Standing in this crowded bus of upright mangled bodies twisted around each other, he tried to free his mind as best he could. He contorted his head toward a window and angled it diagonally to look up at the gargantuan sky clogged in floating masses of clouds. It seemed to him that all futile prayers ended in the ethereal bellies of these livid beasts. Still, they looked thick and real whereas he and those around him seemed, in his sleep deprived state, to be disappearing like vapor.
Why not one more stifled yearning? If he got what he instinctually craved, he would be but inflamed instinct with all the days of his life subject to hedonistic impulses, continually needing others, he would be forever incomplete. It was good that the hotels were behind him and that that inexplicable feeling for the desideratum had died down to a few burning cinders.
"He's bound to stop for a beer somewhere between two bus routes, slit your throat as a fruit vendor would a watermelon from his chilled glass cart, mince you into pieces, dump you from the Friendship bridge, and watch you, in pieces, float down the Mekong river," said a gecko. The reptile was hanging from a rail on the bus, its form grotesquely large for a gecko and resembling a Silpakorn swamp monster in miniature, with a head like a four legged dinosaur, a tongue like a snake, and a body like an alligator, but a gecko it was nonetheless. "It's your destiny and you cannot escape it. Why look so frightened? Don't you like that which circumvents etiquette?"
"Maybe."
"Maybe? Exploiter of whores, splattering their filth on canvas in your colors, your rebellion against this land where naïve belief in the goodness of the Chakri dynasty is supreme, belief that Taksin the Great after his wars with the Burmese had suddenly gone mad, that the bludgeoning of his body and the execution of his son in Cambodia had been done at orders other than that first Chakri, Rama I and that Rama IX did not arise by the assassination of his brother, the Eighth, belief that father, the abuser, knows best. You are drawn to those who do something avante garde. Why be afraid. It's ineluctable?"
"Ineluctable?"
"Ineluctable as day meets night. And you want it to happen—this ruining of you at other hands. Admit it."
"I do; but I don't know why."
"The smearing of paint, the smearing of blood, there's no difference. The murder of a rich man to get his gold, the impaling of a whore with your cock, its all mixing to get the most poignant colors on the palette. He will get you drunk. People of that type always like to drink and to do so at their friend's expense. He will notice your gold and stay silent about it as though it does not interest him at all. People of that type always do."
"And the means of doing it?"