“Mother,” he yelled in a surprised tone. “You’re back.” The engine stopped.
“Of course I’m here. You knew I’d be back in an hour. Where else would I be?” Her voice screamed out belligerently but it was hollow and virtually inaudible in the container of the car. The Mercedes Benz was flaxen and waxed and the woman inside was a bit of the same self in an idealized way. She was even more young, beautiful and poised than Kumpee’s girlfriend. Her skin was also whiter than the fetid one’s infatuation and instead of being dark, thick, and puffy like a durable and well tread tire she was a thin sheath, almost like a transparent condom, and perfectly unblemished.
“Did you go to Ayutthaya?”
“Have you really forgotten where I’ve been. Even you can’t be that stupid. I told you before I left. I went to Thee Nhai.” Thee nai was the word “Where” in Thai; but she spoke it with such certainty that he believed in its legitimacy as a city name like Chaing Mai. She spoke even more loudly from her encasement inside the car but was still barely audible.
“To see Grandmother?”
“And grocery shopping. After all, it is grocery day. “ She stopped frowning and slowly made a partial smile. “I have something for you.” He felt surprised. He wondered why he would be given something. He couldn’t remember having ever been given a gift. In Thailand (the real Thailand as lived by the poor masses) children were instruments: tools to ease the task of making a living, and later they were sustenance and emotional pampering for the aging parents. Above the steering wheel she showed to him a small rectangular box that she opened like a coffin. In it was a large golden pen that gleamed like the roofs of a Buddhist temple. Minutes passed. She continued to exhibit the pen and her half-smile while staying encased. All of the car windows were rolled up. He kept wondering what good the pen would do him if it were just a visual appearance seen through the glass of a car. He forgot the pen and concentrated on his mother who was as intangible. He heard the sound of her calmly wrestling unsuccessfully with a door handle that would not unlock.
He or it—this mordant mosquito—came with wings piercing through sleep. He again spoke of her, the girlfriend, as “Chinatown skin” and drawing her from a deck of cards, the mosquito threw her. The card, animated like an email greeting, clicked around as if on high heels. The woman’s form, detaching itself from the shell of the card, sang and danced her dance. Jatupon and the mosquito both lusted for her. Jatupon wanted to rush into the toilet the way he had seen a man in his early twenties rush into the public restroom at the movie theatre, Major Ciniplex in Ayuttaya, a week before his parents died. On that occasion, or misadventure, Jatupon, who a minute later went to relieve himself in an adjacent cubicle before going back to his cart of noodles, heard pumping noises. Then on his side of the crack he faintly saw a shadow of a hand stroking a penis on the tiles to the left of his feet. That man had sought pleasure in marginal solitude; but for him, with a mosquito staring him down with emotionless black eyes, there was no privacy. His masturbatory time was limited by his hallucinations.
He tried to suffocate the thought of the Chinese Thai woman in an imaginary pillowcase. He tried to extinguish the sparks of his own desires by deluging them with more abstract and tenuous thoughts. He wondered what would be some other choices of jobs he could pursue to break away from what was left of this fraternity and become an independent being. The idea hurt him. He then told himself that he never wanted to leave his brothers. He told himself that he would go out to find Kumpee, the fetid one, if he only knew where in the big city to search.
Jatupon saw his own pimpled face staring at him; his childhood friends who moved or became people he could not relate to; and his parents that no human sense of bonding, volition, or imagination could bring back. Orphic memories gleamed and sparkled opaquely like the moving shadows of leaves on the pavement. “So, I can not see my own reflection without cringing. So, I felt that sense of fear that came from thinking that my classmates might not want me to play takraw with them and that feeling has not left me entirely. So, I’m scared of losing people, like fumbling with the bamboo ball, as if their departure would be the end of my own personal essence! So, in the end, we all come down in a cruel fate.” He could not formulate these abstract thoughts. It all was a base and indistinct feeling. He was attempting to channel the fears that constituted so much of his being so that they would not burst into his consciousness.
“So, have you finished falling so fully and foolishly into yourself,” asked the mosquito. It paused and looked back at the girl. “She is Chinatown skin, the kind every man pants for: all beautifully white, each aesthetic non-deformity ranking her in the realm of desirability in every Thai man’s mind. ‘Won’t she, in this quintessence of beauty, have virtually no chance of making a deformed baby,’ screams the man’s ingrained DNA programming that composes each and every cell. ‘Won’t she, in this quintessence of beauty, have virtually no chance of making a deformed baby,’ scream’s the psychological programming created by the influence of his peers who think that her money and education have made her as valuable as white ivory -the type often used in Buddhist statuettes. Hormonal discriminatory passions ensue, dopamine hits the pleasure receptors of the brain, and make him an addict for a hormonal pleasure with her.”