Examining himself in the mirror for the umpteenth time with a refreshingly spry countenance there to befriend him once again, he gave thanks to the mysterious forces that had given him a life where he might make a living presenting his varied depictions of himself with his whores on canvas (a whore of every type from every angle), fervidly contemplative of life's decadent urgings. Like a schoolboy twisting in the grass, he blessed the fates that had allowed him time to revel in his spinnings. Free to contemplate the unequal plight of man (or woman as it was in his case), to see color in forms and feelings and thought, to mix with forms by allowing licentious whims to twist around the kite in accordance with natural mandates to reign in those turbulent skies, he basked in others perceptions of him as handsome, successful, and affluent. Like juicy fruit on the stem, his days in the sun, as an elated appetite of women and an envy of men—at least for those who knew something about contemporary Thai art—were embarrassing and awkward to the modest Jatupon that he was; but it was the very furthest of human plights. Selling his paintings at ever inflated prices because of their worth and his celebrity status as their decadent creator, he had the ideal life. The creature of pleasure had to concede as much as this.
Smirking at himself, the wry smile soon fell flat at the thought that even ugly pimps who were affluent from their brutish, sexual peccadilloes might be considered equally sexy; and he sighed at his bland fame. He had gained it from portraying the same models in the same redundant and stereotypical theme to which he knew no variation; and whether or not those guilt- ridden self-portraits of himself engaging with his whores as stiffly as a Buddha were an exploration of his models or an exploitation of them remained an unanswered question. He moved closer to the mirror and looked deeper into the image. The rot of forty, if it were a rot, was an internal degeneration that had not yet reached the surface of the apple except for a few premature wrinkles, which he had already stiffened out with Botox. He flexed his muscles into the mirror that like social interaction and painting reflected consciousness and reminded him of existing beyond the redundant actions of eating, urinating, defecating, reproducing, sleeping and all the other - ings.
Stepping out of the toilet as he was now doing, he posited that such banal and inconsequential movements as this were like copulation with a rife assortment of women, that movement provided men with a base physical consciousness that was indispensable to their overall welfare by making them appear more tangible to themselves than any images in mirrors could do. Still, while moving out of the toilet and pondering this new justification for male promiscuity within the corridor between the two cars, he inadvertently halted there before his image in a second mirror. "I am still a young man. Both mirrors say so," he lied to himself; and then began to wash his face at a sink. The tap water pulsated out in an extorted and convulsing trickle, pushing him a little into those turbulent memories of the recent past. Not wanting to think of Noppawan or the mangled angel who was no more volant and permanent than any pallid terracotta falling eleven or more stories (he had forgotten the exact number with the burgeoning thickets of neuron brush that were daily mutating the landscape of his mind), he looked into the image of his own eyes to reassure himself that they still had a young man's luster.
4
As he did this, combining the mirror's confirmation of forty with a sense of feeling no different than he had at twenty so that a nice conciliatory countenance of thirty stared back at him, he remembered another fragment of that earlier dream in a sleep that had been filled with such episodic starts and stops.
As the restless shifting of dreams like those he had experienced in the 'tenebrous tomb' were the chaotic composite of what the true self really was, they were also his idée fixe, for as an artist he knew that the true self was the only subject worthy of his delineation, his imagining, and that being awake was merely the desperate garnering of the true self's scatterings. In some sense being awake was a liberation from sleep, that anarchy of fleeting images, fears, and anxieties about the unalterable past which the subconscious lived over again and again in new arrangements like a news reel seen in various colored filters and in reverse of a young French and English teacher jumping from her balcony. It was a means by which, if not to erase or delete memory, to splice it, to fictionalize it, and to some degree begin again; and yet he judged consciousness to be even less real. Married one moment, separated the next, the boy was always growing out of his clothes or being stripped of them. And as the door of the fitting room by which people came in to wear him and be worn by him never seemed to shut well, allowing all whom he loved to briefly use him and be used by him to get a variant feel of themselves before going toward new entries, it seemed to him that the door might as well keep revolving. One might even stifle human growth if one were to try. This had been his supposition in maimed youth after his parents were jettisoned from their windshield by a Fate seemingly eager to part with superfluous human baggage, these burdensome nuisances, and he was too old to part from such inveterate conclusions now.
Being awake was a concoction of pasting together the fragments of subconscious thought. Whereas a biographer was a historian of superficial events, the artist was a cartographer; and it had always been his hope that collectively all artists (himself included if he were not retired) would in time be able to chart an accurate aerial view of the splendid, volcanic thrusts of the subconscious. He took a comb out of the pocket of his wrinkled pants and began to straighten his disheveled hair lovingly. Then in consort with his debonair image, his Siamese twin in the mirror, he put his palm on his forehead for it was aching numbly, and more numbly was his heart. And thinking of his own restlessness, he knew it would not end with ended sleep. He could tell this from the hammering taps of his present headache that were born of the travail of truly chaotic dreams.
He told himself that there was no reason to feel anxious; for what was a man if he were inwardly shaken by external vicissitudes? Many evenings before his self-declared retirement he would stare up into empty space from the bleachers near the lit sports stadium in that area where they both lived (an area convenient to Assumption University where his wife worked), sketch something, and feel warmth in the blackness and nothingness. A real man, he argued, could sink himself into blackness, knowing himself to be like a bit of top soil washed away in storm waters, and think nothing of it. So Kimberly was dead…so, he had a son by her in the hands of the wife whom he guessed that he was now separated from…so he was a forty year old man who briefly felt a queer amorous titillation of homosexual yearning and a phantasm of a tryst inside his head…so the tryst was for a Laotian in a train…so, like a poor man on a train, he was going to the capital of one of the most undeveloped countries on the planet…so, he was running away on this December 5th, the king's birthday (Father's Day), seemingly oblivious to any agenda about what he was running toward. It was all a sinking of his dirt in eternities of black space and he told himself that he was warm and content within it.
The link of associated thoughts that had brought him to recall this particular fragment of a dream while staring into the mirror with a preposterous sense of self-satisfaction was oblique at best. It began with him looking into his sparkling eyes and his clear white smile of multiple brushings and whitening solutions, followed by a second in which he very well might have used the English word "gay" to describe his image had that abhorrent word of myriad connotations to which the worst were dissonant to the pleasant characterization of himself as a womanizer and a lady's man not been repressed. Then, to further avoid summoning the word which he forcefully restrained into his subconscious muck like a Burmese refugee to a sylvan camp in one of those northern provinces, he stared into his mirrored eyes deeply. He concentrated on how these eyes seemed to gleam more in certain seconds and how his face looked even younger and more handsome than thirty in these evanescent blazes or vestige flashes of his former being, the boy whom he once was. The delusion of thinking of his appearance as that of a thirty year old man or as one much younger than this made him think of being thirteen, frightened by his first wet dreams and the accompanying stink of his body, which he then supposed to be some type of inception of death or body rot; but it also made him think of that day his mother bought him some goulashes for thirty baht and how proud he, that tiny boy, was that she would spend so much money on him. The goulashes made him think of being coerced to trudge around with his brothers along the edges of creeks and canals where they, guffawing sadists and martinets, made him abduct and mutilate crawdads to recognize that he was no better than any other creature of the natural order that gloated at itself as one individual in a species of myriad predators. And finally crawdad hunting in Ayutthaya, the home of his forlorn youth, made him think simultaneously of being with his brothers scavenging and pilfering refund cola bottles in the doorways of alleyways so as to buy a little candy from a local store, and wall crawling geckos.
In this earlier dream that he was now recalling a gecko crawled on a wooden cross that marked a mound near the trash barrel where a family cat had been buried in a shoe box coffin long ago. Then on the upper portion of the cross, the gecko became limp and stagnant, hanging on two of its arms like a dangling Christ. Hanging there inertly, it inadvertently pulled on it, this lever, opening a strange, familyesque commiseration of the parents and mourning of the brothers just as they had felt it together that time as young children long ago. But these odd, cognate feelings over the death of a pet were like distorted sound waves that bounced off the back of empty space and none of them were present—not even himself—just a gecko silently hanging on a cat's cross…feelings of loss…dross.