Uncertain if it were at all permissible to light up a cigarette anywhere in the train, if he would be reproached and fined if he were to do so in this particular area that he was in, or if he even wanted to smoke at all, he floundered ambivalently before dropping the subject altogether. Still needing to have something to do, he re-combed the breadth of his unwashed hair and beyond that continued to stand aimlessly, inadvertently smelling the effluvium from his shirt which in the s.p.a.ce of twenty hours had become its own unflushed toilet. Then there was a sudden need to defer to larger movements of the moment so he backed against a wall near a sink in the corridor to get out of the way of the officer who was now officiating over two large bundles of wadded linen that he was dragging toward a container near Nawin"s feet.
He certainly could have easily felt better just being there with awakening, groping creatures of movement like himself and would have begun to do so in this moment of proximity to the train officer except for an unsettling feeling that was a precursor to the siege of memory. Being in this darkened aisle, he felt as if he were once again the adumbrated boy whom he once was. It was as if he were that being who was scared to advance beyond the back corridor leading to and from he and his brother"s room at his parents home, for fear that his presence would be despised by all. He snickered at these craven impulses for a few seconds but this coa.r.s.e and bitter fire of laughter quickly incinerated what was jocular within it. It occurred to him that the boy"s perennial sadness had so fully overcome him that it was as if what he had been experiencing were nothing other than an attempted coup. Jatupon"s thoughts had briefly usurped his mind; and even in repugning the advances and regaining this mental kingdom from the boy he was certain that Jatupon was probably still there hidden behind a hill of gray matter, wounded but waiting for an opportune moment to initiate a new attack. As he was forty now it was rather obvious that these insurrections would be ongoing throughout the entirety of his life, that the insurgent named Jatupon, whose suppressed, raw, mauled emotions and thought were as intransigent as his own will within these skirmishes, would attempt to control critical sectors and regions of his mind at unsuspecting moments, and that behind the scenes he would attempt to influence and discomfit key decisions in the mind.
When the officer was gone, he remained stationary for a few moments longer to allow, or ostensibly allow, the free pa.s.sage of the toilet goer who was returning back to the car, and then for a gla.s.s bottle of Gatorade as empty and hollow as he was to roll quickly past the toes of his bare feet. More significantly, however, he stood there leaning against the sink to feel something solid beneath him as the train was seeming more and more like a jet in turbulence as if, for a social creature dwelling in the waves of his stagnant body of thoughts concerning his social relationships, there really were any turbulence beyond that which was there in one"s own mind.
Throughout the minutes of waiting in the aisle it seemed to him that conversation was becoming as imperative as air to breathe.
He needed the vibrating air of speech to interpose between his thoughts so as to stabilize a ruminating spiral into self- destructive, non-sensical darkness where there was a risk of losing all that was tangible in himself.
Like with most strangers, in both of these brief encounters with the linen officiator and the toilet goer he had respectively greeted and smiled at each of these individuals at the moments of seeing them with a sawadee khrap and a gracious nod of the head in place of the wai. As a result of being high, the expressions that he had exhibited then were exaggerated and ludicrous and generated little reaction but eyes attempting to avert him. They had given him reciprocal greetings but they had been begrudging utterances of asperity and dismissal. Thinking of this now, his smile deadened to a bland and withdrawn expression as strangers, these treasure chests in which conversation could unlock knowledge and spontaneity, seemed empty and exhausted resources. It was not only true of these two men but of those he saw at a distance now awakening in the car before him (some who were seated lengthwise or dangling their feet from upper or lower bunks): they were all diminishing steadily to remote and alien presences.
Standing there as he was, for a moment he had to hold onto the sink for the physical world seemed to be turning into a gas. For a few seconds he imagined geckos flying low in an air born mist moving like low-flying, prey-seeking pelicans and then, as they receded from him, like squirrels hopping over the caps of the waves of a river as furrowed mounds of the dirt of a field. As the mist thickened into fog, they became less and less visible.
The only thing that was salient was the immediate past impaled by feelings of regret and futility for that which could not be erased and redone. There was just the immediate past which could not be consumed, altered, or forgotten. Recalling it and reliving it again boosted his stress. It was as if he were there at the Italian restaurant with Kimberly and his wife. It was as if he were once again foolishly, gullibly, and jubilantly agreeing within the surreal flickering candlelight of the table to father Kimberly"s child and this agreement was being done not only with the hope of releasing pent up s.e.xual energy for this foreign woman who had been part of his moral code of unapproachables (concocted morality the equivalent of timidity and hardly a virtue at all) but also to have something from a life that was so unremarkable and indistinct when lost within a middle aged fog. Every man by getting married divorced himself from his parents, but it was only in having a son and making his link to the concatenated continuum of life that manhood was obtained; and whether or not his parents were alive, spirits, or nothingness beyond loose elements, a man had to commune with them and declare his manhood in this way. This is what he had done, more or less, in marrying sterile Noppawan, and completing fifteen years belatedly with Noppawan and Kimberly; and yet he could think of no battleground more deleterious than family.
When he was a boy, had the Burmese been at war with the Siamese, like the elephant wars of yesteryear, he would have enlisted as a soldier, for to be impaled with metal blades was less of a travail than to be impaled with mental ones, these spoken words; but ironically here he was now in his own sad concoction of family as one diminishing plume of smoke begot another.
And there on hardened benches or pews with the dust of the open windows smiting their eyes were these laborers in something slightly more opulent than cattle cars. If they preferred to be in this air conditioned car that he was in with its padded seats which had folded out into sleepers the previous night, he, the laborer that he had been born as, would almost have been inclined to go in there and stay with them. And as giddy and light-headed as he was from that which he had smoked, he was tempted even further to go into the tenth car to randomly ask sundry individuals for invitations to one of their family reunions but that within him which retained logic and a sense of the socially acceptable and plausible was only moved to laugh until his body jiggled like Jell-O at the absurdities that ran through the human mind.
Shivering and immobile as he was in the "refrigerated car," he thought of himself as a half dead carca.s.s with s.e.xual energy and desire having been recently depleted in a bizarre, depraved masturbatory experience that had confounded him for being contingent on oogling and grazing over an imaginary version of the Laotian in his head, and regrets about Kimberly having churned and re-churned his thoughts into a liquidated ma.s.s. It seemed to him that he was as bereft of viscous thoughts sticking to the surface of the brain as his own readable perceptions of life. He told himself that he just wanted to return to his bunk, cover himself up, and return to sleep. His brain was on a descent from its high, but it seemed to him that even if he were to land gracefully in a field of his choosing he would be whipped around in the winds of this world regardless of what he were to do. Unless he were to return to the landing strip of family his whole life would be for nothing and yet that landing strip was on gaseous Jupiter and the strip was ethereal and waving as though a gas were being pumped into it from underneath.
He knew that even if he had a telephone, all his attempts to reach his wife would be futile. There would be the same perennial ringing in his ears as when he was at the hospital broken at her hand, in the driveway locked out of his own home, in the hotel room womanless, alone, forlorn, lost, and directionless, half hoping to become a nice couple"s foundling at the train station. If he were to borrow a telephone and call her now it would be wasted, unrecorded effort at making contact as a scream in s.p.a.ce reverberating forever through and for nothing; and yet he was reaching a hand into an empty pocket nonetheless, as if his mobile phone had not been thrown into the trash barrel at the train station. He was subconsciously bending his fingers as if they were clasping the Nokia 3660, and he was tapping imaginary numbers into his palm. Then he recalled the plausible which deflated hope and imagination to earthly things.
He noted the possibility of never seeing her again. It occurred to him how the plausible and real were part of his daydreams.
Even in them he could not shirk reality where calls to her would be as calls to the Nirvana that was Kimberly.
For a moment he felt that same intense nosocomial sadness and regret which had caused him to cry in front of a nurse a few days earlier. If she had judged him, it had been a judgment of tenderness; but for him the emasculate act of visceral mourning over Kimberly"s death in front of this stranger had been so mortifying that it was worse than spilling the content of one"s curved, plastic urinal onto the bed sheets. Thinking of it now, he decided that if ever again overtaken by the tragedies of this world, slitting his throat would be the only act of self- decency. That did not mean, however, that he expected suicide to be his eminent end any time soon for it seemed to him that he could make a distinction between the negative occurrences surrounding a life from life itself, and that two people, for whatever comity that they displayed in love, were volatile wills like tremors of changeable landscapes in which the suspension bridge of a relationship was tied. Sometimes things just fell apart.
Standing there in this back corridor that was permeated by the dulcet stench of the toilet, he spent a few moments breathing in and out as deeply as he could in his own dabbling of lay yoga.
It was as though he were a vacuum cleaner in reverse regurgitating from his bag the filth of this world. Then he told himself that Kimberly"s post-partum depression and her swift leap into the elements had not been his fault (fault not having yet been officially determined by Bangkok police officers who, in this ambiguous situation, were perhaps as circ.u.mspect, finicky, and slow to move as squatting, urinating b.i.t.c.hes in Lumphini Park, enamored and distracted by some such b.i.t.c.hes, or preoccupied with matters involving the location and use of drug pushers for target practice). He was not one who could divine evil events but merely a partic.i.p.ant banging and being banged as one of life"s billiard b.a.l.l.s. In a further attempt to calm himself he rationalized in an a.n.a.logy apposite to an artist that any ostensible relationship might appear as a fusion of color in all this mixing, but the color could recede and when it did there were just two individuals staring at each other in black and white from distant corners. All relationships receded in a world of impermanence, said the atheist bombastic to himself most piously.
He told himself that it was true that the present moment was the motion and commotion now registered to the senses with the past gone and the future not yet nascent. Then he told himself that although yesterday under logical scrutiny seemed the epitome of archaic and antiquated happenings and had no baring on the present, it propped up today the way the distant past depending on family background was a solid or unstable foundation that was the pedestal for yesterday. Then he concluded that although the past was unreal, it const.i.tuted the present and could never be repudiated successfully. And as for regrets, any sentient being had regrets over negative, advent.i.tious happenings. Still, to expend one"s rational powers trying to expunge the negative happenings of this life with intangible thought seemed the most absurd act of futility.
Now relaxed in an objective distancing of himself from prevailing emotions, he conceived an idea for a painting which he did not care to ponder. It was one which, even with the right artist, would not work well as a series, let alone as one image and yet there it was projected onto the canvas of his mind as if he were destined for it. It was story and images in which a h.o.a.ry man with the appearance of the train officer was moving as one urban speck in a peripatetic herd of pedestrians when for a second his phlegmatic demeanor identical to those around him was altered by a spontaneous surge of despair, a feeling which in turn caused thought about the meaning of his life to imbue and pulsate from his face. Needing or desperately thinking himself to need the continuum of former friends, he grabbed his cellular telephone from his briefcase and called one, only to find that the man was now a stranger who was distorted in age and mental outlook from that which he remembered. Then he attempted to emulate his earlier stoicism but he kept seeing shadows of the form of his deceased wife stretching out as shadows in front of store windows. Abjuring the idea of dialing the telephone number of their former home together, he did it nonetheless as if there were a chance that she would answer and tell him that her staged death had been a practical joke. Hearing an automated voice telling him of a disconnected number, he cowered into the crowd and seemed to wither there. He envisaged this as if it could be transcribed into art and as if he, a retired has-been who had merely reproduced wh.o.r.es and slight thematic variations of them, were the right one to depict it.
As this was not a given second but a series of changes in a few minutes of a man"s life, he soon saw these scenes in a chain of diminutive beads. Every other bead would reflect the present dilemma and alternate beads would portray a significant person in his life. The significant others would be mirrors and a light source that would give some visibility to a huge diaphanous face of the man that the entire chain outlined. He was, after all, a reflection of those whom he was trying to desperately contact and it seemed to him that they should make up every other monad and that their eyes would be attempting to look at the entirety of a face that they would never be able to see fully. As it would be an anecdotal work on a large canvas, each scene, each bead of this outline of the man"s face, would be a punctilious and time consuming feat to render. He did not have a clue whether the motif was incandescent or prosaic and insipid. The only thing that he believed with some certainty was that if the painting was worth doing he was not the man to implement his ideas. For in comparison to a Caravaggio, a t.i.tian, a Michelangelo, or a Da Vinci, he knew that his talents were the top of the bottom tier of dilettantes, and even a knowledge that he was able to render his own mediocrity with the splendor of originality was not helpful. The thought of his mediocrity was asphyxiating to him and he again pondered that he was merely a prost.i.tute painter, a fetid and odious "n.o.body" within the demarcated self of a Nawin Biadklang that he could never transcend. He fretted about his place in the world as if the ma.s.ses of men ever found a voice within themselves, as if his earlier paintings, which were still being collected, valued, and traded, had vanquished with him off the artistic scene, and as if his brief inclusion in an article about contemporary Asian art in Newsweek had meant nothing at all.
The train officer clanged each of the metallic ladders with the handle of a b.u.t.ter knife while repeating, "Nongkai in one hour.
Breakfasts for those who ordered them." Then he began to pull down linen, shoving tenebrous tombs back into their embankments, and readjusting bottom bunks. Nawin relinquished the idea of returning to his seat anytime soon and sat down on a box of clean linen where he contemplated the article. He recalled: "Nawin Biadklang"s paintings are almost like a hybrid of Montien Boonma"s Buddhist sculpture with an amateur painter"s penchant for easily obtained nude models in Bangkok"s red light district.
Biadklang"s talents at present are clearly dwarfed when compared to his predecessor, the most important Thai artist of international significance; but then youth is often seedy and so are his works, studies of prost.i.tutes that make up his oeuvre.
The combination is a somewhat refreshing exhibition that succeeds as a study of the oppressed and the human condition."
It was a pa.s.sage that he knew by heart and yet one where the writer"s meaning still eluded him.
Then without meaning to do so, the self was eclipsed and he was asleep in a nap with its expeditious transit into a percolating sea of images. He was deluged in raw feelings, the construction material of thought, which the movement of those images brought down upon him. Within one series of loosely concatenated images, one dream, he (he or something similar as one part of himself seemed to be an audience of one watching the Nawin debacle from an objective distance) was in his mother"s car driving to her home. They were returning from a cemetery in which they had failed to commune with even the positive memories of the deceased. They were inadvertently deviating into that distant, solitary region of themselves where negative and defunct memories continually reverberated against bluffs of the mind as faint, unresponsive echoes. The short journey to her home seemed long and dull and thirty miles into it they both felt ill. She asked him to stop the car so they bought some fast food and turned into a parking lot along the Mississippi River. There they began to eat while looking out onto the sodden waters under darkening skies. There was a flock of pelicans flying overhead, and geckos trying to elude the birds by floating on top of the mist.
"Look over there," she pointed. "They must be making their nests under the bridge."
"What is?"
"What is?," she mocked. "The pelicans!"
He looked. "I don"t to see any of them making a nest," he murmured.
"Well, maybe I need to take you to get some new gla.s.ses."
"No, that"s all right," he said. He tried to look again but this time he was distracted by an eerie roll of thunder which sounded like the ambulatory movements on creaking floor boards of the residents of an upper apartment heard from one story below.
"To the left, under the bridge. Can"t you see?"
"Oh, I see them now. I bet so," he lied blandly. "A lot of them seem to be cl.u.s.tered over there, don"t they?"
"It"s got to be nests," she said as she rolled down her window to gain fuller clarity. Sitting in there with his mother, it occurred to him that their relationship was merely a spoken list of advent.i.tious occurrences recorded by the other"s senses. On this day, it was ornamental designs engraved on tombstones, xanthic blooms of Magnolia trees, the flight of birds observed from the car, and now nests under a bridge. Yesterday it had been the number of buds on her rose tree, the clothes he had not brought with him and needed to purchase at Wal-Mart, sheets and pillow cases that she needed to buy there, gra.s.s that needed to be mowed, food that they wanted to eat, a bathroom that needed to be cleaned, and other incidentals that they happened to relay to each other. As such, there was nothing personal in it at all.
Still, she had nurtured him when he was young. She had been the one who had fed and clothed him, made him soup and gave him a wet washcloth for his hot forehead when he was sick, had him get out of thunder storms, told him to never walk across the street unless in consort with the ma.s.ses and only at green pedestrian lights or when incoming traffic was stalled at red lights, and given him a sundry of unrecalled, commonplace items that forged the early bonds of affection. Even though she was not interested in him now, she was his mother, and he wanted to at least feign an interest in her, for feigning often became believing if acted persuasively enough. Thais thought that altruism was the impetus of parental love, the purest of love, and he told himself that regardless of the veracity of the claim he should go on thinking it was true for if he were to cease believing in its goodness, all other forms of love would be instantly rendered as mendacious counterfeits. Also, the superficial evidence of words and facial expressions often belied the inner feelings and sensitivities that might be active within these guarded human creatures. He always felt her disapproval of him even in the most favorable situations, but with the intangible and often erroneous nature of feelings, how would he know that it was not his own imagination? Furthermore, how could he on any day, let alone a day of returning from a cemetery, look into her haggard countenance and pa.s.s judgment on her as unloving? If shopping, meticulous housekeeping, gardening, and commentary on nature were her only subjects of concern and her only crimes, it seemed to him that they were rather innocuous ones. If she fortified herself by clogging her mind with these activities it seemed to him that the impalpable self needed them for definition and that human beings had to clog the s.p.a.ce of their brains with at least some nugatory issues in order to have any degree of sentience.
And yet, in her curtailed life, which was so fortified by the distractions of the plants she grew, domestic ch.o.r.es that needed to be performed, and diurnal trips to and from Wal-Mart, he knew that she immured herself from self-reflection. She, an active defiler, had to know the stench of her former family and yet it always seemed to him that she pretended the rot and her role within it did not exist. And more importantly, the absence of a mutually agreed past left them bereft of a present, rendering talk on the most trivial matters arduous if not ineffable.
Silence overtook them until at last he concocted something to say. "You know, birds like that quickly abandon their newborn.
They have so many of them that they can leave their survival to chance."
"What do you mean by that?" she asked pugnaciously, as if comments on the maternity of birds were an oblique critique of her role as a mother. Then, sensing the absurdity of the a.s.sociation, she tried to modify his perception of her. "I mean you don"t know anything about pelicans, do you?"
"Just an article which I looked at before we left the house." He lied. He had not read anything. It was just that he did not know what to say to this human being who was reliving a former role as a maternal autocrat, a mother whom he had outgrown long ago.
This had been his lie, his benign artifice, to connect with her somehow, although the benign contained its own acerbity.
"You always did like to read."
"Yes," he smiled.
"Books and paint but rarely doing any work. That"s the way it has always been with you, hasn"t it?"
"I am a famous artist now. I make more money than--"
"You are n.o.body. You are no better than the rest of us."
"No I"m not," he admitted and pressed his lips together into a contrived smile that hid his teeth. For a moment he was reticent to say anything at all, but fearing a worsening imbroglio if he continued his silence he asked, "You"ve never seen pelicans here?"
"No. I said that before. I don"t remember even hearing of them in this area. They are normally from warmer places. Florida, the newspaper says. I guess all of them came out here from that area."
"With a road map and a desire to see the Midwest for their holidays," he added facetiously. It was an utterance meant to make their relationship congeal in levity and friendliness but he immediately sensed the sarcastic nuance within it and that he was as much stating his own displeasure at seeing her once again. He knew that he was making things worse. "Maybe they"ve been in the delta all along but migrate up the Mississippi River during abnormally warm springs."
"Whatever!" she responded biliously. They were silent for they were perplexed as to what they should say to each other so the woman and the middle-aged son whom she was ashamed of (at least the taciturn disposition, pressed lips. and sunken eyes seemed to be a suppressed animadversion of a being whom she wished that she did not despise) wondered about the ramifications of saying nothing at all.
"I wish that your father were here to see this with me," she said. Unmarried and living away, he was failure personified so why would she want to be seated inches away from him? Maybe she thought that he should never have come home. Maybe she thought that he should have run away before having his first wet dream at the age of twelve thereby allowing her, even decades later, to frantically hope for the well-being and return of that perennially missing child of her imagination. Even worse, he wondered, maybe she preferred for him to be dead instead; and yet he did not know those as her thoughts or how to know much of anything really.
This was their respite after seeing the marble stones that indicated where his brother, Kazem, and his father lay, but now he was as bereft of words as he had been then and he was straggling tortuously in his head the way he had wandered with a numb and aimless gait around the tombstones. He had returned from Thailand to restore a relationship and more importantly to once again be with his mother and hear her call his name and yet for this earnest effort how could he speak with her earnestly?
How could he say that he was glad that at least some of his torturers were buried underground, or admit that his best thought toward the devil who was his father was that he should rest in peace. He could only nibble his hamburger, slurp his chocolate shake, offer to share some of his onion rings with her, his stout mother, which she finally did take, and remember, as no lobotomy or other expurgation of specific memories was yet in existence. Visiting a cemetery for a man was supposed to engender lachrymose thought rather than tears and vented memories tenderly spoken; but for him whose life was an aberration, it had merely evoked minced silence. And this, his silence at the cemetery, which had flagellated her with the unalterable past, now made him repugnant to her.
At last something good, the mellifluous and the true, began to trickle from his brain and pour in with the saliva of his mouth.
"I"m here. I know it has been five years--you needing to help raise your grandchildren or whatever required your attention during this time--grandkids or not, it doesn"t matter... I"m not blaming you--but finally you relented and we"re here together, and I am glad...glad to be here with you." It was there, a harnessed wisp of liquidated air in his mouth, but as he believed that she would only despise him were he to release the words he replaced sentiment with the mundane, as strange as it was. "Did the newspaper explain the geckos? Their migration here seems odder yet. The fact that they float up there eating bits of the sky seems odder than any pelicans migrating this far north."
She got out of the car and went to them, her birds, as nearly as she could approach them at the edge of the river, that body of water that was distended in fish and sewage and barely able to move like a fat man after gormandizing at a buffet. When she returned she had him change positions, took over the driver"s seat, started the car, and they drove away. By this time the air was thundering with such a noise of pelicans that they could no longer hear the creaking of the air under the weight of the geckos.
"I don"t understand your hurry to get back"