Chapter 10

"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 distraction from his subject of deliberation. He was preoccupied with a bigger worry that, prior to going to the toilet, the stranger had seen his eyes grazing his body. He was wondering what gestures or facial expressions might indicate that the man had seen him ogle his body, if he indeed had, and yet the reason for caring what another individual thought of him eluded him. Had not art, this flaunting of his portraits of female whores with his own whorish self-portraits to which both parties were portrayed as locked in self-degradation, and going to these exhibitions of his work with an arm locked in that of his best friend (legally a wife), Noppawan, shown that he was free to express his desires in his own mode without having to subscribe to another's moral ordinances regarding the energies that exuded from him? With such a force there needed to be rules of restraint so that one was not sucked into the vacuous oblivion of desire and did not lose rational cognizance in the meaningless frolic of sexual quests, which were the mere insatiable manipulating urges of an animal and could so easily be the sole and altogether forgettable essence of a man. This he knew from interaction with the inordinate array of bitches who pawed him with their love (their needy and myriad convoluted yearnings for no other reason than a handsome figure to admire their flesh and thereby gain the illusion of immutable beauty - a neediness dirty as their underwear which he more often than not successfully tugged off to be intimate in their flesh and their and his own selfish caprices). He needed restraint, but to him those ordinances should come from within himself, this prowler's own creative and logical prowess.

"Yes, definitely a loud thud; but it wasn't from the noise so much as that smell that cascaded down with your body."

"Smell?"

"Yes, but I don't want to think of it, thank you. No more of that. So tell me of your adventure this morning."

"What adventure?" he chuckled softly with a sotto voce of scoffing asperity as if there had been no earlier adventure on the metallic toilet floor. He said it for in a sense it had been unfitness, a secret aberration even to areas of his cognizance that could not accept anything but the thought of himself as a lady's man and womanizer, it was true.

"I don't know. As I have nothing better to do, tell me where you have been."

"The toilet, mostly," said the body ogler with an embarrassed laugh as if this trifle of where he had been (this masturbatory exercise in the toilet of the train) were not worthy of speech instead of being a paramount expression of repressed, latent forces that had been compressed within him for so many years. It was still his assumption that as a sleeping body was beautiful with its breath rising and lowering the chest rhythmically like a raft on an ocean, so an artist, the appreciator of beauty in the mundane, would have an artist's aberrations from the insensate throngs, and as such, such appreciative aberrations should not be judged as anything that was particularly queer or at any rate queerer than anything else. Just being on the planet at all, a successful conception from one of competing sperm spilled out in a moment of two people needing, from a transient mood, to subscribe to an illusion of intimacy in a physical experience, was queer enough.

"I suppose looking at that handsome but middle-aged face deteriorate in the mirror--I mean when you were in the toilet. Right?"

"Maybe. Something like that."

"Well, that's a bit odd if you don't mind me saying so. Even a woman would not dare to pee or stay in front of a mirror that long."

Nawin laughed. Like his expressions of love in his juggling of women that was and was not the love he claimed it as being, he had moments of a predilection for mendacity like a boy wanting to hide himself within the shadows of a field and to remain there indefinitely, never to be discovered. He spoke mendaciously and yet to him it was not really a lie. "I wasn't there all that long. Afterwards, I just waited outside the toilet for the seats to be readjusted. Just waited back there, wasting time." Of course "wasting time" had consisted of that adolescent masturbatory sport, which he had conducted earlier in that fetid toilet, a water closet that was more tin than tinsel; and as he thought of it once again with a mischievous grin, he thought of this use of the source of the fantasy for pleasure, the Laotian, without much compunction. Then he thought of himself as guilty for not feeling guilt until recognizing that these new sexual urges were as a volcano spewing out old molten churnings of lava. So of a volcano, he thought, so of a human psyche. He accepted this change to the contour of the surface for ultimately (according to his rationalization), as queer as it was, like everything else, there was nothing new or strange in it.

"And while waiting outside the toilet you were probably staring at yourself in one of the other mirrors, weren't you?"

"Yes, but how do you know that?"

"It would have to be a guess, wouldn't it, unless I can read minds, at least in some imperfect way. In this case it is not so much reading minds but faces."

"So what is in my face?"

"It doesn't matter what is in your face. I don't need to look at it all that much. All upper class Thai darkees are the same. Cleansed and made beautiful and white by money they are a vain lot--solitary cowards behind face fortresses. They are like the Chinese in that sense, and both Thai lightees and darkees with money pretend to be of a higher species. They try to avoid foraging, disease carrying primates like me. Their fortresses are built from fear that lack of money will make them have to acknowledge that they are merely hairless monkeys--no more special, no more potential to matter than any animal."

"You think that I am like that?"

"Well, each person is a bit different. You don't seem so bad. Let's just say that for now, you are a nice guy in a snobbish sort of way" (meaning that having been given a bit of money the previous night in that gesture of unbegrudging levity as if it had merely been the sharing of a bag of sticky rice, a smile from this giver, Nawin, since these Thai compatriots saw smiling as their highest attribute, and voluble conversation beyond the vouchsafed utterances given to a repugnant laborer from a country that was poorer than Thailand, he could hardly hate this particular Thai with that quick primeval xenophobia, in which hominoids reacted to those strangers of a different and potentially deleterious group). Nawin had to be put in a special category slightly different than the usual brand of rich and dark Thais of money. Nawin chuckled abashedly as he tilted his august face to the floor. Then he lifted his head and, in the way of the Thais, a morose, soft, and artful smile alighted on his swarthy countenance like a lambent shadow of a descending airplane across a naked field. He became aware of how much he needed other human beings, these jovial extensions to his limited domain, these pleasant respites from redundant churnings of thought and the hauntings of memories, and he knew that he would feign any interested smile to get the reprieve. "Did you have a good sleep?"

"No, not at all, if you really want to know, which I couldn't see that you would really. Personally, I've never minded a little stink: a sock here, a shoe there, even women smelling like raw, rotting tuna down where a man wants to go--I accept these things. Things that get used get smelly. But that which was stinking up there was of no use....unless one were to capture it, put it in a pill somehow, and sell it off as a cheap form of methamphetamines to truckers, bus drivers, and maybe even guys like me who want nothing better than to stare into space on a bunk all night instead of sleep."

"My socks?"

"Your monstrous socks!"

"Was it that bad?" asked this American Thai, Nawin, with an awkward laugh. He was feeling a sense of exhilaration at being with one who was unlike demure Southeast Asians' superficial demeanor. Like a Nawin Biadklang painting in being so wanton in declaring sordid reality as such, so seemed the man; and Nawin liked what was true and like himself.

"It was like drowning in molecules--at least a little. Still, I survived it all right, so it's okay. Morning came."

"How did morning make a difference?"

"The train official removed those rotting monsters with tongs."

"With tongs?"

"Tongs from the restaurant car."

"With tongs from the restaurant car?"

"Big tongs. Forceps, maybe. Well, something like that."

"Where are my socks?"

"Above you in your bag. I told him to bury them there. I hope that is all right. I hope that it didn't contaminate the rest of your clothes too much."

"Ground contamination is always the better of the two options," Nawin said as he sat down. His zipper which was still open from his bathroom adventure parted suddenly like the spreading foreskin of the V of a vagina. The Laotian looked down at the off-white pee stained hill of underwear within and yet the artistic demigod did not notice. "Airing out the old elephant, I see."

"What?"

"It can't always be happy to be kept away in its smelly stall, now can it? A little air can be just the thing for its mental health. Also a good airing out is as good as soap and water. That's always been my theory." The Laotian grinned mischievously, and then looked out of the window.

Nawin supposed that he was making reference to an elephant in a hamlet, one in a forest, or one in a field of a passing landscape. "Do they put elephants in stables?" asked Nawin with ingenuous naivety as he pondered the meaning of the Laotian's questions.

The Laotian burst out in a laughter which started out as a mild guffaw before burning away any acrimony against opulent Bangkokians, their ignorance, and more specifically, this rich Thai's obtuseness, to become a pleasant and embracing cacophony of good will.

Nawin noticed a blanketed entity at his feet that puzzled him and made the reason for the laughter cease to matter. Then the Laotian spoke and the blanketed one who was half on the floor and the two seats before the window was forgotten.

"So, a rich man like you doesn't know where elephants are kept but then why would you? I guess it wouldn't have been something that you would have studied in college." He waited for a response but all that he got was the artist's furrowed look of puzzlement followed by an aloof stare. Like a faithful childish protégé who was fascinated by the most mundane of motion and noise, Nawin, an animistic thinker even in this more than waning prime of life, began to listen to the fan that rotated above the luggage. At first he was merely wondering why the fan was now on, stirring the cold air, thereby making the air-conditioned area seem colder yet; but as he listened to its grating squeal he imagined that he was hearing the fan talk to him all so discreetly. It was whispering that the vibrations heard by the man who was supposing it to be the actual sound of the fan were fallacious. It was saying that, as with the sound of the fan, so was the Laotian's voice and all specious sound: that sound, by being heard indirectly if not vicariously, existed only as an adulterated sensation. According to the fan true sounds were unknown for one was not hearing what true vibrations sounded like inside a given source, but was merely hearing the air vibrating from its disturbances, or more obliquely one was hearing disturbed air from a vibration that then became disturbed and distorted once more in hitting the eardrums and this thwarted sound, correctly attributed as originating from a given source, was incorrectly attributed as being the real sound of that source. Likewise, said the fan, the Laotian's cologne and aftershave, like any smell, were a diffusion of higher concentrations of molecules to lower ones, so he was not smelling the scent of the man mixed with the artificial chemicals as they were on him, but the scent of him within his perfumed mixture as a less dense concentration oozing away from the man, leaving him and diffusing with other molecular scents, and the more one was at a distance, the less distinct this or any smell became. Sight was unabsorbed color that was exuded from a given presence although the mind believed it to be the filling in, the materialization, of the object's outline. All senses seemed fallible, and the world of the senses seemed like a voice echoing in a canyon, and no more real than that. It suddenly seemed to him that his own marriage, an abstraction concocted in his and her head, and then spilled as ink on a tenuous sheet of easily torn paper made hallow in ceremony, and by a deistic, bodily fluid overseer, imbued less sense than the nonsense the Laotian was speaking. This thought that a caring relationship grounded in many years could dissipate with such precipitancy by a mutual friend jumping off a balcony was proof of the vaporous quality of all things. It tortured him in one deranged second for all was a phantasm of the mind and the phantasmagoria of an impermanent existence. It made him feel his true proportions as a disintegrating speck in a microcosm of the galaxy.

He once again recalled Noppawan's summary of an incident that should have been an augury to them both. It consisted of facts bloated in an imagined scene. Momentarily distracted at hearing the window sliding on a sill, she was unconcerned and returned to typing her handout at the computer in her office at Assumption University when a premonition suddenly shot a cold and macabre sensation through her mind and body. Running to the back of the office, she saw Kimberly in a black rectangular hole of the open window. She saw her in that empty black hole of the self fluttering loose, tattered, and free like a banner on the fade of the university building they were in. "Oh no, Kimberly. Come down from the window. Please." "I want to die," "No, you don't. There are so many people who care about you. You don't want that!" "No one cares. Not really." "Oh, you know that is not true. Unlike me, you have a ton of friends and close friends in me--Nawin too. He would be here in an instant if he knew that you were so unhappy. We didn't know it was so bad, Kimberly. It's late. Come down and go to bed. Things always seem clearer in the morning when emotions burn down in sleep." "I'm just a hole to men here--nothing else." She was crying but her weakened voice undulated loudly with strident, random words. "A pearly white sperm receptacle here and there, in America and France, just a woman, another one, with nothing special in her. I'll never find anyone to spend my years with, the way you have with Nawin. I'll never have someone like him." "Please Kimberly, life isn't easy for any woman. You think living with him is easy? All these women he paints and pants after. Come down Kimberly. We are the same, you and I." "It's different. You have him. I just have all these others whose only use in me is to make claims on my body for to them I am only a tool for pleasure." "Sometimes I wish that someone would claim me. He is not mine, you know. I just share him in these compromises of marriage." "You do share him, don't you? Will you?" "What?" "Share him with me...not like them but like a marriage--the three of us." With a display of their desperation and sometimes given conscesions in love, such people never committed suicide. That was what he and Noppawan told themselves immediately before and during Kimberly's impregnation and pregnancy: that she would never really kill herself: that had been the belief.

These voices (in large part his own imagining but plausible and faithful to the outline delineated by Noppawan's narrative) resounded in his brain and, in consensus with his own verdict on himself, they condemned him. Still he snuggled up to them for a middle aged man with no one was naked and discomfited in purpose. Holding tight to what had passed away he believed that he was less lonely even though conversely this snuggling to imagined abstractions with female bodies, facsimiles of what was that was distorted into what was not, made him feel even more lonely than he would otherwise have felt. He imagined these voices of the past and the dead, and yet for all their distinct clarity, they were at best half-imagined impressions, half concocted indentions in the damp putty of his brain. In reality they were as behind him as the township of Udon Thani that the train had now passed through. They had parted with him and fled like the bird that had witnessed his homosexual solo-eroticism in the fetid toilet of the train. How alone he felt; and the thought of the three of them shopping for baby clothes together, watching DVDs, or roasting marshmallows on the ends of sticks held over a barbeque grill near the swimming pool of his estate made him queasy. He continued to query himself incessantly with what-ifs. If he and Noppawan had invited Kimberly into their home, he wondered, would none of this have happened? And yet it seemed that something else could have taken place. Had this invitation been made and accepted she might have drowned herself in the pool. Who was to say she would not have done so? He excoriated himself for appeasing his guilt with such a morbid thought. Maybe tomorrow a mega-sized typhoon of global warming dimensions would pass over Bangkok and clean the slate of people like himself, obscene drawings of human denizens; but then he was going northeast to the sleepiest of the world's comatose capitals, Vientiane. What could happen to him there? Only if he were to ignore the illustrated signs of a man being electrocuted that graced the whole of Vientiane, and grab a low electrical wire would an end come to him there. Only then would he end his umbilical connection to this immoral world where existence could be so randomly and arbitrarily obliterated to some, as life's gluttons watched it as entertaining news from their television sets, and where under the wrong circumstances a good man might become a looter, a thief, a prostitute, or a beggar.

"I said, if you weren't listening, that I guess it wouldn't have been studied in college. Why would you know if an elephant is kept in a stall in the back yard, tied behind a tree of a neighbor's penthouse, or kept in a neighbor's wife? Elephant studies can be confusing to any novice especially when he doesn't make a distinction between the two species of elephants. Honestly, I think that with both breeds, the figurative and the literal elephants, there are stalls for them. It is certainly true of the figurative when they can be tamed enough to stay in stalls."

"You know, I don't have a clue what you are talking about. You are rambling shit like a crazy man."

"You don't?"

"No, but I'm okay with that, really. I'm just listening to your amusing nonsense and not caring particularly whether or not there is anything at all sensible in it."

The Laotian laughed until the point where he had difficulty swallowing his saliva. Then he coughed, and regaining his voice, he cleared his throat. The grave expression of gagging on his saliva as if were as gaggable as ox tongue, roasted duck gizzards, and fried cockroach in burnt rouge cream at a Laotian restaurant attempting to emulate French cuisine, only lasted a moment and then he smiled, putting at ease disconcerted Nawin who was now rising from his seat as if being called on to perform the Heimlich maneuver. "That's good. More people should do that--not be so serious all the time... just realize that you are fucking around with your time, keeping your life from being entirely meaningless with a personal..." He could not find the word.

"Experience?"

"Yes but more. 'Titillation'--titillation here and there; but I think that we did have a subject. We were talking about elephants if I remember correctly." His words did not come volubly. They were forced and contrived like one intent on seeming educated. The sentences were spoken slowly like one in search of latent words that were once heard somewhere but, because of social-economic privation, stagnated in unfamiliarity. "I have noticed that in this, your country, rural compatriots sometimes bring elephants into large cities in the hope of selling their fine fodder to the pedestrians so that they might have the experience of elephant feeding."

Nawin was amused at the strained efforts the Laotian underwent-- with some formality of diction--to impress him. "Yes, in Laos too, I would suppose."

"I don't know, really. I haven't seen people pay money to feed them in Vientiane, if they do, but that doesn't mean that they don't. But it would make more sense doing it in someplace where the people are filthy rich, and I guess seeing large literal animals is a bit of a novelty in cities like Bangkok where they are so used to the open exhibition of the figurative breeds. I'm just trying to imagine those silky hands of yours scooping up elephant dung off sidewalks. I am trying to imagine how someone like you would cope in being a beggar pulling an elephant down the streets."

"No better or worse than other beggars. What would give you the idea that I am from a privileged background? Believe me, I am a self- made man and these "silky" hands, as you call them, have done a lot of things. Do you have a name?"

"Boi."

"Tell me something, Boi, I'm curious; do the beggars with their elephants just sleep with them randomly on sidewalks? Where do they go after shoppers go home and man and beast need to sleep?"

"It's a mystery," said the Laotian and then grabbed one of Nawin's hands. "Thai silk. Just as I thought; if these things were not so large or so strong, or at least stronger than the average woman, their texture..."

"The silkiness?"

"Yes, the silkiness--the silkiness might seem to some like that of a woman's hands. Fortunately you are darkly complected. That makes you more masculine in a pretty boy, middle aged man sort of way." Nawin chuckled at the absurdity of someone making a study of his hands. "You haven't exactly used these things very much in hard labor, have you? Yes, if they were not so large and strong they would pass off as women's hands. What is it that you do for a living, anyhow?"

"I am an artist."

"An artist? That would explain hands like these. What do you draw?" he asked while returning the hand.

"Naked women."

"And people pay you for that?"

"They seem to."

"Do they pay well?"

"Yes, of course. I am a rich man according to you."

"In Thailand, one finds both the calloused and the silky types but in Laos even some of the higher government officials are workers in their secondary vocations. They all have the damnedest hands."

"What? Do you study the hands of government officials too?"

"A brief survey, I guess. I wouldn't think of it as a study."

It seemed to Nawin that the two of them were merely crows cawing at the night to give texture to the air and all vacuous substance in order to make themselves and their world seem real. It seemed to him that small talk and bantering were, as the Laotian said, titillations to make something personal in the void of time and space. "How do you know that I'm a loafer?" asked Nawin with a laugh.

"Did I say that you were?"

"I don' remember. Maybe not exactly like that but you implied it anyhow. How do you know that I am a loafer?"

"I don't. I just guess that you are."

"I am, you know."

"Are what?"

"A loafer. Not much of an artist now. Retired."

"Retired?"

"Uninspired. They are synonymous words."