An Apostate: Nawin of Thais Part 21

offered Nawin with a feigned chuckle.

Near the sculpture garden was a 7-11 and he bought some coffee, milk, and a box of corn flakes, sat down amidst purposeful and less temporary form, and ate the cereal from the box as he had when he was five years old in America. To be here in so much empty s.p.a.ce among stone carvings and to be the only one around appealed to him. If nothing else having been abused gave him this: the desire to pour color on paper and entertain himself alone, self-contained, in any empty s.p.a.ce he could find.

However, this solitary behavior was only pleasant for a few hours and then self-containment seemed particularly vacuous and the blessing a curse. He read a book on Etruscan art for a few hours before his already aching b.u.t.tocks began to hurt from the position on the ground. He got up, swallowed some pain killers for his arm with no a.s.sistance but his saliva, and waited for a bus to take him back to Nongkhai. A kiosk selling soft drinks, Buddha statuettes, and cotton candy was already open. In front of it at one table was a typical jasmine rosary salesman who also sold balloons, some of which he blew up and shaped into replicas of Hindu and Buddha emblems, and others he inflated with helium.

"How many helium balloons would it take to float a lightweight piece of metal into a different county or country for that matter?"

"I don't understand you. Do you want some balloons?"

"Yes. I would think six should suffice."

Nawin bought them, removed the stifling wedding ring from his hand, tied it with the six strings, and released the gestalt of colored rubber, metal, and diamonds into the airy realms of the unfettered and the lost.

30

Within this ambivalence how was he to know that his obdurate stance would not crack and that he would not relent, allowing neediness to surge over him like lava, incinerate him and heave residuals homeward? If he relented by calling her at a pay telephone booth and by a miracle fortuitous, dull, or moribund, he was made to believe that some type of reconciliation was possible as economic provider or more, it would be better that it were done there where he could buy a ticket immediately than to experience a breakdown of His integrity while stuck uncomfortably in Vientiane. Thus, as the sun pulled ever tighter over the hand of the world, memory seemed to encompa.s.s him tighter than the burdensome wedding band ever had, and having played in the wounds of old intimacies it now seemed like the desperation of an old man opening his door to strangers.

Preferring to allow the possibility of being murdered than to continue in the meaningless domicile of his empty sh.e.l.l, he told the tuk-tuk driver to take him to the train station instead of the border.

It was a cold ride to this area where a day earlier his debased posture had no doubt alarmed train officials that here was someone, who if not a southern terrorist, was suffering from a nervous breakdown on government premises (and yet were it not so, and to most Euro-American foreigners it would not be with the day's temperature for them equivalent to a balmy spring day, still by Thai accounts as well as his own, it was a frigid morning with moments of impaling breeze that made the dogs in the corners of parapets surrounding temples s.h.i.+ver and his blood run cold; but then, as he had already ventured out without anywhere in particular to return to, the peripatetic libertine continued with the journey, tolerating the blowing inundation of wind like one holding his breath until arriving at the train station.)

There was only one ccurse, the forward course in which a supernova would eventually devour the Earth like a piece of kindling wood, and so he walked to the junction that was on the border--the right side of the road an entry point to Thailand, the left, eventually, to Laos (specifically, he kicked a rock repeatedly for several hundred yards until losing it, skidded and etched lines into the mud with his feet, eventually moving west to the intersection that was the border--the right an entry into a land not of his birth and inhabited predominately by philistines who suffered from a lethargy no different from other denizens of warm societies under the mesmerizing intensity of the sun--the left an entry into an altogether insular and comatose nation). Obtaining a Laotian visa for a thousand baht; another payment albeit a nominal one, he stood on a small bus like a Siamese twin conjoined to eighty or more bodies, all going in the same direction, each having his or her own objective as he did albeit the others surely with more clarity than he had. He took a bus ride with myriad others across the Friends.h.i.+p Bridge of the Mekong river, filled out his entry card at this extended checkpoint, his pa.s.sport eventually being stamped in a line of waiting and moving but seemingly going nowhere, he paid a new monetary charge, the cryptic exit fee then shared a tuk-tuk for a forty minute ride to the city, sometimes witnessing exaggerated gestures and hearing jocular comments about how cold it was from Laotians and Thais, some in both shorts and hooded jackets, though not from westerners who didn't seem to suffer any distress outside of blowing strands of disheveled hair. He bypa.s.sed fields and water buffalo, feeling the exhilaration of the wind, cold as it was, and suffuse with a sense of regeneration he sensed the present immerse him whole into its prodigious depths and believed he was traversing into something new which would whitewash his negative memories in amnesia. Arriving in the city of Vientiane, that little bit of Paris with a lot of dirt that wind occasionally sc.r.a.ped and twirled as if it were a field, he observed a department store (arguably more than a hybrid of store and barn with its outlying outdoor market), morning monks with emaciated frail bodies seeking alms in tawny saffron robes soiled in Laotian dust, businessmen receiving the laying on of hands and the wai in the hope of making their lives propitious, two school girls in blue uniforms on a bicycle, more motorcycles than cars but more of both with each moment of the waking morning, and a man pulling a food cart on the side of the street. Nawin looked directly into the man's incarnadined, sun burnt face and his furrows of coa.r.s.e wrinkling skin, and the old man, though abashed, grinned and nodded once as if grateful that the younger man not only acknowledged his existence but saw his worth in it. Neither sunrise nor sunset was as beautiful as this.

It had been a similar acknowledgement three years ago that had been the catalyst of his self declared quasi-retirement. He had gone on sabbatical from Silpakorn University to get a doctoral degree before realizing that scholarly pursuits were inimical to creativity (not that he was attempting to create anything at that time) and that these simultaneous states of mind if not joint ventures would be deleterious to each other. They were wasted years if measured in action and accomplishment but constructive in terms of disa.s.sembling pretensions and so it did not matter.

Now he was able to repudiate the grandeur of self unflinchingly.

Extirpating himself of those inst.i.tutions and beings that facilitated the feeding of his instinctual neediness, departing from his nation and the circ.u.mscribed roles which he had there, and having relieved himself of hungers for food and s.e.x earlier this morning, he was now able to appreciate of the sfumato of society and nature and could just be...Just be! What a romantic he was: at least so he chided himself. Unfathomable suffering existed under the most lush of lives. It was beneath every superficial, jovial exterior, and to think that in a land probably without much of that exterior layer he would experience any enlightenment beyond encounters with deeper veins of suffering than any he had experienced heretofore seemed preposterous. Just this morning after the prost.i.tute had given Nawin an indignant look and then had gone away leaving him there alone in his pile of clothes, he could not, for some minutes, even fasten the b.u.t.tons on his s.h.i.+rt so overcome was he with suffering. It had seemed so acute and pervasive in all beings and all matters that he, a forty year old man, did not know what to do other than murmur ever so quietly, "meh" (mother). He had wanted the resurrection of that woman who had not only looked away as the abusers did their dastardly deeds but made him out to be the culprit who had instigated it all. He had called out for her like a child hoping that she would lead him back to beginnings of chasing b.a.l.l.s and b.u.t.terflies. He had yearned for a state of innocence in which he would be ignorant of s.e.xual jostling from instinctual hungers and but not of the love that was the conception of all animal life. He had wanted this resurrected "meh" to end the suffering which permeated the lives of all things and to make knowledge and understanding more than vicarious suffering. Perhaps he was too sensitive for this world but here he was and so, to use an Americanism, he needed to see things through "rose colored filters." Thus his first impression of Vientiane Laos was that of an intricate tapestry of life. All he had to do to appreciate it was to simply open his eyes by abjuring agenda and accomplishment and melting into true being.

31

Everywhere he went there seemed to be metallic signs on poles to power lines. Each sign was in the international language of pictorial symbols and each ill.u.s.tration the same: a sinuous electrical current striking a stick figure that fell back as though electrocuted. He could have detoured to an area along a different stretch of road and walked elsewhere where there were not these signs of warning were it not for his proclivity to continue walking on such a narrow sidewalk in which a stumbling foot could cost him his life. There was a definite morbid curiosity and courting of death in his actions, his feelings elated by travel to someplace new, but his thoughts were macabre and fixated on the vicissitudes and impermanence of one's life, the attempts to belie those with money, property, family, and notoriety as if one could solidify one's effluvial existence to a statue's, despite the permanent inevitability of one's demise.

Knowing this, and rich enough that he did not need to work another day in his life, nor as corollary become obtuse to this truth by engagements in mundane routine, he was not sure what to do with himself. Other men were also used for sperm and as economic providers to family but they saw their sons who grew with the years and whose growth would measure how far they had degenerated into the years, mirrors to see aging, ghastly, and lackl.u.s.ter reflections of themselves (for him, he would never see his son again, or at least that was Noppawan claimed on that day she battered him with an iron frying pan, not that he necessarily wanted to see his time on the planet in the hour gla.s.s of a changing boy). Likewise, they had their roles as procurers of meat so that their women might enjoy playing with live dolls (for him whose investments made money unto themselves he could be of no personal use to family even if allowed back into it, and when was a man included in the joys of child rearing anyway?).

His cheek inadvertently brushed against an extended vine of green bananas dangling above the sidewalk near a French colonial building used by a Laotian government ministry. Although a normal, reflexive reaction would have been to feel startled especially after having noticed the signs and fearing the next touch of the unknown to be his ineluctable death, he just smiled. If fate, the G.o.d of all Atheists, had deemed it a pole of a power line instead of bananas that his cheek had touched, him electrocuted, stricken down to sear the ground with his incinerating fall it would be of no major significance to anyone but himself if even that; furthermore, he thought, continuing to synthesize more ideas to remain stimulated and happily self- contained in his own company, this second of consciousness being irrevocably extinguished might be a rather pleasant experience despite its brevity. In it he would be on an enlightened transit before the void swallowed him entirely, an omniscient second of wisdom in which egregious Buddha-G.o.ds and heaven-and-h.e.l.l aberrations of the ideas of the Buddha, who surely was not a buddhist, would be known to not exist. To know something with absolute certainty beyond the realm of supposition (like the amount of love a bludgeoning spouse once had toward him, the degree of selfishness and altruism that const.i.tuted emotion and cognition, and so much else unknown to him) would be particularly refres.h.i.+ng after a lifetime spent in the glimmers of truth. It would be as refres.h.i.+ng as those times that as children, he and his pauper brothers stripped to their underwear and from piers dove into the Chao Phraya River to escape the blistering heat of April.

The surprise of bananas brus.h.i.+ng against his cheek made him smile wryly--smile at witnessing a banana tree in the heart of a city, smile wryly as the surprised encounter was imbued in the rustic as well as the bucolic, and thus was both repulsive and quaint. Understanding it to be both made him postulate that in a broader sense every given ent.i.ty or event was rarely one attribute exclusively but the polarity of two ant.i.thetical thoughts. Even the calcifying antipathy and repugnance toward s.e.x, which were now steadily building up inside his mind were at times stymied in ethereal fantasies of burnis.h.i.+ng the silky leather of human flesh and a hunger for beauty that suddenly came over him like a consuming and growing flame before being subdued and partially extinguished in the gravity of his all- too-human thought, which wanted reality even more than fantasy the best it could find it. Glancing at clothed b.u.t.tocks, covered thighs, and other appendages of a female here and a male there, it was as though his const.i.tution could mutate from solid to vapor at random despite human will. This was what he gleaned from his cheek brus.h.i.+ng against a bunch of unripe bananas while journeying onward with sights and sounds satiating consciousness, sketching impressions of the mind that one could only appreciate in foreign travel.

Closer to the market there were numerous people in a row like sequacious ants, all seeking bits of a distant morsel, but unlike ants these people sought for themselves and, even here, with their wallets as feelers. A few minutes later he was among them, eventually buying a dangling earring for a left lobe, a solid gold necklace to adorn his swarthy complexion so that the deep dirt and poverty that he once was remained hidden from himself and from anyone whom he encountered, and a pocket pc/cellular telephone, which he needed but had no occasion to use. In the outdoor market he watched someone seated on a small couch at a kiosk under a huge umbrella, get a tattoo. He wanted an eagle tattooed on his biceps and to other regions as well to demonstrate that he was as an apostate, Nawin of Thais, but the conditions here did not look urbane or sterile, and he backed away until he was in a parking lot filled with tuk-tuks.

A conventional two seater took him to a temple with his traveler's guide gospel in one hand and suitcase in the other.

It was a temple, outside of which a sign informed readers that the building, which appeared more like an attic and junkyard than a museum and temple, once housed the Emerald Buddha. He stayed inside wandering around various sized wooden and stone buddhas dating back to early periods in history and as such often having parts of arms and faces missing from their dilapidated forms. There, relaxed, he melted into true being.

It was good to be there unfettered of obligations to others, and with no wh.o.r.e to distract him from keeping the deeper self company of his ruminations. He was synthesizing some peculiar notion he only half grasped (something to the effect of "a person comes into the world for no apparent reason; perspectives mutate in changeable physical existence; a person's ideas change due to the changes around him, changing so as to withhold some level of verisimilitude to which sanity is entirely dependent..." ) when the women of his life suddenly came upon him unexpectedly. Others might have thought exhibitions of buddhas would be of interest to all foreigners and especially to someone like Kimberly who was an accomplished amateur sculptor herself, and yet he knew that Noppawan would have enjoyed it more. Unable to share the experience with her, what could the mind do other than impose a facimile? Many times he almost believed that he was really pointing out smaller statuettes hidden behind the larger and more salient ones and that she was going to them, thoroughly examining each one that he pointed out to her like a collector of religious antiquities. How odd that he was so close to releasing words from his lips as if she were really there. No, neither h.o.m.os.e.xual encounter nor this sending of a wedding ring into oblivion had freed him from memories.

Another tuk-tuk outside the gate of the museum; another blue c.o.c.kroach driver eager for twenty baht (this one specified that he wanted Thai baht and not Laotian kip)--and, once agreed upon, a quick trip to the communist history museum. Inside there was an archaeological exhibit which he skimmed briefly. Noppawan knew so many inordinate details for it to be of interest to her, and for Kimberly it had always been amus.e.m.e.nt parks, French wine, and Debussy and Ravel performances at the Thai Cultural Center. But in one corner on the second floor, near the staircase, there was an a.s.sortment of traditional clothing that he knew she would have enjoyed seeing and he wanted to take her in his arms, behind that particular exhibit, and impart a visceral kiss, which if unable to pump the air of life back into her would at least convey how dear she was to him before the return to the great beyond which was in fact cessation and vacuity. She was not alive so what could the mind do but resurrect her or something like her briefly? It could do nothing else. Traditional instruments were in one far corner but most of the museum seemed to be a diatribe without words, a deprecatory p.r.o.nouncement against Siam, French, and American imperialists in photographic images, uniforms, and guns. The museum was more of an anti-imperialist manifesto than a communist one and part.i.tioned walls made court rooms for evidence and indictment.

Being a Thai-American with a girlfriend who had been French, his was a triple indictment--at least so he postulated to himself humorously.

He could have gone to the States, the land of his birth. Not knowing anyone there would not have deterred him. In boyhood, each day before fulfilling his indenture as a poor son he would wake up early and leave the house so that for a half an hour, diluted under a cloud in some empty area along the river, he could become little more than the nonstop movements of serving food. Loneliness was not something that he was so desperate to lose. He could have gone there and procured a second set of x- rays and a second opinion from an orthopedic surgeon in Los Angeles or elsewhere. A second set of x-rays was rarely taken in Thailand, and so if he had to have a practical reason for returning to the United States this could be one. He had plenty of accessible money for his travels. Not all of his money was in joint accounts for he was too knowledgeable of the changeable tectonics of family to believe that joint ventures of any kind were lifelong. He might have gone there to travel for a period of months without having to work at all. To melt into the prodigious Grand Canyon, and to have it melt into him would be well worth any expense he incurred and it had always seemed to him that if he went far enough and long enough he would be out of the pale of memory. That too would be a practical benefit.

However, it was a haughty land of religious zealots who believed its hegemony was a mandate to dictate world affairs, its growing military bases police boxes, its wars an extension of democracy and human rights, and its intolerance morality itself. It was foundering in its debt as a dying empire and the entire country sickened him.

But then, he thought, he himself was a reprobate and any moral p.r.o.nouncements that he made would be hypocritical and ridiculous. Was he not living the disreputable life of the great Artist, Caravaggio? Maybe he just wished to be compared and contrasted to the man so that his work would seem to have some international and everlasting significance. Still, compare he would! As Nawin he was poor no longer, although under his former name, Jatupon, he had been that and more. He had not killed anyone--at least not deliberately; and it did not seem particularly Caravaggio-like to not have the intention. He was not a h.o.m.os.e.xual fleeing murder but a bis.e.xual fleeing interconnectedness. These were mere incidentals that could be argued in various ways and they did not delineate a man. Both men had given beauty to the world and this alone surely disproved them as having disreputable natures, but then, how was he to know?

32

The drab stones of the stupa were probably erected in the nineteenth century and through the prodigious span of years, he thought, the unadorned city surrounded it in languid increments like the moss that had annexed its crevices. The encroachment no doubt diminished the distinct ident.i.ty of the monument, making it less remote and secluded, like human life. That was what he thought, and it was a more concrete and definitive explanation than any other he could provide himself with. Of his own life, he did not know why he wanted to slip away unto himself as he did, to be forgotten personally as well as publicly, to be altogether expunged like the public persona of artistic decadence which he once maintained, and to be further ensconced under the blanket of himself if that were possible without suffocating to annihilation and oblivion. It was as mysterious as the primordial desire of s.e.x, communion, and connection which had driven him spellbound into contact with the flesh of the paramour hours ago.

A block away, a part of the main street ab.u.t.ted this once silent area, fomenting it with traffic along a stretch of businesses catering to foreigners. There were guest houses and Internet cafes. Men were unloading a s.h.i.+pment of supplies to one of the closed bars. There were foreigners on bicycles, or coming in and out of souvenir shops, baguette restaurants, hotel rooms, and apparently Vientiane's only convenience store, or worse its only supermarket. A couple held hands whistling as they pa.s.sed the monument for a side street in which, according to a sign, a guest house was located. It was noise which he disliked, as distant and muted as it was, but as inclined as he was to romanticize the quaint rusticity around him, he did not yet despise it. In the new environment, positive but neither overly elated or ebullient, he felt that the energy exuded around him belied the gravity of the consequences of action, as if the strutting movements of youth were not dances in a graveyard, when in fact the whole Earth was nothing but a necropolis, and any laughter which he heard seemed to scoff at his new disfigurement. Often tourists would come to the stupa posing for pictures at its base. They seemed to come only in pairs to compound the quasi-reality of the experience of foreign travel into something more solid, for as pairs the dopamine was doubled for these mundane presences, leaving him alone in deprivation within the capsule of the rocket of the mind. They came to this nameless rock, but as it was less of an attraction than That Louang; the few who came did not stay for long. The stupa was the same one pictured in his guide book, the same one he had thought of wistfully when he was on the train, and s.e.xual inclinations had not been the entirety of his yearnings there-at least so he wanted to believe. In leaning against this particular stone relic towering above him, it was not that he was seeking to be a non-worldly aspirant feigning ignorance of a world of suffering ma.s.ses kimberlying downward from one type of post-partum depression or another to which the G.o.ds were of complete indifference, or admitting as much, but that this deity or deities designated greater plans that entailed human suffering and tragedy. He did not want false repudiations of the human condition of suffering but acceptance of it so as to be trans.m.u.ted into it so deeply that he could imagine the experiences of others more richly and would cease to take his allocation of suffering personally.

He was seated in the bit of gra.s.s that was there, his head leaning against this towering icon more uncomfortably than he thought it would, head remaining against hard stone, neck aching, and having to slap and decimate a second set of fire ants that got onto his book and into his sandals stinging his feet. He did not like this flawed design of species competing to sustain themselves and using him as the ammunition available to them so he scattered a piece of bread for some pigeons at his feet to perform an expiation. Thinking about this world of species, each trying to exist comfortably at the expense of others, he knew that there was no spirit in a being and nothing spiritual--just recognition of contentment in simple pleasures, the foundation for all tenuous others, which were not subject to life's vicissitudes. This was the only spiritual journey that a realist and atheist might undertake.

There was a puddle of water from the previous night's inundation of rain at one of his feet. He was inclined to seek his reflection a second time within it, and would have done so (especially since he had not even bothered to go into the bathroom to shave in front of a mirror, or take a shower, in his need to make a swift exit from the guest house) were it not so turbid, with a dark taffeta sheen no more able to reflect a gray hair, a wrinkle, or the doleful intensity of a sagging, aged countenance any more than seeing his diaphanous reflection in car windows. Whether or not he had gotten visibly older over these past twenty four hours, which had entailed a fortieth birthday on the train and a half catharsis/half reopening of the wounds of his abused youth by the intimate encounter with the paramour--a paramour who looked like his brother Kazem, or at least how he remembered Kazem so many years ago--was wasted speculation. One would not have aged significantly in such a brief time unless the paramour were G.o.d and he Moses. Still, he wanted a mirror nonetheless, for he knew that tragedy and grief had maimed and distorted him over the past few weeks. Obviously he was now taciturn, and disliked the cloying exuberance of youth that clawed against the concentrated walls of his deliberation, although deliberating what he could not say, as he sat there leaning his head against the stupa with eyes resting on the clouds, if indeed he was in a state of rest. And if he were so prison pent, he thought, a touch of those electrical poles would open up whatever portal Kimberly had gone into with him, with her disappearing into it and it disappearing into the oblivion of itself.

He was ruminating that love was not an actuality, but merely humans finding no exterior meaning and seeking solace and artificial meaning in each others company, when he was suddenly accosted by a Caucasian woman. She was middle aged, had sinuous black hair, and seemed attractive as best he could tell, as she was wearing a round brimmed white hat and dark sungla.s.ses that covered some of her face.

"Pardonnez_moi pours vous faire savent le Francais?" she asked.

"J'ai etudie la pendant un certain temps. C'a ete il y a des annees," he said, "but you are safer in the international language. I was only in Paris for six months."

"Oh, then you are fluent, as French is the international language," she said with a laugh.

"No, the language of f.u.c.king is," he thought, startled by how close the words were to his lips. Had he spoken them he would have been truthful. His brief time under a scholars.h.i.+p grant had been more of s.e.xual rendezvous than anything more substantive.

It had been his language of choice as no one there seemed to want to speak in English. And had he spoken those words he would have released a belligerent inner burst of misogyny from a long dormant maternal source aggravated nowadays by his wife having beaten him with a skillet.

"What did you study there? French?"

"No, f.u.c.king," he thought but he held tightly to the reins of the tongue, his restive beast. He did not want to disparage another person for his own proclivities toward freeing himself of any female captors. He vented a sigh of relief for having managed to stay quiet and thought how close the words were to his lips before dissipating like everything else, and in this case leaving him defenseless against his good looks.

"Painting."

"Painting?"

"A grant.... It was a grant from your country--a cultural exchange with accomplished artists... I was one of the applicants who won." His words were slow and laborious as he wished not to divulge anything.

"How wonderful! A famous artist of this area. Are you Laotian?"

"I'm American," he said. It was the second most offensive word that he could think of.

"Are you here on vacation?"

"Yes," he said curtly, not bothering to reciprocate, and the two strangers fell into silence.

"I'm here with my sister," she spoke at last with less certainty than before." We were trying to find a royal palace. We saw a sign but got lost in some backstreets and did not know where we were going."

"Oh," he said. "Well, did you ask around?"

"Yes, but I guess Thai would be better than English."

"Yes, I suppose it would, but you don't speak it do you?"