Corpus of a Siam Mosquito

by Steven David Justin Sills

When the train began to move he went into a corridor connecting two cars and rinsed his face in the sink. He looked into the mirror. Even his reflection seemed different. His eyebrows seemed more bristly and masculine. He wasn’t Jatuporn any longer. A good son must join the monastery for a while to fulfill his mother’s wish to see her son take on such holy head-shaven rites. A good son must fund the livelihood of his middle-aged parents who wanted to be free from the hardship of work. A good son must renovate and extend the house of his elderly parents. A scenario of filial loyalty to serve the parents’ wishes abounded in Thais’ simplistic notions of “good” behavior but tragedy had freed him from it. Then abuse disabused him of fraternal loyalties. Now he would be educated and find new compounds in his sunrises and sunsets.

A train officer asked him to get his luggage out of the way of the aisle. Jatupon put his suitcase onto the ceiling rack and sat down watching the scenery go by-watching Bangkok zip past him and become the vanishing point from which something different would emerge from his experiences at Chaing Mai International School. He pulled the postcard out of his pocket. He read the words again and again, “I got them to allow me to come to Chaing Mai. I’ll transfer there. See you in a week.” He smiled, slapped the postcard against his lower lip, and watched the departure from Bangkok where the scenery became increasingly green.

When he came home he opened the door onto plentiful space. His body became stiff and cold. He needed to give directives to his legs in order to move. The movements of his splayed legs when he walked were like parting ice cycles even though the furnace was operating and it was warm inside his apartment. Nearly everything movable by two hands was gone, as well as most that would have required an additional mover. Only the heaviest things remained although clavicles of hangers dangled from the bedroom closet and pots and pans were loyal and steadfast. The sofa remained. It had been difficult to get in. It was no wonder that it hadn’t been budged. His socks and underwear had been knocked out of the dresser before it was taken. He sighed. His canvases were gone and from them his new leitmotif that was maturing beyond Patpong whores in Bangkok to something more thoughtful and original. True, most of those canvases had been of her so she must have thought that she was entitled to them as well. She was the model and more who was seeking justice, he told himself, and justice was equity. He hadn’t paid her so she was seeking compensation. All relationships were a contract. All contracts were based upon the two parties gaining some entitlement from the agreement. Was there nothing better than this, he asked himself. There wasn’t. He had thought that he was helping her, that he was enlightening her, and that he was involved with her. A tear rolled down his cheek. She thought that she was entitled to the canvasses too, he repeatedly thought. She thought she was entitled to it all. Then, for a second, his attitude changed about the stolen paintings and he was glad that, at least, she had cared enough to take them. Then he knew that she would shake sentiment from them no different than tossing out the contents of his clothing from the dresser. She would sell even those portraits of herself wherever she could.

He backed against an empty wall and slid down it squatting like a dog ready to defecate. Then he pulled into himself in a fetal position. He was Jatupon in his puddle of blood yearning for the love of the violator. If love was mixing oneself into someone like vodka and cola, he loved her. If it was a child crying over the loss of his favorite toy, he was feeling that. Should a Thai newspaper reporter get a look at him now, he thought, the nonchalant seducer of the souls of Patpong girls would seem to him as a fraud. The reporter would be disillusioned that this young man championed for his bit of hedonism had been an illusion. His head throbbed. He needed love from anyone, sex with a stranger, anything that would stop the pain in his head. With difficulty he slowly removed his winter coat and gloves with the awkwardness of a child.

Love, glue, or cocaine-it was all the same. It was all molecules of smell and taste. It was a vertiginous freedom and insobriety of action exempt of logic. It was the personal adventure in a world of impersonal actions. It was admiring certain characteristics that were lacking in oneself and it sometimes contained some degree of friendship and caring or wanting to be cared about. Maybe it was a vulnerability of a human’s weaker domain that wanted to merge with another being to seem to himself as if he were less petty than what he really was or to record himself permanently in the thoughts of another being.

It was all gone including those canvasses on French Quebec mannequins. His evolution as an artist had been stunted. He wanted to cry but beyond that one tear there was nothing. All he could do was moan and pick up the telephone. He needed a connection. He needed Noppawan. Her sister answered. “Nawin,” she said nervously, “she moved. She got a different teaching position. She wanted a change. She doesn’t want to see you-I’m not really sure why and I don’t think she means it permanently. Well, I do understand why. She’s moving on. I don’t think that she sees it as much of a marriage. Surely you understand that point. I like you but—” He clicked off the telephone. He couldn’t help himself. The void was sucking him into its black hole. He wanted to lie on his bed. He was thankful to still have one. He wanted Kazem to materialize and to copulate with him on that bed. He remembered then, long ago, having his thoughts in a black hole and doubting if Kazem’s love was real, seeing the abstraction of love in colors and design like cubism, and how hungry he was in love with Kazem especially when doubting that love. Nothing had changed. He loved Porn and Piggy each in their own way as desperate as a clinging salamander in the rain.

He called Thai information. He asked the operator to search for Suthep, the youngest and the one closest to his sympathies. At least he used to be. Then he had her search for Kazem and even Kumpee. None of the three had phone connections in their names. His aunt, if she were still living, would be married to someone else. How would he be able to find her again in this vast and mutable cosmos? He wouldn’t. The operator gave him the number of Amorn Tuwayanonde. Maybe it was the same one whom he had sometimes begged and played with as a boy-maybe the same one who had grabbed his shoe instead of the ankle causing his dangling body to fall from the window and into the warehouse triggering off the burglar alarm. He dialed the number. A man answered. Nawin did not know what to say so he hung up the telephone. The one he really wanted to connect with was his uncle and he was dead. And yet they hadn’t really had a relationship. It was strange that the man had paid for all of his tuition and stay at the international school, all undergraduate and graduate expenses, and yet had remained a stranger. He had been the man’s son, in a way, and outside a couple times of staying at his home, during Songkran, he had not known him. When he died he did not inherit anything. He didn’t even want or expect anything. He was grateful for the educational transformation that had been bestowed unto him. What happened to the man’s money was anyone’s guess.

If only he could commune with him somehow to again thank him it would solidify a meaningful connection in his barren heart. The cards congratulating him on his first art exhibition at the art museum at Silpakorn University and later, the temporary exhibit at the National Gallery showed that he must have cared about him. He must have been proud of him. “Congratulations on the showing.” That was all they had said. Nawin guessed that the man had read about him in the newspapers and knew of the exhibits that way. It was all strange.

On his knees he scurried through his socks while discarding his underwear in a pile. Most of those socks that she had littered on the floor were folded into each other as mates, but not all. He felt inside each sock and when he couldn’t find anything he would throw it into that pile like a dead fish. Within the toes of one pair he pulled out four plastic bags of cocaine. It was his stash for periods of loss and he monitored what he took according to the dictates of his third of a teaspoon rule for self-rations. The Nawin rule stated that once every three months if an emergency arose requiring exhilaration or thrust away from the void, then he might administer the prescription. Such was his doctoral degree of addiction and from this philosophical islet inundations from void and addiction could not take him away. He sat on the unmovable sofa and snorted the cocaine from one of its wooden armrests. He could feel it like a Thai massage over his entire body and the insouciance it brought to his thoughts.

He put on his winter coat and gloves and got in a taxi. He told the taxi driver to take him to a go-go bar called “Foxy’s.” He had been there several times before. He watched women twisting their bodies around poles as if each movement of being a woman was centered on waxing the shiny phallus. Tissue paper probably enlarged their bosoms but he didn’t care. He would eat the juicy fruit and its wrappings no different than any nigger his melon. He wanted to relieve himself in one or more of them. Lost, he wanted to be lead by the hallucinations of his mind. When one who was on break said her hellos and sat down on his lap, he put his paws on all parts of her body. She told him that he was a “naughty boy” and asked him where he was from. He told her. She said that she liked Asian men since they were so small. He told her that he wasn’t small. “I’ve seen them before. They are itsy bitsy small.” She used her fingers as a measurement. It wasn’t what he cared to hear and although he wanted to pierce her with his lengthy sword, he left in disgust. He walked further down the street to a male go-go bar that he had never been in before although his wistful eyes had scanned it numerous times in the past month.