An Apostate: Nawin of Thais

With a more solidified judgment that their actions were obscene Nawin began a slow unwrapping of his own gum; and yet not wanting to judge precipitously on nominal matters where...

The gambits of feeling, senses, and logic were even fallible when working together. To trust one exclusively over the others was a madness equivalent to an artist falling in lov...

Shopping was only adjunct to the instinct that prompted the switching on of one's breath. Of course he would do it naturally for man's energy was not to be self-contained, but i...

He did not quite expect it and yet how could he expect anything other than that fierce loneliness would befall him? The fact that he was taking this aimless trip at all was evid...

If he did not think his behavior odd, he certainly felt its peculiarity nonetheless, and thus he found himself disconcerted and spinning ever so slowly in a thick and viscous vo...

"Anyhow," he thought as he sucked in the smoke of his reefer, "about the bird, what am I thinking? Who gives a fuck about the bird? Why am I dwelling on this bird. If the bird c...

"Why would anyone want your paintings? That is what I'm trying to figure out. Video porn... DVD porn for those with computers, okay. They are closer to the real thing, aren't th...

"Oh, sorry, did I wake you?" Nawin's concern in this matter was only marginally genuine. For the most part it was feigned for the sake of kindness and to thwart this voice of di...

"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...

The Laotian made the prayerful gesture of the wai which Nawin reciprocated. Then he said, "In the train, man. Remember?" He was trying to pierce through the fixed, glazed expres...

Telling the dog to stay, he went a kilometer or two through serpentine gravel and dirt roads until he found a raan aharn (outdoor restaurant under a canopy) to obtain some meat...

Now he, this forty year old birthday boy in a toilet of a train and the stench thereof, was once again trying to recall this same article for he was wondering if the writer had...

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...

Ruminating, he thought about how each year for his birthday she had fixed her American born, but not raised, angel food cake burnished in icing, and brought him to fairs to shoo...

While pasting the fragments of the true self into a reticulate and concocted whole following sleep, it seemed to him (who, in boyhood, had once been envious of a 12 year old fri...

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...

He assumed that in being exhausted from sporadic fits of sleep and wakeful spans of dull, hypnagogic thoughts matching the inertia of his confinement he would finally become ens...

Everywhere he went there seemed to be metallic signs on poles to power lines. Each sign was in the international language of pictorial symbols and each illustration the same: a...

Earlier he had thought about saying, "I'm not used to this sort of thing. I'm married so maybe we should just be together this one time" which might have caused him to say, "So...

But was he really dreaming anything about them even in an indirect way? No, he had to admit, he was not having nightmares about the women he cared for--and he cared for them all...

He wondered what Noppawan was doing at this moment. Awakened by the baby, was she warming the bottle of milk and combing that thicket of long hair as he had seen her do before....

He thought, "Have I, Nawin Biadklang or whoever I am--whatever I call myself, done anything remarkable within all these forty years?" He posited this question as if this subject...

Throughout these moments of the conversation she, whoever she was, had been at his knee all along even though, oddly enough, her presence had registered in his brain with the va...

He listened to the frequent gusts assail the window panes. They were a hybrid of breath and force. They were muddled articulations in brawn. In that respect, he told himself [at...

Hydrogen clouds detonating into stars; stars exploding as supernovas and the debris congealing into planets; microorganisms of those planets that became extinct, stayed the same...

"Yes, of course it's a nickname. It's just that when I was coming here I met someone on the train who was also calling himself that. I guess it is often used around here."

"It's got to be nests," she said as she rolled down her window to gain fuller clarity. Sitting in there with his mother, it occurred to him that their relationship was merely a...

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...