Jatupon became taciturn. His head hurt and he wanted to vomit. He couldn’t get up. He tried to stand up but couldn’t do so. He tried to vomit in a cup but nothing came up.”
“You might as well stay where you are at. If you go into the bathroom for more pills or slip into your bag for some glue you might be able to discombobulate my voice like a child spinning around in the grass but ultimately you’ll fall into me and the mordant words will be all the more deleterious. Besides, it is still my hand and there are more cards to play. It tossed another card from the deck his way. It was Kumpee’s girl friend. It was her face and shape.
“Yes, Jatupon said, “She’s a lovely card” and the mosquito nodded his head disdainfully. Then it clapped its feet and said, “One baht for the human’s ability to at least recognize physical beauty.” Jatupon looked on the table and there appeared a one baht coin with a naked China woman engraved on it. He picked it up. It’s weight, which was always equal to that of play money, had become less; and there was a continual sensation that even though it rested in his finger tips it was being pulled lightlessly away from him to fall endlessly into an inconvertible currency. He watched it vaporize into a gas.
“She is one of the second group who has no special significance to you at all and yet from her your life has been changed. People like this might be helpful and even compassionate but at the end of the day they won’t stay with you. They are evanescent nectar in the dissolution of events and time.”
“Only two groups?”
“Only two unless you make up a third. All I know of the future is from the perspective of today.”
Catered to the limitations of Jatupon’s entomological knowledge, this gigantic mosquito was male and a bloodsucker nonetheless. It looked into his intimate space with such a bold stare that he felt that it could easily seduce him in as its prey—that the survival of the fittest reigned with the hegemony of its kind just as micro-organisms always get the last meal. As he saw its eyes he suddenly knew the sadistic fun it was having with its mind games, and the cruel hunting games of cats and their dead mice. Deeper into its eyes he saw a starving child and a vulture awaiting on a rock, the fight for dominion of species and nations, and the sexual aggression of making love among mankind. He felt like walking meat; and he knew that all animals felt the same of their own lives ceaselessly. He grieved for them. The mosquito knew this intuitively and began to laugh at him for his sensitivity and his na�ve animistic thinking, which like a child, made animals conscious and sagacious.
“You aren’t real, you know, but the fever of my own brain,” said Jatupon to curtail his vision.
“Oh, let’s not start the reality game. I’ll make this simple so that even you can understand it. It foils others I enlighten who give me the same argument. I say to them that they, who create ideas, will die in a hundred years but an idea that they might have has the possibility of living on. To the idea, I say, the man would not seem real.” Then he obfuscated. “Didn’t you read in an encyclopedia one time that the American president, Abraham Lincoln, said, ‘In the civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party—and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect his purpose.’”
“I don’t understand what you are meaning by that. I didn’t understand that long sentence when I read it anyhow.”