Perhaps one did not evolve any more than the word "love" had substance beyond its four letter content and the amount of time and energy expended to gain this concocted abstraction which by being believed, managed, as a corollary, to patch the void and perpetuate the species—a species of monetary, intellectual, and physical disparity whose only ablution would come in a rain of nuclear bombs.
The postcard which he had picked up for her in Nongkhai he had forgotten in his room at the guesthouse. A maid had no doubt thrown it into the trash by now; but then it matched the telephone and life which he had thrown, as well, into the trash receptacle at the train station—yes, two negatives were better than one because the odd was never harmonious and even. What did he want of that telephone anyhow, as possessing it would not bring women back, not even the cute nurse at Siriaj Hospital, for the wound had been reopened and a reopening a vile hole he must fall through.
At this time she, Noppawan, was no doubt there in their home with his child, and so he could return to Vientiane, find a decent hotel—the few that there were—and give her a call. Better, he could boldly return to her who had been the salvation of his youth; but now they were not the same as before—their relations would be like returning to an empty house after it had been repossessed by the bank. He, the Nawin of ten years hence, would just be another variation of this thing that he called self, constructed substantially of recent memories, and erected broadly on distant general impressions of largely diminished and forgotten accounts. His true self was the self of the moment and it would only be real for a time if his colors did not blur into the colors of everything else—but then one did not live without interacting and diluting. Was not his sojourn here, this atheist's retreat, futile if he did not interact with others and mix himself in them, hoping to learn and be enhanced beyond his musty, circumscribed domain?
Why, he asked himself, was he here? If he had gone to Chiangmai, he could have been hang-gliding, or Pattaya, para-skiing, action where, for a time, being isolated, diluted, vanishing, not even a professional selfless entity, a cog in the social-economic apparatus, ceased to matter. Who could blame those who dissolved themselves fully into the mindless purity of action, the substance of the expanding universe? In the brevity of motorcycle rides and the attendance of football games he did it on a regular basis himself…but then he would always return to that unfathomable, pensive self that others muffled gregariously with the noise of companions—a pensive, mellifluous dirge sought after and found most fully, for him, in broad empty spaces.
Now, to not be all alone, separated from this mad world he meant to separate himself from, to not hear so clearly the inner voice which, in a change of attitude, he now did not want to hear fully, to not think of himself as an affluent but still aimless drifter or a delinquent parent in a fatherhood that had come about from this game of massage and ejaculation concocted by two women yearning for a child, to not be a broken aching man with a broken throbbing arm and clavicle, the gifts of a wife who despised him, to be free of that recurrent guilt-ridden memory of a girlfriend suffering from postpartum depression who leaped from a balcony to elude him, that nightmare of a mutilated corpse always fresh in his thoughts, and to stand in the eternal compass of love without a diminutive man-made version that was broken fragments in his hands, would be his ultimate rapture.
Nawin—of course the word was a name change, a mere alteration of a label from that hapless creature, "Jatupon," fleeing the past of noodle servitude to his brothers and whoredom to one of them—no, not a sex slave per se, as he had been with him from volition with all that serotonin, adrenalin, testosterone, dopamine, naivety, inexperience, youthful trust of feelings, and all the rest making him madly in love (mandates and mastery by chemistry, so hardly slavery in the traditional sense of the word which would imply an external factor); and it was done because a Buddhist monk had advised it to be done. So why, with women let alone anyone else, should he want to feel this spurious emotion of "love" once again? A time and a half had been more than enough.
"So you're not groveling back to your wife, wounded and wanting her tender mercies. I had you all wrong—good for you," he daydreamed the Laotian as saying and himself providing the response of, "No, with any violent altercation or, at least a conclusion in my mind that neither party is any good to the other—the wife to the husband and the husband to the wife, my allegiance changes."
"To a different sex than what you are involved in?"
"Why would you think that?"
"I have my reasons. Come on, all pent up in your head with no one to talk to, wouldn't you like to confess to one person?"