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List written for him; 5000 baht relinquished to him (2000 would not be enough, at least so the Laotian had claimed, as though he would know something about this matter; and the equivalent in kip, he said, would be confusing, which was undoubtedly true); the departure executed with the figure of the Laotian at a vanishing point around the Morning Market where supposedly he would obtain paint, brushes, canvasses, a sketch pad, charcoal pencils, an easel, and other material items so vital for painters obsessed in depicting the inner world that was demotically and mistakingly referred to as the "soul" and was inconsequential to the world at large. As body, the material produced inner consciousness, "soul," perceived in the glint of the human eye, so base materials like those that the Laotian claimed that he would obtain produced "art" of an equally perishable substance, art of a relative, dubious quality that should not come from him, no not him, and especially now.
A man penetrating the virulence in the licentious might be thought of as sagacious when young but for an older man as he, to continue to draw these incessant, dirty pictures with their redundant themes, was foolish in its like of discernment even if, and by his painting he proved, that this was all there was. And yet he had agreed to paint him but the reason for doing so no facade of innocence could belie. He should be sitting next to that famous Phra Thuat Luang Stupa constructed in the year 1565 for the wisdom that might emanate from its gold and simplicity instead of hoping for—did he dare to admit it himself?—a ménage a trois.
But what was there to be wise about? That even a homeless dog needed recognition and extension, that ants summoned each other to carry a moth carcass up a tree, that creative inspiration was sexual, and philosophical ruminations were the morbid ponderings of the inconsequential and the brief, and that one wanted to live life fully and yet if rides, interaction (professional and personal), and reflections were the only ingredients he was not sure of the appropriate mixture.
If the unlikely happened as it sometimes did, and the Laotian were to return to this monument there would be the logistical problem of them getting the material to his parent's home; but no, there would be no chance of him buying the material and returning with it. He was no doubt running off with the money. Why wouldn't he be especially when it was so obvious that he wanted him to do so for otherwise he would have gone with him to obtain the supplies or would have obtained them by himself had he known where to go. By saying, "Well, if you want it that bad you can get it and I'll go up here" (meaning inside the copied French monument) both had made a contract that the fraud or casual, personal, embezzlement was permissible and that the Laotian could take the gratuity and do what he wanted with it.
If nothing else, giving this tiny bit of money had been a nominal act of redistribution for a principle of equity, and the Laotian merely an initial vehicle for transport. The money would be injected into their economy and so if the Laotian were to spend it on booze and women or seeds for the next crop it would be of no concern for him—at least so he told himself.
With all the whores he had drawn and played with by going into with a mental microscope and a condom a bit like a marine biologist scuba diving with an underwater camera in his hand he knew the ocean of human suffering inside and out, and drawing it he fed off of it symbiotically. If those around the monument now had jobs in 7-11 stores like those in Thailand (almost no convenience stores here, no nothing for sure) wouldn't they be happy? To forfeit 4000 baht, a hundred dollars, borrowed from various sources to pay the owner in the event of stealing something, an impossibility with video monitored stores, breaking something, as though a carton of milk had such a price, or running away, which of course they could do as modern day slaves with the power to walk away but no predominant will to do so, to work 14 hours a day for a mere five dollars, 170 baht; to be paid only if the acting manager liked his or her job performance and signed a document in Thai attesting this fact, they would be elated to gain such an opportunity.
Still seated on the now half-vacant bench of the monument, he was foundering inside himself in a melancholy that contaminated his bounty as an oil spill a lagoon. He loathed the inner vulnerabilities of the human creature that needed the ersatz of others for companionship (or at least confirmation when beyond the need of extension, and when thinking himself beyond confirmation still needing sexual contact to feel grounded in reality especially when spending so much time in his own head), and yet was amused by it all the same.
The relative silence was interrupted by plaintive, orphic sounds of a flute played by a uniformed high school student who sat stiffly on the steps leading into the monument. Sometimes stridently off key the music was made all the more euphonious for the errors. Truer than inadequate words at reflecting thought, the tune was pure feeling like a Moslem call to worship and it seemed to slither onto the athiest's soul comfortably enough as though that which was desolate and discordant in mortal man who lost everything and everyone Heraculutously including innocence and the various stages of development that trod upon it was a ubiquitous leitmotiff, a black light one had to bask in for his own good, human bondage not executed onto him alone but done uniformly and impersonally to all.
It seemed to him odd that unlike Bangkok, this Communist bastion seemed to be conspicuously absent of overt beggars. He had expected the same maimed, exploited mendicants whom gangsters, eager for profit that could be coerced by sympathy, mutilated by cutting off limbs and tortured by subjecting these dysfunctional amputees of body and mind to the hopelessness of begging on the streets. Still in smaller quantities there was no paucity of human misery here: separately older men without vocation and with glazed eyes gazed onto rain that, for the most part, they probably did not consciously register; salesmen stood aimlessly behind fruit and noodle carts that were instruments of servitude and sustenance they were invisibly chained to; and hack tradesmen from shoe repairmen to homemade broom salesmen sought refuge from the rain not only for themselves but for that which they were peddling. It occurred to him that in some ways he had wanted to see unprecedented misery and that this was why he had come here instead of picking up his airline ticket and flying into San Francisco as he had planned. Perhaps this was why he had forfeited a return to a country of which he entertained a vague childish memory not of love in family but of hope that there was such a thing. The early times of stripping to his underwear and diving off piers into the Chao Phraya river with his brothers had proven the concept of family to be ever so brief.