"So what is in my face?"
"It doesn't matter what is in your face. I don't need to look at it all that much. All upper class Thai darkees are the same. Cleansed and made beautiful and white by money they are a vain lot—solitary cowards behind face fortresses. They are like the Chinese in that sense, and both Thai lightees and darkees with money pretend to be of a higher species. They try to avoid foraging, disease carrying primates like me. Their fortresses are built from fear that lack of money will make them have to acknowledge that they are merely hairless monkeys—no more special, no more potential to matter than any animal."
"You think that I am like that?"
"Well, each person is a bit different. You don't seem so bad. Let's just say that for now, you are a nice guy in a snobbish sort of way" (meaning that having been given a bit of money the previous night in that gesture of unbegrudging levity as if it had merely been the sharing of a bag of sticky rice, a smile from this giver, Nawin, since these Thai compatriots saw smiling as their highest attribute, and voluble conversation beyond the vouchsafed utterances given to a repugnant laborer from a country that was poorer than Thailand, he could hardly hate this particular Thai with that quick primeval xenophobia, in which hominoids reacted to those strangers of a different and potentially deleterious group). Nawin had to be put in a special category slightly different than the usual brand of rich and dark Thais of money. Nawin chuckled abashedly as he tilted his august face to the floor. Then he lifted his head and, in the way of the Thais, a morose, soft, and artful smile alighted on his swarthy countenance like a lambent shadow of a descending airplane across a naked field. He became aware of how much he needed other human beings, these jovial extensions to his limited domain, these pleasant respites from redundant churnings of thought and the hauntings of memories, and he knew that he would feign any interested smile to get the reprieve. "Did you have a good sleep?"
"No, not at all, if you really want to know, which I couldn't see that you would really. Personally, I've never minded a little stink: a sock here, a shoe there, even women smelling like raw, rotting tuna down where a man wants to go—I accept these things. Things that get used get smelly. But that which was stinking up there was of no use….unless one were to capture it, put it in a pill somehow, and sell it off as a cheap form of methamphetamines to truckers, bus drivers, and maybe even guys like me who want nothing better than to stare into space on a bunk all night instead of sleep."
"My socks?"
"Your monstrous socks!"
"Was it that bad?" asked this American Thai, Nawin, with an awkward laugh. He was feeling a sense of exhilaration at being with one who was unlike demure Southeast Asians' superficial demeanor. Like a Nawin Biadklang painting in being so wanton in declaring sordid reality as such, so seemed the man; and Nawin liked what was true and like himself.
"It was like drowning in molecules—at least a little. Still, I survived it all right, so it's okay. Morning came."
"How did morning make a difference?"