where the police rarely harassed them. The woman transient gave
herself to her man so completely that when he was angry, happy, or sad,
she was more this way--so little did she understand her own mind,
having become nothing but an extension of his pleasure and pain.
Sometimes silent and tacit, these transients who were continually
judged by others, judged the sincerity of his callow rebellion with
their stares. A few times they went beyond that to a more pronounced
judgment. "Don't you have a mamma to go to? Your mamma's calling for
you to come to lunch," said the one with the woman. That time the shoe
barterer laughed so hard it churned up mucus into his mouth, which he
spit into a crack in the sidewalk that already had its share of gum and
cigarette buds. "Mamma's calling," said the woman. "Lunch is ready,
honey. Mamma's calling," she repeated or at least he thought she
repeated. Maybe none of them had said anything. He wasn't quite sure.
Jatupon turned away from them and slipped off his tennis shoes,
smelling their soles to make sure that they weren't overly fetid. He
looked at one of his bare feet composed of roadways of veins and early
wrinkles of epidermis. He thought to himself that an unrecognized
universe had existed right there in his shoes. He sniffed his armpits.
They were fetid as glue but he liked the transmission of the sweat
molecules up his nostrils.
He deeply inhaled the glue and then held his breath allowing the
fumes to permeate within. He repeated the process four or five times
and for the most part he, they, and all went away in a haze. It was
like being blindfolded but instead of darkness there was a soft patch
of white haze. At first it startled him and he wondered if this
ethereal gaseous mist was Saddam Hussein's lethal spray upon the world
and yet he felt giddy in this laughing gas. When his mind was able to
register the fact that they were seated next to him, the haze made the
man and his woman, the shoe barterer, the sky crier, and all