| Book I: Palaver |
| Chapter 1 |
| Chapter 2 |
| Book II: Many Lifetimes Ago |
| Chapter 3 |
| Chapter 4 |
| Chapter 5 |
| Chapter 6 |
| Chapter 7 |
| Chapter 8 |
| Chapter 9 |
| Chapter 10 |
| Chapter 11 |
| Chapter 12 |
| Chapter 13 |
| Chapter 14 |
“So he spoke, and the bright-eyed goddess, Athene, was pleased that shewas the god he prayed to before all the others. She put strength in hisshoulders and knees, and set in his heart the daring of a mosquito, which,though constantly brushed away from a man’s skin, still insists on bitinghim for the pleasure of human blood.”
—The Iliad
Homer
They, with their driver, went down Ramkhamhaeng Road singularly in the scope oftheir thoughts but conditioned into repudiating their aloneness. It was anearly Bangkok morning with a new day tripping over the corpse of the earlierone the way dogs on the Bangkok sidewalks were walked on. It was early in therelationship of the two passengers and this nascent association contained thecomplex and awkward ambiguity of not being clearly professional or personal andhe and his prostitute-model were tripping into each other. When she put herhand on his leg he would stiffen and both his legs would slightly slant awayfrom her but when she removed her hand and kept it away from him for someminutes he would put it back there closer than ever to his thighs. Even he hadto admit his actions made no sense given the fact that he flaunted her, andothers like her, wherever he went; but it was part of the game of beingdesired. Although he wasn’t even conscious that such a game was beingplayed, she was fully cognizant of these subliminal calculative moves and how awoman was played. She knew that she was desiring him more as a consequence. Shealso knew that being desired required adhering to the rules of withdrawing fromthe neediness of wanting to be linked to a man and of transforming herself intothe metamorphoses of self-contained fantasies that he would desire.
Despite Thai’s reverence for royalty, the three of them went downRamkhamhaeng Road without even thinking about the king behind the name. He, hiswhore, and perhaps the faceless one at the steering wheel as well, thought ofthemselves as a unit albeit an insignificant one. They had that sociabletendency to chat at each other to reduce the drone of one’s solitary andmelancholic thoughts but it was less the case with the pensive passenger, Nawin(formerly Jatupon) who, Aristotelian and poised as a Garuda, was a surlycontempl