“I don’t know. I’m tired of thinking about it. It is such an anguish to worry about surviving continually.”
“Indeed. Just like you were thinking before: animals that have insight into the fact that they are nothing but ambulatory meat; only you are the meat of the richer classes. Your life will be consumed at work for their pleasure.”
The girl friend handed her sun burnt Siamese a key to the room and excoriated him for not believing her about the distance of the apartment building from the department store. She snubbed encountering extensive numbers of the underclass even though her father owned the building. She stood aloof and contracted the muscles of her face even before the evaporation of urinary molecules from the fa�ade of the building attacked her nostrils. She disheveled Jatupon’s hair and then maternally combed it back again with her fingers. She told Kumpee that she would take a taxi back to the department store and wait for him at McDonald’s. Then she left them in repugnance.
Within a glance each of them saw all there was of their apartment burrowed under the building and became sullen. Kumpee lied that he would leave his bag in the apartment and then see his girlfriend back to her home. Jatupon lay on the floor. Suthep unpacked and put the headphones of a Walkman around his ears. Kazem took a shower. The subject of his departure was forgotten. Kumpee sat on his case for a half hour eating his durian. Then when there seemed an inconspicuous exit he picked up his bag and went away. They felt his missing presence prod the vacuous air an hour later when they noticed that the suitcase was gone.
Chapter 4
It was 2 a.m. and the mosquito came into the scenes of his REM with wings piercing through and dominating over every brief episodic nightmare. It was wearing an orange monk’s robe and superciliously imposed its own presence on all scenes that Jatupon alone was supposed to rehearse. It altered a script that Jatupon’s brain had conjured in the hope of figuring out how to interact with his environment and live with himself harmoniously. Initially his sleep consisted of nascent dream-roles to find out if feigning a serious illness would have altered his parents’ journey of early demise. Later there were others such as trying to persuade the fetid one’s Chinese girlfriend to buy him a white shirt and necktie so that he could apply at the Bangkok Metropolitan Transportation Department and thereby resurrect himself as an economic deliverer and a masculine force to be admired instead of dog excrement on his brothers’ heels that he perceived them as perceiving him to be. There were also briefer skits in the random feelings, thoughts, and perceptions he was trying to categorize. One was of trying to successfully bite his shirt to stop himself from crying out when Kazem’s riveting night sports were too painful and another one was of attempting to remember the few neighborhoods and streets of Bangkok that he had learnt in past visits and perhaps link them to various names that only sleep could recall. Throughout it all was the buzz of the mosquito. This insect-monk buzzed no differently than a bee.
“And where were you today and yesterday?” it asked.
“I didn’t get out the glue and there were no pills to pop.”
“Why didn’t you get out the glue?”
“I want to do this for fun. I want these trips to stay what they call “recreational.” I’ll take them only when I need out. I don’t want to be an addict.”