It was his wish to go on a solitary journey where he might be in the vicinity of itinerant others like himself for reasons like his own, while staying aloof from them by a peripheral a.s.sociation of glances. He might sit dreamingly for hours at a time at a sidewalk restaurant or on the ground before a stupa in Vientiane, eat vegetable and cheese baguettes (the American cheese variety of course) and watch Europeans go by on their rented bicycles. From these glances he would be part of them without allowing them to disrupt his Buddhist contemplation; however, knowing which of them were cultured, and which were merely backpacking hedonists might be hard to determine with mere glances, and if he felt that only the latter were there, he would think that he might as well return home for Bangkok was the prime bivouac for such characters. For what he knew, this rustic Paris might well be the dernier cri for such lost souls like his or, conversely, a Mecca for middle-aged men fantasizing about Laotian men's erections. In either case, or nothing of the sort, he was going there by train as if he were not able to pay for a plane ticket as easily as the average man could pay for a ride on a city bus. Of course this particular car was air conditioned, and riding in it, despite its coldness, was certainly more comfortable than the "cattle cars" linked from behind; but coming by train at all was an attempt toward simplifying his life and it was as close to the Jatupon whom he once was that he cared to ever be again.

He knew it without dwelling upon the point for the latter activity would separate him from others even further: despite an impoverished and savage childhood, he was a refined man although hopefully demure enough not to believe it too intensely or allow it to exude into his interactions beyond a surly air softened in a warm smile. He could have taken an airplane. Refined men always did but here he was in this particular car of this particular train hoping to find balance after falling into the stone and dust rubble that intense pleasures had brought upon him. And yet, he told himself, if his own experiences immediately before, during and after his e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n in the toilet portended stygian events to come that would have him wallowing in base instinctual drives, so be it. He smiled and thought how his life was an unpredictable series of unconnected episodes. It was as if he were at a sanuk packard (amus.e.m.e.nt park) and torturous suffering was mixed into the thrill of every ride. Although seeking and favoring "sanook" in all matters like any great hedonist, realistically he hoped to learn something within these vicissitudes.

So the Laotian called his partner a b.i.t.c.h. So she bit his toe, kissed it, and now had her own foot on his lap. Why should any of it matter to him? They were not subjects under the dictates of his sovereignty, and who was he to be didactic, he who looked at a given moment as an experiment of the convergence of people and thought? He was sovereign of nothing. The two women of his life, his major connections in this existence, had in part due to his own actions, evaporated like all lost essence of family so what sententious dogma did he have to pontificate? Clearly the Laotian woman was not bothered by these mere wisps of vibrating air, so why should he be? He knew that he should not be so irascible. He knew that he should not be brooding about a pejorative word used on this woman, a creature who seemed to flourish in the word and for all he knew might be well suited and defined by it. Still tension of his own making about how wrong the Laotian was to have uttered his pugnacious, rude, chauvinistic, and socially inappropriate word seemed to alter the air so that it was viscous and palpable. True, as a minute or two wore on the tension seemed to be diluting slightly in the strong daylight which was pouring through the windows but still, as confined with them as he was there within this small s.p.a.ce, breathing seemed to be a more arduous task. Tension seemed to also sully the floor which was already fetid enough due to whatever stench the train officer's random spot mopping with ammonia earlier in the night had not covered.

And there she was with both naked feet resting on the Laotian's lap so any reaction that he might have in defense of her at this time, even if it were mere silence, seemed inane.

Escaping them entirely with his mind, he found himself trudging through a prodigious mire of memories which would have been better had they stayed in a diminished state, a staid frame of mind which would have made them more easily accepted if not appreciated. One particular memory began to percolate within him and boil over his rim. It began to be the sole activity of consciousness in a reality so vivid that it was as if he had fallen through a portal in time. He was with her again and she was exactly the same. "Kimberly, I should be painting that expression instead. What's wrong? You've seen that one of Noppawan a hundred times before." "I am just seeing it in a new way. You are the world to her. You can see it in her eyes--so much love for you and you are the one who painted that love so lovingly." "I'm drawing you now, aren't I, if you would stand still? Haven't I done plenty of you?" "Still, this painting makes me wonder what I'm doing with you. She is my friend."

"Whom she chose to give birth to our child--yours, hers, and mine." "A son... the ultrasound showed it, you know..we'll be having a son--yours, mine and hers. Maybe your connection to me will be special for that reason, but you love her and I shouldn't be doing this." "You are in your fifth month. It's a little late to go in reverse now, wouldn't you say? As I've said a hundred times before it was her idea. She knew that I wanted you and that I was trying to repress it since the two of you were best friends. She wanted children through you, and this pregnancy is your gift as a friend to her. She enlarged marriage to include you in it so we are all married in a sense. There's nothing to feel regret about." Then this memory, which had seemed so vivid and concrete, dispersed as if it were sound, smoke and wind..

16

Thais with a disposition and willingness to scrutinize their own cultural suppositions were rare but for those who were so inclined to repugn family and Buddha, if only in outward aloofness and tacit pondering, little remained sacrosanct from intellectual dissection except for issues in reference to the king, for to cease to revere him would make one something other than Thai. That is what he thought at 8:00 A.M. as he heard the king's anthem playing at a distance from a pa.s.senger's radio.

That was what he thought, and yet had the moment been different he would have thought differently. He knew that what he was, what he claimed to be, was merely from being in the particular situation where he found himself. Now in this car of the train among these strangers whom he did not particularly like, hearing that rather bland melody repeated, one more of the daily repet.i.tions throughout the years, and as always feeling that strong inhibition which made him not able to even acknowledge to himself this blandness, his disposition grew a bit peevish and restless for he kept telling himself that every moment he remained here was aging him toward his forty-first year. Having one birthday in a train was bad enough, he told himself. He did hardly wanted another one. The moments seemed like hours, unmovable as boulders.

As Nawin heard the anthem he saw that the three food salesmen, in concert with everyone else, were deferentially erect and motionless in response, and noticed that there were no more strident cries or other such tonal annoyances of khao phat moo, phad thai jae (noodles and vegetables), and kauy-tiaw (noodles) with some sauce with a Laotian or northern Thai dialect name, at any rate shrieked beyond recognition. Noting that any delay in getting off the train would be a brief one and that the freelance food salesmen would be gone with the slightest forward thrust of the train, he pulled out sixty baht from his wallet so that he might quickly buy one container of each for himself and the two pa.s.sengers whose s.p.a.ce he was confined to. It was only polite to do so and any effort that he might make to give less credence to his feelings of disgust toward them would make the rest of the ride more agreeable. Besides, as feelings were so interlinked to perception of a given event in a given moment like attack dogs that were often standing in late evenings by the doors of banks and randomly barking at the scents and movements of pa.s.sers-by and their shadows, they were not reliable gages for a.s.sessing reality and he did not give much credence to them.

The gambits of feeling, senses, and logic were even fallible when working together. To trust one exclusively over the others was a madness equivalent to an artist falling in love with his subjects, an inebriation of the myopic he had always tried to avoid in the hope of going beyond the "reality" of one's petty a.s.sociations to an expose of exploitation and tacit desperation in which the viewers would see the wh.o.r.es residing within themselves. This Earth was in one respect like a huge amniotic sac of impermanent quasi-reality in which he seemed to be a six billionth major cell of some inchoate but never complete organism that was being tossed therein. In another sense it was diametrically different and he seemed a complexity of contradictory feelings, logic, and sensory input like partly functional gages and gears that he manipulated and was manipulated by to move and a.s.sess movement in this nebulous terrestrial cloud or fog he found himself in. To some degree he was part of a cell if not an entire cell in the gestation of the making of a life and the Earth was merely a cl.u.s.ter of cells if not an entire organ in the inchoate organism called the universe; and yet to some degree it was as if he was a probe slowly feeling its way in a very small acreage within Martian darkness. One thing that was certain was the intricate and confusing number of switches and responses in himself. Even with logic, if a compa.s.sionate man had only this, he would continue to stay stationary in any situation he happened to find himself.

It was feelings of pain that urged a man's extrication so that he might find situations and quests more worthy of his time. So he thought while hearing the ending of the anthem.

Inwardly having great humility and reverence toward King Rama IX, he nonetheless facetiously told himself that this opportunity to eat a scanty sustenance was provided by the king himself and that royal cuisine of this nature was not to be pa.s.sed by. "khortoht [excuse me]," he said, raising his hand and motioning to the nearest salesman to come toward him. It seemed odd to do so, for he was feeling the desire to turn in the opposite direction toward the Laotian himself, so that he might say, "Phom tongkarn khun [I want you]" and "Phom gamlang ja pai gap khun [I will be going with you]." Odder yet, his mind itself retained the hauntings of Kimberly, who was even more similar to him than Noppawon in being a little of this and that, and belonging to no group or family for she was French-American, and he Thai American, or at any rate an American Thai, and, unequivocally, both were expatriates of this world.

As if it were not ironic enough to lack superst.i.tions about ghosts and all else and yet have his mind so discomfited by the creeking, rattling, and shuffling of her presence in the dark corridors of his mind, he was possessed by inexplicable, ineffable desire for this individual before him who was of the same gender. The rattling chains of the former were feeling, instead of sound and, understandably, this rattling was from the stress experienced by remorse; but the latter was a burning sensation less explicable than the other as if he was possessed, although there was nothing to possess him but himself. Together the phantom of that tacit, gentle soul of a woman and the possessive fantasy of the rough and naughty Laotian were trying to overtake him. They were mental poltergeists and he was the source of his own haunting.

He had boarded this train in part because he was trying to flee Kimberly and yet were he to fly without cause or reason, he knew that she would go with him to Niamey in Niger just the same as Nongkai in Thailand or to Vienna the same as Vientiane for she was an ineluctable memory of myriad of these ineluctable memories that he would lobotomize in minor whittling of his brain with a pocket knife if only he could. Many times, marred and blurred as she often was, Kimberly and those not so far gone memories of youth which were equally hideous in their own ways, would detonate like a land mine inside of him when he was tired, causing him to falter into depression and the unconsciousness of deep sleep. Still, what could be done but to freefall in sleep, hit bottom, and awaken rejuvenated with the sun? One could not dispense with a mind the way he had his telephone. In a sense, of these apparitions from the subconscious, she was summoned from nowhere phantomesque, and yet like weeds thrusting from a rocky landscape without reason after a cool rain. As in that memory a minute ago which had acted an entire scene upon his mind, Kimberly, hybrid of weed and flower, was there in his mind's eye like rife dandelions. Even though now she seemed to be withering within him once again, and he was at least cognizant of his pull toward her, he seemed to be falling more rapidly and with greater force toward this rocky slope covered in dandelions and fog, compelled to fall into the lap of beauty and death while the final impact remained suspended from an incessant retreat.

Even now, he thought, she was more distinct than the smudges that came from the contrivances of conscious will when attempting to remember, but that image was diminishing with the seconds no differently than subsequent attempts to recollect her consciously garnered less than was exact with the pa.s.sing days.

As with other hauntings, he felt startled, and spent a minute or two trying to recollect himself within disconcerted thought but that was especially hard to do this time since his mind was crowded by that visceral, recent occurrence that was one more presence in the haunt of memory.

Strangely, even if done immediately after glancing at her photograph, or after seeing slides of a painting of her, which was an impression of her and him both, were he to try to remember her exactly it would be an act of abject futility. It would give him nothing but a blur. He could even concentrate on the specifics of her wearing that turquoise dress that he had given her, a combination of the color, green, that she liked most and the ethereal blue aqua vitae lakes of her eyes, and it would not matter. Attempts to consciously bring her back would extract nothing but smudges and visceral pangs of loss. The hauntings of memory hadn't any more reason to be than the screen door of the shed at his home (exclusively Noppowan's home now through his default in not exerting his innocence and in not shifting the blame back on to her, the proposer of their doom) which opened, closed, and banged around in the winds. But when she haunted the oblique corridors of his brain there was nothing opaque about her. Clear as reality, he was often able to remember not only her, but also a continuum of moments in their interaction together and, as now, the ensuing shock would cause him to stand for a minute or two lost in himself while trying to find a way back to the present moment and a.n.a.lyzing and rea.n.a.lyzing this thought process as if hoping to find a switch to turn it off. So his mind droned on like this, as it always did after a deep thought of her image, until he was able to find enough of himself to make the choice to part from her.

Glancing out of the window for a few seconds with his hand still motioning toward the salesmen, he watched Thailand's vacant greenery, a pickup truck on a distant road, and a water buffalo standing in what should have been a modern rice farm. These images continued to peel and fold back behind the train no differently than the people and events of his life. This, above all, was why he had subconsciously chosen to come by train. It was an instrument for ill.u.s.trating his impermanence so that he might accept that this was the natural course of all things even if human intellect knew that nature was vile and that this impermanence should be otherwise.

"Sorry, I got carried away," said the Laotian to no one in particular. It caused the girl to laugh and then look up at Nawin with a broad smile. As much as her smile could speak, it seemed to be saying that expletives were the norm. It was as if that smile were saying that profane and abusive names were merely a mode of expression, like bantering, that gave visibility to something as impalpable as a relationship, and that she enjoyed whatever he wanted to call her as well as Nawin's intrusion of silence which was meant to be a reproach against Boi. Thinking of how a smile conveyed language, it seemed to him that even the walls of the train were speaking if he would just listen to them. It occurred to him that if thinking so was childish, animistic, and all things Piaget, life was more meaningful with this chimera.

"Anyway, it doesn't look like it's hurt," said Nawin in an attempt to bring closure to the subject of the toe.

"Yes, I think you're right."

"Is Nongkai next?"

"It's the next stop--the last stop. Are we friends now?" he asked Nawin of the Thais who chuckled good humouredly in reply as if the earlier retort of surly silence had been from some other self. It indeed had been, in his opinion, for each minute, if not mentally connected to its predecessors, could be unique from all others and unpolluted in that sense. At least that was what he thought and so he laughed magnanimously. "Why not?" he said with fresh amus.e.m.e.nt in being with the Laotian. "Maw ni khrap" he called out to the salesmen pointing to all three and handing them each twenty baht. He distributed the food to his acquaintances and the young woman pulled herself up into his seat.

"Ambrosia, food of the G.o.ds," said Nawin.

"The G.o.ds must be cheap b.a.s.t.a.r.ds or starving rice farmers to consume something like this."

Nawin laughed. His eyes became focused and dilated like those of a baby intrigued by the newness of life. Meeting an iconoclast in these parts was a sumptuous treat.

"That is his way of thanking you," said the girl. "You are so kind."

"Mai pen rai. Yindee torn-rub khrap." ["Think nothing of it.

You're welcome"], he said fully, captured by her mellifluous sound and how the smile lit up her face right before the spoonful of rice was placed in between her two rows of teeth.

"Reunions are so nice--you and me and you and my sister, her Thai toilet friend. She's been talking about you, you know, ever since she pa.s.sed you coming and going from the toilet--this handsome, middle aged man who is obsessed by his image."

"Sister?" He was stunned.

"Oh, yes my sister, not my girlfriend. You thought she was my girlfriend, didn't you? Well, not really. Are we boyfriends from chatting and drinking beer together?--not so much but who's to say not or never. Earlier when she pa.s.sed you she was wearing a cap, a man's jacket, and what else?"

"Sungla.s.ses," giggled the woman.

"Yes, sungla.s.ses to hide herself from being noticed when she isn't as beautiful as she wants as if foreign laborers are likely to encounter a lot of important friends everywhere they go. We hardly know a soul here except other Laotians. I bet when she pa.s.sed you, you didn't notice her any more than you would any androgynous clown walking the streets of Bangkok."

"A clown?" interposed the woman.

"A beautiful clown."

"Well," explained the woman, "I was in a hurry to get to the tracks. I hadn't washed my hair so that explains the cap. They don't have a station back there so I had to wait in the sun at the tracks. It was chilly. Do I really need to explain this?"

"Your hair's fine."

"Yes after washing it in the sink and blow drying it, but it is uncombed now."

"Beautiful, isn't she?" He knew that Boi's meaning was not fraternal and that that which should not have repulsed him but did was now being replaced by that which should repulse him but did not.

17

"Free of connections, free of clutter--unfettered--and happier for it, I suppose," he thought as if disconnectedness from others, freedom from circuitous movements around and preoccupation with people would free his thoughts rather than free him of thought. Thought was surely the material a.s.sessed in abstraction, but l.u.s.tfully eating his food with the foreign acquaintances of that country of backward brethren he did not consider that issue consciously. To some degree he was like those who in the monotony of their circuitous movements around material possessions and a preoccupation with them came to remote areas like Vientiane to find more to themselves than the acc.u.mulation of money and objects, but his retreat was more from the loss of people than the dismissal of material possessions, and his departure was not out of choice but the circ.u.mstances that had brought about the need to extricate himself from inordinate pain. He did not so much want fairly empty rooms in a guest house but the totally empty realm of his mind.

He knew that he would not be considering the subject of whether or not disconnection was propelling him to happiness unless something were amiss or lacking in his life. What was once the clogging of his brain with the mauled grammar of students'

redundant essays in art survey cla.s.ses, women whom he was involved with, and was obliged to attempt to make happy (such an inordinate amount of women, as his heart was a sponge of sorrow, caring deeply or loving advent.i.tiously and incurring feminine wrath for it all, who were paintings of this life and mattered to him as well as mitigating those sorrows, the result of injustices), a futile effort that had ended worse than imagination had reach. Having students to maintain professional interaction with as altruism and being a benefactor allowed him to stretch closer to the ethereal realm of virtue and also gave him more tentacles for a.s.sessing reality, and the somewhat plagiarized and hastened research and cursory art coinciding with old themes that had been done to maintain his position at Silpakorn University had now been replaced with freedom to ponder vacuity. And vacuity he pondered unceasingly for, in this train, emptiness rode in him as he was riding in it. Vientiane, he derided, was not a destination any more than the Buddha's Lumbini forest. His time might have been better spent had he stayed in Bangkok seeking prost.i.tutes to draw in the city's Lumpini Park (p for p.o.r.n), and yet here he was for some reason going to that final destination of Nongkai, the sister city of Vientiane.

He was like an empty wrappers of those fruit filled cookies that in boredom he had gormandized the previous night for they had fallen from his bunk during his restless sleep to be, for a time, caught in the reigning randomness of the fan's winds. And yet contrary to the social animal that was man, placid acceptance of his disconnected state was in a sense a spiritual retreat; and it was, after all, as a spiritual retreat, more or less, that he, an atheist, was hoping to facilitate by coming to such a lackl.u.s.ter and lackadaisical city like sleepy Vientiane where there would be no distractions to cordon off this theme of vacuity.

Affluent and unfettered by property, which seemed at any rate to be entirely lost to him with his wife having changed the locks on the doors, he could go anywhere to become something different. In that sense he was truly free. He knew that and reminded himself that he should be grateful for it, but like any social creature he needed a mind stuffed with clutter to have the equilibrium that would deliver him from being random movements of an unstable, empty vessel lost at sea and unto itself. Whether he was on a spiritual pilgramage or being flushed down to Vientiane as defecation in a downward deluge of his own whims he did not know; but in either case he was free (free, that is, when not fully wracked in guilt about Kimberly's death and all that had led to that grotesque spectacle which he had no power to change) and freedom always felt good. To be humanized from mechanical actions, not that he had carried out many of those in the past year of his premature retirement, and denuded of pretensions by l.u.s.ting after two or three young beings who had pa.s.sed to the toilet, as well as the two seated before him, was in essence like being found; and they who were found were encompa.s.sed in thought like birds to air. It was good, even if much of the air was sordid and polluted and ineluctably so. Nothing was lonelier than the loss of thought and being compressed into the agenda of the day, the cluttered interaction of interconnectedness he only in part liked because of a loathing of it taking him from himself. If he were to work for a month in a factory like a dirt poor laborer (he was indeed swarthy as most Thai laborers and once of their cla.s.s), return to the sidewalk restaurants which were his inception and, he posited, probably were his true destiny had he not been so insolent to repugn them, or even to return to Silpakorn University, such an experience of once again doing work would give him a fuller appreciation for what he had; however, even with this satiated and cloyed sense of leisure that often seemed perennial, his indolence seemed the preferable course. A flight into the World Trade Center towers of oneself might be in part a flight down to a sordid h.e.l.l but he, an artist, although a retired one, would hardly repugn it if it were.

While eating with them he stayed silent. Was it so peculiar to scan each of these acquaintances respectively with circ.u.mspect glances, to do so apprehensively (more apprehensively and yet more often to the male than the female of this brother and sister combination as she, whom he barely knew at all, was nearer and the s.e.xual interest would be more conspicuous), and to let the erumpent odors of both, imagined or real, send him on a molecular magic carpet ride away from the mundane and the tragic of this world? Was it strange to occasionally think of them as his friends when not really knowing much about them? It was probably, as he now lacked anyone in his life, a normal reaction. With his telephone thrown into the trash at the train station, he even lost the nurse whom despite his brokenness he was able to inveigle with tender caring questions and full attention toward the caregiver, a charm that wooed her as all who felt no one in this world listened to them. Was it so peculiar that he should feel comfortable in a brother and sister combination when it was quite apparent to him that they were intimate beyond sibling love? It was an intimacy that to most would seem repugnant but for those who were in one way or another abused, molested and maligned in youth, and whose thoughts were stuck in that mire of sediment and sentiment still (sentiment because, tragically, it was rarely all bad and thus stayed there like sludge slowing the victim's thoughts), they who were perhaps under a different name than now, who were once in their own brother's arms, witnessing perversion as he had in seeing this earlier foot kissing of siblings was a homecoming.

To see that others were so engaged made the taboo subject a human tendency frequent in the subconscious though never, or at least rarely, in deed as this molesting of a woman who happened to be walking on a sidewalk. With the witnessing of such an aberration he was freer than he had ever felt before. For a moment he felt a rush of dopamine and serotonin that almost made him love the siblings. Was this "love" really for them any more than he was really "loved" by those who needed someone to listen to their ideas and truly care for them with no other motive than this? He supposed it was not "love" in any pure sense of the word. Still it was good that he was no longer having to persecute and banish memory and thought, or having to consider that part of the brain vile which was the trash receptacle of repressed thought and thus, he theorized, his body was feeling amorous in celebration with s.e.xual feeling as if he were being tossed into the air like confetti. Perhaps a celebration, as all human actions and interconnection, was just the macrocosm of the innate chemistry within (in this case the party within). But what did he know for sure of the demented, or at least aberrational aspect of this brother and sister relationship? How did he know that his conclusions were warranted? He did not know anything for sure as little or nothing was known conclusively.

Once in those beginning stages of his molestation he had spoken to his mother. It was an oblique reference but the pain in his facial expressions (furrowed eyebrows, sunken eyes, and the slight and irregular quivers of the lower lip) were easily interpreted even for someone like his mother who was accustomed to some amount of pain always embedded into those features. She understood what was implied and flattened it vehemently by contending that "nothing had happened" and that he was "crazy."

How was he to know now, twenty years later, with absolute certainty, that it had happened, as his vague memories recalled it, for memories were impressions dented onto the clay of the brain and were so easily defaced. Certainly memories did not become more real in time. And if he did not know his ability to know how would he know the relationship of a couple of relative strangers absolutely. Epistemology was the study of nothing for nothing could be known absolutely no matter how much the brain yearned for certainty. He could sense that the Laotian knew that he liked him as well as the girl. He could also sense that not only did the Laotian like her as well but that what he liked most was Nawin knowing that he liked her. It was all amusing to him. He sensed it but how he sensed it from a smile, a look, and the length of a look he did not know.

"May I have a sip of your water?"

"Sure," said Nawin as he gave him the container that was on the seat near his leg. The Laotian drank. "Do you want it?" he asked his sister in respite from quaffing the water, but without waiting for a response from her he once more drank voraciously and then tilted the bottle to her who bent forward toward it. He fed it unto her in what Nawin, ostensibly a neutral third party, was inclined to think of as an obscene gesture. It seemed obscene despite the fact that it was merely the drinking of water.

"Yes, my sister has been talking about you--well we have, really. She says that in going and returning from the toilet that she saw a handsome older man at a mirror. It had to be you, don't you think?"