An Apostate: Nawin of Thais Part 13

"The government seems to keep them from becoming menaces to the other provinces but if you want to think that I am one, and that I've come this far with a bomb, so be it."

"A pervert who shows naked pictures of women to strangers on trains?"

"Well, that would have a bit more of a foundation in reality wouldn't it but then would I really be showing slides?"

"Our mother's birthday is next week. If the two of us were not your distant cousins from the tiny former kingdom of Laos, now a bankrupt communist state of rural peasants, we might even pay you to draw her or for that matter my sister."

"No money," the girl laughed as she slumped down in the seat.

"Only rice sometimes."

"Is it expensive to do that?"

"What?"

"Commission a painting."

"Yes. Quite."

"A thousand baht"

"Sometimes times fifty."

"Are you that rich?"

"No, it takes a long time to paint and I don't do it much anymore."

"So, my sister will be your model and inspiration. Pay us money to draw her and you can sell it in Bangkok."

"A portrait is nothing. To make it into art is what takes time and I don't like going through that pain anymore."

"Why have the slides then."

"So they will be with me."

"She would be a beautiful model. This is no common face."

"Yes, but I still have to feel it, or want to feel it."

"You must draw her. You could stay with us while you do it."

"Let me think about it. I've got to go to the bathroom now, adjust my sling, take some pain killers."

"Sure," said the Laotian.

"Excuse me," he told the woman, took his bag from the upper suitcase rack, and left but thinking of a nude painting of the brown and white of the couple the whole time.

18

He was examining his mirrored face privately in the toilet as the train slowed down and then crept to the station with a jerky forwardness, as if it too were caught by a backward pull if not a penchant for backward inclinations. Hardly impervious to sensation, he did feel this slowing of the train, felt the thrust of the stop, and heard the jostling of bags and the eager voices of departing pa.s.sengers. He was even aware of a few minutes of silence and then a less vociferous noisiness when train employees came into the carriage to stuff the linen into bundles and, through open windows, toss them onto the platform of the Nongkai train station. Still, hearing it all as he did, it did not dawn on him that he should leave.

He had come into the toilet to see his reflection via a mirror and to abscond from these Laotian siblings long enough that they would dismiss his friendliness and construe his absence to mean a disinterest in them as potential models even if, as odd as it seemed to him then, he was interested in them as such and more.

If at moments feeling extremely solitary and purposeless in his indolent, terrestrial drifting, being dragged in the vicissitudes of life, and trying to catch his breath from it all, he told himself that he would rather asphyxiate than relinquish his undiluted leisure. Lonely despair might in certain moments make him want to cling to people, places, and routines instead of breathing them in and out in a natural context for a changeable world. Specifically, it might make him inclined to return to that excruciating labor of painting or sabotage a trip like this one by allowing people to clog up his brain and distract him from the void; but these were only desperate caprices and nothing more than this.

It was such a handsome face that was his own, and was now pleasantly seen to be staring back at him; and yet staring at it as he was, he was trying to isolate the specific changes a simple year had made to the contour of his face, and attempt with blurred memories of himself instead of numbers to somehow devise a measurement so that he might conceptualize what havoc a year into the future would do not only to himself but also to that of every man's face. That was attempted for he was dwelling incessantly on why for the first time on this physically and mentally painful day of his fortieth birthday someone had spoken of him as an older man. Still, to subdue a growing feeling of aversion and loathing of the day, as disheartened as he was by this insinuation of him being a middle-aged man, which of course he was, he tried to recall whether or not on the previous night he had told the Laotian that this day would be his fortieth birthday. Had he done so on that evening when the two of them had beer in their hands, the comment could be dismissed as mere bantering from a boorish buffoon and yet each time he recalled or exhumed this fresh corpse of memory it had nothing like this on it. Thus, to be corrigible to the self he concluded that as it was impossible for his face to have deteriorated significantly in just a day it was likely that a year had changed it ever so slightly and that these slight changes were exacerbated temporarily due to a lack of sleep. It was true that his sleep had been rather sporadic and inconsistent the previous night. This restlessness, however, was not only from lying stationary when he was unable to preoccupy himself from that pain and discomfort gained after his wife beat him with a frying pan, but also from his witnessing that horrific jump from the balcony and then Kimberly's mangled b.l.o.o.d.y corpse with missing arm, contorted neck, multi-lacerated face, and empty eye sockets along with the broken pieces of the metallic awning being extracted from the water of the swimming pool.

The fact that the train had stopped was an advent.i.tious happening like a cloud out there hovering in the sky. It was something that he knew, but he did not seem to recognize as the awareness was scant and did not seem particularly a.s.sociated with the self, which needed to see personal importance in matters for them to matter at all or for a given object or situation to instill a pa.s.sion within him. Thus, finding no reason to leave he stayed to contemplate this loss of beauty if it was indeed lost.

Had his beauty depreciated significantly in one day, or even in one year, it would be one more comic incident in this tragic adventure of life. This was what he told himself; and smiling a little at that thought (the rational voice therein rea.s.suring him and giving him smug confidence in the friendship of the self that no circ.u.mstance of life, apart from death, would take from him), he could not see why it mattered that he looked forty, and yet it did. He wanted to recollect exactly what he looked like 365 days earlier. It was not difficult to remember that birthday as it had been a particularly odd day spent with Kimberly and his wife. They had been drinking wine, eating the oddest of sauteed dishes, as cultured French cuisine demonstrated: with a bit of oil, wine, and cheese any part of a given creature could be successfully cooked and consumed with exquisite barbarism and taste, when he heard this odd proposal of having Kimberly become a surrogate mother hatch out of his wife's head and thud into the bread basket. With the proposal made and calmly deliberated by all, he had gone into the toilet of that restaurant, had gasped for a moment, teetered for another, and then had stared onto a reflection of his face for twenty minutes. Satisfied at seeing the same face as that of his thirty eighth year he had returned to the table where the topic had not been his age-- only, all so indirectly, his sperm. Sitting there awkwardly, he had been drawn into suffering, that empathic piercing into another person's pain that seemed an unwanted obligation subjected onto one by the G.o.ds, if there were G.o.ds and he believed that there were none considering the smashing into pages and limited scope of man's story book understanding of things.

At that restaurant he had understood her fully: the requisite for an end to her neediness would only come from the neediness of a child of her own. From needing to care for one so needing to be taken care of she might be able to imagine a baby as caring exclusively about her since by needing her totally it would satisfy some of her needs for someone to care about, someone of her own, or at least allow her to have a distraction for forgetting her husband's philandering ways. Unlike an ocean, there was no means to measure the sadness of a wife. If it were greater or smaller than such a body of water, he did not know-- only that it was large indeed.

Pondering why it was that people would think of him as middle aged now, when no one had ever done so before and why he might be considered old by some when at least to himself his reflection seemed the same youthful glimmer that it always was, a weariness in his features due to an irregularity of his sleeping patterns (a weariness that as weary as he was might have been impossible for him to see) still seemed as the best explanation.

"Am I really going to waste this trip painting them and then having to tote the final products back to Bangkok? I cannot think of anything more disagreeable," he reiterated to himself with what he hoped would be puissant and cogent reasoning. "What is the best way to get out of this thing?" he asked himself.

Then it occurred to him that he did not need to devise any strategy since the train was obviously stopped, and all its content of beings dispersed like a flatulent gas.

He slapped some water onto his face. "Time to go," he told himself; but even with this a.s.sertion he was in a fusion of daydreams and faded memories that added color and exact details to his thoughts--a more poignant fusion than that experienced in trying to recall the facts of a given situation as they really were. He thought:

"She's beautiful isn't she?" asked the Laotian.

"Yes, I would say so," said Nawin. "You don't have to persuade me on that point. It is just the time required to do a painting --a real one with a theme, a mood, symmetry, perspective, things like this and I am on vacation. Anyhow..." Her dainty face looked like the nurse at Siriaj Hospital when he was recuperating from arm surgery; that same one from whom he had parried questions about the nature of his arm injury by posing innocuous questions about her own life in order; the one whom he listened to intently, and as a consequence was able to make her believe him to be the kind human that he was instead of the broken man that he was, or the flirtatious playboy, that he also was; the same one for whom he had swapped cellular telephone numbers to no avail.

"Taking a vacation from not working I guess."

"Exactly."

"Good for you. That is the life. So, you think she is pretty."

"Yes."

"Do you want her?"

"Maybe. Maybe I want you."

"What?"

"I mean to model. Not now, but maybe someday when you are in Bangkok. Both of you I think, although there is no way to know until some sketches are actually done or for that matter the beginning of a painting if we even get that far." Then the woman was there kissing the toe of the foot that rested on the seat and made up the phallic arch of a bent leg, and Nawin was looking at them with surprise and envy.

He opened the toilet door and then bent to pick up his bag.

"What are you doing in here? Mister, it's Nongkai. Time to go,"

said a train officer. Then to reproach a fellow officer who was responsible for the trash he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, "I thought that you said you checked the toilet. Why was someone still in here?"

"I did," the man responded. "Maybe he flew in through the window."

"Flew in through the window? Is that before or after you checked the toilet?"

"Of course afterwards." Both men laughed.