there really was a destination. The sensory input of traditional Thai
music was coming to them from the front and back speakers of the car
that was their confinement. The radio music, no matter if interpreted
as harmonious or strident by the three individuals, was a levee helping
to block their pervasive inundation of self-absorbing, mordant thoughts
and reminded them (the patriot and the pending expatriates) of their
commonality as Thais.
They passed a mall where he and Porn had gone shopping a month
earlier. That day they had spent together there was the levity of the
stroll and the shiny flash of credit cards in this Thai way of
forgetting one's impoverished roots. Feeling on top of the world, he
comported the male gesture of having one arm clutching the other one
behind his back. It was a gesture of affluence in the stroll of the
shopper's quest. At least twice when he encountered friends of his
from Silpakorn Art University with bags in their hands he would talk to
them for a half hour and somewhere into the talk he used another male
gesture of affluence. He would slip a foot from a sandal and then slap
it onto the floor loud as a firecracker. The sandal would hit the
floor like a hand slapping against an impoverished peasant.
They stopped in an alley smaller than a side street called a
"soi." It was in between many Mom and Pop businesses and there, crowded
within, was her apartment. He knew rooms like this well. They were
rented out for fifteen or twenty dollars a month (600 or 700 baht),
barren, hot, and unventilated as an attic. When she had gone in to get
her bags he felt less lonely to be momentarily rid of her. Even now at
age 26 but with thoughts at certain moments suffering and dragging like
a man of 50, there was just himself, the real unit of one, and delude
himself all he pleased he knew that he could not find anyone more
significant than that. The only thing next to his heart, in the
pocket of his shirt, were the slides of his art depicting the naked and