It engulfed him with glassy eyes that were unmoving oceans, even stagnant universes, and he knew that everything lacked purpose beyond being an object tossed out for pure animation. To not go forward was completely meaningless.
"Huh? What are you doing?" asked the man.
"Wanting to smoke but I can't find my lighter," said Nawin.
23
There were consecutive sneezes to which a forth was as incomplete as muffled sound. Then there was the wiping of his nose on his arm, a few seconds of an intolerable facial itch, which he scratched incessantly (such a plethora of pleasures there were in discomfort, or acclimating to this life as one was compelled to do, just an adequate amount concocted within an entity to keep it, in most circumstances, from cutting its throat or kimberlying downward) and his cigarette, still dangling loosely in his mouth, lit and allowed to disperse death unto him inexplicably. "Are you happy?" the intimate stranger asked him, but before any potential response could be uttered Nawin sensed his cigarette being extracted from him and, a second later, saw it wedged in the other's mouth for his long inhalation.
Nawin laughed at the filching during his elongated interjection of reproach. As he was most often his own adventitious source positing potential truths to the intense contemplative domain of his multi-tiered mind, which, at top levels, sought life's riddled viands voraciously; at first he did not register the question as coming from any interlocutor other than himself. He was preoccupied with trying to find an exact correlation between burning cigarette phalluses and the afterglow of sexual relations, conceptualizing it the way he would were he to transpose it to canvas with traditional gender substitutes, wondering if the masses of men really felt that pleasurable corporeal sensation + union with another was happiness, and if it really was so why he did not ever feel it.
Why, he asked himself in a bout of hubris, had this insolent creature, who a couple minutes earlier had been buried in sleep, reassembled his parts and spoken to him? He had not granted him permission to do so. It was merely this one's part to transport him home to the abuse that was the foundation of childhood. This he had done fully; and as it was concluded action subsequent cohabitation, to his mind, would be superfluous. By those painful, pleasurable thrusts of intimacy edifices, property, prosperity, verility, invincibility, relationships and stature, all that one made of a life by repudiating everything that one once was, were now seen as the sandcastles that they were and he himself as the ravaged spoils of dirt there to be bulldozed by others' wills as before, to sense the suppressed cries of childhood as before. He did not know how, after these ravaging trespasses of bodily entanglement he could maintain an amicable conversation with the invited violator and yet he did not know how he could avoid an attempt? He could not ask him to leave when he had, by desire if not volition, asked him to come here.
Was it not a standard belief, and a rational one at that, that conversation was the means to further intimacies, that sexual relations with strangers were inverted intimacy and sexual relations with men were perverted or at least distorted, inverted intimacy?; and yet even in heterosexual relationships, he said to himself, the normal sequence of mental divulging leading to the ribald, the carnal, and the bestial seemed its own desultory and discomfiting mess. Was it really unnatural for men to be together in this way? More than he might fear that it was, he feared that it was not. What could be more natural than competitive fencing and impaling another man with one's vibrating, titillating sword with a vibrant force far greater than women could take? Was it not vile for a married man to profane his relationship with his wife in such a way? Yes, he conceded, it was. Did he have compunction about his action? For what good it did anyone, yes he did; and yet this action was as natural as condoning or sanctioning killing itself; it was natural for the immune system to kill microorganisms, for a child, despite sentimental attachments, to grow up and out of all which he once thought of as dear, and for family to evaporate like morning dew.
Talk of love belied the innate desire to experience a workout, to at last turn off thought and respond as an animal should by instinct, to be released from desire tickling incessantly like the crawl of a line of ants on one's skin, and to release a surfeit into a hole with the instrument of urination, an intimate and exquisite release. Likewise, thoughts repudiating the naked truth that killing was as ineluctable and natural in a being as its own breath, contravened any degree of understanding of the life that the fates circumscribed man to have.
And as for being with a woman and begetting children with her, whether it be action that was virtuous or not, it was natural without equivocation; and yet when a marriage certificate, an artificial piece of paper, was signed, it became an instrument for self-deceit by fostering an illusion of permanence while a means to sanctify what was natural by saying that without legitimacy in ink and paper this carnal and emotional bond was debauchery. Thus by refining nature it contravened it. In his case, he only had nominal passion for Noppawan. To him they were two intellects clinging to each other, after family had dissipated from their lives like dispersing smoke from a conflagration. What could be more of an unnatural contrivance than this? And if not only the sport of man on man, but all unions of naked intimacy were illicit and vulgar without paper and ink contrived unions of prehistory predating and leading to both, the present generation would make vile bastards of all. At least that was what he thought or was thinking at the time. He might have thought of himself as self-contained despite at times feeling distraught over this incessant reign of impermanence deluging him; he might have thought of love as neediness and that, personally, it was emotional bonding that, like teddy bears, he himself was beyond as he was beyond Buddhist statuettes, jasmine rosaries, and the intervention of a Buddha god theistically; and yet he loved Noppawan nonetheless. What else could it be but love?