To calm his racing, startled heart beat and damn off the adrenaline that permeated and burnt through thought to the rigid ready-to-respond posture of his muscles in a spreading ethereal of flaming gas, he made the dark omen jocular. He told himself that the bird was the ubiquitous symbol of a man running from his own image figuratively while retaining a fixed stare at the literal one. He might have even believed that there had been no bird at all if it were not for his racing heart and the simple fact that the window of the toilet was open. The two together made the bird's existence more plausible (at least so the self said if it meant much in the mixture of inhaled cannabis smoke, swallowed antibiotics, and pain killers that had to be stretching and distorting perception by thwarting the natural flow of neurotransmitters into different speeds and in new spirals of circuitry and thought). And yet even if this copy of the bird that was branded or molded on a bit of his brain had diminished to the point where it was now as unrecognizable, weathered initials engraved on a tree, or an outline posing as form, that did not mean anything. Did not a year in the life of a boy ultimately vanish without even an outline? All that he could say for sure was that even if it did not happen, that which did not happen was gone now. He chuckled and found pleasure in tilted equilibrium juggling its lit torches of ideas. Then he thought, "Maybe I should have gone to a beach in Phuket the way I was thinking I should earlier at the train station. Watching the waves, I could have forgotten." It was a natural enough response as embedded as it was like an instinct. Intuitively one first sought large bodies of moving water, a tangible version of eternity, by which to compare and measure oneself. In so doing, his problems would become minute with the man; and this was what he meant, for the train ride out of Bangkok was doing nothing for him. "But really," he continued, "how long can one be immersed in waves unless washed out neatly with a tsunami and there is little chance of that happening again anytime soon." The main reason that he had not gone to a beach had little to do with fear of boredom. It was for fear of seeming to himself as one of "those old retired nobodies with money" who waited near the waters edge for death. To him those waiting for death who sought non-failing amusement in the waves which acted as their sedatives were a lost and lifeless abhorrence.