There in the bathroom, in this luxurious condominium overlooking the Chao Phraya river, the water he felt and could not seem to leave was not the water of a rich man pampering his longing for hot showers but the cold rain of June in which a much younger version of himself stood behind a food cart fettered in noodles and pork, a boy named Jatupon who served soup to customers under a leaking plastic canopy. In this state even the cognizance of his wife being outside the door faded. There was just the recollection of servitude under a cobbled leaking roof that was trying to fly off like a kite. For a few minutes his self- awareness remained as the poor servant he once was until he heard,
- Nawin?
- Okay Honey, getting out now. He turned off the water, wrapped a towel around himself, and exited.
- Nawin, she said a minute later as he came out dripping in a towel, why do you have large stacks of new underwear in the closet. She was laughing at him.
He smiled coyly. - You never know when you will need clean underwear.
- This one stack alone must have fifty and they are totally unworn with tags attached.
He smirked. - The idiosyncrasies of man, he said.
- Weirdness I would say; but he knew that she understood. As someone who had known him in adolescence as Jatupon, and had seen JatuPORN, as the fraternity called him, weep in the museum of preserved corpses for the wish to be as deceased as they, she knew the poverty that he was. He knew that she would assume the stacks of underwear to be a repudiation of what he was. He knew that she would not mention this, as indeed she did not, and he loved her all the more for it.
"What do you want?" he asked an enormous gecko that was staring at him, distracting him from inhaling a new cloud of smoke after exhaling the previous one.
"You" or "Youth" it said, [He was not sure which one the thing muttered] "I will eat" and it began to eat a long sheet of paper like a poster which had his photograph as a noodle worker on it.