- Nawin?

- Okay Honey, getting out now. He turned off the water, wrapped a towel around himself, and exited.

- Nawin, she said a minute later as he came out dripping in a towel, why do you have large stacks of new underwear in the closet. She was laughing at him.

He smiled coyly. - You never know when you will need clean underwear.

- This one stack alone must have fifty and they are totally unworn with tags attached.

He smirked. - The idiosyncrasies of man, he said.

- Weirdness I would say; but he knew that she understood. As someone who had known him in adolescence as Jatupon, and had seen Jatup.o.r.n, as the fraternity called him, weep in the museum of preserved corpses for the wish to be as deceased as they, she knew the poverty that he was. He knew that she would a.s.sume the stacks of underwear to be a repudiation of what he was. He knew that she would not mention this, as indeed she did not, and he loved her all the more for it.

"What do you want?" he asked an enormous gecko that was staring at him, distracting him from inhaling a new cloud of smoke after exhaling the previous one.

"You" or "Youth" it said, [He was not sure which one the thing muttered] "I will eat" and it began to eat a long sheet of paper like a poster which had his photograph as a noodle worker on it.

"Stop that," he said but the recalcitrant monster continued to eat regardless of his wishes.

- I am not Panyap.o.r.n any longer, said one of his favorite models one day in his studio.

- Is that so? He smiled.

- You are not drawing the woman you think you are but a stranger of another name, she said.

- I don't mind strangers, he said. As they are strange they are full of unknown possibilities.

Besides, imagining someone as other than pathetically human is terribly erotic. Don't you think so?

- Why are strangers more erotic models, Nawin?

- You mean why are strangers more erotic creatures in general. I don't know, he said playfully. Human beings are quite lovable, you know, their painful journeys, their tragedies. At least I think so. But the first brush stroke or caress of a stranger is not love. It is different. It is uncomplicated, buoyant, and mysterious like melting into the flames of a G.o.ddess."

- Nawin, I think that you hide behind your canvas. I think that you are a pervert hiding deep in your paint so that women won't see you for what you are. They believe that you are different.

They think that you aren't using them but admiring their beauty when really you are no better than any man who abandons his wife to come to women like me.

- Of course not. No different at all. All men feel the same in being with others. There is no love in it, no empathy, it is simply melting in a flame. Melting... and it is a melting substance that releases its enzymes and eats the source of the flame. Hold still while I draw your chin! That's right! Drawing prost.i.tutes, f.u.c.king them, it is all in consuming and being consumed by beautiful flesh...flaming angels if you will. It lacks love because love is baneful to l.u.s.t and making love... an obstacle to reproduction, you know. Illusions and delusions-- life is dependent on them. So you are not Panyap.o.r.n. No, I didn't know this but then how would I unless you told me. I wonder why the face and voice are the same, the body, the long hair falling onto the b.r.e.a.s.t.s and burying them, and the salient nipples peaking out of the burial demurely.

- The name, Nawin, the name! The monk told my mother that it was an unlucky name and I needed to have it changed.

- I like your name. I cannot see anything unlucky in it. For what reason? Why do you need this name change?

- To escape bad luck.

- Yes but how? You are with me so I cannot see how are you unlucky. She shrugged her shoulders and he put away his brush and walked over to her. You look like a Panyap.o.r.n to me.

- Either you believe in the monks' intuition or not. My mother does so I have a new name to improve my life...to become more happy, wealthy, successful.

- Poor and ignorant men in orange cloth leading the nation of Thailand and the simpletons within it, he thought. Still he smiled, for the Buddhism of the Thais had such ineffable beauty the way a sunset was both true and lovely and he did not know why. He did not want to think but to devour his girlfriend's succulent skin in voracious kisses and he did just that until she backed away. What is wrong? You are with me. How much luckier can you be? Do you give your mother the money you earn here?

- Of course. She is happy to have it. She is pleased to sell my looks.

- You are lucky then. So do I still call you by the nickname of "p.o.r.n?"

- No my real name. My new one is best.

- What is it?

- It's too long to say. Let's just call me Bun. p.o.r.n is too much like my previous name.

- Like a bunny rabbit as they say in English.

- Take me out of here, Nawin.

- Here? he asked.

- This world. I want to go with you to another place.

- Rabboplanet, I bet. All bunnies like Rabboplanet. The gravity there is so light that in one hop a bunny can stay midair for ten minutes.

- Rabboplanet, she said in rapturous veneration as if contemplating a utopia. He looked up at her, contemplated her sincere wistful ecstasy at this contrived word, and guffawed.

Then he knew love for her, that wish to give any resource that he had to deliver her to a better life.

He thought of leaving the bathroom again. It was different in the mutable mind that knew and remembered imperfectly.

- Nawin, you know that there is a closet back here? And in it is another one of your mountains of folded underwear. Why would anybody need so much underwear?

- A guy can never know. One day he might be shooting some b.a.l.l.s on the court when suddenly his underwear falls from his hips down to his feet like a hoola-hoop and all in front of the other players looking down at his equipment.

She laughed, thinking it was a joke, for what did she know of poverty? She knew the grief of family which had aged, enlightened, and separated her to be bereft of the giddiness of youth and this was plenty. Pain sobered one to the injustices and suffering of the ma.s.ses. But for he who knew the inordinate burden of both there was a twice-fold enlightenment that came to him. It was an emptiness like the vibrations of blowing into a hollow bottle and an ache as eternal as a mortal could know.

The marijuana had numbed his headache so for the most part he could ignore the lifeless aching. It was not all that different than the monotonous chants of Buddhist monks that were broadcast from speakers hanging in tree limbs of certain residential areas of Bangkok. The sounds of bees and nagging wives one might not be able to ignore, but a headache, active but flattened in cannabis, was a throbbing numbness that almost felt t.i.tillating.

Still, mental pain could excel a bit of the lesser and more manageable, physical pain, even when one was lucky enough not to have both exacerbating the other. Thus, he felt the duress of loneliness making him slide deeper into disconnection as the stimulating and riveting air rushed through his hair.

Feeling more and more disconnected by the minute, he finally released the joint to the vacuum of winds outside the train.

Then he waited a minute for a sufficient amount of zephyrs to flush out the odors of the smoke before grabbing his shirt from the crack, dressing completely, and stepping out of the toilet.

A stranger who had been timid at knocking squeezed by and went into the toilet. A train officer who had been responsible for placing the linen on the bunks was now gathering it from the cots and stuffing a wad of it into a crevice beside the sink.

10

Leaving the toilet, he walked toward his seat, which was in the eleventh car. His movements were slow as if this shivering from the coldness that descended onto his carca.s.s in the "refrigerated car" were the cause. He wanted the warmth that was in the other parts of the train but more wistfully, for a warmth that was less superficial. It was a yearning to be, if only in proximity, in some way connected to the lives of laborers within who were going home to meet family for the long weekend of Father's Day, the king's birthday. Before him a train official was removing the linen from the bunks of the pa.s.sengers who were already awake and there was a mounting pile of blankets, sheets, and pillow cases on the floor as though for him an augury to a fallen but still scattering life. Suddenly stopping at a distance to wait for it all to be cleared away, Nawin wondered of the laborers in these other cars who were bringing their new families to meet the old ones. Were they not conscious, he thought, that the families manufactured from having "banged their c.o.c.ks" in Bangkok were the only reality (a reality, such as it was, exponentially longer than the carnal devourings of flesh and pleasure that were the impetus for the conceptions of the offspring, but no less ephemeral)? Did they not know that upon leaving the reunions their extended families would be relegated to the faces of strangers in the foggy back alleys of memory in which they would exit as maternal, paternal, avuncular and aunt-like outlines of diaphanous faces and stick figures only to be restored a little from time to time with letters and telephone calls? Did these laborers not know that their own loin-begotten families conceived by emotional and physical frenzy were easily diminishing puffs of smoke that in a brief s.p.a.ce of years would replicate into other puffs of smoke before entirely vanishing, and that the labor of ethereal man to keep a puff of smoke there in his clasped hands was to no avail? Never to be made sagacious by the wisdom of perversion, were each of these myriad aestivating dwellers of arid complacency to never experience as he had a rude awakening of fraternal molestation in cold showers from that only family member who genuinely cared about him and whose insertion of hard riveting love almost seemed true with brothers who knew and yet said nothing beyond the distortion of his name to Jatu-p.o.r.n or the equivalent thereof and with parents who knew and did nothing but to continue the usual mandates of errands and ch.o.r.es with more vitriolic contempt? No, fortunately for the ma.s.ses of men they did not have his background. They were innocents content in their illusions as innocents did when innocence was bliss.

He smiled bitterly as he glowered into s.p.a.ce. He realized that he was groping and swinging his aspersions madly as a blind man piercing the air indiscriminately with his stick and yet at the same time he was writhing in himself, eager to escape his own skin. He was curious about the family men whom he had seen many hours earlier walking contently enough to the "cattle cars" at the train station accompanied, demarcated, and limited by wives and children while at the same time censuring their perfunctory lives. If his thoughts were in part an iconoclast's blaspheme against the family unit, a group that comprised all groups, they were also full of regret that, beyond a work of art, a mortal man could not change into the livery of another's skin, of a child who was proud of his Biadklang name and the parents who owned their own rice and noodle cart that was part of their sidewalk restaurant, of being their son if but a slave who was reproached and disparaged most awakened minutes, and of being in a fraternity, an eternity of belittling words sported against him to get the grin, chuckle, or tacit endors.e.m.e.nt of the father emperor who, when at home, crossed one leg on another in his recliner and thumped his foot in an erotic gavel. He abjured devoting so much thought in this vein; still, the high of the marijuana was at certain moments lifting his grave ideas like a magic carpet, allowing an exhilaration of uninhibited thought even if the turbulent ride was dependent on intermittent gusts.

Hydrogen clouds detonating into stars; stars exploding as supernovas and the debris congealing into planets; microorganisms of those planets that became extinct, stayed the same, or evolved; male life forms in some of these worlds disgorging bodily fluids within partners who would sometimes conceive new offspring; this expended energy producing offspring that was animated or still-born, born with health and beauty or defects and predispositions toward degenerative illnesses, and all was chance in this spewing forth of matter. Pondering this around ten feet from the toilet in a part of the aisle which was an intersection between the two cars of the train, he knew that even with this proclivity for imploding in his own black hole he too was a bit of an exploding star, a spewing mess unto himself going randomly forward.

Standing there, wanting the worker to suddenly finish his task so as to allow him to proceed to his seat or bunk, he could only sense an oblique and loose connection to himself in the obscure light. Eagerness for any activity was curtailed in a man whose self seemed to be oozing into his shadow, and he was no exception. As much as he was capable of, he wished repet.i.tively for his expedited entry into the car but minute after minute it was blocked by this enc.u.mbrance of a train officer. His tepid eagerness was not so much for a return to the confines of a s.p.a.ce that had been designated to him but to end a silence that was becoming more disconcerting with each pa.s.sing moment and from a concern that the time of waiting there would sink him further into himself. He wanted to smoke a cigarette to have something to do. It was not nicotine or an oral sensation to clog the void of s.p.a.ce and time that he so much yearned for but a mental conceptualization of himself with a cigarette in his mouth which when matching the reality of actually having one hang there would be equated as insouciance. Doubting that a relaxed mental outlook was really garnered with such an ineffectual drug as tobacco and theorizing that its efficacy in making one at ease with the world was not so much from the nicotine but the pleasure gained in graciously sticking out one's cigarette to the world, exhibiting nominal contempt for the planet by blowing smoke out onto one's miniscule sector of society, and concocting a sense of defiant and invincible imperturbability in a world that he knew one should be perturbed by. It occurred to him that imperturbability was really the aim of any smoker; and he posited that lacking a quality caused one to imagine a quintessential form of it, to stencil it onto the brain from the pattern of the ideal (man with cigarette, detached, and triumphant in a haughty and complacent indifference to all), and then to persuade himself that he was the paragon of that which he was lacking. This being so, the billboards in Bangkok showing images of the cigaretted man alone, felicitous, and nonchalant or felicitous and nonchalant with a felicitous and nonchalant partner smacked of an unreality slated for destruction.