An Apostate: Nawin of Thais

by Steven David Justin Sills

Although more clinch than original, an idea as trite as an aphorism ruminated in his head. He told himself that ideas were nothing unless one acted upon them; and yet from a less cognizant mélange of disorganized feelings which had not been refined into thought he was really meaning that fervent, peculiar whims prompted all pleasurable acts and that unto themselves these saccharin gusts that bate were of no substance unless, in opposition to society at large, one partook of them fully by allowing them to saturate to fulsome, insatiability in behavior that was in complete accord with their perverse dictates. In the brief space of that moment he repeatedly averred this facile idea silently in his mind. He willed belief into it like pumped air into a holey inner tube which, like in his filthy boyhood in the still filthier Chao Phraya river in Ayutthaya, for a brief time of escaped labor, he would ride.

Ideas are nothing unless one acts upon them: the thought was not at all novel even if this particular context for it was. It seemed to him to have Buddhist or Biblical implications which he supposed as having been transmitted to him long ago through someone affiliated with a temple or a church, although he was not exactly sure how or when such an idea had been passed to him or how it had become so embedded in his brain even if brains were, for the most part, mere sponges. Oddly enough, there it was, even in such a man so unfettered by moral restraints as he was. It was like a blood-sucking mosquito but quaffing away analytic and synthetic processes of idea making, aggravating placid delusions in fever, and muddling the mind in an amphigory of simplistic human nature, which when unchecked, was really more carnal, multi-dimensioned, and beastly than anyone would care to presume.

His prudish behavior on this day was diametrically opposed to the Nawin of old who on virtually every other day of his adult life but this one, from influences of feelings and underlying thoughts which he hardly recognized, had followed his carnal whims with women inordinately. A being, after all, did the tricks that nature prompted him to do for the sweet bait of pleasure and so from the perspective of carrying out those functions that biological creatures were meant to, the physical and perhaps only basis of morality, his own behavior was exemplary. In the seats of his car parked around forested areas within Bangkok's outlying roadside parks (the woods therein avoided because of the bigger probability of the brambles of "queers" accosting him), in forests far from the city, against walls of women's toilets in gas stations, in discotheque parking lots, in hotel rooms, empty upper staircases, in boyfriends' and husbands' beds when they were out, several times, under banana and durian trees in one particular father's orchard, once in a pimp's bedroom when he was out, many times in the villagers own bedrooms while they slept on living room floors eager to take advantage of his copulatory pleasure to get a bit of financial support for their families and fame for the daughters' whose beauty he, the surrogate husband, would preserve on canvases, abandoned buildings and tall skeletal structures that were never quite built after the 1996 financial meltdown, once backstage with a Russian ballerina after a performance of Swan Lake at the Thai Cultural Center, several times between two enormous trash bins at a stadium and once under its bleachers, never in his and Noppawon's home unless occasionally with Noppawan herself but very often in his studio, he had released his snake to a mostly strange and less than angelic array of females who too were victims of poverty and exploitation. Both them and a smaller second set as well (a set to which each respective woman behaved as both friend and lover until invariably insisting that he obtain a divorce from his wife, a strident and resonating demand that despite his wishes to the contrary, always caused an avalanche of debris to fall upon them both in a closure of the relationship that turned as black and mordant as light sucked into a black hole and that was as indelible as death) he would massage as gently as wind since, according to him, the Nawin massage was more effective at loosening inhibitions and making the body malleable to sexual positioning than the pryings and twistings of the Thai variant, listen intensely to their troubles during pillow talks in which he reflected their feelings like a psychologist, and kindly ejaculate into them the venom and bite that were the gifts of his body.

With today perhaps being the exception; throughout his life it always seemed to him, the exponential adulterer that he was, that carnal caprices should not at all be repudiated when they were all. Every rare, sublime thought that managed to get through the savage millennia did so because of sordid, procreative energy which manufactured the generations despite imperfect performances of maladroit sperm missing their targets, the targets most times missing, and even the walls of the missing targets sometimes being some other type of wall, a wall like his own wall, a man's wall.

If from a Christian source, the idea must have originated with his aunt on his mother's side who had once dabbled in his life with feigned love back in those early days of Jatupon when he believed that this bit of extended family, this refined lady of an exceptional marriage who was blood of his blood (which she had willingly sold by buckets to a hoary senator with age blemishes) would at last tug him back from the precipice or at least intercede when he was foundering in the abyss of family. Back then there was a belief in deliverers who would reach for him while uttering charming, mellifluous words which all of the family members would accede to. Back then there was a belief in forgiveness, the righting of wrongs, that a time would come when both mother and son would feel comfortable enough in each other's presence to almost be able to speak openly about what was happening to him in this monstrosity called family, that there would be a time of not having to fear losing any remnant of the maternal instinct for love which she still possessed and occasionally demonstrated in brief tacit glances of commiseration, that a day would finally come for this open admission of the truth (although now he believed that it probably never would have occurred even if the parents had not died so early in that fatal automobile accident, which had led to his subsequent indentured status as a noodle worker behind his brothers' food cart and the late evenings/early mornings of becoming, even more gratuitously, his brother, Kazem's "cheap date," his "free hole"), and happy endings for this putative, perennial propinquity called family which he had once thought of as an everlasting substance that would one day satiate him with meaning, and like a tsunami drown and bury his tiny, forlorn existence in its eternal watery mass. His youth had cowered in the corners of the shadows of family, and he had stayed within them complacently, cognizant that every cockroach that was not smashed sooner or later found a more preferable exit, and that although it would seem forever, this time of the impermanent first family would just be a brief space of years within one's lifetime.

Art had been his way of taking umbrage. It had been his way of committing that monstrous deed of giving a voice to the miniscule cockroach by inserting a man's vocal cords within it. How in early boyhood could he have known family to be merely half-remembered battles, and diminished faces of long known and scarcely understood combatants that the memories and critical intelligence of an adult would present to him? He had believed in the magical restoration of it then, child that he was, as if self-interest were not a priority in human beings. Integrity was rare and integrity for his sake rarer yet. Should he have expected something greater from his aunt? To her he had been cute, and so not having children of her own, she had dabbled in a love for him, pampering him for a time with her neediness. She was, after all, a human being seeking her own happiness as he was; and unlike him, she probably never had a clue what happiness was really. However, he did know despite often living contrary to its precepts.

By his account happiness was seeing meaning in the blowing branches of a tree on a murky, partly cloudy day that was as ambiguous in weather as purpose, and expecting nothing greater from his environment or fellow men than ambiguous and random happenings on such a gloomy day. To find a bit of pleasure in what was and not expect anything more: this was seeing innate value instead of creating ideal scenarios, which were bound to not happen and lead to disappointment.

The mystery of obtaining happiness was not so confusing but sexuality, that ever changing river, was. As many times as he pondered again this recent event, his ruminations churned up vacuity and uncertainty for he still did not know whether or not this mono-homosexual experience of masturbating one time to the image of a male in a toilet of a train on a day of panicking over having turned forty constituted a thought that was acted upon, and so the aphorism did nothing for him. If meant to liberate him from guilt or cure him of sexual depravity this nostrum had less efficacy than a placebo.

It was not only them, whomever they were, but he himself, whoever he was, that seemed to meander on the outside. He was lost like an insect crawling on a seat of a roller coaster ride which, designed for thrills as it was, lacked purpose. This ride on and of the world in forty rotations around the sun, which had changed him both physically and mentally since his birth, seemed to him now as meaningless as a pail of water being twirled around forty times in centrifugal force. The Earth had bore him as another product cursorily begotten on an assembly line. A product did not transform a factory, he thought, nor did a man change the world, or even leave any indelible sign of himself before being dumped in the landfill.

Images of a stern female four with a broad boned body and a balding and obese zero with one arm taunted him in his, arguably, depraved imagination. They were salient neither in nightmares as it was not night, nor daydreams as this word only had positive connotations, but in a sense, daymares. In them the couple were walking through the rain toward their home. In his mind's eye zero was still scrambling for his keys when they, the husband and wife, arrived at the doorstep. "You are so disorganized," she reproached. "God, I hope that you did not lose them again," she excoriated. Forty times the zero quietly stomached the abuse as he continued to inspect all of his pockets for the fortieth time. He knew that she had married him for his purchase of a parcel of land to which she could build her nest, for union with sperm from the only man who had exhibited some interest in her, and for a financial provider for her birdies. He knew that, altogether, she had used his body because of an instinct to seek happiness in that which would place her on the throne of maternal monarchy, and so her insults not only seemed unwarranted but particularly contemptible. Furthermore, he could not understand why, when she knew the reactions that getting drunk and shouting her invective as intense as imprecations would cause, that she continually insulted him. More times than not he would be provoked to beat her, pull her around by the hair, and continue to slap their forty children from time to time for caring about the shallow smackings of the mother instead of the mental flagellations that she rendered unto Him. Despite the bruises and black eyes that he gave them, he knew that she would never take them away, for a woman, if anything, was a prostitute of a bird. Obeying instinct, she would do anything for a parcel of land to have and maintain as her nest. Was this, as some type of a singular image, he asked himself, the subject for an abstract painting? It was for someone else, he retorted.