An Apostate: Nawin of Thais Part 4

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 relations.h.i.+ps, 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, smas.h.i.+ng 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 wh.o.r.eish 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 wh.o.r.es 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 c.o.c.ky 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 pa.s.s 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 succ.u.mbed.

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.

7

Inebriated, he was a pa.s.sive 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 pa.s.sive receiver of the dual stench of family, this sanitized word also reeking of and under an ostensible cleanliness. And while he made the a.s.sociation 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 ingrat.i.tude toward the family that conceived and sustained him made him unworthy of their a.s.sociation. 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 a.s.sociation 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 dis...o...b..bulated 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 ma.s.sage him hard and o.r.g.a.s.mically, 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 inst.i.tution 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 G.o.ddess.

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 s.p.a.ce to sweep and mop cursorily before pa.s.sing 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 ma.s.sage parlors after soccer games by his cla.s.smates' 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 relations.h.i.+ps. It did not occur to him that if he were to have casual s.e.x 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 relations.h.i.+ps--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 prost.i.tutes 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 s.e.x he had, eroticism found itself impaled in envisaging exploited frailties and male aggression behind the facade of the beer and chip gaiety of prost.i.tutes and clients sitting around stages of dancing girls. It was pointless to determine whether or not the compet.i.tion with peers or maturity itself were culprits or facilitators of more meaningful interaction, and it was pointless to determine if this artistic compet.i.tion 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 wh.o.r.es, 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 s.h.i.+ning 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, wh.o.r.es, 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, a.s.sembled a joint, and smoked.

8

Seated in his fetid corner, he was tacit in thought, still in its fathoms like a corpse in a sunken and forgotten s.h.i.+p 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sing 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 d.a.m.n 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 p.h.u.ket 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 n.o.bodies with money" who waited near the waters edge for death. To him those waiting for death who sought non-failing amus.e.m.e.nt 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 f.u.c.k 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 s.h.i.+rt 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 m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e 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, p.o.r.n, with black hair bowering to her b.u.t.tocks. 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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sport, 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 a.s.s. 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed 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 was.h.i.+ng himself at the sink. Pus.h.i.+ng down on the tab to get his dribble it seemed to him that every man was a dilettante artist.

9

From a hot Tuk-Tuk taxi ride leading to the train station to being a carca.s.s 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 ent.i.ty 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 wh.o.r.es with the most uncommon diligence and when dressed, was regimented in fas.h.i.+onable 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, diminis.h.i.+ng 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 s.p.a.ce 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,