Friendship—an act to seek out one like himself for confirmation of his ideas and behavior as correct or having some consistency in the world at large—this was that which he had hoped for when he bought the ticket to Nongkhai. He believed that here he would witness unprecedented suffering and in that sponge of his heart he would absorb it and burst like the clouds above. It was his belief that it would be better to die of a heart attack with eyes wide open instead of bit by bit by withdrawing into his shell of pachydermatous affluence and indifference as he moved about in this world of suffering. He watched the dark billowing clouds not from above but below reflected in the turgid green sheen of the expanding puddles that in this perennial rain formed of the ground a lake. He listened for reflections in the deluge and the inundation of water he stared into. It croaked surreally with no visible evidence of that which produced the sound, as if the water itself were transforming into toads—but then this was a reflection too, another distortion of the mind.
No, he did not expect him to return nor did he want him to but that was from wanting him to so badly. If he did not return there would be but the self, he and his thoughts droning on unnoticed to others like scrapings on the wall of a cell of solitary confinement, graffiti under a rock, thought under the rock of the skull that closed him off like the tomb did Christ. No, there was not a chance in the world of seeing him again and it was as he wished it to be—at least that which was rational in him wished it to be.
And again, if instead of using the money for more constructive purposes the Laotian were to buy beers and whores with it, the money would be in circulation in this communist bastion of basic sustenance and mild deprivation instead of being an inconsequential part of an astronomical sum in his savings back home, a vehicle for some degree of equity in this world where one would be better off to pluck out his eyes to stay ignorant about such matters. Loss of this money would be an invisible extraction from his savings, an easy riddance.
This rational element schemed was as pretentious an affectation as the clothes he wore—or any clothes for that matter. This boy, the Laotian, whom he mentally labeled as Boi 1 (to make a distinction with the other) was another self delusion, another lie. Both were bodies and he had an inexorable yearning to see this Boi 1 naked, to devour and be devoured in wetness, unity, and sensation with him.
He could say all he wanted as justification for giving him that money. He could claim the pretension that from giving it he hoped it would expiate him of the gross insensitivity of being affluent in this world of suffering and doing nothing about it, but really he wanted him to return, he wanted the paint ordered and delivered, he wanted an excuse to draw him and record his beauty and his nakedness, to shut out the world in bliss with him, to be in a ménage a trois with him and his sister in a euphoria of gluttonous devouring.
36
If the Laotian were to return with the supplies or a receipt for them, a scenario he could hardly imagine, it would further solidify a contract begotten of seemingly inconsequential words and bits of paper currency, the substance of contracts; they would be in this union and its ensuing obligation of him to paint one or another of the members of this rural Lao family even though the subjects and themes this would pertain to were yet unknown to him. He would stay with them until he completed his task, rural, sodden and destitute as they were, no doubt sleeping on the planks of a wooden shack if not on a dirt floor once again, drinking boiled tea colored tap water or worse mixed with lemon juice, eating once a day as they did, consuming rice with fish sauce or salt sometimes mixed with an ant egg curry and a few boiled vegetables purchased cheaply as they were on the verge of rotting, somtam, chicken, noodles, boiled eggs, sticky rice and mangos of the more wealthy almost as exotic as French cuisine, and out of respect to them ostentatious, flickering gold would no longer adorn his brown skin to replace his slave collar of plaited noodles and in lieu of the yellow plastic wrist band of mindless King Rama myrmidons who also wore yellow T-shirts with royal insignias on Mondays and Fridays the thousand dollar wrist watch would have to be deposited obscurely into his luggage. But were this stranger to desert him, should he in his loneliness be desperate enough to conceptualize it as such, there would be the continuation of this freedom from others, expectations of him just as he wanted, despite any neediness to the contrary, an uncompromised, unadulterated self in surfeit, in which even the painting of internal and external worlds was perceived not as expression but as a blurring or smudging of the true self by form and colors; and there would be more of the same unbearable loneliness, and emptiness. He thought this as he heard thunder in the distance of the passing storm and in an undercurrent of thought recalled explanations of thunder and lightning posed by adults, those pleasant lies of childhood that after all this time he had for the most part forgotten, memories unused that without imagining the way they once were, fell apart with pieces scattered in disarray and sometimes lost entirely, unable to be found again, void recollections of the mind.
If left alone he would be a cactus flowering obscurely touched by nothing except the ravaging sandstorms within, an ascetic monk whose insights would languish within the intact internal life of a temporary being, a fetus barely alive in a dead woman's body—if this were really what he wanted. If the Laotian did not return he might continue to have the pleasant company of his thoughts provided he held reign over their restive movements and they were directed mostly toward some external aim instead of a constant churning of old redundant ideas and ghosts of memory haunting him with their illusionary palpability as though that which had been could be grasped still. Alone here in Laos, a foreign land, there was plenty that was novel to explore and by being a sole traveler, his will, his uncompromised agenda, would be exactly as he wished it to be. And if in this solitary journey he were to become unbearably lonely, wishing to do god knows what with this family and unable to do so, his consolation would be that he had given money to those who no doubt needed it. But apart from putting into practice an egalitarian principal which gave him some satisfaction (pleasure always being the positive reinforcement of an action never to be pursued unto itself but giving personal meaning to virtuous action) there was nothing so personal in it.
No, he sought only to draw his base nakedness and feel that erect body against his own. He wanted to be intoxicated by the molecular exchange of kissing a man like yearning for a bite from a water monitor, an animal that was rife at the Silpakorn University campus in Nakkon Pathom, and to ride and be ridden to launch his sensations out of his mundane, incarcerating, gravity-bound subjugation.
There was more of the distant thunder. It was like a homeless bottle collector pushing an unwieldy cart away from him or, if it could be transmuted to sound, that of a man repudiating his own impecunious past. Hadn't that faded memory of a mother once told him that thunder was a diamond falling from some goddess when struggling in the heavens against a diminutive monster?—he could not remember any of the specifics; hadn't some uncle in the United States of America, the country of his birth, once told him that thunder was the sound of Thai monkeys angrily tossing coconuts from coconut trees in the hope of getting to the bananas? He remembered that in his naivity and love of his nativity he had fused the two stories together. He smiled ruefully as all variety of family was now gone from him, its ephemeral nature expedited by circumstance and choice. It occurred to him how quickly the child within could penetrate the veneer of a man, and by resurfacing, claim hegemony over adult thoughts. It might give way to them altogether were it not for the need to make a living in a role that in some minute way was a propulsion of human existence—not that seated on park benches or the equivalent for the past three or more years of his self- proclaimed retirement, tolerating his wife's looks of disrespect and thus bonding all the more with Kimberly in due course, he had performed many roles over the past few years…he had merely fathered a son. But of 6 billion people on the planet, how would he know that his assumptions of self were applicable to them? He could not even prove the dominant child trapped in the veneer of manhood for himself, let alone others, when from one minute to the next he was a different being entirely thinking different thoughts or seemed so as any object in variant angles of light. Maybe this assumption just related to those whose childhood, despite some sublime moments, was overall harrowing, or maybe it was merely his own idiosyncrasies.