Chapter 15

Restless in the dewy grass of the hard ground, he was asleep. His dreams registered what, numb, he hadn’t comprehended so well the previous evening. His brain rehashed those images surreal and slow: Vanont slipping them a thousand baht; the decision on the sidewalk to go to the whores; Kumpee saying that he, Jatupon, was a ladyboy and couldn’t go with them as if he had wanted to go with them (He might have wanted to go but not with them and not with that thousand baht); his numb malevolent smile at their laughter; being handed some loose change to go home with; and then getting on a bus randomly, handing the ticket tearer ten baht and pretending to be mute and dumb when asked his destination since there was none. He hadn’t even said goodbye to his brothers and all of those years together. He just contemptuously smiled at their contempt and disappeared. One day he would be in America. In time, he told himself, in time. Being the cockroach had passed in time. He had lived in the world as that of an insect all those years. These family members didn’t even have to ferret out his miserable little existence to stomp on him daily. It hadn’t been much of a sport just to see him scurry around in the same space within his pain and yet it had been their main preoccupation. Bad as it was, it had passed without the necessity to kill himself. He just said to himself that it would pass and it had. He was no ladyboy. Maybe his serious intensity made his limbs rigid and his movements circumspect and gauche. Maybe it was strange that he rarely walked with his brothers but instead walked behind them. Undoubtedly he had been the sexual recipient. Still that didn’t make him into a ladyboy nor did it make him gay. He was liberated. He was a changing creation. Past actions did not have to define him. The word, ladyboy, for once did not hurt him deeply since he was undergoing the metamorphosis of manhood. Manhood was indefinable since it could be anything one slipped off and slipped on at will during times that were critical junctures, as he knew this was. If he were to go back to Kazem or scurry over to the senator so begrudging innate inclinations to help him, he would be a man but a dependent one with childish yearnings to be shaped by others. He told himself he would smell like the fetid one, he would let the sagging elasticity completely peel off his underwear embarrassingly, and he would eat stray cats in the park but he would not sacrifice his newly discovered integrity for the sake of comfort.

In the early light of morning he woke up with maximum determination despite the lack of solid sleep and seeing that his new home was on the outskirts of a park. It was a grassy fringe that went behind the wall and gate that enclosed the actual park. The sprinkling of rain was falling onto him and he could smell the stink of his damp shirt as if the metamorphosis to manhood had made him into the fetid one. Behind the wall he heard the squeaking chains of empty swings being moved slowly in the wind. Cars that infrequently passed the park were unreal and eerie as descending ghosts. No sooner had he awakened than a middle-aged woman in a red jacket rode up beside him on her bicycle. “Fortune teller?” she asked.

“No,” said Jatupon.

“Don’t you want your fortune read?”

“No,” he said. He knew he didn’t have one.

“I teach English too.”

“No,” said Jatupon. “I don’t have anything for you.”

“Here. Give this to someone who needs it.” She gave him a business card that was nothing but a sliver of paper with a computer printed, reduced, and photocopied message of Thai on one side and English on the other. In her palm she had a whole stack of these tiny square bits of paper. As she rode away he read the English. “Nattanat near Lumpini Park. (13:00-21:00) Office 3761/296 soi Yudee 9 Chan Road Tambon Bangko, Kate Bangkolaem, BKK 10120 Thailand. Tel.02-673-1436 Time call 04.00 AM or after 10.00 PM Fortune Teller: I give you many gifts I am teacher English teacher/ Thai language Ride big bicycle.” She was one of the lucky ones. Occasionally she probably was able to find a foreigner who wanted to learn Thai and each day she was able to give some fortunes that allowed her to have her own little room and a telephone. Thin as she was, she was able to live even if, in part, she had to seek clients in the beggars themselves. He waited around for the park to open. Slipping into numbness with nothing industrious to do, his integrity was shaken. He didn’t want to be here. He could still go back to Kazem, he told himself.

Kazem had always been “kind” in the respect that he had domineered over him and protected him from harm except for times when he harmed him; and this interestingly contradictory reality was what made their relationship more sexy and beguiling the way a similar one might beguile a battered woman in love to have more sex and children despite her wish to leave him. Sex (heterosexual or homosexual, conventional or incestuous) was a passion of frenzy based on pleasure bonding and emotional dependency, an inordinate amount of semen and sperm needing to be ejaculated especially after a few days of sexual abstinence, and force and self-consumption in a hunger to defy aloneness in rhythmic banging and basic hedonism. Kazem was strong and being a force that could reckon with the world physically, he engendered in others an instinct rife in interpreting powerful figures such as him as a prime breeding experience. A kind individual could never elicit the same response. For Jatupon a muscular presence that could harm him oozed not only a pheromone but triggered in him a yearning to breed with a prime specimen who asserted his will. If he had been a woman a baby of this kind might well be created. It would be a baby who would become a man well equipped to survive and be sexy enough to perpetuate another generation of this kind and deep in the psyche of every human was that wish to breed with the best physical specimens.

This being “in love” was an addictive rush and despite his mental convictions, his body craved for the beloved. Still one night had totally passed without him and there would be others. The time on the ground had been uncomfortable but he knew he could be inured to it. He could numb himself to survive and it wouldn’t be all that bad. This wound Kazem had given him was a blackening of perspective as well as the eye. It was the only gift he had really given him: the gift of maturity.

He did not know what he was to do with the day. Was he to spend the last of his baht on bags of breadcrumbs that, like an old man, he was to spread out for his friends, the pigeons? He paid a couple baht at a public bathroom. After relieving himself, he took a partial bath by cleaning part of his upper body in a sink. Then he went into a booth that had a faucet, which leaked water into an Asian style toilet. Through effort he was able to catch some of the water before it went into this urinal that was embedded into the floor. He was able to wash off a bit of his lower extremities by these sprinkles. He didn’t want to splash too much water or he might be fined or arrested.

Numb and wary how to proceed with the hours of the days, he did not know what to do with himself or how others in his predicament wrestled with their time. Was he supposed to meander along with nothing to guide his walking? Was he supposed to follow behind those who seemed like herds and those who seemed like flocks? If so, he told himself, it should be with those who were homeless. By following them he could learn how homeless people survived best and fulfill, at least in a minuscule way, one’s innate need for society. He felt loose and disconcerted. His thoughts insurrected him and it felt as if they were towing away bits of his brain. The post office would open in a few hours. He could make the long sojourn to his mailbox and see if he had a letter from Noppawan Piggy but public transportation cost money so he just needed to comfort himself with the ideas that she had presented to him. She often said that everyone from ambassadors to beggars sewed such petty lives for themselves. At least he thought those were her exact words. She said something to that effect. Each time that he tried to remember exactly what she had written to him, and what she had spoken from the boat, it became different. It was distorted by the impermanent neurological circuitry of the brain (so little did one possess himself). The world was godless, love was a selfish realm, and from what he knew of friendship, it was with people who used each other to grow for a certain time or share similar attitudes in the hope of not feeling alone when going through certain stages of life. He wondered if even his friendship with Noppawan was evanescent as a whiff of clouds. Why should she write to him, he thought to himself.

If there hadn’t been a bit of a thrill in becoming independent and killing off past associations with family, he told himself, he would commit suicide. He couldn’t really see much point in survival anyhow with the inevitability of death biting at one’s heels. It was good to kill off past family associations. His aunt, he thought, had invited a boy of his realm into her domain only to find that he had too many needs and wasn’t worth the trouble-the dog that needed to be sent back to the pet store. He resented her and was pleased with his independent stance at severing family from his mind. He tried to forget the comfort of sleeping in his cell and never having to worry about having money for meals and public toilets.

He slept intermittently on park benches throughout the day. To avoid hunger and thirst he took a cup he found in the trash and begged outside the park. He watched a blind old woman with a wooden attach� case of lottery tickets, a jasmine rosary salesman with merchandise looped around his arms like long bracelets who went from car to car, a woman at a table stringing them for her own sales (even the mendicants had to compete with each other to gain a mere sustenance), sidewalk seamstresses with their antique foot pumped sewing machines, and a man with a bicycle-pulled ice-cream cart who stood there scooping out a dip for someone. A sock salesman at his table sat on a stool with his hand poised under his chin when the rest of his life was faltering. They did have such petty lives. They, no different than the rich, consumed food and expended their kinetic energy and liquids in the bedroom in this perennial trap that human instinct and physiognomy concocted. He put on his sunglasses to blind himself from the motion around him and time became stagnant as a traffic jam he was witnessing-the people finally oozing out of trapped busses and around halted vehicles like leaking oil. The hours passed somehow and again the park closed and he slept on its fringes with many others.

The next morning taught him that breakfast could be waived if begging from the previous evening had not gotten him the twenty baht required for a meal but he needed to always keep some coins in his pockets so that he could go into a public bathroom. Around 2:00 sidewalk restaurant workers tended to need their own respite from drudgery and a barter arrangement of a meal for an hour’s work could sustain him and keep him from having to buy food. As non-preferable as it was, the police did not badger one if he washed away his rotting layers of stinking skin in the polluted canals or the Chao Phraya River so long as he entered and exited with his underwear on. The waters did give him a skin rash, after a few days of bathing in this manner, but this itch around his thighs was bearable. Lucrative ventures came every now and then when men wanted him. He, at such times, was sufficiently numb and insouciant in manhood and he would go there and serve them safely without letting the whining child within him clamor out. He performed, was paid, and left never combining emotions with such a physical act. These men would not be his deliverance. He had to force that idea into his head and fight off his wish for a savior.

Within a month and a little bit of persistency against refusals, the metropolitan authorities scheduled him for an interview as a money taker on a city bus. He was scheduled with a score of others despite his age. He might not have gotten any job at all let alone a better one than what he was applying for had English not rescued him. They needed someone knowledgeable of English in the information booth in an air-conditioned cubicle at a skytrain station. He would not be wearing the grungy blue suits of the money takers but white ones that looked like a captain. The thought of it filled him with pride.

They gave him an advance so that he could buy this clothing, rent out a cheap room, and not fast when it came to purchasing his lunches. They didn’t give him a day off but outside of making change for the customers that needed to be done quickly, the work was easy. It just required a familiarity with major landmarks around each of the stops and that he be able to direct foreigners where they needed to go. National holidays (when he got them) were spent in the vicarious borrowing of a personal life from a movie at a theatre. He didn’t really know his coworkers. Since it was his first job, and a new one at that, he kept quiet and focused on his work. He looked gauche and foolish and he worked around them trying not to get into much contact. They gossiped about others whom he didn’t know (perhaps himself as well) and repeatedly asked how he knew English so well. Their tones always became more caustic in addressing him; and when it came to justifying his knowledge of English he would always vary his answers fictitiously so as not to feel that he was buried in a rubble of monotony. His introverted awkwardness was at variance with their complacent self-assured movements, and he withdrew into a world of shadows surreal as being sucked up into random scenes of a silent picture show. He was friendless and alone. Outside of Noppawan, he couldn’t even imagine anyone who really cared about him a little; but he did not have time to go to his post office box and he feared that she was lost to him forever. A solitary person usually needed to invent a commiserating individual out there even if that person did not really care; but he did not know anyone with whom to fool himself and he saw that despite the Noppawan Doctrine against pettiness, he was securing a petty life for himself like everyone else and the exhilaration from his independence was waning.

As Vanont slipped 40 baht through the hole of the window, Jatupon changed it, attempting to keep his eyes steady in a marginally sunken poise of professionalism without any special recognition of the customer wanting the change. The old man smiled at him warmly. “Where have you been, my boy?” he asked.

Nawin Biadklang: it was a label, just a simple and different group of words in which an entire metamorphosis took place. He was new and glorious and the lost and forlorn being that was Jatupon had fallen from him effortlessly like the stink of scathing skin that he had showered away in the morning. Nawin Biadklang stood near the Hualampong train station, watching the mosaic of light and shadow at his feet like a child fully in the splendor of the present moment. He was drinking milk at a newsstand and thinking about his recent meeting with Piggy in the Siriaj Hospital Museum. He had asked her to go with him to Wonder World Amusement Park but she wanted the silence away from the meaningless of action. He turned to the headlines of the Bangkok Post glancing at the cacophony of human relations.

He read that a very passive anti-war demonstration had occurred in Pattaya. 10,000 Thai Moslems had prayed for peace. Well, he thought, it was certainly gentler than placards and banners outside the American Embassy in Bangkok, equating Bush as Satan; however it was probably less effective. Was the God who allowed thousands of people to be incinerated in fire and melting steel caring especially about the fate of the Afghans from a meditation and a chant? He thought that it was no wonder people tried to shut out larger issues than themselves and seek comfort in the personal domain of their petty lives. He turned away from the newspaper. Four filthy boys came to him forcefully. They wanted milk from his grocery bag. They wanted the same as what he was drinking while reading the horror of the daily news. He gave part of what he had but he didn’t want to give out the rest. He was already becoming coarse in his luck and he knew that he was guilty for providing them with a nominal gratuity and shooing them away. He went inside the building, looked for more food and magazines to take with him on his trip, and then entered the train.

When the train began to move he went into a corridor connecting two cars and rinsed his face in the sink. He looked into the mirror. Even his reflection seemed different. His eyebrows seemed more bristly and masculine. He wasn’t Jatuporn any longer. A good son must join the monastery for a while to fulfill his mother’s wish to see her son take on such holy head-shaven rites. A good son must fund the livelihood of his middle-aged parents who wanted to be free from the hardship of work. A good son must renovate and extend the house of his elderly parents. A scenario of filial loyalty to serve the parents’ wishes abounded in Thais’ simplistic notions of “good” behavior but tragedy had freed him from it. Then abuse disabused him of fraternal loyalties. Now he would be educated and find new compounds in his sunrises and sunsets.

A train officer asked him to get his luggage out of the way of the aisle. Jatupon put his suitcase onto the ceiling rack and sat down watching the scenery go by-watching Bangkok zip past him and become the vanishing point from which something different would emerge from his experiences at Chaing Mai International School. He pulled the postcard out of his pocket. He read the words again and again, “I got them to allow me to come to Chaing Mai. I’ll transfer there. See you in a week.” He smiled, slapped the postcard against his lower lip, and watched the departure from Bangkok where the scenery became increasingly green.

When he came home he opened the door onto plentiful space. His body became stiff and cold. He needed to give directives to his legs in order to move. The movements of his splayed legs when he walked were like parting ice cycles even though the furnace was operating and it was warm inside his apartment. Nearly everything movable by two hands was gone, as well as most that would have required an additional mover. Only the heaviest things remained although clavicles of hangers dangled from the bedroom closet and pots and pans were loyal and steadfast. The sofa remained. It had been difficult to get in. It was no wonder that it hadn’t been budged. His socks and underwear had been knocked out of the dresser before it was taken. He sighed. His canvases were gone and from them his new leitmotif that was maturing beyond Patpong whores in Bangkok to something more thoughtful and original. True, most of those canvases had been of her so she must have thought that she was entitled to them as well. She was the model and more who was seeking justice, he told himself, and justice was equity. He hadn’t paid her so she was seeking compensation. All relationships were a contract. All contracts were based upon the two parties gaining some entitlement from the agreement. Was there nothing better than this, he asked himself. There wasn’t. He had thought that he was helping her, that he was enlightening her, and that he was involved with her. A tear rolled down his cheek. She thought that she was entitled to the canvasses too, he repeatedly thought. She thought she was entitled to it all. Then, for a second, his attitude changed about the stolen paintings and he was glad that, at least, she had cared enough to take them. Then he knew that she would shake sentiment from them no different than tossing out the contents of his clothing from the dresser. She would sell even those portraits of herself wherever she could.

He backed against an empty wall and slid down it squatting like a dog ready to defecate. Then he pulled into himself in a fetal position. He was Jatupon in his puddle of blood yearning for the love of the violator. If love was mixing oneself into someone like vodka and cola, he loved her. If it was a child crying over the loss of his favorite toy, he was feeling that. Should a Thai newspaper reporter get a look at him now, he thought, the nonchalant seducer of the souls of Patpong girls would seem to him as a fraud. The reporter would be disillusioned that this young man championed for his bit of hedonism had been an illusion. His head throbbed. He needed love from anyone, sex with a stranger, anything that would stop the pain in his head. With difficulty he slowly removed his winter coat and gloves with the awkwardness of a child.

Love, glue, or cocaine-it was all the same. It was all molecules of smell and taste. It was a vertiginous freedom and insobriety of action exempt of logic. It was the personal adventure in a world of impersonal actions. It was admiring certain characteristics that were lacking in oneself and it sometimes contained some degree of friendship and caring or wanting to be cared about. Maybe it was a vulnerability of a human’s weaker domain that wanted to merge with another being to seem to himself as if he were less petty than what he really was or to record himself permanently in the thoughts of another being.

It was all gone including those canvasses on French Quebec mannequins. His evolution as an artist had been stunted. He wanted to cry but beyond that one tear there was nothing. All he could do was moan and pick up the telephone. He needed a connection. He needed Noppawan. Her sister answered. “Nawin,” she said nervously, “she moved. She got a different teaching position. She wanted a change. She doesn’t want to see you-I’m not really sure why and I don’t think she means it permanently. Well, I do understand why. She’s moving on. I don’t think that she sees it as much of a marriage. Surely you understand that point. I like you but—” He clicked off the telephone. He couldn’t help himself. The void was sucking him into its black hole. He wanted to lie on his bed. He was thankful to still have one. He wanted Kazem to materialize and to copulate with him on that bed. He remembered then, long ago, having his thoughts in a black hole and doubting if Kazem’s love was real, seeing the abstraction of love in colors and design like cubism, and how hungry he was in love with Kazem especially when doubting that love. Nothing had changed. He loved Porn and Piggy each in their own way as desperate as a clinging salamander in the rain.

He called Thai information. He asked the operator to search for Suthep, the youngest and the one closest to his sympathies. At least he used to be. Then he had her search for Kazem and even Kumpee. None of the three had phone connections in their names. His aunt, if she were still living, would be married to someone else. How would he be able to find her again in this vast and mutable cosmos? He wouldn’t. The operator gave him the number of Amorn Tuwayanonde. Maybe it was the same one whom he had sometimes begged and played with as a boy-maybe the same one who had grabbed his shoe instead of the ankle causing his dangling body to fall from the window and into the warehouse triggering off the burglar alarm. He dialed the number. A man answered. Nawin did not know what to say so he hung up the telephone. The one he really wanted to connect with was his uncle and he was dead. And yet they hadn’t really had a relationship. It was strange that the man had paid for all of his tuition and stay at the international school, all undergraduate and graduate expenses, and yet had remained a stranger. He had been the man’s son, in a way, and outside a couple times of staying at his home, during Songkran, he had not known him. When he died he did not inherit anything. He didn’t even want or expect anything. He was grateful for the educational transformation that had been bestowed unto him. What happened to the man’s money was anyone’s guess.

If only he could commune with him somehow to again thank him it would solidify a meaningful connection in his barren heart. The cards congratulating him on his first art exhibition at the art museum at Silpakorn University and later, the temporary exhibit at the National Gallery showed that he must have cared about him. He must have been proud of him. “Congratulations on the showing.” That was all they had said. Nawin guessed that the man had read about him in the newspapers and knew of the exhibits that way. It was all strange.

On his knees he scurried through his socks while discarding his underwear in a pile. Most of those socks that she had littered on the floor were folded into each other as mates, but not all. He felt inside each sock and when he couldn’t find anything he would throw it into that pile like a dead fish. Within the toes of one pair he pulled out four plastic bags of cocaine. It was his stash for periods of loss and he monitored what he took according to the dictates of his third of a teaspoon rule for self-rations. The Nawin rule stated that once every three months if an emergency arose requiring exhilaration or thrust away from the void, then he might administer the prescription. Such was his doctoral degree of addiction and from this philosophical islet inundations from void and addiction could not take him away. He sat on the unmovable sofa and snorted the cocaine from one of its wooden armrests. He could feel it like a Thai massage over his entire body and the insouciance it brought to his thoughts.

He put on his winter coat and gloves and got in a taxi. He told the taxi driver to take him to a go-go bar called “Foxy’s.” He had been there several times before. He watched women twisting their bodies around poles as if each movement of being a woman was centered on waxing the shiny phallus. Tissue paper probably enlarged their bosoms but he didn’t care. He would eat the juicy fruit and its wrappings no different than any nigger his melon. He wanted to relieve himself in one or more of them. Lost, he wanted to be lead by the hallucinations of his mind. When one who was on break said her hellos and sat down on his lap, he put his paws on all parts of her body. She told him that he was a “naughty boy” and asked him where he was from. He told her. She said that she liked Asian men since they were so small. He told her that he wasn’t small. “I’ve seen them before. They are itsy bitsy small.” She used her fingers as a measurement. It wasn’t what he cared to hear and although he wanted to pierce her with his lengthy sword, he left in disgust. He walked further down the street to a male go-go bar that he had never been in before although his wistful eyes had scanned it numerous times in the past month.

When he entered young men from their angles of the platform were pulling on their genitalia within dark frothy briefs of an opaque translucency that made the movements of their genitalia obvious. He watched and waited not understanding why it was erotic. He watched and waited for the midnight all-legal fuck show. He was tempted to take these sly masturbators by force until what little was rational in his brain contrived a belief that he was shackled against the wall waiting to be attacked by them. That portion of the brain said to him, “Even if you were to get out of your shackles and fetters it would be bad manners to attack these men before they come to attack you.” He watched their contortionist-twisting and the surreal images on the stage became more like flames and smoke. The why-the reason that the movements were erotic—eluded him. The why-the reason-that flames and smoke plumes made these adonises erotic in a spinning room of gnarling metallic walls was a mystery.

He wasn’t sure if it was a dismembered part of a woman, a transvestite, or something amorphous and alien, but lips in the sky spoke to him. “Do you want to take one home, honey?”

“I want all of them,” he said. She laughed.

“Do you have that much money?” she asked.

“Maybe for one,” he said. “I need one to fuck me and my girlfriend throughout the night.”

“That will be double the price, but well worth it. We’ll see to that. Satisfaction guaranteed. What’s your girlfriend’s name, honey?” asked the lips.

“Foxy’s,” he said.

“Foxy’s, like the girl go-go bar across the street?”

“I don’t know her name,” he told the lips.

“You don’t know your girlfriend’s name?” guffawed the lips.

“I never checked the birth certificate.”

“Never checked the birth certificate! What a crazy mother fucker you are!” The lips laughed hysterically.

“Do you have paint and canvases?”

“Do I have what?”

“I need paint. I’ll paint the fuck show on the walls. I’m a famous artist in Thailand. Don’t you know?”

“No, is that so?”

“I have to draw when the fuck show begins.”

The lips laughed hysterically. She coughed from choking on her own saliva. “Wanting to pay in paint?” she asked.

“Wanting to paint a fuck show,” he said. He looked through her mouth. He could see down her throat into her entrails. Her brain was where her stomach should have been.

“Where to?” asked the taxi driver. The voice again seemed like one he could vaguely recall. A boy who had been on top in the fuck show (a boy 18 or 19 who was a snowman with a bit of a French complexion) was seated next to him. He remembered paying top Canadian dollars for this boy.

“Just keep going.”

“You said that 15 minutes ago but I need a destination.”

“Foxy’s” he said.

“We passed that long ago. It was right across the street from where you were at,” said the taxi driver through his gray balding scalp.

“Okay, just take us out of the city. Someplace rural.”

“Okay, I’m now turning on a highway going north.”

“Do you still want me with your girlfriend?” asked the boy.

“I was going to pair you up with a girl: voyeurism. I’ve had second thoughts.” He kissed the boy on his lips. He wanted to drain him of all liquids including his breath.

The boy pulled back his face to come up for breath. “Where are we going?”

“I don’t know, really. Maybe we should go to a hotel. I guess we can’t do it in the backseat here, off of a road somewhere.”

“Yeah, the back seat of a taxi thing wouldn’t be too comfortable for anyone.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“There’s a sign pointing out a Best Western,” he told Nawin. “Can you take us to that hotel?” the boy asked the taxi driver.

“Excuse me. Is that the decision? Best Western?” asked the taxi driver.

“Yes,” said Nawin.

Turning to Nawin he interjected, “You aren’t a psycho, cannibal, or anything, are you?”

“I’m a vegetarian,” said Nawin. He chuckled. “Don’t worry. I won’t cut you up into pieces. I’m harmless, and I hope the same is true of you.”

“Sure, most of the time,” said the boy as he yawned.

“Jatupon, don’t be shocked! Look at me in the rear view mirror. Face your fears,” said the taxi driver. Jatupon looked up. He was startled but he wasn’t horrified. He saw that the mosquito was in the old man’s form.

“I made a merger,” said the mosquito. “I bought out the stock of his blood. With controlling stock I am the head of the company. I control all movements.” He laughed. “How do I look?”

Nawin did not know what to say. “My God, I haven’t seen you in 12 years, my boy. You’ve grown up. You have money and nice clothes. Who’d ever think we’d meet again and in Montreal of all places.”

Nawin laughed bitterly “Don’t use that word, Jatupon, with me. Okay? I hate that word. You didn’t need to emerge. My lessens about life are all my own, now.”

“Can you face life without clinging to anything?”

“It is the way of the Buddha”

“But is it your way?”

“Sure, why not? If I choose so I can do anything. If I choose, I can swat you out of existence.”

“The only friend you’ve ever had?”

“Sure, why not? Just like with a gnat.” He slapped him on the head and the mosquito seemed to shrink.

“Please don’t. Who will drive you then if you get rid of me? You killed my ancestors in your buckets of laundry soap and slapped them into your palms like a sport. I think that is enough.”

“I can get into another cab if I choose. I can stop the coke if I choose. I don’t need women or anybody least of all you. But you know, you aren’t so bad. You certainly aren’t scary any longer. Maybe I’ll let you stay.”

“Gee, thanks.” The mosquito paused for a moment. “Why do you have this go-go boy in here? Who is this boy? “ he asked.

“Someone I’m ready to fuck”

“I gathered that; and that the tenor of the conversation had turned against back seat liaisons. I’m just puzzled by these changeable sexual patterns, Jatupon. Something’s not right in your head.”

“Listen! Don’t use that name with me or I’ll take you by the fucking neck and smash your face against the windshield”

“Okay, Nawin, calm down.”

“For that matter, I could roll down the window and let you fly out and drive myself. I have an international driver’s license. Nawin is a big boy, now, Mosquito.” He guffawed at the pest and slapped him on the head. The mosquito/man hissed and stuck out its fangs. “You watch yourself. You are in forces over your head. You’re not even in control of yourself. Why did you get married? Why did you bring Porn here? Why am I and this boy with you now? What forces drive you?”

“Hunger.”

“Porn?”

“Hunger.”

“Noppawan?”

“Union.”

“Hunger again. Hunger for stability.”

“Okay, hunger again. Women are a turn on”

“Are they? And here you are with a boy, Jatupon.”

“The name’s Nawin,” he shouted. Then he calmed down and laughed at himself. “Yeah, it’s Jatupon; and you’re right, here I am with a boy.” He laughed again. “Variety is the spice of life. That is an American aphorism, Mosquito; and Nawin here is a full blooded American born in the states.”

“I don’t see a Best Western. How far out on this road do you want to go?”

Nawin looked at the boy next to him who had fallen asleep. “He looks like a child-a hurt child trying in sleep to just figure out how to make sense out of his situation, survive and not sell himself out too fully. I should be saving kids like this-even in Canada kids can be trashed.”

“Will you save him before or after you fuck him?”

“Maybe I ought to just go home. This guy on top or bottom isn’t going to stop me from hurting or from being hungry. It just propels me quicker to the next hunger.” He smiled. “I think I can get a grip on me completely. I really do. Having people plug up my pain is the glue that I disgorge into my nostrils, the caulk and the repainting that hides the broken facade. I don’t want to be a wrinkled black thing like you and still picking up prostitutes. Piggy had the right idea. I might as well start the habit sooner than later.”

“She’s left you. She’s gone now.”

“It’s okay. Maybe she needs some time to grow away from being a Biadklang. Maybe she needs to get rid of my name completely. I can be alone. I need a relationship with myself anyhow. Maybe I’ll see her again and maybe not. Anyhow, there’s some Aristotle and Plato I want to read-a textbook on tenebrism I need to get through for my Caravaggio class. I’ll have to begin my doctoral thesis shortly.”

“Hollow ideas.”

“To the impetuousness of human feelings, hollow; but not to the mind. There the theory of forms is sensed as eternal. Take me home. Drop this kid off wherever he wants first.”