Corpus of a Siam Mosquito

by Steven David Justin Sills

He did not know what he was to do with the day. Was he to spend the last of his baht on bags of breadcrumbs that, like an old man, he was to spread out for his friends, the pigeons? He paid a couple baht at a public bathroom. After relieving himself, he took a partial bath by cleaning part of his upper body in a sink. Then he went into a booth that had a faucet, which leaked water into an Asian style toilet. Through effort he was able to catch some of the water before it went into this urinal that was embedded into the floor. He was able to wash off a bit of his lower extremities by these sprinkles. He didn’t want to splash too much water or he might be fined or arrested.

Numb and wary how to proceed with the hours of the days, he did not know what to do with himself or how others in his predicament wrestled with their time. Was he supposed to meander along with nothing to guide his walking? Was he supposed to follow behind those who seemed like herds and those who seemed like flocks? If so, he told himself, it should be with those who were homeless. By following them he could learn how homeless people survived best and fulfill, at least in a minuscule way, one’s innate need for society. He felt loose and disconcerted. His thoughts insurrected him and it felt as if they were towing away bits of his brain. The post office would open in a few hours. He could make the long sojourn to his mailbox and see if he had a letter from Noppawan Piggy but public transportation cost money so he just needed to comfort himself with the ideas that she had presented to him. She often said that everyone from ambassadors to beggars sewed such petty lives for themselves. At least he thought those were her exact words. She said something to that effect. Each time that he tried to remember exactly what she had written to him, and what she had spoken from the boat, it became different. It was distorted by the impermanent neurological circuitry of the brain (so little did one possess himself). The world was godless, love was a selfish realm, and from what he knew of friendship, it was with people who used each other to grow for a certain time or share similar attitudes in the hope of not feeling alone when going through certain stages of life. He wondered if even his friendship with Noppawan was evanescent as a whiff of clouds. Why should she write to him, he thought to himself.

If there hadn’t been a bit of a thrill in becoming independent and killing off past associations with family, he told himself, he would commit suicide. He couldn’t really see much point in survival anyhow with the inevitability of death biting at one’s heels. It was good to kill off past family associations. His aunt, he thought, had invited a boy of his realm into her domain only to find that he had too many needs and wasn’t worth the trouble-the dog that needed to be sent back to the pet store. He resented her and was pleased with his independent stance at severing family from his mind. He tried to forget the comfort of sleeping in his cell and never having to worry about having money for meals and public toilets.

He slept intermittently on park benches throughout the day. To avoid hunger and thirst he took a cup he found in the trash and begged outside the park. He watched a blind old woman with a wooden attach� case of lottery tickets, a jasmine rosary salesman with merchandise looped around his arms like long bracelets who went from car to car, a woman at a table stringing them for her own sales (even the mendicants had to compete with each other to gain a mere sustenance), sidewalk seamstresses with their antique foot pumped sewing machines, and a man with a bicycle-pulled ice-cream cart who stood there scooping out a dip for someone. A sock salesman at his table sat on a stool with his hand poised under his chin when the rest of his life was faltering. They did have such petty lives. They, no different than the rich, consumed food and expended their kinetic energy and liquids in the bedroom in this perennial trap that human instinct and physiognomy concocted. He put on his sunglasses to blind himself from the motion around him and time became stagnant as a traffic jam he was witnessing-the people finally oozing out of trapped busses and around halted vehicles like leaking oil. The hours passed somehow and again the park closed and he slept on its fringes with many others.

The next morning taught him that breakfast could be waived if begging from the previous evening had not gotten him the twenty baht required for a meal but he needed to always keep some coins in his pockets so that he could go into a public bathroom. Around 2:00 sidewalk restaurant workers tended to need their own respite from drudgery and a barter arrangement of a meal for an hour’s work could sustain him and keep him from having to buy food. As non-preferable as it was, the police did not badger one if he washed away his rotting layers of stinking skin in the polluted canals or the Chao Phraya River so long as he entered and exited with his underwear on. The waters did give him a skin rash, after a few days of bathing in this manner, but this itch around his thighs was bearable. Lucrative ventures came every now and then when men wanted him. He, at such times, was sufficiently numb and insouciant in manhood and he would go there and serve them safely without letting the whining child within him clamor out. He performed, was paid, and left never combining emotions with such a physical act. These men would not be his deliverance. He had to force that idea into his head and fight off his wish for a savior.

Within a month and a little bit of persistency against refusals, the metropolitan authorities scheduled him for an interview as a money taker on a city bus. He was scheduled with a score of others despite his age. He might not have gotten any job at all let alone a better one than what he was applying for had English not rescued him. They needed someone knowledgeable of English in the information booth in an air-conditioned cubicle at a skytrain station. He would not be wearing the grungy blue suits of the money takers but white ones that looked like a captain. The thought of it filled him with pride.

They gave him an advance so that he could buy this clothing, rent out a cheap room, and not fast when it came to purchasing his lunches. They didn’t give him a day off but outside of making change for the customers that needed to be done quickly, the work was easy. It just required a familiarity with major landmarks around each of the stops and that he be able to direct foreigners where they needed to go. National holidays (when he got them) were spent in the vicarious borrowing of a personal life from a movie at a theatre. He didn’t really know his coworkers. Since it was his first job, and a new one at that, he kept quiet and focused on his work. He looked gauche and foolish and he worked around them trying not to get into much contact. They gossiped about others whom he didn’t know (perhaps himself as well) and repeatedly asked how he knew English so well. Their tones always became more caustic in addressing him; and when it came to justifying his knowledge of English he would always vary his answers fictitiously so as not to feel that he was buried in a rubble of monotony. His introverted awkwardness was at variance with their complacent self-assured movements, and he withdrew into a world of shadows surreal as being sucked up into random scenes of a silent picture show. He was friendless and alone. Outside of Noppawan, he couldn’t even imagine anyone who really cared about him a little; but he did not have time to go to his post office box and he feared that she was lost to him forever. A solitary person usually needed to invent a commiserating individual out there even if that person did not really care; but he did not know anyone with whom to fool himself and he saw that despite the Noppawan Doctrine against pettiness, he was securing a petty life for himself like everyone else and the exhilaration from his independence was waning.

As Vanont slipped 40 baht through the hole of the window, Jatupon changed it, attempting to keep his eyes steady in a marginally sunken poise of professionalism without any special recognition of the customer wanting the change. The old man smiled at him warmly. “Where have you been, my boy?” he asked.

Nawin Biadklang: it was a label, just a simple and different group of words in which an entire metamorphosis took place. He was new and glorious and the lost and forlorn being that was Jatupon had fallen from him effortlessly like the stink of scathing skin that he had showered away in the morning. Nawin Biadklang stood near the Hualampong train station, watching the mosaic of light and shadow at his feet like a child fully in the splendor of the present moment. He was drinking milk at a newsstand and thinking about his recent meeting with Piggy in the Siriaj Hospital Museum. He had asked her to go with him to Wonder World Amusement Park but she wanted the silence away from the meaningless of action. He turned to the headlines of the Bangkok Post glancing at the cacophony of human relations.

He read that a very passive anti-war demonstration had occurred in Pattaya. 10,000 Thai Moslems had prayed for peace. Well, he thought, it was certainly gentler than placards and banners outside the American Embassy in Bangkok, equating Bush as Satan; however it was probably less effective. Was the God who allowed thousands of people to be incinerated in fire and melting steel caring especially about the fate of the Afghans from a meditation and a chant? He thought that it was no wonder people tried to shut out larger issues than themselves and seek comfort in the personal domain of their petty lives. He turned away from the newspaper. Four filthy boys came to him forcefully. They wanted milk from his grocery bag. They wanted the same as what he was drinking while reading the horror of the daily news. He gave part of what he had but he didn’t want to give out the rest. He was already becoming coarse in his luck and he knew that he was guilty for providing them with a nominal gratuity and shooing them away. He went inside the building, looked for more food and magazines to take with him on his trip, and then entered the train.