Corpus of a Siam Mosquito

by Steven David Justin Sills

“You don’t understand subtle and abstract meanings because you are uneducated. You sometimes dabble here and there with an encyclopedia in the library and then you forget everything you’ve read when you understand it at all,” said the mosquito in a contumelious air. “Only the dreamer is the illusion. Not the dream. The dreamer sinks back with the dirt.”

It tossed that card like a coin from its gangling talon tips. The card enlarged to a life-sized form and moved toward Jatupon. He almost felt seduced by it as it moved around him in its mating dance. The mosquito laughed harder and then said that not only had he and his brothers relinquished their homeland in Ayutthaya on account of her but that she was a trap or a symbol of a trap. It was not just she, he explained. It was all of them. Love and marriage was a specie ** specie ? or species ? ** preserving drug induced into a man to keep him bound and limited through passion, fear of loneliness, and obligation.”

“Then I should feel sorry for my elder brother if it is a sickness like how I’m feeling now. I mean I was feeling really sick but now I must still be sick if I’m imagining you. I wish I were able to tell what is happening to me now. It is like suffering the withdrawals or dengue fever.” Slowly forcing himself beyond his cowardly pose, Jatupon got up and opened his suitcase. He took out two warm cans of Coca Cola. He opened the tabs and slid one to the mosquito that drank up.

“It isn’t quite the nectar of blood but it is okay when one is thirsty,” it commented.

He was like a wounded soldier who perceived that the enemy was another victim in the war and so he wanted to sit down near this opposing peer. Jatupon crept near it and gradually sat on a mat. A minute later, after not being eaten, his confidence grew and he felt like confessing his soul to the insect as if the mosquito’s appearance were only that mask Thai monks hid behind when they said their chants. “Kumpee said he would live with us but I guess he might mean that now. After all, his girlfriend is with him. He only talked to her on our way here.” He paused and thought deeply once again. “I don’t like what you say but it’s honest. I have no one to talk with, you know.” He thought of this mosquito as a spirit who came through the burning of incense placed at a stupa. “I don’t have anyone to be honest with me and all of the friends I once had I’ve had to leave. Would you visit me in Bangkok?” He spoke with such innocence that the mosquito had to smile bashfully and look away from the awkwardness of knowing that only a child believes that mother and father are extensions of his own body; only a child walks into the forest with a kind stranger where he is bound to a tree, raped and murdered; and only one warped in the wisdom gained in tragedy finds himself inseparably bound by every stern, euphonious truth uttered by a monster.

“Would I accept the invitation to come to Bangkok to bite you and inject you with malaria? No, I’m afraid I would not be able to accept such an invitation at this time and you shouldn’t be extending it. Always remember that truth is lethal. To know and to be aware of many things is like a man too fat for his house and this obese pig of a man is forced onto the streets where he can’t tolerate the heat and cold because of his flab; and then I come along and suck through his baboonish skin before he knocks off. I certainly would accompany you if it were not for there being truth in the adage that a mosquito could never live in Bangkok because the pollution would kill him off.”

Then the mosquito’s eyes were those of the second eldest brother, Kazem, and Jatupon was with him in the bathroom where he had taken the pills. Kazem lifted up “Jatuporn’s” bare legs onto his shoulders; inserted himself; and rode. Jatupon realized that he was hallucinating this because there was the mosquito before him. He felt ill. He just wanted to get out of the confines of the mosquito net. He just wanted to brush his teeth.

The next thing Jatupon dreamt or knew the third eldest one, Suthep, put a cold washcloth on his forehead and then had him take some aspirin. As Jatupon gluttonously swallowed the pills down his gullet he kept wondering if it were cocaine. Suthep vanished and then there was the mosquito again. In a transformed madness, the mosquito became Kazem; and this brother kept riding him painfully while Jatupon wondered if Kumpee, the fetid one, had run off permanently with his “Chinawoman.”

Somewhere into the night—had it been in the bathroom when he was vomiting or when he was back under the net with a washcloth on his head?—he could not place where he was at; and then odd thoughts came into his mind. “If love oils are a way to make the anus and the vagina something that they aren’t designed for maybe I’m pregnant with my brother’s child? Does he love me? What is love? My bottom has spread out like a damp shirt when stretched”

Then it was the mosquito again. He asked what were Jatupon’s job aspirations in Bangkok. “Oh, I don’t know,” the boy responded. “I have thought many things.”