"I'll walk for a while and follow what looks good. Thank you."
He began walking. He was almost at the juncture when he heard the beep of another tuk-tuk.
"Are you Nawin?"
"Yes."
"Somebody left this at the train station. The officers have been asking people they happened to see if its for them. You slipped by so one of them said to bring it to you. Are you Nawin Biadklang?"
"Yes."
Nawin took the sheet of paper. It was the telephone number of someone called Wichian. In parenthesis it said "Boi."
20
As another inconsequential member of this species riding the promptings of caprices toward that which was most pleasant, a pleasure in its own right, as with the activities that were deemed as pleasant, most of his choices could not be anything other than irrational. And of these irrational and erratic choices, he thought further, most were often made from antithetical impulses to which one was not measurably any more pleasant or worthy of being followed than its alternatives. He was seated at a table in a restaurant of a guest house, wondering obtusely why he was there. It was, he mentally noted to himself, a most peculiar feeling to have come somewhere, to know oneself to have done so, and yet to remain clueless about the aim. It almost felt as if, while in reverie, he had been snatched from his idiocy at the train station and placed here in the city of cognizance without his consent when in fact he had walked three kilometers before tiring and then succumbing to being swallowed in that blue cockroach shaped vehicle, the tuk- tuk, which had then driven him further into the center of Nongkhai.
And so, restless, he stirred the foam back and forth in his hot Cappuccino, hoping without knowing why to soil all parts of the inner embankment of the cup, and only taking occasional sips as he became increasingly pensive. He thought to himself that had he cared to do so, which of course he had not, the money that he was spending on the coffee alone could have bought two or three meals for those who scarcely ate anything on a given day. He began to think about how peculiar the world was with its interdependent members that made up units of one entire whole; and that interaction of one species with another was merely for the need to gain sustenance outside the unit, that the frenzied propagation of a species to ensure its continuum was kept in check by voracious predators; and that individual persons, considering it an enjoyable sport, incessantly tried not only to sustain themselves but also to thrive by hording avariciously or seeking pleasures gluttonously at the sake of others within the unit, striving for even more so as to think of themselves as successful in partaking of the good. He thought of how this showed life for what it was: not that of laudable creations overseen by a creator, or at least forlorn entities of a godless universe interacting with benevolent energy, but of comestible viands seeking to elude predators. The whole thing seemed an ineffective and barbaric system of incongruous, animate bits seeking some means to barely coexist, and as such life was not so laudable—neither of god nor of goodness—even though in every culture, and every religion, he supposed, common practitioners believed in both to create a pleasant perspective of themselves and their place in the world. Even Buddha, who did not believe in god became such as a statuette more rife than a crucifix. The morning stimulant was not so hot that he had to barely sip it, and yet he did for cognizance of the rife and innate selfishness of man seemed to constrict his throat. It was a constriction as slight as his compunction; and the subject was forgotten entirely as he poured maple syrup on his pancakes.