It was indeed strange that the disheveled being who was shooting fetid wisps of air as sonorously as a bagpipe should be both enticing and repulsive all in the same reeking breath, and Nawin smirked at the sight of his acquaintance. He feigned disgust, and this action mixed with amusement in a contorted, clownish countenance until the odd smile finally flattened for there was a peculiar sensation within that at first he did not readily acknowledge. To evade the cognizable he again ruminated on how odd it was that, now feeling as refreshed as he could be when waking from rolling turbulent dreams that wrenched his brain with a pain like the sprained of leg of a child fleeing a bully (albeit that the bully in his case was the deprecating voice within himself that censured him for being entirely lost at forty), he should not be able to decipher appeal or repugnance over something so simple as the pleasure factor behind the sound and smell of a man's loud breathing--cacophonous mutterings of a hominid or something quite orphic? This was his jocular deliberation so as to stay hidden from himself behind a wall of thought. Ultimately, however, there was a scaling of the wall and the coward was ferreted.
"Am I really feeling this way?" he asked himself. He knew that he was, for his body tingled with the titillation of one wanting sex. He thought how consternating and queer it was that after leaving his brother, Kazem, over twenty years ago without ever thinking of him or any man in much of any sense (including "that way" except in the most fleeting manner), that this man, this unshaven and uncomely Laotian, should seem sensual to him now. No, he thought, with a new idea repudiating the old, the only peculiarity was that as a casualty on the battle ground of family he should live so well and so long without having to continually purge himself of memory that could continually discomfit the present with its stench, rubbing its foul wounded body in recidivistic and wanton desire.
Still, he reassured himself consolingly; it was not so "queer" for an artist to love the beauty of form. In this world of lackadaisical automatons who never appreciated the here and now, the beauty of the human frame was there to be shown by discerning artists. He posited that his own artistic proclivities in conjunction with all the trauma of the past month (Kimberly's suicide, Noppawan's beating of him with the frying pan, and being locked out of the house when returning from the hospital) were putting him in a dust storm no more nebulous than that which he felt instantly at taking a shot of whiskey or when spinning one of his madonnas on a dance floor. It was merely a minute of temporary derangement that was quite natural in life, a game of musical chairs in which the chairs also moved. He further averred that a moment or two of confusion when waking up from nightmares was totally understandable and natural in life's craziness. But, he then asked himself, why would any artist have this obsession in conveying the beauty of form unless he were painting over the background that tainted him? Perversion had the transitive root 'to pervert', and it was rooted deep with the years: it was familiar, it was going home, it was a homecoming to the illusion of that former family that could be argued to have never existed at all were it not for that almost impalpable stain that the perverted wore unknowingly like a light jacket.