Chapter 18
He listened to the frequent gusts assail the window panes. They were a hybrid of breath and force. They were muddled articulations in brawn. In that respect, he told himself [at that second he was thinking of his own childhood as a reference, since the centripetal domain of his myopic existence was all there was], the howling in the denigration of night was figuratively no different from the diatribe of human speech, and yet being literally both it felt entirely strange. He listened intently for whatever else there was for him to do as a unit in this barren room of post-sensual darkness inside his own head; scatter and drift with the wind? The gusts of this peculiar storm in the middle of the dry season seemed to be attempts at conveying meaning, ineffable sounds from without transforming to thought that smote recriminations within, and this he listened to as well even as he smiled wryly to think how superstitious he was to attempt to augur some cosmological significance to his petty existence from adventitious happenings. Smell equally condemned him: sweat evaporating from chafed skin of bodies reft from a union of friction; underwear tainted by residual liquids and reeking that odor sweetly; and, for him, immured in a poorly ventilated room of a guest house, it was nighttime and there was the saccharine stench of rotting male flesh everywhere.
Circumspect, he was unable to trust that there was safety in falling asleep [he could not feel otherwise with his wallet there in the top drawer of the bed-stand near that body], and thus there were long minutes of darkness made darker yet by being awake with eyes closed; mind somewhat assuaged by what it could repudiate from illuminating visual sensory input; thought, nature, and a connection to both seeming more acute despite the fact that he felt tired; and all of this a less pessimistic perspective garnered in certain seconds only to be lost in others. For his was an episteme of concurrent antitheses where, from the impact of human will, bits of knowledge like a mixture of adulterated pollutants that comprised the canals in Bangkok, were thrust into composite waves and counter-waves of ferment; but when will sped elsewhere it all reverted to its stagnant origin as waves of cogitation and cognition like waves of water resumed their former states.
All that he could know absolutely of himself within his droll, droning thoughts was that the perspectives he was trading shifted from variations of mood like different or seemingly different selves kaleidoscopically making it so he hardly knew a consistent self at all. All that he could know outside himself was that right now, perceived with gravity but variable nuances of optimism and humor, he was definitely in this room and, as much as he might wish to extricate himself, he was not alone.
Stretched out stiffly on the bed like a cadaver (Why so rigid? Why at all negative? he asked himself), he did not have to see the objects of the room again to feel a cold, surreal, and alien remoteness in their presence nor did he have to be deceased and within a state of rigor mortis to be so inert. Yet! (fuck!), he thought in Thai for that expletive implied how intimately disconnection could be felt; and as life, more than thought, was allowing oneself to be besmirched by the saturations of feeling, validating it with action, which then was the catalyst for more feeling, he asked himself whether or not after the massage that he had rendered like a slave to another's sense of pleasure and this being riveted for such a lengthy and hellish twenty minute duration which had just ceased a few moments ago, he were really living life. He was, he told himself, and what was more, by this one intimate act with the man and the void he was connecting himself atavistically to that antediluvian period of early self in which he had been sodomized so hard as to rupture childhood irreparably and to be condemned to this morbid repressed pain his atheist's soul, his all-too human, mind--a mind which even early on had been a refuge to a harmonious and familiar voice within.
This pain was for so many years seldom thought of, but now that it was thawed like a creek, it flowed it's bane as microbes and water. Pain, once necessitated, was now necessitating the diminished memories of the diminutive boy whom he had once been-- diminutive as the creature had been banished and repudiated all of these years from the belief that only a man's appetites and actions within the present moment were real. Back then he had not bothered to postulate that a present bereft of foundation was like a cleft chunk of a planet floating aimlessly as an asteroid; and that if fully connected to himself; the boy might not be a diminished fictional character any longer while the man might become more than a tailless lizard with a regenerative head. Thus, this being bedraggled and besmirched in painful intimate sport was for him a homecoming.
There were so many voices of the past in the wind. They were distinct in themselves and yet, swallowed and digested by the wind, they were part of its reeking breath: brothers, parents, extended family, evanescent friends of youth, distant cold bits of memory less than specter and dust; Noppawan and Kimberly, his only two portions of love, which, as a self-contained being, he never needed but delighted in ravenously as one who lacked and was in love with those who engendered such lovable feelings (the feelings of being in love being that which were loved most); so many female models, so many desperate, delectable whores with defunct eyes of hopelessness, dead embers with a slight wistful glow for possible deliverance for which men roved like the dimmest of spotlights; so many relationships; so many desperate others no different than the whores (was there a male or female who got involved, let alone married, to worsen one's lot or to become best friends with the self, brazenly riding through loneliness on a solitary raft? No, never!). There was snoring. There was putrid breath, sweeping the side of his face. There was effluvium from the individual lying next to him and this was a type of wind as well.
No matter whether it was done as perpetrator or willing victim, no matter what the particular genders involved were, or the positions of riding or being ridden, the sexual union of two people was in his conclusion a mallet lunging its mass forcefully into dark, dank, and constricted space, a club forcing entrance into narrow passages not designed for its presence, and an overpowering of a being to devour but also to inflict servitude and pain while obtaining that apogee of pleasure, the brevity of orgasm, which could be gained in no other way. A mélange of croquet and billiards, polo and wrestling, this sport and aggression performed in the heterosexual role could cause the conception of a child more readily than it could cause venereal disease, but deviant sexuality was conjoined for sexual desire of every kind was definitely a crude and barbarous means of getting a specie to interact physically so that under an obsessive and specious sense of rapture and intimacy and a wish for extension of self by annexation of another being or being annexed by him, different apertures would be explored at various times and from human curiosity and experimentation, pregnancy might ensue.
Yes, he told himself, by being amenable to pleasurable promptings in an intimacy with a male half his age, and finding himself himself suddenly middle aged and needing to become enmeshed and invigorated in his beauty, he was living life as animals were meant to live it. Infidelities of every kind within this godless universe gave men, even gentry like himself who were cloyed by leisure, a rapturous respite from their roles as automatons and thus they were an essential sport of man. For the naive this conduct led to some months of being in love but for a worldly adulterer like himself it was minutes of indispensable intoxication. He continued to listen to the howling wind. It seemed to inveigle and beckon him and he found himself wistfully and sequaciously summoned to its cryptic codes. Did the wind not entice him to make his naked form denuded further so that he might become as amorphous as it, to be amalgamated with wind, and to slip into it wholly? It did; and yet it seemed such a grotesque hybrid of breath and force with these continual elated, muddled, and ineffable articulations in brawn. Yes, he reiterated, in that respect the howling was figuratively no different than the aspersions and diatribe of human speech. By that, although perhaps not consciously thinking it, he was nonetheless meaning that war called family which happened so briefly in the history of a life as if it had never been, though undoubtedly had occurred for, he assessed, there was an expanse or large swath of charred, fallow, and contaminated brain therein where, to the present day, little grew but a sense of desertification. Living in the centripetal domain of a myopic existence as everyone did he supposed that his hapless childhood would always be his point of reference, his vantage point, and also the multi-pointed obstacle of his life. Generalizations, skewed and concocted from the sordid past that were their antecedent, extruded from his fissures in an incessant cursive lava flow of amicable contempt. The howling was as undecipherable as the cries of a forlorn child. It was eerie as though a million such children with their muffled cries were being slammed into the windows with each new gust.
Lying there, a cohabitant of the darkness of this relatively unfamiliar room, the howling then seemed more fierce than before. It literally was brawn and breath. As such it was worse than the acerbity of humans (not that his father excoriating him for retreating to his "cage," that cage he willingly absconded to as a casualty of a sadistic sport in which he needed to shoot and denigrate before being shot and denigrated himself, and once hit to seek the prey more aggressively in the hope of being seen as the master of disparaging wit, or the father being as rustic and ungrammatical as a wild boar, did not howl yet in memory) and made the evening seem all the more surreal and peculiar if such a thing were possible.
"Where am I?" he asked himself absurdly, as if it could be anything other than that same room at the guest house in Nongkhai. "What happened to me?" he asked with feigned innocence which caused him to chortle and spray saliva that was like the froth of a wave upon a breaker, the cluster of rocks that was his smile. He had to admit, despite himself, that this being violated, by his own volition, had been quite a ride. It had been an internal roller coaster physically; but more it had been a ride into an abyss within, not merely from the physical sensation of this odd womanly role he found himself in or the pleasure of being free of aberration as creatures of variation loved aberration if social constraints were slackened (and slackened they were not only in Bang-cock but to some degree in the whole of Thailand as the Lord Buddha did not envisage gods, rules, and the dogma of coercion), but most saliently in these years as a womanizer overturned with this stranger's slight push of his body toward the bed.
Even with eyes closed and sedulous efforts made to concentrate on the wind to avoid thinking of the raw, anal soreness and all that transpired which was as confusing for the libertine as it was liberating, he knew. He listened intently. He listened scrupulously. How superstitious he was to equate the wind with a specter and yet he did it nonetheless. The smells of the room did not seem as acrid as a fully evaporated area over a recent urine-saturated pavement near a park or stadium in Bangkok or as repugnant as a room littered with his brothers fetid socks and other equally if not more reprehensible articles of attire peeled off the bodies of these anathemas but still, as small as the room was, nothing was impervious to it. If the curtains and the carpet were all permeated by a redoubling of these male odors, he would not have been surprised--not that surprise, or any other human emotion could have been registered all that readily in his impassive state. His was a naked mind, like that of his body, except that his body was wrapped loosely in a used mildewed towel and his mind in a bawdy numbness which he labeled the void.
He sneezed and opened his eyes. He rubbed his nose against his shoulder, careful not to make any more precipitous movements against the broken arm in the sling, since it was hurting worse than before, as of course it would from the earlier sport. There was no point in closing his eyes again. He would not be able to rest any more than before. With a mind needing debouchment more than his body needed to relieve itself in the toilet he stayed where he was, which was where there were windows. The circumfluence of the fetid, enervated air beneath the incessant creaking of the ceiling fan; creaking as if it were not only grating against the torpor and stagnancy of the air itself but against the melee of all, for all was restrained in the time and space of what now was and in a circulation and deciduous draping of those same odors caught to which the windows were permanently sealed to keep out the rain.
22
Gained as an unintentional wooer of women by dint of an opalesque smile, a mellifluous voice, a successful name, and a handsome albeit swarthy and sodden appearance which made him, for them at least, a semi-deluctable presence, and years of venial sensual licentiousness, a recompense for empathic suffering in his thoughtful studies of prostitutes and injustices of the world at large, it was his inveterate perspective of himself as delusionary as it may have been. It was disconcerting to think of it as gone; and yet, he told himself, as emasculated and denuded as he now felt, were he to continue to mature this way, to climb the precipice of old age, while still acting callow enough to be obsessed by the exquisite release of his body (love making out of the tension of repressed urges towards the many and, as a cumulative exhortation of fantasies vented on a specific one, an act of adultery when making love to her, as it was love of himself, his own gratification), partaking of blithe experiences with female strangers under societal approbation and with youthful lewdness, needing to restrain his behavior very little, scrutinizing it no more than this, and having nothing to show for his life other than wanton appetites dragging him into every damp and unseemly hole open to him would he not eventually become more obscene than the hole he was at this moment in time? Would it not be worse than now to end his life no more master of the self than that and to have made sexuality the sole subject of study and preoccupation as he had done for decades? He was not sure, although to feel better about himself he averred it silently as if he were so. He told himself that there was nothing to feel guilty about. It was the clay of life. Human will might choose to misrepresent it as ethereal as a cloud but it was not so. From the first regenerative microbe it was an experiment, and so of course there would be experimentation now. If obscene, was it not even more obscene that this, which was an inception of all, was all there was?
The carnal scholar that he was, did he not seek to understand life pedantically, partaking of it mostly with prostitute models instead of those of affluent means? Whatever small, favorable outcome it did for them financially he knew all too clearly that it was exploiting the exploited whatever august and sententious aim he might entertain. By seeking the omniscience of a god and showing the injustices of life as they really were (or as accurate an account as one could do within his tiny scope of experience and knowledge) his was to know both the parts of the exploiter and the exploited. What other reason did he have to enjoy them than to enlarge his study to the perpetrators of exploitation themselves when there was such a smorgasbord for free, or at least as free as women got? So many years of praised debauchery had embedded that self perspective of himself as a wooer of women ("Naughty Nawin" as articles often called him); and it had seemed as impregnable as granite when really it was a thin outline of a self that could easily be smudged and erased.
Lying on his half of the bed, the thunder, lightning, and wind from outside seemed to diffuse into that porous and amorphous outline of a defunct self. For half an hour he was cognizant of nothing but the storm and the faint, subdued murmurs and indistinct featureless shapes of early, distant memories set in a rather subconscious mental fog, scampering away at a distance as though seeking to allude him. Without thinking so, he felt that large amalgamations of his character, the daily sensory input of a constant, non-threatening environment, and his fond attachments to others gained from shared pleasant experiences together, which together he called himself fell from him annually. He was deciduous, but unlike a tree, he suffered a loss of most of the trunk of his entire being: the full love of a child for his mother that would never come again; the family that damaged and then vanished almost as quickly as one was conceived, gestated, and delivered as a member into its cell of sordid and clandestine activities; an infatuation with a girl that once seemed garish, all-consuming, and eternal as the sun; and the full pleasure of feeling those awesome gusts of wind hit against his face as a boy would, smelling the pile of winter leaves that he once jumped into as they began to suffocate him, and appreciating the significance of the simple delights of the ordinary as a child's mind did, and to which no vacation to Vientiane as an adult had the hope of restoring. He was merely what he sensed from the storm and for some time he stayed this way soughing skidding around with it in his mind like a severed and desiccated old leaf.
Manhood, this summation of himself as masculine force and presence, had nothing tangible in it and could vanish quicker than the toppling of a house of cards. With so many years of incessant layers of thought it had seemed ossified so how could he have known that this perspective--one that was endemic to such a profession of contemplative decadence and decadent contemplation and had seemed myriad as the shore's self- flagellation of waves--would be so evanescent? As his nose was beginning to itch he rubbed it with the back of his hand. From the gesture he found himself returning to a self which, regrettably, could not be discarded entirely. How strange, he thought, to be washed up on new shores. He thought this as if there were something so new in it, and as if sodomy, and in his case fraternal incest at that, were totally unknown to him. It was not so strange a shore as he wanted to believe, he had to admit, and he would only be alone and marooned there if he saw himself as such. The fecund, dark soil of a less familiar shore could only be foreign, ominous, and grave if he stated to himself that it was such.
"So, I am with a man! What of it!" he thought; but guilt continued to reverberate, as those eerie lamenting calls to worship that, from a nearby mosque, thrice a day rolled off of the black sheen of the waters of the canal and trespassed into his Bangkok estate bypassing a wall and gate meant to fortify him from possible theft, and more generally to barricade him from the ignorance and poverty that were his past. If this perspective of himself as an inadvertent wooer of women and debonair presence, were a wall to memory meant to keep himself from considering the peculiarity of his perverted and twisted past and the walls of his estate were meant to fortify himself from poverty and misery both of them failed unequivocally.
Guilt, like the wind that he was now listening to, wailed on. Self flagellation like thunder and lightning piercing the room, did so under the aegis of his closed eyes. And there, correcting examinations in her favorite seat in the living room with eyes perusing paper behind thick glasses, and fighting back parts of the disheveled hair that obstructed the process, was a spectral and indistinct image of his wife. He judged that she was no different from the rest, already well into diminishing to the state of former friends and family like his deceased girlfriend, his infant son, and his paternal obligations.
There they would become part of a blotch of nebulous memory that might have its pull like a poltergeist against the organization of his thoughts but would nonetheless seem to have never been.
If he were to accept the defining components of marriage as the masses defined it, he was never married at all. The signing of a marriage certificate long ago had been done as a lifelong pledge to prioritize one individual and one bond above others and not as a renunciation of social interaction or forfeiting the ownership of his genitalia; and what was true throughout the marriage was surely no less true now. Noppawan, the anthropologist and professor whom he gained such delight in, which was love, once said that there had to be a reason that jealousy was such an embedded instinct. She said that it no doubt had its origin in primordial man. Perhaps, she said, female Australopithecus africans needed to ensure that the providers did not abandon them and their prodigy and their primordial male counterparts wanted to ensure that those offspring whom they were providing for were really their own.
Did ideas and attitudes of cognizant beings ever evolve at all? he wondered, for sexual fidelity was still thought of as such an important factor to marriage when really it should be a contract of a union of best friends. Facile measurements of this nature would legitimize the most indifferent partners as well as relationships where obtaining monetary or social status was the objective. Contracts of faithfulness and appeasing a partner's jealous propensities by suffocating the self unlovingly could exist just as the facile measurements of what a marriage really was could materialize (all had the right to measure, define, and live as they judged apposite in obtaining some degree of happiness) but, he thought, that surely did not mean that he had to subscribe to it himself. All who signed marriage certificates did not have to do so with the same motivation and none ever signed documents to which there was a likelihood of their present state remaining as it was or worsening. As an aberration of a liberal man who from being fragmented by pain was able to design himself anew, why should it matter what the masses believed? By the momentum of one free to be dissolute he, a libertine, had a short time earlier worn away one more restriction; but as it was one of consenting adults; was it all that necessary to build dams and reroute the currents of a river that ran both ways? He thought not, when the damn was such an unnatural barrier.