Chapter 3

The acceleration that took them out of Huamark and through other adjacent sections of the city eventually led them to her area. He did not remember the name of it: Bangkae, Bangplad, Bang-something. He paid little attention to what his mistress said. Her voice often seemed the strident spluttering of burning fuel in an engine that couldn’t produce motion. King Ramkhamhaeng was a bygone entity. As soon as his model picked up some of her things that she had forgotten to bring with her the previous day and they had some breakfast, then Thailand would be a thing of the past too. For how long he didn’t know. He was married but it was one signature on many sheets of paper. The significance of spilled ink could not be read unless, like many superstitious Thais, he were to seek a fortuneteller-mendicant sitting on a sheet or straw mat on a sidewalk or in a park.

Noppawan had her chance to go with him. He had asked repeatedly. He had tacitly exhorted (mostly with his eyes) but she had refused him. Maybe she needed him to command her presence. Maybe in this nebulousness of strong selfishness and altruism called a personal relationship, so immediate and personal like finding oneself enveloped in smoking and fiery dust, she needed constant reminders that he cared about her more than any other entity selfishly and altruistically. That would be the woman in her if there were such a woman.

He tried to contemplate what love was like for normal people. It was surely a dust storm one invented in one’s mind to escape loneliness but then it became intertwined in more neediness and consciousness of the other’s feelings and thoughts so as not to be vanquished to aloneness. An individual who was able to overcome the grief of the loss of dopamine in the ephemeral and moribund high of being in love would cling to his former pleasure-inducer as a source of meaning in life’s vicissitudes. He and Noppawan had done the same but they were less like individuals finding themselves separately cast onto lifeboats in an ocean of random waves for they found oceans of thoughts within themselves that seemed more navigable to solid chunks of reality. They needed each other less; or so he thought.

Thai women generally had obsequious crying bouts in their rafts, but Noppawan, he argued, was not a woman. She was female without womanity. She was a female who advocated overcoming petty human existence for a love of ideals, compassion, and the attempts at understanding the human predicament. He couldn’t see into the future to know if he would be returning to Thailand anytime soon to be peered at through his wife’s thick dark framed glasses. At present there were only the wills of three individuals cowardly seeking meaning for themselves in a unit. There were only these socialized wills rolling along on a road in marginal darkness under the specious assumption that there really was a destination. The sensory input of traditional Thai music was coming to them from the front and back speakers of the car that was their confinement. The radio music, no matter if interpreted as harmonious or strident by the three individuals, was a levee helping to block their pervasive inundation of self-absorbing, mordant thoughts and reminded them (the patriot and the pending expatriates) of their commonality as Thais.

They passed a mall where he and Porn had gone shopping a month earlier. That day they had spent together there was the levity of the stroll and the shiny flash of credit cards in this Thai way of forgetting one’s impoverished roots. Feeling on top of the world, he comported the male gesture of having one arm clutching the other one behind his back. It was a gesture of affluence in the stroll of the shopper’s quest. At least twice when he encountered friends of his from Silpakorn Art University with bags in their hands he would talk to them for a half hour and somewhere into the talk he used another male gesture of affluence. He would slip a foot from a sandal and then slap it onto the floor loud as a firecracker. The sandal would hit the floor like a hand slapping against an impoverished peasant.

They stopped in an alley smaller than a side street called a “soi.” It was in between many Mom and Pop businesses and there, crowded within, was her apartment. He knew rooms like this well. They were rented out for fifteen or twenty dollars a month (600 or 700 baht), barren, hot, and unventilated as an attic. When she had gone in to get her bags he felt less lonely to be momentarily rid of her. Even now at age 26 but with thoughts at certain moments suffering and dragging like a man of 50, there was just himself, the real unit of one, and delude himself all he pleased he knew that he could not find anyone more significant than that. The only thing next to his heart, in the pocket of his shirt, were the slides of his art depicting the naked and dejected whores of Patpong that had ejaculated him into fame and puffed up a latent ego in himself that thought that he was a higher being than other Thais. He was keeping them there that day because he wanted to momentarily hand them over to airport authorities so they would not be harmed in airport security. When she returned with an added bag that the taxi driver plunked into the trunk the two men smiled at her and she smiled back. After all, Thailand was the land of smiles and every infant understood the advantages of smiling. To bypass his surly temperament and increase friendly relations, Nawin offered more breath fresheners or chewing gum for everyone. No Thai would refuse such friendly gestures and the two of them took from his hand greedily like tamed birds. Then he began his old contemplation of why 2 was greater than 1 or why 3 was greater than 2. It was an old argument of his wife. The first time she posed it to him they both were 16 years old. He had made the mistake of asking her to a dance. “Why do two things coming in close proximity to each other have greater value?” she asked. His only response had been “A le nah?” meaning “What did you say?” Neither one of them went to the dance but straight to their bedrooms and their sullen thoughts.

Porn was, according to his thinking, an “all right whore.” She didn’t cause him any problems at all and it was for this reason that he carried her along with him as a personification of his intellectual decadence thereby increasing public intrigue with him. She was the pretty doll he could swing about as a reminder of his one-man school of art. He, Nawin Biadklang, could flaunt her around as the premier example of the dark vision in his mind and the sexual slavery of his nation all meshed together. He would have to draw a lot in Montreal and sell everything he painted to pay for any expenses the scholarship would not cover. She preferred her title of model. He was not so heartless to deny her this euphemism. She successfully relieved him of the tension of his body and to be emitted of it like a squeezed tangerine in such a good rhythmic fingering would well compensate for the stress level of having to spend so much time with her. He desired her a lot of the time so by most accounts of love he did truly love her. Foremost, Noppawan did not object to her. Matter of fact, she wanted Porn to relieve him. She wanted him squeezed. She wanted the pus squished from his brain without having to get dirty. She wanted to continuously wear the glasses that caged her tepid orbs and to not succumb them to rapturous non-Buddhist primal yearnings. She did not care to dodge the aloneness of her thoughts through a rapturous delusion that she was one partial being made whole in sex and love. And yet by her account she did not want to mandate his awareness. It was only by tripping on shadows and feeling vapid equanimity that came after having absurdly given oneself over so entirely to the sensation of pulling on one’s genitalia that a man actually knew anything.

This whore was and was not his typical whorehouse girl. On the day of their first meeting he had been sketching runners and trees at a stadium near Assumption University where his wife taught. His head was resting in a fog until she materialized. There she was casting a shadow onto the sun that was sedating him and wrapping him into himself in sleep. There she was questioning him on his art and pointing out her mommy, a skinny and frail thing, sitting on the other set of bleachers.

He found out that she was a dancer. There was no surprise there. Her flirtatious gestures and the presence of her frail mommy looking over at them and hoping the purchase would take place were tacit but undeniable clues that she was poor and wanted a male companion. That was no surprise either. Yet beyond this calculated small talk or artifice was an ingenuous mouth that glistened in guileless desire. She was a money girl. That was obvious, and yet there was more. There was infatuation and an accompanying mommy who was like an SOS. Porn was a whore, but if he hadn’t been married, she could have been more. Except for Noppawan, who was a flagrant novelty, he couldn’t quite decipher how whores and wives were all that different. Both baited the man for the fecundity of prosperity and progeny. It was a survival response that was selfish in base primeval instincts. It was human and beautiful. It was filled with womanity.

She turned up the volume on her tape recorder and repeated, “Excusez-moi; au revoir; oui; toilletes; papier hygienique.”

“Was that the main reason for coming to your apartment: for the tape recorder?” he asked.

She turned off the machine without the least concern about a distraction deferring her scholarship. “Oui,” she said, “but also my favorite blouse, jeans, a necklace-see, isn’t it beautiful—lots of things. A tape recorder is rather important, I think. You don’t want me to be unable to talk.” He nodded his head as he frowned wishing that she couldn’t speak at all. She would have been all the more beautiful mute and deaf. He had proposed getting up early initially to compensate for his slow, pokey movements but not as early as this and he resented having lost sleep for such knicknacks. He didn’t feel that he should be subject to listening to her palaver in Canada. His nod was that of acquiescence the way the King Ramas had agreed with planned activities of the imperialists to divert their attention. He, however, was trying to divert a headache. He looked at the booklet that was on her lap. She was unsuccessfully trying to imitate a product published in Thailand as he had guessed a minute earlier from the fact that the speaker on the tape sounded Thai. It was the blind leading the blind, he thought.

“You do know some English, don’t you?” he asked.

“No,” she said. He could imagine the palaver she would be saying on the streets of Montreal and he yearned for his wife, Noppawan. He got the taxi driver to turn right and park on the side of a street. His eyes were fixed on a barren serenity of gravel and weeds that was in the vicinity of a pier. The sun was now rising fully and aided by a golden roofed temple on the other side of the river, there was a silvery and golden glaze in the waters camouflaging the sooty sediments that were diluted within. He wanted to go to the gravel and eat along the side of begging dogs of which the bodies were deflating like tires. He wanted to sit at one of the red metallic tables on a plastic stool among a group of saffron robed monks, with the scents of rice or noodles penetrating his nostrils. He had to smile that such an aversion as twenty baht meals still called to him pleasantly because they were the foundation of memories that constituted his verdant youth.

“What are we doing?” she asked

“We’re eating,” he said. “Come on, it will be fun to act like common people,” he chuckled.

“Common. I know common. Common is having a treat of eating fried insects on the dirt road, Nawin. Common is sleeping on a rug because you don’t have a bed. Common is praying for the opportunity of having one’s sandals fall apart or getting them trapped deep into the soil of the rice field so as to have an excuse to get out of the hamlet. Occasionally we paid an arm and a leg to the owner of a truck who came once a day ten miles down a muddy road to pick people up. Common, Nawin, is collecting rain water in those big ceramic tubs that sit in front of the house, being stingy with every drop of water when you wash your body, and then go to bed exhausted without even eating dinner. Common is getting up at 5 a.m. to feed the water buffalo so that at 6 a.m. your father can use it to plow the field. You don’t know anything about the word.”

He did know. He bled from knowledge but he frowned and for a moment he was taciturn fighting back anger and memories. “Well, do whatever you damn well please. I need out of this car and that is what I’m doing. You can feast on what remains of the breath fresheners. I for one am dining out. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

“When do we need to get on the plane?”

“There’s plenty of time,” he said. “Plenty of time to eat another meal in the airport before departing. You’ll get a high price western meal at the airport. I guarantee it.” He left the taxi and sat down meditating on the river flowing at a distance. Soon the anger dissolved and his memories were imprisoned.

The idea of paying on a taxi where the meter continued to rise without his presence enthralled him. Having lots of money was a novelty and flaunting this novelty to patrician and plebian, proletariat and CEO alike still engrossed him. Thais were culturally programmed to give the “wei” to the Buddha and the monk but in their hearts that steamed with greed as they cooked their food on the streets, sold their trinkets from their sheets, worked in office jobs, were government officers, part of an educated middle class, and a million other activities, classifications, and identities, this traditional greeting with the folded hands in front of the face was deeply given in the secret regions of subconscious ideas for those whom they thought of as rich. And as he ate his pork laden noodle soup while the meter ticked on he picked out the pork to feed the dogs; but in so doing he glimpsed someone. Past the gravel were sidewalks and stores and further was a department store. Next to it, beyond the gaunt old woman on the sheet selling and squeezing rubber duckies in the hope of selling a few and having money to eat, a man clanging bells with handless hooks above his cup, shoe repairmen fixing soles, a kiosk of a key maker, and a blind mendicant with a speaker and a microphone singing a strident folk tune, was someone. It was a person who turned him to stone, froze him like an iceberg, mortified him, and pulled out his wounded child. It was a strange composite: at one moment appearing a bit like his brother, Kazem, and at one moment like the youngest of his elder brothers, Suthep. For a second or two as he saw this cook at a distance, he couldn’t remember the name of Suthep-he who had been so innocuous but in his apathy had harmed him the most. Ten or eleven years had gone by. He wondered how he was supposed to know anymore: was this man one or the other or neither of them. Another blind beggar began to sing a song in a microphone linked to a portable speaker. He was being led by his wife. They came to his table singing a louder song more stridently than the one he heard at a distance. The sun was feeling hot and it made him dizzy and mad as Akhenaten in Ancient Egypt. Nawin, the legal alias of Jatupon, was feeling a weight death. His whole ideas and feelings were discombobulated. He took out twenty baht wedging it under the canister containing vinegar and peppers. He walked quickly to the car and cowered himself in the back seat in movement toward the airport.