Dogging him no differently than the persistent fly that for whatever reason continually returned to that same puddle of oily sweat on his right temple only to sometimes be shaken away all so mildly with a brief thrust of his head, there was a persistent, distorted, and grotesque memory or daydream that posed as fact. He kept thinking, if it were indeed thought to be cognizant of so little, that he (as adventitious as he was at that moment) was around fourteen years old, swatting at flies, and pushing a cart of grilled pork down unknown streets in Bangkok. Scores of sparsely furred dogs began to follow. The further he went the more there were. And the more there were the more security there was for them in the communal mob, and the more aggressive were continually standing upon hind legs trying to attack the cart and rob its booty. Through this time of being chased by this desperate canine mob with its ineluctable barking of mute voices that howled the essence of the void which epitomized the planet, there was a background wall of a standing rack or trellis on which used shoes hung like vines for pedestrian purchasers; an occasional bloody limb dangled from one of the ragged sports shoes, and a gecko hung on one of the shoes' tongues. The gecko was many of one, omniscient and omnipresent, looking into his eyes knowingly. "The world has damaged you thus and thus you will be," it conveyed tacitly with those eyes and then by it or from subconscious thought he knew that it was a dent or crack in an item that gave it its feature even if the ungainly shape would lead it to be easily dropped from a maladroit grasp and break asunder into myriad fragments. Yes, he felt alone, with his cracked past he was doomed. He had hoped for interaction with the dog as benefactors did with the poor when needing nothing from them unless in a minute way to lesson injustice, to do something virtuous which might make one a bit more than merely another avaricious creature seeking more than mere survival and pleasures greater than comfort as means for its betterment, as well as to feel grounded in reality (one physical body making an impact on another); and yet before he could do anything to help it, the dog had vanished, like the flame of a candle in a puff of wind, and now all that was tactile, all that he could touch, was the air which was as ghostly as his thought. Whether his inaction came about from a brain so active in its meaningful albeit subliminal cogitation, or from an idiot who was foolish enough to stoop down to a presence that was no more, like revisiting the rubble of one's childhood home and expecting the pieces to reassemble themselves, he did not know or even ponder. He did not decry or rationalize it, but experience it and pass through it as one did any fog.