The glue-induced waves of befuddlement came to him curled like talons
and this twisted and grotesque inundation beat his shore pulling and
pushing bits of himself fervently in all directions. It was as his
father had told him often: he did not know if he was coming or going.
He was both becoming more conscious of himself and his environment and
yet more despondent with strange thoughts fulminating out of his living
carcass, controlling him. He was moving toward reality and yet
diverging from it. He believed that he was downtown with Noppawan and
that they were wasting some time before the meeting with this former
avuncular image. They were walking through a mall and he was thinking
how long ago in boyhood he and his brothers had entertained the thought
of this man really being family to ease the pain of routine
constricting them in noodles. In the hallucination they left the mall
and went into an adjacent 80-story building and then took a high-speed
elevator to the top of that skyscraper. There the couple sat in the
opulence of the Baiyoke Sky Lounge revolving around glass windows and
ordering their cappuccino.
Then he wasn’t there. He was in his room, his cell, staring out of the
window. He was watching a tiger watching the descending sun. He was
startled. He hadn’t known that animals would look out at the beauty of
a descending sun. The tiger noticed him and got up; but discerning this
human’s own benign posture directed toward the same sunset, the tiger
returned to where it was at and once again revered the sun. Then he was
walking the streets and feeling such a crazy loneliness. He began to
mutter nonsense and he felt himself numb and slipping on his own frozen
thoughts. It was very strange for he wasn’t moving and yet the streets
moved him—strange as the fetid one, Kumpee, having been the angel who
had come at the right second delivering him from his worst impulses to
kill Kazem. If anything had given him food for thought that week of
idleness and recuperation in his cell, it had been the irony of the
fetid one as his guardian angel. If the fetid one had not stepped in
nothing would have intervened and he would have murdered his brother or
been murdered by him. If Suthep had come at that instant, instead of
Kumpee, he would have believed in Buddha or God. As it was, he believed
in Glue and its power to imitate the strange magic of the world that
was all around him.
His hallucination took him through the drenching storms of heavy rains
and again to the heavily billboarded world of downtown opulence:
iridescent Isuzu Ascender, its back wheels aired above a city, front
wheels ascending toward the fiery black nothingness of space, ascend,
it says, ascend, as if it, a thing, were the portal to creation, the
why, the reason of it all, ascend; Compaq Computers, don’t be left
behind, don’t, easy just a don’t; large, sprawling cursory sentences of
lumination on these black moliminous rectangles towering above all the
tiny traffic, tiny cars and tinier lives, advertising self-help and
get-rich seminars; a more conventional but gigantic billboard placed
near a skyscraper lit like stage lights on an actress, a gigantic face
of a beautiful Chinese Thai with clean and white Chinese skin that
stayed pimpleless with Johnson and Johnson’s Clean and Clear. There
were electric rotating piecemeal signs advertising cellular phones and
internet providers (instantaneous messages not for his patronage).
Advertisements were on the sides of busses and bus stops of happy soap
families and big-breasted bra wearers both of which made the saliva
increase in his mouth the way an orange would. Shop signs crouched low
with sidewalk beggars, international fast food restaurants and flyers
thrust into hands: and it all spoke of the city the same as the
skyscrapers that alone were the epitome of opulence and disparity.
“What do you want from life?” said the whore at her door. “Enroll at
Siam University and find new opportunities. Don’t let bad grades stop
you,” she continued. “Come in, and I’ll give you a massage that will
make your body feel in ways you’ve never imagined,” said the shark
restaurant worker who made a commission luring those of supercilious
tastes to a cuisine laced in marginal traces of mercury. “Shark Fins
this way,” said the tuc tuc driver eager to compound a taxi fee with an
agency’s commission for bringing a foreigner to a beloved half-hour
lady of the night. “Want a girl?” asked the white robed female Buddhist
nuns who had shaved heads and collection canisters in their hands as
they stood on the steps leading to the platform of the sky train like
Hara Krishnas. Jatupon heard the door open.
“Oh, God,” he heard Kazem’s voice. Surprisingly, it wasn’t angry. He
heard footsteps of restless movement. “Oh, God,” he heard again. Then
he heard the footsteps move toward him. The movements were slow and
careful. He opened his eyes and saw his brother. Kazem was scratching
his head in confusion.
“I’m sorry buddy. I’m so sorry. I know I’m late saying that, but fuck,
you were ready to throw a television into my head. I don’t know how all
that happened, but what a mess. Why did you have to get yourself all
doped like that at this time-especially this time; and oh, fuck, did
you get into my whiskey? You did, you little thief! Right? Right? Was
that a nod? Was that a nod? Do you like that? I’ll pull your ears off
the way father nearly did. Man, we’ve got an appointment! Did you take
anything besides sniffing this stuff? I mean besides drinking my liquor
and sniffing glue was there a third thing? Think: I’ve got to know how
serious!” This had been one of Jatupon’s only times of being in the
cell and flying within his own head. Nearly all the other times he had
gone out to the streets to gain his high and stayed there until he was
able to return home halfway sober and feign a sickness successfully. He
regretted being witnessed and scrutinized by Kazem. The environment was
bouncing to the cadence of Kazem’s voice and stung Jatupon’s hands
through the conduit of the rubbery stickiness of desiccated glue that
still hung in patches from some of his fingertips. He was pulled into
the shower with underpants still on. The hair of his head was locked in
Kazem’s fingers. He could smell the sweetness of his brother’s sweat.
He could smell his body odor like any dog getting its molecular high.
Jatupon thought it was very romantic. He smiled widely at Kazem whose
fingers clenched him by the throat pinning him against the back wall of
the shower as the cold waters ran over him and through his underpants.
Jatupon fought like a suffocating fish and when he was free from the
loosened grasp he gasped and then kissed and licked the body that he
was denuding—the same body that had brought him near death but the same
one who had saved him from drowning long ago when he was a boy.
Then after a good long vomit and a brief nap he exited with his brother
into the light rain and they were off to see the wizard. They went by
taxi with the idea of picking up Suthep along the way. Kazem waited in
the taxi while Jatupon knocked on Suthep’s door. Jatupon knocked,
stood, and waited repeatedly for five or ten minutes without success.
Then he began to return to the taxi looking down and scrapping his feet
against dirt and rocks like a child preferring to be left alone in his
imagination.
But when he returned the taxi had turned into a limousine like a
pumpkin into a carriage. He wondered if he was hallucinating once
again. Then standing there like a diffident and disconcerted child in
total confusion, he noticed the window descending for him and out poked
the head of the fetid one but his hair was cut, greased back, and
nicely groomed, his face was shaven, and the cologne or aftershave
lotion that he was wearing had molecules that poignantly bit into
Jatupon’s psyche favorably. Here was a dark but handsome man. He never
knew him, before, to be such. “Get in you little Monkey—up front with
the driver.” When Jatupon was seated comfortably in softness and space
he glanced back at his three brothers who reclined in an opulent
shadow.
“Cheers, Jatuporn,” said Kumpee.
Kazem clanged his glass against the glasses held by Kumpee and Suthep.
“Cheers to every boy, girl, hollering hound, and wide spread whore on
the planet,” said Kazem. Suthep and Kumpee laughed.
“Yes, I’ll have to say my cheers to them too,” said Kumpee. All three
brothers were drinking wine in the back seat.
“Should we give him something?” asked Suthep.
“Are you kidding,” said Kazem. “That boy goes places we can only dream
about. No more fuel for that tank. He’s been there, done that. He’s
gone on one round trip today. That’s enough.” He drank more of his
wine. “Sometimes I have to sleep with one eye open to make sure he
doesn’t drift further into mischief.”
“Did you like how we fucked up your mind?” Kumpee asked Kazem. “It was
Suthep’s idea of parking on the corner. When you didn’t leave the taxi
we still waited a little until you fell into a smoking addiction.
Suthep said, ‘Just wait, he’ll go into the 7-11’ and that is exactly
what happened. While you were in there buying your cigarettes we paid
off the taxi driver and sent him away. Then we parked in his place.”
“Well, if that trick was for me, it didn’t do anything. I wasn’t even
surprised let alone shocked. I definitely didn’t think I was out of my
mind.”
“Well, Jatuporn sure thought he was seeing things,” said Suthep.
“He looked like the Emerald Buddha was talking to him,” said Kumpee.
The brothers laughed. Suthep farted.
“Bangkok bus exhaust. Plug your nose,” commented Kumpee. Their laughter
intensified. Even Jatupon was laughing with them.
“I want to know why Jatuporn is wearing sunglasses,” said Suthep
anxious to diffuse their thinking of his odor. Horrific odors were
usually attributed to Kumpee and he cared to keep it that way.
“You know already,” said Kazem. “Leave it alone. Why are you wearing
that gold chain around your neck?”
“A girl gave it to me” said Suthep.
“What girl? Some girl behind a cash register. Did you pull out a gun
and make her believe her brains would be splattered?”
“That wouldn’t have been me. I am a woman lover. I don’t make war,”
said Suthep. “Show me your eyes, Jatuporn.”
“Leave him alone,” said Kazem.
Kumpee grabbed Jatupon’s head, yanked off the glasses, and twisted the
face so that Suthep could see it. “A regular raccoon, that one is.
“No, even a raccoon is lighter than that. Maybe it’s like watching a
raccoon after he and a bear have been going at it: the bear with a
television in his paws and the raccoon cowering near his puddle of
blood. Thai boxing doesn’t get as exciting as what I saw. I just regret
not having been there for the whole show.”
“Stop it!” ordered Kazem.
“Does he always give orders like that?” asked Kumpee to Suthep. Then to
Kazem he said, “Hey, remember that I am the oldest one here. Could you
say that in a more pleasant tone?”
“I would like for you to stop picking on him. Look at him up there.”
Jatupon’s eyes were withdrawn and his head was slightly tilted to the
dashboard.
“Here are your glasses,” said Kumpee as he stood and bent forward with
effort to give them back. His hand disheveled Jatupon’s unkempt hair
even further. “You need to comb that mop.”
Arrows of the past, mostly from his father and Kumpee, shot out of the
neurological circuitry of his brain paralyzing him in a numb withdrawal
of survival. It was no different than at earlier stages of his life
when he wondered why things didn’t move forward but at the same time
was fearful that they would. He was back in the horror known as family
withdrawing himself from it, living in his protective bubble of
withdrawal. “You are afraid of your own shadow.” “Are you preparing for
a flood? Those pants look stupid on you.” “What are you doing sitting
over there? Get out of that seat?” “I’ll mop up the floor with you one
of these days.” “Why aren’t you working? You are absolutely good for
nothing.” “What do you do in that back room, you pimple faced monkey?
Get out of that cage of yours and put down those books. No use you
thinking you are any better than the rest of us.” “Get out of my seat
you ugly little fart.” He heard it even though none of these
disparaging ideas were articulated in the limousine.
Jatuporn, Jatuporn, he thought. They knew and they mocked him with his
ignominy. If he had been a girl and someone had sexually abused him he
could speak of it and have a good purifying cry cleansing himself of
his stress but his situation was different. It was one he had invited
upon himself. He’d sleep with the others as well if it would make them
kinder to him-so vehement was his need for their love. How horrible it
was to meet this rich avuncular stranger, he thought to himself. It
would be horrible enough meeting a bag lady with a face that looked
like a raccoon and an aching in his raw bottom. He put on his
sunglasses.
In an odd way for him it was like traveling on a poor man’s cattle
train back to the town from whence an exodus from the rice fields had
occurred. No poor man would want to return to his farm and admit that
he couldn’t obtain employment in Bangkok and no one with any real
self-esteem wanted to link again to a wealthy man who, for good reason,
had been reluctant to have any association with his ex-nephews-in-law.
His father had tried countless times to get money from the senator. His
mother had been subtler and more industrious. She got a campaign drive
active in her neighborhood to do her little part in trying to get him
reelected. The senator never forgot such hard working activists and
always remembered her birthday with a gift. She was content with that
but for her husband it intensified his yearning for better things. And
so it was with his brothers: they thought about how their dreams could
be effectuated with a bit of the senator’s savings. Jatupon did not
adhere to this disingenuous wish for a family reunion and so trapped in
a moving box with brothers who had one converging theme that was not
his own, he felt like an unemployed laborer returning back on the poor
man’s train even though he was riding in a limousine.
The recurring idea that the aunt and the uncle had not gone to the
funeral made him even increasingly repellent toward this meeting with
the senator. He halfway wanted to jump out of the door and let a
physics lesson ensue. Would he just drop or would he be thrust out like
a projectile. Would his blood ooze out or would it disgorge like the
insides of a tossed pumpkin? He looked out of the window at the quick
passing of buildings and then up to the billowing clouds. They were gas
with distinct and individual form. They were energy that was distended
and fomenting. How mysterious it all was. When one was cremated he
would be such gas. Man was ephemeral noise but nature was reticent and
swelling. Distending and distending, it extended him beyond his petty
thinking. How good it all was!
Well, he thought, there was no resisting the inevitable. He would be
entering the senator’s house mortified from his sunglasses and black
eyes but the issue was petty enough that there would not be any serious
consideration about avoiding this eventuality through jumping out of a
moving car. Kazem had attempted to put a story into his head that might
save them from being scrutinized about this subject. It had seemed
plausible enough: an injury from the recent Songkran festival in
Banglampool gained from a water fight where some water in the plastic
guns had been adulterated with some caustic chemicals. However, he did
not like casting shadowy illusions into the senator’s mighty halls. No,
he shouldn’t be with this chain gang of prisoners going to the warden’s
home, dragging the noodles that bound them, asking for him to remove
them. This avuncular stranger hadn’t come for their parents’ funeral.
He hadn’t wished them condolences. It would have been such a little
thing to do; and since it wasn’t done it was monumentally wrong.
Reticent and deep in himself so that his brothers’ pejorative comments
did not hurt him tremendously when they pierced, he implemented the
same defense mechanism that had saved him from psychosis in such a
family all of these years. This withdrawal made the rational self into
a deadened membrane and shield. This shield deflected their arrows. How
profoundly intricate the psyche’s defenses were. What wouldn’t the
brain do to spare itself wounds! The mind, perhaps, did the same with
love. Within life’s physical titillations in this sordid realm through
the smell and feel of breath rhythmically sliding onto his nose from
the spewing mouth of his mate —a warm soothing wind crossing the hill
of his nose; the tactile wearing of another’s skin by touch more
luxurious than any silk; merciful orgasmic clemency from logic; the
moving of a chest; the heart beat; and yes, the feeling of being in
love addictive and sensitive toward another human presence, one’s ideas
of life were whitewashed and exhilarated. For him, sex in the shower
had annulled his hatred of Kazem. It had made the world into less of a
hostile place. It had provided the specious idea that he was not alone.
He looked out of the car window. The palm trees seemed like rock solid
Cyclopes eating away the remnants of the sun. He noticed that the car
was stopping. The gates opened to an acreage far from balloon peddlers,
sandwich salesmen with a box strapped onto their chests, holy jasmine
makers, goldfish in the bag mountebanks, car window newspaper
accosters, and the sidewalk noodle workers.
“Will he be alone?” asked Suthep.
“His staff will be there,” said Kumpee.
“I mean women. An Old guy with lots of money must have new ones around
each week. I mean they wouldn’t like him but they would feel important
and ornamental to be there at his home.”
“I wouldn’t know one way or the other.”
“What did you do when you were together with him?” asked Suthep.
“I wasn’t really. It was through a speaker. I finally got him to talk
through the speaker after pleading with all his servants that way.
I made him feel guilty. I told him he should have gone to the funeral.
I told him he needed to help his relatives or I’d see if a newspaper
reporter would talk to me.”
“You said that!” yelled Kazem angrily.
“Oh, he agreed with me that he was wrong. He said that he wanted to see
us. He told me that. Then we got visits from his men and this.”
When they arrived into what was to them an opulent mansion (a couple of
the dozen rooms that were only marginally spacious by western
standards) they saw him in the living room in front of a big screen
where, what to the gods, were tenuous carbon copies of men falling from
the windows of a skyscraper with their myriad papers. America
(specifically New York City) was under siege.
The boys gestured the “wei” to him. He saw prayerful hands in front of
faces and, except in the youngest who was hidden behind his sunglasses,
their beggarly downtrodden expressions depicted their unworthiness to
meet him. That was their ploy. He gestured the “wei” in return. He was
begrudging of their entrance in his life and resented having to comply
with the wishes of the eldest that the meeting take place. However, his
plan was to neutralize the possibility of negative publicity. He just
wanted to allow these meetings to take place from time to time. If the
“thugs” thought that he would be giving them anything more than an
occasional meal it was their own delusion and in the meantime he would
be keeping any problems from occurring like the unlikely eventuality of
an newspaper article scathing him for lack of interest in the welfare
of his relatives and making an assumption that he wouldn’t be
interested in the welfare of others. Something like that, unlikely as
it was, could nonetheless happen if he didn’t pacify those who had the
power to possibly create such problems. “Come in and sit down over
here,” he said. The tone of voice of this avuncular stranger was grave
and his face hardly glanced at them as their barefooted feet ascended
into his domain. The television tugged in their diffident movements to
plush, white, upholstered chairs and these chairs kept saying to
Jatupon that he and his brothers had no right to sit there. Still and
seated, they became like spectators at the Coliseum. It was a CNN
glimpse into the future: skyscrapers ablaze from passenger jets
deliberately being slammed into them. They were being made aware of
horrific ways of dying and since it was so horrific there was no
self-centeredness and movement by which to callously disregard it. They
were empathic and there was no escape. Jatupon wanted to shake the gods
from their slumber, to knock the emerald Buddha from its pedestal, and
to hijack fate and turn it around at gunpoint from the cockpit. He
wanted all life to cease and start again in parity and respect. He
wanted deliverance for Siriaj Hospital freaks, the aborted, the
stillborn, deformed, diseased, and the downtrodden, those who die from
malnutrition, old men who always think that their lives have been for
nothing, the elephants that lose their molars and so search for a soft
shaded area of grass to lie down in comfortable death, weaker animals
not yet dead fallen as prey, soldiers who must lose their lives in war,
and child soldiers whose short lives were as instruments of hate. To
him it was no wonder that they (humans) were bad. They were all
conceived by greedy sexual devouring, these selfish absorptions and
attempts at fitting into silk skinned robes and hallucinogenic shadows.
The World Trade Center disaster was proof not only that people were bad
but that there was no god overseer above looking at this clashing of
wills. There was just malicious and inane preying on others and this
time it might well be that these hijackers had not even been incensed
at opulence and starvation which stood back to back like America and
Afghanistan or a domineering state like America to a stateless one like
Palestine. If this had been planned by the rich ex-Saudi, Bin Laden, it
was just hate (senseless, irrational hate that existed for no
particular reason at all), the desire for power, the idea of heroism
and a sure ticket to heaven, and the dramatic thrill of destruction
that would go down as historical.
It was strange that people should perish so terribly and that those
perpetrating this action could rationalize America as a monster worthy
of monstrous actions that would humble this one nation under God,
indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Foremost it was strange
to him that such suffering could be ignored, if not partially forgotten
so quickly when Vanont, the servant, came in for the third time telling
them that the dinner was getting cold and he wasn’t going to warm it up
for the second time. No longer mesmerized, they came back to
themselves. At the dining room table they began their banal chatter.
They asked about the number of his servants, how long he had lived
here, his typical working day, and what he did when he returned home.
They wanted to ask about their aunt but they had determined as they
rode over here that the subject might alienate their host. Except for
Jatupon whose lips slightly frowned, the brothers gained pleasure
pointing out various items in the room, asking questions about them,
and feeling pleased to be in such opulence. The senator asked about
Kazem and Suthep’s restaurant businesses. When Suthep made a more
obvious attack to evoke sympathy for their nominal existence the
senator said, “You are young. It is a first business.” Then to avert
hearing anything more on that matter, he switched to Kumpee who had
extorted this family reunion. He asked what he did for a living.
Kumpee’s circumlocutory answer was no different than any hustler’s
grandiloquence about selling one thing or another real or imagined. His
quick words were inarticulate and glib. Nobody understood what he said
for the words were mountainous heaps of illusion. The senator did find
out that Kumpee had fathered a child. He had a baby girl. Kumpee took
out the photograph from his wallet and then he passed it around. The
senator affected a smile when he saw the picture but he conjectured
that “this boy” was living from this arrangement with the girlfriend
and the baby he had fathered. Jatupon, surprised like his other
siblings, found pleasure in the thought that he was now an uncle. For a
moment he felt love for this unseen entity and a desire to ensure that
her life turned out better than his but then he realized that he would
never see her, and being the child of a rich Chinese Thai, she would
have a better life than he had.
The senator asked Jatupon why he was wearing sunglasses. He gave the
rehearsed answer and then had to remove the sunglasses at the senator’s
insistence. “The Songkran festival ended over a month ago,” said the
avuncular stranger. “Why do you still have black eyes now?”
“Yes, but my face was really hurt badly” Jatupon responded. The senator
looked at him sternly. He didn’t want to waste his night hearing their
lies, and if they were all like Suthep, he didn’t want to hear the
truths either. Kazem opened his mouth. He was prepared to say that
Jatupon had gotten himself into a fight but when he saw the stern
expression of the unbelieving host his words retreated. Jatupon saw
himself and his brothers shaded in the dismal gray of those who could
not be trusted. A man’s mind was a tenuous object swayed in the winds
of discourse so when it sensed a disingenuous response in the surreal
uncertainty of understanding a matter fully it cringed. He felt like he
was casting shadows onto the senator’s grand walls like children using
their hands to project shadows of rabbits and dogs. But then his
conscience waned. He again remembered that the aunt and uncle hadn’t
attended the funeral of his parents. He remembered his aunt’s
magnanimous crusades to become so important in his life, seeing him
educated by paying his tuition and sending him to private tutorials,
the Bible school, the varnishing of Christ’s picture on wood, the taste
of punch at the Bible School, and how outside the building there was a
soccer ball tied to a string and a pole and how the children tried to
compete to get the ball wound up on their side of the poll. She would
sometimes come to pick him up and take him to an ice cream parlor. She
didn’t have any children of her own. He frowned at the senator’s
scolding facial expressions. He met angered glances with those of his
own. The family chatted on. The senator seemed friendlier and Jatupon
even began to look up from his plate. The distrust had diffused to the
point where it ceased to matter. They chatted and their chatter was
irrelevant.
“Why did this happen?” blurted out Jatupon from nowhere. “If it is
Islamic terrorists how could they hate that badly? Is it envy of a
wealthier and more powerful country, or the hatred toward Israeli aid
from the United States? I don’t understand it. We talk and talk and yet
people are falling out of windows of 100 story buildings. How can we
eat and carry on with things?”
Kumpee and Suthep scoffed at him.
“It is barbaric, barbaric no matter what line of reasoning they use to
justify their actions. Do you know anything about the Islamic world and
why it dislikes the west, Jatupon?” The choice of his words were
influenced by his Moslem background.”
“I don’t really,” he said. “ If Bin Laden is so rich it isn’t
inequality that he hates. Tyrants like building up empires but he
doesn’t seem to want one—just wants to destroy the west. I don’t
understand it at all. I know that there are 7000 American soldiers in
the holy land of Saudi Arabia to protect that area from Iraq’s
aggression and—” He swallowed hard. He knew that his brothers would
hate him. “I know that America continues to supply Israel with millions
of dollars in aid and billions of dollars in weapon sales even though
Israel still occupies what was once Palestine.” He knew that he needed
to summarize these issues with some scanty understanding to impress the
senator. “America imposes sanctions against Iraq out of fear of its
military buildup but these sanctions cause thousands of people to die
from malnutrition. America financially backed Iraq against Iran in that
war and the Taliban against the Soviet Union and now those regimes were
the wrong choices. The enemy of my enemy is my friend was the wrong
philosophy. Those were bad foreign affairs blunders. They continually
interfere with the policies of Moslem countries so that the oil that
drives their economy doesn’t cease. It is economic considerations that
cause them to back the governments of Algeria and Egypt that they can
influence even though those governments are not democracies. They’ve
made Iraq and Iran as strong as America.”
The senator knew that this was a good understanding for a 14-year-old
boy. “How do you know these things, Jatupon?”
“He reads a lot of comic books,” said Suthep. They laughed.
“I go to the library when I can,” he said modestly. “Sometimes I go
there just to read comic books and once in a while I read Newsweek.”
“Do you know English?”
“Yes, I do,” he said proudly. The senator found himself interested in
the boy the way his ex-wife had been. Her reasons, however, had been
maternal ones and her disinterest had been from the same source. A
voice of an alter ego that was fettered in a private chamber in the
cellar of her mind shrieked stridently that this was no child of her
own and it had been for this reason that she had dropped him from her
life suddenly. His interest was of a man who sees continuum of what he
is or a rejuvenation of what he was. Both reactions were selfish ones
but this was the planet Earth where most good actions were dictated by
egocentric realms.
Vanont yelled that one of the buildings was imploding and the senator
got up from the table. “Continue eating,” he said as he exited the
room. Jatupon looked out of the window. Thai thunder crackled the skies
like an empty bag of potato chips. Lightning streaked across the Thai
skies naked and ominous. There he was seated with his brothers in that
home they had always wanted to enter for so many years. And yet instead
of being the happy family members visiting the relatives, they were
nothing but a group of extortionists who had manipulated their way
through locked gates. This fraternity of boyhood had evolved on higher
tiers of wants into a Tower of Babel, a tower of thugs.
Low levels of hate still exuded from him toward Kazem who had done this
to his face. He was sedentary in his own guilt for his attempt to
murder Kazem, which later led to the best sexual experience he had ever
had. Hate and the frenzy of love were rotting the best aspects of him
that was so neatly named a soul. Hate and love had been horrible
fulminations of neediness that ignited a person into another being,
possessed will, and thrust reality into chaos. Sure this release of
sexual tension, in the acme of ecstasy, led to Nirvana like any well
thrust missile but each intimacy was like a cow that jumped over the
moon.
He heard his brothers talk but did not listen to anything. Talk was a
kinetic sport. The mouth was a spout. In it emotions were like boiling
water steaming out the teapot. For him, the introvert who communed with
the original wisdom deep in the stagnant pool of his being, there was
only the window and a landscape of waxy greenery in the rain. He was
mesmerized in the mellifluous monotony of rain slapping against the
window.
Men falling from the windows of the World Trade Center in New York: the
world was an evil place and he wanted to sink under the veil of
Childhood for it was benign. Guileless, ingenuous, innocuous, worriless
childhood was where the imagined was tangible and personal. Planes
deliberately crashed into skyscrapers incinerating buildings and
people: this was solid proof that it was a godless universe, but then
he had always assumed that it was such. Still to take a deep breath was
amazing. To be thinking was amazing. To see from the window such a
beautiful verdant acreage and rain pouring onto it making it greener
yet was like fecund life commencing after the destruction of a forest
fire. His parents died but in so doing here he was in the senator’s
dining room: wasn’t this an amazing chain of events even if their
arrival had been obtained badly? The senator called them to come in
with their plates and drinks. For Jatupon it felt like they were a
family huddled together in front of the television—images of tragedy
shared together in common.
A half hour later the senator found himself irritated by the one
likable thug looking the part. “Can you see anything with those
sunglasses on?” he asked bitterly.
“Not much” said Jatupon.
“I’ve seen what you look like. Take them off.”
“Take them off you little idiot” said Kumpee. Jatupon obeyed but
glanced at Kumpee with a strong glare of hate.
“Did you really get that from Songkran?” asked the senator. Jatupon
sensed that the senator’s tone was jocular. He could tell that the
avuncular stranger, like them all, just needed a respite from the grave
images they were witnessing.
“He’s always getting into fights” lied Kumpee stealing the words that
still wouldn’t come from Kazem’s mouth.
“Is that so?” asked the senator but it was to no one specific.
“All the time” confirmed Suthep.
“Is that true?” the senator asked Jatupon. “Who with?”
“I can’t imagine who. I guess myself,” said Jatupon while he stared
into the senator’s eyes with a bold earnestness.
The senator laughed “I’ll interpret that as a need for privacy,” he
said. He backed away from the truth. He sensed it already and it was
really none of his business. In a strange way he was even beginning to
like their presence. It was the closest thing he had to family, and so
he told himself that maybe he should enjoy it.
Jatupon looked out across the senator’s spacious living room and then
returned to the center where they were. He noticed a bowl on an end
table. The bowl contained wrapped caramel within it.
“Help yourself,” said the senator as he passed the bowl first to Kumpee
who was seated nearest to him.
They chewed. The senator continued translating pertinent bits that were
anchored on the news program. “America under attack” was the logo at
the bottom of the screen. The brothers had no label for this snack but
they knew that it was catered to the higher status of palate and
because of this they ate it gluttonously. The taste and the gummy
texture were foreign to them. Jatupon thought of his own insatiable
need for sweets any time he saw his aunt. If she continued to buy candy
necklaces for him to slobber on she continued to care and it was for
that reason that he craved for sweets so voraciously.
“The wrappers are labeled with the names of American states on them.”
“Yes, I like caramel. I always have since Chusanee and I were married.
She liked them so much. Anyhow that’s over now. By the way, I’m not
sure if you know this, Jatupon, but after your mother and father
separated briefly, your mother went away to the states. You were born
in America.” Jatupon sat there in numb surprise with a caramel square
smashed into the back of his mouth. He didn’t chew or swallow as the
senator elaborated on a trip that their aunt had arranged for their
mother to give her some time to think. “I’m mentioning it to you now
because you are American and you should know that fact if ever you have
an opportunity to travel. It is easier with an American passport.”
Then his face focused on the images. A second tower imploded. How many
thousands were dead and dying was anyone’s guess. It was a horrible
thing and yet he felt that they all, rightly or wrongly, were linked
together in the belief that gluttony and poverty were the main
instigators. He wondered if his brothers thought that justice was being
rendered.
Later, when Jatupon was returning from the bathroom, Vanont stopped him
and asked him to go into the study. Ten minutes later the senator came
in and sat down at his desk. He handed Jatupon a can of Coca Cola. The
senator had a second one that he also opened and drank.
“Why do you think that your brothers have been so persistent about
seeing me?” asked the senator.
“I don’t know for sure. That’s the truth. I don’t think there is
anything too planned in it. They’re selfish. I know that. It was wrong
how Kumpee arranged the meeting. Even Kazem thinks that; but it isn’t
so calculating for a bunch of boys with no real family—not even with
each other—to want to know their uncle. I know that you aren’t married
now and it isn’t as if you are an uncle like blood or have to have
anything to do with us. Anyhow I think more than anything they just
wanted to meet someone respectable when their lives aren’t of any
consequence. At least that is how I feel about it. Maybe they think
that they can get something out of it but I don’t think they’ve really
isolated what they want. Maybe it isn’t much more than just wanting to
feel a bit linked to you. I guess I want that in ways, but in ways I
don’t. I mean you’ve been really nice but I don’t understand why you
didn’t go to my parents’ funeral. There was nobody really but us.
Nobody came at all really.”
“Maybe I should help you,” said the senator.” The words ran out of his
mouth like a loose dog. He was surprised to see them running away.
Jatupon could see that he regretted the words.
“I need out. I don’t mean to come here with you. I want, on my own, to
break from them. I can’t go back there again.”
“Which one beat up on you like that?” Jatupon didn’t say anything but
looked down at his legs. The senator asked, “Does it happen very
often?”
“Well, I’m not a kid.”
“You’re 14, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that isn’t manhood yet. It is an awkward age.”
“I won’t return. I hate him for doing that to me. He just left me in
the puddle of my blood. I hated him so badly I wanted to kill him
afterwards.”
“Which one?”
“All of them hate me. Suthep and Kumpee resented what Aunt Chusanee
tried to do for me but I don’t hate them.”
“She always said that you were clever.”
“I wish I could go away and be somebody different than what I am, and
yet I wish that I could be important to them and that the four of us
could be a close family. You too, if you want.”
“Jatupon, families aren’t forever. Boys grow up and they gain their own
lives. They have children. Those children grow up. I don’t know what
you might or might not have done to get into a fight with them or one
of them but it didn’t deserve a fist in your face. You look awful. Give
me a week. I want you to contact me in a week. I’ve got some work I
need to do and Vanont will show you and your brothers out. He’ll point
you in the direction of the bus stop. It isn’t all that late. All the
busses should still be running. Tell your brothers that we’ll try to
get together again in a couple months or so.”
From the window of the classroom, Noppawan saw the wind kick about the
branches of the trees in an anomaly not characteristic of Bangkok
weather. She hated feeling hostage to proctor the eye movements of
these students, to walk every several minutes through the aisles of the
desks, and to scrutinize wanton little individuals prepossessed of
schemes for cheating that could improve their chances of getting good
grades and hasten the end of the tests. Their main wishes were for the
resurrection of their still cadavers to the kinetic movement of going
with their friends to the next Hollywood movie, the next shrill of
laughter, gossip, and karaoke booths in the corridors of malls. She
liked the wind’s attitude of just knocking around the day, kicking off
the old leaves, and dancing about. She wondered why she admired kinetic
movement in nature and not in the uniformed idiocy of the students
before her. It was, she answered to herself, because each of these
uniformed specimens probably did the same exact actions of their
fathers and mothers before them. Certainly year after year new groups
of freshmen were identical to each other. They engaged in senseless
programmed activities like ants: the mating frivolity before working
and hoarding. As rich as they were (these future owners of their
parents’ factories) they were walking down the same hill toward their
deaths no different than the worker ants. None of them contributed to
the permanency of thought and understanding. They just followed and
followed.
Nature experimented, she caused uniqueness in form if not attitude, she
continentally drifted lands for the hell of it, she erupted volcanoes
and earthquakes in the damnedest of places and let her creatures adapt
or perish. Nature was an alchemist and a lover of the extraordinary.
Noppawan wanted to open a window. After all, the students were cold in
the air conditioning and she wanted to feel the breeze, but some fool
or another who supervised proctors would complain that something in the
room wasn’t orthodox. She didn’t want to get a letter in her mailbox
complaining that she hadn’t sealed up the envelopes of the tests with
enough tape or another odd irrelevant idea because she hadn’t been as
orthodox as she should have been.
It was the administration that consisted of desperate fools during
times that were irregular. She had been forced to teach an anthropology
class this semester. How that was related to zoology she couldn’t say
unless the administration was privy to the philosophy of mice and men.
All she knew was that the anthropology teacher ran away and they were
in desperate need of someone to fill the gap as well as perform her
regular duties. A numb throbbing of life’s dreariness overtook her as
she walked around these handsome faces and thought to herself how she
really wanted to open the window.
Her husband had not throbbed his body in her inordinately so she did
not understand why she was jealous of his activities, and yet she was.
It was this beyond all other things that was a gloom over her sedentary
thoughts that were constricted to monitor the eye movements and actions
of the students and to be the perfect guard of these prisoners that had
been assigned to her. She looked at the girl test takers. Unlike Porn,
whose focus was business, they were disrespectful whores whose interest
was only in sucking up the pheromone fumes, having babies, and raising
them to fulfill their need for stability and permanence. To have a role
in the world (that of being a mother) would override the love needs of
the contributor of the sperm, and they would cling to motherhood as
salamanders in the rain. That “salamander in the rain” idea had been
one of her husband’s more clever thoughts that he attributed to the
lack of creativity he saw around him. He was clever and she had liked
him so much for so many years. She hadn’t been in love with him until
his departure. If she had been like all other women she would have
succumbed to these feelings and thoughts that she needed her man
terribly. Their overwhelming power tried to destroy her resolve and
only the idea that these feelings were illusions was she able to
maintain her integrity. The feelings were unadulterated neediness
because of his adultery-the jealous biological programming of a woman.
This feeling of love, this motif of women and pop culture, vexed her.
It was annulling her marital contract that had been engendered out of
friendship of two people who were complete unto themselves. Well, he
wasn’t so complete. He did whine. That was for sure. There was a boy
that came out from time to time needing a mommy. It had been nauseating
to tolerate to say the least; but she had done so under the firm belief
that most men were worse than he was on this point. And for her, there
were female vulnerabilities but earlier she had been prudent enough to
get herself sterilized and minimized her sexual activity.
Before she came into the classroom she had encountered a couple of her
colleagues laughing shyly. In the couple seconds that she drew near
them before passing they were tacit in the shamefaced ways of Thais.
She knew that many of them gossiped about her who was the wife of a man
celebrated for his adulterous debauchery. She could have been their
holy martyr as the object of sympathy and the icon of women’s suffering
but her frank endorsement of her husband’s activities to newspaper
reporters had made her the subject of ridicule. A man would be totally
lost if he didn’t have his extramarital affairs, she said. He would
have no knowing of the nothingness of his misadventures unless he were
to experience minutes of despair after the orgasm was complete. This is
what she told the reporters on a few occasions-each time expanding on
her ideas and making them more colorful than at previous times. She was
proud of creating the Noppawan doctrine and she knew that because of it
the university wanted to get rid of her. In ways she was proud of being
sneered at but it was uncomfortably lonely. She imagined the thoughts
of these two instructors who passed her, “Craggy thing, no man would
mount you. It is no wonder that you’re forlorn for the whores.” No,
they’d never even say anything like that even to each other. They
wouldn’t even consciously think it. Thais were too polite and too
deferential to even the despised for that: instead there was that
shamefaced laugh and that reciprocal glance. Then, as she was walking
to Building P with the tests that she had picked up from the
administration office, a boy and a girl were in front of her. This
pair, holding hands, were taking up the whole sidewalk and blocking
everyone from passing in their slow movements. The girl had books on
her head that she was trying to balance. The boy watched her lovingly.
She wanted to smack them-these dummies who were dopamine gluttons.
Everywhere she went it was young couples in love. She wanted to get out
the biggest can of Raid and perform a major insecticide/genocide that
would give Miloshevik a companion in the Hague; but being a humane
individual such hideous thoughts could only instigate a wry smile or an
occasional chuckle. When she saw such couples everywhere it made her
feel an antithesis of things: like an uncomfortable young girl
experiencing the wetness of blood being absorbed into her tampons for
the first time and as of a 26 year old tripping around in her days with
an old woman inside of her.
This subject she was proctoring was business law, a subject so
unrelated to her field. She unfastened a sheet of paper that was posted
on the window and looked at this list of student names. She matched
their identification cards to the list of names and got each of their
signatures. Weird ideas took over her brain as she looked into their
faces one by one and at their photographs on their student
identification cards. “Surawit ,without glasses you would be as ugly as
with them; Wilawan, that bun of a pony tail is one thing that has just
got to go; Sira, you have nice swarthy skin so fuckable but that nose
is like it came from the days when wild boars used to roam the whole
planet-totally obscene and pugnacious; Kanoknant, really are you the
same girl in this picture I.D? How strange! It looks like your older
sister and you look like you’d be one of the proud little girls who
possess one of these book bags near the white board with little stuffed
animals dangling from them-oh, god, I bet your parents hold their heads
in chagrin after giving birth to you; Pornpitcha, ya’ frizzed orange
hair is of a disco queen; Wiliwan playing beauty shop with your pony
tail-better on yourself than on other girls since that is the usual
preoccupation in classes; Pawisar, wouldn’t that fat face be less
obtrusive if your hair was put in a pony tail-well, maybe not...maybe
it would be worse but still that hair is dangling into your face
distracting you from taking the test and more importantly looking
downright uncouth and stringy; Ekkachai, you certainly have a long
tie-I wonder how big your penis gets.” Those thoughts droned on and on
in the same pattern of crude novelty.