An Apostate: Nawin of Thais

By Steven Sills

He assumed that in being exhausted from sporadic fits of sleep and wakeful spans of dull, hypnagogic thoughts matching the inertia of his confinement he would finally become ensconced there, in this train jostling him around, and at last fall asleep. This was his hope; but in the meantime there was a languid battle with insomnia and inordinate time that he, from his "exalted tomb," disdainfully sullied. A god watching the cookie wrappers that he was emptying into his mouth from the upper coffin glided downward like the leaves of a deciduous tree; he was remembering happier times and in this confined space it was taking him to the edge of madness. It seemed to him that society lied about it all: motherhood as the continuation of playing with dolls, manhood epitomized by competition and money, and old age the enjoyment of spending time reliving the incidents of the past. Children were not nice neat dolls to which one claimed ownership, manhood had to be more than having a heart attack from the stress of making a living and leaving all to one's widow, and old age, if it came, had to be besieged with problems of the present, which would be less painful than recalling happy times that fleeted by and had no chance of being resumed once again. This moving world that he was in was like the 67,000 mile an hour projectile of the Earth, and he sullied it (definitely the floor of the Pullman car, but perhaps the world as a whole) with the crumbs of his fruit pastries. He just lay there with the hours like a corpse in a morgue, eating and filling dead space with his crumbs. Sometimes, to occupy himself, he would continue the same game that he had pursued three hours earlier before the seat-and-window thief left his friends and crossed over, annexing his space and engendering his expulsion. At that time, when he had been alone looking out of the window at the tussling shadows of trees and their counterparts, the light, on the rich verdant fields and on the rough and uneven wooden strips of the rotting platforms of the train stations of all these small towns, he had listened to sounds. Then a game of exhilaration instead of a game of the mundane, it had been an inane guesses that the particular car he was in would hit those coupled metallic bumps of the rails while on this incessant trip to Nongkhai, moving faster than both the train and the Earth combined, even if the movement was a desultory caprice with all this continual shifting of itself in present and past tenses as well as its futuristic daydreams, his mind tried to slow this weltering; it invented its games of distractions, its clutter.

Numb in numb thoughts, even though he was extremely cold in the air conditioned car he did not notice it all that much with his face warm and flushed by thought, which kept trying to suck him in and flatten him in its black hole of memory—memory as of her falling from a balcony; a woman's form, white and light—to him as beautiful as an angel—that seemed speciously able to rapture into a billowing cloud overhead. He knew that it was not merely crumbs that he was trying to sweep from this form but guilt, for numb as he was he had that much awareness lying there with head propped on a pillow. The crumbs on the blanket and the flimsy mat were merely a nominal discomfort to him, so it was not imperative to sweep away or shake off their substance; and yet to sense something else also so incongruous falling through space and time seemed reassuringly cognate. With the memory of that light, white American, Kimberly Debecrois—or something French—pulling away from his grasp of her hands disconcertedly, half blinded in tears but intentionally jumping, falling all those fourteen stories, and crashing through that plastic and metal canopy over the swimming pool at Assumption University, he needed his reassurance. To witness the sporadic dry showers of crumbs falling onto the recently mopped but still noisome floor seemed cathartic. These actions were undeniably childish, but given the fact that the train personnel had mandated the passengers, as naughty children, onto upper and lower sleepers regardless of their will as paying customers, a marginal degree of contempt seemed judiciously appropriate. To eat and to sully was the quest of a man when caught on moving earth. He, Nawin Biadklang, ate slowly and pensively, making the condensation of crumbs and its showers less frequent than they would have been otherwise, for to consume anything was somewhat nauseating with the odor of toilets linking between cars permeating all and making all a drought.

And yet there was an even more salient stench. What he believed prior to sleep to be the fetid tennis shoes of this "sloven individual" of the lower bunk, this thief of window and seats (presumably Thai like himself although as sloven as he was, he thought, he might be Laotian), was merely the effluvium of his own damp socks hanging in a tiny net of one of the inner walls of what he labeled in his mind as his "tomb." Hanging there, these two strips of a cotton contained bits of his flayed soles from the friction of his life's stumbled movements and were now the bacteria's banquet; but, smelling their rot, he did not know that he and nature's interaction with him were the source. The smell often sent him on a molecular movement bumping and bouncing off the stored rubbish of his mind, so it was not entirely disagreeable. In many ways it besot him like orphic sound to a musician, or the tenebrisms of artists (Carvaggios like himself); but nonetheless he continued to project blame at the bearded anathema beneath him, and he still glanced down periodically at the floor hoping to find the putative agents of the odor, evidence to bolster his bilious conclusions, being in full denial of himself. "It's those shoes," he thought, imagining that the sloven beneath him, this seat-and-window thief, had kicked them opaquely under the seats that were now this bottom bunk, for imagining and knowing were the fusion of random bits of the fanciful, the real, and the probable in this overall perspective of what is true, and they were most often blatantly wrong. He knew this too.

He sighed unnoticeably. He compressed his lips firmly and tried to stifle the thought of slapping the head of the fetid one with his magazine, "Revealing Babes," which lay at his side. The title was in English but the nude women and what little writing there was within it were unequivocally Thai.

Once so titillating, a surfeit of the same fulsome images now made them numbly and insensibly bland like a familiar wife: illusory in intimacy and bewitchingly intimate in the illusion, the photographs in the magazine and the yearning engendered by them, like sex itself, were as pungent to his senses as his dirty socks; but only the molecules disgorging from those socks had consistency and longevity in their impact upon him. They mildly aggravated and stimulated without having the effect of flattening in frenzy—not that the subject of the ephemeral and unreal aspects of such a frenzy would vex him, having been such a glutton himself for silky, perfumed girls whose unique scent (this hybrid of perfume and sweat ) seemed to riddle him pleasantly like tiny beads of shrapnel. Yes, he told himself, dirty socks were a more consistent, and thus a more veritable stink. Even with the prior knowledge that engaging in sexual activities would soon lead him into a vacuous afterward of having to stay with such a woman, such an exhausted presence, longer than the illusion warranted, and that experiencing such an exhilarating penetration of shrapnel would soon reopen all wounds of unfulfilled hopes for true intimacy, the hound was still inexorably obsessed with defecation, and the soldier was implacably enthralled with the excitement of being shot at by his female subjects even when he knew it to be specious.

To him there was little merit in the magazine now, outside of seeing it rolled up firmly and allowing the meretricious tool to conjure plausible scenarios of itself being used as a weapon. No, he thought, he did not seriously dislike this fetid sloven beneath him. He did not know him. He had not spoken to him, and by this time his dirty and hairy face with its certainty of being the rightful proprietor of the area of the window below— an area obtained with the aid of officers on board the train— was experiencing the ablution of fading memory. Still, the repellent fetidity had a familiar, fraternal theme that reminded him of his belittled, abused, and forlorn youth. The familiarity of a stink that he equated to his brothers was like going back in time, going home, and being in an antediluvian state within Jatupon (his former name and being) who was a vestige to him now as his fingernails were the vestige to claws. It was a time of being included in a group of home boys that he was excluded from and of feeling the pangs of loneliness that only prisoners of an institution felt.

The stranger was surely amusingly human, a caricature as all were, and hardly worthy of serious fixation. Engagement with him would be jocular levity and merely that. He tried shutting the curtain that slid around his "exalted tomb" but for an obvious reason that eluded him it only increased the odor. Deciding to relax there, and to be at one with the odor that no reticent grievance locked within his mind could rectify, it became him amusingly the way the peculiar smell of defecation would at last be agreeable to the noses of hounds. For a moment his brain was free enough of the images of Kimberly falling and his wife saying, "You should have jumped and not her," but restraining herself enough to bludgeon his arm repeatedly with a frying pan instead of the original target of his face, that he was able to isolate the culprits of the odor: those socks. Suddenly rebounding from his half hour of petulance in his typical good nature, Nawin Biadklang chuckled quietly at his irascible hubris and abjured this moodiness that was part of the curse of his insomnia. The silent giddiness soon wore off with the itchiness of the skin of his broken arm under the cast. All his firing neurons once again became a cluster of pensive rumination.

Had all these years of being a celebrated artist of dejected Patpong whores gone to his head to the point where he could not remember having been as impecunious as a mendicant and poorer than the fecundity of dirt? And for the hound that he was who sniffed every one of his models, his Patpong whores, preceding and following his marriage to Noppawan, why, he asked himself should he object to odors? Dogs sniffed, claimed territory by the spills of their urine, and growled at each other, but which of them actually killed one of its kind? Which of them concocted plans that brought on the suicidal wishes of another, a more indirect and sophisticated form of murder, and by its disingenuousness a worse form. In a visceral objurgation, for one whose brain was being aspersed by sleep and yet could not sleep as if it were being drugged and dragged through an exit and then up to a second door that sleep could not open, he repudiated his earlier thought lackadaisically. He was guilty of nothing more than pursuing a human involvement. She had been part of his personal life, disturbing the whole, but an imbroglio as indispensable as being able to take a shower for a positive perspective of the day. No, he thought again, she sullied him or he sullied himself with her. As a pig wallowed in mud so did a man in a personal life. The physical aspect of intimacy was rapturous and easy. A man and a woman in the friction of bodies became one, but a one that was a different entity altogether—a fire of physical ebullience and pleasure. Had facile sex not existed, he would have sought intimacy solely in feelings, a thorny stem to hold if there ever was one. And had it not existed intimacy would not exist at all. There would have merely been the chiseling of ideas onto hard marble brains.

He told himself that when a young woman broke free from a man's hands, ran onto her balcony, and jumped off it, she was, in that last moment, the ultimate sovereign of her fate no differently than she had been in other aspects of her life. Kimberly might have found the environment upsetting, felt depression at the loss of a body departing from her and into Noppawan's hands, with chemicals amuck in her body and brain, and jealousy ready to fulminate, but she was as responsible for her last claim upon herself as she was for the formation of her life— "No," he told himself, "this is not right either." An internecine battle for a dominant perspective or a logical merger of the two variant types of ideas fought within him. How could he have saved her apart from a dismissal of his wife's ill conceived plan to begin with? And yet how could he not be culpable? It was an insoluble dilemma that frustrated his ability to live with himself.

A being's finality, he argued, was reproduction and death; and the factors that elongated or expedited this plan of nature could not have been in his control unless he had used some force on her, and that never happened despite what the police officers first believed. If he were indirectly responsible for manslaughter, his wife, Noppawan, was the indirect murderess. Barren Noppawan, marrying him, this celebrated container of lust, and having to justify his infidelities all these years in the name of art, decided that she might as well utilize the natural state of man for her own benefit rather than be forever victimized by what was beyond her capability to change. It was she who proposed that he paint Kimberly, her colleague and friend from the university. He did this; and behaving like a good boy, he feigned a professional detachment toward his study so successfully that he began to believe it himself. On canvas, distorting the French-American into an Asian half-breed and a lady of the night, he brought to his model vague Asian features and his notoriously whorish sense of dejection.

But Noppawan was as dissatisfied with this platonic aberration, if not deviance, as she had been with all earlier affairs. It was she who proposed this madness of him begetting a child. Begotten by the father and conceived by the friend, in a valid sense the child would be a production of all three and, according to this plan of hers, hers to raise. All three would be more or less active parents with Kimberly as a visiting one. And of course, she would be married to the biological father who made ten times what she did on a good month; his paternal role would be that of the "provider" as was the role of all fathers before him. Had they thought out a hundred ramifications to such a scenario it would have been hard to envisage any favorable outcome. But the maternal professor, wistful for that feel of a baby in her arms, scooted the glasses down toward the tip of her nose and espoused the most libertine ideas for a spouse. So obdurately fixed on a mental conceptualization of some type of truth her eyes scintillated and they, these sinners of the heart, became mesmerized believers in the idea that being free of the fetters of self restraint would be for the good of Noppawan.

Tiring further, cognizance seemed as the jammed teethed gears and wheels of a mechanical clock—it seemed so…as tired as he was everything merely seemed. In his last conscious moment as he faced the tidal wave that he hoped would claim him fully into sleep—instead of those smaller waves whose prehensile inundations formed such an ineffective grasp—he wondered if, as a wave or waves, whether their undertow led to fathoms of heretofore unknown reefs, whether sleep was formed of waves at all, and whether, as a jammed clock, it jammed so that something in the subconscious more worthy than a record of time or mere sentient essences of the present could be measured or expressed. Ideas shifted around in his head like loose tectonic plates. They were a phantasmagoria in a sleep deprived mind. They had little consistency apart from the inundations of wanderlust of a nearly middle aged man on his inexplicable, cowardly journey to Laos. Sentience had its limitations; so why sleep seemed like a jammed clock for a few seconds, a wave for a few more, and then an edge of a cliff, a precipice, that intersected with the ethereal was as insoluble as why man in all this impermanence could master his fears enough to go out and forge his destiny.

Numb in his tenebrous tomb, it seemed to him that time was a man-made concept erroneously believed as fully real and tangible because of all the clocks and calendars, made to measure mortality, and things known to have already passed away. As the religious measured the ethics of their actions by those of the characters in their scripture, so was time (its tattered relationships, its solitary and jejune rides in coffins on board trains) a fiction to mark individual and collective progress.

But then, he told himself, he was not traveling to Laos to progress but to degenerate. It was a cynical assessment posed from a lack of self awareness of what he was in fact doing - that he was wanting to revert or abscond to a more callow and ingenuous foundation inside himself: to plausibly sully his body on the ground near an ancient stupa, prop his head against its stone spiral, and stare out into clouds and distant space. If in doing so he were to be perceived as another wealthy and indolent foreigner (usually German or French but not always so) suffering and despondent because of a katzenjammer from a previous night of quaffing Laos Beer, so be it. What would it matter to him? Perception was more fleeting than even the beings who were perceiving. For the man who would lean against a stupa and unresistingly watch the worms and fire ants, more electrically charged and shocked clay no different from himself, crawl onto his body, the gods and Buddhas would obsequiously hover around in mid-air.

Sleep deprived, he was, of course, losing it. His stance on the world, that concatenated state that gave him a sense of being grounded, was now showing its disarray. The foundation that he stood upon had been but miniscule shifting bits of plates, brain recorded sensory input all along, and he was succumbing to the vacuous, timeless illogic of dreams where the cohesive bits broke off and synthesized into something less real than awakened perceptions. Sleep was this remote alter-clock, this remote function of the brain deemed as less real and less cognizant than the other but that was in fact more cognizant within its fiction. This thing that he called himself, liquidated or became a gas that shot through a circuit causing him to fall into some type of a quasi-sleep.

He who was named 'Jatupon' on his birth certificate, he whose fetid brothers had called "Porn," —those brothers who in his early years had often made him terrified to move by swinging, striking, and brandishing their sticks; he who was never called a profane name from the shaking taciturn angel who silently recognized that he could not leave his wife for her, he whose wife called him "You prick!" on overcoming the shock about what had happened to her friend, was and was not in sleep.

His dream silence, which was even more asphyxiating than the carbon exhaust fumes permeating the heavy traffic that moved in slow increments down the street was a fog that was embedded in all living things and all moved through it. An elderly woman was walking alone near some type of a hybrid of Sukhumvit and Silom roads. Sensing that she was being observed, she paused between a salesman's ice chest of coconuts and bottled water and a woman stringing together jasmine rosaries from a small table. Looking around the sidewalk in both directions, she did not sense anything unusual; so dismissing her earlier thought and questioning her ability to assess situations accurately, she trembled at senility's brief chafing and purchased a yellow rosary which she then stuffed into her purse. The rationale behind the purchase had been to arrest fleeing sanity and, if anyone had witnessed this early, disconcerted behavior, to have that moment of senility's waning be expunged from human minds. Her intentionally looking aplomb into the rosary saleswoman's petrous countenance as she paid the money to her was a feigned attempt to project composure and went unnoticed. Indifferent in perfunctory movements, taking money and threading her flowers, the saleswoman was as pachydermatous and robotic as the old woman and everyone else was. Telling herself that the only means to forfend senility was to be actively engaged in mental diversions, she nonetheless sought any diversion that she could, to ignore, if not discomfit, this paranoid erosion of sanity. She went into Watson's Beauty and Health Care Store while trying to ignore this feeling that something was walking behind her, following the brackish, permed scent of that head of hair, as if an ocean of harmony lay within it.

Something slightly tangible; something partially impalpable with some of the thought, feeling and memory of this thing called Nawin was indeed following the luminary whom he thought of as 'grandmother', as if she were the setting sun. He halted and waited for her to come out—she who had as swarthy a complexion as he had with features so resembling his own, but with the particular habit of sliding her glasses down her nose like his wife, and examining buildings of an uncertain destination pedantically.

When she came out with her bag of goods she faced a gigantic television screen of video animated advertisements on the wall of a building across the street that flashed 'You prick,' 'Murdering philanderer,' 'You son of a bitch,' and 'Porn, your brothers are watching your ass' at the bottom of the screen. Nawin's life—his myriad faces of lost forlornness, the hes of many ages—was the background to advertisements about soap, beer, condoms, and cars. Repulsed by the foul language, she was transfixed by it nonetheless, until feeling the acidic rain that fell through polluted skies and the putrid city fall onto her skin. Opening an umbrella against the rain, she noticed that there really was a faint translucent man watching her. She grimaced at what she interpreted as a glowering figure and quickened her pace to escape him. Passing California Fitness, 7 Eleven, Robinson Department store, and a Haagen-Dazs ice cream parlor, she paused briefly at the Temple of the Descending Sun (Wat Kham) to pull up the umbrella that was briefly turned inside-out from a strong gust. Then she continued to quickly walk away. He stood there watching the shrinking form. "Grandmother," he thought, "Where are you going?" He tried to get the words out but all was mute including himself. He felt a sense of consternation to see her fleeing from him. He thought, "Why on Earth are you running from me now—why are you not making it up to me now;" but he had not brought her into existence and thus she was not his to possess. Whatever brought him into existence, he thought, was the sole claimant. Still there was a fusion of a being in love and this "grandmother" who was diminishing beyond the unassisted eye to register. Ambivalent between the emotional response of running after her, a sacrilege against the gods, and a logical response, a blaspheme against this positive mixing called love that was the only sense in being on this planet in its forever of affable and lethal associations, he just cried internally, silently. Hesitant in a life clogged in these conflicts that engendered ambivalent waffling and wallowing in futile rumination, he let her pass away. Immobile because of a cold rush of dread, he let the filthy acidic rain sully his head the way his thoughts were sullied in desperation.

Ruminating, he thought about how each year for his birthday she had fixed her American born, but not raised, angel food cake burnished in icing, and brought him to fairs to shoot the moving plastic ducks. Once she had taken him all the way to Bangkok for no other purpose than to allow him to see the sedentary reptiles there. He would often crawl through the window of her porch where shelves were cluttered in Avon bottles shaped in animal figurines, and when she saw him she would just chasten him mildly with, "You, yo-yo, get out of there. What are you thinking?" When he crawled onto her lap he felt the rugged velvety silkiness of her legs in panty hose and he would stroke them.

How cold her home was in summers with that air conditioner in the window of the living room on early into early morning chilling the house like an American winter, and he would snuggle deep under a saffron monk-colored blanket that was as stiff as it had been starched and ironed. Within that room where he would sleep there was a picture in black and white showing her in thick glasses with pointed silver rims on the frame and a long dress as she held him in a fulfilled and satisfied sense of pleasure. The image of the two of them—he a tiny child, but both of them children lost in time—was just a weathering photograph, a jaundicing pallid image lost forever, as a web page with an address that was indefeasibly and indelibly forgotten by all in time's thicket of images. It was one sentimental but insignificant moment lost in the compiling images of time—And here she was again, the one who had absconded away from them at their parents deaths in a Bangkok- to-Ayutthaya automobile accident, walking away from him hurriedly and as she did so passing the Temple of the Descending Sun.

"How foolish you are. Grandmother. And a rich grandmother at that, living in an air conditioned house instead of a broiling shack on stilts in the sylvan area of Ayutthaya. "Not yours, buddy; not yours," said a gecko that was crawling around his tomb within the train. "What?" asked Nawin, whining ingenuously. "The only panty hose that you have ever stroked are the ones you take off as a precursor to your copulatory sports." The gecko stuck out its tongue. "Brackish succulent skin of an edible silky velvet are always the way one likes it as long as they are young with tender meat and best of all, all vanillaly caucasian as an angel—and then the sand paper tongue strokes inside and out to get its salties and sugars. Young succulent skin whose scents, especially in their far from flowery holes, make silly male creatures repeat the delusion of intimacy time and time again like their fathers, grandfathers, and so on—young succulent skin as a varied brunch and dinner delicacy." The gecko released a dry acrimonious chuckle. "Speaking of eats, have you seen any mosquitoes in this smelly train?" "No," said Nawin. "Not a one." "What a pity," said the miniature, khaki colored lizard of the Chakri dynasty. The gecko glowered at Nawin with appetite and fixed interest as if he were an esculent appetize—the gecko crawling on the railing of the BTS Skytrain station looking down at the small womanly morsels and traffic below and amorous Nawin doing the same but as he glanced up dizzyingly at the facade of the colossal Intercontinental Hotel with its eerie pale-blue light diffused throughout, he felt like he was falling into a deep- blue eternal space. His soul, this odd inexplicable word that may or may not have a physical counterpart beyond the letters of the word, was falling into this alien, colossal structure with its lambent bluish light.

Then the edible Nawin woke, instantly realizing that his grandparents had died long before he was born and that here he was, just a few hours from turning forty himself (he was going to consider himself 39 for as long as he could), arm broken, relationship with a wife broken, and girlfriend deceased most horrifically, cowering from his sullied personal life on an upper sleeper of a Pullman car in a train bound for Nongkai and nowhere. He realized that he who had gained his acclaim as a painter of Patpong prostitutes, and had burgeoned from poverty by his dismal themes and color, was all dried up in themes now. Creativity and life were, for him, veritably exhausted. Was this the middle life crisis that was so ubiquitous to man? He did not know.

"Hey guy! Sawadee khrap [hello]," he said with face lowered toward the bunk beneath him. He wanted diversion from any stranger who could plant him outside his own thoughts. The stranger chortled at the face hanging upside down before him. "What?" he asked.

"Why are you upside down?" asked Nawin innocently.

"I am, am I? Khrap, khrap [yes, yes], I guess so that you would ask me why I am upside down."

Nawin smiled widely. "Are you going to Vientiane?"

"Yes."

"To do what?"

"Partying there. You?"

"Sure, partying with you."

"Might as well have an early one then." The stranger raised a beer up to Nawin who put it in his hands and gave the prayerful gesture of the "wai" even though it was upside down. "How long can you hang that way?"

"Don't know," said Nawin.

"Don't try drinking it that way. I don't want you to dribble on me."

"Yes, of course, khorpkhun khrap [thank you]. Are those guys you were sitting next to earlier going to the party too?"

"Of course. Guests of honor, you know. They have overcome servitude in the Japanese owned/Thai co-signed sweatshops. Independence, you know. They will be facing starvation in Laos shortly. Early death is like being a marathon winner, don't you think? Guys who starve to death are the true winners because they get to the finish line first. Yes, a party for losing jobs and visas. Games too. My favorite is who will be the first one to dunk his head the longest in sunk drunkenness. And yet I am also partial to another game: which of life's losers will join the high ranks of the monks for a bite to eat and which ones will marry their sisters."

Nawin laughed out a spray of saliva but immediately regained self-control the best he could when upside down and having drizzled in public. "Oh my, so sorry, forgive me." For a moment he deliberately sobered his rolling caprice of laughter with the thought of the bleak scenario beyond the bold and refreshing honesty of the Laotian's words. "You've lost your jobs?"

"We have. Business slowed and our use is over. We will drift elsewhere in other temporary experiences. Don't worry about us. Don't worry about me. Why are you going to Laos?"

"For a while," said Nawin evasively. "I guess I should give you back your beer."

"Keep it. If I run out of beer later maybe I can ferment wine from some of the rotting day old rice I was trying to eat earlier and whatever you have stinking up your ass."

Nawin chortled uproariously until the saliva began an internal strangulation. Feeling as if he were choking he coughed for a couple moments. However refreshing this acrimony so unencumbered by Thai-Laotian etiquette was, it was not worth dying for; and so he retreated for a few moments on his bunk until dangling once again with an opened can of beer.

He thought again how this stranger defied the obsequious norm with a refreshing brashness that was like having cold water thrown into his face. But like a fish that was suddenly snagged on a hook, images of himself in poverty, which he did not care to recall, caught him within. His pleasure in the stranger waned as impressions of beings and beings themselves waned. He countenanced a mere smile which altered further into a wry, contorted, and ungainly expression that expressed little beyond the awkward fidgetiness of wanting to withdraw from social interaction. Tightened into the hook of memory, he unwillingly recalled the hysterical deprecatory laughter, guffaws, and jeers on that one mortifying day in gym class when, at the age of eleven, his loose underwear fell through the legs of his shorts. From that point forward he did not oppose his family's will to have him toil along with them as a noodle worker in their restaurant. At that time he preferred serving food to being a viand for those who gormandized oddities. In this mundane world one who suffered from a peculiar bout of misery more dramatic than others (like underwear falling onto the floor of the gymnasium) was cannibalized as an inhuman freakish joke that fed their appetite for joyous contempt. At that age of eleven he just wanted to serve obscurely and enter the world of implausible comic book scenarios shortly before sleep. Back then noodles, comics, and sleep had given to him a varied but unaware extension of himself.

He considered pulling a few thousand baht from his wallet to give to this Laotian. Then it occurred to him that he would need to give the same to all of these marathon contenders, but he did not have that much money in his wallet nor was he so inclined to give what he had to one let alone the countless many. If it were unethical to know the suffering of an acquaintance and be unmoved to assist him, he rationalized, giving special favors to one with no regard to the masses did not seem any more ethical. So, as always, he horded what he had; and indeed he was one of those who had an abundance being a purveyor of turpitude as well as art which together was popular with both wealthy intellectuals and idiots alike. Such a trivial dabbling of philanthropy, he further argued, would more likely than not be money thrown into the whirlwind of drugs, liquor, or other exacerbated vice from which a self-deprecating fool more easily annihilated himself. And if he wanted to believe the false presage that such a nominal act would cause perpetual kindness the way a rock thrown in a creek begets one ripple that begets another it would not matter. He would not be able to successfully delude himself for long; at best he would be engendering a short time of ever diminishing ripples.

"Besides," he thought, "if this guy is so badly off, he should not be riding in an air conditioned car." It was a rather harsh judgment given his knowledge that the poor sometimes treated themselves to a bit of middle class opulence to make themselves connected to the society that they served and to sense that they could thrive rather than merely live. He repeated to himself that he would not pull out a few thousand baht and give it to a stranger who would resent him regardless of what he did or did not do. This was his conclusion in a sleep-deprived head that had too much crammed into it.

He then considered that sleep was a diminishing reduction of memory (a zipped file in a computer) but one where the zipping weathers away the details. He considered that, given enough hours over a period of evenings, sleep could even dilute the memory of Noppawan repeatedly swinging the frying pan against his arm—an arm that was still throbbing and itching in the cast.

Giving a thousand baht would imply having a lot to give and giving nothing would imply snobbishly holding back from giving what little he could, so he handed the man a hundred baht. "I can spare this. Keep it as money for transportation when going back to Vientiane."

"Sure, why not, thank you" said the man.

Nawin felt satisfied by his decision to give little. It was a compromise between wanting to ignore the sotto voce of thought that told him to give what he had and that which made him into a culprit for wanting to keep it for himself. And yet between both extremes there was the constant cynicism that the poor were merely pigeons and the more one threw crumbs to them the more they would come to eat. It was a way of not examining that the years of his life were pyrrhic: that they had given to him affluence but at the cost of diminution of his humanity—that each year he was becoming more pachydermatous than before with an inability to empathize with others which made them as disconnected to his life as a passing cumulous cloud. Only the storms, the headlines of the masses that he read in English from the Bangkok Post, would get his attention. A female beggar on an overpass with a child that she nursed under her shirt was no different than someone sitting on a fire hydrant as he waited for a bus. Still, he thought, this was what he would try to correct by a solitary wandering into Vientiane.

He noticed some lint on his shirt and flicked it off but really it was the stranger whom he now wanted to flick away.

"What will you do?" he at last asked.

"Starve," said the Laotian. Nawin saw envy and resentment in the stranger's face even though few things were absolute when being conceptualized upside down. If his were envy and resentment it was no different than the way many of his Thai friends often looked at him when finding out that he had an American passport. But then, everything was relative. Perhaps a Somalian would look at a Laotian in the same way.

"How did you hurt your paw," asked the Laotian

"An old war injury," sighed Nawin.

"In Thailand?' That sounds a bit peculiar. You are a bit peculiar, aren't you? An accident that you don't want to talk about—some type of fight with a guy where you acted like a coward or a civil war in your own home that-"

"Hard to explain," interrupted Nawin.

"Okay, whatever. Now tell me what you are going to Laos for."

"Again for a while—a few weeks or so," said Nawin in jest but seriously believing that there was comfort in friends and acquaintances alike remaining strangers.

"Wanting to have fun with a Laotian girl?"

"Do you have one in mind for me?"

"I will sell my sister at a special discount for you if it doesn't cause more war injuries." These were mere words, flippant wisps of air to fill the vapid moments of time while confined with undesirable others on a train. They were of no more serious intent than the earlier conversation but the idea of selling a member of a family, or selling them out, was something too close to home. It was repugnant enough to make this paragon of honesty transformed grotesquely into an inordinate abuser—such were the fathoms of childhood trauma that a facetious play with words meant that devils could be made instantly from gods, and that gods were made from the muck of childhood sensitivities like any sand or snowman. He wanted to end the conversation abruptly but needed to find a graceful and amicable exit that would keep the one disliked clueless of this fact.

"You don't say? No, probably not. I've become spoiled by taking whiter meat."

"I saw your marriage ring when you first began babbling. Are you married to a European?"

"No, a Thai woman who is darker than us both. That is another story."

"Why did you marry her if she is so dark and ugly and likes to hit on you?"

He became more conscious of the barely bearable itchiness under the cast. It seemed to him that it would be a handy excuse for absconding to his bunk. And there he could rummage through his bag for a hanger from which to scratch with.

"Don't keep me waiting all night for an answer."

"It's morning now. She's not all that ugly and she is a good communicator. Well, my arm is itching. I need to get some powder or something, and besides I've kept you and perhaps others up long enough. I thank you for the beer. It is already making me drowsy. Excuse me, the blood has gone to my head."

"Okay. Whatever."

Nawin slunk back into what he amusingly considered his "tenebrous tomb" not that he found such retreats into himself so odious. Neither society nor solitude seemed to him as being all that commodious and so throughout every waking moment of his life he paced the two rooms of himself like a member of the Burmese National League for Democracy under house arrest. Having exhausted the reserve that fueled what extroverted characteristics he possessed, he just lay there finishing his drink and waiting for the liberating force of sleep to deliver him.

A prodigious, big boned figure of a woman with stiff raised arms that were erect, gesturing boughs waited for her man, not as a doting woman but as a martinet; and four times she demandingly called his name, 'Zero', and four times there was nothing.

(If his brainwaves were water flooding into his hard skull boat and the air-conditioned drafts that he tried to escape by bundling himself within his blankets were the battering inundations of oceanic waves, then it would seem that he was foundering in both the depths of himself and the world for every minute his restless, lopsided head shifted to the other side of his pillow. In the middle of the particular dream he was now in, he turned sharply on his left side and he would have fallen from the precipice of his bunk most judiciously in recompense for Kimberly's death were it not for plastic black straps that allowed him to be restrained there to his sentence of dreams— suicidal dreams periodically jolting the body but having little to do with her.) At last a man as fat as a tub and as sequacious as a child wobbled toward this woman, 'Four'; but, according to the feelings of the god, Nawin, that drenched the ground that they stood upon lugubriously, the two were not meant to stand together. No, the four and the zero were not meant to stay together and the zephyrs of the god blew strongly upon them to obtain their separation. But those winds were futile as a device for prying away such an inspissated couple for once they were together this man and woman babbled to each other a mutually pleasurable one word jabberwocky despite the fiercely driven rains, hail, and the flash flood at their feet. The drone of these distant voices was of forty, and each repeated it to the other forty times. Forty was eighty times redundantly beaten onto his head as if it were a drum; and with a slight headache Nawin awakened.

He instantly realized that he was forty; and although he told himself that he did not feel any different, and that he surely looked no different than he had some hours earlier at the age of 39, and that to have had the span of years needed to successfully rise from what he was, was more of a blessing than a curse, the idea that he was a half rotten apple hanging loosely and purposelessly from a tree made him cringe and wish that he were not at all. Light and flippant, jocular and yet terribly morose, this self-destructive mood was nonetheless powerfully upon him for he could not stop himself thinking that forty was an end of virility, and that an end of virility was the end of manhood, the end of all. This suicidal taunting that was implanted in his brain from a dream snatched as a theme of fears in overall consciousness was, he knew, the result of turning forty in this tomb. Not wanting to confront the morbidity of this attack, he retreated back to sleep as if it were the sanctuary from negative ideas instead of being their crucible.

The gecko did not favorably view Nawin unzipping his skin and lying down in his tenebrous tomb in such a manner. A man behaving like this, instead of fleeing from its formidable presence was nothing like it had ever witnessed before, and it found the situation extremely puzzling. As preoccupied as Nawin was in escaping his carnal flesh and emulating those carcasses he and his wife were so partial to (particularly the slit middle aged husband and wife of a car crash in Ayutthaya who basked peacefully in the lighting of their glass and formaldehyde coffins in the anatomical museum at Siriaj Hospital), he did not notice that the gecko was glowering with its forty eyes— glowering at the man for being so inert when he should be fleeing from the reptile and for having undressed from his besmirched outer layer of flesh with such a crude, complete, and unnatural disrobing. The museum was an anniversary site Nawin and his wife had in fact gone to on a number of occasions to commemorate their youthful meetings there, and to see the freakish human pottery of tawny-brown or tanned ochre that had been of such comfort to them as teenagers. Back then, before finding the dead people and each other, each of them had been wandering respectively through an asphyxiating smoke that was as inescapable as a labyrinth and more confusing. But within it they retained a faint hope that the smoke would eventually disperse from the battle ground of family and that one day this abstract word, family, with nothing concrete in it would altogether vanish—vanish intellectually and emotionally the way the river goddess of Loy Khratong diffused through a child's years until the abstraction was gone from the mind as yesterday's smoke. With 'family' being a word marring their worlds, it was only natural that their hopes should be revived in these preserved entities of Siriaj Hospital. Once alive but now the smallest of freaks jarred on shelves, and the largest grounded in containers, they were a reminder that there was a stage of mangled life, of death, of being put on a shelf, of being displayed as a museum piece, and myriad other unknown possibilities. As it was with them, so family was a battle that would end as all battles ended. Battle grounds could become verdant again but this was not so of the battle ground of family and they smothered in each other wistful thoughts of a return. As a married couple they would occasionally take the Chao Phraya river boat to the museum so that they might reminisce about those meetings of their youth, thank the preserved specimens that had saved them from life, and maintain a lexicographical stance that words like "death" should mean precisely that despite the vehement denials, neologistic concoctions of a heavenly overture, and anthromorphic self-made mythologies of the masses. In some respects, despite the enormity of his size, Nawin was like any raw meat that the gecko had caught before; but never before had any of its prey skinned itself and by its own volition lay before it as inanimately as any torn, half uneaten comestible. The gecko watched Nawin who was poised like a reclining Buddha and staring at the ceiling that hindered the welkins. Although the skinless nude lying there was a bit like a boy praying after slipping out of his clothes, forgetful of getting into his pajamas, the gecko was not able to make this connection. It just assumed that the skinned and fairly inanimate human was playing dead to save itself from becoming its meat. But as time went by the inert human creature became so wholly opprobrious to the gecko, who valued a good hunt, that at last, as the small ceiling fan continued to turn arthritically, churning an unnoticeable, fetid draft of warm air in the direction of the man and the beast with a wobbling, scraping sound like cooks in sidewalk restaurants mixing fried rice but instead mixing these myriad, noxious odors of the train, it informed Nawin of his freakish obscenities with its tacit baleful eyes and scrolled tongue.

When he woke up his headache was worse. "A second commute is never good," he told himself (meaning the commutes to and from sleep that were as two onerous trips to and from Ayutthaya within a day). He pressed his palm against his forehead where his thoughts were taut and moved incrementally like the lethargic cold blooded reptile of Bangkok's traffic. Painful as his headache was, he told himself that it was just. It was a well deserved "mental flagellation" (meaning an excoriation of disturbing dreams for the sins of Kimberly's death, Noppawan's separation, and the general muck that epitomized his personal life). He told himself that he did not suffer enough in his waking hours so a higher arbiter than will seemed to be his judge and executioner, and it was all just.

But was he really dreaming anything about them even in an indirect way? No, he had to admit, he was not having nightmares about the women he cared for—and he cared for them all with these two specially mixing in himself as paint, their pleasures and sorrows his tenebrism. He was not even having nightmares about being all alone, separated, and on a train trip bound for nowhere. Instead, he was personifying forty and being nibbled by a gecko.

It was darkly hysterical and he released a tacit, tickled guffaw in a strong exhaled breath, circumspect to stifle noise that could awaken the other passengers. The dream of forty was rather unequivocal but the meaning of the other was not so obvious. His best explanation was that geckos ate mosquitoes; in his youth, when snorting glue and swallowing amphetamines back in those days when his parents had died and he was working along with his brothers in a sidewalk restaurant and being molested as a "cheap date", he used to hallucinate about talking mosquitoes; so if the mosquitoes were Jatupon's only companion, they symbolized the self, a child of poverty that his name change to "Nawin" could not consume. For whatever his external changes and whatever label he gave himself, Jatupon, an abused and forlorn child was within. At least that was his version of the syllogism.

Amused by himself as he always was, he was much too curious at witnessing his sudden desultory moods of asphyxiating stagnation and foundering desperation within to ever be seriously suicidal. Still, he needed movement—the sensory details of the here and now—to override his ideas, to change him from what he was with every passing minute, and to prove that instead of being a man, he was merely an unfixed, impressionable, and amorphous blob. To air out his musty, old mind became more urgent with every oppressive moment in which he was increasingly discontent to stay within the hole in the embankment of the Pullman car that at times seemed a coffin or a drawer at a morgue, and at other times like a coffinless rot in a crevasse within the walls of a mountain. And finding that there were no more fruit pastries in his box to obtain oral pleasure—pleasure giving man a sense of being more cognizant than an automaton of space dust moving in vacuous time eating, drinking, urinating, defecating, and, given the chance, copulating (although there was little chance of that in the train)—he felt claustrophobic and climbed down the bolted metal ladder of the sleeper with the idea of going to the bathroom. As he did so he heard the Laotian snoring as uproariously as a siren and yet as mellifluously as the enticing song of a Siren.

It was indeed strange that the disheveled being who was shooting fetid wisps of air as sonorously as a bagpipe should be both enticing and repulsive all in the same reeking breath, and Nawin smirked at the sight of his acquaintance. He feigned disgust, and this action mixed with amusement in a contorted, clownish countenance until the odd smile finally flattened for there was a peculiar sensation within that at first he did not readily acknowledge. To evade the cognizable he again ruminated on how odd it was that, now feeling as refreshed as he could be when waking from rolling turbulent dreams that wrenched his brain with a pain like the sprained of leg of a child fleeing a bully (albeit that the bully in his case was the deprecating voice within himself that censured him for being entirely lost at forty), he should not be able to decipher appeal or repugnance over something so simple as the pleasure factor behind the sound and smell of a man's loud breathing—cacophonous mutterings of a hominid or something quite orphic? This was his jocular deliberation so as to stay hidden from himself behind a wall of thought. Ultimately, however, there was a scaling of the wall and the coward was ferreted.

"Am I really feeling this way?" he asked himself. He knew that he was, for his body tingled with the titillation of one wanting sex. He thought how consternating and queer it was that after leaving his brother, Kazem, over twenty years ago without ever thinking of him or any man in much of any sense (including "that way" except in the most fleeting manner), that this man, this unshaven and uncomely Laotian, should seem sensual to him now. No, he thought, with a new idea repudiating the old, the only peculiarity was that as a casualty on the battle ground of family he should live so well and so long without having to continually purge himself of memory that could continually discomfit the present with its stench, rubbing its foul wounded body in recidivistic and wanton desire.

Still, he reassured himself consolingly; it was not so "queer" for an artist to love the beauty of form. In this world of lackadaisical automatons who never appreciated the here and now, the beauty of the human frame was there to be shown by discerning artists. He posited that his own artistic proclivities in conjunction with all the trauma of the past month (Kimberly's suicide, Noppawan's beating of him with the frying pan, and being locked out of the house when returning from the hospital) were putting him in a dust storm no more nebulous than that which he felt instantly at taking a shot of whiskey or when spinning one of his madonnas on a dance floor. It was merely a minute of temporary derangement that was quite natural in life, a game of musical chairs in which the chairs also moved. He further averred that a moment or two of confusion when waking up from nightmares was totally understandable and natural in life's craziness. But, he then asked himself, why would any artist have this obsession in conveying the beauty of form unless he were painting over the background that tainted him? Perversion had the transitive root 'to pervert', and it was rooted deep with the years: it was familiar, it was going home, it was a homecoming to the illusion of that former family that could be argued to have never existed at all were it not for that almost impalpable stain that the perverted wore unknowingly like a light jacket.

Desire: what was it really? It was mad hunger for what one lacked. It was emaciated Haitians attacking a UN storehouse and a mind loose and spinning of its own accord like a top; and disconcertedly, he argued to himself in an alloy that was both a question and a statement, the encroachment of desire was surely a possibility only when the consciousness approved it with its reluctant nod. "Isn't this so?" he asked the mind which knew nothing but questions.

As much as these titillations toward the Laotian repulsed and frightened him and despite a tepid attempt at eschewing his feelings, he wanted the man, like a spellbound warlock whose spells, even when having a life of their own, went contrary to the intent. As abashed as he was by his compulsion to stare, there was nothing to stop him. No one was awake but himself. Uppers and lowers, they were all ensconced in tiny train domains behind their brown curtains. He was quite alone enough to elongate a momentary voyeurism to more. The burly stranger wearing only sufficiently bulged underwear was both handsome and ugly depending on one's perspective; and it was perspective by which all judgments lied. To understand the level of desirability or repugnance of a given thing (whether or not the Moslem woman sleeping in an adjacent bunk across the aisle with partially opened curtains was "with child," "knocked up," or a southern terrorist in disguise, or whether the train ride, one that every young boy would yearn to go on, was pleasant or not for the man he had mutated into) an overall mood was needed, a background color for the canvas based on faded memories falling through the mind as softly as leaves or as revoltingly as trash blowing on the ground.

Beams of light were able to slide through the myriad rectangular slits of the metallic awning that had been pulled down the window as a screen; and when somewhat blocked by forms in the environment the passing southerly trains became oblique. Obliquely, they changed the appearance of the man and in so doing changed the perspective of him. At one moment the light accentuated blemishes visible on his face and at another moment it diffused onto the whole countenance making it sleek and mysterious like tenebrous silver.

When the face was ugly its foul breath was fouler, and when handsome the snoring was a nice inebriating gust that picked up Nawin's kite; but in both perspectives the brazen Laotian in his impoverished vulnerability reminded him of Jatupon. There in tattered dirty clothes Jatupon, whom his brothers derided as 'Jatuporn,' was a vermin he could never entirely escape (scaling the prison walls of the subconscious as the boy did), no matter how many thousands of dollars in baht he was commissioned to paint his whores. For a moment he was scared of the Laotian as if having stumbled into a den of sleeping terrorist cells but it was the self that was his only terrorist. It was the self that filled him with stiffened, cold dread. Fortunately, with the walk to the bathroom, the attraction passed him entirely almost in the same moment it came upon him: Jatuporn was apprehended, and the self was placated as if this particular feeling were as inconsequential as all the other wind driven debris of the mind that had gone before.

If he believed that anything which overtook rational thought and equanimity in such a temporary, all pervasive and engaging burning, lacked legitimacy (and in a way he might have for he knew passion to be like the slight bitter aftertaste of too much cloying chocolate), it was of minor consideration being the Patpong prostitute depicter that he was. With lovely scented women (especially those in ovulation, which was every man's Venus Flytrap unless punctilious enough to carry a nosegay of multi-colored condoms) sensuality was wild flowers of searing energy popping up after a shower making the landscape anew. However, any titillation regarding a man was tremor and mudslides. It was his shaky world tearing apart, falling down the sores of its cracks, and being buried alive within the fall downward. Because of this, all he wanted was departure: in this case, to depart from the man, the spell, and the train, and as this was not possible, to again retreat into his once solitary bower.

Even with passion waning with every step toward the bathroom in a salvation of movement, his mind was preoccupied by wanting to reclaim the window and seat from the window and seat thief, so that he might let morning and movement pass through the orifices of his eyes to obstruct memory—a morning with shanty stations as gateways to shanty towns, rice fields and banana orchards with coconut trees occasionally spewed in, thickets of verdant weeds and knee high grass, sickly palm trees and two-story shacks where the bottom halves had such high earthy foundations and the true houses were the upper portions where drying laundry hanging from ropes were the only ornaments apart from distant glimpses of vehicles and amorphous motorcycle taxi drivers on the main street of some rural town or another. Until he could escape the man and the train entirely, until he could walk away and clog his mind with other things, there would be a window with which to take in various scenes to obstruct memory—an annexing weed of consciousness to idle eyes. And the window would be his were it not for the Laotian's sprawling body clogging his space.

He imagined himself shaking the Laotian, kicking him on his hairy behind, and dragging him out of this annexed space. He smiled and internally laughed at such an absurd caprice. The mind was littered with such protective mines, which soared through the weightless space of ethereal consciousness. By his laughter such evil was not claimed and thus it did not make him. This was his enlightened thought in a partially refreshed brain granted by a nocturnal sleep which had also slugged him with a headache, made his clothes wrinkled and smelly, and left him with the need to urinate.

Chemical fixations and caprices went out of him entirely with his liquids. Urinating in this metallic East-Asian urinal embedded within the floor of a toilet sandwiched between two cars, he facetiously told himself that the fetid little space was his friend. Even though he did it with humor it was the stuff that Jatupon was made of. It was the animistic thoughts of a child. Feeling relieved to relieve himself of fluids and issues, he could have allowed the matter to stay there, but he wanted a guarantee that nothing like this would happen to him again. The dilemma was not knowing who the guarantor was, so he sunk himself into the Buddhist myths of his culture. Ubiquitous superstition, the guardian against creepy crawling memories, came upon him. He said a bit of a prayer, as much as any atheist could, to exorcise homosexual inclinations from his brain. The prayer, if it could be called such, was not conscious or subconscious thought but a type of semi-autonomous space-garbage moving in quick orbits within the mind.

Through deliberately imagining it to be so, he made a spell that transformed Buddha into a god even though there were no gods in Buddhism (at least not in Buddha's Buddhism), no netherworld of heavenly creatures, and no guardian Seraphs and cherubs—only the deadening of desire, in the soft strangulation of this illusion of self to engender a harmony that defiled the essence of being alive. It was a toilet Buddha-god to whom he could offer no oblation beyond urination and potential defecation.

Deep in his "soul" he knew that even if there were a distant god beyond the gods made in man's image, men were mere cockroaches before it, scurrying away from the vibrations of the foot with no understanding of the foot being a foot let alone as part of the limb of a body to a conscious behemoth entity. Such was man's ignorance of God or gods, of which the most intelligent believed nothing and the most ignorant believed the myths that made their besmirched flesh hallowed enough to be at one with them. He scolded himself for wanting a deliverer who would save him from the fleeting whims that haunted the mind, moving it like an empty ship navigating mysteriously by the mandates of erratic winds and caprices. He knew how opposed to the intellect such beliefs were when there was no evidence of intervention by the deities in life's barbarism and injustices, unless it were in the injustices themselves of gods favoring some and letting others perish which would be the same as the traits of any of the monsters of men; and yet he summoned his Buddha nonetheless. Such superstitions were normal in these vulnerable and tenuous corpuses and he was no different. He laughed; he amused himself like no other.

He looked at himself in the mirror. It was the same handsome face. It was not a half rotten apple hanging loosely from a tree—at least not yet. It was the same brawny body that had amorously begotten another male in the phantasmagoria of this world. He thought of this child whom Noppawan was no doubt jubilantly nurturing and pampering at this moment as if he were her own. Should the separation seem permanent a few years from now, Noppawan would no doubt tell her son a story in which, for some families, there were no daddies. She might say that in such lucky families children were delivered to mommies by the assistance of an angel named Kimberly who was quicker with her deliveries than any of the motorcycle delivery boys who worked for Pizza Hut. It was a mean thought against meanness done to him, but he decided that he would not berate himself for it. After all, he could not figure out how there could be any sin unless it were theirs. Disposing of guilt for a moment, he could see the obvious: it was Noppawan's idea for him to father a child through her friend; and prior to the affair how could he have known that it would lead to Kimberly's possessiveness and that in her post partum depression she would leap off of her apartment balcony at Assumption University? Like every affair of any nature one engaged unknowingly, so a beating with the iron frying pan had been totally out of order. He sucked in his lips angrily and told himself that he did not hate them which was not entirely true.

Having begotten a child made him feel that his use had been filled and that his virility had been smashed out of him most intimately by the hands of two women attempting to quench their maternal thirst with his apple juice and the seeds that were rife within it. He was a mushy half-rotten apple that they had squeezed most mercilessly to garner the seeds within his juice. In a sense they had raped him; and he argued to himself that rapes of the handsome, talented, and affluent types were the most common cannibalism in this modern world.

He thought about a Bangkok Post article which, three years earlier, had referred to him euphemistically as "The distinguished benefactor of rural girls in an urban profession." Back then, at the age of 36, he, Nawin Biadklang, had considered the sardonic comment both humorous and exhilarating, for every article allotting time and space to an examination of his self- absorbed ruminations on decadent living, no matter how critical and regardless of the domestic nature, like this one in point, was to him, then, like the first lick of succulent success.

As with all reviews, at the time of this article's publication he considered it, which now was the most recent critique of his oeuvre, as another exhilarating current of air enabling him to soar without much effort. Back then, he had been volant within the dopamines and endorphins of his own head, anticipating a maturity, a growth into the fit of his decadent skin, which would allow him, as much as a serious artist was allotted, to strut his succulence more fully on life's propitious catwalks of fame. That had been the initial impression that had come about, to some degree, from a rather inconsequential review published in Thailand; and it had been an impression and reaction not at variance to the impressions and reactions of all earlier reviews.

And yet a year later when the drawing of all his escorts seemed banal and jejune enough to be replaced by a celebration of the ordinary (a painting, for example, like a photograph in a locket, of his then platonic angel in the driver's seat of her car but from a perspective of looking at her through the exterior of a windshield and through the interior of a dangling jasmine rosary that hung from the rear view mirror; another one of his pedantic wife at a distance sitting on a bench outside the Assumption University library while sipping through a straw the juice of a coconut as she read a book through her heavy spectacles; an odd if not grotesque painting of Noppawan with the perspective from the forehead looking onto the dark, leaning moled hills, and blemished declivity of her face; "A Conversation on Surrogate Motherhood," as one painting was mentally entitled in which both women were at a coffee shop, and despite their restrained if not tranquil demeanor the room was filled with their unrestrained, desperate thoughts flying through the air in sundry shades of every color; and others seeming to him more insignificant and raw stylistically than the three aforementioned), he told himself that he was worthless as a painter. He became determined to remove his paint and canvases to a closet and to forswear art altogether. He averred inwardly that all his studies of aching prostitutes who were quickly manufactured off the assembly belts of this world, which stretched decades, centuries, and millenniums toward the past and the future, would not help one of them, being dead and unborn as they were; and for those escorts in his immediate present whom he gropingly attempted to befriend, to sooth their jealous reactions toward his unwillingness to divorce his wife and marry them, and occasionally tried to set up as beauty shop proprietors, owners not merely of sidewalk restaurants but of the open garage variety so common in Thailand, supporting them financially while they sought a high school degree or other certificate, and other futile attempts at empowerment, it appeared that what he had succeeded in doing for the dead and unborn whores was infinitely more. He had delivered no one to their higher potential. Art, he said, was a frivolous embellishment by those who were weary of enduring the ordinary. It was lavish and empty like a string of heavy jewels locked in a safe, or the accumulation of wealth to give specious dignity to the tenuous body of carbon called man. It did nothing for anyone.

It was then that, because of the article, the word, "distinguished," began to snag his consciousness. The word, when used sarcastically, suggested that one was a dirty old man, that acme of all depravity. 'Depravity' was an all inclusive word in which both playboys and bloodthirsty tyrants were erroneously locked in as cell mates. He had not even climbed far into sensual decadence, a different mountain entirely, with play for the playboy tearing his crepe paper heart the inwardly lachrymose and outwardly debonair way that it did, with these bouts of sensing a woman's genitalia as vapid holes being banged as empty drums from inside by a man's stick; these conclusions that sex was just a bored erumpent man banging on any tin trash can in reach for a bit of sound and vibration, and brief moments of total, pellucid understanding called enlightenment as to the absolute absurdity of an instrument of urination being used for intimacy.

He knew that if viewed alone, without the disparaging meanings pretentious and sanctimonious art critics gave to it, the word, "distinguished," was more good than bad. Still, he did not like the elderly connotation of it in reference to himself and he did not think that he was accomplished enough to be considered "distinguished." Nobly and decadently, he had spent many years chasing lurid themes and nasty girls merely because he, from personal experience, could empathize with innocence being snatched away by the hungry wolves of this world—or rather, the more complex commonality of not really being snatched by those fangs, but innocence, in the form of a thigh, being eagerly given to the waylaying wolves so that the whole body could survive. By being tossed morsels of the good life from the beloved abductor in exchange for a thigh, the body could survive and the brain would be more than empty space for it would have someone to love.

Regardless of whether the innocent were considered victims or volunteers, innocence was nonetheless baited and devoured. As a forlorn younger brother who was hated by all except for the one who would use him as a "cheap date," he knew. He knew that corrupted innocence was a perennial ache, which would ensue for as long as there were hungers. And for Nawin, this Jatupon (merely "Jatuporn"), it was an insoluble theme haunting him with many blissful nights and compelling his days to be slavishly spent in pouring color from tubes into imaginary holes on canvas.

Fine as it was in youth to vindicate injustice by painting his tragic madonnas, one could not exactly grow old that way and seem inwardly wise or outwardly respectable, not that he accredited the latter as having so much importance. Still it was a rather repugnant thought that he who wanted to become wise and enlightened once he entered old age would instead become just another distinguished patron of massage parlors, obsessed by vibrant youth, and having found no awareness from all his days beyond his sexual rhythms. From this conclusion he retired from art with a second and more puissant conviction.

Now he, this forty year old birthday boy in a toilet of a train and the stench thereof, was once again trying to recall this same article for he was wondering if the writer had really meant all along that he was an immature painter whose use of the lurid could only sustain him in his youth. For all these years he had been gloating in all things written about him as if none of it were critical or vatic; and it had never occurred to him that perhaps, by behaving so, he was making himself ridiculous.

He tried to recall it as best the copying and projecting apparatus of the human brain allowed so that he might reinterpret the critique, but the lethargic crawl of memory wobbled like an overweight, arthritic dog kept at a distance, and only that salient collar: the word "distinguished," snagged it a little within the thickets of thought that made up the illogic of his consciousness.

Somewhere into this third time of looking up at himself in the mirror for reassurance that he still possessed the same handsome face, he imagined something like an older man within scraping the vestige of his claws through the inner layers and then through the surface skin of his Botox starched face. The hoary phantasm of the stark, ugly possibility of self and the probability of one day finding himself no more distinguished than any old beast fornicating with youth made him once again reel on this, his first day of being a forty year old man.

Suddenly, a plethora of other articles published about him reeled through his mind like microfilm, but also in a most diminished and faded state. Some of these articles might have merely been the hype of writers at the insistence of gallery owners or independent actions of newspapers and magazines to give readers what they wanted: sleaze about a minor celebrity whom through his paintings and tabloid gossip they could learn more about than any snapshot of a movie star in bed with someone other than his wife. From tiny facts or rumors of facts about this exhibitionist god on canvas, the populace who were bereft of significant involvements could gossip about him to make friends with others equally bereft.

"No, my works are not salacious crap—well, not crap anyhow," he told himself, and laughed at his hyper self-criticism for it was he who had been the youngest artist in Thailand to have an exhibit of his work (a decade in retrospective) dangling nude with legs marginally wide open in the temporary art museum. His adulthood had been good indeed, he told himself; and he knew that he could go on savoring his success if only he could find an inspiration to probe the ordinary as profoundly as he did the carnal. "Strange," he thought, "that the carnal is ordinary but that the ordinary does not seem to be carnal," and he dwelled on this paradox that he created for himself until memory intruded on his game.

- What are you doing, he had asked Noppawan one late Sunday afternoon after returning from his painting and philandering on the floor of his studio.

- Why all alone and in the dark?

- I am not all alone.

- Well, good. Who is with you?

She did not say anything. - Noppawan?, he asked mildly as if addressing a sensitive child.

- I have my lovers too. Can't you see? As withdrawn as she was, her words were barely audible.

- I see Basset on your lap. I see that she loves you just as I do.

- No, hers is different…real.

There was silence between both of them and he felt she was not real but a miniature spirit in a miniature spirit house that he needed to appease with gentle words of oblation. Still, there were questions to be asked: Why are you on a dining room chair in the middle of an empty room with the cat? Why is the room empty? he asked in slightly more critical tones but, as always, still gentle and circumspect with his wounded bird as with the angel and the madonnas. As an empathic man who knew what a landmine the personal life was, there could be no other demeanor for him for little did he want a battle of which rotting bodies and their stench would be the only outcome. - Why have you shoved all the furniture to the back of the room?

- I don't know. Comfort, said the reticent woman.

- Comfort?
- A mirror
- A mirror?

She said nothing until, like a drowning swimmer, words bubbled up from the disconcerting ocean of silence that she so cherished. - For the same reason you became involved with me, Nawin. You needed to marry someone who reminded you of what you were, how you were alone in your family, to remind you that the world was not right for someone else and it wasn't just you aching and mad in your own thoughts. So the furniture gets shoved to the back of the room, so I look into space.

- What?

- As a mirror.

- What does that mean…'as a mirror?'

For a few seconds she withdrew to the cat, petting it but with eyes that seemed to pass through that which she needed to neediness itself. Then she looked back at him—I don't find it lonely just to sit here.

- You should.

- Should I? I don't know. Being with you, not knowing what you think of me…you in these women's company constantly, and me in their shadows…Often I just want to be contained here in my space. Here I don't feel so inadequate to your women, or the need to deprecate myself so much for feeling that way…so inadequate to your disadvantaged, dirty women.

- I'm sorry.

- Inadequacies are fired onto me daily, you know, even if I do tell myself its inside me and that you do not pull the trigger…. No, it isn't the affairs. What you press against your body is none of my business. It isn't as if I need to inspect the underwear you plan to put on…if its cotton or silk, bikinis or boxers, clean or dirty…what you press against your body, who massages it, and how, I don't care.

-What can I do for you?

-Yes, strangely enough you are so decent. Husbands should at least be friends with those they have. I knew what you were when I married you. It's those inadequacies like going out in rags….If you like yourself before, you end up losing any sense of anything good about yourself in being with such a man….No, I can sit here for hours and not see anything so lonely in it. Its like Ban Chiang pottery locked in a glass display but at least in that container I have me. Out of it, with you, I lose me… at best, I have just an image of you from long ago in a special mirror nobody else sees.

-You don't look like my image. He chuckled awkwardly to lighten the mood, fully aware of conversation being an inept bridge to link any pair let alone the purveyor of pain with its victim. Not knowing what to say he changed the subject—Let's move the furniture where it belongs out of the corners. This was his response to silence.

- Why, people ask me are we, I, an archaeological anthropologist and you, a playboy artist, together. They feel sorry for me for they think it a graphic humiliation worse than rape. In ways I suppose it can seem that way when rape is such a private act…and this is not private. I brag about your latest paintings as if to say that what he does with his own body is his business; I don't tell him how and where to move his legs so why should I worry about his other bodily movements and functions; and I couldn't be prouder of a husband who explores the human soul through a vagina. I suggest it, although not in those words…not any words really. She began to cry. - There is no paint for me, Nawin. No canvas…just the clutter of a woman's home…countless things if she marries well…countless knick-knacks she has to move around and in which she has to reflect her thoughts, all in different parts of the house. She moves the furniture to see a world where the same pain exists elsewhere to prove to herself that it is the natural state so as to make all else bearable…I mean it is the natural state in a sense but for other husbands maybe not to these extremes or at least not so openly depicted. If natural, a woman can console herself that it is not just the insanity of aching in her own head.

- Are you leaving me?

- No, I'm not so courageous. It will always be more of the same for me. So I am sitting with this so called goddess of Bubastis, this cat on my lap, and as I do so it seems to me that a cat is good for cuddling but a man with his premature pecker is not a cuddler…just a lovemaker. That is what he is good at. The Egyptians were right about there being a woman in the cat and a cat in a woman, for the two creatures need to feel real within the propinquity of touch. There with another non-threatening suffering creature of this world, touching to feel real, maybe it is just another mirror—just a bigger love, a fuller love and perhaps a more selfish love than a man and a woman feel but this cuddling with a cat is better for a woman.

The memory reeled around and played so distinctly that he almost thought he was there with his wife; but how much of it he had distorted to make it more meaningful, dramatic, and aesthetic than it really was, he had no way of knowing. The brain was always rewinding bits of memory, analyzing them, and splicing them together like film; and as were two people walking down a sidewalk without looking at each other, who were and were not together, so was memory—it was and was not.

Were articles dating back fifteen years adulation about the artist of his youth that might have been true words then but little pertained to the man of forty, or were his works tremendous talent that did not hinge on the salacious biography of the artist and would live beyond his short eruption of ephemeral years? It seemed to him, nonsensically, that they both were and were not. Nonetheless, it was absurd to merely think that over the past few years he had aged so tremendously that critics and commissioners of his work alike had lost interest in him entirely. The art critics had been writing about him, albeit less frequently, until he ran out of inspiration for his redundant themes, irrespective of the surfeited forms of whores who came in droves, each with slightly different circumstances, and each with slightly different expressions. "I was a sensation until I lost interest in beating and stirring up such muck, and none of it has anything to do with turning forty," he told himself, but he knew that it was and was not true.

It was true that just four years ago he, the once eligible but continual playboy, was appealing enough to be referred to as "Naughty Nawin" with those English words in their headings proving that he had not turned into mushy and deciduous fruit in the little over three summers since; but it was not true that as unseemly as his life might be in view of the fact that he was a glutton of the personal life like a boy in front of a thousand cookies he was the same as any foreign business holidayer of the masculine gender looking for the nearest brothel. His was more of a spiritual decadence. "Forty is just a number. You are as handsome as ever," he thought as he looked at himself in the mirror. "You stopped painting and they stopped writing about you. It is as simple as this"; nonetheless he did not believe in simplicity.

He missed the hype organized by galleries. He missed magazines catering to those needing a celebrity from whom they could learn intimacies, tiny facts or rumors of facts about the personal lives of the gods. He checked himself. His mind was going in circles around the word, forty. The circles were more of a vortex as, on bad days, when he descended for some seconds or more into early family and abuse, which could suck him in fully were it not for his active vigilance.

Examining himself in the mirror for the umpteenth time with a refreshingly spry countenance there to befriend him once again, he gave thanks to the mysterious forces that had given him a life where he might make a living presenting his varied depictions of himself with his whores on canvas (a whore of every type from every angle), fervidly contemplative of life's decadent urgings. Like a schoolboy twisting in the grass, he blessed the fates that had allowed him time to revel in his spinnings. Free to contemplate the unequal plight of man (or woman as it was in his case), to see color in forms and feelings and thought, to mix with forms by allowing licentious whims to twist around the kite in accordance with natural mandates to reign in those turbulent skies, he basked in others perceptions of him as handsome, successful, and affluent. Like juicy fruit on the stem, his days in the sun, as an elated appetite of women and an envy of men—at least for those who knew something about contemporary Thai art—were embarrassing and awkward to the modest Jatupon that he was; but it was the very furthest of human plights. Selling his paintings at ever inflated prices because of their worth and his celebrity status as their decadent creator, he had the ideal life. The creature of pleasure had to concede as much as this.

Smirking at himself, the wry smile soon fell flat at the thought that even ugly pimps who were affluent from their brutish, sexual peccadilloes might be considered equally sexy; and he sighed at his bland fame. He had gained it from portraying the same models in the same redundant and stereotypical theme to which he knew no variation; and whether or not those guilt- ridden self-portraits of himself engaging with his whores as stiffly as a Buddha were an exploration of his models or an exploitation of them remained an unanswered question. He moved closer to the mirror and looked deeper into the image. The rot of forty, if it were a rot, was an internal degeneration that had not yet reached the surface of the apple except for a few premature wrinkles, which he had already stiffened out with Botox. He flexed his muscles into the mirror that like social interaction and painting reflected consciousness and reminded him of existing beyond the redundant actions of eating, urinating, defecating, reproducing, sleeping and all the other - ings.

Stepping out of the toilet as he was now doing, he posited that such banal and inconsequential movements as this were like copulation with a rife assortment of women, that movement provided men with a base physical consciousness that was indispensable to their overall welfare by making them appear more tangible to themselves than any images in mirrors could do. Still, while moving out of the toilet and pondering this new justification for male promiscuity within the corridor between the two cars, he inadvertently halted there before his image in a second mirror. "I am still a young man. Both mirrors say so," he lied to himself; and then began to wash his face at a sink. The tap water pulsated out in an extorted and convulsing trickle, pushing him a little into those turbulent memories of the recent past. Not wanting to think of Noppawan or the mangled angel who was no more volant and permanent than any pallid terracotta falling eleven or more stories (he had forgotten the exact number with the burgeoning thickets of neuron brush that were daily mutating the landscape of his mind), he looked into the image of his own eyes to reassure himself that they still had a young man's luster.

As he did this, combining the mirror's confirmation of forty with a sense of feeling no different than he had at twenty so that a nice conciliatory countenance of thirty stared back at him, he remembered another fragment of that earlier dream in a sleep that had been filled with such episodic starts and stops.

As the restless shifting of dreams like those he had experienced in the 'tenebrous tomb' were the chaotic composite of what the true self really was, they were also his idée fixe, for as an artist he knew that the true self was the only subject worthy of his delineation, his imagining, and that being awake was merely the desperate garnering of the true self's scatterings. In some sense being awake was a liberation from sleep, that anarchy of fleeting images, fears, and anxieties about the unalterable past which the subconscious lived over again and again in new arrangements like a news reel seen in various colored filters and in reverse of a young French and English teacher jumping from her balcony. It was a means by which, if not to erase or delete memory, to splice it, to fictionalize it, and to some degree begin again; and yet he judged consciousness to be even less real. Married one moment, separated the next, the boy was always growing out of his clothes or being stripped of them. And as the door of the fitting room by which people came in to wear him and be worn by him never seemed to shut well, allowing all whom he loved to briefly use him and be used by him to get a variant feel of themselves before going toward new entries, it seemed to him that the door might as well keep revolving. One might even stifle human growth if one were to try. This had been his supposition in maimed youth after his parents were jettisoned from their windshield by a Fate seemingly eager to part with superfluous human baggage, these burdensome nuisances, and he was too old to part from such inveterate conclusions now.

Being awake was a concoction of pasting together the fragments of subconscious thought. Whereas a biographer was a historian of superficial events, the artist was a cartographer; and it had always been his hope that collectively all artists (himself included if he were not retired) would in time be able to chart an accurate aerial view of the splendid, volcanic thrusts of the subconscious. He took a comb out of the pocket of his wrinkled pants and began to straighten his disheveled hair lovingly. Then in consort with his debonair image, his Siamese twin in the mirror, he put his palm on his forehead for it was aching numbly, and more numbly was his heart. And thinking of his own restlessness, he knew it would not end with ended sleep. He could tell this from the hammering taps of his present headache that were born of the travail of truly chaotic dreams.

He told himself that there was no reason to feel anxious; for what was a man if he were inwardly shaken by external vicissitudes? Many evenings before his self-declared retirement he would stare up into empty space from the bleachers near the lit sports stadium in that area where they both lived (an area convenient to Assumption University where his wife worked), sketch something, and feel warmth in the blackness and nothingness. A real man, he argued, could sink himself into blackness, knowing himself to be like a bit of top soil washed away in storm waters, and think nothing of it. So Kimberly was dead…so, he had a son by her in the hands of the wife whom he guessed that he was now separated from…so he was a forty year old man who briefly felt a queer amorous titillation of homosexual yearning and a phantasm of a tryst inside his head…so the tryst was for a Laotian in a train…so, like a poor man on a train, he was going to the capital of one of the most undeveloped countries on the planet…so, he was running away on this December 5th, the king's birthday (Father's Day), seemingly oblivious to any agenda about what he was running toward. It was all a sinking of his dirt in eternities of black space and he told himself that he was warm and content within it.

The link of associated thoughts that had brought him to recall this particular fragment of a dream while staring into the mirror with a preposterous sense of self-satisfaction was oblique at best. It began with him looking into his sparkling eyes and his clear white smile of multiple brushings and whitening solutions, followed by a second in which he very well might have used the English word "gay" to describe his image had that abhorrent word of myriad connotations to which the worst were dissonant to the pleasant characterization of himself as a womanizer and a lady's man not been repressed. Then, to further avoid summoning the word which he forcefully restrained into his subconscious muck like a Burmese refugee to a sylvan camp in one of those northern provinces, he stared into his mirrored eyes deeply. He concentrated on how these eyes seemed to gleam more in certain seconds and how his face looked even younger and more handsome than thirty in these evanescent blazes or vestige flashes of his former being, the boy whom he once was. The delusion of thinking of his appearance as that of a thirty year old man or as one much younger than this made him think of being thirteen, frightened by his first wet dreams and the accompanying stink of his body, which he then supposed to be some type of inception of death or body rot; but it also made him think of that day his mother bought him some goulashes for thirty baht and how proud he, that tiny boy, was that she would spend so much money on him. The goulashes made him think of being coerced to trudge around with his brothers along the edges of creeks and canals where they, guffawing sadists and martinets, made him abduct and mutilate crawdads to recognize that he was no better than any other creature of the natural order that gloated at itself as one individual in a species of myriad predators. And finally crawdad hunting in Ayutthaya, the home of his forlorn youth, made him think simultaneously of being with his brothers scavenging and pilfering refund cola bottles in the doorways of alleyways so as to buy a little candy from a local store, and wall crawling geckos.

In this earlier dream that he was now recalling a gecko crawled on a wooden cross that marked a mound near the trash barrel where a family cat had been buried in a shoe box coffin long ago. Then on the upper portion of the cross, the gecko became limp and stagnant, hanging on two of its arms like a dangling Christ. Hanging there inertly, it inadvertently pulled on it, this lever, opening a strange, familyesque commiseration of the parents and mourning of the brothers just as they had felt it together that time as young children long ago. But these odd, cognate feelings over the death of a pet were like distorted sound waves that bounced off the back of empty space and none of them were present—not even himself—just a gecko silently hanging on a cat's cross…feelings of loss…dross.

He sighed. In being awake or asleep in a state of mind that was literal or symbolic, everything that was known to his brain such as the certainty of having been abused by family, the certainty of any past event, who he loved and how much he loved her, his responsibility for the tragic outcome of a woman's life, and his own self-worth, which fluctuated based on the height of the wave it floated upon, registered merely as likely possibilities and vague truths. Any aplomb that he projected could only belie this frantic attempt to make sense out of his impressions of the world—impressions like indentations of a cookie cutter on his doughy brain, and impressions that were interpreted and warped within the pull of memory. He knew nothing of the world at all beyond loose impressions of incidents that were refracted myriad times off diminished memories, twisting into something other than what they initially were before becoming the subject of his discernment as to what life was and what it all meant.

While pasting the fragments of the true self into a reticulate and concocted whole following sleep, it seemed to him (who, in boyhood, had once been envious of a 12 year old friend for being told to leave home when there was, supposedly, not enough food for him to have his share), that for those like himself who knew the worst of family and had long lived as outsiders along its landmine strewn fringes, such dreams—surely not of geckos and crosses on cats' graves, but ones no less poignant in conveying the same grief of being bereft of family—were common on all Thai holidays. For it was on such days that happy or speciously happy groups burgeoned rife on sidewalks as a type of rank urban wildflower; and on these days in particular, pedestrians like himself could not walk down a sidewalk without using a hand like a machete against these impermanent but nonetheless hard and obdurate clusters of families. As gregarious as he was, he was often driven at such times by an obnoxious predilection to cut through the thickets of their obscene closeness and at the same time to take special attention to avoid the steps of shopping malls where the roots of these blooming and ambulatory groups more fully tangled his steps like seaweed washed on crowded shores. On holidays like this, families were everywhere except in fetid trains, like the one he was currently in, going to Nongkai. It was for this irrational caprice among others that, like a relatively poor man in this jiggling and forward moving box, he was absconding on an economical and flightless journey to nowhere. Although the train had couples bunked together, overall it was pleasantly exempt of family, and as such it was a bit of a refuge to Nawin. He laughed at himself for he found the self to be more comically intriguing than any other being.

It was on such holidays, as teenagers, that he and Noppawan, and the "they" that they both were, would go to the Siriaj Hospital Anatomical Museum to be with the dead freaks there, to sit on remote bleachers in tiny and obscure parks, to prop themselves on the ground against the side walls of public toilets near the Chao Phraya river with a small scattering of homeless individuals, and to loiter in other impromptu sanctuaries exempt of this urban seaweed known as family which both had an allergic reaction to.

He thought about how easily a man in these idle hours of a holiday could slip into a specific moment as a teenager or as a child. A boy always outgrew his pants and yet a forty year old man who was well educated, talented, and affluent would, at certain moments, find himself putting them on. In unblocked corridors memories could come to blast him with their spells and he would once again become a straggling boy fighting the pull of sadists on thin, stilted sidewalks along a canal. It was all very alarming and intriguing, and it prompted him to smile at the ironies of being human which totally confounded him in a most pleasant way.

Thinking not only about the dream but the family that once was, it seemed to him that any positive memories were a torturously slow and bitter sweet poison unjustly administered to him, someone who already resided fully as an inmate of his own brain; and that had he been totally bereft of love when he was young so as to be raised by absolute fiends, making him into one himself, it would have been almost preferable. It certainly would have been more liberating than just being confined in a memory chamber where periodically he could recall vestiges of family happiness enough to remember some specifics but otherwise only felt their deep residue. Having their intrusion did nothing for him apart from causing him to wish for what could never happen again.

But then what did he know? Without a good night's sleep, how were any of his ideas anything but minutely sensible at best? If anything was for pulling and clearing it was this weedy thicket of messy ideas in a landscape heavy in leanings toward sleep.

He was not exactly sure why, at the moment of contemplating this rather non-germinal seed of love that was there clogging space within his manhood, that this unpleasant recollection of his attraction to the Laotian suddenly interposed between the concept and the peaceful equilibrium that he supposed that he sought—an equilibrium that he supposed everyone sought when not bored with the tranquil and the blase. Still, it undeniably did, the way the subliminal thought of his dampened socks in the upper tomb still seemed to be aggravating his nose. He wanted to tell himself that the brief titillation, so clearly a phantasm of his own making, had not been real. It was easier than telling himself that Kimberly's death and his separation from his wife were not real; and yet he knew that even if he were able to successfully repudiate this one—this tenuous abstraction, this memory of such a queer feeling—as though it were merely the disconnection of a somewhat sleep deprived brain, such a repudiation could only be successful when he was at last off of this jejune train and out of its monotonous rhythm, and had other stimuli pumped into his orifices. Then it could be forgotten like evaporated dew on a warm, sunlit day. Until then, the stranger of the bottom bunk in underwear camouflaging an erection was tangled in the burring thickets of thought that permeated his mood as a mildew on the upper roots of a tree.

He felt disconcerted and a little anxious, and this apprehension was beginning to make him, he who had not had a shower for the past 24 hours, sweat odiously and stink as his elder brothers. He stopped himself thinking of them for beyond this point these uncultured beasts, long banished to the status of abstraction with years of no contact and diminished memories, were a forbidden subject of contemplation by the declaration of the monarch, Nawin, in the kingdom of the brain. This strange, disconcerted sense of himself was almost like a dizziness. It was as if in part he had momentarily slipped out of his body and brain to become an on-stage caricature whom he, an audience of one, was watching obtusely. He was watching himself, a mute who was trying to give a desperate soliloquy, through his only attribute of wordless, dilated eyes. He snorted and snickered at this discombobulated and confused state that was so unlike himself. His forehead somewhat furrowed in the contemplation of his puzzling idiosyncrasies. Then he wet his hand with a bit of tap water and massage-slapped his face with his fingers the way he spread his aftershave. The purpose was that of sobering himself from delusion; and he told himself that the headache was part of a slight fever. He convinced himself that he was cooling his forehead from it but this was not so. In fact the atheist (that same one who, once his child was born, had sat at an empty swimming pool contemplating what his role as father should be, but was interrupted by witnessing the manager bringing in her oblations of food, incense, and wishes for prosperity to the house of the spirits—a dollhouse on a pedestal, had inadvertently scrutinized her, and then filed the diminishing video footage into his mutating brain under the disparaging category of "S—superstitious Thai" and "T—things not to do") was now using tap water as holy water.

If in the past he thought it both amusing and peculiar that he, an artist who recorded moments in time, should perceive memory as such an assault he did not think it so strange now, for this particular recollection of the Laotian seemed like the hand of a minatory stranger smothering his face and he was somewhat frightened by it as he had been by the actual incident itself. At this particular moment he yearned viscerally for the Laotian, the stranger, to awaken and remove himself from the train at the next stop; and yet as the man was going to Vientiane, there was little or no chance of him leaving before the last stop of Nongkai. Nawin considered the fact that he could not spend an hour or two (whatever it took to get to the last stop) absconded in the bathroom, ostensibly hiding from him but really hiding from himself; still, he would play the moments of impulses in their respective order and for now the fetid metallic tiled bathroom with its metallic floor-based, urinal-shaped toilet was an oasis for the handsome lambent image of his that gleamed and scintillated from the mirror. He splashed a bit more of the water onto his face and felt better.

From non-germinal love hadn't the thought been of that stranger, his father, and then from the father had it not been of the stranger from Laos? Specifically, ruminations of being a kinder man than he wanted to be and obviously not succeeding at that to a memory of the father, and from the father to the Laotian: this, he supposed, was the chronology of his recent thoughts. He assumed that recollection of that titillation was preceded by a memory of his august but haggard restaurant-working father swaggering toward a second-hand reclining chair, telling him to scram, and seating himself with right foot resting on the left leg, thumping its smelliness into the air of what he always declared to be his home, his domain, like a judge with his gavel. Nawin was not all that sure of this being the cause, or how one would determine a cause of a most peculiar and perverted thought as this blown in with all the other perverse ideas of his subconscious when, for whatever reason, it was tossed a bit further on top of all conscious rubbish (of course, as always, he was for the most part successfully blocking out the copulatory sport of the second eldest, Kazem, and that one's playground). He may have hoped, even though he did not believe, that isolating it would be the means to an instantaneous cure from all perverse ideas not of the heterosexual variety; and for a moment he frantically unblocked most neurological corridors, no matter how stygian, until contemplating this senseless contemplation made him feel a bit nauseous.

He used humor to distance himself from this recollection of momentary derangement or crazed but inconsequential titillation by telling himself facetiously that the reason this incident was now being shot like darts into his realm of contemplation was as a form of dogged, fraternal torture inflicted by one sadistic part of the brain against the other; but as fraternal recollection could only exacerbate the headache with the introduction of more dull emotional pain, he tried to block off turbid memory and listen for the sounds of metal being kicked and folded, upper tombs going back into embankments, and seats being readjusted. Hearing none, however, he assumed that the officer who was in charge of the removal of linen and the return of the bottom bunks into seats was asleep. Being forty and not having the desire of the thirty-nine year old to make the awkward climb up the monkey bars to the upper bunk where he would once again stare into the walls of his tenebrous tomb until all elated sleepers were awakened and summoned to their descents, Nawin decided that he would loiter in this toilet, at least until someone needing to relieve himself procured his removal with a few hard and eager taps on the door. The titillation, he tried to pacify himself, was merely one more inconsequential item of rubbish blowing in subconscious gusts and like wondering if, across the aisle, a female passenger who was wearing the hijab was a southern terrorist, it meant nothing.

He had to admit that it was futile to ponder whether the barren and the fallow might be preferable to this annexation of space by a rather non-germinal seed of love that had been planted within him against his will. He could hardly extirpate it, and if the seed had stunted growth he knew of no inward manure that might cause it to grow any more. And as for manure, his thoughts jumped track within their locomotion so that he might change the persistent discourse in his solitary brain; it was peculiar that this substance should be the nutrient for growth just as it was peculiar that an instrument of urination should be the means of intimacy between a man and a woman or for that matter, a man and a man…a man and a man.

The unpleasant memory of his crazed but momentary attraction to the Laotian again returned to him as faithfully as a lover and as sadistically as a brother; and for a second he contemplated jocularly whether or not bad memories were merely shot as a fraternal infliction by one part of the brain to another. The query seemed even flatter and more pointless than before. With the same redundant churning of thought, he reminded himself that there was no point in quickly returning to his cubicle. He might as well dally until one of the officers of the train returned to remove the linen and readjust the seats or he would have to lie in the tenebrous tomb as dormant as the seed of love that existed within him.

As one of the Earth's honored higher creatures who could be consumed with a lick of nature like the 200,000 of last year's tsunami (thousands that at one time were pictured on posters dangling from bulletin boards, and pedestrian blockage rails near the Khao San Road police station and the National Gallery) it was apparent that the planet was non-welcoming of the higher guest. The world was a most peculiar place just as he was a most peculiar being within it. The fact that the peculiarity of both was rarely contemplated showed how base, inherent, and instinctual factors shaped the good and the conventional of all things. He chuckled in a couple latent, audible wisps of air at his strange mind (its creative intellect and its redundant recycling of old ideas) to which his white teeth within his brown face seemed to jingle and gleam in the mirror like ice- layered tree limbs shaking in the wind. He thought about how a man lived in his self-made shack believing himself to be a king in a palace and how his ideas were as laws that he assumed to be sanctioned by destiny, but when things went awry such a common man would in all likelihood say prayers to counter his bleak prospects. He would send them into the ether of Nirvana with the burning of his incense. Sound and sturdy atheistic ideas like those experienced by Buddha before Buddhism or Christ before Christianity could only be sustained by exceptional men as long as they had good health, the necessities of food and shelter, scant relationships at the very least, and some occupation to direct time and thought; for otherwise the scaffolding of higher and wiser vistas would teeter and break, thrusting a man who was trying to balance himself on this scaffolding of tiered thought into that abyss of perceiving the world as an amorphous blob that was continually being twisted by supernatural forces.

Still, he could not quell this concept or misconception that if only he had been treated with unrelenting contempt when he was a boy, as he very well had been but without these sweet respites, it would have "toughened [him] up" (meaning that if he had been granted nothing apart from the worst memories of his former family, he would have been as tough as a champion Thai kick boxer when not wearing makeup and a dress in the sense that no conscience would he have had to intrude onto his public and private life, no pathetic themes would he have seen in the eyes of women whom he intended to use for pure pleasure in the brothels, and no pain would he have encountered in simple walks along Bangkok's mendicant ridden sidewalks and pedestrian overpasses). He sensed that such a scenario would have been a liberation from the revolting non-germinal seed of love, and that liberation from it would be a license to use as he had been used in the sadomasochistic quid pro quo or bartering for pleasures that defined human interaction. It seemed to him even more clearly than ever that if he had been allotted the entirety of contempt when young he would not have known enough of love to miss it. It did not, however, dawn on him that such an escape, even if it did not lead him to a fated time of being locked up in one rat infested Thai jail or another as one more of life's anti-social miscreants, would have vitiated his humanity.

He made his erroneous conclusion as if even a conventional 9-5 job and TV to bed existence, which was willfully ignorant of the world at large, were better than someone seized by sorrow when trying to seek pleasures and nude discoveries in every seedy domain in Bangkok; and as if in this obsession to concatenate a frenzied body to the pleasure receptors of the lower brain and then to that upper brain that was empathic to human sorrow in so much horror, he failed to deliver anyone (for it was true that painting delivered no one to a better existence). However, in a field of serious endeavor, a discipline, he was able to see the flower in myriad events deflowered and plucked and beauty in the ugly. In a discipline he found empathy, an openness to the world, rather than apathy, uniqueness rather than replication, and in-depth understanding of himself that made him an individual, a complete being, rather than a speck in the mass, a human cow in a herd. It was not true that painting saved no one for it saved him to himself. And if he failed at being a good person for lack of role models throughout his life, it was through no fault of his own. Still, all in all, he thought of himself as a 'pretty good,' Patron Saint for those who had been treated perversely. Had he, Saint Nawin, not done his best all alone with the resources he had to build his cathedral and temple to atheism, Wat Nawin? He felt that he had.

He told himself that he was as obsessed by his colors now as when he was a five year old child; and that he was still imbuing his black and white world of early servitude with crayonic paint and chalk as if it had never ended. He ruminated on this early being whom he still was, in part or entirely—a being that existed regardless of changing years, names, and social-economic status. He could not recall anything much of those very early years beyond the residual traces of a boy being allowed to take periodic breaks from bringing bowls of noodles to the tables of his parents' customers. Those were still-life images of himself seeking crayonic ebullience that could glorify his and humanity's noodle shackles. Weren't those first images, he asked himself, undecipherable, waxy smudges on discarded paper that had been wrapped over meat? From his rather indistinct and diminished memories he supposed that they were, but the attempts were the same as now: to evince a moment in time and despite its bleakness to sense it as precious within form. And if his depictions then and now were imbued with more color than that which would have been a true rendition of the scenes, they were soft and sensitive aberrations of love that could be pardoned.

He looked straight into the irises of his eyes—eyes that, when not sparkling and jovial in social exchange or lustful and burning from carnal angels that set them ablaze, seemed, when sober, so inordinately tender. Those eyes were surely not just portals to a rather non-germinal seed of love within him; but even if they were such, and his love of women was little short of a vaginal sport (to the immature dabbler that he was who failed to be a he-man and a happy hedonist), still there was more love therein than a failed marriage could prove. No, he said to himself more resolutely, these were compassionate and suffering eyes.

He pondered his effeminate sensitivity. He did not want it—he never had—but there was nothing that he could do about it. If he were to pretend to be as insouciant and aloof as so many men, this rather craven fleeing from self would be an even more egregious departure from masculine virtues. Sensitive eyes did not entirely eclipse his joy. To women sensitive, boyish eyes were alluring. This fact was proven in his having had a plethora of them even in recent years. Most importantly eyes like these, he told himself, accentuated a youthful countenance, and for any man of forty youth was the breeze that set his dog scampering.

Then he recalled that portrait of King Rama V, Chulalongkorn, hanging in the National Gallery. The depiction of his Majesty was with eyes that sponged up human suffering. "Mine are the same," he told himself; and thus his own were majestic and august even though no royal blood was puissant within the undulations of his veins.

It seemed to him as if old ideas in slightly new arrangements, such as this obsession with an aging self and his ineptness at long-term relationships, were quickly, dizzying, and incessantly being repeated in his brain. He, another recycled being with recycled thoughts, was ostensibly a creature moving forward with the train but in reality a macrocosm of the ideas within him; and these old ideas continued to circulate around the edge of his brain like hamsters whose impressions were that with each push of the nose they would find exits leading to the vertical, the forward, as if there really were a forward within one's cage, within the ideas of one's head.

Had this particular car of the train felt like the rest instead of seeming cold enough to preserve his meat, he, this being who was constricted to the tight walls and smells of the train, would have blamed this peculiar dizziness that he was presently feeling not on the perennial chasing of old ideas nor on ideas mixed with the bad molecular smells of the toilet but, as he was sweating more than he was accustomed, on heat. In lieu of this, he told himself that his dizziness was from being drunk on the self, a plausible theory, and yet he continued to quaff his sumptuous reflection in spite of this conclusion.

The reflection was of a swarthy, handsome man, with tender, toasty eyes glazed in ideas as if spread with honey. Was the reflection an exact replica of what he looked like? The question troubled him for no matter how long he thought about it, the accuracy of a reflection was immeasurable and the subject was insoluble. All that he knew was that the reflection was of a much younger man than his actual age: that was the consistency, even if moment by moment in each barrage of new light, his age and appearance seemed to vary. And he would have stayed in the bathroom for a half hour more staring at himself in that same way in the hope of isolating an exact age for his physical appearance and to gain certainty that his youth and beauty would not submerge with the next emerging moment had a fierce loneliness not begun to consume him like fire.

So stark was it that, to some degree, it seemed that he too was on fire, that he too was plummeting as if from one of the infernos of the World Trade Center while gusts of wind were carrying to him the barely audible moans, screams, and demonic laughter of other fallers; it seemed that he too was flailing his arms against becoming a swallowed morsel cast down the vast expanse of the deep gullet of devouring skies, and obsessively- redundantly bewailing having jumped from a window at all. These torturous feelings and thoughts were beyond loneliness. It was as though the bogus concept of one's self-importance had slipped off of him entirely leaving him exposed to himself and acknowledging that he was naked and bereft of soul, a speck that was a billion times less important than a disregarded crumb flung off a kitchen table by a finger tip. He was merely a falling speck of minutiae that if not thudding unheard like a landing water balloon, smashing and exploding onto a rock in a desert, would finally decompose no differently than all other bits of matter.

He did not quite expect it and yet how could he expect anything other than that fierce loneliness would befall him? The fact that he was taking this aimless trip at all was evidence enough of sensing himself as a plastic wrapper that was being blown in miscellaneous winds. And here on board this random train, chosen for having a departure time coinciding so well with his arrival at the train station (a train instead of an airplane so that there would not be an inordinate distance between him and his wife; for if there were such a vast distance it would, for him, have been a sign of a near, looming, and pending divorce), movement was painfully curtailed when it was so desperately needed to curtail pain.

During the past few weeks since the tragedy and his wife's flogging of him with the frying pan, he managed the throbbing of his arm with pain medication, and his loneliness by filling his thoughts with feigned urgency and shuffle. He threw out canvas (completed paintings, partially completed, and blank for all did not matter), paint, pallets, and all other dirt, trash, and clutter of the space. He attempted to change the studio into an apartment by adding a bed, a couch, a refrigerator, a kitchen table, a microwave oven, and basic electric burners. He had a pharmacist fill a renewed prescription and engaged in mundane actions like grocery shopping that could belie the desperate surge of loneliness. At that time it was successful; but here on board this train taken randomly from all trains, there was no motion to hide behind, and just the obvious reminder that he was random, without destination, and out of control. Having no-one and yet as any mortal needing to cling to a consistent source to foster the illusion of permanence and worth within himself, how could the dark suffocating nets of loneliness not envelop him? How could they not? Even for such a man whose only sense of family was to look at it as a make-believe concept, a mere abstraction, which time erased or, if having something material within it at all that could be grasped, which was always snuffed away, washed out to sea as last year's tsunami victims, but needing to be washed away, vanished like Bonaparte, Hitler, Mussolini, General Phibun, and one day even the emperor Bush, but leaving its stain—a stain that would trouble the mind and upset a positive mood as any fading but never fully diminished nightmare. The stain was memory, a vague copy of barbarous family preserved in one's wretched thoughts, preserved like the male and female corpses at Siriaj Hospital who, despite their slit bodies acting the part of striptease artists of human entrails, had always seemed to him to resemble his own mother and father in their late thirties. How could they not? Even for a man who perceived all women to be programmed with urges for whoreish involvements to gain independence from the parents within the union of a man, to rob a man of the juice required for baby making and that occupational obsession of baby rearing, and foremost to gain a parcel of land to call one's own (a perspective Nawin, the empath of whores had gained from society overall and not so much from his mother and wife who both relinquished money for the love of poor men, although he himself was no longer poor having quickly ascended to the ranks of the affluent). More saliently, with this imagined tryst of himself and the Laotian being continually replayed inside his head, most ominously how, as much as an hour earlier, could he have been anything but certain that loneliness would soon be descending upon him in that dark, suffocating net? A middle aged man traveling alone on a train to nowhere, Nongkai, and then to the sister city of Vientiene, could hardly be exempt of internal lonely burnings any more than he could feel stable when twirling around in this chase within the self no matter how insouciant or cocky he seemed when reflected from others in a figurative mirror or himself in the literal one.

"I don't need a wife—certainly not one who blames me and not herself even though this surrogate mother arrangement hatched out of her egg and not mine" he told himself, but being so dizzy there was not much chance of him believing his insouciant thought. Latent ideas were supposed to be the real ones, but there was not much that was true in this thought clutter, hoisted up to convey a positive self-image, beyond attempting to persuade himself of masculine nonchalance and a wish to repudiate a vulnerable neediness that was sticking to him like glue to a boy's fingertips. And no matter how many times he tried to wash it away its grittiness was extant.

After so much decadent thought about the Laotian the implosion of his solitary tower was an inevitability.

For the most part he regretted having thrown his telephone into the garbage at the train station. He lamented it; but it was done, and had he not done this he would have humiliated himself both in the emasculate and the deprecatory sense. He would have spent the trip calling Noppawan incessantly, and if she answered he would have shown his true visceral remorse ingenuously, which she would have interpreted as an admission of guilt. He might even have begged that she let him pass through the same doors, his doors, that she had made anew with recently acquired locks during his in-patient time in the hospital. He could not think of anything more emasculate and self-deprecatory than innocently showing deep sorrow over the victims of events in which he had had an inadvertent role, and being perceived as pleading guilty because of the admission. It would cause him to suck in his bottom lip while thinking to himself, "As if she had not urged it on—as if I would have had this relationship with Kimberly, as much as I may have wanted it, without this being asked…twice having it pushed onto me..me who am weak when importuned twice on such matters…weak for beautiful women… not that I have ever had situations like this one presented to me before. That is right. I am especially weak on new and intriguing situations and this 'please impregnate my friend and make me into a mommy' bit was a completely new thing for me. Little in the world is really exciting and new so I succumbed. What can I say? As if the impregnation idea were not concocted by these schemers in some coffee shop or another a year ago…by their own admission it was." More alarmingly, if he had not thrown away his Nokia he would be calling Kimberly's apartment over and over again as if there were a possibility that he had tripped over his thoughts, that she was not dead, and that her alleged death was just one more item of rubbish blowing in his subconscious gusts.

Inebriated, he was a passive receiver of the sweet stench of human waste and of the residual cleansers and ammonia that seemed to dilute the former. It was just like in childhood when he was a passive receiver of the dual stench of family, this sanitized word also reeking of and under an ostensible cleanliness. And while he made the association of a literal stink to a figurative one, acknowledging the possibility that each could be exaggerating the other and thus proving that he did not have a clue what was real in this capricious self, he thought of that visceral yearning long ago to believe in family. As a child he wanted to believe in the purity of it and yet, having to justify the indelible somehow, all that he could do was to conclude that it was he who was wicked, that it was he whose ingratitude toward the family that conceived and sustained him made him unworthy of their association. Still the flame, the puff of smoke, and the stench of childhood had come and gone so quickly. It almost seemed to appear and vanish over night. And here he was like magic, a man materialized out of smoke and hot carbon residue, and his own august, tenacious, and still reasonably intact will—even if now he was in the toilet of a train, alone and obsessed by a hope of seeing the flame of youth in an aging self.

Familiar as family, and made fouler yet by that association in the mind, the toilet was an increasingly nauseous place for him, and he felt increasingly peculiar within it. He only felt marginally connected to the whole of himself for he was experiencing seconds of a fleeting self as if he were watching part of it on stage doing and saying nothing in particular while the partial audience of one continued to wait for a soliloquy that would not be forthcoming. It was a most disconcerting peculiarity, this inanimate and uniquely discombobulated show, as jejune and surreal as spinning his head dizzyingly while watching the lifeless dummy of himself the only prop on a barren stage. "Am I going crazy?" he asked himself many times but he knew that thought was merely a symptom of his thinking too much all alone, his sputtering like a car needing gasoline.

Believing that he had little ability to make sense out of life after Kimberly's death and perhaps even before that, yet needing life which was, after all, touch, a link beyond the self, he raised the dust tinted window to sun, greenery, and wind. The toilet tissue reeled out as a streamer and began to take off like the tail of a kite. Sun fell into the bathroom like confetti. He laughed in that ineffable joy of liberation from musty chambers of thought. "Is this true?" he said to himself. "Is it true that all anyone needs is a strong gust to slap across his face? Is that all?" for the wind was carrying light and levity to the cryptic and stygian corridors of his brain. For a moment, as he wound up the loose toilet tissue on the cylinder of the toilet paper holder, he was as convivial as one could be when in a party of one. "I guess so. All anyone needs are simple pleasures pouring into the orifices" he said; but as he stuck his head out of the window, allowing wind to massage him hard and orgasmically, he saw emaciated and barefooted monks in soiled saffron robes stepping outside a rectory that was near a temple. Then, there was a forest, and a few minutes later from a cleared sylvan embankment, the stench of billowing smoke. He saw a burning wooden "castle" that had been concocted around the departed to at least ensure a physical arrival in the ethereal when heavens and the spirit were just conjecture or faith, that adult fairy tale. He saw a family of mourners grieving as families were meant to grieve and meant to care, but all he knew of them moved faster than childhood in the rush of the train. All that he knew was from one glimpse. He thought about how quickly after the death of his parents in the car accident his brothers had sold off everything and had carried him, their slave by default, off to the big city of Bangkok. There had been no time for mourning and yet had he been given time to mourn, little reason to do so. He smiled ruefully since he felt that this equating of the fundamental human institution to a stench or other pejorative similes was a ludicrous misjudgment based upon conjectures from the stinted, pathetic, and sometimes perverse experience which made up his understanding. As his belief in family was slowly being restored he felt the sad yearning to be in that clan of what was no more, and to grow old and die among them like the departed. When it was his time to die he wanted to die in this manner, in love, with his unburnt bones sent out to float in the embrace of the river goddess. Instead, he was sure that, after a two hour, two thousand degree baking in a fancy furnace at a modern, westernized crematorium, his bones would become a gritty white sand which no one would care to keep in an urn; and that although his obituary would have the significance to become an insignificant news item, no one would mourn him personally. He closed the window and sunk into himself. He rationalized that his reason for shutting the window was to shut out the world, which to him was a bad place. It churned up the poor and the desperate, forcing them to feign a spiritual connection to get a bit of food in their stomachs, and it disposed of beings and generations of beings like a consumer throwing out beer bottles.

He knew, as much as one could know from the few tiny apertures leading to the cramped little cell of the brain, that it was in his best interest to leave his toilet theatre of one and loiter in the aisle of bunks. There he might wait for an opportunity to engage in a moment or two of small talk with staff members as they slowly materialized into vapid space to sweep and mop cursorily before passing into the next car of the train. Just a brief moment or two of feeling himself a real and solid presence in the company of others (if only in an inconsequential conversation of being asked to move from an area blocking the dust mop or being told that this particular car was smelling more and more like a locker room) would restore him to himself. There would no longer be the slight oozing away of the self or, at times, those marginally desperate eyes of one who, having a philosophy of needing no one, did not think that he had a reason to be desperate.

For a moment, the walls of the bathroom began to spin around with his mirrored face, and the faster they spun, the more the lambent reflection in flight became former diminished copies of a dominant trait of a mutating self that must have sustained cohesiveness in these former beings of what he looked like at various ages but was no more. For a moment he felt that he was imploding and he slapped more water on his face believing that he had to be suffering from a fever (surely not a nervous breakdown as his anxieties were not that acute) and yet, placing a palm against his forehead, it did not seem abnormally warm. He laughed. "Of course it won't feel warm when dripping from water," he said aloud. Then he thought of his laughter. What was it, really? It was being cognizant that one was a fickle, disorderly creature whose emotions and experiences made him into a different man with every new minute of his irrationality and his blind stumbling, and yet not being morose about it due to the fact that he maintained some degree of logic and awareness of himself.

He was certainly different from the man whom he had been as an undergraduate at Silpakorn University, young and herded into massage parlors after soccer games by his classmates' proddings and his own urgings. Thinking of his simple life then, he yearned for those former thrills that had once let him be purely free of the entanglement of barbed neurological connections of relationships. It did not occur to him that if he were to have casual sex now as he did then, such extreme pleasures would interfere with attempts at extension, this adding of scaffolding and stories to the mature mind of a mortal being. He was thinking about extreme pleasure not only from the wish to be detached of the entanglement of real relationships—not that he had any of his own now for he was still suffocating in the debris of what was before—but due to his present need for it to suffuse over his headache as cold as an ice pack.

"Something happened to me," he thought. "What was it?"; he thought for a few seconds and remembered. "I began to draw the sadness of prostitutes to compete with my peers—to show how clever I was. Then I married Noppawan to share my success… to confirm that it happened through her and for her to enjoy it…and then there was this mixing and fusing of selves like colors that could not be separated without destroying what they were painted on. Earlier, when I was still wet behind the ears, my life was certainly less complicated" —meaning that as an undergraduate in his late teenage years he had not yet gone astray from hedonistic aims.

Now in the little casual sex he had, eroticism found itself impaled in envisaging exploited frailties and male aggression behind the façade of the beer and chip gaiety of prostitutes and clients sitting around stages of dancing girls. It was pointless to determine whether or not the competition with peers or maturity itself were culprits or facilitators of more meaningful interaction, and it was pointless to determine if this artistic competition with peers had aggravated a dormant tenderness and empathy that might well have been left alone for a happier existence. He possessed the sixth sense of empathy now and it was not the type of thing one could discard. "So," he thought, "I've gotten older. It is surely better that way"—meaning something to the effect of, "So there is now this maturity with its yearning for connections to others, an aggrandizing of a petty self in union with another, making strangers of the night less erotic than they would have seemed in youth…so, there is empathy..so empathy of a former sufferer of this world to present sufferers is my lot…so I made some badly constructed bridges to women in the past as relationship building was new to me, maybe I can be a better engineer in the future."

Early into his career, he halfway believed that in his studies of the dejected Patpong whores, petrous automatons of suburbia, desperate homeless mendicants blowing bird whistles at pedestrians near the Chao Phraya river pier, and himself, an outsider inside the travail, the torture, the jailhouse of this unjust world, that he would somehow redeem all. He did pay the nude models who posed for and lay with him but apart from this, neither in amorphous smudges on tattered paper as a boy nor disciplined depictions of form on canvas as a man had he in the least contributed to the redemption of his thralls. And for all his money Jatupon was still there within him shining with tender King Rama V's Chulalongkorn eyes of suffering for his people. Those smudges helped no one but himself and for all his money he could not buy the thing that he wanted most—a hardened mask and protective gear similar to that which he had worn while fencing in his undergraduate days at Silpakorn University which might fortify him from being impaled by dejected beggars, peddlers and their carts, sidewalk restaurant workers, whores, and monks who were never given a chance. Suffering abounded—it scurried away from the heat of the sun like a legless mutant seeking the slippery shade of shadows on the sidewalks and it would be there through decades, centuries, and millenniums to come regardless of temporary external forms.

Had he been able to raise them to their full potential he would have been a missionary with a mission instead of the sordid, missionless man that he was, drawing the oppressed, but as they were connected to him really drawing the self. It was a self that was embedded in the personal life like a tree in its filth. It was obsessed by being besmirched and colorizing the besmirching. It was obsessed by dopamine, adrenalin, and serotonin within for all that he put on canvas—at least it was before retiring and giving himself to indolence, making Noppawan, perplexed at what she could converse about with her retired spouse apart from the names of the bimbos he was copulating with.

He slid down the bathroom wall into a fetal position on the floor as he was obviously imploding. For a couple moments he meditated into nothingness, and had no thoughts beyond a recognition of himself as fallen debris. It seemed real to think of his brokenness and that the pile on the floor was absent of self. He wanted to stay like this forever but thoughts, like muscles in a fresh corpse, began their spasms to be restored. They fought for redemption of the illusion of self despite his own will to shut down. He pulled a bag of cannabis, a lighter, and some rolling paper from his bulging pocket, assembled a joint, and smoked.

Seated in his fetid corner, he was tacit in thought, still in its fathoms like a corpse in a sunken and forgotten ship of long ago, and he stayed in this state of sediment and mire, nothingness and abyss, until startled by a sound of flapping and the stirring of more than the usual continuum of sharp wind. Startled, he turned toward this movement. In a split second he saw wings and then the hard eyes, head, and beak of a black bird sharply changing course when confronting itself in the mirror. Then a couple seconds later it was gone and there was nothing novel to see. It was just a reflection of himself staring back at him, this mere self. To him, a separated man without a relationship who was besieged by a redundant, torturous sense that all along, without being aware of it, the sordid grains of his life had been blowing incrementally out of his open hands and were now passing away with an exponential conspicuousness while he remained here absconding in a toilet of a train; it felt as though he were sitting in a collapsing sand castle waiting for an ultimate asphyxiation. "It was there—I am sure it was" he told himself (meaning the bird, that which was fleeting and had already fled) as if knowing the reality of something so inconsequential with absolute non-human certainty would prove that, despite doubts, his was a stable and sane sense of reality. And if a stable and sane sense of reality was not really possible in the skull-restrained jiggling of his jellified brain that told itself that it was more than all right, saner than the herds of men, he did not want to know of such things.

To calm his racing, startled heart beat and damn off the adrenaline that permeated and burnt through thought to the rigid ready-to-respond posture of his muscles in a spreading ethereal of flaming gas, he made the dark omen jocular. He told himself that the bird was the ubiquitous symbol of a man running from his own image figuratively while retaining a fixed stare at the literal one. He might have even believed that there had been no bird at all if it were not for his racing heart and the simple fact that the window of the toilet was open. The two together made the bird's existence more plausible (at least so the self said if it meant much in the mixture of inhaled cannabis smoke, swallowed antibiotics, and pain killers that had to be stretching and distorting perception by thwarting the natural flow of neurotransmitters into different speeds and in new spirals of circuitry and thought). And yet even if this copy of the bird that was branded or molded on a bit of his brain had diminished to the point where it was now as unrecognizable, weathered initials engraved on a tree, or an outline posing as form, that did not mean anything. Did not a year in the life of a boy ultimately vanish without even an outline? All that he could say for sure was that even if it did not happen, that which did not happen was gone now. He chuckled and found pleasure in tilted equilibrium juggling its lit torches of ideas. Then he thought, "Maybe I should have gone to a beach in Phuket the way I was thinking I should earlier at the train station. Watching the waves, I could have forgotten." It was a natural enough response as embedded as it was like an instinct. Intuitively one first sought large bodies of moving water, a tangible version of eternity, by which to compare and measure oneself. In so doing, his problems would become minute with the man; and this was what he meant, for the train ride out of Bangkok was doing nothing for him. "But really," he continued, "how long can one be immersed in waves unless washed out neatly with a tsunami and there is little chance of that happening again anytime soon." The main reason that he had not gone to a beach had little to do with fear of boredom. It was for fear of seeming to himself as one of "those old retired nobodies with money" who waited near the waters edge for death. To him those waiting for death who sought non-failing amusement in the waves which acted as their sedatives were a lost and lifeless abhorrence.

"Anyhow," he thought as he sucked in the smoke of his reefer, "about the bird, what am I thinking? Who gives a fuck about the bird? Why am I dwelling on this bird. If the bird came in or not it couldn't matter less. It does not even matter if I never know anything and just go from one belief to the next under the influence of whims" for it seemed to him that reality was the obsession that we were under in the immediacy of the moment. If the ultimate decay of one's exterior form made his existence dubious, he argued, the tenuous and watery interior life of a man's mind was even more that way.

With images of wings fluttering salient in his imagination, desire suddenly began to percolate within him, tingling the body like an intimate pot vibrating and ready to boil over with life, and soon he wanted a resurrection from his fetal position on the fetid floor. He wanted to fly and yet all that he could do was remove his clothes. At first, it was to be only the removal of his shirt for he needed to block the marijuana smoke from exiting through the crack of the door. Soon, however, his pants and underpants followed suit in this denuding. Soon they were there caulking the crack as well. And as wind of the open window swept over his nascent nakedness, dispersing the clouds of smoke enough so that he could see fuliginous figures within the world of his cramped toilet, he began to masturbate to the movements of smoke-clouds.

Within, he was seeing diaphanous geckos on top of the ceiling scurrying hurriedly out of the smoke of the toilet and through the other cloud he was ogling a loosely robed sheik of an olive Asian complexion who, fairly and most saliently naked in the most critical aspects of that word, sat on a rock.

Four of the geckos had appearances of his former women as much as geckos were able to resemble human beings. There was a dark, ugly one with spectacles like Noppawan. There was a white angelic one like Kimberly. There was one like the pretty white Thai, Porn, with black hair bowering to her buttocks. There was also that self centered one of childish exuberance radiating its face like a skipping five year old. This gecko was similar to Xinuae, whom long ago he had bestowed the nickname of "Chinese Karen" so as to commemorate the day in which he had learned that he was American by birth. Altogether the reptilian insects were also like these former girlfriends in carrying off his love with their eggs as they ran off to others who promised them an immediate fulfillment of biological urgings, for in reproduction there was not only the continuum of existence but womanly purpose in nurturing posterity, and such happiness had statues of limitation on it. It was not a literal smoke that they were fleeing from nor even the asphyxiation of being alone. He could tell this. It was a symbolic smoke of dying without purpose that they were trying to escape. They knew that the flaming impetuousness with its smoke cloud of being in love so as to beget children was as brief as the body's ability to replicate. They knew that nothing was more asphyxiating than a passing cloud that they had not breathed in. They knew of no grief worse than a barren existence in which they had not done the mating moves in a timely manner that were part of that illusion for meaning and purpose in their lives. To not see life as a rushed activity that one needed to bungee jump into and to run out of time to breed was a capital Sin-u-ae in organisms whose sole purpose was to reproduce a bit of the self that was a composite of replicating cells.

And as for the Laotian sheik, there he was sitting on a rock. Nawin, while masturbating, which he called "stroking the bone", paid most attention to him who had a voice that ripped through the silence. "Since you were about ready to go on your trip to the states, Nawin of the Thais with your American passport, we decided to delay you for a while and show you our cave. An hour ago we took the liberty of putting a nanotech bomb comfortably in your ass. Rest awhile and you should be able to get around tomorrow even if now there is a little pain. We had to seuter you with whatever we could find, you know—wild poppies for one. Don't worry—no plane cancellation for you and you will not feel any discomfort at all when sitting on this flight to Washington in a few days. When George Bush Junior puts the medal of freedom around your neck there will be an explosion never witnessed before. He and the entire capital will be a second and third Grand Canyon. But for now, as training, know me—my smells, my taste, the shape and feel of the contours of me. Know it as training!" It was then that Nawin ejaculated most volcanically onto himself and the wall. He did it with exquisite visceral pleasure and pain like a Thai elephant making his debut as an abstract artist. A minute later he was hand washing himself at the sink. Pushing down on the tab to get his dribble it seemed to him that every man was a dilettante artist.

From a hot Tuk-Tuk taxi ride leading to the train station to being a carcass in a refrigerated car, and then from thinking himself as a member of a couple with marital problems to one slowly sensing in his lone journey out of Bangkok that he was separate and separated, he was now journeying through the toilet of the mind that was as fetid as a brother's sock and as explosive and debilitating as the non-ending barrage of critical words from the miscreants he knew familiarly as family. He was being flushed down with the floating and volatile excrement of memory and where it all would lead he did not know. As such he thought,

- Nawin, what are you doing in there so long? [He was recalling his wife's callow voice from that first week of their marriage] Nawin? [As the marriage was new, her irritation was new; and novel and so it seemed to transcend the barrier of the door to mix sweetly with the falling waters and the rising mist of the steaming shower] You know, you did not marry the bathroom [It seemed a dulcet resonating warmth emanating to him from all directions].

He remembered how as he stood there listening to her voice and scrubbing his naked physique, he suddenly became preoccupied for the first time with wanting to isolate just why he had this belief that he was inordinately handsome when really he was as dark as dirt. The facial contours and muscular physique seemed a little better than average (whatever that meant) and he was "just right" in not being too tall or short with genitalia that were larger than ordinary, but not freakish or even extraordinary. What, he asked himself, made him special? His sullied attractiveness could even be perceived by some as mediocre were it not for the fact that this mediocrity of masculine symmetry was made extraordinary by his interactions with women and their numerous touches with which his mind had been filled over the years. Perhaps, he told himself, these women were aware of nuances that he, a male and the subject of the inquiry, was ignorant of. However, more likely, this being groped had nothing to do with being handsome at all. Perhaps he was merely a non-ugly entity glittering in a bit of fame and affluence that made one popular. In his case this surely meant being portrayed in the newspapers as naughty Nawin, the artistic savant who pursued his studies of common whores with the most uncommon diligence and when dressed, was regimented in fashionable attire that anointed the brown body of Jatupon and transformed into Nawin. So, in the bathroom he asked himself whether the gropings were really for his beautiful self or for characteristics that made these women feel beautiful in his presence. Wildly, he surmised that if he were a preserved, inanimate corpse like that in an anatomical museum this being handsome would be seen as something that was ugly so undoubtedly being attractive had little to do with physical appearance. A woman did not want an inanimate corpse of a man to stand in front of her bed but one to move with the symmetry of her movements and in public to make the unit of male and female gleam like the Emerald Buddha and scintillate like the golden roof of a temple as a hallowed luminous body. It occurred to him that subconsciously he knew this all along for it had not been the gropers whom he had married but she who knew him longest, she who had witnessed him in poverty when his dark skin seemed a revolting filth. He had married Noppawan for truth. Thinking this, with a bar of soap in his hands, he gloated in the marital bond and spoke to her.

- No, nothing comes before my wife. [he said the words in gargled mutterings distorted by his giddy softly cackling laughter] The bathroom is just my royal consort.

- What did you say?

- Forget it. He was basking in being missed, which was being loved; nonetheless, he could not help but that repeated dulcet tunes were cloying to any listener of music, that a repeated tune eventually became travail to the ear that required variety, and that love was no different from any other sweet, diminishing thing. Rinsing off the soap it seemed to him that surely love sustained itself briefly on finite fuel which was pumped from mutable rigs and that sooner or later when the energy was depleted, with much less that could be tapped to keep him dancing inside his head, he would see togetherness as the constricted space that it was. If a man were missed when he went into a bathroom and the bathroom was a subject of jealousy it was obvious that the one who missed him wanted warm, glowing, and perennial felicity and was dependent on him at all moments and that she would be pulling his leash to have him with her at every turn which made she and her male spouse, "them," as if they were handcuffed together. At any rate, that was his fear; for they who in childhood had spent so many years confined and tortured in a cell only to become adults feeling, despite amicable and gregarious facades, inwardly guarded and stiff with each new approach of another human being, an ability to rest in love's embrace was impossible.

At the mirror above the sink the fixed eyes recalled his own voice of youth on that day.—I am waiting for you to come in and wash me, he spoke loudly to transcend the bathroom door and the material world with thought.

- I am not that kind of woman, she retorted to feign an independence of her lover that was not hers. He chuckled at that which could not be believed for only he, her husband, understood that her wish for it was just that. Hers was the ingenuous voice of a romantic who believed that he brought the world to her for he was the new world, a real family replacing the dubiousness of a former one, which she had repudiated and dismissed as just a bad dream. In that sense they were both perfectly alike.

There in the bathroom, in this luxurious condominium overlooking the Chao Phraya river, the water he felt and could not seem to leave was not the water of a rich man pampering his longing for hot showers but the cold rain of June in which a much younger version of himself stood behind a food cart fettered in noodles and pork, a boy named Jatupon who served soup to customers under a leaking plastic canopy. In this state even the cognizance of his wife being outside the door faded. There was just the recollection of servitude under a cobbled leaking roof that was trying to fly off like a kite. For a few minutes his self- awareness remained as the poor servant he once was until he heard,

- 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 JatuPORN, 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 assume 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 Panyaporn 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 goddess."

- 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 prostitutes, fucking 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 lust and making love… an obstacle to reproduction, you know. Illusions and delusions— life is dependent on them. So you are not Panyaporn. 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 breasts 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 Panyaporn 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
"Porn?"

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

- What is it?

- It's too long to say. Let's just call me Bun. Porn 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 balls 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 masses. 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 titillating. 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.

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 carcass 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 passengers 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 cocks" 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 space 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-PORN or the equivalent thereof and with parents who knew and did nothing but to continue the usual mandates of errands and chores with more vitriolic contempt? No, fortunately for the masses 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 space. 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 endorsement 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 repetitively for his expedited entry into the car but minute after minute it was blocked by this encumbrance of a train officer. His tepid eagerness was not so much for a return to the confines of a space that had been designated to him but to end a silence that was becoming more disconcerting with each passing 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 space 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.

Uncertain if it were at all permissible to light up a cigarette anywhere in the train, if he would be reproached and fined if he were to do so in this particular area that he was in, or if he even wanted to smoke at all, he floundered ambivalently before dropping the subject altogether. Still needing to have something to do, he re-combed the breadth of his unwashed hair and beyond that continued to stand aimlessly, inadvertently smelling the effluvium from his shirt which in the space of twenty hours had become its own unflushed toilet. Then there was a sudden need to defer to larger movements of the moment so he backed against a wall near a sink in the corridor to get out of the way of the officer who was now officiating over two large bundles of wadded linen that he was dragging toward a container near Nawin's feet.

He certainly could have easily felt better just being there with awakening, groping creatures of movement like himself and would have begun to do so in this moment of proximity to the train officer except for an unsettling feeling that was a precursor to the siege of memory. Being in this darkened aisle, he felt as if he were once again the adumbrated boy whom he once was. It was as if he were that being who was scared to advance beyond the back corridor leading to and from he and his brother's room at his parents home, for fear that his presence would be despised by all. He snickered at these craven impulses for a few seconds but this coarse and bitter fire of laughter quickly incinerated what was jocular within it. It occurred to him that the boy's perennial sadness had so fully overcome him that it was as if what he had been experiencing were nothing other than an attempted coup. Jatupon's thoughts had briefly usurped his mind; and even in repugning the advances and regaining this mental kingdom from the boy he was certain that Jatupon was probably still there hidden behind a hill of gray matter, wounded but waiting for an opportune moment to initiate a new attack. As he was forty now it was rather obvious that these insurrections would be ongoing throughout the entirety of his life, that the insurgent named Jatupon, whose suppressed, raw, mauled emotions and thought were as intransigent as his own will within these skirmishes, would attempt to control critical sectors and regions of his mind at unsuspecting moments, and that behind the scenes he would attempt to influence and discomfit key decisions in the mind.

When the officer was gone, he remained stationary for a few moments longer to allow, or ostensibly allow, the free passage of the toilet goer who was returning back to the car, and then for a glass bottle of Gatorade as empty and hollow as he was to roll quickly past the toes of his bare feet. More significantly, however, he stood there leaning against the sink to feel something solid beneath him as the train was seeming more and more like a jet in turbulence as if, for a social creature dwelling in the waves of his stagnant body of thoughts concerning his social relationships, there really were any turbulence beyond that which was there in one's own mind. Throughout the minutes of waiting in the aisle it seemed to him that conversation was becoming as imperative as air to breathe. He needed the vibrating air of speech to interpose between his thoughts so as to stabilize a ruminating spiral into self- destructive, non-sensical darkness where there was a risk of losing all that was tangible in himself.

Like with most strangers, in both of these brief encounters with the linen officiator and the toilet goer he had respectively greeted and smiled at each of these individuals at the moments of seeing them with a sawadee khrap and a gracious nod of the head in place of the wai. As a result of being high, the expressions that he had exhibited then were exaggerated and ludicrous and generated little reaction but eyes attempting to avert him. They had given him reciprocal greetings but they had been begrudging utterances of asperity and dismissal. Thinking of this now, his smile deadened to a bland and withdrawn expression as strangers, these treasure chests in which conversation could unlock knowledge and spontaneity, seemed empty and exhausted resources. It was not only true of these two men but of those he saw at a distance now awakening in the car before him (some who were seated lengthwise or dangling their feet from upper or lower bunks): they were all diminishing steadily to remote and alien presences.

Standing there as he was, for a moment he had to hold onto the sink for the physical world seemed to be turning into a gas. For a few seconds he imagined geckos flying low in an air born mist moving like low-flying, prey-seeking pelicans and then, as they receded from him, like squirrels hopping over the caps of the waves of a river as furrowed mounds of the dirt of a field. As the mist thickened into fog, they became less and less visible. The only thing that was salient was the immediate past impaled by feelings of regret and futility for that which could not be erased and redone. There was just the immediate past which could not be consumed, altered, or forgotten. Recalling it and reliving it again boosted his stress. It was as if he were there at the Italian restaurant with Kimberly and his wife. It was as if he were once again foolishly, gullibly, and jubilantly agreeing within the surreal flickering candlelight of the table to father Kimberly's child and this agreement was being done not only with the hope of releasing pent up sexual energy for this foreign woman who had been part of his moral code of unapproachables (concocted morality the equivalent of timidity and hardly a virtue at all) but also to have something from a life that was so unremarkable and indistinct when lost within a middle aged fog. Every man by getting married divorced himself from his parents, but it was only in having a son and making his link to the concatenated continuum of life that manhood was obtained; and whether or not his parents were alive, spirits, or nothingness beyond loose elements, a man had to commune with them and declare his manhood in this way. This is what he had done, more or less, in marrying sterile Noppawan, and completing fifteen years belatedly with Noppawan and Kimberly; and yet he could think of no battleground more deleterious than family. When he was a boy, had the Burmese been at war with the Siamese, like the elephant wars of yesteryear, he would have enlisted as a soldier, for to be impaled with metal blades was less of a travail than to be impaled with mental ones, these spoken words; but ironically here he was now in his own sad concoction of family as one diminishing plume of smoke begot another.

And there on hardened benches or pews with the dust of the open windows smiting their eyes were these laborers in something slightly more opulent than cattle cars. If they preferred to be in this air conditioned car that he was in with its padded seats which had folded out into sleepers the previous night, he, the laborer that he had been born as, would almost have been inclined to go in there and stay with them. And as giddy and light-headed as he was from that which he had smoked, he was tempted even further to go into the tenth car to randomly ask sundry individuals for invitations to one of their family reunions but that within him which retained logic and a sense of the socially acceptable and plausible was only moved to laugh until his body jiggled like Jell-O at the absurdities that ran through the human mind.

Shivering and immobile as he was in the "refrigerated car," he thought of himself as a half dead carcass with sexual energy and desire having been recently depleted in a bizarre, depraved masturbatory experience that had confounded him for being contingent on oogling and grazing over an imaginary version of the Laotian in his head, and regrets about Kimberly having churned and re-churned his thoughts into a liquidated mass. It seemed to him that he was as bereft of viscous thoughts sticking to the surface of the brain as his own readable perceptions of life. He told himself that he just wanted to return to his bunk, cover himself up, and return to sleep. His brain was on a descent from its high, but it seemed to him that even if he were to land gracefully in a field of his choosing he would be whipped around in the winds of this world regardless of what he were to do. Unless he were to return to the landing strip of family his whole life would be for nothing and yet that landing strip was on gaseous Jupiter and the strip was ethereal and waving as though a gas were being pumped into it from underneath.

He knew that even if he had a telephone, all his attempts to reach his wife would be futile. There would be the same perennial ringing in his ears as when he was at the hospital broken at her hand, in the driveway locked out of his own home, in the hotel room womanless, alone, forlorn, lost, and directionless, half hoping to become a nice couple's foundling at the train station. If he were to borrow a telephone and call her now it would be wasted, unrecorded effort at making contact as a scream in space reverberating forever through and for nothing; and yet he was reaching a hand into an empty pocket nonetheless, as if his mobile phone had not been thrown into the trash barrel at the train station. He was subconsciously bending his fingers as if they were clasping the Nokia 3660, and he was tapping imaginary numbers into his palm. Then he recalled the plausible which deflated hope and imagination to earthly things. He noted the possibility of never seeing her again. It occurred to him how the plausible and real were part of his daydreams. Even in them he could not shirk reality where calls to her would be as calls to the Nirvana that was Kimberly.

For a moment he felt that same intense nosocomial sadness and regret which had caused him to cry in front of a nurse a few days earlier. If she had judged him, it had been a judgment of tenderness; but for him the emasculate act of visceral mourning over Kimberly's death in front of this stranger had been so mortifying that it was worse than spilling the content of one's curved, plastic urinal onto the bed sheets. Thinking of it now, he decided that if ever again overtaken by the tragedies of this world, slitting his throat would be the only act of self- decency. That did not mean, however, that he expected suicide to be his eminent end any time soon for it seemed to him that he could make a distinction between the negative occurrences surrounding a life from life itself, and that two people, for whatever comity that they displayed in love, were volatile wills like tremors of changeable landscapes in which the suspension bridge of a relationship was tied. Sometimes things just fell apart.

Standing there in this back corridor that was permeated by the dulcet stench of the toilet, he spent a few moments breathing in and out as deeply as he could in his own dabbling of lay yoga. It was as though he were a vacuum cleaner in reverse regurgitating from his bag the filth of this world. Then he told himself that Kimberly's post-partum depression and her swift leap into the elements had not been his fault (fault not having yet been officially determined by Bangkok police officers who, in this ambiguous situation, were perhaps as circumspect, finicky, and slow to move as squatting, urinating bitches in Lumphini Park, enamored and distracted by some such bitches, or preoccupied with matters involving the location and use of drug pushers for target practice). He was not one who could divine evil events but merely a participant banging and being banged as one of life's billiard balls. In a further attempt to calm himself he rationalized in an analogy apposite to an artist that any ostensible relationship might appear as a fusion of color in all this mixing, but the color could recede and when it did there were just two individuals staring at each other in black and white from distant corners. All relationships receded in a world of impermanence, said the atheist bombastic to himself most piously.

He told himself that it was true that the present moment was the motion and commotion now registered to the senses with the past gone and the future not yet nascent. Then he told himself that although yesterday under logical scrutiny seemed the epitome of archaic and antiquated happenings and had no baring on the present, it propped up today the way the distant past depending on family background was a solid or unstable foundation that was the pedestal for yesterday. Then he concluded that although the past was unreal, it constituted the present and could never be repudiated successfully. And as for regrets, any sentient being had regrets over negative, adventitious happenings. Still, to expend one's rational powers trying to expunge the negative happenings of this life with intangible thought seemed the most absurd act of futility.

Now relaxed in an objective distancing of himself from prevailing emotions, he conceived an idea for a painting which he did not care to ponder. It was one which, even with the right artist, would not work well as a series, let alone as one image and yet there it was projected onto the canvas of his mind as if he were destined for it. It was story and images in which a hoary man with the appearance of the train officer was moving as one urban speck in a peripatetic herd of pedestrians when for a second his phlegmatic demeanor identical to those around him was altered by a spontaneous surge of despair, a feeling which in turn caused thought about the meaning of his life to imbue and pulsate from his face. Needing or desperately thinking himself to need the continuum of former friends, he grabbed his cellular telephone from his briefcase and called one, only to find that the man was now a stranger who was distorted in age and mental outlook from that which he remembered. Then he attempted to emulate his earlier stoicism but he kept seeing shadows of the form of his deceased wife stretching out as shadows in front of store windows. Abjuring the idea of dialing the telephone number of their former home together, he did it nonetheless as if there were a chance that she would answer and tell him that her staged death had been a practical joke. Hearing an automated voice telling him of a disconnected number, he cowered into the crowd and seemed to wither there. He envisaged this as if it could be transcribed into art and as if he, a retired has-been who had merely reproduced whores and slight thematic variations of them, were the right one to depict it.

As this was not a given second but a series of changes in a few minutes of a man's life, he soon saw these scenes in a chain of diminutive beads. Every other bead would reflect the present dilemma and alternate beads would portray a significant person in his life. The significant others would be mirrors and a light source that would give some visibility to a huge diaphanous face of the man that the entire chain outlined. He was, after all, a reflection of those whom he was trying to desperately contact and it seemed to him that they should make up every other monad and that their eyes would be attempting to look at the entirety of a face that they would never be able to see fully. As it would be an anecdotal work on a large canvas, each scene, each bead of this outline of the man's face, would be a punctilious and time consuming feat to render. He did not have a clue whether the motif was incandescent or prosaic and insipid. The only thing that he believed with some certainty was that if the painting was worth doing he was not the man to implement his ideas. For in comparison to a Caravaggio, a Titian, a Michelangelo, or a Da Vinci, he knew that his talents were the top of the bottom tier of dilettantes, and even a knowledge that he was able to render his own mediocrity with the splendor of originality was not helpful. The thought of his mediocrity was asphyxiating to him and he again pondered that he was merely a prostitute painter, a fetid and odious "nobody" within the demarcated self of a Nawin Biadklang that he could never transcend. He fretted about his place in the world as if the masses of men ever found a voice within themselves, as if his earlier paintings, which were still being collected, valued, and traded, had vanquished with him off the artistic scene, and as if his brief inclusion in an article about contemporary Asian art in Newsweek had meant nothing at all.

The train officer clanged each of the metallic ladders with the handle of a butter knife while repeating, "Nongkai in one hour. Breakfasts for those who ordered them." Then he began to pull down linen, shoving tenebrous tombs back into their embankments, and readjusting bottom bunks. Nawin relinquished the idea of returning to his seat anytime soon and sat down on a box of clean linen where he contemplated the article. He recalled: "Nawin Biadklang's paintings are almost like a hybrid of Montien Boonma's Buddhist sculpture with an amateur painter's penchant for easily obtained nude models in Bangkok's red light district. Biadklang's talents at present are clearly dwarfed when compared to his predecessor, the most important Thai artist of international significance; but then youth is often seedy and so are his works, studies of prostitutes that make up his oeuvre. The combination is a somewhat refreshing exhibition that succeeds as a study of the oppressed and the human condition." It was a passage that he knew by heart and yet one where the writer's meaning still eluded him.

Then without meaning to do so, the self was eclipsed and he was asleep in a nap with its expeditious transit into a percolating sea of images. He was deluged in raw feelings, the construction material of thought, which the movement of those images brought down upon him. Within one series of loosely concatenated images, one dream, he (he or something similar as one part of himself seemed to be an audience of one watching the Nawin debacle from an objective distance) was in his mother's car driving to her home. They were returning from a cemetery in which they had failed to commune with even the positive memories of the deceased. They were inadvertently deviating into that distant, solitary region of themselves where negative and defunct memories continually reverberated against bluffs of the mind as faint, unresponsive echoes. The short journey to her home seemed long and dull and thirty miles into it they both felt ill. She asked him to stop the car so they bought some fast food and turned into a parking lot along the Mississippi River. There they began to eat while looking out onto the sodden waters under darkening skies. There was a flock of pelicans flying overhead, and geckos trying to elude the birds by floating on top of the mist.

"Look over there," she pointed. "They must be making their nests under the bridge."

"What is?"

"What is?," she mocked. "The pelicans!"

He looked. "I don't to see any of them making a nest," he murmured.

"Well, maybe I need to take you to get some new glasses."

"No, that's all right," he said. He tried to look again but this time he was distracted by an eerie roll of thunder which sounded like the ambulatory movements on creaking floor boards of the residents of an upper apartment heard from one story below.

"To the left, under the bridge. Can't you see?"

"Oh, I see them now. I bet so," he lied blandly. "A lot of them seem to be clustered over there, don't they?"

"It's got to be nests," she said as she rolled down her window to gain fuller clarity. Sitting in there with his mother, it occurred to him that their relationship was merely a spoken list of adventitious occurrences recorded by the other's senses. On this day, it was ornamental designs engraved on tombstones, xanthic blooms of Magnolia trees, the flight of birds observed from the car, and now nests under a bridge. Yesterday it had been the number of buds on her rose tree, the clothes he had not brought with him and needed to purchase at Wal-Mart, sheets and pillow cases that she needed to buy there, grass that needed to be mowed, food that they wanted to eat, a bathroom that needed to be cleaned, and other incidentals that they happened to relay to each other. As such, there was nothing personal in it at all. Still, she had nurtured him when he was young. She had been the one who had fed and clothed him, made him soup and gave him a wet washcloth for his hot forehead when he was sick, had him get out of thunder storms, told him to never walk across the street unless in consort with the masses and only at green pedestrian lights or when incoming traffic was stalled at red lights, and given him a sundry of unrecalled, commonplace items that forged the early bonds of affection. Even though she was not interested in him now, she was his mother, and he wanted to at least feign an interest in her, for feigning often became believing if acted persuasively enough. Thais thought that altruism was the impetus of parental love, the purest of love, and he told himself that regardless of the veracity of the claim he should go on thinking it was true for if he were to cease believing in its goodness, all other forms of love would be instantly rendered as mendacious counterfeits. Also, the superficial evidence of words and facial expressions often belied the inner feelings and sensitivities that might be active within these guarded human creatures. He always felt her disapproval of him even in the most favorable situations, but with the intangible and often erroneous nature of feelings, how would he know that it was not his own imagination? Furthermore, how could he on any day, let alone a day of returning from a cemetery, look into her haggard countenance and pass judgment on her as unloving? If shopping, meticulous housekeeping, gardening, and commentary on nature were her only subjects of concern and her only crimes, it seemed to him that they were rather innocuous ones. If she fortified herself by clogging her mind with these activities it seemed to him that the impalpable self needed them for definition and that human beings had to clog the space of their brains with at least some nugatory issues in order to have any degree of sentience. And yet, in her curtailed life, which was so fortified by the distractions of the plants she grew, domestic chores that needed to be performed, and diurnal trips to and from Wal-Mart, he knew that she immured herself from self-reflection. She, an active defiler, had to know the stench of her former family and yet it always seemed to him that she pretended the rot and her role within it did not exist. And more importantly, the absence of a mutually agreed past left them bereft of a present, rendering talk on the most trivial matters arduous if not ineffable.

Silence overtook them until at last he concocted something to say. "You know, birds like that quickly abandon their newborn. They have so many of them that they can leave their survival to chance."

"What do you mean by that?" she asked pugnaciously, as if comments on the maternity of birds were an oblique critique of her role as a mother. Then, sensing the absurdity of the association, she tried to modify his perception of her. "I mean you don't know anything about pelicans, do you?"

"Just an article which I looked at before we left the house." He lied. He had not read anything. It was just that he did not know what to say to this human being who was reliving a former role as a maternal autocrat, a mother whom he had outgrown long ago. This had been his lie, his benign artifice, to connect with her somehow, although the benign contained its own acerbity.

"You always did like to read."

"Yes," he smiled.

"Books and paint but rarely doing any work. That's the way it has always been with you, hasn't it?"

"I am a famous artist now. I make more money than—"

"You are nobody. You are no better than the rest of us."

"No I'm not," he admitted and pressed his lips together into a contrived smile that hid his teeth. For a moment he was reticent to say anything at all, but fearing a worsening imbroglio if he continued his silence he asked, "You've never seen pelicans here?"

"No. I said that before. I don't remember even hearing of them in this area. They are normally from warmer places. Florida, the newspaper says. I guess all of them came out here from that area."

"With a road map and a desire to see the Midwest for their holidays," he added facetiously. It was an utterance meant to make their relationship congeal in levity and friendliness but he immediately sensed the sarcastic nuance within it and that he was as much stating his own displeasure at seeing her once again. He knew that he was making things worse. "Maybe they've been in the delta all along but migrate up the Mississippi River during abnormally warm springs."

"Whatever!" she responded biliously. They were silent for they were perplexed as to what they should say to each other so the woman and the middle-aged son whom she was ashamed of (at least the taciturn disposition, pressed lips. and sunken eyes seemed to be a suppressed animadversion of a being whom she wished that she did not despise) wondered about the ramifications of saying nothing at all.

"I wish that your father were here to see this with me," she said. Unmarried and living away, he was failure personified so why would she want to be seated inches away from him? Maybe she thought that he should never have come home. Maybe she thought that he should have run away before having his first wet dream at the age of twelve thereby allowing her, even decades later, to frantically hope for the well-being and return of that perennially missing child of her imagination. Even worse, he wondered, maybe she preferred for him to be dead instead; and yet he did not know those as her thoughts or how to know much of anything really.

This was their respite after seeing the marble stones that indicated where his brother, Kazem, and his father lay, but now he was as bereft of words as he had been then and he was straggling tortuously in his head the way he had wandered with a numb and aimless gait around the tombstones. He had returned from Thailand to restore a relationship and more importantly to once again be with his mother and hear her call his name and yet for this earnest effort how could he speak with her earnestly? How could he say that he was glad that at least some of his torturers were buried underground, or admit that his best thought toward the devil who was his father was that he should rest in peace. He could only nibble his hamburger, slurp his chocolate shake, offer to share some of his onion rings with her, his stout mother, which she finally did take, and remember, as no lobotomy or other expurgation of specific memories was yet in existence. Visiting a cemetery for a man was supposed to engender lachrymose thought rather than tears and vented memories tenderly spoken; but for him whose life was an aberration, it had merely evoked minced silence. And this, his silence at the cemetery, which had flagellated her with the unalterable past, now made him repugnant to her.

At last something good, the mellifluous and the true, began to trickle from his brain and pour in with the saliva of his mouth. "I'm here. I know it has been five years—you needing to help raise your grandchildren or whatever required your attention during this time—grandkids or not, it doesn't matter… I'm not blaming you—but finally you relented and we're here together, and I am glad…glad to be here with you." It was there, a harnessed wisp of liquidated air in his mouth, but as he believed that she would only despise him were he to release the words he replaced sentiment with the mundane, as strange as it was. "Did the newspaper explain the geckos? Their migration here seems odder yet. The fact that they float up there eating bits of the sky seems odder than any pelicans migrating this far north."

She got out of the car and went to them, her birds, as nearly as she could approach them at the edge of the river, that body of water that was distended in fish and sewage and barely able to move like a fat man after gormandizing at a buffet. When she returned she had him change positions, took over the driver's seat, started the car, and they drove away. By this time the air was thundering with such a noise of pelicans that they could no longer hear the creaking of the air under the weight of the geckos.

"I don't understand your hurry to get back"

"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."