though he had never really put himself up for sale and had never been
bought. As American as he wanted to be, in Thailand (even Sanam Luang
in Bangkok) there was little chance of being robbed or murdered. He
realized that he wasn't really worried on that score.
He was the same as the visual images of street life that had come
to him earlier that day: dogs that gnawed through the trash; a man whom
he had seen in the middle of the afternoon holding a tree of hooks
attached to small plastic sandwich bags where water and goldfish
dangled within (how his child cried particularly for the sake of the
fish); strangers pushing against each other in the mad rush to sell
something and improve the lot of their lives; and a blind man who had
screamed a song into a microphone to gain the one baht coins he was
begging for. Like them, he would do almost anything for survival and
the gaining of a better life that would shake in the pockets of his
pants. Life was rained on one like rocks thrown at the emaciated dogs
as they scavenged for their food or listlessly lay in the center of
congested sidewalks.
Like those homeless individuals on their mats, he wanted someone
to look into his eyes and confirm his humanity. He wanted to hear a
voice in the solitude of the night that would give him hope that life
was not entirely random and that he had an importance. He wanted to
believe in illusions. He wanted to believe that the incidents that
happened in one's life were for a good reason and that they were the
iron scaffolding that built up his life into one monumental edifice
which would go on and on. And yet if his family didn't care to deceive
him into seeing connections and connectedness in random events and
time, no stranger out there would be benevolent enough to attempt the
task. He was a rotting organism there to be trodden on like any
insect. He sat on a bench and reread the earlier part of his Laotian
poem: the queens' prayers; the youngest queen's pregnancy; the oldest