"What adventure?" he chuckled softly with a sotto voce of scoffing asperity as if there had been no earlier adventure on the metallic toilet floor. He said it for in a sense it had been unfitness, a secret aberration even to areas of his cognizance that could not accept anything but the thought of himself as a lady's man and womanizer, it was true.
"I don't know. As I have nothing better to do, tell me where you have been."
"The toilet, mostly," said the body ogler with an embarrassed laugh as if this trifle of where he had been (this masturbatory exercise in the toilet of the train) were not worthy of speech instead of being a paramount expression of repressed, latent forces that had been compressed within him for so many years. It was still his assumption that as a sleeping body was beautiful with its breath rising and lowering the chest rhythmically like a raft on an ocean, so an artist, the appreciator of beauty in the mundane, would have an artist's aberrations from the insensate throngs, and as such, such appreciative aberrations should not be judged as anything that was particularly queer or at any rate queerer than anything else. Just being on the planet at all, a successful conception from one of competing sperm spilled out in a moment of two people needing, from a transient mood, to subscribe to an illusion of intimacy in a physical experience, was queer enough.
"I suppose looking at that handsome but middle-aged face deteriorate in the mirror—I mean when you were in the toilet. Right?"
"Maybe. Something like that."
"Well, that's a bit odd if you don't mind me saying so. Even a woman would not dare to pee or stay in front of a mirror that long."
Nawin laughed. Like his expressions of love in his juggling of women that was and was not the love he claimed it as being, he had moments of a predilection for mendacity like a boy wanting to hide himself within the shadows of a field and to remain there indefinitely, never to be discovered. He spoke mendaciously and yet to him it was not really a lie. "I wasn't there all that long. Afterwards, I just waited outside the toilet for the seats to be readjusted. Just waited back there, wasting time." Of course "wasting time" had consisted of that adolescent masturbatory sport, which he had conducted earlier in that fetid toilet, a water closet that was more tin than tinsel; and as he thought of it once again with a mischievous grin, he thought of this use of the source of the fantasy for pleasure, the Laotian, without much compunction. Then he thought of himself as guilty for not feeling guilt until recognizing that these new sexual urges were as a volcano spewing out old molten churnings of lava. So of a volcano, he thought, so of a human psyche. He accepted this change to the contour of the surface for ultimately (according to his rationalization), as queer as it was, like everything else, there was nothing new or strange in it.
"And while waiting outside the toilet you were probably staring at yourself in one of the other mirrors, weren't you?"
"Yes, but how do you know that?"
"It would have to be a guess, wouldn't it, unless I can read minds, at least in some imperfect way. In this case it is not so much reading minds but faces."