He thought, "Have I, Nawin Biadklang or whoever I am—whatever I call myself, done anything remarkable within all these forty years?" He posited this question as if this subject were now a relevant matter to deliberate, and as if, after having scanned through a quick shuffling of vapid memories, a self-judgment had not already been rendered on this matter. Actually, before posing the question his feelings had already concluded that although having risen to upper middle class from dire poverty as an accomplished artist he had not even made one single painting that was so unique and extraordinary that no one else could have made it exactly as he had done. Feeling had rendered in him the decision that he had failed at anything beyond making himself more affluent than most, and so the question held no purpose. He was just a man with a brief and puny life, and as with all men he ate and expelled, sought pleasure and reacted reflexively against threatening stimuli no differently than any common, self-preserving cockroach. It was true that in a man there was self-awareness more keen than in other animals, but from it one could not help analyzing his own insignificance which he would then have to repugn by absconding more fully in the professional and personal domains. Fabricating illusions of grandeur in ambitions and love, he could keep his life busy and fortified from encroaching questions.
For all of Nawin's messy colors in art and living life brightly (his playboy activities, the television commercials, and a month on a soap opera, which came about from his slight fame as a renowned artist and an attractive presence) he had not become a Leonardo Dicaprio let alone a Leonardo Davinci—not that Davinci would have necessarily known his own greatness. He was discontent with himself as being so was endemic in mortal, human creatures who at best could leave no greater legacy than their own puny thoughts, and at worst found their voices mere echoes of the environment, and their only means to halfway preserve themselves was to have offspring partly begotten from the lust of their loins.
He, in his lifetime, was not as much of a renowned painter as Montien Boonma or Chamas Kietkong were in theirs. For meaningful Thai art of international appeal one turned to them and not him. His works were a familiar leitmotiff of sordid, dejected whores to which ideas and representation of forms were, for critics and buyers alike, secondary considerations. This suggested to him a deficiency in the technical mastery of his craft and made him yearn for other pursuits. At certain times he had been obsessed by having celebrity status and at other times he had loathed it, but overall he had resented its intrusion much more than grading art survey compositions at Silpakorn University for commercials, and the daytime melodrama sidetracked the continuum of his life as an artist by keeping him from scholarship and his own creative achievements. Thus, he had done what pathetic, impotent males of the second category often do: he had fathered a child.
It seemed to him that whereas mildly abused individuals added links to ancestry, homosexuals, from the severity of the abuse committed on them as children, or from good common sense, became broken links and thus remained unchained. In that sense, he was definitely not "queer." At least that was what he told himself. Then it seemed to him that there was a certain heroism in being a childless presence, stopping the replication of a damaged element and accepting fully his impermanence. However, he was not heroic in that way either. He was a mere womanizer upon whom his wife had urged a full, unprotected sexual union with her friend to gain a child. Even in considering all the scores of women whom he had had protected sex with through the past two decades of his life he would hardly be a record holder of this marathon either—not that spilling body fluids to say that one existed would, he judged, have been all that less significant than spilling paint.
At a station immediately before the destination of Nongkai the train stopped and a door opened to three villagers who were selling their fried rice and pork in Styrofoam containers. "Khao pat moo. Som sip baht [Pork fried rice. Oranges, ten baht]" they proclaimed on both sides of the aisle, and like bells their voices summoned him out of himself. The Laotian was still seated in front of him as before, but with a furrowed forehead and a smirking countenance as if puzzled not by what to say but on how best to say it. The woman, still seated in part on the floor, was now stretching her arms. Seeing that she was awake, the Laotian's furrowed field of a forehead became smooth, and the subject of contemplation he was fixated on seemed to vanish. He raised his naked foot, and with a profane toe denuded his partner's bangs and began to massage her forehead. This continued for some minutes until she bit the toe.
"Bitch! You're really vicious. Look what you've done. It's probably bleeding now."
Nawin's jaw lowered with his mouth slightly agape. In disapprobation of his culture he sat stiffly for a moment in tacit and obdurate silence, but with glances down at what was beneath him. What was beneath him was beauty.
15
Even if he were to say that it was a new beginning for himself and, unlike other nocturnal prowlers, that he was now a nascent creature capable of appreciating the simple pleasures of the day in a more abstemious lifestyle, there was the immediate past to repugn the assertion. There was that nurse at the hospital, whom from earlier exchanges of smiles, looks, and brief conversations, he was able to obtain her telephone number shortly before being discharged from the hospital—a woman he would be calling now had he not thrown away his mobile telephone or "moh-toh" as Thais (though not him, the inwardly surly, cultured man that he was and an American Thai at that) called such devices. Was he not still a glutton for intense thrills? Was he not always at least nominally enraptured by someone or something different than the other intrigues that had come before? The women of the past had proven that he was as had that which had happened to him less than an hour earlier.
Disagreeable for the source of its arousal and made vulgar and fetid by the association of having been done in such a filthy toilet, this experience had been a particularly odd and abhorrent intimacy with fantasies that he was not accustomed to entertain. The fact that these fantasies had opened the gates to his ejaculation in the toilet of a train was for him an unpleasant reality, not that intentionally trying to avoid thinking of it was, in his judgment, such a wholesome act either for it did not make it less part of his own thoughts and experience to stuff it into the sockets of his brain like one's dirty socks being shoved by a foot under the bed at the knocking of his door and he would not be much of a man to cower away from himself so easily. It was still disconcerting since it was both odd and distantly familiar simultaneously, a combination that made him feel flushed down the toilet portals of ineluctable memory. Masturbating privately wherever he wished was for him as inconsequential as scratching the area of his pants that covered his scrotum when experiencing a particularly strong itch, and yet this carnal escapade was different. It was deviant more for him in the sense of diverging from the mainstream than anything significantly pejorative. Still, it was for him a most sordid encounter with himself even if, to his satisfaction, performed in the purest of form—being free from the self-delusion of love. To him, all sex was making love to oneself but coupled naturally with a woman it did not seem so sordid, even though it perhaps was, while being impure enough as to seem as if he were really making love only to her when the contrary was true. Thus to him making love to a woman was more sordid as a consequence.