Chapter 7

"Anyhow," he thought as he sucked in the smoke of his reefer, "about the bird, what am I thinking? Who gives a fuck about the bird? Why am I dwelling on this bird. If the bird came in or not it couldn't matter less. It does not even matter if I never know anything and just go from one belief to the next under the influence of whims" for it seemed to him that reality was the obsession that we were under in the immediacy of the moment. If the ultimate decay of one's exterior form made his existence dubious, he argued, the tenuous and watery interior life of a man's mind was even more that way.

With images of wings fluttering salient in his imagination, desire suddenly began to percolate within him, tingling the body like an intimate pot vibrating and ready to boil over with life, and soon he wanted a resurrection from his fetal position on the fetid floor. He wanted to fly and yet all that he could do was remove his clothes. At first, it was to be only the removal of his shirt for he needed to block the marijuana smoke from exiting through the crack of the door. Soon, however, his pants and underpants followed suit in this denuding. Soon they were there caulking the crack as well. And as wind of the open window swept over his nascent nakedness, dispersing the clouds of smoke enough so that he could see fuliginous figures within the world of his cramped toilet, he began to masturbate to the movements of smoke-clouds.

Within, he was seeing diaphanous geckos on top of the ceiling scurrying hurriedly out of the smoke of the toilet and through the other cloud he was ogling a loosely robed sheik of an olive Asian complexion who, fairly and most saliently naked in the most critical aspects of that word, sat on a rock.

Four of the geckos had appearances of his former women as much as geckos were able to resemble human beings. There was a dark, ugly one with spectacles like Noppawan. There was a white angelic one like Kimberly. There was one like the pretty white Thai, Porn, with black hair bowering to her buttocks. There was also that self centered one of childish exuberance radiating its face like a skipping five year old. This gecko was similar to Xinuae, whom long ago he had bestowed the nickname of "Chinese Karen" so as to commemorate the day in which he had learned that he was American by birth. Altogether the reptilian insects were also like these former girlfriends in carrying off his love with their eggs as they ran off to others who promised them an immediate fulfillment of biological urgings, for in reproduction there was not only the continuum of existence but womanly purpose in nurturing posterity, and such happiness had statues of limitation on it. It was not a literal smoke that they were fleeing from nor even the asphyxiation of being alone. He could tell this. It was a symbolic smoke of dying without purpose that they were trying to escape. They knew that the flaming impetuousness with its smoke cloud of being in love so as to beget children was as brief as the body's ability to replicate. They knew that nothing was more asphyxiating than a passing cloud that they had not breathed in. They knew of no grief worse than a barren existence in which they had not done the mating moves in a timely manner that were part of that illusion for meaning and purpose in their lives. To not see life as a rushed activity that one needed to bungee jump into and to run out of time to breed was a capital Sin-u-ae in organisms whose sole purpose was to reproduce a bit of the self that was a composite of replicating cells.

And as for the Laotian sheik, there he was sitting on a rock. Nawin, while masturbating, which he called "stroking the bone", paid most attention to him who had a voice that ripped through the silence. "Since you were about ready to go on your trip to the states, Nawin of the Thais with your American passport, we decided to delay you for a while and show you our cave. An hour ago we took the liberty of putting a nanotech bomb comfortably in your ass. Rest awhile and you should be able to get around tomorrow even if now there is a little pain. We had to seuter you with whatever we could find, you know--wild poppies for one. Don't worry--no plane cancellation for you and you will not feel any discomfort at all when sitting on this flight to Washington in a few days. When George Bush Junior puts the medal of freedom around your neck there will be an explosion never witnessed before. He and the entire capital will be a second and third Grand Canyon. But for now, as training, know me--my smells, my taste, the shape and feel of the contours of me. Know it as training!" It was then that Nawin ejaculated most volcanically onto himself and the wall. He did it with exquisite visceral pleasure and pain like a Thai elephant making his debut as an abstract artist. A minute later he was hand washing himself at the sink. Pushing down on the tab to get his dribble it seemed to him that every man was a dilettante artist.

9

From a hot Tuk-Tuk taxi ride leading to the train station to being a carcass in a refrigerated car, and then from thinking himself as a member of a couple with marital problems to one slowly sensing in his lone journey out of Bangkok that he was separate and separated, he was now journeying through the toilet of the mind that was as fetid as a brother's sock and as explosive and debilitating as the non-ending barrage of critical words from the miscreants he knew familiarly as family. He was being flushed down with the floating and volatile excrement of memory and where it all would lead he did not know. As such he thought,

- Nawin, what are you doing in there so long? [He was recalling his wife's callow voice from that first week of their marriage] Nawin? [As the marriage was new, her irritation was new; and novel and so it seemed to transcend the barrier of the door to mix sweetly with the falling waters and the rising mist of the steaming shower] You know, you did not marry the bathroom [It seemed a dulcet resonating warmth emanating to him from all directions].

He remembered how as he stood there listening to her voice and scrubbing his naked physique, he suddenly became preoccupied for the first time with wanting to isolate just why he had this belief that he was inordinately handsome when really he was as dark as dirt. The facial contours and muscular physique seemed a little better than average (whatever that meant) and he was "just right" in not being too tall or short with genitalia that were larger than ordinary, but not freakish or even extraordinary. What, he asked himself, made him special? His sullied attractiveness could even be perceived by some as mediocre were it not for the fact that this mediocrity of masculine symmetry was made extraordinary by his interactions with women and their numerous touches with which his mind had been filled over the years. Perhaps, he told himself, these women were aware of nuances that he, a male and the subject of the inquiry, was ignorant of. However, more likely, this being groped had nothing to do with being handsome at all. Perhaps he was merely a non-ugly entity glittering in a bit of fame and affluence that made one popular. In his case this surely meant being portrayed in the newspapers as naughty Nawin, the artistic savant who pursued his studies of common whores with the most uncommon diligence and when dressed, was regimented in fashionable attire that anointed the brown body of Jatupon and transformed into Nawin. So, in the bathroom he asked himself whether the gropings were really for his beautiful self or for characteristics that made these women feel beautiful in his presence. Wildly, he surmised that if he were a preserved, inanimate corpse like that in an anatomical museum this being handsome would be seen as something that was ugly so undoubtedly being attractive had little to do with physical appearance. A woman did not want an inanimate corpse of a man to stand in front of her bed but one to move with the symmetry of her movements and in public to make the unit of male and female gleam like the Emerald Buddha and scintillate like the golden roof of a temple as a hallowed luminous body. It occurred to him that subconsciously he knew this all along for it had not been the gropers whom he had married but she who knew him longest, she who had witnessed him in poverty when his dark skin seemed a revolting filth. He had married Noppawan for truth. Thinking this, with a bar of soap in his hands, he gloated in the marital bond and spoke to her.

- No, nothing comes before my wife. [he said the words in gargled mutterings distorted by his giddy softly cackling laughter] The bathroom is just my royal consort.

- What did you say?

- Forget it. He was basking in being missed, which was being loved; nonetheless, he could not help but that repeated dulcet tunes were cloying to any listener of music, that a repeated tune eventually became travail to the ear that required variety, and that love was no different from any other sweet, diminishing thing. Rinsing off the soap it seemed to him that surely love sustained itself briefly on finite fuel which was pumped from mutable rigs and that sooner or later when the energy was depleted, with much less that could be tapped to keep him dancing inside his head, he would see togetherness as the constricted space that it was. If a man were missed when he went into a bathroom and the bathroom was a subject of jealousy it was obvious that the one who missed him wanted warm, glowing, and perennial felicity and was dependent on him at all moments and that she would be pulling his leash to have him with her at every turn which made she and her male spouse, "them," as if they were handcuffed together. At any rate, that was his fear; for they who in childhood had spent so many years confined and tortured in a cell only to become adults feeling, despite amicable and gregarious facades, inwardly guarded and stiff with each new approach of another human being, an ability to rest in love's embrace was impossible.

At the mirror above the sink the fixed eyes recalled his own voice of youth on that day.--I am waiting for you to come in and wash me, he spoke loudly to transcend the bathroom door and the material world with thought.

- I am not that kind of woman, she retorted to feign an independence of her lover that was not hers. He chuckled at that which could not be believed for only he, her husband, understood that her wish for it was just that. Hers was the ingenuous voice of a romantic who believed that he brought the world to her for he was the new world, a real family replacing the dubiousness of a former one, which she had repudiated and dismissed as just a bad dream. In that sense they were both perfectly alike.

There in the bathroom, in this luxurious condominium overlooking the Chao Phraya river, the water he felt and could not seem to leave was not the water of a rich man pampering his longing for hot showers but the cold rain of June in which a much younger version of himself stood behind a food cart fettered in noodles and pork, a boy named Jatupon who served soup to customers under a leaking plastic canopy. In this state even the cognizance of his wife being outside the door faded. There was just the recollection of servitude under a cobbled leaking roof that was trying to fly off like a kite. For a few minutes his self- awareness remained as the poor servant he once was until he heard,

- Nawin?

- Okay Honey, getting out now. He turned off the water, wrapped a towel around himself, and exited.

- Nawin, she said a minute later as he came out dripping in a towel, why do you have large stacks of new underwear in the closet. She was laughing at him.

He smiled coyly. - You never know when you will need clean underwear.

- This one stack alone must have fifty and they are totally unworn with tags attached.

He smirked. - The idiosyncrasies of man, he said.

- Weirdness I would say; but he knew that she understood. As someone who had known him in adolescence as Jatupon, and had seen JatuPORN, as the fraternity called him, weep in the museum of preserved corpses for the wish to be as deceased as they, she knew the poverty that he was. He knew that she would assume the stacks of underwear to be a repudiation of what he was. He knew that she would not mention this, as indeed she did not, and he loved her all the more for it.

"What do you want?" he asked an enormous gecko that was staring at him, distracting him from inhaling a new cloud of smoke after exhaling the previous one.

"You" or "Youth" it said, [He was not sure which one the thing muttered] "I will eat" and it began to eat a long sheet of paper like a poster which had his photograph as a noodle worker on it.

"Stop that," he said but the recalcitrant monster continued to eat regardless of his wishes.

- I am not Panyaporn any longer, said one of his favorite models one day in his studio.

- Is that so? He smiled.

- You are not drawing the woman you think you are but a stranger of another name, she said.

- I don't mind strangers, he said. As they are strange they are full of unknown possibilities.

Besides, imagining someone as other than pathetically human is terribly erotic. Don't you think so?

- Why are strangers more erotic models, Nawin?

- You mean why are strangers more erotic creatures in general. I don't know, he said playfully. Human beings are quite lovable, you know, their painful journeys, their tragedies. At least I think so. But the first brush stroke or caress of a stranger is not love. It is different. It is uncomplicated, buoyant, and mysterious like melting into the flames of a goddess."

- Nawin, I think that you hide behind your canvas. I think that you are a pervert hiding deep in your paint so that women won't see you for what you are. They believe that you are different. They think that you aren't using them but admiring their beauty when really you are no better than any man who abandons his wife to come to women like me.

- Of course not. No different at all. All men feel the same in being with others. There is no love in it, no empathy, it is simply melting in a flame. Melting... and it is a melting substance that releases its enzymes and eats the source of the flame. Hold still while I draw your chin! That's right! Drawing prostitutes, fucking them, it is all in consuming and being consumed by beautiful flesh...flaming angels if you will. It lacks love because love is baneful to lust and making love... an obstacle to reproduction, you know. Illusions and delusions-- life is dependent on them. So you are not Panyaporn. No, I didn't know this but then how would I unless you told me. I wonder why the face and voice are the same, the body, the long hair falling onto the breasts and burying them, and the salient nipples peaking out of the burial demurely.

- The name, Nawin, the name! The monk told my mother that it was an unlucky name and I needed to have it changed.

- I like your name. I cannot see anything unlucky in it. For what reason? Why do you need this name change?

- To escape bad luck.

- Yes but how? You are with me so I cannot see how are you unlucky. She shrugged her shoulders and he put away his brush and walked over to her. You look like a Panyaporn to me.

- Either you believe in the monks' intuition or not. My mother does so I have a new name to improve my life...to become more happy, wealthy, successful.

- Poor and ignorant men in orange cloth leading the nation of Thailand and the simpletons within it, he thought. Still he smiled, for the Buddhism of the Thais had such ineffable beauty the way a sunset was both true and lovely and he did not know why. He did not want to think but to devour his girlfriend's succulent skin in voracious kisses and he did just that until she backed away. What is wrong? You are with me. How much luckier can you be? Do you give your mother the money you earn here?

- Of course. She is happy to have it. She is pleased to sell my looks.

- You are lucky then. So do I still call you by the nickname of "Porn?"

- No my real name. My new one is best.

- What is it?

- It's too long to say. Let's just call me Bun. Porn is too much like my previous name.

- Like a bunny rabbit as they say in English.

- Take me out of here, Nawin.

- Here? he asked.

- This world. I want to go with you to another place.

- Rabboplanet, I bet. All bunnies like Rabboplanet. The gravity there is so light that in one hop a bunny can stay midair for ten minutes.

- Rabboplanet, she said in rapturous veneration as if contemplating a utopia. He looked up at her, contemplated her sincere wistful ecstasy at this contrived word, and guffawed. Then he knew love for her, that wish to give any resource that he had to deliver her to a better life.

He thought of leaving the bathroom again. It was different in the mutable mind that knew and remembered imperfectly.

- Nawin, you know that there is a closet back here? And in it is another one of your mountains of folded underwear. Why would anybody need so much underwear?

- A guy can never know. One day he might be shooting some balls on the court when suddenly his underwear falls from his hips down to his feet like a hoola-hoop and all in front of the other players looking down at his equipment.

She laughed, thinking it was a joke, for what did she know of poverty? She knew the grief of family which had aged, enlightened, and separated her to be bereft of the giddiness of youth and this was plenty. Pain sobered one to the injustices and suffering of the masses. But for he who knew the inordinate burden of both there was a twice-fold enlightenment that came to him. It was an emptiness like the vibrations of blowing into a hollow bottle and an ache as eternal as a mortal could know.

The marijuana had numbed his headache so for the most part he could ignore the lifeless aching. It was not all that different than the monotonous chants of Buddhist monks that were broadcast from speakers hanging in tree limbs of certain residential areas of Bangkok. The sounds of bees and nagging wives one might not be able to ignore, but a headache, active but flattened in cannabis, was a throbbing numbness that almost felt titillating. Still, mental pain could excel a bit of the lesser and more manageable, physical pain, even when one was lucky enough not to have both exacerbating the other. Thus, he felt the duress of loneliness making him slide deeper into disconnection as the stimulating and riveting air rushed through his hair.

Feeling more and more disconnected by the minute, he finally released the joint to the vacuum of winds outside the train. Then he waited a minute for a sufficient amount of zephyrs to flush out the odors of the smoke before grabbing his shirt from the crack, dressing completely, and stepping out of the toilet. A stranger who had been timid at knocking squeezed by and went into the toilet. A train officer who had been responsible for placing the linen on the bunks was now gathering it from the cots and stuffing a wad of it into a crevice beside the sink.

10

Leaving the toilet, he walked toward his seat, which was in the eleventh car. His movements were slow as if this shivering from the coldness that descended onto his carcass in the "refrigerated car" were the cause. He wanted the warmth that was in the other parts of the train but more wistfully, for a warmth that was less superficial. It was a yearning to be, if only in proximity, in some way connected to the lives of laborers within who were going home to meet family for the long weekend of Father's Day, the king's birthday. Before him a train official was removing the linen from the bunks of the passengers who were already awake and there was a mounting pile of blankets, sheets, and pillow cases on the floor as though for him an augury to a fallen but still scattering life. Suddenly stopping at a distance to wait for it all to be cleared away, Nawin wondered of the laborers in these other cars who were bringing their new families to meet the old ones. Were they not conscious, he thought, that the families manufactured from having "banged their cocks" in Bangkok were the only reality (a reality, such as it was, exponentially longer than the carnal devourings of flesh and pleasure that were the impetus for the conceptions of the offspring, but no less ephemeral)? Did they not know that upon leaving the reunions their extended families would be relegated to the faces of strangers in the foggy back alleys of memory in which they would exit as maternal, paternal, avuncular and aunt-like outlines of diaphanous faces and stick figures only to be restored a little from time to time with letters and telephone calls? Did these laborers not know that their own loin-begotten families conceived by emotional and physical frenzy were easily diminishing puffs of smoke that in a brief space of years would replicate into other puffs of smoke before entirely vanishing, and that the labor of ethereal man to keep a puff of smoke there in his clasped hands was to no avail? Never to be made sagacious by the wisdom of perversion, were each of these myriad aestivating dwellers of arid complacency to never experience as he had a rude awakening of fraternal molestation in cold showers from that only family member who genuinely cared about him and whose insertion of hard riveting love almost seemed true with brothers who knew and yet said nothing beyond the distortion of his name to Jatu-PORN or the equivalent thereof and with parents who knew and did nothing but to continue the usual mandates of errands and chores with more vitriolic contempt? No, fortunately for the masses of men they did not have his background. They were innocents content in their illusions as innocents did when innocence was bliss.

He smiled bitterly as he glowered into space. He realized that he was groping and swinging his aspersions madly as a blind man piercing the air indiscriminately with his stick and yet at the same time he was writhing in himself, eager to escape his own skin. He was curious about the family men whom he had seen many hours earlier walking contently enough to the "cattle cars" at the train station accompanied, demarcated, and limited by wives and children while at the same time censuring their perfunctory lives. If his thoughts were in part an iconoclast's blaspheme against the family unit, a group that comprised all groups, they were also full of regret that, beyond a work of art, a mortal man could not change into the livery of another's skin, of a child who was proud of his Biadklang name and the parents who owned their own rice and noodle cart that was part of their sidewalk restaurant, of being their son if but a slave who was reproached and disparaged most awakened minutes, and of being in a fraternity, an eternity of belittling words sported against him to get the grin, chuckle, or tacit endorsement of the father emperor who, when at home, crossed one leg on another in his recliner and thumped his foot in an erotic gavel. He abjured devoting so much thought in this vein; still, the high of the marijuana was at certain moments lifting his grave ideas like a magic carpet, allowing an exhilaration of uninhibited thought even if the turbulent ride was dependent on intermittent gusts.