An Apostate: Nawin of Thais

by Steven David Justin Sills

16

Thais with a disposition and willingness to scrutinize their own cultural suppositions were rare but for those who were so inclined to repugn family and Buddha, if only in outward aloofness and tacit pondering, little remained sacrosanct from intellectual dissection except for issues in reference to the king, for to cease to revere him would make one something other than Thai. That is what he thought at 8:00 A.M. as he heard the king's anthem playing at a distance from a passenger's radio. That was what he thought, and yet had the moment been different he would have thought differently. He knew that what he was, what he claimed to be, was merely from being in the particular situation where he found himself. Now in this car of the train among these strangers whom he did not particularly like, hearing that rather bland melody repeated, one more of the daily repetitions throughout the years, and as always feeling that strong inhibition which made him not able to even acknowledge to himself this blandness, his disposition grew a bit peevish and restless for he kept telling himself that every moment he remained here was aging him toward his forty-first year. Having one birthday in a train was bad enough, he told himself. He did hardly wanted another one. The moments seemed like hours, unmovable as boulders.

As Nawin heard the anthem he saw that the three food salesmen, in concert with everyone else, were deferentially erect and motionless in response, and noticed that there were no more strident cries or other such tonal annoyances of khao phat moo, phad thai jae (noodles and vegetables), and kauy-tiaw (noodles) with some sauce with a Laotian or northern Thai dialect name, at any rate shrieked beyond recognition. Noting that any delay in getting off the train would be a brief one and that the freelance food salesmen would be gone with the slightest forward thrust of the train, he pulled out sixty baht from his wallet so that he might quickly buy one container of each for himself and the two passengers whose space he was confined to. It was only polite to do so and any effort that he might make to give less credence to his feelings of disgust toward them would make the rest of the ride more agreeable. Besides, as feelings were so interlinked to perception of a given event in a given moment like attack dogs that were often standing in late evenings by the doors of banks and randomly barking at the scents and movements of passers-by and their shadows, they were not reliable gages for assessing reality and he did not give much credence to them.

The gambits of feeling, senses, and logic were even fallible when working together. To trust one exclusively over the others was a madness equivalent to an artist falling in love with his subjects, an inebriation of the myopic he had always tried to avoid in the hope of going beyond the "reality" of one's petty associations to an exposé of exploitation and tacit desperation in which the viewers would see the whores residing within themselves. This Earth was in one respect like a huge amniotic sac of impermanent quasi-reality in which he seemed to be a six billionth major cell of some inchoate but never complete organism that was being tossed therein. In another sense it was diametrically different and he seemed a complexity of contradictory feelings, logic, and sensory input like partly functional gages and gears that he manipulated and was manipulated by to move and assess movement in this nebulous terrestrial cloud or fog he found himself in. To some degree he was part of a cell if not an entire cell in the gestation of the making of a life and the Earth was merely a cluster of cells if not an entire organ in the inchoate organism called the universe; and yet to some degree it was as if he was a probe slowly feeling its way in a very small acreage within Martian darkness. One thing that was certain was the intricate and confusing number of switches and responses in himself. Even with logic, if a compassionate man had only this, he would continue to stay stationary in any situation he happened to find himself. It was feelings of pain that urged a man's extrication so that he might find situations and quests more worthy of his time. So he thought while hearing the ending of the anthem.

Inwardly having great humility and reverence toward King Rama IX, he nonetheless facetiously told himself that this opportunity to eat a scanty sustenance was provided by the king himself and that royal cuisine of this nature was not to be passed by. "khortoht [excuse me]," he said, raising his hand and motioning to the nearest salesman to come toward him. It seemed odd to do so, for he was feeling the desire to turn in the opposite direction toward the Laotian himself, so that he might say, "Phom tongkarn khun [I want you]" and "Phom gamlang ja pai gap khun [I will be going with you]." Odder yet, his mind itself retained the hauntings of Kimberly, who was even more similar to him than Noppawon in being a little of this and that, and belonging to no group or family for she was French-American, and he Thai American, or at any rate an American Thai, and, unequivocally, both were expatriates of this world.

As if it were not ironic enough to lack superstitions about ghosts and all else and yet have his mind so discomfited by the creeking, rattling, and shuffling of her presence in the dark corridors of his mind, he was possessed by inexplicable, ineffable desire for this individual before him who was of the same gender. The rattling chains of the former were feeling, instead of sound and, understandably, this rattling was from the stress experienced by remorse; but the latter was a burning sensation less explicable than the other as if he was possessed, although there was nothing to possess him but himself. Together the phantom of that tacit, gentle soul of a woman and the possessive fantasy of the rough and naughty Laotian were trying to overtake him. They were mental poltergeists and he was the source of his own haunting.

He had boarded this train in part because he was trying to flee Kimberly and yet were he to fly without cause or reason, he knew that she would go with him to Niamey in Niger just the same as Nongkai in Thailand or to Vienna the same as Vientiane for she was an ineluctable memory of myriad of these ineluctable memories that he would lobotomize in minor whittling of his brain with a pocket knife if only he could. Many times, marred and blurred as she often was, Kimberly and those not so far gone memories of youth which were equally hideous in their own ways, would detonate like a land mine inside of him when he was tired, causing him to falter into depression and the unconsciousness of deep sleep. Still, what could be done but to freefall in sleep, hit bottom, and awaken rejuvenated with the sun? One could not dispense with a mind the way he had his telephone. In a sense, of these apparitions from the subconscious, she was summoned from nowhere phantomesque, and yet like weeds thrusting from a rocky landscape without reason after a cool rain. As in that memory a minute ago which had acted an entire scene upon his mind, Kimberly, hybrid of weed and flower, was there in his mind's eye like rife dandelions. Even though now she seemed to be withering within him once again, and he was at least cognizant of his pull toward her, he seemed to be falling more rapidly and with greater force toward this rocky slope covered in dandelions and fog, compelled to fall into the lap of beauty and death while the final impact remained suspended from an incessant retreat.

Even now, he thought, she was more distinct than the smudges that came from the contrivances of conscious will when attempting to remember, but that image was diminishing with the seconds no differently than subsequent attempts to recollect her consciously garnered less than was exact with the passing days. As with other hauntings, he felt startled, and spent a minute or two trying to recollect himself within disconcerted thought but that was especially hard to do this time since his mind was crowded by that visceral, recent occurrence that was one more presence in the haunt of memory.

Strangely, even if done immediately after glancing at her photograph, or after seeing slides of a painting of her, which was an impression of her and him both, were he to try to remember her exactly it would be an act of abject futility. It would give him nothing but a blur. He could even concentrate on the specifics of her wearing that turquoise dress that he had given her, a combination of the color, green, that she liked most and the ethereal blue aqua vitae lakes of her eyes, and it would not matter. Attempts to consciously bring her back would extract nothing but smudges and visceral pangs of loss. The hauntings of memory hadn't any more reason to be than the screen door of the shed at his home (exclusively Noppowan's home now through his default in not exerting his innocence and in not shifting the blame back on to her, the proposer of their doom) which opened, closed, and banged around in the winds. But when she haunted the oblique corridors of his brain there was nothing opaque about her. Clear as reality, he was often able to remember not only her, but also a continuum of moments in their interaction together and, as now, the ensuing shock would cause him to stand for a minute or two lost in himself while trying to find a way back to the present moment and analyzing and reanalyzing this thought process as if hoping to find a switch to turn it off. So his mind droned on like this, as it always did after a deep thought of her image, until he was able to find enough of himself to make the choice to part from her.

Glancing out of the window for a few seconds with his hand still motioning toward the salesmen, he watched Thailand's vacant greenery, a pickup truck on a distant road, and a water buffalo standing in what should have been a modern rice farm. These images continued to peel and fold back behind the train no differently than the people and events of his life. This, above all, was why he had subconsciously chosen to come by train. It was an instrument for illustrating his impermanence so that he might accept that this was the natural course of all things even if human intellect knew that nature was vile and that this impermanence should be otherwise.