An Apostate: Nawin of Thais.
by Steven Sills.
1
He a.s.sumed that in being exhausted from sporadic fits of sleep and wakeful spans of dull, hypnagogic thoughts matching the inertia of his confinement he would finally become ensconced there, in this train jostling him around, and at last fall asleep. This was his hope; but in the meantime there was a languid battle with insomnia and inordinate time that he, from his "exalted tomb," disdainfully sullied. A G.o.d watching the cookie wrappers that he was emptying into his mouth from the upper coffin glided downward like the leaves of a deciduous tree; he was remembering happier times and in this confined s.p.a.ce it was taking him to the edge of madness. It seemed to him that society lied about it all: motherhood as the continuation of playing with dolls, manhood epitomized by compet.i.tion and money, and old age the enjoyment of spending time reliving the incidents of the past. Children were not nice neat dolls to which one claimed ownership, manhood had to be more than having a heart attack from the stress of making a living and leaving all to one"s widow, and old age, if it came, had to be besieged with problems of the present, which would be less painful than recalling happy times that fleeted by and had no chance of being resumed once again. This moving world that he was in was like the 67,000 mile an hour projectile of the Earth, and he sullied it (definitely the floor of the Pullman car, but perhaps the world as a whole) with the crumbs of his fruit pastries. He just lay there with the hours like a corpse in a morgue, eating and filling dead s.p.a.ce with his crumbs. Sometimes, to occupy himself, he would continue the same game that he had pursued three hours earlier before the seat-and-window thief left his friends and crossed over, annexing his s.p.a.ce and engendering his expulsion. At that time, when he had been alone looking out of the window at the tussling shadows of trees and their counterparts, the light, on the rich verdant fields and on the rough and uneven wooden strips of the rotting platforms of the train stations of all these small towns, he had listened to sounds. Then a game of exhilaration instead of a game of the mundane, it had been an inane guesses that the particular car he was in would hit those coupled metallic b.u.mps of the rails while on this incessant trip to Nongkhai, moving faster than both the train and the Earth combined, even if the movement was a desultory caprice with all this continual shifting of itself in present and past tenses as well as its futuristic daydreams, his mind tried to slow this weltering; it invented its games of distractions, its clutter.
Numb in numb thoughts, even though he was extremely cold in the air conditioned car he did not notice it all that much with his face warm and flushed by thought, which kept trying to suck him in and flatten him in its black hole of memory--memory as of her falling from a balcony; a woman"s form, white and light--to him as beautiful as an angel--that seemed speciously able to rapture into a billowing cloud overhead. He knew that it was not merely crumbs that he was trying to sweep from this form but guilt, for numb as he was he had that much awareness lying there with head propped on a pillow. The crumbs on the blanket and the flimsy mat were merely a nominal discomfort to him, so it was not imperative to sweep away or shake off their substance; and yet to sense something else also so incongruous falling through s.p.a.ce and time seemed rea.s.suringly cognate. With the memory of that light, white American, Kimberly Debecrois--or something French--pulling away from his grasp of her hands disconcertedly, half blinded in tears but intentionally jumping, falling all those fourteen stories, and crashing through that plastic and metal canopy over the swimming pool at a.s.sumption University, he needed his rea.s.surance. To witness the sporadic dry showers of crumbs falling onto the recently mopped but still noisome floor seemed cathartic. These actions were undeniably childish, but given the fact that the train personnel had mandated the pa.s.sengers, as naughty children, onto upper and lower sleepers regardless of their will as paying customers, a marginal degree of contempt seemed judiciously appropriate. To eat and to sully was the quest of a man when caught on moving earth. He, Nawin Biadklang, ate slowly and pensively, making the condensation of crumbs and its showers less frequent than they would have been otherwise, for to consume anything was somewhat nauseating with the odor of toilets linking between cars permeating all and making all a drought.
And yet there was an even more salient stench. What he believed prior to sleep to be the fetid tennis shoes of this "sloven individual" of the lower bunk, this thief of window and seats (presumably Thai like himself although as sloven as he was, he thought, he might be Laotian), was merely the effluvium of his own damp socks hanging in a tiny net of one of the inner walls of what he labeled in his mind as his "tomb." Hanging there, these two strips of a cotton contained bits of his flayed soles from the friction of his life"s stumbled movements and were now the bacteria"s banquet; but, smelling their rot, he did not know that he and nature"s interaction with him were the source. The smell often sent him on a molecular movement b.u.mping and bouncing off the stored rubbish of his mind, so it was not entirely disagreeable. In many ways it besot him like orphic sound to a musician, or the tenebrisms of artists (Carvaggios like himself); but nonetheless he continued to project blame at the bearded anathema beneath him, and he still glanced down periodically at the floor hoping to find the putative agents of the odor, evidence to bolster his bilious conclusions, being in full denial of himself. "It"s those shoes," he thought, imagining that the sloven beneath him, this seat-and-window thief, had kicked them opaquely under the seats that were now this bottom bunk, for imagining and knowing were the fusion of random bits of the fanciful, the real, and the probable in this overall perspective of what is true, and they were most often blatantly wrong. He knew this too.
He sighed unnoticeably. He compressed his lips firmly and tried to stifle the thought of slapping the head of the fetid one with his magazine, "Revealing Babes," which lay at his side. The t.i.tle was in English but the nude women and what little writing there was within it were unequivocally Thai.
Once so t.i.tillating, a surfeit of the same fulsome images now made them numbly and insensibly bland like a familiar wife: illusory in intimacy and bewitchingly intimate in the illusion, the photographs in the magazine and the yearning engendered by them, like s.e.x itself, were as pungent to his senses as his dirty socks; but only the molecules disgorging from those socks had consistency and longevity in their impact upon him. They mildly aggravated and stimulated without having the effect of flattening in frenzy--not that the subject of the ephemeral and unreal aspects of such a frenzy would vex him, having been such a glutton himself for silky, perfumed girls whose unique scent (this hybrid of perfume and sweat ) seemed to riddle him pleasantly like tiny beads of shrapnel. Yes, he told himself, dirty socks were a more consistent, and thus a more veritable stink. Even with the prior knowledge that engaging in s.e.xual activities would soon lead him into a vacuous afterward of having to stay with such a woman, such an exhausted presence, longer than the illusion warranted, and that experiencing such an exhilarating penetration of shrapnel would soon reopen all wounds of unfulfilled hopes for true intimacy, the hound was still inexorably obsessed with defecation, and the soldier was implacably enthralled with the excitement of being shot at by his female subjects even when he knew it to be specious.
To him there was little merit in the magazine now, outside of seeing it rolled up firmly and allowing the meretricious tool to conjure plausible scenarios of itself being used as a weapon.
No, he thought, he did not seriously dislike this fetid sloven beneath him. He did not know him. He had not spoken to him, and by this time his dirty and hairy face with its certainty of being the rightful proprietor of the area of the window below-- an area obtained with the aid of officers on board the train-- was experiencing the ablution of fading memory. Still, the repellent fetidity had a familiar, fraternal theme that reminded him of his belittled, abused, and forlorn youth. The familiarity of a stink that he equated to his brothers was like going back in time, going home, and being in an antediluvian state within Jatupon (his former name and being) who was a vestige to him now as his fingernails were the vestige to claws. It was a time of being included in a group of home boys that he was excluded from and of feeling the pangs of loneliness that only prisoners of an inst.i.tution felt.
The stranger was surely amusingly human, a caricature as all were, and hardly worthy of serious fixation. Engagement with him would be jocular levity and merely that. He tried shutting the curtain that slid around his "exalted tomb" but for an obvious reason that eluded him it only increased the odor. Deciding to relax there, and to be at one with the odor that no reticent grievance locked within his mind could rectify, it became him amusingly the way the peculiar smell of defecation would at last be agreeable to the noses of hounds. For a moment his brain was free enough of the images of Kimberly falling and his wife saying, "You should have jumped and not her," but restraining herself enough to bludgeon his arm repeatedly with a frying pan instead of the original target of his face, that he was able to isolate the culprits of the odor: those socks. Suddenly rebounding from his half hour of petulance in his typical good nature, Nawin Biadklang chuckled quietly at his irascible hubris and abjured this moodiness that was part of the curse of his insomnia. The silent giddiness soon wore off with the itchiness of the skin of his broken arm under the cast. All his firing neurons once again became a cl.u.s.ter of pensive rumination.
Had all these years of being a celebrated artist of dejected Patpong wh.o.r.es gone to his head to the point where he could not remember having been as impecunious as a mendicant and poorer than the fecundity of dirt? And for the hound that he was who sniffed every one of his models, his Patpong wh.o.r.es, preceding and following his marriage to Noppawan, why, he asked himself should he object to odors? Dogs sniffed, claimed territory by the spills of their urine, and growled at each other, but which of them actually killed one of its kind? Which of them concocted plans that brought on the suicidal wishes of another, a more indirect and sophisticated form of murder, and by its disingenuousness a worse form. In a visceral objurgation, for one whose brain was being aspersed by sleep and yet could not sleep as if it were being drugged and dragged through an exit and then up to a second door that sleep could not open, he repudiated his earlier thought lackadaisically. He was guilty of nothing more than pursuing a human involvement. She had been part of his personal life, disturbing the whole, but an imbroglio as indispensable as being able to take a shower for a positive perspective of the day. No, he thought again, she sullied him or he sullied himself with her. As a pig wallowed in mud so did a man in a personal life. The physical aspect of intimacy was rapturous and easy. A man and a woman in the friction of bodies became one, but a one that was a different ent.i.ty altogether--a fire of physical ebullience and pleasure.
Had facile s.e.x not existed, he would have sought intimacy solely in feelings, a th.o.r.n.y stem to hold if there ever was one. And had it not existed intimacy would not exist at all. There would have merely been the chiseling of ideas onto hard marble brains.
He told himself that when a young woman broke free from a man"s hands, ran onto her balcony, and jumped off it, she was, in that last moment, the ultimate sovereign of her fate no differently than she had been in other aspects of her life. Kimberly might have found the environment upsetting, felt depression at the loss of a body departing from her and into Noppawan"s hands, with chemicals amuck in her body and brain, and jealousy ready to fulminate, but she was as responsible for her last claim upon herself as she was for the formation of her life-- "No," he told himself, "this is not right either." An internecine battle for a dominant perspective or a logical merger of the two variant types of ideas fought within him. How could he have saved her apart from a dismissal of his wife"s ill conceived plan to begin with? And yet how could he not be culpable? It was an insoluble dilemma that frustrated his ability to live with himself.
A being"s finality, he argued, was reproduction and death; and the factors that elongated or expedited this plan of nature could not have been in his control unless he had used some force on her, and that never happened despite what the police officers first believed. If he were indirectly responsible for manslaughter, his wife, Noppawan, was the indirect murderess.
Barren Noppawan, marrying him, this celebrated container of l.u.s.t, and having to justify his infidelities all these years in the name of art, decided that she might as well utilize the natural state of man for her own benefit rather than be forever victimized by what was beyond her capability to change. It was she who proposed that he paint Kimberly, her colleague and friend from the university. He did this; and behaving like a good boy, he feigned a professional detachment toward his study so successfully that he began to believe it himself. On canvas, distorting the French-American into an Asian half-breed and a lady of the night, he brought to his model vague Asian features and his notoriously whorish sense of dejection.
But Noppawan was as dissatisfied with this platonic aberration, if not deviance, as she had been with all earlier affairs. It was she who proposed this madness of him begetting a child.
Begotten by the father and conceived by the friend, in a valid sense the child would be a production of all three and, according to this plan of hers, hers to raise. All three would be more or less active parents with Kimberly as a visiting one.
And of course, she would be married to the biological father who made ten times what she did on a good month; his paternal role would be that of the "provider" as was the role of all fathers before him. Had they thought out a hundred ramifications to such a scenario it would have been hard to envisage any favorable outcome. But the maternal professor, wistful for that feel of a baby in her arms, scooted the gla.s.ses down toward the tip of her nose and espoused the most libertine ideas for a spouse. So obdurately fixed on a mental conceptualization of some type of truth her eyes scintillated and they, these sinners of the heart, became mesmerized believers in the idea that being free of the fetters of self restraint would be for the good of Noppawan.
Tiring further, cognizance seemed as the jammed teethed gears and wheels of a mechanical clock--it seemed so...as tired as he was everything merely seemed. In his last conscious moment as he faced the tidal wave that he hoped would claim him fully into sleep--instead of those smaller waves whose prehensile inundations formed such an ineffective grasp--he wondered if, as a wave or waves, whether their undertow led to fathoms of heretofore unknown reefs, whether sleep was formed of waves at all, and whether, as a jammed clock, it jammed so that something in the subconscious more worthy than a record of time or mere sentient essences of the present could be measured or expressed.
Ideas shifted around in his head like loose tectonic plates.
They were a phantasmagoria in a sleep deprived mind. They had little consistency apart from the inundations of wanderl.u.s.t of a nearly middle aged man on his inexplicable, cowardly journey to Laos. Sentience had its limitations; so why sleep seemed like a jammed clock for a few seconds, a wave for a few more, and then an edge of a cliff, a precipice, that intersected with the ethereal was as insoluble as why man in all this impermanence could master his fears enough to go out and forge his destiny.
Numb in his tenebrous tomb, it seemed to him that time was a man-made concept erroneously believed as fully real and tangible because of all the clocks and calendars, made to measure mortality, and things known to have already pa.s.sed away. As the religious measured the ethics of their actions by those of the characters in their scripture, so was time (its tattered relationships, its solitary and jejune rides in coffins on board trains) a fiction to mark individual and collective progress.
But then, he told himself, he was not traveling to Laos to progress but to degenerate. It was a cynical a.s.sessment posed from a lack of self awareness of what he was in fact doing - that he was wanting to revert or abscond to a more callow and ingenuous foundation inside himself: to plausibly sully his body on the ground near an ancient stupa, prop his head against its stone spiral, and stare out into clouds and distant s.p.a.ce. If in doing so he were to be perceived as another wealthy and indolent foreigner (usually German or French but not always so) suffering and despondent because of a katzenjammer from a previous night of quaffing Laos Beer, so be it. What would it matter to him?
Perception was more fleeting than even the beings who were perceiving. For the man who would lean against a stupa and unresistingly watch the worms and fire ants, more electrically charged and shocked clay no different from himself, crawl onto his body, the G.o.ds and Buddhas would obsequiously hover around in mid-air.
Sleep deprived, he was, of course, losing it. His stance on the world, that concatenated state that gave him a sense of being grounded, was now showing its disarray. The foundation that he stood upon had been but miniscule shifting bits of plates, brain recorded sensory input all along, and he was succ.u.mbing to the vacuous, timeless illogic of dreams where the cohesive bits broke off and synthesized into something less real than awakened perceptions. Sleep was this remote alter-clock, this remote function of the brain deemed as less real and less cognizant than the other but that was in fact more cognizant within its fiction. This thing that he called himself, liquidated or became a gas that shot through a circuit causing him to fall into some type of a quasi-sleep.
He who was named "Jatupon" on his birth certificate, he whose fetid brothers had called "p.o.r.n," --those brothers who in his early years had often made him terrified to move by swinging, striking, and brandishing their sticks; he who was never called a profane name from the shaking taciturn angel who silently recognized that he could not leave his wife for her, he whose wife called him "You p.r.i.c.k!" on overcoming the shock about what had happened to her friend, was and was not in sleep.
His dream silence, which was even more asphyxiating than the carbon exhaust fumes permeating the heavy traffic that moved in slow increments down the street was a fog that was embedded in all living things and all moved through it. An elderly woman was walking alone near some type of a hybrid of Sukhumvit and Silom roads. Sensing that she was being observed, she paused between a salesman"s ice chest of coconuts and bottled water and a woman stringing together jasmine rosaries from a small table. Looking around the sidewalk in both directions, she did not sense anything unusual; so dismissing her earlier thought and questioning her ability to a.s.sess situations accurately, she trembled at senility"s brief chafing and purchased a yellow rosary which she then stuffed into her purse. The rationale behind the purchase had been to arrest fleeing sanity and, if anyone had witnessed this early, disconcerted behavior, to have that moment of senility"s waning be expunged from human minds.
Her intentionally looking aplomb into the rosary saleswoman"s petrous countenance as she paid the money to her was a feigned attempt to project composure and went unnoticed. Indifferent in perfunctory movements, taking money and threading her flowers, the saleswoman was as pachydermatous and robotic as the old woman and everyone else was. Telling herself that the only means to forfend senility was to be actively engaged in mental diversions, she nonetheless sought any diversion that she could, to ignore, if not discomfit, this paranoid erosion of sanity.
She went into Watson"s Beauty and Health Care Store while trying to ignore this feeling that something was walking behind her, following the brackish, permed scent of that head of hair, as if an ocean of harmony lay within it.
Something slightly tangible; something partially impalpable with some of the thought, feeling and memory of this thing called Nawin was indeed following the luminary whom he thought of as "grandmother", as if she were the setting sun. He halted and waited for her to come out--she who had as swarthy a complexion as he had with features so resembling his own, but with the particular habit of sliding her gla.s.ses down her nose like his wife, and examining buildings of an uncertain destination pedantically.
When she came out with her bag of goods she faced a gigantic television screen of video animated advertis.e.m.e.nts on the wall of a building across the street that flashed "You p.r.i.c.k,"
"Murdering philanderer," "You son of a b.i.t.c.h," and "p.o.r.n, your brothers are watching your a.s.s" at the bottom of the screen.
Nawin"s life--his myriad faces of lost forlornness, the hes of many ages--was the background to advertis.e.m.e.nts about soap, beer, condoms, and cars. Repulsed by the foul language, she was transfixed by it nonetheless, until feeling the acidic rain that fell through polluted skies and the putrid city fall onto her skin. Opening an umbrella against the rain, she noticed that there really was a faint translucent man watching her. She grimaced at what she interpreted as a glowering figure and quickened her pace to escape him. Pa.s.sing California Fitness, 7 Eleven, Robinson Department store, and a Haagen-Dazs ice cream parlor, she paused briefly at the Temple of the Descending Sun (Wat Kham) to pull up the umbrella that was briefly turned inside-out from a strong gust. Then she continued to quickly walk away. He stood there watching the shrinking form.
"Grandmother," he thought, "Where are you going?" He tried to get the words out but all was mute including himself. He felt a sense of consternation to see her fleeing from him. He thought, "Why on Earth are you running from me now--why are you not making it up to me now;" but he had not brought her into existence and thus she was not his to possess. Whatever brought him into existence, he thought, was the sole claimant. Still there was a fusion of a being in love and this "grandmother"
who was diminishing beyond the una.s.sisted eye to register.
Ambivalent between the emotional response of running after her, a sacrilege against the G.o.ds, and a logical response, a blaspheme against this positive mixing called love that was the only sense in being on this planet in its forever of affable and lethal a.s.sociations, he just cried internally, silently.
Hesitant in a life clogged in these conflicts that engendered ambivalent waffling and wallowing in futile rumination, he let her pa.s.s away. Immobile because of a cold rush of dread, he let the filthy acidic rain sully his head the way his thoughts were sullied in desperation.
Ruminating, he thought about how each year for his birthday she had fixed her American born, but not raised, angel food cake burnished in icing, and brought him to fairs to shoot the moving plastic ducks. Once she had taken him all the way to Bangkok for no other purpose than to allow him to see the sedentary reptiles there. He would often crawl through the window of her porch where shelves were cluttered in Avon bottles shaped in animal figurines, and when she saw him she would just chasten him mildly with, "You, yo-yo, get out of there. What are you thinking?" When he crawled onto her lap he felt the rugged velvety silkiness of her legs in panty hose and he would stroke them.
How cold her home was in summers with that air conditioner in the window of the living room on early into early morning chilling the house like an American winter, and he would snuggle deep under a saffron monk-colored blanket that was as stiff as it had been starched and ironed. Within that room where he would sleep there was a picture in black and white showing her in thick gla.s.ses with pointed silver rims on the frame and a long dress as she held him in a fulfilled and satisfied sense of pleasure. The image of the two of them--he a tiny child, but both of them children lost in time--was just a weathering photograph, a jaundicing pallid image lost forever, as a web page with an address that was indefeasibly and indelibly forgotten by all in time"s thicket of images. It was one sentimental but insignificant moment lost in the compiling images of time--And here she was again, the one who had absconded away from them at their parents deaths in a Bangkok- to-Ayutthaya automobile accident, walking away from him hurriedly and as she did so pa.s.sing the Temple of the Descending Sun.
"How foolish you are. Grandmother. And a rich grandmother at that, living in an air conditioned house instead of a broiling shack on stilts in the sylvan area of Ayutthaya. "Not yours, buddy; not yours," said a gecko that was crawling around his tomb within the train. "What?" asked Nawin, whining ingenuously. "The only panty hose that you have ever stroked are the ones you take off as a precursor to your copulatory sports." The gecko stuck out its tongue. "Brackish succulent skin of an edible silky velvet are always the way one likes it as long as they are young with tender meat and best of all, all vanillaly caucasian as an angel--and then the sand paper tongue strokes inside and out to get its salties and sugars. Young succulent skin whose scents, especially in their far from flowery holes, make silly male creatures repeat the delusion of intimacy time and time again like their fathers, grandfathers, and so on--young succulent skin as a varied brunch and dinner delicacy." The gecko released a dry acrimonious chuckle.
"Speaking of eats, have you seen any mosquitoes in this smelly train?" "No," said Nawin. "Not a one." "What a pity,"
said the miniature, khaki colored lizard of the Chakri dynasty.
The gecko glowered at Nawin with appet.i.te and fixed interest as if he were an esculent appetize--the gecko crawling on the railing of the BTS Skytrain station looking down at the small womanly morsels and traffic below and amorous Nawin doing the same but as he glanced up dizzyingly at the facade of the colossal Intercontinental Hotel with its eerie pale-blue light diffused throughout, he felt like he was falling into a deep- blue eternal s.p.a.ce. His soul, this odd inexplicable word that may or may not have a physical counterpart beyond the letters of the word, was falling into this alien, colossal structure with its lambent bluish light.
Then the edible Nawin woke, instantly realizing that his grandparents had died long before he was born and that here he was, just a few hours from turning forty himself (he was going to consider himself 39 for as long as he could), arm broken, relationship with a wife broken, and girlfriend deceased most horrifically, cowering from his sullied personal life on an upper sleeper of a Pullman car in a train bound for Nongkai and nowhere. He realized that he who had gained his acclaim as a painter of Patpong prost.i.tutes, and had burgeoned from poverty by his dismal themes and color, was all dried up in themes now.
Creativity and life were, for him, veritably exhausted. Was this the middle life crisis that was so ubiquitous to man? He did not know.
"Hey guy! Sawadee khrap [h.e.l.lo]," he said with face lowered toward the bunk beneath him. He wanted diversion from any stranger who could plant him outside his own thoughts.
The stranger chortled at the face hanging upside down before him. "What?" he asked.
"Why are you upside down?" asked Nawin innocently.
"I am, am I? Khrap, khrap [yes, yes], I guess so that you would ask me why I am upside down."
Nawin smiled widely. "Are you going to Vientiane?"
"Yes."
"To do what?"
"Partying there. You?"
"Sure, partying with you."
"Might as well have an early one then." The stranger raised a beer up to Nawin who put it in his hands and gave the prayerful gesture of the "wai" even though it was upside down. "How long can you hang that way?"
"Don"t know," said Nawin.
"Don"t try drinking it that way. I don"t want you to dribble on me."
"Yes, of course, khorpkhun khrap [thank you]. Are those guys you were sitting next to earlier going to the party too?"
"Of course. Guests of honor, you know. They have overcome servitude in the j.a.panese owned/Thai co-signed sweatshops.
Independence, you know. They will be facing starvation in Laos shortly. Early death is like being a marathon winner, don"t you think? Guys who starve to death are the true winners because they get to the finish line first. Yes, a party for losing jobs and visas. Games too. My favorite is who will be the first one to dunk his head the longest in sunk drunkenness. And yet I am also partial to another game: which of life"s losers will join the high ranks of the monks for a bite to eat and which ones will marry their sisters."