He pulled out that sheet of paper from his shirt pocket. He glanced at the name and the telephone number and recalled the faces of the Laotian and his sister as they rode next to him. Was he really to end an uneventful retirement for the sake of these people? Was he, for the sake of seeming a compassionate human being to himself and not merely another selfish being on the planet, to pay them for a miniscule part in posing for some portrait that he was neither inspired to draw nor inclined to tote back to Bangkok? Where would he even obtain paint and canvas? In Laos? Well no doubt they had both within the capital city. If prehistoric man could find ways to dye a cave, Laotians, people of a very similar linguistic and cultural distinction to Thais, could not do less. He could do sketches of them. It would not take long or be much of a burden to carry around and he could leave the family a couple of hundred dollars, which would mean the world to them and be a negligible and hardly noticed loss to himself. It might even restore him to himself; but then did he want to be restored? A restoration of a thoughtful pornographic artist from a third world country was not such a gift to civilization. He would never equal the great artists of the world and of prostitute painters he was one of myriad in contemporary Southeast Asian art alone. The sister was beautiful by his standards of beauty--youth unblemished with skin the pallor of fresh snow; a background of dirt and poverty, a subject he could relate to, and yet unlike those of a swarthy complexion, not appearing as such, with hair that was long and dark as the void, subdued eyes neither scintillating of inexperience nor petrified as ancient granite, absent of bra, nipples that pointed and teased their way toward every curve to which the imagination slid down like a hand to remote and sodden reservoirs. But it was not her beauty that called unto him, but an intrigue with the perverse so that he might know if his suspicions were warranted, and more saliently, to know the economic deprivations and desperation that made siblings into lovers, if indeed they were that. He folded the paper and stuffed it into his wallet against a condom.