He avoided a pack of Tuk Tuk taxi drivers who were vying hungrily for his patronage and walked along the edge of the road as a cool breeze of the north pressed itself into him. He enjoyed this sensation with the appreciative response to simple pleasures that a small child entertained, the feel of tall and rich, verdant weeds poking the edges of his toes in his leather sandals, and the redolence of the morning air that increased with the rising temperatures of the fire of the sun, though that would be, by noon, over-baked and the air would have nothing in it but dry intensity, and empty space where thought would not grow but was confined like a climbing vine. Despite wistful tendencies to the contrary, he was relieved to be rid of the clutter of recent acquaintances from his thoughts. And if, he postulated, this were true of the Laotian, the nurse, and all of the myriad others, was it not true of Noppawan and Kimberly as well? Did he not want to get rid of all clutter? And while thinking this he inadvertently stepped on a dog, which made him stumble.
Before he gained his balance, the creature cried out and ran to the road but rather than begin immediate howls of imprecations it whined pitifully. "Hoop park, hoop park! nyiab," (shut your mouth, quiet) he told the dog with a softness that belied his harsh choice of words. As he bent down toward the creature he noticed its loss of fur, that its skin, seen through the multiple spots of barrenness, was flaking, and that its eyes were still and sunken.
"Sawadee and bonjour to you, Indonchinese pooch," said Nawin with a laugh and a quick nodding bow with his head which was then replaced with a stiffness in both movement and expression. He could not be amused by another's suffering. He could not be happy when cognizant of so much suffering in the world. The sensitive boy was within and no flippant levity on his part could shake him loose. Just because manhood had piled hard layers onto him did not mean that boyhood had been peeled away. "Poor thing!" he said while reluctantly patting the head of the filthy creature as though adverse to petting it fully while less reluctant sensitivities absorbed its sadness like a sponge. Bent as he now was to it he was emotionally and thus physically paralyzed; and if it were to take an hour or two for the creature to become disillusioned with him and to roam elsewhere, he knew that he would wait with it until such a time came. But for now, here it was fixated on him and wavering ambivalently between hope and belief that humans were the good, the god, the sustenance, and the deliverer—its cries as supplications of prayer. He kept thinking that as there was no god, god was an obligation to all humans who were in their own way, able to imagine such an abstraction and climb into its costume. It was their moral duty to ameliorate the suffering of smaller creatures, and to man himself; but the dilemma was not of one suffering creature on the precipice of life but an uncountable number of them and help of one was unjust. Furthermore, it seemed absurd to cease his own plans and prioritize a dog by getting it tranquilized, and put in a cage for a ride back to Bangkok, a long-term solution (as opposed to offering it food merely to delay the creature's hunger and ease his own conscience), but an impossible one, when in a sense he did not even have a home to take it to. To walk a long way to seek food of which he had none (not even one of his fruit filled cookies) was not much of a solution either; and yet all there was, was the suffering of the moment that he could take pains to counter no matter how many insects he trod on, or how many micro- organisms his immune system killed while he was doing so.
Telling the dog to stay, he went a kilometer or two through serpentine gravel and dirt roads until he found a raan aharn (outdoor restaurant under a canopy) to obtain some meat to assuage its hunger; however when he returned with the food, the dog was not to be found. His were merely good intentions that came to no avail in an intransigent world of changes. Had there been an obscure god whose oblique influence was in urging humans of means to help the weak and vulnerable, beneficence would have been a frequent activity instead of the rarity that it was. In this situation his attempt had not only been futile but it had exacerbated misery since now, somewhere, there was a dog that had been humbled by a god (a god who earlier had stepped on one of its feet and a tail) only to be reproached with a monosyllabic, "stay," and abandoned to stray away disillusioned.
This dog, suffering from malnutrition and lack of grooming, was prey to parasites. They laid siege on and within him. As all that were at a disadvantage, were neither the strongest nor the fittest, and had a vulnerability exuding from them that made their brief lives ambulatory carcasses that would fall with a brief amount of time, he believed he was like this. And it seemed to him that despite being immured in talents and wealth, that his vulnerabilities would bring him down like a sick hound; and so he suffered for the dog in that spot he had found him in. He was bent as though seated on the ground but with his buttocks never quite reaching the dirt and he stayed this way numb and thoughtless staring into nothingness.
19
The worn, gaunt dog had left him a half hour earlier and yet as if compelled to attend to it still, he remained in the same spot within the same squatted posture as before while his thoughts remained apprehended in remote, dark cells of his opaque mind. His actions (or a lack of, which in this perspective would be equally inexorable) were even peculiar to him, so more with a general feeling of apprehension rather than any specific isolated thoughts, he felt that he might be, rather than questioned whether he was, on the verge of a nervous breakdown, even though nothing like this had ever happened to him before— not that such a history had to be a prerequisite for frayed nerves in the incessant Heraclitus nightmare of shifting ground under his feet, or within the stress of life's chaotic disturbances, to make him impervious to the impact of tragedy.
Kimberly who, to her demise had been of tragic course his wife's friend and his special intimate, had plunged to an unequivocal death, despite that which he had power to imagine. Although he might envisage himself reaching out and blocking her from running to the balcony, thoughts of this nature, myriad natural but immaterial and inconsequential wishes, were an enormous amount of energy expended in futility all because of the sentiment of the human heart and the belief that human will, which could alter the jungles of the world by repudiating the natural forces and the limitations of man, could also alter death. And as for Noppawan: apart from being his wife and best friend, she had also been his attempt at creating the reality of a caring family to replace that which, except for certain times of resurfaced memories that were not easily extracted and were as brief and spurious as a child's nightmare, now (buried under layers of more immediate past the same as dirt) for the most part seemed to have never been, and as the former family—a family which the child within him once believed would continue forever—had been nothing but a civil war of sadists, should never have been. She, as his new family, had lasted longer than the first, and yet the longevity of caring rather than the brevity of cruelty had made her no more real than the first.
Each day, feeling as if being drowned in the cold numbness within that seemed to come from without, humans clung to the material: money, property, friends, spouses, families and positions. For in this spinning world where people and things could quickly emerge elsewhere or vanish from the planet outright, mankind's entire quest was for less ethereal realms in which to claim a firm reality. Thus with obdurate will a man's evaporating substance was patted as firm and solid as possible. For Nawin, however, the most plausible of the ethereal which he had taken bit by bit and pressed into this substance of "reality" was like a glacier that was fast breaking apart to the point of being sheathes of floating ice, and he was witnessing its enormous shards from afar. These enormous fragments were in a prodigious fog; and they included a vague recurrent thought that the dog was there with him, was coming to him, or would be there with him. The thought was circuitous but stalking, and whenever it reached that pentacle of the brain that was the true self which judged the merits of his own thoughts and actions as well as the intentions of the extraneous beings whom he interacted with, he almost believed that he was still with that creature—the dog with its small clusters of ochre fur, he with his ochre wisps of obsessive thought, both cognate in that sense; the emaciated dog, an innocent that from its starvation was prey to disease, he having been the prey of four sadists and one sodomite in a family which decimated if not entirely obliterated the joy of his youth, and would have a reverberating effect throughout his life, both cognate in that sense as well.
Artist of nude portraits of ladies of the night, a professional womanizer, a celebrated genius, a rags to riches story: was not the life of this indolent playboy prince of paupers enviable to those males who appreciated the esoteric field of art and knew of his name? And yet his was a damaged container, a broken jar, and with time there could be no other course for his wanton licentiousness but to spill from not just a few cracks but every crack, and in so doing spell his doom: so he felt and perhaps half pondered in a new modicum of nebulous thought. He feared that he and the dog were innocents that existed to be slaughtered and it would not be just a partial slaughtering of innocence from within to exist in the world, which all creatures had to do to survive, but a devouring of the gentle, the weak, the disadvantaged, and the maimed.