An Apostate: Nawin of Thais

Numb in his tenebrous tomb, it seemed to him that time was a man-made concept erroneously believed as fully real and tangible because of all the clocks and calendars, made to measure mortality, and things known to have already passed away. As the religious measured the ethics of their actions by those of the characters in their scripture, so was time (its tattered relationships, its solitary and jejune rides in coffins on board trains) a fiction to mark individual and collective progress.

But then, he told himself, he was not traveling to Laos to progress but to degenerate. It w