"I'm not all that particular—A police woman in her communist uniform making rural rounds; a coca cola driver pulling off the edge of the road, coming to stretch his legs and finding himself hungry before he remounts his beast and drives away. That would be fine. Then I can't think of anything more that would be needed and so wouldn't have to do a thing—just watch it go down. You think you can do that?"
Nawin wondered of the ambiguity of language. Was it such because it was inadequate in conveying intentions, that the motivations of a man were multifaceted theses and antitheses, or that to keep motivation and the inner workings of the mind safe, replies were obfuscated? In any case it seemed dubious that the grunts of language were really the best attribute of man.
And he imagined, daydreamed, or dreamed that a man shaped like a zero was being sodomized in the weeds by the stiff broad boned four of a female; that on this most garish of days, Father's Day, King Booby's birthday, when all were supposed to dress in yellow attire to commemorate him (dare he mock the kingly puppet god of the military who nodded silently in the earliest of days when they knocked off his brother, and from it was deified on the condition of staying perennially silent? It was the first time he had done so even in his thoughts, but recent tragedies and experiences had unctioned his mind and under garish cynosure made all normal ways of behaving known as the artificiality of man-made-rules that they were), he and this second stranger were interlocked in a naked embrace on sodden Laotian earth bereft of yellow flags, were coupled together fetid and wild as stray dogs—a product of nature and uninhibited will denuded of pretense. And he dreamed that he was in communion with a reptile ("Listen," he imagined himself saying to the indeterminate specie, "If one doesn't hold onto his own breath why should he hold onto people? Why should he be afraid that more will not flow in? No specific one is needed, although it might seem as though he were; interaction is needed (be it with a person or dog), an outside stimulus to dilute the intensity of one single group of accumulating thoughts foundering one to extremes, but this is all. And if I can dismiss a wife after she broke a clavicle and an arm with a frying pan, I can do it of a stranger—this stranger." "No you can't," said the creature, "for she was the stitching of the wound that could be undone in time. But the train acquaintance is a resemblance of the wound itself, the wounder, and wounding, the trinity, and it possesses you—the erect cock, the blade that will pierce your death intimately." "He's not even playing with his knife any longer. He's no danger to me. He knows me now." "When your guard is down he will strike, and then you will have your intimacy.").
Then a second bus passed them by but the Laotian seemed as wholly impervious to the sensation as before. It was a bus (the right one?—that he did not know—but a bus nonetheless) so raised head and attention askance would only have been natural.
"Why didn't we get on that one?"
"It's not the right one," he said.
Nawin finally admitted to himself that there might not be a right one, and suddenly, at least in feelings, he ceased caring all that much. All that he wanted was to lie in the stink of the earth. Now there was a butterfly fluttering about his feet. If he were to lie down it would fan away the sweat that was collecting at his brow, there would be beauty in the sordid, and there, without compunction he would plunge into dreams thumping as the voices of frogs at a distance.
"Come here," he told the Laotian. Boi came over to him. "So young," he said as he touched a wisp of hair that stuck out over the boy's ear and was salient in his sense of beauty. "You remind me of someone I once knew. It's like the world recycles the same stuff. What do you want from life? I mean not what is real and before you but what you really want."
"What point is there in that? I'm here. My sister's here. When the crops are bad we get jobs elsewhere for as long as we can and then we return. I guess when I was younger I wanted to be a pilot for what it's worth now."
"A pilot?"