An Apostate: Nawin of Thais

by Steven David Justin Sills

Lying there, a cohabitant of the darkness of this relatively unfamiliar room, the howling then seemed more fierce than before. It literally was brawn and breath. As such it was worse than the acerbity of humans (not that his father excoriating him for retreating to his "cage," that cage he willingly absconded to as a casualty of a sadistic sport in which he needed to shoot and denigrate before being shot and denigrated himself, and once hit to seek the prey more aggressively in the hope of being seen as the master of disparaging wit, or the father being as rustic and ungrammatical as a wild boar, did not howl yet in memory) and made the evening seem all the more surreal and peculiar if such a thing were possible.

"Where am I?" he asked himself absurdly, as if it could be anything other than that same room at the guest house in Nongkhai. "What happened to me?" he asked with feigned innocence which caused him to chortle and spray saliva that was like the froth of a wave upon a breaker, the cluster of rocks that was his smile. He had to admit, despite himself, that this being violated, by his own volition, had been quite a ride. It had been an internal roller coaster physically; but more it had been a ride into an abyss within, not merely from the physical sensation of this odd womanly role he found himself in or the pleasure of being free of aberration as creatures of variation loved aberration if social constraints were slackened (and slackened they were not only in Bang-cock but to some degree in the whole of Thailand as the Lord Buddha did not envisage gods, rules, and the dogma of coercion), but most saliently in these years as a womanizer overturned with this stranger's slight push of his body toward the bed.

Even with eyes closed and sedulous efforts made to concentrate on the wind to avoid thinking of the raw, anal soreness and all that transpired which was as confusing for the libertine as it was liberating, he knew. He listened intently. He listened scrupulously. How superstitious he was to equate the wind with a specter and yet he did it nonetheless. The smells of the room did not seem as acrid as a fully evaporated area over a recent urine-saturated pavement near a park or stadium in Bangkok or as repugnant as a room littered with his brothers fetid socks and other equally if not more reprehensible articles of attire peeled off the bodies of these anathemas but still, as small as the room was, nothing was impervious to it. If the curtains and the carpet were all permeated by a redoubling of these male odors, he would not have been surprised—not that surprise, or any other human emotion could have been registered all that readily in his impassive state. His was a naked mind, like that of his body, except that his body was wrapped loosely in a used mildewed towel and his mind in a bawdy numbness which he labeled the void.

He sneezed and opened his eyes. He rubbed his nose against his shoulder, careful not to make any more precipitous movements against the broken arm in the sling, since it was hurting worse than before, as of course it would from the earlier sport. There was no point in closing his eyes again. He would not be able to rest any more than before. With a mind needing debouchment more than his body needed to relieve itself in the toilet he stayed where he was, which was where there were windows. The circumfluence of the fetid, enervated air beneath the incessant creaking of the ceiling fan; creaking as if it were not only grating against the torpor and stagnancy of the air itself but against the melee of all, for all was restrained in the time and space of what now was and in a circulation and deciduous draping of those same odors caught to which the windows were permanently sealed to keep out the rain.

22

Gained as an unintentional wooer of women by dint of an opalesque smile, a mellifluous voice, a successful name, and a handsome albeit swarthy and sodden appearance which made him, for them at least, a semi-deluctable presence, and years of venial sensual licentiousness, a recompense for empathic suffering in his thoughtful studies of prostitutes and injustices of the world at large, it was his inveterate perspective of himself as delusionary as it may have been. It was disconcerting to think of it as gone; and yet, he told himself, as emasculated and denuded as he now felt, were he to continue to mature this way, to climb the precipice of old age, while still acting callow enough to be obsessed by the exquisite release of his body (love making out of the tension of repressed urges towards the many and, as a cumulative exhortation of fantasies vented on a specific one, an act of adultery when making love to her, as it was love of himself, his own gratification), partaking of blithe experiences with female strangers under societal approbation and with youthful lewdness, needing to restrain his behavior very little, scrutinizing it no more than this, and having nothing to show for his life other than wanton appetites dragging him into every damp and unseemly hole open to him would he not eventually become more obscene than the hole he was at this moment in time? Would it not be worse than now to end his life no more master of the self than that and to have made sexuality the sole subject of study and preoccupation as he had done for decades? He was not sure, although to feel better about himself he averred it silently as if he were so. He told himself that there was nothing to feel guilty about. It was the clay of life. Human will might choose to misrepresent it as ethereal as a cloud but it was not so. From the first regenerative microbe it was an experiment, and so of course there would be experimentation now. If obscene, was it not even more obscene that this, which was an inception of all, was all there was?

The carnal scholar that he was, did he not seek to understand life pedantically, partaking of it mostly with prostitute models instead of those of affluent means? Whatever small, favorable outcome it did for them financially he knew all too clearly that it was exploiting the exploited whatever august and sententious aim he might entertain. By seeking the omniscience of a god and showing the injustices of life as they really were (or as accurate an account as one could do within his tiny scope of experience and knowledge) his was to know both the parts of the exploiter and the exploited. What other reason did he have to enjoy them than to enlarge his study to the perpetrators of exploitation themselves when there was such a smorgasbord for free, or at least as free as women got? So many years of praised debauchery had embedded that self perspective of himself as a wooer of women ("Naughty Nawin" as articles often called him); and it had seemed as impregnable as granite when really it was a thin outline of a self that could easily be smudged and erased.

Lying on his half of the bed, the thunder, lightning, and wind from outside seemed to diffuse into that porous and amorphous outline of a defunct self. For half an hour he was cognizant of nothing but the storm and the faint, subdued murmurs and indistinct featureless shapes of early, distant memories set in a rather subconscious mental fog, scampering away at a distance as though seeking to allude him. Without thinking so, he felt that large amalgamations of his character, the daily sensory input of a constant, non-threatening environment, and his fond attachments to others gained from shared pleasant experiences together, which together he called himself fell from him annually. He was deciduous, but unlike a tree, he suffered a loss of most of the trunk of his entire being: the full love of a child for his mother that would never come again; the family that damaged and then vanished almost as quickly as one was conceived, gestated, and delivered as a member into its cell of sordid and clandestine activities; an infatuation with a girl that once seemed garish, all-consuming, and eternal as the sun; and the full pleasure of feeling those awesome gusts of wind hit against his face as a boy would, smelling the pile of winter leaves that he once jumped into as they began to suffocate him, and appreciating the significance of the simple delights of the ordinary as a child's mind did, and to which no vacation to Vientiane as an adult had the hope of restoring. He was merely what he sensed from the storm and for some time he stayed this way soughing skidding around with it in his mind like a severed and desiccated old leaf.

Manhood, this summation of himself as masculine force and presence, had nothing tangible in it and could vanish quicker than the toppling of a house of cards. With so many years of incessant layers of thought it had seemed ossified so how could he have known that this perspective—one that was endemic to such a profession of contemplative decadence and decadent contemplation and had seemed myriad as the shore's self- flagellation of waves—would be so evanescent? As his nose was beginning to itch he rubbed it with the back of his hand. From the gesture he found himself returning to a self which, regrettably, could not be discarded entirely. How strange, he thought, to be washed up on new shores. He thought this as if there were something so new in it, and as if sodomy, and in his case fraternal incest at that, were totally unknown to him. It was not so strange a shore as he wanted to believe, he had to admit, and he would only be alone and marooned there if he saw himself as such. The fecund, dark soil of a less familiar shore could only be foreign, ominous, and grave if he stated to himself that it was such.

"So, I am with a man! What of it!" he thought; but guilt continued to reverberate, as those eerie lamenting calls to worship that, from a nearby mosque, thrice a day rolled off of the black sheen of the waters of the canal and trespassed into his Bangkok estate bypassing a wall and gate meant to fortify him from possible theft, and more generally to barricade him from the ignorance and poverty that were his past. If this perspective of himself as an inadvertent wooer of women and debonair presence, were a wall to memory meant to keep himself from considering the peculiarity of his perverted and twisted past and the walls of his estate were meant to fortify himself from poverty and misery both of them failed unequivocally.