Guilt, like the wind that he was now listening to, wailed on. Self flagellation like thunder and lightning piercing the room, did so under the aegis of his closed eyes. And there, correcting examinations in her favorite seat in the living room with eyes perusing paper behind thick glasses, and fighting back parts of the disheveled hair that obstructed the process, was a spectral and indistinct image of his wife. He judged that she was no different from the rest, already well into diminishing to the state of former friends and family like his deceased girlfriend, his infant son, and his paternal obligations.
There they would become part of a blotch of nebulous memory that might have its pull like a poltergeist against the organization of his thoughts but would nonetheless seem to have never been.
If he were to accept the defining components of marriage as the masses defined it, he was never married at all. The signing of a marriage certificate long ago had been done as a lifelong pledge to prioritize one individual and one bond above others and not as a renunciation of social interaction or forfeiting the ownership of his genitalia; and what was true throughout the marriage was surely no less true now. Noppawan, the anthropologist and professor whom he gained such delight in, which was love, once said that there had to be a reason that jealousy was such an embedded instinct. She said that it no doubt had its origin in primordial man. Perhaps, she said, female Australopithecus africans needed to ensure that the providers did not abandon them and their prodigy and their primordial male counterparts wanted to ensure that those offspring whom they were providing for were really their own.
Did ideas and attitudes of cognizant beings ever evolve at all? he wondered, for sexual fidelity was still thought of as such an important factor to marriage when really it should be a contract of a union of best friends. Facile measurements of this nature would legitimize the most indifferent partners as well as relationships where obtaining monetary or social status was the objective. Contracts of faithfulness and appeasing a partner's jealous propensities by suffocating the self unlovingly could exist just as the facile measurements of what a marriage really was could materialize (all had the right to measure, define, and live as they judged apposite in obtaining some degree of happiness) but, he thought, that surely did not mean that he had to subscribe to it himself. All who signed marriage certificates did not have to do so with the same motivation and none ever signed documents to which there was a likelihood of their present state remaining as it was or worsening. As an aberration of a liberal man who from being fragmented by pain was able to design himself anew, why should it matter what the masses believed? By the momentum of one free to be dissolute he, a libertine, had a short time earlier worn away one more restriction; but as it was one of consenting adults; was it all that necessary to build dams and reroute the currents of a river that ran both ways? He thought not, when the damn was such an unnatural barrier.
He wondered what Noppawan was doing at this moment. Awakened by the baby, was she warming the bottle of milk and combing that thicket of long hair as he had seen her do before. Was she even able to sleep very well nowadays with the infant's hourly crying? Was she able to sleep at all with Kimberly's passing? Did she think of him at all? Did she feel regret over breaking his arm with the frying pan, changing the locks, tossing his clothes onto the drive, and refusing to answer the telephone? Despite making him culpable she had in fact arranged it all. Kimberly's post-partum depression was no doubt exacerbated by those two months of shared motherhood and espousal husbandry that barren Noppawan had conceived, but none could have foreseen the denouement. The world abounded in spills and mess and yet it was miraculous that, at least for many, it came together so well before finally going awry, dissipating as dew, life, the decent and debauched of it.
He opened his eyes. Everything was there as before including that body. He sat up; embraced the mesa of his legs within the multifarious sands of the desert of his mind; admired those various shades of color in the sand, perspectives made so by the variations of mood; and looked down. Consternated, he stared at a mattress cover dappled like a constellation from his soiling, and he laughed nervously. "But then why should it not be so with the extent of it," he thought. He was meaning the twenty minutes or longer of being sodomized, that roller coaster within which eventually prompted bowel movements in a futile attempt to excrete the intruder. Not knowing what he could do as he could hardly remove the mattress cover then and there, he pulled down a package of cigarettes from the mantle of the bed. He put a cigarette into his mouth but not able to find the lighter from the groping of his hand on the mantle, and seeing that it was not on the bed stand, he just let the fireless cigarette dangle in his mouth.
Experience (he smiled again, for as much as this ceaseless analysis of the intricacies of his life might seem morbid to others were they to have them their head, he found postulating potential reasons for his actions beyond the superficial an amusement park where the variation and length of the rides was infinite—it had always amused him to do so; and prior to this whole Kimberly affair he was in action if not thought as shallow and concave as the next person, and more hedonistic than most), there was nothing ugly or disdainful in a given experience but what the mind associated as positive or negative from social conditioning or from paranoid fears of possible ramifications from a little pain. Did some anal pain presage that he would ineluctably contract a disease from this man? No, it did not, nor had each of his myriad raptures of vaginal penetration in his sordid past indicated that the ecstasy he was experiencing in his groins would transcend into a meaningful companionship beyond sexual gymnastics.
Having forgotten to close the curtains there was a warped, oblong silver bar of refracted light on the floor in front of the bed. It was light from an adjacent street lamp that was molded and cast down onto the darkness of the floor. There was a slight sway of a mirror hanging on the wall with reflections of blurred and severed shapes seeming to appear, disappear, and reappear within its sway. What they were he did not know for sure. One was possibly a part of a corner of a wall and a bit of a footstool; another was possibly matte flanks of bed and flesh; less dubiously it seemed that there was a partial foot or severing of that foot, but whatever was being reflected was done so as a rearranging mélange. A cactus, a telephone, and a postcard in which he had only written, "Dear Noppadon, I am here in Nongkai thinking of you and everything. I want—" were yoked together on the bed stand. With every reopening of his eyes they seemed to command the turning of his face toward them not so much from the fact that his wallet was there in one of its drawers but more to suggest that his life was barren and he needed to contact someone. The inanimate which could not copy and transmit impressions of the world or one's relation to it, were to him, at that moment, capable of an empathy and directive that bypassed words. At least it seemed to be so of the items on the bed-stand, and he waited for them to mandate who he was to contact (the beautiful nurse at Siriaj Hospital, his swarthy wife with intellect as thick as the lenses of her glasses, or the sodomy division of the local police office—"hello Mr. Policeman. I would like to report the fact that a stray dog is stuck in my crevasse. You will sir. Thank you, sir. You are such a nice man. I will prepare a nice treat for you and your partner when you come"). He gasped in a muted chuckle.
"What are you doing?" asked a gecko that was crawling on the wall near the bedstand.
"Sitting here. Fornicating. Experimenting."