Steven David Justin Sills

“ He slapped some water onto his face. "Time to go," he told himself; but even with this assertion he was in a fusion of daydreams and faded memories that added color and exact details to his thoughts—a more poignant fusion than that experienced in trying to recall the facts of a given situation as they really were. He thought:
"She's beautiful isn't she?" asked the Laotian.
"Yes, I would say so," said Nawin. "You don't have to persuade me on that point. It is just the time required to do a painting —a real one with a theme, a mood, symmetry, perspective, things like this and I am on vacation. ”

“ The paramour blew his clouds of smoke into the darkness like mist floating above a noxious lake and this lethal haze hid the nocturnal snake that was attached to his form, making obscure all that Nawin had been able to see in the darkness. And yet if nothing really existed more than mere supposition that it was so, surely emotions should not even be accredited with the supposition of reality. If he had more will, he told himself, it would not seem so disconcerting that he, injured and aloof in tragedy, had chosen this ersatz of taking a man over a woman to this particular venue. ”

“ We are friends, aren't we? A friend can be one of hours and not years, and it is still a friendship, isn't it?"
"I suppose so," he said. It was the same question that Nawin had postulated silently in his own head and he felt even more inclined to call him a friend for this affinity to his own private ponderings.
"If it were me I would not get any sleep at all. I'd be staring at them continually. I think it is the same for you if you are a painter of naked beauties; but then maybe they are more cute and handsome than they are beautiful." ”

“ If he were to lie down it would fan away the sweat that was collecting at his brow, there would be beauty in the sordid, and there, without compunction he would plunge into dreams thumping as the voices of frogs at a distance.
"Come here," he told the Laotian. Boi came over to him. "So young," he said as he touched a wisp of hair that stuck out over the boy's ear and was salient in his sense of beauty. "You remind me of someone I once knew. It's like the world recycles the same stuff. What do you want from life? I mean not what is real and before you but what you really want." ”

“ Nawin smiled. To merge into a family, to have a home when he except in extraneous matters of documents averring him as proprietor, was homeless, was that which he sought and wanted to hear. But then there were the bodies and the odors that exuded from them, questions as to whether one loved the bodies or the molecules that they emitted, quandries and riddles for a man, that like it or not, stank in multiple forms of neediness fetid as his brothers strewn socks, the scent of monsters that fluttered all about in his brain. ”

“ He, who was nonetheless human in his godhood, remained intrepid in trudging into this rather unbearable and disconcerting sense of the inconsequence of being. To look at nature, to melt into true being under a cloud by relinquishing one's grandiose claim as an integral being in the temporary and changeable interactions of man, to be exempt of role and its alleged significance on a small corner of contemporary society at best, and as a divine particle revere life as opposed to absconding from it through interaction, only a god would tolerate such torturous but exquisite enlightenment. ”

“ It is uncomplicated, buoyant, and mysterious like melting into the flames of a goddess."
- Nawin, I think that you hide behind your canvas. I think that you are a pervert hiding deep in your paint so that women won't see you for what you are. They believe that you are different. They think that you aren't using them but admiring their beauty when really you are no better than any man who abandons his wife to come to women like me.
- Of course not. No different at all. All men feel the same in being with others. There is no love in it, no empathy, it is simply melting in a flame. ”

“ Believing that he had little ability to make sense out of life after Kimberly's death and perhaps even before that, yet needing life which was, after all, touch, a link beyond the self, he raised the dust tinted window to sun, greenery, and wind. The toilet tissue reeled out as a streamer and began to take off like the tail of a kite. Sun fell into the bathroom like confetti. He laughed in that ineffable joy of liberation from musty chambers of thought. "Is this true?" he said to himself. "Is it true that all anyone needs is a strong gust to slap across his face? ”

“ It was the obdurate will of man that feigned reality to begin with and the weathering forces of drowsiness that loosened the elements allowing their essence to scatter like an empty shell smashed and falling through a fist. This was the quintessential truth of or lack of reality. And yet as he was beckoned to return home by ghosts of the past, corpses now resuscitated and moving to the foreground of his brain as if alive and relevant after so much time and so many changes, he was still gravitating forward toward the Laotian. ”

“ Shrieking as they punctured two large holes that made one prodigious gulf in the thin metallic tiles comprising the awning over the swimming pool, they plunged together, splashing into a fiery inferno of loneliness before the last of their inevitable, lethal descent.
He woke, fully startled to find himself in wakefulness. Concentrating on where he was to allow the excesses of the saturation of sleep, a more temporary reality, to be shaken from his sodden neurons like wetness from an animal's fur, he then did nothing further. He merely allowed it to slowly evaporate from consciousness. ”

“ Now, as with every moment since her death, it seemed that he continued to see concrete images of the world (the hospital room and the big Hualamphong train station in Bangkok, the Laotian siblings and the food hawkers, his mirrored face in the toilet and the big hole in the urinal leading to the train tracks, the rice fields and the wild grasslands, the water buffalo and the starving dog at Nongkai train station) through this single drak-filtered reel of translucent visual images. ”

“ From a distance the waters of the canals flowing into the Chao Phraya River in Bangkok often seemed a pure bronze with sun and blue sky peering into the whole, but close up the diluted pollutants reeked of one identifiable odor. In the same way were the thoughts of a man's mind as they flowed into the consciousness that judged their merit. Once accepted they were part of a web of thought that often seemed brilliant in beauty and intricacy but when looked at closely was merely a refinement of man's sordid cravings. ”

“ It was like a homeless bottle collector pushing an unwieldy cart away from him or, if it could be transmuted to sound, that of a man repudiating his own impecunious past. Hadn't that faded memory of a mother once told him that thunder was a diamond falling from some goddess when struggling in the heavens against a diminutive monster?—he could not remember any of the specifics; hadn't some uncle in the United States of America, the country of his birth, once told him that thunder was the sound of Thai monkeys angrily tossing coconuts from coconut trees in the hope of getting to the bananas? ”

“ He had come into the toilet to see his reflection via a mirror and to abscond from these Laotian siblings long enough that they would dismiss his friendliness and construe his absence to mean a disinterest in them as potential models even if, as odd as it seemed to him then, he was interested in them as such and more. If at moments feeling extremely solitary and purposeless in his indolent, terrestrial drifting, being dragged in the vicissitudes of life, and trying to catch his breath from it all, he told himself that he would rather asphyxiate than relinquish his undiluted leisure. ”

“ When existing on a cold planet in the grandeur of the black but light-speckled universe with its surfeit of random stars and a plethora of void, what could humans do but cling to each other for warmth and attribute, meaning and merit in this desperate coagulation? Thus there was the noise of clanging men, boisterous merry making, and adhesion of like to like not that he, an artist, or he, a man in grief, saw himself cognate with anyone or anything. ”

“ The grave expression of gagging on his saliva as if were as gaggable as ox tongue, roasted duck gizzards, and fried cockroach in burnt rouge cream at a Laotian restaurant attempting to emulate French cuisine, only lasted a moment and then he smiled, putting at ease disconcerted Nawin who was now rising from his seat as if being called on to perform the Heimlich maneuver. "That's good. More people should do that—not be so serious all the time... just realize that you are fucking around with your time, keeping your life from being entirely meaningless with a personal..." ”

“ Even the calcifying antipathy and repugnance toward sex, which were now steadily building up inside his mind were at times stymied in ethereal fantasies of burnishing 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. ”

“ Pain sobered one to the injustices and suffering of the masses. But for he who knew the inordinate burden of both there was a twice-fold enlightenment that came to him. It was an emptiness like the vibrations of blowing into a hollow bottle and an ache as eternal as a mortal could know.
The marijuana had numbed his headache so for the most part he could ignore the lifeless aching. It was not all that different than the monotonous chants of Buddhist monks that were broadcast from speakers hanging in tree limbs of certain residential areas of Bangkok. ”

“ Somewhere into this third time of looking up at himself in the mirror for reassurance that he still possessed the same handsome face, he imagined something like an older man within scraping the vestige of his claws through the inner layers and then through the surface skin of his Botox starched face. The hoary phantasm of the stark, ugly possibility of self and the probability of one day finding himself no more distinguished than any old beast fornicating with youth made him once again reel on this, his first day of being a forty year old man. ”

“ They knew that the flaming impetuousness with its smoke cloud of being in love so as to beget children was as brief as the body's ability to replicate. They knew that nothing was more asphyxiating than a passing cloud that they had not breathed in. They knew of no grief worse than a barren existence in which they had not done the mating moves in a timely manner that were part of that illusion for meaning and purpose in their lives. ”

“ Talk of love belied the innate desire to experience a workout, to at last turn off thought and respond as an animal should by instinct, to be released from desire tickling incessantly like the crawl of a line of ants on one's skin, and to release a surfeit into a hole with the instrument of urination, an intimate and exquisite release. Likewise, thoughts repudiating the naked truth that killing was as ineluctable and natural in a being as its own breath, contravened any degree of understanding of the life that the fates circumscribed man to have. ”

“ Nawin looked down and smiled widely. He was before the Laotian in an unzipped state after having masturbated to an image of him in his head (the same type of illusion that a man had in copulating with his wife to keep illusory human existence on the planet at all) and yet he felt no particular compunction for what he had done or what a man tended to do with his own body in the privacy of his mind, or in the intimacy of a real embrace. In all cases it was the massage of his own body to ease himself from the stress of thinking, knowing, and having to live in a world of illusions. ”

“ Free to contemplate the unequal plight of man (or woman as it was in his case) , to see color in forms and feelings and thought, to mix with forms by allowing licentious whims to twist around the kite in accordance with natural mandates to reign in those turbulent skies, he basked in others perceptions of him as handsome, successful, and affluent. Like juicy fruit on the stem, his days in the sun, as an elated appetite of women and an envy of men—at least for those who knew something about contemporary Thai art—were embarrassing and awkward to the modest Jatupon that he was ”

“ 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 prostitute 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 buttons on his shirt so overcome was he with suffering. ”

“ But as time went by the inert human creature became so wholly opprobrious to the gecko, who valued a good hunt, that at last, as the small ceiling fan continued to turn arthritically, churning an unnoticeable, fetid draft of warm air in the direction of the man and the beast with a wobbling, scraping sound like cooks in sidewalk restaurants mixing fried rice but instead mixing these myriad, noxious odors of the train, it informed Nawin of his freakish obscenities with its tacit baleful eyes and scrolled tongue. ”

“ True, he was much older than the teenager (he glanced at the face; it was a perfect fusion of boy and man; smoking its cigarette and creating a synthetic fog of smoke onto his life) . Only by contrast to the other one's youth would he think of himself as old and then he was not merely old but old as the hills and with so many memories to be excavated therein. It was merely feeling and perception and it meant nothing. It was a mere feeling like all feelings, mirages really. Even family could seem for a time like "solid ground" until one witnessed it become a series of vapors. ”

“ In a discipline he found empathy, an openness to the world, rather than apathy, uniqueness rather than replication, and in-depth understanding of himself that made him an individual, a complete being, rather than a speck in the mass, a human cow in a herd. It was not true that painting saved no one for it saved him to himself. And if he failed at being a good person for lack of role models throughout his life, it was through no fault of his own. ”