the saliva began an internal strangulation. Feeling as if he were choking he coughed for a couple moments. However refreshing this acrimony so unencumbered by Thai-Laotian etiquette was, it was not worth dying for; and so he retreated for a few moments on his bunk until dangling once again with an opened can of beer.

He thought again how this stranger defied the obsequious norm with a refreshing brashness that was like having cold water thrown into his face. But like a fish that was suddenly snagged on a hook, images of himself in poverty, which he did not care to recall, caught him within. His pleasure in the stranger waned as impressions of beings and beings themselves waned. He countenanced a mere smile which altered further into a wry, contorted, and ungainly expression that expressed little beyond the awkward fidgetiness of wanting to withdraw from social interaction. Tightened into the hook of memory, he unwillingly recalled the hysterical deprecatory laughter, guffaws, and jeers on that one mortifying day in gym class when, at the age of eleven, his loose underwear fell through the legs of his shorts. From that point forward he did not oppose his family's will to have him toil along with them as a noodle worker in their restaurant. At that time he preferred serving food to being a viand for those who gormandized oddities. In this mundane world one who suffered from a peculiar bout of misery more dramatic than others (like underwear falling onto the floor of the gymnasium) was cannibalized as an inhuman freakish joke that fed their appetite for joyous contempt. At that age of eleven he just wanted to serve obscurely and enter the world of implausible comic book scenarios shortly before sleep. Back then noodles, comics, and sleep had given to him a varied but unaware extension of himself.

He considered pulling a few thousand baht from his wallet to give to this Laotian. Then it occurred to him that he would need to give the same to all of these marathon contenders, but he did not have that much money in his wallet nor was he so inclined to give what he had to one let alone the countless many. If it were unethical to know the suffering of an acquaintance and be unmoved to assist him, he rationalized, giving special favors to one with no regard to the masses did not seem any more ethical. So, as always, he horded what he had; and indeed he was one of those who had an abundance being a purveyor of turpitude as well as art which together was popular with both wealthy intellectuals and idiots alike. Such a trivial dabbling of philanthropy, he further argued, would more likely than not be money thrown into the whirlwind of drugs, liquor, or other exacerbated vice from which a self-deprecating fool more easily annihilated himself. And if he wanted to believe the false presage that such a nominal act would cause perpetual kindness the way a rock thrown in a creek begets one ripple that begets another it would not matter. He would not be able to successfully delude himself for long; at best he would be engendering a short time of ever diminishing ripples.

"Besides," he thought, "if this guy is so badly off, he should not be riding in an air conditioned car." It was a rather harsh judgment given his knowledge that the poor sometimes treated themselves to a bit of middle class opulence to make themselves connected to the society that they served and to sense that they could thrive rather than merely live. He repeated to himself that he would not pull out a few thousand baht and give it to a stranger who would resent him regardless of what he did or did not do. This was his conclusion in a sleep-deprived head that had too much crammed into it.

He then considered that sleep was a diminishing reduction of memory (a zipped file in a computer) but one where the zipping weathers away the details. He considered that, given enough hours over a period of evenings, sleep could even dilute the memory of Noppawan repeatedly swinging the frying pan against his arm—an arm that was still throbbing and itching in the cast.

Giving a thousand baht would imply having a lot to give and giving nothing would imply snobbishly holding back from giving what little he could, so he handed the man a hundred baht. "I can spare this. Keep it as money for transportation when going back to Vientiane."

"Sure, why not, thank you" said the man.

Nawin felt satisfied by his decision to give little. It was a compromise between wanting to ignore the sotto voce of thought that told him to give what he had and that which made him into a culprit for wanting to keep it for himself. And yet between both extremes there was the constant cynicism that the poor were merely pigeons and the more one threw crumbs to them the more they would come to eat. It was a way of not examining that the years of his life were pyrrhic: that they had given to him affluence but at the cost of diminution of his humanity—that each year he was becoming more pachydermatous than before with an inability to empathize with others which made them as disconnected to his life as a passing cumulous cloud. Only the storms, the headlines of the masses that he read in English from the Bangkok Post, would get his attention. A female beggar on an overpass with a child that she nursed under her shirt was no different than someone sitting on a fire hydrant as he waited for a bus. Still, he thought, this was what he would try to correct by a solitary wandering into Vientiane.

He noticed some lint on his shirt and flicked it off but really it was the stranger whom he now wanted to flick away.

"What will you do?" he at last asked.

"Starve," said the Laotian. Nawin saw envy and resentment in the stranger's face even though few things were absolute when being conceptualized upside down. If his were envy and resentment it was no different than the way many of his Thai friends often looked at him when finding out that he had an American passport. But then, everything was relative. Perhaps a Somalian would look at a Laotian in the same way.

"How did you hurt your paw," asked the Laotian

"An old war injury," sighed Nawin.

"In Thailand?' That sounds a bit peculiar. You are a bit peculiar, aren't you? An accident that you don't want to talk about—some type of fight with a guy where you acted like a coward or a civil war in your own home that-"

"Hard to explain," interrupted Nawin.

"Okay, whatever. Now tell me what you are going to Laos for."

"Again for a while—a few weeks or so," said Nawin in jest but seriously believing that there was comfort in friends and acquaintances alike remaining strangers.

"Wanting to have fun with a Laotian girl?"

"Do you have one in mind for me?"

"I will sell my sister at a special discount for you if it doesn't cause more war injuries." These were mere words, flippant wisps of air to fill the vapid moments of time while confined with undesirable others on a train. They were of no more serious intent than the earlier conversation but the idea of selling a member of a family, or selling them out, was something too close to home. It was repugnant enough to make this paragon of honesty transformed grotesquely into an inordinate abuser—such were the fathoms of childhood trauma that a facetious play with words meant that devils could be made instantly from gods, and that gods were made from the muck of childhood sensitivities like any sand or snowman. He wanted to end the conversation abruptly but needed to find a graceful and amicable exit that would keep the one disliked clueless of this fact.

"You don't say? No, probably not. I've become spoiled by taking whiter meat."

"I saw your marriage ring when you first began babbling. Are you married to a European?"