"That is not the best way of being remembered but yes, it was
me. Please sit down." Nawin sat down on the damp bench.
"It is hard to find a comfortable position on a train, isn't
it?"
"I didn't sleep well the night before."
"Why?"
"Financial worries, change, the thought of returning here. The
two of you had a good time of it the night before. Sleepers and
my brother's beer from what I heard."
"His beer? I wouldn't call it a gift. I gave him money
afterwards."
"It didn't hurt you, did it?--I mean giving him something."
"No, I guess it didn't."
"It helped him. It helped us both to get back. What was left he
gave to our parents. He would not have felt good about coming
back if he had nothing to give."
"I understand. I didn't mind, really. It was a wonder that you
slept at all."
"Why?"
"I think my feet were stinking. I even wanted to walk away from
me." He lifted the pants legs on the foot that rested on his
left leg and sniffed his sock. "Better now." She laughed and
then he continued more somberly to reduce the chance of awkward
silence. "Is there anything to see in this monument?"
"You can go to the top and look out over the city."
"Is it a nice view?"
"I don't know. I've never gone in. It would have to be better
than from the ground. The stairs go to different levels outside
but they might be rather slippery in the rain."
"Maybe not then." He had enough broken bones without taking on
more risks. If only she had flaxen hair like Kimberly's, he
thought, then he would not hesitate a moment. He would swoop her
up in one hand and carry her up to the highest cloud.
"Will you go north to Luang Prabong?"
"I don't know. I am not really here to sightsee. Just here to
simplify existence, relax--"
"Drink beer?"
"Wine preferably." Peace of mind was often facilitated this way.
A Singha, a Leo, a Budweiser, a Heineken, and especially that
most odious Beer Laos which he had drunk the other night which
reminded him of his Barbarous brothers and father. He imagined
them with cans in hands as they tried to stomp on his diminutive
being while that which was maternal and good pretended it was
not happening to him. Thus, in most situations, he eschewed the
elixir of farmers and laborers.
"So, why are you sitting here?"
She tossed him an apple from the bag and bit into one herself.
Then she smiled. "The Morning Market."
Maybe she had gone there but that did not explain why she was
here. Maybe she was soliciting but then, he thought, in one way
or another we all were. To do anything was to seek something
from it discontentedly unless one lost himself in the present
moment. She was a whore. They all were. But then when did he
object to whores. They had been the holy light in his paintings,
the instruments of his success. As the male beast was not any
better than the female there was nothing for him to say. He just
silently bit into her apple as though it were her nipple.
"Don't your parents grow any apples?"
"No, it's a rice farm. Only that."
"Are you staying with them now?"
"Yes, I didn't feel like I should continue to work in the
factory when my brother lost his job."
"What will you do back here?"
"I don't know."
"Maybe we should go someplace else to talk. There must be a
coffee shop around here."
"There isn't."
"Anywhere?"
"None that I have seen. This is Laos. But we can sit over
there."
"There? You will get wet."
"I want to get wet."
They sat down at a bench in the rain away from the crowd that
was cuddled in the arch.
"I've been thinking about hiring a personal secretary."
"Really?
"What would you want one to do?"
"Right now not so much," he said as he bit into the stiff and
the sweet, "as I haven't been doing anything really. But I'll
paint again. There will be phone calls from galleries, bids that
need to be recorded, negotiating prices so everyone makes some
profit, messages from students if I give classes--but the only
thing is that getting a visa for that might be difficult." An
umbrella salesman came by. "Yes, two," said Nawin.
"One is enough."
"What is your name?"
"Porn."
"You have a beautiful smile," he said right before feeling his
pockets in a rather desparate floundering. "Oh no," he said, "I
think I left my wallet in the hotel. I need to go back."
"I'll go with you."
"Okay," he said and they ran hand in hand in the downpour. And
when they were in the room at the Paris-Laotian Hotel they
removed each other's wet clothes, he kissing those lips that had
fostered such smiles and their bodies coupled in comfort and
unified motion--
The daydream had come over him like the flash of Garuda passing,
leaving him here with this Laotian male. Overall he did not want
to speak with him. He did not want to be sociable for the sake
of being nice with those who were envisaging some use for him.
Human entities by their own solipsistic notions, tried to come
in, take up root, to fill the space within others brains and
grow within the fertile soil of money; and yet they existed in
the world too, they were sentenced to this earthly prison the
same as he, they too sought meaning and hope in others when
there was nothing else to gain personal meaning from, and it was
not as if he were pressed for time and was unable to socialize
because of some great task that awaited his attention. Was it
such an imposition to provide a bit solace to others ever so
minutely in human discourse even though the need for money
drooled out of their eyes more than even their mouths as was the
case with this one?
34
The gods had been misers and humidity like an over-packed
storehouse continued to overflow onto the mortals of the deep--
at least so the atheistic artist envisaged it for his own
amusement while wondering why one had to personify abstraction
to be amused. He ignored the answer seated next to him, the
answer that this was all there was, that no idea could be
personable, that being smiled upon incredulously was better than
being banished in his brain. He looked up at a few dark clouds
that seemed to shove out of the amalgamated unit to hover as
separate entities beneath the mass. There was for him amity to
be found in the effectual independence of this part of the sky
that sought its own distinction. Within it there was a
reflection of his own earlier struggles to extricate himself
from poverty, conformity, and obscurity as if the cessation of
all three would bring unto him happiness, whatever that was.
Colors as vivid as those of the first crayon marks in boyhood
had transmuted his black and white existence by allowing his
transcendence into imagination; happiness was merely a contrast
to the misery that preceded it. It was the type of pleasure
gained at being saved from a near drowning, and in his case it
was, in his ineffable sense of loss while wandering like a mute
in foreign lands, a respite, which would make drifting,
befriending clouds, and the wordless discourse of being raped in
male sport, the only bearable intimacies.
At the jerk of his arm to avoid a persistent fly that seemed to
want to go into a crevice of his cast sharp pain flared through
his arm, and the whole of his right torso. He tried to suppress
the pain to retain a phlegmatic countenance before the Laotian
and he tried to suppress too, the misogynist thoughts that came
upon him when reminded that his brokenness had come about
because of women. In trying to separate himself from the brute
impulses which were his protective aversion to pain, he realized
that logic alone could not cull such feelings completely for
despite his intention, women were already becoming for him an
equal source of derision as men and, as they were women,
surpassing them.
"What are the chances of meeting like this?" asked the Laotian
as smoke propelled by a gust of wind came upon them in a gaseous
fog. It was smoke from chicken and pork grilled at the hands of
a sidewalk restaurant worker who, stiff and decrepit as the
monument itself and a reminder, prescient and otherwise, of the
type of man Nawin might have been had opportunity and success
not come upon him (and the Jatupon he would one day be if only
in thought within the last moments of his life), stood at the
other side of the arched entry. It was smoke that he imagined to
one day be his own cremated smell as if living in a city, the
most advanced odorless furnaces in a temple would not be
available at his expiration--smoke that should have been of
Kimberly's cremation according to her wishes had her parents not
ordered the encoffining and refrigeration of her remains on a
flight to Orleans--smoke of his mind.
The whole insoluble subject of human relations was baffling to
him. Pursued as extensive involvements, these joint, often
waning shadows of mutable beings mystified and overwhelmed him.
Pursued as shallow engagements in small talk with strangers,
concepts, at least for now, eluded him as he tried
unsuccessfully to exhume words from his mind to talk with
someone whom he had no inclination to know. Nawin shrugged his
shoulders.
"One in a billion," said the Laotian answering his own question.
"Is that a fact?" asked Nawin diffidently for even those limited
words had to be found and forcefully educed from him and as such
they fell upon each other in a stutter.
"Yes, one in a billion."
"One in a billion, okay," said Nawin and the Laotian laughed.
"You act like you've just seen light after being pulled out of a
box."
"I've been alone a lot in recent days."
"Why?"
"I don't know. I need to get away from people."
"Maybe you just need to get away from the old people."
"Maybe. Anyhow..."
"Anyhow, one in a billion."
Nawin laughed. "If you want to see it that way: manipulation of
all natural forces to ensure our reunion." He spoke flippantly
with a smile. Arrogant and jocular, his was more than contempt
of the concept of pre-destiny in relationships, it was also
derision for the human vulnerabilities of needing companionship
altogether as though he were beyond it. But he too was born of
the herd. He, even more than most, had to climb onto the backs
of laborers to get his physical needs taken care of so as to
have the leisure to see ethereal beauty. Why, he chastised
himself, was he trying to repel human contact? Such behavior, he
thought, was as unnatural as was the proclamation of a self-
declared retirement in a still robust and virile being.
Society equated the worth of a man with doing and most
specifically involvement in the generation of a commercial
product for what other purpose did man have on the planet than
to work toward making the world a more comfortable place? He
remembered Noppawan's initial reaction to his retirement. It had
been favorable enough for to her. It meant a cessation of these
perennial sessions with nude models. And yet with the days,
weeks, months, and years of Buddhist melting in which he
wandered back from a park or stadium for dinner or more
frequently walked around his acreage and sat in lawn chairs to
dispense with the hours, often without a book in his hands, what
could be said to him? He was reticent for not having any
terrestrial concerns to impart and so he was a cockroach on her
plate, an ant in her salt shaker. He remained such except in
fulfilling what she importuned from him most: studding her
friend, Kimberly, so that the three might have a baby.
Surely his success had not been her only motivation for marrying
him. When in adolescence that which was barely alive in him fell
into her life, onto her shoulders, she closed him in her arms at
that freakish friendship hall, the anatomical museum at Siriaj
Hospital, and years later at their marriage, the girlish pathos
for a troubled friend was within her still. However, as even
more time went by so her life became inextricable with her sense
of his success and it could not be any more comfortably
extracted than that of her teeth.
"Are you waiting here for someone?"
"If someone comes, yes."
"And if no one does?"