Corpus of a Siam Mosquito

by Steven David Justin Sills

“Is this love? Is this all that we are? Love is the best part of us and yet it is as this? I can’t believe that,” retorted Jatupon.

The mosquito, the big “it,” guffawed. “You are truly ingenuous. You are contrary to the natural world around you-a true babe focusing your trusting round eyes so eagerly on the savage world around you. Personally it is a novelty to me and I don’t mind it at all. Do you remember how you felt when you were young?”

He remembered the warmth he felt toward his mother even though she did not like him. He remembered how she cared for him despite thinking him a burden. She was the good birdie feeding his mouth. Had he not believed all love to be something like a mother’s love and that this mother’s love was pure? Had he as little as a few days earlier been inveigled in the optimism of being free from the consideration of how instinct is passed down in genetic transfer from generation to generation? Had he not imagined a desire for a woman and being “in love” as something more spectacular than bottle rockets and Roman candles lit from the bridges over the Chao Phraya River in the Loi krathong celebration?

There were times he had even considered love to be a preordained gift bestowed onto each being in subtle and illuminating graces. It was a bit like a lit candle on a krathong, a hand length banana-leaf boat sent out onto waters during the Loi krathong holiday. A given krathong would perhaps sail a hundred meters on a river before being tipped over in waves and winds along with one’s negativity and culpability; and for this exorcism the river goddess would bestow onto such an individual a new year of blessings. As a boy he had thought that this universal love was so pure that it was colorless and translucent. He believed that it was so ubiquitous and protecting like a mosquito net around the world, but alive, sensitive, and full of feeling; and that from it came the babies...the babies. Certainly as the years were placed on the tables like plates of rice and bowls of noodle soup it was harder to believe that brotherly love was equally dispersed among mankind. It seemed that the darker the pigment of a Thai, the more likely he was to do his menial tasks and the whiter he was, the more such Thais seemed to own the enterprises of the country. To his brother, Kumpee, like the father, he had existed as a verbal punching bag to relieve stress. “Night sports” was the term that Kazem called his form of brotherly love.

“Now...” scoffed the mosquito as it smiled maliciously, “Now, you know the truth. The truth shall set you free. Babies come from the desire to both eat healthy human flesh and crawl and slither around in its beautiful skin.”

He woke up startled to a void and a room that was at first unfamiliar in the darkness until memory seeped in and he knew where he was at. As he was feeling depressed looking at this basement room where they were caged and smelling the stagnancy of air stinking of mens’ bodies more eclectically than just their armpits, he fought with the rectangular window to which leaned weeds and grass. He barely budged it open. The patch of greenery flushed its grassy smells as well as the urinary ones with a gust of wind. Even decay was in the grass and such smells were beautiful. He watched the blades moving. They whispered of impermanence. They reminded him that as dictators die, civilizations ultimately become nothing but a few buried artifacts and bones, and palaces crumble, he would not stay in this cell forever. Everything would change; and change at times had its advantage.

And yet the child in him resisted change. It yearned to declare every dust particle that had been trodden on its friend. It did not like parting and it, in him, hated the idea of Kumpee gone. He felt jealous that this woman had taken him. He hated her despite her earlier friendliness to him. He hated her white skin and hated Kumpee for his ugly dark skin, his abandonment, and his fetid ways. Mostly he hated his contemptuously tinged use of the nickname, “Jatuporn,” showing that he knew everything about this relationship with Kazem. The apathy in the pronouncement would have been bearable. The contempt would have at least shown concern. But that particular mix spelled out that he, Jatupon, was really the fetid one and he hated the fetid one for it.

Stagnant and morose in feelings and thoughts, he dripped in the sauna of his own sweat; and, careful not to stumble over his brothers in the night, he opened the door for more breezes, for a passing mosquito, for voices, and the dispersing of crowded thoughts. He recalled untainted and simple memories of Kazem telling Suthep a joke a customer had relayed to him making all four of them laugh until they turned red; the shapes and slight variations of the colors of clouds; and lying on his bed in their parents home hearing the sounds of locusts somewhere in the swaying tree limbs cradled in the wind’s caresses. He knew that such trivial and yet poetical experiences were what constituted human happiness.

He stepped outside and then walked a couple of blocks in a still relatively unfamiliar terrain. To him, the surveyor of the night, the city spilled out in the oozing newness of black and yellow tubes of paint. There was a larger road and across the street was a Seven-Eleven convenience store. He stood there and his eyes followed the traffic that went directly in front of it. He rummaged through one of his bags until he found his glue. He inhaled its fumes and popped some amphetamines he had purchased at the drugstore with Kazem’s pocket money.

He remembered that Suthep and Kazem, like curious beasts, had occasionally looked in on him during that time, a year ago, when his body had its opiate force (really a mixed drug combination adversely affected by beer he drank during the Songkran New Year’s water fight) poured from it like water from a colander. How sick he had been. From Kazem’s suggestion, it had been a monk—a former teacher of his boyhood—whom he had stayed with while he was stiff and shaking. The periodic vomiting and shaking had seemed so incessant although it, like all, was fleeting. It had been too intolerable for his parents and yet for all the talk of the father getting rid of him completely by shoving him into a monastery, they had been happy to again gain their worker.