“You can guess if you follow your instincts. If you follow your instincts they will take you into prehistory when the sweet taste buds formed for succulent bone marrow. Which came first: the taste buds for what was sweet or the experience tearing into bone marrow? For the answer to that question you don’t need a PHD. You just need to follow your instincts and they will let you know everything.”
“I guess people in the past were often desperate for nutrients and found that they could survive by eating bone marrow. Nature began to instill man with a taste for that which was sweet so that he would more likely eat bone marrow when in a desperate situation.”
“Excellent. In answer to your question, maybe the boredom of flying around this rocky planet causes us to need to bite into something deeper. Anyhow, I came to find out how you were doing financially now that you have employment”
“We don’t need to worry about staying alive.”
“What more can you expect from life than that?”
“Jatupon!” There was a pause. “Jatupon!”
“A le nah? (what is it?).
“You are fading off completely,” said Suthep with a grimace. “I think you need to get the hell out of here. Your lover’s waiting for you. Thanks for helping me bring some of this junk.”
Chapter 9
Nawin fell asleep in the suds of his bathtub and when he woke up his thoughts were frothy. Melancholy dripped from the shower nozzle and from time to time hit his head (the contents of which emulated the slow and sad repetition of the dripping). A year earlier it had been in such a bathroom at an artsy party at a friend’s house near Silpakorn University that he went away from the crowd to sit on the edge of the tub and weep with the fatuous wrestling of personal pain. Noppawan came into the bathroom to find out what was wrong. She sat on the edge of the tub next to him and heard about the crash of the United Airlines jet. Without words she took one of his hands. Without trying to absorb the sadness of his face in the emotion of sympathy, he could tell that she was imagining details beyond his relationship with his deceased uncle or the explosion of the plane. Seated there, quickly overcoming personal loss in favor of a more philosophic stance, he believed that America was a self-centered bully and the Moslem world would continue to attack her for being so opulent in a famished world, controlling world policies without giving smaller nations a voice, cuddling the Zionist entity of these self-professed “Chosen people,” and for having the dominant culture of individual freedoms that went contrary to their Islamic tyranny. The couple looked out into nothingness with similar thoughts. Both knew the naturalness of hate in recreating civilization and that destructiveness in society was no different than the kinetic universe as a whole. Both knew that only hope came in recoiling in one’s passive intellectual pursuits. At that time he felt sick like when one hadn’t eaten for days: people who should have been important and salubrious spun around in his head as hollow as all the others. Only his uncle, a man who did not love him and had no particular self-interest in the boy had saved him. Only Noppawan, during his time of mourning, kept him from complete despair. He wiped off his hands and arms and made his call on the telephone as his body leaned stiffly to the edge crushing through frothy embankments of his bubble bath.