“You are a bit like our guardian, aren’t you..”
“Yes, if that is what you need—a surrogate uncle: that is what I’ll be.”
His vision, his mosquito-uncle and deus ex machina, smashed like a fly against a car window. Jatupon was exhausted and his mental alertness relaxed in preparation for sleep. In a REM more troubled, incoherent, and weltering, there were flies seemingly caught between a window and a screen. The screen was opened a crack and yet the crack only demarcated freedom and the self-imprisonment of the mind for they climbed around the screen and yet never found that opening that had allowed them to enter. Then there were rocks with a bit of honey and flies swarming in it; and himself echoing the mosquito’s question on how the three of them would be making a living. He disparaged himself by casting that self as a cartoon of a motorcycle taxi driver sitting sidesaddle with a group waiting patiently in a queue for customers to arrive. Stationary with time passing amuck, and content with empty and drowsy space and flies buzzing about his face, his life defied money and motion. “Get out of the way. If you can’t fasten a doorknob take a broom and sweep up that mess in the back of the restaurant. I don’t know what you are going to do when you get older. You can’t even cook. You can’t do anything and even walking you trip over your own shadow,” said his father. “You should see his cartoons,” said Kazem. “The boy can draw.” The cartoon of himself had signed the wedding papers and he and his cartoon wife were standing near a monk as relatives came by with bowls of water rinsing their hands. Flies buzzed around their faces. A worker, selling Buddhist statuettes, necklaces, and rosaries, picked her child up, pulled down his pants, and let him urinate in the parking lot.
“Love,” said the cartoon of the mosquito, “makes up the vernacular of pop culture. It is innate as a quest. It lances life’s old festers granting a mood of the new. For the male it is a consistent alternative on nights when the hunt for new females becomes unsuccessful. Both sexes need to believe that their own physical attributes will be passed on to posterity. For sociable creatures the illusion of having a permanent foundation for their lives in marriage and family is indispensable. So much goes into this ineluctable lure called love and marriage: most of all a void so enormous that we chip through other skulls to record the memory of ourselves in that watery mass called a brain. On overpasses and sidewalks you’ve noticed those weak starving dogs with patches of fur missing from their bodies. They too sniff around other dogs in the hope of confirming and making some permanent documentation of themselves on those brains. Even if they don’t have energy for sex they still document themselves. Men are programmed to deliver the raw material of themselves in any dark alley. A woman’s love, once devoted to he who has pierced into her-he who has engendered in her that overpowering feeling of one inside her—now devotes herself to motherhood and seeing that the child is...
His ideas were erratic. They hopped and skipped over each other and he held tightly onto parts of the clothing he lay on. Then with photographic images, he dreamed of trees, waterfalls, and Thai islands he had never seen before and his hands relaxed their grip on the clothes. There was a panoramic view of Thailand-rural, Khmer and Burmese individuals smiling in the northern regions and stolid Moslem and Indians in the south. The rural views in sunrise and sunset were more real than reality and then the aerial focus went down and down and veered back up to the center. It was Bangkok again and there was Lumpini Park.
An unknown girl was sitting on a mat in the gravel in a far corner of the entrance to the park. Immediately behind her was the gate and in front of her was a large statue of King Rama V. A car entered the circular drive that went around the statue. She got up to guide its driver where to park. She hoped that by helping to ensure that he didn’t crash into parked cars that he would pay her a few baht as others had. She did not beg. She did not prostitute herself. She only did that.
“I could do something like that. It’s honest,” thought Jatupon. She continued to use hand gestures as the driver backed up according to her directions. “This is a good girl. I want someone like that to become my wife,” he thought. No sooner had this idea come to him than the car sped up and ran over her. Then it stopped and the driver hurried out. The driver held her in his hands and Jatupon felt her pulse. There was none and he dropped the arm. He walked through the gate to a woman sitting within the park on a sheet on top of a grassy knoll. He sat on the sheet in front of her and before the spread of fortune telling cards.
“I don’t see much future in it” she said. “Being in love with an elder brother. There is no future in it from what I see.”
“Those are just cards. How would you know?” he whined
“Yes, those are just cards but you don’t even need to look into the cards to see something like that.”