Perpetually the same, those of leisure yearned each year for the halting of time and, in dissatisfaction gained from comparing themselves to others more youthful, yearned for a return to earlier times of higher pleasures. But it was the laboring classes who continued to labor in insentience without reflection. They cooked their rice and noodles ceaselessly. They clung to their jobs like tiny, sedentary, clinging salamanders to windows during a storm. They found their beings (their minds and the feelings that would be refined into thought within them) lost to the reflexes of the day. Months blew away like empty bags skidding on the pavements. Evanescent and mutable to their ultimate end, their lives passed by blandly in dizzying headaches caused by the sun of the weatherless country during the dry season. When the rainy season set in there was the discomfort of leaking and wind-swept canopies, the lack of customers, and being drenched by the rain; but these issues were minimized by the fact that varied weather made each of the days more memorable. The brothers, transplanted into Bangkok with a livelihood, continued on as if in Ayutthaya. Memory of the uncle's unfulfilled promise of a dinner had worn away like the memory of their parents or the abandonment of Kumpee. At first Suthep strutted around in his independence like a dominant rooster but as the months went by the independence underwent the metamorphosis to loneliness and by 1 a.m. of each early morning, an hour or two after Jatupon would leave him, Suthep would often feel the chill of adulthood. One late night/early morning as the smoke of charbroiled fish and the steam of rice, noodles, and pork soup rose up the sweat-profuseness of his face and into his hairnet, he watched a girl giggle and slurp up her noodles with her boyfriend. He imagined all traffic on the streets and sidewalk gone and that there was just the three of them. He imagined those customers leaving unhappily. Then, as they were beginning to walk together, there was a dispute that intensified to the point where he attacked her. He imagined him dragging her by the hair, slapping her down, and denuding her. Suthep imagined himself walking over toward them and watching their canine copulation for a period of minutes. Then an idea possessed him and he started up his motorcycle and circled the couple, eventually chasing off the body that had been forcing itself into her. He imagined himself helping the trembling body of the female dress. He didn't want to cover her but he did it to comfort her so as to gain her confidence to obtain a new round of banging that would involve himself and would last longer than if he were to force another encounter on her now. Pleasures that had the potential of being perpetual were always the best. He imagined that he learned about her life with contrived sensitivity and with time secured himself as the being whom she yearned for. Then the happy couple was again a reality and he was standing alone in front of his cart. There they were at the table slurping their noodles joyfully. Adulthood was the maturity to relinquish the rebellion against society for relegating one to his petty station in life bereft of the pleasures he sees around him. Being wise was realizing that most of such pleasures were neither good nor beneficial. Although Suthep was an adult, he was a bitter man and he bit his lip in the thought of all the pleasures that were out there waiting for so many others and not for him. He resented being such a lowly clod. After the couple paid for the meal and left he sat at their empty table and looked out across the cars that veered near a discothèque until at last he fell asleep. For a moment or two of REM he dreamed of his youngest brother dangling by some friend from an open window of an appliance warehouse only to have his shoe slip off in the friend's hand and the body unwillingly succumbing to gravity with his force tripping off the alarm. But unlike what really happened two years ago to Jatupon and a teenager once they extricated themselves and arrived in the big city on a bus, he, Suthep, was the friend and when the shoe slipped off he laughed and ran. He woke up, shook off his sleep, and then began washing his dishes in big plastic bowls. He felt a loneliness eat up on him. Each evening it seemed to be exacerbated. The next evening he was struggling in ambivalence on continuing to work or closing early. Feeling forlorn and lonely, and yet needing to talk to Kazem about a decision he had made, he chose the latter. And when he arrived near Kazem's cart with a hairnet still on his head Kazem's countenance was at first chiding. "You couldn't have lost your shirt already," he said.