He was like an empty wrappers of those fruit filled cookies that in boredom he had gormandized the previous night for they had fallen from his bunk during his restless sleep to be, for a time, caught in the reigning randomness of the fan's winds. 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.
Affluent and unfettered by property, which seemed at any rate to be entirely lost to him with his wife having changed the locks on the doors, he could go anywhere to become something different. In that sense he was truly free. He knew that and reminded himself that he should be grateful for it, but like any social creature he needed a mind stuffed with clutter to have the equilibrium that would deliver him from being random movements of an unstable, empty vessel lost at sea and unto itself. Whether he was on a spiritual pilgramage or being flushed down to Vientiane as defecation in a downward deluge of his own whims he did not know; but in either case he was free (free, that is, when not fully wracked in guilt about Kimberly's death and all that had led to that grotesque spectacle which he had no power to change) and freedom always felt good. To be humanized from mechanical actions, not that he had carried out many of those in the past year of his premature retirement, and denuded of pretensions by lusting after two or three young beings who had passed to the toilet, as well as the two seated before him, was in essence like being found; and they who were found were encompassed in thought like birds to air. It was good, even if much of the air was sordid and polluted and ineluctably so. Nothing was lonelier than the loss of thought and being compressed into the agenda of the day, the cluttered interaction of interconnectedness he only in part liked because of a loathing of it taking him from himself. If he were to work for a month in a factory like a dirt poor laborer (he was indeed swarthy as most Thai laborers and once of their class), return to the sidewalk restaurants which were his inception and, he posited, probably were his true destiny had he not been so insolent to repugn them, or even to return to Silpakorn University, such an experience of once again doing work would give him a fuller appreciation for what he had; however, even with this satiated and cloyed sense of leisure that often seemed perennial, his indolence seemed the preferable course. A flight into the World Trade Center towers of oneself might be in part a flight down to a sordid hell but he, an artist, although a retired one, would hardly repugn it if it were.