Within this ambivalence how was he to know that his obdurate stance would not crack and that he would not relent, allowing neediness to surge over him like lava, incinerate him and heave residuals homeward? If he relented by calling her at a pay telephone booth and by a miracle fortuitous, dull, or moribund, he was made to believe that some type of reconciliation was possible as economic provider or more, it would be better that it were done there where he could buy a ticket immediately than to experience a breakdown of His integrity while stuck uncomfortably in Vientiane. Thus, as the sun pulled ever tighter over the hand of the world, memory seemed to encompass him tighter than the burdensome wedding band ever had, and having played in the wounds of old intimacies it now seemed like the desperation of an old man opening his door to strangers. Preferring to allow the possibility of being murdered than to continue in the meaningless domicile of his empty shell, he told the tuk-tuk driver to take him to the train station instead of the border.
It was a cold ride to this area where a day earlier his debased posture had no doubt alarmed train officials that here was someone, who if not a southern terrorist, was suffering from a nervous breakdown on government premises (and yet were it not so, and to most Euro-American foreigners it would not be with the day's temperature for them equivalent to a balmy spring day, still by Thai accounts as well as his own, it was a frigid morning with moments of impaling breeze that made the dogs in the corners of parapets surrounding temples shiver and his blood run cold; but then, as he had already ventured out without anywhere in particular to return to, the peripatetic libertine continued with the journey, tolerating the blowing inundation of wind like one holding his breath until arriving at the train station.)
There was only one ccurse, the forward course in which a supernova would eventually devour the Earth like a piece of kindling wood, and so he walked to the junction that was on the border—the right side of the road an entry point to Thailand, the left, eventually, to Laos (specifically, he kicked a rock repeatedly for several hundred yards until losing it, skidded and etched lines into the mud with his feet, eventually moving west to the intersection that was the border—the right an entry into a land not of his birth and inhabited predominately by philistines who suffered from a lethargy no different from other denizens of warm societies under the mesmerizing intensity of the sun—the left an entry into an altogether insular and comatose nation). Obtaining a Laotian visa for a thousand baht; another payment albeit a nominal one, he stood on a small bus like a Siamese twin conjoined to eighty or more bodies, all going in the same direction, each having his or her own objective as he did albeit the others surely with more clarity than he had. He took a bus ride with myriad others across the Friendship Bridge of the Mekong river, filled out his entry card at this extended checkpoint, his passport eventually being stamped in a line of waiting and moving but seemingly going nowhere, he paid a new monetary charge, the cryptic exit fee then shared a tuk-tuk for a forty minute ride to the city, sometimes witnessing exaggerated gestures and hearing jocular comments about how cold it was from Laotians and Thais, some in both shorts and hooded jackets, though not from westerners who didn't seem to suffer any distress outside of blowing strands of disheveled hair. He bypassed fields and water buffalo, feeling the exhilaration of the wind, cold as it was, and suffuse with a sense of regeneration he sensed the present immerse him whole into its prodigious depths and believed he was traversing into something new which would whitewash his negative memories in amnesia. Arriving in the city of Vientiane, that little bit of Paris with a lot of dirt that wind occasionally scraped and twirled as if it were a field, he observed a department store (arguably more than a hybrid of store and barn with its outlying outdoor market), morning monks with emaciated frail bodies seeking alms in tawny saffron robes soiled in Laotian dust, businessmen receiving the laying on of hands and the wai in the hope of making their lives propitious, two school girls in blue uniforms on a bicycle, more motorcycles than cars but more of both with each moment of the waking morning, and a man pulling a food cart on the side of the street. Nawin looked directly into the man's incarnadined, sun burnt face and his furrows of coarse wrinkling skin, and the old man, though abashed, grinned and nodded once as if grateful that the younger man not only acknowledged his existence but saw his worth in it. Neither sunrise nor sunset was as beautiful as this.
It had been a similar acknowledgement three years ago that had been the catalyst of his self declared quasi-retirement. He had gone on sabbatical from Silpakorn University to get a doctoral degree before realizing that scholarly pursuits were inimical to creativity (not that he was attempting to create anything at that time) and that these simultaneous states of mind if not joint ventures would be deleterious to each other. They were wasted years if measured in action and accomplishment but constructive in terms of disassembling pretensions and so it did not matter.
Now he was able to repudiate the grandeur of self unflinchingly. Extirpating himself of those institutions and beings that facilitated the feeding of his instinctual neediness, departing from his nation and the circumscribed roles which he had there, and having relieved himself of hungers for food and sex earlier this morning, he was now able to appreciate of the sfumato of society and nature and could just be…Just be! What a romantic he was: at least so he chided himself. Unfathomable suffering existed under the most lush of lives. It was beneath every superficial, jovial exterior, and to think that in a land probably without much of that exterior layer he would experience any enlightenment beyond encounters with deeper veins of suffering than any he had experienced heretofore seemed preposterous. Just this morning after the prostitute had given Nawin an indignant look and then had gone away leaving him there alone in his pile of clothes, he could not, for some minutes, even fasten the buttons on his shirt so overcome was he with suffering. It had seemed so acute and pervasive in all beings and all matters that he, a forty year old man, did not know what to do other than murmur ever so quietly, "meh" (mother). He had wanted the resurrection of that woman who had not only looked away as the abusers did their dastardly deeds but made him out to be the culprit who had instigated it all. He had called out for her like a child hoping that she would lead him back to beginnings of chasing balls and butterflies. He had yearned for a state of innocence in which he would be ignorant of sexual jostling from instinctual hungers and but not of the love that was the conception of all animal life. He had wanted this resurrected "meh" to end the suffering which permeated the lives of all things and to make knowledge and understanding more than vicarious suffering. Perhaps he was too sensitive for this world but here he was and so, to use an Americanism, he needed to see things through "rose colored filters." Thus his first impression of Vientiane Laos was that of an intricate tapestry of life. All he had to do to appreciate it was to simply open his eyes by abjuring agenda and accomplishment and melting into true being.
31
Everywhere he went there seemed to be metallic signs on poles to power lines. Each sign was in the international language of pictorial symbols and each illustration the same: a sinuous electrical current striking a stick figure that fell back as though electrocuted. He could have detoured to an area along a different stretch of road and walked elsewhere where there were not these signs of warning were it not for his proclivity to continue walking on such a narrow sidewalk in which a stumbling foot could cost him his life. There was a definite morbid curiosity and courting of death in his actions, his feelings elated by travel to someplace new, but his thoughts were macabre and fixated on the vicissitudes and impermanence of one's life, the attempts to belie those with money, property, family, and notoriety as if one could solidify one's effluvial existence to a statue's, despite the permanent inevitability of one's demise. Knowing this, and rich enough that he did not need to work another day in his life, nor as corollary become obtuse to this truth by engagements in mundane routine, he was not sure what to do with himself. Other men were also used for sperm and as economic providers to family but they saw their sons who grew with the years and whose growth would measure how far they had degenerated into the years, mirrors to see aging, ghastly, and lackluster reflections of themselves (for him, he would never see his son again, or at least that was Noppawan claimed on that day she battered him with an iron frying pan, not that he necessarily wanted to see his time on the planet in the hour glass of a changing boy). Likewise, they had their roles as procurers of meat so that their women might enjoy playing with live dolls (for him whose investments made money unto themselves he could be of no personal use to family even if allowed back into it, and when was a man included in the joys of child rearing anyway?).
His cheek inadvertently brushed against an extended vine of green bananas dangling above the sidewalk near a French colonial building used by a Laotian government ministry. Although a normal, reflexive reaction would have been to feel startled especially after having noticed the signs and fearing the next touch of the unknown to be his ineluctable death, he just smiled. If fate, the God of all Atheists, had deemed it a pole of a power line instead of bananas that his cheek had touched, him electrocuted, stricken down to sear the ground with his incinerating fall it would be of no major significance to anyone but himself if even that; furthermore, he thought, continuing to synthesize more ideas to remain stimulated and happily self- contained in his own company, this second of consciousness being irrevocably extinguished might be a rather pleasant experience despite its brevity. In it he would be on an enlightened transit before the void swallowed him entirely, an omniscient second of wisdom in which egregious Buddha-gods and heaven-and-hell aberrations of the ideas of the Buddha, who surely was not a buddhist, would be known to not exist. To know something with absolute certainty beyond the realm of supposition (like the amount of love a bludgeoning spouse once had toward him, the degree of selfishness and altruism that constituted emotion and cognition, and so much else unknown to him) would be particularly refreshing after a lifetime spent in the glimmers of truth. It would be as refreshing as those times that as children, he and his pauper brothers stripped to their underwear and from piers dove into the Chao Phraya River to escape the blistering heat of April.
The surprise of bananas brushing against his cheek made him smile wryly—smile at witnessing a banana tree in the heart of a city, smile wryly as the surprised encounter was imbued in the rustic as well as the bucolic, and thus was both repulsive and quaint. Understanding it to be both made him postulate that in a broader sense every given entity or event was rarely one attribute exclusively but the polarity of two antithetical thoughts. Even the calcifying antipathy and repugnance toward sex, which were now steadily building up inside his mind were at times stymied in ethereal fantasies of burnishing the silky leather of human flesh and a hunger for beauty that suddenly came over him like a consuming and growing flame before being subdued and partially extinguished in the gravity of his all- too-human thought, which wanted reality even more than fantasy the best it could find it. Glancing at clothed buttocks, covered thighs, and other appendages of a female here and a male there, it was as though his constitution could mutate from solid to vapor at random despite human will. This was what he gleaned from his cheek brushing against a bunch of unripe bananas while journeying onward with sights and sounds satiating consciousness, sketching impressions of the mind that one could only appreciate in foreign travel.
Closer to the market there were numerous people in a row like sequacious ants, all seeking bits of a distant morsel, but unlike ants these people sought for themselves and, even here, with their wallets as feelers. A few minutes later he was among them, eventually buying a dangling earring for a left lobe, a solid gold necklace to adorn his swarthy complexion so that the deep dirt and poverty that he once was remained hidden from himself and from anyone whom he encountered, and a pocket pc/cellular telephone, which he needed but had no occasion to use. In the outdoor market he watched someone seated on a small couch at a kiosk under a huge umbrella, get a tattoo. He wanted an eagle tattooed on his biceps and to other regions as well to demonstrate that he was as an apostate, Nawin of Thais, but the conditions here did not look urbane or sterile, and he backed away until he was in a parking lot filled with tuk-tuks.