An Apostate: Nawin of Thais Part 15

"To the border yes, but you will need a taxi to get anywhere else."

"I'll walk for a while and follow what looks good. Thank you."

He began walking. He was almost at the juncture when he heard the beep of another tuk-tuk.

"Are you Nawin?"

"Yes."

"Somebody left this at the train station. The officers have been asking people they happened to see if its for them. You slipped by so one of them said to bring it to you. Are you Nawin Biadklang?"

"Yes."

Nawin took the sheet of paper. It was the telephone number of someone called Wichian. In parenthesis it said "Boi."

20

As another inconsequential member of this species riding the promptings of caprices toward that which was most pleasant, a pleasure in its own right, as with the activities that were deemed as pleasant, most of his choices could not be anything other than irrational. And of these irrational and erratic choices, he thought further, most were often made from ant.i.thetical impulses to which one was not measurably any more pleasant or worthy of being followed than its alternatives. He was seated at a table in a restaurant of a guest house, wondering obtusely why he was there. It was, he mentally noted to himself, a most peculiar feeling to have come somewhere, to know oneself to have done so, and yet to remain clueless about the aim. It almost felt as if, while in reverie, he had been s.n.a.t.c.hed from his idiocy at the train station and placed here in the city of cognizance without his consent when in fact he had walked three kilometers before tiring and then succ.u.mbing to being swallowed in that blue c.o.c.kroach shaped vehicle, the tuk- tuk, which had then driven him further into the center of Nongkhai.

And so, restless, he stirred the foam back and forth in his hot Cappuccino, hoping without knowing why to soil all parts of the inner embankment of the cup, and only taking occasional sips as he became increasingly pensive. He thought to himself that had he cared to do so, which of course he had not, the money that he was spending on the coffee alone could have bought two or three meals for those who scarcely ate anything on a given day. He began to think about how peculiar the world was with its interdependent members that made up units of one entire whole; and that interaction of one species with another was merely for the need to gain sustenance outside the unit, that the frenzied propagation of a species to ensure its continuum was kept in check by voracious predators; and that individual persons, considering it an enjoyable sport, incessantly tried not only to sustain themselves but also to thrive by hording avariciously or seeking pleasures gluttonously at the sake of others within the unit, striving for even more so as to think of themselves as successful in partaking of the good. He thought of how this showed life for what it was: not that of laudable creations overseen by a creator, or at least forlorn ent.i.ties of a G.o.dless universe interacting with benevolent energy, but of comestible viands seeking to elude predators. The whole thing seemed an ineffective and barbaric system of incongruous, animate bits seeking some means to barely coexist, and as such life was not so laudable--neither of G.o.d nor of goodness--even though in every culture, and every religion, he supposed, common pract.i.tioners believed in both to create a pleasant perspective of themselves and their place in the world. Even Buddha, who did not believe in G.o.d became such as a statuette more rife than a crucifix. The morning stimulant was not so hot that he had to barely sip it, and yet he did for cognizance of the rife and innate selfishness of man seemed to constrict his throat. It was a constriction as slight as his compunction; and the subject was forgotten entirely as he poured maple syrup on his pancakes.

Eating a bit of one pancake, he looked out onto the traffic with its lethal confetti of exhaust fumes which, when moving closer to the buildings, diffused and nominally enveloped pedestrians on a nearby sidewalk. He once more pondered that he did not know exactly why or from what impulse had led him here. The inexplicable nature of it all was like that subway ride to the Hualamphong train station. There, clearly for him, it had been a wombed departure from the travail of interconnectedness with those strangers within seeming to him as a family of distant and tacit, insular beings who were cognate in their desire to arrive in a train which would take them from all that was painful--such had been his need to flee from suffering that the faces of strangers, no matter how happy or bland their expressions, seemed comrades of exile; and yet there, most opaquely, he had chosen to sit down. It had been next to a boisterous woman holding a cellular telephone talking of some poor soul's uneventful dating experiences. He could not have known anything of her beyond this and yet of the two vacant seats available he had chosen to be next to her instead of sitting beside a middle aged woman whose face was sunk toward a book; and the reason for sitting in one seat over another was as inexplicable as now. And so, a.s.suming that all was not destined and man had choice about all matters, he had chosen to check into this guest house in the center of Nongkai instead of going straight into Vientiane. To some degree it had been because of the weight of the backpack.

It had become increasingly heavy against his shoulders with every kilometer of that long walk. Confusion also had had its bearing. Not knowing what to do or where to go, with each possibility seeming equally insipid, he had selected a place to rest and think out some contrived purpose for himself. If not able to formulate a plan and purpose for his travels, here at least he had a place to rest physically when swimming frantically against this mental eddy. For all his disconcerted strokes, his itinerant meandering, he told himself that even though he did not know when it would happen he was certain that he would wash ash.o.r.e eventually and when he did he would have contrived something to do, some urgent matter to pursue, some purpose for himself.

He pulled out that sheet of paper from his shirt pocket. He glanced at the name and the telephone number and recalled the faces of the Laotian and his sister as they rode next to him.

Was he really to end an uneventful retirement for the sake of these people? Was he, for the sake of seeming a compa.s.sionate human being to himself and not merely another selfish being on the planet, to pay them for a miniscule part in posing for some portrait that he was neither inspired to draw nor inclined to tote back to Bangkok? Where would he even obtain paint and canvas? In Laos? Well no doubt they had both within the capital city. If prehistoric man could find ways to dye a cave, Laotians, people of a very similar linguistic and cultural distinction to Thais, could not do less. He could do sketches of them. It would not take long or be much of a burden to carry around and he could leave the family a couple of hundred dollars, which would mean the world to them and be a negligible and hardly noticed loss to himself. It might even restore him to himself; but then did he want to be restored? A restoration of a thoughtful p.o.r.nographic artist from a third world country was not such a gift to civilization. He would never equal the great artists of the world and of prost.i.tute painters he was one of myriad in contemporary Southeast Asian art alone. The sister was beautiful by his standards of beauty--youth unblemished with skin the pallor of fresh snow; a background of dirt and poverty, a subject he could relate to, and yet unlike those of a swarthy complexion, not appearing as such, with hair that was long and dark as the void, subdued eyes neither scintillating of inexperience nor petrified as ancient granite, absent of bra, nipples that pointed and teased their way toward every curve to which the imagination slid down like a hand to remote and sodden reservoirs. But it was not her beauty that called unto him, but an intrigue with the perverse so that he might know if his suspicions were warranted, and more saliently, to know the economic deprivations and desperation that made siblings into lovers, if indeed they were that. He folded the paper and stuffed it into his wallet against a condom.

Maybe he had diverged into the center of Nongkai and had checked into this guest house to divert and check, if not totally restrain, an inordinate curiosity about the perverse. This trip, the best he understood it, was meant to have a spiritual element--at least to the extent an atheist whose wont of thinking had denuded G.o.d from a vast being cloaked in the sacrosanct was capable of. Being bereft of agenda or aim did not necessarily mean being bereft of an overarching theme founded in malaise; so if not sidetracked, he had (for lack of a better term) a spiritual theme that if pursued with aim could easily surpa.s.s the agenda of a monk. After all, and of course he would never openly disclose this most secret a.s.sertion, a monk was merely a poor man seeking education, food, and an end to loneliness, and all other nakedness under a saffron robe and a sacrosanct Buddha was not even the physical substance of a needy monk. Nawin told himself that his time here, if not perverted and aptly spent on the spiritual, would allow him to step out of the egocentric, crumbling tower that he was in. If nothing else he could watch ants use twigs as bridges and freeways and in so doing become aware of the existence of a tiny fraction of the 90 percent of all life that was smaller than a chicken's egg. He could then appreciate a cognizant activity and social order other than that of his own or his own dominant species. If he could lean against a stupa and be in awe of the sun baking his face like a brick or appreciate the t.i.tillation of wind caressing his head like that of a Cambodian child-beggar patted by a foreigner, he would at last be alive.

Still that had not been his main reason for taking a room. It seemed to him that there was no main reason at all--only the pull of some tremendous gravitational force, that ineluctable void which had influenced him to take his wife's best friend for a mistress and bearer of a child and all for reasons that were only in small part to fill the barren heart of a wife of a fallow womb--a void that had prompted his subtle rejections of Kimberly as his main wife, for how could he have left Noppawan behind or renew himself from the philanderer that he was--a void that had been a catalyst of the ensuing consequences.

To have a child! Regardless of their education or the significance of ideas that bred in their heads, women needed those replications of their physical beings to feel complete.

This was exacerbated in marriages, since in thought, if not in deed, marriages were with philandering men who were replicating creatures no different than them albeit ones obsessed by impulses for pleasure in wet disgorging with the mult.i.tude. It was no wonder that with the void as immense as the universe itself and the final surrender to it inevitable in death, one sometimes had delusions of it as the lap of a long lost grandmother and found herself/himself plummeting into that lap from one's balcony.

Long ago Nawin, who at birth was labeled Jatupon, had been a teenager caught in currents and countercurrents of his own. Back then, he had needed his new Bangkok friend, Noppawan, desperately; and so by taking her, at the age of fourteen, to meet his osseous, ochre friends, the dead corpses at the Siriaj Hospital Anatomical Museum, he in a sense had thrown up his arms to indicate a need for love. She by embracing him despite his wish to seem intrepid before death had shown an understanding of what boys could not say in words. So like a blossoming bud she had opened her arms to him and let him fall into the petals of her embrace. So, while surrounded by the shelves of these dead beings basking in formalin, he had cried in her embrace remembering, an hour earlier, Kazem's use of his body, a type of interactive gesture or embrace which he had sometimes called a "sport" and at other times a "cheap date."

Twenty five years later at certain moments of weakness, he still needed love even though the neediness in the content of the word abhorred him. Were couples who stayed together for forty or fifty years to be so commended? The neediness of people in mutual dependency was worse than newlyweds addicted to the pleasure-highs of being in proximity to their spouses, the extensions of themselves; it all was like the monstrosity of a one right legged man and a one left legged woman walking together and it sickened him.

Nawin got up and went to the coin operated telephone. He dialed his home telephone number numerous times and then his wife's mobile telephone number. He did this in the hope of expressing something--admiration, sentiment, respect, grat.i.tude, he was not sure what, but certainly not love, as he had a pure aversion to that word--he did not know what to say, and it did not matter. There was merely that recording telling him that the numbers were disconnected. And so he felt disconcerted as if he were now walking through the gravitational force of a different planet. He went back to the table and drank the rest of his orange juice. It was to be expected, he told himself, as nothing was permanent. He took a deep breath and then breathed out fully. He felt disheartened, but not all that desperate. If a wonderful person, one who had gone out of his life, and who was so salient in such a critical time at his youth, had gone for good reason, he had no reason to question it. He had been blest to have her save him from the abyss as well as providing him with the ensuing friendship of marriage years later. She now had his money, his child, and her independence and he would bequeath these things unto her unconditionally; and so, he told himself that he must release her, exhaling her and breathing in others like respiration. He stuffed the five baht coin into his pocket.

No, if he had loved Kimberly and Noppawan at certain times this was enough love for him in a lifetime. If he had experienced one malevolent family early in his life, this should have been enough of an augury for him that long ago he, Nawin Biadklang, should have forsworn a second round of it and vowed to maintain a single and original life thereafter. He was an artist: compa.s.sion, ideas, exposure to new people, licentious impulses, and the inspiration of dead geniuses on canva.s.s must override this anti-Herac.l.i.tal wish to cling to stable objects.

In the petty routines of man it was rare that one was impacted profoundly by some being other than one if the volumes of dead sages, and yet she had done this for him. Even though this incident had happened long ago he still admired and even loved her for it. He told himself that with time he would become even more professional and accomplished at compa.s.sionate portrayals of life in his paintings and his interactions, even if it were to take thirty years, when his testosterone levels had finally plummeted. And for those who never had anyone there, for them, he, at least in theory, wanted to be there the way Noppawan had been there for him in his youth. Maybe, he told himself, he would visit the Laotians. He was not sure.

Thus, here he was sitting in the restaurant of a guest house watching a pirated DVD on a big screen television and eating his pancakes with maple syrup. For whatever inexplicable reason, he had chosen to check into a guest house in the center of Nongkai and here he--Nawin, Jatupon, or whatever label he gave himself --was baffled by his choice. He could merely speculate and eat his pancakes the same as any Western foreigner, but with the voracious enthusiasm as he had when, long ago, devouring them in America as a four year old child.

He was eating pancakes rather than the French Toast that he was more inclined to order for the sound of the French in the toast made him feel queasy. When he finished eating and was bored with the movie he plunked money, faces of the king, under a salt and pepper shaker and without saying "check bin [bill, please]" or waiting for the waitress to pick up his money or bring back the change, he left the guest house as irresolute as when he came.

A cloud came and past; followed by others, darker and more voluminous. On the sidewalk, near Soi 43 where he happened to be pa.s.sing, lightning refracted from the pavement and his sad solitary figure on this King's birthday/Father's Day was lit in flashes of eerie spotlight. There were strong winds animating the inanimate, which gave the already animate that sense of flutter making him, for a time, feel an elated sense of being that surpa.s.sed reality but this, like the lightning and the cloud that had been the precursor of the storm, were illusory and pa.s.sed as well. His loneliness was weighty but the winds made the gravity of it all insignificant. Then there were sheets of rain pouring from the sky, he had tried to escape under an awning, but a hole in the center caused this miniature waterfall and made those under the awning cl.u.s.ter closer together to avoid it. He went into a shop. A rack was full of postcards with photographic images of Nongkhai's Buddhist sculpture garden and the Friendship Bridge between Nongkhai, Thailand and Vientiane, Laos. He could write to Noppawan, he told himself. He bought several postcards but he could not think of several friends to send them to--he had acquaintances by the droves but friends?

Minus Kimberly, there was only Noppawan. He returned to his table at the guest house and ordered another cup of Cappuccino and a croissant. He took out a pen from his wet pockets but it would not write. He laughed. No, neither rain nor lugubrious tragedy would wash away the gloss that covered his cracks for he never ceased to be amused by the incredible, the ironic, and the peculiar of everyday experiences.

Looking out the window and thinking how peculiar such a rain was in December he turned toward the movie and in so doing noticed a young man in tight wholly jeans and jacket waiting at the door.

He did not know why but he knew what he was there for and without thinking he raised his hand and snapped his fingers augustly, but it did not get the man's attention. "What on Earth was I thinking? What a relief," he thought. He chuckled at his droll existence of near misses and the twisting turns of fate. A woman seated at a nearby table pulled out a laminated photograph of King Rama IX. "What a simpleton," he thought, and smiled at her as if she were a child carrying around a doll. His heart was palpitating less, his blood seemed to be cooling, and his thoughts seemed to be less obsessed by the s.e.xual and the peculiar. Then someone sat next to him. Unlike himself or the one in the denim jacket who both had a golden brown complexion, his was a muddier, more turgid tone. He was also more muscular just as he remembered was his brother, Kazem.

"Sawadee khrap," he said.

"Yes, what can I do for you?" asked Nawin.

"Just thought I'd come here and talk with you. You looked lonely. Thought I'd cheer you up if you needed cheering. You snapped your fingers but the other guy didn't hear you. I've heard and have come."

"What will you do to cheer me up?" asked Nawin with a sheepish grin.

"Better not say in words but I snap. You do what is pleasant for me and it will please you."

"Free?"

"Give me a 500 baht gift afterwards if you want."

Nawin paid the bill and led him to his room.

21

He listened to the frequent gusts a.s.sail the window panes. They were a hybrid of breath and force. They were muddled articulations in brawn. In that respect, he told himself [at that second he was thinking of his own childhood as a reference, since the centripetal domain of his myopic existence was all there was], the howling in the denigration of night was figuratively no different from the diatribe of human speech, and yet being literally both it felt entirely strange. He listened intently for whatever else there was for him to do as a unit in this barren room of post-sensual darkness inside his own head; scatter and drift with the wind? The gusts of this peculiar storm in the middle of the dry season seemed to be attempts at conveying meaning, ineffable sounds from without transforming to thought that smote recriminations within, and this he listened to as well even as he smiled wryly to think how superst.i.tious he was to attempt to augur some cosmological significance to his petty existence from advent.i.tious happenings. Smell equally condemned him: sweat evaporating from chafed skin of bodies reft from a union of friction; underwear tainted by residual liquids and reeking that odor sweetly; and, for him, immured in a poorly ventilated room of a guest house, it was nighttime and there was the saccharine stench of rotting male flesh everywhere.

Circ.u.mspect, he was unable to trust that there was safety in falling asleep [he could not feel otherwise with his wallet there in the top drawer of the bed-stand near that body], and thus there were long minutes of darkness made darker yet by being awake with eyes closed; mind somewhat a.s.suaged by what it could repudiate from illuminating visual sensory input; thought, nature, and a connection to both seeming more acute despite the fact that he felt tired; and all of this a less pessimistic perspective garnered in certain seconds only to be lost in others. For his was an episteme of concurrent ant.i.theses where, from the impact of human will, bits of knowledge like a mixture of adulterated pollutants that comprised the ca.n.a.ls in Bangkok, were thrust into composite waves and counter-waves of ferment; but when will sped elsewhere it all reverted to its stagnant origin as waves of cogitation and cognition like waves of water resumed their former states.

All that he could know absolutely of himself within his droll, droning thoughts was that the perspectives he was trading shifted from variations of mood like different or seemingly different selves kaleidoscopically making it so he hardly knew a consistent self at all. All that he could know outside himself was that right now, perceived with gravity but variable nuances of optimism and humor, he was definitely in this room and, as much as he might wish to extricate himself, he was not alone.

Stretched out stiffly on the bed like a cadaver (Why so rigid?

Why at all negative? he asked himself), he did not have to see the objects of the room again to feel a cold, surreal, and alien remoteness in their presence nor did he have to be deceased and within a state of rigor mortis to be so inert. Yet! (f.u.c.k!), he thought in Thai for that expletive implied how intimately disconnection could be felt; and as life, more than thought, was allowing oneself to be besmirched by the saturations of feeling, validating it with action, which then was the catalyst for more feeling, he asked himself whether or not after the ma.s.sage that he had rendered like a slave to another's sense of pleasure and this being riveted for such a lengthy and h.e.l.lish twenty minute duration which had just ceased a few moments ago, he were really living life. He was, he told himself, and what was more, by this one intimate act with the man and the void he was connecting himself atavistically to that antediluvian period of early self in which he had been sodomized so hard as to rupture childhood irreparably and to be condemned to this morbid repressed pain his atheist's soul, his all-too human, mind--a mind which even early on had been a refuge to a harmonious and familiar voice within.

This pain was for so many years seldom thought of, but now that it was thawed like a creek, it flowed it's bane as microbes and water. Pain, once necessitated, was now necessitating the diminished memories of the diminutive boy whom he had once been-- diminutive as the creature had been banished and repudiated all of these years from the belief that only a man's appet.i.tes and actions within the present moment were real. Back then he had not bothered to postulate that a present bereft of foundation was like a cleft chunk of a planet floating aimlessly as an asteroid; and that if fully connected to himself; the boy might not be a diminished fictional character any longer while the man might become more than a tailless lizard with a regenerative head. Thus, this being bedraggled and besmirched in painful intimate sport was for him a homecoming.

There were so many voices of the past in the wind. They were distinct in themselves and yet, swallowed and digested by the wind, they were part of its reeking breath: brothers, parents, extended family, evanescent friends of youth, distant cold bits of memory less than specter and dust; Noppawan and Kimberly, his only two portions of love, which, as a self-contained being, he never needed but delighted in ravenously as one who lacked and was in love with those who engendered such lovable feelings (the feelings of being in love being that which were loved most); so many female models, so many desperate, delectable wh.o.r.es with defunct eyes of hopelessness, dead embers with a slight wistful glow for possible deliverance for which men roved like the dimmest of spotlights; so many relationships; so many desperate others no different than the wh.o.r.es (was there a male or female who got involved, let alone married, to worsen one's lot or to become best friends with the self, brazenly riding through loneliness on a solitary raft? No, never!). There was snoring.

There was putrid breath, sweeping the side of his face. There was effluvium from the individual lying next to him and this was a type of wind as well.

No matter whether it was done as perpetrator or willing victim, no matter what the particular genders involved were, or the positions of riding or being ridden, the s.e.xual union of two people was in his conclusion a mallet lunging its ma.s.s forcefully into dark, dank, and constricted s.p.a.ce, a club forcing entrance into narrow pa.s.sages not designed for its presence, and an overpowering of a being to devour but also to inflict servitude and pain while obtaining that apogee of pleasure, the brevity of o.r.g.a.s.m, which could be gained in no other way. A melange of croquet and billiards, polo and wrestling, this sport and aggression performed in the heteros.e.xual role could cause the conception of a child more readily than it could cause venereal disease, but deviant s.e.xuality was conjoined for s.e.xual desire of every kind was definitely a crude and barbarous means of getting a specie to interact physically so that under an obsessive and specious sense of rapture and intimacy and a wish for extension of self by annexation of another being or being annexed by him, different apertures would be explored at various times and from human curiosity and experimentation, pregnancy might ensue.

Yes, he told himself, by being amenable to pleasurable promptings in an intimacy with a male half his age, and finding himself himself suddenly middle aged and needing to become enmeshed and invigorated in his beauty, he was living life as animals were meant to live it. Infidelities of every kind within this G.o.dless universe gave men, even gentry like himself who were cloyed by leisure, a rapturous respite from their roles as automatons and thus they were an essential sport of man. For the naive this conduct led to some months of being in love but for a worldly adulterer like himself it was minutes of indispensable intoxication. He continued to listen to the howling wind. It seemed to inveigle and beckon him and he found himself wistfully and sequaciously summoned to its cryptic codes. Did the wind not entice him to make his naked form denuded further so that he might become as amorphous as it, to be amalgamated with wind, and to slip into it wholly? It did; and yet it seemed such a grotesque hybrid of breath and force with these continual elated, muddled, and ineffable articulations in brawn. Yes, he reiterated, in that respect the howling was figuratively no different than the aspersions and diatribe of human speech. By that, although perhaps not consciously thinking it, he was nonetheless meaning that war called family which happened so briefly in the history of a life as if it had never been, though undoubtedly had occurred for, he a.s.sessed, there was an expanse or large swath of charred, fallow, and contaminated brain therein where, to the present day, little grew but a sense of desertification. Living in the centripetal domain of a myopic existence as everyone did he supposed that his hapless childhood would always be his point of reference, his vantage point, and also the multi-pointed obstacle of his life. Generalizations, skewed and concocted from the sordid past that were their antecedent, extruded from his fissures in an incessant cursive lava flow of amicable contempt. The howling was as undecipherable as the cries of a forlorn child. It was eerie as though a million such children with their m.u.f.fled cries were being slammed into the windows with each new gust.

Lying there, a cohabitant of the darkness of this relatively unfamiliar room, the howling then seemed more fierce than before. It literally was brawn and breath. As such it was worse than the acerbity of humans (not that his father excoriating him for retreating to his "cage," that cage he willingly absconded to as a casualty of a s.a.d.i.s.tic sport in which he needed to shoot and denigrate before being shot and denigrated himself, and once hit to seek the prey more aggressively in the hope of being seen as the master of disparaging wit, or the father being as rustic and ungrammatical as a wild boar, did not howl yet in memory) and made the evening seem all the more surreal and peculiar if such a thing were possible.

"Where am I?" he asked himself absurdly, as if it could be anything other than that same room at the guest house in Nongkhai. "What happened to me?" he asked with feigned innocence which caused him to chortle and spray saliva that was like the froth of a wave upon a breaker, the cl.u.s.ter of rocks that was his smile. He had to admit, despite himself, that this being violated, by his own volition, had been quite a ride. It had been an internal roller coaster physically; but more it had been a ride into an abyss within, not merely from the physical sensation of this odd womanly role he found himself in or the pleasure of being free of aberration as creatures of variation loved aberration if social constraints were slackened (and slackened they were not only in Bang-c.o.c.k but to some degree in the whole of Thailand as the Lord Buddha did not envisage G.o.ds, rules, and the dogma of coercion), but most saliently in these years as a womanizer overturned with this stranger's slight push of his body toward the bed.

Even with eyes closed and sedulous efforts made to concentrate on the wind to avoid thinking of the raw, a.n.a.l soreness and all that transpired which was as confusing for the libertine as it was liberating, he knew. He listened intently. He listened scrupulously. How superst.i.tious he was to equate the wind with a specter and yet he did it nonetheless. The smells of the room did not seem as acrid as a fully evaporated area over a recent urine-saturated pavement near a park or stadium in Bangkok or as repugnant as a room littered with his brothers fetid socks and other equally if not more reprehensible articles of attire peeled off the bodies of these anathemas but still, as small as the room was, nothing was impervious to it. If the curtains and the carpet were all permeated by a redoubling of these male odors, he would not have been surprised--not that surprise, or any other human emotion could have been registered all that readily in his impa.s.sive state. His was a naked mind, like that of his body, except that his body was wrapped loosely in a used mildewed towel and his mind in a bawdy numbness which he labeled the void.

He sneezed and opened his eyes. He rubbed his nose against his shoulder, careful not to make any more precipitous movements against the broken arm in the sling, since it was hurting worse than before, as of course it would from the earlier sport. There was no point in closing his eyes again. He would not be able to rest any more than before. With a mind needing debouchment more than his body needed to relieve itself in the toilet he stayed where he was, which was where there were windows. The circ.u.mfluence of the fetid, enervated air beneath the incessant creaking of the ceiling fan; creaking as if it were not only grating against the torpor and stagnancy of the air itself but against the melee of all, for all was restrained in the time and s.p.a.ce of what now was and in a circulation and deciduous draping of those same odors caught to which the windows were permanently sealed to keep out the rain.