When the face was ugly its foul breath was fouler, and when handsome the snoring was a nice inebriating gust that picked up Nawin's kite; but in both perspectives the brazen Laotian in his impoverished vulnerability reminded him of Jatupon. There in tattered dirty clothes Jatupon, whom his brothers derided as 'Jatuporn,' was a vermin he could never entirely escape (scaling the prison walls of the subconscious as the boy did), no matter how many thousands of dollars in baht he was commissioned to paint his whores. For a moment he was scared of the Laotian as if having stumbled into a den of sleeping terrorist cells but it was the self that was his only terrorist. It was the self that filled him with stiffened, cold dread. Fortunately, with the walk to the bathroom, the attraction passed him entirely almost in the same moment it came upon him: Jatuporn was apprehended, and the self was placated as if this particular feeling were as inconsequential as all the other wind driven debris of the mind that had gone before.
If he believed that anything which overtook rational thought and equanimity in such a temporary, all pervasive and engaging burning, lacked legitimacy (and in a way he might have for he knew passion to be like the slight bitter aftertaste of too much cloying chocolate), it was of minor consideration being the Patpong prostitute depicter that he was. With lovely scented women (especially those in ovulation, which was every man's Venus Flytrap unless punctilious enough to carry a nosegay of multi-colored condoms) sensuality was wild flowers of searing energy popping up after a shower making the landscape anew. However, any titillation regarding a man was tremor and mudslides. It was his shaky world tearing apart, falling down the sores of its cracks, and being buried alive within the fall downward. Because of this, all he wanted was departure: in this case, to depart from the man, the spell, and the train, and as this was not possible, to again retreat into his once solitary bower.
Even with passion waning with every step toward the bathroom in a salvation of movement, his mind was preoccupied by wanting to reclaim the window and seat from the window and seat thief, so that he might let morning and movement pass through the orifices of his eyes to obstruct memory--a morning with shanty stations as gateways to shanty towns, rice fields and banana orchards with coconut trees occasionally spewed in, thickets of verdant weeds and knee high grass, sickly palm trees and two-story shacks where the bottom halves had such high earthy foundations and the true houses were the upper portions where drying laundry hanging from ropes were the only ornaments apart from distant glimpses of vehicles and amorphous motorcycle taxi drivers on the main street of some rural town or another. 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.