Kimberly who, to her demise had been of tragic course his wife's friend and his special intimate, had plunged to an unequivocal death, despite that which he had power to imagine. Although he might envisage himself reaching out and blocking her from running to the balcony, thoughts of this nature, myriad natural but immaterial and inconsequential wishes, were an enormous amount of energy expended in futility all because of the sentiment of the human heart and the belief that human will, which could alter the jungles of the world by repudiating the natural forces and the limitations of man, could also alter death. And as for Noppawan: apart from being his wife and best friend, she had also been his attempt at creating the reality of a caring family to replace that which, except for certain times of resurfaced memories that were not easily extracted and were as brief and spurious as a child's nightmare, now (buried under layers of more immediate past the same as dirt) for the most part seemed to have never been, and as the former family--a family which the child within him once believed would continue forever--had been nothing but a civil war of sadists, should never have been. She, as his new family, had lasted longer than the first, and yet the longevity of caring rather than the brevity of cruelty had made her no more real than the first.
Each day, feeling as if being drowned in the cold numbness within that seemed to come from without, humans clung to the material: money, property, friends, spouses, families and positions. For in this spinning world where people and things could quickly emerge elsewhere or vanish from the planet outright, mankind's entire quest was for less ethereal realms in which to claim a firm reality. Thus with obdurate will a man's evaporating substance was patted as firm and solid as possible. For Nawin, however, the most plausible of the ethereal which he had taken bit by bit and pressed into this substance of "reality" was like a glacier that was fast breaking apart to the point of being sheathes of floating ice, and he was witnessing its enormous shards from afar. These enormous fragments were in a prodigious fog; and they included a vague recurrent thought that the dog was there with him, was coming to him, or would be there with him. The thought was circuitous but stalking, and whenever it reached that pentacle of the brain that was the true self which judged the merits of his own thoughts and actions as well as the intentions of the extraneous beings whom he interacted with, he almost believed that he was still with that creature--the dog with its small clusters of ochre fur, he with his ochre wisps of obsessive thought, both cognate in that sense; the emaciated dog, an innocent that from its starvation was prey to disease, he having been the prey of four sadists and one sodomite in a family which decimated if not entirely obliterated the joy of his youth, and would have a reverberating effect throughout his life, both cognate in that sense as well.