Chapter 13

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 were now a relevant matter to deliberate, and as if, after having scanned through a quick shuffling of vapid memories, a self-judgment had not already been rendered on this matter. Actually, before posing the question his feelings had already concluded that although having risen to upper middle class from dire poverty as an accomplished artist he had not even made one single painting that was so unique and extraordinary that no one else could have made it exactly as he had done. Feeling had rendered in him the decision that he had failed at anything beyond making himself more affluent than most, and so the question held no purpose. He was just a man with a brief and puny life, and as with all men he ate and expelled, sought pleasure and reacted reflexively against threatening stimuli no differently than any common, self-preserving cockroach. It was true that in a man there was self-awareness more keen than in other animals, but from it one could not help analyzing his own insignificance which he would then have to repugn by absconding more fully in the professional and personal domains. Fabricating illusions of grandeur in ambitions and love, he could keep his life busy and fortified from encroaching questions.

For all of Nawin's messy colors in art and living life brightly (his playboy activities, the television commercials, and a month on a soap opera, which came about from his slight fame as a renowned artist and an attractive presence) he had not become a Leonardo Dicaprio let alone a Leonardo Davinci--not that Davinci would have necessarily known his own greatness. He was discontent with himself as being so was endemic in mortal, human creatures who at best could leave no greater legacy than their own puny thoughts, and at worst found their voices mere echoes of the environment, and their only means to halfway preserve themselves was to have offspring partly begotten from the lust of their loins.

He, in his lifetime, was not as much of a renowned painter as Montien Boonma or Chamas Kietkong were in theirs. For meaningful Thai art of international appeal one turned to them and not him. His works were a familiar leitmotiff of sordid, dejected whores to which ideas and representation of forms were, for critics and buyers alike, secondary considerations. This suggested to him a deficiency in the technical mastery of his craft and made him yearn for other pursuits. At certain times he had been obsessed by having celebrity status and at other times he had loathed it, but overall he had resented its intrusion much more than grading art survey compositions at Silpakorn University for commercials, and the daytime melodrama sidetracked the continuum of his life as an artist by keeping him from scholarship and his own creative achievements. Thus, he had done what pathetic, impotent males of the second category often do: he had fathered a child.

It seemed to him that whereas mildly abused individuals added links to ancestry, homosexuals, from the severity of the abuse committed on them as children, or from good common sense, became broken links and thus remained unchained. In that sense, he was definitely not "queer." At least that was what he told himself. Then it seemed to him that there was a certain heroism in being a childless presence, stopping the replication of a damaged element and accepting fully his impermanence. However, he was not heroic in that way either. He was a mere womanizer upon whom his wife had urged a full, unprotected sexual union with her friend to gain a child. Even in considering all the scores of women whom he had had protected sex with through the past two decades of his life he would hardly be a record holder of this marathon either--not that spilling body fluids to say that one existed would, he judged, have been all that less significant than spilling paint.

At a station immediately before the destination of Nongkai the train stopped and a door opened to three villagers who were selling their fried rice and pork in Styrofoam containers. "Khao pat moo. Som sip baht [Pork fried rice. Oranges, ten baht]" they proclaimed on both sides of the aisle, and like bells their voices summoned him out of himself. The Laotian was still seated in front of him as before, but with a furrowed forehead and a smirking countenance as if puzzled not by what to say but on how best to say it. The woman, still seated in part on the floor, was now stretching her arms. Seeing that she was awake, the Laotian's furrowed field of a forehead became smooth, and the subject of contemplation he was fixated on seemed to vanish. He raised his naked foot, and with a profane toe denuded his partner's bangs and began to massage her forehead. This continued for some minutes until she bit the toe.

"Bitch! You're really vicious. Look what you've done. It's probably bleeding now."

Nawin's jaw lowered with his mouth slightly agape. In disapprobation of his culture he sat stiffly for a moment in tacit and obdurate silence, but with glances down at what was beneath him. What was beneath him was beauty.

15

Even if he were to say that it was a new beginning for himself and, unlike other nocturnal prowlers, that he was now a nascent creature capable of appreciating the simple pleasures of the day in a more abstemious lifestyle, there was the immediate past to repugn the assertion. There was that nurse at the hospital, whom from earlier exchanges of smiles, looks, and brief conversations, he was able to obtain her telephone number shortly before being discharged from the hospital--a woman he would be calling now had he not thrown away his mobile telephone or "moh-toh" as Thais (though not him, the inwardly surly, cultured man that he was and an American Thai at that) called such devices. Was he not still a glutton for intense thrills? Was he not always at least nominally enraptured by someone or something different than the other intrigues that had come before? The women of the past had proven that he was as had that which had happened to him less than an hour earlier.

Disagreeable for the source of its arousal and made vulgar and fetid by the association of having been done in such a filthy toilet, this experience had been a particularly odd and abhorrent intimacy with fantasies that he was not accustomed to entertain. The fact that these fantasies had opened the gates to his ejaculation in the toilet of a train was for him an unpleasant reality, not that intentionally trying to avoid thinking of it was, in his judgment, such a wholesome act either for it did not make it less part of his own thoughts and experience to stuff it into the sockets of his brain like one's dirty socks being shoved by a foot under the bed at the knocking of his door and he would not be much of a man to cower away from himself so easily. It was still disconcerting since it was both odd and distantly familiar simultaneously, a combination that made him feel flushed down the toilet portals of ineluctable memory. Masturbating privately wherever he wished was for him as inconsequential as scratching the area of his pants that covered his scrotum when experiencing a particularly strong itch, and yet this carnal escapade was different. It was deviant more for him in the sense of diverging from the mainstream than anything significantly pejorative. Still, it was for him a most sordid encounter with himself even if, to his satisfaction, performed in the purest of form--being free from the self-delusion of love. To him, all sex was making love to oneself but coupled naturally with a woman it did not seem so sordid, even though it perhaps was, while being impure enough as to seem as if he were really making love only to her when the contrary was true. Thus to him making love to a woman was more sordid as a consequence.

In this morning encounter with a fantasy and a hand had he not, despite himself, been enraptured by that dark and bearded male partner of the exquisite, pallid creature beneath him? He had. It was not possible to repudiate it as much as he might want to, given the fact that, despite the earlier release, a cool titillation that had never quite left him was once again reasserting itself by soaring and tightening his groin and it was not for the girl--at least not yet, although he hoped for transference--but for this Laotian boy, Boi himself.

This "sick" experience, he argued, had been in large part from insomnia, and the insomnia from visceral loss in his life and from the numb pain of his broken arm. Also in part it had been from the jerky movements of the train after being "a bit sick" to his stomach in the wake of having drunk that watery Laotian beer -with its strange pungent punch like consuming a liquid version of French cheese which always bit back- that Boi had fed to him in his bunk. This had to a lesser degree discomfited his composed mental state as had the acknowledgement of having turned forty. These factors had made him "sick" or a little offset from his mental equilibrium and yet it seemed that he was not over his sickness. He was sick even now.

With women he just wanted to be mildly tipsy and never quite inebriated, and so he would be slightly infatuated with one after another. Even though he wanted the continuum of each one's friendship and to learn to appreciate each as the unique visual, social, and sexual creature that she was, finding no ultimate beauty, the quest for it always seemed to facilitate the making of them all into ephemeral entities in his life when impermanence was making him dizzy. These fleeting figures were sunsets which he never quite wanted to catch when cognizant that there was new light waiting on the outskirts of the horizon. Thus they were as amorphous and mutable as the pursuit for beauty itself. He knew; and if, he postulated, all organisms on the planet were in some respect lovely and loveable, an excitable reverence for the perfection of their forms (even the oldest and most decrepit human, or a single cell microorganism was perfect in contrast to the debris of dark free flowing elements of space), why then did he judge a given person as being beautiful or ugly? It was an unjust contrast to something else more or less visually appealing and it seemed to him both procrustean and ludicrous when every entity was worthy of portraits and every organism on the planet held the potential to excite him in love. It seemed to him that he should be unendingly rapturous to all beings of the world, and yet if one were amorous for all clearly the brain would experience overload. Perhaps the reason one person, two, or three, for a while, became a man's myopic fixation and were thought more beautiful than all others was so that the brain would not experience this overload at recognizing that all forms were equally luscious. This might well be the meaning of a man's fixation on one or a single small group of "beautiful" women--a protective mechanism to stop brain overload. Within one's vicinity and propinquity, an individual registered a finite array of physical traits and characteristics not quite like his own until a next batch would catch his eye.

So that liaisons of sometimes two each day had not become four, causing all aspects of the man to be extinguished but the ragings of appetite, Nawin had taught, for many years, art survey and drawing classes at Silpakorn University, graded papers in the teaching lounge that was exempt of pretty young things who were such ugly distractions to a man who was hoping to seek higher realities than visual and tactile stumblings, pursued jogging, swimming, art, and scholarship, and each week loitered near the golden Thai pavilian or "sala" overlooking the lake at the Bangna campus at Assumption University. There, he would wait to pick up his teacher wife, watch the stretching of geese assert a land based prowess after floating toward him and his bread crumbs, and attempt to once again appreciate simple pleasures. A journey there once or twice a week, like sports and art, helped him to find peace of mind by focusing an aspect of himself less connected to innate appetites and filling Noppawan's mind with an illusion that she was the only one despite the many, an illusion both appreciated as indispensable in congealing and solidifying their relationship.

In loss and tragedy so great that all life seemed a lugubrious and murky haze he knew that at any second he could fall to pieces and yet here he came anyway. On this train moving toward Vientiane Laos, this world capital no different than a country town, this little bit of Paris with a lot of dirt that was the sister city of Nongkai which he had seen once before. His aim was the same: the restoration of self. He was traveling here to find that life was still good despite poignant loss, to part from what-ifs, remorse, guilt, and shame, and to find himself in simple pleasures that he believed were the foundation for appreciating life. He did not know, but it seemed to him that higher pleasures were synthetic, built from tenuous material on a sturdy foundation, and most of the tower had crumbled down and he was there on its foundation, its base, bruised, lacerated, bleeding, and literally with a broken right arm in its rubble. Alone, he wanted to journey to Nongkai so that, undistracted, he might enter Vientiene to contemplate the song, squawk, and flutter of his own thoughts. When simultaneous to some similar song and rustling from the birds themselves it would be reassurance from nature that the fleeting essence of matter and the personal loss he was experiencing at Kimberly's suicide, and the subsequent separation of his wife after beating him senseless with a frying pan were natural. It would also be testament that life was bigger than his myopic perspective of it, beset, as he was, by tragedy. However, on this train, as everywhere, there were palatable humans who continually discomfited hi peace of mind like the chocolate fan poochai (fantastic male) and his vanilla fan pooying, who he supposed was his girlfriend, seated there in the confined space before him.

It was his wish to go on a solitary journey where he might be in the vicinity of itinerant others like himself for reasons like his own, while staying aloof from them by a peripheral association of glances. He might sit dreamingly for hours at a time at a sidewalk restaurant or on the ground before a stupa in Vientiane, eat vegetable and cheese baguettes (the American cheese variety of course) and watch Europeans go by on their rented bicycles. From these glances he would be part of them without allowing them to disrupt his Buddhist contemplation; however, knowing which of them were cultured, and which were merely backpacking hedonists might be hard to determine with mere glances, and if he felt that only the latter were there, he would think that he might as well return home for Bangkok was the prime bivouac for such characters. For what he knew, this rustic Paris might well be the dernier cri for such lost souls like his or, conversely, a Mecca for middle-aged men fantasizing about Laotian men's erections. In either case, or nothing of the sort, he was going there by train as if he were not able to pay for a plane ticket as easily as the average man could pay for a ride on a city bus. Of course this particular car was air conditioned, and riding in it, despite its coldness, was certainly more comfortable than the "cattle cars" linked from behind; but coming by train at all was an attempt toward simplifying his life and it was as close to the Jatupon whom he once was that he cared to ever be again.

He knew it without dwelling upon the point for the latter activity would separate him from others even further: despite an impoverished and savage childhood, he was a refined man although hopefully demure enough not to believe it too intensely or allow it to exude into his interactions beyond a surly air softened in a warm smile. He could have taken an airplane. Refined men always did but here he was in this particular car of this particular train hoping to find balance after falling into the stone and dust rubble that intense pleasures had brought upon him. And yet, he told himself, if his own experiences immediately before, during and after his ejaculation in the toilet portended stygian events to come that would have him wallowing in base instinctual drives, so be it. He smiled and thought how his life was an unpredictable series of unconnected episodes. It was as if he were at a sanuk packard (amusement park) and torturous suffering was mixed into the thrill of every ride. Although seeking and favoring "sanook" in all matters like any great hedonist, realistically he hoped to learn something within these vicissitudes.

So the Laotian called his partner a bitch. So she bit his toe, kissed it, and now had her own foot on his lap. Why should any of it matter to him? They were not subjects under the dictates of his sovereignty, and who was he to be didactic, he who looked at a given moment as an experiment of the convergence of people and thought? He was sovereign of nothing. The two women of his life, his major connections in this existence, had in part due to his own actions, evaporated like all lost essence of family so what sententious dogma did he have to pontificate? Clearly the Laotian woman was not bothered by these mere wisps of vibrating air, so why should he be? He knew that he should not be so irascible. He knew that he should not be brooding about a pejorative word used on this woman, a creature who seemed to flourish in the word and for all he knew might be well suited and defined by it. Still tension of his own making about how wrong the Laotian was to have uttered his pugnacious, rude, chauvinistic, and socially inappropriate word seemed to alter the air so that it was viscous and palpable. True, as a minute or two wore on the tension seemed to be diluting slightly in the strong daylight which was pouring through the windows but still, as confined with them as he was there within this small space, breathing seemed to be a more arduous task. Tension seemed to also sully the floor which was already fetid enough due to whatever stench the train officer's random spot mopping with ammonia earlier in the night had not covered.

And there she was with both naked feet resting on the Laotian's lap so any reaction that he might have in defense of her at this time, even if it were mere silence, seemed inane.

Escaping them entirely with his mind, he found himself trudging through a prodigious mire of memories which would have been better had they stayed in a diminished state, a staid frame of mind which would have made them more easily accepted if not appreciated. One particular memory began to percolate within him and boil over his rim. It began to be the sole activity of consciousness in a reality so vivid that it was as if he had fallen through a portal in time. He was with her again and she was exactly the same. "Kimberly, I should be painting that expression instead. What's wrong? You've seen that one of Noppawan a hundred times before." "I am just seeing it in a new way. You are the world to her. You can see it in her eyes--so much love for you and you are the one who painted that love so lovingly." "I'm drawing you now, aren't I, if you would stand still? Haven't I done plenty of you?" "Still, this painting makes me wonder what I'm doing with you. She is my friend." "Whom she chose to give birth to our child--yours, hers, and mine." "A son... the ultrasound showed it, you know..we'll be having a son--yours, mine and hers. Maybe your connection to me will be special for that reason, but you love her and I shouldn't be doing this." "You are in your fifth month. It's a little late to go in reverse now, wouldn't you say? As I've said a hundred times before it was her idea. She knew that I wanted you and that I was trying to repress it since the two of you were best friends. She wanted children through you, and this pregnancy is your gift as a friend to her. She enlarged marriage to include you in it so we are all married in a sense. There's nothing to feel regret about." Then this memory, which had seemed so vivid and concrete, dispersed as if it were sound, smoke and wind..

16

Thais with a disposition and willingness to scrutinize their own cultural suppositions were rare but for those who were so inclined to repugn family and Buddha, if only in outward aloofness and tacit pondering, little remained sacrosanct from intellectual dissection except for issues in reference to the king, for to cease to revere him would make one something other than Thai. That is what he thought at 8:00 A.M. as he heard the king's anthem playing at a distance from a passenger's radio. That was what he thought, and yet had the moment been different he would have thought differently. He knew that what he was, what he claimed to be, was merely from being in the particular situation where he found himself. Now in this car of the train among these strangers whom he did not particularly like, hearing that rather bland melody repeated, one more of the daily repetitions throughout the years, and as always feeling that strong inhibition which made him not able to even acknowledge to himself this blandness, his disposition grew a bit peevish and restless for he kept telling himself that every moment he remained here was aging him toward his forty-first year. Having one birthday in a train was bad enough, he told himself. He did hardly wanted another one. The moments seemed like hours, unmovable as boulders.

As Nawin heard the anthem he saw that the three food salesmen, in concert with everyone else, were deferentially erect and motionless in response, and noticed that there were no more strident cries or other such tonal annoyances of khao phat moo, phad thai jae (noodles and vegetables), and kauy-tiaw (noodles) with some sauce with a Laotian or northern Thai dialect name, at any rate shrieked beyond recognition. Noting that any delay in getting off the train would be a brief one and that the freelance food salesmen would be gone with the slightest forward thrust of the train, he pulled out sixty baht from his wallet so that he might quickly buy one container of each for himself and the two passengers whose space he was confined to. It was only polite to do so and any effort that he might make to give less credence to his feelings of disgust toward them would make the rest of the ride more agreeable. Besides, as feelings were so interlinked to perception of a given event in a given moment like attack dogs that were often standing in late evenings by the doors of banks and randomly barking at the scents and movements of passers-by and their shadows, they were not reliable gages for assessing reality and he did not give much credence to them.