Chapter 2

Ruminating, he thought about how each year for his birthday she had fixed her American born, but not raised, angel food cake burnished in icing, and brought him to fairs to shoot the moving plastic ducks. Once she had taken him all the way to Bangkok for no other purpose than to allow him to see the sedentary reptiles there. He would often crawl through the window of her porch where shelves were cluttered in Avon bottles shaped in animal figurines, and when she saw him she would just chasten him mildly with, "You, yo-yo, get out of there. What are you thinking?" When he crawled onto her lap he felt the rugged velvety silkiness of her legs in panty hose and he would stroke them.

How cold her home was in summers with that air conditioner in the window of the living room on early into early morning chilling the house like an American winter, and he would snuggle deep under a saffron monk-colored blanket that was as stiff as it had been starched and ironed. Within that room where he would sleep there was a picture in black and white showing her in thick glasses with pointed silver rims on the frame and a long dress as she held him in a fulfilled and satisfied sense of pleasure. The image of the two of them--he a tiny child, but both of them children lost in time--was just a weathering photograph, a jaundicing pallid image lost forever, as a web page with an address that was indefeasibly and indelibly forgotten by all in time's thicket of images. It was one sentimental but insignificant moment lost in the compiling images of time--And here she was again, the one who had absconded away from them at their parents deaths in a Bangkok- to-Ayutthaya automobile accident, walking away from him hurriedly and as she did so passing the Temple of the Descending Sun.

"How foolish you are. Grandmother. And a rich grandmother at that, living in an air conditioned house instead of a broiling shack on stilts in the sylvan area of Ayutthaya. "Not yours, buddy; not yours," said a gecko that was crawling around his tomb within the train. "What?" asked Nawin, whining ingenuously. "The only panty hose that you have ever stroked are the ones you take off as a precursor to your copulatory sports." The gecko stuck out its tongue. "Brackish succulent skin of an edible silky velvet are always the way one likes it as long as they are young with tender meat and best of all, all vanillaly caucasian as an angel--and then the sand paper tongue strokes inside and out to get its salties and sugars. Young succulent skin whose scents, especially in their far from flowery holes, make silly male creatures repeat the delusion of intimacy time and time again like their fathers, grandfathers, and so on--young succulent skin as a varied brunch and dinner delicacy." The gecko released a dry acrimonious chuckle. "Speaking of eats, have you seen any mosquitoes in this smelly train?" "No," said Nawin. "Not a one." "What a pity," said the miniature, khaki colored lizard of the Chakri dynasty. The gecko glowered at Nawin with appetite and fixed interest as if he were an esculent appetize--the gecko crawling on the railing of the BTS Skytrain station looking down at the small womanly morsels and traffic below and amorous Nawin doing the same but as he glanced up dizzyingly at the facade of the colossal Intercontinental Hotel with its eerie pale-blue light diffused throughout, he felt like he was falling into a deep- blue eternal space. His soul, this odd inexplicable word that may or may not have a physical counterpart beyond the letters of the word, was falling into this alien, colossal structure with its lambent bluish light.

Then the edible Nawin woke, instantly realizing that his grandparents had died long before he was born and that here he was, just a few hours from turning forty himself (he was going to consider himself 39 for as long as he could), arm broken, relationship with a wife broken, and girlfriend deceased most horrifically, cowering from his sullied personal life on an upper sleeper of a Pullman car in a train bound for Nongkai and nowhere. He realized that he who had gained his acclaim as a painter of Patpong prostitutes, and had burgeoned from poverty by his dismal themes and color, was all dried up in themes now. Creativity and life were, for him, veritably exhausted. Was this the middle life crisis that was so ubiquitous to man? He did not know.

"Hey guy! Sawadee khrap [hello]," he said with face lowered toward the bunk beneath him. He wanted diversion from any stranger who could plant him outside his own thoughts. The stranger chortled at the face hanging upside down before him. "What?" he asked.

"Why are you upside down?" asked Nawin innocently.

"I am, am I? Khrap, khrap [yes, yes], I guess so that you would ask me why I am upside down."

Nawin smiled widely. "Are you going to Vientiane?"

"Yes."

"To do what?"

"Partying there. You?"

"Sure, partying with you."

"Might as well have an early one then." The stranger raised a beer up to Nawin who put it in his hands and gave the prayerful gesture of the "wai" even though it was upside down. "How long can you hang that way?"

"Don't know," said Nawin.

"Don't try drinking it that way. I don't want you to dribble on me."

"Yes, of course, khorpkhun khrap [thank you]. Are those guys you were sitting next to earlier going to the party too?"

"Of course. Guests of honor, you know. They have overcome servitude in the Japanese owned/Thai co-signed sweatshops. Independence, you know. They will be facing starvation in Laos shortly. Early death is like being a marathon winner, don't you think? Guys who starve to death are the true winners because they get to the finish line first. Yes, a party for losing jobs and visas. Games too. My favorite is who will be the first one to dunk his head the longest in sunk drunkenness. And yet I am also partial to another game: which of life's losers will join the high ranks of the monks for a bite to eat and which ones will marry their sisters."

Nawin laughed out a spray of saliva but immediately regained self-control the best he could when upside down and having drizzled in public. "Oh my, so sorry, forgive me." For a moment he deliberately sobered his rolling caprice of laughter with the thought of the bleak scenario beyond the bold and refreshing honesty of the Laotian's words. "You've lost your jobs?"

"We have. Business slowed and our use is over. We will drift elsewhere in other temporary experiences. Don't worry about us. Don't worry about me. Why are you going to Laos?"

"For a while," said Nawin evasively. "I guess I should give you back your beer."

"Keep it. If I run out of beer later maybe I can ferment wine from some of the rotting day old rice I was trying to eat earlier and whatever you have stinking up your ass."

Nawin chortled uproariously until the saliva began an internal strangulation. Feeling as if he were choking he coughed for a couple moments. However refreshing this acrimony so unencumbered by Thai-Laotian etiquette was, it was not worth dying for; and so he retreated for a few moments on his bunk until dangling once again with an opened can of beer.

He thought again how this stranger defied the obsequious norm with a refreshing brashness that was like having cold water thrown into his face. But like a fish that was suddenly snagged on a hook, images of himself in poverty, which he did not care to recall, caught him within. His pleasure in the stranger waned as impressions of beings and beings themselves waned. He countenanced a mere smile which altered further into a wry, contorted, and ungainly expression that expressed little beyond the awkward fidgetiness of wanting to withdraw from social interaction. Tightened into the hook of memory, he unwillingly recalled the hysterical deprecatory laughter, guffaws, and jeers on that one mortifying day in gym class when, at the age of eleven, his loose underwear fell through the legs of his shorts. From that point forward he did not oppose his family's will to have him toil along with them as a noodle worker in their restaurant. At that time he preferred serving food to being a viand for those who gormandized oddities. In this mundane world one who suffered from a peculiar bout of misery more dramatic than others (like underwear falling onto the floor of the gymnasium) was cannibalized as an inhuman freakish joke that fed their appetite for joyous contempt. At that age of eleven he just wanted to serve obscurely and enter the world of implausible comic book scenarios shortly before sleep. Back then noodles, comics, and sleep had given to him a varied but unaware extension of himself.

He considered pulling a few thousand baht from his wallet to give to this Laotian. Then it occurred to him that he would need to give the same to all of these marathon contenders, but he did not have that much money in his wallet nor was he so inclined to give what he had to one let alone the countless many. If it were unethical to know the suffering of an acquaintance and be unmoved to assist him, he rationalized, giving special favors to one with no regard to the masses did not seem any more ethical. So, as always, he horded what he had; and indeed he was one of those who had an abundance being a purveyor of turpitude as well as art which together was popular with both wealthy intellectuals and idiots alike. Such a trivial dabbling of philanthropy, he further argued, would more likely than not be money thrown into the whirlwind of drugs, liquor, or other exacerbated vice from which a self-deprecating fool more easily annihilated himself. And if he wanted to believe the false presage that such a nominal act would cause perpetual kindness the way a rock thrown in a creek begets one ripple that begets another it would not matter. He would not be able to successfully delude himself for long; at best he would be engendering a short time of ever diminishing ripples.

"Besides," he thought, "if this guy is so badly off, he should not be riding in an air conditioned car." It was a rather harsh judgment given his knowledge that the poor sometimes treated themselves to a bit of middle class opulence to make themselves connected to the society that they served and to sense that they could thrive rather than merely live. He repeated to himself that he would not pull out a few thousand baht and give it to a stranger who would resent him regardless of what he did or did not do. This was his conclusion in a sleep-deprived head that had too much crammed into it.

He then considered that sleep was a diminishing reduction of memory (a zipped file in a computer) but one where the zipping weathers away the details. He considered that, given enough hours over a period of evenings, sleep could even dilute the memory of Noppawan repeatedly swinging the frying pan against his arm--an arm that was still throbbing and itching in the cast.

Giving a thousand baht would imply having a lot to give and giving nothing would imply snobbishly holding back from giving what little he could, so he handed the man a hundred baht. "I can spare this. Keep it as money for transportation when going back to Vientiane."

"Sure, why not, thank you" said the man.

Nawin felt satisfied by his decision to give little. It was a compromise between wanting to ignore the sotto voce of thought that told him to give what he had and that which made him into a culprit for wanting to keep it for himself. And yet between both extremes there was the constant cynicism that the poor were merely pigeons and the more one threw crumbs to them the more they would come to eat. It was a way of not examining that the years of his life were pyrrhic: that they had given to him affluence but at the cost of diminution of his humanity--that each year he was becoming more pachydermatous than before with an inability to empathize with others which made them as disconnected to his life as a passing cumulous cloud. Only the storms, the headlines of the masses that he read in English from the Bangkok Post, would get his attention. A female beggar on an overpass with a child that she nursed under her shirt was no different than someone sitting on a fire hydrant as he waited for a bus. Still, he thought, this was what he would try to correct by a solitary wandering into Vientiane.

He noticed some lint on his shirt and flicked it off but really it was the stranger whom he now wanted to flick away.

"What will you do?" he at last asked.

"Starve," said the Laotian. Nawin saw envy and resentment in the stranger's face even though few things were absolute when being conceptualized upside down. If his were envy and resentment it was no different than the way many of his Thai friends often looked at him when finding out that he had an American passport. But then, everything was relative. Perhaps a Somalian would look at a Laotian in the same way.

"How did you hurt your paw," asked the Laotian

"An old war injury," sighed Nawin.

"In Thailand?' That sounds a bit peculiar. You are a bit peculiar, aren't you? An accident that you don't want to talk about--some type of fight with a guy where you acted like a coward or a civil war in your own home that-"

"Hard to explain," interrupted Nawin.

"Okay, whatever. Now tell me what you are going to Laos for."

"Again for a while--a few weeks or so," said Nawin in jest but seriously believing that there was comfort in friends and acquaintances alike remaining strangers.

"Wanting to have fun with a Laotian girl?"

"Do you have one in mind for me?"

"I will sell my sister at a special discount for you if it doesn't cause more war injuries." These were mere words, flippant wisps of air to fill the vapid moments of time while confined with undesirable others on a train. They were of no more serious intent than the earlier conversation but the idea of selling a member of a family, or selling them out, was something too close to home. It was repugnant enough to make this paragon of honesty transformed grotesquely into an inordinate abuser--such were the fathoms of childhood trauma that a facetious play with words meant that devils could be made instantly from gods, and that gods were made from the muck of childhood sensitivities like any sand or snowman. He wanted to end the conversation abruptly but needed to find a graceful and amicable exit that would keep the one disliked clueless of this fact.

"You don't say? No, probably not. I've become spoiled by taking whiter meat."

"I saw your marriage ring when you first began babbling. Are you married to a European?"

"No, a Thai woman who is darker than us both. That is another story."

"Why did you marry her if she is so dark and ugly and likes to hit on you?"

He became more conscious of the barely bearable itchiness under the cast. It seemed to him that it would be a handy excuse for absconding to his bunk. And there he could rummage through his bag for a hanger from which to scratch with.

"Don't keep me waiting all night for an answer."

"It's morning now. She's not all that ugly and she is a good communicator. Well, my arm is itching. I need to get some powder or something, and besides I've kept you and perhaps others up long enough. I thank you for the beer. It is already making me drowsy. Excuse me, the blood has gone to my head."

"Okay. Whatever."

Nawin slunk back into what he amusingly considered his "tenebrous tomb" not that he found such retreats into himself so odious. Neither society nor solitude seemed to him as being all that commodious and so throughout every waking moment of his life he paced the two rooms of himself like a member of the Burmese National League for Democracy under house arrest. Having exhausted the reserve that fueled what extroverted characteristics he possessed, he just lay there finishing his drink and waiting for the liberating force of sleep to deliver him.

2

A prodigious, big boned figure of a woman with stiff raised arms that were erect, gesturing boughs waited for her man, not as a doting woman but as a martinet; and four times she demandingly called his name, 'Zero', and four times there was nothing.

(If his brainwaves were water flooding into his hard skull boat and the air-conditioned drafts that he tried to escape by bundling himself within his blankets were the battering inundations of oceanic waves, then it would seem that he was foundering in both the depths of himself and the world for every minute his restless, lopsided head shifted to the other side of his pillow. In the middle of the particular dream he was now in, he turned sharply on his left side and he would have fallen from the precipice of his bunk most judiciously in recompense for Kimberly's death were it not for plastic black straps that allowed him to be restrained there to his sentence of dreams-- suicidal dreams periodically jolting the body but having little to do with her.) At last a man as fat as a tub and as sequacious as a child wobbled toward this woman, 'Four'; but, according to the feelings of the god, Nawin, that drenched the ground that they stood upon lugubriously, the two were not meant to stand together. No, the four and the zero were not meant to stay together and the zephyrs of the god blew strongly upon them to obtain their separation. But those winds were futile as a device for prying away such an inspissated couple for once they were together this man and woman babbled to each other a mutually pleasurable one word jabberwocky despite the fiercely driven rains, hail, and the flash flood at their feet. The drone of these distant voices was of forty, and each repeated it to the other forty times. Forty was eighty times redundantly beaten onto his head as if it were a drum; and with a slight headache Nawin awakened.

He instantly realized that he was forty; and although he told himself that he did not feel any different, and that he surely looked no different than he had some hours earlier at the age of 39, and that to have had the span of years needed to successfully rise from what he was, was more of a blessing than a curse, the idea that he was a half rotten apple hanging loosely and purposelessly from a tree made him cringe and wish that he were not at all. Light and flippant, jocular and yet terribly morose, this self-destructive mood was nonetheless powerfully upon him for he could not stop himself thinking that forty was an end of virility, and that an end of virility was the end of manhood, the end of all. This suicidal taunting that was implanted in his brain from a dream snatched as a theme of fears in overall consciousness was, he knew, the result of turning forty in this tomb. Not wanting to confront the morbidity of this attack, he retreated back to sleep as if it were the sanctuary from negative ideas instead of being their crucible.

The gecko did not favorably view Nawin unzipping his skin and lying down in his tenebrous tomb in such a manner. A man behaving like this, instead of fleeing from its formidable presence was nothing like it had ever witnessed before, and it found the situation extremely puzzling. As preoccupied as Nawin was in escaping his carnal flesh and emulating those carcasses he and his wife were so partial to (particularly the slit middle aged husband and wife of a car crash in Ayutthaya who basked peacefully in the lighting of their glass and formaldehyde coffins in the anatomical museum at Siriaj Hospital), he did not notice that the gecko was glowering with its forty eyes-- glowering at the man for being so inert when he should be fleeing from the reptile and for having undressed from his besmirched outer layer of flesh with such a crude, complete, and unnatural disrobing. The museum was an anniversary site Nawin and his wife had in fact gone to on a number of occasions to commemorate their youthful meetings there, and to see the freakish human pottery of tawny-brown or tanned ochre that had been of such comfort to them as teenagers. Back then, before finding the dead people and each other, each of them had been wandering respectively through an asphyxiating smoke that was as inescapable as a labyrinth and more confusing. But within it they retained a faint hope that the smoke would eventually disperse from the battle ground of family and that one day this abstract word, family, with nothing concrete in it would altogether vanish--vanish intellectually and emotionally the way the river goddess of Loy Khratong diffused through a child's years until the abstraction was gone from the mind as yesterday's smoke. With 'family' being a word marring their worlds, it was only natural that their hopes should be revived in these preserved entities of Siriaj Hospital. Once alive but now the smallest of freaks jarred on shelves, and the largest grounded in containers, they were a reminder that there was a stage of mangled life, of death, of being put on a shelf, of being displayed as a museum piece, and myriad other unknown possibilities. As it was with them, so family was a battle that would end as all battles ended. Battle grounds could become verdant again but this was not so of the battle ground of family and they smothered in each other wistful thoughts of a return. As a married couple they would occasionally take the Chao Phraya river boat to the museum so that they might reminisce about those meetings of their youth, thank the preserved specimens that had saved them from life, and maintain a lexicographical stance that words like "death" should mean precisely that despite the vehement denials, neologistic concoctions of a heavenly overture, and anthromorphic self-made mythologies of the masses. In some respects, despite the enormity of his size, Nawin was like any raw meat that the gecko had caught before; but never before had any of its prey skinned itself and by its own volition lay before it as inanimately as any torn, half uneaten comestible. The gecko watched Nawin who was poised like a reclining Buddha and staring at the ceiling that hindered the welkins. Although the skinless nude lying there was a bit like a boy praying after slipping out of his clothes, forgetful of getting into his pajamas, the gecko was not able to make this connection. It just assumed that the skinned and fairly inanimate human was playing dead to save itself from becoming its meat. But as time went by the inert human creature became so wholly opprobrious to the gecko, who valued a good hunt, that at last, as the small ceiling fan continued to turn arthritically, churning an unnoticeable, fetid draft of warm air in the direction of the man and the beast with a wobbling, scraping sound like cooks in sidewalk restaurants mixing fried rice but instead mixing these myriad, noxious odors of the train, it informed Nawin of his freakish obscenities with its tacit baleful eyes and scrolled tongue.

When he woke up his headache was worse. "A second commute is never good," he told himself (meaning the commutes to and from sleep that were as two onerous trips to and from Ayutthaya within a day). He pressed his palm against his forehead where his thoughts were taut and moved incrementally like the lethargic cold blooded reptile of Bangkok's traffic. Painful as his headache was, he told himself that it was just. It was a well deserved "mental flagellation" (meaning an excoriation of disturbing dreams for the sins of Kimberly's death, Noppawan's separation, and the general muck that epitomized his personal life). He told himself that he did not suffer enough in his waking hours so a higher arbiter than will seemed to be his judge and executioner, and it was all just.