An Apostate: Nawin of Thais Part 3

- I'm sorry.

- Inadequacies are fired onto me daily, you know, even if I do tell myself its inside me and that you do not pull the trigger.... No, it isn't the affairs. What you press against your body is none of my business. It isn't as if I need to inspect the underwear you plan to put on...if its cotton or silk, bikinis or boxers, clean or dirty...what you press against your body, who ma.s.sages it, and how, I don't care.

-What can I do for you?

-Yes, strangely enough you are so decent. Husbands should at least be friends with those they have. I knew what you were when I married you. It's those inadequacies like going out in rags....If you like yourself before, you end up losing any sense of anything good about yourself in being with such a man....No, I can sit here for hours and not see anything so lonely in it.

Its like Ban Chiang pottery locked in a gla.s.s display but at least in that container I have me. Out of it, with you, I lose me... at best, I have just an image of you from long ago in a special mirror n.o.body else sees.

-You don't look like my image. He chuckled awkwardly to lighten the mood, fully aware of conversation being an inept bridge to link any pair let alone the purveyor of pain with its victim.

Not knowing what to say he changed the subject--Let's move the furniture where it belongs out of the corners. This was his response to silence.

- Why, people ask me are we, I, an archaeological anthropologist and you, a playboy artist, together. They feel sorry for me for they think it a graphic humiliation worse than rape. In ways I suppose it can seem that way when rape is such a private act...and this is not private. I brag about your latest paintings as if to say that what he does with his own body is his business; I don't tell him how and where to move his legs so why should I worry about his other bodily movements and functions; and I couldn't be prouder of a husband who explores the human soul through a v.a.g.i.n.a. I suggest it, although not in those words...not any words really. She began to cry. - There is no paint for me, Nawin. No canvas...just the clutter of a woman's home...countless things if she marries well...countless knick-knacks she has to move around and in which she has to reflect her thoughts, all in different parts of the house. She moves the furniture to see a world where the same pain exists elsewhere to prove to herself that it is the natural state so as to make all else bearable...I mean it is the natural state in a sense but for other husbands maybe not to these extremes or at least not so openly depicted. If natural, a woman can console herself that it is not just the insanity of aching in her own head.

- Are you leaving me?

- No, I'm not so courageous. It will always be more of the same for me. So I am sitting with this so called G.o.ddess of Bubastis, this cat on my lap, and as I do so it seems to me that a cat is good for cuddling but a man with his premature p.e.c.k.e.r is not a cuddler...just a lovemaker. That is what he is good at. The Egyptians were right about there being a woman in the cat and a cat in a woman, for the two creatures need to feel real within the propinquity of touch. There with another non-threatening suffering creature of this world, touching to feel real, maybe it is just another mirror--just a bigger love, a fuller love and perhaps a more selfish love than a man and a woman feel but this cuddling with a cat is better for a woman.

The memory reeled around and played so distinctly that he almost thought he was there with his wife; but how much of it he had distorted to make it more meaningful, dramatic, and aesthetic than it really was, he had no way of knowing. The brain was always rewinding bits of memory, a.n.a.lyzing them, and splicing them together like film; and as were two people walking down a sidewalk without looking at each other, who were and were not together, so was memory--it was and was not.

Were articles dating back fifteen years adulation about the artist of his youth that might have been true words then but little pertained to the man of forty, or were his works tremendous talent that did not hinge on the salacious biography of the artist and would live beyond his short eruption of ephemeral years? It seemed to him, nonsensically, that they both were and were not. Nonetheless, it was absurd to merely think that over the past few years he had aged so tremendously that critics and commissioners of his work alike had lost interest in him entirely. The art critics had been writing about him, albeit less frequently, until he ran out of inspiration for his redundant themes, irrespective of the surfeited forms of wh.o.r.es who came in droves, each with slightly different circ.u.mstances, and each with slightly different expressions. "I was a sensation until I lost interest in beating and stirring up such muck, and none of it has anything to do with turning forty," he told himself, but he knew that it was and was not true.

It was true that just four years ago he, the once eligible but continual playboy, was appealing enough to be referred to as "Naughty Nawin" with those English words in their headings proving that he had not turned into mushy and deciduous fruit in the little over three summers since; but it was not true that as unseemly as his life might be in view of the fact that he was a glutton of the personal life like a boy in front of a thousand cookies he was the same as any foreign business holidayer of the masculine gender looking for the nearest brothel. His was more of a spiritual decadence. "Forty is just a number. You are as handsome as ever," he thought as he looked at himself in the mirror. "You stopped painting and they stopped writing about you. It is as simple as this"; nonetheless he did not believe in simplicity.

He missed the hype organized by galleries. He missed magazines catering to those needing a celebrity from whom they could learn intimacies, tiny facts or rumors of facts about the personal lives of the G.o.ds. He checked himself. His mind was going in circles around the word, forty. The circles were more of a vortex as, on bad days, when he descended for some seconds or more into early family and abuse, which could suck him in fully were it not for his active vigilance.

Examining himself in the mirror for the umpteenth time with a refreshingly spry countenance there to befriend him once again, he gave thanks to the mysterious forces that had given him a life where he might make a living presenting his varied depictions of himself with his wh.o.r.es on canvas (a wh.o.r.e of every type from every angle), fervidly contemplative of life's decadent urgings. Like a schoolboy twisting in the gra.s.s, he blessed the fates that had allowed him time to revel in his spinnings. Free to contemplate the unequal plight of man (or woman as it was in his case), to see color in forms and feelings and thought, to mix with forms by allowing licentious whims to twist around the kite in accordance with natural mandates to reign in those turbulent skies, he basked in others perceptions of him as handsome, successful, and affluent. Like juicy fruit on the stem, his days in the sun, as an elated appet.i.te of women and an envy of men--at least for those who knew something about contemporary Thai art--were embarra.s.sing and awkward to the modest Jatupon that he was; but it was the very furthest of human plights. Selling his paintings at ever inflated prices because of their worth and his celebrity status as their decadent creator, he had the ideal life. The creature of pleasure had to concede as much as this.

Smirking at himself, the wry smile soon fell flat at the thought that even ugly pimps who were affluent from their brutish, s.e.xual peccadilloes might be considered equally s.e.xy; and he sighed at his bland fame. He had gained it from portraying the same models in the same redundant and stereotypical theme to which he knew no variation; and whether or not those guilt- ridden self-portraits of himself engaging with his wh.o.r.es as stiffly as a Buddha were an exploration of his models or an exploitation of them remained an unanswered question.

He moved closer to the mirror and looked deeper into the image.

The rot of forty, if it were a rot, was an internal degeneration that had not yet reached the surface of the apple except for a few premature wrinkles, which he had already stiffened out with Botox. He flexed his muscles into the mirror that like social interaction and painting reflected consciousness and reminded him of existing beyond the redundant actions of eating, urinating, defecating, reproducing, sleeping and all the other - ings.

Stepping out of the toilet as he was now doing, he posited that such ba.n.a.l and inconsequential movements as this were like copulation with a rife a.s.sortment of women, that movement provided men with a base physical consciousness that was indispensable to their overall welfare by making them appear more tangible to themselves than any images in mirrors could do.

Still, while moving out of the toilet and pondering this new justification for male promiscuity within the corridor between the two cars, he inadvertently halted there before his image in a second mirror. "I am still a young man. Both mirrors say so,"

he lied to himself; and then began to wash his face at a sink.

The tap water pulsated out in an extorted and convulsing trickle, pushing him a little into those turbulent memories of the recent past. Not wanting to think of Noppawan or the mangled angel who was no more volant and permanent than any pallid terracotta falling eleven or more stories (he had forgotten the exact number with the burgeoning thickets of neuron brush that were daily mutating the landscape of his mind), he looked into the image of his own eyes to rea.s.sure himself that they still had a young man's l.u.s.ter.

4

As he did this, combining the mirror's confirmation of forty with a sense of feeling no different than he had at twenty so that a nice conciliatory countenance of thirty stared back at him, he remembered another fragment of that earlier dream in a sleep that had been filled with such episodic starts and stops.

As the restless shifting of dreams like those he had experienced in the 'tenebrous tomb' were the chaotic composite of what the true self really was, they were also his idee fixe, for as an artist he knew that the true self was the only subject worthy of his delineation, his imagining, and that being awake was merely the desperate garnering of the true self's scatterings. In some sense being awake was a liberation from sleep, that anarchy of fleeting images, fears, and anxieties about the unalterable past which the subconscious lived over again and again in new arrangements like a news reel seen in various colored filters and in reverse of a young French and English teacher jumping from her balcony. It was a means by which, if not to erase or delete memory, to splice it, to fictionalize it, and to some degree begin again; and yet he judged consciousness to be even less real. Married one moment, separated the next, the boy was always growing out of his clothes or being stripped of them. And as the door of the fitting room by which people came in to wear him and be worn by him never seemed to shut well, allowing all whom he loved to briefly use him and be used by him to get a variant feel of themselves before going toward new entries, it seemed to him that the door might as well keep revolving. One might even stifle human growth if one were to try. This had been his supposition in maimed youth after his parents were jettisoned from their windshield by a Fate seemingly eager to part with superfluous human baggage, these burdensome nuisances, and he was too old to part from such inveterate conclusions now.

Being awake was a concoction of pasting together the fragments of subconscious thought. Whereas a biographer was a historian of superficial events, the artist was a cartographer; and it had always been his hope that collectively all artists (himself included if he were not retired) would in time be able to chart an accurate aerial view of the splendid, volcanic thrusts of the subconscious. He took a comb out of the pocket of his wrinkled pants and began to straighten his disheveled hair lovingly. Then in consort with his debonair image, his Siamese twin in the mirror, he put his palm on his forehead for it was aching numbly, and more numbly was his heart. And thinking of his own restlessness, he knew it would not end with ended sleep. He could tell this from the hammering taps of his present headache that were born of the travail of truly chaotic dreams.

He told himself that there was no reason to feel anxious; for what was a man if he were inwardly shaken by external vicissitudes? Many evenings before his self-declared retirement he would stare up into empty s.p.a.ce from the bleachers near the lit sports stadium in that area where they both lived (an area convenient to a.s.sumption University where his wife worked), sketch something, and feel warmth in the blackness and nothingness. A real man, he argued, could sink himself into blackness, knowing himself to be like a bit of top soil washed away in storm waters, and think nothing of it. So Kimberly was dead...so, he had a son by her in the hands of the wife whom he guessed that he was now separated from...so he was a forty year old man who briefly felt a queer amorous t.i.tillation of h.o.m.os.e.xual yearning and a phantasm of a tryst inside his head...so the tryst was for a Laotian in a train...so, like a poor man on a train, he was going to the capital of one of the most undeveloped countries on the planet...so, he was running away on this December 5th, the king's birthday (Father's Day), seemingly oblivious to any agenda about what he was running toward. It was all a sinking of his dirt in eternities of black s.p.a.ce and he told himself that he was warm and content within it.

The link of a.s.sociated thoughts that had brought him to recall this particular fragment of a dream while staring into the mirror with a preposterous sense of self-satisfaction was oblique at best. It began with him looking into his sparkling eyes and his clear white smile of multiple brushings and whitening solutions, followed by a second in which he very well might have used the English word "gay" to describe his image had that abhorrent word of myriad connotations to which the worst were dissonant to the pleasant characterization of himself as a womanizer and a lady's man not been repressed. Then, to further avoid summoning the word which he forcefully restrained into his subconscious muck like a Burmese refugee to a sylvan camp in one of those northern provinces, he stared into his mirrored eyes deeply. He concentrated on how these eyes seemed to gleam more in certain seconds and how his face looked even younger and more handsome than thirty in these evanescent blazes or vestige flashes of his former being, the boy whom he once was. The delusion of thinking of his appearance as that of a thirty year old man or as one much younger than this made him think of being thirteen, frightened by his first wet dreams and the accompanying stink of his body, which he then supposed to be some type of inception of death or body rot; but it also made him think of that day his mother bought him some goulashes for thirty baht and how proud he, that tiny boy, was that she would spend so much money on him. The goulashes made him think of being coerced to trudge around with his brothers along the edges of creeks and ca.n.a.ls where they, guffawing s.a.d.i.s.ts and martinets, made him abduct and mutilate crawdads to recognize that he was no better than any other creature of the natural order that gloated at itself as one individual in a species of myriad predators. And finally crawdad hunting in Ayutthaya, the home of his forlorn youth, made him think simultaneously of being with his brothers scavenging and pilfering refund cola bottles in the doorways of alleyways so as to buy a little candy from a local store, and wall crawling geckos.

In this earlier dream that he was now recalling a gecko crawled on a wooden cross that marked a mound near the trash barrel where a family cat had been buried in a shoe box coffin long ago. Then on the upper portion of the cross, the gecko became limp and stagnant, hanging on two of its arms like a dangling Christ. Hanging there inertly, it inadvertently pulled on it, this lever, opening a strange, familyesque commiseration of the parents and mourning of the brothers just as they had felt it together that time as young children long ago. But these odd, cognate feelings over the death of a pet were like distorted sound waves that bounced off the back of empty s.p.a.ce and none of them were present--not even himself--just a gecko silently hanging on a cat's cross...feelings of loss...dross.

He sighed. In being awake or asleep in a state of mind that was literal or symbolic, everything that was known to his brain such as the certainty of having been abused by family, the certainty of any past event, who he loved and how much he loved her, his responsibility for the tragic outcome of a woman's life, and his own self-worth, which fluctuated based on the height of the wave it floated upon, registered merely as likely possibilities and vague truths. Any aplomb that he projected could only belie this frantic attempt to make sense out of his impressions of the world--impressions like indentations of a cookie cutter on his doughy brain, and impressions that were interpreted and warped within the pull of memory. He knew nothing of the world at all beyond loose impressions of incidents that were refracted myriad times off diminished memories, twisting into something other than what they initially were before becoming the subject of his discernment as to what life was and what it all meant.

While pasting the fragments of the true self into a reticulate and concocted whole following sleep, it seemed to him (who, in boyhood, had once been envious of a 12 year old friend for being told to leave home when there was, supposedly, not enough food for him to have his share), that for those like himself who knew the worst of family and had long lived as outsiders along its landmine strewn fringes, such dreams--surely not of geckos and crosses on cats' graves, but ones no less poignant in conveying the same grief of being bereft of family--were common on all Thai holidays. For it was on such days that happy or speciously happy groups burgeoned rife on sidewalks as a type of rank urban wildflower; and on these days in particular, pedestrians like himself could not walk down a sidewalk without using a hand like a machete against these impermanent but nonetheless hard and obdurate cl.u.s.ters of families. As gregarious as he was, he was often driven at such times by an obnoxious predilection to cut through the thickets of their obscene closeness and at the same time to take special attention to avoid the steps of shopping malls where the roots of these blooming and ambulatory groups more fully tangled his steps like seaweed washed on crowded sh.o.r.es. On holidays like this, families were everywhere except in fetid trains, like the one he was currently in, going to Nongkai. It was for this irrational caprice among others that, like a relatively poor man in this jiggling and forward moving box, he was absconding on an economical and flightless journey to nowhere. Although the train had couples bunked together, overall it was pleasantly exempt of family, and as such it was a bit of a refuge to Nawin. He laughed at himself for he found the self to be more comically intriguing than any other being.

It was on such holidays, as teenagers, that he and Noppawan, and the "they" that they both were, would go to the Siriaj Hospital Anatomical Museum to be with the dead freaks there, to sit on remote bleachers in tiny and obscure parks, to prop themselves on the ground against the side walls of public toilets near the Chao Phraya river with a small scattering of homeless individuals, and to loiter in other impromptu sanctuaries exempt of this urban seaweed known as family which both had an allergic reaction to.

He thought about how easily a man in these idle hours of a holiday could slip into a specific moment as a teenager or as a child. A boy always outgrew his pants and yet a forty year old man who was well educated, talented, and affluent would, at certain moments, find himself putting them on. In unblocked corridors memories could come to blast him with their spells and he would once again become a straggling boy fighting the pull of s.a.d.i.s.ts on thin, stilted sidewalks along a ca.n.a.l. It was all very alarming and intriguing, and it prompted him to smile at the ironies of being human which totally confounded him in a most pleasant way.

Thinking not only about the dream but the family that once was, it seemed to him that any positive memories were a torturously slow and bitter sweet poison unjustly administered to him, someone who already resided fully as an inmate of his own brain; and that had he been totally bereft of love when he was young so as to be raised by absolute fiends, making him into one himself, it would have been almost preferable. It certainly would have been more liberating than just being confined in a memory chamber where periodically he could recall vestiges of family happiness enough to remember some specifics but otherwise only felt their deep residue. Having their intrusion did nothing for him apart from causing him to wish for what could never happen again.

But then what did he know? Without a good night's sleep, how were any of his ideas anything but minutely sensible at best? If anything was for pulling and clearing it was this weedy thicket of messy ideas in a landscape heavy in leanings toward sleep.

5

He was not exactly sure why, at the moment of contemplating this rather non-germinal seed of love that was there clogging s.p.a.ce within his manhood, that this unpleasant recollection of his attraction to the Laotian suddenly interposed between the concept and the peaceful equilibrium that he supposed that he sought--an equilibrium that he supposed everyone sought when not bored with the tranquil and the blase. Still, it undeniably did, the way the subliminal thought of his dampened socks in the upper tomb still seemed to be aggravating his nose. He wanted to tell himself that the brief t.i.tillation, so clearly a phantasm of his own making, had not been real. It was easier than telling himself that Kimberly's death and his separation from his wife were not real; and yet he knew that even if he were able to successfully repudiate this one--this tenuous abstraction, this memory of such a queer feeling--as though it were merely the disconnection of a somewhat sleep deprived brain, such a repudiation could only be successful when he was at last off of this jejune train and out of its monotonous rhythm, and had other stimuli pumped into his orifices. Then it could be forgotten like evaporated dew on a warm, sunlit day. Until then, the stranger of the bottom bunk in underwear camouflaging an erection was tangled in the burring thickets of thought that permeated his mood as a mildew on the upper roots of a tree.

He felt disconcerted and a little anxious, and this apprehension was beginning to make him, he who had not had a shower for the past 24 hours, sweat odiously and stink as his elder brothers.

He stopped himself thinking of them for beyond this point these uncultured beasts, long banished to the status of abstraction with years of no contact and diminished memories, were a forbidden subject of contemplation by the declaration of the monarch, Nawin, in the kingdom of the brain. This strange, disconcerted sense of himself was almost like a dizziness. It was as if in part he had momentarily slipped out of his body and brain to become an on-stage caricature whom he, an audience of one, was watching obtusely. He was watching himself, a mute who was trying to give a desperate soliloquy, through his only attribute of wordless, dilated eyes. He snorted and snickered at this dis...o...b..bulated and confused state that was so unlike himself. His forehead somewhat furrowed in the contemplation of his puzzling idiosyncrasies. Then he wet his hand with a bit of tap water and ma.s.sage-slapped his face with his fingers the way he spread his aftershave. The purpose was that of sobering himself from delusion; and he told himself that the headache was part of a slight fever. He convinced himself that he was cooling his forehead from it but this was not so. In fact the atheist (that same one who, once his child was born, had sat at an empty swimming pool contemplating what his role as father should be, but was interrupted by witnessing the manager bringing in her oblations of food, incense, and wishes for prosperity to the house of the spirits--a dollhouse on a pedestal, had inadvertently scrutinized her, and then filed the diminishing video footage into his mutating brain under the disparaging category of "S--superst.i.tious Thai" and "T--things not to do") was now using tap water as holy water.

If in the past he thought it both amusing and peculiar that he, an artist who recorded moments in time, should perceive memory as such an a.s.sault he did not think it so strange now, for this particular recollection of the Laotian seemed like the hand of a minatory stranger smothering his face and he was somewhat frightened by it as he had been by the actual incident itself.

At this particular moment he yearned viscerally for the Laotian, the stranger, to awaken and remove himself from the train at the next stop; and yet as the man was going to Vientiane, there was little or no chance of him leaving before the last stop of Nongkai. Nawin considered the fact that he could not spend an hour or two (whatever it took to get to the last stop) absconded in the bathroom, ostensibly hiding from him but really hiding from himself; still, he would play the moments of impulses in their respective order and for now the fetid metallic tiled bathroom with its metallic floor-based, urinal-shaped toilet was an oasis for the handsome lambent image of his that gleamed and scintillated from the mirror. He splashed a bit more of the water onto his face and felt better.

From non-germinal love hadn't the thought been of that stranger, his father, and then from the father had it not been of the stranger from Laos? Specifically, ruminations of being a kinder man than he wanted to be and obviously not succeeding at that to a memory of the father, and from the father to the Laotian: this, he supposed, was the chronology of his recent thoughts. He a.s.sumed that recollection of that t.i.tillation was preceded by a memory of his august but haggard restaurant-working father swaggering toward a second-hand reclining chair, telling him to scram, and seating himself with right foot resting on the left leg, thumping its smelliness into the air of what he always declared to be his home, his domain, like a judge with his gavel. Nawin was not all that sure of this being the cause, or how one would determine a cause of a most peculiar and perverted thought as this blown in with all the other perverse ideas of his subconscious when, for whatever reason, it was tossed a bit further on top of all conscious rubbish (of course, as always, he was for the most part successfully blocking out the copulatory sport of the second eldest, Kazem, and that one's playground). He may have hoped, even though he did not believe, that isolating it would be the means to an instantaneous cure from all perverse ideas not of the heteros.e.xual variety; and for a moment he frantically unblocked most neurological corridors, no matter how stygian, until contemplating this senseless contemplation made him feel a bit nauseous.

He used humor to distance himself from this recollection of momentary derangement or crazed but inconsequential t.i.tillation by telling himself facetiously that the reason this incident was now being shot like darts into his realm of contemplation was as a form of dogged, fraternal torture inflicted by one s.a.d.i.s.tic part of the brain against the other; but as fraternal recollection could only exacerbate the headache with the introduction of more dull emotional pain, he tried to block off turbid memory and listen for the sounds of metal being kicked and folded, upper tombs going back into embankments, and seats being readjusted. Hearing none, however, he a.s.sumed that the officer who was in charge of the removal of linen and the return of the bottom bunks into seats was asleep. Being forty and not having the desire of the thirty-nine year old to make the awkward climb up the monkey bars to the upper bunk where he would once again stare into the walls of his tenebrous tomb until all elated sleepers were awakened and summoned to their descents, Nawin decided that he would loiter in this toilet, at least until someone needing to relieve himself procured his removal with a few hard and eager taps on the door. The t.i.tillation, he tried to pacify himself, was merely one more inconsequential item of rubbish blowing in subconscious gusts and like wondering if, across the aisle, a female pa.s.senger who was wearing the hijab was a southern terrorist, it meant nothing.

He had to admit that it was futile to ponder whether the barren and the fallow might be preferable to this annexation of s.p.a.ce by a rather non-germinal seed of love that had been planted within him against his will. He could hardly extirpate it, and if the seed had stunted growth he knew of no inward manure that might cause it to grow any more. And as for manure, his thoughts jumped track within their locomotion so that he might change the persistent discourse in his solitary brain; it was peculiar that this substance should be the nutrient for growth just as it was peculiar that an instrument of urination should be the means of intimacy between a man and a woman or for that matter, a man and a man...a man and a man.

The unpleasant memory of his crazed but momentary attraction to the Laotian again returned to him as faithfully as a lover and as s.a.d.i.s.tically as a brother; and for a second he contemplated jocularly whether or not bad memories were merely shot as a fraternal infliction by one part of the brain to another. The query seemed even flatter and more pointless than before. With the same redundant churning of thought, he reminded himself that there was no point in quickly returning to his cubicle. He might as well dally until one of the officers of the train returned to remove the linen and readjust the seats or he would have to lie in the tenebrous tomb as dormant as the seed of love that existed within him.

As one of the Earth's honored higher creatures who could be consumed with a lick of nature like the 200,000 of last year's tsunami (thousands that at one time were pictured on posters dangling from bulletin boards, and pedestrian blockage rails near the Khao San Road police station and the National Gallery) it was apparent that the planet was non-welcoming of the higher guest. The world was a most peculiar place just as he was a most peculiar being within it. The fact that the peculiarity of both was rarely contemplated showed how base, inherent, and instinctual factors shaped the good and the conventional of all things. He chuckled in a couple latent, audible wisps of air at his strange mind (its creative intellect and its redundant recycling of old ideas) to which his white teeth within his brown face seemed to jingle and gleam in the mirror like ice- layered tree limbs shaking in the wind. He thought about how a man lived in his self-made shack believing himself to be a king in a palace and how his ideas were as laws that he a.s.sumed to be sanctioned by destiny, but when things went awry such a common man would in all likelihood say prayers to counter his bleak prospects. He would send them into the ether of Nirvana with the burning of his incense. Sound and st.u.r.dy atheistic ideas like those experienced by Buddha before Buddhism or Christ before Christianity could only be sustained by exceptional men as long as they had good health, the necessities of food and shelter, scant relationships at the very least, and some occupation to direct time and thought; for otherwise the scaffolding of higher and wiser vistas would teeter and break, thrusting a man who was trying to balance himself on this scaffolding of tiered thought into that abyss of perceiving the world as an amorphous blob that was continually being twisted by supernatural forces.

Still, he could not quell this concept or misconception that if only he had been treated with unrelenting contempt when he was a boy, as he very well had been but without these sweet respites, it would have "toughened [him] up" (meaning that if he had been granted nothing apart from the worst memories of his former family, he would have been as tough as a champion Thai kick boxer when not wearing makeup and a dress in the sense that no conscience would he have had to intrude onto his public and private life, no pathetic themes would he have seen in the eyes of women whom he intended to use for pure pleasure in the brothels, and no pain would he have encountered in simple walks along Bangkok's mendicant ridden sidewalks and pedestrian overpa.s.ses). He sensed that such a scenario would have been a liberation from the revolting non-germinal seed of love, and that liberation from it would be a license to use as he had been used in the sadom.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic quid pro quo or bartering for pleasures that defined human interaction. It seemed to him even more clearly than ever that if he had been allotted the entirety of contempt when young he would not have known enough of love to miss it. It did not, however, dawn on him that such an escape, even if it did not lead him to a fated time of being locked up in one rat infested Thai jail or another as one more of life's anti-social miscreants, would have vitiated his humanity.

He made his erroneous conclusion as if even a conventional 9-5 job and TV to bed existence, which was willfully ignorant of the world at large, were better than someone seized by sorrow when trying to seek pleasures and nude discoveries in every seedy domain in Bangkok; and as if in this obsession to concatenate a frenzied body to the pleasure receptors of the lower brain and then to that upper brain that was empathic to human sorrow in so much horror, he failed to deliver anyone (for it was true that painting delivered no one to a better existence). However, in a field of serious endeavor, a discipline, he was able to see the flower in myriad events deflowered and plucked and beauty in the ugly. In a discipline he found empathy, an openness to the world, rather than apathy, uniqueness rather than replication, and in-depth understanding of himself that made him an individual, a complete being, rather than a speck in the ma.s.s, a human cow in a herd. It was not true that painting saved no one for it saved him to himself. And if he failed at being a good person for lack of role models throughout his life, it was through no fault of his own. Still, all in all, he thought of himself as a 'pretty good,' Patron Saint for those who had been treated perversely. Had he, Saint Nawin, not done his best all alone with the resources he had to build his cathedral and temple to atheism, Wat Nawin? He felt that he had.

He told himself that he was as obsessed by his colors now as when he was a five year old child; and that he was still imbuing his black and white world of early servitude with crayonic paint and chalk as if it had never ended. He ruminated on this early being whom he still was, in part or entirely--a being that existed regardless of changing years, names, and social-economic status. He could not recall anything much of those very early years beyond the residual traces of a boy being allowed to take periodic breaks from bringing bowls of noodles to the tables of his parents' customers. Those were still-life images of himself seeking crayonic ebullience that could glorify his and humanity's noodle shackles. Weren't those first images, he asked himself, undecipherable, waxy smudges on discarded paper that had been wrapped over meat? From his rather indistinct and diminished memories he supposed that they were, but the attempts were the same as now: to evince a moment in time and despite its bleakness to sense it as precious within form. And if his depictions then and now were imbued with more color than that which would have been a true rendition of the scenes, they were soft and sensitive aberrations of love that could be pardoned.

He looked straight into the irises of his eyes--eyes that, when not sparkling and jovial in social exchange or l.u.s.tful and burning from carnal angels that set them ablaze, seemed, when sober, so inordinately tender. Those eyes were surely not just portals to a rather non-germinal seed of love within him; but even if they were such, and his love of women was little short of a v.a.g.i.n.al sport (to the immature dabbler that he was who failed to be a he-man and a happy hedonist), still there was more love therein than a failed marriage could prove. No, he said to himself more resolutely, these were compa.s.sionate and suffering eyes.

He pondered his effeminate sensitivity. He did not want it--he never had--but there was nothing that he could do about it. If he were to pretend to be as insouciant and aloof as so many men, this rather craven fleeing from self would be an even more egregious departure from masculine virtues. Sensitive eyes did not entirely eclipse his joy. To women sensitive, boyish eyes were alluring. This fact was proven in his having had a plethora of them even in recent years. Most importantly eyes like these, he told himself, accentuated a youthful countenance, and for any man of forty youth was the breeze that set his dog scampering.

Then he recalled that portrait of King Rama V, Chulalongkorn, hanging in the National Gallery. The depiction of his Majesty was with eyes that sponged up human suffering. "Mine are the same," he told himself; and thus his own were majestic and august even though no royal blood was puissant within the undulations of his veins.

6