These homosexual feelings had swept out _An Apostate: Nawin of Thais

him in an inferno of desire, which only masturbation in the toilet had

been able to douse (this particular desire all the more savage for

being so alien to adulthood). Still with the appropriate undaunted

response such a caprice and aberration did not need to brand him in

the Laotian's mind or his own. And yet this chill that seemed to drip

onto his spine like water from a leaky pipe in the tiled ceiling of

the bathroom, was incessant; and perennial was the trepidation that

the Laotian should know the cryptic depravity that lived in the messy

far reaches of his brain, and the latent whims that gushed out from

his childhood memories. For a few seconds Nawin was able to stare at

his curious rival with a resolute confidence and a lambent smile but

it did not last, and so he stared out of the window and withdrew back

into himself. He once again began to romanticize those cars of

laborers with their families. It would be there, to them, from which

wafting scents of dirt, rice, and wildly lush and weedy greenery, lost

molecules from the whole, would pour into open windows. It would be

there in poignant rushes of wind slapping their faces that, complacent

or even content, these laborers in shared travels to the homes of

extended family would find meaning in their relationships. From the

illusion of desire and love, of transient rushes of feeling, the

families existed and became the boundaries and summation of

themselves--accidents and stumblings from that which in ignorance

begat the unions and material presences to which they tolerated, and

to some degree cared for, as they were extensions of themselves, their

fate.

The bundle (the feet on the Laotian's seat and head leaning

against the edge of his own) began to move and like a decarpeted

Cleopatra her face became visible and it was beautiful.

Throughout these moments of the conversation she, whoever she

was, had been at his knee all along even though, oddly enough,

her presence had registered in his brain with the vaguest of

awareness. Now that he was fully cognizant of her, he perceived

this oddity of having overlooked her earlier as a somewhat

amusing anecdote in a listless, perennial train trip largely in

need of even the most dull amusements, a fact which was droll to

him in its own way; and yet outwardly he hid his smile and tried

to restrain himself from glancing downward. He told himself that

he did so out of Thai modesty which mandated some degree of

reticence, or at least a bit of a reluctance, to broach

questions (being installed by cultural indoctrination this was

the most frequently used program which, when lacking an

operator's manual for one's life, even iconoclasts like him

would switch on reflexively in an effort to make an appropriate

social response before reconsideration and subsequent action).

Indeed that did have some bearing, but for the most part his

silence was in the hope of keeping her there longer.

Clearly, she was now exhaling her warmth onto one of his knees

so, he argued to himself, why not patiently allow the query of

who she was to emerge slowly with her presence when waking would

at last tear open that cocoon. As bereft of women and

relationships as he now was and as confused as he was by what

had transpired inwardly immediately before and during his odd

release in the toilet, it was quite pleasant to imagine her as a

more docile and devoted member of his long throng of scattered

harem over the years and now, at the age of forty, decades of

adulthood. He knew that this desiring of a woman to stay on his

knee was not all that different from the previous night when

with beer in his system and insecurity at being chased by the 4

and 0 which were almost as tangible as stalkers, he had hugged a

pillow to secure some limited sleep. He knew it, and he knew

that this repugnant human weakness suggested that the peace of

mind he hoped to obtain by a Buddhist trip into Vientiane could

be easily ravaged by wild desires as random and pointless as the

landscape of weeds and sedges about the train, for desire was

innate as the yearning to breathe. This wild mono-homo incident,

he somewhat cogently told himself from the more than nominal

truth that was therein, had merely been a release, a mechanical

need to discharge a full load of semen rather than a desire for

one of the same gender; and he fervently yearned for the

obsequious knee doter to stay where she was for as long as it

lasted, not that he would have disturbed her repose if it were

not intertwined with his own pleasure as well as a need for a

secure sense of self-identity. Was not that, he asked himself,

what made the distinction of a kind man from the rest of the

predatory male animals: a patience and tolerance of others'

happiness, and a willingness to invest time to secure it even at

the cost of one's own discomfort? If so, kindness was the virtue

of the former he, Jatupon, who, in lost, forlorn boyhood, when

not wanting to disturb sleeping cats allowed them to lay hours

at a time on his lap. He guffawed silently in his own mental

chamber at such sanctimonious, thrasonical ravings, for childish

behavior of long ago was not evidence for his untenable claim of

being a kind man and thus a good one. It had no relevance to his

barely nominal interaction with the beauty that was sleeping at

his knee. Furthermore, he recriminated himself, his fame came in

depicting the exploitation of others which was in itself a type

of exploitation even were he to reside in the deepest squalor as

an expose journalist, a Mother Theresa, or some other paragon

for ending injustice and suffering. Had not his whores sought

deliverance for themselves and their impoverished families

because of him? Had not jejune sojourns been made to the homes

of their respective rural families where he had to eat with them

as one of their members? Had not a belief that he would leave

his wife for them and an innocent expectation that they would be

redeemed by this deliverer burned within their breasts, hearts,

and clitorises? "Am I a good man? I rather doubt that I am," he

disparaged himself. He even doubted goodness. One never

interacted with anyone unless pleasure was in some way

associated to it. A human, even the best of them, was hardly the

making of a saint. Clearly, were they not so soft and his need

for love so great, he would not have stayed in that

uncomfortable posture on a tree stump outside his parents home,

long ago, to allow cats to sleep upon him.

This idea that pleasure was interconnected with all pursuits, a

viand of a thought, could well have become a repast if not a

banquet for discernment; and as an artist's dissertation was

done on canvas, ideas for a painting, now raw feeling boiling to

the rim, were on the verge of being shaped in his mind. And yet,

he dismissed them. He repudiated them by telling himself that he

would never rank as a great artist, that he was void of color,

theme, and technique.

A knee doter--he could barely hold back his laughter (how easily

he was amused by himself, a wonted practice from the vestige of

childhood along those banks of the Chao Phraya river in

Ayutthaya when solitary play with the elements inherent in air,

rain, and dirt and the chase of an idea scurrying through a mind

which was barely aware of its presence, brought him peace from

the incessant barrage of disparagement meant to stomp upon him,

their cockroach, in that war called family). The verdant

landscape, now near Nongkai and her sister city of Vientiane,

came incessantly toward the passengers as the train moved

through it. It came intimately. Every minute of a man's life

that was not in sexual intercourse, he thought, was in an

intercourse of a very different kind, in union with circumstance

and thereby impregnated with new thought that made him a new

man. A knee doter, he inwardly chuckled (once again he was

pondering how easily he was amused by himself, a practice he had

become accustomed to from the vestige of that hell called family

in which, if one's sensitivity was intact enough to not laugh at

a sundry of crude commentaries such as the father's daily

repetition that it did not matter what a woman looked like as

she could be denuded and a sack put over her head, and these

manly attempts at being the most clever one at belittling the

other (mostly aiming for him, that easiest and most sensitive of

targets) these rudimentary and vulpine or wolfish members of the

pack would attempt a full annihilation of him in words--all of

them that was but his brother and tacit protector, Kazem, whose

hard eyes were his fort, but whose gun would discharge later in

his rectum). He found this peculiar idea of her as the

obsequious love slave, as much as the source behind it, not only

amusing but arousing. It had always seemed to him, fettered as

he once had been in ideas and paint, obsessed with transforming

sordid memories and thought into color as he inexplicably gazed

at a barren wall of canvas, that one never made love to a woman

but a facsimile of one in one's own brain which that brain

distorted to meet the orgasm it longed for. It always seemed to

him that the craving for women was merely for a spark to

stimulate fire in the vacuity of the brain so as to liberate it

from catatonic list, the result of boredom, and thus orgasm was

merely for oneself even if by chasing illusions of "love" a real

child materialized along the way. Thinking it now, it was

nothing new for him, for to him, Jatupon, who was once in love

with his brother and scrutinized the validity of human emotions

thereafter as Nawin, feelings were gossamer threads of chemicals

prompting puppet man to breed and breed elsewhere. Marriage had

at least taught him that tempestuous feelings of love and

despondency could pass if one gave them little credence and by

being unmoved by their promptings one could at least have some

years of success in obtaining a consistent uxorial presence in

his life. Love at first sight that was felt from brief

encounters was merely a neediness for an interesting presence to

stir up one's passion for life and end loneliness. It was always

transferred to a conceivably obtainable sense of beauty by which

to obtain immortality in a DNA continuum. For even love from a

sexual encounter, to have any substance of reality, had to be a

reciprocal neediness ground in years of friendship. And yet a

woman was a whore whose penchant for a parcel of land and a

branch of a tree to build her nest was an instinct that was as

fulsome as the worse of human hungers. His mother, to get her

few scanty goods, had closed her eyes to his suffering. His

wife, now that she acquired his child, took over his domain and

changed the locks. Ironically, here he was lusting after a woman

once again for did not every man require intimacy like butter

that would melt and fuse him and his sausage onto the woman and

her egg? Did he not secretly want a woman's bypassed stares in

the minutes of anger to diminish him into the dissolved umbrage

of her shadow like slinking into shadows of an alley to taunt

thieves and cutthroats to have some limited intimacy with death?

He allowed his ruminations to quickly shuffle through his mind

once more, for they amused him tremendously. Then he redundantly

centered on one in particular. Throughout this nascent

conversation with the Laotian, whoever this man was, who perhaps

used a nickname-alias of Boi as an easily worn but also easily

removed one word summation of himself, this pallid, young female

with flowing hair, just as he liked them, had been inches near

his thighs and he had barely even noticed it, as he was

preoccupied with this bizarre homosexual caprice that had rushed

upon him an hour earlier as zephyrs from the subconscious, and

thinking of ways to repudiate any judgment of him as a

homosexual that might be in the mind of the Laotian. Eagerly

succumbing to desire for the girl, and perhaps even exaggerating

any desire that he did possess to feel masculine within himself,

he deliberately glanced down at her even though he was once

trying not to do so. She looked like that nurse at Siriaj

Hospital who had been responsible for catering toward him whose

wife had broken his arm with a skillet and his heart with those

words, "The son that you and Kimberly brought into the world

should not have a hateful person like you as his father! Get

out! We're through!" For ongoing emotional comfort and to set up

dates for caresses he would be calling that nurse, smitten as

she was for his good looks and his marginal celebrity status. He

would be doing it now at this moment were it not for having

thrown away his telephone at the train station.

Although more clinch than original, an idea as trite as an

aphorism ruminated in his head. He told himself that ideas were

nothing unless one acted upon them; and yet from a less

cognizant mélange of disorganized feelings which had not been

refined into thought he was really meaning that fervent,

peculiar whims prompted all pleasurable acts and that unto

themselves these saccharin gusts that bate were of no substance

unless, in opposition to society at large, one partook of them

fully by allowing them to saturate to fulsome, insatiability in

behavior that was in complete accord with their perverse

dictates. In the brief space of that moment he repeatedly

averred this facile idea silently in his mind. He willed belief

into it like pumped air into a holey inner tube which, like in

his filthy boyhood in the still filthier Chao Phraya river in

Ayutthaya, for a brief time of escaped labor, he would ride.

Ideas are nothing unless one acts upon them: the thought was not

at all novel even if this particular context for it was. It

seemed to him to have Buddhist or Biblical implications which he

supposed as having been transmitted to him long ago through

someone affiliated with a temple or a church, although he was

not exactly sure how or when such an idea had been passed to him

or how it had become so embedded in his brain even if brains

were, for the most part, mere sponges. Oddly enough, there it

was, even in such a man so unfettered by moral restraints as he

was. It was like a blood-sucking mosquito but quaffing away

analytic and synthetic processes of idea making, aggravating

placid delusions in fever, and muddling the mind in an amphigory

of simplistic human nature, which when unchecked, was really

more carnal, multi-dimensioned, and beastly than anyone would

care to presume.

His prudish behavior on this day was diametrically opposed to

the Nawin of old who on virtually every other day of his adult

life but this one, from influences of feelings and underlying

thoughts which he hardly recognized, had followed his carnal

whims with women inordinately. A being, after all, did the

tricks that nature prompted him to do for the sweet bait of

pleasure and so from the perspective of carrying out those

functions that biological creatures were meant to, the physical

and perhaps only basis of morality, his own behavior was

exemplary. In the seats of his car parked around forested areas

within Bangkok's outlying roadside parks (the woods therein

avoided because of the bigger probability of the brambles of

"queers" accosting him), in forests far from the city, against

walls of women's toilets in gas stations, in discotheque parking

lots, in hotel rooms, empty upper staircases, in boyfriends' and

husbands' beds when they were out, several times, under banana

and durian trees in one particular father's orchard, once in a

pimp's bedroom when he was out, many times in the villagers own

bedrooms while they slept on living room floors eager to take

advantage of his copulatory pleasure to get a bit of financial

support for their families and fame for the daughters' whose

beauty he, the surrogate husband, would preserve on canvases,

abandoned buildings and tall skeletal structures that were never

quite built after the 1996 financial meltdown, once backstage

with a Russian ballerina after a performance of Swan Lake at the

Thai Cultural Center, several times between two enormous trash

bins at a stadium and once under its bleachers, never in his and

Noppawon's home unless occasionally with Noppawan herself but

very often in his studio, he had released his snake to a mostly

strange and less than angelic array of females who too were

victims of poverty and exploitation. Both them and a smaller

second set as well (a set to which each respective woman behaved

as both friend and lover until invariably insisting that he

obtain a divorce from his wife, a strident and resonating demand

that despite his wishes to the contrary, always caused an

avalanche of debris to fall upon them both in a closure of the

relationship that turned as black and mordant as light sucked

into a black hole and that was as indelible as death) he would

massage as gently as wind since, according to him, the Nawin

massage was more effective at loosening inhibitions and making

the body malleable to sexual positioning than the pryings and

twistings of the Thai variant, listen intensely to their

troubles during pillow talks in which he reflected their

feelings like a psychologist, and kindly ejaculate into them the

venom and bite that were the gifts of his body.

With today perhaps being the exception; throughout his life it

always seemed to him, the exponential adulterer that he was,

that carnal caprices should not at all be repudiated when they

were all. Every rare, sublime thought that managed to get

through the savage millennia did so because of sordid,

procreative energy which manufactured the generations despite

imperfect performances of maladroit sperm missing their targets,

the targets most times missing, and even the walls of the

missing targets sometimes being some other type of wall, a wall

like his own wall, a man's wall.

If from a Christian source, the idea must have originated with

his aunt on his mother's side who had once dabbled in his life

with feigned love back in those early days of Jatupon when he

believed that this bit of extended family, this refined lady of

an exceptional marriage who was blood of his blood (which she

had willingly sold by buckets to a hoary senator with age

blemishes) would at last tug him back from the precipice or at

least intercede when he was foundering in the abyss of family.

Back then there was a belief in deliverers who would reach for

him while uttering charming, mellifluous words which all of the

family members would accede to. Back then there was a belief in

forgiveness, the righting of wrongs, that a time would come when

both mother and son would feel comfortable enough in each

other's presence to almost be able to speak openly about what

was happening to him in this monstrosity called family, that

there would be a time of not having to fear losing any remnant

of the maternal instinct for love which she still possessed and

occasionally demonstrated in brief tacit glances of

commiseration, that a day would finally come for this open

admission of the truth (although now he believed that it

probably never would have occurred even if the parents had not

died so early in that fatal automobile accident, which had led

to his subsequent indentured status as a noodle worker behind

his brothers' food cart and the late evenings/early mornings of

becoming, even more gratuitously, his brother, Kazem's "cheap

date," his "free hole"), and happy endings for this putative,

perennial propinquity called family which he had once thought of

as an everlasting substance that would one day satiate him with

meaning, and like a tsunami drown and bury his tiny, forlorn

existence in its eternal watery mass. His youth had cowered in

the corners of the shadows of family, and he had stayed within

them complacently, cognizant that every cockroach that was not

smashed sooner or later found a more preferable exit, and that

although it would seem forever, this time of the impermanent

first family would just be a brief space of years within one's

lifetime.

Art had been his way of taking umbrage. It had been his way of

committing that monstrous deed of giving a voice to the

miniscule cockroach by inserting a man's vocal cords within it.

How in early boyhood could he have known family to be merely

half-remembered battles, and diminished faces of long known and

scarcely understood combatants that the memories and critical

intelligence of an adult would present to him? He had believed

in the magical restoration of it then, child that he was, as if

self-interest were not a priority in human beings. Integrity was

rare and integrity for his sake rarer yet. Should he have

expected something greater from his aunt? To her he had been

cute, and so not having children of her own, she had dabbled in

a love for him, pampering him for a time with her neediness. She

was, after all, a human being seeking her own happiness as he

was; and unlike him, she probably never had a clue what

happiness was really. However, he did know despite often living

contrary to its precepts.

By his account happiness was seeing meaning in the blowing

branches of a tree on a murky, partly cloudy day that was as

ambiguous in weather as purpose, and expecting nothing greater

from his environment or fellow men than ambiguous and random

happenings on such a gloomy day. To find a bit of pleasure in

what was and not expect anything more: this was seeing innate

value instead of creating ideal scenarios, which were bound to

not happen and lead to disappointment.

The mystery of obtaining happiness was not so confusing but

sexuality, that ever changing river, was. As many times as he

pondered again this recent event, his ruminations churned up

vacuity and uncertainty for he still did not know whether or not

this mono-homosexual experience of masturbating one time to the

image of a male in a toilet of a train on a day of panicking

over having turned forty constituted a thought that was acted

upon, and so the aphorism did nothing for him. If meant to

liberate him from guilt or cure him of sexual depravity this

nostrum had less efficacy than a placebo.

It was not only them, whomever they were, but he himself,

whoever he was, that seemed to meander on the outside. He was

lost like an insect crawling on a seat of a roller coaster ride

which, designed for thrills as it was, lacked purpose. This ride

on and of the world in forty rotations around the sun, which had

changed him both physically and mentally since his birth, seemed

to him now as meaningless as a pail of water being twirled

around forty times in centrifugal force. The Earth had bore him

as another product cursorily begotten on an assembly line. A

product did not transform a factory, he thought, nor did a man

change the world, or even leave any indelible sign of himself

before being dumped in the landfill.

Images of a stern female four with a broad boned body and a

balding and obese zero with one arm taunted him in his,

arguably, depraved imagination. They were salient neither in

nightmares as it was not night, nor daydreams as this word only

had positive connotations, but in a sense, daymares. In them the

couple were walking through the rain toward their home. In his

mind's eye zero was still scrambling for his keys when they, the

husband and wife, arrived at the doorstep. "You are so

disorganized," she reproached. "God, I hope that you did not

lose them again," she excoriated. Forty times the zero quietly

stomached the abuse as he continued to inspect all of his

pockets for the fortieth time. He knew that she had married him

for his purchase of a parcel of land to which she could build

her nest, for union with sperm from the only man who had

exhibited some interest in her, and for a financial provider for

her birdies. He knew that, altogether, she had used his body

because of an instinct to seek happiness in that which would

place her on the throne of maternal monarchy, and so her insults

not only seemed unwarranted but particularly contemptible.

Furthermore, he could not understand why, when she knew the

reactions that getting drunk and shouting her invective as

intense as imprecations would cause, that she continually

insulted him. More times than not he would be provoked to beat

her, pull her around by the hair, and continue to slap their

forty children from time to time for caring about the shallow

smackings of the mother instead of the mental flagellations that

she rendered unto Him. Despite the bruises and black eyes that

he gave them, he knew that she would never take them away, for a

woman, if anything, was a prostitute of a bird. Obeying

instinct, she would do anything for a parcel of land to have and

maintain as her nest. Was this, as some type of a singular

image, he asked himself, the subject for an abstract painting?

It was for someone else, he retorted.

He thought, "Have I, Nawin Biadklang or whoever I am--whatever I

call myself, done anything remarkable within all these forty

years?" He posited this question as if this subject were now a

relevant matter to deliberate, and as if, after having scanned

through a quick shuffling of vapid memories, a self-judgment had

not already been rendered on this matter. Actually, before

posing the question his feelings had already concluded that

although having risen to upper middle class from dire poverty as

an accomplished artist he had not even made one single painting

that was so unique and extraordinary that no one else could have

made it exactly as he had done. Feeling had rendered in him the

decision that he had failed at anything beyond making himself

more affluent than most, and so the question held no purpose. He

was just a man with a brief and puny life, and as with all men

he ate and expelled, sought pleasure and reacted reflexively

against threatening stimuli no differently than any common,

self-preserving cockroach. It was true that in a man there was

self-awareness more keen than in other animals, but from it one

could not help analyzing his own insignificance which he would

then have to repugn by absconding more fully in the professional

and personal domains. Fabricating illusions of grandeur in

ambitions and love, he could keep his life busy and fortified

from encroaching questions.

For all of Nawin's messy colors in art and living life brightly

(his playboy activities, the television commercials, and a month

on a soap opera, which came about from his slight fame as a

renowned artist and an attractive presence) he had not become a

Leonardo Dicaprio let alone a Leonardo Davinci--not that Davinci

would have necessarily known his own greatness. He was

discontent with himself as being so was endemic in mortal, human

creatures who at best could leave no greater legacy than their

own puny thoughts, and at worst found their voices mere echoes

of the environment, and their only means to halfway preserve

themselves was to have offspring partly begotten from the lust

of their loins.

He, in his lifetime, was not as much of a renowned painter as

Montien Boonma or Chamas Kietkong were in theirs. For meaningful

Thai art of international appeal one turned to them and not him.

His works were a familiar leitmotiff of sordid, dejected whores

to which ideas and representation of forms were, for critics and

buyers alike, secondary considerations. This suggested to him a

deficiency in the technical mastery of his craft and made him

yearn for other pursuits. At certain times he had been obsessed

by having celebrity status and at other times he had loathed it,

but overall he had resented its intrusion much more than grading

art survey compositions at Silpakorn University for commercials,

and the daytime melodrama sidetracked the continuum of his life

as an artist by keeping him from scholarship and his own

creative achievements. Thus, he had done what pathetic, impotent

males of the second category often do: he had fathered a child.

It seemed to him that whereas mildly abused individuals added

links to ancestry, homosexuals, from the severity of the abuse

committed on them as children, or from good common sense, became

broken links and thus remained unchained. In that sense, he was

definitely not "queer." At least that was what he told himself.

Then it seemed to him that there was a certain heroism in being

a childless presence, stopping the replication of a damaged

element and accepting fully his impermanence. However, he was

not heroic in that way either. He was a mere womanizer upon whom

his wife had urged a full, unprotected sexual union with her

friend to gain a child. Even in considering all the scores of

women whom he had had protected sex with through the past two

decades of his life he would hardly be a record holder of this

marathon either--not that spilling body fluids to say that one

existed would, he judged, have been all that less significant

than spilling paint.

At a station immediately before the destination of Nongkai the

train stopped and a door opened to three villagers who were

selling their fried rice and pork in Styrofoam containers. "Khao

pat moo. Som sip baht [Pork fried rice. Oranges, ten baht]" they

proclaimed on both sides of the aisle, and like bells their

voices summoned him out of himself. The Laotian was still seated

in front of him as before, but with a furrowed forehead and a

smirking countenance as if puzzled not by what to say but on how

best to say it. The woman, still seated in part on the floor,

was now stretching her arms. Seeing that she was awake, the

Laotian's furrowed field of a forehead became smooth, and the

subject of contemplation he was fixated on seemed to vanish. He

raised his naked foot, and with a profane toe denuded his

partner's bangs and began to massage her forehead. This

continued for some minutes until she bit the toe.

"Bitch! You're really vicious. Look what you've done. It's

probably bleeding now."

Nawin's jaw lowered with his mouth slightly agape. In

disapprobation of his culture he sat stiffly for a moment in

tacit and obdurate silence, but with glances down at what was

beneath him. What was beneath him was beauty.

Even if he were to say that it was a new beginning for himself

and, unlike other nocturnal prowlers, that he was now a nascent

creature capable of appreciating the simple pleasures of the day

in a more abstemious lifestyle, there was the immediate past to

repugn the assertion. There was that nurse at the hospital, whom

from earlier exchanges of smiles, looks, and brief

conversations, he was able to obtain her telephone number

shortly before being discharged from the hospital--a woman he

would be calling now had he not thrown away his mobile telephone

or "moh-toh" as Thais (though not him, the inwardly surly,

cultured man that he was and an American Thai at that) called

such devices. Was he not still a glutton for intense thrills?

Was he not always at least nominally enraptured by someone or

something different than the other intrigues that had come

before? The women of the past had proven that he was as had that

which had happened to him less than an hour earlier.

Disagreeable for the source of its arousal and made vulgar and

fetid by the association of having been done in such a filthy

toilet, this experience had been a particularly odd and

abhorrent intimacy with fantasies that he was not accustomed to

entertain. The fact that these fantasies had opened the gates to

his ejaculation in the toilet of a train was for him an

unpleasant reality, not that intentionally trying to avoid

thinking of it was, in his judgment, such a wholesome act either

for it did not make it less part of his own thoughts and

experience to stuff it into the sockets of his brain like one's

dirty socks being shoved by a foot under the bed at the knocking

of his door and he would not be much of a man to cower away from

himself so easily. It was still disconcerting since it was both

odd and distantly familiar simultaneously, a combination that

made him feel flushed down the toilet portals of ineluctable

memory. Masturbating privately wherever he wished was for him as

inconsequential as scratching the area of his pants that covered

his scrotum when experiencing a particularly strong itch, and

yet this carnal escapade was different. It was deviant more for

him in the sense of diverging from the mainstream than anything

significantly pejorative. Still, it was for him a most sordid

encounter with himself even if, to his satisfaction, performed

in the purest of form--being free from the self-delusion of

love. To him, all sex was making love to oneself but coupled

naturally with a woman it did not seem so sordid, even though it

perhaps was, while being impure enough as to seem as if he were

really making love only to her when the contrary was true. Thus

to him making love to a woman was more sordid as a consequence.

In this morning encounter with a fantasy and a hand had he not,

despite himself, been enraptured by that dark and bearded male

partner of the exquisite, pallid creature beneath him? He had.

It was not possible to repudiate it as much as he might want to,

given the fact that, despite the earlier release, a cool

titillation that had never quite left him was once again

reasserting itself by soaring and tightening his groin and it

was not for the girl--at least not yet, although he hoped for

transference--but for this Laotian boy, Boi himself.

This "sick" experience, he argued, had been in large part from

insomnia, and the insomnia from visceral loss in his life and

from the numb pain of his broken arm. Also in part it had been

from the jerky movements of the train after being "a bit sick"

to his stomach in the wake of having drunk that watery Laotian

beer -with its strange pungent punch like consuming a liquid

version of French cheese which always bit back- that Boi had fed

to him in his bunk. This had to a lesser degree discomfited his

composed mental state as had the acknowledgement of having

turned forty. These factors had made him "sick" or a little

offset from his mental equilibrium and yet it seemed that he was

not over his sickness. He was sick even now.

With women he just wanted to be mildly tipsy and never quite

inebriated, and so he would be slightly infatuated with one

after another. Even though he wanted the continuum of each one's

friendship and to learn to appreciate each as the unique visual,

social, and sexual creature that she was, finding no ultimate

beauty, the quest for it always seemed to facilitate the making

of them all into ephemeral entities in his life when

impermanence was making him dizzy. These fleeting figures were

sunsets which he never quite wanted to catch when cognizant that

there was new light waiting on the outskirts of the horizon.

Thus they were as amorphous and mutable as the pursuit for

beauty itself. He knew; and if, he postulated, all organisms on

the planet were in some respect lovely and loveable, an

excitable reverence for the perfection of their forms (even the

oldest and most decrepit human, or a single cell microorganism

was perfect in contrast to the debris of dark free flowing

elements of space), why then did he judge a given person as

being beautiful or ugly? It was an unjust contrast to something

else more or less visually appealing and it seemed to him both

procrustean and ludicrous when every entity was worthy of

portraits and every organism on the planet held the potential to

excite him in love. It seemed to him that he should be

unendingly rapturous to all beings of the world, and yet if one

were amorous for all clearly the brain would experience

overload. Perhaps the reason one person, two, or three, for a

while, became a man's myopic fixation and were thought more

beautiful than all others was so that the brain would not

experience this overload at recognizing that all forms were

equally luscious. This might well be the meaning of a man's

fixation on one or a single small group of "beautiful" women--a

protective mechanism to stop brain overload. Within one's

vicinity and propinquity, an individual registered a finite

array of physical traits and characteristics not quite like his

own until a next batch would catch his eye.

So that liaisons of sometimes two each day had not become four,

causing all aspects of the man to be extinguished but the

ragings of appetite, Nawin had taught, for many years, art

survey and drawing classes at Silpakorn University, graded

papers in the teaching lounge that was exempt of pretty young

things who were such ugly distractions to a man who was hoping

to seek higher realities than visual and tactile stumblings,

pursued jogging, swimming, art, and scholarship, and each week

loitered near the golden Thai pavilian or "sala" overlooking the

lake at the Bangna campus at Assumption University. There, he

would wait to pick up his teacher wife, watch the stretching of

geese assert a land based prowess after floating toward him and

his bread crumbs, and attempt to once again appreciate simple

pleasures. A journey there once or twice a week, like sports and

art, helped him to find peace of mind by focusing an aspect of

himself less connected to innate appetites and filling

Noppawan's mind with an illusion that she was the only one

despite the many, an illusion both appreciated as indispensable

in congealing and solidifying their relationship.

In loss and tragedy so great that all life seemed a lugubrious

and murky haze he knew that at any second he could fall to

pieces and yet here he came anyway. On this train moving toward

Vientiane Laos, this world capital no different than a country

town, this little bit of Paris with a lot of dirt that was the

sister city of Nongkai which he had seen once before. His aim

was the same: the restoration of self. He was traveling here to

find that life was still good despite poignant loss, to part

from what-ifs, remorse, guilt, and shame, and to find himself in

simple pleasures that he believed were the foundation for

appreciating life. He did not know, but it seemed to him that

higher pleasures were synthetic, built from tenuous material on

a sturdy foundation, and most of the tower had crumbled down and

he was there on its foundation, its base, bruised, lacerated,

bleeding, and literally with a broken right arm in its rubble.

Alone, he wanted to journey to Nongkai so that, undistracted, he

might enter Vientiene to contemplate the song, squawk, and

flutter of his own thoughts. When simultaneous to some similar

song and rustling from the birds themselves it would be

reassurance from nature that the fleeting essence of matter and

the personal loss he was experiencing at Kimberly's suicide, and

the subsequent separation of his wife after beating him

senseless with a frying pan were natural. It would also be

testament that life was bigger than his myopic perspective of

it, beset, as he was, by tragedy. However, on this train, as

everywhere, there were palatable humans who continually

discomfited hi peace of mind like the chocolate fan poochai

(fantastic male) and his vanilla fan pooying, who he supposed

was his girlfriend, seated there in the confined space before

him.

It was his wish to go on a solitary journey where he might be in

the vicinity of itinerant others like himself for reasons like

his own, while staying aloof from them by a peripheral

association of glances. He might sit dreamingly for hours at a

time at a sidewalk restaurant or on the ground before a stupa in

Vientiane, eat vegetable and cheese baguettes (the American

cheese variety of course) and watch Europeans go by on their

rented bicycles. From these glances he would be part of them

without allowing them to disrupt his Buddhist contemplation;

however, knowing which of them were cultured, and which were

merely backpacking hedonists might be hard to determine with

mere glances, and if he felt that only the latter were there, he

would think that he might as well return home for Bangkok was

the prime bivouac for such characters. For what he knew, this

rustic Paris might well be the dernier cri for such lost souls

like his or, conversely, a Mecca for middle-aged men fantasizing

about Laotian men's erections. In either case, or nothing of the

sort, he was going there by train as if he were not able to pay

for a plane ticket as easily as the average man could pay for a

ride on a city bus. Of course this particular car was air

conditioned, and riding in it, despite its coldness, was

certainly more comfortable than the "cattle cars" linked from

behind; but coming by train at all was an attempt toward

simplifying his life and it was as close to the Jatupon whom he

once was that he cared to ever be again.

He knew it without dwelling upon the point for the latter

activity would separate him from others even further: despite an

impoverished and savage childhood, he was a refined man although

hopefully demure enough not to believe it too intensely or allow

it to exude into his interactions beyond a surly air softened in

a warm smile. He could have taken an airplane. Refined men

always did but here he was in this particular car of this

particular train hoping to find balance after falling into the

stone and dust rubble that intense pleasures had brought upon

him. And yet, he told himself, if his own experiences

immediately before, during and after his ejaculation in the

toilet portended stygian events to come that would have him

wallowing in base instinctual drives, so be it. He smiled and

thought how his life was an unpredictable series of unconnected

episodes. It was as if he were at a sanuk packard (amusement

park) and torturous suffering was mixed into the thrill of every

ride. Although seeking and favoring "sanook" in all matters like

any great hedonist, realistically he hoped to learn something

within these vicissitudes.

So the Laotian called his partner a bitch. So she bit his toe,

kissed it, and now had her own foot on his lap. Why should any

of it matter to him? They were not subjects under the dictates

of his sovereignty, and who was he to be didactic, he who looked

at a given moment as an experiment of the convergence of people

and thought? He was sovereign of nothing. The two women of his

life, his major connections in this existence, had in part due

to his own actions, evaporated like all lost essence of family

so what sententious dogma did he have to pontificate? Clearly

the Laotian woman was not bothered by these mere wisps of

vibrating air, so why should he be? He knew that he should not

be so irascible. He knew that he should not be brooding about a

pejorative word used on this woman, a creature who seemed to

flourish in the word and for all he knew might be well suited

and defined by it. Still tension of his own making about how

wrong the Laotian was to have uttered his pugnacious, rude,

chauvinistic, and socially inappropriate word seemed to alter

the air so that it was viscous and palpable. True, as a minute

or two wore on the tension seemed to be diluting slightly in the

strong daylight which was pouring through the windows but still,

as confined with them as he was there within this small space,

breathing seemed to be a more arduous task. Tension seemed to

also sully the floor which was already fetid enough due to

whatever stench the train officer's random spot mopping with

ammonia earlier in the night had not covered.

And there she was with both naked feet resting on the Laotian's

lap so any reaction that he might have in defense of her at this

time, even if it were mere silence, seemed inane.

Escaping them entirely with his mind, he found himself trudging

through a prodigious mire of memories which would have been

better had they stayed in a diminished state, a staid frame of

mind which would have made them more easily accepted if not

appreciated. One particular memory began to percolate within him

and boil over his rim. It began to be the sole activity of

consciousness in a reality so vivid that it was as if he had

fallen through a portal in time. He was with her again and she

was exactly the same. "Kimberly, I should be painting that

expression instead. What's wrong? You've seen that one of

Noppawan a hundred times before." "I am just seeing it in a new

way. You are the world to her. You can see it in her eyes--so

much love for you and you are the one who painted that love so

lovingly." "I'm drawing you now, aren't I, if you would stand

still? Haven't I done plenty of you?" "Still, this painting

makes me wonder what I'm doing with you. She is my friend."

"Whom she chose to give birth to our child--yours, hers, and

mine." "A son... the ultrasound showed it, you know..we'll be

having a son--yours, mine and hers. Maybe your connection to me

will be special for that reason, but you love her and I

shouldn't be doing this." "You are in your fifth month. It's a

little late to go in reverse now, wouldn't you say? As I've said

a hundred times before it was her idea. She knew that I wanted

you and that I was trying to repress it since the two of you

were best friends. She wanted children through you, and this

pregnancy is your gift as a friend to her. She enlarged marriage

to include you in it so we are all married in a sense. There's

nothing to feel regret about." Then this memory, which had

seemed so vivid and concrete, dispersed as if it were sound,

smoke and wind..

Thais with a disposition and willingness to scrutinize their own

cultural suppositions were rare but for those who were so

inclined to repugn family and Buddha, if only in outward

aloofness and tacit pondering, little remained sacrosanct from

intellectual dissection except for issues in reference to the

king, for to cease to revere him would make one something other

than Thai. That is what he thought at 8:00 A.M. as he heard the

king's anthem playing at a distance from a passenger's radio.

That was what he thought, and yet had the moment been different

he would have thought differently. He knew that what he was,

what he claimed to be, was merely from being in the particular

situation where he found himself. Now in this car of the train

among these strangers whom he did not particularly like, hearing

that rather bland melody repeated, one more of the daily

repetitions throughout the years, and as always feeling that

strong inhibition which made him not able to even acknowledge to

himself this blandness, his disposition grew a bit peevish and

restless for he kept telling himself that every moment he

remained here was aging him toward his forty-first year. Having

one birthday in a train was bad enough, he told himself. He did

hardly wanted another one. The moments seemed like hours,

unmovable as boulders.

As Nawin heard the anthem he saw that the three food salesmen,

in concert with everyone else, were deferentially erect and

motionless in response, and noticed that there were no more

strident cries or other such tonal annoyances of khao phat moo,

phad thai jae (noodles and vegetables), and kauy-tiaw (noodles)

with some sauce with a Laotian or northern Thai dialect name, at

any rate shrieked beyond recognition. Noting that any delay in

getting off the train would be a brief one and that the

freelance food salesmen would be gone with the slightest forward

thrust of the train, he pulled out sixty baht from his wallet so

that he might quickly buy one container of each for himself and

the two passengers whose space he was confined to. It was only

polite to do so and any effort that he might make to give less

credence to his feelings of disgust toward them would make the

rest of the ride more agreeable. Besides, as feelings were so

interlinked to perception of a given event in a given moment

like attack dogs that were often standing in late evenings by

the doors of banks and randomly barking at the scents and

movements of passers-by and their shadows, they were not

reliable gages for assessing reality and he did not give much

credence to them.

The gambits of feeling, senses, and logic were even fallible

when working together. To trust one exclusively over the others

was a madness equivalent to an artist falling in love with his

subjects, an inebriation of the myopic he had always tried to

avoid in the hope of going beyond the "reality" of one's petty

associations to an exposé of exploitation and tacit desperation

in which the viewers would see the whores residing within

themselves. This Earth was in one respect like a huge amniotic

sac of impermanent quasi-reality in which he seemed to be a six

billionth major cell of some inchoate but never complete

organism that was being tossed therein. In another sense it was

diametrically different and he seemed a complexity of

contradictory feelings, logic, and sensory input like partly

functional gages and gears that he manipulated and was

manipulated by to move and assess movement in this nebulous

terrestrial cloud or fog he found himself in. To some degree he

was part of a cell if not an entire cell in the gestation of the

making of a life and the Earth was merely a cluster of cells if

not an entire organ in the inchoate organism called the

universe; and yet to some degree it was as if he was a probe

slowly feeling its way in a very small acreage within Martian

darkness. One thing that was certain was the intricate and

confusing number of switches and responses in himself. Even with

logic, if a compassionate man had only this, he would continue

to stay stationary in any situation he happened to find himself.

It was feelings of pain that urged a man's extrication so that

he might find situations and quests more worthy of his time. So

he thought while hearing the ending of the anthem.

Inwardly having great humility and reverence toward King Rama

IX, he nonetheless facetiously told himself that this

opportunity to eat a scanty sustenance was provided by the king

himself and that royal cuisine of this nature was not to be

passed by. "khortoht [excuse me]," he said, raising his hand and

motioning to the nearest salesman to come toward him. It seemed

odd to do so, for he was feeling the desire to turn in the

opposite direction toward the Laotian himself, so that he might

say, "Phom tongkarn khun [I want you]" and "Phom gamlang ja pai

gap khun [I will be going with you]." Odder yet, his mind itself

retained the hauntings of Kimberly, who was even more similar to

him than Noppawon in being a little of this and that, and

belonging to no group or family for she was French-American, and

he Thai American, or at any rate an American Thai, and,

unequivocally, both were expatriates of this world.

As if it were not ironic enough to lack superstitions about

ghosts and all else and yet have his mind so discomfited by the

creeking, rattling, and shuffling of her presence in the dark

corridors of his mind, he was possessed by inexplicable,

ineffable desire for this individual before him who was of the

same gender. The rattling chains of the former were feeling,

instead of sound and, understandably, this rattling was from the

stress experienced by remorse; but the latter was a burning

sensation less explicable than the other as if he was possessed,

although there was nothing to possess him but himself. Together

the phantom of that tacit, gentle soul of a woman and the

possessive fantasy of the rough and naughty Laotian were trying

to overtake him. They were mental poltergeists and he was the

source of his own haunting.

He had boarded this train in part because he was trying to flee

Kimberly and yet were he to fly without cause or reason, he knew

that she would go with him to Niamey in Niger just the same as

Nongkai in Thailand or to Vienna the same as Vientiane for she

was an ineluctable memory of myriad of these ineluctable

memories that he would lobotomize in minor whittling of his

brain with a pocket knife if only he could. Many times, marred

and blurred as she often was, Kimberly and those not so far gone

memories of youth which were equally hideous in their own ways,

would detonate like a land mine inside of him when he was tired,

causing him to falter into depression and the unconsciousness of

deep sleep. Still, what could be done but to freefall in sleep,

hit bottom, and awaken rejuvenated with the sun? One could not

dispense with a mind the way he had his telephone. In a sense,

of these apparitions from the subconscious, she was summoned

from nowhere phantomesque, and yet like weeds thrusting from a

rocky landscape without reason after a cool rain. As in that

memory a minute ago which had acted an entire scene upon his

mind, Kimberly, hybrid of weed and flower, was there in his

mind's eye like rife dandelions. Even though now she seemed to

be withering within him once again, and he was at least

cognizant of his pull toward her, he seemed to be falling more

rapidly and with greater force toward this rocky slope covered

in dandelions and fog, compelled to fall into the lap of beauty

and death while the final impact remained suspended from an

incessant retreat.

Even now, he thought, she was more distinct than the smudges

that came from the contrivances of conscious will when

attempting to remember, but that image was diminishing with the

seconds no differently than subsequent attempts to recollect her

consciously garnered less than was exact with the passing days.

As with other hauntings, he felt startled, and spent a minute or

two trying to recollect himself within disconcerted thought but

that was especially hard to do this time since his mind was

crowded by that visceral, recent occurrence that was one more

presence in the haunt of memory.

Strangely, even if done immediately after glancing at her

photograph, or after seeing slides of a painting of her, which

was an impression of her and him both, were he to try to

remember her exactly it would be an act of abject futility. It

would give him nothing but a blur. He could even concentrate on

the specifics of her wearing that turquoise dress that he had

given her, a combination of the color, green, that she liked

most and the ethereal blue aqua vitae lakes of her eyes, and it

would not matter. Attempts to consciously bring her back would

extract nothing but smudges and visceral pangs of loss. The

hauntings of memory hadn't any more reason to be than the screen

door of the shed at his home (exclusively Noppowan's home now

through his default in not exerting his innocence and in not

shifting the blame back on to her, the proposer of their doom)

which opened, closed, and banged around in the winds. But when

she haunted the oblique corridors of his brain there was nothing

opaque about her. Clear as reality, he was often able to

remember not only her, but also a continuum of moments in their

interaction together and, as now, the ensuing shock would cause

him to stand for a minute or two lost in himself while trying to

find a way back to the present moment and analyzing and

reanalyzing this thought process as if hoping to find a switch

to turn it off. So his mind droned on like this, as it always

did after a deep thought of her image, until he was able to find

enough of himself to make the choice to part from her.

Glancing out of the window for a few seconds with his hand still

motioning toward the salesmen, he watched Thailand's vacant

greenery, a pickup truck on a distant road, and a water buffalo

standing in what should have been a modern rice farm. These

images continued to peel and fold back behind the train no

differently than the people and events of his life. This, above

all, was why he had subconsciously chosen to come by train. It

was an instrument for illustrating his impermanence so that he

might accept that this was the natural course of all things even

if human intellect knew that nature was vile and that this

impermanence should be otherwise.

"Sorry, I got carried away," said the Laotian to no one in

particular. It caused the girl to laugh and then look up at

Nawin with a broad smile. As much as her smile could speak, it

seemed to be saying that expletives were the norm. It was as if

that smile were saying that profane and abusive names were

merely a mode of expression, like bantering, that gave

visibility to something as impalpable as a relationship, and

that she enjoyed whatever he wanted to call her as well as

Nawin's intrusion of silence which was meant to be a reproach

against Boi. Thinking of how a smile conveyed language, it

seemed to him that even the walls of the train were speaking if

he would just listen to them. It occurred to him that if

thinking so was childish, animistic, and all things Piaget, life

was more meaningful with this chimera.

"Anyway, it doesn't look like it's hurt," said Nawin in an

attempt to bring closure to the subject of the toe.

"Yes, I think you're right."

"Is Nongkai next?"

"It's the next stop--the last stop. Are we friends now?" he

asked Nawin of the Thais who chuckled good humouredly in reply

as if the earlier retort of surly silence had been from some

other self. It indeed had been, in his opinion, for each minute,

if not mentally connected to its predecessors, could be unique

from all others and unpolluted in that sense. At least that was

what he thought and so he laughed magnanimously. "Why not?" he

said with fresh amusement in being with the Laotian. "Maw ni

khrap" he called out to the salesmen pointing to all three and

handing them each twenty baht. He distributed the food to his

acquaintances and the young woman pulled herself up into his

seat.

"Ambrosia, food of the Gods," said Nawin.

"The Gods must be cheap bastards or starving rice farmers to

consume something like this."

Nawin laughed. His eyes became focused and dilated like those of

a baby intrigued by the newness of life. Meeting an iconoclast

in these parts was a sumptuous treat.

"That is his way of thanking you," said the girl. "You are so

kind."

"Mai pen rai. Yindee torn-rub khrap." ["Think nothing of it.

You're welcome"], he said fully, captured by her mellifluous

sound and how the smile lit up her face right before the

spoonful of rice was placed in between her two rows of teeth.

"Reunions are so nice--you and me and you and my sister, her

Thai toilet friend. She's been talking about you, you know, ever

since she passed you coming and going from the toilet--this

handsome, middle aged man who is obsessed by his image."

"Sister?" He was stunned.

"Oh, yes my sister, not my girlfriend. You thought she was my

girlfriend, didn't you? Well, not really. Are we boyfriends from

chatting and drinking beer together?--not so much but who's to

say not or never. Earlier when she passed you she was wearing a

cap, a man's jacket, and what else?"

"Sunglasses," giggled the woman.

"Yes, sunglasses to hide herself from being noticed when she

isn't as beautiful as she wants as if foreign laborers are

likely to encounter a lot of important friends everywhere they

go. We hardly know a soul here except other Laotians. I bet when

she passed you, you didn't notice her any more than you would

any androgynous clown walking the streets of Bangkok."

"A clown?" interposed the woman.

"A beautiful clown."

"Well," explained the woman, "I was in a hurry to get to the

tracks. I hadn't washed my hair so that explains the cap. They

don't have a station back there so I had to wait in the sun at

the tracks. It was chilly. Do I really need to explain this?"

"Your hair's fine."

"Yes after washing it in the sink and blow drying it, but it is

uncombed now."

"Beautiful, isn't she?" He knew that Boi's meaning was not

fraternal and that that which should not have repulsed him but

did was now being replaced by that which should repulse him but

did not.

"Free of connections, free of clutter--unfettered--and happier

for it, I suppose," he thought as if disconnectedness from

others, freedom from circuitous movements around and

preoccupation with people would free his thoughts rather than

free him of thought. Thought was surely the material assessed in

abstraction, but lustfully eating his food with the foreign

acquaintances of that country of backward brethren he did not

consider that issue consciously. To some degree he was like

those who in the monotony of their circuitous movements around

material possessions and a preoccupation with them came to

remote areas like Vientiane to find more to themselves than the

accumulation of money and objects, but his retreat was more from

the loss of people than the dismissal of material possessions,

and his departure was not out of choice but the circumstances

that had brought about the need to extricate himself from

inordinate pain. He did not so much want fairly empty rooms in a

guest house but the totally empty realm of his mind.

He knew that he would not be considering the subject of whether

or not disconnection was propelling him to happiness unless

something were amiss or lacking in his life. What was once the

clogging of his brain with the mauled grammar of students'

redundant essays in art survey classes, women whom he was

involved with, and was obliged to attempt to make happy (such an

inordinate amount of women, as his heart was a sponge of sorrow,

caring deeply or loving adventitiously and incurring feminine

wrath for it all, who were paintings of this life and mattered

to him as well as mitigating those sorrows, the result of

injustices), a futile effort that had ended worse than

imagination had reach. Having students to maintain professional

interaction with as altruism and being a benefactor allowed him

to stretch closer to the ethereal realm of virtue and also gave

him more tentacles for assessing reality, and the somewhat

plagiarized and hastened research and cursory art coinciding

with old themes that had been done to maintain his position at

Silpakorn University had now been replaced with freedom to

ponder vacuity. And vacuity he pondered unceasingly for, in this

train, emptiness rode in him as he was riding in it. Vientiane,

he derided, was not a destination any more than the Buddha's

Lumbini forest. His time might have been better spent had he

stayed in Bangkok seeking prostitutes to draw in the city's

Lumpini Park (p for porn), and yet here he was for some reason

going to that final destination of Nongkai, the sister city of

Vientiane.

He was like an empty wrappers of those fruit filled cookies that

in boredom he had gormandized the previous night for they had

fallen from his bunk during his restless sleep to be, for a

time, caught in the reigning randomness of the fan's winds. And

yet contrary to the social animal that was man, placid

acceptance of his disconnected state was in a sense a spiritual

retreat; and it was, after all, as a spiritual retreat, more or

less, that he, an atheist, was hoping to facilitate by coming to

such a lackluster and lackadaisical city like sleepy Vientiane

where there would be no distractions to cordon off this theme of

vacuity.

Affluent and unfettered by property, which seemed at any rate to

be entirely lost to him with his wife having changed the locks

on the doors, he could go anywhere to become something

different. In that sense he was truly free. He knew that and

reminded himself that he should be grateful for it, but like any

social creature he needed a mind stuffed with clutter to have

the equilibrium that would deliver him from being random

movements of an unstable, empty vessel lost at sea and unto

itself. Whether he was on a spiritual pilgramage or being

flushed down to Vientiane as defecation in a downward deluge of

his own whims he did not know; but in either case he was free

(free, that is, when not fully wracked in guilt about Kimberly's

death and all that had led to that grotesque spectacle which he

had no power to change) and freedom always felt good. To be

humanized from mechanical actions, not that he had carried out

many of those in the past year of his premature retirement, and

denuded of pretensions by lusting after two or three young

beings who had passed to the toilet, as well as the two seated

before him, was in essence like being found; and they who were

found were encompassed in thought like birds to air. It was

good, even if much of the air was sordid and polluted and

ineluctably so. Nothing was lonelier than the loss of thought

and being compressed into the agenda of the day, the cluttered

interaction of interconnectedness he only in part liked because

of a loathing of it taking him from himself. If he were to work

for a month in a factory like a dirt poor laborer (he was indeed

swarthy as most Thai laborers and once of their class), return

to the sidewalk restaurants which were his inception and, he

posited, probably were his true destiny had he not been so

insolent to repugn them, or even to return to Silpakorn

University, such an experience of once again doing work would

give him a fuller appreciation for what he had; however, even

with this satiated and cloyed sense of leisure that often seemed

perennial, his indolence seemed the preferable course. A flight

into the World Trade Center towers of oneself might be in part a

flight down to a sordid hell but he, an artist, although a

retired one, would hardly repugn it if it were.

While eating with them he stayed silent. Was it so peculiar to

scan each of these acquaintances respectively with circumspect

glances, to do so apprehensively (more apprehensively and yet

more often to the male than the female of this brother and

sister combination as she, whom he barely knew at all, was

nearer and the sexual interest would be more conspicuous), and

to let the erumpent odors of both, imagined or real, send him on

a molecular magic carpet ride away from the mundane and the

tragic of this world? Was it strange to occasionally think of

them as his friends when not really knowing much about them? It

was probably, as he now lacked anyone in his life, a normal

reaction. With his telephone thrown into the trash at the train

station, he even lost the nurse whom despite his brokenness he

was able to inveigle with tender caring questions and full

attention toward the caregiver, a charm that wooed her as all

who felt no one in this world listened to them. Was it so

peculiar that he should feel comfortable in a brother and sister

combination when it was quite apparent to him that they were

intimate beyond sibling love? It was an intimacy that to most

would seem repugnant but for those who were in one way or

another abused, molested and maligned in youth, and whose

thoughts were stuck in that mire of sediment and sentiment still

(sentiment because, tragically, it was rarely all bad and thus

stayed there like sludge slowing the victim's thoughts), they

who were perhaps under a different name than now, who were once

in their own brother's arms, witnessing perversion as he had in

seeing this earlier foot kissing of siblings was a homecoming.

To see that others were so engaged made the taboo subject a

human tendency frequent in the subconscious though never, or at

least rarely, in deed as this molesting of a woman who happened

to be walking on a sidewalk. With the witnessing of such an

aberration he was freer than he had ever felt before. For a

moment he felt a rush of dopamine and serotonin that almost made

him love the siblings. Was this "love" really for them any more

than he was really "loved" by those who needed someone to listen

to their ideas and truly care for them with no other motive than

this? He supposed it was not "love" in any pure sense of the

word. Still it was good that he was no longer having to

persecute and banish memory and thought, or having to consider

that part of the brain vile which was the trash receptacle of

repressed thought and thus, he theorized, his body was feeling

amorous in celebration with sexual feeling as if he were being

tossed into the air like confetti. Perhaps a celebration, as all

human actions and interconnection, was just the macrocosm of the

innate chemistry within (in this case the party within). But

what did he know for sure of the demented, or at least

aberrational aspect of this brother and sister relationship? How

did he know that his conclusions were warranted? He did not know

anything for sure as little or nothing was known conclusively.

Once in those beginning stages of his molestation he had spoken

to his mother. It was an oblique reference but the pain in his

facial expressions (furrowed eyebrows, sunken eyes, and the

slight and irregular quivers of the lower lip) were easily

interpreted even for someone like his mother who was accustomed

to some amount of pain always embedded into those features. She

understood what was implied and flattened it vehemently by

contending that "nothing had happened" and that he was "crazy."

How was he to know now, twenty years later, with absolute

certainty, that it had happened, as his vague memories recalled

it, for memories were impressions dented onto the clay of the

brain and were so easily defaced. Certainly memories did not

become more real in time. And if he did not know his ability to

know how would he know the relationship of a couple of relative

strangers absolutely. Epistemology was the study of nothing for

nothing could be known absolutely no matter how much the brain

yearned for certainty. He could sense that the Laotian knew that

he liked him as well as the girl. He could also sense that not

only did the Laotian like her as well but that what he liked

most was Nawin knowing that he liked her. It was all amusing to

him. He sensed it but how he sensed it from a smile, a look, and

the length of a look he did not know.

"May I have a sip of your water?"

"Sure," said Nawin as he gave him the container that was on the

seat near his leg. The Laotian drank. "Do you want it?" he asked

his sister in respite from quaffing the water, but without

waiting for a response from her he once more drank voraciously

and then tilted the bottle to her who bent forward toward it. He

fed it unto her in what Nawin, ostensibly a neutral third party,

was inclined to think of as an obscene gesture. It seemed

obscene despite the fact that it was merely the drinking of

water.

"Yes, my sister has been talking about you--well we have,

really. She says that in going and returning from the toilet

that she saw a handsome older man at a mirror. It had to be you,

don't you think?"

"An older man?" Nawin mocked. "Not me then--impossible," he

said facetiously with a contrived chuckle to disguise a sigh.

"Is that so?" asked the Laotian. "Maybe you just look like a

well preserved older type. Anyhow, you were gone much of the

morning. It hasn't given us much of a chance to talk."

Was the obscene truly so, he posited to himself, or was it just

oversensitivity about doing something, or being associated with

others who were doing something not considered the norm? If it

were the latter then so much oversensitivity over something so

insignificant as the kissing of a toe or the feeding of another

water seemed crazy, but if it were the former why did he not

just excuse himself to the toilet and remain absent until the

train stopped or from some tenuous excuse withdraw to one of the

many newly vacant seats?

Nawin nodded and smiled. Then he stared out of the window so as

to have a pretense to turn to a woman's gentility. He glanced at

her directly with a shy smile. She was no longer eating but

wiping her mouth with a napkin and stuffing her Styrofoam

container between the metallic cup holder and the window.

"Would you like some gum?" he asked the woman as he pulled out a

stick from the pack in his pocket.

The woman smiled with closed lips and a childish, exaggerated

shaking of her head.

"She's not supposed to talk to strange men let alone take things

from them," said the Laotian with a grin. "However, you can send

it this way."

"Sure," said Nawin. He gave the stick of gum to him.

"Thank you, kind sir," he said with a brief gesture of the wai

and a quick denuding of his stick of gum.

With a more solidified judgment that their actions were obscene

Nawin began a slow unwrapping of his own gum; and yet not

wanting to judge precipitously on nominal matters where he could

be mistaken egregiously, he decided that he would remain seated

where he was and not leave them. And if obscene, why would he

want to leave them when the obscene seemed so comfortable to him

despite his moral objections of himself for it being such.

"'Kind sir?'" Nawin mocked with good humored bantering. "I'm not

seventy you know."

"You are such a touchy person. Now 'sir' bothers you. Clearly

you aren't twenty anymore," said the Laotian. "There is nothing

wrong in admitting that. It is an exit we walk through briefly

to join the majority who are thought old by somebody or another.

My sister is twenty-one but that too will pass."

"Yes, age is a state of mind," said Nawin rather unprofoundly,

smiling widely and readjusting his opinion of the Laotian who

seconds ago he had pegged as a pachydermatous brute although

perceived more erotically for it. As this issue was germane to

him, he thought that nothing truer could have been spoken. He

felt an attraction to this Laotian named Boi as a human being,

and this attraction seemed to flush out the tense congestion of

hormones in the traffic jam of his groins.

"As she could not use the sink where you were at, she primped

where she could--at that nasty metal sink in the toilet. Since

she primps for a long time that means that this man was primping

for a longer time and she saw him--you, that is--still at the

sink of the corridor when she was leaving. It had to be you as

you still weren't here when she returned and woke me up."

"Maybe it was. What's the point?"

"No point, my friend. An observation. For the longest time we

kept thinking that you would be back at any moment. My sister

was so disappointed that she had to sleep off the depression.

For me, I was just puzzled--kept thinking that you must be doing

something strange back there but god only knows what. Your name

again is Nawin. Right?"

"Nawin Biadklang."

He felt a chill in the spine of his back and a burning sensation

in his face with this absurd and paranoid fear that the Laotian

knew what he did privately in both thought and action in the

toilet. "He doesn't know a thing, of course" he reminded

himself. It was obvious that the Laotian had found a means to

make him feel intimidated in generalized words, but laughter and

a warm smile, he told himself, would burn away that fog.

He thought about his earlier name and the time he had changed

it. At the age of sixteen a monk who had been concerned about

the tragic implications of the name, Jatupon Biangklang, without

much awareness about the circumstances of his life, had guided

him toward a more fortuitous appellation; but now, as he was

saying it, the fact that he had changed his first name and not

the last seemed a bit surreal and disconcerting as if he had a

different head placed on the his body or the same head placed on

a different body (which, he was not sure). Still it was good

that he had done it even though it had not been done fully.

Unable to lobotomize memory, and being Thai, hardly able to

repudiate the name of even his savage tribe, what other way did

he have to separate himself from Jatupon, a wisp of air that in

his mind still seemed pornographic? "Over two decades ago and

none of it matters now!" he told himself. Still the cliché of

the past not mattering belied reality. If the past, having

founded the present, ceased to matter so would the present to

the future which would mean that all would be immaterial.

"Remember me? Sabai dee mai?" said the woman to both men.

"Khrap. Sabai dee" Nawin said.

"This is Nawin Biadklang, a nice enough Thai, I suppose," said

the Laotian to his sister. "Last night I gave him a beer that

put him to sleep like a baby, but those ferocious socks of his

roared on through the night stinking up the entire train. Still

there isn't much point in detesting a man for his stink

especially when I have to ride with him and he seems a good

enough man even if he is Thai."

"Thank you for the meal, said the woman as she gave him the

prayerful gesture of the wai."

"Mai pen rai" said Nawin with a returned gesture, a broad smile,

and a few seconds of sustained eye contact.

"Don't mind my brother. He likes you or he wouldn't keep talking

to you."

"I like a bit of bantering. It has made the trip less

monotonous." He said this but in considering his time in the

toilet it was a vast understatement.

"He tells it the way he sees it."

"Good. I like that sometimes--all the time really, as long as it

is in limits--not stuck on the bad which is vicious nor on the

good to obtain an advantage. Then I guess it is fine--fine for

me. Did you came in at the last stop."

"Two or three back. Udom Thani. I was working in a women's

garment factory there. Siam Pooying. Have you heard of it?"

"No."

"Maybe your wife has."

Nawin ignored the inquiry.

"He got laid off in his factory so I decided to quit and go back

too."

"Where are you both going?"

"Our father's farm."

"What about you?"

"Taking a break--a vacation--needed some time away"

"A self appointed vacation," interjected the Laotian. "Must be

nice. And what about that ugly brown wife who beat you up? Are

you going without her."

"Yes of course. I rarely go on vacations with ladies who

bludgeon me with iron frying pans."

"Didn't like you drawing nudes?"

"Something like that."

"He claims to be an artist," said the Laotian.

"You saw the slides," said Nawin.

"Yes, I did. Some naked beauties."

"There, you have it then, but whatever you want to think about

me is okay."

"So if I think you are a boyscout--"

"Then I am."

"A southern terrorist with a bomb."

"The government seems to keep them from becoming menaces to the

other provinces but if you want to think that I am one, and that

I've come this far with a bomb, so be it."

"A pervert who shows naked pictures of women to strangers on

trains?"

"Well, that would have a bit more of a foundation in reality

wouldn't it but then would I really be showing slides?"

"Our mother's birthday is next week. If the two of us were not

your distant cousins from the tiny former kingdom of Laos, now a

bankrupt communist state of rural peasants, we might even pay

you to draw her or for that matter my sister."

"No money," the girl laughed as she slumped down in the seat.

"Only rice sometimes."

"Is it expensive to do that?"

"What?"

"Commission a painting."

"Yes. Quite."

"A thousand baht"

"Sometimes times fifty."

"Are you that rich?"

"No, it takes a long time to paint and I don't do it much

anymore."

"So, my sister will be your model and inspiration. Pay us money

to draw her and you can sell it in Bangkok."

"A portrait is nothing. To make it into art is what takes time

and I don't like going through that pain anymore."

"Why have the slides then."

"So they will be with me."

"She would be a beautiful model. This is no common face."

"Yes, but I still have to feel it, or want to feel it."

"You must draw her. You could stay with us while you do it."

"Let me think about it. I've got to go to the bathroom now,

adjust my sling, take some pain killers."

"Sure," said the Laotian.

"Excuse me," he told the woman, took his bag from the upper

suitcase rack, and left but thinking of a nude painting of the

brown and white of the couple the whole time.

He was examining his mirrored face privately in the toilet as

the train slowed down and then crept to the station with a jerky

forwardness, as if it too were caught by a backward pull if not

a penchant for backward inclinations. Hardly impervious to

sensation, he did feel this slowing of the train, felt the

thrust of the stop, and heard the jostling of bags and the eager

voices of departing passengers. He was even aware of a few

minutes of silence and then a less vociferous noisiness when

train employees came into the carriage to stuff the linen into

bundles and, through open windows, toss them onto the platform

of the Nongkai train station. Still, hearing it all as he did,

it did not dawn on him that he should leave.

He had come into the toilet to see his reflection via a mirror

and to abscond from these Laotian siblings long enough that they

would dismiss his friendliness and construe his absence to mean

a disinterest in them as potential models even if, as odd as it

seemed to him then, he was interested in them as such and more.

If at moments feeling extremely solitary and purposeless in his

indolent, terrestrial drifting, being dragged in the

vicissitudes of life, and trying to catch his breath from it

all, he told himself that he would rather asphyxiate than

relinquish his undiluted leisure. Lonely despair might in

certain moments make him want to cling to people, places, and

routines instead of breathing them in and out in a natural

context for a changeable world. Specifically, it might make him

inclined to return to that excruciating labor of painting or

sabotage a trip like this one by allowing people to clog up his

brain and distract him from the void; but these were only

desperate caprices and nothing more than this.

It was such a handsome face that was his own, and was now

pleasantly seen to be staring back at him; and yet staring at it

as he was, he was trying to isolate the specific changes a

simple year had made to the contour of his face, and attempt

with blurred memories of himself instead of numbers to somehow

devise a measurement so that he might conceptualize what havoc a

year into the future would do not only to himself but also to

that of every man's face. That was attempted for he was dwelling

incessantly on why for the first time on this physically and

mentally painful day of his fortieth birthday someone had spoken

of him as an older man. Still, to subdue a growing feeling of

aversion and loathing of the day, as disheartened as he was by

this insinuation of him being a middle-aged man, which of course

he was, he tried to recall whether or not on the previous night

he had told the Laotian that this day would be his fortieth

birthday. Had he done so on that evening when the two of them

had beer in their hands, the comment could be dismissed as mere

bantering from a boorish buffoon and yet each time he recalled

or exhumed this fresh corpse of memory it had nothing like this

on it. Thus, to be corrigible to the self he concluded that as

it was impossible for his face to have deteriorated

significantly in just a day it was likely that a year had

changed it ever so slightly and that these slight changes were

exacerbated temporarily due to a lack of sleep. It was true that

his sleep had been rather sporadic and inconsistent the previous

night. This restlessness, however, was not only from lying

stationary when he was unable to preoccupy himself from that

pain and discomfort gained after his wife beat him with a frying

pan, but also from his witnessing that horrific jump from the

balcony and then Kimberly's mangled bloody corpse with missing

arm, contorted neck, multi-lacerated face, and empty eye sockets

along with the broken pieces of the metallic awning being

extracted from the water of the swimming pool.

The fact that the train had stopped was an adventitious

happening like a cloud out there hovering in the sky. It was

something that he knew, but he did not seem to recognize as the

awareness was scant and did not seem particularly associated

with the self, which needed to see personal importance in

matters for them to matter at all or for a given object or

situation to instill a passion within him. Thus, finding no

reason to leave he stayed to contemplate this loss of beauty if

it was indeed lost.

Had his beauty depreciated significantly in one day, or even in

one year, it would be one more comic incident in this tragic

adventure of life. This was what he told himself; and smiling a

little at that thought (the rational voice therein reassuring

him and giving him smug confidence in the friendship of the self

that no circumstance of life, apart from death, would take from

him), he could not see why it mattered that he looked forty, and

yet it did. He wanted to recollect exactly what he looked like

365 days earlier. It was not difficult to remember that birthday

as it had been a particularly odd day spent with Kimberly and

his wife. They had been drinking wine, eating the oddest of

sautéed dishes, as cultured French cuisine demonstrated: with a

bit of oil, wine, and cheese any part of a given creature could

be successfully cooked and consumed with exquisite barbarism and

taste, when he heard this odd proposal of having Kimberly become

a surrogate mother hatch out of his wife's head and thud into

the bread basket. With the proposal made and calmly deliberated

by all, he had gone into the toilet of that restaurant, had

gasped for a moment, teetered for another, and then had stared

onto a reflection of his face for twenty minutes. Satisfied at

seeing the same face as that of his thirty eighth year he had

returned to the table where the topic had not been his age--

only, all so indirectly, his sperm. Sitting there awkwardly, he

had been drawn into suffering, that empathic piercing into

another person's pain that seemed an unwanted obligation

subjected onto one by the gods, if there were gods and he

believed that there were none considering the smashing into

pages and limited scope of man's story book understanding of

things.

At that restaurant he had understood her fully: the requisite

for an end to her neediness would only come from the neediness

of a child of her own. From needing to care for one so needing

to be taken care of she might be able to imagine a baby as

caring exclusively about her since by needing her totally it

would satisfy some of her needs for someone to care about,

someone of her own, or at least allow her to have a distraction

for forgetting her husband's philandering ways. Unlike an ocean,

there was no means to measure the sadness of a wife. If it were

greater or smaller than such a body of water, he did not know--

only that it was large indeed.

Pondering why it was that people would think of him as middle

aged now, when no one had ever done so before and why he might

be considered old by some when at least to himself his

reflection seemed the same youthful glimmer that it always was,

a weariness in his features due to an irregularity of his

sleeping patterns (a weariness that as weary as he was might

have been impossible for him to see) still seemed as the best

explanation.

"Am I really going to waste this trip painting them and then

having to tote the final products back to Bangkok? I cannot

think of anything more disagreeable," he reiterated to himself

with what he hoped would be puissant and cogent reasoning. "What

is the best way to get out of this thing?" he asked himself.

Then it occurred to him that he did not need to devise any

strategy since the train was obviously stopped, and all its

content of beings dispersed like a flatulent gas.

He slapped some water onto his face. "Time to go," he told

himself; but even with this assertion he was in a fusion of

daydreams and faded memories that added color and exact details

to his thoughts--a more poignant fusion than that experienced

in trying to recall the facts of a given situation as they

really were. He thought:

"She's beautiful isn't she?" asked the Laotian.

"Yes, I would say so," said Nawin. "You don't have to persuade

me on that point. It is just the time required to do a painting

--a real one with a theme, a mood, symmetry, perspective, things

like this and I am on vacation. Anyhow..." Her dainty face

looked like the nurse at Siriaj Hospital when he was

recuperating from arm surgery; that same one from whom he had

parried questions about the nature of his arm injury by posing

innocuous questions about her own life in order; the one whom he

listened to intently, and as a consequence was able to make her

believe him to be the kind human that he was instead of the

broken man that he was, or the flirtatious playboy, that he also

was; the same one for whom he had swapped cellular telephone

numbers to no avail.

"Taking a vacation from not working I guess."

"Exactly."

"Good for you. That is the life. So, you think she is pretty."

"Yes."

"Do you want her?"

"Maybe. Maybe I want you."

"What?"

"I mean to model. Not now, but maybe someday when you are in

Bangkok. Both of you I think, although there is no way to know

until some sketches are actually done or for that matter the

beginning of a painting if we even get that far." Then the woman

was there kissing the toe of the foot that rested on the seat

and made up the phallic arch of a bent leg, and Nawin was

looking at them with surprise and envy.

He opened the toilet door and then bent to pick up his bag.

"What are you doing in here? Mister, it's Nongkai. Time to go,"

said a train officer. Then to reproach a fellow officer who was

responsible for the trash he ejaculated, "I thought that you

said you checked the toilet. Why was someone still in here?"

"I did," the man responded. "Maybe he flew in through the

window."

"Flew in through the window? Is that before or after you checked

the toilet?"

"Of course afterwards." Both men laughed.

"I didn't notice that we stopped. I am going now, sorry," said

Nawin as he exited the train and walked out onto the platform.

Then he was out of the tiny train station and walking on a paved

rural road not sure where he was going or what he was going

toward (a left for a couple kilometers would bring him to the

center of Nongkai; to the right, past the border crossing and

the Friendship Bridge, were the rural outskirts of Vientiane;

and between these destinations, finding nothing worth doing and

yet as creature of movement needing to do something, was the

human mind--his at any rate); but he did not care.

The couple were obviously gone, evaporated like wintery early

morning condensation on windows of hill tribe huts. They were

gone as the mucus and saliva that was surely spat on this road

by some of yesterday's passengers. This being so, he tossed his

hands into the air as though now relinquishing his will to fate

and circumstance that could raze elaborate plans as it would

half-hearted good intentions like his own. Then he smiled. He

recognized that he had achieved what he wanted in part. The

primary reason for absconding to the toilet had been to

apprehend such philanthropic tendencies; but sexual feelings and

desire for intimacies or friendship aside, most of his reason

for wanting to continue the association was to help them

financially for he understood too well that to be poor and blown

in different directions by injustices and random fate was an

ineffable wrong.

How the male had caused memories of abuse, desire for love from

the former abuser, and a whole hot stream of perverse fantasies

to percolate through cracks in the surface veneer of

consciousness he did not know. Still there it was--this need for

love, this wish to immerse himself, if not into the arms, into

sex with another being and surrender to this prevailing attitude

that one was nothing without someone. He smiled again for his

own peculiarities did not cease to amaze him and he was pleased

that neediness did not overtake him completely when it could so

easily do so during this difficult period of his life. From

telling himself that sorrow was a universal rather than a

personal issue these waves of neediness hit the sides of his

boat with vehement force but did not capsize it. His need for

love, his neediness, was not so great and from this fact that he

was secure in the poundings, he found the inundations somewhat

titillating. It was a macabre period in his life but one to be

survived intact as the distinct individual that he was.

He avoided a pack of Tuk Tuk taxi drivers who were vying

hungrily for his patronage and walked along the edge of the road

as a cool breeze of the north pressed itself into him. He

enjoyed this sensation with the appreciative response to simple

pleasures that a small child entertained, the feel of tall and

rich, verdant weeds poking the edges of his toes in his leather

sandals, and the redolence of the morning air that increased

with the rising temperatures of the fire of the sun, though that

would be, by noon, over-baked and the air would have nothing in

it but dry intensity, and empty space where thought would not

grow but was confined like a climbing vine. Despite wistful

tendencies to the contrary, he was relieved to be rid of the

clutter of recent acquaintances from his thoughts. And if, he

postulated, this were true of the Laotian, the nurse, and all of

the myriad others, was it not true of Noppawan and Kimberly as

well? Did he not want to get rid of all clutter? And while

thinking this he inadvertently stepped on a dog, which made him

stumble.

Before he gained his balance, the creature cried out and ran to

the road but rather than begin immediate howls of imprecations

it whined pitifully. "Hoop park, hoop park! nyiab," (shut your

mouth, quiet) he told the dog with a softness that belied his

harsh choice of words. As he bent down toward the creature he

noticed its loss of fur, that its skin, seen through the

multiple spots of barrenness, was flaking, and that its eyes

were still and sunken.

"Sawadee and bonjour to you, Indonchinese pooch," said Nawin

with a laugh and a quick nodding bow with his head which was

then replaced with a stiffness in both movement and expression.

He could not be amused by another's suffering. He could not be

happy when cognizant of so much suffering in the world. The

sensitive boy was within and no flippant levity on his part

could shake him loose. Just because manhood had piled hard

layers onto him did not mean that boyhood had been peeled away.

"Poor thing!" he said while reluctantly patting the head of the

filthy creature as though adverse to petting it fully while less

reluctant sensitivities absorbed its sadness like a sponge. Bent

as he now was to it he was emotionally and thus physically

paralyzed; and if it were to take an hour or two for the

creature to become disillusioned with him and to roam elsewhere,

he knew that he would wait with it until such a time came. But

for now, here it was fixated on him and wavering ambivalently

between hope and belief that humans were the good, the god, the

sustenance, and the deliverer--its cries as supplications of

prayer. He kept thinking that as there was no god, god was an

obligation to all humans who were in their own way, able to

imagine such an abstraction and climb into its costume. It was

their moral duty to ameliorate the suffering of smaller

creatures, and to man himself; but the dilemma was not of one

suffering creature on the precipice of life but an uncountable

number of them and help of one was unjust. Furthermore, it

seemed absurd to cease his own plans and prioritize a dog by

getting it tranquilized, and put in a cage for a ride back to

Bangkok, a long-term solution (as opposed to offering it food

merely to delay the creature's hunger and ease his own

conscience), but an impossible one, when in a sense he did not

even have a home to take it to. To walk a long way to seek food

of which he had none (not even one of his fruit filled cookies)

was not much of a solution either; and yet all there was, was

the suffering of the moment that he could take pains to counter

no matter how many insects he trod on, or how many micro-

organisms his immune system killed while he was doing so.

Telling the dog to stay, he went a kilometer or two through

serpentine gravel and dirt roads until he found a raan aharn

(outdoor restaurant under a canopy) to obtain some meat to

assuage its hunger; however when he returned with the food, the

dog was not to be found. His were merely good intentions that

came to no avail in an intransigent world of changes. Had there

been an obscure god whose oblique influence was in urging humans

of means to help the weak and vulnerable, beneficence would have

been a frequent activity instead of the rarity that it was. In

this situation his attempt had not only been futile but it had

exacerbated misery since now, somewhere, there was a dog that

had been humbled by a god (a god who earlier had stepped on one

of its feet and a tail) only to be reproached with a

monosyllabic, "stay," and abandoned to stray away disillusioned.

This dog, suffering from malnutrition and lack of grooming, was

prey to parasites. They laid siege on and within him. As all

that were at a disadvantage, were neither the strongest nor the

fittest, and had a vulnerability exuding from them that made

their brief lives ambulatory carcasses that would fall with a

brief amount of time, he believed he was like this. And it

seemed to him that despite being immured in talents and wealth,

that his vulnerabilities would bring him down like a sick hound;

and so he suffered for the dog in that spot he had found him in.

He was bent as though seated on the ground but with his buttocks

never quite reaching the dirt and he stayed this way numb and

thoughtless staring into nothingness.

The worn, gaunt dog had left him a half hour earlier and yet as

if compelled to attend to it still, he remained in the same spot

within the same squatted posture as before while his thoughts

remained apprehended in remote, dark cells of his opaque mind.

His actions (or a lack of, which in this perspective would be

equally inexorable) were even peculiar to him, so more with a

general feeling of apprehension rather than any specific

isolated thoughts, he felt that he might be, rather than

questioned whether he was, on the verge of a nervous breakdown,

even though nothing like this had ever happened to him before--

not that such a history had to be a prerequisite for frayed

nerves in the incessant Heraclitus nightmare of shifting ground

under his feet, or within the stress of life's chaotic

disturbances, to make him impervious to the impact of tragedy.

Kimberly who, to her demise had been of tragic course his wife's

friend and his special intimate, had plunged to an unequivocal

death, despite that which he had power to imagine. Although he

might envisage himself reaching out and blocking her from

running to the balcony, thoughts of this nature, myriad natural

but immaterial and inconsequential wishes, were an enormous

amount of energy expended in futility all because of the

sentiment of the human heart and the belief that human will,

which could alter the jungles of the world by repudiating the

natural forces and the limitations of man, could also alter

death. And as for Noppawan: apart from being his wife and best

friend, she had also been his attempt at creating the reality of

a caring family to replace that which, except for certain times

of resurfaced memories that were not easily extracted and were

as brief and spurious as a child's nightmare, now (buried under

layers of more immediate past the same as dirt) for the most

part seemed to have never been, and as the former family--a

family which the child within him once believed would continue

forever--had been nothing but a civil war of sadists, should

never have been. She, as his new family, had lasted longer than

the first, and yet the longevity of caring rather than the

brevity of cruelty had made her no more real than the first.

Each day, feeling as if being drowned in the cold numbness

within that seemed to come from without, humans clung to the

material: money, property, friends, spouses, families and

positions. For in this spinning world where people and things

could quickly emerge elsewhere or vanish from the planet

outright, mankind's entire quest was for less ethereal realms in

which to claim a firm reality. Thus with obdurate will a man's

evaporating substance was patted as firm and solid as possible.

For Nawin, however, the most plausible of the ethereal which he

had taken bit by bit and pressed into this substance of

"reality" was like a glacier that was fast breaking apart to the

point of being sheathes of floating ice, and he was witnessing

its enormous shards from afar. These enormous fragments were in

a prodigious fog; and they included a vague recurrent thought

that the dog was there with him, was coming to him, or would be

there with him. The thought was circuitous but stalking, and

whenever it reached that pentacle of the brain that was the true

self which judged the merits of his own thoughts and actions as

well as the intentions of the extraneous beings whom he

interacted with, he almost believed that he was still with that

creature--the dog with its small clusters of ochre fur, he with

his ochre wisps of obsessive thought, both cognate in that

sense; the emaciated dog, an innocent that from its starvation

was prey to disease, he having been the prey of four sadists and

one sodomite in a family which decimated if not entirely

obliterated the joy of his youth, and would have a reverberating

effect throughout his life, both cognate in that sense as well.

Artist of nude portraits of ladies of the night, a professional

womanizer, a celebrated genius, a rags to riches story: was not

the life of this indolent playboy prince of paupers enviable to

those males who appreciated the esoteric field of art and knew

of his name? And yet his was a damaged container, a broken jar,

and with time there could be no other course for his wanton

licentiousness but to spill from not just a few cracks but every

crack, and in so doing spell his doom: so he felt and perhaps

half pondered in a new modicum of nebulous thought. He feared

that he and the dog were innocents that existed to be

slaughtered and it would not be just a partial slaughtering of

innocence from within to exist in the world, which all creatures

had to do to survive, but a devouring of the gentle, the weak,

the disadvantaged, and the maimed.

The catatonic was between an edge of sward and pavement leading

away from the train station, between sluggish and futile

conscious thought with its maelstrom of subconscious feelings,

the disconnected randomness of fleeting images underneath, and

complete inaction, and perpetually bent toward something when,

except for insects, weeds, and dirt, there was nothing there. To

him the tactile and the visual, the palpable, had to be there,

only lost temporarily in the weeds like a dislodged contact

lens, and yet nothing was there. His numbness made intake from

the senses seem surreal and incredulous, since that which was

recorded by the senses was adventitious and distant from a self

that in his case was slipping away in its own right. The senses

were becoming faulty instruments for receiving signals while

this abstract form of sympathy, adhesive to nothing that was

concrete, seemed burdensome and unshakable. This state of

feeling deep sadness not only for the dog that had left him but

the entire world was like being paralyzed by the pallets of a

tranquilizer gun even though there was nothing halcyon or

pleasant in being shot with sympathy unless, in more lucid

seconds, it was in considering the fact that he should be

grateful that it was not empathy. Nothing--not even the dog, the

catalyst that it was--seemed the direct cause of the pathos

which did nothing for anyone and made him in better moments look

like a young tree with sagging boughs after a tempest, and in

worse ones a defecating homeless transient or the distraught

middle aged man that he was. Apart from this fulsome feeling,

his was the full numbness of a shadow dragged about by some

colossal and incomprehensible figure.

Dogging him no differently than the persistent fly that for

whatever reason continually returned to that same puddle of oily

sweat on his right temple only to sometimes be shaken away all

so mildly with a brief thrust of his head, there was a

persistent, distorted, and grotesque memory or daydream that

posed as fact. He kept thinking, if it were indeed thought to be

cognizant of so little, that he (as adventitious as he was at

that moment) was around fourteen years old, swatting at flies,

and pushing a cart of grilled pork down unknown streets in

Bangkok. Scores of sparsely furred dogs began to follow. The

further he went the more there were. And the more there were the

more security there was for them in the communal mob, and the

more aggressive were continually standing upon hind legs trying

to attack the cart and rob its booty. Through this time of being

chased by this desperate canine mob with its ineluctable barking

of mute voices that howled the essence of the void which

epitomized the planet, there was a background wall of a standing

rack or trellis on which used shoes hung like vines for

pedestrian purchasers; an occasional bloody limb dangled from

one of the ragged sports shoes, and a gecko hung on one of the

shoes' tongues. The gecko was many of one, omniscient and

omnipresent, looking into his eyes knowingly. "The world has

damaged you thus and thus you will be," it conveyed tacitly with

those eyes and then by it or from subconscious thought he knew

that it was a dent or crack in an item that gave it its feature

even if the ungainly shape would lead it to be easily dropped

from a maladroit grasp and break asunder into myriad fragments.

Yes, he felt alone, with his cracked past he was doomed. He had

hoped for interaction with the dog as benefactors did with the

poor when needing nothing from them unless in a minute way to

lesson injustice, to do something virtuous which might make one

a bit more than merely another avaricious creature seeking more

than mere survival and pleasures greater than comfort as means

for its betterment, as well as to feel grounded in reality (one

physical body making an impact on another); and yet before he

could do anything to help it, the dog had vanished, like the

flame of a candle in a puff of wind, and now all that was

tactile, all that he could touch, was the air which was as

ghostly as his thought. Whether his inaction came about from a

brain so active in its meaningful albeit subliminal cogitation,

or from an idiot who was foolish enough to stoop down to a

presence that was no more, like revisiting the rubble of one's

childhood home and expecting the pieces to reassemble

themselves, he did not know or even ponder. He did not decry or

rationalize it, but experience it and pass through it as one did

any fog.

Ostensibly, he was bent toward that which he must have still

imagined as the presence of the dog, and for his part would not

have known any other reason for his squatted and sedentary

posture, if any at all, than for its sake. More saliently,

however, this positioning of himself in such a way was, in part,

because of a deep melancholy over all those who were gone from

his life and regret for all the experiences that they had given

him--experiences that had accumulated and embedded carvings onto

the walls of his brain until there were reliefs of inexpugnable,

defunct memories, aggravating the past so that it was alive in

him still. Most of all, he was in this posture because

subconsciously he was still bent over the rubble of childhood,

expecting the pieces to reassemble themselves. If there were

gentle and sublime moments in the distant past, tiny shards of

some shiny splendor in the rubble, to him it would almost seem

impossible that they would not be eventually restored somehow.

And to him any fragment of that which was love, that mutual

delight in being in the presence of those whom one was familiar

with, had to be salvaged but not knowing how this was to be

done, he conceptualized the shards as having the innate power to

reassemble themselves, as if those rare occurrences of some degree

of familial harmony had power to resurrect and reshape anew a

distant, unhappy past that had ended decades ago. Despite

knowing that everything moved ineluctably forward with its

tattered past being dragged behind, it was only natural to have

moments of being mesmerized by those shards and fixated with

fixing the unfixable.

For at this moment he was remembering, all so dimly, a time of

awful sweetness in the bitter, a darkness tinged opaquely in

light. It was a dinner in which he had been so nervous among his

family and their sadistic barraging of him, the youngest, with

disparagement that he had dropped a plate of food in the

kitchen, had found himself threatened with a belt, since

fumbling a plate like fumbling a ball would, to the pleasure of

all the rival team, exact a penalty, had seen Kazem, the

molester, impede their father from swinging his belt, and then

had witnessed Kazem's custodial role of cleaning up the mess at

the game's closure. No, there had not been any closures for,

back then, it had been one game stretched out over the years

with pauses in the action each night in the respite of sleep

that was sometimes interrupted by a different game entirely.

Had there been nothing but pain from this former family, it

might have been easier for him to move forward with his own life

than it was. His life would have been that of defying the

members with every impulse. However, in doing so he would have

found himself merely an irate puppet moving against the pull of

the strings instead of conducting actions in support of the

rational principles of man himself.

From a distance the waters of the canals flowing into the Chao

Phraya River in Bangkok often seemed a pure bronze with sun and

blue sky peering into the whole, but close up the diluted

pollutants reeked of one identifiable odor. In the same way were

the thoughts of a man's mind as they flowed into the

consciousness that judged their merit. Once accepted they were

part of a web of thought that often seemed brilliant in beauty

and intricacy but when looked at closely was merely a refinement

of man's sordid cravings. Would it have been better to look

inside himself less than he did? Would he have not appreciated

life more to feel and examine himself less? He had posed the

question myriad times but the alternative in exaggerated form

was one of choosing to be as unaware as an insect, and this was

hardly the preferable route for a semi-rational creature.

Was kindness toward an animal or a human being possible without

first feeling the suffering in the other and then wanting to

appease if not extinguish it with his own actions, pursued not

so much out of benevolence per se as from imagining any efforts

as appeasement of his own suffering? He would have postulated

that question brazenly had he been in his right mind but as he

was somewhere in left field, stuck in sediment and sentiment,

there was still merely unrefined thought and it consisted solely

of raw feeling for feeling was all that he was capable of. By

feeling so much, he exacerbated more by feeling a repugnance

toward this effeminate trait of inordinate feeling.

When the thought of the dog was not present there was merely a

trail of vacuity in his mind like the swaths of trodden weeds in

a forest; however, when it came with regularity it vexed him and

seemed to make an enormous rut or trench in his brain with its

periodic passing, into which all his other embryonic thoughts,

as nascent and inchoate as they were, fell. This was the source

of his numb but all pervasive headache.

So here he continued to remain alone in this posture of a

defecating dog, within this strange catatonic trance, and with a

numb aching in his head. Still it was more comfortable than not

for him to sit here for the retinue of weeds and his own shadow

mingling restfully within them would not abandon him as long as

he stayed where he was--at least this was how he felt. If now, a

few hundred yards from the train station and in the open air, he

was feeling lost, forlorn, and numb through the lack of purpose

that epitomized his life, it was reassuring to think that the

sky above him was an everlasting awning raised there to shield

him instead of the receptacle that it often was for the

urination of some obtuse god. Likewise, it was certainly

pleasant to smell redolent fresh air after twelve hours of the

rank agglomeration of repugnant orders in the train to which the

fetid toilets were the main source, and it was more pleasant to

think this than reside at the bottom of a god's urinal. Such was

his state of mind and it was as peculiar as a stone cognizant of

life growing from it, a bird trying to fly while feeling the

memory of the ground tug hard at its talons, or an ambulatory

man with a continual sensation of being paralyzed.

Much of what he saw around him was obscured in a thin veil of

single memory. It was as if there were a faint light of a small

excerpt of a movie, a scene repeatedly projected onto the blank

walls of the brain and his intake of the outside world via his

senses, in which Kimberly, most often kept free of the impact of

the awning to the swimming pool, fell again and again

torturously. Now, as with every moment since her death, it

seemed that he continued to see concrete images of the world

(the hospital room and the big Hualamphong train station in

Bangkok, the Laotian siblings and the food hawkers, his mirrored

face in the toilet and the big hole in the urinal leading to the

train tracks, the rice fields and the wild grasslands, the water

buffalo and the starving dog at Nongkai train station) through

this single drak-filtered reel of translucent visual images. For

many days now he questioned whether or not it was normal to

grieve in this way but now with the collapse of thought there

were no more questions.

It was certainly not normal to stay sedentary in this posture or

to grovel for deliverance or resurrection from some unknown

force that he imagined to be the caretaker of this field of

broken dreams. To that he sensed or understood but not enough to

be motivated out of his catatonic state for he had lost

sovereignty and restraint of himself. A lack of a history of

mental illness meant nothing for, had he been able to consider

it, entire foundations of long established cities had fallen

under enough visceral shifting of plates so why not his own? And

as if this were not enough there was forty: the stiff broad

shouldered female with the erect arms making her autocratic

pronouncements to a tacit and obese zero of a man who stood

beside her, and this couple had been his birthday present gained

alone in the jolting movements of a train. Youth had recoiled or

found itself resupinate from a collision with this single word.

These homosexual feelings had swept out of nowhere, and they had put