Chapter 19

He wondered what Noppawan was doing at this moment. Awakened by the baby, was she warming the bottle of milk and combing that thicket of long hair as he had seen her do before. Was she even able to sleep very well nowadays with the infant's hourly crying? Was she able to sleep at all with Kimberly's passing? Did she think of him at all? Did she feel regret over breaking his arm with the frying pan, changing the locks, tossing his clothes onto the drive, and refusing to answer the telephone? Despite making him culpable she had in fact arranged it all. Kimberly's post-partum depression was no doubt exacerbated by those two months of shared motherhood and espousal husbandry that barren Noppawan had conceived, but none could have foreseen the denouement. The world abounded in spills and mess and yet it was miraculous that, at least for many, it came together so well before finally going awry, dissipating as dew, life, the decent and debauched of it.

He opened his eyes. Everything was there as before including that body. He sat up; embraced the mesa of his legs within the multifarious sands of the desert of his mind; admired those various shades of color in the sand, perspectives made so by the variations of mood; and looked down. Consternated, he stared at a mattress cover dappled like a constellation from his soiling, and he laughed nervously. "But then why should it not be so with the extent of it," he thought. He was meaning the twenty minutes or longer of being sodomized, that roller coaster within which eventually prompted bowel movements in a futile attempt to excrete the intruder. Not knowing what he could do as he could hardly remove the mattress cover then and there, he pulled down a package of cigarettes from the mantle of the bed. He put a cigarette into his mouth but not able to find the lighter from the groping of his hand on the mantle, and seeing that it was not on the bed stand, he just let the fireless cigarette dangle in his mouth.

Experience (he smiled again, for as much as this ceaseless analysis of the intricacies of his life might seem morbid to others were they to have them their head, he found postulating potential reasons for his actions beyond the superficial an amusement park where the variation and length of the rides was infinite--it had always amused him to do so; and prior to this whole Kimberly affair he was in action if not thought as shallow and concave as the next person, and more hedonistic than most), there was nothing ugly or disdainful in a given experience but what the mind associated as positive or negative from social conditioning or from paranoid fears of possible ramifications from a little pain. Did some anal pain presage that he would ineluctably contract a disease from this man? No, it did not, nor had each of his myriad raptures of vaginal penetration in his sordid past indicated that the ecstasy he was experiencing in his groins would transcend into a meaningful companionship beyond sexual gymnastics.

Having forgotten to close the curtains there was a warped, oblong silver bar of refracted light on the floor in front of the bed. It was light from an adjacent street lamp that was molded and cast down onto the darkness of the floor. There was a slight sway of a mirror hanging on the wall with reflections of blurred and severed shapes seeming to appear, disappear, and reappear within its sway. What they were he did not know for sure. One was possibly a part of a corner of a wall and a bit of a footstool; another was possibly matte flanks of bed and flesh; less dubiously it seemed that there was a partial foot or severing of that foot, but whatever was being reflected was done so as a rearranging mélange. A cactus, a telephone, and a postcard in which he had only written, "Dear Noppadon, I am here in Nongkai thinking of you and everything. I want--" were yoked together on the bed stand. With every reopening of his eyes they seemed to command the turning of his face toward them not so much from the fact that his wallet was there in one of its drawers but more to suggest that his life was barren and he needed to contact someone. The inanimate which could not copy and transmit impressions of the world or one's relation to it, were to him, at that moment, capable of an empathy and directive that bypassed words. At least it seemed to be so of the items on the bed-stand, and he waited for them to mandate who he was to contact (the beautiful nurse at Siriaj Hospital, his swarthy wife with intellect as thick as the lenses of her glasses, or the sodomy division of the local police office--"hello Mr. Policeman. I would like to report the fact that a stray dog is stuck in my crevasse. You will sir. Thank you, sir. You are such a nice man. I will prepare a nice treat for you and your partner when you come"). He gasped in a muted chuckle.

"What are you doing?" asked a gecko that was crawling on the wall near the bedstand.

"Sitting here. Fornicating. Experimenting."

It engulfed him with glassy eyes that were unmoving oceans, even stagnant universes, and he knew that everything lacked purpose beyond being an object tossed out for pure animation. To not go forward was completely meaningless.

"Huh? What are you doing?" asked the man.

"Wanting to smoke but I can't find my lighter," said Nawin.

23

There were consecutive sneezes to which a forth was as incomplete as muffled sound. Then there was the wiping of his nose on his arm, a few seconds of an intolerable facial itch, which he scratched incessantly (such a plethora of pleasures there were in discomfort, or acclimating to this life as one was compelled to do, just an adequate amount concocted within an entity to keep it, in most circumstances, from cutting its throat or kimberlying downward) and his cigarette, still dangling loosely in his mouth, lit and allowed to disperse death unto him inexplicably. "Are you happy?" the intimate stranger asked him, but before any potential response could be uttered Nawin sensed his cigarette being extracted from him and, a second later, saw it wedged in the other's mouth for his long inhalation.

Nawin laughed at the filching during his elongated interjection of reproach. As he was most often his own adventitious source positing potential truths to the intense contemplative domain of his multi-tiered mind, which, at top levels, sought life's riddled viands voraciously; at first he did not register the question as coming from any interlocutor other than himself. He was preoccupied with trying to find an exact correlation between burning cigarette phalluses and the afterglow of sexual relations, conceptualizing it the way he would were he to transpose it to canvas with traditional gender substitutes, wondering if the masses of men really felt that pleasurable corporeal sensation + union with another was happiness, and if it really was so why he did not ever feel it.

Why, he asked himself in a bout of hubris, had this insolent creature, who a couple minutes earlier had been buried in sleep, reassembled his parts and spoken to him? He had not granted him permission to do so. It was merely this one's part to transport him home to the abuse that was the foundation of childhood. This he had done fully; and as it was concluded action subsequent cohabitation, to his mind, would be superfluous. By those painful, pleasurable thrusts of intimacy edifices, property, prosperity, verility, invincibility, relationships and stature, all that one made of a life by repudiating everything that one once was, were now seen as the sandcastles that they were and he himself as the ravaged spoils of dirt there to be bulldozed by others' wills as before, to sense the suppressed cries of childhood as before. He did not know how, after these ravaging trespasses of bodily entanglement he could maintain an amicable conversation with the invited violator and yet he did not know how he could avoid an attempt? He could not ask him to leave when he had, by desire if not volition, asked him to come here.

Was it not a standard belief, and a rational one at that, that conversation was the means to further intimacies, that sexual relations with strangers were inverted intimacy and sexual relations with men were perverted or at least distorted, inverted intimacy?; and yet even in heterosexual relationships, he said to himself, the normal sequence of mental divulging leading to the ribald, the carnal, and the bestial seemed its own desultory and discomfiting mess. Was it really unnatural for men to be together in this way? More than he might fear that it was, he feared that it was not. What could be more natural than competitive fencing and impaling another man with one's vibrating, titillating sword with a vibrant force far greater than women could take? Was it not vile for a married man to profane his relationship with his wife in such a way? Yes, he conceded, it was. Did he have compunction about his action? For what good it did anyone, yes he did; and yet this action was as natural as condoning or sanctioning killing itself; it was natural for the immune system to kill microorganisms, for a child, despite sentimental attachments, to grow up and out of all which he once thought of as dear, and for family to evaporate like morning dew.

Talk of love belied the innate desire to experience a workout, to at last turn off thought and respond as an animal should by instinct, to be released from desire tickling incessantly like the crawl of a line of ants on one's skin, and to release a surfeit into a hole with the instrument of urination, an intimate and exquisite release. Likewise, thoughts repudiating the naked truth that killing was as ineluctable and natural in a being as its own breath, contravened any degree of understanding of the life that the fates circumscribed man to have.

And as for being with a woman and begetting children with her, whether it be action that was virtuous or not, it was natural without equivocation; and yet when a marriage certificate, an artificial piece of paper, was signed, it became an instrument for self-deceit by fostering an illusion of permanence while a means to sanctify what was natural by saying that without legitimacy in ink and paper this carnal and emotional bond was debauchery. Thus by refining nature it contravened it. In his case, he only had nominal passion for Noppawan. To him they were two intellects clinging to each other, after family had dissipated from their lives like dispersing smoke from a conflagration. What could be more of an unnatural contrivance than this? And if not only the sport of man on man, but all unions of naked intimacy were illicit and vulgar without paper and ink contrived unions of prehistory predating and leading to both, the present generation would make vile bastards of all. At least that was what he thought or was thinking at the time. He might have thought of himself as self-contained despite at times feeling distraught over this incessant reign of impermanence deluging him; he might have thought of love as neediness and that, personally, it was emotional bonding that, like teddy bears, he himself was beyond as he was beyond Buddhist statuettes, jasmine rosaries, and the intervention of a Buddha god theistically; and yet he loved Noppawan nonetheless. What else could it be but love?

Unable to share experiences that he found himself in, even when certain that they would be pleasurable to a given person now lost to him the mind conjured its ersatz. On the train ride here she, of course, was not with him and yet, hauntingly, she was; and if he had gone in a second or third class carriage she would have particularly enjoyed this train ride with him more than she had: windows down, redolent smells grafted in the hard breeze and wafting the aisle of the car. When he was glancing at post cards so that he could send one to her, oddly in an eerie way, she was there with him urging him to find one for herself that more accurately depicted the history of Nongkai. Every time he thought of going straight into Vientiane she expostulated that it would be better to bypass the city as much as possible so that they might spend more time in the Plain of Jars. She was the plausible what might have been. and as he could not give to reality he would give to the hollow mirages that replicated therein. This, if not the entirety of the neediness called love, epitomized the good that was there.

He continued to think: ...and with solidity breaking into smaller and smaller pieces like bits and sub-bits of glaciers and then rearranging, the conclusiveness of conclusions controverted, and impermanence rife in all, was it not natural to need someone--even that he should be here--

"So, what is it?"

"Huh?"

"Yes or no?"

"Yes or no what? Am I happy? Is that what you asked?"

"Yes."

"Don't worry. I'm okay," responded Nawin indifferently.

"You didn't enjoy it?" asked the stranger. His voice was groggy in partial sleep.

"I guess I did," admitted Nawin "--as much as one can in that position. It was different."

"Different good, or different bad?"

"Different. I don't know. Why do you ask?" There was silence in which both men did not know what to say, and in it Nawin reproached himself for making the situation more awkward than it had to be, and then reproached himself for finding anything awkward in it at all. As though it were justified to be cautious upon finishing intimacies with a stranger he did not approve of or to be apathetic with an undertone of supercilious, sneering antipathy, any more than to partake of the carnal episode itself. Still he could not conceptualize anything innately wrong in activity with another man. Beings were attracted elements, compounds that enjoyed times of coupling as double compound entities; and cathartic releases of physical desire toward one or the other gender, like medicine to illness, restored one toward a more logical inquiry of thought. But, he told himself, he had gained no such release. His paramour had him spellbound and made him no more than a galley slave rowing the master's carnal euphoria. Perhaps, he thought, moral dilemmas were not on moral grounds at all. Perhaps they could be reduced to such basic factors as sexual frustration. He forced himself to reciprocate a feigned interest in enjoyment although he was not able to extricate himself from the phlegmatic tone that spewed from his mouth bearing his thoughts. "What about you?" he asked.

"I love you. Do you love me too?" Nawin looked away and did not say anything. Whether this question was an artifice contrived for monetary gain or a real neediness he did not know. It did occur to him that having this man really interested in him (a suitor of sorts) might be more disadvantageous for him economically than a brief tryst--not that the prodigal son needed to retrench his life with fewer mistresses and zero misters, and he was still contemplating the addition of a nurse at Siriaj Hospital to his intimate menagerie. Worse, he thought, if the neediness of this other party was one of emotional rather than financial deficiencies, he himself, a married man, might be dogged if not stalked by this undesirable, desired being, this being who might desperately need to register himself into a companion's brain. What was worse than to be with someone who needed to be needed, who needed another person to be wistful and yearn for him, and who needed to etch himself personally and as indelibly as one could onto the adventitious, impermanent putty of the human mind? It was not easy to be compassionate and extract oneself from such parasites. He could not believe anything that was linked to such an amorphous word as love, which only had one consistent thread within it and that was what all love was, a neediness within projected onto that which was without.

"Are you in pain? Did I tear you up?"

"Did you what? Did you tear me up?...Well...since you ask sitting is a bit painful but as much as I can tell, I guess that I am not torn up, as you call it. By the way, I am not used to this sort of thing and...to tell the truth...it is rather embarrassing to say this...with the action and all I think...I think I soiled the bed sheet."

"Soiled?"

"Soiled. What other word do you want me to use?"

The paramour laughed mildly. At first Nawin appreciated that the dry laughter was so terse and restrained. Then the fact that he had laughed at all seemed as inordinate insolence. "Maybe you should get up and I'll remove the sheet," he said irascibly.

"No, I'm going back to sleep. If it didn't bother me the first time I can sleep on it again. Leave it for the maids. It makes something new in their days."

"You're going to go back to sleep?"

"Soon. I did you long and hard but if there's no blood you aren't torn up."

"Okay, good; now can we talk about something else?"

"If you want. What were you staring at when I woke up?"

"I don't know--a post card I didn't finish writing; the telephone; a gecko crawling above the bed stand; the corners of the room which are filthy--the room must be infested with insects." Nawin smiled abashedly, chuckled, and then stared directly into the face of the paramour with a baffled expression. "You keep grinning. Why?"

"I'm happy."

"Happy?"

"The happiest. The happiest I've ever been."

"Well, good for you...I mean if you were happy before you've got more of it. If you weren't I guess you have less of it...unhappiness that is, negated negatives."

The paramour laughed. "You're a comedian. I love that; I love you," he said as his fingers slid into the elastic of Nawin's underwear. Nawin laughed incredulously careful not to release a cynical laugh out of fear that, although unlikely, the paramour could possibly mean that which he said.

"Don't you think it is a bit early to feel that way. It's certainly too early in the morning to say a lot of nothing."

"It's not nothing," he said, snapping the elastic--he himself wearing nothing but his grin. "No, that's not how I think. You just have to do things. If there is a good feeling ride it fully, you just have to throw yourself into it and live it. If you stand back and pick things apart because you don't know 100 percent you might as well be dead because what you're living isn't life."

"Is that so?" Nawin said. It was cogent enough to him who would have had the need and thus the gullibility to believe such things were it not for the countenance, the melodramatic tone of he who promulgated this holy maxim, and the circumstances that went contrary to the putative sentiments.

24

Sensing that a bit of enlightenment could accompany a binge of debauchery and provide him with not only wind but ablution into the cellar of his musty mind, he was given a reason for intimacy, not that this reason or any other would have to prevail in creatures so prone to irrational caprices as he now concluded that he was. So a man would seek less alien companionship with another man after a girlfriend had jumped from the eleventh story of a university building and a wife who had subsequently broken his arm with an iron frying pan now kept him locked out of their home--this attributing of men as less illogical and more steady presences, rightly or wrongly, and identifying solely with them was reasonable enough; but to succumb spellbound to the brevity of frenzy, knowing well such intimacies to be spectacles as brief and garish as the puffs of aerosol he and a college roommate used to spray and light so that they might experience an inferno of the air, to know and yet to do it nonetheless, was inane.

Now seated and stationary on this bed in this room and in this mind, groping for contours of objects in dark and curtailed space among antithetical thoughts and caprices, putative reality seemed nothing but the most tangible of the intangibles. As a result he became even more reticent, pondering what the right combinations were to live life fully: inward versus outward explorations; feeling versus logic; work versus leisure; silent reverie versus boisterous revelry; digressions into the future and the past; savoring the present moment as in lying on a bench at Wat Arun watching clouds overhead, sensing the breath enter and leave his frame, and feeling a sense of awe that he was even cognizant of all this; conversely, doing and having agenda and purpose about the affairs of man, interaction which allowed one to avoid the intrusiveness of too many unwanted, distracting thoughts, all of which confirmed his inconsequence even in the here and now. There had to be a harmony of these incongruous elements but he did not know how or to what degree.

"And I suppose you will always be there for me," Nawin asked with a sardonic smile on his face. He now wanted levity and the substance of sound, even his own, to dispel, or at least obfuscate the longevity that was in each and every minute to distract him from the realization of the hours until sunrise, and to preoccupy him during the time, still unknown, until departure of this intimate stranger.

He, the womanizer he once was, reproached himself for being here with this man in a chagrin of manhood, a mortification and yet a mortification of what he could not say. Perhaps there was no reason for mortification at all, he countered in a retort of thought. Perhaps this was a cleansing and a freeing of himself from a false sense of what manhood should be. Still, he had all these explosions of intimacy in the knowledge he would feel this vacuity afterwards, and that upon feeling it any moment could make him a perpetrator of indifference who rudely discarded this delusion rather than built a multi-story make-believe castle upon it; intimacy bedazzled him for a time before his return to a more subdued and substantive state; this time in an effeminate role of mute intercourse not to his liking but which he needed nonetheless; exacerbated sexual tension abated but not entirely extinguished in post-sexual melancholy. To know such matters and yet to interact this way regardless like any biologically programmed automaton thwarted by early childhood experience was an inane life.

So he concluded and re-concluded, with his thoughts becoming increasingly redundant, twisted, and plaited. To gain some solace and respite he hummed the melody of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Thinking as he did so that the whirlwind he would create by repeating it thrice therein should clear away all dross he instead found that the debris remained even as it dragged circuitously although less tediously in music.

"And I know that you will always be there for me," Nawin remembered himself saying facetiously. It occurred to him that this lover, this sprawled figure so near to him, was like a dog he had seen recently near Gaysorn Department Store lying on its back at the base of a Brahma statue, its genitalia an oblation to that deity. At that time, while he was chuckling at a deity aptly profaned and pondering how our pantheistic awe of nature had been overtaken by these artificial weeds of dogma, false stories and tradition, as with the alleged bones of the Buddha that were enshrined in a temple near the Silpakorn University branch in Nakhon Pathom, he was re-entering Gaysorn intent on purchasing a 38,000 baht watch so as to have it shine opulently upon his handsome albeit dark dirt-brown skin.