“I want to go to New York City.”
“That is something to be considered too,” he said evasively. He changed his cynical ideas. It seemed to him that empathy was love.
Chapter 10
Jatupon agreed to meet her at Siriaj Hospital. From a bus he took an express boat. Seated there, he tried to read the Student Weekly published by the Bangkok Post but attempts at understanding English were to no avail. The sun and wind together shot him with tranquility darts that took him to an ethereal, unearthly peace exempt from the conflicts of consciousness but also from assembling understanding from the fragments of the pieces to the day that came through his senses in a mosaic. He wanted to understand his place in the world. He wanted to understand the premise of his life that constituted a compromise of the internal conflicts of the mind. But he also wanted peace of mind and he sank in with his ease until he was asleep.
He woke on the hard orange chair inside the boat to a splash of polluted water against his face. Once again he was staring at the waters that gyrated against the boat. He watched the frothy mist from the motion of the boat arise to the window-sized glassless hole that was beside him. Again he was in the world of conflict and for a moment he resented being there as if breathing and thinking deigned him. His conflict was what he was doing now. He was continuing his part as the absent employee and he worried about the consequences. He thought of going back. All he had to do was step out onto any dock and wait for a boat going in the opposite direction; but his legs were like stone. He would not budge. The boat was moving forward and so would he. He removed his sunglasses, put his hand into the water, scooped in a residue of the moisture that did not fall from his fingertips, and cooled the hot throbbing of the swollen blackish blue skin beneath his left eye. He was proud of his courage. Four nights ago Kazem had finally given into his demands for his mail but it had been a calculative maneuver to mitigate their protracted altercation that had gotten out of control over his noodle soup/fried rice-truancy.
His thoughts carried him piggyback at a gallop. There were savage impulses amuck in that instinctual need to dominate in procreation and yet how was it he had let himself become the one who was ridden on instead of the one riding? It was a mystery as to why he should be content to a role so clearly defying the male instinct to be the sexual aggressor. Maybe, he half-wondered or felt in some murky and illusive way that failed to come together as a cohesive thought, it was from not taking on that masculine pose of one ready to preempt his own selfish and sadistic impulses onto others for his own self-gratification.
He wasn’t addicted to drugs any more than he was to love, he told himself. One needed a bit of both. He wasn’t weak. Except once of clearly finding himself addicted and being forced to go through detoxification with some charitable monks (that had been the cocaine period the result of frequent raids of the cash box and an episode of thievery in Bangkok), he believed that his mentality was a strong one. Of course, until the move to Bangkok, the family had ensured that for the past two years he was rarely allowed out of their sight and never came near the cash box. This had assisted his lack of addiction. Even now his interaction with customers was overseen suspiciously. And laboriously friendless as his life droned on (with this new exception if indeed she cared to really be his friend and he was anxious that she should be such) he perceived himself as a freakish aberration to so many boys his age that had normal if not exceptional lives. They walked together in throngs-schoolboys in their light blue knit shirts and dark blue shorts walking the streets, entering 7-11s, clustering in for “All You Can Eat” Pizza Hut specials, or walking hand in hand with girls to the malls. He half hated them. He hated their laughter, which seemed to deride him. Sometimes he wanted to hit against the wall that entrapped him. It was like he was a Mexican and America had deliberately concocted a wall to keep him out. If only it were an eggshell, he thought to himself, he would be able to peck his way out.
And here he was at the Siriaj pier. There was a Dairy Queen, and a Black Canyon Restaurant near the pier and a long winding outdoor market. He wondered why she had chosen Siriaj Hospital for their meeting place and why, given the location, she had not chosen for them to meet in one of those restaurants. Instead, he was supposed to meet her in front of a museum. He meandered in different pathways throughout many buildings until he noticed her sitting on a stoop under a sign that said “Museum” in English. Her hair was shorter than the last time he saw her and her cheeks seemed chubbier. She was dressed in her school uniform.
“Sunthon Phu, there you are,” Noppawan said. Sunthon Phu was an important poet long ago who had risen from humble parents to become a private secretary for King Rama II because of his literary abilities.
“Here I am,” he said. He smiled glowingly. There was nothing about it that was affected. He came nearer to her.