An Apostate: Nawin of Thais Part 2

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 t.i.tillations 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 pa.s.sing 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 'Jatup.o.r.n,' 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 wh.o.r.es. 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 pa.s.sed him entirely almost in the same moment it came upon him: Jatup.o.r.n 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 pa.s.sion to be like the slight bitter aftertaste of too much cloying chocolate), it was of minor consideration being the Patpong prost.i.tute 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 t.i.tillation 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.s 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 gra.s.s, 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 s.p.a.ce.

He imagined himself shaking the Laotian, kicking him on his hairy behind, and dragging him out of this annexed s.p.a.ce. He smiled and internally laughed at such an absurd caprice. The mind was littered with such protective mines, which soared through the weightless s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce 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 superst.i.tion, the guardian against creepy crawling memories, came upon him. He said a bit of a prayer, as much as any atheist could, to exorcise h.o.m.os.e.xual inclinations from his brain. The prayer, if it could be called such, was not conscious or subconscious thought but a type of semi-autonomous s.p.a.ce-garbage moving in quick orbits within the mind.

Through deliberately imagining it to be so, he made a spell that transformed Buddha into a G.o.d even though there were no G.o.ds 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-G.o.d 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 G.o.d beyond the G.o.ds made in man's image, men were mere c.o.c.kroaches 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 ent.i.ty. Such was man's ignorance of G.o.d or G.o.ds, 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 s.h.i.+p 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 G.o.ds 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 superst.i.tions 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 a.s.sistance 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 a.s.sumption 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.

3

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 s.p.a.ce 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, antic.i.p.ating 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 ba.n.a.l 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 winds.h.i.+eld 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 a.s.sumption 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 ent.i.tled 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 prost.i.tutes who were quickly manufactured off the a.s.sembly 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 wh.o.r.es 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 acc.u.mulation 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 s.e.x 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." n.o.bly and decadently, he had spent many years chasing lurid themes and nasty girls merely because he, from personal experience, could empathize with innocence being s.n.a.t.c.hed away by the hungry wolves of this world--or rather, the more complex commonality of not really being s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 s.p.a.ce 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 "Jatup.o.r.n"), 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 ma.s.sage parlors, obsessed by vibrant youth, and having found no awareness from all his days beyond his s.e.xual 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 rea.s.surance that he still possessed the same handsome face, he imagined something like an older man within sc.r.a.ping the vestige of his claws through the inner layers and then through the surface skin of his Botox starched face. The h.o.a.ry 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 G.o.d 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 c.r.a.p--well, not c.r.a.p 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 Ba.s.set 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 circ.u.mspect 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 s.p.a.ce.

- 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 pa.s.s 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 s.p.a.ce. 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.