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Likewise, said the fan, the Laotian's cologne and aftershave, like any smell, were a diffusion of higher concentrations of molecules to lower ones, so he was not smelling the scent of the man mixed with the artificial chemicals as they were on him, but the scent of him within his perfumed mixture as a less dense concentration oozing away from the man, leaving him and diffusing with other molecular scents, and the more one was at a distance, the less distinct this or any smell became.
Still he did not know what to say, and feeling that discomfort, he wanted the closure of all communication with a stranger who knew him more than his own wife. Still with the appropriate undaunted response such a caprice and aberration did not need to brand him in the Laotian's mind or his own.
The woman, still seated in part on the floor, was now stretching her arms. Seeing that she was awake, the Laotian's furrowed field of a forehead became smooth, and the subject of contemplation he was fixated on seemed to vanish. He raised his naked foot, and with a profane toe denuded his partner's bangs and began to massage her forehead. This continued for some minutes until she bit the toe.
It seemed to him that a word had percolated from the Laotian's thoughts and yet the mouth bore nothing. The pursed lips seemed to incarcerate sound and the only thing to materialize was an imagined utterance and his own irritation at not even knowing such an insignificant item in the social sphere of man with absolute certainty.
The Laotian grinned mischievously, and then looked out of the window. Nawin supposed that he was making reference to an elephant in a hamlet, one in a forest, or one in a field of a passing landscape. "Do they put elephants in stables?" asked Nawin with ingenuous naivety as he pondered the meaning of the Laotian's questions.
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.
Tension seemed to also sully the floor which was already fetid enough due to whatever stench the train officer's random spot mopping with ammonia earlier in the night had not covered. And there she was with both naked feet resting on the Laotian's lap so any reaction that he might have in defense of her at this time, even if it were mere silence, seemed inane.
Nawin laughed out a spray of saliva but immediately regained self-control the best he could when upside down and having drizzled in public. "Oh my, so sorry, forgive me." For a moment he deliberately sobered his rolling caprice of laughter with the thought of the bleak scenario beyond the bold and refreshing honesty of the Laotian's words. "You've lost your jobs?" "We have.
He was here in front of the Patuxay monument, this Archo de Triomphe created from money that the Americans had alloted for an airport. "Lost?" There was only one object, himself, that was the meaning of this word, for the Laotian's eyes seemed to be peering into him with murky beams of light. "Not entirely lost, no. Detached, I think, which makes me less lost really. Who knows?
It was saying that, as with the sound of the fan, so was the Laotian's voice and all specious sound: that sound, by being heard indirectly if not vicariously, existed only as an adulterated sensation.
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