Chapter 3
But was he really dreaming anything about them even in an indirect way? No, he had to admit, he was not having nightmares about the women he cared for--and he cared for them all with these two specially mixing in himself as paint, their pleasures and sorrows his tenebrism. He was not even having nightmares about being all alone, separated, and on a train trip bound for nowhere. Instead, he was personifying forty and being nibbled by a gecko.
It was darkly hysterical and he released a tacit, tickled guffaw in a strong exhaled breath, circumspect to stifle noise that could awaken the other passengers. The dream of forty was rather unequivocal but the meaning of the other was not so obvious. His best explanation was that geckos ate mosquitoes; in his youth, when snorting glue and swallowing amphetamines back in those days when his parents had died and he was working along with his brothers in a sidewalk restaurant and being molested as a "cheap date", he used to hallucinate about talking mosquitoes; so if the mosquitoes were Jatupon's only companion, they symbolized the self, a child of poverty that his name change to "Nawin" could not consume. For whatever his external changes and whatever label he gave himself, Jatupon, an abused and forlorn child was within. At least that was his version of the syllogism.
Amused by himself as he always was, he was much too curious at witnessing his sudden desultory moods of asphyxiating stagnation and foundering desperation within to ever be seriously suicidal. Still, he needed movement--the sensory details of the here and now--to override his ideas, to change him from what he was with every passing minute, and to prove that instead of being a man, he was merely an unfixed, impressionable, and amorphous blob. To air out his musty, old mind became more urgent with every oppressive moment in which he was increasingly discontent to stay within the hole in the embankment of the Pullman car that at times seemed a coffin or a drawer at a morgue, and at other times like a coffinless rot in a crevasse within the walls of a mountain. And finding that there were no more fruit pastries in his box to obtain oral pleasure--pleasure giving man a sense of being more cognizant than an automaton of space dust moving in vacuous time eating, drinking, urinating, defecating, and, given the chance, copulating (although there was little chance of that in the train)--he felt claustrophobic and climbed down the bolted metal ladder of the sleeper with the idea of going to the bathroom. As he did so he heard the Laotian snoring as uproariously as a siren and yet as mellifluously as the enticing song of a Siren.
It was indeed strange that the disheveled being who was shooting fetid wisps of air as sonorously as a bagpipe should be both enticing and repulsive all in the same reeking breath, and Nawin smirked at the sight of his acquaintance. He feigned disgust, and this action mixed with amusement in a contorted, clownish countenance until the odd smile finally flattened for there was a peculiar sensation within that at first he did not readily acknowledge. To evade the cognizable he again ruminated on how odd it was that, now feeling as refreshed as he could be when waking from rolling turbulent dreams that wrenched his brain with a pain like the sprained of leg of a child fleeing a bully (albeit that the bully in his case was the deprecating voice within himself that censured him for being entirely lost at forty), he should not be able to decipher appeal or repugnance over something so simple as the pleasure factor behind the sound and smell of a man's loud breathing--cacophonous mutterings of a hominid or something quite orphic? This was his jocular deliberation so as to stay hidden from himself behind a wall of thought. Ultimately, however, there was a scaling of the wall and the coward was ferreted.
"Am I really feeling this way?" he asked himself. He knew that he was, for his body tingled with the titillation of one wanting sex. He thought how consternating and queer it was that after leaving his brother, Kazem, over twenty years ago without ever thinking of him or any man in much of any sense (including "that way" except in the most fleeting manner), that this man, this unshaven and uncomely Laotian, should seem sensual to him now. No, he thought, with a new idea repudiating the old, the only peculiarity was that as a casualty on the battle ground of family he should live so well and so long without having to continually purge himself of memory that could continually discomfit the present with its stench, rubbing its foul wounded body in recidivistic and wanton desire.
Still, he reassured himself consolingly; it was not so "queer" for an artist to love the beauty of form. In this world of lackadaisical automatons who never appreciated the here and now, the beauty of the human frame was there to be shown by discerning artists. He posited that his own artistic proclivities in conjunction with all the trauma of the past month (Kimberly's suicide, Noppawan's beating of him with the frying pan, and being locked out of the house when returning from the hospital) were putting him in a dust storm no more nebulous than that which he felt instantly at taking a shot of whiskey or when spinning one of his madonnas on a dance floor. It was merely a minute of temporary derangement that was quite natural in life, a game of musical chairs in which the chairs also moved. He further averred that a moment or two of confusion when waking up from nightmares was totally understandable and natural in life's craziness. But, he then asked himself, why would any artist have this obsession in conveying the beauty of form unless he were painting over the background that tainted him? Perversion had the transitive root 'to pervert', and it was rooted deep with the years: it was familiar, it was going home, it was a homecoming to the illusion of that former family that could be argued to have never existed at all were it not for that almost impalpable stain that the perverted wore unknowingly like a light jacket.
Desire: what was it really? It was mad hunger for what one lacked. It was emaciated Haitians attacking a UN storehouse and a mind loose and spinning of its own accord like a top; and disconcertedly, he argued to himself in an alloy that was both a question and a statement, the encroachment of desire was surely a possibility only when the consciousness approved it with its reluctant nod. "Isn't this so?" he asked the mind which knew nothing but questions.
As much as these titillations toward the Laotian repulsed and frightened him and despite a tepid attempt at eschewing his feelings, he wanted the man, like a spellbound warlock whose spells, even when having a life of their own, went contrary to the intent. As abashed as he was by his compulsion to stare, there was nothing to stop him. No one was awake but himself. Uppers and lowers, they were all ensconced in tiny train domains behind their brown curtains. He was quite alone enough to elongate a momentary voyeurism to more. The burly stranger wearing only sufficiently bulged underwear was both handsome and ugly depending on one's perspective; and it was perspective by which all judgments lied. To understand the level of desirability or repugnance of a given thing (whether or not the Moslem woman sleeping in an adjacent bunk across the aisle with partially opened curtains was "with child," "knocked up," or a southern terrorist in disguise, or whether the train ride, one that every young boy would yearn to go on, was pleasant or not for the man he had mutated into) an overall mood was needed, a background color for the canvas based on faded memories falling through the mind as softly as leaves or as revoltingly as trash blowing on the ground.
Beams of light were able to slide through the myriad rectangular slits of the metallic awning that had been pulled down the window as a screen; and when somewhat blocked by forms in the environment the passing southerly trains became oblique. Obliquely, they changed the appearance of the man and in so doing changed the perspective of him. At one moment the light accentuated blemishes visible on his face and at another moment it diffused onto the whole countenance making it sleek and mysterious like tenebrous silver.
When the face was ugly its foul breath was fouler, and when handsome the snoring was a nice inebriating gust that picked up Nawin's kite; but in both perspectives the brazen Laotian in his impoverished vulnerability reminded him of Jatupon. There in tattered dirty clothes Jatupon, whom his brothers derided as 'Jatuporn,' was a vermin he could never entirely escape (scaling the prison walls of the subconscious as the boy did), no matter how many thousands of dollars in baht he was commissioned to paint his whores. For a moment he was scared of the Laotian as if having stumbled into a den of sleeping terrorist cells but it was the self that was his only terrorist. It was the self that filled him with stiffened, cold dread. Fortunately, with the walk to the bathroom, the attraction passed him entirely almost in the same moment it came upon him: Jatuporn was apprehended, and the self was placated as if this particular feeling were as inconsequential as all the other wind driven debris of the mind that had gone before.
If he believed that anything which overtook rational thought and equanimity in such a temporary, all pervasive and engaging burning, lacked legitimacy (and in a way he might have for he knew passion to be like the slight bitter aftertaste of too much cloying chocolate), it was of minor consideration being the Patpong prostitute depicter that he was. With lovely scented women (especially those in ovulation, which was every man's Venus Flytrap unless punctilious enough to carry a nosegay of multi-colored condoms) sensuality was wild flowers of searing energy popping up after a shower making the landscape anew. However, any titillation regarding a man was tremor and mudslides. It was his shaky world tearing apart, falling down the sores of its cracks, and being buried alive within the fall downward. Because of this, all he wanted was departure: in this case, to depart from the man, the spell, and the train, and as this was not possible, to again retreat into his once solitary bower.
Even with passion waning with every step toward the bathroom in a salvation of movement, his mind was preoccupied by wanting to reclaim the window and seat from the window and seat thief, so that he might let morning and movement pass through the orifices of his eyes to obstruct memory--a morning with shanty stations as gateways to shanty towns, rice fields and banana orchards with coconut trees occasionally spewed in, thickets of verdant weeds and knee high grass, sickly palm trees and two-story shacks where the bottom halves had such high earthy foundations and the true houses were the upper portions where drying laundry hanging from ropes were the only ornaments apart from distant glimpses of vehicles and amorphous motorcycle taxi drivers on the main street of some rural town or another. Until he could escape the man and the train entirely, until he could walk away and clog his mind with other things, there would be a window with which to take in various scenes to obstruct memory--an annexing weed of consciousness to idle eyes. And the window would be his were it not for the Laotian's sprawling body clogging his space.
He imagined himself shaking the Laotian, kicking him on his hairy behind, and dragging him out of this annexed space. He smiled and internally laughed at such an absurd caprice. The mind was littered with such protective mines, which soared through the weightless space of ethereal consciousness. By his laughter such evil was not claimed and thus it did not make him. This was his enlightened thought in a partially refreshed brain granted by a nocturnal sleep which had also slugged him with a headache, made his clothes wrinkled and smelly, and left him with the need to urinate.
Chemical fixations and caprices went out of him entirely with his liquids. Urinating in this metallic East-Asian urinal embedded within the floor of a toilet sandwiched between two cars, he facetiously told himself that the fetid little space was his friend. Even though he did it with humor it was the stuff that Jatupon was made of. It was the animistic thoughts of a child. Feeling relieved to relieve himself of fluids and issues, he could have allowed the matter to stay there, but he wanted a guarantee that nothing like this would happen to him again. The dilemma was not knowing who the guarantor was, so he sunk himself into the Buddhist myths of his culture. Ubiquitous superstition, the guardian against creepy crawling memories, came upon him. He said a bit of a prayer, as much as any atheist could, to exorcise homosexual inclinations from his brain. The prayer, if it could be called such, was not conscious or subconscious thought but a type of semi-autonomous space-garbage moving in quick orbits within the mind.
Through deliberately imagining it to be so, he made a spell that transformed Buddha into a god even though there were no gods in Buddhism (at least not in Buddha's Buddhism), no netherworld of heavenly creatures, and no guardian Seraphs and cherubs--only the deadening of desire, in the soft strangulation of this illusion of self to engender a harmony that defiled the essence of being alive. It was a toilet Buddha-god to whom he could offer no oblation beyond urination and potential defecation.
Deep in his "soul" he knew that even if there were a distant god beyond the gods made in man's image, men were mere cockroaches before it, scurrying away from the vibrations of the foot with no understanding of the foot being a foot let alone as part of the limb of a body to a conscious behemoth entity. Such was man's ignorance of God or gods, of which the most intelligent believed nothing and the most ignorant believed the myths that made their besmirched flesh hallowed enough to be at one with them. He scolded himself for wanting a deliverer who would save him from the fleeting whims that haunted the mind, moving it like an empty ship navigating mysteriously by the mandates of erratic winds and caprices. He knew how opposed to the intellect such beliefs were when there was no evidence of intervention by the deities in life's barbarism and injustices, unless it were in the injustices themselves of gods favoring some and letting others perish which would be the same as the traits of any of the monsters of men; and yet he summoned his Buddha nonetheless. Such superstitions were normal in these vulnerable and tenuous corpuses and he was no different. He laughed; he amused himself like no other.
He looked at himself in the mirror. It was the same handsome face. It was not a half rotten apple hanging loosely from a tree--at least not yet. It was the same brawny body that had amorously begotten another male in the phantasmagoria of this world. He thought of this child whom Noppawan was no doubt jubilantly nurturing and pampering at this moment as if he were her own. Should the separation seem permanent a few years from now, Noppawan would no doubt tell her son a story in which, for some families, there were no daddies. She might say that in such lucky families children were delivered to mommies by the assistance of an angel named Kimberly who was quicker with her deliveries than any of the motorcycle delivery boys who worked for Pizza Hut. It was a mean thought against meanness done to him, but he decided that he would not berate himself for it. After all, he could not figure out how there could be any sin unless it were theirs. Disposing of guilt for a moment, he could see the obvious: it was Noppawan's idea for him to father a child through her friend; and prior to the affair how could he have known that it would lead to Kimberly's possessiveness and that in her post partum depression she would leap off of her apartment balcony at Assumption University? Like every affair of any nature one engaged unknowingly, so a beating with the iron frying pan had been totally out of order. He sucked in his lips angrily and told himself that he did not hate them which was not entirely true.
Having begotten a child made him feel that his use had been filled and that his virility had been smashed out of him most intimately by the hands of two women attempting to quench their maternal thirst with his apple juice and the seeds that were rife within it. He was a mushy half-rotten apple that they had squeezed most mercilessly to garner the seeds within his juice. In a sense they had raped him; and he argued to himself that rapes of the handsome, talented, and affluent types were the most common cannibalism in this modern world.
3
He thought about a Bangkok Post article which, three years earlier, had referred to him euphemistically as "The distinguished benefactor of rural girls in an urban profession." Back then, at the age of 36, he, Nawin Biadklang, had considered the sardonic comment both humorous and exhilarating, for every article allotting time and space to an examination of his self- absorbed ruminations on decadent living, no matter how critical and regardless of the domestic nature, like this one in point, was to him, then, like the first lick of succulent success.
As with all reviews, at the time of this article's publication he considered it, which now was the most recent critique of his oeuvre, as another exhilarating current of air enabling him to soar without much effort. Back then, he had been volant within the dopamines and endorphins of his own head, anticipating a maturity, a growth into the fit of his decadent skin, which would allow him, as much as a serious artist was allotted, to strut his succulence more fully on life's propitious catwalks of fame. That had been the initial impression that had come about, to some degree, from a rather inconsequential review published in Thailand; and it had been an impression and reaction not at variance to the impressions and reactions of all earlier reviews.
And yet a year later when the drawing of all his escorts seemed banal and jejune enough to be replaced by a celebration of the ordinary (a painting, for example, like a photograph in a locket, of his then platonic angel in the driver's seat of her car but from a perspective of looking at her through the exterior of a windshield and through the interior of a dangling jasmine rosary that hung from the rear view mirror; another one of his pedantic wife at a distance sitting on a bench outside the Assumption University library while sipping through a straw the juice of a coconut as she read a book through her heavy spectacles; an odd if not grotesque painting of Noppawan with the perspective from the forehead looking onto the dark, leaning moled hills, and blemished declivity of her face; "A Conversation on Surrogate Motherhood," as one painting was mentally entitled in which both women were at a coffee shop, and despite their restrained if not tranquil demeanor the room was filled with their unrestrained, desperate thoughts flying through the air in sundry shades of every color; and others seeming to him more insignificant and raw stylistically than the three aforementioned), he told himself that he was worthless as a painter. He became determined to remove his paint and canvases to a closet and to forswear art altogether. He averred inwardly that all his studies of aching prostitutes who were quickly manufactured off the assembly belts of this world, which stretched decades, centuries, and millenniums toward the past and the future, would not help one of them, being dead and unborn as they were; and for those escorts in his immediate present whom he gropingly attempted to befriend, to sooth their jealous reactions toward his unwillingness to divorce his wife and marry them, and occasionally tried to set up as beauty shop proprietors, owners not merely of sidewalk restaurants but of the open garage variety so common in Thailand, supporting them financially while they sought a high school degree or other certificate, and other futile attempts at empowerment, it appeared that what he had succeeded in doing for the dead and unborn whores was infinitely more. He had delivered no one to their higher potential. Art, he said, was a frivolous embellishment by those who were weary of enduring the ordinary. It was lavish and empty like a string of heavy jewels locked in a safe, or the accumulation of wealth to give specious dignity to the tenuous body of carbon called man. It did nothing for anyone.
It was then that, because of the article, the word, "distinguished," began to snag his consciousness. The word, when used sarcastically, suggested that one was a dirty old man, that acme of all depravity. 'Depravity' was an all inclusive word in which both playboys and bloodthirsty tyrants were erroneously locked in as cell mates. He had not even climbed far into sensual decadence, a different mountain entirely, with play for the playboy tearing his crepe paper heart the inwardly lachrymose and outwardly debonair way that it did, with these bouts of sensing a woman's genitalia as vapid holes being banged as empty drums from inside by a man's stick; these conclusions that sex was just a bored erumpent man banging on any tin trash can in reach for a bit of sound and vibration, and brief moments of total, pellucid understanding called enlightenment as to the absolute absurdity of an instrument of urination being used for intimacy.
He knew that if viewed alone, without the disparaging meanings pretentious and sanctimonious art critics gave to it, the word, "distinguished," was more good than bad. Still, he did not like the elderly connotation of it in reference to himself and he did not think that he was accomplished enough to be considered "distinguished." Nobly and decadently, he had spent many years chasing lurid themes and nasty girls merely because he, from personal experience, could empathize with innocence being snatched away by the hungry wolves of this world--or rather, the more complex commonality of not really being snatched by those fangs, but innocence, in the form of a thigh, being eagerly given to the waylaying wolves so that the whole body could survive. By being tossed morsels of the good life from the beloved abductor in exchange for a thigh, the body could survive and the brain would be more than empty space for it would have someone to love.
Regardless of whether the innocent were considered victims or volunteers, innocence was nonetheless baited and devoured. As a forlorn younger brother who was hated by all except for the one who would use him as a "cheap date," he knew. He knew that corrupted innocence was a perennial ache, which would ensue for as long as there were hungers. And for Nawin, this Jatupon (merely "Jatuporn"), it was an insoluble theme haunting him with many blissful nights and compelling his days to be slavishly spent in pouring color from tubes into imaginary holes on canvas.
Fine as it was in youth to vindicate injustice by painting his tragic madonnas, one could not exactly grow old that way and seem inwardly wise or outwardly respectable, not that he accredited the latter as having so much importance. Still it was a rather repugnant thought that he who wanted to become wise and enlightened once he entered old age would instead become just another distinguished patron of massage parlors, obsessed by vibrant youth, and having found no awareness from all his days beyond his sexual rhythms. From this conclusion he retired from art with a second and more puissant conviction.