He was startled by a driver beeping his horn and gesturing for

him to also come into his blue three wheeled tuk-tuk taxi. The

tuk-tuk was driving by with the last of a small group of

foreigners who had straggled out of the train station later than

he, but from the same train that he had. From the appearance of

their wet and tangled hair when the tuk-tuk was slowly passing

him by he assumed subconsciously that they had taken showers in

the train station restrooms and, like him, were now probably on

their way to Vientiane. Foreigners that they were, he was as

foreign as they and then some not because of an American

passport, which he had although having it, he neither lived in

America nor from it traveled there, but because, even though not

always feeling a connection to the world, he felt more that he

was a citizen of it than a citizen of any specific country. In

accordance with the mandates of travel guidebooks to see as many

sites as possible regardless whether or not such brief exposure

was in fact true experience, they would no doubt sightsee by day

and then in evenings release their communal and sexual yearnings

by drinking "Beerlaos" with their kind, eating western meals,

frequenting nightclubs, and returning with partners to hotel

rooms that were some of the most nominal within world capitals--

that or some such agenda--before going to Luang Prabang and the

Plain of Jars. As material as the tuk-tuk and its passengers

were, in his mind that which sped away from him wavered between

the palpable and impalpable like an incongruous quark. The

vehicle sparkled iridescently, stopped, and started as if

blinking though not of the irregularity of the visible but of

the inconsistency of the real and the material.

His entire array of thoughts, despondent and almost unknown to

him, seemed emaciated and aloof like the white water buffalo

that an hour earlier, from the train, he had seen standing

dumbly and staring back at him bewilderedly along the tracks. So

numb he was in his own despondent realm with such minimal

awareness of the prowess of his internal and external faculties

that rational scrutiny of action and motivation was not readily

possible. Recognition of himself was a witnessing from afar as

on a distant bank on the Laos side of the Mekong River. It was

merely a stranger seen acting out his peculiar extemporaneous

role from at a distance.

Within a nebulous understanding of where he was at and what he

was doing and the abnormality of it all, the catatonic was able

to recognize the fact that this perennial squatting would seem

to others as though he were a homeless and disoriented beggar

trying to defecate along the road. No matter the gentility of

his intentions in waiting there in this odd manner, by the

experiences of squatting in traditional Asian toilets a witness

to his execrable posture would ineluctably link it to excrement.

Had it garnered the cynosure of security guards at that present

moment it would not have been much of a surprise, not that had

he lost his mind and found himself instinctively performing more

natural toilet activities in the open his actions would have

been innately vile for primitive actions of primate forefathers

had led to the present. Civilization and all that was refined

was constructed on the backs of those barbarous corpses.

Understanding immediate happenings based upon those further in

the past, scheming about probabilities of the future based on

past events, and floating on hopes while dragging along the

weighty past, the present "reality" was only seen in glimpses.

Crazed action was merely ceasing to glance at or assess the

material world around his physical presence. As for posturing as

if to defecate along the road, surely any restful position was

no better or worse than others if blood circulated well enough

through one's limbs. And as for actually formulating an

actuality about something by unequivocally defecating along the

side of the road, it would not have been all that different than

the elimination that dropped daily out of the open holes of the

floor based Asian stools in the toilets of Thailand's trains. It

was true that, unlike a man squatting toward the ground in the

open air, under the weight and impact of a moving train exhaust

of this nature, was desiccated and blown asunder as a vapor, and

many times in the twelve hours of confinement he had watched the

freedom of his own stream fall upon a metal rail and imagined or

witnessed--he was not sure which--it vaporize instantaneously

before him. Sedate as waves of an ocean hitting the shore, so

the stream of urine falling onto the hot metal relaxed and

rejuvenated him for to see, and what was more, to accept the

temporary in the natural order was a respite from human will

which tended to oppose it and believe it could thwart what was

Heraclitean in all things.

If he did not think his behavior odd, he certainly felt its

peculiarity nonetheless, and thus he found himself disconcerted

and spinning ever so slowly in a thick and viscous void. If

there were hot flares of blood rushing into his face warning him

that his vastly peculiar and mortified state was on the

precipice of insanity they were not cogent enough to motivate

him to stand and walk on; but then why would they and why would

he reject this petrifaction within for, despite his wealth, he

was no better than a disconnected, homeless transient himself;

and if feeling was raw material to be refined into thought, what

he was mining within his lethargy might only be ostensibly

inconsequential.

If, when impeded from performing services or playing his meager

role in the production of goods to be sold to insatiable

consumers he found himself unemployed and eventually reduced to

a beggar who did not even have two baht to pay for the use of a

public toilet, there would be less urgency for refined means in

conducting natural tendencies. He would do his natural business

on the streets; and with frequency and in the company of others

of the same meager resources, that which was once base would

become the norm. When the individual was desensitized further in

compounded experience these natural activities and the natural

means of doing them would become reflexive actions once again

which would evoke little or no thought. Eating and eliminating

wastes were necessary functions so the human mind refused to

consider them abhorrent and animalistic. That which was judged

was how he did them, but even this changed when deprived of the

tools of so called refinement. Prisoners with no utensils other

than bolted bowls would not find them humiliating after some

time. So he thought most dimly--he was actually thinking and was

aware that there was a vague he from behind who was monitoring

these thoughts. He smiled. The smile was in part because such an

entertaining idea, even though he did not register its content

beyond recognizing it as amusing, had brushed against him

lightly; but mostly he smiled for knowing that thought was now

turned on and from it self-awareness was forming.

Leary of the peculiar, a security guard and one of the train

officers who witnessed and scrutinized the man in this posture

of one defecating with pants still up, made occasional orbits

around him like Mars in its closest rendezvous with the sun.

Whether the odd one was insane by having been overcharged with

an excess of dopamine, or lethargic as of those who had been

smashed by bereavement, they would not have known. Separately,

they suspected the individual as chemically dependent and

entertained the idea of seeking police involvement, but now

lacking evidence for any conclusion they continued to observe

him from a distance. Then a second security guard appeared out

of nowhere, materializing with the sounds of his portable

transmitter and receiver in nebulous static blaring from his

hip. Less wary, he meandered sinuously until he made his way

close to Nawin who was thinking: "Those foreigners in the tuk-

tuk must be in Laos by now--going to Vientiane as I am." He

smiled at the guard, staring at him with deliberate eye contact

in order to project lucidity, which was after all a director's

projection, a concoction, when man was a strand of knotted

strands of chemical impulses, feeling, thoughts flowing down and

dashing upon the banks of memory. "Sawadee khrap," he said with

a wai. "Sorry, I guess I got lost in my thoughts. I Just broke

up with my wife. A lot to think over."

"You broke up with her or she broke up with you?"

"Maybe the other way around. Anyway the better half is gone."

"Where are you going?"

"Well, I am debating that actually. Nongkai has a Buddhist

sculptural garden, doesn't it? Vientiane too."

"I guess so. I've never been to either one. Never stepped into

Laos."

"You never wanted too?"

"Not really."

"Why is that?"

"I don't know. Too much trouble to do it I guess. No passport.

No particular wish to see people who are poorer than here."

"I see. Well, I need to make a left I guess and then walk

straight ahead for a while. Will Vientiane be to the left or the

right?"

"Right."

"Can I walk there?"

"To the border yes, but you will need a taxi to get anywhere

else."

"I'll walk for a while and follow what looks good. Thank you."

He began walking. He was almost at the juncture when he heard

the beep of another tuk-tuk.

"Are you Nawin?"

"Yes."

"Somebody left this at the train station. The officers have been

asking people they happened to see if its for them. You slipped

by so one of them said to bring it to you. Are you Nawin

Biadklang?"

"Yes."

Nawin took the sheet of paper. It was the telephone number of

someone called Wichian. In parenthesis it said "Boi."

20

As another inconsequential member of this species riding the

promptings of caprices toward that which was most pleasant, a

pleasure in its own right, as with the activities that were

deemed as pleasant, most of his choices could not be anything

other than irrational. And of these irrational and erratic

choices, he thought further, most were often made from

antithetical impulses to which one was not measurably any more

pleasant or worthy of being followed than its alternatives. He

was seated at a table in a restaurant of a guest house,

wondering obtusely why he was there. It was, he mentally noted

to himself, a most peculiar feeling to have come somewhere, to

know oneself to have done so, and yet to remain clueless about

the aim. It almost felt as if, while in reverie, he had been

snatched from his idiocy at the train station and placed here in

the city of cognizance without his consent when in fact he had

walked three kilometers before tiring and then succumbing to

being swallowed in that blue cockroach shaped vehicle, the tuk-

tuk, which had then driven him further into the center of

Nongkhai.

And so, restless, he stirred the foam back and forth in his hot

Cappuccino, hoping without knowing why to soil all parts of the

inner embankment of the cup, and only taking occasional sips as

he became increasingly pensive. He thought to himself that had

he cared to do so, which of course he had not, the money that he

was spending on the coffee alone could have bought two or three

meals for those who scarcely ate anything on a given day. He

began to think about how peculiar the world was with its

interdependent members that made up units of one entire whole;

and that interaction of one species with another was merely for

the need to gain sustenance outside the unit, that the frenzied

propagation of a species to ensure its continuum was kept in

check by voracious predators; and that individual persons,

considering it an enjoyable sport, incessantly tried not only to

sustain themselves but also to thrive by hording avariciously or

seeking pleasures gluttonously at the sake of others within the

unit, striving for even more so as to think of themselves as

successful in partaking of the good. He thought of how this

showed life for what it was: not that of laudable creations

overseen by a creator, or at least forlorn entities of a godless

universe interacting with benevolent energy, but of comestible

viands seeking to elude predators. The whole thing seemed an

ineffective and barbaric system of incongruous, animate bits

seeking some means to barely coexist, and as such life was not

so laudable--neither of god nor of goodness--even though in

every culture, and every religion, he supposed, common

practitioners believed in both to create a pleasant perspective

of themselves and their place in the world. Even Buddha, who did

not believe in god became such as a statuette more rife than a

crucifix. The morning stimulant was not so hot that he had to

barely sip it, and yet he did for cognizance of the rife and

innate selfishness of man seemed to constrict his throat. It was

a constriction as slight as his compunction; and the subject was

forgotten entirely as he poured maple syrup on his pancakes.

Eating a bit of one pancake, he looked out onto the traffic with

its lethal confetti of exhaust fumes which, when moving closer

to the buildings, diffused and nominally enveloped pedestrians

on a nearby sidewalk. He once more pondered that he did not know

exactly why or from what impulse had led him here. The

inexplicable nature of it all was like that subway ride to the

Hualamphong train station. There, clearly for him, it had been a

wombed departure from the travail of interconnectedness with

those strangers within seeming to him as a family of distant and

tacit, insular beings who were cognate in their desire to arrive

in a train which would take them from all that was painful--such

had been his need to flee from suffering that the faces of

strangers, no matter how happy or bland their expressions,

seemed comrades of exile; and yet there, most opaquely, he had

chosen to sit down. It had been next to a boisterous woman

holding a cellular telephone talking of some poor soul's

uneventful dating experiences. He could not have known anything

of her beyond this and yet of the two vacant seats available he

had chosen to be next to her instead of sitting beside a middle

aged woman whose face was sunk toward a book; and the reason for

sitting in one seat over another was as inexplicable as now. And

so, assuming that all was not destined and man had choice about

all matters, he had chosen to check into this guest house in the

center of Nongkai instead of going straight into Vientiane. To

some degree it had been because of the weight of the backpack.

It had become increasingly heavy against his shoulders with

every kilometer of that long walk. Confusion also had had its

bearing. Not knowing what to do or where to go, with each

possibility seeming equally insipid, he had selected a place to

rest and think out some contrived purpose for himself. If not

able to formulate a plan and purpose for his travels, here at

least he had a place to rest physically when swimming

frantically against this mental eddy. For all his disconcerted

strokes, his itinerant meandering, he told himself that even

though he did not know when it would happen he was certain that

he would wash ashore eventually and when he did he would have

contrived something to do, some urgent matter to pursue, some

purpose for himself.

He pulled out that sheet of paper from his shirt pocket. He

glanced at the name and the telephone number and recalled the

faces of the Laotian and his sister as they rode next to him.

Was he really to end an uneventful retirement for the sake of

these people? Was he, for the sake of seeming a compassionate

human being to himself and not merely another selfish being on

the planet, to pay them for a miniscule part in posing for some

portrait that he was neither inspired to draw nor inclined to

tote back to Bangkok? Where would he even obtain paint and

canvas? In Laos? Well no doubt they had both within the capital

city. If prehistoric man could find ways to dye a cave,

Laotians, people of a very similar linguistic and cultural

distinction to Thais, could not do less. He could do sketches of

them. It would not take long or be much of a burden to carry

around and he could leave the family a couple of hundred

dollars, which would mean the world to them and be a negligible

and hardly noticed loss to himself. It might even restore him to

himself; but then did he want to be restored? A restoration of a

thoughtful pornographic artist from a third world country was

not such a gift to civilization. He would never equal the great

artists of the world and of prostitute painters he was one of

myriad in contemporary Southeast Asian art alone. The sister was

beautiful by his standards of beauty--youth unblemished with

skin the pallor of fresh snow; a background of dirt and poverty,

a subject he could relate to, and yet unlike those of a swarthy

complexion, not appearing as such, with hair that was long and

dark as the void, subdued eyes neither scintillating of

inexperience nor petrified as ancient granite, absent of bra,

nipples that pointed and teased their way toward every curve to

which the imagination slid down like a hand to remote and sodden

reservoirs. But it was not her beauty that called unto him, but

an intrigue with the perverse so that he might know if his

suspicions were warranted, and more saliently, to know the

economic deprivations and desperation that made siblings into

lovers, if indeed they were that. He folded the paper and

stuffed it into his wallet against a condom.

Maybe he had diverged into the center of Nongkai and had checked

into this guest house to divert and check, if not totally

restrain, an inordinate curiosity about the perverse. This trip,

the best he understood it, was meant to have a spiritual

element--at least to the extent an atheist whose wont of thinking

had denuded god from a vast being cloaked in the sacrosanct was

capable of. Being bereft of agenda or aim did not necessarily

mean being bereft of an overarching theme founded in malaise; so

if not sidetracked, he had (for lack of a better term) a

spiritual theme that if pursued with aim could easily surpass

the agenda of a monk. After all, and of course he would never

openly disclose this most secret assertion, a monk was merely a

poor man seeking education, food, and an end to loneliness, and

all other nakedness under a saffron robe and a sacrosanct Buddha

was not even the physical substance of a needy monk. Nawin told

himself that his time here, if not perverted and aptly spent on

the spiritual, would allow him to step out of the egocentric,

crumbling tower that he was in. If nothing else he could watch

ants use twigs as bridges and freeways and in so doing become

aware of the existence of a tiny fraction of the 90 percent of

all life that was smaller than a chicken's egg. He could then

appreciate a cognizant activity and social order other than that

of his own or his own dominant species. If he could lean against

a stupa and be in awe of the sun baking his face like a brick or

appreciate the titillation of wind caressing his head like that

of a Cambodian child-beggar patted by a foreigner, he would at

last be alive.

Still that had not been his main reason for taking a room. It

seemed to him that there was no main reason at all--only the

pull of some tremendous gravitational force, that ineluctable

void which had influenced him to take his wife's best friend for

a mistress and bearer of a child and all for reasons that were

only in small part to fill the barren heart of a wife of a

fallow womb--a void that had prompted his subtle rejections of

Kimberly as his main wife, for how could he have left Noppawan

behind or renew himself from the philanderer that he was--a void

that had been a catalyst of the ensuing consequences.

To have a child! Regardless of their education or the

significance of ideas that bred in their heads, women needed

those replications of their physical beings to feel complete.

This was exacerbated in marriages, since in thought, if not in

deed, marriages were with philandering men who were replicating

creatures no different than them albeit ones obsessed by

impulses for pleasure in wet disgorging with the multitude. It

was no wonder that with the void as immense as the universe

itself and the final surrender to it inevitable in death, one

sometimes had delusions of it as the lap of a long lost

grandmother and found herself/himself plummeting into that lap

from one's balcony.

Long ago Nawin, who at birth was labeled Jatupon, had been a

teenager caught in currents and countercurrents of his own. Back

then, he had needed his new Bangkok friend, Noppawan,

desperately; and so by taking her, at the age of fourteen, to

meet his osseous, ochre friends, the dead corpses at the Siriaj

Hospital Anatomical Museum, he in a sense had thrown up his arms

to indicate a need for love. She by embracing him despite his

wish to seem intrepid before death had shown an understanding of

what boys could not say in words. So like a blossoming bud she

had opened her arms to him and let him fall into the petals of

her embrace. So, while surrounded by the shelves of these dead

beings basking in formalin, he had cried in her embrace

remembering, an hour earlier, Kazem's use of his body, a type of

interactive gesture or embrace which he had sometimes called a

"sport" and at other times a "cheap date."

Twenty five years later at certain moments of weakness, he still

needed love even though the neediness in the content of the word

abhorred him. Were couples who stayed together for forty or

fifty years to be so commended? The neediness of people in

mutual dependency was worse than newlyweds addicted to the

pleasure-highs of being in proximity to their spouses, the

extensions of themselves; it all was like the monstrosity of a

one right legged man and a one left legged woman walking

together and it sickened him.

Nawin got up and went to the coin operated telephone. He dialed

his home telephone number numerous times and then his wife's

mobile telephone number. He did this in the hope of expressing

something--admiration, sentiment, respect, gratitude, he was

not sure what, but certainly not love, as he had a pure aversion

to that word--he did not know what to say, and it did not

matter. There was merely that recording telling him that the

numbers were disconnected. And so he felt disconcerted as if he

were now walking through the gravitational force of a different

planet. He went back to the table and drank the rest of his

orange juice. It was to be expected, he told himself, as nothing

was permanent. He took a deep breath and then breathed out

fully. He felt disheartened, but not all that desperate. If a

wonderful person, one who had gone out of his life, and who was

so salient in such a critical time at his youth, had gone for

good reason, he had no reason to question it. He had been blest

to have her save him from the abyss as well as providing him

with the ensuing friendship of marriage years later. She now had

his money, his child, and her independence and he would bequeath

these things unto her unconditionally; and so, he told himself

that he must release her, exhaling her and breathing in others

like respiration. He stuffed the five baht coin into his pocket.

No, if he had loved Kimberly and Noppawan at certain times this

was enough love for him in a lifetime. If he had experienced one

malevolent family early in his life, this should have been

enough of an augury for him that long ago he, Nawin Biadklang,

should have forsworn a second round of it and vowed to maintain

a single and original life thereafter. He was an artist:

compassion, ideas, exposure to new people, licentious impulses,

and the inspiration of dead geniuses on canvass must override

this anti-Heraclital wish to cling to stable objects.

In the petty routines of man it was rare that one was impacted

profoundly by some being other than one if the volumes of dead

sages, and yet she had done this for him. Even though this

incident had happened long ago he still admired and even loved

her for it. He told himself that with time he would become even

more professional and accomplished at compassionate portrayals

of life in his paintings and his interactions, even if it were

to take thirty years, when his testosterone levels had finally

plummeted. And for those who never had anyone there, for them,

he, at least in theory, wanted to be there the way Noppawan had

been there for him in his youth. Maybe, he told himself, he

would visit the Laotians. He was not sure.

Thus, here he was sitting in the restaurant of a guest house

watching a pirated DVD on a big screen television and eating his

pancakes with maple syrup. For whatever inexplicable reason, he

had chosen to check into a guest house in the center of Nongkai

and here he--Nawin, Jatupon, or whatever label he gave himself

--was baffled by his choice. He could merely speculate and eat

his pancakes the same as any Western foreigner, but with the

voracious enthusiasm as he had when, long ago, devouring them in

America as a four year old child.

He was eating pancakes rather than the French Toast that he was

more inclined to order for the sound of the French in the toast

made him feel queasy. When he finished eating and was bored with

the movie he plunked money, faces of the king, under a salt and

pepper shaker and without saying "check bin [bill, please]" or

waiting for the waitress to pick up his money or bring back the

change, he left the guest house as irresolute as when he came.

A cloud came and past; followed by others, darker and more

voluminous. On the sidewalk, near Soi 43 where he happened to be

passing, lightning refracted from the pavement and his sad

solitary figure on this King's birthday/Father's Day was lit in

flashes of eerie spotlight. There were strong winds animating

the inanimate, which gave the already animate that sense of

flutter making him, for a time, feel an elated sense of being

that surpassed reality but this, like the lightning and the

cloud that had been the precursor of the storm, were illusory

and passed as well. His loneliness was weighty but the winds

made the gravity of it all insignificant. Then there were sheets

of rain pouring from the sky, he had tried to escape under an

awning, but a hole in the center caused this miniature waterfall

and made those under the awning cluster closer together to avoid

it. He went into a shop. A rack was full of postcards with

photographic images of Nongkhai's Buddhist sculpture garden and

the Friendship Bridge between Nongkhai, Thailand and Vientiane,

Laos. He could write to Noppawan, he told himself. He bought

several postcards but he could not think of several friends to

send them to--he had acquaintances by the droves but friends?

Minus Kimberly, there was only Noppawan. He returned to his

table at the guest house and ordered another cup of Cappuccino

and a croissant. He took out a pen from his wet pockets but it

would not write. He laughed. No, neither rain nor lugubrious

tragedy would wash away the gloss that covered his cracks for he

never ceased to be amused by the incredible, the ironic, and the

peculiar of everyday experiences.

Looking out the window and thinking how peculiar such a rain was

in December he turned toward the movie and in so doing noticed a

young man in tight wholly jeans and jacket waiting at the door.

He did not know why but he knew what he was there for and

without thinking he raised his hand and snapped his fingers

augustly, but it did not get the man's attention. "What on Earth

was I thinking? What a relief," he thought. He chuckled at his

droll existence of near misses and the twisting turns of fate. A

woman seated at a nearby table pulled out a laminated photograph

of King Rama IX. "What a simpleton," he thought, and smiled at

her as if she were a child carrying around a doll. His heart was

palpitating less, his blood seemed to be cooling, and his

thoughts seemed to be less obsessed by the sexual and the

peculiar. Then someone sat next to him. Unlike himself or the

one in the denim jacket who both had a golden brown complexion,

his was a muddier, more turgid tone. He was also more muscular

just as he remembered was his brother, Kazem.

"Sawadee khrap," he said.

"Yes, what can I do for you?" asked Nawin.

"Just thought I'd come here and talk with you. You looked

lonely. Thought I'd cheer you up if you needed cheering. You

snapped your fingers but the other guy didn't hear you. I've

heard and have come."

"What will you do to cheer me up?" asked Nawin with a sheepish

grin.

"Better not say in words but I snap. You do what is pleasant for

me and it will please you."

"Free?"

"Give me a 500 baht gift afterwards if you want."

Nawin paid the bill and led him to his room.

21

He listened to the frequent gusts assail the window panes. They

were a hybrid of breath and force. They were muddled

articulations in brawn. In that respect, he told himself [at

that second he was thinking of his own childhood as a reference,

since the centripetal domain of his myopic existence was all

there was], the howling in the denigration of night was

figuratively no different from the diatribe of human speech, and

yet being literally both it felt entirely strange. He listened

intently for whatever else there was for him to do as a unit in

this barren room of post-sensual darkness inside his own head;

scatter and drift with the wind? The gusts of this peculiar

storm in the middle of the dry season seemed to be attempts at

conveying meaning, ineffable sounds from without transforming to

thought that smote recriminations within, and this he listened

to as well even as he smiled wryly to think how superstitious he

was to attempt to augur some cosmological significance to his

petty existence from adventitious happenings. Smell equally

condemned him: sweat evaporating from chafed skin of bodies reft

from a union of friction; underwear tainted by residual liquids

and reeking that odor sweetly; and, for him, immured in a poorly

ventilated room of a guest house, it was nighttime and there was

the saccharine stench of rotting male flesh everywhere.

Circumspect, he was unable to trust that there was safety in

falling asleep [he could not feel otherwise with his wallet

there in the top drawer of the bed-stand near that body], and

thus there were long minutes of darkness made darker yet by

being awake with eyes closed; mind somewhat assuaged by what it

could repudiate from illuminating visual sensory input; thought,

nature, and a connection to both seeming more acute despite the

fact that he felt tired; and all of this a less pessimistic

perspective garnered in certain seconds only to be lost in

others. For his was an episteme of concurrent antitheses where,

from the impact of human will, bits of knowledge like a mixture

of adulterated pollutants that comprised the canals in Bangkok,

were thrust into composite waves and counter-waves of ferment;

but when will sped elsewhere it all reverted to its stagnant

origin as waves of cogitation and cognition like waves of water

resumed their former states.

All that he could know absolutely of himself within his droll,

droning thoughts was that the perspectives he was trading

shifted from variations of mood like different or seemingly

different selves kaleidoscopically making it so he hardly knew a

consistent self at all. All that he could know outside himself

was that right now, perceived with gravity but variable nuances

of optimism and humor, he was definitely in this room and, as

much as he might wish to extricate himself, he was not alone.

Stretched out stiffly on the bed like a cadaver (Why so rigid?

Why at all negative? he asked himself), he did not have to see

the objects of the room again to feel a cold, surreal, and alien

remoteness in their presence nor did he have to be deceased and

within a state of rigor mortis to be so inert. Yet! (fuck!), he

thought in Thai for that expletive implied how intimately

disconnection could be felt; and as life, more than thought, was

allowing oneself to be besmirched by the saturations of feeling,

validating it with action, which then was the catalyst for more

feeling, he asked himself whether or not after the massage that

he had rendered like a slave to another's sense of pleasure and

this being riveted for such a lengthy and hellish twenty minute

duration which had just ceased a few moments ago, he were really

living life. He was, he told himself, and what was more, by this

one intimate act with the man and the void he was connecting

himself atavistically to that antediluvian period of early self

in which he had been sodomized so hard as to rupture childhood

irreparably and to be condemned to this morbid repressed pain

his atheist's soul, his all-too human, mind--a mind which even

early on had been a refuge to a harmonious and familiar voice

within.

This pain was for so many years seldom thought of, but now that

it was thawed like a creek, it flowed it's bane as microbes and

water. Pain, once necessitated, was now necessitating the

diminished memories of the diminutive boy whom he had once been--

diminutive as the creature had been banished and repudiated all

of these years from the belief that only a man's appetites and

actions within the present moment were real. Back then he had

not bothered to postulate that a present bereft of foundation

was like a cleft chunk of a planet floating aimlessly as an

asteroid; and that if fully connected to himself; the boy might

not be a diminished fictional character any longer while the man

might become more than a tailless lizard with a regenerative

head. Thus, this being bedraggled and besmirched in painful

intimate sport was for him a homecoming.

There were so many voices of the past in the wind. They were

distinct in themselves and yet, swallowed and digested by the

wind, they were part of its reeking breath: brothers, parents,

extended family, evanescent friends of youth, distant cold bits

of memory less than specter and dust; Noppawan and Kimberly, his

only two portions of love, which, as a self-contained being, he

never needed but delighted in ravenously as one who lacked and

was in love with those who engendered such lovable feelings (the

feelings of being in love being that which were loved most); so

many female models, so many desperate, delectable whores with

defunct eyes of hopelessness, dead embers with a slight wistful

glow for possible deliverance for which men roved like the

dimmest of spotlights; so many relationships; so many desperate

others no different than the whores (was there a male or female

who got involved, let alone married, to worsen one's lot or to

become best friends with the self, brazenly riding through

loneliness on a solitary raft? No, never!). There was snoring.

There was putrid breath, sweeping the side of his face. There

was effluvium from the individual lying next to him and this was

a type of wind as well.

No matter whether it was done as perpetrator or willing victim,

no matter what the particular genders involved were, or the

positions of riding or being ridden, the sexual union of two

people was in his conclusion a mallet lunging its mass

forcefully into dark, dank, and constricted space, a club

forcing entrance into narrow passages not designed for its

presence, and an overpowering of a being to devour but also to

inflict servitude and pain while obtaining that apogee of

pleasure, the brevity of orgasm, which could be gained in no

other way. A mélange of croquet and billiards, polo and

wrestling, this sport and aggression performed in the

heterosexual role could cause the conception of a child more

readily than it could cause venereal disease, but deviant

sexuality was conjoined for sexual desire of every kind was

definitely a crude and barbarous means of getting a specie to

interact physically so that under an obsessive and specious

sense of rapture and intimacy and a wish for extension of self

by annexation of another being or being annexed by him,

different apertures would be explored at various times and from

human curiosity and experimentation, pregnancy might ensue.

Yes, he told himself, by being amenable to pleasurable

promptings in an intimacy with a male half his age, and finding

himself himself suddenly middle aged and needing to become

enmeshed and invigorated in his beauty, he was living life as

animals were meant to live it. Infidelities of every kind within

this godless universe gave men, even gentry like himself who

were cloyed by leisure, a rapturous respite from their roles as

automatons and thus they were an essential sport of man. For the

naive this conduct led to some months of being in love but for a

worldly adulterer like himself it was minutes of indispensable

intoxication. He continued to listen to the howling wind. It

seemed to inveigle and beckon him and he found himself wistfully

and sequaciously summoned to its cryptic codes. Did the wind not

entice him to make his naked form denuded further so that he

might become as amorphous as it, to be amalgamated with wind,

and to slip into it wholly? It did; and yet it seemed such a

grotesque hybrid of breath and force with these continual

elated, muddled, and ineffable articulations in brawn. Yes, he

reiterated, in that respect the howling was figuratively no

different than the aspersions and diatribe of human speech. By

that, although perhaps not consciously thinking it, he was

nonetheless meaning that war called family which happened so

briefly in the history of a life as if it had never been, though

undoubtedly had occurred for, he assessed, there was an expanse

or large swath of charred, fallow, and contaminated brain

therein where, to the present day, little grew but a sense of

desertification. Living in the centripetal domain of a myopic

existence as everyone did he supposed that his hapless childhood

would always be his point of reference, his vantage point, and

also the multi-pointed obstacle of his life. Generalizations,

skewed and concocted from the sordid past that were their

antecedent, extruded from his fissures in an incessant cursive

lava flow of amicable contempt. The howling was as

undecipherable as the cries of a forlorn child. It was eerie as

though a million such children with their muffled cries were

being slammed into the windows with each new gust.

Lying there, a cohabitant of the darkness of this relatively

unfamiliar room, the howling then seemed more fierce than

before. It literally was brawn and breath. As such it was worse

than the acerbity of humans (not that his father excoriating him

for retreating to his "cage," that cage he willingly absconded

to as a casualty of a sadistic sport in which he needed to shoot

and denigrate before being shot and denigrated himself, and once

hit to seek the prey more aggressively in the hope of being seen

as the master of disparaging wit, or the father being as rustic

and ungrammatical as a wild boar, did not howl yet in memory)

and made the evening seem all the more surreal and peculiar if

such a thing were possible.

"Where am I?" he asked himself absurdly, as if it could be

anything other than that same room at the guest house in

Nongkhai. "What happened to me?" he asked with feigned innocence

which caused him to chortle and spray saliva that was like the

froth of a wave upon a breaker, the cluster of rocks that was

his smile. He had to admit, despite himself, that this being

violated, by his own volition, had been quite a ride. It had

been an internal roller coaster physically; but more it had been

a ride into an abyss within, not merely from the physical

sensation of this odd womanly role he found himself in or the

pleasure of being free of aberration as creatures of variation

loved aberration if social constraints were slackened (and

slackened they were not only in Bang-cock but to some degree in

the whole of Thailand as the Lord Buddha did not envisage gods,

rules, and the dogma of coercion), but most saliently in these

years as a womanizer overturned with this stranger's slight push

of his body toward the bed.

Even with eyes closed and sedulous efforts made to concentrate

on the wind to avoid thinking of the raw, anal soreness and all

that transpired which was as confusing for the libertine as it

was liberating, he knew. He listened intently. He listened

scrupulously. How superstitious he was to equate the wind with a

specter and yet he did it nonetheless. The smells of the room

did not seem as acrid as a fully evaporated area over a recent

urine-saturated pavement near a park or stadium in Bangkok or as

repugnant as a room littered with his brothers fetid socks and

other equally if not more reprehensible articles of attire

peeled off the bodies of these anathemas but still, as small as

the room was, nothing was impervious to it. If the curtains and

the carpet were all permeated by a redoubling of these male

odors, he would not have been surprised--not that surprise, or

any other human emotion could have been registered all that

readily in his impassive state. His was a naked mind, like that

of his body, except that his body was wrapped loosely in a used

mildewed towel and his mind in a bawdy numbness which he labeled

the void.

He sneezed and opened his eyes. He rubbed his nose against his

shoulder, careful not to make any more precipitous movements

against the broken arm in the sling, since it was hurting worse

than before, as of course it would from the earlier sport. There

was no point in closing his eyes again. He would not be able to

rest any more than before. With a mind needing debouchment more

than his body needed to relieve itself in the toilet he stayed

where he was, which was where there were windows. The

circumfluence of the fetid, enervated air beneath the incessant

creaking of the ceiling fan; creaking as if it were not only

grating against the torpor and stagnancy of the air itself but

against the melee of all, for all was restrained in the time and

space of what now was and in a circulation and deciduous draping

of those same odors caught to which the windows were permanently

sealed to keep out the rain.

22

Gained as an unintentional wooer of women by dint of an

opalesque smile, a mellifluous voice, a successful name, and a

handsome albeit swarthy and sodden appearance which made him,

for them at least, a semi-deluctable presence, and years of

venial sensual licentiousness, a recompense for empathic

suffering in his thoughtful studies of prostitutes and

injustices of the world at large, it was his inveterate

perspective of himself as delusionary as it may have been. It

was disconcerting to think of it as gone; and yet, he told

himself, as emasculated and denuded as he now felt, were he to

continue to mature this way, to climb the precipice of old age,

while still acting callow enough to be obsessed by the exquisite

release of his body (love making out of the tension of repressed

urges towards the many and, as a cumulative exhortation of

fantasies vented on a specific one, an act of adultery when

making love to her, as it was love of himself, his own

gratification), partaking of blithe experiences with female

strangers under societal approbation and with youthful lewdness,

needing to restrain his behavior very little, scrutinizing it no

more than this, and having nothing to show for his life other

than wanton appetites dragging him into every damp and unseemly

hole open to him would he not eventually become more obscene

than the hole he was at this moment in time? Would it not be

worse than now to end his life no more master of the self than

that and to have made sexuality the sole subject of study and

preoccupation as he had done for decades? He was not sure,

although to feel better about himself he averred it silently as

if he were so. He told himself that there was nothing to feel

guilty about. It was the clay of life. Human will might choose

to misrepresent it as ethereal as a cloud but it was not so.

From the first regenerative microbe it was an experiment, and so

of course there would be experimentation now. If obscene, was it

not even more obscene that this, which was an inception of all,

was all there was?

The carnal scholar that he was, did he not seek to understand

life pedantically, partaking of it mostly with prostitute models

instead of those of affluent means? Whatever small, favorable

outcome it did for them financially he knew all too clearly that

it was exploiting the exploited whatever august and sententious

aim he might entertain. By seeking the omniscience of a god and

showing the injustices of life as they really were (or as

accurate an account as one could do within his tiny scope of

experience and knowledge) his was to know both the parts of the

exploiter and the exploited. What other reason did he have to

enjoy them than to enlarge his study to the perpetrators of

exploitation themselves when there was such a smorgasbord for

free, or at least as free as women got? So many years of praised

debauchery had embedded that self perspective of himself as a

wooer of women ("Naughty Nawin" as articles often called him);

and it had seemed as impregnable as granite when really it was a

thin outline of a self that could easily be smudged and erased.

Lying on his half of the bed, the thunder, lightning, and wind

from outside seemed to diffuse into that porous and amorphous

outline of a defunct self. For half an hour he was cognizant of

nothing but the storm and the faint, subdued murmurs and

indistinct featureless shapes of early, distant memories set in

a rather subconscious mental fog, scampering away at a distance

as though seeking to allude him. Without thinking so, he felt

that large amalgamations of his character, the daily sensory

input of a constant, non-threatening environment, and his fond

attachments to others gained from shared pleasant experiences

together, which together he called himself fell from him

annually. He was deciduous, but unlike a tree, he suffered a

loss of most of the trunk of his entire being: the full love of

a child for his mother that would never come again; the family

that damaged and then vanished almost as quickly as one was

conceived, gestated, and delivered as a member into its cell of

sordid and clandestine activities; an infatuation with a girl

that once seemed garish, all-consuming, and eternal as the sun;

and the full pleasure of feeling those awesome gusts of wind hit

against his face as a boy would, smelling the pile of winter

leaves that he once jumped into as they began to suffocate him,

and appreciating the significance of the simple delights of the

ordinary as a child's mind did, and to which no vacation to

Vientiane as an adult had the hope of restoring. He was merely

what he sensed from the storm and for some time he stayed this

way soughing skidding around with it in his mind like a severed

and desiccated old leaf.

Manhood, this summation of himself as masculine force and

presence, had nothing tangible in it and could vanish quicker

than the toppling of a house of cards. With so many years of

incessant layers of thought it had seemed ossified so how could

he have known that this perspective--one that was endemic to

such a profession of contemplative decadence and decadent

contemplation and had seemed myriad as the shore's self-

flagellation of waves--would be so evanescent? As his nose was

beginning to itch he rubbed it with the back of his hand. From

the gesture he found himself returning to a self which,

regrettably, could not be discarded entirely. How strange, he

thought, to be washed up on new shores. He thought this as if

there were something so new in it, and as if sodomy, and in his

case fraternal incest at that, were totally unknown to him. It

was not so strange a shore as he wanted to believe, he had to

admit, and he would only be alone and marooned there if he saw

himself as such. The fecund, dark soil of a less familiar shore

could only be foreign, ominous, and grave if he stated to

himself that it was such.

"So, I am with a man! What of it!" he thought; but guilt

continued to reverberate, as those eerie lamenting calls to

worship that, from a nearby mosque, thrice a day rolled off of

the black sheen of the waters of the canal and trespassed into

his Bangkok estate bypassing a wall and gate meant to fortify

him from possible theft, and more generally to barricade him

from the ignorance and poverty that were his past. If this

perspective of himself as an inadvertent wooer of women and

debonair presence, were a wall to memory meant to keep himself

from considering the peculiarity of his perverted and twisted

past and the walls of his estate were meant to fortify himself

from poverty and misery both of them failed unequivocally.

Guilt, like the wind that he was now listening to, wailed on.

Self flagellation like thunder and lightning piercing the room,

did so under the aegis of his closed eyes. And there, correcting

examinations in her favorite seat in the living room with eyes

perusing paper behind thick glasses, and fighting back parts of

the disheveled hair that obstructed the process, was a spectral

and indistinct image of his wife. He judged that she was no

different from the rest, already well into diminishing to the

state of former friends and family like his deceased girlfriend,

his infant son, and his paternal obligations.

There they would become part of a blotch of nebulous memory that

might have its pull like a poltergeist against the organization

of his thoughts but would nonetheless seem to have never been.

If he were to accept the defining components of marriage as the

masses defined it, he was never married at all. The signing of a

marriage certificate long ago had been done as a lifelong pledge

to prioritize one individual and one bond above others and not

as a renunciation of social interaction or forfeiting the

ownership of his genitalia; and what was true throughout the

marriage was surely no less true now. Noppawan, the

anthropologist and professor whom he gained such delight in,

which was love, once said that there had to be a reason that

jealousy was such an embedded instinct. She said that it no

doubt had its origin in primordial man. Perhaps, she said,

female Australopithecus africans needed to ensure that the

providers did not abandon them and their prodigy and their

primordial male counterparts wanted to ensure that those

offspring whom they were providing for were really their own.

Did ideas and attitudes of cognizant beings ever evolve at all?

he wondered, for sexual fidelity was still thought of as such an

important factor to marriage when really it should be a contract

of a union of best friends. Facile measurements of this nature

would legitimize the most indifferent partners as well as

relationships where obtaining monetary or social status was the

objective. Contracts of faithfulness and appeasing a partner's

jealous propensities by suffocating the self unlovingly could

exist just as the facile measurements of what a marriage really

was could materialize (all had the right to measure, define, and

live as they judged apposite in obtaining some degree of

happiness) but, he thought, that surely did not mean that he had

to subscribe to it himself. All who signed marriage certificates

did not have to do so with the same motivation and none ever

signed documents to which there was a likelihood of their

present state remaining as it was or worsening. As an aberration

of a liberal man who from being fragmented by pain was able to

design himself anew, why should it matter what the masses

believed? By the momentum of one free to be dissolute he, a

libertine, had a short time earlier worn away one more

restriction; but as it was one of consenting adults; was it all

that necessary to build dams and reroute the currents of a river

that ran both ways? He thought not, when the damn was such an

unnatural barrier.

He wondered what Noppawan was doing at this moment. Awakened by

the baby, was she warming the bottle of milk and combing that

thicket of long hair as he had seen her do before. Was she even

able to sleep very well nowadays with the infant's hourly

crying? Was she able to sleep at all with Kimberly's passing?

Did she think of him at all? Did she feel regret over breaking

his arm with the frying pan, changing the locks, tossing his

clothes onto the drive, and refusing to answer the telephone?

Despite making him culpable she had in fact arranged it all.

Kimberly's post-partum depression was no doubt exacerbated by

those two months of shared motherhood and espousal husbandry

that barren Noppawan had conceived, but none could have foreseen

the denouement. The world abounded in spills and mess and yet it

was miraculous that, at least for many, it came together so well

before finally going awry, dissipating as dew, life, the decent

and debauched of it.

He opened his eyes. Everything was there as before including

that body. He sat up; embraced the mesa of his legs within the

multifarious sands of the desert of his mind; admired those

various shades of color in the sand, perspectives made so by the

variations of mood; and looked down. Consternated, he stared at

a mattress cover dappled like a constellation from his soiling,

and he laughed nervously. "But then why should it not be so with

the extent of it," he thought. He was meaning the twenty minutes

or longer of being sodomized, that roller coaster within which

eventually prompted bowel movements in a futile attempt to

excrete the intruder. Not knowing what he could do as he could

hardly remove the mattress cover then and there, he pulled down

a package of cigarettes from the mantle of the bed. He put a

cigarette into his mouth but not able to find the lighter from

the groping of his hand on the mantle, and seeing that it was

not on the bed stand, he just let the fireless cigarette dangle

in his mouth.

Experience (he smiled again, for as much as this ceaseless

analysis of the intricacies of his life might seem morbid to

others were they to have them their head, he found postulating

potential reasons for his actions beyond the superficial an

amusement park where the variation and length of the rides was

infinite--it had always amused him to do so; and prior to this

whole Kimberly affair he was in action if not thought as shallow

and concave as the next person, and more hedonistic than most),

there was nothing ugly or disdainful in a given experience but

what the mind associated as positive or negative from social

conditioning or from paranoid fears of possible ramifications

from a little pain. Did some anal pain presage that he would

ineluctably contract a disease from this man? No, it did not,

nor had each of his myriad raptures of vaginal penetration in

his sordid past indicated that the ecstasy he was experiencing

in his groins would transcend into a meaningful companionship

beyond sexual gymnastics.

Having forgotten to close the curtains there was a warped,

oblong silver bar of refracted light on the floor in front of

the bed. It was light from an adjacent street lamp that was

molded and cast down onto the darkness of the floor. There was a

slight sway of a mirror hanging on the wall with reflections of

blurred and severed shapes seeming to appear, disappear, and

reappear within its sway. What they were he did not know for

sure. One was possibly a part of a corner of a wall and a bit of

a footstool; another was possibly matte flanks of bed and flesh;

less dubiously it seemed that there was a partial foot or

severing of that foot, but whatever was being reflected was done

so as a rearranging mélange. A cactus, a telephone, and a

postcard in which he had only written, "Dear Noppadon, I am here

in Nongkai thinking of you and everything. I want--" were yoked

together on the bed stand. With every reopening of his eyes they

seemed to command the turning of his face toward them not so

much from the fact that his wallet was there in one of its

drawers but more to suggest that his life was barren and he

needed to contact someone. The inanimate which could not copy

and transmit impressions of the world or one's relation to it,

were to him, at that moment, capable of an empathy and directive

that bypassed words. At least it seemed to be so of the items on

the bed-stand, and he waited for them to mandate who he was to

contact (the beautiful nurse at Siriaj Hospital, his swarthy

wife with intellect as thick as the lenses of her glasses, or

the sodomy division of the local police office--"hello Mr.

Policeman. I would like to report the fact that a stray dog is

stuck in my crevasse. You will sir. Thank you, sir. You are such

a nice man. I will prepare a nice treat for you and your partner

when you come"). He gasped in a muted chuckle.

"What are you doing?" asked a gecko that was crawling on the

wall near the bedstand.

"Sitting here. Fornicating. Experimenting."

It engulfed him with glassy eyes that were unmoving oceans, even

stagnant universes, and he knew that everything lacked purpose

beyond being an object tossed out for pure animation. To not go

forward was completely meaningless.

"Huh? What are you doing?" asked the man.

"Wanting to smoke but I can't find my lighter," said Nawin.

23

There were consecutive sneezes to which a forth was as

incomplete as muffled sound. Then there was the wiping of his

nose on his arm, a few seconds of an intolerable facial itch,

which he scratched incessantly (such a plethora of pleasures

there were in discomfort, or acclimating to this life as one was

compelled to do, just an adequate amount concocted within an

entity to keep it, in most circumstances, from cutting its

throat or kimberlying downward) and his cigarette, still

dangling loosely in his mouth, lit and allowed to disperse death

unto him inexplicably. "Are you happy?" the intimate stranger

asked him, but before any potential response could be uttered

Nawin sensed his cigarette being extracted from him and, a

second later, saw it wedged in the other's mouth for his long

inhalation.

Nawin laughed at the filching during his elongated interjection

of reproach. As he was most often his own adventitious source

positing potential truths to the intense contemplative domain of

his multi-tiered mind, which, at top levels, sought life's

riddled viands voraciously; at first he did not register the

question as coming from any interlocutor other than himself. He

was preoccupied with trying to find an exact correlation between

burning cigarette phalluses and the afterglow of sexual

relations, conceptualizing it the way he would were he to

transpose it to canvas with traditional gender substitutes,

wondering if the masses of men really felt that pleasurable

corporeal sensation + union with another was happiness, and if

it really was so why he did not ever feel it.

Why, he asked himself in a bout of hubris, had this insolent

creature, who a couple minutes earlier had been buried in sleep,

reassembled his parts and spoken to him? He had not granted him

permission to do so. It was merely this one's part to transport

him home to the abuse that was the foundation of childhood. This

he had done fully; and as it was concluded action subsequent

cohabitation, to his mind, would be superfluous. By those

painful, pleasurable thrusts of intimacy edifices, property,

prosperity, verility, invincibility, relationships and stature,

all that one made of a life by repudiating everything that one

once was, were now seen as the sandcastles that they were and he

himself as the ravaged spoils of dirt there to be bulldozed by

others' wills as before, to sense the suppressed cries of

childhood as before. He did not know how, after these ravaging

trespasses of bodily entanglement he could maintain an amicable

conversation with the invited violator and yet he did not know

how he could avoid an attempt? He could not ask him to leave

when he had, by desire if not volition, asked him to come here.

Was it not a standard belief, and a rational one at that, that

conversation was the means to further intimacies, that sexual

relations with strangers were inverted intimacy and sexual

relations with men were perverted or at least distorted,

inverted intimacy?; and yet even in heterosexual relationships,

he said to himself, the normal sequence of mental divulging

leading to the ribald, the carnal, and the bestial seemed its

own desultory and discomfiting mess. Was it really unnatural for

men to be together in this way? More than he might fear that it

was, he feared that it was not. What could be more natural than

competitive fencing and impaling another man with one's

vibrating, titillating sword with a vibrant force far greater

than women could take? Was it not vile for a married man to

profane his relationship with his wife in such a way? Yes, he

conceded, it was. Did he have compunction about his action? For

what good it did anyone, yes he did; and yet this action was as

natural as condoning or sanctioning killing itself; it was

natural for the immune system to kill microorganisms, for a

child, despite sentimental attachments, to grow up and out of

all which he once thought of as dear, and for family to

evaporate like morning dew.

Talk of love belied the innate desire to experience a workout,

to at last turn off thought and respond as an animal should by

instinct, to be released from desire tickling incessantly like

the crawl of a line of ants on one's skin, and to release a

surfeit into a hole with the instrument of urination, an

intimate and exquisite release. Likewise, thoughts repudiating

the naked truth that killing was as ineluctable and natural in a

being as its own breath, contravened any degree of understanding

of the life that the fates circumscribed man to have.

And as for being with a woman and begetting children with her,

whether it be action that was virtuous or not, it was natural

without equivocation; and yet when a marriage certificate, an

artificial piece of paper, was signed, it became an instrument

for self-deceit by fostering an illusion of permanence while a

means to sanctify what was natural by saying that without

legitimacy in ink and paper this carnal and emotional bond was

debauchery. Thus by refining nature it contravened it.

In his case, he only had nominal passion for Noppawan. To him

they were two intellects clinging to each other, after family

had dissipated from their lives like dispersing smoke from a

conflagration. What could be more of an unnatural contrivance

than this? And if not only the sport of man on man, but all

unions of naked intimacy were illicit and vulgar without paper

and ink contrived unions of prehistory predating and leading to

both, the present generation would make vile bastards of all. At

least that was what he thought or was thinking at the time.

He might have thought of himself as self-contained despite at

times feeling distraught over this incessant reign of

impermanence deluging him; he might have thought of love as

neediness and that, personally, it was emotional bonding that,

like teddy bears, he himself was beyond as he was beyond

Buddhist statuettes, jasmine rosaries, and the intervention of a

Buddha god theistically; and yet he loved Noppawan nonetheless.

What else could it be but love?

Unable to share experiences that he found himself in, even when

certain that they would be pleasurable to a given person now

lost to him the mind conjured its ersatz. On the train ride here

she, of course, was not with him and yet, hauntingly, she was;

and if he had gone in a second or third class carriage she would

have particularly enjoyed this train ride with him more than she

had: windows down, redolent smells grafted in the hard breeze

and wafting the aisle of the car. When he was glancing at post

cards so that he could send one to her, oddly in an eerie way,

she was there with him urging him to find one for herself that

more accurately depicted the history of Nongkai. Every time he

thought of going straight into Vientiane she expostulated that

it would be better to bypass the city as much as possible so

that they might spend more time in the Plain of Jars. She was

the plausible what might have been. and as he could not give to

reality he would give to the hollow mirages that replicated

therein. This, if not the entirety of the neediness called love,

epitomized the good that was there.

He continued to think: ...and with solidity breaking into

smaller and smaller pieces like bits and sub-bits of glaciers

and then rearranging, the conclusiveness of conclusions

controverted, and impermanence rife in all, was it not natural

to need someone--even that he should be here--

"So, what is it?"

"Huh?"

"Yes or no?"

"Yes or no what? Am I happy? Is that what you asked?"

"Yes."

"Don't worry. I'm okay," responded Nawin indifferently.

"You didn't enjoy it?" asked the stranger. His voice was groggy

in partial sleep.

"I guess I did," admitted Nawin "--as much as one can in that

position. It was different."

"Different good, or different bad?"

"Different. I don't know. Why do you ask?" There was silence in

which both men did not know what to say, and in it Nawin

reproached himself for making the situation more awkward than it

had to be, and then reproached himself for finding anything

awkward in it at all. As though it were justified to be cautious

upon finishing intimacies with a stranger he did not approve of

or to be apathetic with an undertone of supercilious, sneering

antipathy, any more than to partake of the carnal episode

itself. Still he could not conceptualize anything innately wrong

in activity with another man. Beings were attracted elements,

compounds that enjoyed times of coupling as double compound

entities; and cathartic releases of physical desire toward one

or the other gender, like medicine to illness, restored one

toward a more logical inquiry of thought. But, he told himself,

he had gained no such release. His paramour had him spellbound

and made him no more than a galley slave rowing the master's

carnal euphoria. Perhaps, he thought, moral dilemmas were not on

moral grounds at all. Perhaps they could be reduced to such

basic factors as sexual frustration. He forced himself to

reciprocate a feigned interest in enjoyment although he was not

able to extricate himself from the phlegmatic tone that spewed

from his mouth bearing his thoughts. "What about you?" he asked.

"I love you. Do you love me too?" Nawin looked away and did not

say anything. Whether this question was an artifice contrived

for monetary gain or a real neediness he did not know. It did

occur to him that having this man really interested in him (a

suitor of sorts) might be more disadvantageous for him

economically than a brief tryst--not that the prodigal son

needed to retrench his life with fewer mistresses and zero

misters, and he was still contemplating the addition of a nurse

at Siriaj Hospital to his intimate menagerie. Worse, he thought,

if the neediness of this other party was one of emotional rather

than financial deficiencies, he himself, a married man, might be

dogged if not stalked by this undesirable, desired being, this

being who might desperately need to register himself into a

companion's brain. What was worse than to be with someone who

needed to be needed, who needed another person to be wistful and

yearn for him, and who needed to etch himself personally and as

indelibly as one could onto the adventitious, impermanent putty

of the human mind? It was not easy to be compassionate and

extract oneself from such parasites. He could not believe

anything that was linked to such an amorphous word as love,

which only had one consistent thread within it and that was

what all love was, a neediness within projected onto that which

was without.

"Are you in pain? Did I tear you up?"

"Did you what? Did you tear me up?...Well...since you ask

sitting is a bit painful but as much as I can tell, I guess that

I am not torn up, as you call it. By the way, I am not used to

this sort of thing and...to tell the truth...it is rather

embarrassing to say this...with the action and all I think...I

think I soiled the bed sheet."

"Soiled?"

"Soiled. What other word do you want me to use?"

The paramour laughed mildly. At first Nawin appreciated that the

dry laughter was so terse and restrained. Then the fact that he

had laughed at all seemed as inordinate insolence. "Maybe you

should get up and I'll remove the sheet," he said irascibly.

"No, I'm going back to sleep. If it didn't bother me the first

time I can sleep on it again. Leave it for the maids. It makes

something new in their days."

"You're going to go back to sleep?"

"Soon. I did you long and hard but if there's no blood you

aren't torn up."

"Okay, good; now can we talk about something else?"

"If you want. What were you staring at when I woke up?"

"I don't know--a post card I didn't finish writing; the

telephone; a gecko crawling above the bed stand; the corners of

the room which are filthy--the room must be infested with

insects." Nawin smiled abashedly, chuckled, and then stared

directly into the face of the paramour with a baffled

expression. "You keep grinning. Why?"

"I'm happy."

"Happy?"

"The happiest. The happiest I've ever been."

"Well, good for you...I mean if you were happy before you've got

more of it. If you weren't I guess you have less of

it...unhappiness that is, negated negatives."

The paramour laughed. "You're a comedian. I love that; I love

you," he said as his fingers slid into the elastic of Nawin's

underwear. Nawin laughed incredulously careful not to release a

cynical laugh out of fear that, although unlikely, the paramour

could possibly mean that which he said.

"Don't you think it is a bit early to feel that way. It's

certainly too early in the morning to say a lot of nothing."

"It's not nothing," he said, snapping the elastic--he himself

wearing nothing but his grin. "No, that's not how I think. You

just have to do things. If there is a good feeling ride it

fully, you just have to throw yourself into it and live it. If

you stand back and pick things apart because you don't know 100

percent you might as well be dead because what you're living

isn't life."

"Is that so?" Nawin said. It was cogent enough to him who would

have had the need and thus the gullibility to believe such

things were it not for the countenance, the melodramatic tone of

he who promulgated this holy maxim, and the circumstances that

went contrary to the putative sentiments.

24

Sensing that a bit of enlightenment could accompany a binge of

debauchery and provide him with not only wind but ablution into

the cellar of his musty mind, he was given a reason for

intimacy, not that this reason or any other would have to

prevail in creatures so prone to irrational caprices as he now

concluded that he was. So a man would seek less alien

companionship with another man after a girlfriend had jumped

from the eleventh story of a university building and a wife who

had subsequently broken his arm with an iron frying pan now kept

him locked out of their home--this attributing of men as less

illogical and more steady presences, rightly or wrongly, and

identifying solely with them was reasonable enough; but to

succumb spellbound to the brevity of frenzy, knowing well such

intimacies to be spectacles as brief and garish as the puffs of

aerosol he and a college roommate used to spray and light so

that they might experience an inferno of the air, to know and

yet to do it nonetheless, was inane.

Now seated and stationary on this bed in this room and in this

mind, groping for contours of objects in dark and curtailed

space among antithetical thoughts and caprices, putative reality

seemed nothing but the most tangible of the intangibles. As a

result he became even more reticent, pondering what the right

combinations were to live life fully: inward versus outward

explorations; feeling versus logic; work versus leisure; silent

reverie versus boisterous revelry; digressions into the future

and the past; savoring the present moment as in lying on a bench

at Wat Arun watching clouds overhead, sensing the breath enter

and leave his frame, and feeling a sense of awe that he was even

cognizant of all this; conversely, doing and having agenda and

purpose about the affairs of man, interaction which allowed one

to avoid the intrusiveness of too many unwanted, distracting

thoughts, all of which confirmed his inconsequence even in the

here and now. There had to be a harmony of these incongruous

elements but he did not know how or to what degree.

"And I suppose you will always be there for me," Nawin asked

with a sardonic smile on his face. He now wanted levity and the

substance of sound, even his own, to dispel, or at least

obfuscate the longevity that was in each and every minute to

distract him from the realization of the hours until sunrise,

and to preoccupy him during the time, still unknown, until

departure of this intimate stranger.

He, the womanizer he once was, reproached himself for being here

with this man in a chagrin of manhood, a mortification and yet a

mortification of what he could not say. Perhaps there was no

reason for mortification at all, he countered in a retort of

thought. Perhaps this was a cleansing and a freeing of himself

from a false sense of what manhood should be. Still, he had all

these explosions of intimacy in the knowledge he would feel this

vacuity afterwards, and that upon feeling it any moment could

make him a perpetrator of indifference who rudely discarded this

delusion rather than built a multi-story make-believe castle

upon it; intimacy bedazzled him for a time before his return to

a more subdued and substantive state; this time in an effeminate

role of mute intercourse not to his liking but which he needed

nonetheless; exacerbated sexual tension abated but not entirely

extinguished in post-sexual melancholy. To know such matters and

yet to interact this way regardless like any biologically

programmed automaton thwarted by early childhood experience was

an inane life.

So he concluded and re-concluded, with his thoughts becoming

increasingly redundant, twisted, and plaited. To gain some

solace and respite he hummed the melody of Beethoven's Ninth

Symphony. Thinking as he did so that the whirlwind he would

create by repeating it thrice therein should clear away all

dross he instead found that the debris remained even as it

dragged circuitously although less tediously in music.

"And I know that you will always be there for me," Nawin

remembered himself saying facetiously. It occurred to him that

this lover, this sprawled figure so near to him, was like a dog

he had seen recently near Gaysorn Department Store lying on its

back at the base of a Brahma statue, its genitalia an oblation

to that deity. At that time, while he was chuckling at a deity

aptly profaned and pondering how our pantheistic awe of nature

had been overtaken by these artificial weeds of dogma, false

stories and tradition, as with the alleged bones of the Buddha

that were enshrined in a temple near the Silpakorn University

branch in Nakhon Pathom, he was re-entering Gaysorn intent on

purchasing a 38,000 baht watch so as to have it shine opulently

upon his handsome albeit dark dirt-brown skin.

Shopping was only adjunct to the instinct that prompted the

switching on of one's breath. Of course he would do it naturally

for man's energy was not to be self-contained, but instead was

continually changing in changeable containers, and in desperate

moments he would barter what he had for intimacy--barter with

what he had. And if he knew not what he hoped to gain from a

spiritual journey already thwarted in activity similar to the

perversity of his youth, all he needed to do was to look at the

obvious. From it, there could be no other interpretation but

that he wanted to be taken back to a feeling of ravaged youth

when he had perverse hopes that the physical penetration would

stop while at the same time he would be recognized as

permanently married to his brother. Being taken back home to a

foundation of dilapidated innocence, but an ingenuous foundation

nonetheless, he sought a return to himself that was the ends and

not the means.

In this guest house in the city of Nongkhai, this was what he

had to have, and it was now his. Whether he would have to pay

for it with money or time remained to be seen. It seemed to him

that there were just these two payments, each a type of direct

or indirect pleasure. If the stranger asked for money, then it

would be proof that a contract of brief employment had taken

place in which he was hiring him not to be his master but a

slave. If this were true, the nature of the relationship would

be unambiguous enough: it would be that of hiring someone to do

a bit of drudgery which they would not want to do or would not

think pleasurable enough to do if the pecuniary rewards were not

there, and after receiving the sum, departing from his life

like a pizza delivery boy. This, Nawin thought, would be best

for his own purposes. However, if no money was transferred he

might be thought of by this one as a female surrogate who by one

intimacy made an implied contract of continual intimacies as the

sole favored supplier of pleasure.

The intimate stranger looked irritated. Then he smiled bitterly.

"Sure, something like that. I like being kind to the elderly."

It was a delayed response to Nawin's flippant comment of "I'm

sure you will always be there for me."

"Elderly?"

"Khrap" he said with a wai. "Can you tell me your age. I mean

how old are you honestly?"

"Thirty something." Honesty did not always come out despite

being summoned.

"Elderly, as I said. How old do you think I am?"

"I'd hate to know."

"Seventeen."

"Seventeen, really? Hmm." He pursed his lips thoughtfully.

"Single, and barefoot free. I am married, you know."

"Married? Well, married men have to get it too."

"I suppose so." Nawin sniggered mutedly while feeling both

amusement and aversion at being in this guest house and in this

company, this effeminate role to which he found himself in, and

of becoming so old despite feeling youthful physically even with

all this distorted emotional stretching over the past month. He

sensed that the stranger knew that he was trying to sabotage the

possibility of their intimacy becoming a relationship and he

felt compunction over it. Still, to sabotage and extricate

himself from debauchery thick, viscous, and onerous to his

spiritual pursuit (although he did not believe in the spirit)

seemed the wisest course of action, and so he could hardly

disabuse himself of such an idea.

25

At first the word "elderly" seemed, if not ludicrous,

exaggerated and distorted, an irascible utterance of the

intimate stranger that a playmate twice his age would not be a

more gullible victim of scheme and schemer. But then he

questioned his judgment on this matter as well for as he could

not think of anything that he knew absolutely, how could he

trust his own conjecture about one whom he was not familiar with

beyond some scant words and vacuous physical intimacies and had

no intention to try to know by speech or the intercourse of

minds, beyond that which was thrust upon him? Considering the

fact that every morning when a man slipped on his pants, usually

after one sordid nocturnal adventure or another, he also put on

a belief that he really did exist and was himself and not

someone else (in his case that which he called Nawin, this free

and thus debauched libertine-artist, not that he was so hard-

pressed for entertainment that this issue of absolute knowledge

that he existed, this epistemological speculation more

comfortably set in humor than horror and resembling a confounded

baby playing with his fingers, should be much of a subject of

speculation) he then thought how little he knew with absolute

certainty and how frightening this really was. He smiled at his

friend with that strange, contemplative longing that introverts

projected to belie their disdain for the outside world,

withdrew, and looked away.

Then that which was thought to be mendacious and absurd seemed

to be true in the perennial mutating, albeit perhaps, in terms

of truth, non-evolving thoughts of the mind. Even if the

exaggerations of the youth were noted and culled from memory and

perception one truth would be irrefutable: Nawin was undoubtedly

forty which made him marginally but undeniably a middle aged

man; and if not old now he soon would be, just as he already was

within the perception of his definition of youth. Loss of what

he once was, just as loss of who he once was when with others

who once were, was the inexorable forward movement of it all,

toward what aim no intellect could even begin to guess and to

which, apart from death, he knew of no escape. Nine seemed an

insurmountable age to one who was five, and of a forty year old

boy an inordinate amount of humanity would think of as near the

precipice of old age and death; but, he told himself, he did not

live by others perception of him, or if he did, he did

unwittingly and it was as ineluctable as day meets night, there

was surely solace to be found in not having one strand of grey

hair on his head or elsewhere and in being without a single

wrinkle. In the judgment of the mirror skewed by that which he

wanted to see there was a collaborative work of biographical

fiction not so far from reality and given credibility from the

obvious fact of feeling physically no different than he ever

had. According to this collaborative fiction, little had changed

over the past twenty years except the increasing amount of

people who came and went from his life so vertiginously.

Body conceived and mounted on the barren rock of the planet;

mind peopled like speckled icing on a rich boy's birthday cake

so as to have meaning; meaning that was stripped and denuded in

change; and for all his consternation in this dizzy state it did

nothing to redeem or resurrect them to his life once again. All

came and went leaving only diminished, diminutive copies of

themselves clustered there in the brain as furtive shadows

digressing the reality of the present into that which once was.

And even if Kimberly were to de-decompose with cremated remains

reassembling to allow her to rise from the dead with all

continuing as before there would be the knowledge that she had

chosen death to separate herself from him ineluctably, and this

alone would thwart what they had into perfunctory roles of

financial provider and taker. How she could jump like that as if

he had never been there for her or any of his entourage of

women, he did not know. He may have wanted to be thought of as a

nonchalant playboy to the outside world, as newspaper articles

smudged him as being, but if one were to examine the portraits

of those women whom he both played and portrayed it would be

clear that solemn grey empathy, the only real love there was,

sullied the reds and oranges of his passions into the pain of

empathy--not that with each day of adulthood he did not find

bits of his sensitivity chafed and weathered away in time like

an image of a face sculpted in a mountain.

Despite both women having concocted the plan and being

signatories to this document agreeing to surrogate motherhood,

he was an adulterer according to both, not so much for the other

women that he had been with, but by being the natural father and

husband of one and the legal husband of the other. Thus they

provided him with evidence that "adultery" was just a perception

like everything else and from it that a homosexual encounter

was, as his brother had called their activity together, cheap

dates more aligned to sport. Relationships of this nature were

not acts of adultery any more than masturbation in the shower

was adultery with water. At least, he told himself so to feel

less guilty and the words were a successful analgesic. And as

for Kimberly and his wife whom he as philanderer nonetheless had

many years of shared friendship, how could he be domesticated

and exclusive to either one when exploration of the study of the

sadness and rapture of human existence still beckoned him? These

were tenable arguments that passed successfully through the

scrutiny of his mind permeating all regions and though he had

not isolated it completely his beliefs were: 1. that he was born

the sole owner of his penis and twenty years after his birth,

when he signed a marriage certificate that was deliberately

spilled ink on paper meant, as strange as it was that spilled

ink meant anything, to show enduring friendship toward Noppawan

and a wish to have a shared life together, he had not sold his

anatomy to her; 2. that conversation with a female friend at a

coffee shop (in the past this usually being a student or

colleague at Silpakorn University on those rare semesters when

he was not on a sabbatical) could be much more intimate than

half hours of ecstasy which were not intimacy but a delusion of

intimacy in which, when innate hungers were subdued, the man

would at least in thought return to his wife and then the

following day be able to pursue real intimacy with her; 3. that

sex was exercise and just as he did not need permission from his

wife to exercise at a fitness center he could think of no reason

he would need permission to exercise his penis and be exorcized

of his primitive hungers that would take over his higher

thoughts and agenda if not released; 4. that a man was

programmed to, as the Bible declared, "be fruitful and multiply"

and so one could not oppose his basic biological urges; 5. as it

would take so much energy to restrain instinct, this coerced

restraint was a wasted resource that might be used more

constructively, and 6. that the only reason a woman got angry at

a man for his nocturnal adventures was because in antediluvian

times a woman was scared that she would lose her hunter, for

clearly back then women were not physically capable of hunting,

nor were they able to even gather fruit from trees or berries

from vines if they had to take care of their babies, and thus

they became angry and jealous of a man's other sexual encounters

because they were threats of losing their economic provider.

Humans in these 30,000 years did not change so if it was true in

earlier times, it would have to be true now no matter what

memory-bugaboos of the past spooked him to cling to another by a

more common and domesticated lifestyle--bugaboos that made him

now see outlines of ominous forms in the corners of both the

room of the guest house and in its amorphous darkness.

He might question whether the mirrored image of himself that he

saw daily was real or refracted light made into a roseate image

of the mind, but at the very least his face, unlike many middle

aged men he knew, did not look like a squished shammy that he

used to burnish the shine of his Mercedes Benz GL sports utility

vehicle, that same vehicle which he had abandoned in the drive a

few weeks ago for that emergency taxi ride to the hospital.

He thought of how he had importuned her, this stoic wife of his,

to drive him to the hospital, of her obdurate refusals even when

she had been the perpetrator of his broken arm and spintered

clavical, and how it was from guilt his silent recriminations

had mutated to hate in that taxi ride to Siriaj Hospital, that

hospital that in youth they had gone to be with the abused dead

of the anatomical museum.

Then he tried to channel his thoughts from hate filled

digressions to how in the vicissitudes of life among so many

shammy faced people a face like his maintained a fairly stable

look. He smiled, amused by himself and the peculiarity of being

here within this sordid black adventure in a guest house in

Nongkhai. Then he sank himself in the depths of sullen night and

sullied denouement.

He wanted to sleep off whatever time lapsed until the stranger

left. His wallet was in a drawer of a night table near his side

of the bed. He was a light sleeper when circumstances dictated,

so any noise would awaken him unless it were that accompanying a

fatal blow, but this was not America. The opulence of Bangkok

might entice poor school girls in uniform to become whores of

old Chinese-Thais and straight men to be serpentine prostitutes,

but few were the Buddhists who would kill their servants of

their pleasures. Still, even with the probability of being snug

and secure in his den of decadence, the croaking of those

incessant frogs outside ensured that no sleep was possible for a

city dweller who deemed traffic to be a purr when hearing the

harangue of the jungles.

At one moment, he wanted the creaking ceiling fan that was

turning incessantly to peel with the plaster so that the

metallic arms might fall and embrace them both mincing them and

this scene into pulp. At another moment, however, he thought

about how good it was to be here with the distraction of another

being on such a day as Father's Day, a day that diced people

like him in the wistful sentiment of early family. That family

had never been more than bits of stinking scraps of sweetness

tossed out to his scoffed, kicked, and abused existence; but

starved, emaciated dog that he at that time was, he had been

given enough that was kind to keep the hateful experiences of

childhood embedded in his head while reminding him that he was

born one of a countless litter of dogs trashing the sidewalks of

time. Dysfunctional families might be more prevalent in Thailand

than most people believed but their members could ignore this

fact unless they belonged to extreme cases, and under the "good

deeds beget good deeds" philosophy of the Buddhists a wretch

like him must have done something monstrous indeed to know

nothing but the breaking of family. With virtually everyone

paying homage to fathers and all genuflecting to majesty there

was such loneliness for members of extreme cases on such a day.

Telling himself that he should not treat the intimate stranger

with indifference, he half-slapped, half-clasped, the foot of

his companion as though shaking hands with him. It was a gesture

no less awkward than any of his other tepid nonsexual attempts

to relate to him and came from a nervousness at parting from his

masculine ways and returning to effeminate ones, and from

thrusting his will to allowing himself to be a pawn to the will

of another. Then he returned to the freedom of darkness and

silence.

If by this encounter he profaned his wife, if she were still

anything other than proscribed by legal document alone, so be

it. If his actions were adulterous, it seemed to him that, as

they were undertaken in sport, they were mildly so (his brain,

being a large circular mass had thoughts that went around in

circuitous orbits as if nothing were ever resolved) and thus his

private parts were not to be circumscribed to pacify the jealous

instincts of women who long ago in antediluvian pre-history

feared the loss of a provider. If ethical, he told himself, a

man should be mildly self-restrained allowing some movement of

the libertine, without allowing all actions and thought to

degenerate to appetite alone. This was logical restraint.

26

To be male: to have this perennial sexual appetite and its

feasting for pleasure, dominance, and self-preservation; and the

release of such the surfeit of tension through the explosion of

liquid shrapnel; a discharge all the stronger and more accurate

for the apparatus not having been used for some time; potent and

inimical fertilizing springs like long suppressed geysers shot

out potential life through nature's hand and bidding but as such

arsenal all the same; live weaponry shot from a missile launcher

that could not be said to be possessed or manipulated by any

other force than that of the given man himself, a being who with

enough experimentation was eventually cognizant of sexual

relations as an illusion of intimacy and yet was pressured

beyond restraint nonetheless by urges and promptings of appetite

and titillation and for personal sensation that might awaken a

sense that he could be more than the tedium of whatever

redundant tasks he was assigned as work that provided him with

sustenance, or free of monetary bondage altogether, to break

from the vacuity of his shell (earlier, both of them had stepped

into the room only to sit down on edges of the bed in an awkward

state where words were nascent, catatonic wisps of air,

stillborn fetuses of pneumatic thought, decomposing on lips; and

at this time, before a removal of articles of clothing in which

all was removed except the fear of the unknown euphemized as

moral conscience, he would have been disingenuous had he told

him to leave... now, however even with not having had any sexual

satisfaction of his own from this encounter he could tell him to

go and mean it as with him gone he would be free to go himself

and how difficult could it be just to state what was really in

the foremost part of one's mind, to unfold and spread out one's

will upon the second of its mental conception as one would in

deliberately casting his reflection onto waters and with the

sincerity and tackless artlessness of a child?... and if this

potential utterance of candor were done, articulate albeit

lacking an adult's sophistication for subtle and separate,

antithetical layers of that which was said, logically meant, and

yearned for, this triple entendre of politeness and deceit, he

would find it liberating to be such a simpleton but he was

unable to say that which he meant so all that he could do was to

lie and prevaricate...he could attest that as it was Father's Day

he needed to leave and see his own family (who would believe

that someone of forty would not have one), that shortly there

would be a reunion in which he and his wife would surprise his

father, (dead as he was) by showing him their infant grandson...

but then for such words to be plausible, he would have to be

here in Nongkhai with a wife instead of as a single, solitary

traveler; he would have to be in a more domestic setting than a

guest house for foreigners and their whores; and in a coupling

other than wet, fetid nakedness with another male...to be

hypocritical enough to even say such a thing, how could he be

thought of as anything but a middle aged man who did not know

whether to fire or be fired upon, or if an experience was to be

enjoyed or feared, a child ignorant and uncomfortable in self

and the world at large, which, questioning everything as he did,

he supposed that in actuality he was); attractions made all the

more so by the magnetic pull of some vague feeling that was a

composite of odors, sights, voices, attention, and interaction

which seemed to emit and reek of the diminished, mostly

forgotten blur of early family; to be so possessed by that which

was long ago that it should be the conduit and thrust of

succulent sexual truculence, and yet not know the specific

memories that were behind it all.

In this present circumstance of not only failing to satisfy

himself but existing as an obsequious and passive body there to

be manipulated by another what he had done, this effeminate role

that he had engaged in, was of this male instinct and yet a

clear aberration of it. Only months earlier he had been a

sequacious adherent of it as an incorrigible womanizer, and yet

now his actions were more impotent than a misfiring and his

manhood was debunked by being sodomized.

Still, by becoming something less than a man did it not allow

him to reemerge as a human being? Such was to be hoped for when

witnessing that the limited self in art and in life could not

change the world for the better and that, in the race to make a

success of himself before his short time on the planet expired

(money and fame sought and pursued relentlessly after a youth

debased in poverty and abuse), his sensitivities hardened so

that now he could bypass a beggar on an overpass without giving

a baht or feeling much more than an instant of empathy or

compunction.

It was his hope with this sojourn to the sister cities of

Nongkai and Vientiane to resurrect himself. He thought about how

different he was from the boy who would extricate trapped

insects from a window sill. He was losing bits of his humanity

all the time with every assertive darting walk through the

crowded sidewalks of Bangkok.

In certain ways it seemed that in the deviation from normal

instinctual male drives he was becoming free of pretensions of

being anything more masculine than a mere man, a vulnerable,

needy creature who often articulated a wish for an extension of

manhood and an introvert's desperate need for at least a minimal

physical connection to fellow man, although in his case now it

was an encounter with a male who looked like his brother, Kazem

at 18 when he was 14. Just as that which was past was

ineluctable memory and stored in him still, and this storage of

the replicas to the incidents of his life could never be made

right as it was all distant and unalterable and as feral as

brothers running along the banks and sand bars of the Chao

Phraya River, he would always be under impulses to avoid the

painful past by clogging his mind in amusements or urgencies of

interaction with other beings. And for whatever activities he

might devise as distractions from his thoughts, fears of the

vacuous nature of existence would always be man's ineluctable

truth, and without agenda vacuous truth was his in excess.

If his thoughts were a quagmire what else would they be

especially in this room and in this uncomfortable company whom

he would not part with so easily?.. could not part, or part

assertively, as doing so would be rude not only to the stranger

but to himself as well since, like it or not, this surrogate

brother, this lover, was a distraction from being without family

on Father's Day and to some degree he needed him or he would not

have had him here.

He existed in memories as all of his experiences in the days of

his life were nothing other than past incidents; and so for

those who reproached a man for living in the past (as that

beautiful nurse at Siriaj Hospital had done after overhearing

him talk in his sleep--a woman who despite this scolding might

heal his brokenness yet were her number saved on a sheet of

paper instead of into a telephone that did not have the

possibility of being retrieved from the trash receptacle at the

train station) they at least meant well by their errant

intrusions on such bitter sweet memories. If only mandates to

turn off memory like tap water were so simple then he would not

be seeking to rehabilitate recalcitrant corpses that refused to

decompose.

Here confined to this room as long as the intimate stranger

remained on the bed, there was at least thick textured darkness

and silence that for him provided an inscrutable sense of

comfort, a vast open sky and sea where a solitary man could find

some liberty in his ruminations like a child enamored by the

flexible manipulations of his body while at the same time

obscuring how constricted he was within both the room and the

company. Thus it was the only blanket that he had. Still he knew

that he could not stay despondent forever and judged that it was

time to once again speak. He asked, "What is your name again?"

"Boi."

"Boi?"

"It's a nickname."

"Yes, of course it's a nickname. It's just that when I was

coming here I met someone on the train who was also calling

himself that. I guess it is often used around here."

"Maybe."

"You're from here?"

"Where else would I be from?"

"Couldn't you be from somewhere else?" Nawin chuckled more

warmly than a snicker but what came out was still a fusion of

both.

"Poor people don't change to better locations. They remain

trapped where they are. What is Bangkok like?"

"You've never seen it?"

"No except clips from television news."

"Polluted, congested, opulent and slummy; a mess [thinking but

not saying, "all making it rife for nights not unlike this one"]

but mess with promise."

"You don't like it there?"

"It has its moments. You surely know someone besides me who

lives there."

"Why would I?"

"Okay, why would you?"

"What do you do there?"

"Nothing really...live, be."

"You dress fancy, live in a city and you don't do anything."

"Hard to explain, but essentially that's right."

"You a rich businessman?"

"Artist."

"Artist?"

Nawin laughed and gesticulated an artist drawing something.

"From a background of rich businessmen. Noodle workers. Dirt

poverty. But if you work hard, have talents, use them

commercially and invest wisely Bangok or any other large city

can liberate a man." He resented even having to divulge this and

kept asking himself why the man did not leave and why when the

communication of bodies, the illusion of intimacy, had passed,

he and this man or any two people were compelled to forage for

scraps of words to assemble a bridge of ideas that would link

them, two distant and alien islands. Words merely verified the

fact that their intimacy was a mirage.

The activity had ceased, the pleasure had been brought to him

and had been his alone. All that there now was, was anti-

climactic small talk. He told himself that a good guest would

show his gratitude by getting dressed quickly and making a swift

departure so as to not inconvenience Him. He told himself that

all he needed to release from his lips were two basic words:

please go.

He thought of the pejorative word, 'elderly,' that the intimate

stranger had used against him and resented his presence even

more. As bantering as the intent of this word might have been it

seemed particularly offensive on a day after his own birthday

and a Father's Day at that. True, he was much older than the

teenager (he glanced at the face; it was a perfect fusion of boy

and man; smoking its cigarette and creating a synthetic fog of

smoke onto his life). Only by contrast to the other one's youth

would he think of himself as old and then he was not merely old

but old as the hills and with so many memories to be excavated

therein. It was merely feeling and perception and it meant

nothing. It was a mere feeling like all feelings, mirages

really. Even family could seem for a time like "solid ground"

until one witnessed it become a series of vapors. It was he who

had chosen to be with someone so young so if he felt old to be

near him. It was a problem of his own making and he told himself

that he could not blame anyone other than himself for the boy

had not materialized in this dark room on his own.

And of this being used for his sperm and disposed of, he had

unwittingly bastardized his own offspring unto the world, one

more illusionary human form, a piece of himself, which he might

never see again. But as Buddhists say the world is an

impermanent place.

After Kimberly's suicide, and the loss of "stable" human

presences he judged that being reminded of his age was

particularly impudent and ruthless. At worst, he was middle aged

and even that should never have occurred nor should it ever

occur to anyone of such a youthful profession. A person like

him, a womanizer and painter of uniformed school girl

prostitutes and pathetic tramps, an artist with conscience about

the exploitation of those he was exploiting, should stay young

forever. How flawed nature was in this and every other respect.

"Still you can't exactly be rich, I guess, to stay in places

like this."

"I suppose not," he said while thinking a contrary idea

altogether. One could, for behind fenced areas of expensive

Malaysian beach resorts, on lounge chairs of grassy acreage, in

the shade of palm trees, there with waiters beckoning him with

cocktails, parachute rides at various intervals in the day from

fast moving boats as exhilarating as being born, luxurious rooms

and ensuing business class flights back home with champagne on

his tray, he, the retired artist, had tried affluent ways before

and they were all stale to him. A guest house or even a night

under the stars with the base of a stupa as his pillow would be

preferable.

"Maybe you just like guest houses in foreign areas or

something." Nawin did not say anything so the youth continued.

"If you are trying to hook up with a foreigner why did you

choose me?"

"Why you? I don't know--to see what it would be like not that I

care to...what did you say?.. hook up with someone?"

"Yes."

"Well, I don't. Besides, it is really best to give oneself to a

discipline of study, the sciences or the arts, which will always

be there--smart men give themselves to knowledge at least in

some small way--building stability around ideas instead of

changing people. People can just twirl around their feet like

empty bags blowing in the breeze, amusing for some minutes,

gone, and forgotten."

"So, for you I am an empty bag blowing in the breeze?" the boy

asked and laughed. Nawin did not say anything and then they fell

into silence as thick as the lifeless darkness which governed

them.

"Someday I'll go there."

"Huh?"

"To Bangkok."

"Then go," said Nawin indifferently. He was meaning more the boy

exiting to his home than a departure from Nongkhai that could

link the youth to him as inextricably as blood sucking ticks or

bacteria and the ensuing infection gained from a water monitor's

mouth (these crocodilian reptiles, frequent inhabitants at the

Nakhon Pathom campus at Silpakorn University).

"Who would I stay with. I don't know anyone there except you."

"Do you live with your parents?"

"Yeah."

"What do they do?"

"Mother's a nurse, father's paralyzed. The story goes that

soldier's thought he was one of a group of drug smugglers coming

across the boarder and shot. He's been that way since I was

young."

"You don't like it--staying with them?"

"Working part time at the Seven [Thai for 7-11] and then taking

care of him so that she can go to work? Hardly."

"You won't stay there forever. Everything passes." He was half

thinking about the strawberry and jasmine garden at his mother

and father's home that he loved so much in his boyhood, of

hawking jasmine rosaries in streets within stalled traffic and

strawberry drinks in transparent plastic cups from sidewalks. He

was thinking of the words mother and home that a child thinks of

as permanent as the sun.

27

Despite, if not because of, the wind and rain and this room

being on the third floor of the guest house, he could

nonetheless hear, he supposed, the growls, vicious howling, and

snarling with hissing rolls of saliva (perhaps imagined; after

all, his aim had initially been to drive to the sea, to see and

hear the harmonic continuum of wave upon wave slamming its froth

against the shore, and yet it had been an aim that could not be

achieved with one arm in both cast and sling nor even

facilitated via train or bus to Phuket, Pattaya, or Cha-am with

all tickets sold out for the holiday) of two dogs in the parking

lot: noise that they directed at each other or perhaps really

toward darkness itself. Novel and urgent utterances to them, it

was part of myriad redundant and inconsequential skirmishes in

the existence of canines that would continue perennially to the

specie's extinction. Malnourished strays with furless spots that

they probably were, they, for being in ineluctable misery and

unable to understand the fates that they were subjected to,

could merely rail against shadowy form and the paucity of

distinguishable matter in darkness and project their antipathy

against members of their kind that were most vulnerable to the

insulting tones of their wordless vitriol, soft targets from

which to measure having an impact of their latent screams. These

other animals were microcosms that were composed of the same

appetites and temperaments as man whose larger but negligible

intelligence was scarcely able to break the force of most waves

that inundated the tenuous levee of rationality which was

supposed to deliver one from innate, instinctual chaos.

The paramour blew his clouds of smoke into the darkness like

mist floating above a noxious lake and this lethal haze hid the

nocturnal snake that was attached to his form, making obscure

all that Nawin had been able to see in the darkness. And yet if

nothing really existed more than mere supposition that it was

so, surely emotions should not even be accredited with the

supposition of reality. If he had more will, he told himself, it

would not seem so disconcerting that he, injured and aloof in

tragedy, had chosen this ersatz of taking a man over a woman to

this particular venue. Was it really an ersatz at all? In terms

of intimacy and reproduction, it was; and yet in terms of this

bit of wrestling, this sport, it was pleasure and pain that was

distinct from all others to which he might as well ride or be

ridden and learn to enjoy its inconsequential levity the way one

preferred male rivals in matches without scrutinizing whether or

not it was fair to exclude women from such sport. It was

pleasure and pain which made him feel more alive in his

numbness.

And if from this manhood he was so easily toppled so be it. Who

was to say that such a tenuous, artificial structure of shoddy

construction was worthy of being had if it continually needed to

be propped up with extra 2x4s of heterosexual experiences as

reinforcement, and that one would not become more of a human

being to be less of a man? This, he told himself, this was

merely a borrowing of youth and beauty to compensate for the

years of a slight diminishing of both, and this wearing it for a

time, was not homosexual overall, any more than, from time to

time, wearing a costume in bed to accentuate an aspect of the

self heretofore surreptitious was complete madness (how august

he was in the pointed crown; how apposite it was by the catalyst

of obdurate orbs of arrogance and a slight pushing of a given

woman's head downward that she should fall to his feet before

subtly raising from the kow-towing gesture to become his subject

in an osculating worship of his body).

Then there was the sudden screeching of one of those animals in

pain; and although its movements were neither seen nor heard,

from its receding and diminishing cries, its scampering could be

perceived through the imaginative compensations of the mind

which concocted the plausible the best that it could when

lacking sensory indicators to address the uncertainties of

reality by prompting understanding and action, if not

verisimilitude, that had a higher probability of being right. On

the bed he was experiencing a slight bout of melancholy as

though reproaching himself for his infidelity, not that his

adulterous adventures had bothered him all that much in times

past. And while recognizing the absurdity of a belated attempt

to be circumspect now when this untoward, alien exchange had

come and gone with whatever fodder and fuel had been essential

in the incendiary night he still felt a wariness that dark

instinctual craving should pull him toward an insidious

happening. In ways it was to him as though this sexual encounter

had not yet occurred and were it to happen would be of

importance to the world at large, so he inanely felt, concerning

an interaction that had already taken place.

He listened but did not hear anything outside but the occasional

howling of traffic and wind. He concluded that this particular

union in another species of animal had been cleft into fractious

bits. To him it was another reminder of the passing away of

life's myriad social interactions and the respective parties so

engaged. Salient and engrossing society of the moment would

always be replaced with the eternal purity of silence were it

not for the desperate need to seek meaning and ascribe

significance to the interactions of man. When existing on a cold

planet in the grandeur of the black but light-speckled universe

with its surfeit of random stars and a plethora of void, what

could humans do but cling to each other for warmth and

attribute, meaning and merit in this desperate coagulation? Thus

there was the noise of clanging men, boisterous merry making,

and adhesion of like to like not that he, an artist, or he, a

man in grief, saw himself cognate with anyone or anything.

For a loner, interruptions of the human mind, noisy as it was,

were less of harangue than all the interaction exuded in doing a

job and fulfilling one's minor role in society (in his case that

of a prurient artist or an artist of prurience and when not on

sabbatical, an overburdened Silpakorn University art survey

lecturer at that, roles which had surely been replaced by

younger and less effete male artists than himself) were only

bearable in short durations. As the shallow and gregarious

needed a similar extension of themselves and could only stay

inward briefly, so rich inward men and they who were plagued by

grief could only make outward connections briefly especially

when needing to be left alone to pick up the pieces of their

lives. But he too was a being of his species and needed humans

especially now. So he thought, for the man who had leisure and

money to experience it all including the sense of ennui that was

its corollary thought inordinately.

He was just thinking that despite the incessant competition for

resources and self-worth within the societies of man and dog, a

being needed to interact with its kind more than just for the

snippets of time that were the totality of his particular

interactions. How strange, he thought, that in tragic loss of

significant others and an inveterate routine of pleasant

association that such a person needed to interact more and yet

interacted less. He told himself that after he completed his

spiritual retreat (a retreat that would begin once the

licentious one had ended) he would work part-time as it was

dangerous not to do so with the identity, purpose, and sanity of

man as tenuous as it was; that his actions here had no moral

value, positive or negative, beyond any which he by his own

volition, ascribed to them; and that it was no "sicker" being

engaged in this liaison than choosing to sit next to the

beautiful and thin rather than the fat and ugly on a BTS sky-

train--one reminding him of vigor and the other weakness and

infirmity. Physical intercourse when the mental bridges between

the distant islands of man had all collapsed was best alloted to

one in this imperfect world.

"If a man isn't functioning as one he shouldn't live. He

shouldn't make anyone else live that way," said the youth.