Chapter 15

With a more solidified judgment that their actions were obscene Nawin began a slow unwrapping of his own gum; and yet not wanting to judge precipitously on nominal matters where he could be mistaken egregiously, he decided that he would remain seated where he was and not leave them. And if obscene, why would he want to leave them when the obscene seemed so comfortable to him despite his moral objections of himself for it being such.

"'Kind sir?'" Nawin mocked with good humored bantering. "I'm not seventy you know."

"You are such a touchy person. Now 'sir' bothers you. Clearly you aren't twenty anymore," said the Laotian. "There is nothing wrong in admitting that. It is an exit we walk through briefly to join the majority who are thought old by somebody or another. My sister is twenty-one but that too will pass."

"Yes, age is a state of mind," said Nawin rather unprofoundly, smiling widely and readjusting his opinion of the Laotian who seconds ago he had pegged as a pachydermatous brute although perceived more erotically for it. As this issue was germane to him, he thought that nothing truer could have been spoken. He felt an attraction to this Laotian named Boi as a human being, and this attraction seemed to flush out the tense congestion of hormones in the traffic jam of his groins.

"As she could not use the sink where you were at, she primped where she could--at that nasty metal sink in the toilet. Since she primps for a long time that means that this man was primping for a longer time and she saw him--you, that is--still at the sink of the corridor when she was leaving. It had to be you as you still weren't here when she returned and woke me up."

"Maybe it was. What's the point?"

"No point, my friend. An observation. For the longest time we kept thinking that you would be back at any moment. My sister was so disappointed that she had to sleep off the depression. For me, I was just puzzled--kept thinking that you must be doing something strange back there but god only knows what. Your name again is Nawin. Right?"

"Nawin Biadklang."

He felt a chill in the spine of his back and a burning sensation in his face with this absurd and paranoid fear that the Laotian knew what he did privately in both thought and action in the toilet. "He doesn't know a thing, of course" he reminded himself. It was obvious that the Laotian had found a means to make him feel intimidated in generalized words, but laughter and a warm smile, he told himself, would burn away that fog.

He thought about his earlier name and the time he had changed it. At the age of sixteen a monk who had been concerned about the tragic implications of the name, Jatupon Biangklang, without much awareness about the circumstances of his life, had guided him toward a more fortuitous appellation; but now, as he was saying it, the fact that he had changed his first name and not the last seemed a bit surreal and disconcerting as if he had a different head placed on the his body or the same head placed on a different body (which, he was not sure). Still it was good that he had done it even though it had not been done fully. Unable to lobotomize memory, and being Thai, hardly able to repudiate the name of even his savage tribe, what other way did he have to separate himself from Jatupon, a wisp of air that in his mind still seemed pornographic? "Over two decades ago and none of it matters now!" he told himself. Still the cliché of the past not mattering belied reality. If the past, having founded the present, ceased to matter so would the present to the future which would mean that all would be immaterial.

"Remember me? Sabai dee mai?" said the woman to both men.

"Khrap. Sabai dee" Nawin said.

"This is Nawin Biadklang, a nice enough Thai, I suppose," said the Laotian to his sister. "Last night I gave him a beer that put him to sleep like a baby, but those ferocious socks of his roared on through the night stinking up the entire train. Still there isn't much point in detesting a man for his stink especially when I have to ride with him and he seems a good enough man even if he is Thai."

"Thank you for the meal, said the woman as she gave him the prayerful gesture of the wai."

"Mai pen rai" said Nawin with a returned gesture, a broad smile, and a few seconds of sustained eye contact.

"Don't mind my brother. He likes you or he wouldn't keep talking to you."

"I like a bit of bantering. It has made the trip less monotonous." He said this but in considering his time in the toilet it was a vast understatement.

"He tells it the way he sees it."

"Good. I like that sometimes--all the time really, as long as it is in limits--not stuck on the bad which is vicious nor on the good to obtain an advantage. Then I guess it is fine--fine for me. Did you came in at the last stop."

"Two or three back. Udom Thani. I was working in a women's garment factory there. Siam Pooying. Have you heard of it?"

"No."

"Maybe your wife has."

Nawin ignored the inquiry.

"He got laid off in his factory so I decided to quit and go back too."

"Where are you both going?"

"Our father's farm."

"What about you?"

"Taking a break--a vacation--needed some time away"

"A self appointed vacation," interjected the Laotian. "Must be nice. And what about that ugly brown wife who beat you up? Are you going without her."

"Yes of course. I rarely go on vacations with ladies who bludgeon me with iron frying pans."

"Didn't like you drawing nudes?"

"Something like that."

"He claims to be an artist," said the Laotian.

"You saw the slides," said Nawin.

"Yes, I did. Some naked beauties."

"There, you have it then, but whatever you want to think about me is okay."

"So if I think you are a boyscout--"

"Then I am."

"A southern terrorist with a bomb."

"The government seems to keep them from becoming menaces to the other provinces but if you want to think that I am one, and that I've come this far with a bomb, so be it."

"A pervert who shows naked pictures of women to strangers on trains?"

"Well, that would have a bit more of a foundation in reality wouldn't it but then would I really be showing slides?"

"Our mother's birthday is next week. If the two of us were not your distant cousins from the tiny former kingdom of Laos, now a bankrupt communist state of rural peasants, we might even pay you to draw her or for that matter my sister."

"No money," the girl laughed as she slumped down in the seat. "Only rice sometimes."

"Is it expensive to do that?"

"What?"

"Commission a painting."

"Yes. Quite."

"A thousand baht"

"Sometimes times fifty."

"Are you that rich?"

"No, it takes a long time to paint and I don't do it much anymore."

"So, my sister will be your model and inspiration. Pay us money to draw her and you can sell it in Bangkok."

"A portrait is nothing. To make it into art is what takes time and I don't like going through that pain anymore."

"Why have the slides then."

"So they will be with me."

"She would be a beautiful model. This is no common face."

"Yes, but I still have to feel it, or want to feel it."

"You must draw her. You could stay with us while you do it."

"Let me think about it. I've got to go to the bathroom now, adjust my sling, take some pain killers."

"Sure," said the Laotian.

"Excuse me," he told the woman, took his bag from the upper suitcase rack, and left but thinking of a nude painting of the brown and white of the couple the whole time.

18

He was examining his mirrored face privately in the toilet as the train slowed down and then crept to the station with a jerky forwardness, as if it too were caught by a backward pull if not a penchant for backward inclinations. Hardly impervious to sensation, he did feel this slowing of the train, felt the thrust of the stop, and heard the jostling of bags and the eager voices of departing passengers. He was even aware of a few minutes of silence and then a less vociferous noisiness when train employees came into the carriage to stuff the linen into bundles and, through open windows, toss them onto the platform of the Nongkai train station. Still, hearing it all as he did, it did not dawn on him that he should leave.

He had come into the toilet to see his reflection via a mirror and to abscond from these Laotian siblings long enough that they would dismiss his friendliness and construe his absence to mean a disinterest in them as potential models even if, as odd as it seemed to him then, he was interested in them as such and more. If at moments feeling extremely solitary and purposeless in his indolent, terrestrial drifting, being dragged in the vicissitudes of life, and trying to catch his breath from it all, he told himself that he would rather asphyxiate than relinquish his undiluted leisure. Lonely despair might in certain moments make him want to cling to people, places, and routines instead of breathing them in and out in a natural context for a changeable world. Specifically, it might make him inclined to return to that excruciating labor of painting or sabotage a trip like this one by allowing people to clog up his brain and distract him from the void; but these were only desperate caprices and nothing more than this.

It was such a handsome face that was his own, and was now pleasantly seen to be staring back at him; and yet staring at it as he was, he was trying to isolate the specific changes a simple year had made to the contour of his face, and attempt with blurred memories of himself instead of numbers to somehow devise a measurement so that he might conceptualize what havoc a year into the future would do not only to himself but also to that of every man's face. That was attempted for he was dwelling incessantly on why for the first time on this physically and mentally painful day of his fortieth birthday someone had spoken of him as an older man. Still, to subdue a growing feeling of aversion and loathing of the day, as disheartened as he was by this insinuation of him being a middle-aged man, which of course he was, he tried to recall whether or not on the previous night he had told the Laotian that this day would be his fortieth birthday. Had he done so on that evening when the two of them had beer in their hands, the comment could be dismissed as mere bantering from a boorish buffoon and yet each time he recalled or exhumed this fresh corpse of memory it had nothing like this on it. Thus, to be corrigible to the self he concluded that as it was impossible for his face to have deteriorated significantly in just a day it was likely that a year had changed it ever so slightly and that these slight changes were exacerbated temporarily due to a lack of sleep. It was true that his sleep had been rather sporadic and inconsistent the previous night. This restlessness, however, was not only from lying stationary when he was unable to preoccupy himself from that pain and discomfort gained after his wife beat him with a frying pan, but also from his witnessing that horrific jump from the balcony and then Kimberly's mangled bloody corpse with missing arm, contorted neck, multi-lacerated face, and empty eye sockets along with the broken pieces of the metallic awning being extracted from the water of the swimming pool.

The fact that the train had stopped was an adventitious happening like a cloud out there hovering in the sky. It was something that he knew, but he did not seem to recognize as the awareness was scant and did not seem particularly associated with the self, which needed to see personal importance in matters for them to matter at all or for a given object or situation to instill a passion within him. Thus, finding no reason to leave he stayed to contemplate this loss of beauty if it was indeed lost.

Had his beauty depreciated significantly in one day, or even in one year, it would be one more comic incident in this tragic adventure of life. This was what he told himself; and smiling a little at that thought (the rational voice therein reassuring him and giving him smug confidence in the friendship of the self that no circumstance of life, apart from death, would take from him), he could not see why it mattered that he looked forty, and yet it did. He wanted to recollect exactly what he looked like 365 days earlier. It was not difficult to remember that birthday as it had been a particularly odd day spent with Kimberly and his wife. They had been drinking wine, eating the oddest of sautéed dishes, as cultured French cuisine demonstrated: with a bit of oil, wine, and cheese any part of a given creature could be successfully cooked and consumed with exquisite barbarism and taste, when he heard this odd proposal of having Kimberly become a surrogate mother hatch out of his wife's head and thud into the bread basket. With the proposal made and calmly deliberated by all, he had gone into the toilet of that restaurant, had gasped for a moment, teetered for another, and then had stared onto a reflection of his face for twenty minutes. Satisfied at seeing the same face as that of his thirty eighth year he had returned to the table where the topic had not been his age-- only, all so indirectly, his sperm. Sitting there awkwardly, he had been drawn into suffering, that empathic piercing into another person's pain that seemed an unwanted obligation subjected onto one by the gods, if there were gods and he believed that there were none considering the smashing into pages and limited scope of man's story book understanding of things.

At that restaurant he had understood her fully: the requisite for an end to her neediness would only come from the neediness of a child of her own. From needing to care for one so needing to be taken care of she might be able to imagine a baby as caring exclusively about her since by needing her totally it would satisfy some of her needs for someone to care about, someone of her own, or at least allow her to have a distraction for forgetting her husband's philandering ways. Unlike an ocean, there was no means to measure the sadness of a wife. If it were greater or smaller than such a body of water, he did not know-- only that it was large indeed.

Pondering why it was that people would think of him as middle aged now, when no one had ever done so before and why he might be considered old by some when at least to himself his reflection seemed the same youthful glimmer that it always was, a weariness in his features due to an irregularity of his sleeping patterns (a weariness that as weary as he was might have been impossible for him to see) still seemed as the best explanation.

"Am I really going to waste this trip painting them and then having to tote the final products back to Bangkok? I cannot think of anything more disagreeable," he reiterated to himself with what he hoped would be puissant and cogent reasoning. "What is the best way to get out of this thing?" he asked himself. Then it occurred to him that he did not need to devise any strategy since the train was obviously stopped, and all its content of beings dispersed like a flatulent gas.

He slapped some water onto his face. "Time to go," he told himself; but even with this assertion he was in a fusion of daydreams and faded memories that added color and exact details to his thoughts--a more poignant fusion than that experienced in trying to recall the facts of a given situation as they really were. He thought:

"She's beautiful isn't she?" asked the Laotian.

"Yes, I would say so," said Nawin. "You don't have to persuade me on that point. It is just the time required to do a painting --a real one with a theme, a mood, symmetry, perspective, things like this and I am on vacation. Anyhow..." Her dainty face looked like the nurse at Siriaj Hospital when he was recuperating from arm surgery; that same one from whom he had parried questions about the nature of his arm injury by posing innocuous questions about her own life in order; the one whom he listened to intently, and as a consequence was able to make her believe him to be the kind human that he was instead of the broken man that he was, or the flirtatious playboy, that he also was; the same one for whom he had swapped cellular telephone numbers to no avail.

"Taking a vacation from not working I guess."

"Exactly."

"Good for you. That is the life. So, you think she is pretty."

"Yes."

"Do you want her?"

"Maybe. Maybe I want you."

"What?"

"I mean to model. Not now, but maybe someday when you are in Bangkok. Both of you I think, although there is no way to know until some sketches are actually done or for that matter the beginning of a painting if we even get that far." Then the woman was there kissing the toe of the foot that rested on the seat and made up the phallic arch of a bent leg, and Nawin was looking at them with surprise and envy.

He opened the toilet door and then bent to pick up his bag.

"What are you doing in here? Mister, it's Nongkai. Time to go," said a train officer. Then to reproach a fellow officer who was responsible for the trash he ejaculated, "I thought that you said you checked the toilet. Why was someone still in here?"

"I did," the man responded. "Maybe he flew in through the window."

"Flew in through the window? Is that before or after you checked the toilet?"

"Of course afterwards." Both men laughed.

"I didn't notice that we stopped. I am going now, sorry," said Nawin as he exited the train and walked out onto the platform.

Then he was out of the tiny train station and walking on a paved rural road not sure where he was going or what he was going toward (a left for a couple kilometers would bring him to the center of Nongkai; to the right, past the border crossing and the Friendship Bridge, were the rural outskirts of Vientiane; and between these destinations, finding nothing worth doing and yet as creature of movement needing to do something, was the human mind--his at any rate); but he did not care.

The couple were obviously gone, evaporated like wintery early morning condensation on windows of hill tribe huts. They were gone as the mucus and saliva that was surely spat on this road by some of yesterday's passengers. This being so, he tossed his hands into the air as though now relinquishing his will to fate and circumstance that could raze elaborate plans as it would half-hearted good intentions like his own. Then he smiled. He recognized that he had achieved what he wanted in part. The primary reason for absconding to the toilet had been to apprehend such philanthropic tendencies; but sexual feelings and desire for intimacies or friendship aside, most of his reason for wanting to continue the association was to help them financially for he understood too well that to be poor and blown in different directions by injustices and random fate was an ineffable wrong.

How the male had caused memories of abuse, desire for love from the former abuser, and a whole hot stream of perverse fantasies to percolate through cracks in the surface veneer of consciousness he did not know. Still there it was--this need for love, this wish to immerse himself, if not into the arms, into sex with another being and surrender to this prevailing attitude that one was nothing without someone. He smiled again for his own peculiarities did not cease to amaze him and he was pleased that neediness did not overtake him completely when it could so easily do so during this difficult period of his life. From telling himself that sorrow was a universal rather than a personal issue these waves of neediness hit the sides of his boat with vehement force but did not capsize it. His need for love, his neediness, was not so great and from this fact that he was secure in the poundings, he found the inundations somewhat titillating. It was a macabre period in his life but one to be survived intact as the distinct individual that he was.

He avoided a pack of Tuk Tuk taxi drivers who were vying hungrily for his patronage and walked along the edge of the road as a cool breeze of the north pressed itself into him. He enjoyed this sensation with the appreciative response to simple pleasures that a small child entertained, the feel of tall and rich, verdant weeds poking the edges of his toes in his leather sandals, and the redolence of the morning air that increased with the rising temperatures of the fire of the sun, though that would be, by noon, over-baked and the air would have nothing in it but dry intensity, and empty space where thought would not grow but was confined like a climbing vine. Despite wistful tendencies to the contrary, he was relieved to be rid of the clutter of recent acquaintances from his thoughts. And if, he postulated, this were true of the Laotian, the nurse, and all of the myriad others, was it not true of Noppawan and Kimberly as well? Did he not want to get rid of all clutter? And while thinking this he inadvertently stepped on a dog, which made him stumble.

Before he gained his balance, the creature cried out and ran to the road but rather than begin immediate howls of imprecations it whined pitifully. "Hoop park, hoop park! nyiab," (shut your mouth, quiet) he told the dog with a softness that belied his harsh choice of words. As he bent down toward the creature he noticed its loss of fur, that its skin, seen through the multiple spots of barrenness, was flaking, and that its eyes were still and sunken.

"Sawadee and bonjour to you, Indonchinese pooch," said Nawin with a laugh and a quick nodding bow with his head which was then replaced with a stiffness in both movement and expression. He could not be amused by another's suffering. He could not be happy when cognizant of so much suffering in the world. The sensitive boy was within and no flippant levity on his part could shake him loose. Just because manhood had piled hard layers onto him did not mean that boyhood had been peeled away. "Poor thing!" he said while reluctantly patting the head of the filthy creature as though adverse to petting it fully while less reluctant sensitivities absorbed its sadness like a sponge. Bent as he now was to it he was emotionally and thus physically paralyzed; and if it were to take an hour or two for the creature to become disillusioned with him and to roam elsewhere, he knew that he would wait with it until such a time came. But for now, here it was fixated on him and wavering ambivalently between hope and belief that humans were the good, the god, the sustenance, and the deliverer--its cries as supplications of prayer. He kept thinking that as there was no god, god was an obligation to all humans who were in their own way, able to imagine such an abstraction and climb into its costume. It was their moral duty to ameliorate the suffering of smaller creatures, and to man himself; but the dilemma was not of one suffering creature on the precipice of life but an uncountable number of them and help of one was unjust. Furthermore, it seemed absurd to cease his own plans and prioritize a dog by getting it tranquilized, and put in a cage for a ride back to Bangkok, a long-term solution (as opposed to offering it food merely to delay the creature's hunger and ease his own conscience), but an impossible one, when in a sense he did not even have a home to take it to. To walk a long way to seek food of which he had none (not even one of his fruit filled cookies) was not much of a solution either; and yet all there was, was the suffering of the moment that he could take pains to counter no matter how many insects he trod on, or how many micro- organisms his immune system killed while he was doing so.