"An older man?" Nawin mocked. "Not me then--impossible," he said facetiously with a contrived chuckle to disguise a sigh.

"Is that so?" asked the Laotian. "Maybe you just look like a well preserved older type. Anyhow, you were gone much of the morning. It hasn't given us much of a chance to talk."

Was the obscene truly so, he posited to himself, or was it just oversensitivity about doing something, or being a.s.sociated with others who were doing something not considered the norm? If it were the latter then so much oversensitivity over something so insignificant as the kissing of a toe or the feeding of another water seemed crazy, but if it were the former why did he not just excuse himself to the toilet and remain absent until the train stopped or from some tenuous excuse withdraw to one of the many newly vacant seats?

Nawin nodded and smiled. Then he stared out of the window so as to have a pretense to turn to a woman's gentility. He glanced at her directly with a shy smile. She was no longer eating but wiping her mouth with a napkin and stuffing her Styrofoam container between the metallic cup holder and the window.

"Would you like some gum?" he asked the woman as he pulled out a stick from the pack in his pocket.

The woman smiled with closed lips and a childish, exaggerated shaking of her head.

"She's not supposed to talk to strange men let alone take things from them," said the Laotian with a grin. "However, you can send it this way."

"Sure," said Nawin. He gave the stick of gum to him.

"Thank you, kind sir," he said with a brief gesture of the wai and a quick denuding of his stick of gum.

With a more solidified judgment that their actions were obscene Nawin began a slow unwrapping of his own gum; and yet not wanting to judge precipitously on nominal matters where he could be mistaken egregiously, he decided that he would remain seated where he was and not leave them. And if obscene, why would he want to leave them when the obscene seemed so comfortable to him despite his moral objections of himself for it being such.

"'Kind sir?'" Nawin mocked with good humored bantering. "I'm not seventy you know."

"You are such a touchy person. Now 'sir' bothers you. Clearly you aren't twenty anymore," said the Laotian. "There is nothing wrong in admitting that. It is an exit we walk through briefly to join the majority who are thought old by somebody or another.

My sister is twenty-one but that too will pa.s.s."

"Yes, age is a state of mind," said Nawin rather unprofoundly, smiling widely and readjusting his opinion of the Laotian who seconds ago he had pegged as a pachydermatous brute although perceived more erotically for it. As this issue was germane to him, he thought that nothing truer could have been spoken. He felt an attraction to this Laotian named Boi as a human being, and this attraction seemed to flush out the tense congestion of hormones in the traffic jam of his groins.

"As she could not use the sink where you were at, she primped where she could--at that nasty metal sink in the toilet. Since she primps for a long time that means that this man was primping for a longer time and she saw him--you, that is--still at the sink of the corridor when she was leaving. It had to be you as you still weren't here when she returned and woke me up."

"Maybe it was. What's the point?"

"No point, my friend. An observation. For the longest time we kept thinking that you would be back at any moment. My sister was so disappointed that she had to sleep off the depression.

For me, I was just puzzled--kept thinking that you must be doing something strange back there but G.o.d only knows what. Your name again is Nawin. Right?"

"Nawin Biadklang."

He felt a chill in the spine of his back and a burning sensation in his face with this absurd and paranoid fear that the Laotian knew what he did privately in both thought and action in the toilet. "He doesn't know a thing, of course" he reminded himself. It was obvious that the Laotian had found a means to make him feel intimidated in generalized words, but laughter and a warm smile, he told himself, would burn away that fog.

He thought about his earlier name and the time he had changed it. At the age of sixteen a monk who had been concerned about the tragic implications of the name, Jatupon Biangklang, without much awareness about the circ.u.mstances of his life, had guided him toward a more fortuitous appellation; but now, as he was saying it, the fact that he had changed his first name and not the last seemed a bit surreal and disconcerting as if he had a different head placed on the his body or the same head placed on a different body (which, he was not sure). Still it was good that he had done it even though it had not been done fully.

Unable to lobotomize memory, and being Thai, hardly able to repudiate the name of even his savage tribe, what other way did he have to separate himself from Jatupon, a wisp of air that in his mind still seemed p.o.r.nographic? "Over two decades ago and none of it matters now!" he told himself. Still the cliche of the past not mattering belied reality. If the past, having founded the present, ceased to matter so would the present to the future which would mean that all would be immaterial.

"Remember me? Sabai dee mai?" said the woman to both men.

"Khrap. Sabai dee" Nawin said.

"This is Nawin Biadklang, a nice enough Thai, I suppose," said the Laotian to his sister. "Last night I gave him a beer that put him to sleep like a baby, but those ferocious socks of his roared on through the night stinking up the entire train. Still there isn't much point in detesting a man for his stink especially when I have to ride with him and he seems a good enough man even if he is Thai."

"Thank you for the meal, said the woman as she gave him the prayerful gesture of the wai."

"Mai pen rai" said Nawin with a returned gesture, a broad smile, and a few seconds of sustained eye contact.

"Don't mind my brother. He likes you or he wouldn't keep talking to you."

"I like a bit of bantering. It has made the trip less monotonous." He said this but in considering his time in the toilet it was a vast understatement.

"He tells it the way he sees it."

"Good. I like that sometimes--all the time really, as long as it is in limits--not stuck on the bad which is vicious nor on the good to obtain an advantage. Then I guess it is fine--fine for me. Did you came in at the last stop."

"Two or three back. Udom Thani. I was working in a women's garment factory there. Siam Pooying. Have you heard of it?"

"No."

"Maybe your wife has."

Nawin ignored the inquiry.

"He got laid off in his factory so I decided to quit and go back too."

"Where are you both going?"

"Our father's farm."

"What about you?"

"Taking a break--a vacation--needed some time away"

"A self appointed vacation," interjected the Laotian. "Must be nice. And what about that ugly brown wife who beat you up? Are you going without her."

"Yes of course. I rarely go on vacations with ladies who bludgeon me with iron frying pans."

"Didn't like you drawing nudes?"

"Something like that."

"He claims to be an artist," said the Laotian.

"You saw the slides," said Nawin.

"Yes, I did. Some naked beauties."

"There, you have it then, but whatever you want to think about me is okay."

"So if I think you are a boyscout--"

"Then I am."

"A southern terrorist with a bomb."