An Apostate: Nawin of Thais

by Steven David Justin Sills

The catatonic was between an edge of sward and pavement leading away from the train station, between sluggish and futile conscious thought with its maelstrom of subconscious feelings, the disconnected randomness of fleeting images underneath, and complete inaction, and perpetually bent toward something when, except for insects, weeds, and dirt, there was nothing there. To him the tactile and the visual, the palpable, had to be there, only lost temporarily in the weeds like a dislodged contact lens, and yet nothing was there. His numbness made intake from the senses seem surreal and incredulous, since that which was recorded by the senses was adventitious and distant from a self that in his case was slipping away in its own right. The senses were becoming faulty instruments for receiving signals while this abstract form of sympathy, adhesive to nothing that was concrete, seemed burdensome and unshakable. This state of feeling deep sadness not only for the dog that had left him but the entire world was like being paralyzed by the pallets of a tranquilizer gun even though there was nothing halcyon or pleasant in being shot with sympathy unless, in more lucid seconds, it was in considering the fact that he should be grateful that it was not empathy. Nothing—not even the dog, the catalyst that it was—seemed the direct cause of the pathos which did nothing for anyone and made him in better moments look like a young tree with sagging boughs after a tempest, and in worse ones a defecating homeless transient or the distraught middle aged man that he was. Apart from this fulsome feeling, his was the full numbness of a shadow dragged about by some colossal and incomprehensible figure.

Dogging him no differently than the persistent fly that for whatever reason continually returned to that same puddle of oily sweat on his right temple only to sometimes be shaken away all so mildly with a brief thrust of his head, there was a persistent, distorted, and grotesque memory or daydream that posed as fact. He kept thinking, if it were indeed thought to be cognizant of so little, that he (as adventitious as he was at that moment) was around fourteen years old, swatting at flies, and pushing a cart of grilled pork down unknown streets in Bangkok. Scores of sparsely furred dogs began to follow. The further he went the more there were. And the more there were the more security there was for them in the communal mob, and the more aggressive were continually standing upon hind legs trying to attack the cart and rob its booty. Through this time of being chased by this desperate canine mob with its ineluctable barking of mute voices that howled the essence of the void which epitomized the planet, there was a background wall of a standing rack or trellis on which used shoes hung like vines for pedestrian purchasers; an occasional bloody limb dangled from one of the ragged sports shoes, and a gecko hung on one of the shoes' tongues. The gecko was many of one, omniscient and omnipresent, looking into his eyes knowingly. "The world has damaged you thus and thus you will be," it conveyed tacitly with those eyes and then by it or from subconscious thought he knew that it was a dent or crack in an item that gave it its feature even if the ungainly shape would lead it to be easily dropped from a maladroit grasp and break asunder into myriad fragments. Yes, he felt alone, with his cracked past he was doomed. He had hoped for interaction with the dog as benefactors did with the poor when needing nothing from them unless in a minute way to lesson injustice, to do something virtuous which might make one a bit more than merely another avaricious creature seeking more than mere survival and pleasures greater than comfort as means for its betterment, as well as to feel grounded in reality (one physical body making an impact on another); and yet before he could do anything to help it, the dog had vanished, like the flame of a candle in a puff of wind, and now all that was tactile, all that he could touch, was the air which was as ghostly as his thought. Whether his inaction came about from a brain so active in its meaningful albeit subliminal cogitation, or from an idiot who was foolish enough to stoop down to a presence that was no more, like revisiting the rubble of one's childhood home and expecting the pieces to reassemble themselves, he did not know or even ponder. He did not decry or rationalize it, but experience it and pass through it as one did any fog.

Ostensibly, he was bent toward that which he must have still imagined as the presence of the dog, and for his part would not have known any other reason for his squatted and sedentary posture, if any at all, than for its sake. More saliently, however, this positioning of himself in such a way was, in part, because of a deep melancholy over all those who were gone from his life and regret for all the experiences that they had given him—experiences that had accumulated and embedded carvings onto the walls of his brain until there were reliefs of inexpugnable, defunct memories, aggravating the past so that it was alive in him still. Most of all, he was in this posture because subconsciously he was still bent over the rubble of childhood, expecting the pieces to reassemble themselves. If there were gentle and sublime moments in the distant past, tiny shards of some shiny splendor in the rubble, to him it would almost seem impossible that they would not be eventually restored somehow. And to him any fragment of that which was love, that mutual delight in being in the presence of those whom one was familiar with, had to be salvaged but not knowing how this was to be done, he conceptualized the shards as having the innate power to reassemble themselves, as if those rare occurrences of some degree of familial harmony had power to resurrect and reshape anew a distant, unhappy past that had ended decades ago. Despite knowing that everything moved ineluctably forward with its tattered past being dragged behind, it was only natural to have moments of being mesmerized by those shards and fixated with fixing the unfixable.

For at this moment he was remembering, all so dimly, a time of awful sweetness in the bitter, a darkness tinged opaquely in light. It was a dinner in which he had been so nervous among his family and their sadistic barraging of him, the youngest, with disparagement that he had dropped a plate of food in the kitchen, had found himself threatened with a belt, since fumbling a plate like fumbling a ball would, to the pleasure of all the rival team, exact a penalty, had seen Kazem, the molester, impede their father from swinging his belt, and then had witnessed Kazem's custodial role of cleaning up the mess at the game's closure. No, there had not been any closures for, back then, it had been one game stretched out over the years with pauses in the action each night in the respite of sleep that was sometimes interrupted by a different game entirely. Had there been nothing but pain from this former family, it might have been easier for him to move forward with his own life than it was. His life would have been that of defying the members with every impulse. However, in doing so he would have found himself merely an irate puppet moving against the pull of the strings instead of conducting actions in support of the rational principles of man himself.

From a distance the waters of the canals flowing into the Chao Phraya River in Bangkok often seemed a pure bronze with sun and blue sky peering into the whole, but close up the diluted pollutants reeked of one identifiable odor. In the same way were the thoughts of a man's mind as they flowed into the consciousness that judged their merit. Once accepted they were part of a web of thought that often seemed brilliant in beauty and intricacy but when looked at closely was merely a refinement of man's sordid cravings. Would it have been better to look inside himself less than he did? Would he have not appreciated life more to feel and examine himself less? He had posed the question myriad times but the alternative in exaggerated form was one of choosing to be as unaware as an insect, and this was hardly the preferable route for a semi-rational creature.

Was kindness toward an animal or a human being possible without first feeling the suffering in the other and then wanting to appease if not extinguish it with his own actions, pursued not so much out of benevolence per se as from imagining any efforts as appeasement of his own suffering? He would have postulated that question brazenly had he been in his right mind but as he was somewhere in left field, stuck in sediment and sentiment, there was still merely unrefined thought and it consisted solely of raw feeling for feeling was all that he was capable of. By feeling so much, he exacerbated more by feeling a repugnance toward this effeminate trait of inordinate feeling.

When the thought of the dog was not present there was merely a trail of vacuity in his mind like the swaths of trodden weeds in a forest; however, when it came with regularity it vexed him and seemed to make an enormous rut or trench in his brain with its periodic passing, into which all his other embryonic thoughts, as nascent and inchoate as they were, fell. This was the source of his numb but all pervasive headache.

So here he continued to remain alone in this posture of a defecating dog, within this strange catatonic trance, and with a numb aching in his head. Still it was more comfortable than not for him to sit here for the retinue of weeds and his own shadow mingling restfully within them would not abandon him as long as he stayed where he was—at least this was how he felt. If now, a few hundred yards from the train station and in the open air, he was feeling lost, forlorn, and numb through the lack of purpose that epitomized his life, it was reassuring to think that the sky above him was an everlasting awning raised there to shield him instead of the receptacle that it often was for the urination of some obtuse god. Likewise, it was certainly pleasant to smell redolent fresh air after twelve hours of the rank agglomeration of repugnant orders in the train to which the fetid toilets were the main source, and it was more pleasant to think this than reside at the bottom of a god's urinal. Such was his state of mind and it was as peculiar as a stone cognizant of life growing from it, a bird trying to fly while feeling the memory of the ground tug hard at its talons, or an ambulatory man with a continual sensation of being paralyzed.

Much of what he saw around him was obscured in a thin veil of single memory. It was as if there were a faint light of a small excerpt of a movie, a scene repeatedly projected onto the blank walls of the brain and his intake of the outside world via his senses, in which Kimberly, most often kept free of the impact of the awning to the swimming pool, fell again and again torturously. Now, as with every moment since her death, it seemed that he continued to see concrete images of the world (the hospital room and the big Hualamphong train station in Bangkok, the Laotian siblings and the food hawkers, his mirrored face in the toilet and the big hole in the urinal leading to the train tracks, the rice fields and the wild grasslands, the water buffalo and the starving dog at Nongkai train station) through this single drak-filtered reel of translucent visual images. For many days now he questioned whether or not it was normal to grieve in this way but now with the collapse of thought there were no more questions.

It was certainly not normal to stay sedentary in this posture or to grovel for deliverance or resurrection from some unknown force that he imagined to be the caretaker of this field of broken dreams. To that he sensed or understood but not enough to be motivated out of his catatonic state for he had lost sovereignty and restraint of himself. A lack of a history of mental illness meant nothing for, had he been able to consider it, entire foundations of long established cities had fallen under enough visceral shifting of plates so why not his own? And as if this were not enough there was forty: the stiff broad shouldered female with the erect arms making her autocratic pronouncements to a tacit and obese zero of a man who stood beside her, and this couple had been his birthday present gained alone in the jolting movements of a train. Youth had recoiled or found itself resupinate from a collision with this single word.