An Apostate: Nawin of Thais

by Steven David Justin Sills

At first the conversation brought Nawin reassurance. The relationship was amicable enough and he was content to be in company that kept him sheltered from being denigrated and reviled in his own thoughts, which rained down upon him. Then he thought of the abrupt petulant shift of the conversation to a tacit moodiness and the Laotian suddenly seemed grotesque and alien to him; the scenario of leaving the city limits with him vastly peculiar; that peculiarity seeming as if it were happening to someone else or viewed from a staticy television broadcast; and although acknowledging that all strangers remained such, unless communicated with and entrusted to be more, he wanted to flee the unknown cravenly and return home on that train which had taken him here.

It was the obdurate will of man that feigned reality to begin with and the weathering forces of drowsiness that loosened the elements allowing their essence to scatter like an empty shell smashed and falling through a fist. This was the quintessential truth of or lack of reality. And yet as he was beckoned to return home by ghosts of the past, corpses now resuscitated and moving to the foreground of his brain as if alive and relevant after so much time and so many changes, he was still gravitating forward toward the Laotian.

Conclusions about the world had subtly assembled in the back of his brain in the course of his life, conclusions repudiated at other times for the need to think positively and to make the world his home for lack of a choice of another, slipped through barriers of his mind to the forefront of his brain. His thoughts were in anarchy; and if drowsiness allowed tiny viral thoughts to enlarge and escape the subconscious, the weary consciousness of the mind exaggerated the extent of the mutation, the brain looking at individual thoughts as mirrors from an amusement park. He saw sparse motorcyclists, drivers, and pedestrians as their true figurative form of human vultures, and yet he did not mind for, as insular as he now was, to have his corpse clawed, scraped off, and devoured by beasts would be a most welcome act of intimacy.

He did not understand the reasons why he continued on this journey with the Laotian (this train stranger's lure of him, or the vulnerability that made him succumb to his will and agenda as if social contracts were always done in weakness and human relationships always pursued with the objective of attainment in mind), and yet he walked with him all the same. Was it simply for cock sweet on the sweetened cock vine? he posited derisively. Maybe there was the hunger for the sensual and the molecular in the attraction but for it to be only this would be a vast oversimplification. In part he was invigorated as much as a sleep deprived man could be by having crossed over the border, with his life just hours earlier seeming closed off to him now; in part it was to be with someone who could look beyond the playboy contrivances of art and life to see the soul of the atheist, the abused child beneath the man—yes, that was the lure over him but as with all things, such firey hungers came from within and were not ignited by extraneous forces without. Early childhood experiences were the arsonist, and the tower of his manhood would burn to a final implosion hoping for one who could fan ebullient flames or put him out entirely.

And of this second Boi, the Thai from Nongkai who claimed that he had come into the restaurant of the guesthouse because of the heavy rain, this unknown boy who already seemed as a passing dream, a wet dream, an evaporated being or residual abstraction oozing out of the furthest corners of memory, would he, Nawin, really have paid for his education? Overall he believed that if a letter, an email, or a phone call were to come to him resurrecting the abstraction into a living being once more, he would help him. But without sleep he hardly knew anything about himself for sure—he was like some piece of discarded trash bobbing superficially on weltering waves. He surely would help him as he had done for ladies of the night and other women whom he drew, rode, and drew once more but that fact alone did not speak well of him. Doing something pleasant for that which brought him pleasure seemed only a means to keep the pleasure coming. No, he retracted, his motives were not as bad as this. He might not be the greatest altruist or philanthropist in the world but as a man who knew it all, had suffered it all, and could easily imagine the travails of the inner lives of others, it was his obligation to correct injustices where and when he saw them. Only a lunatic sought injustices to paint or rectify, but if one alleviated the suffering that came before him and his adumbration, his life would have true worth. But what phone calls would he receive? He had thrown his telephone into the large trash can at the Hualamphong train station, so it was not as if he would get any telephone calls. Address? He was homeless. Deeds that he owned were merely paper, joint property due to hid marriage license, or so he assumed, not that attempting the eviction of wife and son had ever entered his mind. To think of them ensconced eased his mind. Email? As an artist and lecturer, he had allowed one of his students to maintain these secretarial duties. Now his account at Silpakorn University, home of the Silpakorn University Swamp Monster, the roving land and water monitor, had email galore to which he would never be able to get through all alone even if he cared to try.

What did he know? He hardly knew anything—just that he was walking with the Laotian, that a bus depot of some sort was before them, that the possibility of an amorous interlude had fallen behind some moments earlier like a handkerchief from his back pocket, and that from nigh to nay that which could be dissolved into location had become nothing. As all things in the course of time weakened, diffused, and were absorbed by the next behemoth event, so was rapacious emotion, more illusory and immaterial than anything else, and instinctual hungers that were corporeal delusions of intimacy to, more times than not, foster pregnancy, would be all the more fleeting. Now the nearest hotel was blocks behind them, and here they were.

It was like a fallow pasture for the grazing of these mountable but crippled mammoths. They were used busses that were supercilious hand-me-downs from Japan to a world capital bereft of so much. Often there needed to be multiple attempts at the ignition key to get them started, but once revived, these monsters constantly exuded and spewed their noxious and intoxicating flatulence.

He entered deep into the underbelly of one that would take him to the poverty and destitution of the masses out of city limits and illusions. If Bangkok was an opulent deception of rural life he hardly knew what would lie before him away from the antiquated, rustic capital of Vientiane; but he knew that it would be rife in life, and something far truer and more pervasive than his impoverished existence as the son of a sidewalk restaurant proprietor in Ayutthaya. He did not know of any reason for what he was doing; but at least he was living life by actually doing something. And whether or not he would find it more of a positive experience than a negative one, as encounters with women opening up their reeking legs for him, was yet unknown.

It was an adventure to which the outcome was uncertain; but as it was an adventure; at least it had the pleasantry of this component, which was sought most ardently by those who could not rest in their own company, if nothing more substantial. But then with so much that was deceased around him, meaningful relationships decomposing on the mound of earlier rot, he would have to be truly pachydermatous to not feel an impact from that which might seem extraneous. And when the inside was shaken with all in rubble, of course he would have to leave his domicile. He had mistakenly believed that during most of his time in Laos he would be sitting in some park or another reading a volume of essays on Buddhism or art, and when glancing up at the sky he would hear nothing within and without but the gentle rustling of pages turned by the fingers of the wind. Instead he heard evacuation sirens within the city of the mind.

And here he was exiting Vientiane. It was hard to believe that he had actually been in the capital. The city had monuments and a few signs in English elucidating Laotian history, but signs of international commerce or even signs in Laotian prompting capitalism on a local level, seemed scarce. These people were not competing but sustaining themselves and thus there was little thriving on the backs of others. There were no elite artists—no arts at all outside that which impoverished students sold along the river to French tourists.