"Well, its rife in life. I couldn't expect anything better--here or elsewhere."

"Good, then its impossible to disappoint you. There's not much here, I must admit. La Prabang is better. Maybe I'll take you to a few temples and stupas in Vientiane--La Prabang even--before you return to Bangkok."

"It's okay, I don't mind. Seeing sites--it's not what I'm after."

"What are you after if you don't mind telling me? Why did you want to come Vientiene, anyway?"

"That's Complicated," he said ineffably for how could the wish to escape inordinate grief be expressed? He merely stood there not from bravery but from the confusion of a mute animal, numbly feeling this hot iron branding of the forehead, this incommunicable set of feelings, and these memories fading to abstractions with every new day, but there at this distance beckoning him nonetheless. The number he was, the more he could function, not that bereft of agenda, he needed to do anything apart from engaging in a departure that he hoped would bring him peace of mind.

The Laotian kissed him on the cheek taking in the sides of the lips and transferring his molecules therein.

"My new brother," he said ironically. "He keeps wanting to sweep up a pile of dirt that blew away long ago. Forget your past. You are a guest in my home and I usher new beginnings for you."

He tried to thank him but the words would not come out. How could he thank someone for this betrayal of his intention.

Although an invitation to the possibility of fraternity, family, and a consistency of human presence which for sanity he was deemed to need, his body yearned not for true intimacy but true illusion. He wanted him as his lover, the lever for the fuel of his testosterone, dopamine, adrenalin, and serotonin which would be extinguished at e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n like the falling of a bottle rocket. Thus he stayed silent.

He sensed that this imparted kiss was deliberate in its ambiguity; that his stare was a spotlight; and that his grin was one of gaining satisfaction from not disclosing all that he knew. He sensed, although he was not quite sure how, that his thoughts were being discerned: that this friend knew of his womanly sensitivity, knew of the desperate sc.r.a.ping on the walls of the cells of his brain, of the outlines of faces of family and friends lost to him--an action like art to compensate for diminishing memories, of his unsteady scaffolding on the verge of imploding from the loss of entire foundations of youth, of this resistance of selfish impulses that compelled lesser men to father child laborers and others sons that would be extensions of themselves at their demise, of the perception he had of women as obsessed to have a nest in which to breed birdies that once grown would in the best of circ.u.mstances cause the second dissolution of family, of this conviction that the male ent.i.ty was always being used by women, and even more, of nature itself, which coerced a man in the lure of replete pleasure and the barely manageable impulses that were its precursor. Just as on the train he believed that the Laotian ad his sister knew of his attraction toward him, so now he was reading his deeper thoughts. Maybe it was the sagacity to notice the slightest expressions in a countenance that was under the influence of mood. Maybe when a man was not given an opportunity to learn from books, his scholarly pursuits were merely to gain the skill to accurately judge the essence of a man for his own use. Nawin on impulse, wanting to do rather than think, and yearning for a contract with another being rather than the circ.u.mspect reticence and insular freedom of being alone was willing to risk opprobrium rather than having to play more of this game of the straight and narrow, opened and tilted his umbrella over the Laotian and kissed him fervently. He was not sure after these brief seconds were complete if the lips of the other party had at any point pressed into his own reciprocally or were just that of a victimized pa.s.sive agent compelled into action by the rape forced upon them. Aloof and disconcerted, amused and perplexed, the Laotian smiled at him wryly. In so doing it made this fraternal role seem feigned.

"You don't mind?" he asked him.

"I don't mind anything," the Laotian said

"Here's a hotel room. We could stay together until morning."

"You and I together?"

"If you want?"

"I want. I really want. But another day. I want to get you home."

39

Except for brief durations, he had not slept much the previous night. He had been preoccupied by belated concerns over his actions with the intimate stranger and an obsession to purge the travail of abused childhood by placing himself in similar scenarios so as to anoint the visceral wounds with seething pleasure. He had been besieged with worries about the possible theft of his wallet from the drawer of the night stand in the room of the guest house, and yet now he would willingly give away the money he had and the bands of gold that he wore which separated him from others of the swarthy, befouled herd, for an opportunity to sleep. He had this strange, recurrent idea that everything he had with him and all of his material possessions, a.s.sets, and estates in Bangkok were irrelevant. The idea resonated with a drowsy philosophical truthfulness that belied an organism's necessity to thrive at the expense of common laborers. It seemed to him (not that as tired as he was he could trust his ideas) as though, in a world of poverty where the true crime lay in the paucity of theft, such possessions were not his to begin with. If in being taken into the country he ended up murdered, his throat slit and that which he had taken from him, in some ways it would be a justified hypercorrection.

His sensory impressions did not seem to be fully registered, making every few minutes of "reality" shift around on their own Teutonic plates. The sensory input which made its way to the printmaker of the mind to be copied and filed in memory for future reference (ideas and situations unclear to be sketched in artfully, deceitfully, self-delusively, and credulously with his own fabrications) were, in this state, the faintest of reproductions and made him have difficulty seeing and understanding let alone embellishing, believing, and categorizing content. His consciousness awry, at certain seconds the world seemed to have become an ethereal haze and he sensed himself on a slippery precipice of the declension of the foundation of self, which one only feels in the asphyxiation of loneliness. Twice he stumbled as he walked. The second time he did so the Laotian laughed.

"You all right, old man?" he asked.

"Yeah I'm fine. Tired but okay--except for that comment."

"You don't like it?"

"No, not particularly. I mean for my taste its all right--unique (of course, when reconsidered and taken less personally he who mentally referred to King Bhumibol in English as "King b.o.o.by"-- he who has become affluent by exploiting the inner worlds, the souls, of prost.i.tutes in his nude "studies"--would hardly be one to espouse etiquette).

"But not respectful?"

"No, not respectful." East Asian society, in public so deferential of age, in private hearts expressed a more human reaction. It was the same repulsion for mental and physical deterioration, lack of stamina, and loss of beauty, essences of life that vanished with the years.

"Not a thing to do to a guy who is still sensitive about having turned forty, of having experienced his birthday all alone on a train."

"A birthday boy? Why didn't you tell us?"

"I don't know. Didn't I?" he spoke indifferently. "I don't remember. At any rate you gave me a beer on the train. That was like a gift I suppose. I could go for some coffee now. They have that here?"

"Where?"

"Laos. Vientiane."

"We're not jungle monkeys," said the Laotian. Nawin smiled warmly. Of course they were but how pleasant that they were endeavoring to be more.

"Forty, are you? So young," continued the Laotian. "And if we had known we would have made you a cake. We would have, you know?"

"Would you have? And how would you have made one in a train?"

"I don't know. There were stops. I could have sc.r.a.ped together something. Kemiga and I used to make mud pies when we did the baby thing together."

"Your sister's name?"

"Yes. You liked her, didn't you?"

"She's pretty. Do you do the baby thing with her now?"

"The baby thing?" he scoffed, turned red in embara.s.sment, and became reticent with face looking downward as if the breeding dogs that they had seen in pa.s.sing were still before them.

"Playing around upon occasion, sure, but no baby things. We've outgrown that. Anyhow we better hurry. Its getting late."

At first the conversation brought Nawin rea.s.surance. The relationship was amicable enough and he was content to be in company that kept him sheltered from being denigrated and reviled in his own thoughts, which rained down upon him. Then he thought of the abrupt petulant shift of the conversation to a tacit moodiness and the Laotian suddenly seemed grotesque and alien to him; the scenario of leaving the city limits with him vastly peculiar; that peculiarity seeming as if it were happening to someone else or viewed from a staticy television broadcast; and although acknowledging that all strangers remained such, unless communicated with and entrusted to be more, he wanted to flee the unknown cravenly and return home on that train which had taken him here.

It was the obdurate will of man that feigned reality to begin with and the weathering forces of drowsiness that loosened the elements allowing their essence to scatter like an empty sh.e.l.l smashed and falling through a fist. This was the quintessential truth of or lack of reality. And yet as he was beckoned to return home by ghosts of the past, corpses now resuscitated and moving to the foreground of his brain as if alive and relevant after so much time and so many changes, he was still gravitating forward toward the Laotian.

Conclusions about the world had subtly a.s.sembled in the back of his brain in the course of his life, conclusions repudiated at other times for the need to think positively and to make the world his home for lack of a choice of another, slipped through barriers of his mind to the forefront of his brain. His thoughts were in anarchy; and if drowsiness allowed tiny viral thoughts to enlarge and escape the subconscious, the weary consciousness of the mind exaggerated the extent of the mutation, the brain looking at individual thoughts as mirrors from an amus.e.m.e.nt park. He saw spa.r.s.e motorcyclists, drivers, and pedestrians as their true figurative form of human vultures, and yet he did not mind for, as insular as he now was, to have his corpse clawed, sc.r.a.ped off, and devoured by beasts would be a most welcome act of intimacy.

He did not understand the reasons why he continued on this journey with the Laotian (this train stranger's lure of him, or the vulnerability that made him succ.u.mb to his will and agenda as if social contracts were always done in weakness and human relationships always pursued with the objective of attainment in mind), and yet he walked with him all the same. Was it simply for c.o.c.k sweet on the sweetened c.o.c.k vine? he posited derisively. Maybe there was the hunger for the sensual and the molecular in the attraction but for it to be only this would be a vast oversimplification. In part he was invigorated as much as a sleep deprived man could be by having crossed over the border, with his life just hours earlier seeming closed off to him now; in part it was to be with someone who could look beyond the playboy contrivances of art and life to see the soul of the atheist, the abused child beneath the man--yes, that was the lure over him but as with all things, such firey hungers came from within and were not ignited by extraneous forces without.

Early childhood experiences were the arsonist, and the tower of his manhood would burn to a final implosion hoping for one who could fan ebullient flames or put him out entirely.

And of this second Boi, the Thai from Nongkai who claimed that he had come into the restaurant of the guesthouse because of the heavy rain, this unknown boy who already seemed as a pa.s.sing dream, a wet dream, an evaporated being or residual abstraction oozing out of the furthest corners of memory, would he, Nawin, really have paid for his education? Overall he believed that if a letter, an email, or a phone call were to come to him resurrecting the abstraction into a living being once more, he would help him. But without sleep he hardly knew anything about himself for sure--he was like some piece of discarded trash bobbing superficially on weltering waves. He surely would help him as he had done for ladies of the night and other women whom he drew, rode, and drew once more but that fact alone did not speak well of him. Doing something pleasant for that which brought him pleasure seemed only a means to keep the pleasure coming. No, he retracted, his motives were not as bad as this.

He might not be the greatest altruist or philanthropist in the world but as a man who knew it all, had suffered it all, and could easily imagine the travails of the inner lives of others, it was his obligation to correct injustices where and when he saw them. Only a lunatic sought injustices to paint or rectify, but if one alleviated the suffering that came before him and his adumbration, his life would have true worth. But what phone calls would he receive? He had thrown his telephone into the large trash can at the Hualamphong train station, so it was not as if he would get any telephone calls. Address? He was homeless. Deeds that he owned were merely paper, joint property due to hid marriage license, or so he a.s.sumed, not that attempting the eviction of wife and son had ever entered his mind. To think of them ensconced eased his mind. Email? As an artist and lecturer, he had allowed one of his students to maintain these secretarial duties. Now his account at Silpakorn University, home of the Silpakorn University Swamp Monster, the roving land and water monitor, had email galore to which he would never be able to get through all alone even if he cared to try.

What did he know? He hardly knew anything--just that he was walking with the Laotian, that a bus depot of some sort was before them, that the possibility of an amorous interlude had fallen behind some moments earlier like a handkerchief from his back pocket, and that from nigh to nay that which could be dissolved into location had become nothing. As all things in the course of time weakened, diffused, and were absorbed by the next behemoth event, so was rapacious emotion, more illusory and immaterial than anything else, and instinctual hungers that were corporeal delusions of intimacy to, more times than not, foster pregnancy, would be all the more fleeting. Now the nearest hotel was blocks behind them, and here they were.

It was like a fallow pasture for the grazing of these mountable but crippled mammoths. They were used busses that were supercilious hand-me-downs from j.a.pan to a world capital bereft of so much. Often there needed to be multiple attempts at the ignition key to get them started, but once revived, these monsters constantly exuded and spewed their noxious and intoxicating flatulence.

He entered deep into the underbelly of one that would take him to the poverty and dest.i.tution of the ma.s.ses out of city limits and illusions. If Bangkok was an opulent deception of rural life he hardly knew what would lie before him away from the antiquated, rustic capital of Vientiane; but he knew that it would be rife in life, and something far truer and more pervasive than his impoverished existence as the son of a sidewalk restaurant proprietor in Ayutthaya. He did not know of any reason for what he was doing; but at least he was living life by actually doing something. And whether or not he would find it more of a positive experience than a negative one, as encounters with women opening up their reeking legs for him, was yet unknown.

It was an adventure to which the outcome was uncertain; but as it was an adventure; at least it had the pleasantry of this component, which was sought most ardently by those who could not rest in their own company, if nothing more substantial. But then with so much that was deceased around him, meaningful relationships decomposing on the mound of earlier rot, he would have to be truly pachydermatous to not feel an impact from that which might seem extraneous. And when the inside was shaken with all in rubble, of course he would have to leave his domicile. He had mistakenly believed that during most of his time in Laos he would be sitting in some park or another reading a volume of essays on Buddhism or art, and when glancing up at the sky he would hear nothing within and without but the gentle rustling of pages turned by the fingers of the wind. Instead he heard evacuation sirens within the city of the mind.

And here he was exiting Vientiane. It was hard to believe that he had actually been in the capital. The city had monuments and a few signs in English elucidating Laotian history, but signs of international commerce or even signs in Laotian prompting capitalism on a local level, seemed scarce. These people were not competing but sustaining themselves and thus there was little thriving on the backs of others. There were no elite artists--no arts at all outside that which impoverished students sold along the river to French tourists.