27
Despite, if not because of, the wind and rain and this room being on the third floor of the guest house, he could nonetheless hear, he supposed, the growls, vicious howling, and snarling with hissing rolls of saliva (perhaps imagined; after all, his aim had initially been to drive to the sea, to see and hear the harmonic continuum of wave upon wave slamming its froth against the shore, and yet it had been an aim that could not be achieved with one arm in both cast and sling nor even facilitated via train or bus to Phuket, Pattaya, or Cha-am with all tickets sold out for the holiday) of two dogs in the parking lot: noise that they directed at each other or perhaps really toward darkness itself. Novel and urgent utterances to them, it was part of myriad redundant and inconsequential skirmishes in the existence of canines that would continue perennially to the specie's extinction. Malnourished strays with furless spots that they probably were, they, for being in ineluctable misery and unable to understand the fates that they were subjected to, could merely rail against shadowy form and the paucity of distinguishable matter in darkness and project their antipathy against members of their kind that were most vulnerable to the insulting tones of their wordless vitriol, soft targets from which to measure having an impact of their latent screams. These other animals were microcosms that were composed of the same appetites and temperaments as man whose larger but negligible intelligence was scarcely able to break the force of most waves that inundated the tenuous levee of rationality which was supposed to deliver one from innate, instinctual chaos.
The paramour blew his clouds of smoke into the darkness like mist floating above a noxious lake and this lethal haze hid the nocturnal snake that was attached to his form, making obscure all that Nawin had been able to see in the darkness. And yet if nothing really existed more than mere supposition that it was so, surely emotions should not even be accredited with the supposition of reality. If he had more will, he told himself, it would not seem so disconcerting that he, injured and aloof in tragedy, had chosen this ersatz of taking a man over a woman to this particular venue. Was it really an ersatz at all? In terms of intimacy and reproduction, it was; and yet in terms of this bit of wrestling, this sport, it was pleasure and pain that was distinct from all others to which he might as well ride or be ridden and learn to enjoy its inconsequential levity the way one preferred male rivals in matches without scrutinizing whether or not it was fair to exclude women from such sport. It was pleasure and pain which made him feel more alive in his numbness.
And if from this manhood he was so easily toppled so be it. Who was to say that such a tenuous, artificial structure of shoddy construction was worthy of being had if it continually needed to be propped up with extra 2x4s of heterosexual experiences as reinforcement, and that one would not become more of a human being to be less of a man? This, he told himself, this was merely a borrowing of youth and beauty to compensate for the years of a slight diminishing of both, and this wearing it for a time, was not homosexual overall, any more than, from time to time, wearing a costume in bed to accentuate an aspect of the self heretofore surreptitious was complete madness (how august he was in the pointed crown; how apposite it was by the catalyst of obdurate orbs of arrogance and a slight pushing of a given woman's head downward that she should fall to his feet before subtly raising from the kow-towing gesture to become his subject in an osculating worship of his body).
Then there was the sudden screeching of one of those animals in pain; and although its movements were neither seen nor heard, from its receding and diminishing cries, its scampering could be perceived through the imaginative compensations of the mind which concocted the plausible the best that it could when lacking sensory indicators to address the uncertainties of reality by prompting understanding and action, if not verisimilitude, that had a higher probability of being right. On the bed he was experiencing a slight bout of melancholy as though reproaching himself for his infidelity, not that his adulterous adventures had bothered him all that much in times past. And while recognizing the absurdity of a belated attempt to be circumspect now when this untoward, alien exchange had come and gone with whatever fodder and fuel had been essential in the incendiary night he still felt a wariness that dark instinctual craving should pull him toward an insidious happening. In ways it was to him as though this sexual encounter had not yet occurred and were it to happen would be of importance to the world at large, so he inanely felt, concerning an interaction that had already taken place.
He listened but did not hear anything outside but the occasional howling of traffic and wind. He concluded that this particular union in another species of animal had been cleft into fractious bits. To him it was another reminder of the passing away of life's myriad social interactions and the respective parties so engaged. Salient and engrossing society of the moment would always be replaced with the eternal purity of silence were it not for the desperate need to seek meaning and ascribe significance to the interactions of man. When existing on a cold planet in the grandeur of the black but light-speckled universe with its surfeit of random stars and a plethora of void, what could humans do but cling to each other for warmth and attribute, meaning and merit in this desperate coagulation? Thus there was the noise of clanging men, boisterous merry making, and adhesion of like to like not that he, an artist, or he, a man in grief, saw himself cognate with anyone or anything.
For a loner, interruptions of the human mind, noisy as it was, were less of harangue than all the interaction exuded in doing a job and fulfilling one's minor role in society (in his case that of a prurient artist or an artist of prurience and when not on sabbatical, an overburdened Silpakorn University art survey lecturer at that, roles which had surely been replaced by younger and less effete male artists than himself) were only bearable in short durations. As the shallow and gregarious needed a similar extension of themselves and could only stay inward briefly, so rich inward men and they who were plagued by grief could only make outward connections briefly especially when needing to be left alone to pick up the pieces of their lives. But he too was a being of his species and needed humans especially now. So he thought, for the man who had leisure and money to experience it all including the sense of ennui that was its corollary thought inordinately.
He was just thinking that despite the incessant competition for resources and self-worth within the societies of man and dog, a being needed to interact with its kind more than just for the snippets of time that were the totality of his particular interactions. How strange, he thought, that in tragic loss of significant others and an inveterate routine of pleasant association that such a person needed to interact more and yet interacted less. He told himself that after he completed his spiritual retreat (a retreat that would begin once the licentious one had ended) he would work part-time as it was dangerous not to do so with the identity, purpose, and sanity of man as tenuous as it was; that his actions here had no moral value, positive or negative, beyond any which he by his own volition, ascribed to them; and that it was no "sicker" being engaged in this liaison than choosing to sit next to the beautiful and thin rather than the fat and ugly on a BTS sky- train—one reminding him of vigor and the other weakness and infirmity. Physical intercourse when the mental bridges between the distant islands of man had all collapsed was best alloted to one in this imperfect world.
"If a man isn't functioning as one he shouldn't live. He shouldn't make anyone else live that way," said the youth.
Nawin coughed. "That's not a cigarette is it?"