the mirror. It was the same handsome face. It was not a half rotten apple hanging loosely from a tree—at least not yet. It was the same brawny body that had amorously begotten another male in the phantasmagoria of this world. He thought of this child whom Noppawan was no doubt jubilantly nurturing and pampering at this moment as if he were her own. Should the separation seem permanent a few years from now, Noppawan would no doubt tell her son a story in which, for some families, there were no daddies. She might say that in such lucky families children were delivered to mommies by the assistance of an angel named Kimberly who was quicker with her deliveries than any of the motorcycle delivery boys who worked for Pizza Hut. It was a mean thought against meanness done to him, but he decided that he would not berate himself for it. After all, he could not figure out how there could be any sin unless it were theirs. Disposing of guilt for a moment, he could see the obvious: it was Noppawan's idea for him to father a child through her friend; and prior to the affair how could he have known that it would lead to Kimberly's possessiveness and that in her post partum depression she would leap off of her apartment balcony at Assumption University? Like every affair of any nature one engaged unknowingly, so a beating with the iron frying pan had been totally out of order. He sucked in his lips angrily and told himself that he did not hate them which was not entirely true.

Having begotten a child made him feel that his use had been filled and that his virility had been smashed out of him most intimately by the hands of two women attempting to quench their maternal thirst with his apple juice and the seeds that were rife within it. He was a mushy half-rotten apple that they had squeezed most mercilessly to garner the seeds within his juice. In a sense they had raped him; and he argued to himself that rapes of the handsome, talented, and affluent types were the most common cannibalism in this modern world.

3

He thought about a Bangkok Post article which, three years earlier, had referred to him euphemistically as "The distinguished benefactor of rural girls in an urban profession." Back then, at the age of 36, he, Nawin Biadklang, had considered the sardonic comment both humorous and exhilarating, for every article allotting time and space to an examination of his self- absorbed ruminations on decadent living, no matter how critical and regardless of the domestic nature, like this one in point, was to him, then, like the first lick of succulent success.

As with all reviews, at the time of this article's publication he considered it, which now was the most recent critique of his oeuvre, as another exhilarating current of air enabling him to soar without much effort. Back then, he had been volant within the dopamines and endorphins of his own head, anticipating a maturity, a growth into the fit of his decadent skin, which would allow him, as much as a serious artist was allotted, to strut his succulence more fully on life's propitious catwalks of fame. That had been the initial impression that had come about, to some degree, from a rather inconsequential review published in Thailand; and it had been an impression and reaction not at variance to the impressions and reactions of all earlier reviews.

And yet a year later when the drawing of all his escorts seemed banal and jejune enough to be replaced by a celebration of the ordinary (a painting, for example, like a photograph in a locket, of his then platonic angel in the driver's seat of her car but from a perspective of looking at her through the exterior of a windshield and through the interior of a dangling jasmine rosary that hung from the rear view mirror; another one of his pedantic wife at a distance sitting on a bench outside the Assumption University library while sipping through a straw the juice of a coconut as she read a book through her heavy spectacles; an odd if not grotesque painting of Noppawan with the perspective from the forehead looking onto the dark, leaning moled hills, and blemished declivity of her face; "A Conversation on Surrogate Motherhood," as one painting was mentally entitled in which both women were at a coffee shop, and despite their restrained if not tranquil demeanor the room was filled with their unrestrained, desperate thoughts flying through the air in sundry shades of every color; and others seeming to him more insignificant and raw stylistically than the three aforementioned), he told himself that he was worthless as a painter. He became determined to remove his paint and canvases to a closet and to forswear art altogether. He averred inwardly that all his studies of aching prostitutes who were quickly manufactured off the assembly belts of this world, which stretched decades, centuries, and millenniums toward the past and the future, would not help one of them, being dead and unborn as they were; and for those escorts in his immediate present whom he gropingly attempted to befriend, to sooth their jealous reactions toward his unwillingness to divorce his wife and marry them, and occasionally tried to set up as beauty shop proprietors, owners not merely of sidewalk restaurants but of the open garage variety so common in Thailand, supporting them financially while they sought a high school degree or other certificate, and other futile attempts at empowerment, it appeared that what he had succeeded in doing for the dead and unborn whores was infinitely more. He had delivered no one to their higher potential. Art, he said, was a frivolous embellishment by those who were weary of enduring the ordinary. It was lavish and empty like a string of heavy jewels locked in a safe, or the accumulation of wealth to give specious dignity to the tenuous body of carbon called man. It did nothing for anyone.

It was then that, because of the article, the word, "distinguished," began to snag his consciousness. The word, when used sarcastically, suggested that one was a dirty old man, that acme of all depravity. 'Depravity' was an all inclusive word in which both playboys and bloodthirsty tyrants were erroneously locked in as cell mates. He had not even climbed far into sensual decadence, a different mountain entirely, with play for the playboy tearing his crepe paper heart the inwardly lachrymose and outwardly debonair way that it did, with these bouts of sensing a woman's genitalia as vapid holes being banged as empty drums from inside by a man's stick; these conclusions that sex was just a bored erumpent man banging on any tin trash can in reach for a bit of sound and vibration, and brief moments of total, pellucid understanding called enlightenment as to the absolute absurdity of an instrument of urination being used for intimacy.

He knew that if viewed alone, without the disparaging meanings pretentious and sanctimonious art critics gave to it, the word, "distinguished," was more good than bad. Still, he did not like the elderly connotation of it in reference to himself and he did not think that he was accomplished enough to be considered "distinguished." Nobly and decadently, he had spent many years chasing lurid themes and nasty girls merely because he, from personal experience, could empathize with innocence being snatched away by the hungry wolves of this world—or rather, the more complex commonality of not really being snatched by those fangs, but innocence, in the form of a thigh, being eagerly given to the waylaying wolves so that the whole body could survive. By being tossed morsels of the good life from the beloved abductor in exchange for a thigh, the body could survive and the brain would be more than empty space for it would have someone to love.

Regardless of whether the innocent were considered victims or volunteers, innocence was nonetheless baited and devoured. As a forlorn younger brother who was hated by all except for the one who would use him as a "cheap date," he