"I don't need a wife--certainly not one who blames me and not herself even though this surrogate mother arrangement hatched out of her egg and not mine" he told himself, but being so dizzy there was not much chance of him believing his insouciant thought. Latent ideas were supposed to be the real ones, but there was not much that was true in this thought clutter, hoisted up to convey a positive self-image, beyond attempting to persuade himself of masculine nonchalance and a wish to repudiate a vulnerable neediness that was sticking to him like glue to a boy's fingertips. And no matter how many times he tried to wash it away its grittiness was extant.
After so much decadent thought about the Laotian the implosion of his solitary tower was an inevitability.
For the most part he regretted having thrown his telephone into the garbage at the train station. He lamented it; but it was done, and had he not done this he would have humiliated himself both in the emasculate and the deprecatory sense. He would have spent the trip calling Noppawan incessantly, and if she answered he would have shown his true visceral remorse ingenuously, which she would have interpreted as an admission of guilt. He might even have begged that she let him pass through the same doors, his doors, that she had made anew with recently acquired locks during his in-patient time in the hospital. He could not think of anything more emasculate and self-deprecatory than innocently showing deep sorrow over the victims of events in which he had had an inadvertent role, and being perceived as pleading guilty because of the admission. It would cause him to suck in his bottom lip while thinking to himself, "As if she had not urged it on--as if I would have had this relationship with Kimberly, as much as I may have wanted it, without this being asked...twice having it pushed onto me..me who am weak when importuned twice on such matters...weak for beautiful women... not that I have ever had situations like this one presented to me before. That is right. I am especially weak on new and intriguing situations and this 'please impregnate my friend and make me into a mommy' bit was a completely new thing for me. Little in the world is really exciting and new so I succumbed. What can I say? As if the impregnation idea were not concocted by these schemers in some coffee shop or another a year ago...by their own admission it was." More alarmingly, if he had not thrown away his Nokia he would be calling Kimberly's apartment over and over again as if there were a possibility that he had tripped over his thoughts, that she was not dead, and that her alleged death was just one more item of rubbish blowing in his subconscious gusts.