Standing in this crowded bus of upright mangled bodies twisted around each other, he tried to free his mind as best he could.

He contorted his head toward a window and angled it diagonally to look up at the gargantuan sky clogged in floating ma.s.ses of clouds. It seemed to him that all futile prayers ended in the ethereal bellies of these livid beasts. Still, they looked thick and real whereas he and those around him seemed, in his sleep deprived state, to be disappearing like vapor.

Why not one more stifled yearning? If he got what he instinctually craved, he would be but inflamed instinct with all the days of his life subject to hedonistic impulses, continually needing others, he would be forever incomplete. It was good that the hotels were behind him and that that inexplicable feeling for the desideratum had died down to a few burning cinders.

"He's bound to stop for a beer somewhere between two bus routes, slit your throat as a fruit vendor would a watermelon from his chilled gla.s.s cart, mince you into pieces, dump you from the Friendship bridge, and watch you, in pieces, float down the Mekong river," said a gecko. The reptile was hanging from a rail on the bus, its form grotesquely large for a gecko and resembling a Silpakorn swamp monster in miniature, with a head like a four legged dinosaur, a tongue like a snake, and a body like an alligator, but a gecko it was nonetheless. "It's your destiny and you cannot escape it. Why look so frightened? Don't you like that which circ.u.mvents etiquette?"

"Maybe."

"Maybe? Exploiter of wh.o.r.es, splattering their filth on canvas in your colors, your rebellion against this land where nave belief in the goodness of the Chakri dynasty is supreme, belief that Taksin the Great after his wars with the Burmese had suddenly gone mad, that the bludgeoning of his body and the execution of his son in Cambodia had been done at orders other than that first Chakri, Rama I and that Rama IX did not arise by the a.s.sa.s.sination of his brother, the Eighth, belief that father, the abuser, knows best. You are drawn to those who do something avante garde. Why be afraid. It's ineluctable?"

"Ineluctable?"

"Ineluctable as day meets night. And you want it to happen--this ruining of you at other hands. Admit it."

"I do; but I don't know why."

"The smearing of paint, the smearing of blood, there's no difference. The murder of a rich man to get his gold, the impaling of a wh.o.r.e with your c.o.c.k, its all mixing to get the most poignant colors on the palette. He will get you drunk.

People of that type always like to drink and to do so at their friend's expense. He will notice your gold and stay silent about it as though it does not interest him at all. People of that type always do."

"And the means of doing it?"

"A rusty pocket knife with a dull edg,e but with enough muscle and unflinching will even the dullest object can puncture another. But I wouldn't give it any concern; it's no different than the wallowing explorations of the pig-like wh.o.r.es you are so fond of, all for the thrill of exploitation and impaling. He will be intimate with your blood and as he does so he will never forget you."

"Sit down. Over there," said this Boi. A woman had just left the back row of seats. Feeling enervated, Nawin obeyed.

40

They had gotten off one bus to wait along the road for another which, he a.s.sumed, would take them to other hamlets or rural scatterings possibly more remote than this--a.s.sumed, for what did he know waiting perennially, or seemingly so as he was, and shaking his head from time to time to keep himself on top of the internal waves and not be overtaken, not be absorbed by them- waves which came upon him voraciously like inundating tongues, polysemous tsunamis of a muted, mutating language cryptic to him, not of volition and thus advent.i.tious in a sense, but still of his own making. The gecko/water monitor-hybrid was still whispering from the tips of the tallest of weeds, "He's brought you out here to kill you," even though it seemed to him that if the Laotian were to do this he would have done it by now; that, barely glancing at him, as preoccupied as the younger man now was with this new pastime of murmuring into his telephone while scratching and pinching his crotch, activities pursued almost as fervently as playing with his blades, that his intent was innocuous, or as innocuous as it could be for one more of the naked and purposeless human animals for which manipulating the environment to serve one's sense of pleasure and to repudiate by acquisition that which he was, was always a salient motive. So he thought, and wearing a gold chain and a thousand dollar watch as he was, so he needed to believe; and thus he justified his actions to his nebulous and somewhat effervescent self that was surreally disconnected like a half severed limb.

Looking at him from the dense, weeded patch where he stood a couple yards behind--it was, surely, this first Boi, the one in the train, and not the other; or maybe they were manifestations of the same: the wounded and the wounding--he sought an objective appraisal of him, this migrant laborer who skid around like a leaf; this individual who had given him a beer in the train but now often wielded a knife, this peculiar man whom he had seen touching his sister's feet and from a mere glance had interpreted or misinterpreted a look of l.u.s.t toward her, a desperate and impoverished predilection that he knew too well, this intimate stranger of his mind whom he believed (but did not know) to have noted his own h.o.m.os.e.xual proclivity, which he had mentioned in oblique jocular sagacity, an individual with an appearance like his brother of long ago, or what he remembered of him, who could well have been soliciting himself at the Patuxai or just sitting there insouciantly as though accepting his and humanity's own naked, futile state, which acquisitive attempts even by the most affluent ultimately belied, this male who perhaps had little or no s.e.xual interest in him ( a fact which would have negated his own feelings quickly had the teasing not exacerbated them), and was using him somehow although he did not know exactly how or care all that much for he wanted to be of use so as to discover something useful in himself.

No, the Laotian was not one whom he could objectively surmise when yearning for intimacy with and salvation for him. Already there was a taste of loose molecules of him in his mouth and the smell of him, or an emission of him, which was not him really, rolling in his nose--or more logically, he contravened, the memory of the smell and taste of others mixed with his smell which by his imaginative reveries he ascribed to him; and he wanted to deliver him the way he did of 7-11 clerks and food cart restaurateurs in his worthless good wishes but with slightly more personal emphasis and effort. It was no major hardship to forsake his retirement for a brief time, to paint the family not in time-consuming and arduous "art," if his could be called such, but as quick smears that magically conveyed a superficial essence, and to pay them a few thousand baht for sitting still and posing before him--creatures of movement expanding with time but made silent and inert deserved compensation, although what he would do with the final products, he did not know. Dragged to Bangkok to be stuffed in a closet of a home he had yet to possess in his new life as a sole bachelor, they would never see the light of day (they could not be known for it would depreciate his own commercial worth). Still, it was irrelevant.

A bus came...a seat where he could be sleeping and from a nap recovering, understanding what he was doing more rationally; but then it went by and they continued to wait as though it had not come at all. The telephone was now folded and put into a pocket and the Laotian was once again opening and closing the blades of his knife as before without even looking at the bus that was now disappearing into the distance.

He could jump the blade wielder if he so pleased, take away the knife under the impulse of the moment (maybe escalating or degenerating into making love to him in the sodden gra.s.ses like a pleasure-seeking wild boar if att.i.tude could be wrenched from him with no more difficulty than the knife), and demand an answer for this long wait. But then he would have to be rather certain that his own thinking was clear, and he knew that it was not; that the wait was inordinate instead of seeming such--he was not sure exactly how long they had been waiting; or if he was in fact being threatened in some way instead of entertaining the possibility of being threatened (anything was possible). To jump him aggressively or to even outwardly accuse him of something only to find his own reasoning egregiously and mortifyingly false would make him the miscreant. It was his judgment that there was more of a probability that his own need for sleep was making him suspicious, if not paranoid. He decided the Laotian's behavior was not indicative that he himself was the desideratum, the target of execution--but, even of this, what did he know with the reasoning ability he had sloshing around in drowsiness and drowsiness speaking so incessantly with its reptilian voice murmuring that he, Nawin, would be stabbed (to use the exact word in Reptilian, impaled) and that he wanted it that way; and perhaps he did want it that way, he speculated about his wish to be impaled intimately, his natural death wish that would be unnatural if not opposed strongly by a zeal to live. The extent of his zeal to live (surely the more pervasive and predominate it was the more healthy the human psyche) he was uncertain of in such an exhausted state with inordinate muck, the black dust and fabric of the brain, in all sectors animated and taking on primitive life like a ma.s.s of prions rising from nothing recalcitrantly, clogging his mind with their movements, his will, his sensibility lost to them that were no more than adumbrations of forgotten aspects of his life...lost.

Lost...how much more, especially when in this sleep deprived state, could he tolerate this standing idly at the edge of the highway and, in each sound of an emerging truck, antic.i.p.ating, or coercing a feigned antic.i.p.ation of, the emergence of a bus futilely, but in thought expecting that it would never come most perspicaciously? How much more could he tolerate all this: these prodigious moments of fighting the pull of sleep; people rift from him; increasing age transporting him further and further from the sensitive child whom he once was, a sheen of innocence that he once had and could have maintained to some degree had there not been a need to survive on the streets and to rise above them economically; his nave wish to be loved; and his hunger to use others for s.e.xual gratification, all of which compelled him to mutate--a groping primate of sorts dangling on a limb to avoid putting his feet directly on the sordid ground, as if that which he garnered from the earth, his money, were clean. Lost, it was a part of him that he could not keep, a ragam.u.f.fin whom he wanted to reject and reclaim simultaneously and yet could do neither one well.

But, in accepting the mutation--there was little choice but to accept it and as he had always flaunted himself in the livery of his manhood there was no point in reversing the trend now--how was he to know that the man he now was was the man he was meant to be? Who was to say that one was meant to be anything at all but atoms attracted to each other loosely and reverberating off each other in temporary ma.s.s, an agglomeration less solid, less real, than a rock, and more equivalent to a gas? Who was to say that man evolved personally let alone socially? He just let the old foundation crumble and sordid experiences caulk into and harden over the holes stinking like excrement.

Perhaps one did not evolve any more than the word "love" had substance beyond its four letter content and the amount of time and energy expended to gain this concocted abstraction which by being believed, managed, as a corollary, to patch the void and perpetuate the species--a species of monetary, intellectual, and physical disparity whose only ablution would come in a rain of nuclear bombs.

The postcard which he had picked up for her in Nongkhai he had forgotten in his room at the guesthouse. A maid had no doubt thrown it into the trash by now; but then it matched the telephone and life which he had thrown, as well, into the trash receptacle at the train station--yes, two negatives were better than one because the odd was never harmonious and even. What did he want of that telephone anyhow, as possessing it would not bring women back, not even the cute nurse at Siriaj Hospital, for the wound had been reopened and a reopening a vile hole he must fall through.

At this time she, Noppawan, was no doubt there in their home with his child, and so he could return to Vientiane, find a decent hotel--the few that there were--and give her a call.

Better, he could boldly return to her who had been the salvation of his youth; but now they were not the same as before--their relations would be like returning to an empty house after it had been repossessed by the bank. He, the Nawin of ten years hence, would just be another variation of this thing that he called self, constructed substantially of recent memories, and erected broadly on distant general impressions of largely diminished and forgotten accounts. His true self was the self of the moment and it would only be real for a time if his colors did not blur into the colors of everything else--but then one did not live without interacting and diluting. Was not his sojourn here, this atheist's retreat, futile if he did not interact with others and mix himself in them, hoping to learn and be enhanced beyond his musty, circ.u.mscribed domain?

Why, he asked himself, was he here? If he had gone to Chiangmai, he could have been hang-gliding, or Pattaya, para-skiing, action where, for a time, being isolated, diluted, vanishing, not even a professional selfless ent.i.ty, a cog in the social-economic apparatus, ceased to matter. Who could blame those who dissolved themselves fully into the mindless purity of action, the substance of the expanding universe? In the brevity of motorcycle rides and the attendance of football games he did it on a regular basis himself...but then he would always return to that unfathomable, pensive self that others m.u.f.fled gregariously with the noise of companions--a pensive, mellifluous dirge sought after and found most fully, for him, in broad empty s.p.a.ces.

Now, to not be all alone, separated from this mad world he meant to separate himself from, to not hear so clearly the inner voice which, in a change of att.i.tude, he now did not want to hear fully, to not think of himself as an affluent but still aimless drifter or a delinquent parent in a fatherhood that had come about from this game of ma.s.sage and e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n concocted by two women yearning for a child, to not be a broken aching man with a broken throbbing arm and clavicle, the gifts of a wife who despised him, to be free of that recurrent guilt-ridden memory of a girlfriend suffering from postpartum depression who leaped from a balcony to elude him, that nightmare of a mutilated corpse always fresh in his thoughts, and to stand in the eternal compa.s.s of love without a diminutive man-made version that was broken fragments in his hands, would be his ultimate rapture.

Nawin--of course the word was a name change, a mere alteration of a label from that hapless creature, "Jatupon," fleeing the past of noodle servitude to his brothers and wh.o.r.edom to one of them--no, not a s.e.x slave per se, as he had been with him from volition with all that serotonin, adrenalin, testosterone, dopamine, naivety, inexperience, youthful trust of feelings, and all the rest making him madly in love (mandates and mastery by chemistry, so hardly slavery in the traditional sense of the word which would imply an external factor); and it was done because a Buddhist monk had advised it to be done. So why, with women let alone anyone else, should he want to feel this spurious emotion of "love" once again? A time and a half had been more than enough.

"So you're not groveling back to your wife, wounded and wanting her tender mercies. I had you all wrong--good for you," he daydreamed the Laotian as saying and himself providing the response of, "No, with any violent altercation or, at least a conclusion in my mind that neither party is any good to the other--the wife to the husband and the husband to the wife, my allegiance changes."

"To a different s.e.x than what you are involved in?"

"Why would you think that?"

"I have my reasons. Come on, all pent up in your head with no one to talk to, wouldn't you like to confess to one person?"

"Not really."

"All right. So be it; if you want to stagnate that way. It's entirely up to you."

"Well, if you have to know, it can change or be for none at all.

I'm not afraid."

"Of what? Me?"

"Of disengagement. Of saying my goodbyes."

"But you followed me here" he laughed incredulously. "Why's that Pree [older brother] Nawin?"

"Yes."

And he remembered that in the last year or two she, Noppawan, would mutely convey that most indifferent of yeses to him, her retired, worthless husband who no longer had the stamina to p.u.s.s.y-hunt beyond the domain of his two women, and did not even have the virility to raise a paintbrush as, he concluded, his paintings did not have either enlightened vision or the t.i.tian colors of the Greats, and that he was a commercial wh.o.r.e more than an artist--wives of course always wanting money and possessions, always buying and making plans for the renovations of their nests (empty with infertility as they might be), and the buyers of his canvases whom he catered to needing their luscious prost.i.tutes to exude testosterone throughout their stiff cadaverous bodies to transport them from the mundane. And when he tried to share the poignancy of the seemingly blase and inconsequential of a given day of his leisure and meditation at the zoo, various parks, and at park benches (the patterns of clouds, the black diamond sparkle of shadows of leaves on the ground, the lofty fan of bold pigeons perching on his table to steal his Styrofoam container of rice, wind carrying the smell of rejuvenating blades of gra.s.s--that same perennial and eternal smell he remembered from 35 years ago) often she, Noppawan, would continue to make dinner in silence, mutely conveying that most indifferent of yeses to him, pony tail nodding indifferently against the nape of her neck in affirmation of nothing.

He needed to urinate and obviously so did the younger man who was no longer looking at the road but toward the land with forest behind them, and a pasture with free roaming emaciated water buffalo at a distance. Unzipping his pants, the Laotian aimed the release of the arch of his liquids to nature and to the exhibition of all pa.s.sing cars.

"How long are we going to wait out here?" complained Nawin in his somniloquy. That which he was hearing did not seem to come from himself at all but an invisible presence with the utterances of his own voice projected like an actor off screen, and the Laotian an alien performance put in front of his face, so as to be more real than any real being, a surreal and magnificent presence, magni-real in a sense. To be able to stare at him justifiably, words had to supply a pretext, and so the complaint spilled out of a mouth of a man who wanted to see another male's nakedness.

"Until it comes. Glad to know that you aren't dumb and mute after all," he said--he who went under the nickname of Boi.

Whether this one was really Boi 1 or Boi 2 would depend on perspective; but, in either case, he judged that it did not matter. If there was something that mattered it was that these traumas he had experienced in Bangkok were making him transfixed by boys.

"I speak occasionally; but there isn't much sense in rattling nonsense so that everything seems less empty, is there? Besides, I like to think and be quiet."

"Why?"

"I don't know. It makes me feel alive."

"To not say anything to anyone?"

"Yes. To not be in the commotion of others too much. It's a trade off--which voice seems most important at a given time. But I know that it comes from affliction, early pain and reticence I never overcame. Seeking color in darkness. What are you doing?"

Nawin smirked.