The Laotian smiled. "I didn't write the receipt. Did you go up into the monument."
"No, just stayed here. What's up there?"
"I don't know. What's up there? Poor people trying to sell their trinkets, souvenirs if you want to call it that. Junk for westerners to remember their trip to Laos. All of it is the same as in Thailand. Nothing that would interest you unless you want a little better view of the city."
"I see. Then I guess not."
"You don't want to be a spectator of poverty?"
"No, I've seen plenty of that and I guess I'll be seeing more if
I stay with you."
"Of course. Let's do it."
37
A third person, an older man with a handkerchief on his head, trudged hurriedly by. Had it been Bangkok, this individual would have needed to shove through umbrellad cell phone using laggards jamming pedestrian movements, but here in this village of the national capital there was nothing to curtail his movements so, even as decrepit as he was, he disappeared as dirt down the makeshift gutter that was the declivity of the entirety of road. Then there was a forth, a monstrosity of four animated legs walking toward them, a bodiless unit of Siamese twins under a sole umbrella that in passing was shown to be of separate beings, male and female counterparts, much younger than he was, and, in a state of subdued happiness, much more naïve than he could ever recall being.
Even happiness like this will not last, he thought solemnly with a sense of sympathy for these distinct individuals beginning to prevail over a bit of jealousy at the innocence of youth which had glimpsed him with his cynical countenance and he them before receding behind him, the memory relegated to the region of the brain where all inconsequential sensory input was assigned. Then despite his intention he vaguely recalled that ingenuous sense of a belief in euphoric, all-pervasive love emanating from the attraction of two beings, that feeling he could not entirely repudiate, a feeling he once had toward his brother. After this particular perversion (all sexual acts a perverse blend of imagination and the tactile and so the more usual of them also perverse but not a perversion in the usual meaning of the word, or so he justified it to himself), he had not felt it since. But then as one who had perpetual notoriety as a womanizer, a provocative offense and humiliation to any wife, he had to admit that he did not know of the longevity that might be maintained in a relationship—he who thought that marriage to an anthropologist whose features were buried under thick glasses would be beyond the atavistic jealousy of troglodytic females waiting anxiously for the hunter to arrive with his meat, baby's bone marrow, and bananas, and his penis that should only be hers, he who did not know that every woman was also a woman in instinct and reaction.