Nawin fell asleep in the suds of his bathtub and when he woke up his thoughts were frothy. Melancholy dripped from the shower nozzle and from time to time hit his head (the contents of which emulated the slow and sad repetition of the dripping). A year earlier it had been in such a bathroom at an artsy party at a friend's house near Silpakorn University that he went away from the crowd to sit on the edge of the tub and weep with the fatuous wrestling of personal pain. Noppawan came into the bathroom to find out what was wrong. She sat on the edge of the tub next to him and heard about the crash of the United Airlines jet. Without words she took one of his hands. Without trying to absorb the sadness of his face in the emotion of sympathy, he could tell that she was imagining details beyond his relationship with his deceased uncle or the explosion of the plane. Seated there, quickly overcoming personal loss in favor of a more philosophic stance, he believed that America was a self-centered bully and the Moslem world would continue to attack her for being so opulent in a famished world, controlling world policies without giving smaller nations a voice, cuddling the Zionist entity of these self-professed "Chosen people," and for having the dominant culture of individual freedoms that went contrary to their Islamic tyranny. The couple looked out into nothingness with similar thoughts. Both knew the naturalness of hate in recreating civilization and that destructiveness in society was no different than the kinetic universe as a whole. Both knew that only hope came in recoiling in one's passive intellectual pursuits. At that time he felt sick like when one hadn't eaten for days: people who should have been important and salubrious spun around in his head as hollow as all the others. Only his uncle, a man who did not love him and had no particular self-interest in the boy had saved him. Only Noppawan, during his time of mourning, kept him from complete despair. He wiped off his hands and arms and made his call on the telephone as his body leaned stiffly to the edge crushing through frothy embankments of his bubble bath. "Piggy?" "Yes?" "Piggy, is that you?" "Yes, Nawin." "Piggy, I feel tongue tied here. This shouldn't be a question a husband poses. I...I don't know what to say. We are married technically. Technically, and emotionally from my standpoint, that is the case so as a husband don't you think I'd be curious when my wife is going to start making love to me?" "I have, Nawin, but there isn't much I can do with us on different sides of the planet." "Well, you should be here and she shouldn't. I asked you to come." "And I said that I had papers to grade and research to do." "I understand all of that. Nobody is to blame. I'm not even talking about that. I'm talking about three times before we got married. 2 1/2 times afterward. We're newlyweds. I need for you to need to smell my feet, massage my back, do womanly things I can't talk about on the telephone. I need you." She thought to herself that appetites were not the substance of memory. She wanted to lecture him but only muttered, "Did Porn leave you?" "No, she is here. But that is not the point. The point is figuring out if you will ever need me like a wife." "The way Porn does? Honey, she is a businesswoman. I'm sure she enjoys you immeasurably but you would go broke paying for both of us." She laughed. She was fully amused by herself; but then she noticed that she had caused him to retreat in silence. "Hello?" she said uneasily. She picked up the poetic story, Thao Nok Kaba Phuak (The Nightjar) that was on her bookshelf. She opened the book, which had his name and address on it when he was 14 years old and her name since he had dedicated the book to her. Her fingertips caressed the illustration of the Nightjar on the cover page. "Yeah, I'm here. You continued to encourage me to have my relationships after we were married. It was crazy but I went along with it. I thought it was a game: playboy artist encouraged by his wife to continue to draw saddened whores. I even went to the airport with Porn thinking you would come there and stop us." "Surprise, surprise!" she said. She laughed lovingly. "Men explode, Nawin. They get it out of their system for a few hours but a woman percolates romantically throughout the day. She loses all sense of reason. She does everything for the sake of that relationship. She loses herself." "So-no one wants to reason 24 hours a day. You can't think that people get married to stop sexual intercourse. If that was your idea I wish that you had told me before we got married." "Nawin, the reason I married you was not to percolate nor was it to be a recipient of your explosions when you can't get any temporaries to service you.