It was no wonder that one set of freaks felt cognate with another set.
For him, the sight of the formaline or formaldyhyde-laden corpses at
the Siriaj Hospital Museum as well as the girl who introduced him to
them seemed to have exhilarated a nascent courage, an oozing, a growth
hormone of the mind. New neurological connections were burgeoning or
the same ones were reconnecting in different patterns. Anyhow, he felt
the inception of something new that made him feel that he wasn’t quite
the same: that he was outgrowing patterns of behavior. He was not able
to distinguish if his freakishness was exceptional, deficient, or
exceptionally deficient to the point of being inept. Certainly if his
gray matter made him innately exceptional, his noodles made him less
than ordinary. His gray matter was becoming grayer with each dusk of a
dying day. Being with noodles so long no doubt loosened this compact
tissue of brain into something quite slimy. The use of his brain in the
mundane tasks of thinking about the size of meat he wanted to cut with
the butcher knife had perhaps cut his corpus callosum. At least he
thought so. But regardless of being superior or inferior in his
freakishness, this was who he was. There was a history: the history was
of being maimed. There was the character of Jatupon: there were dark
prodigious forces inside and outside that frame that were ineluctable.
No celestial power would rectify his life by making family better than
what it was or himself, the sordid bastard that loomed there, as
hallowed and saintly as what he once believed monks to be. Nature begot
freaks of the worst kind and so becoming a freak in the tossing of the
passing years was understandable.
Jatupon’s ego was not turgid. In ways it was self-deprecating. That
which hadn’t been squashed by his father and eldest brother, poured
into countless bowls, or slapped onto myriad plates had such deformed
and stunted growth. He had trouble making opinions about people. He did
it with shy reluctance and usually the feelings he had about them never
emerged all that much in a cohesive thought. He considered Noppawan
Piggy to be his superior in intellect and yet there was one thing about
her he had to admit that he detested and that was the abhorrent smell
of baby powder that came from her body. It made Jatupon feel like his
nose had gotten trapped in a dust storm in which naked and screaming
babies flew with the dust in an attack against him. Not all girls and
women in Thailand smelled the same but those who had abhorrent smells,
although not abhorrent themselves, couldn’t be said to be totally
agreeable.
Upon leaving the park his intention was to go to the library and look
up information on the peculiarities he had seen in the museum that had
smiled upon him freak to freak but he found himself distracted by a
large comic book kiosk that whisked him off from this world to that of
another. One such comic book was set into the future of 3000 AD and
non-existent creatures with little resemblance to anything extant
propelled him into problems of their non-existent agricultural and
mining planet-colonies and he lost himself there for an hour. How
splendid it was to lose oneself wholly and he savored the time there
until his left foot fell asleep while he was seated on a plastic stool.
Then he stood up.
“Your time is up again.” Jatupon faced a scrawny teenager with glasses
who was a year or two older than he was. “Are you reading or buying?”
“Reading” he said; but afterwards he stretched his neck only to see his
reflection in the store’s anti-theft mirror. The skin around his eye
looked darker and it felt even more painful.
“You need to pay another fifteen baht to continue reading.”
“No, I guess I’ll stop reading. I’ll go,” he said.
Standing there ready to go, his taciturn heart pardoning Kazem who had
been the only one who cared about him, he tried to not think about the
hot stinging of the swelling around his eye. Instead, he thought about
this uncle whom he had only met on rare occasions long ago. It seemed
that it only took the frequent utterance of his name and they had been
granted a livelihood—a continuing sustenance as if by magic. And yet it
had not exactly been much of an effusion of magic. It had been the most
niggardly and scanty display that any affluent magic man could bestow
and it brought the renewal of their servitude. Before they were
restored to a similar but diminished livelihood, they had often spoken
of this vaguely real or super-real entity (this uncle by a marriage) as
one might think of the early king Ramas of the Chakri Dynasty.
Walking away from the kiosk, he wanted to return to early childhood: of
hopscotch, climbing trees with his brothers, Suthep teaching him how to
throw a ball, taking cups of ice to the customers so that they could
pour out the water in pitchers that were on their tables, skin around
the eyes that wasn’t black and swollen, and the time when his body
wasn’t being invaded. He could run away for good; but where would he
run? There was nothing in Ayutthaya and if he really wanted to run away
he would be more invisible in Bangkok. He would need money. He
considered becoming a Luk Thung singer of Traditional Thai music. They
wore their heavy makeup and pointed golden tiaras for beggarly bits of
baht. However, he told himself that his voice probably wasn’t as good
as the worst of them and even if it was he did not want to do tricks
for a few baht. It was too demeaning and contrary to the aristocratic
life he envisioned. There was a famous Swedish Luk Thung singer named
Jonas Anderson who had lived his whole life in Thailand but only
someone with vocal training and boldness could persevere to be someone
accomplished in this musical genre. He could run to Noppawan Piggy’s
home. He had the address on the mail she sent to him. But there would
be no sense in running to someplace that Noppawan herself was running
from and the likelihood of a rich family taking in a strange teenager,
and an ex-burglar and quasi-drug addict at that, was more than a remote
possibility. An emaciated dog with clumps of fur falling out had a
greater chance of being made into a pet. Just as the need for the
enzymes of animal protein was one trait of many linking the human to
and as an animal, so enmeshed in soul, sentiment, and survival he clung
to Kazem for his sense of home and family.
He knew that he was just a collection of molecules being shot out into
space and time. Others were the same but they flew away from him in
their own deviant paths. He knew. He thought he knew. Did he know? Did
he really know anything? Thoughts were so dreary. They enervated him.
He got on a bus to go home (that stationary foundation from which
outlook, experience, thought, and restoration of energy for movement
were generated). Even on such a simple event as going home he was lost
in the intricate circuits of his brain, lost in the labyrinth within
himself.
But through the window he saw the clear beauty of other beings that
passed; and even in the ugly faces there was a posture, a smile, even a
vehement depth of lonely despair so uniquely beautiful and yet
universal. The bus passed four stores each of which seemed to alternate
a presentation of boys, dogs, and combinations sleeping against the
facades of buildings. The passing was quick like fingers moving against
a keyboard and the sight was as euphonious as melancholy in sound. Then
for a second, in stalled traffic, Jatupon found himself looking into
the deep eyes of a deformed boy beggar. Jatupon was inside the bus and
the boy outside of it, but they both saw an affinity in each other.
They were the same. They were both unfortunate beggarly outsiders
beaten up by life; and yet he was riding around in an air-conditioned
bus. He was not one of the 2 billion people who lived on 2 dollars a
day in a rural area on the verge of starvation. Inside the bus the
facial expressions of the money collector were stone as death with
monotony that was distinct, ebullient, and luminous as sunlight against
wind-rippled leaves. A woman sleeping in a seat to his right had a head
that fell toward the aisle, straightened, fell again, and straightened
like a pendulum.
He might have gone back to work to appease Kazem. He might have started
taking orders from the customers with no explanation and let the hours
make the whole issue of his long absence mute. His brother would not
have made an embarrassing scene in public. The hours would alone have
just slowly uncorked it all allowing the rage to disperse slowly and
unnoticed. The restoration of old habits would have made the past issue
so irrelevant that a bit of the mind would have questioned if his
absence had even occurred. It had been his intention to do so when he
left the comic book kiosk and it continued to be his intention when he
sat on the seat in the bus. Yet a human being fulfilled few intentions.
Scholars were sociable creatures who needed meaningless action and
cacophony even when it adulterated their aims. Petty government
officers on their meager salaries, as well as the well-paid top tier,
didn’t need to be cloistered in the political issues that mired the day
but yearned for sports columns in their newspapers and genuflected to
the action effusing from their television sets. And tired people on
Bangkok busses that were plodding their way slowly through traffic had
intentions other than sleep but yearned for rest and an easy way home.
He was one of the latter that needed sleep; and yet when he was in the
cell, which was his home, his mind was active in dread. Its color was
gray, its texture coarse, and the molecules that oozed up from it
acrid. Within the space of his own head he was vanquished in the gloom,
the nothingness, the vanished thoughts of the hollow cavities that were
part of one waiting for punishment. He lay on the floor with an old,
previously read comic book in his hands. His head was so preoccupied
with the barrenness of thought and the feeling of dread that he didn’t
understand the pictures and the words. He got up. He dipped up a bowl
of rice from a rice cooker, drenched it in soy, chili sauce, and a bit
of pepper and vinegar. He did his pushups in front of a televised
soccer game and when the game was over he shut off the set and in an
hour sleep percolated over him. In his dreams he was in a penthouse on
the fifteenth floor and below him were beggars like moving dots. Above
the moving dots were moving golden skies of sunset. Gigantic clouds
moved through the air in the shape of viruses.
Then there was a punch on his face and it reopened the facial wound
causing blood to rush on the floor. In that second his dream fragmented
into many dreams and spun out of control. He was no longer in a
penthouse but was a sidewalk-based seamster with his little antique
sewing machine, a pedal, and a hill of torn clothes he was supposed to
sew. He was all alone on a cement cover of a city sewer that went under
the sidewalk. Then he fell into the sewer. Self was gone. In the last
of his dream or dreams, before he completely awakened, there was no
self. There was just the scene of a large park ahead of him, the
aesthetic glow of a withdrawing sun, and an old man who bought some
phad-thai and found a pavilion near a lake. He sat down and began to
eat his noodles, watching the lights of skyscrapers and the fast moving
traffic far beyond the lake. The cacophony of boys playing football
irritated him because he was envious of it. He put his empty Styrofoam
container back in the plastic bag and laid it down. A rat scurried from
one flower and fern bed; and dragged the bag into another flowerbed.
The old man could hear the gnawing of the Styrofoam. Jatupon sensed
that the rat might be himself.
He felt blood oozing from him and uniting as a puddle under his face.
Kazem, dumbfounded by the vehement rage that disgorged from him,
floundered a few steps in the room, sat down, and whined, “It’s all on
me. If you are on drugs or stealing something, I’ve got to get you out
of it. It’s all on me. I have to be responsible for you but you just do
whatever you please.” His voice trailed away and faltered. He cleared
his throat. “You don’t ever behave with any responsibility toward me. I
give you days off here and there. I don’t get any. You work or don’t
work or work for one of us and not the other based on how you feel on a
given day. You steal money out of my pockets and I don’t say anything.
Don’t blame me. You’ve brought it on yourself.” Jatupon sat up and
glared with one eye. The second eyelid was already drooping from
swelling. It wouldn’t open fully and it squinted from a bit of blood
that sank into it. He intuitively guessed that his brother knew he was
losing control of him. He waited and observed the guilt-ridden
countenance and the gauche retreat from the offensive. He judged that
the assault had been a desperate one. Jatupon smiled malevolently as of
a masochist exuding pride that the pain had only brought the opposite
wish of the inflictor. Kazem’s unpaid noodle worker who wasn’t allowed
to loosen his fetters and shackles had slipped from them anyway. He had
gone out to see Piggy and there was nothing Kazem had been able to do
to stop him. Jatupon smiled wider. Then he guffawed scoffingly like a
lunatic although the pleasure soon extinguished itself.
“Do you want me to come over there and squeeze the juice out of your
head?” The muscles in Kazem’s arms and legs suddenly stiffened like one
ready to suddenly stand and attack.
“I’m not listening to you,” Jatupon spoke firmly. “You are a pathetic
bully-a fucking ape—and it is the end of it for me. It is the end of
it!” Manhood’s conviction and effrontery reeked from his mouth like
foul breath and Kazem, who already wanted to wreak havoc on his
impudence, flipped him over with the elastic of his underwear like a
pancake.
“Okay, swim in your own blood. Swim! Let’s see you drown in it.”
Jatupon’s hair was twisted in Kazem’s fingers and his face was in his
own blood as the thick leather hand swatted him a few lateral slaps.
Then Kazem’s compunction again caused him to flounder back to his seat.
It was the only chair in the room. He put his elbow on his leg and hand
on the forehead of his genuflected head. His ideas were
discombobulated.
Jatupon was floundering too from more than the nausea of lost blood. He
was half a boy and half a man and this newly begotten half called a
“man” was having manhood castigated, excoriated, and leaked from him.
Callow as he was, he was not just half a man or half a boy the way the
Nightjar poem concerned itself with a bird-boy. He was a hybrid of
boy/man and God with vast wisdom from fathoms of himself examined from
suffering.
He again stared at the other presence in the room. It was a monster, a
being of violence, and an unknown phantom. Still this monster was the
one who had delivered him from the watery abyss, the one who did not
chastise his addiction (at least then he didn’t) but was with him
through the withdraws, the one who fixed his bicycle, who had
introduced him to basketball and his first beer. Appearing like his
brother it was the brother mixed with some type of shadowy creature he
could not comprehend and this being, familiar and unfamiliar, he
loathed. The elastic of his underwear had been encroached. He had been
violated with those fingers. His body had been flipped over like a
pancake. He had felt his face pushed in a puddle of his blood. Sitting
on the floor, piercing him with his eyes, he wanted to purge this beast
from his life. Then a few seconds later his next conscious assembly of
understanding only made him want to vanish. He wanted so much of the
impossible that second: for the substance of his own life to vaporize
swiftly and meaninglessly and opposite of this, to kill the monster and
resurrect his dwarfed manhood in his own eyes. Sitting there he felt as
if time had ended and that all entities on the Earth were waiting and
watching the two of them in silent dread but neither god nor man cared
about any aspect of this relationship at all. Things went on as cruel
as death. In one second a fly flew and landed in a bottle of water, a
dog barked from outside, a rat scurried around in front of the building
for food, a family was feuding in the apartment above him, and a car
came onto the thin long back-road called a soi.
Kazem looked onto this bludgeoned ugly little face reluctantly and
Jatupon felt like a piggish or bovine woman whose acquaintance said,
“We could never be more than friends, you know” and she—Yes, she could
see. She could see—hadn’t she seen it before? Had she really dismissed
those countless earlier smirks of repugnance aimed at her fat enervated
face and her clumsy tense body both of which made her nothing. Mother
nature made the being breed with the best of bodies to create a good
physical specimen in the baby. Sex, romance, or just an intimate talk
with a man would not be hers since she could not trigger the pleasure
response—not even intellectually. Romantic and sexual inclinations were
discriminatory. They were as cruel as death and she would tell him that
sex wasn’t intimacy although she wouldn’t believe it. She craved such
intimacy more than she could ever articulate and she would not tell him
that. She would tell him that being in love was a delusion that one
biologically craved to propagate the species. She would say that she
did not want to go through the brief illusion of being in love. She did
not want to be high in urinary molecules from his underwear flying into
her face when he had her denuded and lying on a bed littered in
clothes. She would tell him that one generation after another would
dance its sexual dance before passing and that she had been fortunate
enough to be born a disagreeably unaesthetic thing with a face like a
mushy old apple.
Feeling sick and weak, his mind was running away from him. His head was
thinking himself a different gender. He was believing that he could
hear the content of the feuding family upstairs. The eldest son, having
gotten his girlfriend pregnant, had been compelled to bring her into
the home and the fight was about him running away from the family every
evening after work to drink with his buddies.
Then suddenly, without even knowing it, he stood up, grabbed the
television that Kazem had given to him as a gift, and he was running
toward him. There he was aiming the television at his brother’s head
only to have it reflexively snatched from him by Kazem’s dexterous
fingertips. Finally, there he was peering up at it and backing away
into the corner where he came from, realizing that one impulse
materialized in action had caused a counter action that was about ready
to kill him. It had been just one unrestrained impulse that, repulsive
to the consciousness, he hadn’t even considered; and it had slipped
from his brain slimy as a worm. It had materialized in action and now
it had lethal consequences.
“Don’t play so hard, boys” said Kumpee. In Jatupon’s perspective the
stink of his smoke-ridden clothes and the beer of his breath gave an
acrid and fetid cloud which was miraculously saving him.
Kazem lowered his arms. “Where the hell have you been?” he asked. He
put the television on the floor relieved at having escaped the worst
passion that can fulminate in a man and lose him in the deepest abyss
of regret. Sweat poured from Kazem’s forehead and his face became a
deep red in chagrin.
“With my woman. If you were to have a woman you wouldn’t have so much
time to play with your Jatu-PORN.”
“Where’s our money?”
“Invested.”
“Invested how?” He grabbed the chair and sat down. He wiped the sweat
from his forehead. Jatupon was already seated in a corner with his
puddle of blood.
“But your worries have ended. The senator’s page visited you, didn’t
he? Maybe he was our uncle’s chauffeur. I forget now. You look
confused. He came to my apartment to tell me the definite date for the
agreed dinner after somehow finding Suthep and informing him. Well,
anyhow, it happened because of my own efforts.”
“You visited him and got him to agree to see us? You? How could you do
that looking as you do? I tried many times. I don’t believe you.”
“Well, there’s nothing I can do about your hateful beliefs, but all the
same I’m telling you the truth.”
“So, you are the big brother looking after all of us now” said Kazem
incredulously. He snickered.
“Sure. It’s obvious by age and merit. I’ve never tried to kill one of
you in the entire duration of my 18 years. Aren’t I the lucky omen? I
saved you both from killing each other and had some additional
favorable news to spill out.”
“What was your reason for coming here?”
“Nothing. Just to make sure you were coming.”
“When?”
“Next Saturday.”
“Time?”
“6 p.m.”
“You can deal with him. I don’t want to stay here tonight. I’m finished
watching over these two. I’m leaving.”
“Two? I only see one. The other monkey didn’t like you and ran away.
And where, might I ask, are you going?”
“A Hotel. A bar. A massage parlor. Anywhere I like although it isn’t
any of your business.”
“It seems rather wasteful to me when I have provided this apartment for
you rent-free but I guess you can go ahead.”
Kazem laughed sardonically for a minute. He needed to release the shock
of discovering the vile hatred that had arisen in himself and Jatupon
and the serendipitous arrival of Kumpee, who if worthless at everything
else, had delivered them from being sealed into the body bags of
unrestrained emotion. “It hasn’t been rent free for a long time. We get
billed from the father of your Chinese bitch and we pay the money like
responsible tenants-bank transfers.”
“She was a bitch,” said Kumpee pensively. He became preoccupied with
this self-absorbed thought. “And her father just couldn’t warm up to
what could have been his son in law. I’m seeing her sister now.” Then
he stared at Kazem with a specific intent. “Just remember the
appointment and that you need to be punctual. Since you need some time
away I’ll look after the little one.” Jatupon mumbled a response.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing.”
“No, come on. What did you say?”
“I don’t need you. I hate you worse than I hate him,” said Jatupon.
Kumpee laughed and then all of them were taciturn for a minute. Kazem
folded some clothes and put them in a bag. Kumpee got a bottle of coca
cola from a carton in the corner and pulled off the bottle top by
wedging it like a lever between the drawer of a cabinet and its handle.
He drank slowly savoring every sip.
“Maybe that attitude toward older brothers is what has caused your head
to be kicked around like a football,” said Kumpee after Kazem left the
apartment and he heard the door shut. “What do you think about that,
you little monkey,” he said as his fingers disheveled Jatupon’s hair
abrasively and then pulled his ear playfully. “Just you and me,
Jatuporn. Jatuporn. Why do you think that you are called Jatuporn?”
Jatupon slithered into a dry corner and began to shake. He tried not to
cry. “Why did you do that? I’m not going to hurt you,” said Kumpee; but
it was really the loss of blood, the trauma, the opaque surrealism of
what had occurred that made him tremble. “I see your eyes all watered.
You want to cry, don’t you?”
“I want to sleep. I don’t understand any of this. I don’t.”
“You’ve got to know more than I do about it.”
“Well I don’t”
“Mmmm. Well, he was ready to put you in the television. You did
something you shouldn’t or maybe you just wouldn’t let him put himself
into you. Have you become a frigid bitch? Have you, Jatuporn? You
thought I didn’t know about that, didn’t you? You thought that the
nickname we created for you didn’t mean anything but just meanness but
we had a reason for giving it to you.” He chuckled. “I keep an eye on
my boys. That you can be sure of.”
Kumpee sat down beside the sprawled body of his brother and drank his
cola in equanimity, from time to time placing the bottle between his
legs. “I needed more from my life than this, you know. Do you remember
when we were kids and we collected bottles like this. We got a few baht
from the stores for every twenty we brought into them. We thought we
would buy a Chinese restaurant for father and mother with air
conditioning and an electric juke box.” He laughed. “Maybe you don’t
remember. You were four or five.”
“I do.” Jatupon really couldn’t remember this but yearning for some
unadulterated version of innocent love or compassion not linked to the
selfish inclinations that were part of being human, he halfway believed
that he remembered and he put his hand on his brother’s arm. Kumpee’s
posture tightened. The eldest brother felt squeamish from a man’s hand
on him but, not wanting to reject the youngest outright he did not move
his arm. Also, a sick curious depravity began to flood out of the
squalor of the recesses to his mind. He looked at the half-empty
phallic bottle, picked it up, and said “What about this bottle? Would
you take in anything hard?” But the youngest brother was asleep and so,
a minute later, he removed the hand and abandoned him.