"'Kind sir?'" Nawin mocked with good humored bantering. "I'm not seventy you know."
"You are such a touchy person. Now 'sir' bothers you. Clearly you aren't twenty anymore," said the Laotian. "There is nothing wrong in admitting that. It is an exit we walk through briefly to join the majority who are thought old by somebody or another. My sister is twenty-one but that too will pass."
"Yes, age is a state of mind," said Nawin rather unprofoundly, smiling widely and readjusting his opinion of the Laotian who seconds ago he had pegged as a pachydermatous brute although perceived more erotically for it. As this issue was germane to him, he thought that nothing truer could have been spoken. He felt an attraction to this Laotian named Boi as a human being, and this attraction seemed to flush out the tense congestion of hormones in the traffic jam of his groins.
"As she could not use the sink where you were at, she primped where she could—at that nasty metal sink in the toilet. Since she primps for a long time that means that this man was primping for a longer time and she saw him—you, that is—still at the sink of the corridor when she was leaving. It had to be you as you still weren't here when she returned and woke me up."
"Maybe it was. What's the point?"
"No point, my friend. An observation. For the longest time we kept thinking that you would be back at any moment. My sister was so disappointed that she had to sleep off the depression. For me, I was just puzzled—kept thinking that you must be doing something strange back there but god only knows what. Your name again is Nawin. Right?"
"Nawin Biadklang."
He felt a chill in the spine of his back and a burning sensation in his face with this absurd and paranoid fear that the Laotian knew what he did privately in both thought and action in the toilet. "He doesn't know a thing, of course" he reminded himself. It was obvious that the Laotian had found a means to make him feel intimidated in generalized words, but laughter and a warm smile, he told himself, would burn away that fog.
He thought about his earlier name and the time he had changed it. At the age of sixteen a monk who had been concerned about the tragic implications of the name, Jatupon Biangklang, without much awareness about the circumstances of his life, had guided him toward a more fortuitous appellation; but now, as he was saying it, the fact that he had changed his first name and not the last seemed a bit surreal and disconcerting as if he had a different head placed on the his body or the same head placed on a different body (which, he was not sure). Still it was good that he had done it even though it had not been done fully. Unable to lobotomize memory, and being Thai, hardly able to repudiate the name of even his savage tribe, what other way did he have to separate himself from Jatupon, a wisp of air that in his mind still seemed pornographic? "Over two decades ago and none of it matters now!" he told himself. Still the cliché of the past not mattering belied reality. If the past, having founded the present, ceased to matter so would the present to the future which would mean that all would be immaterial.
"Remember me? Sabai dee mai?" said the woman to both men.