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.