Early into his career, he halfway believed that in his studies of the dejected Patpong whores, petrous automatons of suburbia, desperate homeless mendicants blowing bird whistles at pedestrians near the Chao Phraya river pier, and himself, an outsider inside the travail, the torture, the jailhouse of this unjust world, that he would somehow redeem all. He did pay the nude models who posed for and lay with him but apart from this, neither in amorphous smudges on tattered paper as a boy nor disciplined depictions of form on canvas as a man had he in the least contributed to the redemption of his thralls. And for all his money Jatupon was still there within him shining with tender King Rama V's Chulalongkorn eyes of suffering for his people. Those smudges helped no one but himself and for all his money he could not buy the thing that he wanted most—a hardened mask and protective gear similar to that which he had worn while fencing in his undergraduate days at Silpakorn University which might fortify him from being impaled by dejected beggars, peddlers and their carts, sidewalk restaurant workers, whores, and monks who were never given a chance. Suffering abounded—it scurried away from the heat of the sun like a legless mutant seeking the slippery shade of shadows on the sidewalks and it would be there through decades, centuries, and millenniums to come regardless of temporary external forms.
Had he been able to raise them to their full potential he would have been a missionary with a mission instead of the sordid, missionless man that he was, drawing the oppressed, but as they were connected to him really drawing the self. It was a self that was embedded in the personal life like a tree in its filth. It was obsessed by being besmirched and colorizing the besmirching. It was obsessed by dopamine, adrenalin, and serotonin within for all that he put on canvas—at least it was before retiring and giving himself to indolence, making Noppawan, perplexed at what she could converse about with her retired spouse apart from the names of the bimbos he was copulating with.
He slid down the bathroom wall into a fetal position on the floor as he was obviously imploding. For a couple moments he meditated into nothingness, and had no thoughts beyond a recognition of himself as fallen debris. It seemed real to think of his brokenness and that the pile on the floor was absent of self. He wanted to stay like this forever but thoughts, like muscles in a fresh corpse, began their spasms to be restored. They fought for redemption of the illusion of self despite his own will to shut down. He pulled a bag of cannabis, a lighter, and some rolling paper from his bulging pocket, assembled a joint, and smoked.
8
Seated in his fetid corner, he was tacit in thought, still in its fathoms like a corpse in a sunken and forgotten ship of long ago, and he stayed in this state of sediment and mire, nothingness and abyss, until startled by a sound of flapping and the stirring of more than the usual continuum of sharp wind. Startled, he turned toward this movement. In a split second he saw wings and then the hard eyes, head, and beak of a black bird sharply changing course when confronting itself in the mirror. Then a couple seconds later it was gone and there was nothing novel to see. It was just a reflection of himself staring back at him, this mere self. To him, a separated man without a relationship who was besieged by a redundant, torturous sense that all along, without being aware of it, the sordid grains of his life had been blowing incrementally out of his open hands and were now passing away with an exponential conspicuousness while he remained here absconding in a toilet of a train; it felt as though he were sitting in a collapsing sand castle waiting for an ultimate asphyxiation. "It was there—I am sure it was" he told himself (meaning the bird, that which was fleeting and had already fled) as if knowing the reality of something so inconsequential with absolute non-human certainty would prove that, despite doubts, his was a stable and sane sense of reality. And if a stable and sane sense of reality was not really possible in the skull-restrained jiggling of his jellified brain that told itself that it was more than all right, saner than the herds of men, he did not want to know of such things.
To calm his racing, startled heart beat and damn off the adrenaline that permeated and burnt through thought to the rigid ready-to-respond posture of his muscles in a spreading ethereal of flaming gas, he made the dark omen jocular. He told himself that the bird was the ubiquitous symbol of a man running from his own image figuratively while retaining a fixed stare at the literal one. He might have even believed that there had been no bird at all if it were not for his racing heart and the simple fact that the window of the toilet was open. The two together made the bird's existence more plausible (at least so the self said if it meant much in the mixture of inhaled cannabis smoke, swallowed antibiotics, and pain killers that had to be stretching and distorting perception by thwarting the natural flow of neurotransmitters into different speeds and in new spirals of circuitry and thought). And yet even if this copy of the bird that was branded or molded on a bit of his brain had diminished to the point where it was now as unrecognizable, weathered initials engraved on a tree, or an outline posing as form, that did not mean anything. Did not a year in the life of a boy ultimately vanish without even an outline? All that he could say for sure was that even if it did not happen, that which did not happen was gone now. He chuckled and found pleasure in tilted equilibrium juggling its lit torches of ideas. Then he thought, "Maybe I should have gone to a beach in Phuket the way I was thinking I should earlier at the train station. Watching the waves, I could have forgotten." It was a natural enough response as embedded as it was like an instinct. Intuitively one first sought large bodies of moving water, a tangible version of eternity, by which to compare and measure oneself. In so doing, his problems would become minute with the man; and this was what he meant, for the train ride out of Bangkok was doing nothing for him. "But really," he continued, "how long can one be immersed in waves unless washed out neatly with a tsunami and there is little chance of that happening again anytime soon." The main reason that he had not gone to a beach had little to do with fear of boredom. It was for fear of seeming to himself as one of "those old retired nobodies with money" who waited near the waters edge for death. To him those waiting for death who sought non-failing amusement in the waves which acted as their sedatives were a lost and lifeless abhorrence.
"Anyhow," he thought as he sucked in the smoke of his reefer, "about the bird, what am I thinking? Who gives a fuck about the bird? Why am I dwelling on this bird. If the bird came in or not it couldn't matter less. It does not even matter if I never know anything and just go from one belief to the next under the influence of whims" for it seemed to him that reality was the obsession that we were under in the immediacy of the moment. If the ultimate decay of one's exterior form made his existence dubious, he argued, the tenuous and watery interior life of a man's mind was even more that way.
With images of wings fluttering salient in his imagination, desire suddenly began to percolate within him, tingling the body like an intimate pot vibrating and ready to boil over with life, and soon he wanted a resurrection from his fetal position on the fetid floor. He wanted to fly and yet all that he could do was remove his clothes. At first, it was to be only the removal of his shirt for he needed to block the marijuana smoke from exiting through the crack of the door. Soon, however, his pants and underpants followed suit in this denuding. Soon they were there caulking the crack as well. And as wind of the open window swept over his nascent nakedness, dispersing the clouds of smoke enough so that he could see fuliginous figures within the world of his cramped toilet, he began to masturbate to the movements of smoke-clouds.
Within, he was seeing diaphanous geckos on top of the ceiling scurrying hurriedly out of the smoke of the toilet and through the other cloud he was ogling a loosely robed sheik of an olive Asian complexion who, fairly and most saliently naked in the most critical aspects of that word, sat on a rock.
Four of the geckos had appearances of his former women as much as geckos were able to resemble human beings. There was a dark, ugly one with spectacles like Noppawan. There was a white angelic one like Kimberly. There was one like the pretty white Thai, Porn, with black hair bowering to her buttocks. There was also that self centered one of childish exuberance radiating its face like a skipping five year old. This gecko was similar to Xinuae, whom long ago he had bestowed the nickname of "Chinese Karen" so as to commemorate the day in which he had learned that he was American by birth. Altogether the reptilian insects were also like these former girlfriends in carrying off his love with their eggs as they ran off to others who promised them an immediate fulfillment of biological urgings, for in reproduction there was not only the continuum of existence but womanly purpose in nurturing posterity, and such happiness had statues of limitation on it. It was not a literal smoke that they were fleeing from nor even the asphyxiation of being alone. He could tell this. It was a symbolic smoke of dying without purpose that they were trying to escape. They knew that the flaming impetuousness with its smoke cloud of being in love so as to beget children was as brief as the body's ability to replicate. They knew that nothing was more asphyxiating than a passing cloud that they had not breathed in. They knew of no grief worse than a barren existence in which they had not done the mating moves in a timely manner that were part of that illusion for meaning and purpose in their lives. To not see life as a rushed activity that one needed to bungee jump into and to run out of time to breed was a capital Sin-u-ae in organisms whose sole purpose was to reproduce a bit of the self that was a composite of replicating cells.