Nawin smiled. To merge into a family, to have a home when he except in extraneous matters of documents averring him as proprietor, was homeless, was that which he sought and wanted to hear. But then there were the bodies and the odors that exuded from them, questions as to whether one loved the bodies or the molecules that they emitted, quandries and riddles for a man, that like it or not, stank in multiple forms of neediness fetid as his brothers strewn socks, the scent of monsters that fluttered all about in his brain.
38
Friend, acquaintance: he was not quite sure which word he should categorize him under, or if the relationship were more than superficially amiable. For what he knew, walking as he did beside him when less flooded pavement permitted, and behind him when situations warranted, he was being led into outlying areas for ostensible reasons that belied the plan of shooting, stabbing, or bludgeoning him to death, which he would have invited upon himself. As touching poles warning of imminent electrocution had been a temptation earlier, so now, he concluded, he was stroking death from a more gregarious angle and no one would be to blame but himself if his early demise were to occur because of it. A gilded collar on a dog of burnt umber was still a dog and a collar. Absurdly in coming here, gold still hung from his neck, dangled from a right earlobe and as the thousand dollar Swiss watch that adorned his wrist. Like a billboard flaunting opulence and reminding others of inequalities the culprit would be the billboard itself rather than the man who brought it down. And all to undo the dog by flaunting a glittering symbol of savoir-vivre. Now that he considered it, it was a wonder that he had gotten through the previous night intact only having to pay a thousand baht salary, penitence for his soiree with an underage male who had been the stranger of his strange, intimate encounter. He did not know this individual whom he was walking with, but then he obviously did not know the childhood friend whom he had married and who had bludgeoned him with an iron skillet. People were such amorphous blobs that changed shape with the years and when confronted with the brevity of their own lives. That did not totally displease him. It made them more the pitiful mysteries that were the subject of his art and empathy. From humanism to materialism, their digressions and mutations were simply a need for permanence and significance. His wife, a scholar, had maternal instinct as her quest for permanence, her art and if for years now she had been building her empty nest, he had never blamed her but handed over money for these perennial renovations that gave her happiness in the midst of her sadness.
Friend or acquaintance, potential lover or murderer, it did not matter as the situation of enjoying the company of another was pleasant and merely being with someone irrepressible to one in such a somber state of mind. If crimes did occur in this communist country it seemed to him that they would happen in bucolic surroundings far from the scrutiny of the officers sitting in tiny police boxes on every corner of this village capital, and that if his demise were to occur at human hands it would be no different from the Pyrrhic viruses and cancer that killed incidentally, or even the immune system which was a killer in its own right. It seemed to him that there was little point in concerning oneself with the inevitable and the ineluctable; and it was indeed ineluctable for a man continually slipping and falling under the weight of retrogressive memories to seek companionship at some stage of despair within his self containment rather than to tolerate one more minute in solitude and thought. It occurred to him that he was in a state of needing to be befriended by a serial killer and he laughed.
"What's funny?"
"Nothing." He smiled.
"What?"
"Just the crazy thoughts in one's head. That's all," he responded evasively.
The two men closed their umbrellas, and each jumped respectively onto a large rock that nudged out of a turbid, fetid pool on a sunken area of sidewalk, and then made a second and broader leap to drier pavement. Straws in small bags of coca cola that each had in his right hand jiggled with phallic looseness as did their singular and murky reflections in passing over the inundated sidewalk. He could now see at a distance the bald muddied area of the bus terminal with its dilapidated secondhand buses that, according to the travel guide, had been given by the Japanese government to the retarded capital as a gesture of friendship, buses that would take them outside Vientiane albeit for him without any good reason for except for this sharp prodding feeling of needing to be with someone. It seemed that he was receding into an earlier Thailand and an earlier self, and that after so many weeks of travail (so many years really), that he was now happy that he was dirty, poor, and free as a seven year old boy in the company of brothers at a pier.
Then they saw two dogs and themselves. Two dogs dogged by cravings and two men suddenly in rapt attention around the copulating beasts. It was the mating of common four legged creatures and yet they did not seem to mind: sexuality was the mounting of another form for pure pleasure (conquest of pleasure and the pleasure of conquest) that would be exempt of suffering and thought, the forced intimate exchange with a female, the forced intrusion and annexation of a cave, a feminine domain by which in sexual contact, the male animal, having nothing and bereft of all, asserted a declaration of ownership against a weaker mortal, a fertile being of obdurate will from which there was an exciting possibility of fertilized union and untoward pregnancy; and even from outside in witnessing another species and the action performed by it, it was a ubiquitous reminder of real life denuded of brand name pretense and mesmerizing for this fact alone. This bitch was still alarmed by the swelling and gyrating of the body part still extended into and locked within her, and she continued to jerk in various futile positions in the hope of extricating herself from this peculiar alien fusion, which before ejaculation, insemination, and probable gestation—with a new alien hijacking her body—was impossible. It reminded him of those that he had seen in a more willing communion a few weeks earlier on Pinklao Street. Cars and motorcycles had swerved around them, those varmints that had been using their instruments of vile urination for pleasure, and in so doing inadvertently achieving for themselves nominal immortality amongst tortuous shoppers like him who had come out of Central Department store off an opulent cloud of various exits to the bathos of the gritty and the pornographic. For him it had been amusing and, while going to the parking garage, there had been a sheepish grin on his face. Like any male he had gazed at the exhibitionists and the duality of rapture beyond that of any female counterpart leaving the mall; like any artistic mutant of a man who from his own abused childhood pursued brothel studies as though he were an astrophysicist on the verge of a singular theory. He had gazed at the varmints and their apotheosized obscenity, vile and natural, until its completion, far longer than other men exiting the mall.