For a moment he was stunned to have these crevices of opaque light so heavily and obliquely invade the filthy corners of his mind, the dark enlightenment being alluded to, both parties seeming to peer onto it (he himself undoubtedly so and this smirking of the Laotian and his eyes that seemed to pierce his soul so knowingly could not have equivocal interpretations). He kept debating whether he should stay or go and found himself, due to his indecisiveness, floundering in desperate ambivalence. Clearly he wanted to move to a different seat so in that sense of knowing his own dominant yearning and witnessing it unopposed by contrary yearnings he was not ambivalent at all and yet, he asked himself, how could he just go? To go so precipitously would be rude even if done with the obsequious gesture of the wai (although even this was complicated by the fact that he was the older and vastly more affluent of the two parties and should not be the one initiating such gestures); and to leave for one of the now vacant seats would only aggravate suspicion. The idea of the Laotian having proof of his decadence would dog whatever specious tranquility he hoped to have in a vacant space of his own. He could stay. True, it would be uncomfortable but then, he told himself, there was not any option for solving any problem that was ever entirely perfect. He was uncomfortable now, and would surely be even more so with the passing moments. Such discomfort would sprawl like a dark vine onto the minutes, strangling them like a rope, or in excessive growth smothering them like a baby buried in its foam bath. And yet if he were inordinately resolute if not obdurate in staying where he was, would not the tempestuousness pass away easily by acting the part of a god? Zeus-like in shooting his thunder bolts, albeit thunder bolts of conversation against that soft epistemological core of a man's mind which realized that nothing was known absolutely, he could easily impart the venom of doubt. He could lead the conversation into inconsequential matters such as the latest news about these Moslem separatists in the South or the seventy year old saffron frocked monk who mistakenly pulled out glue from the medicine cabinet, inserted it into one of his eyes, and then allowed a colleague to remedy it by applying paint thinner into his hallowed orbs. Anything believed to be known, could be doubted as illusory when the possibilities of the present were continually supplanting those of the past. By continuing to talk it would become more real than the Laotian's vague recollection of him staring at his body. Still he did not know what to say, and feeling that discomfort, he wanted the closure of all communication with a stranger who knew him more than his own wife.
These homosexual feelings had swept out of nowhere, and they had put him in an inferno of desire, which only masturbation in the toilet had been able to douse (this particular desire all the more savage for being so alien to adulthood). Still with the appropriate undaunted response such a caprice and aberration did not need to brand him in the Laotian's mind or his own. And yet this chill that seemed to drip onto his spine like water from a leaky pipe in the tiled ceiling of the bathroom, was incessant; and perennial was the trepidation that the Laotian should know the cryptic depravity that lived in the messy far reaches of his brain, and the latent whims that gushed out from his childhood memories. For a few seconds Nawin was able to stare at his curious rival with a resolute confidence and a lambent smile but it did not last, and so he stared out of the window and withdrew back into himself. He once again began to romanticize those cars of laborers with their families. It would be there, to them, from which wafting scents of dirt, rice, and wildly lush and weedy greenery, lost molecules from the whole, would pour into open windows. It would be there in poignant rushes of wind slapping their faces that, complacent or even content, these laborers in shared travels to the homes of extended family would find meaning in their relationships. From the illusion of desire and love, of transient rushes of feeling, the families existed and became the boundaries and summation of themselves—accidents and stumblings from that which in ignorance begat the unions and material presences to which they tolerated, and to some degree cared for, as they were extensions of themselves, their fate.
The bundle (the feet on the Laotian's seat and head leaning against the edge of his own) began to move and like a decarpeted Cleopatra her face became visible and it was beautiful.
13
Throughout these moments of the conversation she, whoever she was, had been at his knee all along even though, oddly enough, her presence had registered in his brain with the vaguest of awareness. Now that he was fully cognizant of her, he perceived this oddity of having overlooked her earlier as a somewhat amusing anecdote in a listless, perennial train trip largely in need of even the most dull amusements, a fact which was droll to him in its own way; and yet outwardly he hid his smile and tried to restrain himself from glancing downward. He told himself that he did so out of Thai modesty which mandated some degree of reticence, or at least a bit of a reluctance, to broach questions (being installed by cultural indoctrination this was the most frequently used program which, when lacking an operator's manual for one's life, even iconoclasts like him would switch on reflexively in an effort to make an appropriate social response before reconsideration and subsequent action). Indeed that did have some bearing, but for the most part his silence was in the hope of keeping her there longer.
Clearly, she was now exhaling her warmth onto one of his knees so, he argued to himself, why not patiently allow the query of who she was to emerge slowly with her presence when waking would at last tear open that cocoon. As bereft of women and relationships as he now was and as confused as he was by what had transpired inwardly immediately before and during his odd release in the toilet, it was quite pleasant to imagine her as a more docile and devoted member of his long throng of scattered harem over the years and now, at the age of forty, decades of adulthood. He knew that this desiring of a woman to stay on his knee was not all that different from the previous night when with beer in his system and insecurity at being chased by the 4 and 0 which were almost as tangible as stalkers, he had hugged a pillow to secure some limited sleep. He knew it, and he knew that this repugnant human weakness suggested that the peace of mind he hoped to obtain by a Buddhist trip into Vientiane could be easily ravaged by wild desires as random and pointless as the landscape of weeds and sedges about the train, for desire was innate as the yearning to breathe. This wild mono-homo incident, he somewhat cogently told himself from the more than nominal truth that was therein, had merely been a release, a mechanical need to discharge a full load of semen rather than a desire for one of the same gender; and he fervently yearned for the obsequious knee doter to stay where she was for as long as it lasted, not that he would have disturbed her repose if it were not intertwined with his own pleasure as well as a need for a secure sense of self-identity. Was not that, he asked himself, what made the distinction of a kind man from the rest of the predatory male animals: a patience and tolerance of others' happiness, and a willingness to invest time to secure it even at the cost of one's own discomfort? If so, kindness was the virtue of the former he, Jatupon, who, in lost, forlorn boyhood, when not wanting to disturb sleeping cats allowed them to lay hours at a time on his lap. He guffawed silently in his own mental chamber at such sanctimonious, thrasonical ravings, for childish behavior of long ago was not evidence for his untenable claim of being a kind man and thus a good one. It had no relevance to his barely nominal interaction with the beauty that was sleeping at his knee. Furthermore, he recriminated himself, his fame came in depicting the exploitation of others which was in itself a type of exploitation even were he to reside in the deepest squalor as an expose journalist, a Mother Theresa, or some other paragon for ending injustice and suffering. Had not his whores sought deliverance for themselves and their impoverished families because of him? Had not jejune sojourns been made to the homes of their respective rural families where he had to eat with them as one of their members? Had not a belief that he would leave his wife for them and an innocent expectation that they would be redeemed by this deliverer burned within their breasts, hearts, and clitorises? "Am I a good man? I rather doubt that I am," he disparaged himself. He even doubted goodness. One never interacted with anyone unless pleasure was in some way associated to it. A human, even the best of them, was hardly the making of a saint. Clearly, were they not so soft and his need for love so great, he would not have stayed in that uncomfortable posture on a tree stump outside his parents home, long ago, to allow cats to sleep upon him.
This idea that pleasure was interconnected with all pursuits, a viand of a thought, could well have become a repast if not a banquet for discernment; and as an artist's dissertation was done on canvas, ideas for a painting, now raw feeling boiling to the rim, were on the verge of being shaped in his mind. And yet, he dismissed them. He repudiated them by telling himself that he would never rank as a great artist, that he was void of color, theme, and technique.
A knee doter—he could barely hold back his laughter (how easily he was amused by himself, a wonted practice from the vestige of childhood along those banks of the Chao Phraya river in Ayutthaya when solitary play with the elements inherent in air, rain, and dirt and the chase of an idea scurrying through a mind which was barely aware of its presence, brought him peace from the incessant barrage of disparagement meant to stomp upon him, their cockroach, in that war called family). The verdant landscape, now near Nongkai and her sister city of Vientiane, came incessantly toward the passengers as the train moved through it. It came intimately. Every minute of a man's life that was not in sexual intercourse, he thought, was in an intercourse of a very different kind, in union with circumstance and thereby impregnated with new thought that made him a new man. A knee doter, he inwardly chuckled (once again he was pondering how easily he was amused by himself, a practice he had become accustomed to from the vestige of that hell called family in which, if one's sensitivity was intact enough to not laugh at a sundry of crude commentaries such as the father's daily repetition that it did not matter what a woman looked like as she could be denuded and a sack put over her head, and these manly attempts at being the most clever one at belittling the other (mostly aiming for him, that easiest and most sensitive of targets) these rudimentary and vulpine or wolfish members of the pack would attempt a full annihilation of him in words—all of them that was but his brother and tacit protector, Kazem, whose hard eyes were his fort, but whose gun would discharge later in his rectum). He found this peculiar idea of her as the obsequious love slave, as much as the source behind it, not only amusing but arousing. It had always seemed to him, fettered as he once had been in ideas and paint, obsessed with transforming sordid memories and thought into color as he inexplicably gazed at a barren wall of canvas, that one never made love to a woman but a facsimile of one in one's own brain which that brain distorted to meet the orgasm it longed for. It always seemed to him that the craving for women was merely for a spark to stimulate fire in the vacuity of the brain so as to liberate it from catatonic list, the result of boredom, and thus orgasm was merely for oneself even if by chasing illusions of "love" a real child materialized along the way. Thinking it now, it was nothing new for him, for to him, Jatupon, who was once in love with his brother and scrutinized the validity of human emotions thereafter as Nawin, feelings were gossamer threads of chemicals prompting puppet man to breed and breed elsewhere. Marriage had at least taught him that tempestuous feelings of love and despondency could pass if one gave them little credence and by being unmoved by their promptings one could at least have some years of success in obtaining a consistent uxorial presence in his life. Love at first sight that was felt from brief encounters was merely a neediness for an interesting presence to stir up one's passion for life and end loneliness. It was always transferred to a conceivably obtainable sense of beauty by which to obtain immortality in a DNA continuum. For even love from a sexual encounter, to have any substance of reality, had to be a reciprocal neediness ground in years of friendship. And yet a woman was a whore whose penchant for a parcel of land and a branch of a tree to build her nest was an instinct that was as fulsome as the worse of human hungers. His mother, to get her few scanty goods, had closed her eyes to his suffering. His wife, now that she acquired his child, took over his domain and changed the locks. Ironically, here he was lusting after a woman once again for did not every man require intimacy like butter that would melt and fuse him and his sausage onto the woman and her egg? Did he not secretly want a woman's bypassed stares in the minutes of anger to diminish him into the dissolved umbrage of her shadow like slinking into shadows of an alley to taunt thieves and cutthroats to have some limited intimacy with death?
He allowed his ruminations to quickly shuffle through his mind once more, for they amused him tremendously. Then he redundantly centered on one in particular. Throughout this nascent conversation with the Laotian, whoever this man was, who perhaps used a nickname-alias of Boi as an easily worn but also easily removed one word summation of himself, this pallid, young female with flowing hair, just as he liked them, had been inches near his thighs and he had barely even noticed it, as he was preoccupied with this bizarre homosexual caprice that had rushed upon him an hour earlier as zephyrs from the subconscious, and thinking of ways to repudiate any judgment of him as a homosexual that might be in the mind of the Laotian. Eagerly succumbing to desire for the girl, and perhaps even exaggerating any desire that he did possess to feel masculine within himself, he deliberately glanced down at her even though he was once trying not to do so. She looked like that nurse at Siriaj Hospital who had been responsible for catering toward him whose wife had broken his arm with a skillet and his heart with those words, "The son that you and Kimberly brought into the world should not have a hateful person like you as his father! Get out! We're through!" For ongoing emotional comfort and to set up dates for caresses he would be calling that nurse, smitten as she was for his good looks and his marginal celebrity status. He would be doing it now at this moment were it not for having thrown away his telephone at the train station.
14