Corpus of a Siam Mosquito

by Steven David Justin Sills

It was a family of addicts, addicted to family or even a concoction of family, cobbled together within the affinity of pain and the tangles of neurons like brambles pricking their consciousness with old travail at every turn: memories that they couldn’t free themselves from. Within this desert of cacti and brambles they poured destructive chemicals and suicidal inclinations to kill and enlarge their brambly world. They were landscape artists of their personal deserts: hating, destroying, and replanting their cacti and brambles with each new whim. Here he was with a new family—a mosaic of complete strangers who were not related to him nor were they relating to him or much to each other. Still, it was a surrogate family nonetheless succumbing to an infinite current of darkness to which they all had understanding. In many ways they were wiser: they knew that the insatiability of desire that made one propelled to breed, work, and buy was not going to stop. They knew that no one in such circles was going to find contentment. They were all going to fail miserably. They knew that there was a deep discontent in the human psyche that yearned for destruction and death. In the course of being degraded by significant others they had somehow gotten excluded from the participation of such narcissistic, consumeristic appetites and that the salvation of compassion would not be forthcoming. This benign pastel family sat together on the slab of cement under the overpass while over them, on the overpass itself, were the trinkets sold by salesmen, homeless elderly women, mothers, those who stunk from being unable to bathe off their rotting surface of scaling skin, and deformed slabs of flesh spread out on parts of the overpass with fidgeting partial limbs. They all had nearly empty cups of one baht coins and the most unfortunate of them could testify of dark currents deeper than regular people could imagine for one moment. They, his surrogate family, knew that there was not just one blackness but despair had myriad blacker and bleaker hues.

Under the steps of the overpass sniffing his glue while these transients already riddled in amphetamines and alcohol (at times borrowing his glue) smoked cigarettes incessantly, his mind swept away from him like a butterfly fluttering by. When he first met them in this spot their first words were to offer to him cigarettes but he told them that if he were to put one in his mouth it would remind him of the fetid one with his fetid shoes and socks littered everywhere, the one who had stolen his parents property upon their deaths and had abandoned them to starvation in the great city of Bangkok. These transients had the understanding and listening skills of trained psychologists and offered unto him a piece of bubble gum instead which he gratefully accepted.

Still, a thought preoccupied him off and on. He wondered why they were all seated there in such a confined space; but within a few hours the storm clouds moved overhead and the rain deluged the streets making him forget about one man complaining of his jock itch and scratching himself, another that cried and looked up into the clouds, and a third that kept wanting to barter off his torn sandals for Jatupon’s sneakers and kept calling him “uncle” even though he was ten or fifteen years the older brother. Across the road he occasionally saw umbrellas sail out to the gray of the clouds. One of the other five transients was repulsed by a spider that crept onto him in its effort to escape the rain, cursed at a rock in his shoe that would not leave the obscure crevice of the sole, and then in one of his shifting moods made a declaration of happiness that they had found such an inconspicuous spot where the police rarely harassed them. The woman transient gave herself to her man so completely that when he was angry, happy, or sad, she was more this way—so little did she understand her own mind, having become nothing but an extension of his pleasure and pain.

Sometimes silent and tacit, these transients who were continually judged by others, judged the sincerity of his callow rebellion with their stares. A few times they went beyond that to a more pronounced judgment. “Don’t you have a mamma to go to? Your mamma’s calling for you to come to lunch,” said the one with the woman. That time the shoe barterer laughed so hard it churned up mucus into his mouth, which he spit into a crack in the sidewalk that already had its share of gum and cigarette buds. “Mamma’s calling,” said the woman. “Lunch is ready, honey. Mamma’s calling,” she repeated or at least he thought she repeated. Maybe none of them had said anything. He wasn’t quite sure.

Jatupon turned away from them and slipped off his tennis shoes, smelling their soles to make sure that they weren’t overly fetid. He looked at one of his bare feet composed of roadways of veins and early wrinkles of epidermis. He thought to himself that an unrecognized universe had existed right there in his shoes. He sniffed his armpits. They were fetid as glue but he liked the transmission of the sweat molecules up his nostrils.

He deeply inhaled the glue and then held his breath allowing the fumes to permeate within. He repeated the process four or five times and for the most part he, they, and all went away in a haze. It was like being blindfolded but instead of darkness there was a soft patch of white haze. At first it startled him and he wondered if this ethereal gaseous mist was Saddam Hussein’s lethal spray upon the world and yet he felt giddy in this laughing gas. When his mind was able to register the fact that they were seated next to him, the haze made the man and his woman, the shoe barterer, the sky crier, and all (transient and non-transient, imagined and remembered) such special creatures. These transients were sordid and brainless but, especially in the intense inundation of fumes they were the most extraordinary of life forms. He was almost moved to kiss each of them on their foreheads. From this pillar of light the mosquito, dressed in Buddhist attire and carrying its mask, came with the force of God. Its feelers were like acid and when they touched Jatupon his clothes seemed to sizzle and burn away. He was naked with a smashed ant sandwiched between a fingernail and skin. He remembered that a minute earlier he had been trying to direct it away from his leg and in his clumsy misdirection at the appearance of the pillar of light there it was under the nail curled up in fetal agony.

As the mosquito slowly descended he could see tragedy more clearly than he ever did when not snorting the fumes, and yet it rolled off his mind weightlessly. He was giddy in brotherly love and yet naked, he wanted to copulate with the world. Even more, he wanted to reproduce his ideas with her. He sensed that all humans fell victim to this substance: they got giddy in love and reproduced, they gained meaning in their lives from this feeling, and then after nature got them to beget children, she plugged up the dopamine somewhat like the waning high he felt with his brother. He felt the insect monster inject him with the malaria of tragedy: random images were kicked about in his mind like starving dogs allowed to propagate on the streets incessantly from the non-interference of Buddhist principles. He saw all the suffering species from an aerial perspective for he was being carried around on the wings of the mordant mosquito that had scooped him up on its back. Buddha knew that tragedy abounded in recycled life but Jatupon could not figure out if Buddha tried to break the recycling of life like a coward who couldn’t endure pain or if he left his protective palace to understand the magnitude of human suffering for the masses. The story was full of contradictions. He thought, “Where are you taking me...straight...now spinning...now plunging...more G-force than I think I can stand.”

“Into yourself,” it shouted.

“That’s a cruel place to be,” Jatupon said.

“Yes, it is,” admitted the mordant entity. From their distance distinct forms were difficult to ascertain but he knew that he was far outside himself and to be outside of it into a world of motion and forms made him feel relieved. But from a couple of indecipherable forms in movement he halfway made out and half way imagined a half-naked baby crying on the outskirts of a park. It crawled alone at a distance from a cook. The cook halted her work to get him. He cried loudly at each initiative at trying to appease him. He didn’t like being held. He didn’t like the banana put in his hands. Finally, she placed him in the bucket of water that contained her dirty plates.