Chapter 27
"The baby thing?" he scoffed, turned red in embarassment, and became reticent with face looking downward as if the breeding dogs that they had seen in passing were still before them.
"Playing around upon occasion, sure, but no baby things. We've outgrown that. Anyhow we better hurry. Its getting late."
At first the conversation brought Nawin reassurance. The relationship was amicable enough and he was content to be in company that kept him sheltered from being denigrated and reviled in his own thoughts, which rained down upon him. Then he thought of the abrupt petulant shift of the conversation to a tacit moodiness and the Laotian suddenly seemed grotesque and alien to him; the scenario of leaving the city limits with him vastly peculiar; that peculiarity seeming as if it were happening to someone else or viewed from a staticy television broadcast; and although acknowledging that all strangers remained such, unless communicated with and entrusted to be more, he wanted to flee the unknown cravenly and return home on that train which had taken him here.
It was the obdurate will of man that feigned reality to begin with and the weathering forces of drowsiness that loosened the elements allowing their essence to scatter like an empty shell smashed and falling through a fist. This was the quintessential truth of or lack of reality. And yet as he was beckoned to return home by ghosts of the past, corpses now resuscitated and moving to the foreground of his brain as if alive and relevant after so much time and so many changes, he was still gravitating forward toward the Laotian.
Conclusions about the world had subtly assembled in the back of his brain in the course of his life, conclusions repudiated at other times for the need to think positively and to make the world his home for lack of a choice of another, slipped through barriers of his mind to the forefront of his brain. His thoughts were in anarchy; and if drowsiness allowed tiny viral thoughts to enlarge and escape the subconscious, the weary consciousness of the mind exaggerated the extent of the mutation, the brain looking at individual thoughts as mirrors from an amusement park. He saw sparse motorcyclists, drivers, and pedestrians as their true figurative form of human vultures, and yet he did not mind for, as insular as he now was, to have his corpse clawed, scraped off, and devoured by beasts would be a most welcome act of intimacy.
He did not understand the reasons why he continued on this journey with the Laotian (this train stranger's lure of him, or the vulnerability that made him succumb to his will and agenda as if social contracts were always done in weakness and human relationships always pursued with the objective of attainment in mind), and yet he walked with him all the same. Was it simply for cock sweet on the sweetened cock vine? he posited derisively. Maybe there was the hunger for the sensual and the molecular in the attraction but for it to be only this would be a vast oversimplification. In part he was invigorated as much as a sleep deprived man could be by having crossed over the border, with his life just hours earlier seeming closed off to him now; in part it was to be with someone who could look beyond the playboy contrivances of art and life to see the soul of the atheist, the abused child beneath the man--yes, that was the lure over him but as with all things, such firey hungers came from within and were not ignited by extraneous forces without. Early childhood experiences were the arsonist, and the tower of his manhood would burn to a final implosion hoping for one who could fan ebullient flames or put him out entirely.
And of this second Boi, the Thai from Nongkai who claimed that he had come into the restaurant of the guesthouse because of the heavy rain, this unknown boy who already seemed as a passing dream, a wet dream, an evaporated being or residual abstraction oozing out of the furthest corners of memory, would he, Nawin, really have paid for his education? Overall he believed that if a letter, an email, or a phone call were to come to him resurrecting the abstraction into a living being once more, he would help him. But without sleep he hardly knew anything about himself for sure--he was like some piece of discarded trash bobbing superficially on weltering waves. He surely would help him as he had done for ladies of the night and other women whom he drew, rode, and drew once more but that fact alone did not speak well of him. Doing something pleasant for that which brought him pleasure seemed only a means to keep the pleasure coming. No, he retracted, his motives were not as bad as this. He might not be the greatest altruist or philanthropist in the world but as a man who knew it all, had suffered it all, and could easily imagine the travails of the inner lives of others, it was his obligation to correct injustices where and when he saw them. Only a lunatic sought injustices to paint or rectify, but if one alleviated the suffering that came before him and his adumbration, his life would have true worth. But what phone calls would he receive? He had thrown his telephone into the large trash can at the Hualamphong train station, so it was not as if he would get any telephone calls. Address? He was homeless. Deeds that he owned were merely paper, joint property due to hid marriage license, or so he assumed, not that attempting the eviction of wife and son had ever entered his mind. To think of them ensconced eased his mind. Email? As an artist and lecturer, he had allowed one of his students to maintain these secretarial duties. Now his account at Silpakorn University, home of the Silpakorn University Swamp Monster, the roving land and water monitor, had email galore to which he would never be able to get through all alone even if he cared to try.
What did he know? He hardly knew anything--just that he was walking with the Laotian, that a bus depot of some sort was before them, that the possibility of an amorous interlude had fallen behind some moments earlier like a handkerchief from his back pocket, and that from nigh to nay that which could be dissolved into location had become nothing. As all things in the course of time weakened, diffused, and were absorbed by the next behemoth event, so was rapacious emotion, more illusory and immaterial than anything else, and instinctual hungers that were corporeal delusions of intimacy to, more times than not, foster pregnancy, would be all the more fleeting. Now the nearest hotel was blocks behind them, and here they were.
It was like a fallow pasture for the grazing of these mountable but crippled mammoths. They were used busses that were supercilious hand-me-downs from Japan to a world capital bereft of so much. Often there needed to be multiple attempts at the ignition key to get them started, but once revived, these monsters constantly exuded and spewed their noxious and intoxicating flatulence.
He entered deep into the underbelly of one that would take him to the poverty and destitution of the masses out of city limits and illusions. If Bangkok was an opulent deception of rural life he hardly knew what would lie before him away from the antiquated, rustic capital of Vientiane; but he knew that it would be rife in life, and something far truer and more pervasive than his impoverished existence as the son of a sidewalk restaurant proprietor in Ayutthaya. He did not know of any reason for what he was doing; but at least he was living life by actually doing something. And whether or not he would find it more of a positive experience than a negative one, as encounters with women opening up their reeking legs for him, was yet unknown.
It was an adventure to which the outcome was uncertain; but as it was an adventure; at least it had the pleasantry of this component, which was sought most ardently by those who could not rest in their own company, if nothing more substantial. But then with so much that was deceased around him, meaningful relationships decomposing on the mound of earlier rot, he would have to be truly pachydermatous to not feel an impact from that which might seem extraneous. And when the inside was shaken with all in rubble, of course he would have to leave his domicile. He had mistakenly believed that during most of his time in Laos he would be sitting in some park or another reading a volume of essays on Buddhism or art, and when glancing up at the sky he would hear nothing within and without but the gentle rustling of pages turned by the fingers of the wind. Instead he heard evacuation sirens within the city of the mind.
And here he was exiting Vientiane. It was hard to believe that he had actually been in the capital. The city had monuments and a few signs in English elucidating Laotian history, but signs of international commerce or even signs in Laotian prompting capitalism on a local level, seemed scarce. These people were not competing but sustaining themselves and thus there was little thriving on the backs of others. There were no elite artists--no arts at all outside that which impoverished students sold along the river to French tourists.
Standing in this crowded bus of upright mangled bodies twisted around each other, he tried to free his mind as best he could. He contorted his head toward a window and angled it diagonally to look up at the gargantuan sky clogged in floating masses of clouds. It seemed to him that all futile prayers ended in the ethereal bellies of these livid beasts. Still, they looked thick and real whereas he and those around him seemed, in his sleep deprived state, to be disappearing like vapor.
Why not one more stifled yearning? If he got what he instinctually craved, he would be but inflamed instinct with all the days of his life subject to hedonistic impulses, continually needing others, he would be forever incomplete. It was good that the hotels were behind him and that that inexplicable feeling for the desideratum had died down to a few burning cinders.
"He's bound to stop for a beer somewhere between two bus routes, slit your throat as a fruit vendor would a watermelon from his chilled glass cart, mince you into pieces, dump you from the Friendship bridge, and watch you, in pieces, float down the Mekong river," said a gecko. The reptile was hanging from a rail on the bus, its form grotesquely large for a gecko and resembling a Silpakorn swamp monster in miniature, with a head like a four legged dinosaur, a tongue like a snake, and a body like an alligator, but a gecko it was nonetheless. "It's your destiny and you cannot escape it. Why look so frightened? Don't you like that which circumvents etiquette?"
"Maybe."
"Maybe? Exploiter of whores, splattering their filth on canvas in your colors, your rebellion against this land where naïve belief in the goodness of the Chakri dynasty is supreme, belief that Taksin the Great after his wars with the Burmese had suddenly gone mad, that the bludgeoning of his body and the execution of his son in Cambodia had been done at orders other than that first Chakri, Rama I and that Rama IX did not arise by the assassination of his brother, the Eighth, belief that father, the abuser, knows best. You are drawn to those who do something avante garde. Why be afraid. It's ineluctable?"
"Ineluctable?"
"Ineluctable as day meets night. And you want it to happen--this ruining of you at other hands. Admit it."
"I do; but I don't know why."
"The smearing of paint, the smearing of blood, there's no difference. The murder of a rich man to get his gold, the impaling of a whore with your cock, its all mixing to get the most poignant colors on the palette. He will get you drunk. People of that type always like to drink and to do so at their friend's expense. He will notice your gold and stay silent about it as though it does not interest him at all. People of that type always do."
"And the means of doing it?"
"A rusty pocket knife with a dull edg,e but with enough muscle and unflinching will even the dullest object can puncture another. But I wouldn't give it any concern; it's no different than the wallowing explorations of the pig-like whores you are so fond of, all for the thrill of exploitation and impaling. He will be intimate with your blood and as he does so he will never forget you."
"Sit down. Over there," said this Boi. A woman had just left the back row of seats. Feeling enervated, Nawin obeyed.
40
They had gotten off one bus to wait along the road for another which, he assumed, would take them to other hamlets or rural scatterings possibly more remote than this--assumed, for what did he know waiting perennially, or seemingly so as he was, and shaking his head from time to time to keep himself on top of the internal waves and not be overtaken, not be absorbed by them- waves which came upon him voraciously like inundating tongues, polysemous tsunamis of a muted, mutating language cryptic to him, not of volition and thus adventitious in a sense, but still of his own making. The gecko/water monitor-hybrid was still whispering from the tips of the tallest of weeds, "He's brought you out here to kill you," even though it seemed to him that if the Laotian were to do this he would have done it by now; that, barely glancing at him, as preoccupied as the younger man now was with this new pastime of murmuring into his telephone while scratching and pinching his crotch, activities pursued almost as fervently as playing with his blades, that his intent was innocuous, or as innocuous as it could be for one more of the naked and purposeless human animals for which manipulating the environment to serve one's sense of pleasure and to repudiate by acquisition that which he was, was always a salient motive. So he thought, and wearing a gold chain and a thousand dollar watch as he was, so he needed to believe; and thus he justified his actions to his nebulous and somewhat effervescent self that was surreally disconnected like a half severed limb.
Looking at him from the dense, weeded patch where he stood a couple yards behind--it was, surely, this first Boi, the one in the train, and not the other; or maybe they were manifestations of the same: the wounded and the wounding--he sought an objective appraisal of him, this migrant laborer who skid around like a leaf; this individual who had given him a beer in the train but now often wielded a knife, this peculiar man whom he had seen touching his sister's feet and from a mere glance had interpreted or misinterpreted a look of lust toward her, a desperate and impoverished predilection that he knew too well, this intimate stranger of his mind whom he believed (but did not know) to have noted his own homosexual proclivity, which he had mentioned in oblique jocular sagacity, an individual with an appearance like his brother of long ago, or what he remembered of him, who could well have been soliciting himself at the Patuxai or just sitting there insouciantly as though accepting his and humanity's own naked, futile state, which acquisitive attempts even by the most affluent ultimately belied, this male who perhaps had little or no sexual interest in him ( a fact which would have negated his own feelings quickly had the teasing not exacerbated them), and was using him somehow although he did not know exactly how or care all that much for he wanted to be of use so as to discover something useful in himself.
No, the Laotian was not one whom he could objectively surmise when yearning for intimacy with and salvation for him. Already there was a taste of loose molecules of him in his mouth and the smell of him, or an emission of him, which was not him really, rolling in his nose--or more logically, he contravened, the memory of the smell and taste of others mixed with his smell which by his imaginative reveries he ascribed to him; and he wanted to deliver him the way he did of 7-11 clerks and food cart restaurateurs in his worthless good wishes but with slightly more personal emphasis and effort. It was no major hardship to forsake his retirement for a brief time, to paint the family not in time-consuming and arduous "art," if his could be called such, but as quick smears that magically conveyed a superficial essence, and to pay them a few thousand baht for sitting still and posing before him--creatures of movement expanding with time but made silent and inert deserved compensation, although what he would do with the final products, he did not know. Dragged to Bangkok to be stuffed in a closet of a home he had yet to possess in his new life as a sole bachelor, they would never see the light of day (they could not be known for it would depreciate his own commercial worth). Still, it was irrelevant.
A bus came...a seat where he could be sleeping and from a nap recovering, understanding what he was doing more rationally; but then it went by and they continued to wait as though it had not come at all. The telephone was now folded and put into a pocket and the Laotian was once again opening and closing the blades of his knife as before without even looking at the bus that was now disappearing into the distance.
He could jump the blade wielder if he so pleased, take away the knife under the impulse of the moment (maybe escalating or degenerating into making love to him in the sodden grasses like a pleasure-seeking wild boar if attitude could be wrenched from him with no more difficulty than the knife), and demand an answer for this long wait. But then he would have to be rather certain that his own thinking was clear, and he knew that it was not; that the wait was inordinate instead of seeming such--he was not sure exactly how long they had been waiting; or if he was in fact being threatened in some way instead of entertaining the possibility of being threatened (anything was possible). To jump him aggressively or to even outwardly accuse him of something only to find his own reasoning egregiously and mortifyingly false would make him the miscreant. It was his judgment that there was more of a probability that his own need for sleep was making him suspicious, if not paranoid. He decided the Laotian's behavior was not indicative that he himself was the desideratum, the target of execution--but, even of this, what did he know with the reasoning ability he had sloshing around in drowsiness and drowsiness speaking so incessantly with its reptilian voice murmuring that he, Nawin, would be stabbed (to use the exact word in Reptilian, impaled) and that he wanted it that way; and perhaps he did want it that way, he speculated about his wish to be impaled intimately, his natural death wish that would be unnatural if not opposed strongly by a zeal to live. The extent of his zeal to live (surely the more pervasive and predominate it was the more healthy the human psyche) he was uncertain of in such an exhausted state with inordinate muck, the black dust and fabric of the brain, in all sectors animated and taking on primitive life like a mass of prions rising from nothing recalcitrantly, clogging his mind with their movements, his will, his sensibility lost to them that were no more than adumbrations of forgotten aspects of his life...lost.
Lost...how much more, especially when in this sleep deprived state, could he tolerate this standing idly at the edge of the highway and, in each sound of an emerging truck, anticipating, or coercing a feigned anticipation of, the emergence of a bus futilely, but in thought expecting that it would never come most perspicaciously? How much more could he tolerate all this: these prodigious moments of fighting the pull of sleep; people rift from him; increasing age transporting him further and further from the sensitive child whom he once was, a sheen of innocence that he once had and could have maintained to some degree had there not been a need to survive on the streets and to rise above them economically; his naïve wish to be loved; and his hunger to use others for sexual gratification, all of which compelled him to mutate--a groping primate of sorts dangling on a limb to avoid putting his feet directly on the sordid ground, as if that which he garnered from the earth, his money, were clean. Lost, it was a part of him that he could not keep, a ragamuffin whom he wanted to reject and reclaim simultaneously and yet could do neither one well.
But, in accepting the mutation--there was little choice but to accept it and as he had always flaunted himself in the livery of his manhood there was no point in reversing the trend now--how was he to know that the man he now was was the man he was meant to be? Who was to say that one was meant to be anything at all but atoms attracted to each other loosely and reverberating off each other in temporary mass, an agglomeration less solid, less real, than a rock, and more equivalent to a gas? Who was to say that man evolved personally let alone socially? He just let the old foundation crumble and sordid experiences caulk into and harden over the holes stinking like excrement.
Perhaps one did not evolve any more than the word "love" had substance beyond its four letter content and the amount of time and energy expended to gain this concocted abstraction which by being believed, managed, as a corollary, to patch the void and perpetuate the species--a species of monetary, intellectual, and physical disparity whose only ablution would come in a rain of nuclear bombs.
The postcard which he had picked up for her in Nongkhai he had forgotten in his room at the guesthouse. A maid had no doubt thrown it into the trash by now; but then it matched the telephone and life which he had thrown, as well, into the trash receptacle at the train station--yes, two negatives were better than one because the odd was never harmonious and even. What did he want of that telephone anyhow, as possessing it would not bring women back, not even the cute nurse at Siriaj Hospital, for the wound had been reopened and a reopening a vile hole he must fall through.
At this time she, Noppawan, was no doubt there in their home with his child, and so he could return to Vientiane, find a decent hotel--the few that there were--and give her a call. Better, he could boldly return to her who had been the salvation of his youth; but now they were not the same as before--their relations would be like returning to an empty house after it had been repossessed by the bank. He, the Nawin of ten years hence, would just be another variation of this thing that he called self, constructed substantially of recent memories, and erected broadly on distant general impressions of largely diminished and forgotten accounts. His true self was the self of the moment and it would only be real for a time if his colors did not blur into the colors of everything else--but then one did not live without interacting and diluting. Was not his sojourn here, this atheist's retreat, futile if he did not interact with others and mix himself in them, hoping to learn and be enhanced beyond his musty, circumscribed domain?
Why, he asked himself, was he here? If he had gone to Chiangmai, he could have been hang-gliding, or Pattaya, para-skiing, action where, for a time, being isolated, diluted, vanishing, not even a professional selfless entity, a cog in the social-economic apparatus, ceased to matter. Who could blame those who dissolved themselves fully into the mindless purity of action, the substance of the expanding universe? In the brevity of motorcycle rides and the attendance of football games he did it on a regular basis himself...but then he would always return to that unfathomable, pensive self that others muffled gregariously with the noise of companions--a pensive, mellifluous dirge sought after and found most fully, for him, in broad empty spaces.