of feeling in love (tame as it was for new love), comic heroes that
pulled him into more noble pursuits, and dreams of an aristocratic
life.

There was a garbled mass of half-remembered faces that gnarled
Nawin's thoughts when he woke up one morning. No different than noodle
workers toward customers buoying in their brains at the end of the
night, he had to let these myriad faces-most of whom he had encountered
in high school and at the universities he had attended -to gradually
subside into forgetfulness. He sat up in bed and rubbed his forehead.
His mind felt like one whose shoes were trapped in the coils of fallen
barbed wire. He looked at Porn, this woman with whom he had mentally
signed a contract to serve her needs and she his. Her hair billowed
against her pillow like feathers. He thought to himself that she,
being a prostitute, and he actually establishing a relationship with
one, were so different from all other human beings. Maybe they were
surviving hominids. They were definitely a divergent species of animal.
He thought about Songkran Festivals. All of his grandparents were
deceased early into his boyhood. In his family there was no tradition
of each relative taking bowls of water and cleansing the hands of the
older family members and this tradition of offering good luck for the
New Year, respect, and deference had never really embedded itself into
his mind as a moral duty. He had never been Thai. Circumstances had
made him into a hominid. He wondered pityingly about the circumstances
that had maimed and freed her. He stared at her face with great pain
and pathos. Tears weltered in the corners of his eyes. He did not
know what to do with this feeling so he buried it and made love to her.
She took him in her mouth. The quicker and deeper she went the more
pleasurable it was. Little did he care if she choked on it. When he was
ready to ejaculate he pressed her head so that he could penetrate more