An Apostate: Nawin of Thais

Copyright (C) 2008 by Steven Sills.
An Apostate: Nawin of Thais
By Steven Sills
He assumed that in being exhausted from sporadic fits of sleep and wakeful spans of dull, hypnagogic thoughts matching the inertia of his confinement he would finally become ensconced there, in this train jostling him around, and at last fall asleep. This was his hope; but in the meantime there was a languid battle with insomnia and inordinate time that he, from his exalted tomb, disdainfully sullied. A god watching the cookie wrappers that he was emptying into his mouth from the upper coffin glided downward like the leaves of a deciduous tree; he was remembering happier times and in this confined space it was taking him to the edge of madness. It seemed to him that society lied about it all: motherhood as the continuation of playing with dolls, manhood epitomized by competition and money, and old age the enjoyment of spending time reliving the incidents of the past. Children were not nice neat dolls to which one claimed ownership, manhood had to be more than having a heart attack from the stress of making a living and leaving all to one's widow, and old age, if it came, had to be besieged with problems of the present, which would be less painful than recalling happy times that fleeted by and had no chance of being resumed once again. This moving world that he was in was like the 67,000 mile an hour projectile of the Earth, and he sullied it (definitely the floor of the Pullman car, but perhaps the world as a whole) with the crumbs of his fruit pastries. He just lay there with the hours like a corpse in a morgue, eating and filling dead space with his crumbs. Sometimes, to occupy himself, he would continue the same game that he had pursued three hours earlier before the seat-and-window thief left his friends and crossed over, annexing his space and engendering his expulsion. At that time, when he had been alone looking out of the window at the tussling shadows of trees and their counterparts, the light, on the rich verdant fields and on the rough and uneven wooden strips of the rotting platforms of the train stations of all these small towns, he had listened to sounds. Then a game of exhilaration instead of a game of the mundane, it had been an inane guesses that the particular car he was in would hit those coupled metallic bumps of the rails while on this incessant trip to Nongkhai, moving faster than both the train and the Earth combined, even if the movement was a desultory caprice with all this continual shifting of itself in present and past tenses as well as its futuristic daydreams, his mind tried to slow this weltering; it invented its games of distractions, its clutter.