He looked so fashionable despite his poverty but the poor and
discontent always found their stealth means to master petty thievery
and a sullied self-image was easily forgotten. There were imitation
mountains and waterfalls all around. He swam to the opposite side of
the pool and said hello to a foreigner who sat on a rock letting the
force of the fall hit his feet. The foreigner ignored him and again
started swimming his laps. Then, feeling that he had been rude, he
returned to the boy and asked him his name. The boy smiled and said an
easy two-syllable name, Nawin. It seemed like an easy name for a
foreigner to remember. After an uneventful attempt at conversations in
two different languages to which neither party could understand the
other one, the foreigner swam off. Still the boy was persistent,
swimming over to the foreigner when he rested. This prompted the
foreigner to go to the locker room to change sooner than what he would
have done otherwise. The boy followed him. He accosted him while he
was at the urinal and looked down onto him. He tried to come in when
the foreigner was in his cubicle taking a shower. His motives for
doing so were ambiguous ones: he wanted a foreigner friend even if this
man was so much older than he was, he wanted to really learn the
international language, and although he did not really have sexual
feelings he would have done anything for a bit of money. As the man
dressed on the bench Jatupon, the boy, put his hands together in a
mendicant grasshopper pose with palms sandwiched together and held
before his face in the "wei." He opened his hands with the opening of
the wallet.
A door of a shower booth opened. It was the mosquito drying
himself with a towel.
"Nothing like a good swim followed by a warm shower. You got to
meet an old friend today. That's nice. Earlier you never mentioned
this memory. I guess it wouldn't have been a particularly flattering