An Apostate: Nawin of Thais

by Steven David Justin Sills

"What has your nose been rubbed in, Mother? I have a girlfriend and a child—a child. For God's sake, look at the pictures in my wallet!" he pulled out a wallet, unfolded it, and flipped the photographs randomly.

"Get them out of my face. They are the same ones that you sent to me—the ones I glanced at and mailed back to you. It's not your child. It has nothing to do with you and less to do with me."

"It's my child," he yelled.

"Don't you dare raise your voice to me. Don't you dare raise your voice to your mother." At this place that in youth he had referred to as home for lack of anything more substantial, he quickly packed his bags and thought of how concocted and sententious morality was. It seemed to him that it was the equivalent of timidity and hardly a virtue at all. It was seeing shadows and monsters in that which deviated beyond the boundaries of one's awareness and only this. There were clearly wrong actions, actions of hate, but these were not issues of morality but the loss of a logical restraint to instinctual passions of destruction for the sake of self- preservation. He told himself that he would and could break off the relationship for to not do so would make him the mimesis of the bad they thought that he was, and if he believed that he was bad he would relinquish self-control and in a turbulent rest allow himself to be overtaken in a vortex of destructive passions. He had gone through this much of his life without in the early juncture of his youth having constructive role models. Still he had concocted his own imperfect expression of love as others who had been mulled in family. As they did with the years of their lives, he also tried to fine tune what benevolent love existed within him and would go on doing so, sometimes even accomplishing it.

He woke to human contact. It was a nudge.

"What are you doing?"

"Oh," said Nawin while smiling. "I was just trying to stay out of your way."

"You can go back to your seat now, I'm done."

Nawin stood up and the dream, like flooding river water, receded back to its usual course. Deemed as unreal and untrue, it was relegated no differently than other repudiated and forgotten experiences within the continual shove of movements in time and by a consciousness which only accepted the reality of everything new that flowed into it (At this moment, for him it was what the senses were recording as the linen officer departing into another car, the drab and fetid qualities of the train, and his constricted space within it as he continued to flee his fumbled personal life, which he remembered all too well). He shook his head and scoffed at the dream where a dim sense of reality persisted. Pushed further into the past with every mounting moment, it still discombobulated his present reality with its magnetism. It had been a mere dream but when he was in it, the images had seemed so clear, motivation had seemed less cryptic, and he could not help but wonder if in sleep the awakened state would seem dreamy if dreams had cognition of such a state.

Contrary to the dream, he had never known his mother in adulthood and apart from being born in America and living there for a few years, possibly the bastard of an unknown father (at least that was his conjecture to explain his parents separation then and the degree to which he was flouted afterward over so many years) he did not know America. This was apparent by his conceptualization of the Mississippi River where motorized gondolas moved around high rise condominiums only to depart into a canal the way they did in Bangkok. Whether the dream attempted to indict him as a homosexual or depict sexual ambiguity, he could not see either one as exceptionally true at mirroring his image (truth being that—a mirror). He certainly was not a homosexual whatever queer caprices might come upon him—sexual energy merely flowing without direction or destination were it not for mores and a negative, positive, or hyper-inflated interpretation of one parent or both as role models which barricaded the momentum and, like crags, altered the flow. No, he told himself, he was no more queer than any heterosexual—it was just that what was most pleasant in one's bleak environment at a given moment became the playmate and intrigue in one's head to which innate energies were channeled in its favor. And of his relationship with his mother, as she had died when he was fourteen years old, there had not been enough time for a rupture. He recalled that this mother in the dream had not been his own but a macabre, ersatz face stolen from the naked, preserved corpse with the slit chest at the anatomical museum at Siriaj Hospital who the fourteen year old child, Jatupon, had rightly or erroneously believed in his grief and neediness to resemble his mother—the details of the face of his real mother having diminished like the engraving of a name in the sand after the first wave.