Chapter 9

"It's got to be nests," she said as she rolled down her window to gain fuller clarity. Sitting in there with his mother, it occurred to him that their relationship was merely a spoken list of adventitious occurrences recorded by the other's senses. On this day, it was ornamental designs engraved on tombstones, xanthic blooms of Magnolia trees, the flight of birds observed from the car, and now nests under a bridge. Yesterday it had been the number of buds on her rose tree, the clothes he had not brought with him and needed to purchase at Wal-Mart, sheets and pillow cases that she needed to buy there, grass that needed to be mowed, food that they wanted to eat, a bathroom that needed to be cleaned, and other incidentals that they happened to relay to each other. As such, there was nothing personal in it at all. Still, she had nurtured him when he was young. She had been the one who had fed and clothed him, made him soup and gave him a wet washcloth for his hot forehead when he was sick, had him get out of thunder storms, told him to never walk across the street unless in consort with the masses and only at green pedestrian lights or when incoming traffic was stalled at red lights, and given him a sundry of unrecalled, commonplace items that forged the early bonds of affection. Even though she was not interested in him now, she was his mother, and he wanted to at least feign an interest in her, for feigning often became believing if acted persuasively enough. Thais thought that altruism was the impetus of parental love, the purest of love, and he told himself that regardless of the veracity of the claim he should go on thinking it was true for if he were to cease believing in its goodness, all other forms of love would be instantly rendered as mendacious counterfeits. Also, the superficial evidence of words and facial expressions often belied the inner feelings and sensitivities that might be active within these guarded human creatures. He always felt her disapproval of him even in the most favorable situations, but with the intangible and often erroneous nature of feelings, how would he know that it was not his own imagination? Furthermore, how could he on any day, let alone a day of returning from a cemetery, look into her haggard countenance and pass judgment on her as unloving? If shopping, meticulous housekeeping, gardening, and commentary on nature were her only subjects of concern and her only crimes, it seemed to him that they were rather innocuous ones. If she fortified herself by clogging her mind with these activities it seemed to him that the impalpable self needed them for definition and that human beings had to clog the space of their brains with at least some nugatory issues in order to have any degree of sentience. And yet, in her curtailed life, which was so fortified by the distractions of the plants she grew, domestic chores that needed to be performed, and diurnal trips to and from Wal-Mart, he knew that she immured herself from self-reflection. She, an active defiler, had to know the stench of her former family and yet it always seemed to him that she pretended the rot and her role within it did not exist. And more importantly, the absence of a mutually agreed past left them bereft of a present, rendering talk on the most trivial matters arduous if not ineffable.

Silence overtook them until at last he concocted something to say. "You know, birds like that quickly abandon their newborn. They have so many of them that they can leave their survival to chance."

"What do you mean by that?" she asked pugnaciously, as if comments on the maternity of birds were an oblique critique of her role as a mother. Then, sensing the absurdity of the association, she tried to modify his perception of her. "I mean you don't know anything about pelicans, do you?"

"Just an article which I looked at before we left the house." He lied. He had not read anything. It was just that he did not know what to say to this human being who was reliving a former role as a maternal autocrat, a mother whom he had outgrown long ago. This had been his lie, his benign artifice, to connect with her somehow, although the benign contained its own acerbity.

"You always did like to read."

"Yes," he smiled.

"Books and paint but rarely doing any work. That's the way it has always been with you, hasn't it?"

"I am a famous artist now. I make more money than--"

"You are nobody. You are no better than the rest of us."

"No I'm not," he admitted and pressed his lips together into a contrived smile that hid his teeth. For a moment he was reticent to say anything at all, but fearing a worsening imbroglio if he continued his silence he asked, "You've never seen pelicans here?"

"No. I said that before. I don't remember even hearing of them in this area. They are normally from warmer places. Florida, the newspaper says. I guess all of them came out here from that area."

"With a road map and a desire to see the Midwest for their holidays," he added facetiously. It was an utterance meant to make their relationship congeal in levity and friendliness but he immediately sensed the sarcastic nuance within it and that he was as much stating his own displeasure at seeing her once again. He knew that he was making things worse. "Maybe they've been in the delta all along but migrate up the Mississippi River during abnormally warm springs."

"Whatever!" she responded biliously. They were silent for they were perplexed as to what they should say to each other so the woman and the middle-aged son whom she was ashamed of (at least the taciturn disposition, pressed lips. and sunken eyes seemed to be a suppressed animadversion of a being whom she wished that she did not despise) wondered about the ramifications of saying nothing at all.

"I wish that your father were here to see this with me," she said. Unmarried and living away, he was failure personified so why would she want to be seated inches away from him? Maybe she thought that he should never have come home. Maybe she thought that he should have run away before having his first wet dream at the age of twelve thereby allowing her, even decades later, to frantically hope for the well-being and return of that perennially missing child of her imagination. Even worse, he wondered, maybe she preferred for him to be dead instead; and yet he did not know those as her thoughts or how to know much of anything really.

This was their respite after seeing the marble stones that indicated where his brother, Kazem, and his father lay, but now he was as bereft of words as he had been then and he was straggling tortuously in his head the way he had wandered with a numb and aimless gait around the tombstones. He had returned from Thailand to restore a relationship and more importantly to once again be with his mother and hear her call his name and yet for this earnest effort how could he speak with her earnestly? How could he say that he was glad that at least some of his torturers were buried underground, or admit that his best thought toward the devil who was his father was that he should rest in peace. He could only nibble his hamburger, slurp his chocolate shake, offer to share some of his onion rings with her, his stout mother, which she finally did take, and remember, as no lobotomy or other expurgation of specific memories was yet in existence. Visiting a cemetery for a man was supposed to engender lachrymose thought rather than tears and vented memories tenderly spoken; but for him whose life was an aberration, it had merely evoked minced silence. And this, his silence at the cemetery, which had flagellated her with the unalterable past, now made him repugnant to her.

At last something good, the mellifluous and the true, began to trickle from his brain and pour in with the saliva of his mouth. "I'm here. I know it has been five years--you needing to help raise your grandchildren or whatever required your attention during this time--grandkids or not, it doesn't matter... I'm not blaming you--but finally you relented and we're here together, and I am glad...glad to be here with you." It was there, a harnessed wisp of liquidated air in his mouth, but as he believed that she would only despise him were he to release the words he replaced sentiment with the mundane, as strange as it was. "Did the newspaper explain the geckos? Their migration here seems odder yet. The fact that they float up there eating bits of the sky seems odder than any pelicans migrating this far north."

She got out of the car and went to them, her birds, as nearly as she could approach them at the edge of the river, that body of water that was distended in fish and sewage and barely able to move like a fat man after gormandizing at a buffet. When she returned she had him change positions, took over the driver's seat, started the car, and they drove away. By this time the air was thundering with such a noise of pelicans that they could no longer hear the creaking of the air under the weight of the geckos.

"I don't understand your hurry to get back"

"Your Aunt Helen and Uncle Jake will be waiting. I plan to eat ice cream and cake with them even if the guest of honor refuses to go."

"I did not refuse. I simply pointed out that the invitation was ten days belated and followed you giving them some furniture. You know that it is less of an invitation than a token payment to make sure that the giver keeps giving. How obvious can it be? They haven't communicated with me for twenty years, so why should they bother now? And as for this idea of yours that if I don't go I don't love you, maybe it successfully manipulates children but it is rather reprehensible to adults, wouldn't you say? If I were to go what would I say about my personal life? I'm forty years old, unmarried, and they are bound to ask. I can't exactly continue to stammer out some evasive nonsense to the question about my involvements: that I am still looking, or laughing uncomfortably and ignoring the question altogether-- whatever I said or did last time. I really don't remember what I said. Maybe it was that I wanted to get my career in order first. Maybe I was silent like a mental and social retard."

"Don't go then!"

"What?"

"Don't go. I don't want you to be there. You aren't welcome."

"I want to know why in all of these many years you never even show the least interest in my life relationships, friendships, where I travel, where I live, what I do."

Her face cringed at the steering wheel and dashboard and he could see in it repugnance at what she believed to be the turpitude of his life.

"Why can't you ask anything?" he importuned.

"I don't want to know anything. Go back to Thailand and do God knows what. You don't even live with anyone do you? It is just sex. Your life is just filled with sex."

"You don't know anything. How could you with nothing ever asked or said. You make assumptions without knowing anything."

"What you do with your male friends--your sex life, I don't want to hear about it. It is private--your private business and I don't want my nose rubbed in it."

"What has your nose been rubbed in, Mother? I have a girlfriend and a child--a child. For God's sake, look at the pictures in my wallet!" he pulled out a wallet, unfolded it, and flipped the photographs randomly.

"Get them out of my face. They are the same ones that you sent to me--the ones I glanced at and mailed back to you. It's not your child. It has nothing to do with you and less to do with me."

"It's my child," he yelled.

"Don't you dare raise your voice to me. Don't you dare raise your voice to your mother." At this place that in youth he had referred to as home for lack of anything more substantial, he quickly packed his bags and thought of how concocted and sententious morality was. It seemed to him that it was the equivalent of timidity and hardly a virtue at all. It was seeing shadows and monsters in that which deviated beyond the boundaries of one's awareness and only this. There were clearly wrong actions, actions of hate, but these were not issues of morality but the loss of a logical restraint to instinctual passions of destruction for the sake of self- preservation. He told himself that he would and could break off the relationship for to not do so would make him the mimesis of the bad they thought that he was, and if he believed that he was bad he would relinquish self-control and in a turbulent rest allow himself to be overtaken in a vortex of destructive passions. He had gone through this much of his life without in the early juncture of his youth having constructive role models. Still he had concocted his own imperfect expression of love as others who had been mulled in family. As they did with the years of their lives, he also tried to fine tune what benevolent love existed within him and would go on doing so, sometimes even accomplishing it.

He woke to human contact. It was a nudge.

"What are you doing?"

"Oh," said Nawin while smiling. "I was just trying to stay out of your way."

"You can go back to your seat now, I'm done."

Nawin stood up and the dream, like flooding river water, receded back to its usual course. Deemed as unreal and untrue, it was relegated no differently than other repudiated and forgotten experiences within the continual shove of movements in time and by a consciousness which only accepted the reality of everything new that flowed into it (At this moment, for him it was what the senses were recording as the linen officer departing into another car, the drab and fetid qualities of the train, and his constricted space within it as he continued to flee his fumbled personal life, which he remembered all too well). He shook his head and scoffed at the dream where a dim sense of reality persisted. Pushed further into the past with every mounting moment, it still discombobulated his present reality with its magnetism. It had been a mere dream but when he was in it, the images had seemed so clear, motivation had seemed less cryptic, and he could not help but wonder if in sleep the awakened state would seem dreamy if dreams had cognition of such a state.

Contrary to the dream, he had never known his mother in adulthood and apart from being born in America and living there for a few years, possibly the bastard of an unknown father (at least that was his conjecture to explain his parents separation then and the degree to which he was flouted afterward over so many years) he did not know America. This was apparent by his conceptualization of the Mississippi River where motorized gondolas moved around high rise condominiums only to depart into a canal the way they did in Bangkok. Whether the dream attempted to indict him as a homosexual or depict sexual ambiguity, he could not see either one as exceptionally true at mirroring his image (truth being that--a mirror). He certainly was not a homosexual whatever queer caprices might come upon him--sexual energy merely flowing without direction or destination were it not for mores and a negative, positive, or hyper-inflated interpretation of one parent or both as role models which barricaded the momentum and, like crags, altered the flow. No, he told himself, he was no more queer than any heterosexual--it was just that what was most pleasant in one's bleak environment at a given moment became the playmate and intrigue in one's head to which innate energies were channeled in its favor. And of his relationship with his mother, as she had died when he was fourteen years old, there had not been enough time for a rupture. He recalled that this mother in the dream had not been his own but a macabre, ersatz face stolen from the naked, preserved corpse with the slit chest at the anatomical museum at Siriaj Hospital who the fourteen year old child, Jatupon, had rightly or erroneously believed in his grief and neediness to resemble his mother--the details of the face of his real mother having diminished like the engraving of a name in the sand after the first wave.

11

There was one second of thinking that the memory of his mother had neither dissipated in part nor whole but surely remained as something inappreciably more cohesive and tangible that was either lost or banished and forlorn within the present jungle- thicket growth of neurons, and caught in the weeds and brambles of failed possibilities. He thought that with sedulous and indefatigable will, even more paths could surely be trodden within his growing array of brambly chaotic connections; and that eventually from this somewhat circuitous trudging through memory and thought and being nearly blown away in volant whims of his biochemistry and penchant for pleasure, these paths would bring him nearer to those lost bonds of the past (not to her who, of course, was deceased and when alive and enervated from perennial work and exasperating children and who had despised him placidly within the ameliorating parameters of maternal instinct, but to a recollection of her the way she really was instead of the distortions of memory that had her as a weathered and defaced countenance like a featureless rock or, at other poor attempts at recollection, merely the ersatz of that preserved female corpse seen at the anatomical museum at Siriaj Hospital; to recall something like her face from those early and less bleak childhood memories when she would begrudgingly join him and his brothers as they played netless badminton and volleyball on a dirt road near their home; to let these memories of shared smiles and laughter, mutual pleasure that registered as "love" with such beings, permeate his consciousness as pleasure in its imprint of memory was the only perception of how close a relationship it had been, and whether or not he had to some limited degree been valued as an instrument of pleasure, and so in a sense cared been about; and to reluctantly acknowledge that he was one of those beings who was susceptible to love, that mixing and receding of color, a mere human even though to him this word neither defined nor demarcated him very well). The next second he was thinking of male Silpakorn University students whom over the years he had seen at various outdoor restaurants near the campus, each eating and laughing in his group indistinct from all others, but when solitary would often be reading a comic book and riveting one of the legs under a table though not in a queer sensuality toward comic books; the phallic gestures were a satiety of virulence that was innate in a man. The throbbing of legs was a venting of superfluous flowing energy that by its sheer force could be channeled one way or another or both to the objects of one's intrigues, these friends who possessed admirable traits that he lacked. Then, more probingly, it occurred to him how unlike the womanizing playboy artist that he was, that a truly unperverted mind had no sexual orientation at all: that for such a being the pleasure of intrigues, these soft and low beds of earth that from His affable magnetism surrounded Him, were the natural course from which His, an Unperverted Bisexual's liquids, would easily flow into. But for the perverted, like him, who for the most part allowed themselves to be channeled in one particular sexual orientation, their limited intrigues were not so much an interest in these intimate associations as they were a replication of the same parental model, or a finding of the antithesis to one or both parents or the reminders of mothers and fathers interaction with each other that such a mind cared to emulate or reject. Then he pondered how common he was (not that he, the supercilious one, believed it with fears of being a commoner ravaging his psyche and compelling him to contrive the august demeanor and beliefs that he had as all beliefs were contrivances and fortifications against one's fears). He pondered how when out of academic and artistic circles, as in this train of passenger-rustics and professionals who still clung to their agrarian roots of Nongkai or Vientiene, his presence was glanced at and dismissed like anyone else; and this caused him to wonder if he would even be remembered in artistic circles five years hence (not that, he being a part-time lecturer at Silpakorn University and full-time wastrel--one who had to some extent rid himself of art, relinquished himself to the void, and remained divorced of the artistic omphalos as well as the paint brush--to be followed by, were it to happen, a physical presence which might expunge him from the planet in some accident, there would need to be five years for public memory of his work to be forgotten). Then, to avoid thinking of man's insignificance, he returned to a sexual theme, that personal sanctuary, as ineluctable appetites constituted so much of his mental faculties and preoccupations. He thought of how the women he liked most were more often than not a docile antithesis to his mother with the notable exceptions of young, recalcitrant, and sexy martinets of selfish whims imposed as laws who when with that same draping and tangled curl of hair and the same totalitarian streak to squelch all males seemed just like his mother, or what little he remembered of her beyond his castrated will under her auspices. Present relationships were for all heterosexual and homosexual perverts based on the model of the parents who had been of an adequate, deficient, or excessive nature, as caretakers causing a given person to reject, accept, or fiercely need what had or had not been given to them. He had no sooner concluded his deliberation that one's choice of intrigues was in large part due to one's interpretation of failures and successes of parental and espousal models than, before he even knew it, he was at his seat and the Laotian was saying unto him a hello, which in the Thai- Laotian that they had concocted hours earlier was still "Sawadee khrap" with the accompanied gesture of the deferential wai.

"Sawadee khrap. Sabai dee mai? "

"Sabai dee. Where have you been all this time?"

"Above you, of course, sleeping."

"I mean since 5:30 when you thudded to the floor."