At one moment, he wanted the creaking ceiling fan that was turning incessantly to peel with the plaster so that the metallic arms might fall and embrace them both mincing them and this scene into pulp. At another moment, however, he thought about how good it was to be here with the distraction of another being on such a day as Father's Day, a day that diced people like him in the wistful sentiment of early family. That family had never been more than bits of stinking scraps of sweetness tossed out to his scoffed, kicked, and abused existence; but starved, emaciated dog that he at that time was, he had been given enough that was kind to keep the hateful experiences of childhood embedded in his head while reminding him that he was born one of a countless litter of dogs trashing the sidewalks of time. Dysfunctional families might be more prevalent in Thailand than most people believed but their members could ignore this fact unless they belonged to extreme cases, and under the "good deeds beget good deeds" philosophy of the Buddhists a wretch like him must have done something monstrous indeed to know nothing but the breaking of family. With virtually everyone paying homage to fathers and all genuflecting to majesty there was such loneliness for members of extreme cases on such a day.
Telling himself that he should not treat the intimate stranger with indifference, he half-slapped, half-clasped, the foot of his companion as though shaking hands with him. It was a gesture no less awkward than any of his other tepid nonsexual attempts to relate to him and came from a nervousness at parting from his masculine ways and returning to effeminate ones, and from thrusting his will to allowing himself to be a pawn to the will of another. Then he returned to the freedom of darkness and silence.
If by this encounter he profaned his wife, if she were still anything other than proscribed by legal document alone, so be it. If his actions were adulterous, it seemed to him that, as they were undertaken in sport, they were mildly so (his brain, being a large circular mass had thoughts that went around in circuitous orbits as if nothing were ever resolved) and thus his private parts were not to be circumscribed to pacify the jealous instincts of women who long ago in antediluvian pre-history feared the loss of a provider. If ethical, he told himself, a man should be mildly self-restrained allowing some movement of the libertine, without allowing all actions and thought to degenerate to appetite alone. This was logical restraint.
26
To be male: to have this perennial sexual appetite and its feasting for pleasure, dominance, and self-preservation; and the release of such the surfeit of tension through the explosion of liquid shrapnel; a discharge all the stronger and more accurate for the apparatus not having been used for some time; potent and inimical fertilizing springs like long suppressed geysers shot out potential life through nature's hand and bidding but as such arsenal all the same; live weaponry shot from a missile launcher that could not be said to be possessed or manipulated by any other force than that of the given man himself, a being who with enough experimentation was eventually cognizant of sexual relations as an illusion of intimacy and yet was pressured beyond restraint nonetheless by urges and promptings of appetite and titillation and for personal sensation that might awaken a sense that he could be more than the tedium of whatever redundant tasks he was assigned as work that provided him with sustenance, or free of monetary bondage altogether, to break from the vacuity of his shell (earlier, both of them had stepped into the room only to sit down on edges of the bed in an awkward state where words were nascent, catatonic wisps of air, stillborn fetuses of pneumatic thought, decomposing on lips; and at this time, before a removal of articles of clothing in which all was removed except the fear of the unknown euphemized as moral conscience, he would have been disingenuous had he told him to leave… now, however even with not having had any sexual satisfaction of his own from this encounter he could tell him to go and mean it as with him gone he would be free to go himself and how difficult could it be just to state what was really in the foremost part of one's mind, to unfold and spread out one's will upon the second of its mental conception as one would in deliberately casting his reflection onto waters and with the sincerity and tackless artlessness of a child?… and if this potential utterance of candor were done, articulate albeit lacking an adult's sophistication for subtle and separate, antithetical layers of that which was said, logically meant, and yearned for, this triple entendre of politeness and deceit, he would find it liberating to be such a simpleton but he was unable to say that which he meant so all that he could do was to lie and prevaricate…he could attest that as it was Father's Day he needed to leave and see his own family (who would believe that someone of forty would not have one), that shortly there would be a reunion in which he and his wife would surprise his father, (dead as he was) by showing him their infant grandson… but then for such words to be plausible, he would have to be here in Nongkhai with a wife instead of as a single, solitary traveler; he would have to be in a more domestic setting than a guest house for foreigners and their whores; and in a coupling other than wet, fetid nakedness with another male…to be hypocritical enough to even say such a thing, how could he be thought of as anything but a middle aged man who did not know whether to fire or be fired upon, or if an experience was to be enjoyed or feared, a child ignorant and uncomfortable in self and the world at large, which, questioning everything as he did, he supposed that in actuality he was); attractions made all the more so by the magnetic pull of some vague feeling that was a composite of odors, sights, voices, attention, and interaction which seemed to emit and reek of the diminished, mostly forgotten blur of early family; to be so possessed by that which was long ago that it should be the conduit and thrust of succulent sexual truculence, and yet not know the specific memories that were behind it all.
In this present circumstance of not only failing to satisfy himself but existing as an obsequious and passive body there to be manipulated by another what he had done, this effeminate role that he had engaged in, was of this male instinct and yet a clear aberration of it. Only months earlier he had been a sequacious adherent of it as an incorrigible womanizer, and yet now his actions were more impotent than a misfiring and his manhood was debunked by being sodomized.
Still, by becoming something less than a man did it not allow him to reemerge as a human being? Such was to be hoped for when witnessing that the limited self in art and in life could not change the world for the better and that, in the race to make a success of himself before his short time on the planet expired (money and fame sought and pursued relentlessly after a youth debased in poverty and abuse), his sensitivities hardened so that now he could bypass a beggar on an overpass without giving a baht or feeling much more than an instant of empathy or compunction.
It was his hope with this sojourn to the sister cities of Nongkai and Vientiane to resurrect himself. He thought about how different he was from the boy who would extricate trapped insects from a window sill. He was losing bits of his humanity all the time with every assertive darting walk through the crowded sidewalks of Bangkok.
In certain ways it seemed that in the deviation from normal instinctual male drives he was becoming free of pretensions of being anything more masculine than a mere man, a vulnerable, needy creature who often articulated a wish for an extension of manhood and an introvert's desperate need for at least a minimal physical connection to fellow man, although in his case now it was an encounter with a male who looked like his brother, Kazem at 18 when he was 14. Just as that which was past was ineluctable memory and stored in him still, and this storage of the replicas to the incidents of his life could never be made right as it was all distant and unalterable and as feral as brothers running along the banks and sand bars of the Chao Phraya River, he would always be under impulses to avoid the painful past by clogging his mind in amusements or urgencies of interaction with other beings. And for whatever activities he might devise as distractions from his thoughts, fears of the vacuous nature of existence would always be man's ineluctable truth, and without agenda vacuous truth was his in excess.
If his thoughts were a quagmire what else would they be especially in this room and in this uncomfortable company whom he would not part with so easily?.. could not part, or part assertively, as doing so would be rude not only to the stranger but to himself as well since, like it or not, this surrogate brother, this lover, was a distraction from being without family on Father's Day and to some degree he needed him or he would not have had him here.