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Corpus of a Siam Mosquito

by Steven David Justin Sills · English · Gutenberg #5176 · 432,097 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Corpus of a Siam Mosquito

Author: Steven David Justin Sills


        
Release date: February 1, 2004 [eBook #5176]
                Most recently updated: June 29, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5176


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CORPUS OF A SIAM MOSQUITO ***




Corpus of a Siam Mosquito

by Steven Sills

Contents

 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 she
was the god he prayed to before all the others. She put strength in his
shoulders 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 biting him for the pleasure of human blood.”

—The Iliad
    Homer




Book I: Palaver




Chapter 1


They, with their driver, went down Ramkhamhaeng Road singularly in the
scope of their thoughts but conditioned into repudiating their
aloneness. It was an early Bangkok morning with a new day tripping over
the corpse of the earlier one the way dogs on the Bangkok sidewalks
were walked on. It was early in the relationship of the two passengers
and this nascent association contained the complex and awkward
ambiguity of not being clearly professional or personal and he and his
prostitute-model were tripping into each other. When she put her hand
on his leg he would stiffen and both his legs would slightly slant away
from her but when she removed her hand and kept it away from him for
some minutes he would put it back there closer than ever to his thighs.
Even he had to admit his actions made no sense given the fact that he
flaunted her, and others like her, wherever he went; but it was part of
the game of being desired. Although he wasn’t even conscious that such
a game was being played, she was fully cognizant of these subliminal
calculative moves and how a woman was played. She knew that she was
desiring him more as a consequence. She also knew that being desired
required adhering to the rules of withdrawing from the neediness of
wanting to be linked to a man and of transforming herself into the
metamorphoses of self-contained fantasies that he would desire.

Despite Thai’s reverence for royalty, the three of them went down
Ramkhamhaeng Road without even thinking about the king behind the name.
He, his whore, and perhaps the faceless one at the steering wheel as
well, thought of themselves as a unit albeit an insignificant one. They
had that sociable tendency to chat at each other to reduce the drone of
one’s solitary and melancholic thoughts but it was less the case with
the pensive passenger, Nawin (formerly Jatupon) who, Aristotelian and
poised as a Garuda, was a surly contemplative despite lordly
debauchery. Through being whirled in vicissitudes he felt that he could
withstand anything fate had to offer. Unlike the others, he did not
need to escape his thoughts as much as a bull from a corral. Instead,
he befriended his morose tendencies.

Basking in the grandeur of his new stature, the back seat Nawin was
dwelling on himself continually in the concern that his fame, isolated
as it was, had not happened totally from the merit of his work. He
wondered how much the licentiousness of his life and the salaciousness
of the subject matter were the real color of what could be marginal
talents. He wondered if he should change his subject matter proving
himself as an artist even if it reduced the virility he felt as a type
of swarthy Thai sex symbol. How strange it was, he thought to himself,
that despite the fact that being dark was never an attractive trait in
Thailand where the lighter, Chinese skinned Thais were thought to have
more material success, sensuality, and beauty, he who was not
particularly handsome from being dark as a shoe’s heel should be sexy
from his wanton disposition. Likewise, his thoughts were dark in a land
of frivolous irresponsibility. To Thai’s the word “serious” had a
negative connotation and he was that. Unless one was a monk, being
contemplative was a tacit violation of laws in the Land of Smiles. He
had become the rescuer of whores humanizing their sorry plight. Their
only sins were to be born poor and to be loyal enough to not pull out
of the loose fetters of family obligations. They continued to remember
shadowy figments of obscure rural relatives whom they needed to feed.
Still being a hero was burdening him with a singular motif and he
continually shot this thought through his neurological circuitry until
the taxi driver spoke, parting his thoughts like Moses and the Red Sea
or Buddha sabotaging a bit of the recycle factory of the human soul.

“My son flew into Chaing Mai recently. I’ve been wondering about
airplanes ever since-just thinking about how things get off the ground.

Have you ever wondered that?”

“Ka,” meaning yes, the woman in the backseat croaked like a crow. “I’m
trying not to question it. Wondering such things would make me scared
that they don’t stay up in the sky,” she laughed. Her name was Jarunee
but her nickname was Porn. “This will be my first plane ride soaring
off with the birds.”

“Thais don’t often fly,” he said. His idea was tinged with a bitter
undertone as if poverty turned one’s bones to lead and he found that
his idea put him back in the solitude of his thoughts for only silence
ensued. He decided to sound happier. “You sound excited.”

“It has been my dream.” She leaned her head against Nawin’s shoulder.

“Flew off to Chaing Mai. He lost his job during the financial meltdown
of 96. 3000 baht. That’s what the family lived on each month for a good
many years. Then she was pregnant and laid off from the restaurant and
they stayed with us for five or six months. Of course they could have
stayed longer. After all, they are family.”

“Yes, of course. You sound like a good father. I’m sure it will get
better for everyone soon,” responded Porn as she looked up at the old
face in the mirror hoping with softness to make the tenor of the
conversation gayer.

“Krap,” he said meaning yes although he wasn’t in agreement. “No, he
continually got more depressed and then no matter how many job
interviews he went on, he came up empty handed. Then she took their
children to her parents. He came up there a bit later. The in-laws had
him but didn’t want him. He hadn’t been trained at anything but working
in the factory. He didn’t know how to plant rice or maybe he was too
depressed to learn. It wouldn’t seem there would be much to learn. You
just put them into the ground. Anyhow, he was walking around in a daze
all that time. That’s what she claimed they said about him. Soon he
returned with us but before we knew it off he went to Chaing Mai. I
don’t know why. I got a post card from there. It didn’t say much other
than he had taken his first flight. Can you imagine just buying a
ticket, leaving, and not saying a word.”

“Ka, not really. I can’t imagine anybody doing that...unless he just
didn’t want to worry you. Maybe he didn’t want to worry you about if
the idea was right or wrong financially. I bet he has friends there and
they’ll help him to locate work.”

“Yes, it is the best thing. I’ve been going to the temple to give food
to the monks and blessings will follow. I’m sure of that. I’ve never
gone on a flight. Where are the two of you going?”

“To Montreal.”

“Where’s that?”

“To Canada.” She smiled but the word, favorable as it was, didn’t have
the flavor of Paris or cities in America.

“What will you do there?”

Nawin wondered what she would be doing there. She had escorted him
around galleries, parties, and auditoriums where he gave speeches.
Bangkok gossip columnists had sometimes even mentioned her presence
with him. What would she be doing in Montreal while he attended
post-graduate classes? That was a fundamental question he had no answer
for. He had granted unto her a new profession where she didn’t have to
spread her legs to anyone but him. He had rescued her from stripping
and whoring in a bar in Patpong but perhaps that would not be enough.
Nobody was content. Like any animal, a human always yearned for more.
They were trying to build up on themselves so that they were free of
all discomfort. A woman was more that way than even a man based on his
judgments and to be left alone in an apartment in a foreign country
would be one major discomfort she would not tolerate. He began to miss
his wife: she didn’t need anything—not even sex with him. She was free
to love other things than him—higher things and he was free to love
higher things than her as well as the lower things like Porn. It was
for this reason that he loved her but he didn’t desire her so much
except as an intellectual companion. This one he desired and that love
certainly had more thrust than the former one. At least it appeared to
be stronger.

The sky had tubes of light paint oozing out into the darkness and the
sky could not ascertain if it wanted a moon or a sun in its presence.
The ride was just beginning and yet it was monotonous in the darkness
and the light of the street lamps that refracted glaringly. The three
of them still remained as little conscious of the moon or, dependent on
the limitation of their eyes, the corona of the moon, that they
happened to glimpse as accompanying them on their early morning
departure as they were of the monarch, Ramkhamhaeng, that was the
source of the road’s name. The taxi driver was near-sighted so to him,
as most things at a distance, the reality of it all was begotten as a
blur.

The back-seated Nawin with the cigarette fuming and the legs sprawled
out and thumping to his portable CD player and his model or whore with
her hand again on one of his legs had their thoughts parted once more
in the kinetic movements of linguistic moans.

“What airline will you be flying out of?” asked the taxi driver.
Following patriarchal social etiquette he was addressing the man
instead of the girlfriend despite not liking the smoke. The man was
more than a customer but a member of the more affluent class and this
by Thai, although not Buddhist standards, was well revered. How swift
one’s encroaching aloneness was purged and thwarted in the retreat
engineered by the batons and water cannons of one’s linguistic moans.
The whore, whose self-image had been disparaged by the unconventional
positive endorsement of her activities by the wife, was grateful to
gain the parting of her thoughts from the driver’s voice. She was
pleased to be once again hearing anything—even the least little
unenlightening fact-about their trip. She smiled. After all, it was the
land of smiles.

“Thai” mumbled Nawin’s voice from the back seat.

“Domestic or international?” asked the taxi driver as if amnesia had
wiped away a whole section of memory. Porn released an alien chortle
that made Nawin think that he was sitting on the back seat with some
type of mythological, hybrid animal he was in the process of taking on
an overseas journey. How quickly she had gone from seductress to a
callow calf and kid. He smiled at the man’s ignorance without laughing.
He felt that his girlfriend was ugly and noticed how mutable the sight
of anyone was: at one-time ugly and at another time beautiful, at
one-time virtuous and another point wicked, and at one point victim and
another time slut. It was not only the physical dimensions that could
vary from moment to moment. The perception of a whole being could
change. He moved himself to the window to get away from her hand and
feigned a curiosity with the world outside. He rolled down the window.
At that moment they both had a similar jejune feeling of the repetition
of old things and new things not fully connecting. It was indescribable
to them both. Porn kept asking herself if she was doing the right thing
in forsaking her responsibilities with her clients for the unknown of
traveling with him.

“You look like you are car sick,” said the driver. “My son always got
that way even a kilometer down the road when he was a boy. Matter of
fact that happens to him now—not quite as bad, though. I can’t think
how he survived the flight to Chaing Mai. That I’ll never know.” Nawin,
to show proper deference to an older man and to prove to himself that
he wasn’t churlish, looked toward the mirror and front windshield and
gave the whole frontal world a nod. The boy born of the name Jatupon
was bleeding inside him. His brain waves wiggled around like noodles.
He was no better than this man. They both had been born poor with
limited opportunities. He couldn’t laugh at him for any reason.

“Are you going international or domestic,” asked the driver of the
twenty-five year old. Again there was a chortle. “Why does that
question seem to make her laugh,” asked the taxi driver. “That is very
strange. That is a strange young lady.”

“Krap,” said Nawin gruffly, “I don’t know why she is laughing.” “We are
going international. Eva Airlines. Eva Airlines, an international
flight to Japan,” reiterated Nawin. He kept it simple. He didn’t even
want to think about Montreal. The thought of accompanying an animal, of
sorts, to the other side of the world was too much. No sooner had he
said it than she reminded them both of the fact that she would be going
to her home first. Nawin had fallen into his own pensive inclinations
but unlike them he wanted the completion of his thoughts. He was
scanning his mutating neurological circuitry for a possible answer to
the enigma whom he called his wife. Noppawan’s flippant comment that
the stoplight wouldn’t get any greener as she smiled and shut the door
on him and his whore troubled or inveigled him. One’s driveway wasn’t
exactly equipped with a stoplight so that one sentence bordered on
sarcasm. Her placid demeanor was like plastic and how she behaved
belied everything so how was he to know if she was discontent with this
arrangement if not jealous of it.

It was the first time that he would be leaving her to travel abroad. He
had offered to delay the trip by a week or two until she had submitted
her grades at Assumption University, which Thais called A-back. Maybe
having his Porn stay over at their house the previous night was
disrespectful to his wife but nice or offensive behavior was based upon
one’s guesswork on how society would interpret such situations and
unique situations like this were all the more impossible to judge. His
wife was definitely different. That was for sure; but she was still a
woman down deep even if she denied it just as his American passport and
name-change made him abstain from bits of himself. A woman had
instincts at suspecting a man’s activities. A woman had jealous rages
and seductive lures that had a chance of keeping a man with her:
genetic programming from hundreds or thousands of female ancestors who
had experienced the promiscuity of husbands and were afraid that they
and their children would not be properly taken care of. But there was
certainly no chance of children. She slept with him a few times as
husband and wife in a motion of fulfilled and completed consummation
never to be repeated. Then she went in to get herself sterilized. Why
she needed to do both was unclear. She was a mystery and steadfast in
committing herself to that vow they had made to each other when they
were 14 or 15 years old to not live petty lives. Such was the gray in
the gray matter that enveloped them. Life with Noppawan had the
insatiability of an itch to a mosquito’s bite and contained the same
pleasurable discomfort.

“Taking a trip to Japan” thought the taxi driver sarcastically. He
wasn’t certain how anyone could afford to go there. He was stuck to the
boundaries of the car and he resented it; although from it, despite its
limitations, he was always introduced to people so different than he
was. They were the favored ones whose ideas were not curtailed to
traffic jams exacerbated by infuriatingly influential traffic lights
and accidents. Traffic accidents were such chaos because smashed cars
could not be moved until insurance agents came to the scene to make
their reports. Traffic policemen, who could easily be bribed, were
never to be trusted. The favored people did not have everyday to roam
the streets like homeless but highly mobile mendicants, their every
movement enslaved and dictated by the pronouncement of street names
called out from the back seat. “Do young people like you have money to
go off wherever you wish?” The words pierced out of one who was
pierced. The ache tore open like a tenuous newly heeled scar with the
blade coming up to slit others. He knew that he had behaved contrary to
social instinct but he hadn’t been able to stop himself.

“Don’t you know who this is?” asked the whore with arrogant vehemence.

The taxi driver looked in the rear view mirror at the brown-faced Nawin
or Jatupon and asked, “No, should I know you?”

“No you shouldn’t. Neither one of us should know the other one. Just
drive!” said Nawin although again he winced from his darker alter ego
that only became him when he uttered its thoughts. He wasn’t totally
devoid of societal programming of right and wrong no matter what he
claimed to Noppawan. Being respectful to one’s elders and giving the
prayerful gesture of the “wei” (pronounced as “why”) to one’s superiors
did exist in him at certain times. He would always stand up for the
tribute paid to the king prior to a movie although that was more from
the idea of not offending the sensibilities of others around him or,
less altruistically, getting himself possibly thrown out of the movie
theatre. Furthermore, the Jatupon who had brought cups of ice to
customers when he was a boy, the uneducated slave who had found himself
spun up in noodles of sidewalk restaurants until he was 15, often began
to stretch like a 26 year old fetus locked up in a heavily fortified
placenta. He would feel how disparaged Jatupon often felt. He would
feel guilt when he disparaged others that seeped into his veins while
ghosts of yesteryear suddenly vexed him making him feel numb and cold
inside.

He too wanted to stop thinking and he wished that his thoughts could be
intruded with conversation. “I just mean that I’m nobody important. I
paint a little. I’m going to Montreal for that reason.” The taxi driver
was reticent. “Do you have many hours left driving today?” Nawin asked
him. Still there was no answer. He threw the cigarette out of the
opened window. “Do you want a stick of gum,” he asked the girl.

“I have a tick tack in my mouth now but I’ll take your gum and save it
for later. You might not offer it again.” She giggled and he smiled at
her with the tightness of his closed lips. She had lost her animal, and
there she was as his seductress. He kissed her and returned the
headphones over his ears. The savory taste of her mouth was in him.




Chapter 2


The acceleration that took them out of Huamark and through other
adjacent sections of the city eventually led them to her area. He did
not remember the name of it: Bangkae, Bangplad, Bang-something. He paid
little attention to what his mistress said. Her voice often seemed the
strident spluttering of burning fuel in an engine that couldn’t produce
motion. King Ramkhamhaeng was a bygone entity. As soon as his model
picked up some of her things that she had forgotten to bring with her
the previous day and they had some breakfast, then Thailand would be a
thing of the past too. For how long he didn’t know. He was married but
it was one signature on many sheets of paper. The significance of
spilled ink could not be read unless, like many superstitious Thais, he
were to seek a fortuneteller-mendicant sitting on a sheet or straw mat
on a sidewalk or in a park.

Noppawan had her chance to go with him. He had asked repeatedly. He had
tacitly exhorted (mostly with his eyes) but she had refused him. Maybe
she needed him to command her presence. Maybe in this nebulousness of
strong selfishness and altruism called a personal relationship, so
immediate and personal like finding oneself enveloped in smoking and
fiery dust, she needed constant reminders that he cared about her more
than any other entity selfishly and altruistically. That would be the
woman in her if there were such a woman.

He tried to contemplate what love was like for normal people. It was
surely a dust storm one invented in one’s mind to escape loneliness but
then it became intertwined in more neediness and consciousness of the
other’s feelings and thoughts so as not to be vanquished to aloneness.
An individual who was able to overcome the grief of the loss of
dopamine in the ephemeral and moribund high of being in love would
cling to his former pleasure-inducer as a source of meaning in life’s
vicissitudes. He and Noppawan had done the same but they were less like
individuals finding themselves separately cast onto lifeboats in an
ocean of random waves for they found oceans of thoughts within
themselves that seemed more navigable to solid chunks of reality. They
needed each other less; or so he thought.

Thai women generally had obsequious crying bouts in their rafts, but
Noppawan, he argued, was not a woman. She was female without womanity.
She was a female who advocated overcoming petty human existence for a
love of ideals, compassion, and the attempts at understanding the human
predicament. He couldn’t see into the future to know if he would be
returning to Thailand anytime soon to be peered at through his wife’s
thick dark framed glasses. At present there were only the wills of
three individuals cowardly seeking meaning for themselves in a unit.
There were only these socialized wills rolling along on a road in
marginal darkness under the specious assumption that there really was a
destination. The sensory input of traditional Thai music was coming to
them from the front and back speakers of the car that was their
confinement. The radio music, no matter if interpreted as harmonious or
strident by the three individuals, was a levee helping to block their
pervasive inundation of self-absorbing, mordant thoughts and reminded
them (the patriot and the pending expatriates) of their commonality as
Thais.

They passed a mall where he and Porn had gone shopping a month earlier.
That day they had spent together there was the levity of the stroll and
the shiny flash of credit cards in this Thai way of forgetting one’s
impoverished roots. Feeling on top of the world, he comported the male
gesture of having one arm clutching the other one behind his back. It
was a gesture of affluence in the stroll of the shopper’s quest. At
least twice when he encountered friends of his from Silpakorn Art
University with bags in their hands he would talk to them for a half
hour and somewhere into the talk he used another male gesture of
affluence. He would slip a foot from a sandal and then slap it onto the
floor loud as a firecracker. The sandal would hit the floor like a hand
slapping against an impoverished peasant.

They stopped in an alley smaller than a side street called a “soi.” It
was in between many Mom and Pop businesses and there, crowded within,
was her apartment. He knew rooms like this well. They were rented out
for fifteen or twenty dollars a month (600 or 700 baht), barren, hot,
and unventilated as an attic. When she had gone in to get her bags he
felt less lonely to be momentarily rid of her. Even now at age 26 but
with thoughts at certain moments suffering and dragging like a man of
50, there was just himself, the real unit of one, and delude himself
all he pleased he knew that he could not find anyone more significant
than that. The only thing next to his heart, in the pocket of his
shirt, were the slides of his art depicting the naked and dejected
whores of Patpong that had ejaculated him into fame and puffed up a
latent ego in himself that thought that he was a higher being than
other Thais. He was keeping them there that day because he wanted to
momentarily hand them over to airport authorities so they would not be
harmed in airport security. When she returned with an added bag that
the taxi driver plunked into the trunk the two men smiled at her and
she smiled back. After all, Thailand was the land of smiles and every
infant understood the advantages of smiling. To bypass his surly
temperament and increase friendly relations, Nawin offered more breath
fresheners or chewing gum for everyone. No Thai would refuse such
friendly gestures and the two of them took from his hand greedily like
tamed birds. Then he began his old contemplation of why 2 was greater
than 1 or why 3 was greater than 2. It was an old argument of his wife.
The first time she posed it to him they both were 16 years old. He had
made the mistake of asking her to a dance. “Why do two things coming in
close proximity to each other have greater value?” she asked. His only
response had been “A le nah?” meaning “What did you say?” Neither one
of them went to the dance but straight to their bedrooms and their
sullen thoughts.

Porn was, according to his thinking, an “all right whore.” She didn’t
cause him any problems at all and it was for this reason that he
carried her along with him as a personification of his intellectual
decadence thereby increasing public intrigue with him. She was the
pretty doll he could swing about as a reminder of his one-man school of
art. He, Nawin Biadklang, could flaunt her around as the premier
example of the dark vision in his mind and the sexual slavery of his
nation all meshed together. He would have to draw a lot in Montreal and
sell everything he painted to pay for any expenses the scholarship
would not cover. She preferred her title of model. He was not so
heartless to deny her this euphemism. She successfully relieved him of
the tension of his body and to be emitted of it like a squeezed
tangerine in such a good rhythmic fingering would well compensate for
the stress level of having to spend so much time with her. He desired
her a lot of the time so by most accounts of love he did truly love
her. Foremost, Noppawan did not object to her. Matter of fact, she
wanted Porn to relieve him. She wanted him squeezed. She wanted the pus
squished from his brain without having to get dirty. She wanted to
continuously wear the glasses that caged her tepid orbs and to not
succumb them to rapturous non-Buddhist primal yearnings. She did not
care to dodge the aloneness of her thoughts through a rapturous
delusion that she was one partial being made whole in sex and love. And
yet by her account she did not want to mandate his awareness. It was
only by tripping on shadows and feeling vapid equanimity that came
after having absurdly given oneself over so entirely to the sensation
of pulling on one’s genitalia that a man actually knew anything.

This whore was and was not his typical whorehouse girl. On the day of
their first meeting he had been sketching runners and trees at a
stadium near Assumption University where his wife taught. His head was
resting in a fog until she materialized. There she was casting a shadow
onto the sun that was sedating him and wrapping him into himself in
sleep. There she was questioning him on his art and pointing out her
mommy, a skinny and frail thing, sitting on the other set of bleachers.

He found out that she was a dancer. There was no surprise there. Her
flirtatious gestures and the presence of her frail mommy looking over
at them and hoping the purchase would take place were tacit but
undeniable clues that she was poor and wanted a male companion. That
was no surprise either. Yet beyond this calculated small talk or
artifice was an ingenuous mouth that glistened in guileless desire. She
was a money girl. That was obvious, and yet there was more. There was
infatuation and an accompanying mommy who was like an SOS. Porn was a
whore, but if he hadn’t been married, she could have been more. Except
for Noppawan, who was a flagrant novelty, he couldn’t quite decipher
how whores and wives were all that different. Both baited the man for
the fecundity of prosperity and progeny. It was a survival response
that was selfish in base primeval instincts. It was human and
beautiful. It was filled with womanity.

She turned up the volume on her tape recorder and repeated,
“Excusez-moi; au revoir; oui; toilletes; papier hygienique.”

“Was that the main reason for coming to your apartment: for the tape
recorder?” he asked.

She turned off the machine without the least concern about a
distraction deferring her scholarship. “Oui,” she said, “but also my
favorite blouse, jeans, a necklace-see, isn’t it beautiful—lots of
things. A tape recorder is rather important, I think. You don’t want me
to be unable to talk.” He nodded his head as he frowned wishing that
she couldn’t speak at all. She would have been all the more beautiful
mute and deaf. He had proposed getting up early initially to compensate
for his slow, pokey movements but not as early as this and he resented
having lost sleep for such knicknacks. He didn’t feel that he should be
subject to listening to her palaver in Canada. His nod was that of
acquiescence the way the King Ramas had agreed with planned activities
of the imperialists to divert their attention. He, however, was trying
to divert a headache. He looked at the booklet that was on her lap. She
was unsuccessfully trying to imitate a product published in Thailand as
he had guessed a minute earlier from the fact that the speaker on the
tape sounded Thai. It was the blind leading the blind, he thought.

“You do know some English, don’t you?” he asked.

“No,” she said. He could imagine the palaver she would be saying on the
streets of Montreal and he yearned for his wife, Noppawan. He got the
taxi driver to turn right and park on the side of a street. His eyes
were fixed on a barren serenity of gravel and weeds that was in the
vicinity of a pier. The sun was now rising fully and aided by a golden
roofed temple on the other side of the river, there was a silvery and
golden glaze in the waters camouflaging the sooty sediments that were
diluted within. He wanted to go to the gravel and eat along the side of
begging dogs of which the bodies were deflating like tires. He wanted
to sit at one of the red metallic tables on a plastic stool among a
group of saffron robed monks, with the scents of rice or noodles
penetrating his nostrils. He had to smile that such an aversion as
twenty baht meals still called to him pleasantly because they were the
foundation of memories that constituted his verdant youth.

“What are we doing?” she asked

“We’re eating,” he said. “Come on, it will be fun to act like common
people,” he chuckled.

“Common. I know common. Common is having a treat of eating fried
insects on the dirt road, Nawin. Common is sleeping on a rug because
you don’t have a bed. Common is praying for the opportunity of having
one’s sandals fall apart or getting them trapped deep into the soil of
the rice field so as to have an excuse to get out of the hamlet.
Occasionally we paid an arm and a leg to the owner of a truck who came
once a day ten miles down a muddy road to pick people up. Common,
Nawin, is collecting rain water in those big ceramic tubs that sit in
front of the house, being stingy with every drop of water when you wash
your body, and then go to bed exhausted without even eating dinner.
Common is getting up at 5 a.m. to feed the water buffalo so that at 6
a.m. your father can use it to plow the field. You don’t know anything
about the word.”

He did know. He bled from knowledge but he frowned and for a moment he
was taciturn fighting back anger and memories. “Well, do whatever you
damn well please. I need out of this car and that is what I’m doing.
You can feast on what remains of the breath fresheners. I for one am
dining out. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

“When do we need to get on the plane?”

“There’s plenty of time,” he said. “Plenty of time to eat another meal
in the airport before departing. You’ll get a high price western meal
at the airport. I guarantee it.” He left the taxi and sat down
meditating on the river flowing at a distance. Soon the anger dissolved
and his memories were imprisoned.

The idea of paying on a taxi where the meter continued to rise without
his presence enthralled him. Having lots of money was a novelty and
flaunting this novelty to patrician and plebian, proletariat and CEO
alike still engrossed him. Thais were culturally programmed to give the
“wei” to the Buddha and the monk but in their hearts that steamed with
greed as they cooked their food on the streets, sold their trinkets
from their sheets, worked in office jobs, were government officers,
part of an educated middle class, and a million other activities,
classifications, and identities, this traditional greeting with the
folded hands in front of the face was deeply given in the secret
regions of subconscious ideas for those whom they thought of as rich.
And as he ate his pork laden noodle soup while the meter ticked on he
picked out the pork to feed the dogs; but in so doing he glimpsed
someone. Past the gravel were sidewalks and stores and further was a
department store. Next to it, beyond the gaunt old woman on the sheet
selling and squeezing rubber duckies in the hope of selling a few and
having money to eat, a man clanging bells with handless hooks above his
cup, shoe repairmen fixing soles, a kiosk of a key maker, and a blind
mendicant with a speaker and a microphone singing a strident folk tune,
was someone. It was a person who turned him to stone, froze him like an
iceberg, mortified him, and pulled out his wounded child. It was a
strange composite: at one moment appearing a bit like his brother,
Kazem, and at one moment like the youngest of his elder brothers,
Suthep. For a second or two as he saw this cook at a distance, he
couldn’t remember the name of Suthep-he who had been so innocuous but
in his apathy had harmed him the most. Ten or eleven years had gone by.
He wondered how he was supposed to know anymore: was this man one or
the other or neither of them. Another blind beggar began to sing a song
in a microphone linked to a portable speaker. He was being led by his
wife. They came to his table singing a louder song more stridently than
the one he heard at a distance. The sun was feeling hot and it made him
dizzy and mad as Akhenaten in Ancient Egypt. Nawin, the legal alias of
Jatupon, was feeling a weight death. His whole ideas and feelings were
discombobulated. He took out twenty baht wedging it under the canister
containing vinegar and peppers. He walked quickly to the car and
cowered himself in the back seat in movement toward the airport.




Book II: Many Lifetimes Ago




Chapter 3


Their parents were dead; the cremation ceremony was over, and life went
on: he internally recited, swallowed his whispered whit of air, and
regurgitated the aphorism. Its cold, laconic and impersonal meaning was
assumed an efficacy to change on this propelling Earth like the odious
taste of medicine and so he could not fail to believe that it was true
since there was nothing to his knowledge to replace it with. The
present moment ravished and trashed all former beings and, like a
mountebank, sold its new products as the true goods. To Jatupon, the
youngest, there was a vermilion color to the day. It was no wonder. The
present had come upon him as inconspicuously as the gait of the monk’s
orange robe in the subtle movements that philosopher made during their
time of mourning.

Carrying suitcases and bags with his brothers and a woman of Chinese
complexion, he sensed the rapacious discord of Bangkok—virulent and
paralyzing as ennui for the rich and servitude for the poor—and so he
lagged behind them. There had been a time that he would have sniffed at
this new city like one of the myriad crazed but gently starving dogs
(after all, in certain areas of the streets, pheromones and urinary
molecules dominated over the odors of car exhausts) but, as he guessed,
Bangkok was always more tempting from afar. Even though he had repined
for a more promised land he did not expect that even if he were to live
somewhere in “Euro-American Bangkok” (Banglampool, Silom, and Sukumvit
roads with their seven day a week travelers check cashing windows) his
life would be any different than his situation at present; nor would it
be any worse than his life in Ayutthaya unless he were to starve.

Still, he felt apprehension; and like a restive boy he slowly dragged
his suitcases. He imagined remote Hill Tribe villages on the sidewalks
and himself taking his suitcases through the bedrooms of naked girls as
if, like one of the kings of the Chakri dynasty with his many wives, he
were to declare to them “Honeys, I’m home.” The dreaminess belied a
gloom. If Jatupon were to think of one positive trait about himself
that late afternoon he might have thought that the ejaculation of his
semen, which he conducted alone, disgorged extremely far—so far he had
sunk into a shaky gray within himself that he couldn’t see outside of
any void unless it had a rope attached to it. Even the fetid air
intimidated him. He felt intellectually obtuse. He was like a dog
carried by an owner (a woman in a skirt, riding side saddle on a
motorcycle) that squealed its head off when the motorcycle skid and
floundered onto one side.

Staring down as his brothers, his owners, pulled the invisible leash,
he knew that they condemned him, the laggard; and nominally, that
condemnation made him feel compelled to look down more often than he
would have done otherwise. Still, when they crossed over to another
sidewalk bustling with pedestrians he was forced to look up since he
was inadvertently bowling his suitcases against the pins of strangers.
In so doing, he noticed a store windowsill besieged by an orderly
society of ants. He was beginning to acknowledge that Buddhist
principles were curtailed by reality: a few ants allowed to live with a
human became a hundred easily; multiplying mosquitoes brought disease
and pain, and one’s immune system killed bacteria, viruses, and
protozoa because murder was stamped into the natural order that no
human will could bypass. And yet this demonstrated that the Earth,
herself, was alive and full of creative potential. It was this
mesmerizing dynamism that most lured his eyes.

The city was fetid as his older brother’s shoes in the back of his girl
friend’s car (the car that had brought them here); and yet its
billboards and tall buildings were opulent. He imagined them glazed in
morbidly saffron or vermilion dust the color of a monk’s robe and the
color of blood and death. All the pedestrians were individually and
rapaciously galvanized but banging against each other less
systematically than the ants. They were ebullient like the bouncing of
hair on a schoolgirl’s back since most of them were shoppers.

The brothers and the Chinese Thai woman passed another street. Near it
was the edge of a small park with one blended shadow of the fronds of
palm trees spread out among a patch of grass and providing a visual
respite from traffic exhaust and pavement that seemed to define the
city. Here he was slithering about like a snake acclimating to both a
foreign environment and the alien skin that he was now wearing. These
three weeks had made him unreal. His parents had ridden in the car
alone; there was the car accident; then a cremation and the selling of
property; the drive from Ayutthaya; the night at someone’s house in
some type of a fever or hallucination; mosquito bites under a net; and
himself turning into some type of caricature in a comic book or
cartoon.

Whereas many other boys had books and knowledge he had his comics. He
didn’t know anything about the techniques of art although he had
thumbed through some pictures from a book at a library in Ayutthaya. He
had never even been exposed to algebra or other intellectual exercises
that brought one in touch (so to speak) with abstract realities. He had
heard of the Internet and assumed it was the brand name of a certain
computer but wished to know for sure. He knew that his poverty created
his ignorance and felt his ignorance made him stupid. For him there was
nothing but day to day living twisting about like a noodle fried in the
juice of itself under the hot Thailand sun.

There was a secondary trait about him that despite his bleakly gray and
vermilion self-deprecation he was pleased that he possessed. His 14
years of life had provided him with at least enough acclimating
instinct or reflexes that, as they crossed the road, zigzagging through
stalled traffic, his feet and ears performed a specific cautionary
duality of quickness in speed and breaks. This allowed him to retreat
from motorcycles without headlights that were swerving around multiple
lanes of cars. Even within Ayutthaya, which was conspicuously absent of
operable traffic lights, he had never had an accident. There was that
time that he had flown off of a motorcycle taxi and over a vendor who
had been wheeling his cart when the motorcycle had run into his toasted
buns glazed in feces-tinted Ovaltine, but that was a different type of
incident altogether.

Across the street culinary workers of the sidewalk poured soup and
scooped rice dishes into plastic bags sealed with rubber bands or put
the plates of food on metallic tables. So many city residents (all of
whom lived in apartments) did not possess kitchens from some law or
another. This, he supposed, was good. It had provided he and his family
with an existence. It did the same for them. One worker who rested on a
red stool enthralled him. Without any specific gestures or words sent
to him, he nonetheless felt her listlessness and knew her anguish. He
knew the 4000 baht that many indigent souls received. It was their
permit to live; and to get this permit to ride in life they had to
harness and ensnare the creative force that had conceived them and were
them, and then allow themselves to be subservient seven days a week in
their robotic roles of reflexes. He saw another one wring out a
washcloth and clean another table. He could imagine her travail just as
he understood the travail of those around him on overpasses: the
emaciated elderly with cups in their hands seemed to cluster on and
under every pedestrian overpass. To be homeless, he thought, would be
more horrific than the moments at one’s death: a travail of being
worthless and lost, where dangling blue from a rope inveigled the
imagination that could not fathom a means to get 6000 baht and pull
oneself off of a park bench. He felt: “I have been where you are with a
hair net on my head, many late nights splintered on a wooden stool, or
placid on a red plastic stool, strength thwarted, and with angular
crowds stumbling over me.” Almost without thinking it, he felt the
horror as he struggled for words; and since he did not have his journal
with him, he tried to memorize the feeling.

He remembered those years of nights in Ayutthaya when his work had
ended and he was free of the vending cart, and embraced within the
black smog of busses. Then there was a reprieve from the gaseous smoke
of cooked food (grilled pork and chicken) trapped between canopy roofs
and sidewalk. His reprieve and liberation was only in comics borrowed
from a newsstand. It was a personal life—a bit of himself in a
vicarious existence. The words under the pictures would often zoom
across the interior of his skull in his drowsiness like cars on a
speedway and he would not comprehend anything much before falling
asleep at one of the tables. In sleep he would not exist. Cartoon
images would run amuck. His pent up needs would flow in action and
adventure although his likeness would not be in the dreams.

If thought were a product made from the raw material of feeling, he
felt more than thought: “Your reflexive and monotonous perfunctory days
and nights are gloomy in starlessness. Face draped on the backs of your
hands folded on the table, you almost look as if you are making the
gesture of ‘wei’ or praying to Buddha.” He remembered that seconds
before he was in those minutes of sleep, at the end of the work nights,
he prayed for a way out or that community and connectedness could be
gained within his limited life. He walked by the stranger. He walked
past twenty others. With his eyes he bestowed onto them blessings.

He continued to follow his brothers through perennial steps and time
and swayed alone as lifeless as wet laundry hanging on balconies during
the dry season. The fetid one slammed him with poignant expletives to
which the second eldest smiled and nodded his head. Suthep, however,
had childish sensitivities of his own that life had not yet hacked from
him but when Jatupon quickened his pace to walk near him Suthep looked
over toward him with silent rage. Jatupon just turned away and sucked
in his bottom lip. It was true that weeks had passed since the death of
their parents and it was so that life went on—that it was quickly
manufactured and quickly hit the dust bin like any worn out or broken
commodity; but, he argued to himself, an admission of their own pain
and a kind smile would have helped to keep his boyhood suppressed and
his manhood poised.

Jatupon was still nonplused. The present was an undercurrent in his
inundating thoughts. His vision was often cracked and misted in
suppressed tears and his eyes burned from his sweat seeping into them.
He felt disoriented and although it was apparent, it didn’t seem to
evoke sympathy. In virtually his first words that day he hoarsely spoke
incommunicably, cleared his throat, and then yelled over to Kazem, the
second eldest, that he needed to go to the bathroom. Kazem stopped
walking and told the youngest, Jatupon (to whom he nicknamed
“Jatuporn”), to hold his water until they were “home.” The word “home”
did not make any impression on the youngest who was now wondering if
they would be spending the rest of their lives walking in this fashion.

He felt that they were sinking in an abyss of negative probabilities.
Concerning the pejorative comment about holding his water, it was no
worse than being called “Jatuporn.” He was used to it.

A facial muscle below Kazem’s left eye began to twitch immediately
before they again started walking. Conscious of Kazem’s disposition,
Jatupon became less disconcerted and more guarded, hurrying but
maintaining a consistent space between himself and his brothers. How
strange, Jatupon thought, that the fetid one did not have the same
physical antagonism: it was strictly mental as if the thought of the
youngest was so repugnant as to be beyond a physical response. He began
to stumble with the bags until Kumpee’s girlfriend stopped their
advancement to help him carry some of his load. Her smile was wide
against her pale pigment; and her Chinese complexion looked at odds to
Kumpee, the oldest and darkest of the fraternal misadventurers. Jatupon
was jealous of her relationship with the fetid one but this gesture of
pulling away from his brothers to take one of his bags ameliorated any
negativity that the appearance had not counteracted.

The journey from the parking garage and down through the hectic whims
of Bangkok traffic seemed inordinately long to him and silently he
objected to being led this way forfeiting friends and consistency he
had always known in Ayuttaya. The sidewalk and road went over a canal.
A woman with baskets of fruit dangling from the ends of a bamboo pole
that was on her shoulders must have made Kumpee’s girlfriend hungry
since no sooner was she back with her beau than the exigency of eating
had driven the herd to seek a bowl of tom yam soup with noodles. Under
the canvas, eating and sinking morbidly into himself as he looked out
over the cabin-shacks that were along the canal, he listened to Kumpee
and Kazem.

“You’re the one who wanted to move here and so I said, ‘Yes, little
brother. Let me fulfill your wishes and needs. It is my duty as an
elder brother.”

“I never said that.”

“You were always saying that.”

“Back up. That was before the accident and it was just talk.”

“Man, you did not make any objections. We sold off their things and
there wasn’t one objection from any of you.”

“I didn’t know then that you would be pocketing the money.”

“In other words, you wanted to move over here and now that we are over
here you are raising objections as if now we should just get back into
the car and go back. That is crazy.”

“I was in a daze. I admit it. I let you lead us around. We don’t even
know anyone here.”

“That isn’t entirely true; but even if it turns out that he doesn’t
help us any at least we are in a large city where there are more
opportunities than working in restaurants like this one.”

“ I want that money-or a share of it at anyway.”

“For what?”

“So that I won’t have to beg for a bowl of soup in places like this-so
that if you and Natenapa take off somewhere” (Kumpee’s girlfriend, who
was listening to them, now looked away and reached for the pitcher of
water that was at the table) “that the money doesn’t go with you.” She
poured water into her glass, sipped it once, and reached into her purse
for her makeup.

“It is Thai tradition that the eldest brother is supposed to keep the
inheritance for the younger ones. If you question that you don’t have
any sense of right and wrong. If you have a problem with that you have
a problem with the way things are and have always been. But even if I
were to run away tomorrow you wouldn’t have lost much. None of it was
worth anything. Look at these jeans with the holes in the knees and the
pockets. If I want to start spending everything for myself I would have
started with some new clothes and instead of dragging you to Bangkok
with me I would have left all of you in Ayutthaya, wouldn’t I?”

“You buy jeans and cut out the areas around the knees so that doesn’t
prove much. Just see to it that the money doesn’t fall from the holes
and that you keep remembering the duties of an elder brother to the
younger ones.”

On foot again with his brothers and the China woman, he kept wishing to
be a boy that year that his parents opened what they referred to as a
real restaurant. He wished for the strange faces in the familiar space:
an area no different than a garage with some metallic tables and chairs
in the center and woks, burners, a refrigerator, and Coke machine in
the front. It had taken the family so many years of working on the
street to be able to afford this space. This restaurant was more
legitimate and less beggarly in appearance although not exempt from
taxes. His parents were exhilarated for a while until they discovered
that the added customers only compensated for rent and taxation and the
same subsistence level prevailed. Soon the mundane set in and the
discomfort of working on the streets was forgotten. Then he thought of
a better time: that sweet time that very young children have in harmony
with the parents’ wishes and the fruition of love. He could see himself
pouring ice and water into small metallic cups and bringing them to the
customers on the sidewalk or making his foray into salesmanship by
draping from his arms the jasmine rosaries that his mother linked
together from a long needle.

One day, as that boy, had he not just looked down briefly to zip his
pants and found that they did not fit all that well; and that, no
longer a cute or special one, he wasn’t the same (or wasn’t perceived
the same) being within his new clothes? A metamorphosis had altered him
to a taller and more aggravating expense and only by working hard could
he avert the faces of scorn. In those years in some bedroom or another
he found some peace. The plastic blinds had the same sounds of fingers
wedged between them as they bounced around in the December breeze or in
a June storm; and the piecemeal environment seen in the crevices of
those blinds were of the same trash cans on the same pavement near some
gravel. That had been reassuring to him. Now, he had been extracted
from that environment.

Walking on, morose as the abyss of his subconscious disgorged like a
geyser, he thought of his boyhood in school satiated in learning. There
had indeed been such a boyhood in such a time brief as a few days of
Bangkok winter that makes homeless dogs and cats shiver before temple
walls when fortunate enough to wander into such an animal sanctuary.
Learning had been a series of refreshing stimuli slapping up against
him like a cool breeze. It had stimulated him and had planted in him an
appetite. It was then taken away from him leaving only the wistfulness
and the barren days squirming around like noodles in pork soup. At the
aunt’s insistence his mother and father had paid for him to go to a
poor Buddhist school run by the monks. The monks had been impressed by
his academic cleverness, and soon, at their persuasion, his parents had
paid for him to attend special classes as well. During those three
years he had only worked in the summers; and the last of those summers
was the end to a consistent time of academic learning. They rented him
off to pick coconuts from a woman’s orchard and didn’t see much point
in dismissing the added revenue. The aunt, with her excess of money,
intervened with special tutors and home-school teachers. It lasted for
a time until she became bored with overseeing it.

During the trip here an accident had occurred on the highway from
Ayuttaya to Bangkok and the congestion made irascible beings used to
the quick weltering motion of freedom trapped in their own thoughts.
Horns, at that time sounded from all directions and Kumpee, the fetid
one, at times irascibly chewed the fetid fruit called durian or slowly
slurped from the beer can in his hands allowing the liquid in his mouth
to spread and re-spread before swallowing. He wanted to step out of the
car and punch someone but instead he bit into the heart of the durian.
When the girlfriend’s car gained enough freedom to interweave within
the slowness (a slowness that caused their minds to be more lamenting),
Kumpee, at that time, made their way out of the last lanes and pulled
into a town to get another beer. He had hardly entered the town when he
fell asleep for a second and swerving to escape hitting a tuc tuc upon
awakening (a tuc tuc being a big golf-cart taxi) or a bicycle rickshaw,
the car nearly hit a truck and then nicked a fruit cart that was being
pushed along the side of the road. Kumpee, burdened and desiring for
speed and escape, drove on. During that second of the near miss with
the truck, Jatupon felt that it was their destiny—their karma—to have
the same fate that their parents had experienced weeks earlier. He
found himself disappointed to be alive but sensed that he was alone in
this. Even if such a thought flashed before his brothers, they were
older and quickly regained that cold detachment as if their psyches
were fully evolved as separate entities. They portrayed, in legitimate
or feigned smiles, that they no longer felt that the fate of the
parents was interlinked to that of the sons. Suthep, who was just a
year and a half older than Jatupon, had not been so convincing. When he
felt that he was unobserved he seemed troubled and twice looked out the
back window.

Kumpee, deciding to sleep, drove a little further in the same direction
to his friend’s house. He was apologetic. After all, Bangkok (or Krung
Thep Maha Nakhon) was only 45 miles from Nakhon Si Ayutthaya but to
experience traffic problems in Thailand was like no other, and to have
sold the parents’ possessions after burning the bodies of the mother
and father before the inevitable rot (a ubiquitous ordeal so
individually personal) was like no other. They were exhausted and
needed someplace to stay. The friend welcomed them in without the least
reservation. Kumpee and Kazem put rice mats on the floor. Then they
began to tie up the tent of the mosquito net by stringing it up against
light fixtures and unused nails that stuck out of walls. Suthep and
Jatupon became aware that their masculine images of themselves were
dependent on being a builder of the house, and so they quickly secured
two sagging corners so that they would not be badgered for feminine
subservience.

That night, under the net, Jatupon considered the mosquito stealth:
that it waited for the concluding restless mumbling of his two eldest
brothers who were rehashing where they would go long-term and what they
would do. The mosquito waited; and the minute that they fell asleep its
wings cut through the black air and time with the buzz of a monotonous
chant. The mosquito carried a wicker fan called a “balabot” that monks
used to hide their faces as they gave the air their morbid and sonorous
drones. He heard the mosquito shuffling around the room under the net.
There were times, throughout the night, that he questioned if some less
supernatural version of a mosquito had bitten him and had given him
dengue fever which might have brought on these hallucinations, or if he
was experiencing withdrawal from not having used drugs or sniffed glue
for a while. It did not occur to him that a third possibility might
have been the variety of chemical substances already in his body mixed
with the new amphetamines that he had popped into his mouth an hour
earlier while in the bathroom of Kumpee’s friend. It was a well-known
fact that metropolitan bus drivers in every city popped amphetamines;
and so to him it had been vitamins fortifying him against depression
and lethargy.

As he walked with his brothers and the “Chinawoman” through the heat
and smoke of the sidewalk restaurants, he remembered having been very
hot the previous night and how he had felt so miserably trapped under
the mosquito net like a fish in the web and snare of its net. He was
sick but it did not last for very long. According to his memory this
strange entity as large as himself shuffled under the net from one
corner to the next and the sickness of his stomach was replaced by a
queasy and tightening horror while he cowered in the embrace of his
legs. Thinking himself in a net where there was no extrication he
experienced the adrenalin of bravado. He wanted to confront his fears.
Trying to reach for a religion to formulate a rational perspective in
the irrational, he argued that the snare outside had to be less
poignant than the snare of gluttonous appetites that were the cell, the
bunk, and the chained wall within the underground prison that was he.
This mosquito evoked in him, or he invoked in himself, such trepidation
that he imagined an equal: prehistoric peoples of Thailand watching
their halcyon harmony with nature execrably disparaged in the vehement
winds of a hurricane—the trees along the river, which had offered
protection now torn and lethally slapped at them.

The mosquito landed, crawled, and looked at the bodies on the floor.
“Everyone is separated out into little forts. The others are under two
different nets,” it flared its voice in a quasi-question without
looking at Jatupon’s face. “Who are these creatures?” it asked.

“My brothers”

“There’s one woman,” it said pugnaciously. “They can’t all be your
brothers. Let’s have an inventory. Be specific!”

“My eldest brother’s friend and my brother, Kazem, are under one tent.
My brother, Kumpee, and his girlfriend are in a second tent. My
brother, Suthep, is here with me.”

“And you I know. Don’t you think this is a bit overdone: three forts
around a few microscopic insects?”

Jatupon opened his mouth but failed to say anything. Then he closed his
mouth in fear of an insect flying into it.

“At any rate, why isn’t one tent used throughout the room.”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”

“Aren’t you a little dummy,” it said. “Considering the fact that one
large tent spread throughout the room would be a more economical
investment than three smaller ones, one would think that you would care
to inquire about it logically.”

“We aren’t renting them. They are the host’s and it would be impolite
to ask such questions.”

“‘They are the host’s and it wouldn’t be polite to ask those
questions,’” it mocked. “You are so Thai through and through: one dummy
in a nation of dummies. Here, let me look at this dummy.”

After a thorough examination of Suthep’s body like a doctor or a
depraved sexual stalker, it turned away from the one sleeping and spoke
Jatupon’s disparaging nickname of “Jatuporn” disdainfully. Then it told
him that he and it would be playing cards. It shuffled its body from
corner to corner and then shuffled the cards. One card became thwarted
and dislodged from the uniform movement. It flipped face up and showed
a still life of his parents who were expressionless as mannequins. They
were a couple of a dark pigment (he from birth and she with her Chinese
skin all burnt and wrinkled brown). She was naked but wearing a hair
net and he was without his usual cap but was wearing a loincloth that
had been soiled by his weekend work in the rice fields in the rural
outskirts of the city. The mosquito quickly buried the card into the
others face down.

“Lets talk of them, the ashes that they be. They make up one of two
groups of people in your life and these categories of individuals need
to be discussed.”

“Why are you crying?”

“Seeing them makes me miss them. They died in a horrible accident.”

“Accidents abound.”

“ We had to burn their bodies.”

“That’s done. You don’t want them rotting in the streets. From what I
heard, they made excellent firewood in the incinerator. What is there
to cry about? They fulfilled the quest of their lives. It was the only
decent thing they ever did: becoming a fireball. What is there to cry
about?”

“They are gone. They were my parents and I loved them.”

“You are sorry for the pain they experienced. I suppose that is decent
of you; but most of that love is just like not questioning why there
are three nets in this room instead of one. You, Thais, are so
subservient to your cultural definitions of right and wrong. What silly
things you all are. You are specifically foolish having the loyalty of
a dog that is kicked, fed, and comes back for more. You are too Thai.
It is absolutely sickening.” It again glanced at Suthep. “Tell me about
this one on the mat with you. Is he as stupid?”

“Are you going to hurt him and me?”

“Possibly; or just allow you to hurt yourselves.”

“Tell me about him.”

“He is the third eldest brother. He is a litter older than me. He likes
Thai boxing and snookers. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what
you want. He is my brother. I love him.”

“There you go with that word. Do you think that they, your parents,
loved you?”

“Of course.”

“That’s what you think but that isn’t what you know. I want what you
know from what you have repressed. I want the truth. I want to
enlighten you, or for you to enlighten yourself. It’s a misnomer, you
know. It isn’t really light at all in either color or weight.
Enlightenment is hard and dark. Don’t you think so?”

“I’ve never considered it.”

“I know you haven’t.” It paused. “You know, I can read your thoughts.
Why are you trying to memorize everything I’m saying. You flatter me
so.”

“I want to put it in my journal but it is buried in one of my bags.”

“I see. I’m glad you write. I think you should write or draw.”

“Why?”

“Why not? As an indictment of love if nothing else. I’m wondering what
you think about your mother having four sons. Really five including the
miscarriage.”

“I wouldn’t know. I suppose she loved Children. She loved raising
them.”

“She needed children. Not only did her body push her to make copies of
herself to preserve her DNA but also she needed the distractions from
her own thinking-from love gone awry. She had married a tyrant. The
only thing they shared was the scheming of easily cobbled projects to
make a tiny bit of money they always hoped would make them filthy rich.
The rebellion against her family and sexual felicity with his large
genitalia had been eroded in time. She became conscious of his piggish
habits. She was always thinking about being alienated from her former
family, which, if she had stayed with them, would have allowed her to
live a comfortable life. Children were her distraction but when they
were older she resented their independence. As far as your father is
concerned, he loved you even more: he loved chasing after you as if you
were a cockroach that he wanted to smash. He got your brothers to help
him stomp on you.”

“How do you know that the need to preserve DNA makes a mother love?”
Jatupon whined sullenly.

“I read it in a comic book.”

Jatupon became taciturn. His head hurt and he wanted to vomit. He
couldn’t get up. He tried to stand up but couldn’t do so. He tried to
vomit in a cup but nothing came up.”

“You might as well stay where you are at. If you go into the bathroom
for more pills or slip into your bag for some glue you might be able to
discombobulate my voice like a child spinning around in the grass but
ultimately you’ll fall into me and the mordant words will be all the
more deleterious. Besides, it is still my hand and there are more cards
to play. It tossed another card from the deck his way. It was Kumpee’s
girl friend. It was her face and shape.

“Yes, Jatupon said, “She’s a lovely card” and the mosquito nodded his
head disdainfully. Then it clapped its feet and said, “One baht for the
human’s ability to at least recognize physical beauty.” Jatupon looked
on the table and there appeared a one baht coin with a naked China
woman engraved on it. He picked it up. It’s weight, which was always
equal to that of play money, had become less; and there was a continual
sensation that even though it rested in his finger tips it was being
pulled lightlessly away from him to fall endlessly into an
inconvertible currency. He watched it vaporize into a gas.

“She is one of the second group who has no special significance to you
at all and yet from her your life has been changed. People like this
might be helpful and even compassionate but at the end of the day they
won’t stay with you. They are evanescent nectar in the dissolution of
events and time.”

“Only two groups?”

“Only two unless you make up a third. All I know of the future is from
the perspective of today.”

Catered to the limitations of Jatupon’s entomological knowledge, this
gigantic mosquito was male and a bloodsucker nonetheless. It looked
into his intimate space with such a bold stare that he felt that it
could easily seduce him in as its prey—that the survival of the fittest
reigned with the hegemony of its kind just as micro-organisms always
get the last meal. As he saw its eyes he suddenly knew the sadistic fun
it was having with its mind games, and the cruel hunting games of cats
and their dead mice. Deeper into its eyes he saw a starving child and a
vulture awaiting on a rock, the fight for dominion of species and
nations, and the sexual aggression of making love among mankind. He
felt like walking meat; and he knew that all animals felt the same of
their own lives ceaselessly. He grieved for them. The mosquito knew
this intuitively and began to laugh at him for his sensitivity and his
na�ve animistic thinking, which like a child, made animals conscious
and sagacious.

“You aren’t real, you know, but the fever of my own brain,” said
Jatupon to curtail his vision.

“Oh, let’s not start the reality game. I’ll make this simple so that
even you can understand it. It foils others I enlighten who give me the
same argument. I say to them that they, who create ideas, will die in a
hundred years but an idea that they might have has the possibility of
living on. To the idea, I say, the man would not seem real.” Then he
obfuscated. “Didn’t you read in an encyclopedia one time that the
American president, Abraham Lincoln, said, ‘In the civil war it is
quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the
purpose of either party—and yet the human instrumentalities, working
just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect his purpose.’”

“I don’t understand what you are meaning by that. I didn’t understand
that long sentence when I read it anyhow.”

“You don’t understand subtle and abstract meanings because you are
uneducated. You sometimes dabble here and there with an encyclopedia in
the library and then you forget everything you’ve read when you
understand it at all,” said the mosquito in a contumelious air. “Only
the dreamer is the illusion. Not the dream. The dreamer sinks back with
the dirt.”

It tossed that card like a coin from its gangling talon tips. The card
enlarged to a life-sized form and moved toward Jatupon. He almost felt
seduced by it as it moved around him in its mating dance. The mosquito
laughed harder and then said that not only had he and his brothers
relinquished their homeland in Ayutthaya on account of her but that she
was a trap or a symbol of a trap. It was not just she, he explained. It
was all of them. Love and marriage was a specie ** specie ? or species
? ** preserving drug induced into a man to keep him bound and limited
through passion, fear of loneliness, and obligation.”

“Then I should feel sorry for my elder brother if it is a sickness like
how I’m feeling now. I mean I was feeling really sick but now I must
still be sick if I’m imagining you. I wish I were able to tell what is
happening to me now. It is like suffering the withdrawals or dengue
fever.” Slowly forcing himself beyond his cowardly pose, Jatupon got up
and opened his suitcase. He took out two warm cans of Coca Cola. He
opened the tabs and slid one to the mosquito that drank up.

“It isn’t quite the nectar of blood but it is okay when one is
thirsty,” it commented.

He was like a wounded soldier who perceived that the enemy was another
victim in the war and so he wanted to sit down near this opposing peer.
Jatupon crept near it and gradually sat on a mat. A minute later, after
not being eaten, his confidence grew and he felt like confessing his
soul to the insect as if the mosquito’s appearance were only that mask
Thai monks hid behind when they said their chants. “Kumpee said he
would live with us but I guess he might mean that now. After all, his
girlfriend is with him. He only talked to her on our way here.” He
paused and thought deeply once again. “I don’t like what you say but
it’s honest. I have no one to talk with, you know.” He thought of this
mosquito as a spirit who came through the burning of incense placed at
a stupa. “I don’t have anyone to be honest with me and all of the
friends I once had I’ve had to leave. Would you visit me in Bangkok?”
He spoke with such innocence that the mosquito had to smile bashfully
and look away from the awkwardness of knowing that only a child
believes that mother and father are extensions of his own body; only a
child walks into the forest with a kind stranger where he is bound to a
tree, raped and murdered; and only one warped in the wisdom gained in
tragedy finds himself inseparably bound by every stern, euphonious
truth uttered by a monster.

“Would I accept the invitation to come to Bangkok to bite you and
inject you with malaria? No, I’m afraid I would not be able to accept
such an invitation at this time and you shouldn’t be extending it.
Always remember that truth is lethal. To know and to be aware of many
things is like a man too fat for his house and this obese pig of a man
is forced onto the streets where he can’t tolerate the heat and cold
because of his flab; and then I come along and suck through his
baboonish skin before he knocks off. I certainly would accompany you if
it were not for there being truth in the adage that a mosquito could
never live in Bangkok because the pollution would kill him off.”

Then the mosquito’s eyes were those of the second eldest brother,
Kazem, and Jatupon was with him in the bathroom where he had taken the
pills. Kazem lifted up “Jatuporn’s” bare legs onto his shoulders;
inserted himself; and rode. Jatupon realized that he was hallucinating
this because there was the mosquito before him. He felt ill. He just
wanted to get out of the confines of the mosquito net. He just wanted
to brush his teeth.

The next thing Jatupon dreamt or knew the third eldest one, Suthep, put
a cold washcloth on his forehead and then had him take some aspirin. As
Jatupon gluttonously swallowed the pills down his gullet he kept
wondering if it were cocaine. Suthep vanished and then there was the
mosquito again. In a transformed madness, the mosquito became Kazem;
and this brother kept riding him painfully while Jatupon wondered if
Kumpee, the fetid one, had run off permanently with his “Chinawoman.”

Somewhere into the night—had it been in the bathroom when he was
vomiting or when he was back under the net with a washcloth on his
head?—he could not place where he was at; and then odd thoughts came
into his mind. “If love oils are a way to make the anus and the vagina
something that they aren’t designed for maybe I’m pregnant with my
brother’s child? Does he love me? What is love? My bottom has spread
out like a damp shirt when stretched”

Then it was the mosquito again. He asked what were Jatupon’s job
aspirations in Bangkok. “Oh, I don’t know,” the boy responded. “I have
thought many things.”

“Such as...” it asked.

“At times I have thought that I could become a monk—one of those real
monks that live in the cave, eat only vegetables, and have no needs or
wants.”

The mosquito scoffed. “What a bloody idealist. Deny your hungers and
you deny the animal that comprises so much of the human being-the
animal that developed a high degree of consciousness to fight his way
up as the dominant species, the animal that nonetheless behaves
according to instinct. If you deny the human you will have wasted your
life not living it at all. That is what will happen if you are lucky.
If unlucky, I suppose you will eventually snap like a crazed
immigration officer who begins to shoot tourists. You are an animal not
that you have to be swallowed up whole into your hungers. The illusions
of being in love, the ambitions that have allowed you to subdue the
Earth under the illusion of gaining some happy plateau after making
your conquests, are hardly instincts one can extract. One shouldn’t
extract them. These instincts have filled your kind with purpose
thereby making brief existences on a meaningless planet bearable. Most
importantly sexual desire keeps your race proliferating. Tell me
something a bit more practical.”

“Well...sometimes I have thought I could become a money collector in a
city bus. I would be a Bangkok Metropolitan Transportation
employee—BMT.”

“Well, being prime minister would never suit you. I must say that this
is certainly less extreme and easily in your reach. What attracts you
to the profession of ticket tearing?”

Jatupon imagined the money collector clicking the lid of his metallic
cylinder while shoving through the people. At times he would sit on the
monkey bar near the open door feeling the artificial winds created by
this fast moving green tube full of standing contortionists. When new
customers came in he would put their money into the tube and extract
tickets, weightless as stamps, from the same container. He would click
and click to get their attention. When the bus was inordinately full,
barefoot or in sandals, he would stand on the last step an inch from
death like a parachutist without a parachute.

“I just think that I could do it,” he told the mosquito.

“Yes,” said the mosquito, “but could you count change to the
satisfaction of the mass transit department of Bangkok?”

“I’m not hardly a dummy,” Jatupon said angrily.

“Let’s not go into that,” the mosquito said. “I know you can count. I’m
just not sure if it goes beyond ten. That’s all. What other fun things
could you become if needed-any type of job that can at least grant you
eighty dollars worth of free falling baht each month?”

“I don’t know. I’m tired of thinking about it. It is such an anguish to
worry about surviving continually.”

“Indeed. Just like you were thinking before: animals that have insight
into the fact that they are nothing but ambulatory meat; only you are
the meat of the richer classes. Your life will be consumed at work for
their pleasure.”

The girl friend handed her sun burnt Siamese a key to the room and
excoriated him for not believing her about the distance of the
apartment building from the department store. She snubbed encountering
extensive numbers of the underclass even though her father owned the
building. She stood aloof and contracted the muscles of her face even
before the evaporation of urinary molecules from the fa�ade of the
building attacked her nostrils. She disheveled Jatupon’s hair and then
maternally combed it back again with her fingers. She told Kumpee that
she would take a taxi back to the department store and wait for him at
McDonald’s. Then she left them in repugnance.

Within a glance each of them saw all there was of their apartment
burrowed under the building and became sullen. Kumpee lied that he
would leave his bag in the apartment and then see his girlfriend back
to her home. Jatupon lay on the floor. Suthep unpacked and put the
headphones of a Walkman around his ears. Kazem took a shower. The
subject of his departure was forgotten. Kumpee sat on his case for a
half hour eating his durian. Then when there seemed an inconspicuous
exit he picked up his bag and went away. They felt his missing presence
prod the vacuous air an hour later when they noticed that the suitcase
was gone.




Chapter 4


It was 2 a.m. and the mosquito came into the scenes of his REM with
wings piercing through and dominating over every brief episodic
nightmare. It was wearing an orange monk’s robe and superciliously
imposed its own presence on all scenes that Jatupon alone was supposed
to rehearse. It altered a script that Jatupon’s brain had conjured in
the hope of figuring out how to interact with his environment and live
with himself harmoniously. Initially his sleep consisted of nascent
dream-roles to find out if feigning a serious illness would have
altered his parents’ journey of early demise. Later there were others
such as trying to persuade the fetid one’s Chinese girlfriend to buy
him a white shirt and necktie so that he could apply at the Bangkok
Metropolitan Transportation Department and thereby resurrect himself as
an economic deliverer and a masculine force to be admired instead of
dog excrement on his brothers’ heels that he perceived them as
perceiving him to be. There were also briefer skits in the random
feelings, thoughts, and perceptions he was trying to categorize. One
was of trying to successfully bite his shirt to stop himself from
crying out when Kazem’s riveting night sports were too painful and
another one was of attempting to remember the few neighborhoods and
streets of Bangkok that he had learnt in past visits and perhaps link
them to various names that only sleep could recall. Throughout it all
was the buzz of the mosquito. This insect-monk buzzed no differently
than a bee.

“And where were you today and yesterday?” it asked.

“I didn’t get out the glue and there were no pills to pop.”

“Why didn’t you get out the glue?”

“I want to do this for fun. I want these trips to stay what they call
“recreational.” I’ll take them only when I need out. I don’t want to be
an addict.”

“You aren’t an addict. If your body really wanted it, you wouldn’t have
been able to resist it for over 24 hours. Still, even though this is
noble and good, you don’t want to walk away from your friends.”

“I know.”

“What did you do this afternoon?”

“I went to fly a kite near Wat Phra Kaeo.”

“Do you mean you masturbated in the temple housing the Emerald Buddha?
I mean that’s fine if it is true. Surely another person or two over the
past two or three centuries has done that also. All the same, please
refrain from using Thai slang. You don’t want to sound like a dummy
when you talk to me.”

“No, I mean it literally, Ajarn,” said Jatupon. Ajarn meant “respected
teacher.” “I went to the area outside of the Grand Palace in Sanam
Luang. In front of the golden and pointed domes of the entrance there
is an oval football field of dirt. The radio mentioned that hundreds of
boys and girls were flying kites there. I was planning to buy a kite
and fly mine with the hundreds that were soaring next to each other but
there was no one my age doing that.”

“Neither a boy nor a man: what an awkward state to be in. Anyhow, so
you wanted to fly a kite near the golden pagodas and cupolas of the
Grand Palace and Wat Phra Kaeo but you didn’t do so. I assume it was
more for lack of money. Is that right? Is that all? I can’t imagine why
you would think that you could use money for such extravagances
considering your present predicament.”

“I had some. I always get some.”

“How?”

“I go through Kazem’s pockets when he is asleep.”

“Do you mean you steal it?”

“Not really. He knows I do it. It is kind of like a little game...sort
of.”

“Oh, I can pick it from your simple mind so easily. The rule being that
after you provide your sexual services to him he allows you to
pickpocket from the pants that he drapes on a chair. If he awakens he
beats you or disparages your existence in front of the family but if
you are quiet you can take most of what he has in his pockets and run
away throughout the day.”

“When I’m not working. That is kind of how it has gone. He has always
been kind enough to see that I get a vacation every week. He was always
telling Mother that I needed to be something other than an illiterate
slob and the least they could do was allow me to go to the library once
a week. I would usually go there...sometimes a movie or standing at a
newsstand reading the comics. That is sort of how it was. Now we aren’t
working so I didn’t take very much yesterday. Hey, if you can read my
simple little mind so easily, why do you bother to ask things?”

“To amuse myself a little. Did this pickpocket game occur when your
parents were alive?”

“Yes, it began when I was eleven. What could I have said to anyone? I
was hated. You said so yourself. I wasn’t going to make it worse by
humiliating myself that way. They wouldn’t have believed me; and they
wouldn’t have wanted to think about something so disgusting. Anyhow,
Kazem always had me swear that I’d keep it secret and he is the only
one who has really cared about me-as much as people care about others.
Maybe not so much.” He became taciturn.

“Quiet!” said the mosquito belatedly. “I hear something.” It paused and
looked through the small window of the basement apartment. “Oh, it is
your mother driving up now.”

“She doesn’t drive. She doesn’t own a car.”

“She does now.” Jatupon remembered that she always did buy lottery
tickets that mendicants sold from wooden attach� cases hung around
their chests. “I thought she didn’t have the chance of a snowball in
hell of winning” commented the mosquito. “Anyhow, here she is and it is
grocery day. You need to help her bring in the bags.”

It was raining but he nonetheless heard the car. He sauntered out of
the kitchen of the river cabin as the screen door sprang back behind
him.

“Mother,” he yelled in a surprised tone. “You’re back.” The engine
stopped.

“Of course I’m here. You knew I’d be back in an hour. Where else would
I be?” Her voice screamed out belligerently but it was hollow and
virtually inaudible in the container of the car. The Mercedes Benz was
flaxen and waxed and the woman inside was a bit of the same self in an
idealized way. She was even more young, beautiful and poised than
Kumpee’s girlfriend. Her skin was also whiter than the fetid one’s
infatuation and instead of being dark, thick, and puffy like a durable
and well tread tire she was a thin sheath, almost like a transparent
condom, and perfectly unblemished.

“Did you go to Ayutthaya?”

“Have you really forgotten where I’ve been. Even you can’t be that
stupid. I told you before I left. I went to Thee Nhai.” Thee nai was
the word “Where” in Thai; but she spoke it with such certainty that he
believed in its legitimacy as a city name like Chaing Mai. She spoke
even more loudly from her encasement inside the car but was still
barely audible.

“To see Grandmother?”

“And grocery shopping. After all, it is grocery day. “ She stopped
frowning and slowly made a partial smile. “I have something for you.”
He felt surprised. He wondered why he would be given something. He
couldn’t remember having ever been given a gift. In Thailand (the real
Thailand as lived by the poor masses) children were instruments: tools
to ease the task of making a living, and later they were sustenance and
emotional pampering for the aging parents. Above the steering wheel she
showed to him a small rectangular box that she opened like a coffin. In
it was a large golden pen that gleamed like the roofs of a Buddhist
temple. Minutes passed. She continued to exhibit the pen and her
half-smile while staying encased. All of the car windows were rolled
up. He kept wondering what good the pen would do him if it were just a
visual appearance seen through the glass of a car. He forgot the pen
and concentrated on his mother who was as intangible. He heard the
sound of her calmly wrestling unsuccessfully with a door handle that
would not unlock.

He or it—this mordant mosquito—came with wings piercing through sleep.
He again spoke of her, the girlfriend, as “Chinatown skin” and drawing
her from a deck of cards, the mosquito threw her. The card, animated
like an email greeting, clicked around as if on high heels. The woman’s
form, detaching itself from the shell of the card, sang and danced her
dance. Jatupon and the mosquito both lusted for her. Jatupon wanted to
rush into the toilet the way he had seen a man in his early twenties
rush into the public restroom at the movie theatre, Major Ciniplex in
Ayuttaya, a week before his parents died. On that occasion, or
misadventure, Jatupon, who a minute later went to relieve himself in an
adjacent cubicle before going back to his cart of noodles, heard
pumping noises. Then on his side of the crack he faintly saw a shadow
of a hand stroking a penis on the tiles to the left of his feet. That
man had sought pleasure in marginal solitude; but for him, with a
mosquito staring him down with emotionless black eyes, there was no
privacy. His masturbatory time was limited by his hallucinations.

He tried to suffocate the thought of the Chinese Thai woman in an
imaginary pillowcase. He tried to extinguish the sparks of his own
desires by deluging them with more abstract and tenuous thoughts. He
wondered what would be some other choices of jobs he could pursue to
break away from what was left of this fraternity and become an
independent being. The idea hurt him. He then told himself that he
never wanted to leave his brothers. He told himself that he would go
out to find Kumpee, the fetid one, if he only knew where in the big
city to search.

Jatupon saw his own pimpled face staring at him; his childhood friends
who moved or became people he could not relate to; and his parents that
no human sense of bonding, volition, or imagination could bring back.
Orphic memories gleamed and sparkled opaquely like the moving shadows
of leaves on the pavement. “So, I can not see my own reflection without
cringing. So, I felt that sense of fear that came from thinking that my
classmates might not want me to play takraw with them and that feeling
has not left me entirely. So, I’m scared of losing people, like
fumbling with the bamboo ball, as if their departure would be the end
of my own personal essence! So, in the end, we all come down in a cruel
fate.” He could not formulate these abstract thoughts. It all was a
base and indistinct feeling. He was attempting to channel the fears
that constituted so much of his being so that they would not burst into
his consciousness.

“So, have you finished falling so fully and foolishly into yourself,”
asked the mosquito. It paused and looked back at the girl. “She is
Chinatown skin, the kind every man pants for: all beautifully white,
each aesthetic non-deformity ranking her in the realm of desirability
in every Thai man’s mind. ‘Won’t she, in this quintessence of beauty,
have virtually no chance of making a deformed baby,’ screams the man’s
ingrained DNA programming that composes each and every cell. ‘Won’t
she, in this quintessence of beauty, have virtually no chance of making
a deformed baby,’ scream’s the psychological programming created by the
influence of his peers who think that her money and education have made
her as valuable as white ivory -the type often used in Buddhist
statuettes. Hormonal discriminatory passions ensue, dopamine hits the
pleasure receptors of the brain, and make him an addict for a hormonal
pleasure with her.”

“Is this love? Is this all that we are? Love is the best part of us and
yet it is as this? I can’t believe that,” retorted Jatupon.

The mosquito, the big “it,” guffawed. “You are truly ingenuous. You are
contrary to the natural world around you-a true babe focusing your
trusting round eyes so eagerly on the savage world around you.
Personally it is a novelty to me and I don’t mind it at all. Do you
remember how you felt when you were young?”

He remembered the warmth he felt toward his mother even though she did
not like him. He remembered how she cared for him despite thinking him
a burden. She was the good birdie feeding his mouth. Had he not
believed all love to be something like a mother’s love and that this
mother’s love was pure? Had he as little as a few days earlier been
inveigled in the optimism of being free from the consideration of how
instinct is passed down in genetic transfer from generation to
generation? Had he not imagined a desire for a woman and being “in
love” as something more spectacular than bottle rockets and Roman
candles lit from the bridges over the Chao Phraya River in the Loi
krathong celebration?

There were times he had even considered love to be a preordained gift
bestowed onto each being in subtle and illuminating graces. It was a
bit like a lit candle on a krathong, a hand length banana-leaf boat
sent out onto waters during the Loi krathong holiday. A given krathong
would perhaps sail a hundred meters on a river before being tipped over
in waves and winds along with one’s negativity and culpability; and for
this exorcism the river goddess would bestow onto such an individual a
new year of blessings. As a boy he had thought that this universal love
was so pure that it was colorless and translucent. He believed that it
was so ubiquitous and protecting like a mosquito net around the world,
but alive, sensitive, and full of feeling; and that from it came the
babies...the babies. Certainly as the years were placed on the tables
like plates of rice and bowls of noodle soup it was harder to believe
that brotherly love was equally dispersed among mankind. It seemed that
the darker the pigment of a Thai, the more likely he was to do his
menial tasks and the whiter he was, the more such Thais seemed to own
the enterprises of the country. To his brother, Kumpee, like the
father, he had existed as a verbal punching bag to relieve stress.
“Night sports” was the term that Kazem called his form of brotherly
love.

“Now...” scoffed the mosquito as it smiled maliciously, “Now, you know
the truth. The truth shall set you free. Babies come from the desire to
both eat healthy human flesh and crawl and slither around in its
beautiful skin.”

He woke up startled to a void and a room that was at first unfamiliar
in the darkness until memory seeped in and he knew where he was at. As
he was feeling depressed looking at this basement room where they were
caged and smelling the stagnancy of air stinking of mens’ bodies more
eclectically than just their armpits, he fought with the rectangular
window to which leaned weeds and grass. He barely budged it open. The
patch of greenery flushed its grassy smells as well as the urinary ones
with a gust of wind. Even decay was in the grass and such smells were
beautiful. He watched the blades moving. They whispered of
impermanence. They reminded him that as dictators die, civilizations
ultimately become nothing but a few buried artifacts and bones, and
palaces crumble, he would not stay in this cell forever. Everything
would change; and change at times had its advantage.

And yet the child in him resisted change. It yearned to declare every
dust particle that had been trodden on its friend. It did not like
parting and it, in him, hated the idea of Kumpee gone. He felt jealous
that this woman had taken him. He hated her despite her earlier
friendliness to him. He hated her white skin and hated Kumpee for his
ugly dark skin, his abandonment, and his fetid ways. Mostly he hated
his contemptuously tinged use of the nickname, “Jatuporn,” showing that
he knew everything about this relationship with Kazem. The apathy in
the pronouncement would have been bearable. The contempt would have at
least shown concern. But that particular mix spelled out that he,
Jatupon, was really the fetid one and he hated the fetid one for it.

Stagnant and morose in feelings and thoughts, he dripped in the sauna
of his own sweat; and, careful not to stumble over his brothers in the
night, he opened the door for more breezes, for a passing mosquito, for
voices, and the dispersing of crowded thoughts. He recalled untainted
and simple memories of Kazem telling Suthep a joke a customer had
relayed to him making all four of them laugh until they turned red; the
shapes and slight variations of the colors of clouds; and lying on his
bed in their parents home hearing the sounds of locusts somewhere in
the swaying tree limbs cradled in the wind’s caresses. He knew that
such trivial and yet poetical experiences were what constituted human
happiness.

He stepped outside and then walked a couple of blocks in a still
relatively unfamiliar terrain. To him, the surveyor of the night, the
city spilled out in the oozing newness of black and yellow tubes of
paint. There was a larger road and across the street was a Seven-Eleven
convenience store. He stood there and his eyes followed the traffic
that went directly in front of it. He rummaged through one of his bags
until he found his glue. He inhaled its fumes and popped some
amphetamines he had purchased at the drugstore with Kazem’s pocket
money.

He remembered that Suthep and Kazem, like curious beasts, had
occasionally looked in on him during that time, a year ago, when his
body had its opiate force (really a mixed drug combination adversely
affected by beer he drank during the Songkran New Year’s water fight)
poured from it like water from a colander. How sick he had been. From
Kazem’s suggestion, it had been a monk—a former teacher of his
boyhood—whom he had stayed with while he was stiff and shaking. The
periodic vomiting and shaking had seemed so incessant although it, like
all, was fleeting. It had been too intolerable for his parents and yet
for all the talk of the father getting rid of him completely by shoving
him into a monastery, they had been happy to again gain their worker.

Lost in the myriad dimly lit trails of his own thoughts, he at last
returned and went back to his bed of clothes. He smoothed them out. He
made them even. He thought that he might be reprimanded about leaving
the door open for insects to fly in. It was to his satisfaction but it
probably wouldn’t be to theirs and these brothers might easily awaken
from the dogs that could be heard a block away. He got up and shut both
the door and the window. Then, for a few minutes, he listened to the
howling of dogs muffled through the closed door. For a half hour his
positions changed restlessly on the wad of clothes. He thought of the
postcard pictures of temples and palaces; of possibly being a money
collector on the city busses, standing on a step and hanging out of the
continually opened door of a green bus; of—

“What a pathetic existence. You haven’t even paid any rent on this
room. Gifts can be taken back, you know. You could be thrown out at any
whim: Kazem’s, the girlfriend’s, her father who might hate him enough
to kick you out. You have no money or jobs. What will you do?”

“I thought that you weren’t coming here.”

“Here?”

“To Bangkok.”

“Did I say that?” it asked for the first time in a tone that was
introspective and self-conscious.

“You said it. If you make yourself out to be this monster of truths I
can’t see how you can lie like this.”

“I was with you earlier in a less bright, more murky form of a dream
when you were anxious that you hadn’t gotten any privacy to fly your
kite. You didn’t seem to remember quoting me then.”

It did not like the merit of its own veracity scrutinized. It turned
away and paused. It scratched one leg against another thoughtfully the
way one might a scalp. Jatupon wondered for a moment if the insect
would disappear wordlessly from the weight of it’s own waning
confidence but there was no chance of that. It reasserted itself,
attempting to discard its solemn self-interrogations for a more august
posture and attitude.

“You would be the aimless kinetic movements of other dust just like
your kind if it wasn’t for me giving you consciousness and a soul. You
impudent little dummy, you should not speak to your ajarn this way.
Your blood only has worth as the nutrients of my posterity. That is its
purpose. If you become so calculating and crafty with me I’ll
reevaluate our relationship.” One of its arms reached over and caressed
his skin. “At a distance,” it said, “the brownness makes it look as
solid as a rock. I forget that it is so tender. Your naivete also seems
so obdurate that I often forget the self-serving and disingenuous muck
underneath it all.” It brought back its arm, opened its mouth widely,
and spat at the boy. “Here have an early Songkran,” it said. Songkran
was the New Year’s water festival in the hottest month of April. The
month was really March of the year 2445 according to the Thai Buddhist
calendar. “I come and go by the dictates of my own intelligent,
restless brooding. I move from one rock to another hoping to get
satisfaction or at least a reprieve from dissatisfaction. I, an
intelligent being, must delude myself that the composite of rocks that
make up this planet are something other than hardened shells of dirt
and that I, wandering from one rock to another, am really living
experiences instead of hallucinating pleasurable sensations for my self
to stay sane. Only seeing other life forms scrambling around the rocks
to be my appetizers engender me with purpose. It paused. “There is
nothing too peculiar in me wandering around in contradictory paths. All
intelligent creatures are the same. Boredom drives them to reshape
their environment to serve their petty and selfish goals. This might be
entertaining for higher creatures but it’s an absolute curse for the
highest.” It wiggled its face and then pointed with an arm. “I must
relieve your mind of worry. As they say, ignorance is bliss. You have
little risk of finding boredom so insanely strong even if you stay
bound to noodles all your life. Boredom makes me curious. I want to
know many things. I want to know about you boys.”

“You are a bit like our guardian, aren’t you..”

“Yes, if that is what you need—a surrogate uncle: that is what I’ll
be.”

His vision, his mosquito-uncle and deus ex machina, smashed like a fly
against a car window. Jatupon was exhausted and his mental alertness
relaxed in preparation for sleep. In a REM more troubled, incoherent,
and weltering, there were flies seemingly caught between a window and a
screen. The screen was opened a crack and yet the crack only demarcated
freedom and the self-imprisonment of the mind for they climbed around
the screen and yet never found that opening that had allowed them to
enter. Then there were rocks with a bit of honey and flies swarming in
it; and himself echoing the mosquito’s question on how the three of
them would be making a living. He disparaged himself by casting that
self as a cartoon of a motorcycle taxi driver sitting sidesaddle with a
group waiting patiently in a queue for customers to arrive. Stationary
with time passing amuck, and content with empty and drowsy space and
flies buzzing about his face, his life defied money and motion. “Get
out of the way. If you can’t fasten a doorknob take a broom and sweep
up that mess in the back of the restaurant. I don’t know what you are
going to do when you get older. You can’t even cook. You can’t do
anything and even walking you trip over your own shadow,” said his
father. “You should see his cartoons,” said Kazem. “The boy can draw.”
The cartoon of himself had signed the wedding papers and he and his
cartoon wife were standing near a monk as relatives came by with bowls
of water rinsing their hands. Flies buzzed around their faces. A
worker, selling Buddhist statuettes, necklaces, and rosaries, picked
her child up, pulled down his pants, and let him urinate in the parking
lot.

“Love,” said the cartoon of the mosquito, “makes up the vernacular of
pop culture. It is innate as a quest. It lances life’s old festers
granting a mood of the new. For the male it is a consistent alternative
on nights when the hunt for new females becomes unsuccessful. Both
sexes need to believe that their own physical attributes will be passed
on to posterity. For sociable creatures the illusion of having a
permanent foundation for their lives in marriage and family is
indispensable. So much goes into this ineluctable lure called love and
marriage: most of all a void so enormous that we chip through other
skulls to record the memory of ourselves in that watery mass called a
brain. On overpasses and sidewalks you’ve noticed those weak starving
dogs with patches of fur missing from their bodies. They too sniff
around other dogs in the hope of confirming and making some permanent
documentation of themselves on those brains. Even if they don’t have
energy for sex they still document themselves. Men are programmed to
deliver the raw material of themselves in any dark alley. A woman’s
love, once devoted to he who has pierced into her-he who has engendered
in her that overpowering feeling of one inside her—now devotes herself
to motherhood and seeing that the child is...

His ideas were erratic. They hopped and skipped over each other and he
held tightly onto parts of the clothing he lay on. Then with
photographic images, he dreamed of trees, waterfalls, and Thai islands
he had never seen before and his hands relaxed their grip on the
clothes. There was a panoramic view of Thailand-rural, Khmer and
Burmese individuals smiling in the northern regions and stolid Moslem
and Indians in the south. The rural views in sunrise and sunset were
more real than reality and then the aerial focus went down and down and
veered back up to the center. It was Bangkok again and there was
Lumpini Park.

An unknown girl was sitting on a mat in the gravel in a far corner of
the entrance to the park. Immediately behind her was the gate and in
front of her was a large statue of King Rama V. A car entered the
circular drive that went around the statue. She got up to guide its
driver where to park. She hoped that by helping to ensure that he
didn’t crash into parked cars that he would pay her a few baht as
others had. She did not beg. She did not prostitute herself. She only
did that.

“I could do something like that. It’s honest,” thought Jatupon. She
continued to use hand gestures as the driver backed up according to her
directions. “This is a good girl. I want someone like that to become my
wife,” he thought. No sooner had this idea come to him than the car
sped up and ran over her. Then it stopped and the driver hurried out.
The driver held her in his hands and Jatupon felt her pulse. There was
none and he dropped the arm. He walked through the gate to a woman
sitting within the park on a sheet on top of a grassy knoll. He sat on
the sheet in front of her and before the spread of fortune telling
cards.

“I don’t see much future in it” she said. “Being in love with an elder
brother. There is no future in it from what I see.”

“Those are just cards. How would you know?” he whined

“Yes, those are just cards but you don’t even need to look into the
cards to see something like that.”

“How should I live? He’s had sex in me. I should kill myself. A boy
fucked in the ass can not be a man.”

“No, probably not; but you must continue to be the best of what you
are. Man, yes, some-a few—might say. Some would say something less than
that. Whatever you are, maimed or full, you have to continue to
continue. We all should go through the whole show until the winds carry
away our ashes and the soul returns for more learning, more suffering.”




Chapter 5


Bound for his uncle’s home in the far north of the city, Kazem was
forced to reposition himself in the back of the bus next to a bucket of
swishing water and rags. He swatted the mosquito that was hovering over
its sodden progeny. He beat it towards the baldheads of a couple of
monks in front of him who had usurped his seat impudently. From his new
and more uncomfortable seat, which often lost its cushion as he sat
there, he looked out of the window and tried to beat back the inferno
of hate for Kumpee that flared in the nerves throughout his body. He
stared down at what appeared as the moving edge of the road from which
businesses and pedestrians, from the corner of his left eye,
ricocheted. He fingered a slit of the vinyl blue upholstery of his
cushion in a vaginal preoccupation passed onto males through the
inheritance of this cellular knowledge called sexual instinct. Low
levels of guilt oozed from him more subtly than foaming breakers of
beer in a mug and yet he didn’t feel that he had done anything wrong.

This moment was no different than other times of malaise in the past.
He wasn’t specifically troubled about the fruition of his wanton
fantasies to meet his uncle in the hope of using him for some money.
Money should never rest. It should be spent or invested. If it were
invested it would be used to make more wealth or for philanthropy that
ameliorated thievery. He agreed in a vague way with Kumpee who vaguely
inveighed something to the effect that a bit of money from a more
affluent pocket into a poorer one helped the economy and was a just
act. Likewise, he was not bothered by the release he had gained earlier
in a bit of sex with his youngest sibling. This activity was to him
just an extension of a back rub in a good massage compounded in a bit
of sportive wrestling. It was a due owed to him for undergoing the
stress of looking after the younger brothers and keeping the principle
of family alive. He was acting his part of the big brother no different
than he always had since Kumpee was continually negligent in performing
the role. There were no specifics to this malaise he felt. The malaise
was brought on by the wistful craving to go beyond the confines of his
containment and yet reality, petty and limited, told him to use what
was there under his feet, in his sight, and what he could touch. A man
in the confines of his life used what was under him.

What being did not use the Earth?

He continued to finger the slit of the vinyl blue upholstery in a
vaginal preoccupation. He wanted to feel beyond the hole of malaise
that was as empty as the hollow whistling of a wind through a cracked
door or that numb sensation of lying alone, the fantasy of his
masturbation eluding him, and his semen flowing on his skin in a last
vestige of a river. Using others was as unconscious as a reflex but the
malaise came into the equation when he saw what he had to use. Why
didn’t he have money to wine and dine a female in the mating protocol
like any male black-tipped hang fly? Why did he have to cajole, beg, or
charm an avuncular affection from this remote individual who wasn’t
related to them by blood?

He began to stare at the driver and a boy who sat near the front window
in a padded hump that went over the gearshift. It was just like seeing
a self in miniature that had gotten lost and ensnared in the thickets
of time: father driving the bus and this boy seated on a padded metal
covering that went over the transmission. At times the boy touched the
clutch hoping to one day guide the mammoth beast like his father (the
boy believing that his father was the perfection of all things
possible). A plastic red container of ice and water was on this
pedestal where the boy sat and from it a straw stuck out of the lid and
he drank and ate fish chips that were in a plastic sack. He just ate
and drank as the bus circled around its route of the city. How drab it
all was but for a boy and yet believing his father to be the perfection
of all things, such self-restraint was possible. Their father had had
such a job when Kumpee was a young boy. For a year or two of such
journeys, sitting there with the highest admiration for a father, he
was filled with the highest love that was initiating him into the
positive dimensions of manhood and responsibility. When his father lost
his job and worked on the street alongside of their mother, he launched
his tirades against the younger brothers who were “suck-calves” on his
wife. He hated their neediness and as the spankings continued, Kumpee
began to oppose these gestures. Such self-abnegation caused him to
become the full brunt of the beatings.

Having been given time alone, Jatupon scraped up his stolen collection
of loose change and ran off hand in hand with his freedom. Having no
responsibilities for the first time in his life apart from the night
sports that usually happened in the mornings, his life was becoming a
purposeless abyss. He personified his freedom and together they broke
beyond small basement windows and imagined portals to real places.
Together, they went to see the life that fulminated within the streets
of the city of Bangkok. Kazem was gone so they did not have to be there
to hear his expletives about the older brother’s thievery and the
younger brother’s disappearances. The disappearances were ones Kazem
attributed to Suthep chumming up with Kumpee to have a bit of money to
play snookers. For hours and hours they were lost in the movements of
traffic, the brown and Chinese faces, movements of strangers on the
sidewalks, and the swirl of infinite numbers on the quest for money,
happiness, and adventure. He read faces and movements from his
spreading feelers. They too wanted money bestowed onto them to squander
at will in all forms of self-indulgence. They too wanted to squelch
their routines to live their dishonorable lives in the quest of
sensuality. To have resources and freedom to run around loose as a
goose in a department store was something they all yearned for and
seeing these pedestrian shoppers of the sidewalk, with more money than
he, made the boy hunger for better things.

Freedom was becoming old as he continued to walk with her into the
crowds but she rejuvenated lasciviously when his eye spotted someone
not in the shopper’s swirl. The cravings so attractive to Jatupon were
missing in those deadened eyes and passing from him he fell into the
others. Membership was free. It was lack of hope that was given so
generously to the majority of the world’s populace that was
indispensable to them. Lurid as family, fetid as Kumpee’s shoes, here
they were and here he was with them; and yet they were his own or what
he assumed was his own—the little that he knew of himself.

It was a family of addicts, addicted to family or even a concoction of
family, cobbled together within the affinity of pain and the tangles of
neurons like brambles pricking their consciousness with old travail at
every turn: memories that they couldn’t free themselves from. Within
this desert of cacti and brambles they poured destructive chemicals and
suicidal inclinations to kill and enlarge their brambly world. They
were landscape artists of their personal deserts: hating, destroying,
and replanting their cacti and brambles with each new whim. Here he was
with a new family—a mosaic of complete strangers who were not related
to him nor were they relating to him or much to each other. Still, it
was a surrogate family nonetheless succumbing to an infinite current of
darkness to which they all had understanding. In many ways they were
wiser: they knew that the insatiability of desire that made one
propelled to breed, work, and buy was not going to stop. They knew that
no one in such circles was going to find contentment. They were all
going to fail miserably. They knew that there was a deep discontent in
the human psyche that yearned for destruction and death. In the course
of being degraded by significant others they had somehow gotten
excluded from the participation of such narcissistic, consumeristic
appetites and that the salvation of compassion would not be
forthcoming. This benign pastel family sat together on the slab of
cement under the overpass while over them, on the overpass itself, were
the trinkets sold by salesmen, homeless elderly women, mothers, those
who stunk from being unable to bathe off their rotting surface of
scaling skin, and deformed slabs of flesh spread out on parts of the
overpass with fidgeting partial limbs. They all had nearly empty cups
of one baht coins and the most unfortunate of them could testify of
dark currents deeper than regular people could imagine for one moment.
They, his surrogate family, knew that there was not just one blackness
but despair had myriad blacker and bleaker hues.

Under the steps of the overpass sniffing his glue while these
transients already riddled in amphetamines and alcohol (at times
borrowing his glue) smoked cigarettes incessantly, his mind swept away
from him like a butterfly fluttering by. When he first met them in this
spot their first words were to offer to him cigarettes but he told them
that if he were to put one in his mouth it would remind him of the
fetid one with his fetid shoes and socks littered everywhere, the one
who had stolen his parents property upon their deaths and had abandoned
them to starvation in the great city of Bangkok. These transients had
the understanding and listening skills of trained psychologists and
offered unto him a piece of bubble gum instead which he gratefully
accepted.

Still, a thought preoccupied him off and on. He wondered why they were
all seated there in such a confined space; but within a few hours the
storm clouds moved overhead and the rain deluged the streets making him
forget about one man complaining of his jock itch and scratching
himself, another that cried and looked up into the clouds, and a third
that kept wanting to barter off his torn sandals for Jatupon’s sneakers
and kept calling him “uncle” even though he was ten or fifteen years
the older brother. Across the road he occasionally saw umbrellas sail
out to the gray of the clouds. One of the other five transients was
repulsed by a spider that crept onto him in its effort to escape the
rain, cursed at a rock in his shoe that would not leave the obscure
crevice of the sole, and then in one of his shifting moods made a
declaration of happiness that they had found such an inconspicuous spot
where the police rarely harassed them. The woman transient gave herself
to her man so completely that when he was angry, happy, or sad, she was
more this way—so little did she understand her own mind, having become
nothing but an extension of his pleasure and pain.

Sometimes silent and tacit, these transients who were continually
judged by others, judged the sincerity of his callow rebellion with
their stares. A few times they went beyond that to a more pronounced
judgment. “Don’t you have a mamma to go to? Your mamma’s calling for
you to come to lunch,” said the one with the woman. That time the shoe
barterer laughed so hard it churned up mucus into his mouth, which he
spit into a crack in the sidewalk that already had its share of gum and
cigarette buds. “Mamma’s calling,” said the woman. “Lunch is ready,
honey. Mamma’s calling,” she repeated or at least he thought she
repeated. Maybe none of them had said anything. He wasn’t quite sure.

Jatupon turned away from them and slipped off his tennis shoes,
smelling their soles to make sure that they weren’t overly fetid. He
looked at one of his bare feet composed of roadways of veins and early
wrinkles of epidermis. He thought to himself that an unrecognized
universe had existed right there in his shoes. He sniffed his armpits.
They were fetid as glue but he liked the transmission of the sweat
molecules up his nostrils.

He deeply inhaled the glue and then held his breath allowing the fumes
to permeate within. He repeated the process four or five times and for
the most part he, they, and all went away in a haze. It was like being
blindfolded but instead of darkness there was a soft patch of white
haze. At first it startled him and he wondered if this ethereal gaseous
mist was Saddam Hussein’s lethal spray upon the world and yet he felt
giddy in this laughing gas. When his mind was able to register the fact
that they were seated next to him, the haze made the man and his woman,
the shoe barterer, the sky crier, and all (transient and non-transient,
imagined and remembered) such special creatures. These transients were
sordid and brainless but, especially in the intense inundation of fumes
they were the most extraordinary of life forms. He was almost moved to
kiss each of them on their foreheads. From this pillar of light the
mosquito, dressed in Buddhist attire and carrying its mask, came with
the force of God. Its feelers were like acid and when they touched
Jatupon his clothes seemed to sizzle and burn away. He was naked with a
smashed ant sandwiched between a fingernail and skin. He remembered
that a minute earlier he had been trying to direct it away from his leg
and in his clumsy misdirection at the appearance of the pillar of light
there it was under the nail curled up in fetal agony.

As the mosquito slowly descended he could see tragedy more clearly than
he ever did when not snorting the fumes, and yet it rolled off his mind
weightlessly. He was giddy in brotherly love and yet naked, he wanted
to copulate with the world. Even more, he wanted to reproduce his ideas
with her. He sensed that all humans fell victim to this substance: they
got giddy in love and reproduced, they gained meaning in their lives
from this feeling, and then after nature got them to beget children,
she plugged up the dopamine somewhat like the waning high he felt with
his brother. He felt the insect monster inject him with the malaria of
tragedy: random images were kicked about in his mind like starving dogs
allowed to propagate on the streets incessantly from the
non-interference of Buddhist principles. He saw all the suffering
species from an aerial perspective for he was being carried around on
the wings of the mordant mosquito that had scooped him up on its back.
Buddha knew that tragedy abounded in recycled life but Jatupon could
not figure out if Buddha tried to break the recycling of life like a
coward who couldn’t endure pain or if he left his protective palace to
understand the magnitude of human suffering for the masses. The story
was full of contradictions. He thought, “Where are you taking
me...straight...now spinning...now plunging...more G-force than I think
I can stand.”

“Into yourself,” it shouted.

“That’s a cruel place to be,” Jatupon said.

“Yes, it is,” admitted the mordant entity. From their distance distinct
forms were difficult to ascertain but he knew that he was far outside
himself and to be outside of it into a world of motion and forms made
him feel relieved. But from a couple of indecipherable forms in
movement he halfway made out and half way imagined a half-naked baby
crying on the outskirts of a park. It crawled alone at a distance from
a cook. The cook halted her work to get him. He cried loudly at each
initiative at trying to appease him. He didn’t like being held. He
didn’t like the banana put in his hands. Finally, she placed him in the
bucket of water that contained her dirty plates.

“So innocent and yet calculating,” said the mosquito. “It was wanting
in that tub of water all along.”

“Oh, do you see them too.”

“No, not really. Anyhow, based on what you see, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Agree that he crawled away so as to cause his mother to put him in the
water?” He laughed. “No, he is just a baby. I don’t think he is that
developed. I don’t think he is that self serving.”

“Are these two forms you are now seeing outside of yourself too?” asked
the mosquito.

“Of course,” he scoffed but he did not know.

Then he was descending or falling —falling in a diagonal descent on the
mosquito’s back, falling onto its feelers, and falling from it
entirely. There he was a brown boy in the pool on the roof of The Mall
Ayuttaya with goggles on his face and wearing spandex swimming trunks.
He looked so fashionable despite his poverty but the poor and
discontent always found their stealth means to master petty thievery
and a sullied self-image was easily forgotten. There were imitation
mountains and waterfalls all around. He swam to the opposite side of
the pool and said hello to a foreigner who sat on a rock letting the
force of the fall hit his feet. The foreigner ignored him and again
started swimming his laps. Then, feeling that he had been rude, he
returned to the boy and asked him his name. The boy smiled and said an
easy two-syllable name, Nawin. It seemed like an easy name for a
foreigner to remember. After an uneventful attempt at conversations in
two different languages to which neither party could understand the
other one, the foreigner swam off. Still the boy was persistent,
swimming over to the foreigner when he rested. This prompted the
foreigner to go to the locker room to change sooner than what he would
have done otherwise. The boy followed him. He accosted him while he was
at the urinal and looked down onto him. He tried to come in when the
foreigner was in his cubicle taking a shower. His motives for doing so
were ambiguous ones: he wanted a foreigner friend even if this man was
so much older than he was, he wanted to really learn the international
language, and although he did not really have sexual feelings he would
have done anything for a bit of money. As the man dressed on the bench
Jatupon, the boy, put his hands together in a mendicant grasshopper
pose with palms sandwiched together and held before his face in the
“wei.” He opened his hands with the opening of the wallet.

A door of a shower booth opened. It was the mosquito drying himself
with a towel.

“Nothing like a good swim followed by a warm shower. You got to meet an
old friend today. That’s nice. Earlier you never mentioned this memory.
I guess it wouldn’t have been a particularly flattering portrait to
share with anyone. It borders on prostitution. Just when I was feeling
sorry for you as the abused brother I learned of this. It adds a more
complex intellectual dimension to your character, don’t you think? It
makes you less moronic somehow.” Jatupon felt a metamorphosis and
returned to his 14 year old body. Again he was riding on the mosquito’s
back naked as a blue jay and his hair dripped water. He couldn’t
confirm or negate the previous memory. It was vaguely familiar.

“Don’t you believe that was you?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Jatupon said indifferently.

“You don’t think so?”

“No it’s not, is it?” He began to choke on his saliva. He coughed.
“Why?”

“Oh, dear. Are you okay?”

“Yes. Why?”

Why what?”

“Why is the self such a fearful place?”

“Why not?” said the mosquito. “Alone, shut up in one’s own hardened
shell there is no logic—just passions running amuck.”

Tragedy and suicidal wishes clogged up his head. He did not like seeing
bits of himself crawling around naked as a baby’s ass. He hated
wondering if any of his brothers would come back to the apartment or
fearing having to beg alone. He got up.

“Did you decide to finally go back to your mamma?” asked the man who
had the woman resting her face in his lap. The woman picked a wild
dandelion from the crack in the sidewalk and then reached her hand up
to Jatupon’s shirt. She put it in his pocket. “Here is a flower for
Mommy. You can give it to her when she fixes you supper.”

“My mother’s dead” yelled Jatupon with vehement hate and repugnance as
he wadded up the flower in a fist and threw it onto the sidewalk. Then
he walked away.

A tuc tuc driver, slowing down in passing, beeped the horn at him. The
taxi looked like the distorted shape of a fly. He wished that he had
just a chunk of the money Kumpee had plundered. With it, he told
himself, he would buy his own motorcycle and become a self- employed
taxi driver for his age surely restricted him from getting a job with
the Bangkok Metropolitan Authorities. This, he told himself, would be
far better than sitting on the monkey bars near the door of a bus
clanging the tube of money upon one’s knee. Besides, he didn’t
especially want to be one of the many nameless beggars applying for
jobs with the Metropolitan Transportation Authorities.

He veered somehow from the sidewalk into a labyrinth of outdoor
hallways that ran between stands and quasi-stores, under canvas
canopies and through the smell of incense that came from a table that
contained a 2-foot Buddhist statue. Upon finding his way out by
charging through crowds and hangers of clothes, he heard the blaring of
pi phat music, saw a vegetable market, and smelled redolent papayas,
durians, watermelons, pineapples, guavas, and tangerines. Further along
he smelled tom yam soup, grilled squid, goo-ey tia nam (rice noodle
soup), khow laad nhaa gai (rice with chicken and bamboo), and other
dishes in an outdoor restaurant. He passed silk stores, jewelry stores
that catered toward ruby and sapphire-loving foreigners, and fast food
restaurants. Then he went into Robinson Department Store.

In the restroom he relieved himself at a urinal that was furthest from
the cleaning lady since her mopping presence there made him nervous and
had the possibility of clogging him up. Then he sat down in the food
court. His head was in vertigo like small children turning themselves
around in the grass or the routine of one’s petty kinetic life. He
often noticed affluent men walking around with girlfriends or wives in
that male gesture of the hand of one arm clasping the other arm behind
the back. The gesture conveyed that they were beyond the third world
now. They had money, Bangkok had everything, and they would shop as
befitting their status. He wanted to be them. He wanted out of his own
skin to be a different person entirely but there was no exit for him in
fast motion. The only consolation was in always evolving beyond that
one seed, that one dividing cell that had started his life. There was
still hope.

He saw a father and two girls with their many bags. He wanted a father
like that instead of the one who had made him afraid to stand up, sit
down, comb his hair, put on his pants, talk, or be silent without being
excoriated. Only arduous work had offered him a respite from that man’s
criticism. Only work had offered him that escape from being the
cockroach running from his heels. Family wasn’t so ideal. At least his
wasn’t. He was always cravenly scurrying away from one or more of them
and vibrations they made. His mind spun around more wildly. He kept
wishing that it would stay stolid and poised as statues of the Garuda
and Kinnara, mythological creatures that permeated Thai art,
literature, and dance.

He tried to focus in on beautiful ideas of family. He tried to breathe
them in like the smell of drying clothes in the breeze or the smells of
life replicating itself eternally in the verdant greenery on the
outskirts of the city. All he could do was summon memories of Kumpee
and their parents incessantly driven toward chasing any scheme that
would put a few extra coins in their hands; Kazem’s secondhand
treatment of his destitute brown Burmese woman a couple years earlier;
Suthep whom he shared certain childish sympathies; and Kazem who was
his protector. His head hurt and span: in school, out of school,
struggling for subsistence as a group, the heads of the group dying,
the move to Bangkok, and a thousand phantom faces that plagued his
mind, exacerbating the throbbing. He tried to think of monks in their
saffron robes with strapped metallic bowls dangling from their
shoulders in which shopkeepers requiring blessings placed rice; the
sweet taste of rambutans when the spiky core was broken and the
transparent succulent egg was overtaken; and motorcycle taxi drivers
with cardboard and pop bottle games that, with the tap of the nails of
their fingers, kept their time of waiting from overwhelming them in
boredom. A persistent fly over the table made him nervous and he
thought that perhaps to counter the truths his subconscious spewed out
in the form of the insect and his own need for stability (not just his
environment changing but he, himself, was continually changing) he
needed to invent a god for himself if nothing other than the God of
Dirty Underwear. The persistent fly continued to besiege him so he left
the department store and returned to his friends.

The “friends”—he did not know their names—seemed content with their
circumstances. They, like he, were cuddled together under the overpass
consuming and inhaling their amphetamine and glue molecule treats,
which inadvertently gave them ice cream headaches. This intake
delivered them from bleak realities to that of twirling and dizzy
children while fantasies stepped forward as emperors of the spinning
domain. At times when they were more conscious of their existence and
surroundings (especially when feeling intensely hungry) these
transients would beg. They had a method. If someone in a suit carrying
a cellular telephone were standing in front of the cash register at a
nearby convenience store with a long serpentine tail of customers
waiting behind him, one of them would enter the store. Shocked by such
a lugubrious display and needing to quickly expedite his exit with his
bags, such an individual would give generously so as to not be
perceived as parsimonious or niggard in the reaction.

It occurred to him that this word, “friend,” was not really what it at
first seemed. If indeed people were all users attracted to others who
gave them fresh insight into life or a respite for escaping it, these
people were dismissed when that resource was exhausted. Still he wasn’t
all that fond of them so the issue did not really matter all that much.
He tried to smile at them but he could not. He was feeling sick to his
stomach and their faces sometimes spun around in an erratic orbit.

It was like feeling the rush of air and dizzying changes of streets and
buildings from the open portals of an old doorless bus that cast its
shadow onto a bridge connecting Pinklao street to the area around the
Grand Palace—how palpitating was this glue and amphetamine trip. At
times it was a stronger feeling of thrust and omnipotent dominion like
a surfer who could easily be plummeted by the waves he was riding. The
waves, however, were verdant and edible. It was verdant the way nature
at times looked like a green-berry cheesecake, and bovine, he wanted to
eat it.

Seated under the stairwell of steps doing nothing in particular, he at
times took out his pocket knife and engraved a puppet man driven on
forcefully by its master to the pleasure and frenzy of rape, depositing
its seeds in every possible hole (fertile or fallow). This alone was
his only conscious achievement that day in a drug induced but sobering
mind where subconscious images usurped their rational rulers. Careful
not to look threatening with a knife in his hands, he timidly scraped
out a master controlling the puppet man depositing himself in that meek
lowly being.




Chapter 6


“Nawin!” Porn whiningly bantered as she confiscated his headphones that
were plugged into the arm of his seat and punched him in his chest.
“Why aren’t you talking to me?”

“Rachmaninoff,” he said. She did not understand. What did she know
beyond the kinetic rhythms of pop culture? It was in her blank stare.
The word had not penetrated. He wanted to tell her. He wanted to
introduce if not explain something so ineffable and orphic to which a
mortal could only awkwardly utter that inadequate word, “beautiful.” He
wanted to see the countenance of one being extended. He wanted to
change her and take her far beyond the limits she had placed upon
herself. It was the best of him that wanted to bring the love of great
things to others. It was one altruistic motive in his many selfish
motivations for inviting her here. But he knew that like earlier, when
they were waiting in the airport, she would continue to bury herself in
comic books and the latest American sounds when not engrossed in her
French palaver with the cassette recorder. She would continue to
disconnect the ideals and harmonies from the plug in the arm of his
chair.

“I want to know what you are thinking,” she said. Her countenance was
puzzled and remained so for a couple seconds. He loved her so much
then. He breathed in deeply and wished outside himself to the cosmic
forces that she could stay with those features forever: puzzled,
probing, and beautiful!

“Why?”

“Sometimes you leave me, Nawin, and I want to know where you go in
those thoughts of yours. Were you thinking of her—Noppawan?

“I’m always thinking of her. I’m married to her.” He reached for her
hand but she rejected it and so he smiled brightly, kissed her on the
cheek, and gave her a hug. “No, I was probably riding in my artsy
whims.”

“Not a woman.”

“No, actually not a woman.”

“That’s not natural.”

He chuckled. “There are other things than loving people.”

“You are an unnatural person, Nawin.”

He smiled and thought. Maybe dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin,
the components of love, were at work whenever one cared about
something. Maybe being troubled by Palestinians blowing themselves up
was love. Certainly Rachmaninoff was love.

“Her glasses are ugly, you know. They have thick frames and what really
makes them ugly is that they are dark against her dark skin. No, what
really makes her ugly when she wears them is that the lenses are thick
like binoculars. I bet that even when she removes them every night
before she goes to bed she probably looks as plain as burnt toast. Your
wife isn’t pretty, Nawin.”

He chortled. “You’re right,” he said as his eyes looked down
shamefully. He thought about telling Porn that Noppawan never removed
her glasses when she went to bed. It was partly true. He had even had
sex with her once or twice that way. Then he had second thoughts and
decided that some things were better left alone in the dark. “Can I go
back to Rachmaninoff?” he asked while mildly shaking his headphones in
the air.

“No you can’t. Thanks for asking. When are we going to New York City,
Nawin?”

“We haven’t arrived in Canada yet.”

She stood up, stretched, and then crawled over his lap lasciviously as
she looked out of the window. “This flight is too long,” she said.

“Maybe the pilot, co-pilot, hijacker, or whoever is driving can park
for a few minutes on a cloud and you can get out,” he said.

She sat back in her seat. “I think you are angry at me for saying that
about Noppawan.”

“No,” he said indifferently. He liked hearing truth but he felt guilty
being amused by some of it. He changed the subject. “Do you want to
change to my seat so that you can look out?”

“I’d get sick looking out onto that sea of clouds for long.”

“Why do you want to go to New York City?”

“What’s in Canada, Nawin? It’s got a few walking snowmen but what else?
Snowy landscapes and cold temperatures good for penguins. When someone
thinks of Thailand it is always Thai silk, temples, Buddhist statues,
nightlife, and beautiful girls like me. What is the symbol of Canada?”

“Snowmen,” said Nawin as he chuckled, “and Canadian dollars.” He was
enjoying the conversation.

“What are they: these snowmen? Are they just Englishmen?”

“That but also Americans who didn’t want to fight against King
George... Frenchmen, of course in Montreal.”

“Why don’t they have kings now?”

“Well, Canadians do have the British monarchy. Canada is a
commonwealth.”

He didn’t go further because she sighed from intellectual strain.

“Didn’t you like Noppawan at all?” he asked with childish
vulnerability.

“No,” she replied thoughtfully. “I liked all things about her. I liked
her completely. It is hard to believe that anyone should be so
wonderfully odd.”

He liked that response exponentially. He knew that she would never say
anything so true. “Montreal will be fun. A little bit of Paris and a
little bit of New York City.”

“Laos, Nawin, is a little bit of Paris with a lot of dirt poor
Thailand.”

“It will be like going to the Thao Suranari fair in Nakhon Ratchasima.”
That was one of the largest fairs in Thailand. This thought triggered
his memory of a smaller fair in Bangkok.

This avuncular stranger, a member of the parliament and the former
governor of Pattaya, had informed Kumpee that the fair held in March
was coming to a close this year. This fair, run by government
ministries to raise funds for the Red Cross, was near the Parliament in
the area called Dusit. Tickets to enter were sold at 200 baht each. The
two other brothers—all, like him, boys with layers of manhood like
aluminum foil wrapped over the small crumbling pieces of cake that were
themselves-did not utter questions. Had Kazem robbed Thai Farmers Bank,
Siam Commercial, and Bangkok Bank entirely it wouldn’t have made any
difference. The psyche needed a degree of ebullience. This was their
respite from worries about survival to which drugs or snookers had been
ineffective distractions. A bit of it insulated them from the attitude
of doom that would eagerly zip them up into its body bags.

A woman wearing a pointed straw hat, who had a 2-year-old baby cuddled
around her neck, thrust herself before them. She solicited them to her
table of snake blood refreshments seasoned with dried monkey brain. She
was one well-seasoned in salesmanship. She knew the cajolery to lure
daredevils who would come to such a fair as she knew the approach to
children whom she would sell her krathongs, banana boats of flowers and
candles attached to banana leafs and Styrofoam sailed onto the river
for good fortune during each Loi krathong festival, or Buddhist
rosaries and necklaces to old women during religious holidays.

“ Please come over to my table, boys.” They smiled and came. “ I know
you. You think I don’t but I do. I can see into hearts-hearts wanting
to be men, wanting to end boyhood. You’ve heard those stories about men
who became more than that from drinking a bit of this. The stories
aren’t true. They are stupid. Nobody has ever done anything like that;
but the real parts of the stories are gaining courage and strength. My
husband was in his teens when I saw him for the first time doing what
you are about to do. I watched him the way those girls over there are
watching you now. Anybody would have second thoughts about this.
Anybody would. It tastes horrible because it is strong in courage and
strength for those with the courage to drink it. If you can do this you
will never run away from anything again. Instead, you will have it on
the run. This is your only time to conquer your fears and do something
naughty while the police are sleeping. Whatever you do, make sure that
you put a few coins in the box to help the Red Cross.” She pointed at
the plastic box at a distant corner of the table. While Suthep inserted
a few baht into the hole she directed herself to Kazem. “Are those two
your brothers?”

“Yes,” he said.

“I know you won’t make them ashamed of you. It’s just fifty baht each.
Look. People are staring at you. You’ve got to do it. Drink!”

“Drink, money man,” reiterated Suthep.

He glared at Suthep. “Hey, I’m not paying for me alone. I’ll do it for
the pure pleasure of seeing you stand there all night looking into your
cup.” Kazem paid for three cups. Jatupon stood there stiff and
frightened. Starting from the oldest to the youngest they drank down
their beverages. The liquid molecules of hell were a hundred times that
of the airborne ones from Kumpee’s socks and shoes. All of them choked
and coughed. All of them swallowed some of the blood heathenishly but
spit out most. It was followed by a sip of watery and caffeinated
whiskey that had been diluted and adulterated in cola. Normally such
open liquor drinking would have gotten everyone arrested especially
when it involved selling to minors but since some of the proceeds were
going into the public fund on this day it was overlooked. While the
brothers were given a second shot of whiskey again diluted in cola, new
customers came to the woman anxiously. She led them to her table and
sat there with the squalling, squalid child. The baby was restless on
the apron that she wore. Conscious of how a repetition of her spiel
could spell out insincerity and a customer’s aversion, she attempted to
wait silently as they debated doing this. She muted the child with a
firm hand pressed against its mouth. Before she could make the sell she
reflexively responded to the smallest degree of wetness on the apron
and let her child urinate away from the sidewalk and her virility
stand. The ground did not eagerly swallow the fetid and sweet liquid
and his recidivist urine came back to the sidewalk with the insistence
of a foul stream. Past shoe salesmen on a sheet, shoe repairmen, comb
and battery salesmen, noodle workers, and lottery
representatives—unlicensed businesses that abounded everywhere- they
entered the gates of the fair. At kiosks, the three of them threw
darts, shot basketballs in moving hoops, and bounced balls against
walls to knock over bottles for prizes. They continued doing this until
the infancy of night murdered the sun allowing it to slowly die,
languishingly sliding off golden rooftops of temples. When darkness
unfolded around them, they paid to see a woman put her face in a
plastic box of scorpions, elephant trainers whose elephants walked over
them to enter into the crowds where they picked up humans with their
trunks, and oarsmen in the facsimiles of royal barges competing against
each other. The boats had the same body and countenance of dragons just
like the television shows they had seen of the kings’ ancient boats
that were housed in the Royal Barge Museum.

The night and its dark appetites were mature in full insurrection. They
had eaten their share of rice and chicken topped with cotton candy, and
yet not cowering, their stomachs craved for beer so they headed to a
nearby bar. Before them a child was walking slowly on the steps that
rose up to the bridge that went over a canal. He slammed his
fire-snappers against the cement watching the air burst before his
feet. They passed him to quickly fulfill the surfeit of beer that was
part of their general yearnings. They yearned for so much—these three
young men. They yearned for relaxation with beer; they yearned for
friends and places away from this fraternal group that they had been
conceived into and forced to work with; and, except for Jatupon, they
each yearned for a love to come their way so that they would not be
lost in themselves. Jatupon yearned most to be naively complete like
that boy they had passed. Jatupon had once been like him: fascinated by
his own thoughts and sensations and self-contained. In late boyhood a
boy mastered independence that in infancy and early boyhood he
struggled to achieve. It was all thwarted, however, by the upsurge of
sexual feelings which made a young man want to bond cohesively and
addictively to others. The progress of late boyhood was razed in a
brief year or two.

Strangely, the world was a dreamy place and from the modest display of
fireworks being shot over the canal there was a dreamy idea of
connectedness and fraternity in the psyches of these young men although
such ideals varied from moment to moment based upon their
interpretations of the environment. Lagging behind in serpentine
movements of dreaminess but eager for connectedness, Jatupon hurriedly
caught up to his brothers only to lag behind them again. It was time
for Heineken, Singh, or Bush (not those two presidents). It was a time
to celebrate and dunk the self in artificial dreaminess like one
bobbing for apples. Jatupon looked up at the sky when he and his
brothers reached the other side of the bridge. Then he looked down at
his chest. A sweat bee hovered over the glands in his opened shirt like
an oil worker ciphering the ground. He shoved the industrial exploiter
away. He felt awe in how complex it all was: one thing feeding on
another. He wondered if, after the immune system conquered a virus, it
consumed it. He wondered how much of his parents’ bodies would have
been consumed by bacteria in decomposition if they had not been
cremated. He wondered if things were so clearly defined. Maybe a part
of his parents was alive in ways that could be sensed but never
understood or explained.

It was no wonder, as they sat there drinking beer in a pub on the other
side of the canal (remarkably able to afford drinking beer at all) that
Kazem was happy: after all, the uncle’s gate had opened up to him when
he talked into a speaker. It was also not so strange that his mood of
elation had for a short while, when viewing the scorpion lady, gone
awry. Seeing the son of the Ayutthaya landlord who had rented his
family that small space for their restaurant was depressing. There he
was in his fine clothes with his wife and two small children. Kazem had
thought to himself that as a rich man poverty had not ruined his
inclinations-this man, not much older than himself, copulated in the
right hole.

Suthep, sandwiched between his two brothers, drank voraciously without
any strong inclination to run away. He preferred being elsewhere but
elsewhere without money was nowhere. He preferred playing snookers and
trying to woo a young girl to be somewhat interested in him while
playing against his buddies. Here, however, he had no friends. The city
was entirely new and he didn’t know anyone. Once, in Ayutthaya, he had
gone with a herd of those wolves to capture a park whore. He and his
buddies took her to a cheap guesthouse where foreigners often went and
had their spasms within her. It had been his first time. He would
prefer to be with his friends but this wasn’t so bad. Drinking with his
brothers was like playing football with them once again or fishing with
them at the edge of the river.

Somewhere into things the beer changed to whiskey and it was from that
bottle of whiskey that the mosquito and his female counterpart climbed
out and shook off their wetness. When this canine shaking of the
wetness was not enough, they used the paper towels as bath towels. They
were less grotesquely large at this point but returning to their
monstrous shapes by the moment.

—What was the dinner like that Kazem attended?

—It was not a dinner, but the sip of the man’s coffee in the den. It
consequently led to the proposal of a dinner.

—And did he accept the proposal?

—He did.

—On behalf of the family of brothers?

—That would seem to be a correct assessment although the eldest was not
expected to attend. No definitive date was scheduled because the
senator hesitated about this issue. It was a tacit declaration that
could only be read in a scarce trace of caution on his countenance. It
indicated that he was reluctant to be associated with these thugs. This
irritated Kazem and yet he pretended as if he wasn’t bothered by it. He
probably told himself that he needed the time to rehearse his lines.

—What would he need to rehearse?

—His part as the benevolent older brother. He thought he was that but
he had trouble convincing others of its veracity.

—I don’t understand.

—A typical female reaction. Let me be more lucid. It is my impression
that he intended to use this first meeting for future ones where he
could use sympathy as a way of extorting money from the aging man for
this group of leeches and quasi-pariahs.

—As Kazem and the senator/former governor of Pattaya/former
uncle-in-law drank coffee together, what was the lure that kept him
interested in these boys? After all, he knew them only by name apart
from that time or two of being irritated by their noise when the two
families came together. That was over a decade ago. Isn’t that right?

—Yes, you are not ignorant. It was 11 years ago. I believe his new
founded interest in them was what they call empathy?

—Empathy? I know about that. It is a rather rare and abnormal form of
behavior sometimes seen in those evolving beyond their species. From
the research I’ve done on such aliens empathy and compassion seem to be
the only emotions that aren’t destructive and hedonistic. In small
quantities all emotions aid judgment calls in social situations but
unfortunately they are produced and expended in bulk. Unlike other
emotions that are rampant, empathy and compassion tend to be quite
rare. Could you elaborate on his nascent burgeoning of empathy for them
and the disingenuousness that prompted it?

—It was no different than their aunt who hustled a marriage out of him
years ago. Kindliness and loneliness, from what I can tell, have always
been his weakness. It was a simple calculating maneuver on Kazem’s
part, really. Kazem affected being uncomfortable and shy. He waited
until this uncle asked directly about his circumstances and then he
gave a modest biographical summary of their move to Bangkok after
selling their parents assets. He was careful not to mention Kumpee, the
need for money, or any real description of how they were living. The
uncle’s attempts at finding out information on those putrescent issues
were only marginally successful. As a result, it seemed to the senator
that Kazem was earnest and unassuming. He became more curious and
anxious to help these pariahs as a result.

—And can you be more specific on how this was done?

—It’s rather mundane. I don’t wish to really.

—Human studies and our intellectual copulation require more
information. One would have to be ignorant to not know that or male.

—He chitchatted, my dear, in a logical sequence that was a bit
desultory at times. Humans call such an inexact order “variation.”
After he told the location of where they were living and that the move
had taken place because of Kumpee’s desire to be near his girlfriend,
he answered the senator’s question on what his brothers were doing in
their state of unemployment (Jatupon with his comic books and Suthep
with his snookers). Then he moved to large ideas outside of his
personal life: the upcoming elections for prime minister, the question
of the government’s role for the flood victims in Hattayai, and if the
senator would run for re-election in a couple years. It was done to
create a mystique about he and his brothers as well as to elicit the
approval of the senator who preferred people who could break out of
their own skins. It was deferential. It was noble. It was all of those
things that were manipulation in a consummate performance. Kazem played
the part so well that he even began to think that he was this shy,
vulnerable, unpretentious, and caring person despite trying
circumstances.

—Did he directly attempt to exploit the man’s feelings of sympathy for
their plight or the senator’s loneliness?

—In some respects he did. He reminisced about his mother whom this high
governing uncle had sympathy. The senator of course entertained this
sympathy because his wife (their mother’s sister) had always carped,
disparaged, and vilified her for such a marriage to an illiterate
street person. The senator never forgot his sister-in-law’s birthday
even after his divorce. To be specific, Kazem was seated before the
senator drinking coffee and eating doughnuts when he ironically spoke
of how he missed the scents of flowers his mother would bring into the
home or the smell of a freshly cleaned floor. It belied the truth of
this porcine creature whose domestic tendencies had surrendered to male
nastiness early into marriage and motherhood. The sad lonely tone
resonated with the senator. It strummed the harp of his heart.

—What are these three brothers doing at present?

—At present they are drinking beer and celebrating with some of the
money that the senator gave to them.

—Did the senator give money that quickly?

—No, he dismissed Kazem after tiring of him. He said that he needed to
return to his work. And then as the teenage boy was leaving a servant
told him to return the next day. It was then that a sizable amount of
money, by the standards of regular Thai people, was given to him.

—Suthep doesn’t seem as happy as the other two.

—He is happy with the money and the beer but his happiness sinks down
with the dying fizz of the beer but it rejuvenates again with the fizz
of the next beer. His behavior can be attributed to a bit of repugnance
toward the two companions at his table and a bit of general moodiness
aggravated with alcohol consumption. He really has been so moody ever
since becoming a teenager. He was so nice to Jatupon as a child. Oh
well, the world is continually in flux.

—The youngest brother whom they sometimes maliciously nickname
Jatu-PORN now seems to be sad. What could he be thinking at this most
auspicious evening?

—He is thinking of Suthep thinking that these lovers are repugnant.

—And I assume that Suthep is now thinking that he is thinking this.

—Now you understand why these creatures never go anywhere.

—How alone these fickle creatures must be never sure of the acumen of
their own ideas. These ideas seem to change from minute to minute based
upon the chemistry of the food they put into their bodies, their
perceptions of their own failures, the limitations of work and routine,
their hormones, the firing of neurotransmitters left and right, the
pleasures gained in social interaction, memories from the past, the
mood generated from the environment, and the well-being of the body.
How lost they must feel wincing from their forlorn inner selves by
clinging to others around them. Is not one of them self-contained?

—No, my dear, I’m afraid not.

—Your summary is very orgasmic, my husband.

Mosquitoes 1 and 2 changed angles, this time looking into each other’s
left eyes. They were mesmerized in each other’s beings and their wings
flickered from the internal fire of passively intellectualizing life’s
energetic insignificance. Then they looked away from each other and
breathed deeply before once again looking at each other face to face
with less intensity.

—Wouldn’t you say that the older brother, Kazem, possessed a lot of
effrontery to go to the speaker on the brick wall connecting to a gate,
push the button, and talk so glibly? Could a clarification be gained on
how it is that he could have acquired that entrance?

—It could. Such an individual gained entrance by stating that his
mother, prior to her death, had prepared a gift for her brother-in-law
in celebration of the Songkran Thai New Year’s festival

—And what gift did he present to the man as they drank tea and coffee?

—He presented to the man a Buddhist necklace his mother had given to
his father.

—And the politician took it?

—Not immediately. He of course resisted; but Kazem argued persuasively
that it had been intended for him. It looked new, although the
politician wasn’t under much of an illusion that it was. Still, in case
it was a gift from the dead, he couldn’t really refuse it. That would
have hurt the brothers and the memory of the woman.

—And as the brothers drink beer together, do the younger ones notice
that this somewhat expensive trinket that Kazem had heretofore claimed
as his own and had worn around his neck is now missing.

—The more perceptive one called Jatupon notices this and infers that he
really did give a gift to the senator and it was probably the necklace.

—They do play their games of trying to affect future outcomes. They’d
be better being as insentient as cows. The youngest should drink his
beer and be happy to be with the big boys engaging in the naughtiness
of illegal alcohol consumption. Instead he seems worried.

—He’ll be returning like a bound slave. The noodles will bind him once
again when the equipment needed for the sidewalk restaurant is
purchased. He feels that he did not take advantage of the brevity of
freedom.

—To do what?

—He doesn’t know either. Even more troubling, he is also assessing that
his brothers are growing up. He wonders if they will soon desert this
first family. He wonders if for the pleasure of women they’ll jettison
the earlier notion of family as insignificant, weighty, and likely to
cause them to sink. He wonders if they will cast it out like a bad
dream that they want to forget. He knows that they are biologically
driven by hungers like a mouse cognizant of the trap but eating the
cheese anyway.

—-What would he do as a cast away?

—Well, there are ways of survival. One can be out there selling his
body one moment and then find his head shaved and a robe on what had
been out there as a marketable commodity.

—Such a transformation from prostitute to a monk really occurs?

—Indeed, it does. When the goals of money don’t arise well from
prostitution, being a monk is a position that commands respect and an
escape from destitution. It has a morose facade but in such a somber
demeanor like that of Jatupon it has its own splendor

—What splendor can be had in such a pointless and austere profession?

—Well for one, a given monk might put on some military clothes and go
off to the local masseuse for a Thai massage of the most dissolute
dimensions. It is an easy thing for a young monk to do: just take the
expense for the whore out of the monastery coffer

—When Buddha was born in Lumpini Park in Nepal was it so that men might
engage in the recidivism of their animalistic natures?

—All you need to do to answer that question is see the types of whores
parading themselves in Lumpini Park in Bangkok, Thailand not to mention
the male prostitutes waiting for money and sexual experiences in the
shadows of the trees. Everything changes. Good men are distorted into
Gods, and philosophy is made into a sordid religion. Buddhism,
Christianity, Islam, Hinduism-it is all a perversion of the founder’s
ideas.

—How do you know these things?

—What things?

—About the meeting with the senator

—How do I know about the meeting with the senator?

—Yes, how do you know this?

—How do I know this? mumbled the mosquito confoundedly.-They are in
Jatupon’s head.

—And how does he know them?

—How does he know them? Because of the night when they were drinking
together...the night of the fair...were you sleeping when I was talking
to you?

—No, I heard you earlier. So it came from Kazem’s mouth and Jatupon’s
conjectures. Those doesn’t seem like reliable sources.

—What?

—Those don’t seem like reliable sources. The two mosquitoes stared at
each other nihilistically. There was silence.




Chapter 7


Childlike, Jatupon had assumed that togetherness, firecrackers,
celebration, and the proud moment of that manly initiation of cold beer
(not that it was his first) to be the ending of negative events. The
day had resurrected him the way Kazem had once pulled him out of the
lake on the outskirts of the city, Kanjanaburi. He was wading then in
gradually deepening waters when the sludge beneath his feet suddenly
dipped and he was thrust off the precipice into a watery abyss. He was
just a boy then but one who owed his life to his brother. When he was
older and they had returned to Kanjanaburi on a two-hour train ride,
Kazem refused to allow him in stagnant waters. This was fortunate since
a few days later two people died from a protozoan infection. Kazem had
saved his life in both occasions and delivered his spirit on this one.
He had never deserted him. Unlike Kumpee who despised work, Kazem could
have gotten a slave labor position by signing an employment contract
for construction work where he would have found himself assigned to one
of such places as Taipei or Abu Dhabi. A few years there would have
added a solid savings that he could have used for vocational training
that would have broadened his opportunities. Broadened opportunities
and a bit of a savings beneath him would have provided a chance of
luring a woman who wasn’t a noodle worker. Instead, while knowing
escape was an option, he fulfilled his high shepherdly calling.

As he entered the basement cell that they lived in, Jatupon couldn’t
remember a time more linked in fraternity than this one except for the
memories of early boyhood. Boyhood was summarized in that one
photograph Kazem had salvaged out of a box of pictures that were thrown
out with so much from the move. It was a photograph that prompted a
solid memory (imagined or real). It was of the four boys. Jatupon,
three years old and fully nude, trailed behind. Kumpee led the way.
Kumpee had on a cap with the visor inverted to the back of his head.
The four of them were walking down a sidewalk that went along the
canal. Immediately to their left and across the canal were row houses
of tiny wooden cabin shacks with metal roofs that housed residents and
their scavenging businesses. The four of them were going to purchase
some candy.

—They are copulating?

—Yes, and he has just awakened from the brother’s penetration of him on
the basement floor. The belief that the world has been resurrected in
pure and gentle intentions has been thwarted. His brain waves are still
discombobulated from the liquor and none of what he is presently
experiencing seems real. It is though. Innocence has been disgorged
like a squeezed tube of love oil in a ride more painfully and
physically intimate than any intimacy he has yet experienced.

His head was spinning and he couldn’t grab himself in all of the
spinning images: sounds, smells, and visions all spun randomly. Finally
there was a bit of a shape and texture to his thinking and he dressed
himself. He wanted to use the wave of consciousness to exit.

—My dear, pain and pleasure have become inseparable in his young mind.
In this act a few minutes ago-maybe a few hours ago—there was a
yearning for this violation. The abuse was aggravated by too much
alcohol consumption but it wasn’t entirely unwanted. Being a creature
of habit and addiction, Jatupon yearned for his brother-only his
brother-since he vaguely felt that sexual experiences with two people
are totally unique and the physiological and emotional feelings his
brother induced could not be duplicated by any other person. The
madness of wishing to be overtaken, however, was confuted by painful
sodomized lances and an ejaculation of the one who did his stress
workout within him. In other experiences like this one Jatuporn, as
they call him, always masturbated to allow the desire to peel back like
a tide but this time his highest hopes were limp like a noodle. He is
opening the door. He is glancing at himself to make sure that he isn’t
wearing his underwear outside of his pants. Now he is outside as
insentient as a fleeing animal after it has been attacked. Here he is
feeling better in the open air. He is returning.

Jatupon reentered the room. For the first time, since awakening, he
noticed that Suthep had not returned. He had not come “home”-whatever
that word meant. Jatupon scavenged the pockets of his brother’s pants
that were wadded in the corner near Kazem’s sleeping head. In it was
money and a sheet of paper. He put it all in his pockets. He got on the
first bus he could and paid the ticket salesman. The idea crossed his
mind that being a coin collector on a city bus was not anyone’s best
choice. It would be much better to be one of the few men who jumped
onto the piers or docks to tie the city boats. Such a Bangkok
Metropolitan Authority would give three brief whistles so the boat
driver would give a backward thrust as he tied it down for the
customers to enter or depart. He could picture himself whistling once,
untying the boat he was assigned to, and jumping onboard at the last
possible second. The second mosquito spread out its wings and copiously
fluttered them about femininely. Jatupon began to be a little conscious
of himself as a man coming out of anesthesia.

—But the instinct of a man is to fight off predators. Is Jatupon never
tempted to take a knife and slit his brother’s throat?

—No, not for the most part, my dear. He loves his brother; and in some
ways there is intense intimacy and pleasure involved in the novel act
that he would hardly rid himself of despite the pain and humiliation
that is involved. I explained that earlier. Were you sleeping when we
discussed this issue?

There was nothing. There was movement while he sat in a city bus.

All elements had burst out of the Big bang. All things (even ideas)
were conceived violently in movement. And so he moved, switching to
busses only when the former ones parked and all passengers had to
leave. He did not know where he was. He didn’t care. In one bus ride he
suddenly became sentient to the feel of stiff paper in one of his
pockets. He pulled it out and looked. It was his uncle’s name and
address. That was no surprise. The bus was stalled in traffic. Riders
of busses who were near their destination began oozing out of them like
leaking oil. He realized that he was on a bus going on a street that he
had traveled on earlier in the day.

“Ajarn, Do you know what street this is?” he asked a monk.

“Sukumvit” the monk said.

“Which soi are we passing?” asked Jatupon.

“Forties or fifties” said the monk. “I really don’t know.”

Jatupon looked at the sheet of paper. It read, soi 51 Sukumvit Road. He
got out and ten minutes later he was standing at the wall of the
opulent mansion that Kazem had stood at. He didn’t stay long. He needed
to go to the bathroom. He didn’t want to wet his pants and he didn’t
think that being a distant relative with a hangover and urine
splattered pants would be very impressive to the senator. In a bathroom
at a KFC he looked at his face. It was of a dark Laotian or Khmer. He
was from a family with the last name of Biadklang from the North. His
face was as dark as the soil. He looked into the mirror. Just with the
amount of light, darkness, or expression one appeared like a totally
different person from one moment to the next.

“Where do you want to go?” he asked the reflection in the mirror.

“To Sanam Luang to see more of the kites” the reflection said.

On the bus ride to Sanam Luang he had to stand. He noticed the other
people. They were also wistfully discontent for their own personal
reasons. They wished to sit down when the space was congested and there
was nowhere to sit; and in times of sitting they yearned to have vacant
seats next to their own so that they would be free from having to sit
next to strangers and could have a little area of their own to
monopolize. They were all so petty and he told himself that he did not
want to be like that.

At Sanam Luang he bought a kite from a mendicant kite salesman. Feeling
chagrin that the forlorn child within him had taken over his thoughts
instead of the man, he flew his kite in a more obscure area. He was
somewhat relieved to find an innocent pleasure to engage in. A half
hour later the child diluted into his manhood and there he was in full
embarrassment of himself. So he reeled in the kite and sat down on a
park bench. A sidewalk salesman smiled at him.

On a rug this mendicant had six-inch motorcycles crafted from bamboo.
Nobody knew the art of a smile like the people in the Land of Smiles.
Toothless as babes they contrived smiles with the curl that has
distinguished a smile from a bite with a full opening of the mouth.
Thai infants and toddlers knew. They intuitively knew that with enough
naughty actions a toss into the trashcan was not inconceivable. They
intuitively knew big sister would be sold off to a man when she turned
14 and the fetus that was little brother or sister had been forced out
by deliberately rowdy sexual liaisons, making his or her exit no
different than menstruation. With enough shaking of the can of soda pop
all beings disgorged the same when the tab was opened. Thai babies
knew. They had their instinct to smile because of the cellular
replication planned by the DNA architect who made all Thai babies the
same as an American subdivision. How gullible was a human to the wish
of being struck down with pleasant feelings. When a mendicant salesman
with teeth sparkled them from his tanned face even an impoverished Thai
couldn’t resist the inclination to buy. It was the congenial feeling
more than the product itself that a consumer wished to gain. Consumers
bought to get a fuzzy feeling and forget the hostile 9 to 5 working
world (9 to 9 Thai time). How manipulative were the benevolent lies of
Thais in the business of survival. Jatupon bought one of those
purposeless products. He argued to himself that he could put it on a
shelf-that is, if he had a shelf to put it on.

On the bench he pulled out of his book bag the Lao classic, “Thao Nok
Kaba Phuak which in English meant “The White Nightjar.” The back cover
said that it depicted the second queen consort’s birth of a bird and
her exile from the kingdom. The preface stated that both Laotian queens
had prayed that life be recycled in their wombs but only the youngest
became pregnant. At the consort’s request, the oldest queen blindfolded
her when the labor pains ensued. She solicited the help of the court
magician in particular to take advantage of the younger queen’s
squeamishness over the sight of blood by using the time to switch the
baby for that of a bird. When the child was replaced the soothsayer
could then deceive the king by making him believe that the younger
consort had had sexual relations with a foul bird months earlier. This
was not needed since the consort actually begot a bird. Jatupon stopped
reading the preface. It was spoiling the book. He began to read the
first chapter. “I, who have composed this narrative fled far away just
like the little one for I, your servant, sleep alone; I am very lonely,
in my bedroom, with my arms dangling empty. It is destiny that keeps me
away and prevents me from embracing my beloved. I am here, without my
younger one, since I left my home to go among the Thais where I have no
friends...” Jatupon thought about his basic nature. He had lived for 14
years in Thailand but still he did not feel particularly Thai. He
wished that he had been born in some other place like America with a
nice American family. As he was falling asleep he heard the
counterparts:

—What will happen to him on that bench?

—I can’t imagine anything good happening from it. He could apply for a
job but instead he plays with his kite and sits on the bench. He wants
to be an aristocrat.

—You don’t say.

—Yes, it is true. He thinks that all whores, laborers, and
professionals are slaves. He thinks that they all have petty lives.

—How would he gain such conclusions?

—Partly from me. Partly from the amphetamine-poppers under the
overpass. Partly from his own original thoughts. I am surprised to see
that he is half way intelligent.

—There isn’t much chance of him being an aristocrat.

—No, none. He will soon be accosted.

—By whom?

—By a man desiring to have sex with him.

—Explain this approach.

—The same as any other I presume: hello, hello, how are you, I’m fine
and how are you. The man will be thinking to himself, while engaging in
small talk, that he’ll put twenty dollars into Jatupon’s underwear when
they are alone in his apartment. He will not have any doubts about
being able to buy him.

—Just for the feel of human flesh?

—For a human that feel is indispensable. They are gadabouts and they
expend themselves in motion as a defense mechanism by which to avoid
their own thoughts. It is the same for feeling the silk of other skin.

It breaks them from isolation. They find their thoughts such a prison.

He and Porn had an American style apartment. She was content with it
for a few days and then became discontent with the furniture. The
chairs and the sofas, despite their padding, were still wicker and
stiff. He knew that having the landlord take away the furnishings and
using his credit cards fully for the purchase of her wishes would not
ameliorate the discontent that all beings had and few could rein in.

He had met her and her mommy on the bleachers of the stadium on
Ramkhamhaeng Road while sketching out a field and trees and yet still
Nawin felt that she did not know who he was. He went to classes in the
morning and from late afternoon he was busy painting. He couldn’t
understand how she thought that he should just conjure up images
instantaneously with his brush, spend money, and take her places.

He kept avoiding the issue of taking her across the border. She had a
student visa since she was technically enrolled in a language school
(although she rarely attended) so it wasn’t in fear of her visa status
that made him want to avoid the issue of the border. He had his
American passport and yet he still had never spent a day there. He told
himself that he should. And yet it continued to seem to him like such a
dreadful place.

He told himself that it had been a mistake to bring her here. He hadn’t
known how far the campus was from the city. In part he chose the
location with Noppawan and Porn in mind. Still, it was a mistake and he
knew it all along. In Thailand she had seemed so excitable. She was a
gadabout and she always made friends out of strangers from adjacent
tables in restaurants they frequented. She had seemed so open to the
world. Now she seemed like such a Victorian whore, jumping around in
motion but prudishly obdurate to change within. She was
conventional-this Victorian whore of his. Like virtually everyone else,
she was part of the big band and the universe of movement fully
cognizant that the most popular and sexy people were the ones who could
twist and turn with universal movement.

He was the oddity. This Nawin, the romancer of whores, was all for
show. Deep inside was not impetuousness but paralysis. This artistic
brooding was not part of the natural course of events and who was he to
chastise her normalcy. He just smiled and evaded her wishes.




Chapter 8


A little disparate to the poem, Thao Nok Kaba Phuak, he dreamt he was a
black version of a nightjar cradled by the Laotian queen whose pigment
was as light as a northern Chinese woman. He suckled at her nipple with
the violence of his beak as she scavenged for dew to appease the
parched walls of her throat and berries that would provide her with
fortitude against failing strength. Her breast bled from his appetites.
She grappled with waning confidence that she would find a way out of
the labyrinth of trees that overtook her. She wanted to kill this
disgusting child that by its birth had usurped her of status and had
prompted her exile from the kingdom. This feeling embroiled her psyche
but feelings did not thwart her motherly instincts for the strange
creature that she named Jatuporn.

Then, immediately in front of the park bench there was a woman before
him who carried two heavy buckets of ice and drinks. Startled to an
awakened state by the woman asking if he wanted anything to drink, at
first he gave a negative answer, “Mashai” but then he changed it into a
formal feminine ending, “Ka” which could mean “yes.” How absurd he must
have seemed to this woman speaking like herself instead of using the
masculine word, “krub” or the neuter yes-word, “chai,” but at the time,
he had thought of himself as a bird when he spoke and so there had not
been any gender confusion whatsoever. He paid the woman for a bottle of
water. Then a man with his stinking body holding a bag with little bags
inside came to his bench. Jatupon bought two of his bags and began
strewing the ground a few feet from the bench with the dust of
crackers, breadcrumbs, and corn.

He did this slowly while trying to solve his indecisiveness on whether
to stay or go home. The thought of suicide seemed to him even more
repellent than the two major options but it was a tiebreaker he wasn’t
going to reject absolutely. He had a pocketknife. He thought to himself
that when night came upon him he could find an obscure area of a tree’s
shadow in complete darkness away from the gas lamps and slit his
throat. He looked down. Pigeons were beginning to come to him and eat
what he had allotted to them. He liked giving to ostensibly small and
insignificant creatures. When the bags were empty he saved himself by
his impetuousness and returned on bus #203. He dangled from the steps
because of the lack of space provided to him. Standing there on the
precipice of the step he looked in the bus at the crowded Siamese
passengers. At moments this mosaic fusing of contortionist-bodies
seemed as a mass of amorphous human flesh, a multi-head, body, and limb
monster, which choked air and breath from the bus and, worse, had the
outline of Kazem. Bus
#203 zoomed along the river and then over the bridge of the Chao Phraya
#River.
The cool breezes slapped hard against his flesh. He felt like the
15-year-old nightjar that took its first flight from home, strutting
its bird-body independently and finding itself watched attentively by
the princess, the older queen’s daughter—only in his case he was
homeward bound and no one was watching him. Matter of fact, he thought,
if he were to slit his throat his body might after some hours just be
kicked off into a corner of refuse somewhere to rot.

When he arrived in the basement cell no one was there. He sat down in
front of a strange box. His kneecaps never splayed in the normal
outward direction of crossed legs. Moreover, attempted prayer and
television trances in imitation of the usual posture had always brought
to him extreme pain making many people over the years perceive him as
someone who was both anti-religious and, worse, counter pop-cultural.
Kazem and Suthep had vehemently criticized the shoddy construction of
his kneecaps. Kazem had always been pleasantly indifferent to this
subject. As always, all he could master before the box of chocolate was
an irregular sitting posture that looked like the letter M or W
depending on the perspective; and most likely, and most comfortably for
him, the letter N as in Nawin. It was indeed a strange sight: the
letter “N” in front of a small box of Russell Stover chocolate candies
with the parent company of Kansas City, Missouri, USA on the label.
Inside, more than half of the chocolates still remained. He helped
himself, almost feeling like an American spreading out relaxingly over
the world with Thailand and other countries as his footstool, carefree
and gormandizing chocolate down his gullet. He almost felt that nothing
bad could ever happen to him again. And then he remembered being six
years old standing with another dirty boy in front of the Dunkin
Doughnut shop near a mall in Ayutthaya looking through the glass window
that was a partition between them and the customers who were inside.
Even more, it was a partition between feeling hungry and dirty to the
immaculate ones consuming their doughnuts within. He made funny faces
and danced in front of the window where a young man and woman sat at a
counter looking onto the commotion and air pollution of Bangkok. He
pretended to kiss the woman through the glass. She laughed and he
kissed her more. Then as the man was putting his doughnut into his
mouth, Jatupon opened his own mouth widely as if, through the glass, to
rip it out of the man’s teeth with his partially rotten fangs. The
couple laughed and the man motioned them inside. They ran in and were
given doughnuts. Like then, sweets had an antithesis of meanings for
him. They made him feel as one of the elite, carefree and happy and yet
at the same time reminded him of the disparity to which he was one of
the largest masses—that being the underclass.

Half an hour later, from his gluttony, the box was empty. He drank some
bottled water and fell asleep to more images of Laotian queens walking
through cocoa fields with their little black birds. When Kazem came
home with more shopping bags and saw the symbol of a more auspicious
life that he wished to share with his brothers totally devoured by one
alone, he wanted to vituperate him if not slap him around a few times.
He restrained himself since, for other reasons, he did not want him to
again run away. He saw that Suthep was not in the room for whatever
reason and this absence triggered in him a desire to molest the
youngest. It would be a punishing pleasure, a desperate hegira from
one’s solitary domain to brief moments of coupling, banging onto empty
walls, the release of stress, and the intimacy of “love”. And yet he
again restrained himself by comparing it to the gloom after
masturbation. To Kazem, a boy shoved off into manhood, sex with Jatupon
was an innocuous pleasure like some marijuana or a brief roller coaster
ride but the gloom was of being a puppet of wanton desire for something
that was far from his ultimate wish. And gloom for a man of little
self-respect was deleterious. It was fine for the brain to forfeit
logical restraint for that relaxation of fleeting pleasure that
couldn’t be sustained or for one to use whatever was before him, but
someday he wanted a wife as much as he now wanted to think that he was
living up to his ideal of the fraternal benefactor. He didn’t want his
whole life obsessed by the inconsequential pleasures of his night
sports.

Kazem disheveled Jatupon’s hair with his fingers and slapped him on the
head.

“Where the hell were you all day, you bum?” he asked. “You thought we’d
start work again so you took off.” He laughed and sat down on the sole
wooden chair that was the furniture of the apartment.

“I don’t want to talk to you,” Jatupon said.

“I bought you both some clothes. I don’t know if any of it will fit
since neither one of you came with me. Also, I had to see a movie all
by myself. Suthep could have had some type of a tom yam tasting
popcorn. They called it Mexican.”

“Why didn’t you get a girlfriend and bring her with you? Isn’t that
what they are supposed to do: go with you shopping and to movies?”
Jatupon sneered.

Kazem felt an icy sword in his heart. “I wish I could take these
clothes back. Neither of you deserve anything.”

“Why don’t you get a girlfriend and leave me the hell alone,” continued
Jatupon as he turned over on his side and glared at him.

Kazem lit a cigarette, smoked, and blew it into his brother’s face.
“Because you love it too much.” He paused. “You’re right about me
getting a girlfriend. I should get a nice Chinawoman like your brother
Kumpee and then run off with her leaving the two of you to eat worms
from the sidewalk. What a good idea, Jatuporn.”

Jatupon turned away from him and feigned sleep.

Sometimes he hated all of them—they who had made a funny vulgarity of
his name; Kazem, the creator of the nickname, who solved his stress by
physically accosting him; Kumpee who always flayed and flouted him at
every chance; and Suthep who treated him with the blades of
indifference (the worst of all weapons). He vehemently hated them
sometimes and yet—

He imagined the mosquito speaking to him. “And yet you’ll gain the
antibodies of hard, fortified indifference from the illness of hate. It
isn’t so bad. It is a practical emotion that has been demonized as of
late by Buddhist and Christian practitioners although thoroughly
embraced by the Jewish, Moslem, and Hindu world. I’d think it over
carefully before exorcizing myself of it. It is just one more darkly
pragmatic aspect of life as needed imperatively as microorganisms are
needed to lunch on the deceased.”

“I don’t want dark things. I don’t want to hate them. Tell me what to
do so that I won’t hate them.”

“Hmm...You are such an idealist. Well, Suthep couldn’t care less about
you except when he cares to sting you with not caring but he is the one
who taught you to play football and takraw, and although Kazem violates
you repugnantly in painful tactile thrashings much worse than Kumpee’s
socks and sneakers ever did to your olfactory nerves he is the one who
saved you from drowning and being beaten to a pulp by your father. Also
he probably does genuinely care about family despite his bombastic
proclamations of now being the eldest brother. He is the one who
stifled the sadistic belittling of you that would have pulverized your
self-esteem to dust had the father and eldest son been left to inveigh
against you incessantly. When you are financially free and independent
you can kill off all three of them from the present and remember the
children they were. Then, you won’t hate them any longer. Maybe then
you will even feel love but you will have to kill them off first.”

If only good things beget good things and bad things beget bad things
then, thought Jatupon, there would be divine order. Then, the invisible
presence of God or the forces that be would not matter. Dead or bored
as God might be, still the laws of the land would have been laid out
like that of a deceased founder of a company. The principles of
Buddhism would be in place and operative. But such was not the case.
Kazem was not a devil and he, Jatupon, was not a saint. He loved having
Kazem’s tongue enter his anus prior to his entrance. This “priming up”
was a pleasure that he was addicted to have. Wasn’t his resentment of
his brother this evening more from the fact that such pleasure had not
been given to him throughout the day? Wouldn’t it have been lovely if
he had been made into a sexual slave 24 hours a day, totally free from
logic? Somehow, he felt that the mosquito would agree on this point.

The politician, judging aptly that a deposit of 20,000 baht would be
like asking a pack of dogs to put the chicken in the refrigerator, had
one of his aides escort the boys to Chatochok Market which had almost
everything for their business (woks, burners, gas canisters, ice
coolers, utensils, glass vegetable shelves, carts, oil, noodles,
cabbages, bean sprouts, tomatoes, meat, cucumbers, and rice). It was
one of the world’s largest outdoor markets and Thais always gloated
that everything in the world could be obtained there. The purchases
were made in double since the senator believed that they needed more
than one joint livelihood and a hungry pack with meager resources
forced into the same struggle for sustenance would foster acrimony. He
hadn’t exactly thought that they would be jumping onto the same prey
viciously. He didn’t really have many thoughts about it. He hadn’t
given this issue, or them, much thought apart from how to best unite
and part benevolently within the space of a week if not sooner. This
was just his assessment of males in general. He saw males in action on
a daily basis in their debates on various bills. These were rich men
and yet their lust for sinking their teeth into prey was great.

He did care up to a point. He felt that he had aggrieved them by not
attending their parents’ funeral. He hadn’t wanted the discomfort that
his ex-wife would feel standing beside him again. Being human, he
hadn’t wanted it for himself. It would have made him feel uncomfortable
and more out of place being there. It hadn’t occurred to him, then,
that she wouldn’t attend. Furthermore, from what little he believed in
Kazem’s answers to his questions, he felt that he should have protected
these three from having their parents’ assets sucked up into some
unrevealed bank account. They had been clinging onto the idea that
ultimately Kumpee would act the part of the oldest brother. They had
watched him go away without accountability and did this with hardly a
whimper. The senator could have taken it upon himself to hire an
auctioneer and then could have put the money into his own account. He
would have given out the money when wisely warranted. He hadn’t acted
responsibly and he regretted it.

Jatupon stood by, inert and despondent, as these purchases so abstract
and foreign to his hopes were loaded off onto a mover’s truck. Despite
his wish to survive being fulfilled, it was the aristocratic life he
yearned for. Only leisure was life. A laborer was just movement and
reflexes. A laborer did not run barefoot through the weeds and allow
the smells to be one with him, transfer the beauty to a complex style
on canvas when the beauty passed through his complicated mind, or
attempt to understand why the pollen attacked him like a sickness. He
wanted someone to grant him the honors of placing him in an orange
robe, which he felt he was entitled to have—that special robe not of
monks but of the type that surely belonged to aristocrats. He wanted
leisure to see the rhapsody of every small movement under the lambency
of both sun and moon. He wanted to meditate on coruscating city life as
the Buddha of Bangkok. He wanted to be free of the noodles that were
winding about him tightly and to grasp the leisure that should be his
and no doubt was his in an earlier life. Poverty ravaged the mind in
desperate acts—the mind ached in one continual groan for something
within or without that might be sold. No appreciation of the present
moment could be had in such a state. He wanted to know the splendor of
the veins of each distinct leaf towering over him. Still it had been
determined by the powers that be that he would float between the
businesses of the two brothers who would have their separate
livelihoods in different parts of the city.

Still, there was something to be gained in being so lost from memory
and he was inured to being forgotten. The baby of the family that he
was, he had been pulled out of a cranky woman tired of having children
and responsibilities. Nursed and taken care of like any child, still as
the years passed he often felt guilty for being his mother’s burden and
his attempt at being his mother’s little helper did not engender her
appreciation. Forgotten again this time, he would nonetheless be the
instrument that fused the two carts into a family business and he could
get along with both all right, he supposed. He didn’t think that his
brothers were so different than himself: like him, they would work hard
and feel themselves, at times, strangled in noodles. Suthep would be
seeking an alternative being in video games, snookers, Thai boxing
matches, and movement; and Kazem would seek his being through sickening
carnal releases on his brother the result of an imagination that could
make Jatupon into one rapturous whore or another, and a propensity to
always take things apart, beat on them, and put them back together. For
Jatupon, his escape came in his ride of feeling in love (tame as it was
for new love), comic heroes that pulled him into more noble pursuits,
and dreams of an aristocratic life.

There was a garbled mass of half-remembered faces that gnarled Nawin’s
thoughts when he woke up one morning. No different than noodle workers
toward customers buoying in their brains at the end of the night, he
had to let these myriad faces-most of whom he had encountered in high
school and at the universities he had attended -to gradually subside
into forgetfulness. He sat up in bed and rubbed his forehead. His mind
felt like one whose shoes were trapped in the coils of fallen barbed
wire. He looked at Porn, this woman with whom he had mentally signed a
contract to serve her needs and she his. Her hair billowed against her
pillow like feathers. He thought to himself that she, being a
prostitute, and he actually establishing a relationship with one, were
so different from all other human beings. Maybe they were surviving
hominids. They were definitely a divergent species of animal.

He thought about Songkran Festivals. All of his grandparents were
deceased early into his boyhood. In his family there was no tradition
of each relative taking bowls of water and cleansing the hands of the
older family members and this tradition of offering good luck for the
New Year, respect, and deference had never really embedded itself into
his mind as a moral duty. He had never been Thai. Circumstances had
made him into a hominid. He wondered pityingly about the circumstances
that had maimed and freed her. He stared at her face with great pain
and pathos. Tears weltered in the corners of his eyes. He did not know
what to do with this feeling so he buried it and made love to her.

She took him in her mouth. The quicker and deeper she went the more
pleasurable it was. Little did he care if she choked on it. When he was
ready to ejaculate he pressed her head so that he could penetrate more
deeply. His body had its cellular knowledge that a quick thrusting and
a deep penetration would be more pleasurably exciting and the
excitement and especially the depth of the penis in the vaginal opening
would cause the male to ejaculate more semen that had a greater chance
of impregnating a female. Such was the primitive making. When his
savage frenzy had ended he knew the extent of his own selfishness and
was relieved to be exorcized of it. He felt a humane sensitivity
descend on him. He knew that of all the selfish and negative energies
that influenced his thoughts, they were, for the most part, not him.
With the exception of times of sexual frenzy, he was able to find a
deep and benign part of his nature and knew it to be the true Nawin,
the artist who drew the oppressed and had sensitivity to the pains of
others, the one who wanted to enrich Porn and all he knew intimately in
truth and beauty.

Perpetually the same, those of leisure yearned each year for the
halting of time and, in dissatisfaction gained from comparing
themselves to others more youthful, yearned for a return to earlier
times of higher pleasures. But it was the laboring classes who
continued to labor in insentience without reflection. They cooked their
rice and noodles ceaselessly. They clung to their jobs like tiny,
sedentary, clinging salamanders to windows during a storm. They found
their beings (their minds and the feelings that would be refined into
thought within them) lost to the reflexes of the day. Months blew away
like empty bags skidding on the pavements. Evanescent and mutable to
their ultimate end, their lives passed by blandly in dizzying headaches
caused by the sun of the weatherless country during the dry season.
When the rainy season set in there was the discomfort of leaking and
wind-swept canopies, the lack of customers, and being drenched by the
rain; but these issues were minimized by the fact that varied weather
made each of the days more memorable. The brothers, transplanted into
Bangkok with a livelihood, continued on as if in Ayutthaya. Memory of
the uncle’s unfulfilled promise of a dinner had worn away like the
memory of their parents or the abandonment of Kumpee.

At first Suthep strutted around in his independence like a dominant
rooster but as the months went by the independence underwent the
metamorphosis to loneliness and by 1 a.m. of each early morning, an
hour or two after Jatupon would leave him, Suthep would often feel the
chill of adulthood. One late night/early morning as the smoke of
charbroiled fish and the steam of rice, noodles, and pork soup rose up
the sweat-profuseness of his face and into his hairnet, he watched a
girl giggle and slurp up her noodles with her boyfriend. He imagined
all traffic on the streets and sidewalk gone and that there was just
the three of them. He imagined those customers leaving unhappily. Then,
as they were beginning to walk together, there was a dispute that
intensified to the point where he attacked her. He imagined him
dragging her by the hair, slapping her down, and denuding her. Suthep
imagined himself walking over toward them and watching their canine
copulation for a period of minutes. Then an idea possessed him and he
started up his motorcycle and circled the couple, eventually chasing
off the body that had been forcing itself into her. He imagined himself
helping the trembling body of the female dress. He didn’t want to cover
her but he did it to comfort her so as to gain her confidence to obtain
a new round of banging that would involve himself and would last longer
than if he were to force another encounter on her now. Pleasures that
had the potential of being perpetual were always the best. He imagined
that he learned about her life with contrived sensitivity and with time
secured himself as the being whom she yearned for.

Then the happy couple was again a reality and he was standing alone in
front of his cart. There they were at the table slurping their noodles
joyfully. Adulthood was the maturity to relinquish the rebellion
against society for relegating one to his petty station in life bereft
of the pleasures he sees around him. Being wise was realizing that most
of such pleasures were neither good nor beneficial. Although Suthep was
an adult, he was a bitter man and he bit his lip in the thought of all
the pleasures that were out there waiting for so many others and not
for him. He resented being such a lowly clod. After the couple paid for
the meal and left he sat at their empty table and looked out across the
cars that veered near a discoth�que until at last he fell asleep. For a
moment or two of REM he dreamed of his youngest brother dangling by
some friend from an open window of an appliance warehouse only to have
his shoe slip off in the friend’s hand and the body unwillingly
succumbing to gravity with his force tripping off the alarm. But unlike
what really happened two years ago to Jatupon and a teenager once they
extricated themselves and arrived in the big city on a bus, he, Suthep,
was the friend and when the shoe slipped off he laughed and ran. He
woke up, shook off his sleep, and then began washing his dishes in big
plastic bowls. He felt a loneliness eat up on him. Each evening it
seemed to be exacerbated.

The next evening he was struggling in ambivalence on continuing to work
or closing early. Feeling forlorn and lonely, and yet needing to talk
to Kazem about a decision he had made, he chose the latter. And when he
arrived near Kazem’s cart with a hairnet still on his head Kazem’s
countenance was at first chiding.

“You couldn’t have lost your shirt already,” he said.

Suthep took off his shirt, wadded it into a ball, and threw it at
Kazem. Kazem wadded it up and threw it back. Soon the three, in
hairnets, were Thai boxing and laughing with each other. The few
customers they had were ignored. It was dereliction of responsibility.
It was a hiatus. It was bantering. It was enjoyment of each other. It
was a bit of love followed by the sharing of duties.

On that fine evening of gentility Jatupon was able to leave earlier
than usual. While the oth

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