Chapter 20

Shopping was only adjunct to the instinct that prompted the switching on of one's breath. Of course he would do it naturally for man's energy was not to be self-contained, but instead was continually changing in changeable containers, and in desperate moments he would barter what he had for intimacy--barter with what he had. And if he knew not what he hoped to gain from a spiritual journey already thwarted in activity similar to the perversity of his youth, all he needed to do was to look at the obvious. From it, there could be no other interpretation but that he wanted to be taken back to a feeling of ravaged youth when he had perverse hopes that the physical penetration would stop while at the same time he would be recognized as permanently married to his brother. Being taken back home to a foundation of dilapidated innocence, but an ingenuous foundation nonetheless, he sought a return to himself that was the ends and not the means.

In this guest house in the city of Nongkhai, this was what he had to have, and it was now his. Whether he would have to pay for it with money or time remained to be seen. It seemed to him that there were just these two payments, each a type of direct or indirect pleasure. If the stranger asked for money, then it would be proof that a contract of brief employment had taken place in which he was hiring him not to be his master but a slave. If this were true, the nature of the relationship would be unambiguous enough: it would be that of hiring someone to do a bit of drudgery which they would not want to do or would not think pleasurable enough to do if the pecuniary rewards were not there, and after receiving the sum, departing from his life like a pizza delivery boy. This, Nawin thought, would be best for his own purposes. However, if no money was transferred he might be thought of by this one as a female surrogate who by one intimacy made an implied contract of continual intimacies as the sole favored supplier of pleasure.

The intimate stranger looked irritated. Then he smiled bitterly. "Sure, something like that. I like being kind to the elderly." It was a delayed response to Nawin's flippant comment of "I'm sure you will always be there for me."

"Elderly?"

"Khrap" he said with a wai. "Can you tell me your age. I mean how old are you honestly?"

"Thirty something." Honesty did not always come out despite being summoned.

"Elderly, as I said. How old do you think I am?"

"I'd hate to know."

"Seventeen."

"Seventeen, really? Hmm." He pursed his lips thoughtfully. "Single, and barefoot free. I am married, you know."

"Married? Well, married men have to get it too."

"I suppose so." Nawin sniggered mutedly while feeling both amusement and aversion at being in this guest house and in this company, this effeminate role to which he found himself in, and of becoming so old despite feeling youthful physically even with all this distorted emotional stretching over the past month. He sensed that the stranger knew that he was trying to sabotage the possibility of their intimacy becoming a relationship and he felt compunction over it. Still, to sabotage and extricate himself from debauchery thick, viscous, and onerous to his spiritual pursuit (although he did not believe in the spirit) seemed the wisest course of action, and so he could hardly disabuse himself of such an idea.

25

At first the word "elderly" seemed, if not ludicrous, exaggerated and distorted, an irascible utterance of the intimate stranger that a playmate twice his age would not be a more gullible victim of scheme and schemer. But then he questioned his judgment on this matter as well for as he could not think of anything that he knew absolutely, how could he trust his own conjecture about one whom he was not familiar with beyond some scant words and vacuous physical intimacies and had no intention to try to know by speech or the intercourse of minds, beyond that which was thrust upon him? Considering the fact that every morning when a man slipped on his pants, usually after one sordid nocturnal adventure or another, he also put on a belief that he really did exist and was himself and not someone else (in his case that which he called Nawin, this free and thus debauched libertine-artist, not that he was so hard- pressed for entertainment that this issue of absolute knowledge that he existed, this epistemological speculation more comfortably set in humor than horror and resembling a confounded baby playing with his fingers, should be much of a subject of speculation) he then thought how little he knew with absolute certainty and how frightening this really was. He smiled at his friend with that strange, contemplative longing that introverts projected to belie their disdain for the outside world, withdrew, and looked away.

Then that which was thought to be mendacious and absurd seemed to be true in the perennial mutating, albeit perhaps, in terms of truth, non-evolving thoughts of the mind. Even if the exaggerations of the youth were noted and culled from memory and perception one truth would be irrefutable: Nawin was undoubtedly forty which made him marginally but undeniably a middle aged man; and if not old now he soon would be, just as he already was within the perception of his definition of youth. Loss of what he once was, just as loss of who he once was when with others who once were, was the inexorable forward movement of it all, toward what aim no intellect could even begin to guess and to which, apart from death, he knew of no escape. Nine seemed an insurmountable age to one who was five, and of a forty year old boy an inordinate amount of humanity would think of as near the precipice of old age and death; but, he told himself, he did not live by others perception of him, or if he did, he did unwittingly and it was as ineluctable as day meets night, there was surely solace to be found in not having one strand of grey hair on his head or elsewhere and in being without a single wrinkle. In the judgment of the mirror skewed by that which he wanted to see there was a collaborative work of biographical fiction not so far from reality and given credibility from the obvious fact of feeling physically no different than he ever had. According to this collaborative fiction, little had changed over the past twenty years except the increasing amount of people who came and went from his life so vertiginously.

Body conceived and mounted on the barren rock of the planet; mind peopled like speckled icing on a rich boy's birthday cake so as to have meaning; meaning that was stripped and denuded in change; and for all his consternation in this dizzy state it did nothing to redeem or resurrect them to his life once again. All came and went leaving only diminished, diminutive copies of themselves clustered there in the brain as furtive shadows digressing the reality of the present into that which once was. And even if Kimberly were to de-decompose with cremated remains reassembling to allow her to rise from the dead with all continuing as before there would be the knowledge that she had chosen death to separate herself from him ineluctably, and this alone would thwart what they had into perfunctory roles of financial provider and taker. How she could jump like that as if he had never been there for her or any of his entourage of women, he did not know. He may have wanted to be thought of as a nonchalant playboy to the outside world, as newspaper articles smudged him as being, but if one were to examine the portraits of those women whom he both played and portrayed it would be clear that solemn grey empathy, the only real love there was, sullied the reds and oranges of his passions into the pain of empathy--not that with each day of adulthood he did not find bits of his sensitivity chafed and weathered away in time like an image of a face sculpted in a mountain.

Despite both women having concocted the plan and being signatories to this document agreeing to surrogate motherhood, he was an adulterer according to both, not so much for the other women that he had been with, but by being the natural father and husband of one and the legal husband of the other. Thus they provided him with evidence that "adultery" was just a perception like everything else and from it that a homosexual encounter was, as his brother had called their activity together, cheap dates more aligned to sport. Relationships of this nature were not acts of adultery any more than masturbation in the shower was adultery with water. At least, he told himself so to feel less guilty and the words were a successful analgesic. And as for Kimberly and his wife whom he as philanderer nonetheless had many years of shared friendship, how could he be domesticated and exclusive to either one when exploration of the study of the sadness and rapture of human existence still beckoned him? These were tenable arguments that passed successfully through the scrutiny of his mind permeating all regions and though he had not isolated it completely his beliefs were: 1. that he was born the sole owner of his penis and twenty years after his birth, when he signed a marriage certificate that was deliberately spilled ink on paper meant, as strange as it was that spilled ink meant anything, to show enduring friendship toward Noppawan and a wish to have a shared life together, he had not sold his anatomy to her; 2. that conversation with a female friend at a coffee shop (in the past this usually being a student or colleague at Silpakorn University on those rare semesters when he was not on a sabbatical) could be much more intimate than half hours of ecstasy which were not intimacy but a delusion of intimacy in which, when innate hungers were subdued, the man would at least in thought return to his wife and then the following day be able to pursue real intimacy with her; 3. that sex was exercise and just as he did not need permission from his wife to exercise at a fitness center he could think of no reason he would need permission to exercise his penis and be exorcized of his primitive hungers that would take over his higher thoughts and agenda if not released; 4. that a man was programmed to, as the Bible declared, "be fruitful and multiply" and so one could not oppose his basic biological urges; 5. as it would take so much energy to restrain instinct, this coerced restraint was a wasted resource that might be used more constructively, and 6. that the only reason a woman got angry at a man for his nocturnal adventures was because in antediluvian times a woman was scared that she would lose her hunter, for clearly back then women were not physically capable of hunting, nor were they able to even gather fruit from trees or berries from vines if they had to take care of their babies, and thus they became angry and jealous of a man's other sexual encounters because they were threats of losing their economic provider. Humans in these 30,000 years did not change so if it was true in earlier times, it would have to be true now no matter what memory-bugaboos of the past spooked him to cling to another by a more common and domesticated lifestyle--bugaboos that made him now see outlines of ominous forms in the corners of both the room of the guest house and in its amorphous darkness.

He might question whether the mirrored image of himself that he saw daily was real or refracted light made into a roseate image of the mind, but at the very least his face, unlike many middle aged men he knew, did not look like a squished shammy that he used to burnish the shine of his Mercedes Benz GL sports utility vehicle, that same vehicle which he had abandoned in the drive a few weeks ago for that emergency taxi ride to the hospital.

He thought of how he had importuned her, this stoic wife of his, to drive him to the hospital, of her obdurate refusals even when she had been the perpetrator of his broken arm and spintered clavical, and how it was from guilt his silent recriminations had mutated to hate in that taxi ride to Siriaj Hospital, that hospital that in youth they had gone to be with the abused dead of the anatomical museum.

Then he tried to channel his thoughts from hate filled digressions to how in the vicissitudes of life among so many shammy faced people a face like his maintained a fairly stable look. He smiled, amused by himself and the peculiarity of being here within this sordid black adventure in a guest house in Nongkhai. Then he sank himself in the depths of sullen night and sullied denouement.

He wanted to sleep off whatever time lapsed until the stranger left. His wallet was in a drawer of a night table near his side of the bed. He was a light sleeper when circumstances dictated, so any noise would awaken him unless it were that accompanying a fatal blow, but this was not America. The opulence of Bangkok might entice poor school girls in uniform to become whores of old Chinese-Thais and straight men to be serpentine prostitutes, but few were the Buddhists who would kill their servants of their pleasures. Still, even with the probability of being snug and secure in his den of decadence, the croaking of those incessant frogs outside ensured that no sleep was possible for a city dweller who deemed traffic to be a purr when hearing the harangue of the jungles.

At one moment, he wanted the creaking ceiling fan that was turning incessantly to peel with the plaster so that the metallic arms might fall and embrace them both mincing them and this scene into pulp. At another moment, however, he thought about how good it was to be here with the distraction of another being on such a day as Father's Day, a day that diced people like him in the wistful sentiment of early family. That family had never been more than bits of stinking scraps of sweetness tossed out to his scoffed, kicked, and abused existence; but starved, emaciated dog that he at that time was, he had been given enough that was kind to keep the hateful experiences of childhood embedded in his head while reminding him that he was born one of a countless litter of dogs trashing the sidewalks of time. Dysfunctional families might be more prevalent in Thailand than most people believed but their members could ignore this fact unless they belonged to extreme cases, and under the "good deeds beget good deeds" philosophy of the Buddhists a wretch like him must have done something monstrous indeed to know nothing but the breaking of family. With virtually everyone paying homage to fathers and all genuflecting to majesty there was such loneliness for members of extreme cases on such a day.

Telling himself that he should not treat the intimate stranger with indifference, he half-slapped, half-clasped, the foot of his companion as though shaking hands with him. It was a gesture no less awkward than any of his other tepid nonsexual attempts to relate to him and came from a nervousness at parting from his masculine ways and returning to effeminate ones, and from thrusting his will to allowing himself to be a pawn to the will of another. Then he returned to the freedom of darkness and silence.

If by this encounter he profaned his wife, if she were still anything other than proscribed by legal document alone, so be it. If his actions were adulterous, it seemed to him that, as they were undertaken in sport, they were mildly so (his brain, being a large circular mass had thoughts that went around in circuitous orbits as if nothing were ever resolved) and thus his private parts were not to be circumscribed to pacify the jealous instincts of women who long ago in antediluvian pre-history feared the loss of a provider. If ethical, he told himself, a man should be mildly self-restrained allowing some movement of the libertine, without allowing all actions and thought to degenerate to appetite alone. This was logical restraint.

26

To be male: to have this perennial sexual appetite and its feasting for pleasure, dominance, and self-preservation; and the release of such the surfeit of tension through the explosion of liquid shrapnel; a discharge all the stronger and more accurate for the apparatus not having been used for some time; potent and inimical fertilizing springs like long suppressed geysers shot out potential life through nature's hand and bidding but as such arsenal all the same; live weaponry shot from a missile launcher that could not be said to be possessed or manipulated by any other force than that of the given man himself, a being who with enough experimentation was eventually cognizant of sexual relations as an illusion of intimacy and yet was pressured beyond restraint nonetheless by urges and promptings of appetite and titillation and for personal sensation that might awaken a sense that he could be more than the tedium of whatever redundant tasks he was assigned as work that provided him with sustenance, or free of monetary bondage altogether, to break from the vacuity of his shell (earlier, both of them had stepped into the room only to sit down on edges of the bed in an awkward state where words were nascent, catatonic wisps of air, stillborn fetuses of pneumatic thought, decomposing on lips; and at this time, before a removal of articles of clothing in which all was removed except the fear of the unknown euphemized as moral conscience, he would have been disingenuous had he told him to leave... now, however even with not having had any sexual satisfaction of his own from this encounter he could tell him to go and mean it as with him gone he would be free to go himself and how difficult could it be just to state what was really in the foremost part of one's mind, to unfold and spread out one's will upon the second of its mental conception as one would in deliberately casting his reflection onto waters and with the sincerity and tackless artlessness of a child?... and if this potential utterance of candor were done, articulate albeit lacking an adult's sophistication for subtle and separate, antithetical layers of that which was said, logically meant, and yearned for, this triple entendre of politeness and deceit, he would find it liberating to be such a simpleton but he was unable to say that which he meant so all that he could do was to lie and prevaricate...he could attest that as it was Father's Day he needed to leave and see his own family (who would believe that someone of forty would not have one), that shortly there would be a reunion in which he and his wife would surprise his father, (dead as he was) by showing him their infant grandson... but then for such words to be plausible, he would have to be here in Nongkhai with a wife instead of as a single, solitary traveler; he would have to be in a more domestic setting than a guest house for foreigners and their whores; and in a coupling other than wet, fetid nakedness with another male...to be hypocritical enough to even say such a thing, how could he be thought of as anything but a middle aged man who did not know whether to fire or be fired upon, or if an experience was to be enjoyed or feared, a child ignorant and uncomfortable in self and the world at large, which, questioning everything as he did, he supposed that in actuality he was); attractions made all the more so by the magnetic pull of some vague feeling that was a composite of odors, sights, voices, attention, and interaction which seemed to emit and reek of the diminished, mostly forgotten blur of early family; to be so possessed by that which was long ago that it should be the conduit and thrust of succulent sexual truculence, and yet not know the specific memories that were behind it all.

In this present circumstance of not only failing to satisfy himself but existing as an obsequious and passive body there to be manipulated by another what he had done, this effeminate role that he had engaged in, was of this male instinct and yet a clear aberration of it. Only months earlier he had been a sequacious adherent of it as an incorrigible womanizer, and yet now his actions were more impotent than a misfiring and his manhood was debunked by being sodomized.

Still, by becoming something less than a man did it not allow him to reemerge as a human being? Such was to be hoped for when witnessing that the limited self in art and in life could not change the world for the better and that, in the race to make a success of himself before his short time on the planet expired (money and fame sought and pursued relentlessly after a youth debased in poverty and abuse), his sensitivities hardened so that now he could bypass a beggar on an overpass without giving a baht or feeling much more than an instant of empathy or compunction.

It was his hope with this sojourn to the sister cities of Nongkai and Vientiane to resurrect himself. He thought about how different he was from the boy who would extricate trapped insects from a window sill. He was losing bits of his humanity all the time with every assertive darting walk through the crowded sidewalks of Bangkok.

In certain ways it seemed that in the deviation from normal instinctual male drives he was becoming free of pretensions of being anything more masculine than a mere man, a vulnerable, needy creature who often articulated a wish for an extension of manhood and an introvert's desperate need for at least a minimal physical connection to fellow man, although in his case now it was an encounter with a male who looked like his brother, Kazem at 18 when he was 14. Just as that which was past was ineluctable memory and stored in him still, and this storage of the replicas to the incidents of his life could never be made right as it was all distant and unalterable and as feral as brothers running along the banks and sand bars of the Chao Phraya River, he would always be under impulses to avoid the painful past by clogging his mind in amusements or urgencies of interaction with other beings. And for whatever activities he might devise as distractions from his thoughts, fears of the vacuous nature of existence would always be man's ineluctable truth, and without agenda vacuous truth was his in excess.

If his thoughts were a quagmire what else would they be especially in this room and in this uncomfortable company whom he would not part with so easily?.. could not part, or part assertively, as doing so would be rude not only to the stranger but to himself as well since, like it or not, this surrogate brother, this lover, was a distraction from being without family on Father's Day and to some degree he needed him or he would not have had him here.

He existed in memories as all of his experiences in the days of his life were nothing other than past incidents; and so for those who reproached a man for living in the past (as that beautiful nurse at Siriaj Hospital had done after overhearing him talk in his sleep--a woman who despite this scolding might heal his brokenness yet were her number saved on a sheet of paper instead of into a telephone that did not have the possibility of being retrieved from the trash receptacle at the train station) they at least meant well by their errant intrusions on such bitter sweet memories. If only mandates to turn off memory like tap water were so simple then he would not be seeking to rehabilitate recalcitrant corpses that refused to decompose.

Here confined to this room as long as the intimate stranger remained on the bed, there was at least thick textured darkness and silence that for him provided an inscrutable sense of comfort, a vast open sky and sea where a solitary man could find some liberty in his ruminations like a child enamored by the flexible manipulations of his body while at the same time obscuring how constricted he was within both the room and the company. Thus it was the only blanket that he had. Still he knew that he could not stay despondent forever and judged that it was time to once again speak. He asked, "What is your name again?"

"Boi."

"Boi?"