As the hot night faded, Joy and Oy and Noi and Pukki now probably faking their last orgasm, he sat in second class, waiting for the train to take him to the border. On the far side of the tracks, where sarongs hung over cubicles made of corrugated siding, a young woman with long black hair prayed her hands down her face. Beside her, an old lady got to her feet and hobbled barefoot, bent half over under a burden of water. A third woman, whose age seemed in between that of the other two, began to prepare rice. When it was steaming, the young woman began to chop or massage something unknown behind the metal wall, and all at once the black night sky turned morning grey, the train honked sourly, and they began to slide into the new day whose trains and buildings, still cool, mysterious, almost pure, would not fail soon to set about their own solitary routines. His window passed wet grey walls to which laundry clung like spiderwebs. Fire cans seethed orange beside a brown canal; siding-roofed houses crowded under a gracious tree, sweating a smell of smoke. An illuminated train shot by the other window, occluding the morning-clouded sky. In the dark leaf-roofed alleys, boys bicycled out, balancing ice sacks on their handlebars.
The almost empty train pulsed open-windowed past fishy-smelling palm fields, fat lady vendeuses singsonging up and down the aisle with Coke, dried fish, satay, rice… He bought an orange peacock's fan of chicken that was wired between two halves of a bamboo stick. It was very fresh and gingery and good.
The silver-blue backs of metaled houses formed a plain interrupted by shadow-crevices, a canal, an occasional tall palm. . then these ended suddenly in grass as high as the window. A silver-fogged river flashed on him like relapsing fever. Silver fog lived on the grassheads like an aura. He saw a woman with four gold rings on her finger; she pressed her hand to her nose, looking in the window at him, and then the train was past. Bushy islands undercut by silver water-ribbons gave way to housecubes open and shuttered, grey walls. The train breasted the walled river of grass. .
Again they passed another train, through whose windows he saw other heads and then windows, cutout palm foliage. Trains seemed to him like destinies. He wondered what kind of person he'd be becoming if he were on that other train.
The conductor approached in his olive-green uniform, a pad of mysterious forms under his arm like birth control calendars. He punched four and gave them to Vanna's husband. He put a pen in his mouth when he punched them. The golden star and double arrowhead on his shoulder, the golden medallion on his lapel, the grand golden lozenge-emblem just above the slick black visor of his cap, these tokens gave indisputable proof of his majesty. He leaned against the seat, almost erect, writing, saying something with a gentle smile, the long tendons vibrating in his arms. His pockmarked face was lowered, his pants creased to fresh knife-edges. After he was gone, all the passengers had to explain to one another the various forms he'd assigned them. Suddenly, Vanna's husband remembered a maxim he'd heard: In Cambodia you can give every official a gift; in fact, you'd better give every official a gift; in Thailand you'd better not give them a gift unless you know them.
At midday the train stopped for an hour. He went out and sat under the platform canopy, staring at a giant yellow Buddha whose topknot was just a little higher than the highest tree. Two skinny old monks, their once orange robes brown, leaned forward on a bench, patiently. There was a stand with glass-fronted triple shelves on narrow legs, puffed full of white balls with something red hiding inside. - He thought: I wonder if that's how my balls are now, with AIDS inside them. .
Now they rattled through the heart of Thailand, plains of yellow-green, wet rice fields steaming like cunts, the underside of another green tree, white birds on the narrow rivers, a horizon-line of grey-green trees. The bridges were all grand (in Cambodia, each one having been meticulously blown up by the Khmer Rouge, the Hun Sen government rebuilt the only way it could, just twin metal tracks on the rusty trestles, good enough for military vehicles, the river waiting in between, so don't wobble right or left; and every bridge was guarded by soldiers); they were all painted, window-high; no soldiers stood there looking down on green rice-stubble in water. . But in the middle of a rice field he saw a stick-bridge with its sticks projecting like crazy darning needles.