Corpus of a Siam Mosquito

by Steven David Justin Sills

“Thai” mumbled Nawin’s voice from the back seat.

“Domestic or international?” asked the taxi driver as if amnesia had wiped away a whole section of memory. Porn released an alien chortle that made Nawin think that he was sitting on the back seat with some type of mythological, hybrid animal he was in the process of taking on an overseas journey. How quickly she had gone from seductress to a callow calf and kid. He smiled at the man’s ignorance without laughing. He felt that his girlfriend was ugly and noticed how mutable the sight of anyone was: at one-time ugly and at another time beautiful, at one-time virtuous and another point wicked, and at one point victim and another time slut. It was not only the physical dimensions that could vary from moment to moment. The perception of a whole being could change. He moved himself to the window to get away from her hand and feigned a curiosity with the world outside. He rolled down the window. At that moment they both had a similar jejune feeling of the repetition of old things and new things not fully connecting. It was indescribable to them both. Porn kept asking herself if she was doing the right thing in forsaking her responsibilities with her clients for the unknown of traveling with him.

“You look like you are car sick,” said the driver. “My son always got that way even a kilometer down the road when he was a boy. Matter of fact that happens to him now—not quite as bad, though. I can’t think how he survived the flight to Chaing Mai. That I’ll never know.” Nawin, to show proper deference to an older man and to prove to himself that he wasn’t churlish, looked toward the mirror and front windshield and gave the whole frontal world a nod. The boy born of the name Jatupon was bleeding inside him. His brain waves wiggled around like noodles. He was no better than this man. They both had been born poor with limited opportunities. He couldn’t laugh at him for any reason.

“Are you going international or domestic,” asked the driver of the twenty-five year old. Again there was a chortle. “Why does that question seem to make her laugh,” asked the taxi driver. “That is very strange. That is a strange young lady.”

“Krap,” said Nawin gruffly, “I don’t know why she is laughing.” “We are going international. Eva Airlines. Eva Airlines, an international flight to Japan,” reiterated Nawin. He kept it simple. He didn’t even want to think about Montreal. The thought of accompanying an animal, of sorts, to the other side of the world was too much. No sooner had he said it than she reminded them both of the fact that she would be going to her home first. Nawin had fallen into his own pensive inclinations but unlike them he wanted the completion of his thoughts. He was scanning his mutating neurological circuitry for a possible answer to the enigma whom he called his wife. Noppawan’s flippant comment that the stoplight wouldn’t get any greener as she smiled and shut the door on him and his whore troubled or inveigled him. One’s driveway wasn’t exactly equipped with a stoplight so that one sentence bordered on sarcasm. Her placid demeanor was like plastic and how she behaved belied everything so how was he to know if she was discontent with this arrangement if not jealous of it.

It was the first time that he would be leaving her to travel abroad. He had offered to delay the trip by a week or two until she had submitted her grades at Assumption University, which Thais called A-back. Maybe having his Porn stay over at their house the previous night was disrespectful to his wife but nice or offensive behavior was based upon one’s guesswork on how society would interpret such situations and unique situations like this were all the more impossible to judge. His wife was definitely different. That was for sure; but she was still a woman down deep even if she denied it just as his American passport and name-change made him abstain from bits of himself. A woman had instincts at suspecting a man’s activities. A woman had jealous rages and seductive lures that had a chance of keeping a man with her: genetic programming from hundreds or thousands of female ancestors who had experienced the promiscuity of husbands and were afraid that they and their children would not be properly taken care of. But there was certainly no chance of children. She slept with him a few times as husband and wife in a motion of fulfilled and completed consummation never to be repeated. Then she went in to get herself sterilized. Why she needed to do both was unclear. She was a mystery and steadfast in committing herself to that vow they had made to each other when they were 14 or 15 years old to not live petty lives. Such was the gray in the gray matter that enveloped them. Life with Noppawan had the insatiability of an itch to a mosquito’s bite and contained the same pleasurable discomfort.

“Taking a trip to Japan” thought the taxi driver sarcastically. He wasn’t certain how anyone could afford to go there. He was stuck to the boundaries of the car and he resented it; although from it, despite its limitations, he was always introduced to people so different than he was. They were the favored ones whose ideas were not curtailed to traffic jams exacerbated by infuriatingly influential traffic lights and accidents. Traffic accidents were such chaos because smashed cars could not be moved until insurance agents came to the scene to make their reports. Traffic policemen, who could easily be bribed, were never to be trusted. The favored people did not have everyday to roam the streets like homeless but highly mobile mendicants, their every movement enslaved and dictated by the pronouncement of street names called out from the back seat. “Do young people like you have money to go off wherever you wish?” The words pierced out of one who was pierced. The ache tore open like a tenuous newly heeled scar with the blade coming up to slit others. He knew that he had behaved contrary to social instinct but he hadn’t been able to stop himself.

“Don’t you know who this is?” asked the whore with arrogant vehemence.

The taxi driver looked in the rear view mirror at the brown-faced Nawin or Jatupon and asked, “No, should I know you?”

“No you shouldn’t. Neither one of us should know the other one. Just drive!” said Nawin although again he winced from his darker alter ego that only became him when he uttered its thoughts. He wasn’t totally devoid of societal programming of right and wrong no matter what he claimed to Noppawan. Being respectful to one’s elders and giving the prayerful gesture of the “wei” (pronounced as “why”) to one’s superiors did exist in him at certain times. He would always stand up for the tribute paid to the king prior to a movie although that was more from the idea of not offending the sensibilities of others around him or, less altruistically, getting himself possibly thrown out of the movie theatre. Furthermore, the Jatupon who had brought cups of ice to customers when he was a boy, the uneducated slave who had found himself spun up in noodles of sidewalk restaurants until he was 15, often began to stretch like a 26 year old fetus locked up in a heavily fortified placenta. He would feel how disparaged Jatupon often felt. He would feel guilt when he disparaged others that seeped into his veins while ghosts of yesteryear suddenly vexed him making him feel numb and cold inside.