Chapter 11

"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 they?" Nawin smiled widely. He felt reaffirmed and grounded in the inconsequence of vain, lofty pursuits and his retirement finally felt good. Then the Laotian said, "There is some real porn that I am witnessing right now. It is too bad it's just that of any locker room scene" and then he pointed down at Nawin's open zipper.

Nawin looked down and smiled widely. He was before the Laotian in an unzipped state after having masturbated to an image of him in his head (the same type of illusion that a man had in copulating with his wife to keep illusory human existence on the planet at all) and yet he felt no particular compunction for what he had done or what a man tended to do with his own body in the privacy of his mind, or in the intimacy of a real embrace. In all cases it was the massage of his own body to ease himself from the stress of thinking, knowing, and having to live in a world of illusions. It was the massage of one's body which one rightfully owned if anyone did (certainly not one's partner) and thus this acknowledgement repudiated, and rendered inane words like adultery and perversion.

12

Left to himself for a moment, he slipped into a brief sleep where, once again, he was with Kimberly. He too was a prey of gravity, and they were falling rapidly from the balcony of her apartment in the Queen's Tower at Assumption University. The two of them, morsels down the gullet of skies, seemingly torn by winds active as enzymes, pummeled the air futilely with desperate, flailing limbs in an attempt to swim through the air from whence they came but could never return. Hardly an occasion for declaring mai pen rai, still there were scarce traces of hope; and as hope was consciousness, there were scarce traces of the latter as well. If, as scared as he was, he was cognizant enough to have a group of interrelated thoughts beyond the perennial wish for "God", which redundantly played in his head, to save him, it was in reference to a belief that there were some actions that could be reversed. It seemed to him that as a change of one's mind could cause a departure to become a homecoming, so there was a remote possibility that this action could also be reversed. Maintaining hope and consciousness, wisely, it did not occur to him that such a return was physically impossible since beings plunged through life just once. Shrieking as they punctured two large holes that made one prodigious gulf in the thin metallic tiles comprising the awning over the swimming pool, they plunged together, splashing into a fiery inferno of loneliness before the last of their inevitable, lethal descent.

He woke, fully startled to find himself in wakefulness. Concentrating on where he was to allow the excesses of the saturation of sleep, a more temporary reality, to be shaken from his sodden neurons like wetness from an animal's fur, he then did nothing further. He merely allowed it to slowly evaporate from consciousness. It seemed odd to him that in all these diurnal commutes between wakefulness and sleep that the mind should continue to allow either of these two states to overwhelm the other. It seemed odd that after so long it would continue to be sequacious to trust what was experienced in either of the chemically induced realms but then, he asked himself, what choice did it have? Was not sand layered by wind and waves? It was; and so the human brain was molded with whatever energy and force happened to be applied to it. Then, in the next second of thoughts, it did not seem odd at all; and conversely, he speculated that perhaps most individuals considered both states specious and succumbed, like prisoners, to the coercion in apathetic numbness.

Was it not so in this city of Bangkok where incense was snagged in carbon exhausts and its residents were engaged in amusements to escape their small speck on this rock of the planet? They were a lackadaisical ethnicity and their amusements were definitely petty--the young chasing balls and finding the extent of their physical prowess; carnal youth in sexual peccadilloes; the worker ants who, when not at work, and no longer succumbing to that role that gave some structure to their existence, spending time in evening revelries about owning their own businesses; elderly women engaged in Tai Chi and their husbands in Chinese checkers on park benches; the poor along the canals, clustered in evenings near their neighbors' shacks for beer and cigarette pilfering, sometimes the men comic book swapping and always musing the day's pettiness amusingly; the rich speculating on how to invest and have more, seeking large flat screen televisions and the fastest computers at Panthip Plaza, the most fashionable clothes in the best of malls, and exchanging tips on how to improve their landscapes and gardens; but which of them, in the thickets of men, felt or thought deeply about the world? They were as wild vines that grew with the rest of nature on the rock of the planet and sprawled human entanglements and preoccupations thoughtlessly upon it.

It was only from the constancy of waking in the same bed in which he went to sleep, waking to the same issues that he went to sleep with, and finding himself next to the person he fell asleep with the previous night, that sleep was considered sleep and not wakefulness, and wakefulness was considered wakefulness instead of sleep; and yet knowing this did nothing for him. He felt discombobulated as though this dream were of more substance than dew over the eyes that he would eventually dry from, a sandstorm within the self where, were it not for his own angst, that same regret that he felt a dozen yesterdays ago and was a constancy that would commandeer a lifetime of perennial guilt- ridden tomorrows, he would not know reality if it were to swallow him. "I feel a constancy of pain and therefore I am," he thought satirically.

For a couple of seconds he noted how, from where he was positioned inwardly and outwardly (pinioned inside himself as he remained seated a few feet from the window) the swath of fields and outlying roads of small towns hurried past him in an incessant green and grey smudge of flat images. Even though they fleeted by incessantly, they were like pop-ups from a children's book; and for a few additional seconds he began to withdraw into a self that was deflating surreally into a diminutive and flattened form in an imagined land of stationary pop-ups where the unreal was still and preserved instead of the seemingly real, which was always wide-open and fleeting. Then this too, this relinquishing oneself to the void to cease this expending of one's energy in sifting through all of these illusions in illusionary existence, formulating "reality" based upon garnering the most plausible of the illusions, ceased with hearing the loud yawning of this stranger named Boi. Glancing at him, Nawin displayed the notorious Thai smile which was always feigned and hospitable with the genuine warmth of wanting the recipient to like him if not of needing to be liked. He did it almost like any reflexive jerk, a physical retreat of the body, as he ruminated on this word, stranger.

When, he asked himself, did a person cease being a stranger? Had he not known Noppawan since he was fourteen years old (as if years meant anything)? Had they not become soul mates for the reason that each of them had possessed empathy for the other innocent being charred in the torturous hells of family? He had and they had; and yet upon gaining a child from him she had treated him with indifference as if, having obtained what she had always wanted (one of her husband's sperm fertilizing an egg and allowing her a son even if it was through her best friend), he was now irrelevant and made all the more so, weeks later, at Kimberly's demise, when she locked him out physically as well as psychologically. He had not even known her. In all of these years of marriage on top of those comprising their friendship of youth he had not known her any more than one did the strangest of strangers.

"Still tired," asked Nawin.

"Of course," said Boi. "There is little sleep for a man bunked under another man...especially when under a man like you and with socks stinking like that, like an elephant's breath...not that the socks were the entire problem. Those were finally taken away in the morning when I couldn't bear it anymore. They didn't bother me after that. It was..." He stopped.

"It was what?" asked Nawin with a relieved chuckle, grateful for flippant conversation to interpose his silent ponderings. The idea that a Thai and a Laotian could not engage in conversation without an elephant trudging through it almost tickled him to tears.

"I don't know," he smirked knowingly. "I am used to sleeping in the mornings so after they came and removed those contaminated articles of yours I could have fallen back to sleep. For a while I attempted to wave away the remaining cloud of stink so that I could do just that. I rested quietly enough after a time. It wasn't as if I was asphyxiating from those smells any longer. The cloud was still there... extant as they say... but I could have slept were it not for this weird feeling that somebody was looking at me--looking at my body. Have you ever felt that way?"

"No."

"Not at all?"

"No, I don't think so. Not really. I mean with my wife. Maybe at times she watched me when I was sleeping. I wouldn't know."

"You wouldn't know?" he mocked. "And these models that you say that you paint, would you know it if one of them watched you while you slept?"

"I wouldn't know."

"You do paint them?"

"Yes."

"And get butt naked with them, I guess, if you paint them as nudes. Who wouldn't, or at least who wouldn't attempt it unless he was 100 percent gay?"

"Of course I am intimate with my models. That goes hand in hand."

"Do you ever watch them as they are sleeping?"

"I guess, maybe once or twice. Well, now that I think about it, I've painted a few in restless positions while asleep. This is an odd question to be asking me."

"Why? We are friends, aren't we? A friend can be one of hours and not years, and it is still a friendship, isn't it?"

"I suppose so," he said. It was the same question that Nawin had postulated silently in his own head and he felt even more inclined to call him a friend for this affinity to his own private ponderings.

"If it were me I would not get any sleep at all. I'd be staring at them continually. I think it is the same for you if you are a painter of naked beauties; but then maybe they are more cute and handsome than they are beautiful."

Nawin smirked and then grimaced. "I'm not sure what you mean by that," he said but he knew, or at least sensed, an attempt to deface his masculinity with homosexual innuendos and thus he manipulated his words and actions accordingly. "Anyhow, most men would consider them quite beautiful, think what you want." Having said this, and glad that he had, he still was not content for the Laotian to think what he wanted and so he pulled out a wallet that contained some slides of his favorite paintings that were there with some of his favorite condoms. Deliberately pulling out the former and dropping one of the latter, he showed some of the slides while stuffing a condom back into his wallet. Boi held each of the slides up to the light of the window and squinted. "Well, what do you know? You are an artist. What are these beauties that are your subject matter?"

"Ladies of the night. Patpong professionals for the most part."

"Beautiful."

"Do you think so? But then what is beauty? An overweight middle aged man can be considered appealing to an anorexic and her thinness, sadness, and youth can seem beautiful to him if both lack qualities that the other possesses, or have qualities mirrored in the partner which makes them feel less alone. That is my theory, for what it is worth."

"You are a deep one, aren't you?" asked the stranger.

He thought of his own limited sex symbol status. In this decade and a half of being glossed onto covers of esoteric art magazines and the photographs of him with articles being emblazoned on the back pages of Sunday newspapers, this married but eligible hedonist with a sensitive stroke was considered handsome and debonair, luminous in sensuality, jaunty and recalcitrant, and an empathic sufferer for those whom he studied and represented. He was alluring for these qualities and most importantly for being fully comfortable with himself as such. He, "Naughty Nawin," was a luminosity in artistic circles who was more desirable for having been desired by others; and yet in all this time he sensed it for the inferior illusion that it was. In a world of complete illusions, a plausible reality was really the thing that was most desired and clung to and so he had clung to Noppawan, a girl who hated family as much as he did, and yet by clinging he had made a family with her. He had forfeited bachelorhood, as much as a Patpong artist could, and had slipped himself into their union only to find that the woman he was married to could not conceive a child and that by her being infertile his days of bachelorhood (except at least on a legal piece of paper) would be as perennial as the wild flower days of his life. He knew illusions so well, for they were his art to convey truth in fiction and reality in abstraction. He liked producing color on canvasses that would act as a mirror of indictment on this world, where the weak were depicted as abused and falling prey to illnesses like the dogs that were born in the streets, kicked, starved, mange-ridden, and dead early and hideously. He saw this perennial cycle of victims going on forever and only nuclear bombs falling like cleansing rain stopping it. He knew how like a magician he could cast a spell on others through his canvass, but he also understood the potency of words and by words he might now circumvent any suspicions about his sexuality which, the way he saw it, was "straight" and intact, despite a few strange caprices that blew in here and there.

"Supermodels and actresses are considered universally beautiful but I don't think it has much merit. I think that beauty really is in the eyes of the beholder for the earlier reasons that I gave. It is only because of the extent of their physical curves of femininity which are beyond the normal range for most men to find in a partner that supermodels and actresses are depicted and believed as some type of a universal beauty. They would only be considered slightly more beautiful were it not for their fame. The fame makes their style of beauty become embedded into minds as something supernatural. In most cases, I think, beauty is just what we lack. As I am a man, I lack the tender touches and graces of a woman, those gentle curves and scents, and responding like a man I want to thrust myself into that gentility whose hands worship a man's physique. I want to rivet and devour." He knew that his words would be considered outlandish in Thai society where everything was done with maximum freedom but never spoken, and he knew that his turgid words, spoken as if he were the professor of beauty, would bore the most pedantic. Still, that was the aim: he wanted to take the stranger on a meandering path of circumlocutions that would shake him from earlier thoughts and deposit him in this concept that he, Nawin Biadkang, the prostitute artist, was and forever would be a lady's man. "Women are the viand of a man's eyes, the fruit for the bon vivant." He used French words that were retained in English without being Anglicized to give puissance to what he thought of condescendingly as his befuddled mother tongue. In that respect he was no different than any supercilious upper class American or Englishmen who required superior utterance even though to most of the contemporary world's populace the elite language was base English itself. Then he glanced toward the aisle and surrounding seats for although not really embarrassed by his words, ensconced as he was in his role as a libertine, he was deferential enough to worry that he would inadvertently bludgeon a listener with his peculiar thoughts. He then became inexplicably reticent although no one was listening.

With conversation continuing to seem cogent, moving on stretched, unraveled ends, Boi was on the verge of accepting Nawin as a womanizer and might have possibly done so were it not for the artist's cowardly withdrawal into himself which befuddled the befuddlement. Nawin had turned away and was staring at the fan clipping speedily at the air. There could be no other interpretation other than that this Nawin (on the birth certificate, Jatupon, a word that still thrust a cold chill down his spine as cold slackened his pace, freezing him to danger), feeling uncomfortably seated on exaggerated truth, was becoming fixated on these rotating blades dicing the air the way the second hand of a clock seemed to suggest the dicing of a man's life incrementally. Due to the extent of his boredom, to Boi he was a suspicious character, an ambiguous puzzle needing to be solved and a landscape of contrasts to set his claim upon. Nawin sensed this intrigue but gained no satisfaction from it. All that he wanted, he told himself, was to relax and not think so much when thinking was such morbid drudgery like an impoverished gold seeker sifting through mud and obtaining merely that. "Wasn't my reason for coming here to purge people from my life, and live purely in complete empty space without needing others to plug up my loneliness," he thought. "And yet here is one more bit of dross stuffing my gutter."

He realized the impression that he was making and so he smiled and looked into the stranger's face. "So, did you like the paintings? --not that as slides held up to the light anyone could see them all that well."

"They were done well."

"Unlike you who have probably gained a lot of various skills in your labor, I don't have many practical skills. I can't fix anything. Not even a drawer that is ajar in a night table. Never learned to cook anything but noodles from my parents' restaurant and my brothers' noodle stands. But I know how to draw naked whores. That is for sure. I guess it is my gift."

"If those slides are your own work, you do, my friend. You draw them so well, so exquisitely, so astoundingly with all the feminine curves and wiles just right; and I am sure that after you paint and love them they sometimes like to watch you sleep and you like to watch them sleep. But that was not the nature of my query. I am meaning someone whom you don't know all that well looking down on you. Like I was earlier this morning, you are not quite asleep and so you hear him--yes a man, as it is a man's breathing that you hear. Earlier I was lying alone here in my bottom bunk drowsy but not asleep when I swear I heard someone drop from an upper sleeper and got the sense that he was examining my body, wanting it. Strange, huh?"

"I would imagine that it would be," said Nawin.

For a moment he was stunned to have these crevices of opaque light so heavily and obliquely invade the filthy corners of his mind, the dark enlightenment being alluded to, both parties seeming to peer onto it (he himself undoubtedly so and this smirking of the Laotian and his eyes that seemed to pierce his soul so knowingly could not have equivocal interpretations). He kept debating whether he should stay or go and found himself, due to his indecisiveness, floundering in desperate ambivalence. Clearly he wanted to move to a different seat so in that sense of knowing his own dominant yearning and witnessing it unopposed by contrary yearnings he was not ambivalent at all and yet, he asked himself, how could he just go? To go so precipitously would be rude even if done with the obsequious gesture of the wai (although even this was complicated by the fact that he was the older and vastly more affluent of the two parties and should not be the one initiating such gestures); and to leave for one of the now vacant seats would only aggravate suspicion. The idea of the Laotian having proof of his decadence would dog whatever specious tranquility he hoped to have in a vacant space of his own. He could stay. True, it would be uncomfortable but then, he told himself, there was not any option for solving any problem that was ever entirely perfect. He was uncomfortable now, and would surely be even more so with the passing moments. Such discomfort would sprawl like a dark vine onto the minutes, strangling them like a rope, or in excessive growth smothering them like a baby buried in its foam bath. And yet if he were inordinately resolute if not obdurate in staying where he was, would not the tempestuousness pass away easily by acting the part of a god? Zeus-like in shooting his thunder bolts, albeit thunder bolts of conversation against that soft epistemological core of a man's mind which realized that nothing was known absolutely, he could easily impart the venom of doubt. He could lead the conversation into inconsequential matters such as the latest news about these Moslem separatists in the South or the seventy year old saffron frocked monk who mistakenly pulled out glue from the medicine cabinet, inserted it into one of his eyes, and then allowed a colleague to remedy it by applying paint thinner into his hallowed orbs. Anything believed to be known, could be doubted as illusory when the possibilities of the present were continually supplanting those of the past. By continuing to talk it would become more real than the Laotian's vague recollection of him staring at his body. Still he did not know what to say, and feeling that discomfort, he wanted the closure of all communication with a stranger who knew him more than his own wife.

These homosexual feelings had swept out of nowhere, and they had put him in an inferno of desire, which only masturbation in the toilet had been able to douse (this particular desire all the more savage for being so alien to adulthood). Still with the appropriate undaunted response such a caprice and aberration did not need to brand him in the Laotian's mind or his own. And yet this chill that seemed to drip onto his spine like water from a leaky pipe in the tiled ceiling of the bathroom, was incessant; and perennial was the trepidation that the Laotian should know the cryptic depravity that lived in the messy far reaches of his brain, and the latent whims that gushed out from his childhood memories. For a few seconds Nawin was able to stare at his curious rival with a resolute confidence and a lambent smile but it did not last, and so he stared out of the window and withdrew back into himself. He once again began to romanticize those cars of laborers with their families. It would be there, to them, from which wafting scents of dirt, rice, and wildly lush and weedy greenery, lost molecules from the whole, would pour into open windows. It would be there in poignant rushes of wind slapping their faces that, complacent or even content, these laborers in shared travels to the homes of extended family would find meaning in their relationships. From the illusion of desire and love, of transient rushes of feeling, the families existed and became the boundaries and summation of themselves--accidents and stumblings from that which in ignorance begat the unions and material presences to which they tolerated, and to some degree cared for, as they were extensions of themselves, their fate.

The bundle (the feet on the Laotian's seat and head leaning against the edge of his own) began to move and like a decarpeted Cleopatra her face became visible and it was beautiful.

13