An Apostate: Nawin of Thais

by Steven David Justin Sills

From non-germinal love hadn't the thought been of that stranger, his father, and then from the father had it not been of the stranger from Laos? Specifically, ruminations of being a kinder man than he wanted to be and obviously not succeeding at that to a memory of the father, and from the father to the Laotian: this, he supposed, was the chronology of his recent thoughts. He assumed that recollection of that titillation was preceded by a memory of his august but haggard restaurant-working father swaggering toward a second-hand reclining chair, telling him to scram, and seating himself with right foot resting on the left leg, thumping its smelliness into the air of what he always declared to be his home, his domain, like a judge with his gavel. Nawin was not all that sure of this being the cause, or how one would determine a cause of a most peculiar and perverted thought as this blown in with all the other perverse ideas of his subconscious when, for whatever reason, it was tossed a bit further on top of all conscious rubbish (of course, as always, he was for the most part successfully blocking out the copulatory sport of the second eldest, Kazem, and that one's playground). He may have hoped, even though he did not believe, that isolating it would be the means to an instantaneous cure from all perverse ideas not of the heterosexual variety; and for a moment he frantically unblocked most neurological corridors, no matter how stygian, until contemplating this senseless contemplation made him feel a bit nauseous.

He used humor to distance himself from this recollection of momentary derangement or crazed but inconsequential titillation by telling himself facetiously that the reason this incident was now being shot like darts into his realm of contemplation was as a form of dogged, fraternal torture inflicted by one sadistic part of the brain against the other; but as fraternal recollection could only exacerbate the headache with the introduction of more dull emotional pain, he tried to block off turbid memory and listen for the sounds of metal being kicked and folded, upper tombs going back into embankments, and seats being readjusted. Hearing none, however, he assumed that the officer who was in charge of the removal of linen and the return of the bottom bunks into seats was asleep. Being forty and not having the desire of the thirty-nine year old to make the awkward climb up the monkey bars to the upper bunk where he would once again stare into the walls of his tenebrous tomb until all elated sleepers were awakened and summoned to their descents, Nawin decided that he would loiter in this toilet, at least until someone needing to relieve himself procured his removal with a few hard and eager taps on the door. The titillation, he tried to pacify himself, was merely one more inconsequential item of rubbish blowing in subconscious gusts and like wondering if, across the aisle, a female passenger who was wearing the hijab was a southern terrorist, it meant nothing.

He had to admit that it was futile to ponder whether the barren and the fallow might be preferable to this annexation of space by a rather non-germinal seed of love that had been planted within him against his will. He could hardly extirpate it, and if the seed had stunted growth he knew of no inward manure that might cause it to grow any more. And as for manure, his thoughts jumped track within their locomotion so that he might change the persistent discourse in his solitary brain; it was peculiar that this substance should be the nutrient for growth just as it was peculiar that an instrument of urination should be the means of intimacy between a man and a woman or for that matter, a man and a man…a man and a man.

The unpleasant memory of his crazed but momentary attraction to the Laotian again returned to him as faithfully as a lover and as sadistically as a brother; and for a second he contemplated jocularly whether or not bad memories were merely shot as a fraternal infliction by one part of the brain to another. The query seemed even flatter and more pointless than before. With the same redundant churning of thought, he reminded himself that there was no point in quickly returning to his cubicle. He might as well dally until one of the officers of the train returned to remove the linen and readjust the seats or he would have to lie in the tenebrous tomb as dormant as the seed of love that existed within him.

As one of the Earth's honored higher creatures who could be consumed with a lick of nature like the 200,000 of last year's tsunami (thousands that at one time were pictured on posters dangling from bulletin boards, and pedestrian blockage rails near the Khao San Road police station and the National Gallery) it was apparent that the planet was non-welcoming of the higher guest. The world was a most peculiar place just as he was a most peculiar being within it. The fact that the peculiarity of both was rarely contemplated showed how base, inherent, and instinctual factors shaped the good and the conventional of all things. He chuckled in a couple latent, audible wisps of air at his strange mind (its creative intellect and its redundant recycling of old ideas) to which his white teeth within his brown face seemed to jingle and gleam in the mirror like ice- layered tree limbs shaking in the wind. He thought about how a man lived in his self-made shack believing himself to be a king in a palace and how his ideas were as laws that he assumed to be sanctioned by destiny, but when things went awry such a common man would in all likelihood say prayers to counter his bleak prospects. He would send them into the ether of Nirvana with the burning of his incense. Sound and sturdy atheistic ideas like those experienced by Buddha before Buddhism or Christ before Christianity could only be sustained by exceptional men as long as they had good health, the necessities of food and shelter, scant relationships at the very least, and some occupation to direct time and thought; for otherwise the scaffolding of higher and wiser vistas would teeter and break, thrusting a man who was trying to balance himself on this scaffolding of tiered thought into that abyss of perceiving the world as an amorphous blob that was continually being twisted by supernatural forces.

Still, he could not quell this concept or misconception that if only he had been treated with unrelenting contempt when he was a boy, as he very well had been but without these sweet respites, it would have "toughened [him] up" (meaning that if he had been granted nothing apart from the worst memories of his former family, he would have been as tough as a champion Thai kick boxer when not wearing makeup and a dress in the sense that no conscience would he have had to intrude onto his public and private life, no pathetic themes would he have seen in the eyes of women whom he intended to use for pure pleasure in the brothels, and no pain would he have encountered in simple walks along Bangkok's mendicant ridden sidewalks and pedestrian overpasses). He sensed that such a scenario would have been a liberation from the revolting non-germinal seed of love, and that liberation from it would be a license to use as he had been used in the sadomasochistic quid pro quo or bartering for pleasures that defined human interaction. It seemed to him even more clearly than ever that if he had been allotted the entirety of contempt when young he would not have known enough of love to miss it. It did not, however, dawn on him that such an escape, even if it did not lead him to a fated time of being locked up in one rat infested Thai jail or another as one more of life's anti-social miscreants, would have vitiated his humanity.

He made his erroneous conclusion as if even a conventional 9-5 job and TV to bed existence, which was willfully ignorant of the world at large, were better than someone seized by sorrow when trying to seek pleasures and nude discoveries in every seedy domain in Bangkok; and as if in this obsession to concatenate a frenzied body to the pleasure receptors of the lower brain and then to that upper brain that was empathic to human sorrow in so much horror, he failed to deliver anyone (for it was true that painting delivered no one to a better existence). However, in a field of serious endeavor, a discipline, he was able to see the flower in myriad events deflowered and plucked and beauty in the ugly. In a discipline he found empathy, an openness to the world, rather than apathy, uniqueness rather than replication, and in-depth understanding of himself that made him an individual, a complete being, rather than a speck in the mass, a human cow in a herd. It was not true that painting saved no one for it saved him to himself. And if he failed at being a good person for lack of role models throughout his life, it was through no fault of his own. Still, all in all, he thought of himself as a 'pretty good,' Patron Saint for those who had been treated perversely. Had he, Saint Nawin, not done his best all alone with the resources he had to build his cathedral and temple to atheism, Wat Nawin? He felt that he had.

He told himself that he was as obsessed by his colors now as when he was a five year old child; and that he was still imbuing his black and white world of early servitude with crayonic paint and chalk as if it had never ended. He ruminated on this early being whom he still was, in part or entirely—a being that existed regardless of changing years, names, and social-economic status. He could not recall anything much of those very early years beyond the residual traces of a boy being allowed to take periodic breaks from bringing bowls of noodles to the tables of his parents' customers. Those were still-life images of himself seeking crayonic ebullience that could glorify his and humanity's noodle shackles. Weren't those first images, he asked himself, undecipherable, waxy smudges on discarded paper that had been wrapped over meat? From his rather indistinct and diminished memories he supposed that they were, but the attempts were the same as now: to evince a moment in time and despite its bleakness to sense it as precious within form. And if his depictions then and now were imbued with more color than that which would have been a true rendition of the scenes, they were soft and sensitive aberrations of love that could be pardoned.

He looked straight into the irises of his eyes—eyes that, when not sparkling and jovial in social exchange or lustful and burning from carnal angels that set them ablaze, seemed, when sober, so inordinately tender. Those eyes were surely not just portals to a rather non-germinal seed of love within him; but even if they were such, and his love of women was little short of a vaginal sport (to the immature dabbler that he was who failed to be a he-man and a happy hedonist), still there was more love therein than a failed marriage could prove. No, he said to himself more resolutely, these were compassionate and suffering eyes.

He pondered his effeminate sensitivity. He did not want it—he never had—but there was nothing that he could do about it. If he were to pretend to be as insouciant and aloof as so many men, this rather craven fleeing from self would be an even more egregious departure from masculine virtues. Sensitive eyes did not entirely eclipse his joy. To women sensitive, boyish eyes were alluring. This fact was proven in his having had a plethora of them even in recent years. Most importantly eyes like these, he told himself, accentuated a youthful countenance, and for any man of forty youth was the breeze that set his dog scampering.