Corpus of a Siam Mosquito

by Steven David Justin Sills

“That isn’t entirely true; but even if it turns out that he doesn’t help us any at least we are in a large city where there are more opportunities than working in restaurants like this one.”

“ I want that money-or a share of it at anyway.”

“For what?”

“So that I won’t have to beg for a bowl of soup in places like this-so that if you and Natenapa take off somewhere” (Kumpee’s girlfriend, who was listening to them, now looked away and reached for the pitcher of water that was at the table) “that the money doesn’t go with you.” She poured water into her glass, sipped it once, and reached into her purse for her makeup.

“It is Thai tradition that the eldest brother is supposed to keep the inheritance for the younger ones. If you question that you don’t have any sense of right and wrong. If you have a problem with that you have a problem with the way things are and have always been. But even if I were to run away tomorrow you wouldn’t have lost much. None of it was worth anything. Look at these jeans with the holes in the knees and the pockets. If I want to start spending everything for myself I would have started with some new clothes and instead of dragging you to Bangkok with me I would have left all of you in Ayutthaya, wouldn’t I?”

“You buy jeans and cut out the areas around the knees so that doesn’t prove much. Just see to it that the money doesn’t fall from the holes and that you keep remembering the duties of an elder brother to the younger ones.”

On foot again with his brothers and the China woman, he kept wishing to be a boy that year that his parents opened what they referred to as a real restaurant. He wished for the strange faces in the familiar space: an area no different than a garage with some metallic tables and chairs in the center and woks, burners, a refrigerator, and Coke machine in the front. It had taken the family so many years of working on the street to be able to afford this space. This restaurant was more legitimate and less beggarly in appearance although not exempt from taxes. His parents were exhilarated for a while until they discovered that the added customers only compensated for rent and taxation and the same subsistence level prevailed. Soon the mundane set in and the discomfort of working on the streets was forgotten. Then he thought of a better time: that sweet time that very young children have in harmony with the parents’ wishes and the fruition of love. He could see himself pouring ice and water into small metallic cups and bringing them to the customers on the sidewalk or making his foray into salesmanship by draping from his arms the jasmine rosaries that his mother linked together from a long needle.

One day, as that boy, had he not just looked down briefly to zip his pants and found that they did not fit all that well; and that, no longer a cute or special one, he wasn’t the same (or wasn’t perceived the same) being within his new clothes? A metamorphosis had altered him to a taller and more aggravating expense and only by working hard could he avert the faces of scorn. In those years in some bedroom or another he found some peace. The plastic blinds had the same sounds of fingers wedged between them as they bounced around in the December breeze or in a June storm; and the piecemeal environment seen in the crevices of those blinds were of the same trash cans on the same pavement near some gravel. That had been reassuring to him. Now, he had been extracted from that environment.

Walking on, morose as the abyss of his subconscious disgorged like a geyser, he thought of his boyhood in school satiated in learning. There had indeed been such a boyhood in such a time brief as a few days of Bangkok winter that makes homeless dogs and cats shiver before temple walls when fortunate enough to wander into such an animal sanctuary. Learning had been a series of refreshing stimuli slapping up against him like a cool breeze. It had stimulated him and had planted in him an appetite. It was then taken away from him leaving only the wistfulness and the barren days squirming around like noodles in pork soup. At the aunt’s insistence his mother and father had paid for him to go to a poor Buddhist school run by the monks. The monks had been impressed by his academic cleverness, and soon, at their persuasion, his parents had paid for him to attend special classes as well. During those three years he had only worked in the summers; and the last of those summers was the end to a consistent time of academic learning. They rented him off to pick coconuts from a woman’s orchard and didn’t see much point in dismissing the added revenue. The aunt, with her excess of money, intervened with special tutors and home-school teachers. It lasted for a time until she became bored with overseeing it.

During the trip here an accident had occurred on the highway from Ayuttaya to Bangkok and the congestion made irascible beings used to the quick weltering motion of freedom trapped in their own thoughts. Horns, at that time sounded from all directions and Kumpee, the fetid one, at times irascibly chewed the fetid fruit called durian or slowly slurped from the beer can in his hands allowing the liquid in his mouth to spread and re-spread before swallowing. He wanted to step out of the car and punch someone but instead he bit into the heart of the durian. When the girlfriend’s car gained enough freedom to interweave within the slowness (a slowness that caused their minds to be more lamenting), Kumpee, at that time, made their way out of the last lanes and pulled into a town to get another beer. He had hardly entered the town when he fell asleep for a second and swerving to escape hitting a tuc tuc upon awakening (a tuc tuc being a big golf-cart taxi) or a bicycle rickshaw, the car nearly hit a truck and then nicked a fruit cart that was being pushed along the side of the road. Kumpee, burdened and desiring for speed and escape, drove on. During that second of the near miss with the truck, Jatupon felt that it was their destiny—their karma—to have the same fate that their parents had experienced weeks earlier. He found himself disappointed to be alive but sensed that he was alone in this. Even if such a thought flashed before his brothers, they were older and quickly regained that cold detachment as if their psyches were fully evolved as separate entities. They portrayed, in legitimate or feigned smiles, that they no longer felt that the fate of the parents was interlinked to that of the sons. Suthep, who was just a year and a half older than Jatupon, had not been so convincing. When he felt that he was unobserved he seemed troubled and twice looked out the back window.