These voices (in large part his own imagining but plausible and faithful to the outline delineated by Noppawan's narrative) resounded in his brain and, in consensus with his own verdict on himself, they condemned him. Still he snuggled up to them for a middle aged man with no one was naked and discomfited in purpose. Holding tight to what had passed away he believed that he was less lonely even though conversely this snuggling to imagined abstractions with female bodies, facsimiles of what was that was distorted into what was not, made him feel even more lonely than he would otherwise have felt. He imagined these voices of the past and the dead, and yet for all their distinct clarity, they were at best half-imagined impressions, half concocted indentions in the damp putty of his brain. In reality they were as behind him as the township of Udon Thani that the train had now passed through. They had parted with him and fled like the bird that had witnessed his homosexual solo-eroticism in the fetid toilet of the train. How alone he felt; and the thought of the three of them shopping for baby clothes together, watching DVDs, or roasting marshmallows on the ends of sticks held over a barbeque grill near the swimming pool of his estate made him queasy. He continued to query himself incessantly with what-ifs. If he and Noppawan had invited Kimberly into their home, he wondered, would none of this have happened? And yet it seemed that something else could have taken place. Had this invitation been made and accepted she might have drowned herself in the pool. Who was to say she would not have done so? He excoriated himself for appeasing his guilt with such a morbid thought. Maybe tomorrow a mega-sized typhoon of global warming dimensions would pass over Bangkok and clean the slate of people like himself, obscene drawings of human denizens; but then he was going northeast to the sleepiest of the world's comatose capitals, Vientiane. What could happen to him there? Only if he were to ignore the illustrated signs of a man being electrocuted that graced the whole of Vientiane, and grab a low electrical wire would an end come to him there. Only then would he end his umbilical connection to this immoral world where existence could be so randomly and arbitrarily obliterated to some, as life's gluttons watched it as entertaining news from their television sets, and where under the wrong circumstances a good man might become a looter, a thief, a prostitute, or a beggar.