"Not really."
Boi guffawed at the lucid and hesitant utterances of the withdrawn, distrustful being and looked amused as though it were a game to him. "Well, I suppose you'll dry quickly enough when you're back inside. Do you have a hotel room?"
"Not yet."
He was ambivalent whether or not the Laotian meant to say, "Dee" [good] in response. As the Laotian scrutinized the Thai, so Nawin did him. It seemed to him that a word had percolated from the Laotian's thoughts and yet the mouth bore nothing. The pursed lips seemed to incarcerate sound and the only thing to materialize was an imagined utterance and his own irritation at not even knowing such an insignificant item in the social sphere of man with absolute certainty. It was odd but useful, he thought, that the mind was able to distinguish that which was and was not real, especially when both were unreal in the objective measurement of passing time, and that the mind noticed distinct positive attributes in each, rarely confusing the two. In this case, however, he hardly knew whether it was a twitch of lips or a suppressed word. If the latter, he did not really know the word that it would have been but he still strongly believed the unspoken word if it were such to be "dee".
"My sister mentioned you many times. I said that you would probably never call and might not even cross the border." Nawin wondered if certain words were being withheld while others selectively released, but if so he could not see that this was different from anyone else, man or woman. And of a woman, her love might be proclaimed but never the whore within her that yearned to improve her situation in life as the most virtuous married status and money in one sense or another. Was he not missing life by analyzing everything, or was he giving weight and meaning to fleeting experience by the anchor of his ruminations? To live life fully, how much should be spent in the inward exploration of thought and outward action without being macabre or flippant and in both cases superfluous? This he hardly knew and also pondered.
"I almost returned to Bangkok this morning." He did not know why he was saying this. Like a model who would soon allow herself to be denuded there was something inside him wishing to strip off inner layers and be known to others as though knowledge of himself was not enough—as though even the palpable sense of himself in movement and thought was diminished and not reaffirmed by human interaction. Rocks moldered away and would do so all the more quickly if not reinforced by sediment; so, he said to himself, he could not be exempt of the same fate.
"You only arrived in Nongkai a day ago. Why were you thinking of returning?"
"I don't know" he said, and from the prevarication seconds of silence ensued with the discomfort of it, like the sweat, humidity, and filth of the open air clinging to his skin. As discourse was the only tangible means to gain an outline of another and the projected intertwined adumbration, the thick shadow of relationship that was the two, it was impossible to stay silent, refusing to disclose bits of himself; and as the present was at times a prototype for what would follow, an extension of the present that could be the pattern of his whole life. Needing to part the silence he said, "To see my wife if you must know."
"I must. The one who broke your arm?"
"And clavical. The same." The emphatic must enticed him and he smiled begrudgingly.