Then, immediately in front of the park bench there was a woman
before him who carried two heavy buckets of ice and drinks. Startled
to an awakened state by the woman asking if he wanted anything to
drink, at first he gave a negative answer, "Mashai" but then he changed
it into a formal feminine ending, "Ka" which could mean "yes." How
absurd he must have seemed to this woman speaking like herself instead
of using the masculine word, "krub" or the neuter yes-word, "chai," but
at the time, he had thought of himself as a bird when he spoke and so
there had not been any gender confusion whatsoever. He paid the woman
for a bottle of water. Then a man with his stinking body holding a bag
with little bags inside came to his bench. Jatupon bought two of his
bags and began strewing the ground a few feet from the bench with the
dust of crackers, breadcrumbs, and corn.
He did this slowly while trying to solve his indecisiveness on
whether to stay or go home. The thought of suicide seemed to him even
more repellent than the two major options but it was a tiebreaker he
wasn't going to reject absolutely. He had a pocketknife. He thought to
himself that when night came upon him he could find an obscure area of
a tree's shadow in complete darkness away from the gas lamps and slit
his throat. He looked down. Pigeons were beginning to come to him and
eat what he had allotted to them. He liked giving to ostensibly small
and insignificant creatures. When the bags were empty he saved himself
by his impetuousness and returned on bus #203. He dangled from the
steps because of the lack of space provided to him. Standing there on
the precipice of the step he looked in the bus at the crowded Siamese
passengers. At moments this mosaic fusing of contortionist-bodies
seemed as a mass of amorphous human flesh, a multi-head, body, and limb
monster, which choked air and breath from the bus and, worse, had the
outline of Kazem. Bus #203 zoomed along the river and then over the
bridge of the Chao Phraya River. The cool breezes slapped hard against