Corpus of a Siam Mosquito
by Steven Sills
Contents
“So he spoke, and the bright-eyed goddess, Athene, was pleased that she was the god he prayed to before all the others. She put strength in his shoulders and knees, and set in his heart the daring of a mosquito, which, though constantly brushed away from a man’s skin, still insists on biting him for the pleasure of human blood.”
—The Iliad
Homer
Book I: Palaver
Chapter 1
They, with their driver, went down Ramkhamhaeng Road singularly in the scope of their thoughts but conditioned into repudiating their aloneness. It was an early Bangkok morning with a new day tripping over the corpse of the earlier one the way dogs on the Bangkok sidewalks were walked on. It was early in the relationship of the two passengers and this nascent association contained the complex and awkward ambiguity of not being clearly professional or personal and he and his prostitute-model were tripping into each other. When she put her hand on his leg he would stiffen and both his legs would slightly slant away from her but when she removed her hand and kept it away from him for some minutes he would put it back there closer than ever to his thighs. Even he had to admit his actions made no sense given the fact that he flaunted her, and others like her, wherever he went; but it was part of the game of being desired. Although he wasn’t even conscious that such a game was being played, she was fully cognizant of these subliminal calculative moves and how a woman was played. She knew that she was desiring him more as a consequence. She also knew that being desired required adhering to the rules of withdrawing from the neediness of wanting to be linked to a man and of transforming herself into the metamorphoses of self-contained fantasies that he would desire.