"I see. You should not let that happen."
Then there he was again: fourteen or fifteen years old, holding hands with Noppawan in the anatomical museum. It was a day like many of that first summer together in which, extant among preserved, contorted bodies, the two oddities procured a brief but diurnal retreat away from the war of family and the indentured servitude that for him was inlaid and inextricable in the design allotted to impoverished sons and orphans. And there she was disappearing behind shelves of canisters containing fetal abnormalities and bloated testicles as though sickened by it all and yet returning to him from the toilet nonetheless with a ring braided in strands of her hair. On his finger as material branding in her being and then in gold her rings wedded him in empathy and friendship which they believed would last with the longevity of their symbolic tokens.
They had cared about each other so fully then: a strong feeling of euphoria beat and saturated them like a hard rain and a singular perception of the other as the extension, the heretofore missing half of the whole, possessed them. Was it love? He hesitated to use this word for to him it was delight in another and, for a while, even his mother found delight in her ambulatory dolls. Had they just given themselves over to the curator, stepped into a joint formalin filled glass casket, and drowned themselves there; wouldn't they have thought this engrossing form of felicity in another as perennial as eternity? Had they died together, neither of them would have known the dissolution of second families or the temporary nature of all human actions.
He returned from the bathroom fully clothed.
"Your belt is over here," Nawin said, pointing to the shelf."
"Okay," the intimate stranger said while taking it and sliding it around his waist like the way he might a girl's arm. To go, to leave, to not come again; could his sanity tolerate any more ruptures and departures? Still, wasn't it this which he wanted? It was and it wasn't.
Earlier he had thought about saying, "I'm not used to this sort of thing. I'm married so maybe we should just be together this one time" which might have caused him to say, "So I'm the bad one. You brought me up here mister." And paradoxically, as much as he feared losing him at this moment in time, he wanted to say it now but it was impossible to say such a thing with him so eager to go. As unperceivable as it was from his stolid, phlegmatic expressions, his thoughts were in a panic. He told himself that life was ever emerging stories on the skyscraper of man in a downtown that was modernizing and changing faces; he told himself that to feel so disconcerted by a being whose proper name he had not even cared to learn was absurd. He said these things to himself but he felt he was rolling toward the precipice of disconnectedness. He told himself that as taxing as it was in his state of mourning to converse with another being he could have tolerated conversation and interlocutor for a time and that had he made him feel less like an imposter, perhaps he could have had a cherished companion from which to ride out some delicate hours. It seemed to him that other people did not think so much. They socialized and made friends without noticing it as clinging to others for meaning that it was. They obeyed feelings and socialized naturally but for him he analyzed it and such unsavory behavior filled him with repugnance. It was far worse than his effeminate role in this intercourse of bodies which was pursued to gain intimacy when the intercourse of minds seemed so futile and perilous.
"I'll need money for taxi and everything."
"A taxi shouldn't be more than a hundred baht. However I've never seen a charge for everything."
"Well it isn't free."