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 other two brothers washed dishes, wheeled away
the cart to a parking lot, chained it up to a fence, and took supplies
they couldn’t lock up into and under the cart back to the apartment,
Jatupon went to Sanam Luang. Once there, he walked on the long cobbled
oval track; interweaved aimlessly around trees and pedestrians; and
watched the wind animate a bag with absolute breath and power. The
wild, breathing plastic, reminded him of being—the putative lightning
that struck the ocean and caused the crystallization of elements.
Six adroit teenagers playing a game of takraw were in a crescent
position like the broken face of the moon. They hit a bamboo ball back
and forth with their feet and heads in a motion that depicted
continuum. Perhaps they needed to believe in the continuum of action
and being (the random balls of matter that they were). Inside the
stadium-shaped park were homeless families lying on their thin sheets
of rectangular bamboo mats and towels. Above the center of this
football field of dust he saw a few prolonged kite flyers and their
instruments swishing as mad serpents of the open night skies under gas
lamps.
He felt the lifelessness and perfunctory movements of being a noodle
worker further exorcized from him and became enriched in the freedom of
his own impulses. Still, he told himself that even though he was almost
as poor and homeless as those strewn about him, he should not be out
here to be possibly robbed. It was an inherent defense because, more
than fearing robbery, he knew that he would most likely do anything for
money. Also there was a secondary voice of a cruel conscience that
taunted him for being such easily sold goods even though he had never
really put himself up for sale and had never been bought. As American
as he wanted to be, in Thailand (even Sanam Luang in Bangkok) there was
little chance of being robbed or murdered. He realized that he wasn’t
really worried on that score.
He was the same as the visual images of street life that had come to
him earlier that day: dogs that gnawed through the trash; a man whom he
had seen in the middle of the afternoon holding a tree of hooks
attached to small plastic sandwich bags where water and goldfish
dangled within (how his child cried particularly for the sake of the
fish); strangers pushing against each other in the mad rush to sell
something and improve the lot of their lives; and a blind man who had
screamed a song into a microphone to gain the one baht coins he was
begging for. Like them, he would do almost anything for survival and
the gaining of a better life that would shake in the pockets of his
pants. Life was rained on one like rocks thrown at the emaciated dogs
as they scavenged for their food or listlessly lay in the center of
congested sidewalks.
Like those homeless individuals on their mats, he wanted someone to
look into his eyes and confirm his humanity. He wanted to hear a voice
in the solitude of the night that would give him hope that life was not
entirely random and that he had an importance. He wanted to believe in
illusions. He wanted to believe that the incidents that happened in
one’s life were for a good reason and that they were the iron
scaffolding that built up his life into one monumental edifice which
would go on and on. And yet if his family didn’t care to deceive him
into seeing connections and connectedness in random events and time, no
stranger out there would be benevolent enough to attempt the task. He
was a rotting organism there to be trodden on like any insect. He sat
on a bench and reread the earlier part of his Laotian poem: the queens’
prayers; the youngest queen’s pregnancy; the oldest queen’s plot foiled
by reality stranger than the plot; the birth of the bird; the exile;
the growth as a boy in the shape of a bird; the growing independent
striving of the boy-bird and the longer flights away from home; the
princess who saw the bird and wanted it...
“Who are you?” asked a girl who was around his age. Jatupon felt
nonplused. Beauty and truth were extracted from him. He was forced out
of himself and his reading like a boy who stared at the light so long
that when he walked away from it he fell into a ditch. Stupefied, he
did not say anything to the dark skinned glasses-girl. “I’m Noppawan
Piggy,” she continued. “What are you reading?”
“A poem. It is from Laos.”
“Are you Laotian?”
“Not really. I don’t know what I am.”
“Why wouldn’t you know who you are? If you were born here from a Thai
mother or father you are Thai and if you weren’t you are a foreigner. I
can’t think of anything simpler. By the way, your grammar is awful.
It’s ‘who I am.’ Not ‘what I am.’ Maybe you are Laotian”
“Well, I do. I do know who I am. Maybe I’m just wishing to not know.”
“And you are reading poetry to not know?”
“Yes..I...I know its different,” he said with diffidence, “but I’m
wanting that.”
“You are wanting to become a different person by reading poetry or
poetry will make you someone different? Maybe you are wanting to be
different than other people”
“All of the above. Why is your name Noppawan Piggy?” he asked.
“It is a nickname.”
“Noppawan isn’t really a nickname, is it?”
“No, Piggy is. I got that from watching too much of the Muppets and
Sesame Street when I was a girl.” She laughed.
“People don’t have last names as nicknames-only their first names.”
“Well this person does.”
“Why?”
“Why not? I don’t like my last name.”
“Well, it has to be the same name as your parents.”
“Now you understand why my last name is a nickname. It would be rather
dumb to have two nicknames.”
“I can’t see that I understand at all. And no, I’m not Laotian; and my
Thai grammar is impeccable. I’m not stupid. I am a self-taught
individual.”
“Good for you,” she said. “They are the best kind.”
He slapped the park bench with his hand and moved to a corner so that
she could sit down. She sat there. “So explain your reason for the last
name as the nickname.”
“I thought I did. Well, I’ve chosen to make the last name a nickname
because it is my decision to do so; and foremost, I want to be divorced
from my parents.”
“Children can’t get divorced from their parents, can they?”
“Watch me. “
He chortled. “You are so honest. Most Thais aren’t that way. Sometimes
they act like servants and sycophants and then talk behind those
people’s backs. Sometimes they are scared to say anything at all like
about the kings or anyone higher. You say everything openly even though
you don’t even know me. I’m beginning to think you are the one who is
not Thai. I’ve never met anyone like you.”
“I’m one of a kind,” she said. “I’ve never met a poor boy with an
educated head sitting on a park bench before.”
“I’m one of a kind,” he said.
“I like people who read something different and imagine something
different. I hate people who read comic books and play video games all
of the time or buy lots of things from the malls each day, don’t you?”
There was no answer. He had trouble denouncing these items that seemed
to him so alluring although already his rash flood of feelings
prematurely told him that she was the best thing that had happened to
him while living in Bangkok and he didn’t want to destroy an emerging
friendship with honesty. After all, at present he had no friends.
“Aren’t you going to ask why I’m out here?”
He couldn’t let it be shown that he was feeling scared to speak for
fear of saying something that would make her turn away from him. He
didn’t realize that his vulnerability could be read from his
countenance and the sweat that was beginning to come from his forehead.
“Well, why are you out here so late? Are you a homeless orphan?”
She laughed. “Listen, funny guy, see the pendant on this 14 carrot gold
necklace.”
“Yes, I do. Maybe you should take that off. It would be safer. Put it
in your pocket.”
“Oh,” she said diffidently. She took off the necklace and stuffed it
into a pocket. “Thank you,” she said. She paused and then went on.
“I have parents and they are very rich. I live in a nice home. I’m just
running away from it. I’m running away from them. You have a kind face
but you should wash it more often. I see a pimple.”
“So. I’ve got oily skin. It doesn’t mean I don’t wash it. Now it’s my
turn to give a question to you. Your parents did something that upset
you. You are running. From what?”
“I wish I could slip into your poem.”
“It can’t happen but if you read it you can let the poem slip over you.
That’s better really because that way you don’t slip away at all but
just put on some modern armor. It is like feeling invincible—like
slipping on a soldier’s uniform and strapping on a new gun.”
“I like that idea. That is beautiful. What’s the book about?”
“How a prince born as a hawk changed into a man through love and
atonement. I’ve read it before. Here.” He gave her the book although he
hadn’t completed the poem itself but only the preface.
“You won’t read it again?”
“No.” He lied. He wanted her to like him. He wanted to give her
something so that she would remember him.
“Did you know that my father owns three factories and is a high
official in the government?”
“How would I know that? I just met you.” He felt that it was strange
that someone so dark should have parents who were entrepreneurs and
high government officials. He also felt that it was strange that she
should think that he would know her so deeply. Still, their
conversation seemed to him so uniquely intimate like long established
friends. “Here’s a pen and the book. I want you to write your name and
address on the front cover.”
“Okay.” He took her pen and wrote it there. She took back the book.
“Jatupon Biadklang. No email address?” she asked. He didn’t understand
much about such things. He just said “No” and shrugged it off as if it
lacked importance. In his heart, however, he wanted to ask her
questions about this technological age.
Then the girl said goodbye and went away. He did not understand this
needy feeling suddenly brewing within him that yearned for the presence
of another to stitch his open wounds. He wanted her to come back to him
and he waited there on that bench for an additional hour with that one
thought dominant in his mind and a foolish expectation that she would
come back to converse with him further even though neither of them
really knew the other. Still, when he eventually left, he felt hope in
something within his disappointment that she hadn’t returned. He wasn’t
quite sure what the nature of this hopefulness was. Like lightning
flashing once to which the unaccustomed eye blinks twice it pierced
darkness and restored faith in forces beyond mortal knowledge. Like the
refracting rays of the sun coruscating at 5:00 onto the Chao Phrya
River in round wild and random organisms of light before motor-gondolas
and barges, so he felt that something brief but beautiful had happened
to him and that the residue of it would always stay with him.
Born in boredom and anguish at seeing snow fall while doing her dishes
in front of the kitchen window, delivered meals, disposable plates, and
throw-away silverware of plastic came into being. They had seemed at
first to her the perfect tools to minimize discontent. Then she kept
the drapes shut at all times to keep from seeing the snow. Still it did
not help; and one evening she beat on his locked studio door and
screamed to it that she was going to her language class. She hadn’t
been there but once following her enrollment.
While she went out with the snow and the wind, Nawin still remained
locked away but free in his colors. They flowed in tight brushstrokes
of an earthy tone. They were of French-Canadian mannequins performing
their perfunctory duties of marriage. A summary setting of a banquet
table was under the window. A profuse ochre sunlight poured through the
window permeating the scene at the wedding banquet. The table cast a
shadow that inundated around the feet of the mannequins like a pool
providing the scene with form and volume. However, greatness was in the
details and that he was still lacking. He was listening to Thai news
from his computer. The anchorman said that Moslems and Hindus were
burning houses in one Indian community. Hindus were throwing Moslem
children into bonfires, telling them they would meet their deceased
fathers. His pastel colors began to have a fiery gray bleakness. He
felt great despair. He wondered why in the 3 million years of
Australopithecus through the 100,000 years of his species (if his
species was to some degree related to Australopithecus) humans had not
learned love. They had learned speech and social skills for society to
exist but they hadn’t learned love. He wondered if this word was
totally empty without substance. Maybe it was a make-believe word to
make humans feel better about themselves. He wondered if there was
anything outside of human selfishness.
He had once gotten out of noodles—Noodles stirred in a wok or alive,
like worms, in a vat. Briefly, he had gotten out of his boyhood
assignments of washing bowls in tubs, being the seamstress attaching
jasmine flowers into rosaries from a long, thick needle, selling them
on the streets in the traffic, and then returning to wash more bowls.
There was a time when his aunt had had mercy on him and had come into
his life despite the inauspicious marriage that her sister had made. It
almost seemed like a dream. Hadn’t she first enrolled him in a Bible
School class? Within that class so long ago, from a lost being of
himself, had he not taken a paper image of Christ and varnished it onto
a piece of wood? Then his aunt let him dabble in education and gain the
full thirst on the new taste buds. Neurological responses burgeoned and
bifurcated within him. Now this wooden, shiny-faced Christ or the ashes
of it were somewhere in a colossal garbage heap with so much Kumpee had
coerced them to throw away or sell “to have as savings.” That image of
Christ or the conceptualization of it in his head had not spared either
himself or it from the trash heap. He was, nonetheless, fond of it.
Strangely, Bible school for him had been the initial stage of his
education at the temple school. He wished that he had that plaque to
keep forever. If he were to have that plaque now it might be precious
proof that a young scholar had actually lived.
This part of him was undeniably gone. Gone it was, for he continually
slid out of his skin so fully and naturally even though he was rarely
cognizant that this continual sliding away from himself was taking
place. He was just slumbering as all slumbered. This was life, and
unlike a movie, music did not accompany it’s plotless plodding of time.
The sliding out of his skin happened every minute of his life and yet
there was perhaps some consistency one might isolate as a Jatupon if
one were to imagine such a being when Buddhism stipulated that the self
was nothing but a delusion. Whenever he saw an emaciated dog wadded
into itself like crumbled trash or sprawled out onto the pavement as if
dead he would always say, “poor baby dog.” It was a long embedded
sensitivity that he had developed in Ayuttaya from early boyhood. In
Bangkok where they seemed even more pathetic, the sensitivity was
exacerbated and he repeated this phrase over and over again no
different than when he was six years old. This was surely proof of a
bit of a consistent self. Friends always went away after they learned,
shared, or enjoyed the company of a given person for they needed to
evolve to the next level and forget previous levels. However, one
surely did not lose himself completely. He did not know.
Still he was changing and within the darkness that was subjugating him
into doziness a new embedded consistency was formulating. His mind kept
flitting back to the thought of this girl, Noppawan, and his
imaginative curiosity invented a mansion where she no doubt resided. He
could imagine her governess and feel how contained and alone she might
be within a rigid schedule of private teachers and tutors. He imagined
her accompanied by servants while her continually busy parents remained
remote and detached from her life.
He was as happy to be returning to his sordid smelling cell as that
time when he had returned from the fair. With hairnet as a tail in his
back pocket, his eyes gleamed of hope, and curiosity brewed about
Noppawan. Change also marked the life of Suthep, who was sitting on two
bags of his clothes, latent with the night, when Jatupon approached the
apartment building.
“What are you doing?” he asked. Suthep was smoking near a tree.
“I got an apartment. I’m about ready to leave. I thought I’d tell you
goodbye but maybe get you to help me with a bag if you don’t mind.”
“You’re leaving?” He felt nonplused. His senses tingled and throbbed in
confusion like the onslaught of the mosquito when drugs had conjured
illusions and excavated buried, opaque truths. “If you want to leave
us, why were we all working together earlier today?”
“For old time’s sake. I’m not leaving completely—just from time to time
when I’m tired and want to be able to sleep without having to come all
the way back here.”
“What does Kazem say about this?”
“What he says doesn’t matter. What does it matter what he says?”
“I guess none but I want to know.”
Suthep paused. He wasn’t accustomed to confessions in the confessionals
of tree branches. He sighed and spoke with begrudging reluctance. “
I’ve explained this to him for months. He has told me many times that
he wants me to stay here. He always gets angry whenever I talk about
it. Now I’ve stopped talking and am doing it, aren’t I? No, he does not
want anything to interfere with his notion of what big brothers ought
to do. He acts like he is a lot older than I am. Anyhow, he is
obnoxious: always dropping by my business when he can’t catch me here
pretending to be concerned that I might need something. Most of those
times he was just trying to persuade me that we need some type of joint
savings.” He coughed a deep chronic continuum that shook his body. He
was of an average build but seemed to Jatupon as gaunt and sickly at
such moments. “I laugh at his face each time he does that. I’ve been
there, done that. Kumpee made us saps enough.”
“After Mother and Father’s death we were stunned.”
“Maybe. Maybe or just believing that only bad things would happen which
is probably about right. Anyhow, I’m more or less gone. You both should
be thankful to be rid of me so that you can carry on without being
witnessed.” He laughed. “Go ahead and look innocent and confused.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“About looking innocent and confused?” asked Suthep in a chuckle. He
also wanted to keep the conversation murky.
“About any of it.”
“Good, stay that way. None of us want to know anything-least of all me.
Here, you can help me by taking a bag.” As Jatupon reached for a bag he
uncorked his flatulent gas.
“How disgusting! Are you going to fart all the way up there?”
“Where is your apartment?” asked Jatupon, anxious that the subject be
changed.
“You need to have a doctor check you out with all that farting you do”
said Suthep. He was enjoying Jatupon’s embarrassment. “A fart doctor,”
he said. They both laughed. They began walking down the soi to the main
street. Suthep smoked and coughed. His face cringed and then he spat
out some mucus in front of a 7-11. He buried it with the sole of his
sandal. They began walking again. Jatupon was feeling even more
reluctant to experience change and this reluctance spoke to him in the
scraping shuffle of their talking sandals. Jatupon did not know what
his brother knew and his mouth opened a couple times as if wanting to
ask him. Still, he could not speak such things.
“How much is your rent?” he asked at last as the two of them waited for
a period of minutes for a bus. He was anxious to wedge them out of the
coffins that buried each of them separately into themselves.
Only words and actions were his crowbar.
“Just a thousand” Suthep grumbled. But from there the journey was a
wordless void.
Before they arrived at the smaller cell Suthep bought a couple cartons
of beer from a convenience store and the two of them sank into
themselves within the barren room. Exhaustion stung them and yet both,
wishing to find a chamber of themselves not mandated by work and sleep,
let the liquor and marijuana smoke toss about their beings—beings that
were sprawled on pillows on the tileless wooden floor.
Suthep stared at him so directly for a period of seconds with a face
that looked like his aunt when she had peered out at him from her
glasses. His stare seemed incessant and those eyes burned his face that
blushed from the worry of what the stare and the invitation to visit
here all meant. His aunt’s stare through her glasses had long ago been
like a version of the sanphraphun, the dollhouse of the spirits that
was often placed in front of businesses and residences. At such
sanphraphuns Thais put down plates of food and lit incense that would
carry to the gods their wishes. She had been his guardian spirit in a
sanphraphun of those glasses and yet she had abandoned him. Like the
aunt, Suthep’s eyes were probing. In the smoke of the cannabis he too
seemed like a spirit. Suthep’s gaze attempted to measure the traces of
manhood that were in the youngest brother. They attempted to not be
repulsed by the boy, the victim, that still surfaced. Suthep noticed
that even in the masculine activity of beer drinking Jatupon sipped the
beer in little suctions like the infant to its bottle.
“Go ahead, little man, swallow as much as you can in one gulp.”
“Why?”
“Why not?”
“I’m not so little. We’re nearly the same age and I’m taller than you.”
“Age and height don’t make one big. It is experience, and you are
lacking experience.”
“Lacking experience in what?”
“In what? In everything. In women, in outlook, whatever. You’re a
child.”
“And you dragged me here to tell me that?”
“I didn’t drag you. You are making yourself the victim again.” Suthep
chuckled. Jatupon avowed the truth of this with a smile.
“You make it sound like Mother and Father defended me as the baby boy”
he half joked.
“Well, Kazem took up that role when we were out to beat you senseless.”
“Don’t you ever want to return?”
“Return where?” Jatupon swallowed in larger sips while his head was
like a boat swiftly churning its propellers but going nowhere.
“To what we were. Like when we were able to finally afford a restaurant
and Mom would come with Kumpee in the taxi and they would slide sacks
and boxes of vegetables, rice, and pork that we would put away
enthusiastically; or when we ordered a plastic ball from box tops of
cereal boxes like the one that we spent months getting...the spacey one
with many suction cups...it would stick to about anything when wet;
that one Sonkran where we were in the back of a pickup truck with a
barrel of water for ammunition, aiming at every moving target. Father
had rented a truck to pick up something. I don’t remember what. But
then, for some reason, he changed his mind and took us...” They both
sank into their father’s rare episodes of kindness and then their minds
switched to the pure fun of Songkran chaos where society became freer
and fragmented to thoughtless instinctual responses of guerrilla
warfare where aiming guns for the open windows of busses and targeting
other rival gangs had no consequences.
“I am a man now. I don’t want to hear bullshit about returning back.
What good does it do to be sentimental, anyhow? Chance took them and if
they are looking down on us it will be with as little concern as when
they were alive. As I see it, whether we honor their jars of ashes at
the temple or spit on them it doesn’t much matter. Their spirits didn’t
keep Kumpee from running off with what he could. Do I want to return
back? Back wasn’t any good either; so, no, not really if I were to be
honest about it.” Only the high he was experiencing allowed him to be
so honest.
Anxieties began to wreak Jatupon’s sensitivities. The rag of a drape
hanging against the window in a knot looked like a gigantic condom.
There was a huge hole in the wall symbolic of life being a void. His
brother was a person whom he was beginning to know well at one moment
and a stranger with a strange face reminiscent of an aunt, dreamed or
real, the next moment. He thought how odd it was that the whole
perspective of someone he had known his whole life was interchanging so
randomly with the worst moments being when his brother seemed to have a
stone alien countenance.
He let another golden wave hit his tongue. It was like being hit by a
wave from an ocean all bitter and suffocating. He began to laugh. He
couldn’t help it. Pains and pleasures seemed to him as such an
irrelevant and comical absurdity slapping a person around in its
inundations. One moment he would be here and happy and then he would be
there and miserable. He drank more of the beer and laughed.
“Chug it all down!” repeated his brother.
He thought to himself that here they were—two very young men who had
once run freely together through puddles on the streets and yet despite
their history (regardless of it not being a particularly close
relationship) Suthep and all that should seem him was tenuous and
frothy when it should be solid in his memory. Staring at him for a
couple seconds, somehow he couldn’t believe that someone who said “Chug
it all down” was his benefactor. He looked down. As he did so, he
sensed that the bubbles were increasing in his can of beer. The
mosquito, that had been folded, spread out its large mass once it
climbed out of the beer can.
“I don’t want to be lectured to by you,” said Jatupon in his mind to
the mosquito. “I might want an education but not some garbled ideas of
an insect created by my own inebriated brain.”
“You get what you pay for. These opportunities of hearing me on my
soapbox is as much truth as any noodle worker will be exposed to.”
“I know you are horrible but I don’t mind it anymore. I’m not scared of
it anymore. I’m used to it. If I can’t get rid of you, at least you
will no longer upset me.”
“So quickly you people acclimate and adapt to rough ways. How have you
been?”
He felt stunned. How good it was to hear those words. “Okay.”
“Is the job going okay?”
“It is the same old thing.”
“Don’t you feel proud being there enslaved to the needs of higher
classes than yourselves-especially when they are rather lowly to come
to you to begin with? All of these department store workers and so
forth.”
“It’s all right. I don’t know any better. I want to know why you like
blood.”
“A bold childish inquisitiveness without considering order or
propriety. You really aren’t afraid. You are getting bolder by the day
in a more childish way. Why do you like chocolate?”
“I don’t know. I just do.”
“But why do you think that you like it so much?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“You can guess if you follow your instincts. If you follow your
instincts they will take you into prehistory when the sweet taste buds
formed for succulent bone marrow. Which came first: the taste buds for
what was sweet or the experience tearing into bone marrow? For the
answer to that question you don’t need a PHD. You just need to follow
your instincts and they will let you know everything.”
“I guess people in the past were often desperate for nutrients and
found that they could survive by eating bone marrow. Nature began to
instill man with a taste for that which was sweet so that he would more
likely eat bone marrow when in a desperate situation.”
“Excellent. In answer to your question, maybe the boredom of flying
around this rocky planet causes us to need to bite into something
deeper. Anyhow, I came to find out how you were doing financially now
that you have employment”
“We don’t need to worry about staying alive.”
“What more can you expect from life than that?”
“Jatupon!” There was a pause. “Jatupon!”
“A le nah? (what is it?).
“You are fading off completely,” said Suthep with a grimace. “I think
you need to get the hell out of here. Your lover’s waiting for you.
Thanks for helping me bring some of this junk.”