Chapter 12

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 vaguest of awareness. Now that he was fully cognizant of her, he perceived this oddity of having overlooked her earlier as a somewhat amusing anecdote in a listless, perennial train trip largely in need of even the most dull amusements, a fact which was droll to him in its own way; and yet outwardly he hid his smile and tried to restrain himself from glancing downward. He told himself that he did so out of Thai modesty which mandated some degree of reticence, or at least a bit of a reluctance, to broach questions (being installed by cultural indoctrination this was the most frequently used program which, when lacking an operator's manual for one's life, even iconoclasts like him would switch on reflexively in an effort to make an appropriate social response before reconsideration and subsequent action). Indeed that did have some bearing, but for the most part his silence was in the hope of keeping her there longer.

Clearly, she was now exhaling her warmth onto one of his knees so, he argued to himself, why not patiently allow the query of who she was to emerge slowly with her presence when waking would at last tear open that cocoon. As bereft of women and relationships as he now was and as confused as he was by what had transpired inwardly immediately before and during his odd release in the toilet, it was quite pleasant to imagine her as a more docile and devoted member of his long throng of scattered harem over the years and now, at the age of forty, decades of adulthood. He knew that this desiring of a woman to stay on his knee was not all that different from the previous night when with beer in his system and insecurity at being chased by the 4 and 0 which were almost as tangible as stalkers, he had hugged a pillow to secure some limited sleep. He knew it, and he knew that this repugnant human weakness suggested that the peace of mind he hoped to obtain by a Buddhist trip into Vientiane could be easily ravaged by wild desires as random and pointless as the landscape of weeds and sedges about the train, for desire was innate as the yearning to breathe. This wild mono-homo incident, he somewhat cogently told himself from the more than nominal truth that was therein, had merely been a release, a mechanical need to discharge a full load of semen rather than a desire for one of the same gender; and he fervently yearned for the obsequious knee doter to stay where she was for as long as it lasted, not that he would have disturbed her repose if it were not intertwined with his own pleasure as well as a need for a secure sense of self-identity. Was not that, he asked himself, what made the distinction of a kind man from the rest of the predatory male animals: a patience and tolerance of others' happiness, and a willingness to invest time to secure it even at the cost of one's own discomfort? If so, kindness was the virtue of the former he, Jatupon, who, in lost, forlorn boyhood, when not wanting to disturb sleeping cats allowed them to lay hours at a time on his lap. He guffawed silently in his own mental chamber at such sanctimonious, thrasonical ravings, for childish behavior of long ago was not evidence for his untenable claim of being a kind man and thus a good one. It had no relevance to his barely nominal interaction with the beauty that was sleeping at his knee. Furthermore, he recriminated himself, his fame came in depicting the exploitation of others which was in itself a type of exploitation even were he to reside in the deepest squalor as an expose journalist, a Mother Theresa, or some other paragon for ending injustice and suffering. Had not his whores sought deliverance for themselves and their impoverished families because of him? Had not jejune sojourns been made to the homes of their respective rural families where he had to eat with them as one of their members? Had not a belief that he would leave his wife for them and an innocent expectation that they would be redeemed by this deliverer burned within their breasts, hearts, and clitorises? "Am I a good man? I rather doubt that I am," he disparaged himself. He even doubted goodness. One never interacted with anyone unless pleasure was in some way associated to it. A human, even the best of them, was hardly the making of a saint. Clearly, were they not so soft and his need for love so great, he would not have stayed in that uncomfortable posture on a tree stump outside his parents home, long ago, to allow cats to sleep upon him.

This idea that pleasure was interconnected with all pursuits, a viand of a thought, could well have become a repast if not a banquet for discernment; and as an artist's dissertation was done on canvas, ideas for a painting, now raw feeling boiling to the rim, were on the verge of being shaped in his mind. And yet, he dismissed them. He repudiated them by telling himself that he would never rank as a great artist, that he was void of color, theme, and technique.

A knee doter--he could barely hold back his laughter (how easily he was amused by himself, a wonted practice from the vestige of childhood along those banks of the Chao Phraya river in Ayutthaya when solitary play with the elements inherent in air, rain, and dirt and the chase of an idea scurrying through a mind which was barely aware of its presence, brought him peace from the incessant barrage of disparagement meant to stomp upon him, their cockroach, in that war called family). The verdant landscape, now near Nongkai and her sister city of Vientiane, came incessantly toward the passengers as the train moved through it. It came intimately. Every minute of a man's life that was not in sexual intercourse, he thought, was in an intercourse of a very different kind, in union with circumstance and thereby impregnated with new thought that made him a new man. A knee doter, he inwardly chuckled (once again he was pondering how easily he was amused by himself, a practice he had become accustomed to from the vestige of that hell called family in which, if one's sensitivity was intact enough to not laugh at a sundry of crude commentaries such as the father's daily repetition that it did not matter what a woman looked like as she could be denuded and a sack put over her head, and these manly attempts at being the most clever one at belittling the other (mostly aiming for him, that easiest and most sensitive of targets) these rudimentary and vulpine or wolfish members of the pack would attempt a full annihilation of him in words--all of them that was but his brother and tacit protector, Kazem, whose hard eyes were his fort, but whose gun would discharge later in his rectum). He found this peculiar idea of her as the obsequious love slave, as much as the source behind it, not only amusing but arousing. It had always seemed to him, fettered as he once had been in ideas and paint, obsessed with transforming sordid memories and thought into color as he inexplicably gazed at a barren wall of canvas, that one never made love to a woman but a facsimile of one in one's own brain which that brain distorted to meet the orgasm it longed for. It always seemed to him that the craving for women was merely for a spark to stimulate fire in the vacuity of the brain so as to liberate it from catatonic list, the result of boredom, and thus orgasm was merely for oneself even if by chasing illusions of "love" a real child materialized along the way. Thinking it now, it was nothing new for him, for to him, Jatupon, who was once in love with his brother and scrutinized the validity of human emotions thereafter as Nawin, feelings were gossamer threads of chemicals prompting puppet man to breed and breed elsewhere. Marriage had at least taught him that tempestuous feelings of love and despondency could pass if one gave them little credence and by being unmoved by their promptings one could at least have some years of success in obtaining a consistent uxorial presence in his life. Love at first sight that was felt from brief encounters was merely a neediness for an interesting presence to stir up one's passion for life and end loneliness. It was always transferred to a conceivably obtainable sense of beauty by which to obtain immortality in a DNA continuum. For even love from a sexual encounter, to have any substance of reality, had to be a reciprocal neediness ground in years of friendship. And yet a woman was a whore whose penchant for a parcel of land and a branch of a tree to build her nest was an instinct that was as fulsome as the worse of human hungers. His mother, to get her few scanty goods, had closed her eyes to his suffering. His wife, now that she acquired his child, took over his domain and changed the locks. Ironically, here he was lusting after a woman once again for did not every man require intimacy like butter that would melt and fuse him and his sausage onto the woman and her egg? Did he not secretly want a woman's bypassed stares in the minutes of anger to diminish him into the dissolved umbrage of her shadow like slinking into shadows of an alley to taunt thieves and cutthroats to have some limited intimacy with death?

He allowed his ruminations to quickly shuffle through his mind once more, for they amused him tremendously. Then he redundantly centered on one in particular. Throughout this nascent conversation with the Laotian, whoever this man was, who perhaps used a nickname-alias of Boi as an easily worn but also easily removed one word summation of himself, this pallid, young female with flowing hair, just as he liked them, had been inches near his thighs and he had barely even noticed it, as he was preoccupied with this bizarre homosexual caprice that had rushed upon him an hour earlier as zephyrs from the subconscious, and thinking of ways to repudiate any judgment of him as a homosexual that might be in the mind of the Laotian. Eagerly succumbing to desire for the girl, and perhaps even exaggerating any desire that he did possess to feel masculine within himself, he deliberately glanced down at her even though he was once trying not to do so. She looked like that nurse at Siriaj Hospital who had been responsible for catering toward him whose wife had broken his arm with a skillet and his heart with those words, "The son that you and Kimberly brought into the world should not have a hateful person like you as his father! Get out! We're through!" For ongoing emotional comfort and to set up dates for caresses he would be calling that nurse, smitten as she was for his good looks and his marginal celebrity status. He would be doing it now at this moment were it not for having thrown away his telephone at the train station.

14

Although more clinch than original, an idea as trite as an aphorism ruminated in his head. He told himself that ideas were nothing unless one acted upon them; and yet from a less cognizant mélange of disorganized feelings which had not been refined into thought he was really meaning that fervent, peculiar whims prompted all pleasurable acts and that unto themselves these saccharin gusts that bate were of no substance unless, in opposition to society at large, one partook of them fully by allowing them to saturate to fulsome, insatiability in behavior that was in complete accord with their perverse dictates. In the brief space of that moment he repeatedly averred this facile idea silently in his mind. He willed belief into it like pumped air into a holey inner tube which, like in his filthy boyhood in the still filthier Chao Phraya river in Ayutthaya, for a brief time of escaped labor, he would ride.

Ideas are nothing unless one acts upon them: the thought was not at all novel even if this particular context for it was. It seemed to him to have Buddhist or Biblical implications which he supposed as having been transmitted to him long ago through someone affiliated with a temple or a church, although he was not exactly sure how or when such an idea had been passed to him or how it had become so embedded in his brain even if brains were, for the most part, mere sponges. Oddly enough, there it was, even in such a man so unfettered by moral restraints as he was. It was like a blood-sucking mosquito but quaffing away analytic and synthetic processes of idea making, aggravating placid delusions in fever, and muddling the mind in an amphigory of simplistic human nature, which when unchecked, was really more carnal, multi-dimensioned, and beastly than anyone would care to presume.

His prudish behavior on this day was diametrically opposed to the Nawin of old who on virtually every other day of his adult life but this one, from influences of feelings and underlying thoughts which he hardly recognized, had followed his carnal whims with women inordinately. A being, after all, did the tricks that nature prompted him to do for the sweet bait of pleasure and so from the perspective of carrying out those functions that biological creatures were meant to, the physical and perhaps only basis of morality, his own behavior was exemplary. In the seats of his car parked around forested areas within Bangkok's outlying roadside parks (the woods therein avoided because of the bigger probability of the brambles of "queers" accosting him), in forests far from the city, against walls of women's toilets in gas stations, in discotheque parking lots, in hotel rooms, empty upper staircases, in boyfriends' and husbands' beds when they were out, several times, under banana and durian trees in one particular father's orchard, once in a pimp's bedroom when he was out, many times in the villagers own bedrooms while they slept on living room floors eager to take advantage of his copulatory pleasure to get a bit of financial support for their families and fame for the daughters' whose beauty he, the surrogate husband, would preserve on canvases, abandoned buildings and tall skeletal structures that were never quite built after the 1996 financial meltdown, once backstage with a Russian ballerina after a performance of Swan Lake at the Thai Cultural Center, several times between two enormous trash bins at a stadium and once under its bleachers, never in his and Noppawon's home unless occasionally with Noppawan herself but very often in his studio, he had released his snake to a mostly strange and less than angelic array of females who too were victims of poverty and exploitation. Both them and a smaller second set as well (a set to which each respective woman behaved as both friend and lover until invariably insisting that he obtain a divorce from his wife, a strident and resonating demand that despite his wishes to the contrary, always caused an avalanche of debris to fall upon them both in a closure of the relationship that turned as black and mordant as light sucked into a black hole and that was as indelible as death) he would massage as gently as wind since, according to him, the Nawin massage was more effective at loosening inhibitions and making the body malleable to sexual positioning than the pryings and twistings of the Thai variant, listen intensely to their troubles during pillow talks in which he reflected their feelings like a psychologist, and kindly ejaculate into them the venom and bite that were the gifts of his body.

With today perhaps being the exception; throughout his life it always seemed to him, the exponential adulterer that he was, that carnal caprices should not at all be repudiated when they were all. Every rare, sublime thought that managed to get through the savage millennia did so because of sordid, procreative energy which manufactured the generations despite imperfect performances of maladroit sperm missing their targets, the targets most times missing, and even the walls of the missing targets sometimes being some other type of wall, a wall like his own wall, a man's wall.

If from a Christian source, the idea must have originated with his aunt on his mother's side who had once dabbled in his life with feigned love back in those early days of Jatupon when he believed that this bit of extended family, this refined lady of an exceptional marriage who was blood of his blood (which she had willingly sold by buckets to a hoary senator with age blemishes) would at last tug him back from the precipice or at least intercede when he was foundering in the abyss of family. Back then there was a belief in deliverers who would reach for him while uttering charming, mellifluous words which all of the family members would accede to. Back then there was a belief in forgiveness, the righting of wrongs, that a time would come when both mother and son would feel comfortable enough in each other's presence to almost be able to speak openly about what was happening to him in this monstrosity called family, that there would be a time of not having to fear losing any remnant of the maternal instinct for love which she still possessed and occasionally demonstrated in brief tacit glances of commiseration, that a day would finally come for this open admission of the truth (although now he believed that it probably never would have occurred even if the parents had not died so early in that fatal automobile accident, which had led to his subsequent indentured status as a noodle worker behind his brothers' food cart and the late evenings/early mornings of becoming, even more gratuitously, his brother, Kazem's "cheap date," his "free hole"), and happy endings for this putative, perennial propinquity called family which he had once thought of as an everlasting substance that would one day satiate him with meaning, and like a tsunami drown and bury his tiny, forlorn existence in its eternal watery mass. His youth had cowered in the corners of the shadows of family, and he had stayed within them complacently, cognizant that every cockroach that was not smashed sooner or later found a more preferable exit, and that although it would seem forever, this time of the impermanent first family would just be a brief space of years within one's lifetime.

Art had been his way of taking umbrage. It had been his way of committing that monstrous deed of giving a voice to the miniscule cockroach by inserting a man's vocal cords within it. How in early boyhood could he have known family to be merely half-remembered battles, and diminished faces of long known and scarcely understood combatants that the memories and critical intelligence of an adult would present to him? He had believed in the magical restoration of it then, child that he was, as if self-interest were not a priority in human beings. Integrity was rare and integrity for his sake rarer yet. Should he have expected something greater from his aunt? To her he had been cute, and so not having children of her own, she had dabbled in a love for him, pampering him for a time with her neediness. She was, after all, a human being seeking her own happiness as he was; and unlike him, she probably never had a clue what happiness was really. However, he did know despite often living contrary to its precepts.

By his account happiness was seeing meaning in the blowing branches of a tree on a murky, partly cloudy day that was as ambiguous in weather as purpose, and expecting nothing greater from his environment or fellow men than ambiguous and random happenings on such a gloomy day. To find a bit of pleasure in what was and not expect anything more: this was seeing innate value instead of creating ideal scenarios, which were bound to not happen and lead to disappointment.

The mystery of obtaining happiness was not so confusing but sexuality, that ever changing river, was. As many times as he pondered again this recent event, his ruminations churned up vacuity and uncertainty for he still did not know whether or not this mono-homosexual experience of masturbating one time to the image of a male in a toilet of a train on a day of panicking over having turned forty constituted a thought that was acted upon, and so the aphorism did nothing for him. If meant to liberate him from guilt or cure him of sexual depravity this nostrum had less efficacy than a placebo.

It was not only them, whomever they were, but he himself, whoever he was, that seemed to meander on the outside. He was lost like an insect crawling on a seat of a roller coaster ride which, designed for thrills as it was, lacked purpose. This ride on and of the world in forty rotations around the sun, which had changed him both physically and mentally since his birth, seemed to him now as meaningless as a pail of water being twirled around forty times in centrifugal force. The Earth had bore him as another product cursorily begotten on an assembly line. A product did not transform a factory, he thought, nor did a man change the world, or even leave any indelible sign of himself before being dumped in the landfill.

Images of a stern female four with a broad boned body and a balding and obese zero with one arm taunted him in his, arguably, depraved imagination. They were salient neither in nightmares as it was not night, nor daydreams as this word only had positive connotations, but in a sense, daymares. In them the couple were walking through the rain toward their home. In his mind's eye zero was still scrambling for his keys when they, the husband and wife, arrived at the doorstep. "You are so disorganized," she reproached. "God, I hope that you did not lose them again," she excoriated. Forty times the zero quietly stomached the abuse as he continued to inspect all of his pockets for the fortieth time. He knew that she had married him for his purchase of a parcel of land to which she could build her nest, for union with sperm from the only man who had exhibited some interest in her, and for a financial provider for her birdies. He knew that, altogether, she had used his body because of an instinct to seek happiness in that which would place her on the throne of maternal monarchy, and so her insults not only seemed unwarranted but particularly contemptible. Furthermore, he could not understand why, when she knew the reactions that getting drunk and shouting her invective as intense as imprecations would cause, that she continually insulted him. More times than not he would be provoked to beat her, pull her around by the hair, and continue to slap their forty children from time to time for caring about the shallow smackings of the mother instead of the mental flagellations that she rendered unto Him. Despite the bruises and black eyes that he gave them, he knew that she would never take them away, for a woman, if anything, was a prostitute of a bird. Obeying instinct, she would do anything for a parcel of land to have and maintain as her nest. Was this, as some type of a singular image, he asked himself, the subject for an abstract painting? It was for someone else, he retorted.