The White Shadow Page 2

  It’s been a long time since I’ve had a new idea. The light from the paraffin lamp is never bright enough. It only gives out a dim wobbly light that often threatens to go out. I can’t write at all when there’s a strong wind. I always write well when the sky is clear. Can you see them? To the west, over the treetops, the evening star shines brightly, and to the east the moon is rising from behind the black bar of the mountain. For years I’ve been sleeping in the daytime and working through the nights or at least always going to sleep very late, around three or four in the morning. Sometimes I go to sleep at dawn when the others are waking up but sometimes I go out for a walk. The nights spent without doing anything are a torment for me. These days the cold makes my hands go numb. Outside, the thin haze is thickening into fog. The later into the night, the thicker the dew, and even though there’s no wind, the cold becomes unbearable. Here people go to bed early. In the moonlight, the houses in the village are blurred shadows like hunched-up prehistoric beasts asleep in the nipping fog. From one house or another you might see a flutter of light, but it soon goes out. One night I stood watching such companionable lights when all of a sudden a dog went on a protracted yowl that tore the silence apart as if it had seen ghosts. The lights in the village went out. I had gooseflesh all over because the dog stood howling at the top of the stairs. All the dogs here consider this house to be theirs. Every night they bark and howl at me to chase me away. I’ll never succeed in making friends with them. Do you see my shadow, Kangsadarn? One part stretched out across the floor, the other projected against a wall. I’m now grappling with the night, grappling with myself, with you, with everything that happens in life. At the very moment I woke up I thought I was already dead. But in reality not yet. I always keep thinking I’m dead. I’ve thought like this for a long time, thousands, tens of thousands of times. I wish to die, but maybe that wish isn’t sincere. I wish to keep on living, but maybe that wish isn’t sincere either. Do I exist for sure? Aren’t I my own invention in the same way a novelist invents characters out of his own musings? It might well be that I’m but an invention, a ready-made being I’m merely packing with my feelings and thoughts. Then what about my feelings and thoughts? To what extent are they real? I don’t know. Sometimes I forget even my own name. It might seem I’m pretending, but I’m not. It’s more likely a matter of mental drift. I woke up in a state of exhaustion and now I’m still not entirely freed from the poison of drowsiness. Maybe I’m still sleeping and merely mumbling in my sleep. Right now, maybe I’m only awake in a dream and merely talking in my sleep with myself, with you, with whomever. Sleep-talking sleep-talking sleep-talking… mumbling mumbling mumbling… My words become weary doleful echoes, reeling languidly like the footprints of a man lost in a desert about to collapse and die, mixed with moans, sighs, sobs, roars and laughs, sounding like the inner thoughts of a madman, mostly without meaning, nothing but uh-uh ah-ah up and down the vocal scale, uh-uh ah-ah in the imagination. My words become letters in tatters, deliquescent, shabby, faint, wobbly, staggering letters that float on the page of emptiness, that are near and clear, that are distant and blurred, rather irregular, and will eventually disappear. I am thinking, dreaming, talking in my sleep and maybe dying or already dead or none of the above. I don’t know. I only feel very weak, physically and mentally. If I’m not already dead, I’ll kill myself, though I’d rather die peacefully of old age than kill myself. I don’t even want to ask myself if committing suicide is a sin or not. I no longer worry either whether it is cowardice or courage. If I haven’t killed myself yet it’s only because I’m too lazy, too lazy to even figure out if this answer is sincere or not, lazy to the point I don’t even want to move a finger to find a cigarette, stretch my legs to relieve stiffness or change posture, or even bat an eyelid or run my tongue over my dry lips. But nonetheless I’m still able to feel and think. When I say I feel very weak physically and mentally, I’m not trying to be pitied. You know me well enough to know I’m not the wheedling type. I’m not begging for your sympathy. So you think I’m wheedling, do you? You scatterbrain! I said I feel very weak physically and mentally because it’s the truth. I once happened to faint right in an agony of pain. That time I’d been stabbed and my aggressor had run away. I collapsed, writhing and thrashing. Acute pain burst out, obliterating all other feelings, and spread like firework on a festive day, burst out and spread and, woops, curtain! A near-death experience. I passed out just like that but then, spoow, I came to just like in a film run backwards. I came to in hospital. My olfactory nerves were still working properly because I became aware of a smell of medicine or should I say a smell of hospital, a distinctive smell which I perceived as soon as I came to, making me realise afterwards that that time wasn’t the closest I’d been to death. Right then, my optic nerves were still working normally. I could see the ceiling of the hospital room, white, see the walls, white, see the nurse on call, white. She sat reading a book. The book wasn’t white. But I still didn’t know who she was and didn’t know I was in hospital, still didn’t know it even when I saw the blood pouch hanging by the bed. I must’ve lost a lot of blood and it was being replaced. But it was only when I became conscious of that medicinal smell that I told myself Well, well! A hospital, what else? Someone must have taken you to hospital. And I went back to sleep, free from worry because I thought I was out of danger. At the time I was much younger and stronger than now. I was in the last term of my first year at university. I missed courses for several days. When I resumed them I was white as a sheet, I still had to walk slowly, still had to eat bland food. But now I’ve almost forgotten that stabbing, even though I still bear the scar of the wound, which was carefully sewn up. I thought at the time it was an experience I’d never forget and it’d stay forever vivid in my memory… I was stabbed because of a woman – a young woman I’d given too much importance to, although to tell the truth she was but a conceited girl in search of foolish excitement and fun from one day to the next. After that stabbing, she disappeared from my life. When I was a teenager I had a friend and we were very close. We’d eat from the same plate, sleep under the same mosquito net and smoke grass together, but then I never saw him again. None of those who knew him ever saw him again. There was a rumour the cops had bumped him off. He was a wicked lad. He had very effeminate features that had girls wetting their pants. A pretty boy for sure, but wicked. And he disappeared without trace. As did the skipper of Theiwee Samut No 9 disappear from my life. I had gone to the fishing pier in Phuket and recklessly got myself hired as crewman on board that trawler. At the time I was just out of junior high and didn’t think about continuing my studies. But then I left Theiwee Samut No 9 without taking leave of the skipper. I left the boat on the sly when I realised the hot season was almost over and the new term was starting. Typical hotheaded behaviour. The skipper, I remember, was a taciturn man but in his reserve I knew that he loved me. His concern for me was the concern of a grownup stranger for a teenage stranger. He’d once retrieved me from one of those ganja dives that abound along the harbour. He’d gone looking for me and when he found me with a nod motioned me to get out. He didn’t say a word. And I shook my head listlessly like one just emerging from a dream, ganja smoke coming out of my nostrils and mouth, and I walked out after him, feeling sorry about myself rather than guilty. I drifted a little as I walked, but was conscious enough to know what was what. It was very late by then. On the pier there were but the two of us. The sea breeze came in gusts. The sky glistened with stars. I said nothing but felt upset. At the time the future was all darkness and uncertainty. He stood looking sadly at me as I threw up into the sea. I remember I’d stopped walking because I felt giddy and then I threw up. I doubled up and threw up the sweetmeats that went with grass I’d stuffed myself with, threw up the drunken dreams, drunken laughs and drunken prattle of the ganja gathering. He didn’t get near to help me or comfort me but stood still and straight as a ramrod. He was small but stocky, wore an expensive shirt and cheap fisherman’s trousers. The cost
of his shirt may well have bought a dozen such trousers. And he went barefoot like fishermen everywhere. At sea he looked like a marine animal of some kind. It was only inside the boat or on land that he looked like a human being. It was him who taught me the use of various fishing implements and how to look after them. But here I am now unable to remember his name. Actually I forgot his name long ago, maybe in the first week or first month after I turned my back to the sea, and I know perfectly well there’s no way I’ll ever remember it. He himself must have forgotten my name. He used to call me Borstal Boy. I’m among those that have disappeared from his life and he’s among those that have disappeared from my life. Same thing with the girl that got me stabbed. She cast herself adrift. She and I used to live together. We slept together a great deal but in the end drifted apart. She was a pretty woman. I like pretty women. The prettier they are, the more secret, and I’m forever craving to blow their secret. Since I got stabbed, however, sometimes when I look at a woman I start to shake out of intractable dread. But only in some cases, mind you. What I dread rather is the sharp flash of that blade that night. No! Don’t! I yelled in my chest and yelled truly out of shock and misgiving, taken with pity and worry for the man with the knife meaning to hurt me. We should’ve come to terms nicely. My yell sounded like the yell of a medium going into a trance. He rushed at me. I should’ve fled, but nothing doing. I was shocked, sorry for him and for me. We should never have gone to such extremes. I was holding a cigarette in my hand at that moment. It must have been flung away when I was stabbed. Then I passed out. Just before I lost consciousness, I saw everything blurred, double and triple. By then it was early evening. When I came to, it was dark. I had no idea what time it was. I only knew my wound hurt. I only knew my eyesight was back to normal. I knew it slowly and confusedly then gradually and more firmly, but I was dizzy. Closing my eyes I felt better. Same as now. My eyes don’t want to open again. I’m ailing and weary, but I don’t feel dizzy. The moon’s climbed up further, a dark red disk almost like the sun at dawn. This isn’t a full moon though, rather the second or third night of waning moon. It must be great to die under the moonlight. For me death is no big deal, but as it happens I’m still able to make a choice. It doesn’t help at all that tonight the moon is beautiful. It has nothing to do with me, though. Moonlight slants through the windows. Moonlight is awesome. I should write a letter to you. I’ve written many letters to you which I haven’t sent. There are many other letters I must write, something like twenty or thirty, but I haven’t written them, or maybe I have but haven’t sent them. In other words, I’ve never written to anyone. I’m not ready to contact anyone. Like that pact with death I’ve already signed. I feel drained. I’m too damn lazy. For months and months I’ve hardly done anything at all and debts are beginning to pile up and bury me as if the earth was sucking me up and little by little steeping me into hot lava. I know well enough how to protect myself in the presence of evil, but protecting myself amounts to arousing myself as well. It had been three full months that I hadn’t satisfied myself by doing something evil. So, late this afternoon, I committed evil once again, tired to the bone. Khwan, ‘soul knot’: a name so beautiful as to make you rave in your sleep. I’ve slept with her because of her name. Itthee’s death appears to be the main reason of my physical and mental lack of strength. From the moment she died, I thought I no longer had what it takes to sleep with a woman, but then I don’t know where I found the extra energy I expended in our wild and torrid mating. Gone now are inhibitions and procrastinations. She’d brought me a letter from you. We found ourselves alone here, in this deserted house, in a haze of fog, in the heat of sunshine, going berserk. I often take sleeping drugs and barbiturates, and death haunts my thoughts. I was totally misled when I thought death was within reach. That was an utterly wrong assessment. I shouldn’t have slept with her, not that I’m afraid of dying but because I knew it wasn’t right to do so. But on the other hand, I’d like to die while making love. Die of a heart attack. Die out of pleasure. But I’m not dead, merely dead tired, sad, spacey and anxious. I wanted to sleep with her because I knew it was taboo and I was in a mood to defy all taboos. I wanted to jeer, I wanted to defy, misbehave again and again, misbehave in a mega way, spatter the sky, the moon and the stars, commit a blackness that would plunge the universe into mourning, misbehave again and again. For all I know, she may love me. We met many times and talked many times. She’s got it wrong if she thinks I’m a gentle man. As a matter of fact I’m gentle with women and all the gentler with those women I want to sleep with. I know how to talk nice to them when I want to. I know how to talk funny with them when I want to. I’m able to make them believe I thoroughly master the art of conversation when I want to. I can behave like a good suitor when I want to. We went out for a stroll in the fields and then came back here in the deserted, quiet house. It was unbelievably cold. She lay down on my bed because it’s the only place that isn’t too dirty. Her palms perspired from the pounding of her heart. We were very far away from the rest of the world. We were truly one-to-one. She took a book and started to read while I sat smoking quietly at my writing desk, looking at the slanted sunrays seeping through the cracks in the walls and casting a pale blond, diffuse light. I’ve occasionally found myself alone with a young woman in a room without anything sexual being involved – several women, several times. Just lying down, tormented, but at times resigned: nights without sex once past are so beautiful! Just good friends or like brother and sister. Khwan may have sort of felt like sleeping with me, but that must’ve been just a passing mood. To be fair, I shouldn’t have taken advantage of the situation. This is truly what I think, you know. But outside darkness was beginning to take shape quietly; the sun was absconding behind the mountain. In the house there was only the fading glow of dusk. I looked at her. She was sleeping or at least had closed her eyes, the book opened flat on her chest, her body stretched the whole length. Why wasn’t she lying on her side or with one leg folded, given that she was still a young woman and a pretty one? Didn’t she realise I wasn’t in a normal state? The particles of raving madness in my mind could merge into a whirlwind any time. Had she never suspected that for all of the past three months she’d gone out for walks with a madman, she’d grown intimate with a madman, and now was lying on a madman’s bed in a deserted house where she and he found themselves alone? In the course of the past three months had she never noticed the signs of drifting and absence in my eyes? Didn’t she ask herself questions about my behaviour and my comments? Or was it I always controlled myself perfectly in her presence? Her chest is too big to be really beautiful. She gave out a mixture of sweat and perfume. Her heart beat strongly. I kept still, listening to her heartbeats for so long I almost forgot about doing anything else. I even told her her heart was beating too loud, as if this was a fact that elicited suspicion. And then the game played itself out. It was desire pure and simple, once again without love. I actually thought I was sexually impotent but she undertook to prove me wrong. I keep worrying about suffering from this or that disease. What do you call this in clinical terms? I can’t remember. I used to, though, but I can’t think of the term right now, and maybe I never will. You know, when there’s something a little wrong with you and you get really worked up about it? Maybe I am a bit sexually deficient but here I was thinking I was impotent. Still, she and I should never have slept together. She cried. I myself felt guilty. She’s your friend. Itthee has just died. Hence my feeling of guilt. You’ve always tried to be patient with me ever since we met. You’ve always tried to find excuses for me. You went to Itthee’s funeral; I didn’t go. Her funeral at Thartthong temple, a readymade funeral. You went there even though you didn’t have to. I didn’t go even though I should have. I’d been sloshed from dawn to dusk ever since she died. I’d called Itthee’s parents to tell them to come and fetch the body and do what had to be done. I’d fled. I was drunk. There was nothing I could do to help. She’d killed herself. Beer and sleeping pills. Mouth full of blood,
mouth full of foam, rigid fingers, rigid arms and legs, rigid body. Her parents know it well: it had nothing to do with me. Her funeral was forlorn. What did you want me to do? Forlorn readymade funerals, there are thousands of them every year in Bangkok, spread over the various temples, except that people don’t pay much attention to them. In Bangkok, people are only interested in traffic jams, worried about being unable to travel easily. After Itthee’s death, I switched off. Switched off for good. Absent and adrift. That’s when you caught hold of me and put me in the train that brought me here, and you commissioned Khwan to find me a house to rent. Furthermore you write to me often, at least once a week. So Khwan has to take it upon herself to bring me your letters often. Sometimes she merely drops by to hear how I’m getting on out of good manners but with that boyish brusqueness of hers. She’s but a woman who feels lonely, and as you know, I’m but a bastard who feels lonely, so we began to get close. She was surprised I once was a usaid interpreter, though not for long. But it made our conversation that much easier and she often laughed when I began to explain what the Americans were about. She really enjoyed it when I said the Americans were armchair humanists and they were mistaken to think that if God exists, God must be American. She parks her Japanese pickup in the village and from there sometimes walks over to see me here, sometimes borrows a bicycle from a villager and rides over, then pushes it across the tall grass of the orchard, rings its bell and shouts out What are you doing? Dress decently for once, okay? You’ve got a female visitor. Sometimes she puts on a Northern accent for fun, which makes me feel she’s damn cute. It wasn’t long before she came to see me almost every day, in the evening after work. I’ve become so used to it that on the days she doesn’t come I feel oddly at a loss and empty. Sometimes when she won’t come in the evening she comes in the morning merely to tell me she can’t make it later. I hardly know anything about her background, except that she has a house in Bangkok and is still recovering from her break-up with her former boyfriend about a year ago, which has turned her into a coitus-refugee dwelling here with no plans yet to go back to Bangkok in the near future. Three months of the cold season, ninety-seven, ninety-eight days since she and I met: long enough for a friendly relationship to take a new turn, maybe because of the loneliness and remoteness, the sky, mountain, jungle, brook and the haze at dusk. This new outlook of life is so far from the daily life I led when I was still in Bangkok. She once invited me to go for a ride and I, in a mood to please her, said Okay. She borrowed a motorcycle from a villager. Where do you want to go? she asked. To the river, I answered. It’d been a long time since I last sat quietly watching water flow by. I’d long wanted to tell someone how much I love a river. She directed me to a riverbank as we rode through the chilly air, she riding pillion pressed tight against my back. The cold gave me a cold. That was during the twelfth lunar month, and the water was flush with the banks. At the time we hadn’t yet slept together. She has a lovely skin, light, neat and springy. She wears her hair cut short, which makes her face look mischievous. What was on her ex’s mind to have ditched her like that? The river isn’t beautiful, but dirty and furious, a river of death. At the time I hadn’t quite been thinking of sleeping with her. At least, I had made no such plans. I was confused, all taken with my cogitations over death. I wished to remain alone to delve into myself. The cremation site is a good place for me. The cremation site is the place where before long I’ll go to rest, as a corpse without relations, as a corpse without name. The cremation site – not some psychiatric hospital or jail. No, no. Abnormal moods shift deep within me. I’m capable of killing. She doesn’t know that. She doesn’t even know I thought of killing someone in the past and I still think so now and still will think so in the future. I’ve never killed anyone but I’d like to. I’d like to know how it feels to be a murderer. But I carefully keep this impulse locked up. To kill would make me shake with fear, the fear of killing. But under the old rain tree by the riverside, I came to think differently. A young woman and me… To hell with her past! I felt like a young stud. Flowers in full bloom, a clear sky, the bracing air of late morning in early winter and the wind from the lapping river slapping my face and dishevelling my locks. And a woman, a real woman, not a caricature of a woman, a real woman, beaming and radiant, talkative and prompt to laugh… With a woman like this life could begin anew. Death, suicide and other mental illnesses should be banished from my thoughts, but after contemplating the river for a while, I was still morose and started mulling over death again. The footprints of death hadn’t faded out of my memory. The river wasn’t beautiful. I don’t know, maybe because the spot where we stood wasn’t the right one. We stood by the edge of a longan orchard. On the other bank stretched fields of maize, tobacco and red millet, probably under the supervision of the Agricultural Extension Department, as well as a field of young sweet tamarinds a little taller than a person. From there, the river wasn’t beautiful. The water was flush with the banks and ran heavy, fast and turbid, brown red. Maybe it’d look better seen from a distance, under moonlight or in twilight. But I didn’t ask her to take me to another spot along the river. We remained standing there quietly like a couple of novice lovers. I didn’t know what she was thinking, maybe of her former boyfriend. From there, we went into town, a small godforsaken town, stopped by a small bookshop and a godforsaken coffee shop. It was a newfangled coffee shop as you can see everywhere in Bangkok, except it lacked custom and was quiet. There was a choice of delicious cakes. I felt happy sitting in the coffee shop like that, with the good smells of coffee and pastry and the silence as well. My cigarette tasted good. In places like that I’ve often written pretty good poems or at times had pretty good thoughts for future writing. She sat with her legs stretched out and her back leaning against the seat casually and she was reading a book and at times smoothing her hair backwards with her hand. Her posture was natural and attractive. As she sat on the bike on the way back, she still held me tight, her cheek against my shoulder. Her straight boy-like hair needled through the material of my shirt and tickled my skin. I almost deliberately ran the bike into the ditch several times or into the big trees by the roadside or into the lorries and villagers’ carts coming at us. I didn’t want to be too happy. Every time I’m too happy I want to kill myself. It seems I’m under a spell that forbids all access to happiness. It seems I’m more aware than anyone else in the world that happiness is brittle. The golden sunlight of the late afternoon bathed the fields, the orchards, the huddled houses and huts, bathed me and bathed her, bathed the asphalt of the road, the electricity poles, the kilometre markers and the bridges and the watercourses, but the sunshine has never made anyone immortal, nor has the moonlight, nor crude neon light. She was holding me tight, in part because I drove fast. I don’t like to keep seated all stiff on a bike saddle for too long. I’m soon fed up. I’d like to just try and collide into something or jump off a bridge to end it all. What’s the idea of remaining seated stiff with cramp, controlling this, watching over that, eyes and hands and feet always busy? Having an accident wouldn’t be all that bad. I’d like to have an accident to change the course of things, just to know what’s going to change and how. If I decided to sleep with her maybe it was only to see how the relationship between us was going to change, and if I decide to ditch her maybe it’ll only be to see how the relationship between us is going to change. She trusts me because I’m your friend and she must think I’m a fine person like you. Actually, I don’t want to create any more problems. There have been more than enough as it is. I’ve had to rely on analgesics, antibiotics, barbiturates and sleeping pills more than enough as it is. But sleeping with Khwan is the latest complication to date. What if she wants something stupid like marriage or a child? I’m not fit to spend my life with anyone, not fit to have a child. I know this from experience. I’m bankrupt, morally bankrupt. No doubt it’ll be very difficult for me to recover from illness. If I succeed, maybe I’ll manage to work a little. That’s what I hope. A little is better than nothing. B
ut I have yet to do anything worthwhile of any kind and I take the money you send me every month. Oh, I’m fed up having to flee once again. I think all the same I’m going to leave, go away as I’ve done before, wander about aimlessly here and there, stay overnight with this or that friend, travel by bus or by train. Sometimes travelling for too long leaves me exhausted and weak, but I like it. Or maybe I’ll flee into permanent drunkenness, day after day, night after night. You’re afraid I’m going crazy. You told me that as far as you were concerned you could no longer bear to see me live like this, and when I accepted to come here as you wished, I made a mess of things here too. My old debts remain outstanding, besides what I owe you, I mean. Golly! It’s amazing how much fucking credit I’m given: all told, it’s tens of thousands of baht I owe, and I’ve yet to do anything, besides turning increasingly insane as days go by. Khwan is unlucky. It’s because of me that Itthee fell into hell and it’s the reason why I fell into hell as well. Khwan is falling into hell and that’s the reason why I too will fall into hell again at a time when I was scrambling up towards the light. Why are there so many lonely hearts? The meanest son-of-a-gun in Bangkok feels lonely and is looking for someone. Coming here, I found it again: a lonely heart looking for someone. Maybe it’s because I played the part of the nice, gentle man (a part lots of others play much better than I) each time I met her. So she didn’t realise she was coupling with a wild beast. Never mind her! To hell with her! Will she be one of those women you lead by the halter to a clinic for an abortion? To hell with her! The night has fallen. Maybe ten or twelve sleeping pills will do the deed. This is my night. Welcome to my last night. And dawn tomorrow will doubtless be my last dawn. I was born at dawn. That’s what my mother told me. When I was born all of my body and all of my face were covered with hairs sticky with blood. My mouth was wide open, all fangs, and in a greedy grin I said I bloody want… I’m damn hungry… No, I’m joking. What’s true is that I was born at dawn. I was born romantic in a June dawn, under the Gemini sign, the sign of copulation. Thanks to the expertise of a midwife, someone like me managed to be born romantic, on a threshing bamboo basket, under torchlight and lamplight, as rain glistened outside. The place where I was born is a great village, Phraek Narm Daeng. I won’t hide I wish myself a splendid death, except that if possible at all I wish it won’t be too awful, as life is awful enough as it is. But if I must die in an awful way, so be it, because I won’t be alone in the Elysian Fields given that there are lots of people that die in an awful way every day of the year. If only you paid a little more attention to crime reports in the newspapers, you’d see there are awful deaths every day. We human beings die every day. Everybody dies. The right to death is the imprescriptible right of one and all. The Buddha too died after eating rotten pork and before he died said O my disciples, do not be careless! Cesar was stabbed repeatedly to death and before he died said Et tu Brute? Beethoven nailed to his bed on a stormy night brusquely sat up, pointed at the lightning and on the rebound dropped dead. It is said that before he died the great philosopher Voltaire had lost his mind to the point of eating his own excreta. Good thing he didn’t request other people’s excreta! The great thinker Schopenhauer was dead when stomach gases expelled his denture from his mouth, spooking the disciples gathered around the body no end. Jesus died on the cross. Were you there too when Jesus was crucified? Such were the deaths of great men… One day you’ll die, I’ll die. One day everybody will be dead just as one day in the past no one was yet born. The world before mankind… the world after mankind… I’d like to see the world before man was born and the world after the human breed has died out. No one cares about this but me and a few archaeologists from outer space. Have I ever told you my mother killed herself? I don’t think I did or if I did it must have been only in my mind. I’m not at all impressed when someone tells me his mother killed herself and he too is about to kill himself. Sure, go ahead! It’s the last way out but it’s too popular. Same thing with songs: some songs are beautiful but they’re too popular, so they become deplorable rather than admirable: they turn commonplace, they turn ordinary. The same goes for suicide. It may well be that I’ll elect to live. Life is so weird. What the heck am I going to do with myself and the others? At a given time, in a given place, that’s all there is: life. There is me and my self. There’s me and the others. I’m rather indifferent to the relation between me and my self. I don’t really give a damn about it. I’m a mercurial tyrant with myself. I’m Ivan the Terrible with myself. With the others I try to avoid them. But one can’t live alone. That’s a depressing fact. In one’s relations to others one must control oneself a lot. The ability to coexist with others is taken as a yardstick of excellence. It’s something that must be learned. There are plenty of teachings on that score, from philosophy, politics, religion and customs down to table manners. I’m fed up with myself being so slow learning these things. I’d like to be free. I’d like to be one of the very first Homo sapiens in the world, cover my body with tattered animal hides, eat raw meat, surrounded by a hound of scruffy dogs, and a free soul. But after that warning from my mother in my dream I decided to sleep with your friend, maybe because I wanted to hurt my mother. Every time you asked me about my mother, I dodged your questions by talking about something else or by remaining stubbornly silent, which made you say Let’s not talk about it if it upsets you; we’ll talk about it when you’re relaxed. But I’ve never been relaxed enough to talk to you about my mother. What you wanted to know wasn’t about my mother only, but about my father and my childhood as well. You said it’d make you understand me better and if you wanted to understand me better, it was because you were my lover then, nothing else. But I’ve never been relaxed enough to talk to you about my mother, my father and my childhood. I met my father seven days ago in Phraek Narm Daeng. He’s aged a lot and turned more taciturn than ever, like a black, looming watchtower bearing myriad signs of decrepitude and a breath of dilapidation intoxicating barn owls and bats galore. It seems that to him I’m but an utterly destroyed man among utterly destroyed men, as utterly destroyed as he once was. He behaved with me benignly and looked at me commiseratively. I’d like him to die but he still carries on living in the way he considers to be the best, safest, least inconvenient for others and most useful for himself and others. He’s a monk, an old bhikkhu. He’s found the way to a peaceful existence, but I keep walking along the cluttered and eerie path of life. He knows nothing of my woes and I’d rather he didn’t either. I’ve no intention to meet him along any path or have anything to do with him. I merely paid him a visit as an old-time acquaintance. I went back to see him because that’s what Daen wanted. He wasn’t angry with me for some reason or other, just as I was no longer angry with him for some reason or other. I used to hate him, but the hate I had for him has entirely evaporated with time. He even hinted in a roundabout way that I should take the cloth, but all monks talk like this, especially old monks, just like salesmen. Even though they know full well you won’t buy their stuff, they can’t help giving you the sales pitch and prodding you. I’d like him to die just as I’d like to die. Go ahead, try it out! I’d like to talk to him like that, with absolute authority. Just to know what would happen once he’s dead. If he were a character in the story I’m writing, I’d have him die. If my mother was still alive today, I’d like her to die. Luckily, she’s long been dead, which doesn’t prevent me from cursing her and wishing her dead time and time again, cursing her to die within death. I still haven’t got over the shock of seeing her in my dream. I’ve just met my father but I don’t dream about him. Supposing she appeared in my dream as a representative of my sense of right and wrong, my father would do just as well. He’d handle that task just as satisfactorily. I wonder if Khwan is going to be pregnant. She isn’t in the safe period. I met my father, which means I’m back from Phraek Narm Daeng. I must’ve talked to you of Phraek Narm Daeng occasionally. Phraek Narm Daeng, that accursed village! Phraek Narm Daeng, my native village, where I hadn’t gone back
for fourteen or fifteen years. I’ve travelled just about everywhere, I’ve gone miles from anywhere, but I’d never gone back to Phraek Narm Daeng until a week ago. Actually, I should be still there, not here. It’s there I should be carrying on my spiritual convalescence. But you don’t need to know right now why I couldn’t stay there. Let’s not talk about Phraek Narm Daeng any longer, at least not now. I’m tired. I’m too depressed. I’ve burnt down Phraek Narm Daeng thousands of times in my head. Its arid crackled fields, its rows of sugar palm trees, its grapes of houses and huts, its herds of scrawny cows have gone up in smoke thousands of times in my head. I’m cold. Here the cold is fiendish. I’m too delicate for such an intense cold. I could do with a sense of humour. My sense of humour must have shrivelled, humour-made as well as humour-scenery. In our time together I used to make you laugh all the time. In those days we were still bright. In those days life was beautiful still. We laughed non-stop. At any rate a lot more than now. I mean when we began to be close to each other, including when we were friends and we began to love each other. I mean when I had yet to misuse time by sleeping by day and working by night. Everything considered this house isn’t too bad, especially in the daytime. My routine during the day in an ordinary routine. I cook myself simple dishes or eat precooked meals and do the washing-up at the brook. I scour the kettle and the rice cooking pot every day with sand from the bank. Every day the fish are waiting to eat the scraps – snakehead, climbing perch and barbel and many others whose names I don’t know. The barbel are more beautiful than the others. They’re partial to parsley and bean sprouts. If I were fishing I’d catch several every day. Parsley and bean sprouts; finely cut parsley and bean sprouts without their stems. Dragonflies abound. They’d make great bait. Have you ever caught dragonflies? You must move stealthily to the back of them and pinch their tail between finger and thumb and if you fold their tail and bring it close to their beak they gobble it and it’s only when they realise they’re devouring themselves alive that they give up. They’re ferocious and beautiful insects. But I don’t catch dragonflies any longer. And I don’t fish any longer either. I don’t even feel like sweeping the cobwebs off the ceiling, not because I’m lazy but because I take pity on the spiders. Soon after the ceiling is swept clean, here they are weaving again and soon the place is as messy as before. Give inferior lives a chance: this is a principle I remember from I don’t know which book. May all books go to hell! To tell the truth, I don’t quite like those spiders. They’re fat and disgusting. Besides, they are venomous. They’re almost as big as mangrove crabs. And their body is almost the same, except that it’s more disgusting. Their webs are very beautiful, as beautiful as they are disgusting, and shaped like a top-notch architect’s dream, but they seem to be all of the same model. That’s their limitation. They say that a spider that beats its chest is a bad omen. How much noise that makes, I wonder. Here in the dead of night there are strange noises all the time, but not that of a spider beating its chest, let me assure you. On the other hand, gecko cries make your blood run cold. In the darkness and quiet and solitude, the repeated cries of the geckos make your blood run cold like the wails of dead babies. On some nights they come out of the hollow of a dead tree in the orchard, on some nights from below the roof, on some nights against one of the very feet of my bed. These cries give me the creeps. I make noises to chase the gecko away but it isn’t afraid. Besides, there isn’t just one: four or five or seven or eight of them there are! I don’t know for sure. Sometimes they stick to the window jambs. At night, I light the lamp and sit down and read or write. Lots of strange insects come to play around the lamp. I don’t know what kinds; I don’t know where they come from. The geckos stealthily come to gobble the insects, come without my realising it. When I look up I see them staring at me with their big bulging eyes. I stretch out my hand and knock on the wall to chase them away. They open their mouths as if to bite. But I don’t do anything further to them and leave them to themselves. I’d like to know all the same how close they’ll come to me, but I’m afraid, see. Geckos make me think of the supernatural. On some nights, in the sustained peaceful silence of the night, if they get real close and cry out, I’m very scared, so that sometimes I shout like they do. Don’t forget I live alone far away from it all. Gecko! Gecko! I shout, scared, and realise I take a perverse pleasure in it. The same shout, four or five times, my voice as croaking and tremulous as that of a doddery centuries-old gecko. I let myself down and stretch out on the floor. I creep on my belly in the dark. I shout out Gecko! Gecko! I travel into the oh so beautiful, so enthralling labyrinth of dementia. At times I’m afraid I won’t be able to get out of it but at times I feel I haven’t gone far enough yet. I no longer have any strength, any motivation. Nonetheless, I don’t get back up to do something, I mean start writing. But sleeping with Khwan has meant that the idea of suicide that haunts my musings has become a sham, and that’s unforgivable. You must be angry with me. You must feel frustrated. Itthee hasn’t been dead for six months and I’m totally responsible for her death. I caught hold of her life and dragged her over to hell and dumped her in there mercilessly. Actually, I should be in mourning right now. I should be wearing black for the rest of my life. But I’m not even as sad as I should be. I got drunk. I clasped my sorrow like ballast to sink into drunkenness. But as far as you’re concerned, Itthee should never have killed herself. You think that every life is precious, even that of a slut or a whore or a killer. You think like that because you’re an unworldly idealist and someone decent and darn stupid. But as far as I’m concerned, she shouldn’t have lived even one more day. It’s good that she’s dead. Actually she took too long to die. I too am taking too long to die. Much too long. I should’ve died dozens of times, as often as I’ve wished for my mother to die. I should already be dead. I’m of no use in this world. The world will go on just the same without me, the world will go on drifting, will go on revolving. The world couldn’t care less. I’m no longer able to avoid the dark side of life. My collapse is total and unredeemable. You forbid me to think like this. In your letters you forbid me to think like this. In your letters you’re careful about what you write. Pure music is a good shelter, you tell me. In your letters you’re careful about what you write. You’re afraid I’ll dismiss your comments with sarcasm and see in them but cheap consolation. You yourself used to think like this. You yourself used to use pure music as a shelter. No need to console me. No consolation is necessary. I’m a bat. Can you see my wings? I’m a bat, an animal that thrives on darkness. I’m a demonic conductor. Do you want to listen to my symphony? I’m not foolishly going to kill myself. I’d like to find a quiet corner to listen to my symphony. I’m fed up with words and yet my symphony is composed of words.