If the Laotian were to return with the supplies or a receipt for them, a scenario he could hardly imagine, it would further solidify a contract begotten of seemingly inconsequential words and bits of paper currency, the substance of contracts; they would be in this union and its ensuing obligation of him to paint one or another of the members of this rural Lao family even though the subjects and themes this would pertain to were yet unknown to him. He would stay with them until he completed his task, rural, sodden and dest.i.tute as they were, no doubt sleeping on the planks of a wooden shack if not on a dirt floor once again, drinking boiled tea colored tap water or worse mixed with lemon juice, eating once a day as they did, consuming rice with fish sauce or salt sometimes mixed with an ant egg curry and a few boiled vegetables purchased cheaply as they were on the verge of rotting, somtam, chicken, noodles, boiled eggs, sticky rice and mangos of the more wealthy almost as exotic as French cuisine, and out of respect to them ostentatious, flickering gold would no longer adorn his brown skin to replace his slave collar of plaited noodles and in lieu of the yellow plastic wrist band of mindless King Rama myrmidons who also wore yellow T-shirts with royal insignias on Mondays and Fridays the thousand dollar wrist watch would have to be deposited obscurely into his luggage. But were this stranger to desert him, should he in his loneliness be desperate enough to conceptualize it as such, there would be the continuation of this freedom from others, expectations of him just as he wanted, despite any neediness to the contrary, an uncompromised, unadulterated self in surfeit, in which even the painting of internal and external worlds was perceived not as expression but as a blurring or smudging of the true self by form and colors; and there would be more of the same unbearable loneliness, and emptiness. He thought this as he heard thunder in the distance of the pa.s.sing storm and in an undercurrent of thought recalled explanations of thunder and lightning posed by adults, those pleasant lies of childhood that after all this time he had for the most part forgotten, memories unused that without imagining the way they once were, fell apart with pieces scattered in disarray and sometimes lost entirely, unable to be found again, void recollections of the mind.

If left alone he would be a cactus flowering obscurely touched by nothing except the ravaging sandstorms within, an ascetic monk whose insights would languish within the intact internal life of a temporary being, a fetus barely alive in a dead woman's body--if this were really what he wanted. If the Laotian did not return he might continue to have the pleasant company of his thoughts provided he held reign over their restive movements and they were directed mostly toward some external aim instead of a constant churning of old redundant ideas and ghosts of memory haunting him with their illusionary palpability as though that which had been could be grasped still. Alone here in Laos, a foreign land, there was plenty that was novel to explore and by being a sole traveler, his will, his uncompromised agenda, would be exactly as he wished it to be.

And if in this solitary journey he were to become unbearably lonely, wishing to do G.o.d knows what with this family and unable to do so, his consolation would be that he had given money to those who no doubt needed it. But apart from putting into practice an egalitarian princ.i.p.al which gave him some satisfaction (pleasure always being the positive reinforcement of an action never to be pursued unto itself but giving personal meaning to virtuous action) there was nothing so personal in it.

No, he sought only to draw his base nakedness and feel that erect body against his own. He wanted to be intoxicated by the molecular exchange of kissing a man like yearning for a bite from a water monitor, an animal that was rife at the Silpakorn University campus in Nakkon Pathom, and to ride and be ridden to launch his sensations out of his mundane, incarcerating, gravity-bound subjugation.

There was more of the distant thunder. It was like a homeless bottle collector pushing an unwieldy cart away from him or, if it could be trans.m.u.ted to sound, that of a man repudiating his own impecunious past. Hadn't that faded memory of a mother once told him that thunder was a diamond falling from some G.o.ddess when struggling in the heavens against a diminutive monster?--he could not remember any of the specifics; hadn't some uncle in the United States of America, the country of his birth, once told him that thunder was the sound of Thai monkeys angrily tossing coconuts from coconut trees in the hope of getting to the bananas? He remembered that in his naivity and love of his nativity he had fused the two stories together. He smiled ruefully as all variety of family was now gone from him, its ephemeral nature expedited by circ.u.mstance and choice. It occurred to him how quickly the child within could penetrate the veneer of a man, and by resurfacing, claim hegemony over adult thoughts. It might give way to them altogether were it not for the need to make a living in a role that in some minute way was a propulsion of human existence--not that seated on park benches or the equivalent for the past three or more years of his self- proclaimed retirement, tolerating his wife's looks of disrespect and thus bonding all the more with Kimberly in due course, he had performed many roles over the past few years...he had merely fathered a son. But of 6 billion people on the planet, how would he know that his a.s.sumptions of self were applicable to them? He could not even prove the dominant child trapped in the veneer of manhood for himself, let alone others, when from one minute to the next he was a different being entirely thinking different thoughts or seemed so as any object in variant angles of light.

Maybe this a.s.sumption just related to those whose childhood, despite some sublime moments, was overall harrowing, or maybe it was merely his own idiosyncrasies.

Nawin was gazing out to a sidewalk that was across the bifurcated street that veered into many directions around the Arc de Triomphe replica, and he was ready to move toward it. He was just about ready to stand up and walk away. As the Laotian would not be returning there was no need to sit here further.

Furthermore, he was hungry and wanted the steam of coffee to make him into a new man. Then he suddenly felt a tap on his shoulder, human warmth, the sense of belonging to this sorry specie. The Laotian handed him a receipt. "It should be delivered by tomorrow afternoon."

"All of it?"

"I think so."

"To your home?"

"Yes unless you want me to have him deliver it to a hotel room.

You don't have one?"

"No. I was thinking about checking into the Paris Laos Hotel. I saw it earlier in pa.s.sing. Any change?"

"No."

"It came to 5000 even?"

"Its on the receipt."

"That doesn't mean much."

The Laotian smiled. "I didn't write the receipt. Did you go up into the monument."

"No, just stayed here. What's up there?"

"I don't know. What's up there? Poor people trying to sell their trinkets, souvenirs if you want to call it that. Junk for westerners to remember their trip to Laos. All of it is the same as in Thailand. Nothing that would interest you unless you want a little better view of the city."

"I see. Then I guess not."

"You don't want to be a spectator of poverty?"

"No, I've seen plenty of that and I guess I'll be seeing more if I stay with you."

"Of course. Let's do it."

37

A third person, an older man with a handkerchief on his head, trudged hurriedly by. Had it been Bangkok, this individual would have needed to shove through umbrellad cell phone using laggards jamming pedestrian movements, but here in this village of the national capital there was nothing to curtail his movements so, even as decrepit as he was, he disappeared as dirt down the makeshift gutter that was the declivity of the entirety of road.

Then there was a forth, a monstrosity of four animated legs walking toward them, a bodiless unit of Siamese twins under a sole umbrella that in pa.s.sing was shown to be of separate beings, male and female counterparts, much younger than he was, and, in a state of subdued happiness, much more nave than he could ever recall being.

Even happiness like this will not last, he thought solemnly with a sense of sympathy for these distinct individuals beginning to prevail over a bit of jealousy at the innocence of youth which had glimpsed him with his cynical countenance and he them before receding behind him, the memory relegated to the region of the brain where all inconsequential sensory input was a.s.signed. Then despite his intention he vaguely recalled that ingenuous sense of a belief in euphoric, all-pervasive love emanating from the attraction of two beings, that feeling he could not entirely repudiate, a feeling he once had toward his brother. After this particular perversion (all s.e.xual acts a perverse blend of imagination and the tactile and so the more usual of them also perverse but not a perversion in the usual meaning of the word, or so he justified it to himself), he had not felt it since. But then as one who had perpetual notoriety as a womanizer, a provocative offense and humiliation to any wife, he had to admit that he did not know of the longevity that might be maintained in a relationship--he who thought that marriage to an anthropologist whose features were buried under thick gla.s.ses would be beyond the atavistic jealousy of troglodytic females waiting anxiously for the hunter to arrive with his meat, baby's bone marrow, and bananas, and his p.e.n.i.s that should only be hers, he who did not know that every woman was also a woman in instinct and reaction.

Then, again, there was just the two of them continuing to walk silently on a stretch of vacant sidewalk cleansed of the litter of dogs, each under separate umbrella aegis, each in his own direct or askance manner watching the energy of the pellets of rain reverberate in oblique and diminished circular ripples in puddles near their feet. Still independent, he had ample opportunities to say that he had changed his mind and that upon consideration he had decided that he should not forfeit his travels for the laborious task of painting rural life, which had not been part of his agenda but that which he, the Laotian, had imposed upon him and he himself had accepted to seem amiable to him and less anti-social to himself. That was a cl.u.s.ter of words that if spoken would have made the contract of earlier utterances void, allowing immediate freedom from obligation. The words came to his mouth and languished there until death. He could not open the prison gates and release them. No, he yearned for him too much.

He was not part of the four legged monstrosity under a sole umbrella, nor hand in hand at this early stage of their acquaintance (not that with a male he would have found that acceptable at any stage, for to be seen to be free to be queer would allow the public to pigeonhole him, exacerbating that which was in him as it had before to the painter of prost.i.tute studies) and yet he was wishing for the implausible nonetheless.

If holding hands belied the existence of two separate ent.i.ties, belief in such a fusion, a more plausible delusion in heteros.e.xual relationships where one might have proof of a merger on a sheet of paper and a baby byproduct as the burden of bouncing on bedroom mattresses, was vastly less credible than one of naked sportsmen at a bit of wrestling.

For in this plain of existence where all was an illusion, one could only use logic to maneuver himself into the most plausible of situations. He did not know what he was thinking as he walked beside him past the morning market and the Paris Laos hotel which he had pa.s.sed before. They would not become nude sportsman at a bit of wrestling for the victory of pleasure rather than the pleasure of victory, which was the norm for the clothed players. As far as he knew, this was a brother and sister whom he met on a train and whose only interest in him was platonic.

They just wanted to earn a little money by becoming models. That was a rather innocuous wish, which he was in part fulfilling because he was not absolutely sure that doing nothing all the years of his life was any more constructive than the motions of birds in flight, tires of vehicles rolling, and sorry herds (even outdoor custodian sweepers pulling plastic trash barrels on wheels toward a destination) consumed in roles and agenda which gave artificial meaning to their lives.

No, he wanted him. He wanted to be in the Laos Paris hotel with him. There were so many irrepressible whims that came over a man blinding him within a blizzard of heat and t.i.tillation. Overhead the sky seemed to be clearing. Various lower clouds which seemed to have the outline of vultures within them were eager to move ahead of the dissipating ma.s.s. Like individuals shoving through the crowds to swoop in the descent of agenda, so were the lower clouds and so it seemed to him now was the Laotian. He seemed eager to take him someplace.

"Is your home very far out there?"

"Rather. No. I don't know. It depends on what you mean. We'll try to get there before darkness overtakes us." But what if darkness and rusticity was what he wanted. Surely murders happened in communist countries, and if so, it seemed to him that they would occur most frequently in rural desolation when military police or some such comrades were not watching. His gold should have come off neck and wrist before he crossed the border. It should have come off his earlobe before he got on the train. For a man to turn forty and yet to continue to try to appear half that age was absurd. An earring in a young man was a symbol of rebellion against the world, and an expression of latent h.o.m.os.e.xual impulses yearning for an opportunity to exude; it was somewhat acceptable in one who was experimental and lacking self-knowledge yet bold in his attempts to gain it--one who, dissatisfied with the world, had not yet made his own world.

"And what would you get from it: a painting or money?"

"Why not both?"

"Why not the moon. Life doesn't work that way."

"If you think the painting is good and you can sell it, pay the models. If not, don't. Draw a little something for my mother to make her happy--it being her birthday and all. Besides, for cooking and washing your dirty underwear that seems like the decent thing to do."

Nawin smiled. To merge into a family, to have a home when he except in extraneous matters of doc.u.ments averring him as proprietor, was homeless, was that which he sought and wanted to hear. But then there were the bodies and the odors that exuded from them, questions as to whether one loved the bodies or the molecules that they emitted, quandries and riddles for a man, that like it or not, stank in multiple forms of neediness fetid as his brothers strewn socks, the scent of monsters that fluttered all about in his brain.

38

Friend, acquaintance: he was not quite sure which word he should categorize him under, or if the relationship were more than superficially amiable. For what he knew, walking as he did beside him when less flooded pavement permitted, and behind him when situations warranted, he was being led into outlying areas for ostensible reasons that belied the plan of shooting, stabbing, or bludgeoning him to death, which he would have invited upon himself. As touching poles warning of imminent electrocution had been a temptation earlier, so now, he concluded, he was stroking death from a more gregarious angle and no one would be to blame but himself if his early demise were to occur because of it. A gilded collar on a dog of burnt umber was still a dog and a collar. Absurdly in coming here, gold still hung from his neck, dangled from a right earlobe and as the thousand dollar Swiss watch that adorned his wrist. Like a billboard flaunting opulence and reminding others of inequalities the culprit would be the billboard itself rather than the man who brought it down. And all to undo the dog by flaunting a glittering symbol of savoir-vivre. Now that he considered it, it was a wonder that he had gotten through the previous night intact only having to pay a thousand baht salary, penitence for his soiree with an underage male who had been the stranger of his strange, intimate encounter. He did not know this individual whom he was walking with, but then he obviously did not know the childhood friend whom he had married and who had bludgeoned him with an iron skillet. People were such amorphous blobs that changed shape with the years and when confronted with the brevity of their own lives. That did not totally displease him. It made them more the pitiful mysteries that were the subject of his art and empathy. From humanism to materialism, their digressions and mutations were simply a need for permanence and significance. His wife, a scholar, had maternal instinct as her quest for permanence, her art and if for years now she had been building her empty nest, he had never blamed her but handed over money for these perennial renovations that gave her happiness in the midst of her sadness.

Friend or acquaintance, potential lover or murderer, it did not matter as the situation of enjoying the company of another was pleasant and merely being with someone irrepressible to one in such a somber state of mind. If crimes did occur in this communist country it seemed to him that they would happen in bucolic surroundings far from the scrutiny of the officers sitting in tiny police boxes on every corner of this village capital, and that if his demise were to occur at human hands it would be no different from the Pyrrhic viruses and cancer that killed incidentally, or even the immune system which was a killer in its own right. It seemed to him that there was little point in concerning oneself with the inevitable and the ineluctable; and it was indeed ineluctable for a man continually slipping and falling under the weight of retrogressive memories to seek companionship at some stage of despair within his self containment rather than to tolerate one more minute in solitude and thought. It occurred to him that he was in a state of needing to be befriended by a serial killer and he laughed.

"What's funny?"

"Nothing." He smiled.

"What?"

"Just the crazy thoughts in one's head. That's all," he responded evasively.

The two men closed their umbrellas, and each jumped respectively onto a large rock that nudged out of a turbid, fetid pool on a sunken area of sidewalk, and then made a second and broader leap to drier pavement. Straws in small bags of coca cola that each had in his right hand jiggled with phallic looseness as did their singular and murky reflections in pa.s.sing over the inundated sidewalk. He could now see at a distance the bald muddied area of the bus terminal with its dilapidated secondhand buses that, according to the travel guide, had been given by the j.a.panese government to the r.e.t.a.r.ded capital as a gesture of friendship, buses that would take them outside Vientiane albeit for him without any good reason for except for this sharp prodding feeling of needing to be with someone. It seemed that he was receding into an earlier Thailand and an earlier self, and that after so many weeks of travail (so many years really), that he was now happy that he was dirty, poor, and free as a seven year old boy in the company of brothers at a pier.

Then they saw two dogs and themselves. Two dogs dogged by cravings and two men suddenly in rapt attention around the copulating beasts. It was the mating of common four legged creatures and yet they did not seem to mind: s.e.xuality was the mounting of another form for pure pleasure (conquest of pleasure and the pleasure of conquest) that would be exempt of suffering and thought, the forced intimate exchange with a female, the forced intrusion and annexation of a cave, a feminine domain by which in s.e.xual contact, the male animal, having nothing and bereft of all, a.s.serted a declaration of ownership against a weaker mortal, a fertile being of obdurate will from which there was an exciting possibility of fertilized union and untoward pregnancy; and even from outside in witnessing another species and the action performed by it, it was a ubiquitous reminder of real life denuded of brand name pretense and mesmerizing for this fact alone. This b.i.t.c.h was still alarmed by the swelling and gyrating of the body part still extended into and locked within her, and she continued to jerk in various futile positions in the hope of extricating herself from this peculiar alien fusion, which before e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n, insemination, and probable gestation--with a new alien hijacking her body--was impossible. It reminded him of those that he had seen in a more willing communion a few weeks earlier on Pinklao Street. Cars and motorcycles had swerved around them, those varmints that had been using their instruments of vile urination for pleasure, and in so doing inadvertently achieving for themselves nominal immortality amongst tortuous shoppers like him who had come out of Central Department store off an opulent cloud of various exits to the bathos of the gritty and the p.o.r.nographic. For him it had been amusing and, while going to the parking garage, there had been a sheepish grin on his face. Like any male he had gazed at the exhibitionists and the duality of rapture beyond that of any female counterpart leaving the mall; like any artistic mutant of a man who from his own abused childhood pursued brothel studies as though he were an astrophysicist on the verge of a singular theory. He had gazed at the varmints and their apotheosized obscenity, vile and natural, until its completion, far longer than other men exiting the mall.

And yes, he who had an affinity for dogs left to reproduce in Bangkok streets and obviously elsewhere in Southeast Asia so gratuitously, an affinity for them that perished with the overseers' knowledge and without the least compunction, would wish to see them in drooling rapture rather than in grueling rupture. Both scenes, then and now, reminded him that instinctual cravings were such a compulsion in man and dog that for it, this frenzy, this euphoric escape, they would risk death. Such was the insanity of it all--all this programming to replicate beings with no purpose beyond replication itself, unless it were the animation of inanimate elements that they neither saw nor wanted to see, as they each, in separate moments, lowered their umbrellas to jump onto a rock when the rain was a mere sprinkle and continued their destined walk, this movement toward open body bags, coffins, and urns that waited patiently for them in their myopic and only half-believed sense immortality.

"Nice, isn't it?--one of the best sites that we in Laos pride ourselves on, and show to all our rich travelers--dogs doing it."