"Your Aunt Helen and Uncle Jake will be waiting. I plan to eat ice cream and cake with them even if the guest of honor refuses to go."

"I did not refuse. I simply pointed out that the invitation was ten days belated and followed you giving them some furniture.

You know that it is less of an invitation than a token payment to make sure that the giver keeps giving. How obvious can it be?

They haven't communicated with me for twenty years, so why should they bother now? And as for this idea of yours that if I don't go I don't love you, maybe it successfully manipulates children but it is rather reprehensible to adults, wouldn't you say? If I were to go what would I say about my personal life?

I'm forty years old, unmarried, and they are bound to ask. I can't exactly continue to stammer out some evasive nonsense to the question about my involvements: that I am still looking, or laughing uncomfortably and ignoring the question altogether-- whatever I said or did last time. I really don't remember what I said. Maybe it was that I wanted to get my career in order first. Maybe I was silent like a mental and social r.e.t.a.r.d."

"Don't go then!"

"What?"

"Don't go. I don't want you to be there. You aren't welcome."

"I want to know why in all of these many years you never even show the least interest in my life relationships, friendships, where I travel, where I live, what I do."

Her face cringed at the steering wheel and dashboard and he could see in it repugnance at what she believed to be the turpitude of his life.

"Why can't you ask anything?" he importuned.

"I don't want to know anything. Go back to Thailand and do G.o.d knows what. You don't even live with anyone do you? It is just s.e.x. Your life is just filled with s.e.x."

"You don't know anything. How could you with nothing ever asked or said. You make a.s.sumptions without knowing anything."

"What you do with your male friends--your s.e.x life, I don't want to hear about it. It is private--your private business and I don't want my nose rubbed in it."

"What has your nose been rubbed in, Mother? I have a girlfriend and a child--a child. For G.o.d's sake, look at the pictures in my wallet!" he pulled out a wallet, unfolded it, and flipped the photographs randomly.

"Get them out of my face. They are the same ones that you sent to me--the ones I glanced at and mailed back to you. It's not your child. It has nothing to do with you and less to do with me."

"It's my child," he yelled.

"Don't you dare raise your voice to me. Don't you dare raise your voice to your mother."

At this place that in youth he had referred to as home for lack of anything more substantial, he quickly packed his bags and thought of how concocted and sententious morality was. It seemed to him that it was the equivalent of timidity and hardly a virtue at all. It was seeing shadows and monsters in that which deviated beyond the boundaries of one's awareness and only this.

There were clearly wrong actions, actions of hate, but these were not issues of morality but the loss of a logical restraint to instinctual pa.s.sions of destruction for the sake of self- preservation. He told himself that he would and could break off the relationship for to not do so would make him the mimesis of the bad they thought that he was, and if he believed that he was bad he would relinquish self-control and in a turbulent rest allow himself to be overtaken in a vortex of destructive pa.s.sions. He had gone through this much of his life without in the early juncture of his youth having constructive role models.

Still he had concocted his own imperfect expression of love as others who had been mulled in family. As they did with the years of their lives, he also tried to fine tune what benevolent love existed within him and would go on doing so, sometimes even accomplishing it.

He woke to human contact. It was a nudge.

"What are you doing?"

"Oh," said Nawin while smiling. "I was just trying to stay out of your way."

"You can go back to your seat now, I'm done."

Nawin stood up and the dream, like flooding river water, receded back to its usual course. Deemed as unreal and untrue, it was relegated no differently than other repudiated and forgotten experiences within the continual shove of movements in time and by a consciousness which only accepted the reality of everything new that flowed into it (At this moment, for him it was what the senses were recording as the linen officer departing into another car, the drab and fetid qualities of the train, and his constricted s.p.a.ce within it as he continued to flee his fumbled personal life, which he remembered all too well). He shook his head and scoffed at the dream where a dim sense of reality persisted. Pushed further into the past with every mounting moment, it still dis...o...b..bulated his present reality with its magnetism. It had been a mere dream but when he was in it, the images had seemed so clear, motivation had seemed less cryptic, and he could not help but wonder if in sleep the awakened state would seem dreamy if dreams had cognition of such a state.

Contrary to the dream, he had never known his mother in adulthood and apart from being born in America and living there for a few years, possibly the b.a.s.t.a.r.d of an unknown father (at least that was his conjecture to explain his parents separation then and the degree to which he was flouted afterward over so many years) he did not know America. This was apparent by his conceptualization of the Mississippi River where motorized gondolas moved around high rise condominiums only to depart into a ca.n.a.l the way they did in Bangkok. Whether the dream attempted to indict him as a h.o.m.os.e.xual or depict s.e.xual ambiguity, he could not see either one as exceptionally true at mirroring his image (truth being that--a mirror). He certainly was not a h.o.m.os.e.xual whatever queer caprices might come upon him--s.e.xual energy merely flowing without direction or destination were it not for mores and a negative, positive, or hyper-inflated interpretation of one parent or both as role models which barricaded the momentum and, like crags, altered the flow. No, he told himself, he was no more queer than any heteros.e.xual--it was just that what was most pleasant in one's bleak environment at a given moment became the playmate and intrigue in one's head to which innate energies were channeled in its favor. And of his relationship with his mother, as she had died when he was fourteen years old, there had not been enough time for a rupture. He recalled that this mother in the dream had not been his own but a macabre, ersatz face stolen from the naked, preserved corpse with the slit chest at the anatomical museum at Siriaj Hospital who the fourteen year old child, Jatupon, had rightly or erroneously believed in his grief and neediness to resemble his mother--the details of the face of his real mother having diminished like the engraving of a name in the sand after the first wave.

11

There was one second of thinking that the memory of his mother had neither dissipated in part nor whole but surely remained as something inappreciably more cohesive and tangible that was either lost or banished and forlorn within the present jungle- thicket growth of neurons, and caught in the weeds and brambles of failed possibilities. He thought that with sedulous and indefatigable will, even more paths could surely be trodden within his growing array of brambly chaotic connections; and that eventually from this somewhat circuitous trudging through memory and thought and being nearly blown away in volant whims of his biochemistry and penchant for pleasure, these paths would bring him nearer to those lost bonds of the past (not to her who, of course, was deceased and when alive and enervated from perennial work and exasperating children and who had despised him placidly within the ameliorating parameters of maternal instinct, but to a recollection of her the way she really was instead of the distortions of memory that had her as a weathered and defaced countenance like a featureless rock or, at other poor attempts at recollection, merely the ersatz of that preserved female corpse seen at the anatomical museum at Siriaj Hospital; to recall something like her face from those early and less bleak childhood memories when she would begrudgingly join him and his brothers as they played netless badminton and volleyball on a dirt road near their home; to let these memories of shared smiles and laughter, mutual pleasure that registered as "love" with such beings, permeate his consciousness as pleasure in its imprint of memory was the only perception of how close a relationship it had been, and whether or not he had to some limited degree been valued as an instrument of pleasure, and so in a sense cared been about; and to reluctantly acknowledge that he was one of those beings who was susceptible to love, that mixing and receding of color, a mere human even though to him this word neither defined nor demarcated him very well). The next second he was thinking of male Silpakorn University students whom over the years he had seen at various outdoor restaurants near the campus, each eating and laughing in his group indistinct from all others, but when solitary would often be reading a comic book and riveting one of the legs under a table though not in a queer sensuality toward comic books; the phallic gestures were a satiety of virulence that was innate in a man. The throbbing of legs was a venting of superfluous flowing energy that by its sheer force could be channeled one way or another or both to the objects of one's intrigues, these friends who possessed admirable traits that he lacked. Then, more probingly, it occurred to him how unlike the womanizing playboy artist that he was, that a truly unperverted mind had no s.e.xual orientation at all: that for such a being the pleasure of intrigues, these soft and low beds of earth that from His affable magnetism surrounded Him, were the natural course from which His, an Unperverted Bis.e.xual's liquids, would easily flow into. But for the perverted, like him, who for the most part allowed themselves to be channeled in one particular s.e.xual orientation, their limited intrigues were not so much an interest in these intimate a.s.sociations as they were a replication of the same parental model, or a finding of the ant.i.thesis to one or both parents or the reminders of mothers and fathers interaction with each other that such a mind cared to emulate or reject. Then he pondered how common he was (not that he, the supercilious one, believed it with fears of being a commoner ravaging his psyche and compelling him to contrive the august demeanor and beliefs that he had as all beliefs were contrivances and fortifications against one's fears). He pondered how when out of academic and artistic circles, as in this train of pa.s.senger-rustics and professionals who still clung to their agrarian roots of Nongkai or Vientiene, his presence was glanced at and dismissed like anyone else; and this caused him to wonder if he would even be remembered in artistic circles five years hence (not that, he being a part-time lecturer at Silpakorn University and full-time wastrel--one who had to some extent rid himself of art, relinquished himself to the void, and remained divorced of the artistic omphalos as well as the paint brush--to be followed by, were it to happen, a physical presence which might expunge him from the planet in some accident, there would need to be five years for public memory of his work to be forgotten). Then, to avoid thinking of man's insignificance, he returned to a s.e.xual theme, that personal sanctuary, as ineluctable appet.i.tes const.i.tuted so much of his mental faculties and preoccupations. He thought of how the women he liked most were more often than not a docile ant.i.thesis to his mother with the notable exceptions of young, recalcitrant, and s.e.xy martinets of selfish whims imposed as laws who when with that same draping and tangled curl of hair and the same totalitarian streak to squelch all males seemed just like his mother, or what little he remembered of her beyond his castrated will under her auspices. Present relationships were for all heteros.e.xual and h.o.m.os.e.xual perverts based on the model of the parents who had been of an adequate, deficient, or excessive nature, as caretakers causing a given person to reject, accept, or fiercely need what had or had not been given to them. He had no sooner concluded his deliberation that one's choice of intrigues was in large part due to one's interpretation of failures and successes of parental and espousal models than, before he even knew it, he was at his seat and the Laotian was saying unto him a h.e.l.lo, which in the Thai- Laotian that they had concocted hours earlier was still "Sawadee khrap" with the accompanied gesture of the deferential wai.

"Sawadee khrap. Sabai dee mai? "

"Sabai dee. Where have you been all this time?"

"Above you, of course, sleeping."

"I mean since 5:30 when you thudded to the floor."

"Oh, sorry, did I wake you?" Nawin's concern in this matter was only marginally genuine. For the most part it was feigned for the sake of kindness and to thwart this voice of distraction from his subject of deliberation. He was preoccupied with a bigger worry that, prior to going to the toilet, the stranger had seen his eyes grazing his body. He was wondering what gestures or facial expressions might indicate that the man had seen him ogle his body, if he indeed had, and yet the reason for caring what another individual thought of him eluded him. Had not art, this flaunting of his portraits of female wh.o.r.es with his own whorish self-portraits to which both parties were portrayed as locked in self-degradation, and going to these exhibitions of his work with an arm locked in that of his best friend (legally a wife), Noppawan, shown that he was free to express his desires in his own mode without having to subscribe to another's moral ordinances regarding the energies that exuded from him? With such a force there needed to be rules of restraint so that one was not sucked into the vacuous oblivion of desire and did not lose rational cognizance in the meaningless frolic of s.e.xual quests, which were the mere insatiable manipulating urges of an animal and could so easily be the sole and altogether forgettable essence of a man. This he knew from interaction with the inordinate array of b.i.t.c.hes who pawed him with their love (their needy and myriad convoluted yearnings for no other reason than a handsome figure to admire their flesh and thereby gain the illusion of immutable beauty - a neediness dirty as their underwear which he more often than not successfully tugged off to be intimate in their flesh and their and his own selfish caprices). He needed restraint, but to him those ordinances should come from within himself, this prowler's own creative and logical prowess.

"Yes, definitely a loud thud; but it wasn't from the noise so much as that smell that cascaded down with your body."

"Smell?"

"Yes, but I don't want to think of it, thank you. No more of that. So tell me of your adventure this morning."

"What adventure?" he chuckled softly with a sotto voce of scoffing asperity as if there had been no earlier adventure on the metallic toilet floor. He said it for in a sense it had been unfitness, a secret aberration even to areas of his cognizance that could not accept anything but the thought of himself as a lady's man and womanizer, it was true.

"I don't know. As I have nothing better to do, tell me where you have been."

"The toilet, mostly," said the body ogler with an embarra.s.sed laugh as if this trifle of where he had been (this masturbatory exercise in the toilet of the train) were not worthy of speech instead of being a paramount expression of repressed, latent forces that had been compressed within him for so many years. It was still his a.s.sumption that as a sleeping body was beautiful with its breath rising and lowering the chest rhythmically like a raft on an ocean, so an artist, the appreciator of beauty in the mundane, would have an artist's aberrations from the insensate throngs, and as such, such appreciative aberrations should not be judged as anything that was particularly queer or at any rate queerer than anything else. Just being on the planet at all, a successful conception from one of competing sperm spilled out in a moment of two people needing, from a transient mood, to subscribe to an illusion of intimacy in a physical experience, was queer enough.

"I suppose looking at that handsome but middle-aged face deteriorate in the mirror--I mean when you were in the toilet.

Right?"

"Maybe. Something like that."

"Well, that's a bit odd if you don't mind me saying so. Even a woman would not dare to pee or stay in front of a mirror that long."

Nawin laughed. Like his expressions of love in his juggling of women that was and was not the love he claimed it as being, he had moments of a predilection for mendacity like a boy wanting to hide himself within the shadows of a field and to remain there indefinitely, never to be discovered. He spoke mendaciously and yet to him it was not really a lie. "I wasn't there all that long. Afterwards, I just waited outside the toilet for the seats to be readjusted. Just waited back there, wasting time." Of course "wasting time" had consisted of that adolescent masturbatory sport, which he had conducted earlier in that fetid toilet, a water closet that was more tin than tinsel; and as he thought of it once again with a mischievous grin, he thought of this use of the source of the fantasy for pleasure, the Laotian, without much compunction. Then he thought of himself as guilty for not feeling guilt until recognizing that these new s.e.xual urges were as a volcano spewing out old molten churnings of lava. So of a volcano, he thought, so of a human psyche. He accepted this change to the contour of the surface for ultimately (according to his rationalization), as queer as it was, like everything else, there was nothing new or strange in it.

"And while waiting outside the toilet you were probably staring at yourself in one of the other mirrors, weren't you?"

"Yes, but how do you know that?"

"It would have to be a guess, wouldn't it, unless I can read minds, at least in some imperfect way. In this case it is not so much reading minds but faces."

"So what is in my face?"

"It doesn't matter what is in your face. I don't need to look at it all that much. All upper cla.s.s Thai darkees are the same.

Cleansed and made beautiful and white by money they are a vain lot--solitary cowards behind face fortresses. They are like the Chinese in that sense, and both Thai lightees and darkees with money pretend to be of a higher species. They try to avoid foraging, disease carrying primates like me. Their fortresses are built from fear that lack of money will make them have to acknowledge that they are merely hairless monkeys--no more special, no more potential to matter than any animal."

"You think that I am like that?"

"Well, each person is a bit different. You don't seem so bad.

Let's just say that for now, you are a nice guy in a sn.o.bbish sort of way" (meaning that having been given a bit of money the previous night in that gesture of unbegrudging levity as if it had merely been the sharing of a bag of sticky rice, a smile from this giver, Nawin, since these Thai compatriots saw smiling as their highest attribute, and voluble conversation beyond the vouchsafed utterances given to a repugnant laborer from a country that was poorer than Thailand, he could hardly hate this particular Thai with that quick primeval xenophobia, in which hominoids reacted to those strangers of a different and potentially deleterious group). Nawin had to be put in a special category slightly different than the usual brand of rich and dark Thais of money.

Nawin chuckled abashedly as he tilted his august face to the floor. Then he lifted his head and, in the way of the Thais, a morose, soft, and artful smile alighted on his swarthy countenance like a lambent shadow of a descending airplane across a naked field. He became aware of how much he needed other human beings, these jovial extensions to his limited domain, these pleasant respites from redundant churnings of thought and the hauntings of memories, and he knew that he would feign any interested smile to get the reprieve. "Did you have a good sleep?"