Corpus of a Siam Mosquito

by Steven David Justin Sills

“Drink, money man,” reiterated Suthep.

He glared at Suthep. “Hey, I’m not paying for me alone. I’ll do it for the pure pleasure of seeing you stand there all night looking into your cup.” Kazem paid for three cups. Jatupon stood there stiff and frightened. Starting from the oldest to the youngest they drank down their beverages. The liquid molecules of hell were a hundred times that of the airborne ones from Kumpee’s socks and shoes. All of them choked and coughed. All of them swallowed some of the blood heathenishly but spit out most. It was followed by a sip of watery and caffeinated whiskey that had been diluted and adulterated in cola. Normally such open liquor drinking would have gotten everyone arrested especially when it involved selling to minors but since some of the proceeds were going into the public fund on this day it was overlooked. While the brothers were given a second shot of whiskey again diluted in cola, new customers came to the woman anxiously. She led them to her table and sat there with the squalling, squalid child. The baby was restless on the apron that she wore. Conscious of how a repetition of her spiel could spell out insincerity and a customer’s aversion, she attempted to wait silently as they debated doing this. She muted the child with a firm hand pressed against its mouth. Before she could make the sell she reflexively responded to the smallest degree of wetness on the apron and let her child urinate away from the sidewalk and her virility stand. The ground did not eagerly swallow the fetid and sweet liquid and his recidivist urine came back to the sidewalk with the insistence of a foul stream. Past shoe salesmen on a sheet, shoe repairmen, comb and battery salesmen, noodle workers, and lottery representatives—unlicensed businesses that abounded everywhere- they entered the gates of the fair. At kiosks, the three of them threw darts, shot basketballs in moving hoops, and bounced balls against walls to knock over bottles for prizes. They continued doing this until the infancy of night murdered the sun allowing it to slowly die, languishingly sliding off golden rooftops of temples. When darkness unfolded around them, they paid to see a woman put her face in a plastic box of scorpions, elephant trainers whose elephants walked over them to enter into the crowds where they picked up humans with their trunks, and oarsmen in the facsimiles of royal barges competing against each other. The boats had the same body and countenance of dragons just like the television shows they had seen of the kings’ ancient boats that were housed in the Royal Barge Museum.

The night and its dark appetites were mature in full insurrection. They had eaten their share of rice and chicken topped with cotton candy, and yet not cowering, their stomachs craved for beer so they headed to a nearby bar. Before them a child was walking slowly on the steps that rose up to the bridge that went over a canal. He slammed his fire-snappers against the cement watching the air burst before his feet. They passed him to quickly fulfill the surfeit of beer that was part of their general yearnings. They yearned for so much—these three young men. They yearned for relaxation with beer; they yearned for friends and places away from this fraternal group that they had been conceived into and forced to work with; and, except for Jatupon, they each yearned for a love to come their way so that they would not be lost in themselves. Jatupon yearned most to be naively complete like that boy they had passed. Jatupon had once been like him: fascinated by his own thoughts and sensations and self-contained. In late boyhood a boy mastered independence that in infancy and early boyhood he struggled to achieve. It was all thwarted, however, by the upsurge of sexual feelings which made a young man want to bond cohesively and addictively to others. The progress of late boyhood was razed in a brief year or two.

Strangely, the world was a dreamy place and from the modest display of fireworks being shot over the canal there was a dreamy idea of connectedness and fraternity in the psyches of these young men although such ideals varied from moment to moment based upon their interpretations of the environment. Lagging behind in serpentine movements of dreaminess but eager for connectedness, Jatupon hurriedly caught up to his brothers only to lag behind them again. It was time for Heineken, Singh, or Bush (not those two presidents). It was a time to celebrate and dunk the self in artificial dreaminess like one bobbing for apples. Jatupon looked up at the sky when he and his brothers reached the other side of the bridge. Then he looked down at his chest. A sweat bee hovered over the glands in his opened shirt like an oil worker ciphering the ground. He shoved the industrial exploiter away. He felt awe in how complex it all was: one thing feeding on another. He wondered if, after the immune system conquered a virus, it consumed it. He wondered how much of his parents’ bodies would have been consumed by bacteria in decomposition if they had not been cremated. He wondered if things were so clearly defined. Maybe a part of his parents was alive in ways that could be sensed but never understood or explained.

It was no wonder, as they sat there drinking beer in a pub on the other side of the canal (remarkably able to afford drinking beer at all) that Kazem was happy: after all, the uncle’s gate had opened up to him when he talked into a speaker. It was also not so strange that his mood of elation had for a short while, when viewing the scorpion lady, gone awry. Seeing the son of the Ayutthaya landlord who had rented his family that small space for their restaurant was depressing. There he was in his fine clothes with his wife and two small children. Kazem had thought to himself that as a rich man poverty had not ruined his inclinations-this man, not much older than himself, copulated in the right hole.

Suthep, sandwiched between his two brothers, drank voraciously without any strong inclination to run away. He preferred being elsewhere but elsewhere without money was nowhere. He preferred playing snookers and trying to woo a young girl to be somewhat interested in him while playing against his buddies. Here, however, he had no friends. The city was entirely new and he didn’t know anyone. Once, in Ayutthaya, he had gone with a herd of those wolves to capture a park whore. He and his buddies took her to a cheap guesthouse where foreigners often went and had their spasms within her. It had been his first time. He would prefer to be with his friends but this wasn’t so bad. Drinking with his brothers was like playing football with them once again or fishing with them at the edge of the river.

Somewhere into things the beer changed to whiskey and it was from that bottle of whiskey that the mosquito and his female counterpart climbed out and shook off their wetness. When this canine shaking of the wetness was not enough, they used the paper towels as bath towels. They were less grotesquely large at this point but returning to their monstrous shapes by the moment.

—What was the dinner like that Kazem attended?

—It was not a dinner, but the sip of the man’s coffee in the den. It consequently led to the proposal of a dinner.

—And did he accept the proposal?