"You should express yourself freely to your friends."
"Friends?" Nawin laughed. The laugh was mild with mild sarcasm, but it shook his body, reawakening the dull pain of his broken limb and this acute sense of falling from a precipice into an all engulfing abyss.
"What?" retorted the Laotian irascibly. "Are you laughing at me?"
"Well, yes, I'm sorry, but we don't hardly know each other."
"That could change."
"Why should it?" He was critical and cautious, but then he did not know what else he could be. There were less mendacious illusions like a marriage that lasted for some years and deliberate fraudulent ploys by calculating self-centered beings wanting to improve the circumstances of their lives more expeditiously. Both, with any real touch, would fall like a wall of sand so one had to be careful of what he leaned on, who he associated with, and what he believed if he believed in anything at all. It was a world of impermanence, a world where men married women for solidity and a sense of completion as an adult, and women had their babies (or in the case of Noppawan, a friend's baby) as though grounding oneself in the mundane would make the continual shifting of the ground stable and themselves as everlasting monuments. But, he countered, what did he know? Artists might be introverted and anti-social by nature or just inclined to justify their enmity towards the world at large.
"Why shouldn't it?" said the Laotian [meaning why shouldn't their acquaintance become closer]. Nawin could not think of any reason to oppose this particular friendliness any more than to favor it, and so he stood there neutral to the dictates of fate. If he had been more of a non-anthropomorphic deist or anthropomorphic atheist, he would have believed in the significance of this coincidence of finding him here and it would have pressed into his mind with as much religious fervor as the secular could hold. Still as lonely as he was, although adverse to admit it, he just felt its significance without giving it credence.
"Do you still have my number in case you need it? You might when traveling in Laos."
"I Threw it away," Nawin admited regretfully. And as he said this, ashamed of his own conduct, compunction bit into him like a rabid dog, and he felt friendlier towards the Laotian for accrediting him with a liberty that would not entail obligations to paint him or his family. Such moral obligations done to feel the injustice of the world and to allot money (in his case to pay them to model for a painting he did not care to draw out of a sense of pity).
"And yet we are here together. How strange. Sit down. Neither of us will be going anywhere in the rain." Nawin sat down on the wet bench next to the Laotian who wrote his telephone number out for him once again. Around them both was the mesmerizing sound of rain, now a more steady, less vehement pounding in the muddied inundation that surrounded Patuxay. With each new minute it was more like a lake instead of the elongated puddles he had seen minutes earlier.