The night and its dark appetites were mature in full
insurrection. They had eaten their share of rice and chicken topped
with cotton candy, and yet not cowering, their stomachs craved for beer
so they headed to a nearby bar. Before them a child was walking
slowly on the steps that rose up to the bridge that went over a canal.
He slammed his fire-snappers against the cement watching the air burst
before his feet. They passed him to quickly fulfill the surfeit of beer
that was part of their general yearnings. They yearned for so
much--these three young men. They yearned for relaxation with beer;
they yearned for friends and places away from this fraternal group that
they had been conceived into and forced to work with; and, except for
Jatupon, they each yearned for a love to come their way so that they
would not be lost in themselves. Jatupon yearned most to be naively
complete like that boy they had passed. Jatupon had once been like
him: fascinated by his own thoughts and sensations and self-contained.
In late boyhood a boy mastered independence that in infancy and early
boyhood he struggled to achieve. It was all thwarted, however, by the
upsurge of sexual feelings which made a young man want to bond
cohesively and addictively to others. The progress of late boyhood was
razed in a brief year or two.
Strangely, the world was a dreamy place and from the modest
display of fireworks being shot over the canal there was a dreamy idea
of connectedness and fraternity in the psyches of these young men
although such ideals varied from moment to moment based upon their
interpretations of the environment. Lagging behind in serpentine
movements of dreaminess but eager for connectedness, Jatupon hurriedly
caught up to his brothers only to lag behind them again. It was time
for Heineken, Singh, or Bush (not those two presidents). It was a time
to celebrate and dunk the self in artificial dreaminess like one
bobbing for apples. Jatupon looked up at the sky when he and his