"Once upon a time."
"Once upon a time," repeated Nawin thinking of a time when family was an eternal concept in a young boy's mind and one's life was rife in possibilities. He felt sadness, the eternal sadness, reflected in this one who called himself Boi and he knew that he loved him. He tried to kiss him but the Laotian feigned a laugh and pulled away.
"Quit that, you joker. Save your kisses for beautiful Laotian women. I know what you want. You wouldn't be much of a man if you didn't. Thais with money are no different than other sex tourists that come to this country for a piece of Laotian pussy. All those paintings—you must be a real ladies man. Well, it looks like we will be here for a while. We might as well be comfortable as we wait. Let's cross over there and sit down." He pointed to a small shack and an awning at a distance. "You buy the drinks and we'll motion for the bus to stop when it gets here."
"You mean we have been waiting on the wrong side?"
The Laotian laughed. "Well, not exactly. There's a different way. There always is. It's sort of like a bus." Nawin felt ill at ease but did not say anything as the two crossed this infrequently traversed highway where a dead possum lay before them on the edge of the road.
"People deny that they are going to die by looking forward to a new day that brings them closer to death. It's most ironic," said the gecko-monitor as it rode on one of his pant legs. It was a non-sequitur that he could not place in the context of what was happening but then, as such, it seemed no different from anything else. And although he was not terribly alarmed, he questioned whether or not the man crossing the road with him was in fact the Laotian, but as everything changed anyway he could not see that being accompanied by someone else really mattered.
They sat at a second table behind two middle aged men. "Sabaidee mai?" he heard the acquaintance say to them and they reciprocated with the same greeting. If sabaidee was their sawadee he was not sure how he would understand these Laotians in all this shifting of semantics. He understood the acquaintance to say, "He's the Thai I told you about" to which one of the strangers said a word like benefactor in something to the effect of, "Does she like your benefactor." "I'm her brother," the Laotian responded. "She'll do as she is told." Then, as though conscious of him, there was a lot of small talk in which the acquaintance asked about where they worked and lived. Then the conversation changed to that of a football game at the university and, to him, it all seemed staged on his behalf. The acquaintance said, "Drink, you are on vacation. Loosen up" and so he drank two shots of whiskey that appeared in tandem before him. As both head and body heated up, and the stationary environment began to wobble, he tried to reassure himself that although everything changed it did so one moment at a time. He then noticed a bald spot on his acquaintance's scalp. It seemed to be floating hurriedly in the ethereal like a satellite and the biological structure of Nawin cringed at this defective counterpart. The train acquaintance, if he were such, now seemed older than before, and the liquid blueprint, which he was subconsciously yearning for, a less viably transferable product. This Boi asked them other questions in the Laotian tongue that he could not comprehend at all on the fourth shot of whiskey and their furrowed faces answered him although the substance of this he could not determine firmly.
And as they imbibed beer ever more gluttonously and he quaffed more shots of whiskey, becoming the sensation of an entity aflame, the substance of fire, he became conscious that he would be the one who would pay for all these drinks. Thus his hand began to flounder into various pockets for his wallet until finding it in his shirt pocket but with nothing inside its dark brown lining.
"My money—there's nothing there," said Nawin.
"Is that a fact?" said the Laotian.