The Laotian burst out in a laughter which started out as a mild guffaw before burning away any acrimony against opulent Bangkokians, their ignorance, and more specifically, this rich Thai's obtuseness, to become a pleasant and embracing cacophony of good will.
Nawin noticed a blanketed entity at his feet that puzzled him and made the reason for the laughter cease to matter. Then the Laotian spoke and the blanketed one who was half on the floor and the two seats before the window was forgotten.
"So, a rich man like you doesn't know where elephants are kept but then why would you? I guess it wouldn't have been something that you would have studied in college." He waited for a response but all that he got was the artist's furrowed look of puzzlement followed by an aloof stare. Like a faithful childish protégé who was fascinated by the most mundane of motion and noise, Nawin, an animistic thinker even in this more than waning prime of life, began to listen to the fan that rotated above the luggage. At first he was merely wondering why the fan was now on, stirring the cold air, thereby making the air-conditioned area seem colder yet; but as he listened to its grating squeal he imagined that he was hearing the fan talk to him all so discreetly. It was whispering that the vibrations heard by the man who was supposing it to be the actual sound of the fan were fallacious. It was saying that, as with the sound of the fan, so was the Laotian's voice and all specious sound: that sound, by being heard indirectly if not vicariously, existed only as an adulterated sensation. According to the fan true sounds were unknown for one was not hearing what true vibrations sounded like inside a given source, but was merely hearing the air vibrating from its disturbances, or more obliquely one was hearing disturbed air from a vibration that then became disturbed and distorted once more in hitting the eardrums and this thwarted sound, correctly attributed as originating from a given source, was incorrectly attributed as being the real sound of that source. Likewise, said the fan, the Laotian's cologne and aftershave, like any smell, were a diffusion of higher concentrations of molecules to lower ones, so he was not smelling the scent of the man mixed with the artificial chemicals as they were on him, but the scent of him within his perfumed mixture as a less dense concentration oozing away from the man, leaving him and diffusing with other molecular scents, and the more one was at a distance, the less distinct this or any smell became. Sight was unabsorbed color that was exuded from a given presence although the mind believed it to be the filling in, the materialization, of the object's outline. All senses seemed fallible, and the world of the senses seemed like a voice echoing in a canyon, and no more real than that. It suddenly seemed to him that his own marriage, an abstraction concocted in his and her head, and then spilled as ink on a tenuous sheet of easily torn paper made hallow in ceremony, and by a deistic, bodily fluid overseer, imbued less sense than the nonsense the Laotian was speaking. This thought that a caring relationship grounded in many years could dissipate with such precipitancy by a mutual friend jumping off a balcony was proof of the vaporous quality of all things. It tortured him in one deranged second for all was a phantasm of the mind and the phantasmagoria of an impermanent existence. It made him feel his true proportions as a disintegrating speck in a microcosm of the galaxy.