The recurring idea that the aunt and the uncle had not gone to the funeral made him even increasingly repellent toward this meeting with the senator. He halfway wanted to jump out of the door and let a physics lesson ensue. Would he just drop or would he be thrust out like a projectile. Would his blood ooze out or would it disgorge like the insides of a tossed pumpkin? He looked out of the window at the quick passing of buildings and then up to the billowing clouds. They were gas with distinct and individual form. They were energy that was distended and fomenting. How mysterious it all was. When one was cremated he would be such gas. Man was ephemeral noise but nature was reticent and swelling. Distending and distending, it extended him beyond his petty thinking. How good it all was!
Well, he thought, there was no resisting the inevitable. He would be entering the senator’s house mortified from his sunglasses and black eyes but the issue was petty enough that there would not be any serious consideration about avoiding this eventuality through jumping out of a moving car. Kazem had attempted to put a story into his head that might save them from being scrutinized about this subject. It had seemed plausible enough: an injury from the recent Songkran festival in Banglampool gained from a water fight where some water in the plastic guns had been adulterated with some caustic chemicals. However, he did not like casting shadowy illusions into the senator’s mighty halls. No, he shouldn’t be with this chain gang of prisoners going to the warden’s home, dragging the noodles that bound them, asking for him to remove them. This avuncular stranger hadn’t come for their parents’ funeral. He hadn’t wished them condolences. It would have been such a little thing to do; and since it wasn’t done it was monumentally wrong.
Reticent and deep in himself so that his brothers’ pejorative comments did not hurt him tremendously when they pierced, he implemented the same defense mechanism that had saved him from psychosis in such a family all of these years. This withdrawal made the rational self into a deadened membrane and shield. This shield deflected their arrows. How profoundly intricate the psyche’s defenses were. What wouldn’t the brain do to spare itself wounds! The mind, perhaps, did the same with love. Within life’s physical titillations in this sordid realm through the smell and feel of breath rhythmically sliding onto his nose from the spewing mouth of his mate —a warm soothing wind crossing the hill of his nose; the tactile wearing of another’s skin by touch more luxurious than any silk; merciful orgasmic clemency from logic; the moving of a chest; the heart beat; and yes, the feeling of being in love addictive and sensitive toward another human presence, one’s ideas of life were whitewashed and exhilarated. For him, sex in the shower had annulled his hatred of Kazem. It had made the world into less of a hostile place. It had provided the specious idea that he was not alone. He looked out of the car window. The palm trees seemed like rock solid Cyclopes eating away the remnants of the sun. He noticed that the car was stopping. The gates opened to an acreage far from balloon peddlers, sandwich salesmen with a box strapped onto their chests, holy jasmine makers, goldfish in the bag mountebanks, car window newspaper accosters, and the sidewalk noodle workers.
“Will he be alone?” asked Suthep.
“His staff will be there,” said Kumpee.
“I mean women. An Old guy with lots of money must have new ones around each week. I mean they wouldn’t like him but they would feel important and ornamental to be there at his home.”
“I wouldn’t know one way or the other.”
“What did you do when you were together with him?” asked Suthep.
“I wasn’t really. It was through a speaker. I finally got him to talk through the speaker after pleading with all his servants that way.
I made him feel guilty. I told him he should have gone to the funeral. I told him he needed to help his relatives or I’d see if a newspaper reporter would talk to me.”