Manhood, this summation of himself as masculine force and presence, had nothing tangible in it and could vanish quicker than the toppling of a house of cards. With so many years of incessant layers of thought it had seemed ossified so how could he have known that this perspective--one that was endemic to such a profession of contemplative decadence and decadent contemplation and had seemed myriad as the shore's self- flagellation of waves--would be so evanescent? As his nose was beginning to itch he rubbed it with the back of his hand. From the gesture he found himself returning to a self which, regrettably, could not be discarded entirely. How strange, he thought, to be washed up on new shores. He thought this as if there were something so new in it, and as if sodomy, and in his case fraternal incest at that, were totally unknown to him. It was not so strange a shore as he wanted to believe, he had to admit, and he would only be alone and marooned there if he saw himself as such. The fecund, dark soil of a less familiar shore could only be foreign, ominous, and grave if he stated to himself that it was such.
"So, I am with a man! What of it!" he thought; but guilt continued to reverberate, as those eerie lamenting calls to worship that, from a nearby mosque, thrice a day rolled off of the black sheen of the waters of the canal and trespassed into his Bangkok estate bypassing a wall and gate meant to fortify him from possible theft, and more generally to barricade him from the ignorance and poverty that were his past. If this perspective of himself as an inadvertent wooer of women and debonair presence, were a wall to memory meant to keep himself from considering the peculiarity of his perverted and twisted past and the walls of his estate were meant to fortify himself from poverty and misery both of them failed unequivocally.
Guilt, like the wind that he was now listening to, wailed on. Self flagellation like thunder and lightning piercing the room, did so under the aegis of his closed eyes. And there, correcting examinations in her favorite seat in the living room with eyes perusing paper behind thick glasses, and fighting back parts of the disheveled hair that obstructed the process, was a spectral and indistinct image of his wife. He judged that she was no different from the rest, already well into diminishing to the state of former friends and family like his deceased girlfriend, his infant son, and his paternal obligations.