Even with passion 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 pass 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 grass, 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 space.
He imagined himself shaking the Laotian, kicking him on his hairy behind, and dragging him out of this annexed space. He smiled and internally laughed at such an absurd caprice. The mind was littered with such protective mines, which soared through the weightless space 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 space 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 superstition, the guardian against creepy crawling memories, came upon him. He said a bit of a prayer, as much as any atheist could, to exorcise homosexual inclinations from his brain. The prayer, if it could be called such, was not conscious or subconscious thought but a type of semi-autonomous space-garbage moving in quick orbits within the mind.
Through deliberately imagining it to be so, he made a spell that transformed Buddha into a god even though there were no gods 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-god 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 god beyond the gods made in man's image, men were mere cockroaches 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 entity. Such was man's ignorance of God or gods, 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 ship 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 gods 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 superstitions 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 assistance 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 Assumption 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 space 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, anticipating 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.