Kumpee, deciding to sleep, drove a little further in the same direction to his friend’s house. He was apologetic. After all, Bangkok (or Krung Thep Maha Nakhon) was only 45 miles from Nakhon Si Ayutthaya but to experience traffic problems in Thailand was like no other, and to have sold the parents’ possessions after burning the bodies of the mother and father before the inevitable rot (a ubiquitous ordeal so individually personal) was like no other. They were exhausted and needed someplace to stay. The friend welcomed them in without the least reservation. Kumpee and Kazem put rice mats on the floor. Then they began to tie up the tent of the mosquito net by stringing it up against light fixtures and unused nails that stuck out of walls. Suthep and Jatupon became aware that their masculine images of themselves were dependent on being a builder of the house, and so they quickly secured two sagging corners so that they would not be badgered for feminine subservience.
That night, under the net, Jatupon considered the mosquito stealth: that it waited for the concluding restless mumbling of his two eldest brothers who were rehashing where they would go long-term and what they would do. The mosquito waited; and the minute that they fell asleep its wings cut through the black air and time with the buzz of a monotonous chant. The mosquito carried a wicker fan called a “balabot” that monks used to hide their faces as they gave the air their morbid and sonorous drones. He heard the mosquito shuffling around the room under the net. There were times, throughout the night, that he questioned if some less supernatural version of a mosquito had bitten him and had given him dengue fever which might have brought on these hallucinations, or if he was experiencing withdrawal from not having used drugs or sniffed glue for a while. It did not occur to him that a third possibility might have been the variety of chemical substances already in his body mixed with the new amphetamines that he had popped into his mouth an hour earlier while in the bathroom of Kumpee’s friend. It was a well-known fact that metropolitan bus drivers in every city popped amphetamines; and so to him it had been vitamins fortifying him against depression and lethargy.
As he walked with his brothers and the “Chinawoman” through the heat and smoke of the sidewalk restaurants, he remembered having been very hot the previous night and how he had felt so miserably trapped under the mosquito net like a fish in the web and snare of its net. He was sick but it did not last for very long. According to his memory this strange entity as large as himself shuffled under the net from one corner to the next and the sickness of his stomach was replaced by a queasy and tightening horror while he cowered in the embrace of his legs. Thinking himself in a net where there was no extrication he experienced the adrenalin of bravado. He wanted to confront his fears. Trying to reach for a religion to formulate a rational perspective in the irrational, he argued that the snare outside had to be less poignant than the snare of gluttonous appetites that were the cell, the bunk, and the chained wall within the underground prison that was he. This mosquito evoked in him, or he invoked in himself, such trepidation that he imagined an equal: prehistoric peoples of Thailand watching their halcyon harmony with nature execrably disparaged in the vehement winds of a hurricane—the trees along the river, which had offered protection now torn and lethally slapped at them.
The mosquito landed, crawled, and looked at the bodies on the floor. “Everyone is separated out into little forts. The others are under two different nets,” it flared its voice in a quasi-question without looking at Jatupon’s face. “Who are these creatures?” it asked.
“My brothers”
“There’s one woman,” it said pugnaciously. “They can’t all be your brothers. Let’s have an inventory. Be specific!”
“My eldest brother’s friend and my brother, Kazem, are under one tent. My brother, Kumpee, and his girlfriend are in a second tent. My brother, Suthep, is here with me.”
“And you I know. Don’t you think this is a bit overdone: three forts around a few microscopic insects?”
Jatupon opened his mouth but failed to say anything. Then he closed his mouth in fear of an insect flying into it.
“At any rate, why isn’t one tent used throughout the room.”