He became mesmerized in the weltering waves. He spoke glibly. “Families are supposed to be shelter. They’re really just walls cobbled up from dirt, you know. Mine doesn’t even exist but in Kazem’s head. I feel sorry for him in ways. But sometimes I think I should just run away completely and become a monk.”
“Why don’t you?”
“Monks don’t have sex. At least they aren’t supposed to. As you said, lies.”
“Do you have sex?”
“No, of course I’m a little young for that,” he lied. He looked around the restaurant to make sure that others were not listening to them. “But I don’t want to give up that part of me. I don’t think that is right.”
“My Auntie —well, really the servant but sort of the same except that she must obey me usually-she says I should never come ten feet near a monk since they are sexually repressed and might try to reach under a girl’s skirt.”
“Maybe but I’ve never heard anyone talk that way about monks. The newspapers rarely but that is with individual monks accused of crimes—not monks altogether.”
“My family is a bit different that way. It’s their only good attribute.”
They sipped their coffee and then went to Silom Road on the express boat. The annoyance of standing there in a crowd without a seat became an ethereal essence of truth and beauty for him. He could not remember being so happy. It stayed with him as they road the bus to Lumpin Park.
At a lake, in the park, they rented out a fishing boat. They paddled it chasing one puff of cloud in the hope of using it as an umbrella. They had cheese sandwiches, cola, sticky rice, and potato chips that they consumed intermittently.