Corpus of a Siam Mosquito

by Steven David Justin Sills

“How should I live? He’s had sex in me. I should kill myself. A boy fucked in the ass can not be a man.”

“No, probably not; but you must continue to be the best of what you are. Man, yes, some-a few—might say. Some would say something less than that. Whatever you are, maimed or full, you have to continue to continue. We all should go through the whole show until the winds carry away our ashes and the soul returns for more learning, more suffering.”

Chapter 5

Bound for his uncle’s home in the far north of the city, Kazem was forced to reposition himself in the back of the bus next to a bucket of swishing water and rags. He swatted the mosquito that was hovering over its sodden progeny. He beat it towards the baldheads of a couple of monks in front of him who had usurped his seat impudently. From his new and more uncomfortable seat, which often lost its cushion as he sat there, he looked out of the window and tried to beat back the inferno of hate for Kumpee that flared in the nerves throughout his body. He stared down at what appeared as the moving edge of the road from which businesses and pedestrians, from the corner of his left eye, ricocheted. He fingered a slit of the vinyl blue upholstery of his cushion in a vaginal preoccupation passed onto males through the inheritance of this cellular knowledge called sexual instinct. Low levels of guilt oozed from him more subtly than foaming breakers of beer in a mug and yet he didn’t feel that he had done anything wrong.

This moment was no different than other times of malaise in the past. He wasn’t specifically troubled about the fruition of his wanton fantasies to meet his uncle in the hope of using him for some money. Money should never rest. It should be spent or invested. If it were invested it would be used to make more wealth or for philanthropy that ameliorated thievery. He agreed in a vague way with Kumpee who vaguely inveighed something to the effect that a bit of money from a more affluent pocket into a poorer one helped the economy and was a just act. Likewise, he was not bothered by the release he had gained earlier in a bit of sex with his youngest sibling. This activity was to him just an extension of a back rub in a good massage compounded in a bit of sportive wrestling. It was a due owed to him for undergoing the stress of looking after the younger brothers and keeping the principle of family alive. He was acting his part of the big brother no different than he always had since Kumpee was continually negligent in performing the role. There were no specifics to this malaise he felt. The malaise was brought on by the wistful craving to go beyond the confines of his containment and yet reality, petty and limited, told him to use what was there under his feet, in his sight, and what he could touch. A man in the confines of his life used what was under him.

What being did not use the Earth?

He continued to finger the slit of the vinyl blue upholstery in a vaginal preoccupation. He wanted to feel beyond the hole of malaise that was as empty as the hollow whistling of a wind through a cracked door or that numb sensation of lying alone, the fantasy of his masturbation eluding him, and his semen flowing on his skin in a last vestige of a river. Using others was as unconscious as a reflex but the malaise came into the equation when he saw what he had to use. Why didn’t he have money to wine and dine a female in the mating protocol like any male black-tipped hang fly? Why did he have to cajole, beg, or charm an avuncular affection from this remote individual who wasn’t related to them by blood?

He began to stare at the driver and a boy who sat near the front window in a padded hump that went over the gearshift. It was just like seeing a self in miniature that had gotten lost and ensnared in the thickets of time: father driving the bus and this boy seated on a padded metal covering that went over the transmission. At times the boy touched the clutch hoping to one day guide the mammoth beast like his father (the boy believing that his father was the perfection of all things possible). A plastic red container of ice and water was on this pedestal where the boy sat and from it a straw stuck out of the lid and he drank and ate fish chips that were in a plastic sack. He just ate and drank as the bus circled around its route of the city. How drab it all was but for a boy and yet believing his father to be the perfection of all things, such self-restraint was possible. Their father had had such a job when Kumpee was a young boy. For a year or two of such journeys, sitting there with the highest admiration for a father, he was filled with the highest love that was initiating him into the positive dimensions of manhood and responsibility. When his father lost his job and worked on the street alongside of their mother, he launched his tirades against the younger brothers who were “suck-calves” on his wife. He hated their neediness and as the spankings continued, Kumpee began to oppose these gestures. Such self-abnegation caused him to become the full brunt of the beatings.

Having been given time alone, Jatupon scraped up his stolen collection of loose change and ran off hand in hand with his freedom. Having no responsibilities for the first time in his life apart from the night sports that usually happened in the mornings, his life was becoming a purposeless abyss. He personified his freedom and together they broke beyond small basement windows and imagined portals to real places. Together, they went to see the life that fulminated within the streets of the city of Bangkok. Kazem was gone so they did not have to be there to hear his expletives about the older brother’s thievery and the younger brother’s disappearances. The disappearances were ones Kazem attributed to Suthep chumming up with Kumpee to have a bit of money to play snookers. For hours and hours they were lost in the movements of traffic, the brown and Chinese faces, movements of strangers on the sidewalks, and the swirl of infinite numbers on the quest for money, happiness, and adventure. He read faces and movements from his spreading feelers. They too wanted money bestowed onto them to squander at will in all forms of self-indulgence. They too wanted to squelch their routines to live their dishonorable lives in the quest of sensuality. To have resources and freedom to run around loose as a goose in a department store was something they all yearned for and seeing these pedestrian shoppers of the sidewalk, with more money than he, made the boy hunger for better things.

Freedom was becoming old as he continued to walk with her into the crowds but she rejuvenated lasciviously when his eye spotted someone not in the shopper’s swirl. The cravings so attractive to Jatupon were missing in those deadened eyes and passing from him he fell into the others. Membership was free. It was lack of hope that was given so generously to the majority of the world’s populace that was indispensable to them. Lurid as family, fetid as Kumpee’s shoes, here they were and here he was with them; and yet they were his own or what he assumed was his own—the little that he knew of himself.