He sensed that this imparted kiss was deliberate in its ambiguity; that his stare was a spotlight; and that his grin was one of gaining satisfaction from not disclosing all that he knew. He sensed, although he was not quite sure how, that his thoughts were being discerned: that this friend knew of his womanly sensitivity, knew of the desperate scraping on the walls of the cells of his brain, of the outlines of faces of family and friends lost to him—an action like art to compensate for diminishing memories, of his unsteady scaffolding on the verge of imploding from the loss of entire foundations of youth, of this resistance of selfish impulses that compelled lesser men to father child laborers and others sons that would be extensions of themselves at their demise, of the perception he had of women as obsessed to have a nest in which to breed birdies that once grown would in the best of circumstances cause the second dissolution of family, of this conviction that the male entity was always being used by women, and even more, of nature itself, which coerced a man in the lure of replete pleasure and the barely manageable impulses that were its precursor. Just as on the train he believed that the Laotian ad his sister knew of his attraction toward him, so now he was reading his deeper thoughts. Maybe it was the sagacity to notice the slightest expressions in a countenance that was under the influence of mood. Maybe when a man was not given an opportunity to learn from books, his scholarly pursuits were merely to gain the skill to accurately judge the essence of a man for his own use. Nawin on impulse, wanting to do rather than think, and yearning for a contract with another being rather than the circumspect reticence and insular freedom of being alone was willing to risk opprobrium rather than having to play more of this game of the straight and narrow, opened and tilted his umbrella over the Laotian and kissed him fervently. He was not sure after these brief seconds were complete if the lips of the other party had at any point pressed into his own reciprocally or were just that of a victimized passive agent compelled into action by the rape forced upon them. Aloof and disconcerted, amused and perplexed, the Laotian smiled at him wryly. In so doing it made this fraternal role seem feigned.
"You don't mind?" he asked him.
"I don't mind anything," the Laotian said
"Here's a hotel room. We could stay together until morning."
"You and I together?"
"If you want?"
"I want. I really want. But another day. I want to get you home."
39
Except for brief durations, he had not slept much the previous night. He had been preoccupied by belated concerns over his actions with the intimate stranger and an obsession to purge the travail of abused childhood by placing himself in similar scenarios so as to anoint the visceral wounds with seething pleasure. He had been besieged with worries about the possible theft of his wallet from the drawer of the night stand in the room of the guest house, and yet now he would willingly give away the money he had and the bands of gold that he wore which separated him from others of the swarthy, befouled herd, for an opportunity to sleep. He had this strange, recurrent idea that everything he had with him and all of his material possessions, assets, and estates in Bangkok were irrelevant. The idea resonated with a drowsy philosophical truthfulness that belied an organism's necessity to thrive at the expense of common laborers. It seemed to him (not that as tired as he was he could trust his ideas) as though, in a world of poverty where the true crime lay in the paucity of theft, such possessions were not his to begin with. If in being taken into the country he ended up murdered, his throat slit and that which he had taken from him, in some ways it would be a justified hypercorrection.
His sensory impressions did not seem to be fully registered, making every few minutes of "reality" shift around on their own Teutonic plates. The sensory input which made its way to the printmaker of the mind to be copied and filed in memory for future reference (ideas and situations unclear to be sketched in artfully, deceitfully, self-delusively, and credulously with his own fabrications) were, in this state, the faintest of reproductions and made him have difficulty seeing and understanding let alone embellishing, believing, and categorizing content. His consciousness awry, at certain seconds the world seemed to have become an ethereal haze and he sensed himself on a slippery precipice of the declension of the foundation of self, which one only feels in the asphyxiation of loneliness. Twice he stumbled as he walked. The second time he did so the Laotian laughed.