"Reunions are so nice--you and me and you and my sister, her Thai toilet friend. She's been talking about you, you know, ever since she passed you coming and going from the toilet--this handsome, middle aged man who is obsessed by his image."
"Oh, yes my sister, not my girlfriend. You thought she was my girlfriend, didn't you? Well, not really. Are we boyfriends from chatting and drinking beer together?--not so much but who's to say not or never. Earlier when she passed you she was wearing a cap, a man's jacket, and what else?"
"Yes, sunglasses to hide herself from being noticed when she isn't as beautiful as she wants as if foreign laborers are likely to encounter a lot of important friends everywhere they go. We hardly know a soul here except other Laotians. I bet when she passed you, you didn't notice her any more than you would any androgynous clown walking the streets of Bangkok."
"Well," explained the woman, "I was in a hurry to get to the tracks. I hadn't washed my hair so that explains the cap. They don't have a station back there so I had to wait in the sun at the tracks. It was chilly. Do I really need to explain this?"
"Yes after washing it in the sink and blow drying it, but it is uncombed now."
"Beautiful, isn't she?" He knew that Boi's meaning was not fraternal and that that which should not have repulsed him but did was now being replaced by that which should repulse him but did not.
"Free of connections, free of clutter--unfettered--and happier for it, I suppose," he thought as if disconnectedness from others, freedom from circuitous movements around and preoccupation with people would free his thoughts rather than free him of thought. Thought was surely the material assessed in abstraction, but lustfully eating his food with the foreign acquaintances of that country of backward brethren he did not consider that issue consciously. To some degree he was like those who in the monotony of their circuitous movements around material possessions and a preoccupation with them came to remote areas like Vientiane to find more to themselves than the accumulation of money and objects, but his retreat was more from the loss of people than the dismissal of material possessions, and his departure was not out of choice but the circumstances that had brought about the need to extricate himself from inordinate pain. He did not so much want fairly empty rooms in a guest house but the totally empty realm of his mind. He knew that he would not be considering the subject of whether or not disconnection was propelling him to happiness unless something were amiss or lacking in his life. What was once the clogging of his brain with the mauled grammar of students' redundant essays in art survey classes, women whom he was involved with, and was obliged to attempt to make happy (such an inordinate amount of women, as his heart was a sponge of sorrow, caring deeply or loving adventitiously and incurring feminine wrath for it all, who were paintings of this life and mattered to him as well as mitigating those sorrows, the result of injustices), a futile effort that had ended worse than imagination had reach. Having students to maintain professional interaction with as altruism and being a benefactor allowed him to stretch closer to the ethereal realm of virtue and also gave him more tentacles for assessing reality, and the somewhat plagiarized and hastened research and cursory art coinciding with old themes that had been done to maintain his position at Silpakorn University had now been replaced with freedom to ponder vacuity. And vacuity he pondered unceasingly for, in this train, emptiness rode in him as he was riding in it. Vientiane, he derided, was not a destination any more than the Buddha's Lumbini forest. His time might have been better spent had he stayed in Bangkok seeking prostitutes to draw in the city's Lumpini Park (p for porn), and yet here he was for some reason going to that final destination of Nongkai, the sister city of Vientiane.