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.