The acceleration that took them out of Huamark and through other adjacent sections of the city eventually led them to her area. He did not remember the name of it: Bangkae, Bangplad, Bang-something. He paid little attention to what his mistress said. Her voice often seemed the strident spluttering of burning fuel in an engine that couldn't produce motion. King Ramkhamhaeng was a bygone entity. As soon as his model picked up some of her things that she had forgotten to bring with her the previous day and they had some breakfast, then Thailand would be a thing of the past too. For how long he didn't know. He was married but it was one signature on many sheets of paper. The significance of spilled ink could not be read unless, like many superstitious Thais, he were to seek a fortuneteller-mendicant sitting on a sheet or straw mat on a sidewalk or in a park. Noppawan had her chance to go with him. He had asked repeatedly. He had tacitly exhorted (mostly with his eyes) but she had refused him. Maybe she needed him to command her presence. Maybe in this nebulousness of strong selfishness and altruism called a personal relationship, so immediate and personal like finding oneself enveloped in smoking and fiery dust, she needed constant reminders that he cared about her more than any other entity selfishly and altruistically. That would be the woman in her if there were such a woman. He tried to contemplate what love was like for normal people. It was surely a dust storm one invented in one's mind to escape loneliness but then it became intertwined in more neediness and consciousness of the other's feelings and thoughts so as not to be vanquished to aloneness. An individual who was able to overcome the grief of the loss of dopamine in the ephemeral and moribund high of being in love would cling to his former pleasure-inducer as a source of meaning in life's vicissitudes. He and Noppawan had done the same but they were less like individuals finding themselves separately cast onto lifeboats in an ocean of random waves for they found oceans of thoughts within themselves that seemed more navigable to solid chunks of reality. They needed each other less; or so he thought. Thai women generally had obsequious crying bouts in their rafts, but Noppawan, he argued, was not a woman. She was female without womanity. She was a female who advocated overcoming petty human existence for a love of ideals, compassion, and the attempts at understanding the human predicament. He couldn't see into the future to know if he would be returning to Thailand anytime soon to be peered at through his wife's thick dark framed glasses. At present there were only the wills of three individuals cowardly seeking meaning for themselves in a unit. There were only these socialized wills rolling along on a road in marginal darkness under the specious assumption that there really was a destination. The sensory input of traditional Thai music was coming to them from the front and back speakers of the car that was their confinement. The radio music, no matter if interpreted as harmonious or strident by the three individuals, was a levee helping to block their pervasive inundation of self-absorbing, mordant thoughts and reminded them (the patriot and the pending expatriates) of their commonality as Thais. They passed a mall where he and Porn had gone shopping a month earlier. That day they had spent together there was the levity of the stroll and the shiny flash of credit cards in this Thai way of forgetting one's impoverished roots. Feeling on top of the world, he comported the male gesture of having one arm clutching the other one behind his back. It was a gesture of affluence in the stroll of the shopper's quest. At least twice when he encountered friends of his from Silpakorn Art University with bags in their hands he would talk to them for a half hour and somewhere into the talk he used another male gesture of affluence. He would slip a foot from a sandal and then slap it onto the floor loud as a firecracker. The sandal would hit the floor like a hand slapping against an impoverished peasant. They stopped in an alley smaller than a side street called a "soi." It was in between many Mom and Pop businesses and there, crowded within, was her apartment. He knew rooms like this well. They were rented out for fifteen or twenty dollars a month (600 or 700 baht), barren, hot, and unventilated as an attic. When she had gone in to get her bags he felt less lonely to be momentarily rid of her. Even now at age 26 but with thoughts at certain moments suffering and dragging like a man of 50, there was just himself, the real unit of one, and delude himself all he pleased he knew that he could not find anyone more significant than that.