Chapter 21

"It's a nickname."

"Yes, of course it's a nickname. It's just that when I was coming here I met someone on the train who was also calling himself that. I guess it is often used around here."

"Maybe."

"You're from here?"

"Where else would I be from?"

"Couldn't you be from somewhere else?" Nawin chuckled more warmly than a snicker but what came out was still a fusion of both.

"Poor people don't change to better locations. They remain trapped where they are. What is Bangkok like?"

"You've never seen it?"

"No except clips from television news."

"Polluted, congested, opulent and slummy; a mess [thinking but not saying, "all making it rife for nights not unlike this one"] but mess with promise."

"You don't like it there?"

"It has its moments. You surely know someone besides me who lives there."

"Why would I?"

"Okay, why would you?"

"What do you do there?"

"Nothing really...live, be."

"You dress fancy, live in a city and you don't do anything."

"Hard to explain, but essentially that's right."

"You a rich businessman?"

"Artist."

"Artist?"

Nawin laughed and gesticulated an artist drawing something.

"From a background of rich businessmen. Noodle workers. Dirt poverty. But if you work hard, have talents, use them commercially and invest wisely Bangok or any other large city can liberate a man." He resented even having to divulge this and kept asking himself why the man did not leave and why when the communication of bodies, the illusion of intimacy, had passed, he and this man or any two people were compelled to forage for scraps of words to assemble a bridge of ideas that would link them, two distant and alien islands. Words merely verified the fact that their intimacy was a mirage.

The activity had ceased, the pleasure had been brought to him and had been his alone. All that there now was, was anti- climactic small talk. He told himself that a good guest would show his gratitude by getting dressed quickly and making a swift departure so as to not inconvenience Him. He told himself that all he needed to release from his lips were two basic words: please go.

He thought of the pejorative word, 'elderly,' that the intimate stranger had used against him and resented his presence even more. As bantering as the intent of this word might have been it seemed particularly offensive on a day after his own birthday and a Father's Day at that. True, he was much older than the teenager (he glanced at the face; it was a perfect fusion of boy and man; smoking its cigarette and creating a synthetic fog of smoke onto his life). Only by contrast to the other one's youth would he think of himself as old and then he was not merely old but old as the hills and with so many memories to be excavated therein. It was merely feeling and perception and it meant nothing. It was a mere feeling like all feelings, mirages really. Even family could seem for a time like "solid ground" until one witnessed it become a series of vapors. It was he who had chosen to be with someone so young so if he felt old to be near him. It was a problem of his own making and he told himself that he could not blame anyone other than himself for the boy had not materialized in this dark room on his own.

And of this being used for his sperm and disposed of, he had unwittingly bastardized his own offspring unto the world, one more illusionary human form, a piece of himself, which he might never see again. But as Buddhists say the world is an impermanent place.

After Kimberly's suicide, and the loss of "stable" human presences he judged that being reminded of his age was particularly impudent and ruthless. At worst, he was middle aged and even that should never have occurred nor should it ever occur to anyone of such a youthful profession. A person like him, a womanizer and painter of uniformed school girl prostitutes and pathetic tramps, an artist with conscience about the exploitation of those he was exploiting, should stay young forever. How flawed nature was in this and every other respect.

"Still you can't exactly be rich, I guess, to stay in places like this."

"I suppose not," he said while thinking a contrary idea altogether. One could, for behind fenced areas of expensive Malaysian beach resorts, on lounge chairs of grassy acreage, in the shade of palm trees, there with waiters beckoning him with cocktails, parachute rides at various intervals in the day from fast moving boats as exhilarating as being born, luxurious rooms and ensuing business class flights back home with champagne on his tray, he, the retired artist, had tried affluent ways before and they were all stale to him. A guest house or even a night under the stars with the base of a stupa as his pillow would be preferable.

"Maybe you just like guest houses in foreign areas or something." Nawin did not say anything so the youth continued. "If you are trying to hook up with a foreigner why did you choose me?"

"Why you? I don't know--to see what it would be like not that I care to...what did you say?.. hook up with someone?"

"Yes."

"Well, I don't. Besides, it is really best to give oneself to a discipline of study, the sciences or the arts, which will always be there--smart men give themselves to knowledge at least in some small way--building stability around ideas instead of changing people. People can just twirl around their feet like empty bags blowing in the breeze, amusing for some minutes, gone, and forgotten."

"So, for you I am an empty bag blowing in the breeze?" the boy asked and laughed. Nawin did not say anything and then they fell into silence as thick as the lifeless darkness which governed them.

"Someday I'll go there."

"Huh?"

"To Bangkok."

"Then go," said Nawin indifferently. He was meaning more the boy exiting to his home than a departure from Nongkhai that could link the youth to him as inextricably as blood sucking ticks or bacteria and the ensuing infection gained from a water monitor's mouth (these crocodilian reptiles, frequent inhabitants at the Nakhon Pathom campus at Silpakorn University).

"Who would I stay with. I don't know anyone there except you."

"Do you live with your parents?"

"Yeah."

"What do they do?"

"Mother's a nurse, father's paralyzed. The story goes that soldier's thought he was one of a group of drug smugglers coming across the boarder and shot. He's been that way since I was young."

"You don't like it--staying with them?"

"Working part time at the Seven [Thai for 7-11] and then taking care of him so that she can go to work? Hardly."

"You won't stay there forever. Everything passes." He was half thinking about the strawberry and jasmine garden at his mother and father's home that he loved so much in his boyhood, of hawking jasmine rosaries in streets within stalled traffic and strawberry drinks in transparent plastic cups from sidewalks. He was thinking of the words mother and home that a child thinks of as permanent as the sun.

27

Despite, if not because of, the wind and rain and this room being on the third floor of the guest house, he could nonetheless hear, he supposed, the growls, vicious howling, and snarling with hissing rolls of saliva (perhaps imagined; after all, his aim had initially been to drive to the sea, to see and hear the harmonic continuum of wave upon wave slamming its froth against the shore, and yet it had been an aim that could not be achieved with one arm in both cast and sling nor even facilitated via train or bus to Phuket, Pattaya, or Cha-am with all tickets sold out for the holiday) of two dogs in the parking lot: noise that they directed at each other or perhaps really toward darkness itself. Novel and urgent utterances to them, it was part of myriad redundant and inconsequential skirmishes in the existence of canines that would continue perennially to the specie's extinction. Malnourished strays with furless spots that they probably were, they, for being in ineluctable misery and unable to understand the fates that they were subjected to, could merely rail against shadowy form and the paucity of distinguishable matter in darkness and project their antipathy against members of their kind that were most vulnerable to the insulting tones of their wordless vitriol, soft targets from which to measure having an impact of their latent screams. These other animals were microcosms that were composed of the same appetites and temperaments as man whose larger but negligible intelligence was scarcely able to break the force of most waves that inundated the tenuous levee of rationality which was supposed to deliver one from innate, instinctual chaos.

The paramour blew his clouds of smoke into the darkness like mist floating above a noxious lake and this lethal haze hid the nocturnal snake that was attached to his form, making obscure all that Nawin had been able to see in the darkness. And yet if nothing really existed more than mere supposition that it was so, surely emotions should not even be accredited with the supposition of reality. If he had more will, he told himself, it would not seem so disconcerting that he, injured and aloof in tragedy, had chosen this ersatz of taking a man over a woman to this particular venue. Was it really an ersatz at all? In terms of intimacy and reproduction, it was; and yet in terms of this bit of wrestling, this sport, it was pleasure and pain that was distinct from all others to which he might as well ride or be ridden and learn to enjoy its inconsequential levity the way one preferred male rivals in matches without scrutinizing whether or not it was fair to exclude women from such sport. It was pleasure and pain which made him feel more alive in his numbness.

And if from this manhood he was so easily toppled so be it. Who was to say that such a tenuous, artificial structure of shoddy construction was worthy of being had if it continually needed to be propped up with extra 2x4s of heterosexual experiences as reinforcement, and that one would not become more of a human being to be less of a man? This, he told himself, this was merely a borrowing of youth and beauty to compensate for the years of a slight diminishing of both, and this wearing it for a time, was not homosexual overall, any more than, from time to time, wearing a costume in bed to accentuate an aspect of the self heretofore surreptitious was complete madness (how august he was in the pointed crown; how apposite it was by the catalyst of obdurate orbs of arrogance and a slight pushing of a given woman's head downward that she should fall to his feet before subtly raising from the kow-towing gesture to become his subject in an osculating worship of his body).

Then there was the sudden screeching of one of those animals in pain; and although its movements were neither seen nor heard, from its receding and diminishing cries, its scampering could be perceived through the imaginative compensations of the mind which concocted the plausible the best that it could when lacking sensory indicators to address the uncertainties of reality by prompting understanding and action, if not verisimilitude, that had a higher probability of being right. On the bed he was experiencing a slight bout of melancholy as though reproaching himself for his infidelity, not that his adulterous adventures had bothered him all that much in times past. And while recognizing the absurdity of a belated attempt to be circumspect now when this untoward, alien exchange had come and gone with whatever fodder and fuel had been essential in the incendiary night he still felt a wariness that dark instinctual craving should pull him toward an insidious happening. In ways it was to him as though this sexual encounter had not yet occurred and were it to happen would be of importance to the world at large, so he inanely felt, concerning an interaction that had already taken place.

He listened but did not hear anything outside but the occasional howling of traffic and wind. He concluded that this particular union in another species of animal had been cleft into fractious bits. To him it was another reminder of the passing away of life's myriad social interactions and the respective parties so engaged. Salient and engrossing society of the moment would always be replaced with the eternal purity of silence were it not for the desperate need to seek meaning and ascribe significance to the interactions of man. When existing on a cold planet in the grandeur of the black but light-speckled universe with its surfeit of random stars and a plethora of void, what could humans do but cling to each other for warmth and attribute, meaning and merit in this desperate coagulation? Thus there was the noise of clanging men, boisterous merry making, and adhesion of like to like not that he, an artist, or he, a man in grief, saw himself cognate with anyone or anything.

For a loner, interruptions of the human mind, noisy as it was, were less of harangue than all the interaction exuded in doing a job and fulfilling one's minor role in society (in his case that of a prurient artist or an artist of prurience and when not on sabbatical, an overburdened Silpakorn University art survey lecturer at that, roles which had surely been replaced by younger and less effete male artists than himself) were only bearable in short durations. As the shallow and gregarious needed a similar extension of themselves and could only stay inward briefly, so rich inward men and they who were plagued by grief could only make outward connections briefly especially when needing to be left alone to pick up the pieces of their lives. But he too was a being of his species and needed humans especially now. So he thought, for the man who had leisure and money to experience it all including the sense of ennui that was its corollary thought inordinately.

He was just thinking that despite the incessant competition for resources and self-worth within the societies of man and dog, a being needed to interact with its kind more than just for the snippets of time that were the totality of his particular interactions. How strange, he thought, that in tragic loss of significant others and an inveterate routine of pleasant association that such a person needed to interact more and yet interacted less. He told himself that after he completed his spiritual retreat (a retreat that would begin once the licentious one had ended) he would work part-time as it was dangerous not to do so with the identity, purpose, and sanity of man as tenuous as it was; that his actions here had no moral value, positive or negative, beyond any which he by his own volition, ascribed to them; and that it was no "sicker" being engaged in this liaison than choosing to sit next to the beautiful and thin rather than the fat and ugly on a BTS sky- train--one reminding him of vigor and the other weakness and infirmity. Physical intercourse when the mental bridges between the distant islands of man had all collapsed was best alloted to one in this imperfect world.

"If a man isn't functioning as one he shouldn't live. He shouldn't make anyone else live that way," said the youth.

Nawin coughed. "That's not a cigarette is it?"

The young man passed it over to his senior who smoked the cannabis, inhaling it fully. "Maybe that was what I needed too. Shouldn't live? Isn't that a bit harsh."

"I'm bad, aren't I."

"No. I think that anyone would feel that way; and if you tell yourself you are bad you will be finding yourself in a deeper fog. You'll be lost in guilt wrestling with yourself. Far better to feel hateful sometimes, appropriate times, and then refine the feeling into thought and understanding."

"What thought?"

"I don't know. It will come. Just accept your feelings as natural, not good but natural, and you'll see things clearer. He passed the joint to his friend."

"One day I'll go there."

"Where?"

"Bangkok. Will you take me?"

"No," said Nawin and the two resumed their silence. To really learn of a being instead of using one to smother the void in amusing noise was an edifying and exhausting endeavor of pure sadness not to be pursued by a man in grief, and he just wanted the intimate stranger to leave.

"She is unhappy--my mother. Lives dazed in a television when she isn't working or taking care of him" said the boy. It was superfluous knowledge that sprayed out with his spit into the cloud with no reaction. "I need to go," the intimate stranger said, and the words, cold as a BTS sky-train, traveled up the rails of his spinal cord in unexpected alarm. Reverberating hollow, the words almost seemed to ache as they battered the inner layers of the walls of his brain. Dogs with furless sores littering the sidewalks now did the same to his thoughts, deformed children begging in the streets pressed against his mind with weighty themes of injustice as had happened in the early days of arriving in Bangkok with his brothers, and he could imagine fruit, meat, and noodle workers at their carts disassembling their concocted makeshift restaurants and returning home weary and with stiff, aching limbs. He had yearned for these words so many times during and immediately after the pain ridden intercourse which had been a violation he had invited upon himself as a solitary old man might invite a society of gangsters and thieves into his home so as to hear human voices reminding him of family--voices other than his own.

28

The unseasonable thunder and lightning continued relentlessly. For a few minutes the paramour's naked physique, as his own, kept rematerializing more and more saliently before reverting subdued into passive darkness.

"You've never been there before, Really?"

"No, just seen glimpses of it from TV news. I want to go. Someday. Someday I will, someone will take me. Tell me what it is like."

"Hard to say. Each has his own reaction to it I suppose. I can't explain myself let alone ten million others. And when you live somewhere your habits are embedded in it There is nothing romantic or visceral: just day to day life."

"Don't you like it?"

"It has its moments, I guess."

It was a snippet of conversation copied and recopied and from it blurred in inaccuracies. It played repeatedly like a redundant song to a mind in or moving toward the void. It was a void created from fear of the loss of physical contact with this nameless intimacy whom he could barely speak with unless in semi-imagined, quasi-remembered dialogues of the mind.

"And you don't have an opinion?"

"Well, for me it's like walking through noxious clouds of car and bus exhausts and the more you walk through it the dirtier you become in everything and although you know it is not good, or know that it doesn't feel particularly good, externally, at least, it seems real and you find yourself doing more and more filthy acts to be in the heart of understanding life, becoming a true libertine. And even though enlightenment is found to be mostly endarkenment you know that you aren't pretending to live ideals taught to you out of bias and fear but the good and bad of what it really is, and appreciating it the best you can despite its imperfections. You feel the pulse of life and that from touching it, it has extended and altered you and, again, even though it isn't what you want from yourself--not idyllic or pure and it isn't what you really want to be--you know that you are not cowering within, making moral judgments on what you fear and don't understand.

Forgotten lines were filled in by imagination, the script amended for the insertion of earlier stifled thought, and there was true communion in place of circumspect utterances called conversation. It is that which is good for the fecundity of an artist's oeuvre, not nature and beauty. What else should he say: a modern world capital with the same poverty as its surrounding area and yet, condensed, it looks like it is more impoverished. When you can see them, I suppose, it would seem that on every block there are skyscrapers, malls, and dogs to the left and temples, dogs, and ghettos to the right, sidewalk restaurants and hawkers everywhere, but with world commerce and movement of a lot of people...fashion with smelly socks, so to speak... it is opulent and slummy... and if you don't harm anyone it is morally uninhibited and free...all making it rife for nights not unlike this one.

"Rife for nights not unlike this one? I don't know what you mean."

"I don't either, nothing, mai pen rai."

It reeled once again across his mind at the instant of watching the intimate stranger pick up his scattered clothes and go into the toilet.

"Go?," he asked loudly toward the closed door. "So soon? It won't be light for another two hours."

"Before she comes back," rejoined a somewhat muffled voice.

"Your mother?"

"My mother."

"And if you do not return right away."

"Then she'd pay for someone to take care of him until she returns from work."

"I see. You should not let that happen."

Then there he was again: fourteen or fifteen years old, holding hands with Noppawan in the anatomical museum. It was a day like many of that first summer together in which, extant among preserved, contorted bodies, the two oddities procured a brief but diurnal retreat away from the war of family and the indentured servitude that for him was inlaid and inextricable in the design allotted to impoverished sons and orphans. And there she was disappearing behind shelves of canisters containing fetal abnormalities and bloated testicles as though sickened by it all and yet returning to him from the toilet nonetheless with a ring braided in strands of her hair. On his finger as material branding in her being and then in gold her rings wedded him in empathy and friendship which they believed would last with the longevity of their symbolic tokens.

They had cared about each other so fully then: a strong feeling of euphoria beat and saturated them like a hard rain and a singular perception of the other as the extension, the heretofore missing half of the whole, possessed them. Was it love? He hesitated to use this word for to him it was delight in another and, for a while, even his mother found delight in her ambulatory dolls. Had they just given themselves over to the curator, stepped into a joint formalin filled glass casket, and drowned themselves there; wouldn't they have thought this engrossing form of felicity in another as perennial as eternity? Had they died together, neither of them would have known the dissolution of second families or the temporary nature of all human actions.

He returned from the bathroom fully clothed.

"Your belt is over here," Nawin said, pointing to the shelf."

"Okay," the intimate stranger said while taking it and sliding it around his waist like the way he might a girl's arm. To go, to leave, to not come again; could his sanity tolerate any more ruptures and departures? Still, wasn't it this which he wanted? It was and it wasn't.