Jatupon agreed to meet her at Siriaj Hospital. From a bus he took an
express boat. Seated there, he tried to read the Student Weekly
published by the Bangkok Post but attempts at understanding English
were to no avail. The sun and wind together shot him with tranquility
darts that took him to an ethereal, unearthly peace exempt from the
conflicts of consciousness but also from assembling understanding from
the fragments of the pieces to the day that came through his senses in
a mosaic. He wanted to understand his place in the world. He wanted to
understand the premise of his life that constituted a compromise of the
internal conflicts of the mind. But he also wanted peace of mind and he
sank in with his ease until he was asleep.
He woke on the hard orange chair inside the boat to a splash of
polluted water against his face. Once again he was staring at the
waters that gyrated against the boat. He watched the frothy mist from
the motion of the boat arise to the window-sized glassless hole that
was beside him. Again he was in the world of conflict and for a moment
he resented being there as if breathing and thinking deigned him. His
conflict was what he was doing now. He was continuing his part as the
absent employee and he worried about the consequences. He thought of
going back. All he had to do was step out onto any dock and wait for a
boat going in the opposite direction; but his legs were like stone. He
would not budge. The boat was moving forward and so would he. He
removed his sunglasses, put his hand into the water, scooped in a
residue of the moisture that did not fall from his fingertips, and
cooled the hot throbbing of the swollen blackish blue skin beneath his
left eye. He was proud of his courage. Four nights ago Kazem had
finally given into his demands for his mail but it had been a
calculative maneuver to mitigate their protracted altercation that had
gotten out of control over his noodle soup/fried rice-truancy.
His thoughts carried him piggyback at a gallop. There were savage
impulses amuck in that instinctual need to dominate in procreation and
yet how was it he had let himself become the one who was ridden on
instead of the one riding? It was a mystery as to why he should be
content to a role so clearly defying the male instinct to be the sexual
aggressor. Maybe, he half-wondered or felt in some murky and illusive
way that failed to come together as a cohesive thought, it was from not
taking on that masculine pose of one ready to preempt his own selfish
and sadistic impulses onto others for his own self-gratification.
He wasn’t addicted to drugs any more than he was to love, he told
himself. One needed a bit of both. He wasn’t weak. Except once of
clearly finding himself addicted and being forced to go through
detoxification with some charitable monks (that had been the cocaine
period the result of frequent raids of the cash box and an episode of
thievery in Bangkok), he believed that his mentality was a strong one.
Of course, until the move to Bangkok, the family had ensured that for
the past two years he was rarely allowed out of their sight and never
came near the cash box. This had assisted his lack of addiction. Even
now his interaction with customers was overseen suspiciously. And
laboriously friendless as his life droned on (with this new exception
if indeed she cared to really be his friend and he was anxious that she
should be such) he perceived himself as a freakish aberration to so
many boys his age that had normal if not exceptional lives. They walked
together in throngs-schoolboys in their light blue knit shirts and dark
blue shorts walking the streets, entering 7-11s, clustering in for “All
You Can Eat” Pizza Hut specials, or walking hand in hand with girls to
the malls. He half hated them. He hated their laughter, which seemed to
deride him. Sometimes he wanted to hit against the wall that entrapped
him. It was like he was a Mexican and America had deliberately
concocted a wall to keep him out. If only it were an eggshell, he
thought to himself, he would be able to peck his way out.
And here he was at the Siriaj pier. There was a Dairy Queen, and a
Black Canyon Restaurant near the pier and a long winding outdoor
market. He wondered why she had chosen Siriaj Hospital for their
meeting place and why, given the location, she had not chosen for them
to meet in one of those restaurants. Instead, he was supposed to meet
her in front of a museum. He meandered in different pathways throughout
many buildings until he noticed her sitting on a stoop under a sign
that said “Museum” in English. Her hair was shorter than the last time
he saw her and her cheeks seemed chubbier. She was dressed in her
school uniform.
“Sunthon Phu, there you are,” Noppawan said. Sunthon Phu was an
important poet long ago who had risen from humble parents to become a
private secretary for King Rama II because of his literary abilities.
“Here I am,” he said. He smiled glowingly. There was nothing about it
that was affected. He came nearer to her.
“I was worried that you wouldn’t get my last letter.”
“I got it yesterday in my new mailbox at the post office” he said with
pride.
“Good. That brother of yours was really keeping my letters, was he?
What a scoundrel .”
“I’ll always get them from now on. Do you want to go into the coffee
shop? I can buy our coffee.”
“What happened to you?” She was staring at his left eye.
“Oh.” He realized that he had forgotten to put the sunglasses on his
face.
“I got into an argument with him.”
“Over stealing the letters?”
“Yes.”
“ Is he the brawny one you told me about before-the oldest one?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then he should be put in jail for thievery, assault and battery,
and being a brawny moron.”
“I have money. Do you want to eat at Black Canyon? You might not want
coffee. I never drink it. Just water and cola.”
“If we were to eat at Black Canyon or someplace less dingy—really
elegant—I’d make sure my father paid for it. We wouldn’t need money.
The whole day could be put on a credit card.”
“No, as the man, I insist on paying.”
“Maybe later,” she first spoke in irritation. She wasn’t interested in
his chivalry. “ I want to go in here now. Have you ever been in here?”
“No, what is it?”
“Do you like museums?”
“I love learning. That’s all I love.”
“Not just Laotian poetry?”
“Everything.”
“Now you know why you are my friend. When I saw you reading on a
bench-and reading an English translation of a book—I knew that we would
get along well. This is a special place. When I run away, I often come
here. I spend hours not just learning about natural science but
becoming friends with it if that makes sense.” She took his hand and
led him in. “Don’t be alarmed,” she said, “Things that are beautiful
are often ugly, and what is ugly is often beautiful. I like coming to
someplace where everything is true. I hate lies, don’t you? Even ugly
truths are better than that?”
He thought about what the mosquito had said. “I’ve been told that truth
is sometimes a little ugly.”
“I think it’s always ugly and beautiful-not just a little bit.” They
climbed up three flights of stairs. The air in the building smelled
like a biology laboratory during the dissection of frogs. They entered:
internal organs in glass boxes of formalin; brains; an ear with a
joining canal; and then there was an entire baby standing there also in
formalin and also inside its large glass aquarium. The child was
hauntingly ceramic in a grayish orange or ochre complexion and his body
was so tightly rigid. It had calcificans congenita and, she said, it
must have been born as a non-movable rock. Then there was a child that
had a gigantic, alien head. It had suffered from internal hydrocephalus
. It was all there: babies born with amencephaly (some with partial
heads and all with no brains); fetuses; four month old fetuses with
placentas and umbilical cords (one with hands together as if it were
praying or gesturing the “wei”); fetuses that were zygotic twin
quadruplets; babies born as Siamese and conjoined twins such as
pycopasus twins that were attached from their buttocks and Siamese
epionathus parasiticus that each had a brother’s foot inimitably in a
mouth; full term fetuses with their chests dissected so that their
internal organs were exhibited from the slit; gigantic skeletons; dwarf
skeletons; twisted adult skeletons; regular skeletons upright in glass
cupboards or in standing coffins each with his photograph above his
skeleton—a photograph of what was; fetuses of all sizes and ages; and a
naked man and woman in whole with the front skin, muscle and skeleton
removed to give full view of their internal organs as one saw their
private exterior organs. There they were more than naked and fully
intact as if basking in a tanning booth in order to get a suntan-only
they were ochre and stiff as ceramic vases and floating in formalin or
formaldeyhyde.
He told himself that that from which one should hide he should
appreciate since it delivered him from the way he wanted the world to
be to what it really was. He repeated this to himself many times to
quell the weltering tremble of nausea and to hide his horrified child
in the presence of Noppawan. He told himself that seeing this almost
delivered him to a new level of maturity. If one could confront this
without losing his nerve, he reasoned, he could break from the ghosts
of mother and father, the innate need for family, and the wish to be a
less damaged “good for nothing.” He could sense the nuance of manhood
begin to brew up through him like a hot spring. Passing through another
aisle of stocked fetuses, he wondered about his conception. Had it been
from loving caresses or a desperate release of stress and frustration
on one who had capitulated? Yes, the exhibition was beginning to
deliver him into a new awareness and the two of them could sense that
it affected the other in the same way and also thrust that individual
into a soft sensitive regret for those who were never given a chance to
sense themselves against the tactile sensations of the sun, the warmth,
the feel of grass under bare feet, the wind, the caresses, the rain,
and the respite from inordinate heat and sun. Feeling virile and
assured of this new manhood within him, he grabbed her hand swaying it
in the pretense of joy as they interweaved slowly around the myriad
cabinets. He stared at it all as fully as he could. It was there shelf
after shelf with some of it towering so high that he couldn’t see it
very well at all.
“I’m so happy that you aren’t afraid. When you come enough it almost
seems like there is a spirit hovering above it all and that they
appreciate someone being there for them. I know that is silly. I’m not
even religious. Maybe it is just that it is very quiet. I often bring
my books to the table near the skeletons. I just do some reading. The
doctors, the nurses, and the museum curator don’t seem to mind. They
just say, “Hi, Piggy.” And again, it is a good place to run away from
it all. Maybe it is a bit of a strange place to hide out for most
people but most people are scared of their own shadows. If nothing else
this museum is a good place to know what death is-or at least come as
close as one can. Most people haven’t a clue what really happens to
one’s body after death. Decaying corpses would of course be better than
this but they are vile to one’s nose with everything going back to the
elements and all.” They descended the stairs. She sensed that his hand
was very sweaty. “You are glad that I brought you, aren’t you?”
“Sure” he said although he wasn’t fully. He knew that seeing this had
made a dark impression on him that he would never be able to shirk. He
suspected aptly that this friend of his had intentionally stabbed the
little innocence that was in him to match that of her own.
Enlightenment had punctured his innocence. Outside, he stuffed his
hands in his pockets. He felt a cold numbness in his limbs, a slight
coldness toward her, and ennui from memories of his peculiar history
that would impair his future relationships with girls. They sat on the
stoop.
“I hope you don’t want to run away from me.”
“I’m not running. I’m sitting here with you, aren’t I?”
“Okay, I guess so.”
“When you said “at least this was not a lie,” what did you mean? I mean
what are the lies?”
“In society?”
“Yes.”
“There are too many to count.”
“Mention one.”
“All right-religion. My parents are Christians. The servants are
Christians. When I was little the servants took me to Sunday school.
There, the teachers would always talk about heaven. I couldn’t figure
out why if one would be with her family in heaven after she dies, as
the church teaches, that wouldn’t mean being there with all humanity
regardless of religious preference. If one were to be there with her
father and mother, she’d be there with hers, and she with hers, and she
with hers, and that seems to me like everyone. After all everybody is
supposed to be related to Adam. That to me would mean that heaven is
some type of polluted hellhole a million times worse than Bangkok with
overcrowding so that you can’t turn around without banging into
someone. I don’t know. It isn’t important really. It just shows that
nobody thinks anything out. Maybe Heaven is just a Country Club only
for Christian Hara Krishnas who say Christ is salvation in rote but I
can’t see how they’d extend much of an invitation to me. I never have
been much into rote.” Jatupon didn’t know who the Hara Krishnas were or
what a Country Club was but these items didn’t detract from his
positive impression of her opposition to sententious punctilio. He
smiled. This was certainly better than talking to a mosquito.
“Tell me another.”
“Another? All right. I can keep firing them all day. I can’t see how
they can claim that King Phraya Taksin was really insane. I mean the
man created military strategies that were successful at getting the
Burmese out of the country, or at least removed to Chaing Mai. Then he
decided to control the church as well as the politics. He became
arrogant and said that he was now equal to Buddha and could dictate
doctrine and political laws. The people said that he was insane and his
military executed him. He didn’t just go from being a great military
strategist to insanity and if he was insane, that’s a sickness and they
wouldn’t have executed sick people-just people they were scared of.”
“How do you know that?”
“It’s easy, Jatupon. Just think it out. Use some intuition and common
sense. He just was overly ambitious and they hated him and today we
aren’t supposed to think of him at all except as someone who was
insane. We don’t even have a road with his name attached to it. Have
you ever traveled on Taksin Road? It doesn’t exist. Back then they put
the first general in his place and declared him King Rama I. Kings
emerged from the Chakri Dynasty when really it should have been the
descendents of Taksin. I don’t even know why, in such a poor country,
we throw away tax money on these guys.”
“Be quiet. Someone might hear you. We could get arrested.”
“Do you really think they’d arrest 14 year olds?”
“They’d arrest a 14 year old’s parents.”
“My father should be arrested.”
“Why?”
“Do you promise, as my best friend, to not tell anyone.”
“Sure.”
“He raped me. Don’t run away from me Jatupon. Promise you won’t.”
“No, of course I won’t.” He felt nervous. He didn’t know what to say.
“I’d never do anything like that,” he affirmed.
“So, you will buy the coffee?” she asked; and on the second floor of
Black Canyon the fumes of the molecules of coffee steam and “love”
slapped his senses. From the window of the air conditioned restaurant
they watched motor gondolas and express boats stir the waters the way
housewives in America would watch as their electric blenders stir cake
mixes-each wave falling, being sucked into the force that pulled in the
new part of the wave and then being pushed out into the wave again. It
was all so fast and all so interconnected and systematic that each of
the waves looked like frozen motion or like society itself.
He became mesmerized in the weltering waves. He spoke glibly. “Families
are supposed to be shelter. They’re really just walls cobbled up from
dirt, you know. Mine doesn’t even exist but in Kazem’s head. I feel
sorry for him in ways. But sometimes I think I should just run away
completely and become a monk.”
“Why don’t you?”
“Monks don’t have sex. At least they aren’t supposed to. As you said,
lies.”
“Do you have sex?”
“No, of course I’m a little young for that,” he lied. He looked around
the restaurant to make sure that others were not listening to them.
“But I don’t want to give up that part of me. I don’t think that is
right.”
“My Auntie —well, really the servant but sort of the same except that
she must obey me usually-she says I should never come ten feet near a
monk since they are sexually repressed and might try to reach under a
girl’s skirt.”
“Maybe but I’ve never heard anyone talk that way about monks. The
newspapers rarely but that is with individual monks accused of
crimes—not monks altogether.”
“My family is a bit different that way. It’s their only good
attribute.”
They sipped their coffee and then went to Silom Road on the express
boat. The annoyance of standing there in a crowd without a seat became
an ethereal essence of truth and beauty for him. He could not remember
being so happy. It stayed with him as they road the bus to Lumpin Park.
At a lake, in the park, they rented out a fishing boat. They paddled it
chasing one puff of cloud in the hope of using it as an umbrella. They
had cheese sandwiches, cola, sticky rice, and potato chips that they
consumed intermittently.
“If I stay much longer,” she said an hour later, “they will start
looking for me-or at least the servants will. I usually only run away
on Saturdays and Sundays. I don’t like missing too much school.”
He knew what he had suspected on their first meeting: that her
rebellion was far larger and more personal than anything he had
witnessed before. She kept mostly to intangible subjects like religion
because her repugnance toward religion had been easier for her to
communicate. He felt her rebellion. It stood out like a Long Necked
Karen (the native Burmese people living in Chaing Mai who had the
tradition of distorting the growth of their necks). He felt her
rebellion and it was a novelty for him. It intrigued him and it felt
wholly real. He thought, in Thailand one gave the “wei” to Buddhist
statues, stupas, shrines, temples, and people who were older and of
higher classes if such individuals exerted a powerful role over him;
and yet one did this not understanding why it was done. It occurred to
him that it was all ludicrous in a way and not just limited to Thai
customs. How could she or anyone communicate the exact items that they
were rebelling against? Rebellion was seen in the eyes but it could not
be readily explained and in ways it went contrary to nature and the
social response. Greed and aggression were entrenched in the survival
of a being and lay latent but active within every cell but those cells
were sugar coated with that cloying substance of Thailand, the land of
smiles.
As they paddled back she looked up at the puffy whiff of clouds above
her and said, “This is real. Relaxing and being part of the clouds and
the second, attaching to the mystery of it all . . . the universe and
time-that is the only thing that makes sense, don’t you think?” He
smiled and nodded his head in pleasure. Yes, this was certainly better
than talking to the mosquito. How strange they were. Their serious
probing of life and their awareness of the geyser of unique thoughts
that erupted in them certainly didn’t seem Thai. A typical urban Thai
yearned to languish if not extinguish himself or herself in strolls in
a shopping mall, a movie, a video game, laughter, cellular telephones,
beer, and comic books. Jatupon did pursue the pejorative in comic books
as most Thai males from five to fifty and the two of them were pursuing
their quest of leisure as lazily as the best of Thais; still to him
they seemed so different from all others.
She asked about his parents and was saddened to hear of their tragedy.
She probed into it further in interest and then backed away when she
saw his pain. Kindness and empathy illuminated her countenance. She
tried to mitigate his pain by becoming absorbed in her own that she
pursued philosophically exempt of emotionalism. “My parents are always
moving around in the future. Ambition moves them around like the places
on a board game of chess-or draughts played by motorcycle taxi drivers
when they wait-with the pop bottle caps-have you seen them?” He was
startled by how her ideas had such confluence with his own. She was an
augmentation of his own thoughts.
They left the park reluctantly. She did not want to leave at all
without assurances and he offered them. He told her that his brother
was not a violent person. He said that Kazem sometimes belted him when
he really deserved it but that there were plenty of times he deserved
it and yet his brother wouldn’t touch him. She seemed to believe his
assurances and went away.
As she vanished from his senses his empty hollow mind was filled with
images of half-headed beings, twisted skeletons, rigid corpses like old
ochre vases, the naked man and the woman floating in their formaldehyde
glass coffins with their fronts carved out for the display of their
entrails, the fetuses and their placentas, one child that had such a
gigantic head and another one that had been born like a solid never
feeling motion. These images attacked his consciousness. It seemed to
him that the world was a loveless and ceaseless factory that replicated
over and over again manufacturing slightly damaged and terribly damaged
products with impunity. He paid his two baht to the lady in the
glassless window and went into the public bathroom. He wept for those
who had deserved better than this. Then his weeping poured into
himself. He knew that after what he saw he should not want anything
more from his life than the noodles that sustained him and yet he did.
He knew he should not want a more purified love than what Kazem
extended to him and yet he nonetheless did.
The hours of that spring day came and went indistinguishably from other
seasons, and all days were clones with stoic dispositions. His majesty,
King Rama IX, a few hours earlier, had changed the seasonable robes of
the Emerald Buddha like a girl dressing a doll. He then presided over
the plowing ceremony with its blessings to the rice goddess; and
watched one cow predict the agricultural future of the nation from its
bovine appetites—the cow wandering over to preferred troughs filled
with anything from brandy to barley, beans and rice, or just plain
water—instinctively consuming something or another interpreted as
conditions prosperous or economically disparaging.
Further into the heart of the city, Suthep slept removed from the
mooing of omniscient cows in Sanam Luang which stood on an island of
dirt where kites had flown surrounded by inundating dark black exhaust
fumes and fast, obnoxious wheeled beasts, honking their loud voices as
they passed each other. Tucked in his smaller cell he rode the REM of
being. He dreamed he was on a motorcycle leaving his uncomfortably
tight partial apartment that was comfortably free of brothers and
awkward moments of catching them together. Hired to cater his fried
rice with chicken he cooked it, put it on paper plates, and sealed the
plates with plastic wrap. Then he put them in baskets on opposite sides
of a bamboo pole. Balancing the pole of baskets on his back, he drove
to a government building. Why the banquet only had that one dish of
“kow pat” (fried rice) was a point that the dream did not address. Also
the street names were not those of the Dusit area but those of central
Bangkok. As he came near the building , a limousine hit him and hurried
off. Blood poured from the orifice of his face. There was nothing but
gray and a firm belief he would die. The ambulance drivers, none of
whom were paramedics, came to pillage him of his wallet and watch. He
got up, Thai boxed them for his things, and realized as they ran from
him in fright that he was as ethereal as a cloud. And then his parents
came out of nothingness and he told them that they needed to go away
since he (ghost or man) was now a free agent and did not need them any
longer. As he got back on his motorcycle someone knocked on the door.
He woke up but his brain was retarded in an earlier being. As he heard
the knocking he imagined that Jatupon was lying beside him and
listening to his scurrying feet move toward the door. So many years
they had slept in the same room. They had slept side by side until a
few years ago. Did he love his brother so much that he would wake up
with him skirting around in his dreams? Maybe he did since the habit of
being with him was long. The youngest sibling was so much of his past
and he had been accustomed to him without major aversion. The habit of
being with someone without major repugnance was indeed the only thing
that constituted fraternal love; and yet, little as it might be, it was
what the particles of black space in the universe were created for.
Suthep, slapped a cap on his head with the visor inverted to the back
of his head and greeted the knocker in his underwear.
“A le nuh?,” (what is it?), asked Suthep as he straightened the cap. It
was a man in livery asking the surname of this family of impoverished
brothers. Suthep imagined the stink of his armpits as he addressed the
guest and the staleness of air in the room which was in deep need of a
deodorizer. He began to feel foolish but he kept his boyish poise while
the man tried to withhold his laughter. He didn’t hear the question.
The man repeated it and Suthep wanted to prevaricate. Then he
reluctantly said that his last name was Biadklang. It was the senator’s
page and they were finally invited to meet the apotheosis that had
given them their living.