Chapter 8
Hydrogen clouds detonating into stars; stars exploding as supernovas and the debris congealing into planets; microorganisms of those planets that became extinct, stayed the same, or evolved; male life forms in some of these worlds disgorging bodily fluids within partners who would sometimes conceive new offspring; this expended energy producing offspring that was animated or still-born, born with health and beauty or defects and predispositions toward degenerative illnesses, and all was chance in this spewing forth of matter. Pondering this around ten feet from the toilet in a part of the aisle which was an intersection between the two cars of the train, he knew that even with this proclivity for imploding in his own black hole he too was a bit of an exploding star, a spewing mess unto himself going randomly forward.
Standing there, wanting the worker to suddenly finish his task so as to allow him to proceed to his seat or bunk, he could only sense an oblique and loose connection to himself in the obscure light. Eagerness for any activity was curtailed in a man whose self seemed to be oozing into his shadow, and he was no exception. As much as he was capable of, he wished repetitively for his expedited entry into the car but minute after minute it was blocked by this encumbrance of a train officer. His tepid eagerness was not so much for a return to the confines of a space that had been designated to him but to end a silence that was becoming more disconcerting with each passing moment and from a concern that the time of waiting there would sink him further into himself. He wanted to smoke a cigarette to have something to do. It was not nicotine or an oral sensation to clog the void of space and time that he so much yearned for but a mental conceptualization of himself with a cigarette in his mouth which when matching the reality of actually having one hang there would be equated as insouciance. Doubting that a relaxed mental outlook was really garnered with such an ineffectual drug as tobacco and theorizing that its efficacy in making one at ease with the world was not so much from the nicotine but the pleasure gained in graciously sticking out one's cigarette to the world, exhibiting nominal contempt for the planet by blowing smoke out onto one's miniscule sector of society, and concocting a sense of defiant and invincible imperturbability in a world that he knew one should be perturbed by. It occurred to him that imperturbability was really the aim of any smoker; and he posited that lacking a quality caused one to imagine a quintessential form of it, to stencil it onto the brain from the pattern of the ideal (man with cigarette, detached, and triumphant in a haughty and complacent indifference to all), and then to persuade himself that he was the paragon of that which he was lacking. This being so, the billboards in Bangkok showing images of the cigaretted man alone, felicitous, and nonchalant or felicitous and nonchalant with a felicitous and nonchalant partner smacked of an unreality slated for destruction.
Uncertain if it were at all permissible to light up a cigarette anywhere in the train, if he would be reproached and fined if he were to do so in this particular area that he was in, or if he even wanted to smoke at all, he floundered ambivalently before dropping the subject altogether. Still needing to have something to do, he re-combed the breadth of his unwashed hair and beyond that continued to stand aimlessly, inadvertently smelling the effluvium from his shirt which in the space of twenty hours had become its own unflushed toilet. Then there was a sudden need to defer to larger movements of the moment so he backed against a wall near a sink in the corridor to get out of the way of the officer who was now officiating over two large bundles of wadded linen that he was dragging toward a container near Nawin's feet.
He certainly could have easily felt better just being there with awakening, groping creatures of movement like himself and would have begun to do so in this moment of proximity to the train officer except for an unsettling feeling that was a precursor to the siege of memory. Being in this darkened aisle, he felt as if he were once again the adumbrated boy whom he once was. It was as if he were that being who was scared to advance beyond the back corridor leading to and from he and his brother's room at his parents home, for fear that his presence would be despised by all. He snickered at these craven impulses for a few seconds but this coarse and bitter fire of laughter quickly incinerated what was jocular within it. It occurred to him that the boy's perennial sadness had so fully overcome him that it was as if what he had been experiencing were nothing other than an attempted coup. Jatupon's thoughts had briefly usurped his mind; and even in repugning the advances and regaining this mental kingdom from the boy he was certain that Jatupon was probably still there hidden behind a hill of gray matter, wounded but waiting for an opportune moment to initiate a new attack. As he was forty now it was rather obvious that these insurrections would be ongoing throughout the entirety of his life, that the insurgent named Jatupon, whose suppressed, raw, mauled emotions and thought were as intransigent as his own will within these skirmishes, would attempt to control critical sectors and regions of his mind at unsuspecting moments, and that behind the scenes he would attempt to influence and discomfit key decisions in the mind.
When the officer was gone, he remained stationary for a few moments longer to allow, or ostensibly allow, the free passage of the toilet goer who was returning back to the car, and then for a glass bottle of Gatorade as empty and hollow as he was to roll quickly past the toes of his bare feet. More significantly, however, he stood there leaning against the sink to feel something solid beneath him as the train was seeming more and more like a jet in turbulence as if, for a social creature dwelling in the waves of his stagnant body of thoughts concerning his social relationships, there really were any turbulence beyond that which was there in one's own mind. Throughout the minutes of waiting in the aisle it seemed to him that conversation was becoming as imperative as air to breathe. He needed the vibrating air of speech to interpose between his thoughts so as to stabilize a ruminating spiral into self- destructive, non-sensical darkness where there was a risk of losing all that was tangible in himself.
Like with most strangers, in both of these brief encounters with the linen officiator and the toilet goer he had respectively greeted and smiled at each of these individuals at the moments of seeing them with a sawadee khrap and a gracious nod of the head in place of the wai. As a result of being high, the expressions that he had exhibited then were exaggerated and ludicrous and generated little reaction but eyes attempting to avert him. They had given him reciprocal greetings but they had been begrudging utterances of asperity and dismissal. Thinking of this now, his smile deadened to a bland and withdrawn expression as strangers, these treasure chests in which conversation could unlock knowledge and spontaneity, seemed empty and exhausted resources. It was not only true of these two men but of those he saw at a distance now awakening in the car before him (some who were seated lengthwise or dangling their feet from upper or lower bunks): they were all diminishing steadily to remote and alien presences.
Standing there as he was, for a moment he had to hold onto the sink for the physical world seemed to be turning into a gas. For a few seconds he imagined geckos flying low in an air born mist moving like low-flying, prey-seeking pelicans and then, as they receded from him, like squirrels hopping over the caps of the waves of a river as furrowed mounds of the dirt of a field. As the mist thickened into fog, they became less and less visible. The only thing that was salient was the immediate past impaled by feelings of regret and futility for that which could not be erased and redone. There was just the immediate past which could not be consumed, altered, or forgotten. Recalling it and reliving it again boosted his stress. It was as if he were there at the Italian restaurant with Kimberly and his wife. It was as if he were once again foolishly, gullibly, and jubilantly agreeing within the surreal flickering candlelight of the table to father Kimberly's child and this agreement was being done not only with the hope of releasing pent up sexual energy for this foreign woman who had been part of his moral code of unapproachables (concocted morality the equivalent of timidity and hardly a virtue at all) but also to have something from a life that was so unremarkable and indistinct when lost within a middle aged fog. Every man by getting married divorced himself from his parents, but it was only in having a son and making his link to the concatenated continuum of life that manhood was obtained; and whether or not his parents were alive, spirits, or nothingness beyond loose elements, a man had to commune with them and declare his manhood in this way. This is what he had done, more or less, in marrying sterile Noppawan, and completing fifteen years belatedly with Noppawan and Kimberly; and yet he could think of no battleground more deleterious than family. When he was a boy, had the Burmese been at war with the Siamese, like the elephant wars of yesteryear, he would have enlisted as a soldier, for to be impaled with metal blades was less of a travail than to be impaled with mental ones, these spoken words; but ironically here he was now in his own sad concoction of family as one diminishing plume of smoke begot another.
And there on hardened benches or pews with the dust of the open windows smiting their eyes were these laborers in something slightly more opulent than cattle cars. If they preferred to be in this air conditioned car that he was in with its padded seats which had folded out into sleepers the previous night, he, the laborer that he had been born as, would almost have been inclined to go in there and stay with them. And as giddy and light-headed as he was from that which he had smoked, he was tempted even further to go into the tenth car to randomly ask sundry individuals for invitations to one of their family reunions but that within him which retained logic and a sense of the socially acceptable and plausible was only moved to laugh until his body jiggled like Jell-O at the absurdities that ran through the human mind.
Shivering and immobile as he was in the "refrigerated car," he thought of himself as a half dead carcass with sexual energy and desire having been recently depleted in a bizarre, depraved masturbatory experience that had confounded him for being contingent on oogling and grazing over an imaginary version of the Laotian in his head, and regrets about Kimberly having churned and re-churned his thoughts into a liquidated mass. It seemed to him that he was as bereft of viscous thoughts sticking to the surface of the brain as his own readable perceptions of life. He told himself that he just wanted to return to his bunk, cover himself up, and return to sleep. His brain was on a descent from its high, but it seemed to him that even if he were to land gracefully in a field of his choosing he would be whipped around in the winds of this world regardless of what he were to do. Unless he were to return to the landing strip of family his whole life would be for nothing and yet that landing strip was on gaseous Jupiter and the strip was ethereal and waving as though a gas were being pumped into it from underneath.
He knew that even if he had a telephone, all his attempts to reach his wife would be futile. There would be the same perennial ringing in his ears as when he was at the hospital broken at her hand, in the driveway locked out of his own home, in the hotel room womanless, alone, forlorn, lost, and directionless, half hoping to become a nice couple's foundling at the train station. If he were to borrow a telephone and call her now it would be wasted, unrecorded effort at making contact as a scream in space reverberating forever through and for nothing; and yet he was reaching a hand into an empty pocket nonetheless, as if his mobile phone had not been thrown into the trash barrel at the train station. He was subconsciously bending his fingers as if they were clasping the Nokia 3660, and he was tapping imaginary numbers into his palm. Then he recalled the plausible which deflated hope and imagination to earthly things. He noted the possibility of never seeing her again. It occurred to him how the plausible and real were part of his daydreams. Even in them he could not shirk reality where calls to her would be as calls to the Nirvana that was Kimberly.
For a moment he felt that same intense nosocomial sadness and regret which had caused him to cry in front of a nurse a few days earlier. If she had judged him, it had been a judgment of tenderness; but for him the emasculate act of visceral mourning over Kimberly's death in front of this stranger had been so mortifying that it was worse than spilling the content of one's curved, plastic urinal onto the bed sheets. Thinking of it now, he decided that if ever again overtaken by the tragedies of this world, slitting his throat would be the only act of self- decency. That did not mean, however, that he expected suicide to be his eminent end any time soon for it seemed to him that he could make a distinction between the negative occurrences surrounding a life from life itself, and that two people, for whatever comity that they displayed in love, were volatile wills like tremors of changeable landscapes in which the suspension bridge of a relationship was tied. Sometimes things just fell apart.
Standing there in this back corridor that was permeated by the dulcet stench of the toilet, he spent a few moments breathing in and out as deeply as he could in his own dabbling of lay yoga. It was as though he were a vacuum cleaner in reverse regurgitating from his bag the filth of this world. Then he told himself that Kimberly's post-partum depression and her swift leap into the elements had not been his fault (fault not having yet been officially determined by Bangkok police officers who, in this ambiguous situation, were perhaps as circumspect, finicky, and slow to move as squatting, urinating bitches in Lumphini Park, enamored and distracted by some such bitches, or preoccupied with matters involving the location and use of drug pushers for target practice). He was not one who could divine evil events but merely a participant banging and being banged as one of life's billiard balls. In a further attempt to calm himself he rationalized in an analogy apposite to an artist that any ostensible relationship might appear as a fusion of color in all this mixing, but the color could recede and when it did there were just two individuals staring at each other in black and white from distant corners. All relationships receded in a world of impermanence, said the atheist bombastic to himself most piously.
He told himself that it was true that the present moment was the motion and commotion now registered to the senses with the past gone and the future not yet nascent. Then he told himself that although yesterday under logical scrutiny seemed the epitome of archaic and antiquated happenings and had no baring on the present, it propped up today the way the distant past depending on family background was a solid or unstable foundation that was the pedestal for yesterday. Then he concluded that although the past was unreal, it constituted the present and could never be repudiated successfully. And as for regrets, any sentient being had regrets over negative, adventitious happenings. Still, to expend one's rational powers trying to expunge the negative happenings of this life with intangible thought seemed the most absurd act of futility.
Now relaxed in an objective distancing of himself from prevailing emotions, he conceived an idea for a painting which he did not care to ponder. It was one which, even with the right artist, would not work well as a series, let alone as one image and yet there it was projected onto the canvas of his mind as if he were destined for it. It was story and images in which a hoary man with the appearance of the train officer was moving as one urban speck in a peripatetic herd of pedestrians when for a second his phlegmatic demeanor identical to those around him was altered by a spontaneous surge of despair, a feeling which in turn caused thought about the meaning of his life to imbue and pulsate from his face. Needing or desperately thinking himself to need the continuum of former friends, he grabbed his cellular telephone from his briefcase and called one, only to find that the man was now a stranger who was distorted in age and mental outlook from that which he remembered. Then he attempted to emulate his earlier stoicism but he kept seeing shadows of the form of his deceased wife stretching out as shadows in front of store windows. Abjuring the idea of dialing the telephone number of their former home together, he did it nonetheless as if there were a chance that she would answer and tell him that her staged death had been a practical joke. Hearing an automated voice telling him of a disconnected number, he cowered into the crowd and seemed to wither there. He envisaged this as if it could be transcribed into art and as if he, a retired has-been who had merely reproduced whores and slight thematic variations of them, were the right one to depict it.
As this was not a given second but a series of changes in a few minutes of a man's life, he soon saw these scenes in a chain of diminutive beads. Every other bead would reflect the present dilemma and alternate beads would portray a significant person in his life. The significant others would be mirrors and a light source that would give some visibility to a huge diaphanous face of the man that the entire chain outlined. He was, after all, a reflection of those whom he was trying to desperately contact and it seemed to him that they should make up every other monad and that their eyes would be attempting to look at the entirety of a face that they would never be able to see fully. As it would be an anecdotal work on a large canvas, each scene, each bead of this outline of the man's face, would be a punctilious and time consuming feat to render. He did not have a clue whether the motif was incandescent or prosaic and insipid. The only thing that he believed with some certainty was that if the painting was worth doing he was not the man to implement his ideas. For in comparison to a Caravaggio, a Titian, a Michelangelo, or a Da Vinci, he knew that his talents were the top of the bottom tier of dilettantes, and even a knowledge that he was able to render his own mediocrity with the splendor of originality was not helpful. The thought of his mediocrity was asphyxiating to him and he again pondered that he was merely a prostitute painter, a fetid and odious "nobody" within the demarcated self of a Nawin Biadklang that he could never transcend. He fretted about his place in the world as if the masses of men ever found a voice within themselves, as if his earlier paintings, which were still being collected, valued, and traded, had vanquished with him off the artistic scene, and as if his brief inclusion in an article about contemporary Asian art in Newsweek had meant nothing at all.
The train officer clanged each of the metallic ladders with the handle of a butter knife while repeating, "Nongkai in one hour. Breakfasts for those who ordered them." Then he began to pull down linen, shoving tenebrous tombs back into their embankments, and readjusting bottom bunks. Nawin relinquished the idea of returning to his seat anytime soon and sat down on a box of clean linen where he contemplated the article. He recalled: "Nawin Biadklang's paintings are almost like a hybrid of Montien Boonma's Buddhist sculpture with an amateur painter's penchant for easily obtained nude models in Bangkok's red light district. Biadklang's talents at present are clearly dwarfed when compared to his predecessor, the most important Thai artist of international significance; but then youth is often seedy and so are his works, studies of prostitutes that make up his oeuvre. The combination is a somewhat refreshing exhibition that succeeds as a study of the oppressed and the human condition." It was a passage that he knew by heart and yet one where the writer's meaning still eluded him.
Then without meaning to do so, the self was eclipsed and he was asleep in a nap with its expeditious transit into a percolating sea of images. He was deluged in raw feelings, the construction material of thought, which the movement of those images brought down upon him. Within one series of loosely concatenated images, one dream, he (he or something similar as one part of himself seemed to be an audience of one watching the Nawin debacle from an objective distance) was in his mother's car driving to her home. They were returning from a cemetery in which they had failed to commune with even the positive memories of the deceased. They were inadvertently deviating into that distant, solitary region of themselves where negative and defunct memories continually reverberated against bluffs of the mind as faint, unresponsive echoes. The short journey to her home seemed long and dull and thirty miles into it they both felt ill. She asked him to stop the car so they bought some fast food and turned into a parking lot along the Mississippi River. There they began to eat while looking out onto the sodden waters under darkening skies. There was a flock of pelicans flying overhead, and geckos trying to elude the birds by floating on top of the mist.
"Look over there," she pointed. "They must be making their nests under the bridge."
"What is?"
"What is?," she mocked. "The pelicans!"
He looked. "I don't to see any of them making a nest," he murmured.
"Well, maybe I need to take you to get some new glasses."
"No, that's all right," he said. He tried to look again but this time he was distracted by an eerie roll of thunder which sounded like the ambulatory movements on creaking floor boards of the residents of an upper apartment heard from one story below.
"To the left, under the bridge. Can't you see?"
"Oh, I see them now. I bet so," he lied blandly. "A lot of them seem to be clustered over there, don't they?"