As this was not a given second but a series of changes in a few minutes of a man's life, he soon saw these scenes in a chain of diminutive beads. Every other bead would reflect the present dilemma and alternate beads would portray a significant person in his life. The significant others would be mirrors and a light source that would give some visibility to a huge diaphanous face of the man that the entire chain outlined. He was, after all, a reflection of those whom he was trying to desperately contact and it seemed to him that they should make up every other monad and that their eyes would be attempting to look at the entirety of a face that they would never be able to see fully. As it would be an anecdotal work on a large canvas, each scene, each bead of this outline of the man's face, would be a punctilious and time consuming feat to render. He did not have a clue whether the motif was incandescent or prosaic and insipid. The only thing that he believed with some certainty was that if the painting was worth doing he was not the man to implement his ideas. For in comparison to a Caravaggio, a Titian, a Michelangelo, or a Da Vinci, he knew that his talents were the top of the bottom tier of dilettantes, and even a knowledge that he was able to render his own mediocrity with the splendor of originality was not helpful. The thought of his mediocrity was asphyxiating to him and he again pondered that he was merely a prostitute painter, a fetid and odious "nobody" within the demarcated self of a Nawin Biadklang that he could never transcend. He fretted about his place in the world as if the masses of men ever found a voice within themselves, as if his earlier paintings, which were still being collected, valued, and traded, had vanquished with him off the artistic scene, and as if his brief inclusion in an article about contemporary Asian art in Newsweek had meant nothing at all.
The train officer clanged each of the metallic ladders with the handle of a butter knife while repeating, "Nongkai in one hour. Breakfasts for those who ordered them." Then he began to pull down linen, shoving tenebrous tombs back into their embankments, and readjusting bottom bunks. Nawin relinquished the idea of returning to his seat anytime soon and sat down on a box of clean linen where he contemplated the article. He recalled: "Nawin Biadklang's paintings are almost like a hybrid of Montien Boonma's Buddhist sculpture with an amateur painter's penchant for easily obtained nude models in Bangkok's red light district. Biadklang's talents at present are clearly dwarfed when compared to his predecessor, the most important Thai artist of international significance; but then youth is often seedy and so are his works, studies of prostitutes that make up his oeuvre. The combination is a somewhat refreshing exhibition that succeeds as a study of the oppressed and the human condition." It was a passage that he knew by heart and yet one where the writer's meaning still eluded him.
Then without meaning to do so, the self was eclipsed and he was asleep in a nap with its expeditious transit into a percolating sea of images. He was deluged in raw feelings, the construction material of thought, which the movement of those images brought down upon him. Within one series of loosely concatenated images, one dream, he (he or something similar as one part of himself seemed to be an audience of one watching the Nawin debacle from an objective distance) was in his mother's car driving to her home. They were returning from a cemetery in which they had failed to commune with even the positive memories of the deceased. They were inadvertently deviating into that distant, solitary region of themselves where negative and defunct memories continually reverberated against bluffs of the mind as faint, unresponsive echoes. The short journey to her home seemed long and dull and thirty miles into it they both felt ill. She asked him to stop the car so they bought some fast food and turned into a parking lot along the Mississippi River. There they began to eat while looking out onto the sodden waters under darkening skies. There was a flock of pelicans flying overhead, and geckos trying to elude the birds by floating on top of the mist.
"Look over there," she pointed. "They must be making their nests under the bridge."
"What is?"
"What is?," she mocked. "The pelicans!"
He looked. "I don't to see any of them making a nest," he murmured.
"Well, maybe I need to take you to get some new glasses."
"No, that's all right," he said. He tried to look again but this time he was distracted by an eerie roll of thunder which sounded like the ambulatory movements on creaking floor boards of the residents of an upper apartment heard from one story below.
"To the left, under the bridge. Can't you see?"