Chapter 5

While pasting the fragments of the true self into a reticulate and concocted whole following sleep, it seemed to him (who, in boyhood, had once been envious of a 12 year old friend for being told to leave home when there was, supposedly, not enough food for him to have his share), that for those like himself who knew the worst of family and had long lived as outsiders along its landmine strewn fringes, such dreams--surely not of geckos and crosses on cats' graves, but ones no less poignant in conveying the same grief of being bereft of family--were common on all Thai holidays. For it was on such days that happy or speciously happy groups burgeoned rife on sidewalks as a type of rank urban wildflower; and on these days in particular, pedestrians like himself could not walk down a sidewalk without using a hand like a machete against these impermanent but nonetheless hard and obdurate clusters of families. As gregarious as he was, he was often driven at such times by an obnoxious predilection to cut through the thickets of their obscene closeness and at the same time to take special attention to avoid the steps of shopping malls where the roots of these blooming and ambulatory groups more fully tangled his steps like seaweed washed on crowded shores. On holidays like this, families were everywhere except in fetid trains, like the one he was currently in, going to Nongkai. It was for this irrational caprice among others that, like a relatively poor man in this jiggling and forward moving box, he was absconding on an economical and flightless journey to nowhere. Although the train had couples bunked together, overall it was pleasantly exempt of family, and as such it was a bit of a refuge to Nawin. He laughed at himself for he found the self to be more comically intriguing than any other being.

It was on such holidays, as teenagers, that he and Noppawan, and the "they" that they both were, would go to the Siriaj Hospital Anatomical Museum to be with the dead freaks there, to sit on remote bleachers in tiny and obscure parks, to prop themselves on the ground against the side walls of public toilets near the Chao Phraya river with a small scattering of homeless individuals, and to loiter in other impromptu sanctuaries exempt of this urban seaweed known as family which both had an allergic reaction to.

He thought about how easily a man in these idle hours of a holiday could slip into a specific moment as a teenager or as a child. A boy always outgrew his pants and yet a forty year old man who was well educated, talented, and affluent would, at certain moments, find himself putting them on. In unblocked corridors memories could come to blast him with their spells and he would once again become a straggling boy fighting the pull of sadists on thin, stilted sidewalks along a canal. It was all very alarming and intriguing, and it prompted him to smile at the ironies of being human which totally confounded him in a most pleasant way.

Thinking not only about the dream but the family that once was, it seemed to him that any positive memories were a torturously slow and bitter sweet poison unjustly administered to him, someone who already resided fully as an inmate of his own brain; and that had he been totally bereft of love when he was young so as to be raised by absolute fiends, making him into one himself, it would have been almost preferable. It certainly would have been more liberating than just being confined in a memory chamber where periodically he could recall vestiges of family happiness enough to remember some specifics but otherwise only felt their deep residue. Having their intrusion did nothing for him apart from causing him to wish for what could never happen again.

But then what did he know? Without a good night's sleep, how were any of his ideas anything but minutely sensible at best? If anything was for pulling and clearing it was this weedy thicket of messy ideas in a landscape heavy in leanings toward sleep.

5

He was not exactly sure why, at the moment of contemplating this rather non-germinal seed of love that was there clogging space within his manhood, that this unpleasant recollection of his attraction to the Laotian suddenly interposed between the concept and the peaceful equilibrium that he supposed that he sought--an equilibrium that he supposed everyone sought when not bored with the tranquil and the blase. Still, it undeniably did, the way the subliminal thought of his dampened socks in the upper tomb still seemed to be aggravating his nose. He wanted to tell himself that the brief titillation, so clearly a phantasm of his own making, had not been real. It was easier than telling himself that Kimberly's death and his separation from his wife were not real; and yet he knew that even if he were able to successfully repudiate this one--this tenuous abstraction, this memory of such a queer feeling--as though it were merely the disconnection of a somewhat sleep deprived brain, such a repudiation could only be successful when he was at last off of this jejune train and out of its monotonous rhythm, and had other stimuli pumped into his orifices. Then it could be forgotten like evaporated dew on a warm, sunlit day. Until then, the stranger of the bottom bunk in underwear camouflaging an erection was tangled in the burring thickets of thought that permeated his mood as a mildew on the upper roots of a tree.

He felt disconcerted and a little anxious, and this apprehension was beginning to make him, he who had not had a shower for the past 24 hours, sweat odiously and stink as his elder brothers. He stopped himself thinking of them for beyond this point these uncultured beasts, long banished to the status of abstraction with years of no contact and diminished memories, were a forbidden subject of contemplation by the declaration of the monarch, Nawin, in the kingdom of the brain. This strange, disconcerted sense of himself was almost like a dizziness. It was as if in part he had momentarily slipped out of his body and brain to become an on-stage caricature whom he, an audience of one, was watching obtusely. He was watching himself, a mute who was trying to give a desperate soliloquy, through his only attribute of wordless, dilated eyes. He snorted and snickered at this discombobulated and confused state that was so unlike himself. His forehead somewhat furrowed in the contemplation of his puzzling idiosyncrasies. Then he wet his hand with a bit of tap water and massage-slapped his face with his fingers the way he spread his aftershave. The purpose was that of sobering himself from delusion; and he told himself that the headache was part of a slight fever. He convinced himself that he was cooling his forehead from it but this was not so. In fact the atheist (that same one who, once his child was born, had sat at an empty swimming pool contemplating what his role as father should be, but was interrupted by witnessing the manager bringing in her oblations of food, incense, and wishes for prosperity to the house of the spirits--a dollhouse on a pedestal, had inadvertently scrutinized her, and then filed the diminishing video footage into his mutating brain under the disparaging category of "S--superstitious Thai" and "T--things not to do") was now using tap water as holy water.

If in the past he thought it both amusing and peculiar that he, an artist who recorded moments in time, should perceive memory as such an assault he did not think it so strange now, for this particular recollection of the Laotian seemed like the hand of a minatory stranger smothering his face and he was somewhat frightened by it as he had been by the actual incident itself. At this particular moment he yearned viscerally for the Laotian, the stranger, to awaken and remove himself from the train at the next stop; and yet as the man was going to Vientiane, there was little or no chance of him leaving before the last stop of Nongkai. Nawin considered the fact that he could not spend an hour or two (whatever it took to get to the last stop) absconded in the bathroom, ostensibly hiding from him but really hiding from himself; still, he would play the moments of impulses in their respective order and for now the fetid metallic tiled bathroom with its metallic floor-based, urinal-shaped toilet was an oasis for the handsome lambent image of his that gleamed and scintillated from the mirror. He splashed a bit more of the water onto his face and felt better.

From non-germinal love hadn't the thought been of that stranger, his father, and then from the father had it not been of the stranger from Laos? Specifically, ruminations of being a kinder man than he wanted to be and obviously not succeeding at that to a memory of the father, and from the father to the Laotian: this, he supposed, was the chronology of his recent thoughts. He assumed that recollection of that titillation was preceded by a memory of his august but haggard restaurant-working father swaggering toward a second-hand reclining chair, telling him to scram, and seating himself with right foot resting on the left leg, thumping its smelliness into the air of what he always declared to be his home, his domain, like a judge with his gavel. Nawin was not all that sure of this being the cause, or how one would determine a cause of a most peculiar and perverted thought as this blown in with all the other perverse ideas of his subconscious when, for whatever reason, it was tossed a bit further on top of all conscious rubbish (of course, as always, he was for the most part successfully blocking out the copulatory sport of the second eldest, Kazem, and that one's playground). He may have hoped, even though he did not believe, that isolating it would be the means to an instantaneous cure from all perverse ideas not of the heterosexual variety; and for a moment he frantically unblocked most neurological corridors, no matter how stygian, until contemplating this senseless contemplation made him feel a bit nauseous.

He used humor to distance himself from this recollection of momentary derangement or crazed but inconsequential titillation by telling himself facetiously that the reason this incident was now being shot like darts into his realm of contemplation was as a form of dogged, fraternal torture inflicted by one sadistic part of the brain against the other; but as fraternal recollection could only exacerbate the headache with the introduction of more dull emotional pain, he tried to block off turbid memory and listen for the sounds of metal being kicked and folded, upper tombs going back into embankments, and seats being readjusted. Hearing none, however, he assumed that the officer who was in charge of the removal of linen and the return of the bottom bunks into seats was asleep. Being forty and not having the desire of the thirty-nine year old to make the awkward climb up the monkey bars to the upper bunk where he would once again stare into the walls of his tenebrous tomb until all elated sleepers were awakened and summoned to their descents, Nawin decided that he would loiter in this toilet, at least until someone needing to relieve himself procured his removal with a few hard and eager taps on the door. The titillation, he tried to pacify himself, was merely one more inconsequential item of rubbish blowing in subconscious gusts and like wondering if, across the aisle, a female passenger who was wearing the hijab was a southern terrorist, it meant nothing.

He had to admit that it was futile to ponder whether the barren and the fallow might be preferable to this annexation of space by a rather non-germinal seed of love that had been planted within him against his will. He could hardly extirpate it, and if the seed had stunted growth he knew of no inward manure that might cause it to grow any more. And as for manure, his thoughts jumped track within their locomotion so that he might change the persistent discourse in his solitary brain; it was peculiar that this substance should be the nutrient for growth just as it was peculiar that an instrument of urination should be the means of intimacy between a man and a woman or for that matter, a man and a man...a man and a man.

The unpleasant memory of his crazed but momentary attraction to the Laotian again returned to him as faithfully as a lover and as sadistically as a brother; and for a second he contemplated jocularly whether or not bad memories were merely shot as a fraternal infliction by one part of the brain to another. The query seemed even flatter and more pointless than before. With the same redundant churning of thought, he reminded himself that there was no point in quickly returning to his cubicle. He might as well dally until one of the officers of the train returned to remove the linen and readjust the seats or he would have to lie in the tenebrous tomb as dormant as the seed of love that existed within him.

As one of the Earth's honored higher creatures who could be consumed with a lick of nature like the 200,000 of last year's tsunami (thousands that at one time were pictured on posters dangling from bulletin boards, and pedestrian blockage rails near the Khao San Road police station and the National Gallery) it was apparent that the planet was non-welcoming of the higher guest. The world was a most peculiar place just as he was a most peculiar being within it. The fact that the peculiarity of both was rarely contemplated showed how base, inherent, and instinctual factors shaped the good and the conventional of all things. He chuckled in a couple latent, audible wisps of air at his strange mind (its creative intellect and its redundant recycling of old ideas) to which his white teeth within his brown face seemed to jingle and gleam in the mirror like ice- layered tree limbs shaking in the wind. He thought about how a man lived in his self-made shack believing himself to be a king in a palace and how his ideas were as laws that he assumed to be sanctioned by destiny, but when things went awry such a common man would in all likelihood say prayers to counter his bleak prospects. He would send them into the ether of Nirvana with the burning of his incense. Sound and sturdy atheistic ideas like those experienced by Buddha before Buddhism or Christ before Christianity could only be sustained by exceptional men as long as they had good health, the necessities of food and shelter, scant relationships at the very least, and some occupation to direct time and thought; for otherwise the scaffolding of higher and wiser vistas would teeter and break, thrusting a man who was trying to balance himself on this scaffolding of tiered thought into that abyss of perceiving the world as an amorphous blob that was continually being twisted by supernatural forces.

Still, he could not quell this concept or misconception that if only he had been treated with unrelenting contempt when he was a boy, as he very well had been but without these sweet respites, it would have "toughened [him] up" (meaning that if he had been granted nothing apart from the worst memories of his former family, he would have been as tough as a champion Thai kick boxer when not wearing makeup and a dress in the sense that no conscience would he have had to intrude onto his public and private life, no pathetic themes would he have seen in the eyes of women whom he intended to use for pure pleasure in the brothels, and no pain would he have encountered in simple walks along Bangkok's mendicant ridden sidewalks and pedestrian overpasses). He sensed that such a scenario would have been a liberation from the revolting non-germinal seed of love, and that liberation from it would be a license to use as he had been used in the sadomasochistic quid pro quo or bartering for pleasures that defined human interaction. It seemed to him even more clearly than ever that if he had been allotted the entirety of contempt when young he would not have known enough of love to miss it. It did not, however, dawn on him that such an escape, even if it did not lead him to a fated time of being locked up in one rat infested Thai jail or another as one more of life's anti-social miscreants, would have vitiated his humanity.

He made his erroneous conclusion as if even a conventional 9-5 job and TV to bed existence, which was willfully ignorant of the world at large, were better than someone seized by sorrow when trying to seek pleasures and nude discoveries in every seedy domain in Bangkok; and as if in this obsession to concatenate a frenzied body to the pleasure receptors of the lower brain and then to that upper brain that was empathic to human sorrow in so much horror, he failed to deliver anyone (for it was true that painting delivered no one to a better existence). However, in a field of serious endeavor, a discipline, he was able to see the flower in myriad events deflowered and plucked and beauty in the ugly. In a discipline he found empathy, an openness to the world, rather than apathy, uniqueness rather than replication, and in-depth understanding of himself that made him an individual, a complete being, rather than a speck in the mass, a human cow in a herd. It was not true that painting saved no one for it saved him to himself. And if he failed at being a good person for lack of role models throughout his life, it was through no fault of his own. Still, all in all, he thought of himself as a 'pretty good,' Patron Saint for those who had been treated perversely. Had he, Saint Nawin, not done his best all alone with the resources he had to build his cathedral and temple to atheism, Wat Nawin? He felt that he had.

He told himself that he was as obsessed by his colors now as when he was a five year old child; and that he was still imbuing his black and white world of early servitude with crayonic paint and chalk as if it had never ended. He ruminated on this early being whom he still was, in part or entirely--a being that existed regardless of changing years, names, and social-economic status. He could not recall anything much of those very early years beyond the residual traces of a boy being allowed to take periodic breaks from bringing bowls of noodles to the tables of his parents' customers. Those were still-life images of himself seeking crayonic ebullience that could glorify his and humanity's noodle shackles. Weren't those first images, he asked himself, undecipherable, waxy smudges on discarded paper that had been wrapped over meat? From his rather indistinct and diminished memories he supposed that they were, but the attempts were the same as now: to evince a moment in time and despite its bleakness to sense it as precious within form. And if his depictions then and now were imbued with more color than that which would have been a true rendition of the scenes, they were soft and sensitive aberrations of love that could be pardoned.

He looked straight into the irises of his eyes--eyes that, when not sparkling and jovial in social exchange or lustful and burning from carnal angels that set them ablaze, seemed, when sober, so inordinately tender. Those eyes were surely not just portals to a rather non-germinal seed of love within him; but even if they were such, and his love of women was little short of a vaginal sport (to the immature dabbler that he was who failed to be a he-man and a happy hedonist), still there was more love therein than a failed marriage could prove. No, he said to himself more resolutely, these were compassionate and suffering eyes.

He pondered his effeminate sensitivity. He did not want it--he never had--but there was nothing that he could do about it. If he were to pretend to be as insouciant and aloof as so many men, this rather craven fleeing from self would be an even more egregious departure from masculine virtues. Sensitive eyes did not entirely eclipse his joy. To women sensitive, boyish eyes were alluring. This fact was proven in his having had a plethora of them even in recent years. Most importantly eyes like these, he told himself, accentuated a youthful countenance, and for any man of forty youth was the breeze that set his dog scampering.

Then he recalled that portrait of King Rama V, Chulalongkorn, hanging in the National Gallery. The depiction of his Majesty was with eyes that sponged up human suffering. "Mine are the same," he told himself; and thus his own were majestic and august even though no royal blood was puissant within the undulations of his veins.

6

It seemed to him as if old ideas in slightly new arrangements, such as this obsession with an aging self and his ineptness at long-term relationships, were quickly, dizzying, and incessantly being repeated in his brain. He, another recycled being with recycled thoughts, was ostensibly a creature moving forward with the train but in reality a macrocosm of the ideas within him; and these old ideas continued to circulate around the edge of his brain like hamsters whose impressions were that with each push of the nose they would find exits leading to the vertical, the forward, as if there really were a forward within one's cage, within the ideas of one's head.

Had this particular car of the train felt like the rest instead of seeming cold enough to preserve his meat, he, this being who was constricted to the tight walls and smells of the train, would have blamed this peculiar dizziness that he was presently feeling not on the perennial chasing of old ideas nor on ideas mixed with the bad molecular smells of the toilet but, as he was sweating more than he was accustomed, on heat. In lieu of this, he told himself that his dizziness was from being drunk on the self, a plausible theory, and yet he continued to quaff his sumptuous reflection in spite of this conclusion.

The reflection was of a swarthy, handsome man, with tender, toasty eyes glazed in ideas as if spread with honey. Was the reflection an exact replica of what he looked like? The question troubled him for no matter how long he thought about it, the accuracy of a reflection was immeasurable and the subject was insoluble. All that he knew was that the reflection was of a much younger man than his actual age: that was the consistency, even if moment by moment in each barrage of new light, his age and appearance seemed to vary. And he would have stayed in the bathroom for a half hour more staring at himself in that same way in the hope of isolating an exact age for his physical appearance and to gain certainty that his youth and beauty would not submerge with the next emerging moment had a fierce loneliness not begun to consume him like fire.

So stark was it that, to some degree, it seemed that he too was on fire, that he too was plummeting as if from one of the infernos of the World Trade Center while gusts of wind were carrying to him the barely audible moans, screams, and demonic laughter of other fallers; it seemed that he too was flailing his arms against becoming a swallowed morsel cast down the vast expanse of the deep gullet of devouring skies, and obsessively- redundantly bewailing having jumped from a window at all. These torturous feelings and thoughts were beyond loneliness. It was as though the bogus concept of one's self-importance had slipped off of him entirely leaving him exposed to himself and acknowledging that he was naked and bereft of soul, a speck that was a billion times less important than a disregarded crumb flung off a kitchen table by a finger tip. He was merely a falling speck of minutiae that if not thudding unheard like a landing water balloon, smashing and exploding onto a rock in a desert, would finally decompose no differently than all other bits of matter.