Then he recalled that portrait of King Rama V, Chulalongkorn, hanging in the National Gallery. The depiction of his Majesty was with eyes that sponged up human suffering. "Mine are the same," he told himself; and thus his own were majestic and august even though no royal blood was puissant within the undulations of his veins.
6
It seemed to him as if old ideas in slightly new arrangements, such as this obsession with an aging self and his ineptness at long-term relationships, were quickly, dizzying, and incessantly being repeated in his brain. He, another recycled being with recycled thoughts, was ostensibly a creature moving forward with the train but in reality a macrocosm of the ideas within him; and these old ideas continued to circulate around the edge of his brain like hamsters whose impressions were that with each push of the nose they would find exits leading to the vertical, the forward, as if there really were a forward within one's cage, within the ideas of one's head.
Had this particular car of the train felt like the rest instead of seeming cold enough to preserve his meat, he, this being who was constricted to the tight walls and smells of the train, would have blamed this peculiar dizziness that he was presently feeling not on the perennial chasing of old ideas nor on ideas mixed with the bad molecular smells of the toilet but, as he was sweating more than he was accustomed, on heat. In lieu of this, he told himself that his dizziness was from being drunk on the self, a plausible theory, and yet he continued to quaff his sumptuous reflection in spite of this conclusion.
The reflection was of a swarthy, handsome man, with tender, toasty eyes glazed in ideas as if spread with honey. Was the reflection an exact replica of what he looked like? The question troubled him for no matter how long he thought about it, the accuracy of a reflection was immeasurable and the subject was insoluble. All that he knew was that the reflection was of a much younger man than his actual age: that was the consistency, even if moment by moment in each barrage of new light, his age and appearance seemed to vary. And he would have stayed in the bathroom for a half hour more staring at himself in that same way in the hope of isolating an exact age for his physical appearance and to gain certainty that his youth and beauty would not submerge with the next emerging moment had a fierce loneliness not begun to consume him like fire.
So stark was it that, to some degree, it seemed that he too was on fire, that he too was plummeting as if from one of the infernos of the World Trade Center while gusts of wind were carrying to him the barely audible moans, screams, and demonic laughter of other fallers; it seemed that he too was flailing his arms against becoming a swallowed morsel cast down the vast expanse of the deep gullet of devouring skies, and obsessively- redundantly bewailing having jumped from a window at all. These torturous feelings and thoughts were beyond loneliness. It was as though the bogus concept of one's self-importance had slipped off of him entirely leaving him exposed to himself and acknowledging that he was naked and bereft of soul, a speck that was a billion times less important than a disregarded crumb flung off a kitchen table by a finger tip. He was merely a falling speck of minutiae that if not thudding unheard like a landing water balloon, smashing and exploding onto a rock in a desert, would finally decompose no differently than all other bits of matter.
He did not quite expect it and yet how could he expect anything other than that fierce loneliness would befall him? The fact that he was taking this aimless trip at all was evidence enough of sensing himself as a plastic wrapper that was being blown in miscellaneous winds. And here on board this random train, chosen for having a departure time coinciding so well with his arrival at the train station (a train instead of an airplane so that there would not be an inordinate distance between him and his wife; for if there were such a vast distance it would, for him, have been a sign of a near, looming, and pending divorce), movement was painfully curtailed when it was so desperately needed to curtail pain.
During the past few weeks since the tragedy and his wife's flogging of him with the frying pan, he managed the throbbing of his arm with pain medication, and his loneliness by filling his thoughts with feigned urgency and shuffle. He threw out canvas (completed paintings, partially completed, and blank for all did not matter), paint, pallets, and all other dirt, trash, and clutter of the space. He attempted to change the studio into an apartment by adding a bed, a couch, a refrigerator, a kitchen table, a microwave oven, and basic electric burners. He had a pharmacist fill a renewed prescription and engaged in mundane actions like grocery shopping that could belie the desperate surge of loneliness. At that time it was successful; but here on board this train taken randomly from all trains, there was no motion to hide behind, and just the obvious reminder that he was random, without destination, and out of control. Having no-one and yet as any mortal needing to cling to a consistent source to foster the illusion of permanence and worth within himself, how could the dark suffocating nets of loneliness not envelop him? How could they not? Even for such a man whose only sense of family was to look at it as a make-believe concept, a mere abstraction, which time erased or, if having something material within it at all that could be grasped, which was always snuffed away, washed out to sea as last year's tsunami victims, but needing to be washed away, vanished like Bonaparte, Hitler, Mussolini, General Phibun, and one day even the emperor Bush, but leaving its stain—a stain that would trouble the mind and upset a positive mood as any fading but never fully diminished nightmare. The stain was memory, a vague copy of barbarous family preserved in one's wretched thoughts, preserved like the male and female corpses at Siriaj Hospital who, despite their slit bodies acting the part of striptease artists of human entrails, had always seemed to him to resemble his own mother and father in their late thirties. How could they not? Even for a man who perceived all women to be programmed with urges for whoreish involvements to gain independence from the parents within the union of a man, to rob a man of the juice required for baby making and that occupational obsession of baby rearing, and foremost to gain a parcel of land to call one's own (a perspective Nawin, the empath of whores had gained from society overall and not so much from his mother and wife who both relinquished money for the love of poor men, although he himself was no longer poor having quickly ascended to the ranks of the affluent). More saliently, with this imagined tryst of himself and the Laotian being continually replayed inside his head, most ominously how, as much as an hour earlier, could he have been anything but certain that loneliness would soon be descending upon him in that dark, suffocating net? A middle aged man traveling alone on a train to nowhere, Nongkai, and then to the sister city of Vientiene, could hardly be exempt of internal lonely burnings any more than he could feel stable when twirling around in this chase within the self no matter how insouciant or cocky he seemed when reflected from others in a figurative mirror or himself in the literal one.
"I don't need a wife—certainly not one who blames me and not herself even though this surrogate mother arrangement hatched out of her egg and not mine" he told himself, but being so dizzy there was not much chance of him believing his insouciant thought. Latent ideas were supposed to be the real ones, but there was not much that was true in this thought clutter, hoisted up to convey a positive self-image, beyond attempting to persuade himself of masculine nonchalance and a wish to repudiate a vulnerable neediness that was sticking to him like glue to a boy's fingertips. And no matter how many times he tried to wash it away its grittiness was extant.
After so much decadent thought about the Laotian the implosion of his solitary tower was an inevitability.