"Here's five thousand, ten times the going rate and my business card. Maybe my earlier offer lasted as long as my sympathy; maybe this time it is done so that I won't feel insincere in my earlier offer; maybe I will want to forget you as soon as you leave here; who wants to pay for sex or even give large quantities of money to a needy stranger when coerced to do so? Still, take the card. It has my address on it. Send me a detailed letter explaining logically where you want to study and why it is important for me to help you and maybe I will see the fairness in doing so. Besides it is more sincere than doing it out of feeling sad for you."
The intimate stranger flicked the card as though he were a primitive sensing music in the mundane but not knowing what to do with it.
"No, I won't contact you for that but I'll keep the card" which was short for "…because you're a good fuck and pay for it." Nawin then read his thoughts and the intimate stranger saw that he understood: he could set him up in Bangkok. It was the least he could do. He understood and said nothing for the boy reminded him of his brother and it was for this reason that he brought him here.
Nawin pulled out a hand full of raisins from a bag, slowly chewed each, and waited for belated exuberance and thanks until it occurred to him a minute later that it would not be forthcoming. "Want some," he asked but it did not garner a response. The youth picked up his bag and left as though he had never been, a testament to the insignificance of interaction.
As Nawin continued to eat the raisins, one at a time, it occurred to him that the real reason eating animals was wrong had nothing to do with maintaining the sanctity of life. The society of dogs was to them reality, and the world in an environment of oblique human presences. And as all creatures were myopic with similar perceptions and concluding sentiments their reality and world was in the social interaction of their species. As he would not wish to be the protein fueling their hegemony, why should it be thought that the innate value of pigs, cows, and chickens was to be domesticated so as to be easy viands of human consumption.
The society of man was no more real than that of dogs, he told himself. Society was a delusion of respective animals needing a greater external meaning for their lives; and yet, the Buddhist introvert that he was, he yearned for the return of this human presence until his head ached, he wished for the viand of his phallus, and he wanted the pain of being sodomized.
29
When perceived in terms of his proclivity for avoiding social interaction and for his loss, negligence, and failure at roles which he had once ascribed to himself—artist, womanizer, lecturer and that most ephemeral role of paternal ersatz who sometimes changed diapers so Noppawan could sleep—he, a god was relegated to an irrelevance equivalent to nothing. He knew this for it could not be otherwise with the world valuing action as much as it did, action which apposite, was too finite and inadequate a means for appraising an individual of his scope. And their interaction, he thought to himself in another strange supercilious thrust of validation beyond his grief, was pursued so fervently to evade an alarming and discombobulating sense of their own irrelevance for human creatures would have no sense of being alive at all were it not for witnessing the mobility of their shadows intermingling with other moving adumbrations. But cremated, the deceased did not cast shadows; and as exempt of people and roles as he was, his was definitely a figurative extinction. A retiree from the art of doing, a demigod who chose the reality of being marooned in his own thoughts, he stayed steadfast in the immobility of his empty shell, a state dearth of role and impetus. He, who was nonetheless human in his godhood, remained intrepid in trudging into this rather unbearable and disconcerting sense of the inconsequence of being. To look at nature, to melt into true being under a cloud by relinquishing one's grandiose claim as an integral being in the temporary and changeable interactions of man, to be exempt of role and its alleged significance on a small corner of contemporary society at best, and as a divine particle revere life as opposed to absconding from it through interaction, only a god would tolerate such torturous but exquisite enlightenment. His mission, the purpose of His trip, was to further Himself as deity by no longer needing to be confirmed by others as a presence on the planet, to no longer need to gain approbation through social interaction, and to find himself fully able to separate from craven mortals whose only sense of being came from doing and whose viscous neediness precipitated even more interactive clinging and all the concocted meaning therein. Deemed by serendipity and evolvement gained from his education to the status of demigod and no further than this, he could never succeed completely in self contained intellectual asceticism, for how could he retreat into the thickets of fecund solitude without becoming more and more desperate to rest his head on the pillow case of human flesh as he ran around in sinuous stretches circuitously lost in reason and emotion. Still, he would travel inward and explore what was there for as long as it was bearable. At least so he said in silent thought, with only partial belief.
The gecko, barely visible in the smoky fog of marijuana, reaffixed itself on a portion of wall above the night stand. It remained there above the clutter of archaic connections: a telephone that kept ringing—at least inside his head—and a post card on which he had merely written "Dear Noppawan, I hope that you've been well despite everything that happened" before striking two lines through the sentiment and tossing it back onto the night stand. And this diminutive animal deemed him to fall into the doom of those opaque, glassy domed eyes and he did fall as Kimberly had fallen through the metal and plastic awning of the swimming pool to be an eyeless corpse; he fell as any man would through tenuous self image at the loss of women of the present to the molestation of the past. Truth, if it existed, was a state that was sedentary; but movement was meaning and this man sought it. It was his emulation of the universe and it went straight forward even if sentiment caused it to bend and deviate slightly toward that which was past. So, he thought, avowing a new position entirely.
"No, that's not entirely true," said the gecko.