It was their third time playing the board game of Monopoly that week
and Porn sensed that another ineluctable habit was being imposed onto
her more from within than without. She often deliberately tossed the
dice directly into his token when it was near her side of the board but
mostly her rolling was with a lethargic rattling in her palm and the
apathetic dropping of dice from her numb fingertips. Once she spilled
the content of her glass, which then flooded over Marlborough and Vine
Streets as well as Community Chest. She snowed her popcorn crumbs over
two colors of property. He silently blamed her clumsiness on the vodka
that she had mixed into her cola. From time to time he could see
irascible facial expressions cutting through her guile of complacent
concentration and close lipped smiles but he told himself it was just a
bit of competitive strife or tipsiness even though he knew better. At
the beginning of each game, for the brief period that it lasted, he
felt for certain that she enjoyed playing and discussing life with him.
He was right about the former. For her the beginning of the game
brought the rush of accumulating play-money, gibbering her attempts at
English to play the game, and having one monotony replace that of
another. The game was one way of killing an hour or more of a given day
as sedately as a hot bath. She hated cold weather to such extremes
that, outside of her irregular attendance at the language school, the
nearby grocery store a block or two away from this distant campus had
become her only cultural attraction. She was waiting for spring but
meanwhile her life was becoming as frigid as a housewife.
“It certainly is coming down,” he said as he heard hail beat against
the windows. “You surely aren’t thinking about going out in this.”
“I never do,” she said.
“I mean you can if you want.”
“Yes, master.”
“You get to massage my feet for that comment, dearest. I especially
like it when you go down on each toe the way you do; but, as a
gentleman, I don’t force that on you.”
“No, master.”
“Do you like anything about the classes at all?”
“The students and the teacher are old, Nawin. There’s nothing to say.”
“How old?”
“Old. Retirement age. “
“Hmm... it is strange that they should be immigrating to Canada at an
old age like that.” She ignored him. “Don’t you think so?”
“I don’t know Nawin. Roll your dice.”
She knew that the only force really binding her on that chair at the
kitchen table was herself. She was uncomfortable with his tenderness
because it shackled her at his side but out of courtesy to him she
tolerated the situation with only a few major grimaces. This quality
time together had occurred for her sake but she minimized its effects
where she could. She cynically told herself that these games were his
pathetic way of finding relief from his solitary ways. She felt sorry
for him and this sympathy ameliorated the loathing she was beginning to
feel for the introverted bore. Looking back on what she knew of him,
she assessed that this wooer of whores had always stayed in safe
circles. In Thai parties that they had attended following his exhibits
he had never been much of a mingler and had relied on her to be his
public relations gadabout. Here in Canada he wasn’t a celebrity. For
him there were just classes and an occasional sale of a painting. She
had no role with him here. She was a bed partner and a grocery shopper.
Even when fulfilling the wifely forgery of grocery shopping, she was
curtailed by financial considerations. If she didn’t buy generic food
of inferior taste he reprimanded her for overspending.
Porn asked if Park Place and Boardwalk were real properties and he told
her that they might be. It was a question that she had also posed two
days earlier but Nawin responded to it with the same cheerfulness as if
there had been sense in asking it a second time. She asked if he
thought they were well known New York City properties and he told her
that was quite possible. She glanced at their quality time together
through the slow perennial movements of the second hand. These
movements of the long second hand were so wobbly as if 60 seconds were
like climbing over a mountain range. She would not only glance up at
the kitchen clock but also the window as if expecting the snow to be
melted and birds singing in her window. She had wanted his attention
and now that she had it she realized that this was just aspirin dulling
the headache. There was a bigger problem. Being poor and lacking
choices had caused her rabid craving for more of everything just as
something long ago down deep in him was probably responsible for his
artistic brooding. The past was always sucking one into its whirlpool.
He rolled the dice and moved his token. “Oh, Old Kent Road-I want
that.”
“Why do you want worthless properties like that?”
“I don’t think either of those two properties are worthless.” He smiled
as radiantly as a child pleased to have one of his best friends
participating in one of his favorite games. He closed his lips in a
tight thoughtful smile. “You know what I’ve been thinking about?”
“No.” She didn’t really care.
“When you met Piggy for the first time.”
She frowned. Was this what they had become: a couple of tycoon
wannabes, two individuals acting like a married couple, or worse two
people acting like an old couple reminiscing about their early days in
front of bored games or a deck of cards? They did not have years
together-just two or three months of knowing each other—and she thought
he had no right to reminisce about anything. As much as she hated the
past, the present was equally bad at absorbing one in its reality. She
had now become his wife because she was with him at present. His wife
had been relegated as one force that had brought them together because
she was not immediately accessible nor was she sexual. “Oh,” she said
disinterestedly. She rolled the dice with more force and moved her
token from the present to the future. “I’ll take that railroad,” she
said. Still she couldn’t help being influenced by him and for a couple
seconds she was absorbed in that immediate past. That day had been good
but strange. After Noppawan had taken her shopping at Chatuchok Market
for clothing, they briefly went into the Butterfly Farm and Insect
Museum (a neutral alternative to the deleterious proposal of Siriaj
Hospital’s dead people museum that made Porn gasp). The butterflies
were fine. She enjoyed seeing their colors flittering around the caged
park although the encasement of dead insects in the adjacent room was
not to her liking. The face bug with its human camouflage on its back
was for her as frightening as it was fascinating to Noppawan. She
watched this wife of Nawin. She was the type that would put her nose
and glasses up against, in her opinion, the damnedest of things. When
they arrived at the married couple’s second home on the opposite part
of the city he was fixing a meal for the three of them. He was
preparing salad, toasting hamburger buns on a barbeque, and microwaving
meatless tofu hamburgers in a culture that was all his own. As the two
women chatted on the balcony Porn tried to overcome feeling like a face
bug caught in a key chain. As they ate, dusk elongated and then
intertwined their shadows before night approached. Soon the remnant of
the day became a violet, a purple, and a black and she felt like a
child first introduced to colors through crayons. They watched the lit
barges on the river and gorgeous glassy skyscrapers with lit angular
tiaras. Strangely enough she felt at peace with them as if they were
more than friends but family and the words of model or prostitute did
not exist. Still it was strange and uncomfortable because it was so
strange.
He dreamed that he was in her mind, that there was adrenalin in the
rebellion, that this adrenalin was the meaning of it all, and that the
meaning of all luminesced from her. Immediate relatives and some more
distant ones had her life planned for her; and her parents, the main
instigators of the status quo in their family, were rocks. They didn’t
change apart from greed that intensified with years and tiers. Stratums
of higher and more violent winds raged them in insatiable appetites.
Wants fed more wants insatiably. They stayed on the same growing pieces
of land, had the same opulent homes and efficient factories (although
more and more of them), matched political ideas to whatever brought
benefits to their wallets, and with these government positions they
implanted such aspirations on the little brother’s mind with the idea
that he was clay by which a conqueror with a double edged sword of
business and politics was formed. After going into the monastery to
have his foray as a monk and finishing his university education he
would be this and once she found a man in college she would be that.
She, the girl, would be less of the plan but still, years into the
future, they would partition a piece of their land and give it to her
husband. She would be expected to reproduce her higher beings on their
land allowing the elderly parents to be spared loneliness by the sounds
of young voices. She would be expected to take care of them as their
servants had taken care of her and to absolutely inebriate them against
any suffering as if Buddha’s attempts at bypassing human suffering had
been an avoidance of it. This would begin in a decade or so (such a
quick passing of time). She would be expected to succumb to female
yearnings-this needing of another to escape the lonely void, this need
to reach out for the silk of human flesh, to consume, to care, to be
intermingled entities in love, and reproduce. And yet she had been
nothing but a little doll that they had shown off and shoved into a
storage room especially when she was dirty or naughty.
And then her bedroom became a limb of a tree and there she was
transforming into an adult female mosquito and he was becoming a male
one. There they both were in complete maturity. He did his dance and he
rubbed his legs so as to attract her with his sound. She was ceramic in
her stiffness. Her skin was ochre like the dead bodies at the Siriaj
Hospital museum sunk into their glass caskets of formaldehyde. Yet her
eyes were lively even though they looked at him so askance and distant.
She smiled with her closed insect lips. The smile was ingenuous and
warm but wry. He could tell from these infinitesimal muscular
contractions and relaxation in her stony insect face that she did not
want him to think of their friendship as a relationship and the words
passed from brain to brain (hers to his, his to hers, and hers to his
like a mutating ping pong ball) something to the effect that a being
was born selfish and two selfish beings together were a compounded
selfish knot and so something new was in order. Something new was in
fact in order. There, ardent in her eyes, was the relationship of her
parents: it was based on hoarding property and power. It also was based
on begetting emotional servants for their old age and that in
particular was abhorrent to her. But he, the male mosquito that was
programmed for copulation and no other task, loved her. He had to since
he needed her for the satisfaction of his hungers and a deliverance
from the past. He continued with his male-on-the-make dance. She bit
into him. His blood was on her lips.
And when he woke up he wasn’t himself. His ideas were discombobulated
and he could tell that his consciousness or sanity was like a loose
button on a thin thread dangling from his shirt. He was ill and numb as
if all of his senses were bandaged over in gauze. He woke up fully,
checked his face in the mirror to see that it was still the same, and
washed it. He tried to desist from many thoughts. Thoughts were pins
stabbing him. He turned on the television, muted the sound, and saw
images as the hours of the day became vanquished. Then Kazem came back
early to bring him some food and in so doing he suspended their mutual
reticence briefly.
“I have some food for you,” he said in disgust.
“Thanks” Jatupon responded in insolent despondency.
The next day it was the same. Kazem came back briefly with some food
and a new pair of sunglasses for Jatupon’s face.
“I have some food for you,” he said in disgust.
“Thanks” Jatupon responded in insolent despondency.
“I also have some sunglasses for you” Kazem said in disgust.
“Thanks” Jatupon responded with a surly and begrudging tone of a nearly
mute volume.
He controlled his contempt out of an instinct for self- preservation.
He wanted to keep himself from being bludgeoned with the sledgehammer
of his brother’s fist or beaten with the leather skin of his slaps.
Kazem wanted to ask if Kumpee had said anything more about their dinner
engagement with the senator as an effort to establish its veracity-a
senator they called uncle as a disingenuous ploy to bring them into a
greater stratum of wanting and needing, winds of higher and more
pleasurable velocity.
The mosquito buzzed around Jatupon’s blackened eyes and then around the
opened bottle of glue. With his wings he made a pejorative click the
way people use their tongues when they shake their heads. Jatupon was
not glad to see him. He did not want the condemnation. At first this
glue-begotten ride had been an enjoyable thrill. The newness of a
newborn was at that time gleaming out of his orbs. He was like a child
in wonder of himself flossing his toes in the grass, having his hair
massaged by the winds, and chasing god in the clouds. Now the mosquito
was here spoiling the solitary party of one which was steadily waning.
The mosquito greeted him in English. “Hello, little man.” He thought it
was Kumpee at first but, to his knowledge, Kumpee didn’t know any
language apart from the strident sounds of Thai and was more in favor
of using the word “monkey” in place of “little man.” Jatupon looked
down at a gigantic insect that was nonetheless smaller than himself. He
responded in the same international tongue with a hello. “Where did you
learn your English?” asked Jatupon; but no sooner had he done this than
he realized how foolish the question was since the mosquito was an
extension of himself. For some reason he was both cognizant of the fact
that the creature didn’t exist and yet believing in him. It was
undeniable that if Buddha was right in claiming that the self was a
delusion there was a chance that instead of the mosquito being less
real it might be more real than himself. It was true that the mosquito
wasn’t afraid of a man but a man was afraid of a mosquito. Wasn’t that,
he asked himself, proof that the one who wasn’t afraid was more real?
“Where did you learn your English? “asked the mosquito.
“Music, TV shows, story books from the library, Newsweek in my more
ambitious times, cartoons mostly.”
“Well, then, me too” the mosquito said. It paused and then pulled out a
cigarette from its gums and lit it without a match by striking it
against the metallic hair on one of its legs. “Another day without
going to work?”
“Another day.”
“Taking it a bit easy?”
“Taking it a bit easy. Yes,” answered Jatupon.
“I would like to know why you have a black eye and a swollen face.”
“You know everything and yet I’m supposed to believe that it hasn’t it
occurred to you that I’m not wanting to think about this-about this
situation I’m in.”
“I understand that but am nonetheless curious what you have to say on
the subject.”
“Very little, if you don’t mind.”
“All right. Are you snorting glue because of what has happened to you?”
“Why ask so many questions?”
“Because I am cruel.”
“Yes, you are, you know.”
“You don’t like me at all?”
“Oh,” Jatupon sighed, “I do like you in ways.”
“What a charming endorsement! I elicit the same response everywhere I
go. Oh well...truth doesn’t have to be a comfortable realm. It rarely
is.”
“Yes,” said Jatupon pensively, “I imagine it rarely is.”
“The pain is so overwhelming you can’t work?”
“The boredom is so overwhelming I can’t work. It is a rot-a rot under
my hairnet. I can’t do it-reflexes every day and not with—”
The mosquito waited to hear the word “him.” “Go ahead and say it” was
in the mosquito’s thoughts but it was Jatupon who articulated this
oblique command, “Go ahead and say it!” to twist the direction of the
conversation .
“I don’t understand,” said the mosquito.
“Aren’t you wanting to give me your lecture that I have to survive?”
“I wasn’t going to say anything but you are meant for more than this
dizzying work and the instinct to survive is thrust on all living
things in all actions. You can’t but help obey it to some degree.”
“I can’t do it any longer.”
“You might have a nervous breakdown if you were to continue. Kazem was
your link. It’s gone now.”
“I’d rather die than go back to it now. Die in the streets if I have
to.”
“I think you are zipping up your pants again and finding them too
tight. You are shedding your boyhood.”
“Do you really think so?”
“Yes,” said the mosquito pensively. “Unfortunately, it was your best
trait.”
The mosquito dissipated with the smoke of Jatupon’s cigarette that he
rested and twirled in his fingertips. Smoking was his new habit that he
pursued in the hope of having a more insouciant image, which with
practice, he could learn to believe in. Boys of himself at earlier ages
came and pressed their noses near him as he had done long ago to the
glass outside the Dunkin Doughnuts Restaurant in Ayuttayha. Long lost
versions of himself at various ages passed up against him and passed
him by. They too dispersed with the gaseous midst of black carbon smog
released by the traffic. His head was spinning around skyscrapers and
billboards. They, he, a single homeless woman who rented out babies to
increase the chances of getting more substantial alms, two dogs
copulating, and all, were dwarfed in advertisements for shark fins for
the man with refined taste, Electric piecemeal billboards for Singh
Beer and cellular telephone companies with new images rotating with the
pieces, plain billboards of pimpleless white skinned Thai models
selling or hustling some facial cream, flashing and mutating signs
advertising various self-improvements seminars at different
universities and at the Convention Center, neon animations of
Barcelona’s Bangkok tour for the Invitation Cup Football Match, and
advertisements for every international and domestic product imaginable
thrust into the hands of consumers in the form of flyers. Indeed, it
was obscene enough to make a man become a monk: orgasmic organisms,
sensation of void.