"You dress fancy, live in a city and you don't do anything."
"Hard to explain, but essentially that's right."
"You a rich businessman?"
"Artist."
"Artist?"
Nawin laughed and gesticulated an artist drawing something.
"From a background of rich businessmen. Noodle workers. Dirt poverty. But if you work hard, have talents, use them commercially and invest wisely Bangok or any other large city can liberate a man." He resented even having to divulge this and kept asking himself why the man did not leave and why when the communication of bodies, the illusion of intimacy, had passed, he and this man or any two people were compelled to forage for scraps of words to assemble a bridge of ideas that would link them, two distant and alien islands. Words merely verified the fact that their intimacy was a mirage.
The activity had ceased, the pleasure had been brought to him and had been his alone. All that there now was, was anti- climactic small talk. He told himself that a good guest would show his gratitude by getting dressed quickly and making a swift departure so as to not inconvenience Him. He told himself that all he needed to release from his lips were two basic words: please go.
He thought of the pejorative word, 'elderly,' that the intimate stranger had used against him and resented his presence even more. As bantering as the intent of this word might have been it seemed particularly offensive on a day after his own birthday and a Father's Day at that. True, he was much older than the teenager (he glanced at the face; it was a perfect fusion of boy and man; smoking its cigarette and creating a synthetic fog of smoke onto his life). Only by contrast to the other one's youth would he think of himself as old and then he was not merely old but old as the hills and with so many memories to be excavated therein. It was merely feeling and perception and it meant nothing. It was a mere feeling like all feelings, mirages really. Even family could seem for a time like "solid ground" until one witnessed it become a series of vapors. It was he who had chosen to be with someone so young so if he felt old to be near him. It was a problem of his own making and he told himself that he could not blame anyone other than himself for the boy had not materialized in this dark room on his own.
And of this being used for his sperm and disposed of, he had unwittingly bastardized his own offspring unto the world, one more illusionary human form, a piece of himself, which he might never see again. But as Buddhists say the world is an impermanent place.