Chapter 4

Now he, this forty year old birthday boy in a toilet of a train and the stench thereof, was once again trying to recall this same article for he was wondering if the writer had really meant all along that he was an immature painter whose use of the lurid could only sustain him in his youth. For all these years he had been gloating in all things written about him as if none of it were critical or vatic; and it had never occurred to him that perhaps, by behaving so, he was making himself ridiculous.

He tried to recall it as best the copying and projecting apparatus of the human brain allowed so that he might reinterpret the critique, but the lethargic crawl of memory wobbled like an overweight, arthritic dog kept at a distance, and only that salient collar: the word "distinguished," snagged it a little within the thickets of thought that made up the illogic of his consciousness.

Somewhere into this third time of looking up at himself in the mirror for reassurance that he still possessed the same handsome face, he imagined something like an older man within scraping the vestige of his claws through the inner layers and then through the surface skin of his Botox starched face. The hoary phantasm of the stark, ugly possibility of self and the probability of one day finding himself no more distinguished than any old beast fornicating with youth made him once again reel on this, his first day of being a forty year old man.

Suddenly, a plethora of other articles published about him reeled through his mind like microfilm, but also in a most diminished and faded state. Some of these articles might have merely been the hype of writers at the insistence of gallery owners or independent actions of newspapers and magazines to give readers what they wanted: sleaze about a minor celebrity whom through his paintings and tabloid gossip they could learn more about than any snapshot of a movie star in bed with someone other than his wife. From tiny facts or rumors of facts about this exhibitionist god on canvas, the populace who were bereft of significant involvements could gossip about him to make friends with others equally bereft.

"No, my works are not salacious crap--well, not crap anyhow," he told himself, and laughed at his hyper self-criticism for it was he who had been the youngest artist in Thailand to have an exhibit of his work (a decade in retrospective) dangling nude with legs marginally wide open in the temporary art museum. His adulthood had been good indeed, he told himself; and he knew that he could go on savoring his success if only he could find an inspiration to probe the ordinary as profoundly as he did the carnal. "Strange," he thought, "that the carnal is ordinary but that the ordinary does not seem to be carnal," and he dwelled on this paradox that he created for himself until memory intruded on his game.

- What are you doing, he had asked Noppawan one late Sunday afternoon after returning from his painting and philandering on the floor of his studio.

- Why all alone and in the dark?

- I am not all alone.

- Well, good. Who is with you?

She did not say anything. - Noppawan?, he asked mildly as if addressing a sensitive child.

- I have my lovers too. Can't you see? As withdrawn as she was, her words were barely audible.

- I see Basset on your lap. I see that she loves you just as I do.

- No, hers is different...real.

There was silence between both of them and he felt she was not real but a miniature spirit in a miniature spirit house that he needed to appease with gentle words of oblation. Still, there were questions to be asked: Why are you on a dining room chair in the middle of an empty room with the cat? Why is the room empty? he asked in slightly more critical tones but, as always, still gentle and circumspect with his wounded bird as with the angel and the madonnas. As an empathic man who knew what a landmine the personal life was, there could be no other demeanor for him for little did he want a battle of which rotting bodies and their stench would be the only outcome. - Why have you shoved all the furniture to the back of the room?

- I don't know. Comfort, said the reticent woman.

- Comfort? - A mirror - A mirror?

She said nothing until, like a drowning swimmer, words bubbled up from the disconcerting ocean of silence that she so cherished. - For the same reason you became involved with me, Nawin. You needed to marry someone who reminded you of what you were, how you were alone in your family, to remind you that the world was not right for someone else and it wasn't just you aching and mad in your own thoughts. So the furniture gets shoved to the back of the room, so I look into space.

- What?

- As a mirror.

- What does that mean...'as a mirror?'

For a few seconds she withdrew to the cat, petting it but with eyes that seemed to pass through that which she needed to neediness itself. Then she looked back at him--I don't find it lonely just to sit here.

- You should.

- Should I? I don't know. Being with you, not knowing what you think of me...you in these women's company constantly, and me in their shadows...Often I just want to be contained here in my space. Here I don't feel so inadequate to your women, or the need to deprecate myself so much for feeling that way...so inadequate to your disadvantaged, dirty women.

- I'm sorry.

- Inadequacies are fired onto me daily, you know, even if I do tell myself its inside me and that you do not pull the trigger.... No, it isn't the affairs. What you press against your body is none of my business. It isn't as if I need to inspect the underwear you plan to put on...if its cotton or silk, bikinis or boxers, clean or dirty...what you press against your body, who massages it, and how, I don't care.

-What can I do for you?

-Yes, strangely enough you are so decent. Husbands should at least be friends with those they have. I knew what you were when I married you. It's those inadequacies like going out in rags....If you like yourself before, you end up losing any sense of anything good about yourself in being with such a man....No, I can sit here for hours and not see anything so lonely in it. Its like Ban Chiang pottery locked in a glass display but at least in that container I have me. Out of it, with you, I lose me... at best, I have just an image of you from long ago in a special mirror nobody else sees.

-You don't look like my image. He chuckled awkwardly to lighten the mood, fully aware of conversation being an inept bridge to link any pair let alone the purveyor of pain with its victim. Not knowing what to say he changed the subject--Let's move the furniture where it belongs out of the corners. This was his response to silence.

- Why, people ask me are we, I, an archaeological anthropologist and you, a playboy artist, together. They feel sorry for me for they think it a graphic humiliation worse than rape. In ways I suppose it can seem that way when rape is such a private act...and this is not private. I brag about your latest paintings as if to say that what he does with his own body is his business; I don't tell him how and where to move his legs so why should I worry about his other bodily movements and functions; and I couldn't be prouder of a husband who explores the human soul through a vagina. I suggest it, although not in those words...not any words really. She began to cry. - There is no paint for me, Nawin. No canvas...just the clutter of a woman's home...countless things if she marries well...countless knick-knacks she has to move around and in which she has to reflect her thoughts, all in different parts of the house. She moves the furniture to see a world where the same pain exists elsewhere to prove to herself that it is the natural state so as to make all else bearable...I mean it is the natural state in a sense but for other husbands maybe not to these extremes or at least not so openly depicted. If natural, a woman can console herself that it is not just the insanity of aching in her own head.

- Are you leaving me?

- No, I'm not so courageous. It will always be more of the same for me. So I am sitting with this so called goddess of Bubastis, this cat on my lap, and as I do so it seems to me that a cat is good for cuddling but a man with his premature pecker is not a cuddler...just a lovemaker. That is what he is good at. The Egyptians were right about there being a woman in the cat and a cat in a woman, for the two creatures need to feel real within the propinquity of touch. There with another non-threatening suffering creature of this world, touching to feel real, maybe it is just another mirror--just a bigger love, a fuller love and perhaps a more selfish love than a man and a woman feel but this cuddling with a cat is better for a woman.

The memory reeled around and played so distinctly that he almost thought he was there with his wife; but how much of it he had distorted to make it more meaningful, dramatic, and aesthetic than it really was, he had no way of knowing. The brain was always rewinding bits of memory, analyzing them, and splicing them together like film; and as were two people walking down a sidewalk without looking at each other, who were and were not together, so was memory--it was and was not.

Were articles dating back fifteen years adulation about the artist of his youth that might have been true words then but little pertained to the man of forty, or were his works tremendous talent that did not hinge on the salacious biography of the artist and would live beyond his short eruption of ephemeral years? It seemed to him, nonsensically, that they both were and were not. Nonetheless, it was absurd to merely think that over the past few years he had aged so tremendously that critics and commissioners of his work alike had lost interest in him entirely. The art critics had been writing about him, albeit less frequently, until he ran out of inspiration for his redundant themes, irrespective of the surfeited forms of whores who came in droves, each with slightly different circumstances, and each with slightly different expressions. "I was a sensation until I lost interest in beating and stirring up such muck, and none of it has anything to do with turning forty," he told himself, but he knew that it was and was not true.

It was true that just four years ago he, the once eligible but continual playboy, was appealing enough to be referred to as "Naughty Nawin" with those English words in their headings proving that he had not turned into mushy and deciduous fruit in the little over three summers since; but it was not true that as unseemly as his life might be in view of the fact that he was a glutton of the personal life like a boy in front of a thousand cookies he was the same as any foreign business holidayer of the masculine gender looking for the nearest brothel. His was more of a spiritual decadence. "Forty is just a number. You are as handsome as ever," he thought as he looked at himself in the mirror. "You stopped painting and they stopped writing about you. It is as simple as this"; nonetheless he did not believe in simplicity.

He missed the hype organized by galleries. He missed magazines catering to those needing a celebrity from whom they could learn intimacies, tiny facts or rumors of facts about the personal lives of the gods. He checked himself. His mind was going in circles around the word, forty. The circles were more of a vortex as, on bad days, when he descended for some seconds or more into early family and abuse, which could suck him in fully were it not for his active vigilance.

Examining himself in the mirror for the umpteenth time with a refreshingly spry countenance there to befriend him once again, he gave thanks to the mysterious forces that had given him a life where he might make a living presenting his varied depictions of himself with his whores on canvas (a whore of every type from every angle), fervidly contemplative of life's decadent urgings. Like a schoolboy twisting in the grass, he blessed the fates that had allowed him time to revel in his spinnings. Free to contemplate the unequal plight of man (or woman as it was in his case), to see color in forms and feelings and thought, to mix with forms by allowing licentious whims to twist around the kite in accordance with natural mandates to reign in those turbulent skies, he basked in others perceptions of him as handsome, successful, and affluent. Like juicy fruit on the stem, his days in the sun, as an elated appetite of women and an envy of men--at least for those who knew something about contemporary Thai art--were embarrassing and awkward to the modest Jatupon that he was; but it was the very furthest of human plights. Selling his paintings at ever inflated prices because of their worth and his celebrity status as their decadent creator, he had the ideal life. The creature of pleasure had to concede as much as this.

Smirking at himself, the wry smile soon fell flat at the thought that even ugly pimps who were affluent from their brutish, sexual peccadilloes might be considered equally sexy; and he sighed at his bland fame. He had gained it from portraying the same models in the same redundant and stereotypical theme to which he knew no variation; and whether or not those guilt- ridden self-portraits of himself engaging with his whores as stiffly as a Buddha were an exploration of his models or an exploitation of them remained an unanswered question. He moved closer to the mirror and looked deeper into the image. The rot of forty, if it were a rot, was an internal degeneration that had not yet reached the surface of the apple except for a few premature wrinkles, which he had already stiffened out with Botox. He flexed his muscles into the mirror that like social interaction and painting reflected consciousness and reminded him of existing beyond the redundant actions of eating, urinating, defecating, reproducing, sleeping and all the other - ings.

Stepping out of the toilet as he was now doing, he posited that such banal and inconsequential movements as this were like copulation with a rife assortment of women, that movement provided men with a base physical consciousness that was indispensable to their overall welfare by making them appear more tangible to themselves than any images in mirrors could do. Still, while moving out of the toilet and pondering this new justification for male promiscuity within the corridor between the two cars, he inadvertently halted there before his image in a second mirror. "I am still a young man. Both mirrors say so," he lied to himself; and then began to wash his face at a sink. The tap water pulsated out in an extorted and convulsing trickle, pushing him a little into those turbulent memories of the recent past. Not wanting to think of Noppawan or the mangled angel who was no more volant and permanent than any pallid terracotta falling eleven or more stories (he had forgotten the exact number with the burgeoning thickets of neuron brush that were daily mutating the landscape of his mind), he looked into the image of his own eyes to reassure himself that they still had a young man's luster.

4

As he did this, combining the mirror's confirmation of forty with a sense of feeling no different than he had at twenty so that a nice conciliatory countenance of thirty stared back at him, he remembered another fragment of that earlier dream in a sleep that had been filled with such episodic starts and stops.

As the restless shifting of dreams like those he had experienced in the 'tenebrous tomb' were the chaotic composite of what the true self really was, they were also his idée fixe, for as an artist he knew that the true self was the only subject worthy of his delineation, his imagining, and that being awake was merely the desperate garnering of the true self's scatterings. In some sense being awake was a liberation from sleep, that anarchy of fleeting images, fears, and anxieties about the unalterable past which the subconscious lived over again and again in new arrangements like a news reel seen in various colored filters and in reverse of a young French and English teacher jumping from her balcony. It was a means by which, if not to erase or delete memory, to splice it, to fictionalize it, and to some degree begin again; and yet he judged consciousness to be even less real. Married one moment, separated the next, the boy was always growing out of his clothes or being stripped of them. And as the door of the fitting room by which people came in to wear him and be worn by him never seemed to shut well, allowing all whom he loved to briefly use him and be used by him to get a variant feel of themselves before going toward new entries, it seemed to him that the door might as well keep revolving. One might even stifle human growth if one were to try. This had been his supposition in maimed youth after his parents were jettisoned from their windshield by a Fate seemingly eager to part with superfluous human baggage, these burdensome nuisances, and he was too old to part from such inveterate conclusions now.

Being awake was a concoction of pasting together the fragments of subconscious thought. Whereas a biographer was a historian of superficial events, the artist was a cartographer; and it had always been his hope that collectively all artists (himself included if he were not retired) would in time be able to chart an accurate aerial view of the splendid, volcanic thrusts of the subconscious. He took a comb out of the pocket of his wrinkled pants and began to straighten his disheveled hair lovingly. Then in consort with his debonair image, his Siamese twin in the mirror, he put his palm on his forehead for it was aching numbly, and more numbly was his heart. And thinking of his own restlessness, he knew it would not end with ended sleep. He could tell this from the hammering taps of his present headache that were born of the travail of truly chaotic dreams.

He told himself that there was no reason to feel anxious; for what was a man if he were inwardly shaken by external vicissitudes? Many evenings before his self-declared retirement he would stare up into empty space from the bleachers near the lit sports stadium in that area where they both lived (an area convenient to Assumption University where his wife worked), sketch something, and feel warmth in the blackness and nothingness. A real man, he argued, could sink himself into blackness, knowing himself to be like a bit of top soil washed away in storm waters, and think nothing of it. So Kimberly was dead...so, he had a son by her in the hands of the wife whom he guessed that he was now separated from...so he was a forty year old man who briefly felt a queer amorous titillation of homosexual yearning and a phantasm of a tryst inside his head...so the tryst was for a Laotian in a train...so, like a poor man on a train, he was going to the capital of one of the most undeveloped countries on the planet...so, he was running away on this December 5th, the king's birthday (Father's Day), seemingly oblivious to any agenda about what he was running toward. It was all a sinking of his dirt in eternities of black space and he told himself that he was warm and content within it.

The link of associated thoughts that had brought him to recall this particular fragment of a dream while staring into the mirror with a preposterous sense of self-satisfaction was oblique at best. It began with him looking into his sparkling eyes and his clear white smile of multiple brushings and whitening solutions, followed by a second in which he very well might have used the English word "gay" to describe his image had that abhorrent word of myriad connotations to which the worst were dissonant to the pleasant characterization of himself as a womanizer and a lady's man not been repressed. Then, to further avoid summoning the word which he forcefully restrained into his subconscious muck like a Burmese refugee to a sylvan camp in one of those northern provinces, he stared into his mirrored eyes deeply. He concentrated on how these eyes seemed to gleam more in certain seconds and how his face looked even younger and more handsome than thirty in these evanescent blazes or vestige flashes of his former being, the boy whom he once was. The delusion of thinking of his appearance as that of a thirty year old man or as one much younger than this made him think of being thirteen, frightened by his first wet dreams and the accompanying stink of his body, which he then supposed to be some type of inception of death or body rot; but it also made him think of that day his mother bought him some goulashes for thirty baht and how proud he, that tiny boy, was that she would spend so much money on him. The goulashes made him think of being coerced to trudge around with his brothers along the edges of creeks and canals where they, guffawing sadists and martinets, made him abduct and mutilate crawdads to recognize that he was no better than any other creature of the natural order that gloated at itself as one individual in a species of myriad predators. And finally crawdad hunting in Ayutthaya, the home of his forlorn youth, made him think simultaneously of being with his brothers scavenging and pilfering refund cola bottles in the doorways of alleyways so as to buy a little candy from a local store, and wall crawling geckos.

In this earlier dream that he was now recalling a gecko crawled on a wooden cross that marked a mound near the trash barrel where a family cat had been buried in a shoe box coffin long ago. Then on the upper portion of the cross, the gecko became limp and stagnant, hanging on two of its arms like a dangling Christ. Hanging there inertly, it inadvertently pulled on it, this lever, opening a strange, familyesque commiseration of the parents and mourning of the brothers just as they had felt it together that time as young children long ago. But these odd, cognate feelings over the death of a pet were like distorted sound waves that bounced off the back of empty space and none of them were present--not even himself--just a gecko silently hanging on a cat's cross...feelings of loss...dross.

He sighed. In being awake or asleep in a state of mind that was literal or symbolic, everything that was known to his brain such as the certainty of having been abused by family, the certainty of any past event, who he loved and how much he loved her, his responsibility for the tragic outcome of a woman's life, and his own self-worth, which fluctuated based on the height of the wave it floated upon, registered merely as likely possibilities and vague truths. Any aplomb that he projected could only belie this frantic attempt to make sense out of his impressions of the world--impressions like indentations of a cookie cutter on his doughy brain, and impressions that were interpreted and warped within the pull of memory. He knew nothing of the world at all beyond loose impressions of incidents that were refracted myriad times off diminished memories, twisting into something other than what they initially were before becoming the subject of his discernment as to what life was and what it all meant.