mind me saying so. Even a

woman would not dare to pee or stay in front of a mirror that

long."

Nawin laughed. Like his expressions of love in his juggling of

women that was and was not the love he claimed it as being, he

had moments of a predilection for mendacity like a boy wanting

to hide himself within the shadows of a field and to remain

there indefinitely, never to be discovered. He spoke

mendaciously and yet to him it was not really a lie. "I wasn't

there all that long. Afterwards, I just waited outside the

toilet for the seats to be readjusted. Just waited back there,

wasting time." Of course "wasting time" had consisted of that

adolescent masturbatory sport, which he had conducted earlier in

that fetid toilet, a water closet that was more tin than tinsel;

and as he thought of it once again with a mischievous grin, he

thought of this use of the source of the fantasy for pleasure,

the Laotian, without much compunction. Then he thought of

himself as guilty for not feeling guilt until recognizing that

these new sexual urges were as a volcano spewing out old molten

churnings of lava. So of a volcano, he thought, so of a human

psyche. He accepted this change to the contour of the surface

for ultimately (according to his rationalization), as queer as

it was, like everything else, there was nothing new or strange

in it.

"And while waiting outside the toilet you were probably staring

at yourself in one of the other mirrors, weren't you?"

"Yes, but how do you know that?"

"It would have to be a guess, wouldn't it, unless I can read

minds, at least in some imperfect way. In this case it is not so

much reading minds but faces."

"So what is in my face?"

"It doesn't matter what is in your face. I don't need to look at

it all that much. All upper class Thai darkees are the same.

Cleansed and made beautiful and white by money they are a vain

lot--solitary cowards behind face fortresses. They are like the

Chinese in that sense, and both Thai lightees and darkees with

money pretend to be of a higher species. They try to avoid

foraging, disease carrying primates like me. Their fortresses

are built from fear that lack of money will make them have to

acknowledge that they are merely hairless monkeys--no more

special, no more potential to matter than any animal."

"You think that I am like that?"

"Well, each person is a bit different. You don't seem so bad.

Let's just say that for now, you are a nice guy in a snobbish

sort of way" (meaning that having been given a bit of money the

previous night in that gesture of unbegrudging levity as if it

had merely been the sharing of a bag of sticky rice, a smile

from this giver, Nawin, since these Thai compatriots saw smiling

as their highest attribute, and voluble conversation beyond the

vouchsafed utterances given to a repugnant laborer from a

country that was poorer than Thailand, he could hardly hate this

particular Thai with that quick primeval xenophobia, in which

hominoids reacted to those strangers of a different and

potentially deleterious group). Nawin had to be put in a special

category slightly different than the usual brand of rich and

dark Thais of money.

Nawin chuckled abashedly as he tilted his august face to the

floor. Then he lifted his head and, in the way of the Thais, a

morose, soft, and artful smile alighted on his swarthy

countenance like a lambent shadow of a descending airplane

across a naked field. He became aware of how much he needed

other human beings, these jovial extensions to his limited

domain, these pleasant respites from redundant churnings of

thought and the hauntings of memories, and he knew that he would

feign any interested smile to get the reprieve. "Did you have a

good sleep?"

"No, not at all, if you really want to know, which I couldn't

see that you would really. Personally, I've never minded a

little stink: a sock here, a shoe there, even women smelling

like raw, rotting tuna down where a man wants to go--I accept

these things. Things that get used get smelly. But that which

was stinking up there was of no use....unless one were to

capture it, put it in a pill somehow, and sell it off as a cheap

form of methamphetamines to truckers, bus drivers, and maybe

even guys like me who want nothing better than to stare into

space on a bunk all night instead of sleep."

"My socks?"

"Your monstrous socks!"

"Was it that bad?" asked this American Thai, Nawin, with an

awkward laugh. He was feeling a sense of exhilaration at being

with one who was unlike demure Southeast Asians' superficial

demeanor. Like a Nawin Biadklang painting in being so wanton in

declaring sordid reality as such, so seemed the man; and Nawin

liked what was true and like himself.

"It was like drowning in molecules--at least a little. Still, I

survived it all right, so it's okay. Morning came."

"How did morning make a difference?"

"The train official removed those rotting monsters with tongs."

"With tongs?"

"Tongs from the restaurant car."

"With tongs from the restaurant car?"

"Big tongs. Forceps, maybe. Well, something like that."

"Where are my socks?"

"Above you in your bag. I told him to bury them there. I hope

that is all right. I hope that it didn't contaminate the rest of

your clothes too much."

"Ground contamination is always the better of the two options,"

Nawin said as he sat down. His zipper which was still open from

his bathroom adventure parted suddenly like the spreading

foreskin of the V of a vagina. The Laotian looked down at the

off-white pee stained hill of underwear within and yet the

artistic demigod did not notice. "Airing out the old elephant, I

see."

"What?"

"It can't always be happy to be kept away in its smelly stall,

now can it? A little air can be just the thing for its mental

health. Also a good airing out is as good as soap and water.

That's always been my theory." The Laotian grinned

mischievously, and then looked out of the window.

Nawin supposed that he was making reference to an elephant in a

hamlet, one in a forest, or one in a field of a passing

landscape. "Do they put elephants in stables?" asked Nawin with

ingenuous naivety as he pondered the meaning of the Laotian's

questions.

The Laotian burst out in a laughter which started out as a mild

guffaw before burning away any acrimony against opulent

Bangkokians, their ignorance, and more specifically, this rich

Thai's obtuseness, to become a pleasant and embracing cacophony

of good will.

Nawin noticed a blanketed entity at his feet that puzzled him

and made the reason for the laughter cease to matter. Then the

Laotian spoke and the blanketed one who was half on the floor

and the two seats before the window was forgotten.

"So, a rich man like you doesn't know where elephants are kept

but then why would you? I guess it wouldn't have been something

that you would have studied in college." He waited for a

response but all that he got was the artist's furrowed look of

puzzlement followed by an aloof stare. Like a faithful childish

protégé who was fascinated by the most mundane of motion and

noise, Nawin, an animistic thinker even in this more than waning

prime of life, began to listen to the fan that rotated above the

luggage. At first he was merely wondering why the fan was now

on, stirring the cold air, thereby making the air-conditioned

area seem colder yet; but as he listened to its grating squeal

he imagined that he was hearing the fan talk to him all so

discreetly. It was whispering that the vibrations heard by the

man who was supposing it to be the actual sound of the fan were

fallacious. It was saying that, as with the sound of the fan, so

was the Laotian's voice and all specious sound: that sound, by

being heard indirectly if not vicariously, existed only as an

adulterated sensation. According to the fan true sounds were

unknown for one was not hearing what true vibrations sounded

like inside a given source, but was merely hearing the air

vibrating from its disturbances, or more obliquely one was

hearing disturbed air from a vibration that then became

disturbed and distorted once more in hitting the eardrums and

this thwarted sound, correctly attributed as originating from a

given source, was incorrectly attributed as being the real sound

of that source. Likewise, said the fan, the Laotian's cologne

and aftershave, like any smell, were a diffusion of higher

concentrations of molecules to lower ones, so he was not

smelling the scent of the man mixed with the artificial

chemicals as they were on him, but the scent of him within his

perfumed mixture as a less dense concentration oozing away from

the man, leaving him and diffusing with other molecular scents,

and the more one was at a distance, the less distinct this or

any smell became. Sight was unabsorbed color that was exuded

from a given presence although the mind believed it to be the

filling in, the materialization, of the object's outline. All

senses seemed fallible, and the world of the senses seemed like

a voice echoing in a canyon, and no more real than that. It

suddenly seemed to him that his own marriage, an abstraction

concocted in his and her head, and then spilled as ink on a

tenuous sheet of easily torn paper made hallow in ceremony, and

by a deistic, bodily fluid overseer, imbued less sense than the

nonsense the Laotian was speaking. This thought that a caring

relationship grounded in many years could dissipate with such

precipitancy by a mutual friend jumping off a balcony was proof

of the vaporous quality of all things. It tortured him in one

deranged second for all was a phantasm of the mind and the

phantasmagoria of an impermanent existence. It made him feel his

true proportions as a disintegrating speck in a microcosm of the

galaxy.

He once again recalled Noppawan's summary of an incident that

should have been an augury to them both. It consisted of facts

bloated in an imagined scene. Momentarily distracted at hearing

the window sliding on a sill, she was unconcerned and returned

to typing her handout at the computer in her office at

Assumption University when a premonition suddenly shot a cold

and macabre sensation through her mind and body. Running to the

back of the office, she saw Kimberly in a black rectangular hole

of the open window. She saw her in that empty black hole of the

self fluttering loose, tattered, and free like a banner on the

fade of the university building they were in. "Oh no, Kimberly.

Come down from the window. Please." "I want to die," "No, you

don't. There are so many people who care about you. You don't

want that!" "No one cares. Not really." "Oh, you know that is

not true. Unlike me, you have a ton of friends and close friends

in me--Nawin too. He would be here in an instant if he knew

that you were so unhappy. We didn't know it was so bad,

Kimberly. It's late. Come down and go to bed. Things always seem

clearer in the morning when emotions burn down in sleep." "I'm

just a hole to men here--nothing else." She was crying but her

weakened voice undulated loudly with strident, random words. "A

pearly white sperm receptacle here and there, in America and

France, just a woman, another one, with nothing special in her.

I'll never find anyone to spend my years with, the way you have

with Nawin. I'll never have someone like him." "Please Kimberly,

life isn't easy for any woman. You think living with him is

easy? All these women he paints and pants after. Come down

Kimberly. We are the same, you and I." "It's different. You have

him. I just have all these others whose only use in me is to

make claims on my body for to them I am only a tool for

pleasure." "Sometimes I wish that someone would claim me. He is

not mine, you know. I just share him in these compromises of

marriage." "You do share him, don't you? Will you?" "What?"

"Share him with me...not like them but like a marriage--the

three of us." With a display of their desperation and sometimes

given conscesions in love, such people never committed suicide.

That was what he and Noppawan told themselves immediately before

and during Kimberly's impregnation and pregnancy: that she would

never really kill herself: that had been the belief.

These voices (in large part his own imagining but plausible and

faithful to the outline delineated by Noppawan's narrative)

resounded in his brain and, in consensus with his own verdict on

himself, they condemned him. Still he snuggled up to them for a

middle aged man with no one was naked and discomfited in

purpose. Holding tight to what had passed away he believed that

he was less lonely even though conversely this snuggling to

imagined abstractions with female bodies, facsimiles of what was

that was distorted into what was not, made him feel even more

lonely than he would otherwise have felt. He imagined these

voices of the past and the dead, and yet for all their distinct

clarity, they were at best half-imagined impressions, half

concocted indentions in the damp putty of his brain. In reality

they were as behind him as the township of Udon Thani that the

train had now passed through. They had parted with him and fled

like the bird that had witnessed his homosexual solo-eroticism

in the fetid toilet of the train. How alone he felt; and the

thought of the three of them shopping for baby clothes together,

watching DVDs, or roasting marshmallows on the ends of sticks

held over a barbeque grill near the swimming pool of his estate

made him queasy. He continued to query himself incessantly with

what-ifs. If he and Noppawan had invited Kimberly into their

home, he wondered, would none of this have happened? And yet it

seemed that something else could have taken place. Had this

invitation been made and accepted she might have drowned herself

in the pool. Who was to say she would not have done so? He

excoriated himself for appeasing his guilt with such a morbid

thought. Maybe tomorrow a mega-sized typhoon of global warming

dimensions would pass over Bangkok and clean the slate of people

like himself, obscene drawings of human denizens; but then he

was going northeast to the sleepiest of the world's comatose

capitals, Vientiane. What could happen to him there? Only if he

were to ignore the illustrated signs of a man being electrocuted

that graced the whole of Vientiane, and grab a low electrical

wire would an end come to him there. Only then would he end his

umbilical connection to this immoral world where existence could

be so randomly and arbitrarily obliterated to some, as life's

gluttons watched it as entertaining news from their television

sets, and where under the wrong circumstances a good man might

become a looter, a thief, a prostitute, or a beggar.

"I said, if you weren't listening, that I guess it wouldn't have

been studied in college. Why would you know if an elephant is

kept in a stall in the back yard, tied behind a tree of a

neighbor's penthouse, or kept in a neighbor's wife? Elephant

studies can be confusing to any novice especially when he

doesn't make a distinction between the two species of elephants.

Honestly, I think that with both breeds, the figurative and the

literal elephants, there are stalls for them. It is certainly

true of the figurative when they can be tamed enough to stay in

stalls."

"You know, I don't have a clue what you are talking about. You

are rambling shit like a crazy man."

"You don't?"

"No, but I'm okay with that, really. I'm just listening to your

amusing nonsense and not caring particularly whether or not

there is anything at all sensible in it."

The Laotian laughed until the point where he had difficulty

swallowing his saliva. Then he coughed, and regaining his voice,

he cleared his throat. The grave expression of gagging on his

saliva as if were as gaggable as ox tongue, roasted duck

gizzards, and fried cockroach in burnt rouge cream at a Laotian

restaurant attempting to emulate French cuisine, only lasted a

moment and then he smiled, putting at ease disconcerted Nawin

who was now rising from his seat as if being called on to

perform the Heimlich maneuver. "That's good. More people should

do that--not be so serious all the time... just realize that you

are fucking around with your time, keeping your life from being

entirely meaningless with a personal..." He could not find the

word.

"Experience?"

"Yes but more. 'Titillation'--titillation here and there; but I

think that we did have a subject. We were talking about

elephants if I remember correctly." His words did not come

volubly. They were forced and contrived like one intent on

seeming educated. The sentences were spoken slowly like one in

search of latent words that were once heard somewhere but,

because of social-economic privation, stagnated in

unfamiliarity. "I have noticed that in this, your country, rural

compatriots sometimes bring elephants into large cities in the

hope of selling their fine fodder to the pedestrians so that

they might have the experience of elephant feeding."

Nawin was amused at the strained efforts the Laotian underwent--

with some formality of diction--to impress him. "Yes, in Laos

too, I would suppose."

"I don't know, really. I haven't seen people pay money to feed

them in Vientiane, if they do, but that doesn't mean that they

don't. But it would make more sense doing it in someplace where

the people are filthy rich, and I guess seeing large literal

animals is a bit of a novelty in cities like Bangkok where they

are so used to the open exhibition of the figurative breeds. I'm

just trying to imagine those silky hands of yours scooping up

elephant dung off sidewalks. I am trying to imagine how someone

like you would cope in being a beggar pulling an elephant down

the streets."

"No better or worse than other beggars. What would give you the

idea that I am from a privileged background? Believe me, I am a

self- made man and these "silky" hands, as you call them, have

done a lot of things. Do you have a name?"

"Boi."

"Tell me something, Boi, I'm curious; do the beggars with their

elephants just sleep with them randomly on sidewalks? Where do

they go after shoppers go home and man and beast need to sleep?"

"It's a mystery," said the Laotian and then grabbed one of

Nawin's hands. "Thai silk. Just as I thought; if these things

were not so large or so strong, or at least stronger than the

average woman, their texture..."

"The silkiness?"

"Yes, the silkiness--the silkiness might seem to some like that

of a woman's hands. Fortunately you are darkly complected. That

makes you more masculine in a pretty boy, middle aged man sort

of way." Nawin chuckled at the absurdity of someone making a

study of his hands. "You haven't exactly used these things very

much in hard labor, have you? Yes, if they were not so large and

strong they would pass off as women's hands. What is it that you

do for a living, anyhow?"

"I am an artist."

"An artist? That would explain hands like these. What do you

draw?" he asked while returning the hand.

"Naked women."

"And people pay you for that?"

"They seem to."

"Do they pay well?"

"Yes, of course. I am a rich man according to you."

"In Thailand, one finds both the calloused and the silky types

but in Laos even some of the higher government officials are

workers in their secondary vocations. They all have the

damnedest hands."

"What? Do you study the hands of government officials too?"

"A brief survey, I guess. I wouldn't think of it as a study."

It seemed to Nawin that the two of them were merely crows cawing

at the night to give texture to the air and all vacuous

substance in order to make themselves and their world seem real.

It seemed to him that small talk and bantering were, as the

Laotian said, titillations to make something personal in the

void of time and space. "How do you know that I'm a loafer?"

asked Nawin with a laugh.

"Did I say that you were?"

"I don' remember. Maybe not exactly like that but you implied it

anyhow. How do you know that I am a loafer?"

"I don't. I just guess that you are."

"I am, you know."

"Are what?"

"A loafer. Not much of an artist now. Retired."

"Retired?"

"Uninspired. They are synonymous words."

"Why would anyone want your paintings? That is what I'm trying

to figure out. Video porn... DVD porn for those with computers,

okay. They are closer to the real thing, aren't they?" Nawin

smiled widely. He felt reaffirmed and grounded in the

inconsequence of vain, lofty pursuits and his retirement finally

felt good. Then the Laotian said, "There is some real porn that

I am witnessing right now. It is too bad it's just that of any

locker room scene" and then he pointed down at Nawin's open

zipper.

Nawin looked down and smiled widely. He was before the Laotian

in an unzipped state after having masturbated to an image of him

in his head (the same type of illusion that a man had in

copulating with his wife to keep illusory human existence on the

planet at all) and yet he felt no particular compunction for

what he had done or what a man tended to do with his own body in

the privacy of his mind, or in the intimacy of a real embrace.

In all cases it was the massage of his own body to ease himself

from the stress of thinking, knowing, and having to live in a

world of illusions. It was the massage of one's body which one

rightfully owned if anyone did (certainly not one's partner) and

thus this acknowledgement repudiated, and rendered inane words

like adultery and perversion.

12

Left to himself for a moment, he slipped into a brief sleep

where, once again, he was with Kimberly. He too was a prey of

gravity, and they were falling rapidly from the balcony of her

apartment in the Queen's Tower at Assumption University. The two

of them, morsels down the gullet of skies, seemingly torn by

winds active as enzymes, pummeled the air futilely with

desperate, flailing limbs in an attempt to swim through the air

from whence they came but could never return. Hardly an occasion

for declaring mai pen rai, still there were scarce traces of

hope; and as hope was consciousness, there were scarce traces of

the latter as well. If, as scared as he was, he was cognizant

enough to have a group of interrelated thoughts beyond the

perennial wish for "God", which redundantly played in his head,

to save him, it was in reference to a belief that there were

some actions that could be reversed. It seemed to him that as a

change of one's mind could cause a departure to become a

homecoming, so there was a remote possibility that this action

could also be reversed. Maintaining hope and consciousness,

wisely, it did not occur to him that such a return was

physically impossible since beings plunged through life just

once. Shrieking as they punctured two large holes that made one

prodigious gulf in the thin metallic tiles comprising the awning

over the swimming pool, they plunged together, splashing into a

fiery inferno of loneliness before the last of their inevitable,

lethal descent.

He woke, fully startled to find himself in wakefulness.

Concentrating on where he was to allow the excesses of the

saturation of sleep, a more temporary reality, to be shaken from

his sodden neurons like wetness from an animal's fur, he then

did nothing further. He merely allowed it to slowly evaporate

from consciousness. It seemed odd to him that in all these

diurnal commutes between wakefulness and sleep that the mind

should continue to allow either of these two states to overwhelm

the other. It seemed odd that after so long it would continue to

be sequacious to trust what was experienced in either of the

chemically induced realms but then, he asked himself, what

choice did it have? Was not sand layered by wind and waves? It

was; and so the human brain was molded with whatever energy and

force happened to be applied to it. Then, in the next second of

thoughts, it did not seem odd at all; and conversely, he

speculated that perhaps most individuals considered both states

specious and succumbed, like prisoners, to the coercion in

apathetic numbness.

Was it not so in this city of Bangkok where incense was snagged

in carbon exhausts and its residents were engaged in amusements

to escape their small speck on this rock of the planet? They

were a lackadaisical ethnicity and their amusements were

definitely petty--the young chasing balls and finding the extent

of their physical prowess; carnal youth in sexual peccadilloes;

the worker ants who, when not at work, and no longer succumbing

to that role that gave some structure to their existence,

spending time in evening revelries about owning their own

businesses; elderly women engaged in Tai Chi and their husbands

in Chinese checkers on park benches; the poor along the canals,

clustered in evenings near their neighbors' shacks for beer and

cigarette pilfering, sometimes the men comic book swapping and

always musing the day's pettiness amusingly; the rich

speculating on how to invest and have more, seeking large flat

screen televisions and the fastest computers at Panthip Plaza,

the most fashionable clothes in the best of malls, and

exchanging tips on how to improve their landscapes and gardens;

but which of them, in the thickets of men, felt or thought

deeply about the world? They were as wild vines that grew with

the rest of nature on the rock of the planet and sprawled human

entanglements and preoccupations thoughtlessly upon it.

It was only from the constancy of waking in the same bed in

which he went to sleep, waking to the same issues that he went

to sleep with, and finding himself next to the person he fell

asleep with the previous night, that sleep was considered sleep

and not wakefulness, and wakefulness was considered wakefulness

instead of sleep; and yet knowing this did nothing for him. He

felt discombobulated as though this dream were of more substance

than dew over the eyes that he would eventually dry from, a

sandstorm within the self where, were it not for his own angst,

that same regret that he felt a dozen yesterdays ago and was a

constancy that would commandeer a lifetime of perennial guilt-

ridden tomorrows, he would not know reality if it were to

swallow him. "I feel a constancy of pain and therefore I am," he

thought satirically.

For a couple of seconds he noted how, from where he was

positioned inwardly and outwardly (pinioned inside himself as he

remained seated a few feet from the window) the swath of fields

and outlying roads of small towns hurried past him in an

incessant green and grey smudge of flat images. Even though they

fleeted by incessantly, they were like pop-ups from a children's

book; and for a few additional seconds he began to withdraw into

a self that was deflating surreally into a diminutive and

flattened form in an imagined land of stationary pop-ups where

the unreal was still and preserved instead of the seemingly

real, which was always wide-open and fleeting. Then this too,

this relinquishing oneself to the void to cease this expending

of one's energy in sifting through all of these illusions in

illusionary existence, formulating "reality" based upon

garnering the most plausible of the illusions, ceased with

hearing the loud yawning of this stranger named Boi. Glancing at

him, Nawin displayed the notorious Thai smile which was always

feigned and hospitable with the genuine warmth of wanting the

recipient to like him if not of needing to be liked. He did it

almost like any reflexive jerk, a physical retreat of the body,

as he ruminated on this word, stranger.

When, he asked himself, did a person cease being a stranger? Had

he not known Noppawan since he was fourteen years old (as if

years meant anything)? Had they not become soul mates for the

reason that each of them had possessed empathy for the other

innocent being charred in the torturous hells of family? He had

and they had; and yet upon gaining a child from him she had

treated him with indifference as if, having obtained what she

had always wanted (one of her husband's sperm fertilizing an egg

and allowing her a son even if it was through her best friend),

he was now irrelevant and made all the more so, weeks later, at

Kimberly's demise, when she locked him out physically as well as

psychologically. He had not even known her. In all of these

years of marriage on top of those comprising their friendship of

youth he had not known her any more than one did the strangest

of strangers.

"Still tired," asked Nawin.

"Of course," said Boi. "There is little sleep for a man bunked

under another man...especially when under a man like you and

with socks stinking like that, like an elephant's breath...not

that the socks were the entire problem. Those were finally taken

away in the morning when I couldn't bear it anymore. They didn't

bother me after that. It was..." He stopped.

"It was what?" asked Nawin with a relieved chuckle, grateful for

flippant conversation to interpose his silent ponderings. The

idea that a Thai and a Laotian could not engage in conversation

without an elephant trudging through it almost tickled him to

tears.

"I don't know," he smirked knowingly. "I am used to sleeping in

the mornings so after they came and removed those contaminated

articles of yours I could have fallen back to sleep. For a while

I attempted to wave away the remaining cloud of stink so that I

could do just that. I rested quietly enough after a time. It

wasn't as if I was asphyxiating from those smells any longer.

The cloud was still there... extant as they say... but I could

have slept were it not for this weird feeling that somebody was

looking at me--looking at my body. Have you ever felt that

way?"

"No."

"Not at all?"

"No, I don't think so. Not really. I mean with my wife. Maybe at

times she watched me when I was sleeping. I wouldn't know."

"You wouldn't know?" he mocked. "And these models that you say

that you paint, would you know it if one of them watched you

while you slept?"

"I wouldn't know."

"You do paint them?"

"Yes."

"And get butt naked with them, I guess, if you paint them as

nudes. Who wouldn't, or at least who wouldn't attempt it unless

he was 100 percent gay?"

"Of course I am intimate with my models. That goes hand in

hand."

"Do you ever watch them as they are sleeping?"

"I guess, maybe once or twice. Well, now that I think about it,

I've painted a few in restless positions while asleep. This is

an odd question to be asking me."

"Why? We are friends, aren't we? A friend can be one of hours

and not years, and it is still a friendship, isn't it?"

"I suppose so," he said. It was the same question that Nawin had

postulated silently in his own head and he felt even more

inclined to call him a friend for this affinity to his own

private ponderings.

"If it were me I would not get any sleep at all. I'd be staring

at them continually. I think it is the same for you if you are a

painter of naked beauties; but then maybe they are more cute and

handsome than they are beautiful."

Nawin smirked and then grimaced. "I'm not sure what you mean by

that," he said but he knew, or at least sensed, an attempt to

deface his masculinity with homosexual innuendos and thus he

manipulated his words and actions accordingly. "Anyhow, most men

would consider them quite beautiful, think what you want."

Having said this, and glad that he had, he still was not content

for the Laotian to think what he wanted and so he pulled out a

wallet that contained some slides of his favorite paintings that

were there with some of his favorite condoms. Deliberately

pulling out the former and dropping one of the latter, he showed

some of the slides while stuffing a condom back into his wallet.

Boi held each of the slides up to the light of the window and

squinted. "Well, what do you know? You are an artist. What are

these beauties that are your subject matter?"

"Ladies of the night. Patpong professionals for the most part."

"Beautiful."

"Do you think so? But then what is beauty? An overweight middle

aged man can be considered appealing to an anorexic and her

thinness, sadness, and youth can seem beautiful to him if both

lack qualities that the other possesses, or have qualities

mirrored in the partner which makes them feel less alone. That

is my theory, for what it is worth."

"You are a deep one, aren't you?" asked the stranger.

He thought of his own limited sex symbol status. In this decade

and a half of being glossed onto covers of esoteric art

magazines and the photographs of him with articles being

emblazoned on the back pages of Sunday newspapers, this married

but eligible hedonist with a sensitive stroke was considered

handsome and debonair, luminous in sensuality, jaunty and

recalcitrant, and an empathic sufferer for those whom he studied

and represented. He was alluring for these qualities and most

importantly for being fully comfortable with himself as such.

He, "Naughty Nawin," was a luminosity in artistic circles who

was more desirable for having been desired by others; and yet in

all this time he sensed it for the inferior illusion that it

was. In a world of complete illusions, a plausible reality was

really the thing that was most desired and clung to and so he

had clung to Noppawan, a girl who hated family as much as he

did, and yet by clinging he had made a family with her. He had

forfeited bachelorhood, as much as a Patpong artist could, and

had slipped himself into their union only to find that the woman

he was married to could not conceive a child and that by her

being infertile his days of bachelorhood (except at least on a

legal piece of paper) would be as perennial as the wild flower

days of his life. He knew illusions so well, for they were his

art to convey truth in fiction and reality in abstraction. He

liked producing color on canvasses that would act as a mirror of

indictment on this world, where the weak were depicted as abused

and falling prey to illnesses like the dogs that were born in

the streets, kicked, starved, mange-ridden, and dead early and

hideously. He saw this perennial cycle of victims going on

forever and only nuclear bombs falling like cleansing rain

stopping it. He knew how like a magician he could cast a spell

on others through his canvass, but he also understood the

potency of words and by words he might now circumvent any

suspicions about his sexuality which, the way he saw it, was

"straight" and intact, despite a few strange caprices that blew

in here and there.

"Supermodels and actresses are considered universally beautiful

but I don't think it has much merit. I think that beauty really

is in the eyes of the beholder for the earlier reasons that I

gave. It is only because of the extent of their physical curves

of femininity which are beyond the normal range for most men to

find in a partner that supermodels and actresses are depicted

and believed as some type of a universal beauty. They would only

be considered slightly more beautiful were it not for their

fame. The fame makes their style of beauty become embedded into

minds as something supernatural. In most cases, I think, beauty

is just what we lack. As I am a man, I lack the tender touches

and graces of a woman, those gentle curves and scents, and

responding like a man I want to thrust myself into that

gentility whose hands worship a man's physique. I want to rivet

and devour." He knew that his words would be considered

outlandish in Thai society where everything was done with

maximum freedom but never spoken, and he knew that his turgid

words, spoken as if he were the professor of beauty, would bore

the most pedantic. Still, that was the aim: he wanted to take

the stranger on a meandering path of circumlocutions that would

shake him from earlier thoughts and deposit him in this concept

that he, Nawin Biadkang, the prostitute artist, was and forever

would be a lady's man. "Women are the viand of a man's eyes, the

fruit for the bon vivant." He used French words that were

retained in English without being Anglicized to give puissance

to what he thought of condescendingly as his befuddled mother

tongue. In that respect he was no different than any

supercilious upper class American or Englishmen who required

superior utterance even though to most of the contemporary

world's populace the elite language was base English itself.

Then he glanced toward the aisle and surrounding seats for

although not really embarrassed by his words, ensconced as he

was in his role as a libertine, he was deferential enough to

worry that he would inadvertently bludgeon a listener with his

peculiar thoughts. He then became inexplicably reticent although

no one was listening.

With conversation continuing to seem cogent, moving on

stretched, unraveled ends, Boi was on the verge of accepting

Nawin as a womanizer and might have possibly done so were it not

for the artist's cowardly withdrawal into himself which

befuddled the befuddlement. Nawin had turned away and was

staring at the fan clipping speedily at the air. There could be

no other interpretation other than that this Nawin (on the birth

certificate, Jatupon, a word that still thrust a cold chill down

his spine as cold slackened his pace, freezing him to danger),

feeling uncomfortably seated on exaggerated truth, was becoming

fixated on these rotating blades dicing the air the way the

second hand of a clock seemed to suggest the dicing of a man's

life incrementally. Due to the extent of his boredom, to Boi he

was a suspicious character, an ambiguous puzzle needing to be

solved and a landscape of contrasts to set his claim upon. Nawin

sensed this intrigue but gained no satisfaction from it. All

that he wanted, he told himself, was to relax and not think so

much when thinking was such morbid drudgery like an impoverished

gold seeker sifting through mud and obtaining merely that.

"Wasn't my reason for coming here to purge people from my life,

and live purely in complete empty space without needing others

to plug up my loneliness," he thought. "And yet here is one more

bit of dross stuffing my gutter."

He realized the impression that he was making and so he smiled

and looked into the stranger's face. "So, did you like the

paintings? --not that as slides held up to the light anyone

could see them all that well."

"They were done well."

"Unlike you who have probably gained a lot of various skills in

your labor, I don't have many practical skills. I can't fix

anything. Not even a drawer that is ajar in a night table. Never

learned to cook anything but noodles from my parents' restaurant

and my brothers' noodle stands. But I know how to draw naked

whores. That is for sure. I guess it is my gift."

"If those slides are your own work, you do, my friend. You draw

them so well, so exquisitely, so astoundingly with all the

feminine curves and wiles just right; and I am sure that after

you paint and love them they sometimes like to watch you sleep

and you like to watch them sleep. But that was not the nature of

my query. I am meaning someone whom you don't know all that well

looking down on you. Like I was earlier this morning, you are

not quite asleep and so you hear him--yes a man, as it is a

man's breathing that you hear. Earlier I was lying alone here in

my bottom bunk drowsy but not asleep when I swear I heard

someone drop from an upper sleeper and got the sense that he was

examining my body, wanting it. Strange, huh?"

"I would imagine that it would be," said Nawin.

For a moment he was stunned to have these crevices of opaque

light so heavily and obliquely invade the filthy corners of his

mind, the dark enlightenment being alluded to, both parties

seeming to peer onto it (he himself undoubtedly so and this

smirking of the Laotian and his eyes that seemed to pierce his

soul so knowingly could not have equivocal interpretations). He

kept debating whether he should stay or go and found himself,

due to his indecisiveness, floundering in desperate ambivalence.

Clearly he wanted to move to a different seat so in that sense

of knowing his own dominant yearning and witnessing it unopposed

by contrary yearnings he was not ambivalent at all and yet, he

asked himself, how could he just go? To go so precipitously

would be rude even if done with the obsequious gesture of the

wai (although even this was complicated by the fact that he was

the older and vastly more affluent of the two parties and should

not be the one initiating such gestures); and to leave for one

of the now vacant seats would only aggravate suspicion. The idea

of the Laotian having proof of his decadence would dog whatever

specious tranquility he hoped to have in a vacant space of his

own. He could stay. True, it would be uncomfortable but then, he

told himself, there was not any option for solving any problem

that was ever entirely perfect. He was uncomfortable now, and

would surely be even more so with the passing moments. Such

discomfort would sprawl like a dark vine onto the minutes,

strangling them like a rope, or in excessive growth smothering

them like a baby buried in its foam bath. And yet if he were

inordinately resolute if not obdurate in staying where he was,

would not the tempestuousness pass away easily by acting the

part of a god? Zeus-like in shooting his thunder bolts, albeit

thunder bolts of conversation against that soft epistemological

core of a man's mind which realized that nothing was known

absolutely, he could easily impart the venom of doubt. He could

lead the conversation into inconsequential matters such as the

latest news about these Moslem separatists in the South or the

seventy year old saffron frocked monk who mistakenly pulled out

glue from the medicine cabinet, inserted it into one of his

eyes, and then allowed a colleague to remedy it by applying

paint thinner into his hallowed orbs.

Anything believed to be known, could be doubted as illusory when

the possibilities of the present were continually supplanting

those of the past. By continuing to talk it would become more

real than the Laotian's vague recollection of him staring at his

body. Still he did not know what to say, and feeling that

discomfort, he wanted the closure of all communication with a

stranger who knew him more than his own wife.