Eating a bit of one pancake, he looked out onto the traffic with its lethal confetti of exhaust fumes which, when moving closer to the buildings, diffused and nominally enveloped pedestrians on a nearby sidewalk. He once more pondered that he did not know exactly why or from what impulse had led him here. The inexplicable nature of it all was like that subway ride to the Hualamphong train station. There, clearly for him, it had been a wombed departure from the travail of interconnectedness with those strangers within seeming to him as a family of distant and tacit, insular beings who were cognate in their desire to arrive in a train which would take them from all that was painful—such had been his need to flee from suffering that the faces of strangers, no matter how happy or bland their expressions, seemed comrades of exile; and yet there, most opaquely, he had chosen to sit down. It had been next to a boisterous woman holding a cellular telephone talking of some poor soul's uneventful dating experiences. He could not have known anything of her beyond this and yet of the two vacant seats available he had chosen to be next to her instead of sitting beside a middle aged woman whose face was sunk toward a book; and the reason for sitting in one seat over another was as inexplicable as now. And so, assuming that all was not destined and man had choice about all matters, he had chosen to check into this guest house in the center of Nongkai instead of going straight into Vientiane. To some degree it had been because of the weight of the backpack. It had become increasingly heavy against his shoulders with every kilometer of that long walk. Confusion also had had its bearing. Not knowing what to do or where to go, with each possibility seeming equally insipid, he had selected a place to rest and think out some contrived purpose for himself. If not able to formulate a plan and purpose for his travels, here at least he had a place to rest physically when swimming frantically against this mental eddy. For all his disconcerted strokes, his itinerant meandering, he told himself that even though he did not know when it would happen he was certain that he would wash ashore eventually and when he did he would have contrived something to do, some urgent matter to pursue, some purpose for himself.
He pulled out that sheet of paper from his shirt pocket. He glanced at the name and the telephone number and recalled the faces of the Laotian and his sister as they rode next to him. Was he really to end an uneventful retirement for the sake of these people? Was he, for the sake of seeming a compassionate human being to himself and not merely another selfish being on the planet, to pay them for a miniscule part in posing for some portrait that he was neither inspired to draw nor inclined to tote back to Bangkok? Where would he even obtain paint and canvas? In Laos? Well no doubt they had both within the capital city. If prehistoric man could find ways to dye a cave, Laotians, people of a very similar linguistic and cultural distinction to Thais, could not do less. He could do sketches of them. It would not take long or be much of a burden to carry around and he could leave the family a couple of hundred dollars, which would mean the world to them and be a negligible and hardly noticed loss to himself. It might even restore him to himself; but then did he want to be restored? A restoration of a thoughtful pornographic artist from a third world country was not such a gift to civilization. He would never equal the great artists of the world and of prostitute painters he was one of myriad in contemporary Southeast Asian art alone. The sister was beautiful by his standards of beauty—youth unblemished with skin the pallor of fresh snow; a background of dirt and poverty, a subject he could relate to, and yet unlike those of a swarthy complexion, not appearing as such, with hair that was long and dark as the void, subdued eyes neither scintillating of inexperience nor petrified as ancient granite, absent of bra, nipples that pointed and teased their way toward every curve to which the imagination slid down like a hand to remote and sodden reservoirs. But it was not her beauty that called unto him, but an intrigue with the perverse so that he might know if his suspicions were warranted, and more saliently, to know the economic deprivations and desperation that made siblings into lovers, if indeed they were that. He folded the paper and stuffed it into his wallet against a condom.
Maybe he had diverged into the center of Nongkai and had checked into this guest house to divert and check, if not totally restrain, an inordinate curiosity about the perverse. This trip, the best he understood it, was meant to have a spiritual element—at least to the extent an atheist whose wont of thinking had denuded god from a vast being cloaked in the sacrosanct was capable of. Being bereft of agenda or aim did not necessarily mean being bereft of an overarching theme founded in malaise; so if not sidetracked, he had (for lack of a better term) a spiritual theme that if pursued with aim could easily surpass the agenda of a monk. After all, and of course he would never openly disclose this most secret assertion, a monk was merely a poor man seeking education, food, and an end to loneliness, and all other nakedness under a saffron robe and a sacrosanct Buddha was not even the physical substance of a needy monk. Nawin told himself that his time here, if not perverted and aptly spent on the spiritual, would allow him to step out of the egocentric, crumbling tower that he was in. If nothing else he could watch ants use twigs as bridges and freeways and in so doing become aware of the existence of a tiny fraction of the 90 percent of all life that was smaller than a chicken's egg. He could then appreciate a cognizant activity and social order other than that of his own or his own dominant species. If he could lean against a stupa and be in awe of the sun baking his face like a brick or appreciate the titillation of wind caressing his head like that of a Cambodian child-beggar patted by a foreigner, he would at last be alive.
Still that had not been his main reason for taking a room. It seemed to him that there was no main reason at all—only the pull of some tremendous gravitational force, that ineluctable void which had influenced him to take his wife's best friend for a mistress and bearer of a child and all for reasons that were only in small part to fill the barren heart of a wife of a fallow womb—a void that had prompted his subtle rejections of Kimberly as his main wife, for how could he have left Noppawan behind or renew himself from the philanderer that he was—a void that had been a catalyst of the ensuing consequences.
To have a child! Regardless of their education or the significance of ideas that bred in their heads, women needed those replications of their physical beings to feel complete. This was exacerbated in marriages, since in thought, if not in deed, marriages were with philandering men who were replicating creatures no different than them albeit ones obsessed by impulses for pleasure in wet disgorging with the multitude. It was no wonder that with the void as immense as the universe itself and the final surrender to it inevitable in death, one sometimes had delusions of it as the lap of a long lost grandmother and found herself/himself plummeting into that lap from one's balcony.
Long ago Nawin, who at birth was labeled Jatupon, had been a teenager caught in currents and countercurrents of his own. Back then, he had needed his new Bangkok friend, Noppawan, desperately; and so by taking her, at the age of fourteen, to meet his osseous, ochre friends, the dead corpses at the Siriaj Hospital Anatomical Museum, he in a sense had thrown up his arms to indicate a need for love. She by embracing him despite his wish to seem intrepid before death had shown an understanding of what boys could not say in words. So like a blossoming bud she had opened her arms to him and let him fall into the petals of her embrace. So, while surrounded by the shelves of these dead beings basking in formalin, he had cried in her embrace remembering, an hour earlier, Kazem's use of his body, a type of interactive gesture or embrace which he had sometimes called a "sport" and at other times a "cheap date."
Twenty five years later at certain moments of weakness, he still needed love even though the neediness in the content of the word abhorred him. Were couples who stayed together for forty or fifty years to be so commended? The neediness of people in mutual dependency was worse than newlyweds addicted to the pleasure-highs of being in proximity to their spouses, the extensions of themselves; it all was like the monstrosity of a one right legged man and a one left legged woman walking together and it sickened him.
Nawin got up and went to the coin operated telephone. He dialed his home telephone number numerous times and then his wife's mobile telephone number. He did this in the hope of expressing something—admiration, sentiment, respect, gratitude, he was not sure what, but certainly not love, as he had a pure aversion to that word—he did not know what to say, and it did not matter. There was merely that recording telling him that the numbers were disconnected. And so he felt disconcerted as if he were now walking through the gravitational force of a different planet. He went back to the table and drank the rest of his orange juice. It was to be expected, he told himself, as nothing was permanent. He took a deep breath and then breathed out fully. He felt disheartened, but not all that desperate. If a wonderful person, one who had gone out of his life, and who was so salient in such a critical time at his youth, had gone for good reason, he had no reason to question it. He had been blest to have her save him from the abyss as well as providing him with the ensuing friendship of marriage years later. She now had his money, his child, and her independence and he would bequeath these things unto her unconditionally; and so, he told himself that he must release her, exhaling her and breathing in others like respiration. He stuffed the five baht coin into his pocket. No, if he had loved Kimberly and Noppawan at certain times this was enough love for him in a lifetime. If he had experienced one malevolent family early in his life, this should have been enough of an augury for him that long ago he, Nawin Biadklang, should have forsworn a second round of it and vowed to maintain a single and original life thereafter. He was an artist: compassion, ideas, exposure to new people, licentious impulses, and the inspiration of dead geniuses on canvass must override this anti-Heraclital wish to cling to stable objects.
In the petty routines of man it was rare that one was impacted profoundly by some being other than one if the volumes of dead sages, and yet she had done this for him. Even though this incident had happened long ago he still admired and even loved her for it. He told himself that with time he would become even more professional and accomplished at compassionate portrayals of life in his paintings and his interactions, even if it were to take thirty years, when his testosterone levels had finally plummeted. And for those who never had anyone there, for them, he, at least in theory, wanted to be there the way Noppawan had been there for him in his youth. Maybe, he told himself, he would visit the Laotians. He was not sure.
Thus, here he was sitting in the restaurant of a guest house watching a pirated DVD on a big screen television and eating his pancakes with maple syrup. For whatever inexplicable reason, he had chosen to check into a guest house in the center of Nongkai and here he—Nawin, Jatupon, or whatever label he gave himself —was baffled by his choice. He could merely speculate and eat his pancakes the same as any Western foreigner, but with the voracious enthusiasm as he had when, long ago, devouring them in America as a four year old child.