"What would you want one to do?"
"Right now not so much," he said as he bit into the stiff and the sweet, "as I haven"t been doing anything really. But I"ll paint again. There will be phone calls from galleries, bids that need to be recorded, negotiating prices so everyone makes some profit, messages from students if I give cla.s.ses--but the only thing is that getting a visa for that might be difficult." An umbrella salesman came by. "Yes, two," said Nawin.
"One is enough."
"What is your name?"
"p.o.r.n."
"You have a beautiful smile," he said right before feeling his pockets in a rather desparate floundering. "Oh no," he said, "I think I left my wallet in the hotel. I need to go back."
"I"ll go with you."
"Okay," he said and they ran hand in hand in the downpour. And when they were in the room at the Paris-Laotian Hotel they removed each other"s wet clothes, he kissing those lips that had fostered such smiles and their bodies coupled in comfort and unified motion--
The daydream had come over him like the flash of Garuda pa.s.sing, leaving him here with this Laotian male. Overall he did not want to speak with him. He did not want to be sociable for the sake of being nice with those who were envisaging some use for him.
Human ent.i.ties by their own solipsistic notions, tried to come in, take up root, to fill the s.p.a.ce within others brains and grow within the fertile soil of money; and yet they existed in the world too, they were sentenced to this earthly prison the same as he, they too sought meaning and hope in others when there was nothing else to gain personal meaning from, and it was not as if he were pressed for time and was unable to socialize because of some great task that awaited his attention. Was it such an imposition to provide a bit solace to others ever so minutely in human discourse even though the need for money drooled out of their eyes more than even their mouths as was the case with this one?
34
The G.o.ds had been misers and humidity like an over-packed storehouse continued to overflow onto the mortals of the deep-- at least so the atheistic artist envisaged it for his own amus.e.m.e.nt while wondering why one had to personify abstraction to be amused. He ignored the answer seated next to him, the answer that this was all there was, that no idea could be personable, that being smiled upon incredulously was better than being banished in his brain. He looked up at a few dark clouds that seemed to shove out of the amalgamated unit to hover as separate ent.i.ties beneath the ma.s.s. There was for him amity to be found in the effectual independence of this part of the sky that sought its own distinction. Within it there was a reflection of his own earlier struggles to extricate himself from poverty, conformity, and obscurity as if the cessation of all three would bring unto him happiness, whatever that was.
Colors as vivid as those of the first crayon marks in boyhood had trans.m.u.ted his black and white existence by allowing his transcendence into imagination; happiness was merely a contrast to the misery that preceded it. It was the type of pleasure gained at being saved from a near drowning, and in his case it was, in his ineffable sense of loss while wandering like a mute in foreign lands, a respite, which would make drifting, befriending clouds, and the wordless discourse of being raped in male sport, the only bearable intimacies.
At the jerk of his arm to avoid a persistent fly that seemed to want to go into a crevice of his cast sharp pain flared through his arm, and the whole of his right torso. He tried to suppress the pain to retain a phlegmatic countenance before the Laotian and he tried to suppress too, the misogynist thoughts that came upon him when reminded that his brokenness had come about because of women. In trying to separate himself from the brute impulses which were his protective aversion to pain, he realized that logic alone could not cull such feelings completely for despite his intention, women were already becoming for him an equal source of derision as men and, as they were women, surpa.s.sing them.
"What are the chances of meeting like this?" asked the Laotian as smoke propelled by a gust of wind came upon them in a gaseous fog. It was smoke from chicken and pork grilled at the hands of a sidewalk restaurant worker who, stiff and decrepit as the monument itself and a reminder, prescient and otherwise, of the type of man Nawin might have been had opportunity and success not come upon him (and the Jatupon he would one day be if only in thought within the last moments of his life), stood at the other side of the arched entry. It was smoke that he imagined to one day be his own cremated smell as if living in a city, the most advanced odorless furnaces in a temple would not be available at his expiration--smoke that should have been of Kimberly"s cremation according to her wishes had her parents not ordered the encoffining and refrigeration of her remains on a flight to Orleans--smoke of his mind.
The whole insoluble subject of human relations was baffling to him. Pursued as extensive involvements, these joint, often waning shadows of mutable beings mystified and overwhelmed him.
Pursued as shallow engagements in small talk with strangers, concepts, at least for now, eluded him as he tried unsuccessfully to exhume words from his mind to talk with someone whom he had no inclination to know. Nawin shrugged his shoulders.
"One in a billion," said the Laotian answering his own question.
"Is that a fact?" asked Nawin diffidently for even those limited words had to be found and forcefully educed from him and as such they fell upon each other in a stutter.
"Yes, one in a billion."
"One in a billion, okay," said Nawin and the Laotian laughed.
"You act like you"ve just seen light after being pulled out of a box."
"I"ve been alone a lot in recent days."
"Why?"
"I don"t know. I need to get away from people."
"Maybe you just need to get away from the old people."
"Maybe. Anyhow..."
"Anyhow, one in a billion."
Nawin laughed. "If you want to see it that way: manipulation of all natural forces to ensure our reunion." He spoke flippantly with a smile. Arrogant and jocular, his was more than contempt of the concept of pre-destiny in relationships, it was also derision for the human vulnerabilities of needing companionship altogether as though he were beyond it. But he too was born of the herd. He, even more than most, had to climb onto the backs of laborers to get his physical needs taken care of so as to have the leisure to see ethereal beauty. Why, he chastised himself, was he trying to repel human contact? Such behavior, he thought, was as unnatural as was the proclamation of a self- declared retirement in a still robust and virile being.
Society equated the worth of a man with doing and most specifically involvement in the generation of a commercial product for what other purpose did man have on the planet than to work toward making the world a more comfortable place? He remembered Noppawan"s initial reaction to his retirement. It had been favorable enough for to her. It meant a cessation of these perennial sessions with nude models. And yet with the days, weeks, months, and years of Buddhist melting in which he wandered back from a park or stadium for dinner or more frequently walked around his acreage and sat in lawn chairs to dispense with the hours, often without a book in his hands, what could be said to him? He was reticent for not having any terrestrial concerns to impart and so he was a c.o.c.kroach on her plate, an ant in her salt shaker. He remained such except in fulfilling what she importuned from him most: studding her friend, Kimberly, so that the three might have a baby.
Surely his success had not been her only motivation for marrying him. When in adolescence that which was barely alive in him fell into her life, onto her shoulders, she closed him in her arms at that freakish friendship hall, the anatomical museum at Siriaj Hospital, and years later at their marriage, the girlish pathos for a troubled friend was within her still. However, as even more time went by so her life became inextricable with her sense of his success and it could not be any more comfortably extracted than that of her teeth.
"Are you waiting here for someone?"
"If someone comes, yes."
"And if no one does?"
Boi smiled. "Then I would eventually leave, wouldn"t I?"
"I suppose so."
A couple of workers began to sweep water out of both sides of the arched entry. As Nawin watched these automatons and their redundant strokes he remembered one time when he went into the stadium to jog and dabble in studies toward a Ph.D. which he had no real interest to complete. There he saw a group of workers cutting down a small tree, sawing large portions into more manageable pieces, and carrying those pieces to a pile. The workers looked like an entire family with the variety of their ages and s.e.xes. Two of the adults who were moving the pieces cajoled a small boy into believing that he was instrumental in removing the branches for as each was being lifted he would hold onto a bit of the center and they would praise his efforts. They were determining his fate by brainwashing him with positive reinforcement but at least, Nawin thought then, he would be content with his station in life. Who was to say that the boy when grown would not feel sorry for people like himself who did not know what to do with all the days of their lives.
A sales mendicant came by with a dozen or more umbrellas in his hand. "Do you want one?" Nawin asked.
"All of them. Then I can stand out here all day and have something to sell." The voice was not earnest and it engendered no sympathy.
"Two umbrellas please--any color, I don"t care."
"100 baht," said the salesman. Nawin paid the money and handed one to the Laotian.
"I think you are selling something already."
The Laotian grinned. "Really? Are you wanting to buy?" He was.
Ashamed of himself, Nawin looked down at the green sheen of water that now surrounded the monument. Its reflection seemed to sway and careen in the harmonious bombardment of the pellets of rain. More fluid than reality itself, the reflection would for a time seem permanently unsteady before evaporating entirely.
"No, maybe not," he said vaguely.
The Laotian chuckled. "No, Man, I"m here just because I got caught in the rain like you did."
Maybe it was true. Maybe the perverse fabrications of the mind when imparted by speech altered the intentions of the other party, distorting the fabric of probable outcome.
"Where is your sister?"
"On the farm planting, cleaning, cooking, getting water from the well, I don"t know, I don"t care, but she"s probably thinking of you. Do you like her?"
"I don"t know her. I don"t think I have any real opinion." He paused thoughtfully and then said, "How do you mean?"
"I mean for a painting--of a country girl, rural life.