He did know. He bled from knowledge but he frowned and for a moment he was taciturn fighting back anger and memories. “Well, do whatever you damn well please. I need out of this car and that is what I’m doing. You can feast on what remains of the breath fresheners. I for one am dining out. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”
“When do we need to get on the plane?”
“There’s plenty of time,” he said. “Plenty of time to eat another meal in the airport before departing. You’ll get a high price western meal at the airport. I guarantee it.” He left the taxi and sat down meditating on the river flowing at a distance. Soon the anger dissolved and his memories were imprisoned.
The idea of paying on a taxi where the meter continued to rise without his presence enthralled him. Having lots of money was a novelty and flaunting this novelty to patrician and plebian, proletariat and CEO alike still engrossed him. Thais were culturally programmed to give the “wei” to the Buddha and the monk but in their hearts that steamed with greed as they cooked their food on the streets, sold their trinkets from their sheets, worked in office jobs, were government officers, part of an educated middle class, and a million other activities, classifications, and identities, this traditional greeting with the folded hands in front of the face was deeply given in the secret regions of subconscious ideas for those whom they thought of as rich. And as he ate his pork laden noodle soup while the meter ticked on he picked out the pork to feed the dogs; but in so doing he glimpsed someone. Past the gravel were sidewalks and stores and further was a department store. Next to it, beyond the gaunt old woman on the sheet selling and squeezing rubber duckies in the hope of selling a few and having money to eat, a man clanging bells with handless hooks above his cup, shoe repairmen fixing soles, a kiosk of a key maker, and a blind mendicant with a speaker and a microphone singing a strident folk tune, was someone. It was a person who turned him to stone, froze him like an iceberg, mortified him, and pulled out his wounded child. It was a strange composite: at one moment appearing a bit like his brother, Kazem, and at one moment like the youngest of his elder brothers, Suthep. For a second or two as he saw this cook at a distance, he couldn’t remember the name of Suthep-he who had been so innocuous but in his apathy had harmed him the most. Ten or eleven years had gone by. He wondered how he was supposed to know anymore: was this man one or the other or neither of them. Another blind beggar began to sing a song in a microphone linked to a portable speaker. He was being led by his wife. They came to his table singing a louder song more stridently than the one he heard at a distance. The sun was feeling hot and it made him dizzy and mad as Akhenaten in Ancient Egypt. Nawin, the legal alias of Jatupon, was feeling a weight death. His whole ideas and feelings were discombobulated. He took out twenty baht wedging it under the canister containing vinegar and peppers. He walked quickly to the car and cowered himself in the back seat in movement toward the airport.
Book II: Many Lifetimes Ago
Chapter 3
Their parents were dead; the cremation ceremony was over, and life went on: he internally recited, swallowed his whispered whit of air, and regurgitated the aphorism. Its cold, laconic and impersonal meaning was assumed an efficacy to change on this propelling Earth like the odious taste of medicine and so he could not fail to believe that it was true since there was nothing to his knowledge to replace it with. The present moment ravished and trashed all former beings and, like a mountebank, sold its new products as the true goods. To Jatupon, the youngest, there was a vermilion color to the day. It was no wonder. The present had come upon him as inconspicuously as the gait of the monk’s orange robe in the subtle movements that philosopher made during their time of mourning.
Carrying suitcases and bags with his brothers and a woman of Chinese complexion, he sensed the rapacious discord of Bangkok—virulent and paralyzing as ennui for the rich and servitude for the poor—and so he lagged behind them. There had been a time that he would have sniffed at this new city like one of the myriad crazed but gently starving dogs (after all, in certain areas of the streets, pheromones and urinary molecules dominated over the odors of car exhausts) but, as he guessed, Bangkok was always more tempting from afar. Even though he had repined for a more promised land he did not expect that even if he were to live somewhere in “Euro-American Bangkok” (Banglampool, Silom, and Sukumvit roads with their seven day a week travelers check cashing windows) his life would be any different than his situation at present; nor would it be any worse than his life in Ayutthaya unless he were to starve.
Still, he felt apprehension; and like a restive boy he slowly dragged his suitcases. He imagined remote Hill Tribe villages on the sidewalks and himself taking his suitcases through the bedrooms of naked girls as if, like one of the kings of the Chakri dynasty with his many wives, he were to declare to them “Honeys, I’m home.” The dreaminess belied a gloom. If Jatupon were to think of one positive trait about himself that late afternoon he might have thought that the ejaculation of his semen, which he conducted alone, disgorged extremely far—so far he had sunk into a shaky gray within himself that he couldn’t see outside of any void unless it had a rope attached to it. Even the fetid air intimidated him. He felt intellectually obtuse. He was like a dog carried by an owner (a woman in a skirt, riding side saddle on a motorcycle) that squealed its head off when the motorcycle skid and floundered onto one side.
Staring down as his brothers, his owners, pulled the invisible leash, he knew that they condemned him, the laggard; and nominally, that condemnation made him feel compelled to look down more often than he would have done otherwise. Still, when they crossed over to another sidewalk bustling with pedestrians he was forced to look up since he was inadvertently bowling his suitcases against the pins of strangers. In so doing, he noticed a store windowsill besieged by an orderly society of ants. He was beginning to acknowledge that Buddhist principles were curtailed by reality: a few ants allowed to live with a human became a hundred easily; multiplying mosquitoes brought disease and pain, and one’s immune system killed bacteria, viruses, and protozoa because murder was stamped into the natural order that no human will could bypass. And yet this demonstrated that the Earth, herself, was alive and full of creative potential. It was this mesmerizing dynamism that most lured his eyes.