"Why would anyone want your paintings? That is what I'm trying to figure out. Video porn… DVD porn for those with computers, okay. They are closer to the real thing, aren't they?" Nawin smiled widely. He felt reaffirmed and grounded in the inconsequence of vain, lofty pursuits and his retirement finally felt good. Then the Laotian said, "There is some real porn that I am witnessing right now. It is too bad it's just that of any locker room scene" and then he pointed down at Nawin's open zipper.
Nawin looked down and smiled widely. He was before the Laotian in an unzipped state after having masturbated to an image of him in his head (the same type of illusion that a man had in copulating with his wife to keep illusory human existence on the planet at all) and yet he felt no particular compunction for what he had done or what a man tended to do with his own body in the privacy of his mind, or in the intimacy of a real embrace. In all cases it was the massage of his own body to ease himself from the stress of thinking, knowing, and having to live in a world of illusions. It was the massage of one's body which one rightfully owned if anyone did (certainly not one's partner) and thus this acknowledgement repudiated, and rendered inane words like adultery and perversion.
12
Left to himself for a moment, he slipped into a brief sleep where, once again, he was with Kimberly. He too was a prey of gravity, and they were falling rapidly from the balcony of her apartment in the Queen's Tower at Assumption University. The two of them, morsels down the gullet of skies, seemingly torn by winds active as enzymes, pummeled the air futilely with desperate, flailing limbs in an attempt to swim through the air from whence they came but could never return. Hardly an occasion for declaring mai pen rai, still there were scarce traces of hope; and as hope was consciousness, there were scarce traces of the latter as well. If, as scared as he was, he was cognizant enough to have a group of interrelated thoughts beyond the perennial wish for "God", which redundantly played in his head, to save him, it was in reference to a belief that there were some actions that could be reversed. It seemed to him that as a change of one's mind could cause a departure to become a homecoming, so there was a remote possibility that this action could also be reversed. Maintaining hope and consciousness, wisely, it did not occur to him that such a return was physically impossible since beings plunged through life just once. Shrieking as they punctured two large holes that made one prodigious gulf in the thin metallic tiles comprising the awning over the swimming pool, they plunged together, splashing into a fiery inferno of loneliness before the last of their inevitable, lethal descent.
He woke, fully startled to find himself in wakefulness. Concentrating on where he was to allow the excesses of the saturation of sleep, a more temporary reality, to be shaken from his sodden neurons like wetness from an animal's fur, he then did nothing further. He merely allowed it to slowly evaporate from consciousness. It seemed odd to him that in all these diurnal commutes between wakefulness and sleep that the mind should continue to allow either of these two states to overwhelm the other. It seemed odd that after so long it would continue to be sequacious to trust what was experienced in either of the chemically induced realms but then, he asked himself, what choice did it have? Was not sand layered by wind and waves? It was; and so the human brain was molded with whatever energy and force happened to be applied to it. Then, in the next second of thoughts, it did not seem odd at all; and conversely, he speculated that perhaps most individuals considered both states specious and succumbed, like prisoners, to the coercion in apathetic numbness.
Was it not so in this city of Bangkok where incense was snagged in carbon exhausts and its residents were engaged in amusements to escape their small speck on this rock of the planet? They were a lackadaisical ethnicity and their amusements were definitely petty—the young chasing balls and finding the extent of their physical prowess; carnal youth in sexual peccadilloes; the worker ants who, when not at work, and no longer succumbing to that role that gave some structure to their existence, spending time in evening revelries about owning their own businesses; elderly women engaged in Tai Chi and their husbands in Chinese checkers on park benches; the poor along the canals, clustered in evenings near their neighbors' shacks for beer and cigarette pilfering, sometimes the men comic book swapping and always musing the day's pettiness amusingly; the rich speculating on how to invest and have more, seeking large flat screen televisions and the fastest computers at Panthip Plaza, the most fashionable clothes in the best of malls, and exchanging tips on how to improve their landscapes and gardens; but which of them, in the thickets of men, felt or thought deeply about the world? They were as wild vines that grew with the rest of nature on the rock of the planet and sprawled human entanglements and preoccupations thoughtlessly upon it.
It was only from the constancy of waking in the same bed in which he went to sleep, waking to the same issues that he went to sleep with, and finding himself next to the person he fell asleep with the previous night, that sleep was considered sleep and not wakefulness, and wakefulness was considered wakefulness instead of sleep; and yet knowing this did nothing for him. He felt discombobulated as though this dream were of more substance than dew over the eyes that he would eventually dry from, a sandstorm within the self where, were it not for his own angst, that same regret that he felt a dozen yesterdays ago and was a constancy that would commandeer a lifetime of perennial guilt- ridden tomorrows, he would not know reality if it were to swallow him. "I feel a constancy of pain and therefore I am," he thought satirically.
For a couple of seconds he noted how, from where he was positioned inwardly and outwardly (pinioned inside himself as he remained seated a few feet from the window) the swath of fields and outlying roads of small towns hurried past him in an incessant green and grey smudge of flat images. Even though they fleeted by incessantly, they were like pop-ups from a children's book; and for a few additional seconds he began to withdraw into a self that was deflating surreally into a diminutive and flattened form in an imagined land of stationary pop-ups where the unreal was still and preserved instead of the seemingly real, which was always wide-open and fleeting. Then this too, this relinquishing oneself to the void to cease this expending of one's energy in sifting through all of these illusions in illusionary existence, formulating "reality" based upon garnering the most plausible of the illusions, ceased with hearing the loud yawning of this stranger named Boi. Glancing at him, Nawin displayed the notorious Thai smile which was always feigned and hospitable with the genuine warmth of wanting the recipient to like him if not of needing to be liked. He did it almost like any reflexive jerk, a physical retreat of the body, as he ruminated on this word, stranger.
When, he asked himself, did a person cease being a stranger? Had he not known Noppawan since he was fourteen years old (as if years meant anything)? Had they not become soul mates for the reason that each of them had possessed empathy for the other innocent being charred in the torturous hells of family? He had and they had; and yet upon gaining a child from him she had treated him with indifference as if, having obtained what she had always wanted (one of her husband's sperm fertilizing an egg and allowing her a son even if it was through her best friend), he was now irrelevant and made all the more so, weeks later, at Kimberly's demise, when she locked him out physically as well as psychologically. He had not even known her. In all of these years of marriage on top of those comprising their friendship of youth he had not known her any more than one did the strangest of strangers.
"Still tired," asked Nawin.