Chapter 24

The Laotian made the prayerful gesture of the wai which Nawin reciprocated. Then he said, "In the train, man. Remember?" He was trying to pierce through the fixed, glazed expression to pry into another mind and loosen the memories therein. His words could only be insolent if they were contemptuous, which they were not, and flagrant if he considered the age of the interlocutor, which he may not have done, and overall, the informality of it made Nawin feel equal instead of superior which was equivalent to a sense of being young once again. He remembered and smiled at his acquaintance and found himself amused at the fluctuation of demeanor in a given moment of time.

"Yes."

"I gave you a beer."

"Gave?" Nawin sneered playfully before a more cordial tone replaced it to patch over a stretch of silence. "I suppose you did in a way."

"Did or didn't?"

"Okay, you did."

"So here you are."

"Yes."

"You're a bit wet."

"Yes, I am."

"Are you cold?"

"No."

"You look tired. Are you tired?"

"Not really."

Boi guffawed at the lucid and hesitant utterances of the withdrawn, distrustful being and looked amused as though it were a game to him. "Well, I suppose you'll dry quickly enough when you're back inside. Do you have a hotel room?"

"Not yet."

He was ambivalent whether or not the Laotian meant to say, "Dee" [good] in response. As the Laotian scrutinized the Thai, so Nawin did him. It seemed to him that a word had percolated from the Laotian's thoughts and yet the mouth bore nothing. The pursed lips seemed to incarcerate sound and the only thing to materialize was an imagined utterance and his own irritation at not even knowing such an insignificant item in the social sphere of man with absolute certainty. It was odd but useful, he thought, that the mind was able to distinguish that which was and was not real, especially when both were unreal in the objective measurement of passing time, and that the mind noticed distinct positive attributes in each, rarely confusing the two. In this case, however, he hardly knew whether it was a twitch of lips or a suppressed word. If the latter, he did not really know the word that it would have been but he still strongly believed the unspoken word if it were such to be "dee".

"My sister mentioned you many times. I said that you would probably never call and might not even cross the border." Nawin wondered if certain words were being withheld while others selectively released, but if so he could not see that this was different from anyone else, man or woman. And of a woman, her love might be proclaimed but never the whore within her that yearned to improve her situation in life as the most virtuous married status and money in one sense or another. Was he not missing life by analyzing everything, or was he giving weight and meaning to fleeting experience by the anchor of his ruminations? To live life fully, how much should be spent in the inward exploration of thought and outward action without being macabre or flippant and in both cases superfluous? This he hardly knew and also pondered.

"I almost returned to Bangkok this morning." He did not know why he was saying this. Like a model who would soon allow herself to be denuded there was something inside him wishing to strip off inner layers and be known to others as though knowledge of himself was not enough--as though even the palpable sense of himself in movement and thought was diminished and not reaffirmed by human interaction. Rocks moldered away and would do so all the more quickly if not reinforced by sediment; so, he said to himself, he could not be exempt of the same fate.

"You only arrived in Nongkai a day ago. Why were you thinking of returning?"

"I don't know" he said, and from the prevarication seconds of silence ensued with the discomfort of it, like the sweat, humidity, and filth of the open air clinging to his skin. As discourse was the only tangible means to gain an outline of another and the projected intertwined adumbration, the thick shadow of relationship that was the two, it was impossible to stay silent, refusing to disclose bits of himself; and as the present was at times a prototype for what would follow, an extension of the present that could be the pattern of his whole life. Needing to part the silence he said, "To see my wife if you must know."

"I must. The one who broke your arm?"

"And clavical. The same." The emphatic must enticed him and he smiled begrudgingly.

"You know what I think?"

"No, why would I?"

"That she doesn't exist."

"A le nah [huh]?"

"She doesn't exist."

His smile dissipated. Then he tilted his head down and his taut countenance became empty like the void in his head. "That's more or less what I decided and so I wandered here," he said dolefully.

For, oddly enough, he, as rich as he was, had come to this place of all places like an impecunious, malnourished refugee seeking any parlous state that might save him from starvation. Since Kimberly's death he could not find even scant viands or morsels of hope anywhere; and as all humanity competed for this resource, a prodigious amount was needed to feed their ambulatory corpses for the continuation of their hauntings, which would end in final stumbles. If there were a search light piercing a sliver of darkness for his sake in the solidity of his grief, the one hard substance in the random and furious changes of his life, how would he who was buried alive inside himself see it? And why would anyone else, busy in his or her solipsistic role, find enough humanity to save him?

If any light came to him now or had emanated heretofore, he was not aware of it. The border leading back to Thailand seemed a dark and opaque one-way journey sealed off to retrospective deviants. Thus, he was stranded in this swamp of Vientiane, Laos, without any chance of return. He was here in front of the Patuxay monument, this Archo de Triomphe created from money that the Americans had alloted for an airport.

"Lost?" There was only one object, himself, that was the meaning of this word, for the Laotian's eyes seemed to be peering into him with murky beams of light.

"Not entirely lost, no. Detached, I think, which makes me less lost really. Who knows? It feels different though--different from how I see it... not that you need to know that," he said condescendingly with a chuckle, believing that his ideas would not readily permeate into the obtuse mind of the laborer. Then he countered this claim by doubting if intelligence was innate. It was in part the result of human will for transcendence, and in part provided by education fueled by money like everything else. The Laotian seemed to be sagacious enough to know his situation or perhaps this loneliness was so inordinate that he wanted to believe him as such. To be known was a vulnerability to be exploited especially when man's feelings wanted to avow friendship with he who saw him denuded, but to shy away from people was rather weak and craven.

"You should express yourself freely to your friends."

"Friends?" Nawin laughed. The laugh was mild with mild sarcasm, but it shook his body, reawakening the dull pain of his broken limb and this acute sense of falling from a precipice into an all engulfing abyss.

"What?" retorted the Laotian irascibly. "Are you laughing at me?"

"Well, yes, I'm sorry, but we don't hardly know each other."

"That could change."

"Why should it?" He was critical and cautious, but then he did not know what else he could be. There were less mendacious illusions like a marriage that lasted for some years and deliberate fraudulent ploys by calculating self-centered beings wanting to improve the circumstances of their lives more expeditiously. Both, with any real touch, would fall like a wall of sand so one had to be careful of what he leaned on, who he associated with, and what he believed if he believed in anything at all. It was a world of impermanence, a world where men married women for solidity and a sense of completion as an adult, and women had their babies (or in the case of Noppawan, a friend's baby) as though grounding oneself in the mundane would make the continual shifting of the ground stable and themselves as everlasting monuments. But, he countered, what did he know? Artists might be introverted and anti-social by nature or just inclined to justify their enmity towards the world at large.

"Why shouldn't it?" said the Laotian [meaning why shouldn't their acquaintance become closer]. Nawin could not think of any reason to oppose this particular friendliness any more than to favor it, and so he stood there neutral to the dictates of fate. If he had been more of a non-anthropomorphic deist or anthropomorphic atheist, he would have believed in the significance of this coincidence of finding him here and it would have pressed into his mind with as much religious fervor as the secular could hold. Still as lonely as he was, although adverse to admit it, he just felt its significance without giving it credence.

"Do you still have my number in case you need it? You might when traveling in Laos."

"I Threw it away," Nawin admited regretfully. And as he said this, ashamed of his own conduct, compunction bit into him like a rabid dog, and he felt friendlier towards the Laotian for accrediting him with a liberty that would not entail obligations to paint him or his family. Such moral obligations done to feel the injustice of the world and to allot money (in his case to pay them to model for a painting he did not care to draw out of a sense of pity).

"And yet we are here together. How strange. Sit down. Neither of us will be going anywhere in the rain." Nawin sat down on the wet bench next to the Laotian who wrote his telephone number out for him once again. Around them both was the mesmerizing sound of rain, now a more steady, less vehement pounding in the muddied inundation that surrounded Patuxay. With each new minute it was more like a lake instead of the elongated puddles he had seen minutes earlier.

There in the arch of the monument to the French replica, within the overarching sounds of the falling rain, he heard the sotto voce of a rotating squeak of a bicycle, the swishing of a boy's saturated sandals, and the solitary howl of a roaming stray dog. He watched the oval ripples reverberating around patches of random grass, the bathing of pigeons, the crawling of a worm at his feet, and that dog reaching out with two stretched paws to the solid overflow in the trash bin. It all seemed to him quite beautiful, sad, and fleeting.

Aimless as a transient, his was a melting of self into life and a conscious recording of that which imbued his senses. At this moment his life felt more replete in purpose since he was in the present moment, casting away the hopes and anxieties of the self entirely. Nawin breathed out, smiled and stretched as much as he could without touching the Laotian, content and relaxed in the inconsequence of existence. If there was meaning, he thought, it lay in the montage of what fell into one's senses and it did not need to be any more profound than this. He was thankful for money which was needed to provide for him in this transmutation as a homeless transient and observer of life but without stigma and free of onerous thoughts of what was needed for survival.

"It's me. In the train? Remember? I sat next to you I was--"

Nawin smiled warmly. "You were on the floor at my feet."

"That is not the best way of being remembered but yes, it was me. Please sit down." Nawin sat down on the damp bench.

"It is hard to find a comfortable position on a train, isn't it?"

"I didn't sleep well the night before."

"Why?"

"Financial worries, change, the thought of returning here. The two of you had a good time of it the night before. Sleepers and my brother's beer from what I heard."

"His beer? I wouldn't call it a gift. I gave him money afterwards."

"It didn't hurt you, did it?--I mean giving him something."

"No, I guess it didn't."

"It helped him. It helped us both to get back. What was left he gave to our parents. He would not have felt good about coming back if he had nothing to give."

"I understand. I didn't mind, really. It was a wonder that you slept at all."

"Why?"

"I think my feet were stinking. I even wanted to walk away from me." He lifted the pants legs on the foot that rested on his left leg and sniffed his sock. "Better now." She laughed and then he continued more somberly to reduce the chance of awkward silence. "Is there anything to see in this monument?"

"You can go to the top and look out over the city."

"Is it a nice view?"

"I don't know. I've never gone in. It would have to be better than from the ground. The stairs go to different levels outside but they might be rather slippery in the rain."

"Maybe not then." He had enough broken bones without taking on more risks. If only she had flaxen hair like Kimberly's, he thought, then he would not hesitate a moment. He would swoop her up in one hand and carry her up to the highest cloud.

"Will you go north to Luang Prabong?"

"I don't know. I am not really here to sightsee. Just here to simplify existence, relax--"

"Drink beer?"

"Wine preferably." Peace of mind was often facilitated this way. A Singha, a Leo, a Budweiser, a Heineken, and especially that most odious Beer Laos which he had drunk the other night which reminded him of his Barbarous brothers and father. He imagined them with cans in hands as they tried to stomp on his diminutive being while that which was maternal and good pretended it was not happening to him. Thus, in most situations, he eschewed the elixir of farmers and laborers.

"So, why are you sitting here?"

She tossed him an apple from the bag and bit into one herself. Then she smiled. "The Morning Market."

Maybe she had gone there but that did not explain why she was here. Maybe she was soliciting but then, he thought, in one way or another we all were. To do anything was to seek something from it discontentedly unless one lost himself in the present moment. She was a whore. They all were. But then when did he object to whores. They had been the holy light in his paintings, the instruments of his success. As the male beast was not any better than the female there was nothing for him to say. He just silently bit into her apple as though it were her nipple.

"Don't your parents grow any apples?"

"No, it's a rice farm. Only that."

"Are you staying with them now?"

"Yes, I didn't feel like I should continue to work in the factory when my brother lost his job."

"What will you do back here?"

"I don't know."

"Maybe we should go someplace else to talk. There must be a coffee shop around here."

"There isn't."

"Anywhere?"

"None that I have seen. This is Laos. But we can sit over there."

"There? You will get wet."

"I want to get wet."

They sat down at a bench in the rain away from the crowd that was cuddled in the arch.

"I've been thinking about hiring a personal secretary."

"Really?

"What would you want one to do?"

"Right now not so much," he said as he bit into the stiff and the sweet, "as I haven't been doing anything really. But I'll paint again. There will be phone calls from galleries, bids that need to be recorded, negotiating prices so everyone makes some profit, messages from students if I give classes--but the only thing is that getting a visa for that might be difficult." An umbrella salesman came by. "Yes, two," said Nawin.

"One is enough."

"What is your name?"

"Porn."

"You have a beautiful smile," he said right before feeling his pockets in a rather desparate floundering. "Oh no," he said, "I think I left my wallet in the hotel. I need to go back."

"I'll go with you."

"Okay," he said and they ran hand in hand in the downpour. And when they were in the room at the Paris-Laotian Hotel they removed each other's wet clothes, he kissing those lips that had fostered such smiles and their bodies coupled in comfort and unified motion--

The daydream had come over him like the flash of Garuda passing, leaving him here with this Laotian male. Overall he did not want to speak with him. He did not want to be sociable for the sake of being nice with those who were envisaging some use for him. Human entities by their own solipsistic notions, tried to come in, take up root, to fill the space within others brains and grow within the fertile soil of money; and yet they existed in the world too, they were sentenced to this earthly prison the same as he, they too sought meaning and hope in others when there was nothing else to gain personal meaning from, and it was not as if he were pressed for time and was unable to socialize because of some great task that awaited his attention. Was it such an imposition to provide a bit solace to others ever so minutely in human discourse even though the need for money drooled out of their eyes more than even their mouths as was the case with this one?

34

The gods had been misers and humidity like an over-packed storehouse continued to overflow onto the mortals of the deep-- at least so the atheistic artist envisaged it for his own amusement while wondering why one had to personify abstraction to be amused. He ignored the answer seated next to him, the answer that this was all there was, that no idea could be personable, that being smiled upon incredulously was better than being banished in his brain. He looked up at a few dark clouds that seemed to shove out of the amalgamated unit to hover as separate entities beneath the mass. There was for him amity to be found in the effectual independence of this part of the sky that sought its own distinction. Within it there was a reflection of his own earlier struggles to extricate himself from poverty, conformity, and obscurity as if the cessation of all three would bring unto him happiness, whatever that was. Colors as vivid as those of the first crayon marks in boyhood had transmuted his black and white existence by allowing his transcendence into imagination; happiness was merely a contrast to the misery that preceded it. It was the type of pleasure gained at being saved from a near drowning, and in his case it was, in his ineffable sense of loss while wandering like a mute in foreign lands, a respite, which would make drifting, befriending clouds, and the wordless discourse of being raped in male sport, the only bearable intimacies.

At the jerk of his arm to avoid a persistent fly that seemed to want to go into a crevice of his cast sharp pain flared through his arm, and the whole of his right torso. He tried to suppress the pain to retain a phlegmatic countenance before the Laotian and he tried to suppress too, the misogynist thoughts that came upon him when reminded that his brokenness had come about because of women. In trying to separate himself from the brute impulses which were his protective aversion to pain, he realized that logic alone could not cull such feelings completely for despite his intention, women were already becoming for him an equal source of derision as men and, as they were women, surpassing them.

"What are the chances of meeting like this?" asked the Laotian as smoke propelled by a gust of wind came upon them in a gaseous fog. It was smoke from chicken and pork grilled at the hands of a sidewalk restaurant worker who, stiff and decrepit as the monument itself and a reminder, prescient and otherwise, of the type of man Nawin might have been had opportunity and success not come upon him (and the Jatupon he would one day be if only in thought within the last moments of his life), stood at the other side of the arched entry. It was smoke that he imagined to one day be his own cremated smell as if living in a city, the most advanced odorless furnaces in a temple would not be available at his expiration--smoke that should have been of Kimberly's cremation according to her wishes had her parents not ordered the encoffining and refrigeration of her remains on a flight to Orleans--smoke of his mind.

The whole insoluble subject of human relations was baffling to him. Pursued as extensive involvements, these joint, often waning shadows of mutable beings mystified and overwhelmed him. Pursued as shallow engagements in small talk with strangers, concepts, at least for now, eluded him as he tried unsuccessfully to exhume words from his mind to talk with someone whom he had no inclination to know. Nawin shrugged his shoulders.

"One in a billion," said the Laotian answering his own question.

"Is that a fact?" asked Nawin diffidently for even those limited words had to be found and forcefully educed from him and as such they fell upon each other in a stutter.

"Yes, one in a billion."

"One in a billion, okay," said Nawin and the Laotian laughed.

"You act like you've just seen light after being pulled out of a box."

"I've been alone a lot in recent days."

"Why?"

"I don't know. I need to get away from people."

"Maybe you just need to get away from the old people."

"Maybe. Anyhow..."

"Anyhow, one in a billion."

Nawin laughed. "If you want to see it that way: manipulation of all natural forces to ensure our reunion." He spoke flippantly with a smile. Arrogant and jocular, his was more than contempt of the concept of pre-destiny in relationships, it was also derision for the human vulnerabilities of needing companionship altogether as though he were beyond it. But he too was born of the herd. He, even more than most, had to climb onto the backs of laborers to get his physical needs taken care of so as to have the leisure to see ethereal beauty. Why, he chastised himself, was he trying to repel human contact? Such behavior, he thought, was as unnatural as was the proclamation of a self- declared retirement in a still robust and virile being.

Society equated the worth of a man with doing and most specifically involvement in the generation of a commercial product for what other purpose did man have on the planet than to work toward making the world a more comfortable place? He remembered Noppawan's initial reaction to his retirement. It had been favorable enough for to her. It meant a cessation of these perennial sessions with nude models. And yet with the days, weeks, months, and years of Buddhist melting in which he wandered back from a park or stadium for dinner or more frequently walked around his acreage and sat in lawn chairs to dispense with the hours, often without a book in his hands, what could be said to him? He was reticent for not having any terrestrial concerns to impart and so he was a cockroach on her plate, an ant in her salt shaker. He remained such except in fulfilling what she importuned from him most: studding her friend, Kimberly, so that the three might have a baby.

Surely his success had not been her only motivation for marrying him. When in adolescence that which was barely alive in him fell into her life, onto her shoulders, she closed him in her arms at that freakish friendship hall, the anatomical museum at Siriaj Hospital, and years later at their marriage, the girlish pathos for a troubled friend was within her still. However, as even more time went by so her life became inextricable with her sense of his success and it could not be any more comfortably extracted than that of her teeth.

"Are you waiting here for someone?"

"If someone comes, yes."

"And if no one does?"

Boi smiled. "Then I would eventually leave, wouldn't I?"

"I suppose so."