It was darkly hysterical and he released a tacit, tickled guffaw in a strong exhaled breath, circumspect to stifle noise that could awaken the other passengers. The dream of forty was rather unequivocal but the meaning of the other was not so obvious. His best explanation was that geckos ate mosquitoes; in his youth, when snorting glue and swallowing amphetamines back in those days when his parents had died and he was working along with his brothers in a sidewalk restaurant and being molested as a "cheap date", he used to hallucinate about talking mosquitoes; so if the mosquitoes were Jatupon's only companion, they symbolized the self, a child of poverty that his name change to "Nawin" could not consume. For whatever his external changes and whatever label he gave himself, Jatupon, an abused and forlorn child was within. At least that was his version of the syllogism.
Amused by himself as he always was, he was much too curious at witnessing his sudden desultory moods of asphyxiating stagnation and foundering desperation within to ever be seriously suicidal. Still, he needed movement—the sensory details of the here and now—to override his ideas, to change him from what he was with every passing minute, and to prove that instead of being a man, he was merely an unfixed, impressionable, and amorphous blob. To air out his musty, old mind became more urgent with every oppressive moment in which he was increasingly discontent to stay within the hole in the embankment of the Pullman car that at times seemed a coffin or a drawer at a morgue, and at other times like a coffinless rot in a crevasse within the walls of a mountain. And finding that there were no more fruit pastries in his box to obtain oral pleasure—pleasure giving man a sense of being more cognizant than an automaton of space dust moving in vacuous time eating, drinking, urinating, defecating, and, given the chance, copulating (although there was little chance of that in the train)—he felt claustrophobic and climbed down the bolted metal ladder of the sleeper with the idea of going to the bathroom. As he did so he heard the Laotian snoring as uproariously as a siren and yet as mellifluously as the enticing song of a Siren.
It was indeed strange that the disheveled being who was shooting fetid wisps of air as sonorously as a bagpipe should be both enticing and repulsive all in the same reeking breath, and Nawin smirked at the sight of his acquaintance. He feigned disgust, and this action mixed with amusement in a contorted, clownish countenance until the odd smile finally flattened for there was a peculiar sensation within that at first he did not readily acknowledge. To evade the cognizable he again ruminated on how odd it was that, now feeling as refreshed as he could be when waking from rolling turbulent dreams that wrenched his brain with a pain like the sprained of leg of a child fleeing a bully (albeit that the bully in his case was the deprecating voice within himself that censured him for being entirely lost at forty), he should not be able to decipher appeal or repugnance over something so simple as the pleasure factor behind the sound and smell of a man's loud breathing—cacophonous mutterings of a hominid or something quite orphic? This was his jocular deliberation so as to stay hidden from himself behind a wall of thought. Ultimately, however, there was a scaling of the wall and the coward was ferreted.
"Am I really feeling this way?" he asked himself. He knew that he was, for his body tingled with the titillation of one wanting sex. He thought how consternating and queer it was that after leaving his brother, Kazem, over twenty years ago without ever thinking of him or any man in much of any sense (including "that way" except in the most fleeting manner), that this man, this unshaven and uncomely Laotian, should seem sensual to him now. No, he thought, with a new idea repudiating the old, the only peculiarity was that as a casualty on the battle ground of family he should live so well and so long without having to continually purge himself of memory that could continually discomfit the present with its stench, rubbing its foul wounded body in recidivistic and wanton desire.
Still, he reassured himself consolingly; it was not so "queer" for an artist to love the beauty of form. In this world of lackadaisical automatons who never appreciated the here and now, the beauty of the human frame was there to be shown by discerning artists. He posited that his own artistic proclivities in conjunction with all the trauma of the past month (Kimberly's suicide, Noppawan's beating of him with the frying pan, and being locked out of the house when returning from the hospital) were putting him in a dust storm no more nebulous than that which he felt instantly at taking a shot of whiskey or when spinning one of his madonnas on a dance floor. It was merely a minute of temporary derangement that was quite natural in life, a game of musical chairs in which the chairs also moved. He further averred that a moment or two of confusion when waking up from nightmares was totally understandable and natural in life's craziness. But, he then asked himself, why would any artist have this obsession in conveying the beauty of form unless he were painting over the background that tainted him? Perversion had the transitive root 'to pervert', and it was rooted deep with the years: it was familiar, it was going home, it was a homecoming to the illusion of that former family that could be argued to have never existed at all were it not for that almost impalpable stain that the perverted wore unknowingly like a light jacket.
Desire: what was it really? It was mad hunger for what one lacked. It was emaciated Haitians attacking a UN storehouse and a mind loose and spinning of its own accord like a top; and disconcertedly, he argued to himself in an alloy that was both a question and a statement, the encroachment of desire was surely a possibility only when the consciousness approved it with its reluctant nod. "Isn't this so?" he asked the mind which knew nothing but questions.
As much as these titillations toward the Laotian repulsed and frightened him and despite a tepid attempt at eschewing his feelings, he wanted the man, like a spellbound warlock whose spells, even when having a life of their own, went contrary to the intent. As abashed as he was by his compulsion to stare, there was nothing to stop him. No one was awake but himself. Uppers and lowers, they were all ensconced in tiny train domains behind their brown curtains. He was quite alone enough to elongate a momentary voyeurism to more. The burly stranger wearing only sufficiently bulged underwear was both handsome and ugly depending on one's perspective; and it was perspective by which all judgments lied. To understand the level of desirability or repugnance of a given thing (whether or not the Moslem woman sleeping in an adjacent bunk across the aisle with partially opened curtains was "with child," "knocked up," or a southern terrorist in disguise, or whether the train ride, one that every young boy would yearn to go on, was pleasant or not for the man he had mutated into) an overall mood was needed, a background color for the canvas based on faded memories falling through the mind as softly as leaves or as revoltingly as trash blowing on the ground.
Beams of light were able to slide through the myriad rectangular slits of the metallic awning that had been pulled down the window as a screen; and when somewhat blocked by forms in the environment the passing southerly trains became oblique. Obliquely, they changed the appearance of the man and in so doing changed the perspective of him. At one moment the light accentuated blemishes visible on his face and at another moment it diffused onto the whole countenance making it sleek and mysterious like tenebrous silver.
When the face was ugly its foul breath was fouler, and when handsome the snoring was a nice inebriating gust that picked up Nawin's kite; but in both perspectives the brazen Laotian in his impoverished vulnerability reminded him of Jatupon. There in tattered dirty clothes Jatupon, whom his brothers derided as 'Jatuporn,' was a vermin he could never entirely escape (scaling the prison walls of the subconscious as the boy did), no matter how many thousands of dollars in baht he was commissioned to paint his whores. For a moment he was scared of the Laotian as if having stumbled into a den of sleeping terrorist cells but it was the self that was his only terrorist. It was the self that filled him with stiffened, cold dread. Fortunately, with the walk to the bathroom, the attraction passed him entirely almost in the same moment it came upon him: Jatuporn was apprehended, and the self was placated as if this particular feeling were as inconsequential as all the other wind driven debris of the mind that had gone before.
If he believed that anything which overtook rational thought and equanimity in such a temporary, all pervasive and engaging burning, lacked legitimacy (and in a way he might have for he knew passion to be like the slight bitter aftertaste of too much cloying chocolate), it was of minor consideration being the Patpong prostitute depicter that he was. With lovely scented women (especially those in ovulation, which was every man's Venus Flytrap unless punctilious enough to carry a nosegay of multi-colored condoms) sensuality was wild flowers of searing energy popping up after a shower making the landscape anew. However, any titillation regarding a man was tremor and mudslides. It was his shaky world tearing apart, falling down the sores of its cracks, and being buried alive within the fall downward. Because of this, all he wanted was departure: in this case, to depart from the man, the spell, and the train, and as this was not possible, to again retreat into his once solitary bower.