by Steven Sills
Chapter 14
Morality and Happiness Indicted in Abstentia
I wake up. A woman unknown to me is asleep. Her strange naked flesh is next to my own. Startled, for a moment, and in a room that also seems unfamiliar, I do not recognize her, and yet there she is nonetheless. But then, whatever I last was upon suddenly awakening (a five year old child playing with a matchbox car, a teenager anxious about using a condom for the first time, or eagerly entering monkhood for a week, a conflation of all three in brain waves meshing into each other and every other me and experience held by these mes within the ocean of being) eventually diminishes and recognition begins.
And as I get out of the bed and slip on my underwear with its trapped urine molecules in cotton screams and other subsequent articles of clothing, and inadvertently slip into the patchwork of memories that makes up a minute, an hour, a day, a year, a decade, a series of decades (that which provides texture to a being, a consistency, if merely through threads holding together motely memories and variegated beings as one being—the threads coercive attempts to retain the various selves to stay sane, with seams seemingly reinforced by relative consistency of character, ideology, and perspective that is imprinted and molded by these myriad versions of self, garnered through one’s years) I do remember her vaguely; and that feeling as though I were diminutive and diminishing, I had put on her skin to feel once again like a real man. But how, I ask myself, did I acquire this smooth leather? Then I recall returning from the go-go bar, the notes I scrawled in the solitude of this room, the inability to sleep, and that same bellboy who had greeted me at my return more than willing to make a call for me to one of the nearby massage parlors that was closing its doors. Everyone in it for his or her share, there she is.
“Sir,” said the hotel gecko, dressed in a housekeeping uniform, “What should I do about the lump in the bed?”
“What?”
“Sir, are you checking out?”
“Yes.”
“I have to find out how much liquor you have taken out of the refrigerator. And I don’t know what you want me to do about the lump in the bed.”
“The lump?”
“Yes, Sir. The lump.”
“Well, I guess you can make the bed over it. Just tighten the sheets and blanket more firmly than what you would do otherwise. It’s human so it will rot away with enough time. It is not like it is real or anything.”
“I see, Sir. Regarding the other issue, it seems Sir that you will need to pay an extra ten thousand baht for the drinks.”
“Oh, only this?”
“Yes, sir.”
The system of logic in these pages, if any, is nothing but the premises that have constructed it which, unlike mathematics, are never absolute. Matter must be assessed not just based upon the factors that created it which are varied and great indeed but based upon what it happens to be from moment to moment as seen through myriad lenses, and thus logic is not the desideratum in these pages but truth, with every nearly inscrutable second bringing a new truth and a new awareness—the rock of a proposition, like the rock of the Earth itself, to be turned and examined endlessly not only on all sides but against space and time and the changes that arise therein.
Like the World War II bomb that was recently found intact and sold to a scrap metal shop which tampered with it before it exploded, so I drop this manuscript. Whether it lands into the laps of posterity, or goes into oblivion with no impact capability whatsoever, I know not. I cannot construe if what is written here is for good or bad either in content or purpose, or that good does not engender the bad, the bad the good, or that initially or even afterwards, that we know what good and bad are. All I can do is to express what I believe in the moment that I believe it before I morph into something different than what I am now, in a world that is morphing around me with all denizens in it in their own respective ways, and hope that there is no destruction beyond a perspective that needed to be reset or destructed anyhow.
This is the world we live in, but I condemn it not. Like that old man brandishing a bamboo pole at me menacingly the other day for feeding puppies near his property-- precious and distinct creatures, an infestation according to some because of the fecundity of nature, probably which he bludgeoned to death and tossed into the canal-- we can trash life as needed with no compunction whatsoever. We can hardly expect anything different in a world in which life is still trying to harmonize, and in the early social contract of the animals the best harmony that was possible was fecundity of birth and predation, although indubitably, if society does not self-destruct, it will engender more symbiotic relationships yet to come. In the social contract of humans, those born to society without any say in the matter but who would hardly choose the alternative, the main rule of existence is to produce for society or perish even if the Titanic of global world commerce is crashing not against an iceberg but all of nature, and a natural corrective will take place.
“Don’t forget your papers, Sir.”
“Oh, I must put that in my luggage here. I’ve got it, thank you. Thank you so much.”
“I hope that you enjoyed your time here Sir, even if the bed was lumpy.”
“It felt nice. It wasn’t too lumpy, at all. If everything is too smooth, I doubt that one would feel or think anything. Maybe things are too smooth now, which is why in the modern era we have no great intellects, and only mediocrity.”
“Then your stay was successful?”
“Yes, I felt, and thought, and fucked. I bought some dried mushrooms. My supply was really getting dangerously low. Yes, I believe it was successful.”
“I’m glad to hear that.”
“Have a good morning.”
“You too, Sir. And don’t forget our motto here at Bang-cock’s Bayoke Tower, created by our founder Democritus: “All those who derive pleasure from their guts by eating or drinking or having sex to an excessive or inordinate degree find their pleasures brief and short lived in that they last for only as long as they are actually eating or drinking while their pains are many.”72
