He was startled by a driver beeping his horn and gesturing for him to also come into his blue three wheeled tuk-tuk taxi. The tuk-tuk was driving by with the last of a small group of foreigners who had straggled out of the train station later than he, but from the same train that he had. From the appearance of their wet and tangled hair when the tuk-tuk was slowly passing him by he assumed subconsciously that they had taken showers in the train station restrooms and, like him, were now probably on their way to Vientiane. Foreigners that they were, he was as foreign as they and then some not because of an American passport, which he had although having it, he neither lived in America nor from it traveled there, but because, even though not always feeling a connection to the world, he felt more that he was a citizen of it than a citizen of any specific country. In accordance with the mandates of travel guidebooks to see as many sites as possible regardless whether or not such brief exposure was in fact true experience, they would no doubt sightsee by day and then in evenings release their communal and sexual yearnings by drinking "Beerlaos" with their kind, eating western meals, frequenting nightclubs, and returning with partners to hotel rooms that were some of the most nominal within world capitals— that or some such agenda—before going to Luang Prabang and the Plain of Jars. As material as the tuk-tuk and its passengers were, in his mind that which sped away from him wavered between the palpable and impalpable like an incongruous quark. The vehicle sparkled iridescently, stopped, and started as if blinking though not of the irregularity of the visible but of the inconsistency of the real and the material.
His entire array of thoughts, despondent and almost unknown to him, seemed emaciated and aloof like the white water buffalo that an hour earlier, from the train, he had seen standing dumbly and staring back at him bewilderedly along the tracks. So numb he was in his own despondent realm with such minimal awareness of the prowess of his internal and external faculties that rational scrutiny of action and motivation was not readily possible. Recognition of himself was a witnessing from afar as on a distant bank on the Laos side of the Mekong River. It was merely a stranger seen acting out his peculiar extemporaneous role from at a distance.
Within a nebulous understanding of where he was at and what he was doing and the abnormality of it all, the catatonic was able to recognize the fact that this perennial squatting would seem to others as though he were a homeless and disoriented beggar trying to defecate along the road. No matter the gentility of his intentions in waiting there in this odd manner, by the experiences of squatting in traditional Asian toilets a witness to his execrable posture would ineluctably link it to excrement. Had it garnered the cynosure of security guards at that present moment it would not have been much of a surprise, not that had he lost his mind and found himself instinctively performing more natural toilet activities in the open his actions would have been innately vile for primitive actions of primate forefathers had led to the present. Civilization and all that was refined was constructed on the backs of those barbarous corpses.
Understanding immediate happenings based upon those further in the past, scheming about probabilities of the future based on past events, and floating on hopes while dragging along the weighty past, the present "reality" was only seen in glimpses. Crazed action was merely ceasing to glance at or assess the material world around his physical presence. As for posturing as if to defecate along the road, surely any restful position was no better or worse than others if blood circulated well enough through one's limbs. And as for actually formulating an actuality about something by unequivocally defecating along the side of the road, it would not have been all that different than the elimination that dropped daily out of the open holes of the floor based Asian stools in the toilets of Thailand's trains. It was true that, unlike a man squatting toward the ground in the open air, under the weight and impact of a moving train exhaust of this nature, was desiccated and blown asunder as a vapor, and many times in the twelve hours of confinement he had watched the freedom of his own stream fall upon a metal rail and imagined or witnessed—he was not sure which—it vaporize instantaneously before him. Sedate as waves of an ocean hitting the shore, so the stream of urine falling onto the hot metal relaxed and rejuvenated him for to see, and what was more, to accept the temporary in the natural order was a respite from human will which tended to oppose it and believe it could thwart what was Heraclitean in all things.
If he did not think his behavior odd, he certainly felt its peculiarity nonetheless, and thus he found himself disconcerted and spinning ever so slowly in a thick and viscous void. If there were hot flares of blood rushing into his face warning him that his vastly peculiar and mortified state was on the precipice of insanity they were not cogent enough to motivate him to stand and walk on; but then why would they and why would he reject this petrifaction within for, despite his wealth, he was no better than a disconnected, homeless transient himself; and if feeling was raw material to be refined into thought, what he was mining within his lethargy might only be ostensibly inconsequential.
If, when impeded from performing services or playing his meager role in the production of goods to be sold to insatiable consumers he found himself unemployed and eventually reduced to a beggar who did not even have two baht to pay for the use of a public toilet, there would be less urgency for refined means in conducting natural tendencies. He would do his natural business on the streets; and with frequency and in the company of others of the same meager resources, that which was once base would become the norm. When the individual was desensitized further in compounded experience these natural activities and the natural means of doing them would become reflexive actions once again which would evoke little or no thought. Eating and eliminating wastes were necessary functions so the human mind refused to consider them abhorrent and animalistic. That which was judged was how he did them, but even this changed when deprived of the tools of so called refinement. Prisoners with no utensils other than bolted bowls would not find them humiliating after some time. So he thought most dimly—he was actually thinking and was aware that there was a vague he from behind who was monitoring these thoughts. He smiled. The smile was in part because such an entertaining idea, even though he did not register its content beyond recognizing it as amusing, had brushed against him lightly; but mostly he smiled for knowing that thought was now turned on and from it self-awareness was forming.
Leary of the peculiar, a security guard and one of the train officers who witnessed and scrutinized the man in this posture of one defecating with pants still up, made occasional orbits around him like Mars in its closest rendezvous with the sun. Whether the odd one was insane by having been overcharged with an excess of dopamine, or lethargic as of those who had been smashed by bereavement, they would not have known. Separately, they suspected the individual as chemically dependent and entertained the idea of seeking police involvement, but now lacking evidence for any conclusion they continued to observe him from a distance. Then a second security guard appeared out of nowhere, materializing with the sounds of his portable transmitter and receiver in nebulous static blaring from his hip. Less wary, he meandered sinuously until he made his way close to Nawin who was thinking: "Those foreigners in the tuk- tuk must be in Laos by now—going to Vientiane as I am." He smiled at the guard, staring at him with deliberate eye contact in order to project lucidity, which was after all a director's projection, a concoction, when man was a strand of knotted strands of chemical impulses, feeling, thoughts flowing down and dashing upon the banks of memory. "Sawadee khrap," he said with a wai. "Sorry, I guess I got lost in my thoughts. I Just broke up with my wife. A lot to think over."
"You broke up with her or she broke up with you?"
"Maybe the other way around. Anyway the better half is gone."
"Where are you going?"