Chapter 17

If he did not think his behavior odd, he certainly felt its peculiarity nonetheless, and thus he found himself disconcerted and spinning ever so slowly in a thick and viscous void. If there were hot flares of blood rushing into his face warning him that his vastly peculiar and mortified state was on the precipice of insanity they were not cogent enough to motivate him to stand and walk on; but then why would they and why would he reject this petrifaction within for, despite his wealth, he was no better than a disconnected, homeless transient himself; and if feeling was raw material to be refined into thought, what he was mining within his lethargy might only be ostensibly inconsequential.

If, when impeded from performing services or playing his meager role in the production of goods to be sold to insatiable consumers he found himself unemployed and eventually reduced to a beggar who did not even have two baht to pay for the use of a public toilet, there would be less urgency for refined means in conducting natural tendencies. He would do his natural business on the streets; and with frequency and in the company of others of the same meager resources, that which was once base would become the norm. When the individual was desensitized further in compounded experience these natural activities and the natural means of doing them would become reflexive actions once again which would evoke little or no thought. Eating and eliminating wastes were necessary functions so the human mind refused to consider them abhorrent and animalistic. That which was judged was how he did them, but even this changed when deprived of the tools of so called refinement. Prisoners with no utensils other than bolted bowls would not find them humiliating after some time. So he thought most dimly--he was actually thinking and was aware that there was a vague he from behind who was monitoring these thoughts. He smiled. The smile was in part because such an entertaining idea, even though he did not register its content beyond recognizing it as amusing, had brushed against him lightly; but mostly he smiled for knowing that thought was now turned on and from it self-awareness was forming.

Leary of the peculiar, a security guard and one of the train officers who witnessed and scrutinized the man in this posture of one defecating with pants still up, made occasional orbits around him like Mars in its closest rendezvous with the sun. Whether the odd one was insane by having been overcharged with an excess of dopamine, or lethargic as of those who had been smashed by bereavement, they would not have known. Separately, they suspected the individual as chemically dependent and entertained the idea of seeking police involvement, but now lacking evidence for any conclusion they continued to observe him from a distance. Then a second security guard appeared out of nowhere, materializing with the sounds of his portable transmitter and receiver in nebulous static blaring from his hip. Less wary, he meandered sinuously until he made his way close to Nawin who was thinking: "Those foreigners in the tuk- tuk must be in Laos by now--going to Vientiane as I am." He smiled at the guard, staring at him with deliberate eye contact in order to project lucidity, which was after all a director's projection, a concoction, when man was a strand of knotted strands of chemical impulses, feeling, thoughts flowing down and dashing upon the banks of memory. "Sawadee khrap," he said with a wai. "Sorry, I guess I got lost in my thoughts. I Just broke up with my wife. A lot to think over."

"You broke up with her or she broke up with you?"

"Maybe the other way around. Anyway the better half is gone."

"Where are you going?"

"Well, I am debating that actually. Nongkai has a Buddhist sculptural garden, doesn't it? Vientiane too."

"I guess so. I've never been to either one. Never stepped into Laos."

"You never wanted too?"

"Not really."

"Why is that?"

"I don't know. Too much trouble to do it I guess. No passport. No particular wish to see people who are poorer than here."

"I see. Well, I need to make a left I guess and then walk straight ahead for a while. Will Vientiane be to the left or the right?"

"Right."

"Can I walk there?"

"To the border yes, but you will need a taxi to get anywhere else."

"I'll walk for a while and follow what looks good. Thank you."

He began walking. He was almost at the juncture when he heard the beep of another tuk-tuk.

"Are you Nawin?"

"Yes."

"Somebody left this at the train station. The officers have been asking people they happened to see if its for them. You slipped by so one of them said to bring it to you. Are you Nawin Biadklang?"

"Yes."

Nawin took the sheet of paper. It was the telephone number of someone called Wichian. In parenthesis it said "Boi."

20

As another inconsequential member of this species riding the promptings of caprices toward that which was most pleasant, a pleasure in its own right, as with the activities that were deemed as pleasant, most of his choices could not be anything other than irrational. And of these irrational and erratic choices, he thought further, most were often made from antithetical impulses to which one was not measurably any more pleasant or worthy of being followed than its alternatives. He was seated at a table in a restaurant of a guest house, wondering obtusely why he was there. It was, he mentally noted to himself, a most peculiar feeling to have come somewhere, to know oneself to have done so, and yet to remain clueless about the aim. It almost felt as if, while in reverie, he had been snatched from his idiocy at the train station and placed here in the city of cognizance without his consent when in fact he had walked three kilometers before tiring and then succumbing to being swallowed in that blue cockroach shaped vehicle, the tuk- tuk, which had then driven him further into the center of Nongkhai.

And so, restless, he stirred the foam back and forth in his hot Cappuccino, hoping without knowing why to soil all parts of the inner embankment of the cup, and only taking occasional sips as he became increasingly pensive. He thought to himself that had he cared to do so, which of course he had not, the money that he was spending on the coffee alone could have bought two or three meals for those who scarcely ate anything on a given day. He began to think about how peculiar the world was with its interdependent members that made up units of one entire whole; and that interaction of one species with another was merely for the need to gain sustenance outside the unit, that the frenzied propagation of a species to ensure its continuum was kept in check by voracious predators; and that individual persons, considering it an enjoyable sport, incessantly tried not only to sustain themselves but also to thrive by hording avariciously or seeking pleasures gluttonously at the sake of others within the unit, striving for even more so as to think of themselves as successful in partaking of the good. He thought of how this showed life for what it was: not that of laudable creations overseen by a creator, or at least forlorn entities of a godless universe interacting with benevolent energy, but of comestible viands seeking to elude predators. The whole thing seemed an ineffective and barbaric system of incongruous, animate bits seeking some means to barely coexist, and as such life was not so laudable--neither of god nor of goodness--even though in every culture, and every religion, he supposed, common practitioners believed in both to create a pleasant perspective of themselves and their place in the world. Even Buddha, who did not believe in god became such as a statuette more rife than a crucifix. The morning stimulant was not so hot that he had to barely sip it, and yet he did for cognizance of the rife and innate selfishness of man seemed to constrict his throat. It was a constriction as slight as his compunction; and the subject was forgotten entirely as he poured maple syrup on his pancakes.

Eating a bit of one pancake, he looked out onto the traffic with its lethal confetti of exhaust fumes which, when moving closer to the buildings, diffused and nominally enveloped pedestrians on a nearby sidewalk. He once more pondered that he did not know exactly why or from what impulse had led him here. The inexplicable nature of it all was like that subway ride to the Hualamphong train station. There, clearly for him, it had been a wombed departure from the travail of interconnectedness with those strangers within seeming to him as a family of distant and tacit, insular beings who were cognate in their desire to arrive in a train which would take them from all that was painful--such had been his need to flee from suffering that the faces of strangers, no matter how happy or bland their expressions, seemed comrades of exile; and yet there, most opaquely, he had chosen to sit down. It had been next to a boisterous woman holding a cellular telephone talking of some poor soul's uneventful dating experiences. He could not have known anything of her beyond this and yet of the two vacant seats available he had chosen to be next to her instead of sitting beside a middle aged woman whose face was sunk toward a book; and the reason for sitting in one seat over another was as inexplicable as now. And so, assuming that all was not destined and man had choice about all matters, he had chosen to check into this guest house in the center of Nongkai instead of going straight into Vientiane. To some degree it had been because of the weight of the backpack. It had become increasingly heavy against his shoulders with every kilometer of that long walk. Confusion also had had its bearing. Not knowing what to do or where to go, with each possibility seeming equally insipid, he had selected a place to rest and think out some contrived purpose for himself. If not able to formulate a plan and purpose for his travels, here at least he had a place to rest physically when swimming frantically against this mental eddy. For all his disconcerted strokes, his itinerant meandering, he told himself that even though he did not know when it would happen he was certain that he would wash ashore eventually and when he did he would have contrived something to do, some urgent matter to pursue, some purpose for himself.

He pulled out that sheet of paper from his shirt pocket. He glanced at the name and the telephone number and recalled the faces of the Laotian and his sister as they rode next to him. Was he really to end an uneventful retirement for the sake of these people? Was he, for the sake of seeming a compassionate human being to himself and not merely another selfish being on the planet, to pay them for a miniscule part in posing for some portrait that he was neither inspired to draw nor inclined to tote back to Bangkok? Where would he even obtain paint and canvas? In Laos? Well no doubt they had both within the capital city. If prehistoric man could find ways to dye a cave, Laotians, people of a very similar linguistic and cultural distinction to Thais, could not do less. He could do sketches of them. It would not take long or be much of a burden to carry around and he could leave the family a couple of hundred dollars, which would mean the world to them and be a negligible and hardly noticed loss to himself. It might even restore him to himself; but then did he want to be restored? A restoration of a thoughtful pornographic artist from a third world country was not such a gift to civilization. He would never equal the great artists of the world and of prostitute painters he was one of myriad in contemporary Southeast Asian art alone. The sister was beautiful by his standards of beauty--youth unblemished with skin the pallor of fresh snow; a background of dirt and poverty, a subject he could relate to, and yet unlike those of a swarthy complexion, not appearing as such, with hair that was long and dark as the void, subdued eyes neither scintillating of inexperience nor petrified as ancient granite, absent of bra, nipples that pointed and teased their way toward every curve to which the imagination slid down like a hand to remote and sodden reservoirs. But it was not her beauty that called unto him, but an intrigue with the perverse so that he might know if his suspicions were warranted, and more saliently, to know the economic deprivations and desperation that made siblings into lovers, if indeed they were that. He folded the paper and stuffed it into his wallet against a condom.

Maybe he had diverged into the center of Nongkai and had checked into this guest house to divert and check, if not totally restrain, an inordinate curiosity about the perverse. This trip, the best he understood it, was meant to have a spiritual element--at least to the extent an atheist whose wont of thinking had denuded god from a vast being cloaked in the sacrosanct was capable of. Being bereft of agenda or aim did not necessarily mean being bereft of an overarching theme founded in malaise; so if not sidetracked, he had (for lack of a better term) a spiritual theme that if pursued with aim could easily surpass the agenda of a monk. After all, and of course he would never openly disclose this most secret assertion, a monk was merely a poor man seeking education, food, and an end to loneliness, and all other nakedness under a saffron robe and a sacrosanct Buddha was not even the physical substance of a needy monk. Nawin told himself that his time here, if not perverted and aptly spent on the spiritual, would allow him to step out of the egocentric, crumbling tower that he was in. If nothing else he could watch ants use twigs as bridges and freeways and in so doing become aware of the existence of a tiny fraction of the 90 percent of all life that was smaller than a chicken's egg. He could then appreciate a cognizant activity and social order other than that of his own or his own dominant species. If he could lean against a stupa and be in awe of the sun baking his face like a brick or appreciate the titillation of wind caressing his head like that of a Cambodian child-beggar patted by a foreigner, he would at last be alive.

Still that had not been his main reason for taking a room. It seemed to him that there was no main reason at all--only the pull of some tremendous gravitational force, that ineluctable void which had influenced him to take his wife's best friend for a mistress and bearer of a child and all for reasons that were only in small part to fill the barren heart of a wife of a fallow womb--a void that had prompted his subtle rejections of Kimberly as his main wife, for how could he have left Noppawan behind or renew himself from the philanderer that he was--a void that had been a catalyst of the ensuing consequences.

To have a child! Regardless of their education or the significance of ideas that bred in their heads, women needed those replications of their physical beings to feel complete. This was exacerbated in marriages, since in thought, if not in deed, marriages were with philandering men who were replicating creatures no different than them albeit ones obsessed by impulses for pleasure in wet disgorging with the multitude. It was no wonder that with the void as immense as the universe itself and the final surrender to it inevitable in death, one sometimes had delusions of it as the lap of a long lost grandmother and found herself/himself plummeting into that lap from one's balcony.

Long ago Nawin, who at birth was labeled Jatupon, had been a teenager caught in currents and countercurrents of his own. Back then, he had needed his new Bangkok friend, Noppawan, desperately; and so by taking her, at the age of fourteen, to meet his osseous, ochre friends, the dead corpses at the Siriaj Hospital Anatomical Museum, he in a sense had thrown up his arms to indicate a need for love. She by embracing him despite his wish to seem intrepid before death had shown an understanding of what boys could not say in words. So like a blossoming bud she had opened her arms to him and let him fall into the petals of her embrace. So, while surrounded by the shelves of these dead beings basking in formalin, he had cried in her embrace remembering, an hour earlier, Kazem's use of his body, a type of interactive gesture or embrace which he had sometimes called a "sport" and at other times a "cheap date."

Twenty five years later at certain moments of weakness, he still needed love even though the neediness in the content of the word abhorred him. Were couples who stayed together for forty or fifty years to be so commended? The neediness of people in mutual dependency was worse than newlyweds addicted to the pleasure-highs of being in proximity to their spouses, the extensions of themselves; it all was like the monstrosity of a one right legged man and a one left legged woman walking together and it sickened him.

Nawin got up and went to the coin operated telephone. He dialed his home telephone number numerous times and then his wife's mobile telephone number. He did this in the hope of expressing something--admiration, sentiment, respect, gratitude, he was not sure what, but certainly not love, as he had a pure aversion to that word--he did not know what to say, and it did not matter. There was merely that recording telling him that the numbers were disconnected. And so he felt disconcerted as if he were now walking through the gravitational force of a different planet. He went back to the table and drank the rest of his orange juice. It was to be expected, he told himself, as nothing was permanent. He took a deep breath and then breathed out fully. He felt disheartened, but not all that desperate. If a wonderful person, one who had gone out of his life, and who was so salient in such a critical time at his youth, had gone for good reason, he had no reason to question it. He had been blest to have her save him from the abyss as well as providing him with the ensuing friendship of marriage years later. She now had his money, his child, and her independence and he would bequeath these things unto her unconditionally; and so, he told himself that he must release her, exhaling her and breathing in others like respiration. He stuffed the five baht coin into his pocket. No, if he had loved Kimberly and Noppawan at certain times this was enough love for him in a lifetime. If he had experienced one malevolent family early in his life, this should have been enough of an augury for him that long ago he, Nawin Biadklang, should have forsworn a second round of it and vowed to maintain a single and original life thereafter. He was an artist: compassion, ideas, exposure to new people, licentious impulses, and the inspiration of dead geniuses on canvass must override this anti-Heraclital wish to cling to stable objects.

In the petty routines of man it was rare that one was impacted profoundly by some being other than one if the volumes of dead sages, and yet she had done this for him. Even though this incident had happened long ago he still admired and even loved her for it. He told himself that with time he would become even more professional and accomplished at compassionate portrayals of life in his paintings and his interactions, even if it were to take thirty years, when his testosterone levels had finally plummeted. And for those who never had anyone there, for them, he, at least in theory, wanted to be there the way Noppawan had been there for him in his youth. Maybe, he told himself, he would visit the Laotians. He was not sure.

Thus, here he was sitting in the restaurant of a guest house watching a pirated DVD on a big screen television and eating his pancakes with maple syrup. For whatever inexplicable reason, he had chosen to check into a guest house in the center of Nongkai and here he--Nawin, Jatupon, or whatever label he gave himself --was baffled by his choice. He could merely speculate and eat his pancakes the same as any Western foreigner, but with the voracious enthusiasm as he had when, long ago, devouring them in America as a four year old child.

He was eating pancakes rather than the French Toast that he was more inclined to order for the sound of the French in the toast made him feel queasy. When he finished eating and was bored with the movie he plunked money, faces of the king, under a salt and pepper shaker and without saying "check bin [bill, please]" or waiting for the waitress to pick up his money or bring back the change, he left the guest house as irresolute as when he came.

A cloud came and past; followed by others, darker and more voluminous. On the sidewalk, near Soi 43 where he happened to be passing, lightning refracted from the pavement and his sad solitary figure on this King's birthday/Father's Day was lit in flashes of eerie spotlight. There were strong winds animating the inanimate, which gave the already animate that sense of flutter making him, for a time, feel an elated sense of being that surpassed reality but this, like the lightning and the cloud that had been the precursor of the storm, were illusory and passed as well. His loneliness was weighty but the winds made the gravity of it all insignificant. Then there were sheets of rain pouring from the sky, he had tried to escape under an awning, but a hole in the center caused this miniature waterfall and made those under the awning cluster closer together to avoid it. He went into a shop. A rack was full of postcards with photographic images of Nongkhai's Buddhist sculpture garden and the Friendship Bridge between Nongkhai, Thailand and Vientiane, Laos. He could write to Noppawan, he told himself. He bought several postcards but he could not think of several friends to send them to--he had acquaintances by the droves but friends? Minus Kimberly, there was only Noppawan. He returned to his table at the guest house and ordered another cup of Cappuccino and a croissant. He took out a pen from his wet pockets but it would not write. He laughed. No, neither rain nor lugubrious tragedy would wash away the gloss that covered his cracks for he never ceased to be amused by the incredible, the ironic, and the peculiar of everyday experiences.

Looking out the window and thinking how peculiar such a rain was in December he turned toward the movie and in so doing noticed a young man in tight wholly jeans and jacket waiting at the door. He did not know why but he knew what he was there for and without thinking he raised his hand and snapped his fingers augustly, but it did not get the man's attention. "What on Earth was I thinking? What a relief," he thought. He chuckled at his droll existence of near misses and the twisting turns of fate. A woman seated at a nearby table pulled out a laminated photograph of King Rama IX. "What a simpleton," he thought, and smiled at her as if she were a child carrying around a doll. His heart was palpitating less, his blood seemed to be cooling, and his thoughts seemed to be less obsessed by the sexual and the peculiar. Then someone sat next to him. Unlike himself or the one in the denim jacket who both had a golden brown complexion, his was a muddier, more turgid tone. He was also more muscular just as he remembered was his brother, Kazem.

"Sawadee khrap," he said.

"Yes, what can I do for you?" asked Nawin.

"Just thought I'd come here and talk with you. You looked lonely. Thought I'd cheer you up if you needed cheering. You snapped your fingers but the other guy didn't hear you. I've heard and have come."

"What will you do to cheer me up?" asked Nawin with a sheepish grin.

"Better not say in words but I snap. You do what is pleasant for me and it will please you."

"Free?"

"Give me a 500 baht gift afterwards if you want."

Nawin paid the bill and led him to his room.

21