"It's not nothing," he said, snapping the elastic—he himself wearing nothing but his grin. "No, that's not how I think. You just have to do things. If there is a good feeling ride it fully, you just have to throw yourself into it and live it. If you stand back and pick things apart because you don't know 100 percent you might as well be dead because what you're living isn't life."
"Is that so?" Nawin said. It was cogent enough to him who would have had the need and thus the gullibility to believe such things were it not for the countenance, the melodramatic tone of he who promulgated this holy maxim, and the circumstances that went contrary to the putative sentiments.
24
Sensing that a bit of enlightenment could accompany a binge of debauchery and provide him with not only wind but ablution into the cellar of his musty mind, he was given a reason for intimacy, not that this reason or any other would have to prevail in creatures so prone to irrational caprices as he now concluded that he was. So a man would seek less alien companionship with another man after a girlfriend had jumped from the eleventh story of a university building and a wife who had subsequently broken his arm with an iron frying pan now kept him locked out of their home—this attributing of men as less illogical and more steady presences, rightly or wrongly, and identifying solely with them was reasonable enough; but to succumb spellbound to the brevity of frenzy, knowing well such intimacies to be spectacles as brief and garish as the puffs of aerosol he and a college roommate used to spray and light so that they might experience an inferno of the air, to know and yet to do it nonetheless, was inane.
Now seated and stationary on this bed in this room and in this mind, groping for contours of objects in dark and curtailed space among antithetical thoughts and caprices, putative reality seemed nothing but the most tangible of the intangibles. As a result he became even more reticent, pondering what the right combinations were to live life fully: inward versus outward explorations; feeling versus logic; work versus leisure; silent reverie versus boisterous revelry; digressions into the future and the past; savoring the present moment as in lying on a bench at Wat Arun watching clouds overhead, sensing the breath enter and leave his frame, and feeling a sense of awe that he was even cognizant of all this; conversely, doing and having agenda and purpose about the affairs of man, interaction which allowed one to avoid the intrusiveness of too many unwanted, distracting thoughts, all of which confirmed his inconsequence even in the here and now. There had to be a harmony of these incongruous elements but he did not know how or to what degree.
"And I suppose you will always be there for me," Nawin asked with a sardonic smile on his face. He now wanted levity and the substance of sound, even his own, to dispel, or at least obfuscate the longevity that was in each and every minute to distract him from the realization of the hours until sunrise, and to preoccupy him during the time, still unknown, until departure of this intimate stranger.
He, the womanizer he once was, reproached himself for being here with this man in a chagrin of manhood, a mortification and yet a mortification of what he could not say. Perhaps there was no reason for mortification at all, he countered in a retort of thought. Perhaps this was a cleansing and a freeing of himself from a false sense of what manhood should be. Still, he had all these explosions of intimacy in the knowledge he would feel this vacuity afterwards, and that upon feeling it any moment could make him a perpetrator of indifference who rudely discarded this delusion rather than built a multi-story make-believe castle upon it; intimacy bedazzled him for a time before his return to a more subdued and substantive state; this time in an effeminate role of mute intercourse not to his liking but which he needed nonetheless; exacerbated sexual tension abated but not entirely extinguished in post-sexual melancholy. To know such matters and yet to interact this way regardless like any biologically programmed automaton thwarted by early childhood experience was an inane life.
So he concluded and re-concluded, with his thoughts becoming increasingly redundant, twisted, and plaited. To gain some solace and respite he hummed the melody of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Thinking as he did so that the whirlwind he would create by repeating it thrice therein should clear away all dross he instead found that the debris remained even as it dragged circuitously although less tediously in music.
"And I know that you will always be there for me," Nawin remembered himself saying facetiously. It occurred to him that this lover, this sprawled figure so near to him, was like a dog he had seen recently near Gaysorn Department Store lying on its back at the base of a Brahma statue, its genitalia an oblation to that deity. At that time, while he was chuckling at a deity aptly profaned and pondering how our pantheistic awe of nature had been overtaken by these artificial weeds of dogma, false stories and tradition, as with the alleged bones of the Buddha that were enshrined in a temple near the Silpakorn University branch in Nakhon Pathom, he was re-entering Gaysorn intent on purchasing a 38,000 baht watch so as to have it shine opulently upon his handsome albeit dark dirt-brown skin.
Shopping was only adjunct to the instinct that prompted the switching on of one's breath. Of course he would do it naturally for man's energy was not to be self-contained, but instead was continually changing in changeable containers, and in desperate moments he would barter what he had for intimacy—barter with what he had. And if he knew not what he hoped to gain from a spiritual journey already thwarted in activity similar to the perversity of his youth, all he needed to do was to look at the obvious. From it, there could be no other interpretation but that he wanted to be taken back to a feeling of ravaged youth when he had perverse hopes that the physical penetration would stop while at the same time he would be recognized as permanently married to his brother. Being taken back home to a foundation of dilapidated innocence, but an ingenuous foundation nonetheless, he sought a return to himself that was the ends and not the means.