He realized the impression that he was making and so he smiled and looked into the stranger's face. "So, did you like the paintings? --not that as slides held up to the light anyone could see them all that well."
"Unlike you who have probably gained a lot of various skills in your labor, I don't have many practical skills. I can't fix anything. Not even a drawer that is ajar in a night table. Never learned to cook anything but noodles from my parents' restaurant and my brothers' noodle stands. But I know how to draw naked whores. That is for sure. I guess it is my gift."
"If those slides are your own work, you do, my friend. You draw them so well, so exquisitely, so astoundingly with all the feminine curves and wiles just right; and I am sure that after you paint and love them they sometimes like to watch you sleep and you like to watch them sleep. But that was not the nature of my query. I am meaning someone whom you don't know all that well looking down on you. Like I was earlier this morning, you are not quite asleep and so you hear him--yes a man, as it is a man's breathing that you hear. Earlier I was lying alone here in my bottom bunk drowsy but not asleep when I swear I heard someone drop from an upper sleeper and got the sense that he was examining my body, wanting it. Strange, huh?"
"I would imagine that it would be," said Nawin.
For a moment he was stunned to have these crevices of opaque light so heavily and obliquely invade the filthy corners of his mind, the dark enlightenment being alluded to, both parties seeming to peer onto it (he himself undoubtedly so and this smirking of the Laotian and his eyes that seemed to pierce his soul so knowingly could not have equivocal interpretations). He kept debating whether he should stay or go and found himself, due to his indecisiveness, floundering in desperate ambivalence. Clearly he wanted to move to a different seat so in that sense of knowing his own dominant yearning and witnessing it unopposed by contrary yearnings he was not ambivalent at all and yet, he asked himself, how could he just go? To go so precipitously would be rude even if done with the obsequious gesture of the wai (although even this was complicated by the fact that he was the older and vastly more affluent of the two parties and should not be the one initiating such gestures); and to leave for one of the now vacant seats would only aggravate suspicion. The idea of the Laotian having proof of his decadence would dog whatever specious tranquility he hoped to have in a vacant space of his own. He could stay. True, it would be uncomfortable but then, he told himself, there was not any option for solving any problem that was ever entirely perfect. He was uncomfortable now, and would surely be even more so with the passing moments. Such discomfort would sprawl like a dark vine onto the minutes, strangling them like a rope, or in excessive growth smothering them like a baby buried in its foam bath. And yet if he were inordinately resolute if not obdurate in staying where he was, would not the tempestuousness pass away easily by acting the part of a god? Zeus-like in shooting his thunder bolts, albeit thunder bolts of conversation against that soft epistemological core of a man's mind which realized that nothing was known absolutely, he could easily impart the venom of doubt. He could lead the conversation into inconsequential matters such as the latest news about these Moslem separatists in the South or the seventy year old saffron frocked monk who mistakenly pulled out glue from the medicine cabinet, inserted it into one of his eyes, and then allowed a colleague to remedy it by applying paint thinner into his hallowed orbs. Anything believed to be known, could be doubted as illusory when the possibilities of the present were continually supplanting those of the past. By continuing to talk it would become more real than the Laotian's vague recollection of him staring at his body. Still he did not know what to say, and feeling that discomfort, he wanted the closure of all communication with a stranger who knew him more than his own wife.