He realized the impression that he was making and so he smiled and looked into the stranger's face. "So, did you like the paintings? --not that as slides held up to the light anyone could see them all that well."

"They were done well."

"Unlike you who have probably gained a lot of various skills in your labor, I don't have many practical skills. I can't fix anything. Not even a drawer that is ajar in a night table. Never learned to cook anything but noodles from my parents' restaurant and my brothers' noodle stands. But I know how to draw naked wh.o.r.es. That is for sure. I guess it is my gift."

"If those slides are your own work, you do, my friend. You draw them so well, so exquisitely, so astoundingly with all the feminine curves and wiles just right; and I am sure that after you paint and love them they sometimes like to watch you sleep and you like to watch them sleep. But that was not the nature of my query. I am meaning someone whom you don't know all that well looking down on you. Like I was earlier this morning, you are not quite asleep and so you hear him--yes a man, as it is a man's breathing that you hear. Earlier I was lying alone here in my bottom bunk drowsy but not asleep when I swear I heard someone drop from an upper sleeper and got the sense that he was examining my body, wanting it. Strange, huh?"

"I would imagine that it would be," said Nawin.

For a moment he was stunned to have these crevices of opaque light so heavily and obliquely invade the filthy corners of his mind, the dark enlightenment being alluded to, both parties seeming to peer onto it (he himself undoubtedly so and this smirking of the Laotian and his eyes that seemed to pierce his soul so knowingly could not have equivocal interpretations). He kept debating whether he should stay or go and found himself, due to his indecisiveness, floundering in desperate ambivalence.

Clearly he wanted to move to a different seat so in that sense of knowing his own dominant yearning and witnessing it unopposed by contrary yearnings he was not ambivalent at all and yet, he asked himself, how could he just go? To go so precipitously would be rude even if done with the obsequious gesture of the wai (although even this was complicated by the fact that he was the older and vastly more affluent of the two parties and should not be the one initiating such gestures); and to leave for one of the now vacant seats would only aggravate suspicion. The idea of the Laotian having proof of his decadence would dog whatever specious tranquility he hoped to have in a vacant s.p.a.ce of his own. He could stay. True, it would be uncomfortable but then, he told himself, there was not any option for solving any problem that was ever entirely perfect. He was uncomfortable now, and would surely be even more so with the pa.s.sing moments. Such discomfort would sprawl like a dark vine onto the minutes, strangling them like a rope, or in excessive growth smothering them like a baby buried in its foam bath. And yet if he were inordinately resolute if not obdurate in staying where he was, would not the tempestuousness pa.s.s away easily by acting the part of a G.o.d? Zeus-like in shooting his thunder bolts, albeit thunder bolts of conversation against that soft epistemological core of a man's mind which realized that nothing was known absolutely, he could easily impart the venom of doubt. He could lead the conversation into inconsequential matters such as the latest news about these Moslem separatists in the South or the seventy year old saffron frocked monk who mistakenly pulled out glue from the medicine cabinet, inserted it into one of his eyes, and then allowed a colleague to remedy it by applying paint thinner into his hallowed orbs.

Anything believed to be known, could be doubted as illusory when the possibilities of the present were continually supplanting those of the past. By continuing to talk it would become more real than the Laotian's vague recollection of him staring at his body. Still he did not know what to say, and feeling that discomfort, he wanted the closure of all communication with a stranger who knew him more than his own wife.

These h.o.m.os.e.xual feelings had swept out of nowhere, and they had put him in an inferno of desire, which only masturbation in the toilet had been able to douse (this particular desire all the more savage for being so alien to adulthood). Still with the appropriate undaunted response such a caprice and aberration did not need to brand him in the Laotian's mind or his own. And yet this chill that seemed to drip onto his spine like water from a leaky pipe in the tiled ceiling of the bathroom, was incessant; and perennial was the trepidation that the Laotian should know the cryptic depravity that lived in the messy far reaches of his brain, and the latent whims that gushed out from his childhood memories. For a few seconds Nawin was able to stare at his curious rival with a resolute confidence and a lambent smile but it did not last, and so he stared out of the window and withdrew back into himself. He once again began to romanticize those cars of laborers with their families. It would be there, to them, from which wafting scents of dirt, rice, and wildly lush and weedy greenery, lost molecules from the whole, would pour into open windows. It would be there in poignant rushes of wind slapping their faces that, complacent or even content, these laborers in shared travels to the homes of extended family would find meaning in their relationships. From the illusion of desire and love, of transient rushes of feeling, the families existed and became the boundaries and summation of themselves--accidents and stumblings from that which in ignorance begat the unions and material presences to which they tolerated, and to some degree cared for, as they were extensions of themselves, their fate.

The bundle (the feet on the Laotian's seat and head leaning against the edge of his own) began to move and like a decarpeted Cleopatra her face became visible and it was beautiful.

13

Throughout these moments of the conversation she, whoever she was, had been at his knee all along even though, oddly enough, her presence had registered in his brain with the vaguest of awareness. Now that he was fully cognizant of her, he perceived this oddity of having overlooked her earlier as a somewhat amusing anecdote in a listless, perennial train trip largely in need of even the most dull amus.e.m.e.nts, a fact which was droll to him in its own way; and yet outwardly he hid his smile and tried to restrain himself from glancing downward. He told himself that he did so out of Thai modesty which mandated some degree of reticence, or at least a bit of a reluctance, to broach questions (being installed by cultural indoctrination this was the most frequently used program which, when lacking an operator's manual for one's life, even iconoclasts like him would switch on reflexively in an effort to make an appropriate social response before reconsideration and subsequent action).

Indeed that did have some bearing, but for the most part his silence was in the hope of keeping her there longer.

Clearly, she was now exhaling her warmth onto one of his knees so, he argued to himself, why not patiently allow the query of who she was to emerge slowly with her presence when waking would at last tear open that coc.o.o.n. As bereft of women and relationships as he now was and as confused as he was by what had transpired inwardly immediately before and during his odd release in the toilet, it was quite pleasant to imagine her as a more docile and devoted member of his long throng of scattered harem over the years and now, at the age of forty, decades of adulthood. He knew that this desiring of a woman to stay on his knee was not all that different from the previous night when with beer in his system and insecurity at being chased by the 4 and 0 which were almost as tangible as stalkers, he had hugged a pillow to secure some limited sleep. He knew it, and he knew that this repugnant human weakness suggested that the peace of mind he hoped to obtain by a Buddhist trip into Vientiane could be easily ravaged by wild desires as random and pointless as the landscape of weeds and sedges about the train, for desire was innate as the yearning to breathe. This wild mono-h.o.m.o incident, he somewhat cogently told himself from the more than nominal truth that was therein, had merely been a release, a mechanical need to discharge a full load of s.e.m.e.n rather than a desire for one of the same gender; and he fervently yearned for the obsequious knee doter to stay where she was for as long as it lasted, not that he would have disturbed her repose if it were not intertwined with his own pleasure as well as a need for a secure sense of self-ident.i.ty. Was not that, he asked himself, what made the distinction of a kind man from the rest of the predatory male animals: a patience and tolerance of others'

happiness, and a willingness to invest time to secure it even at the cost of one's own discomfort? If so, kindness was the virtue of the former he, Jatupon, who, in lost, forlorn boyhood, when not wanting to disturb sleeping cats allowed them to lay hours at a time on his lap. He guffawed silently in his own mental chamber at such sanctimonious, thrasonical ravings, for childish behavior of long ago was not evidence for his untenable claim of being a kind man and thus a good one. It had no relevance to his barely nominal interaction with the beauty that was sleeping at his knee. Furthermore, he recriminated himself, his fame came in depicting the exploitation of others which was in itself a type of exploitation even were he to reside in the deepest squalor as an expose journalist, a Mother Theresa, or some other paragon for ending injustice and suffering. Had not his wh.o.r.es sought deliverance for themselves and their impoverished families because of him? Had not jejune sojourns been made to the homes of their respective rural families where he had to eat with them as one of their members? Had not a belief that he would leave his wife for them and an innocent expectation that they would be redeemed by this deliverer burned within their b.r.e.a.s.t.s, hearts, and c.l.i.torises? "Am I a good man? I rather doubt that I am," he disparaged himself. He even doubted goodness. One never interacted with anyone unless pleasure was in some way a.s.sociated to it. A human, even the best of them, was hardly the making of a saint. Clearly, were they not so soft and his need for love so great, he would not have stayed in that uncomfortable posture on a tree stump outside his parents home, long ago, to allow cats to sleep upon him.

This idea that pleasure was interconnected with all pursuits, a viand of a thought, could well have become a repast if not a banquet for discernment; and as an artist's dissertation was done on canvas, ideas for a painting, now raw feeling boiling to the rim, were on the verge of being shaped in his mind. And yet, he dismissed them. He repudiated them by telling himself that he would never rank as a great artist, that he was void of color, theme, and technique.

A knee doter--he could barely hold back his laughter (how easily he was amused by himself, a wonted practice from the vestige of childhood along those banks of the Chao Phraya river in Ayutthaya when solitary play with the elements inherent in air, rain, and dirt and the chase of an idea scurrying through a mind which was barely aware of its presence, brought him peace from the incessant barrage of disparagement meant to stomp upon him, their c.o.c.kroach, in that war called family). The verdant landscape, now near Nongkai and her sister city of Vientiane, came incessantly toward the pa.s.sengers as the train moved through it. It came intimately. Every minute of a man's life that was not in s.e.xual intercourse, he thought, was in an intercourse of a very different kind, in union with circ.u.mstance and thereby impregnated with new thought that made him a new man. A knee doter, he inwardly chuckled (once again he was pondering how easily he was amused by himself, a practice he had become accustomed to from the vestige of that h.e.l.l called family in which, if one's sensitivity was intact enough to not laugh at a sundry of crude commentaries such as the father's daily repet.i.tion that it did not matter what a woman looked like as she could be denuded and a sack put over her head, and these manly attempts at being the most clever one at belittling the other (mostly aiming for him, that easiest and most sensitive of targets) these rudimentary and vulpine or wolfish members of the pack would attempt a full annihilation of him in words--all of them that was but his brother and tacit protector, Kazem, whose hard eyes were his fort, but whose gun would discharge later in his r.e.c.t.u.m). He found this peculiar idea of her as the obsequious love slave, as much as the source behind it, not only amusing but arousing. It had always seemed to him, fettered as he once had been in ideas and paint, obsessed with transforming sordid memories and thought into color as he inexplicably gazed at a barren wall of canvas, that one never made love to a woman but a facsimile of one in one's own brain which that brain distorted to meet the o.r.g.a.s.m it longed for. It always seemed to him that the craving for women was merely for a spark to stimulate fire in the vacuity of the brain so as to liberate it from catatonic list, the result of boredom, and thus o.r.g.a.s.m was merely for oneself even if by chasing illusions of "love" a real child materialized along the way. Thinking it now, it was nothing new for him, for to him, Jatupon, who was once in love with his brother and scrutinized the validity of human emotions thereafter as Nawin, feelings were gossamer threads of chemicals prompting puppet man to breed and breed elsewhere. Marriage had at least taught him that tempestuous feelings of love and despondency could pa.s.s if one gave them little credence and by being unmoved by their promptings one could at least have some years of success in obtaining a consistent uxorial presence in his life. Love at first sight that was felt from brief encounters was merely a neediness for an interesting presence to stir up one's pa.s.sion for life and end loneliness. It was always transferred to a conceivably obtainable sense of beauty by which to obtain immortality in a DNA continuum. For even love from a s.e.xual encounter, to have any substance of reality, had to be a reciprocal neediness ground in years of friendship. And yet a woman was a wh.o.r.e whose penchant for a parcel of land and a branch of a tree to build her nest was an instinct that was as fulsome as the worse of human hungers. His mother, to get her few scanty goods, had closed her eyes to his suffering. His wife, now that she acquired his child, took over his domain and changed the locks. Ironically, here he was l.u.s.ting after a woman once again for did not every man require intimacy like b.u.t.ter that would melt and fuse him and his sausage onto the woman and her egg? Did he not secretly want a woman's bypa.s.sed stares in the minutes of anger to diminish him into the dissolved umbrage of her shadow like slinking into shadows of an alley to taunt thieves and cutthroats to have some limited intimacy with death?

He allowed his ruminations to quickly shuffle through his mind once more, for they amused him tremendously. Then he redundantly centered on one in particular. Throughout this nascent conversation with the Laotian, whoever this man was, who perhaps used a nickname-alias of Boi as an easily worn but also easily removed one word summation of himself, this pallid, young female with flowing hair, just as he liked them, had been inches near his thighs and he had barely even noticed it, as he was preoccupied with this bizarre h.o.m.os.e.xual caprice that had rushed upon him an hour earlier as zephyrs from the subconscious, and thinking of ways to repudiate any judgment of him as a h.o.m.os.e.xual that might be in the mind of the Laotian. Eagerly succ.u.mbing to desire for the girl, and perhaps even exaggerating any desire that he did possess to feel masculine within himself, he deliberately glanced down at her even though he was once trying not to do so. She looked like that nurse at Siriaj Hospital who had been responsible for catering toward him whose wife had broken his arm with a skillet and his heart with those words, "The son that you and Kimberly brought into the world should not have a hateful person like you as his father! Get out! We're through!" For ongoing emotional comfort and to set up dates for caresses he would be calling that nurse, smitten as she was for his good looks and his marginal celebrity status. He would be doing it now at this moment were it not for having thrown away his telephone at the train station.

14

Although more clinch than original, an idea as trite as an aphorism ruminated in his head. He told himself that ideas were nothing unless one acted upon them; and yet from a less cognizant melange of disorganized feelings which had not been refined into thought he was really meaning that fervent, peculiar whims prompted all pleasurable acts and that unto themselves these saccharin gusts that bate were of no substance unless, in opposition to society at large, one partook of them fully by allowing them to saturate to fulsome, insatiability in behavior that was in complete accord with their perverse dictates. In the brief s.p.a.ce of that moment he repeatedly averred this facile idea silently in his mind. He willed belief into it like pumped air into a holey inner tube which, like in his filthy boyhood in the still filthier Chao Phraya river in Ayutthaya, for a brief time of escaped labor, he would ride.

Ideas are nothing unless one acts upon them: the thought was not at all novel even if this particular context for it was. It seemed to him to have Buddhist or Biblical implications which he supposed as having been transmitted to him long ago through someone affiliated with a temple or a church, although he was not exactly sure how or when such an idea had been pa.s.sed to him or how it had become so embedded in his brain even if brains were, for the most part, mere sponges. Oddly enough, there it was, even in such a man so unfettered by moral restraints as he was. It was like a blood-sucking mosquito but quaffing away a.n.a.lytic and synthetic processes of idea making, aggravating placid delusions in fever, and muddling the mind in an amphigory of simplistic human nature, which when unchecked, was really more carnal, multi-dimensioned, and beastly than anyone would care to presume.

His prudish behavior on this day was diametrically opposed to the Nawin of old who on virtually every other day of his adult life but this one, from influences of feelings and underlying thoughts which he hardly recognized, had followed his carnal whims with women inordinately. A being, after all, did the tricks that nature prompted him to do for the sweet bait of pleasure and so from the perspective of carrying out those functions that biological creatures were meant to, the physical and perhaps only basis of morality, his own behavior was exemplary. In the seats of his car parked around forested areas within Bangkok's outlying roadside parks (the woods therein avoided because of the bigger probability of the brambles of "queers" accosting him), in forests far from the city, against walls of women's toilets in gas stations, in discotheque parking lots, in hotel rooms, empty upper staircases, in boyfriends' and husbands' beds when they were out, several times, under banana and durian trees in one particular father's orchard, once in a pimp's bedroom when he was out, many times in the villagers own bedrooms while they slept on living room floors eager to take advantage of his copulatory pleasure to get a bit of financial support for their families and fame for the daughters' whose beauty he, the surrogate husband, would preserve on canvases, abandoned buildings and tall skeletal structures that were never quite built after the 1996 financial meltdown, once backstage with a Russian ballerina after a performance of Swan Lake at the Thai Cultural Center, several times between two enormous trash bins at a stadium and once under its bleachers, never in his and Noppawon's home unless occasionally with Noppawan herself but very often in his studio, he had released his snake to a mostly strange and less than angelic array of females who too were victims of poverty and exploitation. Both them and a smaller second set as well (a set to which each respective woman behaved as both friend and lover until invariably insisting that he obtain a divorce from his wife, a strident and resonating demand that despite his wishes to the contrary, always caused an avalanche of debris to fall upon them both in a closure of the relationship that turned as black and mordant as light sucked into a black hole and that was as indelible as death) he would ma.s.sage as gently as wind since, according to him, the Nawin ma.s.sage was more effective at loosening inhibitions and making the body malleable to s.e.xual positioning than the pryings and twistings of the Thai variant, listen intensely to their troubles during pillow talks in which he reflected their feelings like a psychologist, and kindly e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.e into them the venom and bite that were the gifts of his body.

With today perhaps being the exception; throughout his life it always seemed to him, the exponential adulterer that he was, that carnal caprices should not at all be repudiated when they were all. Every rare, sublime thought that managed to get through the savage millennia did so because of sordid, procreative energy which manufactured the generations despite imperfect performances of maladroit sperm missing their targets, the targets most times missing, and even the walls of the missing targets sometimes being some other type of wall, a wall like his own wall, a man's wall.

If from a Christian source, the idea must have originated with his aunt on his mother's side who had once dabbled in his life with feigned love back in those early days of Jatupon when he believed that this bit of extended family, this refined lady of an exceptional marriage who was blood of his blood (which she had willingly sold by buckets to a h.o.a.ry senator with age blemishes) would at last tug him back from the precipice or at least intercede when he was foundering in the abyss of family.

Back then there was a belief in deliverers who would reach for him while uttering charming, mellifluous words which all of the family members would accede to. Back then there was a belief in forgiveness, the righting of wrongs, that a time would come when both mother and son would feel comfortable enough in each other's presence to almost be able to speak openly about what was happening to him in this monstrosity called family, that there would be a time of not having to fear losing any remnant of the maternal instinct for love which she still possessed and occasionally demonstrated in brief tacit glances of commiseration, that a day would finally come for this open admission of the truth (although now he believed that it probably never would have occurred even if the parents had not died so early in that fatal automobile accident, which had led to his subsequent indentured status as a noodle worker behind his brothers' food cart and the late evenings/early mornings of becoming, even more gratuitously, his brother, Kazem's "cheap date," his "free hole"), and happy endings for this putative, perennial propinquity called family which he had once thought of as an everlasting substance that would one day satiate him with meaning, and like a tsunami drown and bury his tiny, forlorn existence in its eternal watery ma.s.s. His youth had cowered in the corners of the shadows of family, and he had stayed within them complacently, cognizant that every c.o.c.kroach that was not smashed sooner or later found a more preferable exit, and that although it would seem forever, this time of the impermanent first family would just be a brief s.p.a.ce of years within one's lifetime.

Art had been his way of taking umbrage. It had been his way of committing that monstrous deed of giving a voice to the miniscule c.o.c.kroach by inserting a man's vocal cords within it.

How in early boyhood could he have known family to be merely half-remembered battles, and diminished faces of long known and scarcely understood combatants that the memories and critical intelligence of an adult would present to him? He had believed in the magical restoration of it then, child that he was, as if self-interest were not a priority in human beings. Integrity was rare and integrity for his sake rarer yet. Should he have expected something greater from his aunt? To her he had been cute, and so not having children of her own, she had dabbled in a love for him, pampering him for a time with her neediness. She was, after all, a human being seeking her own happiness as he was; and unlike him, she probably never had a clue what happiness was really. However, he did know despite often living contrary to its precepts.

By his account happiness was seeing meaning in the blowing branches of a tree on a murky, partly cloudy day that was as ambiguous in weather as purpose, and expecting nothing greater from his environment or fellow men than ambiguous and random happenings on such a gloomy day. To find a bit of pleasure in what was and not expect anything more: this was seeing innate value instead of creating ideal scenarios, which were bound to not happen and lead to disappointment.

The mystery of obtaining happiness was not so confusing but s.e.xuality, that ever changing river, was. As many times as he pondered again this recent event, his ruminations churned up vacuity and uncertainty for he still did not know whether or not this mono-h.o.m.os.e.xual experience of masturbating one time to the image of a male in a toilet of a train on a day of panicking over having turned forty const.i.tuted a thought that was acted upon, and so the aphorism did nothing for him. If meant to liberate him from guilt or cure him of s.e.xual depravity this nostrum had less efficacy than a placebo.

It was not only them, whomever they were, but he himself, whoever he was, that seemed to meander on the outside. He was lost like an insect crawling on a seat of a roller coaster ride which, designed for thrills as it was, lacked purpose. This ride on and of the world in forty rotations around the sun, which had changed him both physically and mentally since his birth, seemed to him now as meaningless as a pail of water being twirled around forty times in centrifugal force. The Earth had bore him as another product cursorily begotten on an a.s.sembly line. A product did not transform a factory, he thought, nor did a man change the world, or even leave any indelible sign of himself before being dumped in the landfill.

Images of a stern female four with a broad boned body and a balding and obese zero with one arm taunted him in his, arguably, depraved imagination. They were salient neither in nightmares as it was not night, nor daydreams as this word only had positive connotations, but in a sense, daymares. In them the couple were walking through the rain toward their home. In his mind's eye zero was still scrambling for his keys when they, the husband and wife, arrived at the doorstep. "You are so disorganized," she reproached. "G.o.d, I hope that you did not lose them again," she excoriated. Forty times the zero quietly stomached the abuse as he continued to inspect all of his pockets for the fortieth time. He knew that she had married him for his purchase of a parcel of land to which she could build her nest, for union with sperm from the only man who had exhibited some interest in her, and for a financial provider for her birdies. He knew that, altogether, she had used his body because of an instinct to seek happiness in that which would place her on the throne of maternal monarchy, and so her insults not only seemed unwarranted but particularly contemptible.

Furthermore, he could not understand why, when she knew the reactions that getting drunk and shouting her invective as intense as imprecations would cause, that she continually insulted him. More times than not he would be provoked to beat her, pull her around by the hair, and continue to slap their forty children from time to time for caring about the shallow smackings of the mother instead of the mental flagellations that she rendered unto Him. Despite the bruises and black eyes that he gave them, he knew that she would never take them away, for a woman, if anything, was a prost.i.tute of a bird. Obeying instinct, she would do anything for a parcel of land to have and maintain as her nest. Was this, as some type of a singular image, he asked himself, the subject for an abstract painting?

It was for someone else, he retorted.

He thought, "Have I, Nawin Biadklang or whoever I am--whatever I call myself, done anything remarkable within all these forty years?" He posited this question as if this subject were now a relevant matter to deliberate, and as if, after having scanned through a quick shuffling of vapid memories, a self-judgment had not already been rendered on this matter. Actually, before posing the question his feelings had already concluded that although having risen to upper middle cla.s.s from dire poverty as an accomplished artist he had not even made one single painting that was so unique and extraordinary that no one else could have made it exactly as he had done. Feeling had rendered in him the decision that he had failed at anything beyond making himself more affluent than most, and so the question held no purpose. He was just a man with a brief and puny life, and as with all men he ate and expelled, sought pleasure and reacted reflexively against threatening stimuli no differently than any common, self-preserving c.o.c.kroach. It was true that in a man there was self-awareness more keen than in other animals, but from it one could not help a.n.a.lyzing his own insignificance which he would then have to repugn by absconding more fully in the professional and personal domains. Fabricating illusions of grandeur in ambitions and love, he could keep his life busy and fortified from encroaching questions.

For all of Nawin's messy colors in art and living life brightly (his playboy activities, the television commercials, and a month on a soap opera, which came about from his slight fame as a renowned artist and an attractive presence) he had not become a Leonardo Dicaprio let alone a Leonardo Davinci--not that Davinci would have necessarily known his own greatness. He was discontent with himself as being so was endemic in mortal, human creatures who at best could leave no greater legacy than their own puny thoughts, and at worst found their voices mere echoes of the environment, and their only means to halfway preserve themselves was to have offspring partly begotten from the l.u.s.t of their loins.

He, in his lifetime, was not as much of a renowned painter as Montien Boonma or Chamas Kietkong were in theirs. For meaningful Thai art of international appeal one turned to them and not him.

His works were a familiar leitmotiff of sordid, dejected wh.o.r.es to which ideas and representation of forms were, for critics and buyers alike, secondary considerations. This suggested to him a deficiency in the technical mastery of his craft and made him yearn for other pursuits. At certain times he had been obsessed by having celebrity status and at other times he had loathed it, but overall he had resented its intrusion much more than grading art survey compositions at Silpakorn University for commercials, and the daytime melodrama sidetracked the continuum of his life as an artist by keeping him from scholarship and his own creative achievements. Thus, he had done what pathetic, impotent males of the second category often do: he had fathered a child.

It seemed to him that whereas mildly abused individuals added links to ancestry, h.o.m.os.e.xuals, from the severity of the abuse committed on them as children, or from good common sense, became broken links and thus remained unchained. In that sense, he was definitely not "queer." At least that was what he told himself.

Then it seemed to him that there was a certain heroism in being a childless presence, stopping the replication of a damaged element and accepting fully his impermanence. However, he was not heroic in that way either. He was a mere womanizer upon whom his wife had urged a full, unprotected s.e.xual union with her friend to gain a child. Even in considering all the scores of women whom he had had protected s.e.x with through the past two decades of his life he would hardly be a record holder of this marathon either--not that spilling body fluids to say that one existed would, he judged, have been all that less significant than spilling paint.

At a station immediately before the destination of Nongkai the train stopped and a door opened to three villagers who were selling their fried rice and pork in Styrofoam containers. "Khao pat moo. Som sip baht [Pork fried rice. Oranges, ten baht]" they proclaimed on both sides of the aisle, and like bells their voices summoned him out of himself. The Laotian was still seated in front of him as before, but with a furrowed forehead and a smirking countenance as if puzzled not by what to say but on how best to say it. The woman, still seated in part on the floor, was now stretching her arms. Seeing that she was awake, the Laotian's furrowed field of a forehead became smooth, and the subject of contemplation he was fixated on seemed to vanish. He raised his naked foot, and with a profane toe denuded his partner's bangs and began to ma.s.sage her forehead. This continued for some minutes until she bit the toe.

"b.i.t.c.h! You're really vicious. Look what you've done. It's probably bleeding now."

Nawin's jaw lowered with his mouth slightly agape. In disapprobation of his culture he sat stiffly for a moment in tacit and obdurate silence, but with glances down at what was beneath him. What was beneath him was beauty.

15

Even if he were to say that it was a new beginning for himself and, unlike other nocturnal prowlers, that he was now a nascent creature capable of appreciating the simple pleasures of the day in a more abstemious lifestyle, there was the immediate past to repugn the a.s.sertion. There was that nurse at the hospital, whom from earlier exchanges of smiles, looks, and brief conversations, he was able to obtain her telephone number shortly before being discharged from the hospital--a woman he would be calling now had he not thrown away his mobile telephone or "moh-toh" as Thais (though not him, the inwardly surly, cultured man that he was and an American Thai at that) called such devices. Was he not still a glutton for intense thrills?

Was he not always at least nominally enraptured by someone or something different than the other intrigues that had come before? The women of the past had proven that he was as had that which had happened to him less than an hour earlier.

Disagreeable for the source of its arousal and made vulgar and fetid by the a.s.sociation of having been done in such a filthy toilet, this experience had been a particularly odd and abhorrent intimacy with fantasies that he was not accustomed to entertain. The fact that these fantasies had opened the gates to his e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n in the toilet of a train was for him an unpleasant reality, not that intentionally trying to avoid thinking of it was, in his judgment, such a wholesome act either for it did not make it less part of his own thoughts and experience to stuff it into the sockets of his brain like one's dirty socks being shoved by a foot under the bed at the knocking of his door and he would not be much of a man to cower away from himself so easily. It was still disconcerting since it was both odd and distantly familiar simultaneously, a combination that made him feel flushed down the toilet portals of ineluctable memory. Masturbating privately wherever he wished was for him as inconsequential as scratching the area of his pants that covered his s.c.r.o.t.u.m when experiencing a particularly strong itch, and yet this carnal escapade was different. It was deviant more for him in the sense of diverging from the mainstream than anything significantly pejorative. Still, it was for him a most sordid encounter with himself even if, to his satisfaction, performed in the purest of form--being free from the self-delusion of love. To him, all s.e.x was making love to oneself but coupled naturally with a woman it did not seem so sordid, even though it perhaps was, while being impure enough as to seem as if he were really making love only to her when the contrary was true. Thus to him making love to a woman was more sordid as a consequence.

In this morning encounter with a fantasy and a hand had he not, despite himself, been enraptured by that dark and bearded male partner of the exquisite, pallid creature beneath him? He had.

It was not possible to repudiate it as much as he might want to, given the fact that, despite the earlier release, a cool t.i.tillation that had never quite left him was once again rea.s.serting itself by soaring and tightening his groin and it was not for the girl--at least not yet, although he hoped for transference--but for this Laotian boy, Boi himself.

This "sick" experience, he argued, had been in large part from insomnia, and the insomnia from visceral loss in his life and from the numb pain of his broken arm. Also in part it had been from the jerky movements of the train after being "a bit sick"

to his stomach in the wake of having drunk that watery Laotian beer -with its strange pungent punch like consuming a liquid version of French cheese which always bit back- that Boi had fed to him in his bunk. This had to a lesser degree discomfited his composed mental state as had the acknowledgement of having turned forty. These factors had made him "sick" or a little offset from his mental equilibrium and yet it seemed that he was not over his sickness. He was sick even now.

With women he just wanted to be mildly tipsy and never quite inebriated, and so he would be slightly infatuated with one after another. Even though he wanted the continuum of each one's friendship and to learn to appreciate each as the unique visual, social, and s.e.xual creature that she was, finding no ultimate beauty, the quest for it always seemed to facilitate the making of them all into ephemeral ent.i.ties in his life when impermanence was making him dizzy. These fleeting figures were sunsets which he never quite wanted to catch when cognizant that there was new light waiting on the outskirts of the horizon.

Thus they were as amorphous and mutable as the pursuit for beauty itself. He knew; and if, he postulated, all organisms on the planet were in some respect lovely and loveable, an excitable reverence for the perfection of their forms (even the oldest and most decrepit human, or a single cell microorganism was perfect in contrast to the debris of dark free flowing elements of s.p.a.ce), why then did he judge a given person as being beautiful or ugly? It was an unjust contrast to something else more or less visually appealing and it seemed to him both procrustean and ludicrous when every ent.i.ty was worthy of portraits and every organism on the planet held the potential to excite him in love. It seemed to him that he should be unendingly rapturous to all beings of the world, and yet if one were amorous for all clearly the brain would experience overload. Perhaps the reason one person, two, or three, for a while, became a man's myopic fixation and were thought more beautiful than all others was so that the brain would not experience this overload at recognizing that all forms were equally luscious. This might well be the meaning of a man's fixation on one or a single small group of "beautiful" women--a protective mechanism to stop brain overload. Within one's vicinity and propinquity, an individual registered a finite array of physical traits and characteristics not quite like his own until a next batch would catch his eye.

So that liaisons of sometimes two each day had not become four, causing all aspects of the man to be extinguished but the ragings of appet.i.te, Nawin had taught, for many years, art survey and drawing cla.s.ses at Silpakorn University, graded papers in the teaching lounge that was exempt of pretty young things who were such ugly distractions to a man who was hoping to seek higher realities than visual and tactile stumblings, pursued jogging, swimming, art, and scholarship, and each week loitered near the golden Thai pavilian or "sala" overlooking the lake at the Bangna campus at a.s.sumption University. There, he would wait to pick up his teacher wife, watch the stretching of geese a.s.sert a land based prowess after floating toward him and his bread crumbs, and attempt to once again appreciate simple pleasures. A journey there once or twice a week, like sports and art, helped him to find peace of mind by focusing an aspect of himself less connected to innate appet.i.tes and filling Noppawan's mind with an illusion that she was the only one despite the many, an illusion both appreciated as indispensable in congealing and solidifying their relationship.

In loss and tragedy so great that all life seemed a lugubrious and murky haze he knew that at any second he could fall to pieces and yet here he came anyway. On this train moving toward Vientiane Laos, this world capital no different than a country town, this little bit of Paris with a lot of dirt that was the sister city of Nongkai which he had seen once before. His aim was the same: the restoration of self. He was traveling here to find that life was still good despite poignant loss, to part from what-ifs, remorse, guilt, and shame, and to find himself in simple pleasures that he believed were the foundation for appreciating life. He did not know, but it seemed to him that higher pleasures were synthetic, built from tenuous material on a st.u.r.dy foundation, and most of the tower had crumbled down and he was there on its foundation, its base, bruised, lacerated, bleeding, and literally with a broken right arm in its rubble.

Alone, he wanted to journey to Nongkai so that, undistracted, he might enter Vientiene to contemplate the song, squawk, and flutter of his own thoughts. When simultaneous to some similar song and rustling from the birds themselves it would be rea.s.surance from nature that the fleeting essence of matter and the personal loss he was experiencing at Kimberly's suicide, and the subsequent separation of his wife after beating him senseless with a frying pan were natural. It would also be testament that life was bigger than his myopic perspective of it, beset, as he was, by tragedy. However, on this train, as everywhere, there were palatable humans who continually discomfited hi peace of mind like the chocolate fan poochai (fantastic male) and his vanilla fan pooying, who he supposed was his girlfriend, seated there in the confined s.p.a.ce before him.