Chapter 23

Everywhere he went there seemed to be metallic signs on poles to power lines. Each sign was in the international language of pictorial symbols and each illustration the same: a sinuous electrical current striking a stick figure that fell back as though electrocuted. He could have detoured to an area along a different stretch of road and walked elsewhere where there were not these signs of warning were it not for his proclivity to continue walking on such a narrow sidewalk in which a stumbling foot could cost him his life. There was a definite morbid curiosity and courting of death in his actions, his feelings elated by travel to someplace new, but his thoughts were macabre and fixated on the vicissitudes and impermanence of one's life, the attempts to belie those with money, property, family, and notoriety as if one could solidify one's effluvial existence to a statue's, despite the permanent inevitability of one's demise. Knowing this, and rich enough that he did not need to work another day in his life, nor as corollary become obtuse to this truth by engagements in mundane routine, he was not sure what to do with himself. Other men were also used for sperm and as economic providers to family but they saw their sons who grew with the years and whose growth would measure how far they had degenerated into the years, mirrors to see aging, ghastly, and lackluster reflections of themselves (for him, he would never see his son again, or at least that was Noppawan claimed on that day she battered him with an iron frying pan, not that he necessarily wanted to see his time on the planet in the hour glass of a changing boy). Likewise, they had their roles as procurers of meat so that their women might enjoy playing with live dolls (for him whose investments made money unto themselves he could be of no personal use to family even if allowed back into it, and when was a man included in the joys of child rearing anyway?).

His cheek inadvertently brushed against an extended vine of green bananas dangling above the sidewalk near a French colonial building used by a Laotian government ministry. Although a normal, reflexive reaction would have been to feel startled especially after having noticed the signs and fearing the next touch of the unknown to be his ineluctable death, he just smiled. If fate, the God of all Atheists, had deemed it a pole of a power line instead of bananas that his cheek had touched, him electrocuted, stricken down to sear the ground with his incinerating fall it would be of no major significance to anyone but himself if even that; furthermore, he thought, continuing to synthesize more ideas to remain stimulated and happily self- contained in his own company, this second of consciousness being irrevocably extinguished might be a rather pleasant experience despite its brevity. In it he would be on an enlightened transit before the void swallowed him entirely, an omniscient second of wisdom in which egregious Buddha-gods and heaven-and-hell aberrations of the ideas of the Buddha, who surely was not a buddhist, would be known to not exist. To know something with absolute certainty beyond the realm of supposition (like the amount of love a bludgeoning spouse once had toward him, the degree of selfishness and altruism that constituted emotion and cognition, and so much else unknown to him) would be particularly refreshing after a lifetime spent in the glimmers of truth. It would be as refreshing as those times that as children, he and his pauper brothers stripped to their underwear and from piers dove into the Chao Phraya River to escape the blistering heat of April.

The surprise of bananas brushing against his cheek made him smile wryly--smile at witnessing a banana tree in the heart of a city, smile wryly as the surprised encounter was imbued in the rustic as well as the bucolic, and thus was both repulsive and quaint. Understanding it to be both made him postulate that in a broader sense every given entity or event was rarely one attribute exclusively but the polarity of two antithetical thoughts. Even the calcifying antipathy and repugnance toward sex, which were now steadily building up inside his mind were at times stymied in ethereal fantasies of burnishing the silky leather of human flesh and a hunger for beauty that suddenly came over him like a consuming and growing flame before being subdued and partially extinguished in the gravity of his all- too-human thought, which wanted reality even more than fantasy the best it could find it. Glancing at clothed buttocks, covered thighs, and other appendages of a female here and a male there, it was as though his constitution could mutate from solid to vapor at random despite human will. This was what he gleaned from his cheek brushing against a bunch of unripe bananas while journeying onward with sights and sounds satiating consciousness, sketching impressions of the mind that one could only appreciate in foreign travel.

Closer to the market there were numerous people in a row like sequacious ants, all seeking bits of a distant morsel, but unlike ants these people sought for themselves and, even here, with their wallets as feelers. A few minutes later he was among them, eventually buying a dangling earring for a left lobe, a solid gold necklace to adorn his swarthy complexion so that the deep dirt and poverty that he once was remained hidden from himself and from anyone whom he encountered, and a pocket pc/cellular telephone, which he needed but had no occasion to use. In the outdoor market he watched someone seated on a small couch at a kiosk under a huge umbrella, get a tattoo. He wanted an eagle tattooed on his biceps and to other regions as well to demonstrate that he was as an apostate, Nawin of Thais, but the conditions here did not look urbane or sterile, and he backed away until he was in a parking lot filled with tuk-tuks.

A conventional two seater took him to a temple with his traveler's guide gospel in one hand and suitcase in the other. It was a temple, outside of which a sign informed readers that the building, which appeared more like an attic and junkyard than a museum and temple, once housed the Emerald Buddha. He stayed inside wandering around various sized wooden and stone buddhas dating back to early periods in history and as such often having parts of arms and faces missing from their dilapidated forms. There, relaxed, he melted into true being.

It was good to be there unfettered of obligations to others, and with no whore to distract him from keeping the deeper self company of his ruminations. He was synthesizing some peculiar notion he only half grasped (something to the effect of "a person comes into the world for no apparent reason; perspectives mutate in changeable physical existence; a person's ideas change due to the changes around him, changing so as to withhold some level of verisimilitude to which sanity is entirely dependent..." ) when the women of his life suddenly came upon him unexpectedly. Others might have thought exhibitions of buddhas would be of interest to all foreigners and especially to someone like Kimberly who was an accomplished amateur sculptor herself, and yet he knew that Noppawan would have enjoyed it more. Unable to share the experience with her, what could the mind do other than impose a facimile? Many times he almost believed that he was really pointing out smaller statuettes hidden behind the larger and more salient ones and that she was going to them, thoroughly examining each one that he pointed out to her like a collector of religious antiquities. How odd that he was so close to releasing words from his lips as if she were really there. No, neither homosexual encounter nor this sending of a wedding ring into oblivion had freed him from memories.

Another tuk-tuk outside the gate of the museum; another blue cockroach driver eager for twenty baht (this one specified that he wanted Thai baht and not Laotian kip)--and, once agreed upon, a quick trip to the communist history museum. Inside there was an archaeological exhibit which he skimmed briefly. Noppawan knew so many inordinate details for it to be of interest to her, and for Kimberly it had always been amusement parks, French wine, and Debussy and Ravel performances at the Thai Cultural Center. But in one corner on the second floor, near the staircase, there was an assortment of traditional clothing that he knew she would have enjoyed seeing and he wanted to take her in his arms, behind that particular exhibit, and impart a visceral kiss, which if unable to pump the air of life back into her would at least convey how dear she was to him before the return to the great beyond which was in fact cessation and vacuity. She was not alive so what could the mind do but resurrect her or something like her briefly? It could do nothing else. Traditional instruments were in one far corner but most of the museum seemed to be a diatribe without words, a deprecatory pronouncement against Siam, French, and American imperialists in photographic images, uniforms, and guns. The museum was more of an anti-imperialist manifesto than a communist one and partitioned walls made court rooms for evidence and indictment. Being a Thai-American with a girlfriend who had been French, his was a triple indictment--at least so he postulated to himself humorously.

He could have gone to the States, the land of his birth. Not knowing anyone there would not have deterred him. In boyhood, each day before fulfilling his indenture as a poor son he would wake up early and leave the house so that for a half an hour, diluted under a cloud in some empty area along the river, he could become little more than the nonstop movements of serving food. Loneliness was not something that he was so desperate to lose. He could have gone there and procured a second set of x- rays and a second opinion from an orthopedic surgeon in Los Angeles or elsewhere. A second set of x-rays was rarely taken in Thailand, and so if he had to have a practical reason for returning to the United States this could be one. He had plenty of accessible money for his travels. Not all of his money was in joint accounts for he was too knowledgeable of the changeable tectonics of family to believe that joint ventures of any kind were lifelong. He might have gone there to travel for a period of months without having to work at all. To melt into the prodigious Grand Canyon, and to have it melt into him would be well worth any expense he incurred and it had always seemed to him that if he went far enough and long enough he would be out of the pale of memory. That too would be a practical benefit. However, it was a haughty land of religious zealots who believed its hegemony was a mandate to dictate world affairs, its growing military bases police boxes, its wars an extension of democracy and human rights, and its intolerance morality itself. It was foundering in its debt as a dying empire and the entire country sickened him.

But then, he thought, he himself was a reprobate and any moral pronouncements that he made would be hypocritical and ridiculous. Was he not living the disreputable life of the great Artist, Caravaggio? Maybe he just wished to be compared and contrasted to the man so that his work would seem to have some international and everlasting significance. Still, compare he would! As Nawin he was poor no longer, although under his former name, Jatupon, he had been that and more. He had not killed anyone--at least not deliberately; and it did not seem particularly Caravaggio-like to not have the intention. He was not a homosexual fleeing murder but a bisexual fleeing interconnectedness. These were mere incidentals that could be argued in various ways and they did not delineate a man. Both men had given beauty to the world and this alone surely disproved them as having disreputable natures, but then, how was he to know?

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The drab stones of the stupa were probably erected in the nineteenth century and through the prodigious span of years, he thought, the unadorned city surrounded it in languid increments like the moss that had annexed its crevices. The encroachment no doubt diminished the distinct identity of the monument, making it less remote and secluded, like human life. That was what he thought, and it was a more concrete and definitive explanation than any other he could provide himself with. Of his own life, he did not know why he wanted to slip away unto himself as he did, to be forgotten personally as well as publicly, to be altogether expunged like the public persona of artistic decadence which he once maintained, and to be further ensconced under the blanket of himself if that were possible without suffocating to annihilation and oblivion. It was as mysterious as the primordial desire of sex, communion, and connection which had driven him spellbound into contact with the flesh of the paramour hours ago.

A block away, a part of the main street abutted this once silent area, fomenting it with traffic along a stretch of businesses catering to foreigners. There were guest houses and Internet cafes. Men were unloading a shipment of supplies to one of the closed bars. There were foreigners on bicycles, or coming in and out of souvenir shops, baguette restaurants, hotel rooms, and apparently Vientiane's only convenience store, or worse its only supermarket. A couple held hands whistling as they passed the monument for a side street in which, according to a sign, a guest house was located. It was noise which he disliked, as distant and muted as it was, but as inclined as he was to romanticize the quaint rusticity around him, he did not yet despise it. In the new environment, positive but neither overly elated or ebullient, he felt that the energy exuded around him belied the gravity of the consequences of action, as if the strutting movements of youth were not dances in a graveyard, when in fact the whole Earth was nothing but a necropolis, and any laughter which he heard seemed to scoff at his new disfigurement. Often tourists would come to the stupa posing for pictures at its base. They seemed to come only in pairs to compound the quasi-reality of the experience of foreign travel into something more solid, for as pairs the dopamine was doubled for these mundane presences, leaving him alone in deprivation within the capsule of the rocket of the mind. They came to this nameless rock, but as it was less of an attraction than That Louang; the few who came did not stay for long. The stupa was the same one pictured in his guide book, the same one he had thought of wistfully when he was on the train, and sexual inclinations had not been the entirety of his yearnings there-at least so he wanted to believe. In leaning against this particular stone relic towering above him, it was not that he was seeking to be a non-worldly aspirant feigning ignorance of a world of suffering masses kimberlying downward from one type of post-partum depression or another to which the gods were of complete indifference, or admitting as much, but that this deity or deities designated greater plans that entailed human suffering and tragedy. He did not want false repudiations of the human condition of suffering but acceptance of it so as to be transmuted into it so deeply that he could imagine the experiences of others more richly and would cease to take his allocation of suffering personally.

He was seated in the bit of grass that was there, his head leaning against this towering icon more uncomfortably than he thought it would, head remaining against hard stone, neck aching, and having to slap and decimate a second set of fire ants that got onto his book and into his sandals stinging his feet. He did not like this flawed design of species competing to sustain themselves and using him as the ammunition available to them so he scattered a piece of bread for some pigeons at his feet to perform an expiation. Thinking about this world of species, each trying to exist comfortably at the expense of others, he knew that there was no spirit in a being and nothing spiritual--just recognition of contentment in simple pleasures, the foundation for all tenuous others, which were not subject to life's vicissitudes. This was the only spiritual journey that a realist and atheist might undertake.

There was a puddle of water from the previous night's inundation of rain at one of his feet. He was inclined to seek his reflection a second time within it, and would have done so (especially since he had not even bothered to go into the bathroom to shave in front of a mirror, or take a shower, in his need to make a swift exit from the guest house) were it not so turbid, with a dark taffeta sheen no more able to reflect a gray hair, a wrinkle, or the doleful intensity of a sagging, aged countenance any more than seeing his diaphanous reflection in car windows. Whether or not he had gotten visibly older over these past twenty four hours, which had entailed a fortieth birthday on the train and a half catharsis/half reopening of the wounds of his abused youth by the intimate encounter with the paramour--a paramour who looked like his brother Kazem, or at least how he remembered Kazem so many years ago--was wasted speculation. One would not have aged significantly in such a brief time unless the paramour were God and he Moses. Still, he wanted a mirror nonetheless, for he knew that tragedy and grief had maimed and distorted him over the past few weeks. Obviously he was now taciturn, and disliked the cloying exuberance of youth that clawed against the concentrated walls of his deliberation, although deliberating what he could not say, as he sat there leaning his head against the stupa with eyes resting on the clouds, if indeed he was in a state of rest. And if he were so prison pent, he thought, a touch of those electrical poles would open up whatever portal Kimberly had gone into with him, with her disappearing into it and it disappearing into the oblivion of itself.

He was ruminating that love was not an actuality, but merely humans finding no exterior meaning and seeking solace and artificial meaning in each others company, when he was suddenly accosted by a Caucasian woman. She was middle aged, had sinuous black hair, and seemed attractive as best he could tell, as she was wearing a round brimmed white hat and dark sunglasses that covered some of her face.

"Pardonnez_moi pours vous faire savent le Francais?" she asked.

"J'ai étudié là pendant un certain temps. C'a été il y a des années," he said, "but you are safer in the international language. I was only in Paris for six months."

"Oh, then you are fluent, as French is the international language," she said with a laugh.

"No, the language of fucking is," he thought, startled by how close the words were to his lips. Had he spoken them he would have been truthful. His brief time under a scholarship grant had been more of sexual rendezvous than anything more substantive. It had been his language of choice as no one there seemed to want to speak in English. And had he spoken those words he would have released a belligerent inner burst of misogyny from a long dormant maternal source aggravated nowadays by his wife having beaten him with a skillet.

"What did you study there? French?"

"No, fucking," he thought but he held tightly to the reins of the tongue, his restive beast. He did not want to disparage another person for his own proclivities toward freeing himself of any female captors. He vented a sigh of relief for having managed to stay quiet and thought how close the words were to his lips before dissipating like everything else, and in this case leaving him defenseless against his good looks.

"Painting."

"Painting?"

"A grant.... It was a grant from your country--a cultural exchange with accomplished artists... I was one of the applicants who won." His words were slow and laborious as he wished not to divulge anything.

"How wonderful! A famous artist of this area. Are you Laotian?"

"I'm American," he said. It was the second most offensive word that he could think of.

"Are you here on vacation?"

"Yes," he said curtly, not bothering to reciprocate, and the two strangers fell into silence.

"I'm here with my sister," she spoke at last with less certainty than before." We were trying to find a royal palace. We saw a sign but got lost in some backstreets and did not know where we were going."

"Oh," he said. "Well, did you ask around?"

"Yes, but I guess Thai would be better than English."

"Yes, I suppose it would, but you don't speak it do you?"

"No but you do, don't you? It certainly would be great to go with someone who knows his way around, or even if you don' t; two women traveling together begin to argue if they are alone too much."

"You argue?" he tried to restrain his smile. He knew how his gentle and probing eyes of sustained interest and a luminous smile made women love him, and so he looked away.

"How old is your sister?"

"Forty. She's older."

"No sisters sixteen years old or younger?" It was the vilest set of words beyond 'fuck' and 'American' that could be spoken to a French damsel, and he was startled to hear them spill out of his mouth. It was a slap against women for losing their beauty with increasing years, and a shallow and blatant disregard of the inner worth of a being. It was chauvinistic and repugnant, and it got him what he wanted.

"No, no younger sister. I've got to go!" As she was leaving him, she suddenly stopped and turned toward him abruptly. "You are ugly and pathetic. You know why? You went to America and America took over your thoughts. You are Asian and yet just like those war criminals. Why don't you just leave here and go back to America or better just go to hell." Then there was perennial solitude once again.

Irritated by the stings of the ants that had crawled up his legs, and feeling a sense of compunction for having been so rude, he felt that he was now lost and wandering through the miasma and malaise of himself. It was so unbearable that he wanted to move away from the stupa and out of his inner self. If he made a left to Main Street and then another left, he would be on the road that went near the Morning Market and toward the Arco de Triomph replica, Patuxay. To the right, he would be where he was--that plaintive temple museum that seemed to still be in mourning over the loss of the Emerald Buddha. Eventually, further in that direction would lead to government buildings, which were in the French colonial architecture, and then to the river; at least that was what the map indicated.

By the time the time the Patuxay monument was clearly visible, it had begun to rain heavily and he dashed toward it for shelter. Once there, he shook the water from his hair and clothes, and stared down at some flowers growing in a square pot at his feet. Feeling less fettered by the dampness, he then looked up at the deviant kinnari and Ramakien giants that were shaped intricately into the arched doorway, and scraped the mud off of his sandals. He remembered when he was five years old in America the faux pas of wiping his feet on a neighbor's doormat that had gotten him into trouble. He had believed then that that was what doormats were for. He again postulated that perhaps there really was no love--just people who having no extrinsic value in the universe at large clung to each other for meaning. Then he suddenly heard in a Thai-Laotian dialect, "It's the Thai artist. Do you remember me."

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