An Apostate: Nawin of Thais

By Steven Sills

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

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

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

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

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

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