The daydream had come over him like the flash of Garuda passing, leaving him here with this Laotian male. Overall he did not want to speak with him. He did not want to be sociable for the sake of being nice with those who were envisaging some use for him. Human entities by their own solipsistic notions, tried to come in, take up root, to fill the space within others brains and grow within the fertile soil of money; and yet they existed in the world too, they were sentenced to this earthly prison the same as he, they too sought meaning and hope in others when there was nothing else to gain personal meaning from, and it was not as if he were pressed for time and was unable to socialize because of some great task that awaited his attention. Was it such an imposition to provide a bit solace to others ever so minutely in human discourse even though the need for money drooled out of their eyes more than even their mouths as was the case with this one?
34
The gods had been misers and humidity like an over-packed storehouse continued to overflow onto the mortals of the deep— at least so the atheistic artist envisaged it for his own amusement while wondering why one had to personify abstraction to be amused. He ignored the answer seated next to him, the answer that this was all there was, that no idea could be personable, that being smiled upon incredulously was better than being banished in his brain. He looked up at a few dark clouds that seemed to shove out of the amalgamated unit to hover as separate entities beneath the mass. There was for him amity to be found in the effectual independence of this part of the sky that sought its own distinction. Within it there was a reflection of his own earlier struggles to extricate himself from poverty, conformity, and obscurity as if the cessation of all three would bring unto him happiness, whatever that was. Colors as vivid as those of the first crayon marks in boyhood had transmuted his black and white existence by allowing his transcendence into imagination; happiness was merely a contrast to the misery that preceded it. It was the type of pleasure gained at being saved from a near drowning, and in his case it was, in his ineffable sense of loss while wandering like a mute in foreign lands, a respite, which would make drifting, befriending clouds, and the wordless discourse of being raped in male sport, the only bearable intimacies.
At the jerk of his arm to avoid a persistent fly that seemed to want to go into a crevice of his cast sharp pain flared through his arm, and the whole of his right torso. He tried to suppress the pain to retain a phlegmatic countenance before the Laotian and he tried to suppress too, the misogynist thoughts that came upon him when reminded that his brokenness had come about because of women. In trying to separate himself from the brute impulses which were his protective aversion to pain, he realized that logic alone could not cull such feelings completely for despite his intention, women were already becoming for him an equal source of derision as men and, as they were women, surpassing them.
"What are the chances of meeting like this?" asked the Laotian as smoke propelled by a gust of wind came upon them in a gaseous fog. It was smoke from chicken and pork grilled at the hands of a sidewalk restaurant worker who, stiff and decrepit as the monument itself and a reminder, prescient and otherwise, of the type of man Nawin might have been had opportunity and success not come upon him (and the Jatupon he would one day be if only in thought within the last moments of his life), stood at the other side of the arched entry. It was smoke that he imagined to one day be his own cremated smell as if living in a city, the most advanced odorless furnaces in a temple would not be available at his expiration—smoke that should have been of Kimberly's cremation according to her wishes had her parents not ordered the encoffining and refrigeration of her remains on a flight to Orleans—smoke of his mind.
The whole insoluble subject of human relations was baffling to him. Pursued as extensive involvements, these joint, often waning shadows of mutable beings mystified and overwhelmed him. Pursued as shallow engagements in small talk with strangers, concepts, at least for now, eluded him as he tried unsuccessfully to exhume words from his mind to talk with someone whom he had no inclination to know. Nawin shrugged his shoulders.
"One in a billion," said the Laotian answering his own question.
"Is that a fact?" asked Nawin diffidently for even those limited words had to be found and forcefully educed from him and as such they fell upon each other in a stutter.
"Yes, one in a billion."
"One in a billion, okay," said Nawin and the Laotian laughed.