him. They mildly aggravated and stimulated without having the effect of flattening in frenzy—not that the subject of the ephemeral and unreal aspects of such a frenzy would vex him, having been such a glutton himself for silky, perfumed girls whose unique scent (this hybrid of perfume and sweat ) seemed to riddle him pleasantly like tiny beads of shrapnel. Yes, he told himself, dirty socks were a more consistent, and thus a more veritable stink. Even with the prior knowledge that engaging in sexual activities would soon lead him into a vacuous afterward of having to stay with such a woman, such an exhausted presence, longer than the illusion warranted, and that experiencing such an exhilarating penetration of shrapnel would soon reopen all wounds of unfulfilled hopes for true intimacy, the hound was still inexorably obsessed with defecation, and the soldier was implacably enthralled with the excitement of being shot at by his female subjects even when he knew it to be specious.

To him there was little merit in the magazine now, outside of seeing it rolled up firmly and allowing the meretricious tool to conjure plausible scenarios of itself being used as a weapon. No, he thought, he did not seriously dislike this fetid sloven beneath him. He did not know him. He had not spoken to him, and by this time his dirty and hairy face with its certainty of being the rightful proprietor of the area of the window below— an area obtained with the aid of officers on board the train— was experiencing the ablution of fading memory. Still, the repellent fetidity had a familiar, fraternal theme that reminded him of his belittled, abused, and forlorn youth. The familiarity of a stink that he equated to his brothers was like going back in time, going home, and being in an antediluvian state within Jatupon (his former name and being) who was a vestige to him now as his fingernails were the vestige to claws. It was a time of being included in a group of home boys that he was excluded from and of feeling the pangs of loneliness that only prisoners of an institution felt.

The stranger was surely amusingly human, a caricature as all were, and hardly worthy of serious fixation. Engagement with him would be jocular levity and merely that. He tried shutting the curtain that slid around his "exalted tomb" but for an obvious reason that eluded him it only increased the odor. Deciding to relax there, and to be at one with the odor that no reticent grievance locked within his mind could rectify, it became him amusingly the way the peculiar smell of defecation would at last be agreeable to the noses of hounds. For a moment his brain was free enough of the images of Kimberly falling and his wife saying, "You should have jumped and not her," but restraining herself enough to bludgeon his arm repeatedly with a frying pan instead of the original target of his face, that he was able to isolate the culprits of the odor: those socks. Suddenly rebounding from his half hour of petulance in his typical good nature, Nawin Biadklang chuckled quietly at his irascible hubris and abjured this moodiness that was part of the curse of his insomnia. The silent giddiness soon wore off with the itchiness of the skin of his broken arm under the cast. All his firing neurons once again became a cluster of pensive rumination.

Had all these years of being a celebrated artist of dejected Patpong whores gone to his head to the point where he could not remember having been as impecunious as a mendicant and poorer than the fecundity of dirt? And for the hound that he was who sniffed every one of his models, his Patpong whores, preceding and following his marriage to Noppawan, why, he asked himself should he object to odors? Dogs sniffed, claimed territory by the spills of their urine, and growled at each other, but which of them actually killed one of its kind? Which of them concocted plans that brought on the suicidal wishes of another, a more indirect and sophisticated form of murder, and by its disingenuousness a worse form. In a visceral objurgation, for one whose brain was being aspersed by sleep and yet could not sleep as if it were being drugged and dragged through an exit and then up to a second door that sleep could not open, he repudiated his earlier thought lackadaisically. He was guilty of nothing more than pursuing a human involvement. She had been part of his personal life, disturbing the whole, but an imbroglio as indispensable as being able to take a shower for a positive perspective of the day. No, he thought again, she sullied him or he sullied himself with her. As a pig wallowed in mud so did a man in a personal life. The physical aspect of intimacy was rapturous and easy. A man and a woman in the friction of bodies became one, but a one that was a different entity altogether—a fire of physical ebullience and pleasure. Had facile sex not existed, he would have sought intimacy solely in feelings, a thorny stem to hold if there ever was one. And had it not existed intimacy would not exist at all. There would have merely been the chiseling of ideas onto hard marble brains.

He told himself that when a young woman broke free from a man's hands, ran onto her balcony, and jumped off it, she was, in that last moment, the ultimate sovereign of her fate no differently than she had been in other aspects of her life. Kimberly might have found the environment upsetting, felt depression at the loss of a body departing from her and into Noppawan's hands, with chemicals amuck in her body and brain, and jealousy ready to fulminate, but she was as responsible for her last claim upon herself as she was for the formation of her life— "No," he told himself, "this is not right either." An internecine battle for a dominant perspective or a logical merger of the two variant types of ideas fought within him. How could he have saved her apart from a dismissal of his wife's ill conceived plan to begin with? And yet how could he not be culpable? It was an insoluble dilemma that frustrated his ability to live with himself.

A being's finality, he argued, was reproduction and death; and the factors that elongated or expedited this plan of nature could not have been in his control unless he had used some force on her, and that never happened despite what the police officers first believed. If he were indirectly responsible for manslaughter, his wife, Noppawan, was the indirect murderess. Barren Noppawan, marrying him, this celebrated container of lust, and having to justify his infidelities all these years in the name of art, decided that she might as well utilize the natural state of man for her own benefit rather than be forever victimized by what was beyond her capability to change. It was she who proposed that he paint Kimberly, her colleague and friend from the university. He did this; and behaving like a good boy, he feigned a professional detachment toward his study so successfully that he began to believe it himself. On canvas, distorting the French-American into an Asian half-breed and a lady of the night, he brought to his model vague Asian features and his notoriously whorish sense of dejection.

But Noppawan was as dissatisfied with this platonic aberration, if not deviance, as she had been with all earlier affairs. It was she who proposed this madness of him begetting a child. Begotten by the father and conceived by the friend, in a valid sense the child would be a production of all three and, according to this plan of hers, hers to raise. All three would be more or less active parents with Kimberly as a visiting one. And of course, she would be married to the biological father who made ten times what she did on a good month; his paternal role would be that of the "provider" as was the role of all fathers before him. Had they thought out a hundred ramifications to such a scenario it would have been hard to envisage any favorable outcome. But the maternal professor, wistful for that feel of a baby in her arms, scooted the glasses down toward the tip of her nose and