Chapter 25

A couple of workers began to sweep water out of both sides of the arched entry. As Nawin watched these automatons and their redundant strokes he remembered one time when he went into the stadium to jog and dabble in studies toward a Ph.D. which he had no real interest to complete. There he saw a group of workers cutting down a small tree, sawing large portions into more manageable pieces, and carrying those pieces to a pile. The workers looked like an entire family with the variety of their ages and sexes. Two of the adults who were moving the pieces cajoled a small boy into believing that he was instrumental in removing the branches for as each was being lifted he would hold onto a bit of the center and they would praise his efforts. They were determining his fate by brainwashing him with positive reinforcement but at least, Nawin thought then, he would be content with his station in life. Who was to say that the boy when grown would not feel sorry for people like himself who did not know what to do with all the days of their lives.

A sales mendicant came by with a dozen or more umbrellas in his hand. "Do you want one?" Nawin asked.

"All of them. Then I can stand out here all day and have something to sell." The voice was not earnest and it engendered no sympathy.

"Two umbrellas please--any color, I don't care."

"100 baht," said the salesman. Nawin paid the money and handed one to the Laotian.

"I think you are selling something already."

The Laotian grinned. "Really? Are you wanting to buy?" He was. Ashamed of himself, Nawin looked down at the green sheen of water that now surrounded the monument. Its reflection seemed to sway and careen in the harmonious bombardment of the pellets of rain. More fluid than reality itself, the reflection would for a time seem permanently unsteady before evaporating entirely.

"No, maybe not," he said vaguely.

The Laotian chuckled. "No, Man, I'm here just because I got caught in the rain like you did."

Maybe it was true. Maybe the perverse fabrications of the mind when imparted by speech altered the intentions of the other party, distorting the fabric of probable outcome.

"Where is your sister?"

"On the farm planting, cleaning, cooking, getting water from the well, I don't know, I don't care, but she's probably thinking of you. Do you like her?"

"I don't know her. I don't think I have any real opinion." He paused thoughtfully and then said, "How do you mean?"

"I mean for a painting--of a country girl, rural life.

"I'm not sure."

"What about me?"

"For what?"

"For whatever."

"Whatever?"

"Whatever. A friend, maybe if you need one. I think that you do. You seem lonely."

"Who isn't? I'm okay with it."

"For a painting then. Will you draw me?"

"Okay, but remember commissioning a painting takes large sums of money. I don't think that's what you want. You just model and I'll get a gallery in Nongkhai to buy it when its done if art supplies can be bought here."

"It's the capitol. We have. Now tell me how."

"How what?"

"How would you paint me?"

"How do you want to be painted?

"If you were to choose."

"Nude?" He phrased it as a question for had it been a statement it would have shown him as possessor of perverse inclinations he did not want him to know. It would have compelled him to be perceived as having the interests of an artist and natural proclivities of a man but with one or the other designated as the main ingredient. Judged favorably or otherwise, it would have been a predominant issue, altering roles and distorting the potential outcome of the interaction.

"I'm okay with it," he said. He was mocking Nawin's circumspect neutrality with a smile.

"I'm just kidding. What about your sister? I mean would she care to pose nude if you and your family don't have any objections to it?"

"Try. My sister, me, the water buffalo, and the chickens: you can draw us all nude if you like as long as my parents see something else instead. You don't need to pay us anything. Just come and stay for a while. Laotian hospitality."

"I don't know."

"Is traveling alone so much fun?"

"No, maybe not."

"There's so much road construction when it doesn't rain, dust in the air instead of smog, a small capitol instead of a very large one, but still a city. You've probably never even visited rural areas in Thailand, have you?"

"Not much."

"What happened to your wedding ring?"

"It was raptured from my finger, so to speak."

"Did you lose it?"

"It lost me."

"I think that you need company right now."

"Sure, what the hell," said Nawin. "Maybe I'd like to see you nude."

"I know you do," retorted the Laotian.

His discombobulated and desultory mind made his eyes alternate in momentary gazes between the rain and the flooded land beneath until, for variety, he looked at those who were within the arched entry of the monument as he was. He supposed that he should begin to see more of a commonality with those in his proximity than he did for he was feeling loneliness impale him albeit the loneliness of being in communion with another when not wishing to be so rather than that of a lone traveler to Laos, needing the company of others. It was the only salient loneliness that he knew, and the sudden recognition of this oddity or perhaps the coldness of being so wet made him shudder and want to believe in them as cognate beings which they undoubtedly were in the strict physical sense. But demigods and men all had heads and faces, torsos and limbs. Regular men even had feelings and thoughts in some proportional quantity even if it were a degraded quality that was at the dictates of their myopic needs and agenda at the time. So, although similar in that sense, he thought scornfully, there was little that was so remarkable in it.

35

List written for him; 5000 baht relinquished to him (2000 would not be enough, at least so the Laotian had claimed, as though he would know something about this matter; and the equivalent in kip, he said, would be confusing, which was undoubtedly true); the departure executed with the figure of the Laotian at a vanishing point around the Morning Market where supposedly he would obtain paint, brushes, canvasses, a sketch pad, charcoal pencils, an easel, and other material items so vital for painters obsessed in depicting the inner world that was demotically and mistakingly referred to as the "soul" and was inconsequential to the world at large. As body, the material produced inner consciousness, "soul," perceived in the glint of the human eye, so base materials like those that the Laotian claimed that he would obtain produced "art" of an equally perishable substance, art of a relative, dubious quality that should not come from him, no not him, and especially now.

A man penetrating the virulence in the licentious might be thought of as sagacious when young but for an older man as he, to continue to draw these incessant, dirty pictures with their redundant themes, was foolish in its like of discernment even if, and by his painting he proved, that this was all there was. And yet he had agreed to paint him but the reason for doing so no facade of innocence could belie. He should be sitting next to that famous Phra Thuat Luang Stupa constructed in the year 1565 for the wisdom that might emanate from its gold and simplicity instead of hoping for--did he dare to admit it himself?--a ménage a trois.

But what was there to be wise about? That even a homeless dog needed recognition and extension, that ants summoned each other to carry a moth carcass up a tree, that creative inspiration was sexual, and philosophical ruminations were the morbid ponderings of the inconsequential and the brief, and that one wanted to live life fully and yet if rides, interaction (professional and personal), and reflections were the only ingredients he was not sure of the appropriate mixture.

If the unlikely happened as it sometimes did, and the Laotian were to return to this monument there would be the logistical problem of them getting the material to his parent's home; but no, there would be no chance of him buying the material and returning with it. He was no doubt running off with the money. Why wouldn't he be especially when it was so obvious that he wanted him to do so for otherwise he would have gone with him to obtain the supplies or would have obtained them by himself had he known where to go. By saying, "Well, if you want it that bad you can get it and I'll go up here" (meaning inside the copied French monument) both had made a contract that the fraud or casual, personal, embezzlement was permissible and that the Laotian could take the gratuity and do what he wanted with it.

If nothing else, giving this tiny bit of money had been a nominal act of redistribution for a principle of equity, and the Laotian merely an initial vehicle for transport. The money would be injected into their economy and so if the Laotian were to spend it on booze and women or seeds for the next crop it would be of no concern for him--at least so he told himself.

With all the whores he had drawn and played with by going into with a mental microscope and a condom a bit like a marine biologist scuba diving with an underwater camera in his hand he knew the ocean of human suffering inside and out, and drawing it he fed off of it symbiotically. If those around the monument now had jobs in 7-11 stores like those in Thailand (almost no convenience stores here, no nothing for sure) wouldn't they be happy? To forfeit 4000 baht, a hundred dollars, borrowed from various sources to pay the owner in the event of stealing something, an impossibility with video monitored stores, breaking something, as though a carton of milk had such a price, or running away, which of course they could do as modern day slaves with the power to walk away but no predominant will to do so, to work 14 hours a day for a mere five dollars, 170 baht; to be paid only if the acting manager liked his or her job performance and signed a document in Thai attesting this fact, they would be elated to gain such an opportunity.

Still seated on the now half-vacant bench of the monument, he was foundering inside himself in a melancholy that contaminated his bounty as an oil spill a lagoon. He loathed the inner vulnerabilities of the human creature that needed the ersatz of others for companionship (or at least confirmation when beyond the need of extension, and when thinking himself beyond confirmation still needing sexual contact to feel grounded in reality especially when spending so much time in his own head), and yet was amused by it all the same.

The relative silence was interrupted by plaintive, orphic sounds of a flute played by a uniformed high school student who sat stiffly on the steps leading into the monument. Sometimes stridently off key the music was made all the more euphonious for the errors. Truer than inadequate words at reflecting thought, the tune was pure feeling like a Moslem call to worship and it seemed to slither onto the athiest's soul comfortably enough as though that which was desolate and discordant in mortal man who lost everything and everyone Heraculutously including innocence and the various stages of development that trod upon it was a ubiquitous leitmotiff, a black light one had to bask in for his own good, human bondage not executed onto him alone but done uniformly and impersonally to all.

It seemed to him odd that unlike Bangkok, this Communist bastion seemed to be conspicuously absent of overt beggars. He had expected the same maimed, exploited mendicants whom gangsters, eager for profit that could be coerced by sympathy, mutilated by cutting off limbs and tortured by subjecting these dysfunctional amputees of body and mind to the hopelessness of begging on the streets. Still in smaller quantities there was no paucity of human misery here: separately older men without vocation and with glazed eyes gazed onto rain that, for the most part, they probably did not consciously register; salesmen stood aimlessly behind fruit and noodle carts that were instruments of servitude and sustenance they were invisibly chained to; and hack tradesmen from shoe repairmen to homemade broom salesmen sought refuge from the rain not only for themselves but for that which they were peddling. It occurred to him that in some ways he had wanted to see unprecedented misery and that this was why he had come here instead of picking up his airline ticket and flying into San Francisco as he had planned. Perhaps this was why he had forfeited a return to a country of which he entertained a vague childish memory not of love in family but of hope that there was such a thing. The early times of stripping to his underwear and diving off piers into the Chao Phraya river with his brothers had proven the concept of family to be ever so brief.

Friendship--an act to seek out one like himself for confirmation of his ideas and behavior as correct or having some consistency in the world at large--this was that which he had hoped for when he bought the ticket to Nongkhai. He believed that here he would witness unprecedented suffering and in that sponge of his heart he would absorb it and burst like the clouds above. It was his belief that it would be better to die of a heart attack with eyes wide open instead of bit by bit by withdrawing into his shell of pachydermatous affluence and indifference as he moved about in this world of suffering. He watched the dark billowing clouds not from above but below reflected in the turgid green sheen of the expanding puddles that in this perennial rain formed of the ground a lake. He listened for reflections in the deluge and the inundation of water he stared into. It croaked surreally with no visible evidence of that which produced the sound, as if the water itself were transforming into toads--but then this was a reflection too, another distortion of the mind.

No, he did not expect him to return nor did he want him to but that was from wanting him to so badly. If he did not return there would be but the self, he and his thoughts droning on unnoticed to others like scrapings on the wall of a cell of solitary confinement, graffiti under a rock, thought under the rock of the skull that closed him off like the tomb did Christ. No, there was not a chance in the world of seeing him again and it was as he wished it to be--at least that which was rational in him wished it to be.

And again, if instead of using the money for more constructive purposes the Laotian were to buy beers and whores with it, the money would be in circulation in this communist bastion of basic sustenance and mild deprivation instead of being an inconsequential part of an astronomical sum in his savings back home, a vehicle for some degree of equity in this world where one would be better off to pluck out his eyes to stay ignorant about such matters. Loss of this money would be an invisible extraction from his savings, an easy riddance.

This rational element schemed was as pretentious an affectation as the clothes he wore--or any clothes for that matter. This boy, the Laotian, whom he mentally labeled as Boi 1 (to make a distinction with the other) was another self delusion, another lie. Both were bodies and he had an inexorable yearning to see this Boi 1 naked, to devour and be devoured in wetness, unity, and sensation with him.

He could say all he wanted as justification for giving him that money. He could claim the pretension that from giving it he hoped it would expiate him of the gross insensitivity of being affluent in this world of suffering and doing nothing about it, but really he wanted him to return, he wanted the paint ordered and delivered, he wanted an excuse to draw him and record his beauty and his nakedness, to shut out the world in bliss with him, to be in a ménage a trois with him and his sister in a euphoria of gluttonous devouring.

36

If the Laotian were to return with the supplies or a receipt for them, a scenario he could hardly imagine, it would further solidify a contract begotten of seemingly inconsequential words and bits of paper currency, the substance of contracts; they would be in this union and its ensuing obligation of him to paint one or another of the members of this rural Lao family even though the subjects and themes this would pertain to were yet unknown to him. He would stay with them until he completed his task, rural, sodden and destitute as they were, no doubt sleeping on the planks of a wooden shack if not on a dirt floor once again, drinking boiled tea colored tap water or worse mixed with lemon juice, eating once a day as they did, consuming rice with fish sauce or salt sometimes mixed with an ant egg curry and a few boiled vegetables purchased cheaply as they were on the verge of rotting, somtam, chicken, noodles, boiled eggs, sticky rice and mangos of the more wealthy almost as exotic as French cuisine, and out of respect to them ostentatious, flickering gold would no longer adorn his brown skin to replace his slave collar of plaited noodles and in lieu of the yellow plastic wrist band of mindless King Rama myrmidons who also wore yellow T-shirts with royal insignias on Mondays and Fridays the thousand dollar wrist watch would have to be deposited obscurely into his luggage. But were this stranger to desert him, should he in his loneliness be desperate enough to conceptualize it as such, there would be the continuation of this freedom from others, expectations of him just as he wanted, despite any neediness to the contrary, an uncompromised, unadulterated self in surfeit, in which even the painting of internal and external worlds was perceived not as expression but as a blurring or smudging of the true self by form and colors; and there would be more of the same unbearable loneliness, and emptiness. He thought this as he heard thunder in the distance of the passing storm and in an undercurrent of thought recalled explanations of thunder and lightning posed by adults, those pleasant lies of childhood that after all this time he had for the most part forgotten, memories unused that without imagining the way they once were, fell apart with pieces scattered in disarray and sometimes lost entirely, unable to be found again, void recollections of the mind.

If left alone he would be a cactus flowering obscurely touched by nothing except the ravaging sandstorms within, an ascetic monk whose insights would languish within the intact internal life of a temporary being, a fetus barely alive in a dead woman's body--if this were really what he wanted. If the Laotian did not return he might continue to have the pleasant company of his thoughts provided he held reign over their restive movements and they were directed mostly toward some external aim instead of a constant churning of old redundant ideas and ghosts of memory haunting him with their illusionary palpability as though that which had been could be grasped still. Alone here in Laos, a foreign land, there was plenty that was novel to explore and by being a sole traveler, his will, his uncompromised agenda, would be exactly as he wished it to be. And if in this solitary journey he were to become unbearably lonely, wishing to do god knows what with this family and unable to do so, his consolation would be that he had given money to those who no doubt needed it. But apart from putting into practice an egalitarian principal which gave him some satisfaction (pleasure always being the positive reinforcement of an action never to be pursued unto itself but giving personal meaning to virtuous action) there was nothing so personal in it.

No, he sought only to draw his base nakedness and feel that erect body against his own. He wanted to be intoxicated by the molecular exchange of kissing a man like yearning for a bite from a water monitor, an animal that was rife at the Silpakorn University campus in Nakkon Pathom, and to ride and be ridden to launch his sensations out of his mundane, incarcerating, gravity-bound subjugation.

There was more of the distant thunder. It was like a homeless bottle collector pushing an unwieldy cart away from him or, if it could be transmuted to sound, that of a man repudiating his own impecunious past. Hadn't that faded memory of a mother once told him that thunder was a diamond falling from some goddess when struggling in the heavens against a diminutive monster?--he could not remember any of the specifics; hadn't some uncle in the United States of America, the country of his birth, once told him that thunder was the sound of Thai monkeys angrily tossing coconuts from coconut trees in the hope of getting to the bananas? He remembered that in his naivity and love of his nativity he had fused the two stories together. He smiled ruefully as all variety of family was now gone from him, its ephemeral nature expedited by circumstance and choice. It occurred to him how quickly the child within could penetrate the veneer of a man, and by resurfacing, claim hegemony over adult thoughts. It might give way to them altogether were it not for the need to make a living in a role that in some minute way was a propulsion of human existence--not that seated on park benches or the equivalent for the past three or more years of his self- proclaimed retirement, tolerating his wife's looks of disrespect and thus bonding all the more with Kimberly in due course, he had performed many roles over the past few years...he had merely fathered a son. But of 6 billion people on the planet, how would he know that his assumptions of self were applicable to them? He could not even prove the dominant child trapped in the veneer of manhood for himself, let alone others, when from one minute to the next he was a different being entirely thinking different thoughts or seemed so as any object in variant angles of light. Maybe this assumption just related to those whose childhood, despite some sublime moments, was overall harrowing, or maybe it was merely his own idiosyncrasies.

Nawin was gazing out to a sidewalk that was across the bifurcated street that veered into many directions around the Arc de Triomphe replica, and he was ready to move toward it. He was just about ready to stand up and walk away. As the Laotian would not be returning there was no need to sit here further. Furthermore, he was hungry and wanted the steam of coffee to make him into a new man. Then he suddenly felt a tap on his shoulder, human warmth, the sense of belonging to this sorry specie. The Laotian handed him a receipt. "It should be delivered by tomorrow afternoon."

"All of it?"

"I think so."

"To your home?"

"Yes unless you want me to have him deliver it to a hotel room. You don't have one?"

"No. I was thinking about checking into the Paris Laos Hotel. I saw it earlier in passing. Any change?"

"No."

"It came to 5000 even?"

"Its on the receipt."

"That doesn't mean much."

The Laotian smiled. "I didn't write the receipt. Did you go up into the monument."

"No, just stayed here. What's up there?"

"I don't know. What's up there? Poor people trying to sell their trinkets, souvenirs if you want to call it that. Junk for westerners to remember their trip to Laos. All of it is the same as in Thailand. Nothing that would interest you unless you want a little better view of the city."

"I see. Then I guess not."

"You don't want to be a spectator of poverty?"

"No, I've seen plenty of that and I guess I'll be seeing more if I stay with you."

"Of course. Let's do it."

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