The young man passed it over to his senior who smoked the
cannabis, inhaling it fully. "Maybe that was what I needed too.
Shouldn't live? Isn't that a bit harsh."
"I'm bad, aren't I."
"No. I think that anyone would feel that way; and if you tell
yourself you are bad you will be finding yourself in a deeper
fog. You'll be lost in guilt wrestling with yourself. Far better
to feel hateful sometimes, appropriate times, and then refine
the feeling into thought and understanding."
"What thought?"
"I don't know. It will come. Just accept your feelings as
natural, not good but natural, and you'll see things clearer. He
passed the joint to his friend."
"One day I'll go there."
"Where?"
"Bangkok. Will you take me?"
"No," said Nawin and the two resumed their silence. To really
learn of a being instead of using one to smother the void in
amusing noise was an edifying and exhausting endeavor of pure
sadness not to be pursued by a man in grief, and he just wanted
the intimate stranger to leave.
"She is unhappy--my mother. Lives dazed in a television when she
isn't working or taking care of him" said the boy. It was
superfluous knowledge that sprayed out with his spit into the
cloud with no reaction. "I need to go," the intimate stranger
said, and the words, cold as a BTS sky-train, traveled up the
rails of his spinal cord in unexpected alarm. Reverberating
hollow, the words almost seemed to ache as they battered the
inner layers of the walls of his brain. Dogs with furless sores
littering the sidewalks now did the same to his thoughts,
deformed children begging in the streets pressed against his
mind with weighty themes of injustice as had happened in the
early days of arriving in Bangkok with his brothers, and he
could imagine fruit, meat, and noodle workers at their carts
disassembling their concocted makeshift restaurants and
returning home weary and with stiff, aching limbs. He had
yearned for these words so many times during and immediately
after the pain ridden intercourse which had been a violation he
had invited upon himself as a solitary old man might invite a
society of gangsters and thieves into his home so as to hear
human voices reminding him of family--voices other than his own.
28
The unseasonable thunder and lightning continued relentlessly.
For a few minutes the paramour's naked physique, as his own,
kept rematerializing more and more saliently before reverting
subdued into passive darkness.
"You've never been there before, Really?"
"No, just seen glimpses of it from TV news. I want to go.
Someday. Someday I will, someone will take me. Tell me what it
is like."
"Hard to say. Each has his own reaction to it I suppose. I can't
explain myself let alone ten million others. And when you live
somewhere your habits are embedded in it There is nothing
romantic or visceral: just day to day life."
"Don't you like it?"
"It has its moments, I guess."
It was a snippet of conversation copied and recopied and from it
blurred in inaccuracies. It played repeatedly like a redundant
song to a mind in or moving toward the void. It was a void
created from fear of the loss of physical contact with this
nameless intimacy whom he could barely speak with unless in
semi-imagined, quasi-remembered dialogues of the mind.
"And you don't have an opinion?"
"Well, for me it's like walking through noxious clouds of car
and bus exhausts and the more you walk through it the dirtier
you become in everything and although you know it is not good,
or know that it doesn't feel particularly good, externally, at
least, it seems real and you find yourself doing more and more
filthy acts to be in the heart of understanding life, becoming a
true libertine. And even though enlightenment is found to be
mostly endarkenment you know that you aren't pretending to live
ideals taught to you out of bias and fear but the good and bad
of what it really is, and appreciating it the best you can
despite its imperfections. You feel the pulse of life and that
from touching it, it has extended and altered you and, again,
even though it isn't what you want from yourself--not idyllic or
pure and it isn't what you really want to be--you know that you
are not cowering within, making moral judgments on what you fear
and don't understand.
Forgotten lines were filled in by imagination, the script
amended for the insertion of earlier stifled thought, and there
was true communion in place of circumspect utterances called
conversation. It is that which is good for the fecundity of an
artist's oeuvre, not nature and beauty. What else should he say:
a modern world capital with the same poverty as its surrounding
area and yet, condensed, it looks like it is more impoverished.
When you can see them, I suppose, it would seem that on every
block there are skyscrapers, malls, and dogs to the left and
temples, dogs, and ghettos to the right, sidewalk restaurants
and hawkers everywhere, but with world commerce and movement of
a lot of people...fashion with smelly socks, so to speak... it
is opulent and slummy... and if you don't harm anyone it is
morally uninhibited and free...all making it rife for nights not
unlike this one.
"Rife for nights not unlike this one? I don't know what you
mean."
"I don't either, nothing, mai pen rai."
It reeled once again across his mind at the instant of watching
the intimate stranger pick up his scattered clothes and go into
the toilet.
"Go?," he asked loudly toward the closed door. "So soon? It
won't be light for another two hours."
"Before she comes back," rejoined a somewhat muffled voice.
"Your mother?"
"My mother."
"And if you do not return right away."
"Then she'd pay for someone to take care of him until she
returns from work."
"I see. You should not let that happen."
Then there he was again: fourteen or fifteen years old, holding
hands with Noppawan in the anatomical museum. It was a day like
many of that first summer together in which, extant among
preserved, contorted bodies, the two oddities procured a brief
but diurnal retreat away from the war of family and the
indentured servitude that for him was inlaid and inextricable in
the design allotted to impoverished sons and orphans. And there
she was disappearing behind shelves of canisters containing
fetal abnormalities and bloated testicles as though sickened by
it all and yet returning to him from the toilet nonetheless with
a ring braided in strands of her hair. On his finger as material
branding in her being and then in gold her rings wedded him in
empathy and friendship which they believed would last with the
longevity of their symbolic tokens.
They had cared about each other so fully then: a strong feeling
of euphoria beat and saturated them like a hard rain and a
singular perception of the other as the extension, the
heretofore missing half of the whole, possessed them. Was it
love? He hesitated to use this word for to him it was delight in
another and, for a while, even his mother found delight in her
ambulatory dolls. Had they just given themselves over to the
curator, stepped into a joint formalin filled glass casket, and
drowned themselves there; wouldn't they have thought this
engrossing form of felicity in another as perennial as eternity?
Had they died together, neither of them would have known the
dissolution of second families or the temporary nature of all
human actions.
He returned from the bathroom fully clothed.
"Your belt is over here," Nawin said, pointing to the shelf."
"Okay," the intimate stranger said while taking it and sliding
it around his waist like the way he might a girl's arm. To go,
to leave, to not come again; could his sanity tolerate any more
ruptures and departures? Still, wasn't it this which he wanted?
It was and it wasn't.
Earlier he had thought about saying, "I'm not used to this sort
of thing. I'm married so maybe we should just be together this
one time" which might have caused him to say, "So I'm the bad
one. You brought me up here mister." And paradoxically, as much
as he feared losing him at this moment in time, he wanted to say
it now but it was impossible to say such a thing with him so
eager to go. As unperceivable as it was from his stolid,
phlegmatic expressions, his thoughts were in a panic. He told
himself that life was ever emerging stories on the skyscraper of
man in a downtown that was modernizing and changing faces; he
told himself that to feel so disconcerted by a being whose
proper name he had not even cared to learn was absurd. He said
these things to himself but he felt he was rolling toward the
precipice of disconnectedness. He told himself that as taxing as
it was in his state of mourning to converse with another being
he could have tolerated conversation and interlocutor for a time
and that had he made him feel less like an imposter, perhaps he
could have had a cherished companion from which to ride out some
delicate hours. It seemed to him that other people did not think
so much. They socialized and made friends without noticing it as
clinging to others for meaning that it was. They obeyed feelings
and socialized naturally but for him he analyzed it and such
unsavory behavior filled him with repugnance. It was far worse
than his effeminate role in this intercourse of bodies which was
pursued to gain intimacy when the intercourse of minds seemed so
futile and perilous.
"I'll need money for taxi and everything."
"A taxi shouldn't be more than a hundred baht. However I've
never seen a charge for everything."
"Well it isn't free."
"As it's everything, I wouldn't think it would be. How much?"
"Three thousand."
"You're out of your mind."
Nawin's eyes hardened against all screams of dogs and men,
hustlers who sold their youth for as long as it lasted no
different than any other marketable product, and against all
life forms floundering helplessly like fish in nets.
"Don't look at me that way. Its for my father. Of anything I
get, half will go to him and half so that I can leave. If you
have it why shouldn't you give it to me. I let you escape your
pathetic middle aged life for a while. Now you can help me."
"Well consumer beware, but it's certainly cheaper than being a
benefactor providing college education to every creature who
needs it."
"You didn't mean it."
Nawin heard him. He was silent for he did not know.
"See. And yet I am bad for needing."
"And I for having and not giving it away. Here." He pulled out
his wallet from the drawer."
"Here's five thousand, ten times the going rate and my business
card. Maybe my earlier offer lasted as long as my sympathy;
maybe this time it is done so that I won't feel insincere in my
earlier offer; maybe I will want to forget you as soon as you
leave here; who wants to pay for sex or even give large
quantities of money to a needy stranger when coerced to do so?
Still, take the card. It has my address on it. Send me a
detailed letter explaining logically where you want to study and
why it is important for me to help you and maybe I will see the
fairness in doing so. Besides it is more sincere than doing it
out of feeling sad for you."
The intimate stranger flicked the card as though he were a
primitive sensing music in the mundane but not knowing what to
do with it.
"No, I won't contact you for that but I'll keep the card" which
was short for "...because you're a good fuck and pay for it."
Nawin then read his thoughts and the intimate stranger saw that
he understood: he could set him up in Bangkok. It was the least
he could do. He understood and said nothing for the boy reminded
him of his brother and it was for this reason that he brought
him here.
Nawin pulled out a hand full of raisins from a bag, slowly
chewed each, and waited for belated exuberance and thanks until
it occurred to him a minute later that it would not be
forthcoming. "Want some," he asked but it did not garner a
response. The youth picked up his bag and left as though he had
never been, a testament to the insignificance of interaction.
As Nawin continued to eat the raisins, one at a time, it
occurred to him that the real reason eating animals was wrong
had nothing to do with maintaining the sanctity of life. The
society of dogs was to them reality, and the world in an
environment of oblique human presences. And as all creatures
were myopic with similar perceptions and concluding sentiments
their reality and world was in the social interaction of their
species. As he would not wish to be the protein fueling their
hegemony, why should it be thought that the innate value of
pigs, cows, and chickens was to be domesticated so as to be easy
viands of human consumption.
The society of man was no more real than that of dogs, he told
himself. Society was a delusion of respective animals needing a
greater external meaning for their lives; and yet, the Buddhist
introvert that he was, he yearned for the return of this human
presence until his head ached, he wished for the viand of his
phallus, and he wanted the pain of being sodomized.
29
When perceived in terms of his proclivity for avoiding social
interaction and for his loss, negligence, and failure at roles
which he had once ascribed to himself--artist, womanizer,
lecturer and that most ephemeral role of paternal ersatz who
sometimes changed diapers so Noppawan could sleep--he, a god
was relegated to an irrelevance equivalent to nothing. He knew
this for it could not be otherwise with the world valuing action
as much as it did, action which apposite, was too finite and
inadequate a means for appraising an individual of his scope.
And their interaction, he thought to himself in another strange
supercilious thrust of validation beyond his grief, was pursued
so fervently to evade an alarming and discombobulating sense of
their own irrelevance for human creatures would have no sense of
being alive at all were it not for witnessing the mobility of
their shadows intermingling with other moving adumbrations. But
cremated, the deceased did not cast shadows; and as exempt of
people and roles as he was, his was definitely a figurative
extinction. A retiree from the art of doing, a demigod who chose
the reality of being marooned in his own thoughts, he stayed
steadfast in the immobility of his empty shell, a state dearth
of role and impetus. He, who was nonetheless human in his
godhood, remained intrepid in trudging into this rather
unbearable and disconcerting sense of the inconsequence of
being. To look at nature, to melt into true being under a cloud
by relinquishing one's grandiose claim as an integral being in
the temporary and changeable interactions of man, to be exempt
of role and its alleged significance on a small corner of
contemporary society at best, and as a divine particle revere
life as opposed to absconding from it through interaction, only
a god would tolerate such torturous but exquisite enlightenment.
His mission, the purpose of His trip, was to further Himself as
deity by no longer needing to be confirmed by others as a
presence on the planet, to no longer need to gain approbation
through social interaction, and to find himself fully able to
separate from craven mortals whose only sense of being came from
doing and whose viscous neediness precipitated even more
interactive clinging and all the concocted meaning therein.
Deemed by serendipity and evolvement gained from his education
to the status of demigod and no further than this, he could
never succeed completely in self contained intellectual
asceticism, for how could he retreat into the thickets of fecund
solitude without becoming more and more desperate to rest his
head on the pillow case of human flesh as he ran around in
sinuous stretches circuitously lost in reason and emotion.
Still, he would travel inward and explore what was there for as
long as it was bearable. At least so he said in silent thought,
with only partial belief.
The gecko, barely visible in the smoky fog of marijuana,
reaffixed itself on a portion of wall above the night stand. It
remained there above the clutter of archaic connections: a
telephone that kept ringing--at least inside his head--and a
post card on which he had merely written "Dear Noppawan, I hope
that you've been well despite everything that happened" before
striking two lines through the sentiment and tossing it back
onto the night stand. And this diminutive animal deemed him to
fall into the doom of those opaque, glassy domed eyes and he did
fall as Kimberly had fallen through the metal and plastic awning
of the swimming pool to be an eyeless corpse; he fell as any man
would through tenuous self image at the loss of women of the
present to the molestation of the past. Truth, if it existed,
was a state that was sedentary; but movement was meaning and
this man sought it. It was his emulation of the universe and it
went straight forward even if sentiment caused it to bend and
deviate slightly toward that which was past. So, he thought,
avowing a new position entirely.
"No, that's not entirely true," said the gecko.
"No?" asked Nawin as he once more inhaled the smoke of his
marijuana.
The gecko shook his head plaintively. Nawin understood: he had
done fellatio, he had swallowed, and had subsequently allowed
himself to be sodomized so that he might feign belief that,
without anything to grasp in his empty hands, there was a
permanent entity in the impermanence permeating his life and yet
if humans did not have the delusion of sexual intimacies there
would be no contemplation at all for an understanding of true
being was brought forth in copulative intermingling. Despite the
revelation, he felt rather lithe in his fog until the gecko
metamorphosed into a man pointing at his genitalia. "You smoke
me here. Me don't want smoke. You do. Foreign smoke, Foreign
pays. Foreign give more money. Me seventeen. Me tell. You go to
police."
He collected his thoughts the best that he could in his state of
dreaminess and brief hallucinations in the dark, blowing
mustiness of the confines of the empty room. He considered how
quickly odd, erratic ideas could spill out onto all regions of
the brain like paint from leaking tubes, mix grotesquely,
amalgamate in beings, and spread their diminutive warped
presence in insurrections begetting hegemonies of the mind. With
this recent association and its disconnection pressing so fully
onto his mind he could not stay here, the venue and embodiment
of their activity together. It made his head ache worse than his
buttocks, arm, and clavicle. The fact that one's DNA, one's
sacrosanct blueprint, was disseminated randomly in ejaculations
seemed to him inordinately peculiar; that it was emitted from an
instrument of urination which when erect was a pistol of a
sadist forcing his pleasure and will onto others a sickening but
laughable peculiarity; still it made him so amorous that he
could not restrain himself any longer and thus he masturbated
and then took a shower.
Considering that if he were to check out formally he would have
to confront smirking faces and laughter at the front desk once
one of the housekeeping crew reported the soiled disarray of his
sheets, he decided that he would not check out at all. He had
paid for three days, so it was of no consequence. Abandoning the
key on the bed, he left through the fire exit to avoid speaking
to night attendants and all things human, and went out into the
dark streets of Nongkai. Telephone booths seemed to call her
name out to him and to a limited degree he wanted to enter one
to converse with her, and would have done so (momentarily if she
were to hang up on him or if for longer, it would be to engage
with her with, hostilely or civilly, with the neediness of love
or the indifference of a stranger, he could not predict) but for
the aching reminder of the multiple bone fractures she had
rendered unto him. With enough vibrations the china cabinet of a
woman's heart would break and its varied fragments could not be
organized let alone mended into some whole, such was the
integrity of a man when ripped apart beyond suture.
It was later than he thought and for a few moments the emerging
bristle of morning light was fused into a dark mound of cloud
before attempting to surmount it in the struggle of a morning
freeing itself to be born. The view was a layered mélange of
golden crème and whisked effervescent void that was as succulent
as taffy. He wanted to loiter in time and stare at it without
blinking in the hope that constancy would keep it there
unchanged. It was the same type of thought that had prompted him
to stop painting altogether a few years ago, and now he could
hardly remember the feel of a paint brush in his hand.
He got into a tuk-tuk and asked the driver to take him to the
Buddhist Sculpture Garden. The first movements of the three
wheeled vehicle made him shudder and utter equivalent
interjections.
"Yes, it's cold!" said the driver who was wearing a jacket and
shorts, "That odd rain in winter! I met you before, didn't I?"
yelled the mirrored mouth through wind and the roar of the
motor.
"I'm from Bangkok. I wouldn't think so," yelled Nawin even
louder.
"Sure I have. At the train station. The train officer had me
give you a message."
"Oh that's right. The telephone number."
"Did you make the call?"
"No. I'm an artist, so people always give me their numbers
hoping I'll pay them to model. I guess that's what it's about. I
don't know. Anyhow, thanks again." It was close enough to the
truth without the tedium of details for one who was a stranger
to him and needed no more than a stranger's cordial trifle.
"No problem," said the driver. "You looked sick when I saw you
there squatting on the ground."
"Train sickness I guess. Sickness of everything generally"
offered Nawin with a feigned chuckle.
Near the sculpture garden was a 7-11 and he bought some coffee,
milk, and a box of corn flakes, sat down amidst purposeful and
less temporary form, and ate the cereal from the box as he had
when he was five years old in America. To be here in so much
empty space among stone carvings and to be the only one around
appealed to him. If nothing else having been abused gave him
this: the desire to pour color on paper and entertain himself
alone, self-contained, in any empty space he could find.
However, this solitary behavior was only pleasant for a few
hours and then self-containment seemed particularly vacuous and
the blessing a curse. He read a book on Etruscan art for a few
hours before his already aching buttocks began to hurt from the
position on the ground. He got up, swallowed some pain killers
for his arm with no assistance but his saliva, and waited for a
bus to take him back to Nongkhai. A kiosk selling soft drinks,
Buddha statuettes, and cotton candy was already open. In front
of it at one table was a typical jasmine rosary salesman who
also sold balloons, some of which he blew up and shaped into
replicas of Hindu and Buddha emblems, and others he inflated
with helium.
"How many helium balloons would it take to float a lightweight
piece of metal into a different county or country for that
matter?"
"I don't understand you. Do you want some balloons?"
"Yes. I would think six should suffice."
Nawin bought them, removed the stifling wedding ring from his
hand, tied it with the six strings, and released the gestalt of
colored rubber, metal, and diamonds into the airy realms of the
unfettered and the lost.
30
Within this ambivalence how was he to know that his obdurate
stance would not crack and that he would not relent, allowing
neediness to surge over him like lava, incinerate him and heave
residuals homeward? If he relented by calling her at a pay
telephone booth and by a miracle fortuitous, dull, or moribund,
he was made to believe that some type of reconciliation was
possible as economic provider or more, it would be better that
it were done there where he could buy a ticket immediately than
to experience a breakdown of His integrity while stuck
uncomfortably in Vientiane. Thus, as the sun pulled ever tighter
over the hand of the world, memory seemed to encompass him
tighter than the burdensome wedding band ever had, and having
played in the wounds of old intimacies it now seemed like the
desperation of an old man opening his door to strangers.
Preferring to allow the possibility of being murdered than to
continue in the meaningless domicile of his empty shell, he told
the tuk-tuk driver to take him to the train station instead of
the border.
It was a cold ride to this area where a day earlier his debased
posture had no doubt alarmed train officials that here was
someone, who if not a southern terrorist, was suffering from a
nervous breakdown on government premises (and yet were it not
so, and to most Euro-American foreigners it would not be with
the day's temperature for them equivalent to a balmy spring day,
still by Thai accounts as well as his own, it was a frigid
morning with moments of impaling breeze that made the dogs in
the corners of parapets surrounding temples shiver and his blood
run cold; but then, as he had already ventured out without
anywhere in particular to return to, the peripatetic libertine
continued with the journey, tolerating the blowing inundation of
wind like one holding his breath until arriving at the train
station.)
There was only one ccurse, the forward course in which a
supernova would eventually devour the Earth like a piece of
kindling wood, and so he walked to the junction that was on the
border--the right side of the road an entry point to Thailand,
the left, eventually, to Laos (specifically, he kicked a rock
repeatedly for several hundred yards until losing it, skidded
and etched lines into the mud with his feet, eventually moving
west to the intersection that was the border--the right an entry
into a land not of his birth and inhabited predominately by
philistines who suffered from a lethargy no different from other
denizens of warm societies under the mesmerizing intensity of
the sun--the left an entry into an altogether insular and
comatose nation). Obtaining a Laotian visa for a thousand baht;
another payment albeit a nominal one, he stood on a small bus
like a Siamese twin conjoined to eighty or more bodies, all
going in the same direction, each having his or her own
objective as he did albeit the others surely with more clarity
than he had. He took a bus ride with myriad others across the
Friendship Bridge of the Mekong river, filled out his entry card
at this extended checkpoint, his passport eventually being
stamped in a line of waiting and moving but seemingly going
nowhere, he paid a new monetary charge, the cryptic exit fee
then shared a tuk-tuk for a forty minute ride to the city,
sometimes witnessing exaggerated gestures and hearing jocular
comments about how cold it was from Laotians and Thais, some in
both shorts and hooded jackets, though not from westerners who
didn't seem to suffer any distress outside of blowing strands of
disheveled hair. He bypassed fields and water buffalo, feeling
the exhilaration of the wind, cold as it was, and suffuse with a
sense of regeneration he sensed the present immerse him whole
into its prodigious depths and believed he was traversing into
something new which would whitewash his negative memories in
amnesia. Arriving in the city of Vientiane, that little bit of
Paris with a lot of dirt that wind occasionally scraped and
twirled as if it were a field, he observed a department store
(arguably more than a hybrid of store and barn with its outlying
outdoor market), morning monks with emaciated frail bodies
seeking alms in tawny saffron robes soiled in Laotian dust,
businessmen receiving the laying on of hands and the wai in the
hope of making their lives propitious, two school girls in blue
uniforms on a bicycle, more motorcycles than cars but more of
both with each moment of the waking morning, and a man pulling a
food cart on the side of the street. Nawin looked directly into
the man's incarnadined, sun burnt face and his furrows of coarse
wrinkling skin, and the old man, though abashed, grinned and
nodded once as if grateful that the younger man not only
acknowledged his existence but saw his worth in it. Neither
sunrise nor sunset was as beautiful as this.
It had been a similar acknowledgement three years ago that had
been the catalyst of his self declared quasi-retirement. He had
gone on sabbatical from Silpakorn University to get a doctoral
degree before realizing that scholarly pursuits were inimical to
creativity (not that he was attempting to create anything at
that time) and that these simultaneous states of mind if not
joint ventures would be deleterious to each other. They were
wasted years if measured in action and accomplishment but
constructive in terms of disassembling pretensions and so it did
not matter.
Now he was able to repudiate the grandeur of self unflinchingly.
Extirpating himself of those institutions and beings that
facilitated the feeding of his instinctual neediness, departing
from his nation and the circumscribed roles which he had there,
and having relieved himself of hungers for food and sex earlier
this morning, he was now able to appreciate of the sfumato of
society and nature and could just be...Just be! What a romantic he
was: at least so he chided himself. Unfathomable suffering
existed under the most lush of lives. It was beneath every
superficial, jovial exterior, and to think that in a land
probably without much of that exterior layer he would experience
any enlightenment beyond encounters with deeper veins of
suffering than any he had experienced heretofore seemed
preposterous. Just this morning after the prostitute had given
Nawin an indignant look and then had gone away leaving him there
alone in his pile of clothes, he could not, for some minutes,
even fasten the buttons on his shirt so overcome was he with
suffering. It had seemed so acute and pervasive in all beings
and all matters that he, a forty year old man, did not know what
to do other than murmur ever so quietly, "meh" (mother). He had
wanted the resurrection of that woman who had not only looked
away as the abusers did their dastardly deeds but made him out
to be the culprit who had instigated it all. He had called out
for her like a child hoping that she would lead him back to
beginnings of chasing balls and butterflies. He had yearned for
a state of innocence in which he would be ignorant of sexual
jostling from instinctual hungers and but not of the love that
was the conception of all animal life. He had wanted this
resurrected "meh" to end the suffering which permeated the lives
of all things and to make knowledge and understanding more than
vicarious suffering. Perhaps he was too sensitive for this world
but here he was and so, to use an Americanism, he needed to see
things through "rose colored filters." Thus his first impression
of Vientiane Laos was that of an intricate tapestry of life. All
he had to do to appreciate it was to simply open his eyes by
abjuring agenda and accomplishment and melting into true being.
31
Everywhere he went there seemed to be metallic signs on poles to
power lines. Each sign was in the international language of
pictorial symbols and each illustration the same: a sinuous
electrical current striking a stick figure that fell back as
though electrocuted. He could have detoured to an area along a
different stretch of road and walked elsewhere where there were
not these signs of warning were it not for his proclivity to
continue walking on such a narrow sidewalk in which a stumbling
foot could cost him his life. There was a definite morbid
curiosity and courting of death in his actions, his feelings
elated by travel to someplace new, but his thoughts were macabre
and fixated on the vicissitudes and impermanence of one's life,
the attempts to belie those with money, property, family, and
notoriety as if one could solidify one's effluvial existence to
a statue's, despite the permanent inevitability of one's demise.
Knowing this, and rich enough that he did not need to work
another day in his life, nor as corollary become obtuse to this
truth by engagements in mundane routine, he was not sure what to
do with himself. Other men were also used for sperm and as
economic providers to family but they saw their sons who grew
with the years and whose growth would measure how far they had
degenerated into the years, mirrors to see aging, ghastly, and
lackluster reflections of themselves (for him, he would never
see his son again, or at least that was Noppawan claimed on that
day she battered him with an iron frying pan, not that he
necessarily wanted to see his time on the planet in the hour
glass of a changing boy). Likewise, they had their roles as
procurers of meat so that their women might enjoy playing with
live dolls (for him whose investments made money unto themselves
he could be of no personal use to family even if allowed back
into it, and when was a man included in the joys of child
rearing anyway?).
His cheek inadvertently brushed against an extended vine of
green bananas dangling above the sidewalk near a French colonial
building used by a Laotian government ministry. Although a
normal, reflexive reaction would have been to feel startled
especially after having noticed the signs and fearing the next
touch of the unknown to be his ineluctable death, he just
smiled. If fate, the God of all Atheists, had deemed it a pole
of a power line instead of bananas that his cheek had touched,
him electrocuted, stricken down to sear the ground with his
incinerating fall it would be of no major significance to anyone
but himself if even that; furthermore, he thought, continuing to
synthesize more ideas to remain stimulated and happily self-
contained in his own company, this second of consciousness being
irrevocably extinguished might be a rather pleasant experience
despite its brevity. In it he would be on an enlightened transit
before the void swallowed him entirely, an omniscient second of
wisdom in which egregious Buddha-gods and heaven-and-hell
aberrations of the ideas of the Buddha, who surely was not a
buddhist, would be known to not exist. To know something with
absolute certainty beyond the realm of supposition (like the
amount of love a bludgeoning spouse once had toward him, the
degree of selfishness and altruism that constituted emotion and
cognition, and so much else unknown to him) would be
particularly refreshing after a lifetime spent in the glimmers
of truth. It would be as refreshing as those times that as
children, he and his pauper brothers stripped to their underwear
and from piers dove into the Chao Phraya River to escape the
blistering heat of April.
The surprise of bananas brushing against his cheek made him
smile wryly--smile at witnessing a banana tree in the heart of a
city, smile wryly as the surprised encounter was imbued in the
rustic as well as the bucolic, and thus was both repulsive and
quaint. Understanding it to be both made him postulate that in a
broader sense every given entity or event was rarely one
attribute exclusively but the polarity of two antithetical
thoughts. Even the calcifying antipathy and repugnance toward
sex, which were now steadily building up inside his mind were at
times stymied in ethereal fantasies of burnishing the silky
leather of human flesh and a hunger for beauty that suddenly
came over him like a consuming and growing flame before being
subdued and partially extinguished in the gravity of his all-
too-human thought, which wanted reality even more than fantasy
the best it could find it. Glancing at clothed buttocks, covered
thighs, and other appendages of a female here and a male there,
it was as though his constitution could mutate from solid to
vapor at random despite human will. This was what he gleaned
from his cheek brushing against a bunch of unripe bananas while
journeying onward with sights and sounds satiating
consciousness, sketching impressions of the mind that one could
only appreciate in foreign travel.
Closer to the market there were numerous people in a row like
sequacious ants, all seeking bits of a distant morsel, but
unlike ants these people sought for themselves and, even here,
with their wallets as feelers. A few minutes later he was among
them, eventually buying a dangling earring for a left lobe, a
solid gold necklace to adorn his swarthy complexion so that the
deep dirt and poverty that he once was remained hidden from
himself and from anyone whom he encountered, and a pocket
pc/cellular telephone, which he needed but had no occasion to
use. In the outdoor market he watched someone seated on a small
couch at a kiosk under a huge umbrella, get a tattoo. He wanted
an eagle tattooed on his biceps and to other regions as well to
demonstrate that he was as an apostate, Nawin of Thais, but the
conditions here did not look urbane or sterile, and he backed
away until he was in a parking lot filled with tuk-tuks.
A conventional two seater took him to a temple with his
traveler's guide gospel in one hand and suitcase in the other.
It was a temple, outside of which a sign informed readers that
the building, which appeared more like an attic and junkyard
than a museum and temple, once housed the Emerald Buddha. He
stayed inside wandering around various sized wooden and stone
buddhas dating back to early periods in history and as such
often having parts of arms and faces missing from their
dilapidated forms. There, relaxed, he melted into true being.
It was good to be there unfettered of obligations to others, and
with no whore to distract him from keeping the deeper self
company of his ruminations. He was synthesizing some peculiar
notion he only half grasped (something to the effect of "a
person comes into the world for no apparent reason; perspectives
mutate in changeable physical existence; a person's ideas change
due to the changes around him, changing so as to withhold some
level of verisimilitude to which sanity is entirely
dependent..." ) when the women of his life suddenly came upon
him unexpectedly. Others might have thought exhibitions of
buddhas would be of interest to all foreigners and especially to
someone like Kimberly who was an accomplished amateur sculptor
herself, and yet he knew that Noppawan would have enjoyed it
more. Unable to share the experience with her, what could the
mind do other than impose a facimile? Many times he almost
believed that he was really pointing out smaller statuettes
hidden behind the larger and more salient ones and that she was
going to them, thoroughly examining each one that he pointed out
to her like a collector of religious antiquities. How odd that
he was so close to releasing words from his lips as if she were
really there. No, neither homosexual encounter nor this sending
of a wedding ring into oblivion had freed him from memories.
Another tuk-tuk outside the gate of the museum; another blue
cockroach driver eager for twenty baht (this one specified that
he wanted Thai baht and not Laotian kip)--and, once agreed upon,
a quick trip to the communist history museum. Inside there was
an archaeological exhibit which he skimmed briefly. Noppawan
knew so many inordinate details for it to be of interest to her,
and for Kimberly it had always been amusement parks, French
wine, and Debussy and Ravel performances at the Thai Cultural
Center. But in one corner on the second floor, near the
staircase, there was an assortment of traditional clothing that
he knew she would have enjoyed seeing and he wanted to take her
in his arms, behind that particular exhibit, and impart a
visceral kiss, which if unable to pump the air of life back into
her would at least convey how dear she was to him before the
return to the great beyond which was in fact cessation and
vacuity. She was not alive so what could the mind do but
resurrect her or something like her briefly? It could do nothing
else. Traditional instruments were in one far corner but most of
the museum seemed to be a diatribe without words, a deprecatory
pronouncement against Siam, French, and American imperialists in
photographic images, uniforms, and guns. The museum was more of
an anti-imperialist manifesto than a communist one and
partitioned walls made court rooms for evidence and indictment.
Being a Thai-American with a girlfriend who had been French, his
was a triple indictment--at least so he postulated to himself
humorously.
He could have gone to the States, the land of his birth. Not
knowing anyone there would not have deterred him. In boyhood,
each day before fulfilling his indenture as a poor son he would
wake up early and leave the house so that for a half an hour,
diluted under a cloud in some empty area along the river, he
could become little more than the nonstop movements of serving
food. Loneliness was not something that he was so desperate to
lose. He could have gone there and procured a second set of x-
rays and a second opinion from an orthopedic surgeon in Los
Angeles or elsewhere. A second set of x-rays was rarely taken in
Thailand, and so if he had to have a practical reason for
returning to the United States this could be one. He had plenty
of accessible money for his travels. Not all of his money was in
joint accounts for he was too knowledgeable of the changeable
tectonics of family to believe that joint ventures of any kind
were lifelong. He might have gone there to travel for a period
of months without having to work at all. To melt into the
prodigious Grand Canyon, and to have it melt into him would be
well worth any expense he incurred and it had always seemed to
him that if he went far enough and long enough he would be out
of the pale of memory. That too would be a practical benefit.
However, it was a haughty land of religious zealots who believed
its hegemony was a mandate to dictate world affairs, its growing
military bases police boxes, its wars an extension of democracy
and human rights, and its intolerance morality itself. It was
foundering in its debt as a dying empire and the entire country
sickened him.
But then, he thought, he himself was a reprobate and any moral
pronouncements that he made would be hypocritical and
ridiculous. Was he not living the disreputable life of the great
Artist, Caravaggio? Maybe he just wished to be compared and
contrasted to the man so that his work would seem to have some
international and everlasting significance. Still, compare he
would! As Nawin he was poor no longer, although under his former
name, Jatupon, he had been that and more. He had not killed
anyone--at least not deliberately; and it did not seem
particularly Caravaggio-like to not have the intention. He was
not a homosexual fleeing murder but a bisexual fleeing
interconnectedness. These were mere incidentals that could be
argued in various ways and they did not delineate a man. Both
men had given beauty to the world and this alone surely
disproved them as having disreputable natures, but then, how was
he to know?
32
The drab stones of the stupa were probably erected in the
nineteenth century and through the prodigious span of years, he
thought, the unadorned city surrounded it in languid increments
like the moss that had annexed its crevices. The encroachment no
doubt diminished the distinct identity of the monument, making
it less remote and secluded, like human life. That was what he
thought, and it was a more concrete and definitive explanation
than any other he could provide himself with. Of his own life,
he did not know why he wanted to slip away unto himself as he
did, to be forgotten personally as well as publicly, to be
altogether expunged like the public persona of artistic
decadence which he once maintained, and to be further ensconced
under the blanket of himself if that were possible without
suffocating to annihilation and oblivion. It was as mysterious
as the primordial desire of sex, communion, and connection which
had driven him spellbound into contact with the flesh of the
paramour hours ago.
A block away, a part of the main street abutted this once silent
area, fomenting it with traffic along a stretch of businesses
catering to foreigners. There were guest houses and Internet
cafes. Men were unloading a shipment of supplies to one of the
closed bars. There were foreigners on bicycles, or coming in and
out of souvenir shops, baguette restaurants, hotel rooms, and
apparently Vientiane's only convenience store, or worse its only
supermarket. A couple held hands whistling as they passed the
monument for a side street in which, according to a sign, a
guest house was located. It was noise which he disliked, as
distant and muted as it was, but as inclined as he was to
romanticize the quaint rusticity around him, he did not yet
despise it. In the new environment, positive but neither overly
elated or ebullient, he felt that the energy exuded around him
belied the gravity of the consequences of action, as if the
strutting movements of youth were not dances in a graveyard,
when in fact the whole Earth was nothing but a necropolis, and
any laughter which he heard seemed to scoff at his new
disfigurement. Often tourists would come to the stupa posing for
pictures at its base. They seemed to come only in pairs to
compound the quasi-reality of the experience of foreign travel
into something more solid, for as pairs the dopamine was doubled
for these mundane presences, leaving him alone in deprivation
within the capsule of the rocket of the mind. They came to this
nameless rock, but as it was less of an attraction than That
Louang; the few who came did not stay for long. The stupa was
the same one pictured in his guide book, the same one he had
thought of wistfully when he was on the train, and sexual
inclinations had not been the entirety of his yearnings there-at
least so he wanted to believe. In leaning against this
particular stone relic towering above him, it was not that he
was seeking to be a non-worldly aspirant feigning ignorance of a
world of suffering masses kimberlying downward from one type of
post-partum depression or another to which the gods were of
complete indifference, or admitting as much, but that this deity
or deities designated greater plans that entailed human
suffering and tragedy. He did not want false repudiations of the
human condition of suffering but acceptance of it so as to be
transmuted into it so deeply that he could imagine the
experiences of others more richly and would cease to take his
allocation of suffering personally.
He was seated in the bit of grass that was there, his head
leaning against this towering icon more uncomfortably than he
thought it would, head remaining against hard stone, neck
aching, and having to slap and decimate a second set of fire
ants that got onto his book and into his sandals stinging his
feet. He did not like this flawed design of species competing to
sustain themselves and using him as the ammunition available to
them so he scattered a piece of bread for some pigeons at his
feet to perform an expiation. Thinking about this world of
species, each trying to exist comfortably at the expense of
others, he knew that there was no spirit in a being and nothing
spiritual--just recognition of contentment in simple pleasures,
the foundation for all tenuous others, which were not subject to
life's vicissitudes. This was the only spiritual journey that a
realist and atheist might undertake.
There was a puddle of water from the previous night's inundation
of rain at one of his feet. He was inclined to seek his
reflection a second time within it, and would have done so
(especially since he had not even bothered to go into the
bathroom to shave in front of a mirror, or take a shower, in his
need to make a swift exit from the guest house) were it not so
turbid, with a dark taffeta sheen no more able to reflect a gray
hair, a wrinkle, or the doleful intensity of a sagging, aged
countenance any more than seeing his diaphanous reflection in
car windows. Whether or not he had gotten visibly older over
these past twenty four hours, which had entailed a fortieth
birthday on the train and a half catharsis/half reopening of
the wounds of his abused youth by the intimate encounter with
the paramour--a paramour who looked like his brother Kazem, or
at least how he remembered Kazem so many years ago--was wasted
speculation. One would not have aged significantly in such a
brief time unless the paramour were God and he Moses. Still, he
wanted a mirror nonetheless, for he knew that tragedy and grief
had maimed and distorted him over the past few weeks. Obviously
he was now taciturn, and disliked the cloying exuberance of
youth that clawed against the concentrated walls of his
deliberation, although deliberating what he could not say, as he
sat there leaning his head against the stupa with eyes resting
on the clouds, if indeed he was in a state of rest. And if he
were so prison pent, he thought, a touch of those electrical
poles would open up whatever portal Kimberly had gone into with
him, with her disappearing into it and it disappearing into the
oblivion of itself.
He was ruminating that love was not an actuality, but merely
humans finding no exterior meaning and seeking solace and
artificial meaning in each others company, when he was suddenly
accosted by a Caucasian woman. She was middle aged, had sinuous
black hair, and seemed attractive as best he could tell, as she
was wearing a round brimmed white hat and dark sunglasses that
covered some of her face.
"Pardonnez_moi pours vous faire savent le Francais?" she asked.
"J'ai étudié là pendant un certain temps. C'a été il y a des
années," he said, "but you are safer in the international
language. I was only in Paris for six months."
"Oh, then you are fluent, as French is the international
language," she said with a laugh.
"No, the language of fucking is," he thought, startled by how
close the words were to his lips. Had he spoken them he would
have been truthful. His brief time under a scholarship grant had
been more of sexual rendezvous than anything more substantive.
It had been his language of choice as no one there seemed to
want to speak in English. And had he spoken those words he would
have released a belligerent inner burst of misogyny from a long
dormant maternal source aggravated nowadays by his wife having
beaten him with a skillet.
"What did you study there? French?"
"No, fucking," he thought but he held tightly to the reins of
the tongue, his restive beast. He did not want to disparage
another person for his own proclivities toward freeing himself
of any female captors. He vented a sigh of relief for having
managed to stay quiet and thought how close the words were to
his lips before dissipating like everything else, and in this
case leaving him defenseless against his good looks.
"Painting."
"Painting?"
"A grant.... It was a grant from your country--a cultural
exchange with accomplished artists... I was one of the
applicants who won." His words were slow and laborious as he
wished not to divulge anything.
"How wonderful! A famous artist of this area. Are you
Laotian?"
"I'm American," he said. It was the second most offensive word
that he could think of.
"Are you here on vacation?"
"Yes," he said curtly, not bothering to reciprocate, and the two
strangers fell into silence.
"I'm here with my sister," she spoke at last with less certainty
than before." We were trying to find a royal palace. We saw a
sign but got lost in some backstreets and did not know where we
were going."
"Oh," he said. "Well, did you ask around?"
"Yes, but I guess Thai would be better than English."
"Yes, I suppose it would, but you don't speak it do you?"
"No but you do, don't you? It certainly would be great to go
with someone who knows his way around, or even if you don' t;
two women traveling together begin to argue if they are alone
too much."
"You argue?" he tried to restrain his smile. He knew how his
gentle and probing eyes of sustained interest and a luminous
smile made women love him, and so he looked away.
"How old is your sister?"
"Forty. She's older."
"No sisters sixteen years old or younger?" It was the vilest set
of words beyond 'fuck' and 'American' that could be spoken to a
French damsel, and he was startled to hear them spill out of his
mouth. It was a slap against women for losing their beauty with
increasing years, and a shallow and blatant disregard of the
inner worth of a being. It was chauvinistic and repugnant, and
it got him what he wanted.
"No, no younger sister. I've got to go!" As she was leaving him,
she suddenly stopped and turned toward him abruptly. "You are
ugly and pathetic. You know why? You went to America and
America took over your thoughts. You are Asian and yet just like
those war criminals. Why don't you just leave here and go back
to America or better just go to hell." Then there was perennial
solitude once again.
Irritated by the stings of the ants that had crawled up his
legs, and feeling a sense of compunction for having been so
rude, he felt that he was now lost and wandering through the
miasma and malaise of himself. It was so unbearable that he
wanted to move away from the stupa and out of his inner self.
If he made a left to Main Street and then another left, he would
be on the road that went near the Morning Market and toward the
Arco de Triomph replica, Patuxay. To the right, he would be
where he was--that plaintive temple museum that seemed to still
be in mourning over the loss of the Emerald Buddha. Eventually,
further in that direction would lead to government buildings,
which were in the French colonial architecture, and then to the
river; at least that was what the map indicated.
By the time the time the Patuxay monument was clearly visible,
it had begun to rain heavily and he dashed toward it for
shelter. Once there, he shook the water from his hair and
clothes, and stared down at some flowers growing in a square pot
at his feet. Feeling less fettered by the dampness, he then
looked up at the deviant kinnari and Ramakien giants that were
shaped intricately into the arched doorway, and scraped the mud
off of his sandals. He remembered when he was five years old in
America the faux pas of wiping his feet on a neighbor's doormat
that had gotten him into trouble. He had believed then that that
was what doormats were for. He again postulated that perhaps
there really was no love--just people who having no extrinsic
value in the universe at large clung to each other for meaning.
Then he suddenly heard in a Thai-Laotian dialect, "It's the
Thai artist. Do you remember me."
33
The Laotian made the prayerful gesture of the wai which Nawin
reciprocated. Then he said, "In the train, man. Remember?" He
was trying to pierce through the fixed, glazed expression to pry
into another mind and loosen the memories therein. His words
could only be insolent if they were contemptuous, which they
were not, and flagrant if he considered the age of the
interlocutor, which he may not have done, and overall, the
informality of it made Nawin feel equal instead of superior
which was equivalent to a sense of being young once again. He
remembered and smiled at his acquaintance and found himself
amused at the fluctuation of demeanor in a given moment of time.
"Yes."
"I gave you a beer."
"Gave?" Nawin sneered playfully before a more cordial tone
replaced it to patch over a stretch of silence. "I suppose you
did in a way."
"Did or didn't?"
"Okay, you did."
"So here you are."
"Yes."
"You're a bit wet."
"Yes, I am."
"Are you cold?"
"No."
"You look tired. Are you tired?"
"Not really."
Boi guffawed at the lucid and hesitant utterances of the
withdrawn, distrustful being and looked amused as though it were
a game to him. "Well, I suppose you'll dry quickly enough when
you're back inside. Do you have a hotel room?"
"Not yet."
He was ambivalent whether or not the Laotian meant to say, "Dee"
[good] in response. As the Laotian scrutinized the Thai, so
Nawin did him. It seemed to him that a word had percolated from
the Laotian's thoughts and yet the mouth bore nothing. The
pursed lips seemed to incarcerate sound and the only thing to
materialize was an imagined utterance and his own irritation at
not even knowing such an insignificant item in the social sphere
of man with absolute certainty. It was odd but useful, he
thought, that the mind was able to distinguish that which was
and was not real, especially when both were unreal in the
objective measurement of passing time, and that the mind noticed
distinct positive attributes in each, rarely confusing the two.
In this case, however, he hardly knew whether it was a twitch of
lips or a suppressed word. If the latter, he did not really know
the word that it would have been but he still strongly believed
the unspoken word if it were such to be "dee".
"My sister mentioned you many times. I said that you would
probably never call and might not even cross the border." Nawin
wondered if certain words were being withheld while others
selectively released, but if so he could not see that this was
different from anyone else, man or woman. And of a woman, her
love might be proclaimed but never the whore within her that
yearned to improve her situation in life as the most virtuous
married status and money in one sense or another. Was he not
missing life by analyzing everything, or was he giving weight
and meaning to fleeting experience by the anchor of his
ruminations? To live life fully, how much should be spent in the
inward exploration of thought and outward action without being
macabre or flippant and in both cases superfluous? This he
hardly knew and also pondered.
"I almost returned to Bangkok this morning." He did not know why
he was saying this. Like a model who would soon allow herself to
be denuded there was something inside him wishing to strip off
inner layers and be known to others as though knowledge of
himself was not enough--as though even the palpable sense of
himself in movement and thought was diminished and not
reaffirmed by human interaction. Rocks moldered away and would
do so all the more quickly if not reinforced by sediment; so, he
said to himself, he could not be exempt of the same fate.
"You only arrived in Nongkai a day ago. Why were you thinking of
returning?"
"I don't know" he said, and from the prevarication seconds of
silence ensued with the discomfort of it, like the sweat,
humidity, and filth of the open air clinging to his skin. As
discourse was the only tangible means to gain an outline of
another and the projected intertwined adumbration, the thick
shadow of relationship that was the two, it was impossible to
stay silent, refusing to disclose bits of himself; and as the
present was at times a prototype for what would follow, an
extension of the present that could be the pattern of his whole
life. Needing to part the silence he said, "To see my wife if
you must know."
"I must. The one who broke your arm?"
"And clavical. The same." The emphatic must enticed him and he
smiled begrudgingly.
"You know what I think?"
"No, why would I?"
"That she doesn't exist."
"A le nah [huh]?"
"She doesn't exist."
His smile dissipated. Then he tilted his head down and his taut
countenance became empty like the void in his head. "That's more
or less what I decided and so I wandered here," he said
dolefully.
For, oddly enough, he, as rich as he was, had come to this place
of all places like an impecunious, malnourished refugee seeking
any parlous state that might save him from starvation. Since
Kimberly's death he could not find even scant viands or morsels
of hope anywhere; and as all humanity competed for this
resource, a prodigious amount was needed to feed their
ambulatory corpses for the continuation of their hauntings,
which would end in final stumbles. If there were a search light
piercing a sliver of darkness for his sake in the solidity of
his grief, the one hard substance in the random and furious
changes of his life, how would he who was buried alive inside
himself see it? And why would anyone else, busy in his or her
solipsistic role, find enough humanity to save him?
If any light came to him now or had emanated heretofore, he was
not aware of it. The border leading back to Thailand seemed a
dark and opaque one-way journey sealed off to retrospective
deviants. Thus, he was stranded in this swamp of Vientiane,
Laos, without any chance of return. He was here in front of the
Patuxay monument, this Archo de Triomphe created from money that
the Americans had alloted for an airport.
"Lost?" There was only one object, himself, that was the meaning
of this word, for the Laotian's eyes seemed to be peering into
him with murky beams of light.
"Not entirely lost, no. Detached, I think, which makes me less
lost really. Who knows? It feels different though--different
from how I see it... not that you need to know that," he said
condescendingly with a chuckle, believing that his ideas would
not readily permeate into the obtuse mind of the laborer. Then
he countered this claim by doubting if intelligence was innate.
It was in part the result of human will for transcendence, and
in part provided by education fueled by money like everything
else. The Laotian seemed to be sagacious enough to know his
situation or perhaps this loneliness was so inordinate that he
wanted to believe him as such. To be known was a vulnerability
to be exploited especially when man's feelings wanted to avow
friendship with he who saw him denuded, but to shy away from
people was rather weak and craven.
"You should express yourself freely to your friends."
"Friends?" Nawin laughed. The laugh was mild with mild sarcasm,
but it shook his body, reawakening the dull pain of his broken
limb and this acute sense of falling from a precipice into an
all engulfing abyss.
"What?" retorted the Laotian irascibly. "Are you laughing at
me?"
"Well, yes, I'm sorry, but we don't hardly know each other."
"That could change."
"Why should it?" He was critical and cautious, but then he did
not know what else he could be. There were less mendacious
illusions like a marriage that lasted for some years and
deliberate fraudulent ploys by calculating self-centered beings
wanting to improve the circumstances of their lives more
expeditiously. Both, with any real touch, would fall like a wall
of sand so one had to be careful of what he leaned on, who he
associated with, and what he believed if he believed in anything
at all. It was a world of impermanence, a world where men
married women for solidity and a sense of completion as an
adult, and women had their babies (or in the case of Noppawan, a
friend's baby) as though grounding oneself in the mundane would
make the continual shifting of the ground stable and themselves
as everlasting monuments. But, he countered, what did he know?
Artists might be introverted and anti-social by nature or just
inclined to justify their enmity towards the world at large.
"Why shouldn't it?" said the Laotian [meaning why shouldn't
their acquaintance become closer]. Nawin could not think of any
reason to oppose this particular friendliness any more than to
favor it, and so he stood there neutral to the dictates of fate.
If he had been more of a non-anthropomorphic deist or
anthropomorphic atheist, he would have believed in the
significance of this coincidence of finding him here and it
would have pressed into his mind with as much religious fervor
as the secular could hold. Still as lonely as he was, although
adverse to admit it, he just felt its significance without
giving it credence.
"Do you still have my number in case you need it? You might when
traveling in Laos."
"I Threw it away," Nawin admited regretfully. And as he said
this, ashamed of his own conduct, compunction bit into him like
a rabid dog, and he felt friendlier towards the Laotian for
accrediting him with a liberty that would not entail obligations
to paint him or his family. Such moral obligations done to feel
the injustice of the world and to allot money (in his case to
pay them to model for a painting he did not care to draw out of
a sense of pity).
"And yet we are here together. How strange. Sit down. Neither of
us will be going anywhere in the rain." Nawin sat down on the
wet bench next to the Laotian who wrote his telephone number out
for him once again. Around them both was the mesmerizing sound
of rain, now a more steady, less vehement pounding in the
muddied inundation that surrounded Patuxay. With each new minute
it was more like a lake instead of the elongated puddles he had
seen minutes earlier.
There in the arch of the monument to the French replica, within
the overarching sounds of the falling rain, he heard the sotto
voce of a rotating squeak of a bicycle, the swishing of a boy's
saturated sandals, and the solitary howl of a roaming stray dog.
He watched the oval ripples reverberating around patches of
random grass, the bathing of pigeons, the crawling of a worm at
his feet, and that dog reaching out with two stretched paws to
the solid overflow in the trash bin. It all seemed to him quite
beautiful, sad, and fleeting.
Aimless as a transient, his was a melting of self into life and
a conscious recording of that which imbued his senses. At this
moment his life felt more replete in purpose since he was in the
present moment, casting away the hopes and anxieties of the self
entirely. Nawin breathed out, smiled and stretched as much as he
could without touching the Laotian, content and relaxed in the
inconsequence of existence. If there was meaning, he thought, it
lay in the montage of what fell into one's senses and it did not
need to be any more profound than this. He was thankful for
money which was needed to provide for him in this transmutation
as a homeless transient and observer of life but without stigma
and free of onerous thoughts of what was needed for survival.
"It's me. In the train? Remember? I sat next to you I was--"