Nawin paid the bill and led him to his room.
21
He listened to the frequent gusts assail the window panes. They were a hybrid of breath and force. They were muddled articulations in brawn. In that respect, he told himself [at that second he was thinking of his own childhood as a reference, since the centripetal domain of his myopic existence was all there was], the howling in the denigration of night was figuratively no different from the diatribe of human speech, and yet being literally both it felt entirely strange. He listened intently for whatever else there was for him to do as a unit in this barren room of post-sensual darkness inside his own head; scatter and drift with the wind? The gusts of this peculiar storm in the middle of the dry season seemed to be attempts at conveying meaning, ineffable sounds from without transforming to thought that smote recriminations within, and this he listened to as well even as he smiled wryly to think how superstitious he was to attempt to augur some cosmological significance to his petty existence from adventitious happenings. Smell equally condemned him: sweat evaporating from chafed skin of bodies reft from a union of friction; underwear tainted by residual liquids and reeking that odor sweetly; and, for him, immured in a poorly ventilated room of a guest house, it was nighttime and there was the saccharine stench of rotting male flesh everywhere.
Circumspect, he was unable to trust that there was safety in falling asleep [he could not feel otherwise with his wallet there in the top drawer of the bed-stand near that body], and thus there were long minutes of darkness made darker yet by being awake with eyes closed; mind somewhat assuaged by what it could repudiate from illuminating visual sensory input; thought, nature, and a connection to both seeming more acute despite the fact that he felt tired; and all of this a less pessimistic perspective garnered in certain seconds only to be lost in others. For his was an episteme of concurrent antitheses where, from the impact of human will, bits of knowledge like a mixture of adulterated pollutants that comprised the canals in Bangkok, were thrust into composite waves and counter-waves of ferment; but when will sped elsewhere it all reverted to its stagnant origin as waves of cogitation and cognition like waves of water resumed their former states.
All that he could know absolutely of himself within his droll, droning thoughts was that the perspectives he was trading shifted from variations of mood like different or seemingly different selves kaleidoscopically making it so he hardly knew a consistent self at all. All that he could know outside himself was that right now, perceived with gravity but variable nuances of optimism and humor, he was definitely in this room and, as much as he might wish to extricate himself, he was not alone.
Stretched out stiffly on the bed like a cadaver (Why so rigid? Why at all negative? he asked himself), he did not have to see the objects of the room again to feel a cold, surreal, and alien remoteness in their presence nor did he have to be deceased and within a state of rigor mortis to be so inert. Yet! (fuck!), he thought in Thai for that expletive implied how intimately disconnection could be felt; and as life, more than thought, was allowing oneself to be besmirched by the saturations of feeling, validating it with action, which then was the catalyst for more feeling, he asked himself whether or not after the massage that he had rendered like a slave to another's sense of pleasure and this being riveted for such a lengthy and hellish twenty minute duration which had just ceased a few moments ago, he were really living life. He was, he told himself, and what was more, by this one intimate act with the man and the void he was connecting himself atavistically to that antediluvian period of early self in which he had been sodomized so hard as to rupture childhood irreparably and to be condemned to this morbid repressed pain his atheist's soul, his all-too human, mind—a mind which even early on had been a refuge to a harmonious and familiar voice within.
This pain was for so many years seldom thought of, but now that it was thawed like a creek, it flowed it's bane as microbes and water. Pain, once necessitated, was now necessitating the diminished memories of the diminutive boy whom he had once been— diminutive as the creature had been banished and repudiated all of these years from the belief that only a man's appetites and actions within the present moment were real. Back then he had not bothered to postulate that a present bereft of foundation was like a cleft chunk of a planet floating aimlessly as an asteroid; and that if fully connected to himself; the boy might not be a diminished fictional character any longer while the man might become more than a tailless lizard with a regenerative head. Thus, this being bedraggled and besmirched in painful intimate sport was for him a homecoming.
There were so many voices of the past in the wind. They were distinct in themselves and yet, swallowed and digested by the wind, they were part of its reeking breath: brothers, parents, extended family, evanescent friends of youth, distant cold bits of memory less than specter and dust; Noppawan and Kimberly, his only two portions of love, which, as a self-contained being, he never needed but delighted in ravenously as one who lacked and was in love with those who engendered such lovable feelings (the feelings of being in love being that which were loved most); so many female models, so many desperate, delectable whores with defunct eyes of hopelessness, dead embers with a slight wistful glow for possible deliverance for which men roved like the dimmest of spotlights; so many relationships; so many desperate others no different than the whores (was there a male or female who got involved, let alone married, to worsen one's lot or to become best friends with the self, brazenly riding through loneliness on a solitary raft? No, never!). There was snoring. There was putrid breath, sweeping the side of his face. There was effluvium from the individual lying next to him and this was a type of wind as well.
No matter whether it was done as perpetrator or willing victim, no matter what the particular genders involved were, or the positions of riding or being ridden, the sexual union of two people was in his conclusion a mallet lunging its mass forcefully into dark, dank, and constricted space, a club forcing entrance into narrow passages not designed for its presence, and an overpowering of a being to devour but also to inflict servitude and pain while obtaining that apogee of pleasure, the brevity of orgasm, which could be gained in no other way. A mélange of croquet and billiards, polo and wrestling, this sport and aggression performed in the heterosexual role could cause the conception of a child more readily than it could cause venereal disease, but deviant sexuality was conjoined for sexual desire of every kind was definitely a crude and barbarous means of getting a specie to interact physically so that under an obsessive and specious sense of rapture and intimacy and a wish for extension of self by annexation of another being or being annexed by him, different apertures would be explored at various times and from human curiosity and experimentation, pregnancy might ensue.
Yes, he told himself, by being amenable to pleasurable promptings in an intimacy with a male half his age, and finding himself himself suddenly middle aged and needing to become enmeshed and invigorated in his beauty, he was living life as animals were meant to live it. Infidelities of every kind within this godless universe gave men, even gentry like himself who were cloyed by leisure, a rapturous respite from their roles as automatons and thus they were an essential sport of man. For the naive this conduct led to some months of being in love but for a worldly adulterer like himself it was minutes of indispensable intoxication. He continued to listen to the howling wind. It seemed to inveigle and beckon him and he found himself wistfully and sequaciously summoned to its cryptic codes. Did the wind not entice him to make his naked form denuded further so that he might become as amorphous as it, to be amalgamated with wind, and to slip into it wholly? It did; and yet it seemed such a grotesque hybrid of breath and force with these continual elated, muddled, and ineffable articulations in brawn. Yes, he reiterated, in that respect the howling was figuratively no different than the aspersions and diatribe of human speech. By that, although perhaps not consciously thinking it, he was nonetheless meaning that war called family which happened so briefly in the history of a life as if it had never been, though undoubtedly had occurred for, he assessed, there was an expanse or large swath of charred, fallow, and contaminated brain therein where, to the present day, little grew but a sense of desertification. Living in the centripetal domain of a myopic existence as everyone did he supposed that his hapless childhood would always be his point of reference, his vantage point, and also the multi-pointed obstacle of his life. Generalizations, skewed and concocted from the sordid past that were their antecedent, extruded from his fissures in an incessant cursive lava flow of amicable contempt. The howling was as undecipherable as the cries of a forlorn child. It was eerie as though a million such children with their muffled cries were being slammed into the windows with each new gust.