Liberated in the winding mountain roads, he sped, two-wheeled, youthful and invincible, around curves, passing cars and pedestrians. His aviators gleaming, his hair a long, brown, bellowing flag of freedom. To the temple he was bound and at the feet of its 306 stairs he laid down at an unmarked cutback, an unexpected change of mind on the road.
The moto did not complain when he tugged the brakes and twisted the wheel. It did not moan or squeal or try to make the impossible turn. It ignored its driver's demands and resigned itself to inertia and gravity, collapsing like a broken chair. From his lungs a loud burst of air escaped as he struck the pavement and slid and with it the briefest and most appropriate profanity he knew. He listened to the sound of it hurdling from his lips, unthought and unaware of its origin. He leapt up and limped the bike to the edge of the road. Knees bleeding, shoulder aching, but intact and fortunate.
They came to his aid, strangers who picked up his sunglasses, his helmet, helped him start the bike, led him to a water hose, bandaged his wounds, offered him a glass of warm whiskey.
He ascended the 306 stairs to the temple aswarm now with tourists and their children pushing strollers, snapping pictures, ringing bells. His knees ached from the climb and the noise made him sick. This Buddhism made him callous. He wandered as a ghost through the compound, the bookstore, the food umbrellas, uncertain why he'd come at all.
* * *
The morning she left, he'd hardly slept, up late discussing the minutia of love and beauty, sweating on the steps of a seven eleven, drinking 7Up and juice, watching late night motos with their prostitutes in tail, stream by, finely arrayed lures for hungry pale-flesh fish. Is love beauty or beauty love, did one beget the other, are they psychological projections, instincts for survival, or ideals drawn up by a supreme creator? Urgently they discussed and talked themselves in circles. And left the debate for a future date. But the night would not sleep. In bed between the sheets unebbing waves of heat that no fan could dissipate. So it was with bleary eyes, he breathed goodbye at the birth of morning, to the living lines of Egon Schiele, wisped away by a cloud of smoke in the back of a coughing Tuk Tuk.
