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If Bangkok was an opulent deception of rural life he hardly knew what would lie before him away from the antiquated, rustic capital of Vientiane; but he knew that it would be rife in life, and something far truer and more pervasive than his impoverished existence as the son of a sidewalk restaurant proprietor in Ayutthaya.
He repudiated them by telling himself that he would never rank as a great artist, that he was void of color, theme, and technique. The verdant landscape, now near Nongkai and her sister city of Vientiane, came incessantly toward the passengers as the train moved through it. It came intimately.
But as she was sitting in the travel agency ready to buy a ticket to Bangkok with the expectation of taking the train to Nongkai, the sister city of Vientiane Laos, she suddenly changed her mind and decided to buy an airline ticket to Jakarta.
In loss and tragedy so great that all life seemed a lugubrious and murky haze he knew that at any second he could fall to pieces and yet here he came anyway. On this train moving toward Vientiane Laos, this world capital no different than a country town, this little bit of Paris with a lot of dirt that was the sister city of Nongkai which he had seen once before.
Only the storms, the headlines of the masses that he read in English from the Bangkok Post, would get his attention. A female beggar on an overpass with a child that she nursed under her shirt was no different than someone sitting on a fire hydrant as he waited for a bus. Still, he thought, this was what he would try to correct by a solitary wandering into Vientiane.
He excoriated himself for appeasing his guilt with such a morbid thought. Maybe tomorrow a mega-sized typhoon of global warming dimensions would pass over Bangkok and clean the slate of people like himself, obscene drawings of human denizens; but then he was going northeast to the sleepiest of the world's comatose capitals, Vientiane. What could happen to him there?
And yet contrary to the social animal that was man, placid acceptance of his disconnected state was in a sense a spiritual retreat; and it was, after all, as a spiritual retreat, more or less, that he, an atheist, was hoping to facilitate by coming to such a lackluster and lackadaisical city like sleepy Vientiane where there would be no distractions to cordon off this theme of vacuity.
Vientiane." "We're not jungle monkeys," said the Laotian. Nawin smiled warmly. Of course they were but how pleasant that they were endeavoring to be more. "Forty, are you? So young," continued the Laotian. "And if we had known we would have made you a cake. We would have, you know?" "Would you have? And how would you have made one in a train?" "I don't know. There were stops.
He had boarded this train in part because he was trying to flee Kimberly and yet were he to fly without cause or reason, he knew that she would go with him to Niamey in Niger just the same as Nongkai in Thailand or to Vienna the same as Vientiane for she was an ineluctable memory of myriad of these ineluctable memories that he would lobotomize in minor whittling of his brain with a pocket knife if only he could.
A rack was full of postcards with photographic images of Nongkhai's Buddhist sculpture garden and the Friendship Bridge between Nongkhai, Thailand and Vientiane, Laos. He could write to Noppawan, he told himself. He bought several postcards but he could not think of several friends to send them to he had acquaintances by the droves but friends? Minus Kimberly, there was only Noppawan.
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