His dream silence, which was even more asphyxiating than the carbon exhaust fumes permeating the heavy traffic that moved in slow increments down the street was a fog that was embedded in all living things and all moved through it. An elderly woman was walking alone near some type of a hybrid of Sukhumvit and Silom roads. Sensing that she was being observed, she paused between a salesman's ice chest of coconuts and bottled water and a woman stringing together jasmine rosaries from a small table. Looking around the sidewalk in both directions, she did not sense anything unusual; so dismissing her earlier thought and questioning her ability to assess situations accurately, she trembled at senility's brief chafing and purchased a yellow rosary which she then stuffed into her purse. The rationale behind the purchase had been to arrest fleeing sanity and, if anyone had witnessed this early, disconcerted behavior, to have that moment of senility's waning be expunged from human minds. Her intentionally looking aplomb into the rosary saleswoman's petrous countenance as she paid the money to her was a feigned attempt to project composure and went unnoticed. Indifferent in perfunctory movements, taking money and threading her flowers, the saleswoman was as pachydermatous and robotic as the old woman and everyone else was. Telling herself that the only means to forfend senility was to be actively engaged in mental diversions, she nonetheless sought any diversion that she could, to ignore, if not discomfit, this paranoid erosion of sanity. She went into Watson's Beauty and Health Care Store while trying to ignore this feeling that something was walking behind her, following the brackish, permed scent of that head of hair, as if an ocean of harmony lay within it.
Something slightly tangible; something partially impalpable with some of the thought, feeling and memory of this thing called Nawin was indeed following the luminary whom he thought of as 'grandmother', as if she were the setting sun. He halted and waited for her to come out—she who had as swarthy a complexion as he had with features so resembling his own, but with the particular habit of sliding her glasses down her nose like his wife, and examining buildings of an uncertain destination pedantically.
When she came out with her bag of goods she faced a gigantic television screen of video animated advertisements on the wall of a building across the street that flashed 'You prick,' 'Murdering philanderer,' 'You son of a bitch,' and 'Porn, your brothers are watching your ass' at the bottom of the screen. Nawin's life—his myriad faces of lost forlornness, the hes of many ages—was the background to advertisements about soap, beer, condoms, and cars. Repulsed by the foul language, she was transfixed by it nonetheless, until feeling the acidic rain that fell through polluted skies and the putrid city fall onto her skin. Opening an umbrella against the rain, she noticed that there really was a faint translucent man watching her. She grimaced at what she interpreted as a glowering figure and quickened her pace to escape him. Passing California Fitness, 7 Eleven, Robinson Department store, and a Haagen-Dazs ice cream parlor, she paused briefly at the Temple of the Descending Sun (Wat Kham) to pull up the umbrella that was briefly turned inside-out from a strong gust. Then she continued to quickly walk away. He stood there watching the shrinking form. "Grandmother," he thought, "Where are you going?" He tried to get the words out but all was mute including himself. He felt a sense of consternation to see her fleeing from him. He thought, "Why on Earth are you running from me now—why are you not making it up to me now;" but he had not brought her into existence and thus she was not his to possess. Whatever brought him into existence, he thought, was the sole claimant. Still there was a fusion of a being in love and this "grandmother" who was diminishing beyond the unassisted eye to register. Ambivalent between the emotional response of running after her, a sacrilege against the gods, and a logical response, a blaspheme against this positive mixing called love that was the only sense in being on this planet in its forever of affable and lethal associations, he just cried internally, silently. Hesitant in a life clogged in these conflicts that engendered ambivalent waffling and wallowing in futile rumination, he let her pass away. Immobile because of a cold rush of dread, he let the filthy acidic rain sully his head the way his thoughts were sullied in desperation.
Ruminating, he thought about how each year for his birthday she had fixed her American born, but not raised, angel food cake burnished in icing, and brought him to fairs to shoot the moving plastic ducks. Once she had taken him all the way to Bangkok for no other purpose than to allow him to see the sedentary reptiles there. He would often crawl through the window of her porch where shelves were cluttered in Avon bottles shaped in animal figurines, and when she saw him she would just chasten him mildly with, "You, yo-yo, get out of there. What are you thinking?" When he crawled onto her lap he felt the rugged velvety silkiness of her legs in panty hose and he would stroke them.
How cold her home was in summers with that air conditioner in the window of the living room on early into early morning chilling the house like an American winter, and he would snuggle deep under a saffron monk-colored blanket that was as stiff as it had been starched and ironed. Within that room where he would sleep there was a picture in black and white showing her in thick glasses with pointed silver rims on the frame and a long dress as she held him in a fulfilled and satisfied sense of pleasure. The image of the two of them—he a tiny child, but both of them children lost in time—was just a weathering photograph, a jaundicing pallid image lost forever, as a web page with an address that was indefeasibly and indelibly forgotten by all in time's thicket of images. It was one sentimental but insignificant moment lost in the compiling images of time—And here she was again, the one who had absconded away from them at their parents deaths in a Bangkok- to-Ayutthaya automobile accident, walking away from him hurriedly and as she did so passing the Temple of the Descending Sun.
"How foolish you are. Grandmother. And a rich grandmother at that, living in an air conditioned house instead of a broiling shack on stilts in the sylvan area of Ayutthaya. "Not yours, buddy; not yours," said a gecko that was crawling around his tomb within the train. "What?" asked Nawin, whining ingenuously. "The only panty hose that you have ever stroked are the ones you take off as a precursor to your copulatory sports." The gecko stuck out its tongue. "Brackish succulent skin of an edible silky velvet are always the way one likes it as long as they are young with tender meat and best of all, all vanillaly caucasian as an angel—and then the sand paper tongue strokes inside and out to get its salties and sugars. Young succulent skin whose scents, especially in their far from flowery holes, make silly male creatures repeat the delusion of intimacy time and time again like their fathers, grandfathers, and so on—young succulent skin as a varied brunch and dinner delicacy." The gecko released a dry acrimonious chuckle. "Speaking of eats, have you seen any mosquitoes in this smelly train?" "No," said Nawin. "Not a one." "What a pity," said the miniature, khaki colored lizard of the Chakri dynasty. The gecko glowered at Nawin with appetite and fixed interest as if he were an esculent appetize—the gecko crawling on the railing of the BTS Skytrain station looking down at the small womanly morsels and traffic below and amorous Nawin doing the same but as he glanced up dizzyingly at the facade of the colossal Intercontinental Hotel with its eerie pale-blue light diffused throughout, he felt like he was falling into a deep- blue eternal space. His soul, this odd inexplicable word that may or may not have a physical counterpart beyond the letters of the word, was falling into this alien, colossal structure with its lambent bluish light.
Then the edible Nawin woke, instantly realizing that his grandparents had died long before he was born and that here he was, just a few hours from turning forty himself (he was going to consider himself 39 for as long as he could), arm broken, relationship with a wife broken, and girlfriend deceased most horrifically, cowering from his sullied personal life on an upper sleeper of a Pullman car in a train bound for Nongkai and nowhere. He realized that he who had gained his acclaim as a painter of Patpong prostitutes, and had burgeoned from poverty by his dismal themes and color, was all dried up in themes now. Creativity and life were, for him, veritably exhausted. Was this the middle life crisis that was so ubiquitous to man? He did not know.
"Hey guy! Sawadee khrap [hello]," he said with face lowered toward the bunk beneath him. He wanted diversion from any stranger who could plant him outside his own thoughts. The stranger chortled at the face hanging upside down before him. "What?" he asked.
"Why are you upside down?" asked Nawin innocently.
"I am, am I? Khrap, khrap [yes, yes], I guess so that you would ask me why I am upside down."