Chapter 22

Earlier he had thought about saying, "I'm not used to this sort of thing. I'm married so maybe we should just be together this one time" which might have caused him to say, "So I'm the bad one. You brought me up here mister." And paradoxically, as much as he feared losing him at this moment in time, he wanted to say it now but it was impossible to say such a thing with him so eager to go. As unperceivable as it was from his stolid, phlegmatic expressions, his thoughts were in a panic. He told himself that life was ever emerging stories on the skyscraper of man in a downtown that was modernizing and changing faces; he told himself that to feel so disconcerted by a being whose proper name he had not even cared to learn was absurd. He said these things to himself but he felt he was rolling toward the precipice of disconnectedness. He told himself that as taxing as it was in his state of mourning to converse with another being he could have tolerated conversation and interlocutor for a time and that had he made him feel less like an imposter, perhaps he could have had a cherished companion from which to ride out some delicate hours. It seemed to him that other people did not think so much. They socialized and made friends without noticing it as clinging to others for meaning that it was. They obeyed feelings and socialized naturally but for him he analyzed it and such unsavory behavior filled him with repugnance. It was far worse than his effeminate role in this intercourse of bodies which was pursued to gain intimacy when the intercourse of minds seemed so futile and perilous.

"I'll need money for taxi and everything."

"A taxi shouldn't be more than a hundred baht. However I've never seen a charge for everything."

"Well it isn't free."

"As it's everything, I wouldn't think it would be. How much?"

"Three thousand."

"You're out of your mind."

Nawin's eyes hardened against all screams of dogs and men, hustlers who sold their youth for as long as it lasted no different than any other marketable product, and against all life forms floundering helplessly like fish in nets.

"Don't look at me that way. Its for my father. Of anything I get, half will go to him and half so that I can leave. If you have it why shouldn't you give it to me. I let you escape your pathetic middle aged life for a while. Now you can help me."

"Well consumer beware, but it's certainly cheaper than being a benefactor providing college education to every creature who needs it."

"You didn't mean it."

Nawin heard him. He was silent for he did not know.

"See. And yet I am bad for needing."

"And I for having and not giving it away. Here." He pulled out his wallet from the drawer."

"Here's five thousand, ten times the going rate and my business card. Maybe my earlier offer lasted as long as my sympathy; maybe this time it is done so that I won't feel insincere in my earlier offer; maybe I will want to forget you as soon as you leave here; who wants to pay for sex or even give large quantities of money to a needy stranger when coerced to do so? Still, take the card. It has my address on it. Send me a detailed letter explaining logically where you want to study and why it is important for me to help you and maybe I will see the fairness in doing so. Besides it is more sincere than doing it out of feeling sad for you."

The intimate stranger flicked the card as though he were a primitive sensing music in the mundane but not knowing what to do with it.

"No, I won't contact you for that but I'll keep the card" which was short for "...because you're a good fuck and pay for it." Nawin then read his thoughts and the intimate stranger saw that he understood: he could set him up in Bangkok. It was the least he could do. He understood and said nothing for the boy reminded him of his brother and it was for this reason that he brought him here.

Nawin pulled out a hand full of raisins from a bag, slowly chewed each, and waited for belated exuberance and thanks until it occurred to him a minute later that it would not be forthcoming. "Want some," he asked but it did not garner a response. The youth picked up his bag and left as though he had never been, a testament to the insignificance of interaction.

As Nawin continued to eat the raisins, one at a time, it occurred to him that the real reason eating animals was wrong had nothing to do with maintaining the sanctity of life. The society of dogs was to them reality, and the world in an environment of oblique human presences. And as all creatures were myopic with similar perceptions and concluding sentiments their reality and world was in the social interaction of their species. As he would not wish to be the protein fueling their hegemony, why should it be thought that the innate value of pigs, cows, and chickens was to be domesticated so as to be easy viands of human consumption.

The society of man was no more real than that of dogs, he told himself. Society was a delusion of respective animals needing a greater external meaning for their lives; and yet, the Buddhist introvert that he was, he yearned for the return of this human presence until his head ached, he wished for the viand of his phallus, and he wanted the pain of being sodomized.

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When perceived in terms of his proclivity for avoiding social interaction and for his loss, negligence, and failure at roles which he had once ascribed to himself--artist, womanizer, lecturer and that most ephemeral role of paternal ersatz who sometimes changed diapers so Noppawan could sleep--he, a god was relegated to an irrelevance equivalent to nothing. He knew this for it could not be otherwise with the world valuing action as much as it did, action which apposite, was too finite and inadequate a means for appraising an individual of his scope. And their interaction, he thought to himself in another strange supercilious thrust of validation beyond his grief, was pursued so fervently to evade an alarming and discombobulating sense of their own irrelevance for human creatures would have no sense of being alive at all were it not for witnessing the mobility of their shadows intermingling with other moving adumbrations. But cremated, the deceased did not cast shadows; and as exempt of people and roles as he was, his was definitely a figurative extinction. A retiree from the art of doing, a demigod who chose the reality of being marooned in his own thoughts, he stayed steadfast in the immobility of his empty shell, a state dearth of role and impetus. He, who was nonetheless human in his godhood, remained intrepid in trudging into this rather unbearable and disconcerting sense of the inconsequence of being. To look at nature, to melt into true being under a cloud by relinquishing one's grandiose claim as an integral being in the temporary and changeable interactions of man, to be exempt of role and its alleged significance on a small corner of contemporary society at best, and as a divine particle revere life as opposed to absconding from it through interaction, only a god would tolerate such torturous but exquisite enlightenment. His mission, the purpose of His trip, was to further Himself as deity by no longer needing to be confirmed by others as a presence on the planet, to no longer need to gain approbation through social interaction, and to find himself fully able to separate from craven mortals whose only sense of being came from doing and whose viscous neediness precipitated even more interactive clinging and all the concocted meaning therein. Deemed by serendipity and evolvement gained from his education to the status of demigod and no further than this, he could never succeed completely in self contained intellectual asceticism, for how could he retreat into the thickets of fecund solitude without becoming more and more desperate to rest his head on the pillow case of human flesh as he ran around in sinuous stretches circuitously lost in reason and emotion. Still, he would travel inward and explore what was there for as long as it was bearable. At least so he said in silent thought, with only partial belief.

The gecko, barely visible in the smoky fog of marijuana, reaffixed itself on a portion of wall above the night stand. It remained there above the clutter of archaic connections: a telephone that kept ringing--at least inside his head--and a post card on which he had merely written "Dear Noppawan, I hope that you've been well despite everything that happened" before striking two lines through the sentiment and tossing it back onto the night stand. And this diminutive animal deemed him to fall into the doom of those opaque, glassy domed eyes and he did fall as Kimberly had fallen through the metal and plastic awning of the swimming pool to be an eyeless corpse; he fell as any man would through tenuous self image at the loss of women of the present to the molestation of the past. Truth, if it existed, was a state that was sedentary; but movement was meaning and this man sought it. It was his emulation of the universe and it went straight forward even if sentiment caused it to bend and deviate slightly toward that which was past. So, he thought, avowing a new position entirely.

"No, that's not entirely true," said the gecko.

"No?" asked Nawin as he once more inhaled the smoke of his marijuana.

The gecko shook his head plaintively. Nawin understood: he had done fellatio, he had swallowed, and had subsequently allowed himself to be sodomized so that he might feign belief that, without anything to grasp in his empty hands, there was a permanent entity in the impermanence permeating his life and yet if humans did not have the delusion of sexual intimacies there would be no contemplation at all for an understanding of true being was brought forth in copulative intermingling. Despite the revelation, he felt rather lithe in his fog until the gecko metamorphosed into a man pointing at his genitalia. "You smoke me here. Me don't want smoke. You do. Foreign smoke, Foreign pays. Foreign give more money. Me seventeen. Me tell. You go to police."

He collected his thoughts the best that he could in his state of dreaminess and brief hallucinations in the dark, blowing mustiness of the confines of the empty room. He considered how quickly odd, erratic ideas could spill out onto all regions of the brain like paint from leaking tubes, mix grotesquely, amalgamate in beings, and spread their diminutive warped presence in insurrections begetting hegemonies of the mind. With this recent association and its disconnection pressing so fully onto his mind he could not stay here, the venue and embodiment of their activity together. It made his head ache worse than his buttocks, arm, and clavicle. The fact that one's DNA, one's sacrosanct blueprint, was disseminated randomly in ejaculations seemed to him inordinately peculiar; that it was emitted from an instrument of urination which when erect was a pistol of a sadist forcing his pleasure and will onto others a sickening but laughable peculiarity; still it made him so amorous that he could not restrain himself any longer and thus he masturbated and then took a shower.

Considering that if he were to check out formally he would have to confront smirking faces and laughter at the front desk once one of the housekeeping crew reported the soiled disarray of his sheets, he decided that he would not check out at all. He had paid for three days, so it was of no consequence. Abandoning the key on the bed, he left through the fire exit to avoid speaking to night attendants and all things human, and went out into the dark streets of Nongkai. Telephone booths seemed to call her name out to him and to a limited degree he wanted to enter one to converse with her, and would have done so (momentarily if she were to hang up on him or if for longer, it would be to engage with her with, hostilely or civilly, with the neediness of love or the indifference of a stranger, he could not predict) but for the aching reminder of the multiple bone fractures she had rendered unto him. With enough vibrations the china cabinet of a woman's heart would break and its varied fragments could not be organized let alone mended into some whole, such was the integrity of a man when ripped apart beyond suture.

It was later than he thought and for a few moments the emerging bristle of morning light was fused into a dark mound of cloud before attempting to surmount it in the struggle of a morning freeing itself to be born. The view was a layered mélange of golden crème and whisked effervescent void that was as succulent as taffy. He wanted to loiter in time and stare at it without blinking in the hope that constancy would keep it there unchanged. It was the same type of thought that had prompted him to stop painting altogether a few years ago, and now he could hardly remember the feel of a paint brush in his hand.

He got into a tuk-tuk and asked the driver to take him to the Buddhist Sculpture Garden. The first movements of the three wheeled vehicle made him shudder and utter equivalent interjections.

"Yes, it's cold!" said the driver who was wearing a jacket and shorts, "That odd rain in winter! I met you before, didn't I?" yelled the mirrored mouth through wind and the roar of the motor.

"I'm from Bangkok. I wouldn't think so," yelled Nawin even louder.

"Sure I have. At the train station. The train officer had me give you a message."

"Oh that's right. The telephone number."

"Did you make the call?"

"No. I'm an artist, so people always give me their numbers hoping I'll pay them to model. I guess that's what it's about. I don't know. Anyhow, thanks again." It was close enough to the truth without the tedium of details for one who was a stranger to him and needed no more than a stranger's cordial trifle.

"No problem," said the driver. "You looked sick when I saw you there squatting on the ground."

"Train sickness I guess. Sickness of everything generally" offered Nawin with a feigned chuckle.

Near the sculpture garden was a 7-11 and he bought some coffee, milk, and a box of corn flakes, sat down amidst purposeful and less temporary form, and ate the cereal from the box as he had when he was five years old in America. To be here in so much empty space among stone carvings and to be the only one around appealed to him. If nothing else having been abused gave him this: the desire to pour color on paper and entertain himself alone, self-contained, in any empty space he could find. However, this solitary behavior was only pleasant for a few hours and then self-containment seemed particularly vacuous and the blessing a curse. He read a book on Etruscan art for a few hours before his already aching buttocks began to hurt from the position on the ground. He got up, swallowed some pain killers for his arm with no assistance but his saliva, and waited for a bus to take him back to Nongkhai. A kiosk selling soft drinks, Buddha statuettes, and cotton candy was already open. In front of it at one table was a typical jasmine rosary salesman who also sold balloons, some of which he blew up and shaped into replicas of Hindu and Buddha emblems, and others he inflated with helium.

"How many helium balloons would it take to float a lightweight piece of metal into a different county or country for that matter?"

"I don't understand you. Do you want some balloons?"

"Yes. I would think six should suffice."

Nawin bought them, removed the stifling wedding ring from his hand, tied it with the six strings, and released the gestalt of colored rubber, metal, and diamonds into the airy realms of the unfettered and the lost.

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Within this ambivalence how was he to know that his obdurate stance would not crack and that he would not relent, allowing neediness to surge over him like lava, incinerate him and heave residuals homeward? If he relented by calling her at a pay telephone booth and by a miracle fortuitous, dull, or moribund, he was made to believe that some type of reconciliation was possible as economic provider or more, it would be better that it were done there where he could buy a ticket immediately than to experience a breakdown of His integrity while stuck uncomfortably in Vientiane. Thus, as the sun pulled ever tighter over the hand of the world, memory seemed to encompass him tighter than the burdensome wedding band ever had, and having played in the wounds of old intimacies it now seemed like the desperation of an old man opening his door to strangers. Preferring to allow the possibility of being murdered than to continue in the meaningless domicile of his empty shell, he told the tuk-tuk driver to take him to the train station instead of the border.

It was a cold ride to this area where a day earlier his debased posture had no doubt alarmed train officials that here was someone, who if not a southern terrorist, was suffering from a nervous breakdown on government premises (and yet were it not so, and to most Euro-American foreigners it would not be with the day's temperature for them equivalent to a balmy spring day, still by Thai accounts as well as his own, it was a frigid morning with moments of impaling breeze that made the dogs in the corners of parapets surrounding temples shiver and his blood run cold; but then, as he had already ventured out without anywhere in particular to return to, the peripatetic libertine continued with the journey, tolerating the blowing inundation of wind like one holding his breath until arriving at the train station.)

There was only one ccurse, the forward course in which a supernova would eventually devour the Earth like a piece of kindling wood, and so he walked to the junction that was on the border--the right side of the road an entry point to Thailand, the left, eventually, to Laos (specifically, he kicked a rock repeatedly for several hundred yards until losing it, skidded and etched lines into the mud with his feet, eventually moving west to the intersection that was the border--the right an entry into a land not of his birth and inhabited predominately by philistines who suffered from a lethargy no different from other denizens of warm societies under the mesmerizing intensity of the sun--the left an entry into an altogether insular and comatose nation). Obtaining a Laotian visa for a thousand baht; another payment albeit a nominal one, he stood on a small bus like a Siamese twin conjoined to eighty or more bodies, all going in the same direction, each having his or her own objective as he did albeit the others surely with more clarity than he had. He took a bus ride with myriad others across the Friendship Bridge of the Mekong river, filled out his entry card at this extended checkpoint, his passport eventually being stamped in a line of waiting and moving but seemingly going nowhere, he paid a new monetary charge, the cryptic exit fee then shared a tuk-tuk for a forty minute ride to the city, sometimes witnessing exaggerated gestures and hearing jocular comments about how cold it was from Laotians and Thais, some in both shorts and hooded jackets, though not from westerners who didn't seem to suffer any distress outside of blowing strands of disheveled hair. He bypassed fields and water buffalo, feeling the exhilaration of the wind, cold as it was, and suffuse with a sense of regeneration he sensed the present immerse him whole into its prodigious depths and believed he was traversing into something new which would whitewash his negative memories in amnesia. Arriving in the city of Vientiane, that little bit of Paris with a lot of dirt that wind occasionally scraped and twirled as if it were a field, he observed a department store (arguably more than a hybrid of store and barn with its outlying outdoor market), morning monks with emaciated frail bodies seeking alms in tawny saffron robes soiled in Laotian dust, businessmen receiving the laying on of hands and the wai in the hope of making their lives propitious, two school girls in blue uniforms on a bicycle, more motorcycles than cars but more of both with each moment of the waking morning, and a man pulling a food cart on the side of the street. Nawin looked directly into the man's incarnadined, sun burnt face and his furrows of coarse wrinkling skin, and the old man, though abashed, grinned and nodded once as if grateful that the younger man not only acknowledged his existence but saw his worth in it. Neither sunrise nor sunset was as beautiful as this.

It had been a similar acknowledgement three years ago that had been the catalyst of his self declared quasi-retirement. He had gone on sabbatical from Silpakorn University to get a doctoral degree before realizing that scholarly pursuits were inimical to creativity (not that he was attempting to create anything at that time) and that these simultaneous states of mind if not joint ventures would be deleterious to each other. They were wasted years if measured in action and accomplishment but constructive in terms of disassembling pretensions and so it did not matter.

Now he was able to repudiate the grandeur of self unflinchingly. Extirpating himself of those institutions and beings that facilitated the feeding of his instinctual neediness, departing from his nation and the circumscribed roles which he had there, and having relieved himself of hungers for food and sex earlier this morning, he was now able to appreciate of the sfumato of society and nature and could just be...Just be! What a romantic he was: at least so he chided himself. Unfathomable suffering existed under the most lush of lives. It was beneath every superficial, jovial exterior, and to think that in a land probably without much of that exterior layer he would experience any enlightenment beyond encounters with deeper veins of suffering than any he had experienced heretofore seemed preposterous. Just this morning after the prostitute had given Nawin an indignant look and then had gone away leaving him there alone in his pile of clothes, he could not, for some minutes, even fasten the buttons on his shirt so overcome was he with suffering. It had seemed so acute and pervasive in all beings and all matters that he, a forty year old man, did not know what to do other than murmur ever so quietly, "meh" (mother). He had wanted the resurrection of that woman who had not only looked away as the abusers did their dastardly deeds but made him out to be the culprit who had instigated it all. He had called out for her like a child hoping that she would lead him back to beginnings of chasing balls and butterflies. He had yearned for a state of innocence in which he would be ignorant of sexual jostling from instinctual hungers and but not of the love that was the conception of all animal life. He had wanted this resurrected "meh" to end the suffering which permeated the lives of all things and to make knowledge and understanding more than vicarious suffering. Perhaps he was too sensitive for this world but here he was and so, to use an Americanism, he needed to see things through "rose colored filters." Thus his first impression of Vientiane Laos was that of an intricate tapestry of life. All he had to do to appreciate it was to simply open his eyes by abjuring agenda and accomplishment and melting into true being.

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