stare, there was nothing to stop him. No one was awake but himself. Uppers and lowers, they were all ensconced in tiny train domains behind their brown curtains. He was quite alone enough to elongate a momentary voyeurism to more. The burly stranger wearing only sufficiently bulged underwear was both handsome and ugly depending on one's perspective; and it was perspective by which all judgments lied. To understand the level of desirability or repugnance of a given thing (whether or not the Moslem woman sleeping in an adjacent bunk across the aisle with partially opened curtains was "with child," "knocked up," or a southern terrorist in disguise, or whether the train ride, one that every young boy would yearn to go on, was pleasant or not for the man he had mutated into) an overall mood was needed, a background color for the canvas based on faded memories falling through the mind as softly as leaves or as revoltingly as trash blowing on the ground.

Beams of light were able to slide through the myriad rectangular slits of the metallic awning that had been pulled down the window as a screen; and when somewhat blocked by forms in the environment the passing southerly trains became oblique. Obliquely, they changed the appearance of the man and in so doing changed the perspective of him. At one moment the light accentuated blemishes visible on his face and at another moment it diffused onto the whole countenance making it sleek and mysterious like tenebrous silver.

When the face was ugly its foul breath was fouler, and when handsome the snoring was a nice inebriating gust that picked up Nawin's kite; but in both perspectives the brazen Laotian in his impoverished vulnerability reminded him of Jatupon. There in tattered dirty clothes Jatupon, whom his brothers derided as 'Jatuporn,' was a vermin he could never entirely escape (scaling the prison walls of the subconscious as the boy did), no matter how many thousands of dollars in baht he was commissioned to paint his whores. For a moment he was scared of the Laotian as if having stumbled into a den of sleeping terrorist cells but it was the self that was his only terrorist. It was the self that filled him with stiffened, cold dread. Fortunately, with the walk to the bathroom, the attraction passed him entirely almost in the same moment it came upon him: Jatuporn was apprehended, and the self was placated as if this particular feeling were as inconsequential as all the other wind driven debris of the mind that had gone before.

If he believed that anything which overtook rational thought and equanimity in such a temporary, all pervasive and engaging burning, lacked legitimacy (and in a way he might have for he knew passion to be like the slight bitter aftertaste of too much cloying chocolate), it was of minor consideration being the Patpong prostitute depicter that he was. With lovely scented women (especially those in ovulation, which was every man's Venus Flytrap unless punctilious enough to carry a nosegay of multi-colored condoms) sensuality was wild flowers of searing energy popping up after a shower making the landscape anew. However, any titillation regarding a man was tremor and mudslides. It was his shaky world tearing apart, falling down the sores of its cracks, and being buried alive within the fall downward. Because of this, all he wanted was departure: in this case, to depart from the man, the spell, and the train, and as this was not possible, to again retreat into his once solitary bower.

Even with passion waning with every step toward the bathroom in a salvation of movement, his mind was preoccupied by wanting to reclaim the window and seat from the window and seat thief, so that he might let morning and movement pass through the orifices of his eyes to obstruct memory—a morning with shanty stations as gateways to shanty towns, rice fields and banana orchards with coconut trees occasionally spewed in, thickets of verdant weeds and knee high grass, sickly palm trees and two-story shacks where the bottom halves had such high earthy foundations and the true houses were the upper portions where drying laundry hanging from ropes were the only ornaments apart from distant glimpses of vehicles and amorphous motorcycle taxi drivers on the main street of some rural town or another. Until he could escape the man and the train entirely, until he could walk away and clog his mind with other things, there would be a window with which to take in various scenes to obstruct memory—an annexing weed of consciousness to idle eyes. And the window would be his were it not for the Laotian's sprawling body clogging his space.

He imagined himself shaking the Laotian, kicking him on his hairy behind, and dragging him out of this annexed space. He smiled and internally laughed at such an absurd caprice. The mind was littered with such protective mines, which soared through the weightless space of ethereal consciousness. By his laughter such evil was not claimed and thus it did not make him. This was his enlightened thought in a partially refreshed brain granted by a nocturnal sleep which had also slugged him with a headache, made his clothes wrinkled and smelly, and left him with the need to urinate.

Chemical fixations and caprices went out of him entirely with his liquids. Urinating in this metallic East-Asian urinal embedded within the floor of a toilet sandwiched between two cars, he facetiously told himself that the fetid little space was his friend. Even though he did it with humor it was the stuff that Jatupon was made of. It was the animistic thoughts of a child. Feeling relieved to relieve himself of fluids and issues, he could have allowed the matter to stay there, but he wanted a guarantee that nothing like this would happen to him again. The dilemma was not knowing who the guarantor was, so he sunk himself into the Buddhist myths of his culture. Ubiquitous superstition, the guardian against creepy crawling memories, came upon him. He said a bit of a prayer, as much as any atheist could, to exorcise homosexual inclinations from his brain. The prayer, if it could be called such, was not conscious or subconscious thought but a type of semi-autonomous space-garbage moving in quick orbits within the mind.

Through deliberately imagining it to be so, he made a spell that transformed Buddha into a god even though there were no gods in Buddhism (at least not in Buddha's Buddhism), no netherworld of heavenly creatures, and no guardian Seraphs and cherubs—only the deadening of desire, in the soft strangulation of this illusion of self to engender a harmony that defiled the essence of being alive. It was a toilet Buddha-god to whom he could offer no oblation beyond urination and potential defecation.

Deep in his "soul" he knew that even if there were a distant god beyond the gods made in man's image, men were mere cockroaches before it, scurrying away from the vibrations of the foot with no understanding of the foot being a foot let alone as part of the limb of a body to a conscious behemoth entity. Such was man's ignorance of God or gods, of which the most intelligent believed nothing and the most ignorant believed the myths that made their besmirched flesh hallowed enough to be at one with them. He scolded himself for wanting a deliverer who would save him from the fleeting whims that haunted the mind, moving it like an empty ship navigating mysteriously by the mandates of erratic winds and caprices. He knew how opposed to the intellect such beliefs were when there was no evidence of intervention by the deities in life's barbarism and injustices, unless it were in the injustices themselves of gods favoring some and letting others perish which would be the same as the traits of any of the monsters of men; and yet he summoned his Buddha nonetheless. Such superstitions were normal in these vulnerable and tenuous corpuses and he was no different. He laughed; he amused himself like no other.

He looked at himself in