An Apostate: Nawin of Thais Part 14

"I didn't notice that we stopped. I am going now, sorry," said Nawin as he exited the train and walked out onto the platform.

Then he was out of the tiny train station and walking on a paved rural road not sure where he was going or what he was going toward (a left for a couple kilometers would bring him to the center of Nongkai; to the right, past the border crossing and the Friends.h.i.+p Bridge, were the rural outskirts of Vientiane; and between these destinations, finding nothing worth doing and yet as creature of movement needing to do something, was the human mind--his at any rate); but he did not care.

The couple were obviously gone, evaporated like wintery early morning condensation on windows of hill tribe huts. They were gone as the mucus and saliva that was surely spat on this road by some of yesterday's pa.s.sengers. This being so, he tossed his hands into the air as though now relinquis.h.i.+ng his will to fate and circ.u.mstance that could raze elaborate plans as it would half-hearted good intentions like his own. Then he smiled. He recognized that he had achieved what he wanted in part. The primary reason for absconding to the toilet had been to apprehend such philanthropic tendencies; but s.e.xual feelings and desire for intimacies or friends.h.i.+p aside, most of his reason for wanting to continue the a.s.sociation was to help them financially for he understood too well that to be poor and blown in different directions by injustices and random fate was an ineffable wrong.

How the male had caused memories of abuse, desire for love from the former abuser, and a whole hot stream of perverse fantasies to percolate through cracks in the surface veneer of consciousness he did not know. Still there it was--this need for love, this wish to immerse himself, if not into the arms, into s.e.x with another being and surrender to this prevailing att.i.tude that one was nothing without someone. He smiled again for his own peculiarities did not cease to amaze him and he was pleased that neediness did not overtake him completely when it could so easily do so during this difficult period of his life. From telling himself that sorrow was a universal rather than a personal issue these waves of neediness. .h.i.t the sides of his boat with vehement force but did not capsize it. His need for love, his neediness, was not so great and from this fact that he was secure in the poundings, he found the inundations somewhat t.i.tillating. It was a macabre period in his life but one to be survived intact as the distinct individual that he was.

He avoided a pack of Tuk Tuk taxi drivers who were vying hungrily for his patronage and walked along the edge of the road as a cool breeze of the north pressed itself into him. He enjoyed this sensation with the appreciative response to simple pleasures that a small child entertained, the feel of tall and rich, verdant weeds poking the edges of his toes in his leather sandals, and the redolence of the morning air that increased with the rising temperatures of the fire of the sun, though that would be, by noon, over-baked and the air would have nothing in it but dry intensity, and empty s.p.a.ce where thought would not grow but was confined like a climbing vine. Despite wistful tendencies to the contrary, he was relieved to be rid of the clutter of recent acquaintances from his thoughts. And if, he postulated, this were true of the Laotian, the nurse, and all of the myriad others, was it not true of Noppawan and Kimberly as well? Did he not want to get rid of all clutter? And while thinking this he inadvertently stepped on a dog, which made him stumble.

Before he gained his balance, the creature cried out and ran to the road but rather than begin immediate howls of imprecations it whined pitifully. "Hoop park, hoop park! nyiab," (shut your mouth, quiet) he told the dog with a softness that belied his harsh choice of words. As he bent down toward the creature he noticed its loss of fur, that its skin, seen through the multiple spots of barrenness, was flaking, and that its eyes were still and sunken.

"Sawadee and bonjour to you, Indonchinese pooch," said Nawin with a laugh and a quick nodding bow with his head which was then replaced with a stiffness in both movement and expression.

He could not be amused by another's suffering. He could not be happy when cognizant of so much suffering in the world. The sensitive boy was within and no flippant levity on his part could shake him loose. Just because manhood had piled hard layers onto him did not mean that boyhood had been peeled away.

"Poor thing!" he said while reluctantly patting the head of the filthy creature as though adverse to petting it fully while less reluctant sensitivities absorbed its sadness like a sponge. Bent as he now was to it he was emotionally and thus physically paralyzed; and if it were to take an hour or two for the creature to become disillusioned with him and to roam elsewhere, he knew that he would wait with it until such a time came. But for now, here it was fixated on him and wavering ambivalently between hope and belief that humans were the good, the G.o.d, the sustenance, and the deliverer--its cries as supplications of prayer. He kept thinking that as there was no G.o.d, G.o.d was an obligation to all humans who were in their own way, able to imagine such an abstraction and climb into its costume. It was their moral duty to ameliorate the suffering of smaller creatures, and to man himself; but the dilemma was not of one suffering creature on the precipice of life but an uncountable number of them and help of one was unjust. Furthermore, it seemed absurd to cease his own plans and prioritize a dog by getting it tranquilized, and put in a cage for a ride back to Bangkok, a long-term solution (as opposed to offering it food merely to delay the creature's hunger and ease his own conscience), but an impossible one, when in a sense he did not even have a home to take it to. To walk a long way to seek food of which he had none (not even one of his fruit filled cookies) was not much of a solution either; and yet all there was, was the suffering of the moment that he could take pains to counter no matter how many insects he trod on, or how many micro- organisms his immune system killed while he was doing so.

Telling the dog to stay, he went a kilometer or two through serpentine gravel and dirt roads until he found a raan aharn (outdoor restaurant under a canopy) to obtain some meat to a.s.suage its hunger; however when he returned with the food, the dog was not to be found. His were merely good intentions that came to no avail in an intransigent world of changes. Had there been an obscure G.o.d whose oblique influence was in urging humans of means to help the weak and vulnerable, beneficence would have been a frequent activity instead of the rarity that it was. In this situation his attempt had not only been futile but it had exacerbated misery since now, somewhere, there was a dog that had been humbled by a G.o.d (a G.o.d who earlier had stepped on one of its feet and a tail) only to be reproached with a monosyllabic, "stay," and abandoned to stray away disillusioned.

This dog, suffering from malnutrition and lack of grooming, was prey to parasites. They laid siege on and within him. As all that were at a disadvantage, were neither the strongest nor the fittest, and had a vulnerability exuding from them that made their brief lives ambulatory carca.s.ses that would fall with a brief amount of time, he believed he was like this. And it seemed to him that despite being immured in talents and wealth, that his vulnerabilities would bring him down like a sick hound; and so he suffered for the dog in that spot he had found him in.

He was bent as though seated on the ground but with his b.u.t.tocks never quite reaching the dirt and he stayed this way numb and thoughtless staring into nothingness.

19

The worn, gaunt dog had left him a half hour earlier and yet as if compelled to attend to it still, he remained in the same spot within the same squatted posture as before while his thoughts remained apprehended in remote, dark cells of his opaque mind.

His actions (or a lack of, which in this perspective would be equally inexorable) were even peculiar to him, so more with a general feeling of apprehension rather than any specific isolated thoughts, he felt that he might be, rather than questioned whether he was, on the verge of a nervous breakdown, even though nothing like this had ever happened to him before-- not that such a history had to be a prerequisite for frayed nerves in the incessant Herac.l.i.tus nightmare of s.h.i.+fting ground under his feet, or within the stress of life's chaotic disturbances, to make him impervious to the impact of tragedy.

Kimberly who, to her demise had been of tragic course his wife's friend and his special intimate, had plunged to an unequivocal death, despite that which he had power to imagine. Although he might envisage himself reaching out and blocking her from running to the balcony, thoughts of this nature, myriad natural but immaterial and inconsequential wishes, were an enormous amount of energy expended in futility all because of the sentiment of the human heart and the belief that human will, which could alter the jungles of the world by repudiating the natural forces and the limitations of man, could also alter death. And as for Noppawan: apart from being his wife and best friend, she had also been his attempt at creating the reality of a caring family to replace that which, except for certain times of resurfaced memories that were not easily extracted and were as brief and spurious as a child's nightmare, now (buried under layers of more immediate past the same as dirt) for the most part seemed to have never been, and as the former family--a family which the child within him once believed would continue forever--had been nothing but a civil war of s.a.d.i.s.ts, should never have been. She, as his new family, had lasted longer than the first, and yet the longevity of caring rather than the brevity of cruelty had made her no more real than the first.

Each day, feeling as if being drowned in the cold numbness within that seemed to come from without, humans clung to the material: money, property, friends, spouses, families and positions. For in this spinning world where people and things could quickly emerge elsewhere or vanish from the planet outright, mankind's entire quest was for less ethereal realms in which to claim a firm reality. Thus with obdurate will a man's evaporating substance was patted as firm and solid as possible.

For Nawin, however, the most plausible of the ethereal which he had taken bit by bit and pressed into this substance of "reality" was like a glacier that was fast breaking apart to the point of being sheathes of floating ice, and he was witnessing its enormous shards from afar. These enormous fragments were in a prodigious fog; and they included a vague recurrent thought that the dog was there with him, was coming to him, or would be there with him. The thought was circuitous but stalking, and whenever it reached that pentacle of the brain that was the true self which judged the merits of his own thoughts and actions as well as the intentions of the extraneous beings whom he interacted with, he almost believed that he was still with that creature--the dog with its small cl.u.s.ters of ochre fur, he with his ochre wisps of obsessive thought, both cognate in that sense; the emaciated dog, an innocent that from its starvation was prey to disease, he having been the prey of four s.a.d.i.s.ts and one sodomite in a family which decimated if not entirely obliterated the joy of his youth, and would have a reverberating effect throughout his life, both cognate in that sense as well.

Artist of nude portraits of ladies of the night, a professional womanizer, a celebrated genius, a rags to riches story: was not the life of this indolent playboy prince of paupers enviable to those males who appreciated the esoteric field of art and knew of his name? And yet his was a damaged container, a broken jar, and with time there could be no other course for his wanton licentiousness but to spill from not just a few cracks but every crack, and in so doing spell his doom: so he felt and perhaps half pondered in a new modic.u.m of nebulous thought. He feared that he and the dog were innocents that existed to be slaughtered and it would not be just a partial slaughtering of innocence from within to exist in the world, which all creatures had to do to survive, but a devouring of the gentle, the weak, the disadvantaged, and the maimed.

The catatonic was between an edge of sward and pavement leading away from the train station, between sluggish and futile conscious thought with its maelstrom of subconscious feelings, the disconnected randomness of fleeting images underneath, and complete inaction, and perpetually bent toward something when, except for insects, weeds, and dirt, there was nothing there. To him the tactile and the visual, the palpable, had to be there, only lost temporarily in the weeds like a dislodged contact lens, and yet nothing was there. His numbness made intake from the senses seem surreal and incredulous, since that which was recorded by the senses was advent.i.tious and distant from a self that in his case was slipping away in its own right. The senses were becoming faulty instruments for receiving signals while this abstract form of sympathy, adhesive to nothing that was concrete, seemed burdensome and unshakable. This state of feeling deep sadness not only for the dog that had left him but the entire world was like being paralyzed by the pallets of a tranquilizer gun even though there was nothing halcyon or pleasant in being shot with sympathy unless, in more lucid seconds, it was in considering the fact that he should be grateful that it was not empathy. Nothing--not even the dog, the catalyst that it was--seemed the direct cause of the pathos which did nothing for anyone and made him in better moments look like a young tree with sagging boughs after a tempest, and in worse ones a defecating homeless transient or the distraught middle aged man that he was. Apart from this fulsome feeling, his was the full numbness of a shadow dragged about by some colossal and incomprehensible figure.

d.o.g.g.i.ng him no differently than the persistent fly that for whatever reason continually returned to that same puddle of oily sweat on his right temple only to sometimes be shaken away all so mildly with a brief thrust of his head, there was a persistent, distorted, and grotesque memory or daydream that posed as fact. He kept thinking, if it were indeed thought to be cognizant of so little, that he (as advent.i.tious as he was at that moment) was around fourteen years old, swatting at flies, and pus.h.i.+ng a cart of grilled pork down unknown streets in Bangkok. Scores of spa.r.s.ely furred dogs began to follow. The further he went the more there were. And the more there were the more security there was for them in the communal mob, and the more aggressive were continually standing upon hind legs trying to attack the cart and rob its booty. Through this time of being chased by this desperate canine mob with its ineluctable barking of mute voices that howled the essence of the void which epitomized the planet, there was a background wall of a standing rack or trellis on which used shoes hung like vines for pedestrian purchasers; an occasional b.l.o.o.d.y limb dangled from one of the ragged sports shoes, and a gecko hung on one of the shoes' tongues. The gecko was many of one, omniscient and omnipresent, looking into his eyes knowingly. "The world has damaged you thus and thus you will be," it conveyed tacitly with those eyes and then by it or from subconscious thought he knew that it was a dent or crack in an item that gave it its feature even if the ungainly shape would lead it to be easily dropped from a maladroit grasp and break asunder into myriad fragments.

Yes, he felt alone, with his cracked past he was doomed. He had hoped for interaction with the dog as benefactors did with the poor when needing nothing from them unless in a minute way to lesson injustice, to do something virtuous which might make one a bit more than merely another avaricious creature seeking more than mere survival and pleasures greater than comfort as means for its betterment, as well as to feel grounded in reality (one physical body making an impact on another); and yet before he could do anything to help it, the dog had vanished, like the flame of a candle in a puff of wind, and now all that was tactile, all that he could touch, was the air which was as ghostly as his thought. Whether his inaction came about from a brain so active in its meaningful albeit subliminal cogitation, or from an idiot who was foolish enough to stoop down to a presence that was no more, like revisiting the rubble of one's childhood home and expecting the pieces to rea.s.semble themselves, he did not know or even ponder. He did not decry or rationalize it, but experience it and pa.s.s through it as one did any fog.

Ostensibly, he was bent toward that which he must have still imagined as the presence of the dog, and for his part would not have known any other reason for his squatted and sedentary posture, if any at all, than for its sake. More saliently, however, this positioning of himself in such a way was, in part, because of a deep melancholy over all those who were gone from his life and regret for all the experiences that they had given him--experiences that had acc.u.mulated and embedded carvings onto the walls of his brain until there were reliefs of inexpugnable, defunct memories, aggravating the past so that it was alive in him still. Most of all, he was in this posture because subconsciously he was still bent over the rubble of childhood, expecting the pieces to rea.s.semble themselves. If there were gentle and sublime moments in the distant past, tiny shards of some s.h.i.+ny splendor in the rubble, to him it would almost seem impossible that they would not be eventually restored somehow.

And to him any fragment of that which was love, that mutual delight in being in the presence of those whom one was familiar with, had to be salvaged but not knowing how this was to be done, he conceptualized the shards as having the innate power to rea.s.semble themselves, as if those rare occurrences of some degree of familial harmony had power to resurrect and reshape anew a distant, unhappy past that had ended decades ago. Despite knowing that everything moved ineluctably forward with its tattered past being dragged behind, it was only natural to have moments of being mesmerized by those shards and fixated with fixing the unfixable.

For at this moment he was remembering, all so dimly, a time of awful sweetness in the bitter, a darkness tinged opaquely in light. It was a dinner in which he had been so nervous among his family and their s.a.d.i.s.tic barraging of him, the youngest, with disparagement that he had dropped a plate of food in the kitchen, had found himself threatened with a belt, since fumbling a plate like fumbling a ball would, to the pleasure of all the rival team, exact a penalty, had seen Kazem, the molester, impede their father from swinging his belt, and then had witnessed Kazem's custodial role of cleaning up the mess at the game's closure. No, there had not been any closures for, back then, it had been one game stretched out over the years with pauses in the action each night in the respite of sleep that was sometimes interrupted by a different game entirely.

Had there been nothing but pain from this former family, it might have been easier for him to move forward with his own life than it was. His life would have been that of defying the members with every impulse. However, in doing so he would have found himself merely an irate puppet moving against the pull of the strings instead of conducting actions in support of the rational principles of man himself.

From a distance the waters of the ca.n.a.ls flowing into the Chao Phraya River in Bangkok often seemed a pure bronze with sun and blue sky peering into the whole, but close up the diluted pollutants reeked of one identifiable odor. In the same way were the thoughts of a man's mind as they flowed into the consciousness that judged their merit. Once accepted they were part of a web of thought that often seemed brilliant in beauty and intricacy but when looked at closely was merely a refinement of man's sordid cravings. Would it have been better to look inside himself less than he did? Would he have not appreciated life more to feel and examine himself less? He had posed the question myriad times but the alternative in exaggerated form was one of choosing to be as unaware as an insect, and this was hardly the preferable route for a semi-rational creature.

Was kindness toward an animal or a human being possible without first feeling the suffering in the other and then wanting to appease if not extinguish it with his own actions, pursued not so much out of benevolence per se as from imagining any efforts as appeas.e.m.e.nt of his own suffering? He would have postulated that question brazenly had he been in his right mind but as he was somewhere in left field, stuck in sediment and sentiment, there was still merely unrefined thought and it consisted solely of raw feeling for feeling was all that he was capable of. By feeling so much, he exacerbated more by feeling a repugnance toward this effeminate trait of inordinate feeling.

When the thought of the dog was not present there was merely a trail of vacuity in his mind like the swaths of trodden weeds in a forest; however, when it came with regularity it vexed him and seemed to make an enormous rut or trench in his brain with its periodic pa.s.sing, into which all his other embryonic thoughts, as nascent and inchoate as they were, fell. This was the source of his numb but all pervasive headache.

So here he continued to remain alone in this posture of a defecating dog, within this strange catatonic trance, and with a numb aching in his head. Still it was more comfortable than not for him to sit here for the retinue of weeds and his own shadow mingling restfully within them would not abandon him as long as he stayed where he was--at least this was how he felt. If now, a few hundred yards from the train station and in the open air, he was feeling lost, forlorn, and numb through the lack of purpose that epitomized his life, it was rea.s.suring to think that the sky above him was an everlasting awning raised there to s.h.i.+eld him instead of the receptacle that it often was for the urination of some obtuse G.o.d. Likewise, it was certainly pleasant to smell redolent fresh air after twelve hours of the rank agglomeration of repugnant orders in the train to which the fetid toilets were the main source, and it was more pleasant to think this than reside at the bottom of a G.o.d's urinal. Such was his state of mind and it was as peculiar as a stone cognizant of life growing from it, a bird trying to fly while feeling the memory of the ground tug hard at its talons, or an ambulatory man with a continual sensation of being paralyzed.

Much of what he saw around him was obscured in a thin veil of single memory. It was as if there were a faint light of a small excerpt of a movie, a scene repeatedly projected onto the blank walls of the brain and his intake of the outside world via his senses, in which Kimberly, most often kept free of the impact of the awning to the swimming pool, fell again and again torturously. Now, as with every moment since her death, it seemed that he continued to see concrete images of the world (the hospital room and the big Hualamphong train station in Bangkok, the Laotian siblings and the food hawkers, his mirrored face in the toilet and the big hole in the urinal leading to the train tracks, the rice fields and the wild gra.s.slands, the water buffalo and the starving dog at Nongkai train station) through this single drak-filtered reel of translucent visual images. For many days now he questioned whether or not it was normal to grieve in this way but now with the collapse of thought there were no more questions.

It was certainly not normal to stay sedentary in this posture or to grovel for deliverance or resurrection from some unknown force that he imagined to be the caretaker of this field of broken dreams. To that he sensed or understood but not enough to be motivated out of his catatonic state for he had lost sovereignty and restraint of himself. A lack of a history of mental illness meant nothing for, had he been able to consider it, entire foundations of long established cities had fallen under enough visceral s.h.i.+fting of plates so why not his own? And as if this were not enough there was forty: the stiff broad shouldered female with the erect arms making her autocratic p.r.o.nouncements to a tacit and obese zero of a man who stood beside her, and this couple had been his birthday present gained alone in the jolting movements of a train. Youth had recoiled or found itself resupinate from a collision with this single word.

He was startled by a driver beeping his horn and gesturing for him to also come into his blue three wheeled tuk-tuk taxi. The tuk-tuk was driving by with the last of a small group of foreigners who had straggled out of the train station later than he, but from the same train that he had. From the appearance of their wet and tangled hair when the tuk-tuk was slowly pa.s.sing him by he a.s.sumed subconsciously that they had taken showers in the train station restrooms and, like him, were now probably on their way to Vientiane. Foreigners that they were, he was as foreign as they and then some not because of an American pa.s.sport, which he had although having it, he neither lived in America nor from it traveled there, but because, even though not always feeling a connection to the world, he felt more that he was a citizen of it than a citizen of any specific country. In accordance with the mandates of travel guidebooks to see as many sites as possible regardless whether or not such brief exposure was in fact true experience, they would no doubt sightsee by day and then in evenings release their communal and s.e.xual yearnings by drinking "Beerlaos" with their kind, eating western meals, frequenting nightclubs, and returning with partners to hotel rooms that were some of the most nominal within world capitals-- that or some such agenda--before going to Luang Prabang and the Plain of Jars. As material as the tuk-tuk and its pa.s.sengers were, in his mind that which sped away from him wavered between the palpable and impalpable like an incongruous quark. The vehicle sparkled iridescently, stopped, and started as if blinking though not of the irregularity of the visible but of the inconsistency of the real and the material.

His entire array of thoughts, despondent and almost unknown to him, seemed emaciated and aloof like the white water buffalo that an hour earlier, from the train, he had seen standing dumbly and staring back at him bewilderedly along the tracks. So numb he was in his own despondent realm with such minimal awareness of the prowess of his internal and external faculties that rational scrutiny of action and motivation was not readily possible. Recognition of himself was a witnessing from afar as on a distant bank on the Laos side of the Mekong River. It was merely a stranger seen acting out his peculiar extemporaneous role from at a distance.

Within a nebulous understanding of where he was at and what he was doing and the abnormality of it all, the catatonic was able to recognize the fact that this perennial squatting would seem to others as though he were a homeless and disoriented beggar trying to defecate along the road. No matter the gentility of his intentions in waiting there in this odd manner, by the experiences of squatting in traditional Asian toilets a witness to his execrable posture would ineluctably link it to excrement.

Had it garnered the cynosure of security guards at that present moment it would not have been much of a surprise, not that had he lost his mind and found himself instinctively performing more natural toilet activities in the open his actions would have been innately vile for primitive actions of primate forefathers had led to the present. Civilization and all that was refined was constructed on the backs of those barbarous corpses.

Understanding immediate happenings based upon those further in the past, scheming about probabilities of the future based on past events, and floating on hopes while dragging along the weighty past, the present "reality" was only seen in glimpses.

Crazed action was merely ceasing to glance at or a.s.sess the material world around his physical presence. As for posturing as if to defecate along the road, surely any restful position was no better or worse than others if blood circulated well enough through one's limbs. And as for actually formulating an actuality about something by unequivocally defecating along the side of the road, it would not have been all that different than the elimination that dropped daily out of the open holes of the floor based Asian stools in the toilets of Thailand's trains. It was true that, unlike a man squatting toward the ground in the open air, under the weight and impact of a moving train exhaust of this nature, was desiccated and blown asunder as a vapor, and many times in the twelve hours of confinement he had watched the freedom of his own stream fall upon a metal rail and imagined or witnessed--he was not sure which--it vaporize instantaneously before him. Sedate as waves of an ocean hitting the sh.o.r.e, so the stream of urine falling onto the hot metal relaxed and rejuvenated him for to see, and what was more, to accept the temporary in the natural order was a respite from human will which tended to oppose it and believe it could thwart what was Herac.l.i.tean in all things.

If he did not think his behavior odd, he certainly felt its peculiarity nonetheless, and thus he found himself disconcerted and spinning ever so slowly in a thick and viscous void. If there were hot flares of blood rus.h.i.+ng into his face warning him that his vastly peculiar and mortified state was on the precipice of insanity they were not cogent enough to motivate him to stand and walk on; but then why would they and why would he reject this petrifaction within for, despite his wealth, he was no better than a disconnected, homeless transient himself; and if feeling was raw material to be refined into thought, what he was mining within his lethargy might only be ostensibly inconsequential.

If, when impeded from performing services or playing his meager role in the production of goods to be sold to insatiable consumers he found himself unemployed and eventually reduced to a beggar who did not even have two baht to pay for the use of a public toilet, there would be less urgency for refined means in conducting natural tendencies. He would do his natural business on the streets; and with frequency and in the company of others of the same meager resources, that which was once base would become the norm. When the individual was desensitized further in compounded experience these natural activities and the natural means of doing them would become reflexive actions once again which would evoke little or no thought. Eating and eliminating wastes were necessary functions so the human mind refused to consider them abhorrent and animalistic. That which was judged was how he did them, but even this changed when deprived of the tools of so called refinement. Prisoners with no utensils other than bolted bowls would not find them humiliating after some time. So he thought most dimly--he was actually thinking and was aware that there was a vague he from behind who was monitoring these thoughts. He smiled. The smile was in part because such an entertaining idea, even though he did not register its content beyond recognizing it as amusing, had brushed against him lightly; but mostly he smiled for knowing that thought was now turned on and from it self-awareness was forming.

Leary of the peculiar, a security guard and one of the train officers who witnessed and scrutinized the man in this posture of one defecating with pants still up, made occasional orbits around him like Mars in its closest rendezvous with the sun.

Whether the odd one was insane by having been overcharged with an excess of dopamine, or lethargic as of those who had been smashed by bereavement, they would not have known. Separately, they suspected the individual as chemically dependent and entertained the idea of seeking police involvement, but now lacking evidence for any conclusion they continued to observe him from a distance. Then a second security guard appeared out of nowhere, materializing with the sounds of his portable transmitter and receiver in nebulous static blaring from his hip. Less wary, he meandered sinuously until he made his way close to Nawin who was thinking: "Those foreigners in the tuk- tuk must be in Laos by now--going to Vientiane as I am." He smiled at the guard, staring at him with deliberate eye contact in order to project lucidity, which was after all a director's projection, a concoction, when man was a strand of knotted strands of chemical impulses, feeling, thoughts flowing down and das.h.i.+ng upon the banks of memory. "Sawadee khrap," he said with a wai. "Sorry, I guess I got lost in my thoughts. I Just broke up with my wife. A lot to think over."

"You broke up with her or she broke up with you?"

"Maybe the other way around. Anyway the better half is gone."

"Where are you going?"

"Well, I am debating that actually. Nongkai has a Buddhist sculptural garden, doesn't it? Vientiane too."

"I guess so. I've never been to either one. Never stepped into Laos."

"You never wanted too?"

"Not really."

"Why is that?"

"I don't know. Too much trouble to do it I guess. No pa.s.sport.

No particular wish to see people who are poorer than here."

"I see. Well, I need to make a left I guess and then walk straight ahead for a while. Will Vientiane be to the left or the right?"

"Right."

"Can I walk there?"