Having been given time alone, Jatupon scraped up his stolen collection of loose change and ran off hand in hand with his freedom. Having no responsibilities for the first time in his life apart from the night sports that usually happened in the mornings, his life was becoming a purposeless abyss. He personified his freedom and together they broke beyond small basement windows and imagined portals to real places. Together, they went to see the life that fulminated within the streets of the city of Bangkok. Kazem was gone so they did not have to be there to hear his expletives about the older brother's thievery and the younger brother's disappearances. The disappearances were ones Kazem attributed to Suthep chumming up with Kumpee to have a bit of money to play snookers. For hours and hours they were lost in the movements of traffic, the brown and Chinese faces, movements of strangers on the sidewalks, and the swirl of infinite numbers on the quest for money, happiness, and adventure. He read faces and movements from his spreading feelers. They too wanted money bestowed onto them to squander at will in all forms of self-indulgence. They too wanted to squelch their routines to live their dishonorable lives in the quest of sensuality. To have resources and freedom to run around loose as a goose in a department store was something they all yearned for and seeing these pedestrian shoppers of the sidewalk, with more money than he, made the boy hunger for better things. Freedom was becoming old as he continued to walk with her into the crowds but she rejuvenated lasciviously when his eye spotted someone not in the shopper's swirl. The cravings so attractive to Jatupon were missing in those deadened eyes and passing from him he fell into the others. Membership was free. It was lack of hope that was given so generously to the majority of the world's populace that was indispensable to them. Lurid as family, fetid as Kumpee's shoes, here they were and here he was with them; and yet they were his own or what he assumed was his own--the little that he knew of himself. It was a family of addicts, addicted to family or even a concoction of family, cobbled together within the affinity of pain and the tangles of neurons like brambles pricking their consciousness with old travail at every turn: memories that they couldn't free themselves from. Within this desert of cacti and brambles they poured destructive chemicals and suicidal inclinations to kill and enlarge their brambly world. They were landscape artists of their personal deserts: hating, destroying, and replanting their cacti and brambles with each new whim. Here he was with a new family--a mosaic of complete strangers who were not related to him nor were they relating to him or much to each other. Still, it was a surrogate family nonetheless succumbing to an infinite current of darkness to which they all had understanding. In many ways they were wiser: they knew that the insatiability of desire that made one propelled to breed, work, and buy was not going to stop. They knew that no one in such circles was going to find contentment. They were all going to fail miserably. They knew that there was a deep discontent in the human psyche that yearned for destruction and death. In the course of being degraded by significant others they had somehow gotten excluded from the participation of such narcissistic, consumeristic appetites and that the salvation of compassion would not be forthcoming. This benign pastel family sat together on the slab of cement under the overpass while over them, on the overpass itself, were the trinkets sold by salesmen, homeless elderly women, mothers, those who stunk from being unable to bathe off their rotting surface of scaling skin, and deformed slabs of flesh spread out on parts of the overpass with fidgeting partial limbs. They all had nearly empty cups of one baht coins and the most unfortunate of them could testify of dark currents deeper than regular people could imagine for one moment. They, his surrogate family, knew that there was not just one blackness but despair had myriad blacker and bleaker hues. Under the steps of the overpass sniffing his glue while these transients already riddled in amphetamines and alcohol (at times borrowing his glue) smoked cigarettes incessantly, his mind swept away from him like a butterfly fluttering by. When he first met them in this spot their first words were to offer to him cigarettes but he told them that if he were to put one in his mouth it would remind him of the fetid one with his fetid shoes and socks littered everywhere, the one who had stolen his parents property upon their deaths and had abandoned them to starvation in the great city of Bangkok.