id="id00074">"No, a Thai woman who is darker than us both. That is another story."

"Why did you marry her if she is so dark and ugly and likes to hit on you?"

He became more conscious of the barely bearable itchiness under the cast. It seemed to him that it would be a handy excuse for absconding to his bunk. And there he could rummage through his bag for a hanger from which to scratch with.

"Don't keep me waiting all night for an answer."

"It's morning now. She's not all that ugly and she is a good communicator. Well, my arm is itching. I need to get some powder or something, and besides I've kept you and perhaps others up long enough. I thank you for the beer. It is already making me drowsy. Excuse me, the blood has gone to my head."

"Okay. Whatever."

Nawin slunk back into what he amusingly considered his "tenebrous tomb" not that he found such retreats into himself so odious. Neither society nor solitude seemed to him as being all that commodious and so throughout every waking moment of his life he paced the two rooms of himself like a member of the Burmese National League for Democracy under house arrest. Having exhausted the reserve that fueled what extroverted characteristics he possessed, he just lay there finishing his drink and waiting for the liberating force of sleep to deliver him.

2

A prodigious, big boned figure of a woman with stiff raised arms that were erect, gesturing boughs waited for her man, not as a doting woman but as a martinet; and four times she demandingly called his name, 'Zero', and four times there was nothing.

(If his brainwaves were water flooding into his hard skull boat and the air-conditioned drafts that he tried to escape by bundling himself within his blankets were the battering inundations of oceanic waves, then it would seem that he was foundering in both the depths of himself and the world for every minute his restless, lopsided head shifted to the other side of his pillow. In the middle of the particular dream he was now in, he turned sharply on his left side and he would have fallen from the precipice of his bunk most judiciously in recompense for Kimberly's death were it not for plastic black straps that allowed him to be restrained there to his sentence of dreams— suicidal dreams periodically jolting the body but having little to do with her.) At last a man as fat as a tub and as sequacious as a child wobbled toward this woman, 'Four'; but, according to the feelings of the god, Nawin, that drenched the ground that they stood upon lugubriously, the two were not meant to stand together. No, the four and the zero were not meant to stay together and the zephyrs of the god blew strongly upon them to obtain their separation. But those winds were futile as a device for prying away such an inspissated couple for once they were together this man and woman babbled to each other a mutually pleasurable one word jabberwocky despite the fiercely driven rains, hail, and the flash flood at their feet. The drone of these distant voices was of forty, and each repeated it to the other forty times. Forty was eighty times redundantly beaten onto his head as if it were a drum; and with a slight headache Nawin awakened.

He instantly realized that he was forty; and although he told himself that he did not feel any different, and that he surely looked no different than he had some hours earlier at the age of 39, and that to have had the span of years needed to successfully rise from what he was, was more of a blessing than a curse, the idea that he was a half rotten apple hanging loosely and purposelessly from a tree made him cringe and wish that he were not at all. Light and flippant, jocular and yet terribly morose, this self-destructive mood was nonetheless powerfully upon him for he could not stop himself thinking that forty was an end of virility, and that an end of virility was the end of manhood, the end of all. This suicidal taunting that was implanted in his brain from a dream snatched as a theme of fears in overall consciousness was, he knew, the result of turning forty in this tomb. Not wanting to confront the morbidity of this attack, he retreated back to sleep as if it were the sanctuary from negative ideas instead of being their crucible.

The gecko did not favorably view Nawin unzipping his skin and lying down in his tenebrous tomb in such a manner. A man behaving like this, instead of fleeing from its formidable presence was nothing like it had ever witnessed before, and it found the situation extremely puzzling. As preoccupied as Nawin was in escaping his carnal flesh and emulating those carcasses he and his wife were so partial to (particularly the slit middle aged husband and wife of a car crash in Ayutthaya who basked peacefully in the lighting of their glass and formaldehyde coffins in the anatomical museum at Siriaj Hospital), he did not notice that the gecko was glowering with its forty eyes— glowering at the man for being so inert when he should be fleeing from the reptile and for having undressed from his besmirched outer layer of flesh with such a crude, complete, and unnatural disrobing. The museum was an anniversary site Nawin and his wife had in fact gone to on a number of occasions to commemorate their youthful meetings there, and to see the freakish human pottery of tawny-brown or tanned ochre that had been of such comfort to them as teenagers. Back then, before finding the dead people and each other, each of them had been wandering respectively through an asphyxiating smoke that was as inescapable as a labyrinth and more confusing. But within it they retained a faint hope that the smoke would eventually disperse from the battle ground of family and that one day this abstract word, family, with nothing concrete in it would altogether vanish—vanish intellectually and emotionally the way the river goddess of Loy Khratong diffused through a child's years until the abstraction was gone from the mind as yesterday's smoke. With 'family' being a word marring their worlds, it was only natural that their hopes should be revived in these preserved entities of Siriaj Hospital. Once alive but now the smallest of freaks jarred on shelves, and the largest grounded in containers, they were a reminder that there was a stage of mangled life, of death, of being put on a shelf, of being displayed as a museum piece, and myriad other unknown possibilities. As it was with them, so family was a battle that would end as all battles ended. Battle grounds could become verdant again but this was not so of the battle ground of family and they smothered in each other wistful thoughts of a return. As a married couple they would occasionally take the Chao Phraya river boat to the museum so that they might reminisce about those meetings of their youth, thank the preserved specimens that had saved them from life, and maintain a lexicographical stance that words like "death" should mean precisely that despite the vehement denials, neologistic concoctions of a heavenly overture, and anthromorphic self-made mythologies of the masses. In some respects, despite the enormity of his size, Nawin was like any raw meat that the gecko had caught before; but never before had any of its prey skinned itself and by its own volition lay before it as inanimately as any torn, half uneaten comestible. The gecko watched Nawin who was poised like a reclining Buddha and staring at the ceiling that hindered the welkins. Although the skinless nude lying there was a bit like a boy praying after slipping out of his clothes, forgetful of getting into his pajamas, the gecko was not able to make this connection. It just assumed that the skinned and fairly inanimate human was playing dead to save itself from becoming its meat. But as time went by the inert human creature became so wholly opprobrious to the gecko, who valued a good hunt, that at last, as the small ceiling fan continued to turn