"Beautiful, isn't she?" He knew that Boi's meaning was not fraternal and that that which should not have repulsed him but did was now being replaced by that which should repulse him but did not.
17
"Free of connections, free of clutter—unfettered—and happier for it, I suppose," he thought as if disconnectedness from others, freedom from circuitous movements around and preoccupation with people would free his thoughts rather than free him of thought. Thought was surely the material assessed in abstraction, but lustfully eating his food with the foreign acquaintances of that country of backward brethren he did not consider that issue consciously. To some degree he was like those who in the monotony of their circuitous movements around material possessions and a preoccupation with them came to remote areas like Vientiane to find more to themselves than the accumulation of money and objects, but his retreat was more from the loss of people than the dismissal of material possessions, and his departure was not out of choice but the circumstances that had brought about the need to extricate himself from inordinate pain. He did not so much want fairly empty rooms in a guest house but the totally empty realm of his mind. He knew that he would not be considering the subject of whether or not disconnection was propelling him to happiness unless something were amiss or lacking in his life. What was once the clogging of his brain with the mauled grammar of students' redundant essays in art survey classes, women whom he was involved with, and was obliged to attempt to make happy (such an inordinate amount of women, as his heart was a sponge of sorrow, caring deeply or loving adventitiously and incurring feminine wrath for it all, who were paintings of this life and mattered to him as well as mitigating those sorrows, the result of injustices), a futile effort that had ended worse than imagination had reach. Having students to maintain professional interaction with as altruism and being a benefactor allowed him to stretch closer to the ethereal realm of virtue and also gave him more tentacles for assessing reality, and the somewhat plagiarized and hastened research and cursory art coinciding with old themes that had been done to maintain his position at Silpakorn University had now been replaced with freedom to ponder vacuity. And vacuity he pondered unceasingly for, in this train, emptiness rode in him as he was riding in it. Vientiane, he derided, was not a destination any more than the Buddha's Lumbini forest. His time might have been better spent had he stayed in Bangkok seeking prostitutes to draw in the city's Lumpini Park (p for porn), and yet here he was for some reason going to that final destination of Nongkai, the sister city of Vientiane.
He was like an empty wrappers of those fruit filled cookies that in boredom he had gormandized the previous night for they had fallen from his bunk during his restless sleep to be, for a time, caught in the reigning randomness of the fan's winds. And yet contrary to the social animal that was man, placid acceptance of his disconnected state was in a sense a spiritual retreat; and it was, after all, as a spiritual retreat, more or less, that he, an atheist, was hoping to facilitate by coming to such a lackluster and lackadaisical city like sleepy Vientiane where there would be no distractions to cordon off this theme of vacuity.
Affluent and unfettered by property, which seemed at any rate to be entirely lost to him with his wife having changed the locks on the doors, he could go anywhere to become something different. In that sense he was truly free. He knew that and reminded himself that he should be grateful for it, but like any social creature he needed a mind stuffed with clutter to have the equilibrium that would deliver him from being random movements of an unstable, empty vessel lost at sea and unto itself. Whether he was on a spiritual pilgramage or being flushed down to Vientiane as defecation in a downward deluge of his own whims he did not know; but in either case he was free (free, that is, when not fully wracked in guilt about Kimberly's death and all that had led to that grotesque spectacle which he had no power to change) and freedom always felt good. To be humanized from mechanical actions, not that he had carried out many of those in the past year of his premature retirement, and denuded of pretensions by lusting after two or three young beings who had passed to the toilet, as well as the two seated before him, was in essence like being found; and they who were found were encompassed in thought like birds to air. It was good, even if much of the air was sordid and polluted and ineluctably so. Nothing was lonelier than the loss of thought and being compressed into the agenda of the day, the cluttered interaction of interconnectedness he only in part liked because of a loathing of it taking him from himself. If he were to work for a month in a factory like a dirt poor laborer (he was indeed swarthy as most Thai laborers and once of their class), return to the sidewalk restaurants which were his inception and, he posited, probably were his true destiny had he not been so insolent to repugn them, or even to return to Silpakorn University, such an experience of once again doing work would give him a fuller appreciation for what he had; however, even with this satiated and cloyed sense of leisure that often seemed perennial, his indolence seemed the preferable course. A flight into the World Trade Center towers of oneself might be in part a flight down to a sordid hell but he, an artist, although a retired one, would hardly repugn it if it were.
While eating with them he stayed silent. Was it so peculiar to scan each of these acquaintances respectively with circumspect glances, to do so apprehensively (more apprehensively and yet more often to the male than the female of this brother and sister combination as she, whom he barely knew at all, was nearer and the sexual interest would be more conspicuous), and to let the erumpent odors of both, imagined or real, send him on a molecular magic carpet ride away from the mundane and the tragic of this world? Was it strange to occasionally think of them as his friends when not really knowing much about them? It was probably, as he now lacked anyone in his life, a normal reaction. With his telephone thrown into the trash at the train station, he even lost the nurse whom despite his brokenness he was able to inveigle with tender caring questions and full attention toward the caregiver, a charm that wooed her as all who felt no one in this world listened to them. Was it so peculiar that he should feel comfortable in a brother and sister combination when it was quite apparent to him that they were intimate beyond sibling love? It was an intimacy that to most would seem repugnant but for those who were in one way or another abused, molested and maligned in youth, and whose thoughts were stuck in that mire of sediment and sentiment still (sentiment because, tragically, it was rarely all bad and thus stayed there like sludge slowing the victim's thoughts), they who were perhaps under a different name than now, who were once in their own brother's arms, witnessing perversion as he had in seeing this earlier foot kissing of siblings was a homecoming. To see that others were so engaged made the taboo subject a human tendency frequent in the subconscious though never, or at least rarely, in deed as this molesting of a woman who happened to be walking on a sidewalk. With the witnessing of such an aberration he was freer than he had ever felt before. For a moment he felt a rush of dopamine and serotonin that almost made him love the siblings. Was this "love" really for them any more than he was really "loved" by those who needed someone to listen to their ideas and truly care for them with no other motive than this? He supposed it was not "love" in any pure sense of the word. Still it was good that he was no longer having to persecute and banish memory and thought, or having to consider that part of the brain vile which was the trash receptacle of repressed thought and thus, he theorized, his body was feeling amorous in celebration with sexual feeling as if he were being tossed into the air like confetti. Perhaps a celebration, as all human actions and interconnection, was just the macrocosm of the innate chemistry within (in this case the party within). But what did he know for sure of the demented, or at least aberrational aspect of this brother and sister relationship? How did he know that his conclusions were warranted? He did not know anything for sure as little or nothing was known conclusively.
Once in those beginning stages of his molestation he had spoken to his mother. It was an oblique reference but the pain in his facial expressions (furrowed eyebrows, sunken eyes, and the slight and irregular quivers of the lower lip) were easily interpreted even for someone like his mother who was accustomed to some amount of pain always embedded into those features. She understood what was implied and flattened it vehemently by contending that "nothing had happened" and that he was "crazy." How was he to know now, twenty years later, with absolute certainty, that it had happened, as his vague memories recalled it, for memories were impressions dented onto the clay of the brain and were so easily defaced. Certainly memories did not become more real in time. And if he did not know his ability to know how would he know the relationship of a couple of relative strangers absolutely. Epistemology was the study of nothing for nothing could be known absolutely no matter how much the brain yearned for certainty. He could sense that the Laotian knew that he liked him as well as the girl. He could also sense that not only did the Laotian like her as well but that what he liked most was Nawin knowing that he liked her. It was all amusing to him. He sensed it but how he sensed it from a smile, a look, and the length of a look he did not know.
"May I have a sip of your water?"
"Sure," said Nawin as he gave him the container that was on the seat near his leg. The Laotian drank. "Do you want it?" he asked his sister in respite from quaffing the water, but without waiting for a response from her he once more drank voraciously and then tilted the bottle to her who bent forward toward it. He fed it unto her in what Nawin, ostensibly a neutral third party, was inclined to think of as an obscene gesture. It seemed obscene despite the fact that it was merely the drinking of water.
"Yes, my sister has been talking about you—well we have, really. She says that in going and returning from the toilet that she saw a handsome older man at a mirror. It had to be you, don't you think?"