Boi smiled. "Then I would eventually leave, wouldn't I?"

"I suppose so."

A couple of workers began to sweep water out of both sides of

the arched entry. As Nawin watched these automatons and their

redundant strokes he remembered one time when he went into the

stadium to jog and dabble in studies toward a Ph.D. which he had

no real interest to complete. There he saw a group of workers

cutting down a small tree, sawing large portions into more

manageable pieces, and carrying those pieces to a pile. The

workers looked like an entire family with the variety of their

ages and sexes. Two of the adults who were moving the pieces

cajoled a small boy into believing that he was instrumental in

removing the branches for as each was being lifted he would hold

onto a bit of the center and they would praise his efforts. They

were determining his fate by brainwashing him with positive

reinforcement but at least, Nawin thought then, he would be

content with his station in life. Who was to say that the boy

when grown would not feel sorry for people like himself who did

not know what to do with all the days of their lives.

A sales mendicant came by with a dozen or more umbrellas in his

hand. "Do you want one?" Nawin asked.

"All of them. Then I can stand out here all day and have

something to sell." The voice was not earnest and it engendered

no sympathy.

"Two umbrellas please--any color, I don't care."

"100 baht," said the salesman. Nawin paid the money and handed

one to the Laotian.

"I think you are selling something already."

The Laotian grinned. "Really? Are you wanting to buy?" He was.

Ashamed of himself, Nawin looked down at the green sheen of

water that now surrounded the monument. Its reflection seemed to

sway and careen in the harmonious bombardment of the pellets of

rain. More fluid than reality itself, the reflection would for a

time seem permanently unsteady before evaporating entirely.

"No, maybe not," he said vaguely.

The Laotian chuckled. "No, Man, I'm here just because I got

caught in the rain like you did."

Maybe it was true. Maybe the perverse fabrications of the mind

when imparted by speech altered the intentions of the other

party, distorting the fabric of probable outcome.

"Where is your sister?"

"On the farm planting, cleaning, cooking, getting water from the

well, I don't know, I don't care, but she's probably thinking of

you. Do you like her?"

"I don't know her. I don't think I have any real opinion." He

paused thoughtfully and then said,

"How do you mean?"

"I mean for a painting--of a country girl, rural life.

"I'm not sure."

"What about me?"

"For what?"

"For whatever."

"Whatever?"

"Whatever. A friend, maybe if you need one. I think that you do.

You seem lonely."

"Who isn't? I'm okay with it."

"For a painting then. Will you draw me?"

"Okay, but remember commissioning a painting takes large sums of

money. I don't think that's what you want. You just model and

I'll get a gallery in Nongkhai to buy it when its done if art

supplies can be bought here."

"It's the capitol. We have. Now tell me how."

"How what?"

"How would you paint me?"

"How do you want to be painted?

"If you were to choose."

"Nude?" He phrased it as a question for had it been a statement

it would have shown him as possessor of perverse inclinations he

did not want him to know. It would have compelled him to be

perceived as having the interests of an artist and natural

proclivities of a man but with one or the other designated as

the main ingredient. Judged favorably or otherwise, it would

have been a predominant issue, altering roles and distorting the

potential outcome of the interaction.

"I'm okay with it," he said. He was mocking Nawin's circumspect

neutrality with a smile.

"I'm just kidding. What about your sister? I mean would she care

to pose nude if you and your

family don't have any objections to it?"

"Try. My sister, me, the water buffalo, and the chickens: you

can draw us all nude if you like as long as my parents see

something else instead. You don't need to pay us anything. Just

come and stay for a while. Laotian hospitality."

"I don't know."

"Is traveling alone so much fun?"

"No, maybe not."

"There's so much road construction when it doesn't rain, dust in

the air instead of smog, a small capitol instead of a very large

one, but still a city. You've probably never even visited rural

areas in Thailand, have you?"

"Not much."

"What happened to your wedding ring?"

"It was raptured from my finger, so to speak."

"Did you lose it?"

"It lost me."

"I think that you need company right now."

"Sure, what the hell," said Nawin. "Maybe I'd like to see you

nude."

"I know you do," retorted the Laotian.

His discombobulated and desultory mind made his eyes alternate

in momentary gazes between the rain and the flooded land beneath

until, for variety, he looked at those who were within the

arched entry of the monument as he was. He supposed that he

should begin to see more of a commonality with those in his

proximity than he did for he was feeling loneliness impale him

albeit the loneliness of being in communion with another when

not wishing to be so rather than that of a lone traveler to

Laos, needing the company of others. It was the only salient

loneliness that he knew, and the sudden recognition of this

oddity or perhaps the coldness of being so wet made him shudder

and want to believe in them as cognate beings which they

undoubtedly were in the strict physical sense. But demigods and

men all had heads and faces, torsos and limbs. Regular men even

had feelings and thoughts in some proportional quantity even if

it were a degraded quality that was at the dictates of their

myopic needs and agenda at the time. So, although similar in

that sense, he thought scornfully, there was little that was so

remarkable in it.

35

List written for him; 5000 baht relinquished to him (2000 would

not be enough, at least so the Laotian had claimed, as though he

would know something about this matter; and the equivalent in

kip, he said, would be confusing, which was undoubtedly true);

the departure executed with the figure of the Laotian at a

vanishing point around the Morning Market where supposedly he

would obtain paint, brushes, canvasses, a sketch pad, charcoal

pencils, an easel, and other material items so vital for

painters obsessed in depicting the inner world that was

demotically and mistakingly referred to as the "soul" and was

inconsequential to the world at large. As body, the material

produced inner consciousness, "soul," perceived in the glint of

the human eye, so base materials like those that the Laotian

claimed that he would obtain produced "art" of an equally

perishable substance, art of a relative, dubious quality that

should not come from him, no not him, and especially now.

A man penetrating the virulence in the licentious might be

thought of as sagacious when young but for an older man as he,

to continue to draw these incessant, dirty pictures with their

redundant themes, was foolish in its like of discernment even

if, and by his painting he proved, that this was all there was.

And yet he had agreed to paint him but the reason for doing so

no facade of innocence could belie. He should be sitting next to

that famous Phra Thuat Luang Stupa constructed in the year 1565

for the wisdom that might emanate from its gold and simplicity

instead of hoping for--did he dare to admit it himself?--a

ménage a trois.

But what was there to be wise about? That even a homeless dog

needed recognition and extension, that ants summoned each other

to carry a moth carcass up a tree, that creative inspiration was

sexual, and philosophical ruminations were the morbid ponderings

of the inconsequential and the brief, and that one wanted to

live life fully and yet if rides, interaction (professional and

personal), and reflections were the only ingredients he was not

sure of the appropriate mixture.

If the unlikely happened as it sometimes did, and the Laotian

were to return to this monument there would be the logistical

problem of them getting the material to his parent's home; but

no, there would be no chance of him buying the material and

returning with it. He was no doubt running off with the money.

Why wouldn't he be especially when it was so obvious that he

wanted him to do so for otherwise he would have gone with him to

obtain the supplies or would have obtained them by himself had

he known where to go. By saying, "Well, if you want it that bad

you can get it and I'll go up here" (meaning inside the copied

French monument) both had made a contract that the fraud or

casual, personal, embezzlement was permissible and that the

Laotian could take the gratuity and do what he wanted with it.

If nothing else, giving this tiny bit of money had been a

nominal act of redistribution for a principle of equity, and the

Laotian merely an initial vehicle for transport. The money would

be injected into their economy and so if the Laotian were to

spend it on booze and women or seeds for the next crop it would

be of no concern for him--at least so he told himself.

With all the whores he had drawn and played with by going into

with a mental microscope and a condom a bit like a marine

biologist scuba diving with an underwater camera in his hand he

knew the ocean of human suffering inside and out, and drawing it

he fed off of it symbiotically. If those around the monument now

had jobs in 7-11 stores like those in Thailand (almost no

convenience stores here, no nothing for sure) wouldn't they be

happy? To forfeit 4000 baht, a hundred dollars, borrowed from

various sources to pay the owner in the event of stealing

something, an impossibility with video monitored stores,

breaking something, as though a carton of milk had such a price,

or running away, which of course they could do as modern day

slaves with the power to walk away but no predominant will to do

so, to work 14 hours a day for a mere five dollars, 170 baht; to

be paid only if the acting manager liked his or her job

performance and signed a document in Thai attesting this fact,

they would be elated to gain such an opportunity.

Still seated on the now half-vacant bench of the monument, he

was foundering inside himself in a melancholy that contaminated

his bounty as an oil spill a lagoon. He loathed the inner

vulnerabilities of the human creature that needed the ersatz of

others for companionship (or at least confirmation when beyond

the need of extension, and when thinking himself beyond

confirmation still needing sexual contact to feel grounded in

reality especially when spending so much time in his own head),

and yet was amused by it all the same.

The relative silence was interrupted by plaintive, orphic sounds

of a flute played by a uniformed high school student who sat

stiffly on the steps leading into the monument. Sometimes

stridently off key the music was made all the more euphonious

for the errors. Truer than inadequate words at reflecting

thought, the tune was pure feeling like a Moslem call to worship

and it seemed to slither onto the athiest's soul comfortably

enough as though that which was desolate and discordant in

mortal man who lost everything and everyone Heraculutously

including innocence and the various stages of development that

trod upon it was a ubiquitous leitmotiff, a black light one had

to bask in for his own good, human bondage not executed onto

him alone but done uniformly and impersonally to all.

It seemed to him odd that unlike Bangkok, this Communist bastion

seemed to be conspicuously absent of overt beggars. He had

expected the same maimed, exploited mendicants whom gangsters,

eager for profit that could be coerced by sympathy, mutilated

by cutting off limbs and tortured by subjecting these

dysfunctional amputees of body and mind to the hopelessness of

begging on the streets. Still in smaller quantities there was no

paucity of human misery here: separately older men without

vocation and with glazed eyes gazed onto rain that, for the most

part, they probably did not consciously register; salesmen stood

aimlessly behind fruit and noodle carts that were instruments of

servitude and sustenance they were invisibly chained to; and

hack tradesmen from shoe repairmen to homemade broom salesmen

sought refuge from the rain not only for themselves but for that

which they were peddling. It occurred to him that in some ways

he had wanted to see unprecedented misery and that this was why

he had come here instead of picking up his airline ticket and

flying into San Francisco as he had planned. Perhaps this was

why he had forfeited a return to a country of which he

entertained a vague childish memory not of love in family but of

hope that there was such a thing. The early times of stripping

to his underwear and diving off piers into the Chao Phraya river

with his brothers had proven the concept of family to be ever so

brief.

Friendship--an act to seek out one like himself for confirmation

of his ideas and behavior as correct or having some consistency

in the world at large--this was that which he had hoped for when

he bought the ticket to Nongkhai. He believed that here he would

witness unprecedented suffering and in that sponge of his heart

he would absorb it and burst like the clouds above. It was his

belief that it would be better to die of a heart attack with

eyes wide open instead of bit by bit by withdrawing into his

shell of pachydermatous affluence and indifference as he moved

about in this world of suffering. He watched the dark billowing

clouds not from above but below reflected in the turgid green

sheen of the expanding puddles that in this perennial rain

formed of the ground a lake. He listened for reflections in the

deluge and the inundation of water he stared into. It croaked

surreally with no visible evidence of that which produced the

sound, as if the water itself were transforming into toads--but

then this was a reflection too, another distortion of the mind.

No, he did not expect him to return nor did he want him to but

that was from wanting him to so badly. If he did not return

there would be but the self, he and his thoughts droning on

unnoticed to others like scrapings on the wall of a cell of

solitary confinement, graffiti under a rock, thought under the

rock of the skull that closed him off like the tomb did Christ.

No, there was not a chance in the world of seeing him again and

it was as he wished it to be--at least that which was rational

in him wished it to be.

And again, if instead of using the money for more constructive

purposes the Laotian were to buy beers and whores with it, the

money would be in circulation in this communist bastion of basic

sustenance and mild deprivation instead of being an

inconsequential part of an astronomical sum in his savings back

home, a vehicle for some degree of equity in this world where

one would be better off to pluck out his eyes to stay ignorant

about such matters. Loss of this money would be an invisible

extraction from his savings, an easy riddance.

This rational element schemed was as pretentious an affectation

as the clothes he wore--or any clothes for that matter. This boy,

the Laotian, whom he mentally labeled as Boi 1 (to make a

distinction with the other) was another self delusion, another

lie. Both were bodies and he had an inexorable yearning to see

this Boi 1 naked, to devour and be devoured in wetness, unity,

and sensation with him.

He could say all he wanted as justification for giving him that

money. He could claim the pretension that from giving it he

hoped it would expiate him of the gross insensitivity of being

affluent in this world of suffering and doing nothing about it,

but really he wanted him to return, he wanted the paint ordered

and delivered, he wanted an excuse to draw him and record his

beauty and his nakedness, to shut out the world in bliss with

him, to be in a ménage a trois with him and his sister in a

euphoria of gluttonous devouring.

36

If the Laotian were to return with the supplies or a receipt for

them, a scenario he could hardly imagine, it would further

solidify a contract begotten of seemingly inconsequential words

and bits of paper currency, the substance of contracts; they

would be in this union and its ensuing obligation of him to

paint one or another of the members of this rural Lao family

even though the subjects and themes this would pertain to were

yet unknown to him. He would stay with them until he completed

his task, rural, sodden and destitute as they were, no doubt

sleeping on the planks of a wooden shack if not on a dirt floor

once again, drinking boiled tea colored tap water or worse mixed

with lemon juice, eating once a day as they did, consuming rice

with fish sauce or salt sometimes mixed with an ant egg curry

and a few boiled vegetables purchased cheaply as they were on

the verge of rotting, somtam, chicken, noodles, boiled eggs,

sticky rice and mangos of the more wealthy almost as exotic as

French cuisine, and out of respect to them ostentatious,

flickering gold would no longer adorn his brown skin to replace

his slave collar of plaited noodles and in lieu of the yellow

plastic wrist band of mindless King Rama myrmidons who also wore

yellow T-shirts with royal insignias on Mondays and Fridays the

thousand dollar wrist watch would have to be deposited obscurely

into his luggage. But were this stranger to desert him, should

he in his loneliness be desperate enough to conceptualize it as

such, there would be the continuation of this freedom from

others, expectations of him just as he wanted, despite any

neediness to the contrary, an uncompromised, unadulterated self

in surfeit, in which even the painting of internal and external

worlds was perceived not as expression but as a blurring or

smudging of the true self by form and colors; and there would be

more of the same unbearable loneliness, and emptiness. He

thought this as he heard thunder in the distance of the passing

storm and in an undercurrent of thought recalled explanations of

thunder and lightning posed by adults, those pleasant lies of

childhood that after all this time he had for the most part

forgotten, memories unused that without imagining the way they

once were, fell apart with pieces scattered in disarray and

sometimes lost entirely, unable to be found again, void

recollections of the mind.

If left alone he would be a cactus flowering obscurely touched

by nothing except the ravaging sandstorms within, an ascetic

monk whose insights would languish within the intact internal

life of a temporary being, a fetus barely alive in a dead

woman's body--if this were really what he wanted. If the

Laotian did not return he might continue to have the pleasant

company of his thoughts provided he held reign over their

restive movements and they were directed mostly toward some

external aim instead of a constant churning of old redundant

ideas and ghosts of memory haunting him with their illusionary

palpability as though that which had been could be grasped

still. Alone here in Laos, a foreign land, there was plenty that

was novel to explore and by being a sole traveler, his will, his

uncompromised agenda, would be exactly as he wished it to be.

And if in this solitary journey he were to become unbearably

lonely, wishing to do god knows what with this family and unable

to do so, his consolation would be that he had given money to

those who no doubt needed it. But apart from putting into

practice an egalitarian principal which gave him some

satisfaction (pleasure always being the positive reinforcement

of an action never to be pursued unto itself but giving personal

meaning to virtuous action) there was nothing so personal in it.

No, he sought only to draw his base nakedness and feel that

erect body against his own. He wanted to be intoxicated by the

molecular exchange of kissing a man like yearning for a bite

from a water monitor, an animal that was rife at the Silpakorn

University campus in Nakkon Pathom, and to ride and be ridden to

launch his sensations out of his mundane, incarcerating,

gravity-bound subjugation.

There was more of the distant thunder. It was like a homeless

bottle collector pushing an unwieldy cart away from him or, if

it could be transmuted to sound, that of a man repudiating his

own impecunious past. Hadn't that faded memory of a mother once

told him that thunder was a diamond falling from some goddess

when struggling in the heavens against a diminutive monster?--he

could not remember any of the specifics; hadn't some uncle in

the United States of America, the country of his birth, once

told him that thunder was the sound of Thai monkeys angrily

tossing coconuts from coconut trees in the hope of getting to

the bananas? He remembered that in his naivity and love of his

nativity he had fused the two stories together. He smiled

ruefully as all variety of family was now gone from him, its

ephemeral nature expedited by circumstance and choice. It

occurred to him how quickly the child within could penetrate the

veneer of a man, and by resurfacing, claim hegemony over adult

thoughts. It might give way to them altogether were it not for

the need to make a living in a role that in some minute way was

a propulsion of human existence--not that seated on park benches

or the equivalent for the past three or more years of his self-

proclaimed retirement, tolerating his wife's looks of disrespect

and thus bonding all the more with Kimberly in due course, he

had performed many roles over the past few years...he had merely

fathered a son. But of 6 billion people on the planet, how would

he know that his assumptions of self were applicable to them? He

could not even prove the dominant child trapped in the veneer of

manhood for himself, let alone others, when from one minute to

the next he was a different being entirely thinking different

thoughts or seemed so as any object in variant angles of light.

Maybe this assumption just related to those whose childhood,

despite some sublime moments, was overall harrowing, or maybe it

was merely his own idiosyncrasies.

Nawin was gazing out to a sidewalk that was across the

bifurcated street that veered into many directions around the

Arc de Triomphe replica, and he was ready to move toward it. He

was just about ready to stand up and walk away. As the Laotian

would not be returning there was no need to sit here further.

Furthermore, he was hungry and wanted the steam of coffee to

make him into a new man. Then he suddenly felt a tap on his

shoulder, human warmth, the sense of belonging to this sorry

specie. The Laotian handed him a receipt. "It should be

delivered by tomorrow afternoon."

"All of it?"

"I think so."

"To your home?"

"Yes unless you want me to have him deliver it to a hotel room.

You don't have one?"

"No. I was thinking about checking into the Paris Laos Hotel. I

saw it earlier in passing. Any change?"

"No."

"It came to 5000 even?"

"Its on the receipt."

"That doesn't mean much."

The Laotian smiled. "I didn't write the receipt. Did you go up

into the monument."

"No, just stayed here. What's up there?"

"I don't know. What's up there? Poor people trying to sell their

trinkets, souvenirs if you want to call it that. Junk for

westerners to remember their trip to Laos. All of it is the same

as in Thailand. Nothing that would interest you unless you want

a little better view of the city."

"I see. Then I guess not."

"You don't want to be a spectator of poverty?"

"No, I've seen plenty of that and I guess I'll be seeing more if

I stay with you."

"Of course. Let's do it."

37

A third person, an older man with a handkerchief on his head,

trudged hurriedly by. Had it been Bangkok, this individual would

have needed to shove through umbrellad cell phone using laggards

jamming pedestrian movements, but here in this village of the

national capital there was nothing to curtail his movements so,

even as decrepit as he was, he disappeared as dirt down the

makeshift gutter that was the declivity of the entirety of road.

Then there was a forth, a monstrosity of four animated legs

walking toward them, a bodiless unit of Siamese twins under a

sole umbrella that in passing was shown to be of separate

beings, male and female counterparts, much younger than he was,

and, in a state of subdued happiness, much more naïve than he

could ever recall being.

Even happiness like this will not last, he thought solemnly with

a sense of sympathy for these distinct individuals beginning to

prevail over a bit of jealousy at the innocence of youth which

had glimpsed him with his cynical countenance and he them before

receding behind him, the memory relegated to the region of the

brain where all inconsequential sensory input was assigned. Then

despite his intention he vaguely recalled that ingenuous sense

of a belief in euphoric, all-pervasive love emanating from the

attraction of two beings, that feeling he could not entirely

repudiate, a feeling he once had toward his brother. After this

particular perversion (all sexual acts a perverse blend of

imagination and the tactile and so the more usual of them also

perverse but not a perversion in the usual meaning of the word,

or so he justified it to himself), he had not felt it since. But

then as one who had perpetual notoriety as a womanizer, a

provocative offense and humiliation to any wife, he had to admit

that he did not know of the longevity that might be maintained

in a relationship--he who thought that marriage to an

anthropologist whose features were buried under thick glasses

would be beyond the atavistic jealousy of troglodytic females

waiting anxiously for the hunter to arrive with his meat, baby's

bone marrow, and bananas, and his penis that should only be

hers, he who did not know that every woman was also a woman in

instinct and reaction.

Then, again, there was just the two of them continuing to walk

silently on a stretch of vacant sidewalk cleansed of the litter

of dogs, each under separate umbrella aegis, each in his own

direct or askance manner watching the energy of the pellets of

rain reverberate in oblique and diminished circular ripples in

puddles near their feet. Still independent, he had ample

opportunities to say that he had changed his mind and that upon

consideration he had decided that he should not forfeit his

travels for the laborious task of painting rural life, which had

not been part of his agenda but that which he, the Laotian, had

imposed upon him and he himself had accepted to seem amiable to

him and less anti-social to himself. That was a cluster of words

that if spoken would have made the contract of earlier

utterances void, allowing immediate freedom from obligation. The

words came to his mouth and languished there until death. He

could not open the prison gates and release them. No, he yearned

for him too much.

He was not part of the four legged monstrosity under a sole

umbrella, nor hand in hand at this early stage of their

acquaintance (not that with a male he would have found that

acceptable at any stage, for to be seen to be free to be queer

would allow the public to pigeonhole him, exacerbating that

which was in him as it had before to the painter of prostitute

studies) and yet he was wishing for the implausible nonetheless.

If holding hands belied the existence of two separate entities,

belief in such a fusion, a more plausible delusion in

heterosexual relationships where one might have proof of a

merger on a sheet of paper and a baby byproduct as the burden of

bouncing on bedroom mattresses, was vastly less credible than

one of naked sportsmen at a bit of wrestling.

For in this plain of existence where all was an illusion, one

could only use logic to maneuver himself into the most plausible

of situations. He did not know what he was thinking as he walked

beside him past the morning market and the Paris Laos hotel

which he had passed before. They would not become nude sportsman

at a bit of wrestling for the victory of pleasure rather than

the pleasure of victory, which was the norm for the clothed

players. As far as he knew, this was a brother and sister whom

he met on a train and whose only interest in him was platonic.

They just wanted to earn a little money by becoming models. That

was a rather innocuous wish, which he was in part fulfilling

because he was not absolutely sure that doing nothing all the

years of his life was any more constructive than the motions of

birds in flight, tires of vehicles rolling, and sorry herds

(even outdoor custodian sweepers pulling plastic trash barrels

on wheels toward a destination) consumed in roles and agenda

which gave artificial meaning to their lives.

No, he wanted him. He wanted to be in the Laos Paris hotel with

him. There were so many irrepressible whims that came over a man

blinding him within a blizzard of heat and titillation. Overhead

the sky seemed to be clearing. Various lower clouds which seemed

to have the outline of vultures within them were eager to move

ahead of the dissipating mass. Like individuals shoving through

the crowds to swoop in the descent of agenda, so were the lower

clouds and so it seemed to him now was the Laotian. He seemed

eager to take him someplace.

"Is your home very far out there?"

"Rather. No. I don't know. It depends on what you mean. We'll

try to get there before darkness overtakes us." But what if

darkness and rusticity was what he wanted. Surely murders

happened in communist countries, and if so, it seemed to him

that they would occur most frequently in rural desolation when

military police or some such comrades were not watching. His

gold should have come off neck and wrist before he crossed the

border. It should have come off his earlobe before he got on the

train. For a man to turn forty and yet to continue to try to

appear half that age was absurd. An earring in a young man was a

symbol of rebellion against the world, and an expression of

latent homosexual impulses yearning for an opportunity to exude;

it was somewhat acceptable in one who was experimental and

lacking self-knowledge yet bold in his attempts to gain it--one

who, dissatisfied with the world, had not yet made his own

world.

"And what would you get from it: a painting or money?"

"Why not both?"

"Why not the moon. Life doesn't work that way."

"If you think the painting is good and you can sell it, pay the

models. If not, don't. Draw a little something for my mother to

make her happy--it being her birthday and all. Besides, for

cooking and washing your dirty underwear that seems like the

decent thing to do."

Nawin smiled. To merge into a family, to have a home when he

except in extraneous matters of documents averring him as

proprietor, was homeless, was that which he sought and wanted to

hear. But then there were the bodies and the odors that exuded

from them, questions as to whether one loved the bodies or the

molecules that they emitted, quandries and riddles for a man,

that like it or not, stank in multiple forms of neediness fetid

as his brothers strewn socks, the scent of monsters that

fluttered all about in his brain.

38

Friend, acquaintance: he was not quite sure which word he should

categorize him under, or if the relationship were more than

superficially amiable. For what he knew, walking as he did

beside him when less flooded pavement permitted, and behind him

when situations warranted, he was being led into outlying areas

for ostensible reasons that belied the plan of shooting,

stabbing, or bludgeoning him to death, which he would have

invited upon himself. As touching poles warning of imminent

electrocution had been a temptation earlier, so now, he

concluded, he was stroking death from a more gregarious angle

and no one would be to blame but himself if his early demise

were to occur because of it. A gilded collar on a dog of burnt

umber was still a dog and a collar. Absurdly in coming here,

gold still hung from his neck, dangled from a right earlobe and

as the thousand dollar Swiss watch that adorned his wrist. Like

a billboard flaunting opulence and reminding others of

inequalities the culprit would be the billboard itself rather

than the man who brought it down. And all to undo the dog by

flaunting a glittering symbol of savoir-vivre. Now that he

considered it, it was a wonder that he had gotten through the

previous night intact only having to pay a thousand baht salary,

penitence for his soiree with an underage male who had been the

stranger of his strange, intimate encounter. He did not know

this individual whom he was walking with, but then he obviously

did not know the childhood friend whom he had married and who

had bludgeoned him with an iron skillet. People were such

amorphous blobs that changed shape with the years and when

confronted with the brevity of their own lives. That did not

totally displease him. It made them more the pitiful mysteries

that were the subject of his art and empathy. From humanism to

materialism, their digressions and mutations were simply a need

for permanence and significance. His wife, a scholar, had

maternal instinct as her quest for permanence, her art and if

for years now she had been building her empty nest, he had never

blamed her but handed over money for these perennial renovations

that gave her happiness in the midst of her sadness.

Friend or acquaintance, potential lover or murderer, it did not

matter as the situation of enjoying the company of another was

pleasant and merely being with someone irrepressible to one in

such a somber state of mind. If crimes did occur in this

communist country it seemed to him that they would happen in

bucolic surroundings far from the scrutiny of the officers

sitting in tiny police boxes on every corner of this village

capital, and that if his demise were to occur at human hands it

would be no different from the Pyrrhic viruses and cancer that

killed incidentally, or even the immune system which was a

killer in its own right. It seemed to him that there was little

point in concerning oneself with the inevitable and the

ineluctable; and it was indeed ineluctable for a man continually

slipping and falling under the weight of retrogressive memories

to seek companionship at some stage of despair within his self

containment rather than to tolerate one more minute in solitude

and thought. It occurred to him that he was in a state of

needing to be befriended by a serial killer and he laughed.

"What's funny?"

"Nothing." He smiled.

"What?"

"Just the crazy thoughts in one's head. That's all," he

responded evasively.

The two men closed their umbrellas, and each jumped respectively

onto a large rock that nudged out of a turbid, fetid pool on a

sunken area of sidewalk, and then made a second and broader leap

to drier pavement. Straws in small bags of coca cola that each

had in his right hand jiggled with phallic looseness as did

their singular and murky reflections in passing over the

inundated sidewalk. He could now see at a distance the bald

muddied area of the bus terminal with its dilapidated secondhand

buses that, according to the travel guide, had been given by the

Japanese government to the retarded capital as a gesture of

friendship, buses that would take them outside Vientiane albeit

for him without any good reason for except for this sharp

prodding feeling of needing to be with someone. It seemed that

he was receding into an earlier Thailand and an earlier self,

and that after so many weeks of travail (so many years really),

that he was now happy that he was dirty, poor, and free as a

seven year old boy in the company of brothers at a pier.

Then they saw two dogs and themselves. Two dogs dogged by

cravings and two men suddenly in rapt attention around the

copulating beasts. It was the mating of common four legged

creatures and yet they did not seem to mind: sexuality was the

mounting of another form for pure pleasure (conquest of pleasure

and the pleasure of conquest) that would be exempt of suffering

and thought, the forced intimate exchange with a female, the

forced intrusion and annexation of a cave, a feminine domain by

which in sexual contact, the male animal, having nothing and

bereft of all, asserted a declaration of ownership against a

weaker mortal, a fertile being of obdurate will from which there

was an exciting possibility of fertilized union and untoward

pregnancy; and even from outside in witnessing another species

and the action performed by it, it was a ubiquitous reminder of

real life denuded of brand name pretense and mesmerizing for

this fact alone. This bitch was still alarmed by the swelling

and gyrating of the body part still extended into and locked

within her, and she continued to jerk in various futile

positions in the hope of extricating herself from this peculiar

alien fusion, which before ejaculation, insemination, and

probable gestation--with a new alien hijacking her body--was

impossible. It reminded him of those that he had seen in a more

willing communion a few weeks earlier on Pinklao Street. Cars

and motorcycles had swerved around them, those varmints that had

been using their instruments of vile urination for pleasure, and

in so doing inadvertently achieving for themselves nominal

immortality amongst tortuous shoppers like him who had come out

of Central Department store off an opulent cloud of various

exits to the bathos of the gritty and the pornographic. For him

it had been amusing and, while going to the parking garage,

there had been a sheepish grin on his face. Like any male he had

gazed at the exhibitionists and the duality of rapture beyond

that of any female counterpart leaving the mall; like any

artistic mutant of a man who from his own abused childhood

pursued brothel studies as though he were an astrophysicist on

the verge of a singular theory. He had gazed at the varmints and

their apotheosized obscenity, vile and natural, until its

completion, far longer than other men exiting the mall.

And yes, he who had an affinity for dogs left to reproduce in

Bangkok streets and obviously elsewhere in Southeast Asia so

gratuitously, an affinity for them that perished with the

overseers' knowledge and without the least compunction, would

wish to see them in drooling rapture rather than in grueling

rupture. Both scenes, then and now, reminded him that

instinctual cravings were such a compulsion in man and dog that

for it, this frenzy, this euphoric escape, they would risk

death. Such was the insanity of it all--all this programming to

replicate beings with no purpose beyond replication itself,

unless it were the animation of inanimate elements that they

neither saw nor wanted to see, as they each, in separate

moments, lowered their umbrellas to jump onto a rock when the

rain was a mere sprinkle and continued their destined walk, this

movement toward open body bags, coffins, and urns that waited

patiently for them in their myopic and only half-believed sense

immortality.

"Nice, isn't it?--one of the best sites that we in Laos pride

ourselves on, and show to all our rich travelers--dogs doing

it."

"Well, its rife in life. I couldn't expect anything better--here

or elsewhere."

"Good, then its impossible to disappoint you. There's not much

here, I must admit. La Prabang is better. Maybe I'll take you to

a few temples and stupas in Vientiane--La Prabang even--before

you return to Bangkok."

"It's okay, I don't mind. Seeing sites--it's not what I'm

after."

"What are you after if you don't mind telling me? Why did you

want to come Vientiene, anyway?"

"That's Complicated," he said ineffably for how could the wish

to escape inordinate grief be expressed? He merely stood there

not from bravery but from the confusion of a mute animal, numbly

feeling this hot iron branding of the forehead, this

incommunicable set of feelings, and these memories fading to

abstractions with every new day, but there at this distance

beckoning him nonetheless. The number he was, the more he could

function, not that bereft of agenda, he needed to do anything

apart from engaging in a departure that he hoped would bring him

peace of mind.

The Laotian kissed him on the cheek taking in the sides of the

lips and transferring his molecules therein.

"My new brother," he said ironically. "He keeps wanting to sweep

up a pile of dirt that blew away long ago. Forget your past. You

are a guest in my home and I usher new beginnings for you."

He tried to thank him but the words would not come out. How

could he thank someone for this betrayal of his intention.

Although an invitation to the possibility of fraternity, family,

and a consistency of human presence which for sanity he was

deemed to need, his body yearned not for true intimacy but true

illusion. He wanted him as his lover, the lever for the fuel of

his testosterone, dopamine, adrenalin, and serotonin which would

be extinguished at ejaculation like the falling of a bottle

rocket. Thus he stayed silent.

He sensed that this imparted kiss was deliberate in its

ambiguity; that his stare was a spotlight; and that his grin was

one of gaining satisfaction from not disclosing all that he

knew. He sensed, although he was not quite sure how, that his

thoughts were being discerned: that this friend knew of his

womanly sensitivity, knew of the desperate scraping on the walls

of the cells of his brain, of the outlines of faces of family

and friends lost to him--an action like art to compensate for

diminishing memories, of his unsteady scaffolding on the verge

of imploding from the loss of entire foundations of youth, of

this resistance of selfish impulses that compelled lesser men to

father child laborers and others sons that would be extensions

of themselves at their demise, of the perception he had of women

as obsessed to have a nest in which to breed birdies that once

grown would in the best of circumstances cause the second

dissolution of family, of this conviction that the male entity

was always being used by women, and even more, of nature itself,

which coerced a man in the lure of replete pleasure and the

barely manageable impulses that were its precursor. Just as on

the train he believed that the Laotian ad his sister knew of his

attraction toward him, so now he was reading his deeper

thoughts. Maybe it was the sagacity to notice the slightest

expressions in a countenance that was under the influence of

mood. Maybe when a man was not given an opportunity to learn

from books, his scholarly pursuits were merely to gain the skill

to accurately judge the essence of a man for his own use. Nawin

on impulse, wanting to do rather than think, and yearning for a

contract with another being rather than the circumspect

reticence and insular freedom of being alone was willing to risk

opprobrium rather than having to play more of this game of the

straight and narrow, opened and tilted his umbrella over the

Laotian and kissed him fervently. He was not sure after these

brief seconds were complete if the lips of the other party had

at any point pressed into his own reciprocally or were just that

of a victimized passive agent compelled into action by the rape

forced upon them. Aloof and disconcerted, amused and perplexed,

the Laotian smiled at him wryly. In so doing it made this

fraternal role seem feigned.

"You don't mind?" he asked him.

"I don't mind anything," the Laotian said

"Here's a hotel room. We could stay together until morning."

"You and I together?"

"If you want?"

"I want. I really want. But another day. I want to get you

home."

39

Except for brief durations, he had not slept much the previous

night. He had been preoccupied by belated concerns over his

actions with the intimate stranger and an obsession to purge the

travail of abused childhood by placing himself in similar

scenarios so as to anoint the visceral wounds with seething

pleasure. He had been besieged with worries about the possible

theft of his wallet from the drawer of the night stand in the

room of the guest house, and yet now he would willingly give

away the money he had and the bands of gold that he wore which

separated him from others of the swarthy, befouled herd, for an

opportunity to sleep. He had this strange, recurrent idea that

everything he had with him and all of his material possessions,

assets, and estates in Bangkok were irrelevant. The idea

resonated with a drowsy philosophical truthfulness that belied

an organism's necessity to thrive at the expense of common

laborers. It seemed to him (not that as tired as he was he could

trust his ideas) as though, in a world of poverty where the true

crime lay in the paucity of theft, such possessions were not his

to begin with. If in being taken into the country he ended up

murdered, his throat slit and that which he had taken from him,

in some ways it would be a justified hypercorrection.

His sensory impressions did not seem to be fully registered,

making every few minutes of "reality" shift around on their own

Teutonic plates. The sensory input which made its way to the

printmaker of the mind to be copied and filed in memory for

future reference (ideas and situations unclear to be sketched in

artfully, deceitfully, self-delusively, and credulously with his

own fabrications) were, in this state, the faintest of

reproductions and made him have difficulty seeing and

understanding let alone embellishing, believing, and

categorizing content. His consciousness awry, at certain seconds

the world seemed to have become an ethereal haze and he sensed

himself on a slippery precipice of the declension of the

foundation of self, which one only feels in the asphyxiation of

loneliness. Twice he stumbled as he walked. The second time he

did so the Laotian laughed.

"You all right, old man?" he asked.

"Yeah I'm fine. Tired but okay--except for that comment."

"You don't like it?"

"No, not particularly. I mean for my taste its all right--unique

(of course, when reconsidered and taken less personally he who

mentally referred to King Bhumibol in English as "King Booby"--

he who has become affluent by exploiting the inner worlds, the

souls, of prostitutes in his nude "studies"--would hardly be

one to espouse etiquette).

"But not respectful?"

"No, not respectful." East Asian society, in public so

deferential of age, in private hearts expressed a more human

reaction. It was the same repulsion for mental and physical

deterioration, lack of stamina, and loss of beauty, essences of

life that vanished with the years.

"Not a thing to do to a guy who is still sensitive about having

turned forty, of having experienced his birthday all alone on a

train."

"A birthday boy? Why didn't you tell us?"

"I don't know. Didn't I?" he spoke indifferently. "I don't

remember. At any rate you gave me a beer on the train. That was

like a gift I suppose. I could go for some coffee now. They have

that here?"

"Where?"

"Laos. Vientiane."

"We're not jungle monkeys," said the Laotian. Nawin smiled

warmly. Of course they were but how pleasant that they were

endeavoring to be more.

"Forty, are you? So young," continued the Laotian. "And if we

had known we would have made you a cake. We would have, you

know?"

"Would you have? And how would you have made one in a train?"

"I don't know. There were stops. I could have scraped together

something. Kemiga and I used to make mud pies when we did the

baby thing together."

"Your sister's name?"

"Yes. You liked her, didn't you?"

"She's pretty. Do you do the baby thing with her now?"

"The baby thing?" he scoffed, turned red in embarassment, and

became reticent with face looking downward as if the breeding

dogs that they had seen in passing were still before them.

"Playing around upon occasion, sure, but no baby things. We've

outgrown that. Anyhow we better hurry. Its getting late."

At first the conversation brought Nawin reassurance. The

relationship was amicable enough and he was content to be in

company that kept him sheltered from being denigrated and

reviled in his own thoughts, which rained down upon him. Then he

thought of the abrupt petulant shift of the conversation to a

tacit moodiness and the Laotian suddenly seemed grotesque and

alien to him; the scenario of leaving the city limits with him

vastly peculiar; that peculiarity seeming as if it were

happening to someone else or viewed from a staticy television

broadcast; and although acknowledging that all strangers

remained such, unless communicated with and entrusted to be

more, he wanted to flee the unknown cravenly and return home on

that train which had taken him here.

It was the obdurate will of man that feigned reality to begin

with and the weathering forces of drowsiness that loosened the

elements allowing their essence to scatter like an empty shell

smashed and falling through a fist. This was the quintessential

truth of or lack of reality. And yet as he was beckoned to

return home by ghosts of the past, corpses now resuscitated and

moving to the foreground of his brain as if alive and relevant

after so much time and so many changes, he was still gravitating

forward toward the Laotian.

Conclusions about the world had subtly assembled in the back of

his brain in the course of his life, conclusions repudiated at

other times for the need to think positively and to make the

world his home for lack of a choice of another, slipped through

barriers of his mind to the forefront of his brain. His thoughts

were in anarchy; and if drowsiness allowed tiny viral thoughts

to enlarge and escape the subconscious, the weary consciousness

of the mind exaggerated the extent of the mutation, the brain

looking at individual thoughts as mirrors from an amusement

park. He saw sparse motorcyclists, drivers, and pedestrians as

their true figurative form of human vultures, and yet he did not

mind for, as insular as he now was, to have his corpse clawed,

scraped off, and devoured by beasts would be a most welcome act

of intimacy.

He did not understand the reasons why he continued on this

journey with the Laotian (this train stranger's lure of him, or

the vulnerability that made him succumb to his will and agenda

as if social contracts were always done in weakness and human

relationships always pursued with the objective of attainment in

mind), and yet he walked with him all the same. Was it simply

for cock sweet on the sweetened cock vine? he posited

derisively. Maybe there was the hunger for the sensual and the

molecular in the attraction but for it to be only this would be

a vast oversimplification. In part he was invigorated as much as

a sleep deprived man could be by having crossed over the border,

with his life just hours earlier seeming closed off to him now;

in part it was to be with someone who could look beyond the

playboy contrivances of art and life to see the soul of the

atheist, the abused child beneath the man--yes, that was the

lure over him but as with all things, such firey hungers came

from within and were not ignited by extraneous forces without.

Early childhood experiences were the arsonist, and the tower of

his manhood would burn to a final implosion hoping for one who

could fan ebullient flames or put him out entirely.

And of this second Boi, the Thai from Nongkai who claimed that

he had come into the restaurant of the guesthouse because of the

heavy rain, this unknown boy who already seemed as a passing

dream, a wet dream, an evaporated being or residual abstraction

oozing out of the furthest corners of memory, would he, Nawin,

really have paid for his education? Overall he believed that if

a letter, an email, or a phone call were to come to him

resurrecting the abstraction into a living being once more, he

would help him. But without sleep he hardly knew anything about

himself for sure--he was like some piece of discarded trash

bobbing superficially on weltering waves. He surely would help

him as he had done for ladies of the night and other women whom

he drew, rode, and drew once more but that fact alone did not

speak well of him. Doing something pleasant for that which

brought him pleasure seemed only a means to keep the pleasure

coming. No, he retracted, his motives were not as bad as this.

He might not be the greatest altruist or philanthropist in the

world but as a man who knew it all, had suffered it all, and

could easily imagine the travails of the inner lives of others,

it was his obligation to correct injustices where and when he

saw them. Only a lunatic sought injustices to paint or rectify,

but if one alleviated the suffering that came before him and his

adumbration, his life would have true worth. But what phone

calls would he receive? He had thrown his telephone into the

large trash can at the Hualamphong train station, so it was not

as if he would get any telephone calls. Address? He was

homeless. Deeds that he owned were merely paper, joint property

due to hid marriage license, or so he assumed, not that

attempting the eviction of wife and son had ever entered his

mind. To think of them ensconced eased his mind. Email? As an

artist and lecturer, he had allowed one of his students to

maintain these secretarial duties. Now his account at Silpakorn

University, home of the Silpakorn University Swamp Monster, the

roving land and water monitor, had email galore to which he

would never be able to get through all alone even if he cared to

try.

What did he know? He hardly knew anything--just that he was

walking with the Laotian, that a bus depot of some sort was

before them, that the possibility of an amorous interlude had

fallen behind some moments earlier like a handkerchief from his

back pocket, and that from nigh to nay that which could be

dissolved into location had become nothing. As all things in the

course of time weakened, diffused, and were absorbed by the next

behemoth event, so was rapacious emotion, more illusory and

immaterial than anything else, and instinctual hungers that were

corporeal delusions of intimacy to, more times than not, foster

pregnancy, would be all the more fleeting. Now the nearest hotel

was blocks behind them, and here they were.

It was like a fallow pasture for the grazing of these mountable

but crippled mammoths. They were used busses that were

supercilious hand-me-downs from Japan to a world capital bereft

of so much. Often there needed to be multiple attempts at the

ignition key to get them started, but once revived, these

monsters constantly exuded and spewed their noxious and

intoxicating flatulence.

He entered deep into the underbelly of one that would take him

to the poverty and destitution of the masses out of city limits

and illusions. If Bangkok was an opulent deception of rural life

he hardly knew what would lie before him away from the

antiquated, rustic capital of Vientiane; but he knew that it

would be rife in life, and something far truer and more

pervasive than his impoverished existence as the son of a

sidewalk restaurant proprietor in Ayutthaya. He did not know of

any reason for what he was doing; but at least he was living

life by actually doing something. And whether or not he would

find it more of a positive experience than a negative one, as

encounters with women opening up their reeking legs for him, was

yet unknown.

It was an adventure to which the outcome was uncertain; but as

it was an adventure; at least it had the pleasantry of this

component, which was sought most ardently by those who could not

rest in their own company, if nothing more substantial. But then

with so much that was deceased around him, meaningful

relationships decomposing on the mound of earlier rot, he would

have to be truly pachydermatous to not feel an impact from that

which might seem extraneous. And when the inside was shaken with

all in rubble, of course he would have to leave his domicile. He

had mistakenly believed that during most of his time in Laos he

would be sitting in some park or another reading a volume of

essays on Buddhism or art, and when glancing up at the sky he

would hear nothing within and without but the gentle rustling of

pages turned by the fingers of the wind. Instead he heard

evacuation sirens within the city of the mind.

And here he was exiting Vientiane. It was hard to believe that

he had actually been in the capital. The city had monuments and

a few signs in English elucidating Laotian history, but signs of

international commerce or even signs in Laotian prompting

capitalism on a local level, seemed scarce. These people were

not competing but sustaining themselves and thus there was

little thriving on the backs of others. There were no elite

artists--no arts at all outside that which impoverished

students sold along the river to French tourists.

Standing in this crowded bus of upright mangled bodies twisted

around each other, he tried to free his mind as best he could.

He contorted his head toward a window and angled it diagonally

to look up at the gargantuan sky clogged in floating masses of

clouds. It seemed to him that all futile prayers ended in the

ethereal bellies of these livid beasts. Still, they looked thick

and real whereas he and those around him seemed, in his sleep

deprived state, to be disappearing like vapor.

Why not one more stifled yearning? If he got what he

instinctually craved, he would be but inflamed instinct with all

the days of his life subject to hedonistic impulses, continually

needing others, he would be forever incomplete. It was good

that the hotels were behind him and that that inexplicable

feeling for the desideratum had died down to a few burning

cinders.

"He's bound to stop for a beer somewhere between two bus routes,

slit your throat as a fruit vendor would a watermelon from his

chilled glass cart, mince you into pieces, dump you from the

Friendship bridge, and watch you, in pieces, float down the

Mekong river," said a gecko. The reptile was hanging from a rail

on the bus, its form grotesquely large for a gecko and

resembling a Silpakorn swamp monster in miniature, with a head

like a four legged dinosaur, a tongue like a snake, and a body

like an alligator, but a gecko it was nonetheless. "It's your

destiny and you cannot escape it. Why look so frightened? Don't

you like that which circumvents etiquette?"

"Maybe."

"Maybe? Exploiter of whores, splattering their filth on canvas

in your colors, your rebellion against this land where naïve

belief in the goodness of the Chakri dynasty is supreme, belief

that Taksin the Great after his wars with the Burmese had

suddenly gone mad, that the bludgeoning of his body and the

execution of his son in Cambodia had been done at orders other

than that first Chakri, Rama I and that Rama IX did not arise by

the assassination of his brother, the Eighth, belief that

father, the abuser, knows best. You are drawn to those who do

something avante garde. Why be afraid. It's ineluctable?"

"Ineluctable?"

"Ineluctable as day meets night. And you want it to happen--this

ruining of you at other hands. Admit it."

"I do; but I don't know why."

"The smearing of paint, the smearing of blood, there's no

difference. The murder of a rich man to get his gold, the

impaling of a whore with your cock, its all mixing to get the

most poignant colors on the palette. He will get you drunk.

People of that type always like to drink and to do so at their

friend's expense. He will notice your gold and stay silent about

it as though it does not interest him at all. People of that

type always do."

"And the means of doing it?"

"A rusty pocket knife with a dull edg,e but with enough muscle

and unflinching will even the dullest object can puncture

another. But I wouldn't give it any concern; it's no different

than the wallowing explorations of the pig-like whores you are

so fond of, all for the thrill of exploitation and impaling. He

will be intimate with your blood and as he does so he will never

forget you."

"Sit down. Over there," said this Boi. A woman had just left

the back row of seats. Feeling enervated, Nawin obeyed.

40

They had gotten off one bus to wait along the road for another

which, he assumed, would take them to other hamlets or rural

scatterings possibly more remote than this--assumed, for what

did he know waiting perennially, or seemingly so as he was, and

shaking his head from time to time to keep himself on top of the

internal waves and not be overtaken, not be absorbed by them-

waves which came upon him voraciously like inundating tongues,

polysemous tsunamis of a muted, mutating language cryptic to

him, not of volition and thus adventitious in a sense, but still

of his own making. The gecko/water monitor-hybrid was still

whispering from the tips of the tallest of weeds, "He's brought

you out here to kill you," even though it seemed to him that if

the Laotian were to do this he would have done it by now; that,

barely glancing at him, as preoccupied as the younger man now

was with this new pastime of murmuring into his telephone while

scratching and pinching his crotch, activities pursued almost as

fervently as playing with his blades, that his intent was

innocuous, or as innocuous as it could be for one more of the

naked and purposeless human animals for which manipulating the

environment to serve one's sense of pleasure and to repudiate by

acquisition that which he was, was always a salient motive. So

he thought, and wearing a gold chain and a thousand dollar watch

as he was, so he needed to believe; and thus he justified his

actions to his nebulous and somewhat effervescent self that was

surreally disconnected like a half severed limb.

Looking at him from the dense, weeded patch where he stood a

couple yards behind--it was, surely, this first Boi, the one in

the train, and not the other; or maybe they were manifestations

of the same: the wounded and the wounding--he sought an

objective appraisal of him, this migrant laborer who skid around

like a leaf; this individual who had given him a beer in the

train but now often wielded a knife, this peculiar man whom he

had seen touching his sister's feet and from a mere glance had

interpreted or misinterpreted a look of lust toward her, a

desperate and impoverished predilection that he knew too well,

this intimate stranger of his mind whom he believed (but did not

know) to have noted his own homosexual proclivity, which he had

mentioned in oblique jocular sagacity, an individual with an

appearance like his brother of long ago, or what he remembered

of him, who could well have been soliciting himself at the

Patuxai or just sitting there insouciantly as though accepting

his and humanity's own naked, futile state, which acquisitive

attempts even by the most affluent ultimately belied, this male

who perhaps had little or no sexual interest in him ( a fact

which would have negated his own feelings quickly had the

teasing not exacerbated them), and was using him somehow

although he did not know exactly how or care all that much for

he wanted to be of use so as to discover something useful in

himself.

No, the Laotian was not one whom he could objectively surmise

when yearning for intimacy with and salvation for him. Already

there was a taste of loose molecules of him in his mouth and the

smell of him, or an emission of him, which was not him really,

rolling in his nose--or more logically, he contravened, the

memory of the smell and taste of others mixed with his smell

which by his imaginative reveries he ascribed to him; and he

wanted to deliver him the way he did of 7-11 clerks and food

cart restaurateurs in his worthless good wishes but with

slightly more personal emphasis and effort. It was no major

hardship to forsake his retirement for a brief time, to paint

the family not in time-consuming and arduous "art," if his could

be called such, but as quick smears that magically conveyed a

superficial essence, and to pay them a few thousand baht for

sitting still and posing before him--creatures of movement

expanding with time but made silent and inert deserved

compensation, although what he would do with the final products,

he did not know. Dragged to Bangkok to be stuffed in a closet of

a home he had yet to possess in his new life as a sole bachelor,

they would never see the light of day (they could not be known

for it would depreciate his own commercial worth). Still, it was

irrelevant.

A bus came...a seat where he could be sleeping and from a nap

recovering, understanding what he was doing more rationally; but

then it went by and they continued to wait as though it had not

come at all. The telephone was now folded and put into a pocket

and the Laotian was once again opening and closing the blades of

his knife as before without even looking at the bus that was now

disappearing into the distance.

He could jump the blade wielder if he so pleased, take away the

knife under the impulse of the moment (maybe escalating or

degenerating into making love to him in the sodden grasses like

a pleasure-seeking wild boar if attitude could be wrenched from

him with no more difficulty than the knife), and demand an

answer for this long wait. But then he would have to be rather

certain that his own thinking was clear, and he knew that it was

not; that the wait was inordinate instead of seeming such--he

was not sure exactly how long they had been waiting; or if he

was in fact being threatened in some way instead of entertaining

the possibility of being threatened (anything was possible). To

jump him aggressively or to even outwardly accuse him of

something only to find his own reasoning egregiously and

mortifyingly false would make him the miscreant. It was his

judgment that there was more of a probability that his own need

for sleep was making him suspicious, if not paranoid. He decided

the Laotian's behavior was not indicative that he himself was

the desideratum, the target of execution--but, even of this,

what did he know with the reasoning ability he had sloshing

around in drowsiness and drowsiness speaking so incessantly with

its reptilian voice murmuring that he, Nawin, would be stabbed

(to use the exact word in Reptilian, impaled) and that he wanted

it that way; and perhaps he did want it that way, he speculated

about his wish to be impaled intimately, his natural death wish

that would be unnatural if not opposed strongly by a zeal to

live. The extent of his zeal to live (surely the more pervasive

and predominate it was the more healthy the human psyche) he was

uncertain of in such an exhausted state with inordinate muck,

the black dust and fabric of the brain, in all sectors animated

and taking on primitive life like a mass of prions rising from

nothing recalcitrantly, clogging his mind with their movements,

his will, his sensibility lost to them that were no more than

adumbrations of forgotten aspects of his life...lost.

Lost...how much more, especially when in this sleep deprived

state, could he tolerate this standing idly at the edge of the

highway and, in each sound of an emerging truck, anticipating,

or coercing a feigned anticipation of, the emergence of a bus

futilely, but in thought expecting that it would never come most

perspicaciously? How much more could he tolerate all this: these

prodigious moments of fighting the pull of sleep; people rift

from him; increasing age transporting him further and further

from the sensitive child whom he once was, a sheen of innocence

that he once had and could have maintained to some degree had

there not been a need to survive on the streets and to rise

above them economically; his naïve wish to be loved; and his

hunger to use others for sexual gratification, all of which

compelled him to mutate--a groping primate of sorts dangling on

a limb to avoid putting his feet directly on the sordid ground,

as if that which he garnered from the earth, his money, were

clean. Lost, it was a part of him that he could not keep, a

ragamuffin whom he wanted to reject and reclaim simultaneously

and yet could do neither one well.

But, in accepting the mutation--there was little choice but to

accept it and as he had always flaunted himself in the livery of

his manhood there was no point in reversing the trend now--how

was he to know that the man he now was was the man he was meant

to be? Who was to say that one was meant to be anything at all

but atoms attracted to each other loosely and reverberating off

each other in temporary mass, an agglomeration less solid, less

real, than a rock, and more equivalent to a gas? Who was to say

that man evolved personally let alone socially? He just let the

old foundation crumble and sordid experiences caulk into and

harden over the holes stinking like excrement.

Perhaps one did not evolve any more than the word "love" had

substance beyond its four letter content and the amount of time

and energy expended to gain this concocted abstraction which by

being believed, managed, as a corollary, to patch the void and

perpetuate the species--a species of monetary, intellectual, and

physical disparity whose only ablution would come in a rain of

nuclear bombs.

The postcard which he had picked up for her in Nongkhai he had

forgotten in his room at the guesthouse. A maid had no doubt

thrown it into the trash by now; but then it matched the

telephone and life which he had thrown, as well, into the trash

receptacle at the train station--yes, two negatives were better

than one because the odd was never harmonious and even. What did

he want of that telephone anyhow, as possessing it would not

bring women back, not even the cute nurse at Siriaj Hospital,

for the wound had been reopened and a reopening a vile hole he

must fall through.

At this time she, Noppawan, was no doubt there in their home

with his child, and so he could return to Vientiane, find a

decent hotel--the few that there were--and give her a call.

Better, he could boldly return to her who had been the salvation

of his youth; but now they were not the same as before--their

relations would be like returning to an empty house after it had

been repossessed by the bank. He, the Nawin of ten years hence,

would just be another variation of this thing that he called

self, constructed substantially of recent memories, and erected

broadly on distant general impressions of largely diminished and

forgotten accounts. His true self was the self of the moment and

it would only be real for a time if his colors did not blur into

the colors of everything else--but then one did not live without

interacting and diluting. Was not his sojourn here, this

atheist's retreat, futile if he did not interact with others and

mix himself in them, hoping to learn and be enhanced beyond his

musty, circumscribed domain?

Why, he asked himself, was he here? If he had gone to Chiangmai,

he could have been hang-gliding, or Pattaya, para-skiing, action

where, for a time, being isolated, diluted, vanishing, not even

a professional selfless entity, a cog in the social-economic

apparatus, ceased to matter. Who could blame those who dissolved

themselves fully into the mindless purity of action, the

substance of the expanding universe? In the brevity of

motorcycle rides and the attendance of football games he did it

on a regular basis himself...but then he would always return to

that unfathomable, pensive self that others muffled gregariously

with the noise of companions--a pensive, mellifluous dirge

sought after and found most fully, for him, in broad empty

spaces.

Now, to not be all alone, separated from this mad world he meant

to separate himself from, to not hear so clearly the inner voice

which, in a change of attitude, he now did not want to hear

fully, to not think of himself as an affluent but still aimless

drifter or a delinquent parent in a fatherhood that had come

about from this game of massage and ejaculation concocted by two

women yearning for a child, to not be a broken aching man with a

broken throbbing arm and clavicle, the gifts of a wife who

despised him, to be free of that recurrent guilt-ridden memory

of a girlfriend suffering from postpartum depression who leaped

from a balcony to elude him, that nightmare of a mutilated

corpse always fresh in his thoughts, and to stand in the eternal

compass of love without a diminutive man-made version that was

broken fragments in his hands, would be his ultimate rapture.

Nawin--of course the word was a name change, a mere alteration

of a label from that hapless creature, "Jatupon," fleeing the

past of noodle servitude to his brothers and whoredom to one of

them--no, not a sex slave per se, as he had been with him from

volition with all that serotonin, adrenalin, testosterone,

dopamine, naivety, inexperience, youthful trust of feelings, and

all the rest making him madly in love (mandates and mastery by

chemistry, so hardly slavery in the traditional sense of the

word which would imply an external factor); and it was done

because a Buddhist monk had advised it to be done. So why, with

women let alone anyone else, should he want to feel this

spurious emotion of "love" once again? A time and a half had

been more than enough.

"So you're not groveling back to your wife, wounded and wanting

her tender mercies. I had you all wrong--good for you," he

daydreamed the Laotian as saying and himself providing the

response of, "No, with any violent altercation or, at least a

conclusion in my mind that neither party is any good to the

other--the wife to the husband and the husband to the wife, my

allegiance changes."

"To a different sex than what you are involved in?"

"Why would you think that?"

"I have my reasons. Come on, all pent up in your head with no

one to talk to, wouldn't you like to confess to one person?"

"Not really."

"All right. So be it; if you want to stagnate that way. It's

entirely up to you."

"Well, if you have to know, it can change or be for none at all.

I'm not afraid."

"Of what? Me?"

"Of disengagement. Of saying my goodbyes."

"But you followed me here" he laughed incredulously. "Why's that

Pree [older brother] Nawin?"

"Yes."

And he remembered that in the last year or two she, Noppawan,

would mutely convey that most indifferent of yeses to him, her

retired, worthless husband who no longer had the stamina to

pussy-hunt beyond the domain of his two women, and did not even

have the virility to raise a paintbrush as, he concluded, his

paintings did not have either enlightened vision or the titian

colors of the Greats, and that he was a commercial whore more

than an artist--wives of course always wanting money and

possessions, always buying and making plans for the renovations

of their nests (empty with infertility as they might be), and

the buyers of his canvases whom he catered to needing their

luscious prostitutes to exude testosterone throughout their

stiff cadaverous bodies to transport them from the mundane. And

when he tried to share the poignancy of the seemingly blasé and

inconsequential of a given day of his leisure and meditation at

the zoo, various parks, and at park benches (the patterns of

clouds, the black diamond sparkle of shadows of leaves on the

ground, the lofty fan of bold pigeons perching on his table to

steal his Styrofoam container of rice, wind carrying the smell

of rejuvenating blades of grass--that same perennial and eternal

smell he remembered from 35 years ago) often she, Noppawan,

would continue to make dinner in silence, mutely conveying that

most indifferent of yeses to him, pony tail nodding

indifferently against the nape of her neck in affirmation of

nothing.

He needed to urinate and obviously so did the younger man who

was no longer looking at the road but toward the land with

forest behind them, and a pasture with free roaming emaciated

water buffalo at a distance. Unzipping his pants, the Laotian

aimed the release of the arch of his liquids to nature and to

the exhibition of all passing cars.

"How long are we going to wait out here?" complained Nawin in

his somniloquy. That which he was hearing did not seem to come

from himself at all but an invisible presence with the

utterances of his own voice projected like an actor off screen,

and the Laotian an alien performance put in front of his face,

so as to be more real than any real being, a surreal and

magnificent presence, magni-real in a sense. To be able to stare

at him justifiably, words had to supply a pretext, and so the

complaint spilled out of a mouth of a man who wanted to see

another male's nakedness.

"Until it comes. Glad to know that you aren't dumb and mute

after all," he said--he who went under the nickname of Boi.

Whether this one was really Boi 1 or Boi 2 would depend on

perspective; but, in either case, he judged that it did not

matter. If there was something that mattered it was that these

traumas he had experienced in Bangkok were making him transfixed

by boys.

"I speak occasionally; but there isn't much sense in rattling

nonsense so that everything seems less empty, is there? Besides,

I like to think and be quiet."

"Why?"

"I don't know. It makes me feel alive."

"To not say anything to anyone?"

"Yes. To not be in the commotion of others too much. It's a

trade off--which voice seems most important at a given time. But

I know that it comes from affliction, early pain and reticence I

never overcame. Seeking color in darkness. What are you doing?"

Nawin smirked.

"What it looks like."

"Yeah, well I mean, out here?"

"Looks like I'm shutting it down with some wanks. Do you need

to piss?"

"Yes."

"Then pull it out. Who's stopping you? There's no five star

hotel around the corner where you can do your nasty business.

Look around you. What you see is the entire country--nothing."

Nawin smiled painfully. Space and nature and Jatupon whose only

essence could be found here and, in part, within this

impecunious stranger, were the only allure. .

As the two men admitted by action that they were no different

than beasts of early man urinating freely without repressions,

restraints, and repercussions, neither of them feeling that they

had been a detriment to environment and morality, each regained

manhood. It was restored unto them in the flooding of their

small respective areas to the demise of a few insects and

vegetation. As they did this Nawin wondered how it came to be

that a shirt removed in casual situations meant nothing while

two penises dangling out in the open were such an ignominy and

he felt a further sense of exhilaration as though in this petty,

untoward action he were being launched to a different side of

the galaxy. Superfluously, the Laotian multi-jerked himself once

more. Was it to interrupt the last trickle? Was it to

interrupt this spiritual retreat of him who did not believe in a

spirit?

"I wish one of those straw hat milk maidens from one of the

dairy farms would come by for a bit of my wet sausage," he said.

Nawin smiled awkwardly at the words that gave proof to an

impalpable conjecture and made him assess how trite human

interaction was. Unworthy of the god of the human animal, still

it was exhilarating. Relinquishing the mind and plunging into

human interactions, it was as if he were at last experiencing a

bit of life, here across the boarder, and no longer needing to

atone for his sexual liaison in Nongkhai and elsewhere. Caught

in the predicament of opposing thoughts and emotions, he said

nothing. Perhaps, he thought, this was the real source of his

reticence.

"Do you hear me, Mute?"

"Yeah man, I hear you. You want a milk maiden to milk you. What

do you want me to do about it?"

"That's right. What do I want you to do about it?" he chuckled.

Nawin waited in brief silence for an answer that was not

immediately forthcoming. How titillated he was by so little; and

for a moment he dwelt on the fact that such petty and banal

interactions brought ribald pleasure, and the ambiguity of

motives a sense of suspense to life's limited beings.

Now he was yearning for permission to become the animal that he

was--permission to follow the mandates of initial impulses which

were essential to salubrious man free of the conflicting venues

of attempts at self restraint. As coupling had to be done as

that, a couple, he needed him to pointedly say that he wanted

sexual relations with him, although mentally he hoped to have

nothing of the sort. His feelings and refined feelings, thought,

were moving around each other in contrary motions, pulling him

tautly while twisting him into knots that he recognized as the

essence of civilized man, and this too he wanted no part of.

"I'm not all that particular--A police woman in her communist

uniform making rural rounds; a coca cola driver pulling off the

edge of the road, coming to stretch his legs and finding himself

hungry before he remounts his beast and drives away. That would

be fine. Then I can't think of anything more that would be

needed and so wouldn't have to do a thing--just watch it go

down. You think you can do that?"

Nawin wondered of the ambiguity of language. Was it such because

it was inadequate in conveying intentions, that the motivations

of a man were multifaceted theses and antitheses, or that to

keep motivation and the inner workings of the mind safe, replies

were obfuscated? In any case it seemed dubious that the grunts

of language were really the best attribute of man.

And he imagined, daydreamed, or dreamed that a man shaped like a

zero was being sodomized in the weeds by the stiff broad boned

four of a female; that on this most garish of days, Father's

Day, King Booby's birthday, when all were supposed to dress in

yellow attire to commemorate him (dare he mock the kingly puppet

god of the military who nodded silently in the earliest of days

when they knocked off his brother, and from it was deified on

the condition of staying perennially silent? It was the first

time he had done so even in his thoughts, but recent tragedies

and experiences had unctioned his mind and under garish cynosure

made all normal ways of behaving known as the artificiality of

man-made-rules that they were), he and this second stranger were

interlocked in a naked embrace on sodden Laotian earth bereft of

yellow flags, were coupled together fetid and wild as stray

dogs--a product of nature and uninhibited will denuded of

pretense. And he dreamed that he was in communion with a reptile

("Listen," he imagined himself saying to the indeterminate

specie, "If one doesn't hold onto his own breath why should he

hold onto people? Why should he be afraid that more will not

flow in? No specific one is needed, although it might seem as

though he were; interaction is needed (be it with a person or

dog), an outside stimulus to dilute the intensity of one single

group of accumulating thoughts foundering one to extremes, but

this is all. And if I can dismiss a wife after she broke a

clavicle and an arm with a frying pan, I can do it of a

stranger--this stranger." "No you can't," said the creature,

"for she was the stitching of the wound that could be undone in

time. But the train acquaintance is a resemblance of the wound

itself, the wounder, and wounding, the trinity, and it possesses

you--the erect cock, the blade that will pierce your death

intimately." "He's not even playing with his knife any longer.

He's no danger to me. He knows me now." "When your guard is down

he will strike, and then you will have your intimacy.").

Then a second bus passed them by but the Laotian seemed as

wholly impervious to the sensation as before. It was a bus (the

right one?--that he did not know--but a bus nonetheless) so

raised head and attention askance would only have been natural.

"Why didn't we get on that one?"

"It's not the right one," he said.

Nawin finally admitted to himself that there might not be a

right one, and suddenly, at least in feelings, he ceased caring

all that much. All that he wanted was to lie in the stink of the

earth. Now there was a butterfly fluttering about his feet. If

he were to lie down it would fan away the sweat that was

collecting at his brow, there would be beauty in the sordid, and

there, without compunction he would plunge into dreams thumping

as the voices of frogs at a distance.

"Come here," he told the Laotian. Boi came over to him. "So

young," he said as he touched a wisp of hair that stuck out over

the boy's ear and was salient in his sense of beauty. "You

remind me of someone I once knew. It's like the world recycles

the same stuff. What do you want from life? I mean not what is

real and before you but what you really want."

"What point is there in that? I'm here. My sister's here. When

the crops are bad we get jobs elsewhere for as long as we can

and then we return. I guess when I was younger I wanted to be a

pilot for what it's worth now."

"A pilot?"

"Once upon a time."

"Once upon a time," repeated Nawin thinking of a time when

family was an eternal concept in a young boy's mind and one's

life was rife in possibilities. He felt sadness, the eternal

sadness, reflected in this one who called himself Boi and he

knew that he loved him. He tried to kiss him but the Laotian

feigned a laugh and pulled away.

"Quit that, you joker. Save your kisses for beautiful Laotian

women. I know what you want. You wouldn't be much of a man if

you didn't. Thais with money are no different than other sex

tourists that come to this country for a piece of Laotian pussy.

All those paintings--you must be a real ladies man. Well, it

looks like we will be here for a while. We might as well be

comfortable as we wait. Let's cross over there and sit down." He

pointed to a small shack and an awning at a distance. "You buy

the drinks and we'll motion for the bus to stop when it gets

here."

"You mean we have been waiting on the wrong side?"

The Laotian laughed. "Well, not exactly. There's a different

way. There always is. It's sort of like a bus." Nawin felt ill

at ease but did not say anything as the two crossed this

infrequently traversed highway where a dead possum lay before

them on the edge of the road.

"People deny that they are going to die by looking forward to a

new day that brings them closer to death. It's most ironic,"

said the gecko-monitor as it rode on one of his pant legs. It

was a non-sequitur that he could not place in the context of

what was happening but then, as such, it seemed no different

from anything else. And although he was not terribly alarmed, he

questioned whether or not the man crossing the road with him was

in fact the Laotian, but as everything changed anyway he could

not see that being accompanied by someone else really mattered.

They sat at a second table behind two middle aged men. "Sabaidee

mai?" he heard the acquaintance say to them and they

reciprocated with the same greeting. If sabaidee was their

sawadee he was not sure how he would understand these Laotians

in all this shifting of semantics. He understood the

acquaintance to say, "He's the Thai I told you about" to which

one of the strangers said a word like benefactor in something to

the effect of, "Does she like your benefactor." "I'm her

brother," the Laotian responded. "She'll do as she is told."

Then, as though conscious of him, there was a lot of small talk

in which the acquaintance asked about where they worked and

lived. Then the conversation changed to that of a football game

at the university and, to him, it all seemed staged on his

behalf. The acquaintance said, "Drink, you are on vacation.

Loosen up" and so he drank two shots of whiskey that appeared in

tandem before him. As both head and body heated up, and the

stationary environment began to wobble, he tried to reassure

himself that although everything changed it did so one moment at

a time. He then noticed a bald spot on his acquaintance's

scalp. It seemed to be floating hurriedly in the ethereal like a

satellite and the biological structure of Nawin cringed at this

defective counterpart. The train acquaintance, if he were such,

now seemed older than before, and the liquid blueprint, which he

was subconsciously yearning for, a less viably transferable

product. This Boi asked them other questions in the Laotian

tongue that he could not comprehend at all on the fourth shot of

whiskey and their furrowed faces answered him although the

substance of this he could not determine firmly.

And as they imbibed beer ever more gluttonously and he quaffed

more shots of whiskey, becoming the sensation of an entity

aflame, the substance of fire, he became conscious that he would

be the one who would pay for all these drinks. Thus his hand

began to flounder into various pockets for his wallet until

finding it in his shirt pocket but with nothing inside its dark

brown lining.

"My money--there's nothing there," said Nawin.

"Is that a fact?" said the Laotian.

"All of my money is gone."

"You are my friend. I am concerned for you and I am keeping your

wallet so that you don't lose it. Also we have to pay these guys

to take us to the farm. No more busses going that way this

late." Then to the owner who was now attempting to refill the

glass from a whiskey bottle he said, "No, enough. Nothing more

for him." The gecko, sitting on his shoulder, imparted a long

melodramatic look of consternation and worried skepticism which

also seemed staged. The reptile was stirring the puddle of his

eyes, watching the ripples and it continued to do this until

they were outside and the truck was turned on. Bored, it too

needed to make more from the rock of the planet.

One of these drunk companions deliberately skidding the vehicle

on dirt roads to provoke reactions within the clouds of dust;

wet patches where the pickup labored more than once to get

itself out of a rut; then, after this long journey of front seat

revelry, back seat asphyxiation, the arrival at a shack stilted

like a cabin; and inside an extended family eating som tam,

mangos, and sticky rice on a barren floor. Was it merely this he

had unwittingly yearned for all this time--a gift of a surprised

and welcoming smile from her whom he had met once before on the

train? Through all the expended energy of his own version of

spirituality and standard decadence it was just this expression

that he had wanted all along--an expression which could make and

remake a diminutive man. Alacritous, she served to him his

share placed on a banana leaf that was on a bamboo placemat.

The rest of the family was nice enough. Why wouldn't they be

with a rich man of humble sensitivities there to be exploited, a

man who was spinning out of his mind while the food was making

him sick. Boi put him on a scattered blanket inside a dark

bedroom. There he heard the continual barking of dogs through

the window. Here in this cockroach infested room, to think of

something not so painful, not so dreadful, he imagined the women

cooking insect curry and roasted frog and the males smoking in

the main room. The barking of dogs was mordant to his thumping

head, and it took a half hour before he was asleep--the

cascading of sleep only interrupted when the pallid sister

poured him tea, squeezing a lemon exclusively into his glass,

serving unto him while he was lying there.

"You don't have to do that," he said.

"I want to," she said as she tilted a glass toward him.

"You've come here to see us and now you are sick because of us."

"Not so sick. And certainly not because of you. It's my own

foolishness in drinking."

"I think this will help. Mother's remedy."

"Thank you. I shouldn't be taking someone's room. Whose

is it?"

"It's mine. It does not matter."

"Where will you sleep?"

"I'll find a place?"

"Where?"

"Where you want me to."

"Where I want you to?"

"Yes."

Helping him off with his clothes after the tea was drunk

there was a kiss and a reciprocal denuding--he was being set up

as nothing was this easy, but he did not care. "All for you,"

he imagined the Laotian saying to him as he noticed her lower

body slightly distended. Still, he did not care for he needed

a release. Feeling the body, entering it, ravaging it, he groped

for the end of impermanence and acquisition of human flesh, and

for family to cover his nakedness.