"Not really."
"All right. So be it; if you want to stagnate that way. It's entirely up to you."
"Well, if you have to know, it can change or be for none at all.
I'm not afraid."
"Of what? Me?"
"Of disengagement. Of saying my goodbyes."
"But you followed me here" he laughed incredulously. "Why's that
Pree [older brother] Nawin?"
"Yes."
And he remembered that in the last year or two she, Noppawan, would mutely convey that most indifferent of yeses to him, her retired, worthless husband who no longer had the stamina to pussy-hunt beyond the domain of his two women, and did not even have the virility to raise a paintbrush as, he concluded, his paintings did not have either enlightened vision or the titian colors of the Greats, and that he was a commercial whore more than an artist—wives of course always wanting money and possessions, always buying and making plans for the renovations of their nests (empty with infertility as they might be), and the buyers of his canvases whom he catered to needing their luscious prostitutes to exude testosterone throughout their stiff cadaverous bodies to transport them from the mundane. And when he tried to share the poignancy of the seemingly blasé and inconsequential of a given day of his leisure and meditation at the zoo, various parks, and at park benches (the patterns of clouds, the black diamond sparkle of shadows of leaves on the ground, the lofty fan of bold pigeons perching on his table to steal his Styrofoam container of rice, wind carrying the smell of rejuvenating blades of grass—that same perennial and eternal smell he remembered from 35 years ago) often she, Noppawan, would continue to make dinner in silence, mutely conveying that most indifferent of yeses to him, pony tail nodding indifferently against the nape of her neck in affirmation of nothing.
He needed to urinate and obviously so did the younger man who was no longer looking at the road but toward the land with forest behind them, and a pasture with free roaming emaciated water buffalo at a distance. Unzipping his pants, the Laotian aimed the release of the arch of his liquids to nature and to the exhibition of all passing cars.
"How long are we going to wait out here?" complained Nawin in his somniloquy. That which he was hearing did not seem to come from himself at all but an invisible presence with the utterances of his own voice projected like an actor off screen, and the Laotian an alien performance put in front of his face, so as to be more real than any real being, a surreal and magnificent presence, magni-real in a sense. To be able to stare at him justifiably, words had to supply a pretext, and so the complaint spilled out of a mouth of a man who wanted to see another male's nakedness.