Corpus of a Siam Mosquito

by Steven David Justin Sills

He and Porn had an American style apartment. She was content with it for a few days and then became discontent with the furniture. The chairs and the sofas, despite their padding, were still wicker and stiff. He knew that having the landlord take away the furnishings and using his credit cards fully for the purchase of her wishes would not ameliorate the discontent that all beings had and few could rein in.

He had met her and her mommy on the bleachers of the stadium on Ramkhamhaeng Road while sketching out a field and trees and yet still Nawin felt that she did not know who he was. He went to classes in the morning and from late afternoon he was busy painting. He couldn’t understand how she thought that he should just conjure up images instantaneously with his brush, spend money, and take her places.

He kept avoiding the issue of taking her across the border. She had a student visa since she was technically enrolled in a language school (although she rarely attended) so it wasn’t in fear of her visa status that made him want to avoid the issue of the border. He had his American passport and yet he still had never spent a day there. He told himself that he should. And yet it continued to seem to him like such a dreadful place.

He told himself that it had been a mistake to bring her here. He hadn’t known how far the campus was from the city. In part he chose the location with Noppawan and Porn in mind. Still, it was a mistake and he knew it all along. In Thailand she had seemed so excitable. She was a gadabout and she always made friends out of strangers from adjacent tables in restaurants they frequented. She had seemed so open to the world. Now she seemed like such a Victorian whore, jumping around in motion but prudishly obdurate to change within. She was conventional-this Victorian whore of his. Like virtually everyone else, she was part of the big band and the universe of movement fully cognizant that the most popular and sexy people were the ones who could twist and turn with universal movement.

He was the oddity. This Nawin, the romancer of whores, was all for show. Deep inside was not impetuousness but paralysis. This artistic brooding was not part of the natural course of events and who was he to chastise her normalcy. He just smiled and evaded her wishes.

Chapter 8

A little disparate to the poem, Thao Nok Kaba Phuak, he dreamt he was a black version of a nightjar cradled by the Laotian queen whose pigment was as light as a northern Chinese woman. He suckled at her nipple with the violence of his beak as she scavenged for dew to appease the parched walls of her throat and berries that would provide her with fortitude against failing strength. Her breast bled from his appetites. She grappled with waning confidence that she would find a way out of the labyrinth of trees that overtook her. She wanted to kill this disgusting child that by its birth had usurped her of status and had prompted her exile from the kingdom. This feeling embroiled her psyche but feelings did not thwart her motherly instincts for the strange creature that she named Jatuporn.

Then, immediately in front of the park bench there was a woman before him who carried two heavy buckets of ice and drinks. Startled to an awakened state by the woman asking if he wanted anything to drink, at first he gave a negative answer, “Mashai” but then he changed it into a formal feminine ending, “Ka” which could mean “yes.” How absurd he must have seemed to this woman speaking like herself instead of using the masculine word, “krub” or the neuter yes-word, “chai,” but at the time, he had thought of himself as a bird when he spoke and so there had not been any gender confusion whatsoever. He paid the woman for a bottle of water. Then a man with his stinking body holding a bag with little bags inside came to his bench. Jatupon bought two of his bags and began strewing the ground a few feet from the bench with the dust of crackers, breadcrumbs, and corn.

He did this slowly while trying to solve his indecisiveness on whether to stay or go home. The thought of suicide seemed to him even more repellent than the two major options but it was a tiebreaker he wasn’t going to reject absolutely. He had a pocketknife. He thought to himself that when night came upon him he could find an obscure area of a tree’s shadow in complete darkness away from the gas lamps and slit his throat. He looked down. Pigeons were beginning to come to him and eat what he had allotted to them. He liked giving to ostensibly small and insignificant creatures. When the bags were empty he saved himself by his impetuousness and returned on bus #203. He dangled from the steps because of the lack of space provided to him. Standing there on the precipice of the step he looked in the bus at the crowded Siamese passengers. At moments this mosaic fusing of contortionist-bodies seemed as a mass of amorphous human flesh, a multi-head, body, and limb monster, which choked air and breath from the bus and, worse, had the outline of Kazem. Bus #203 zoomed along the river and then over the bridge of the Chao Phraya River. The cool breezes slapped hard against his flesh. He felt like the 15-year-old nightjar that took its first flight from home, strutting its bird-body independently and finding itself watched attentively by the princess, the older queen’s daughter—only in his case he was homeward bound and no one was watching him. Matter of fact, he thought, if he were to slit his throat his body might after some hours just be kicked off into a corner of refuse somewhere to rot.

When he arrived in the basement cell no one was there. He sat down in front of a strange box. His kneecaps never splayed in the normal outward direction of crossed legs. Moreover, attempted prayer and television trances in imitation of the usual posture had always brought to him extreme pain making many people over the years perceive him as someone who was both anti-religious and, worse, counter pop-cultural. Kazem and Suthep had vehemently criticized the shoddy construction of his kneecaps. Kazem had always been pleasantly indifferent to this subject. As always, all he could master before the box of chocolate was an irregular sitting posture that looked like the letter M or W depending on the perspective; and most likely, and most comfortably for him, the letter N as in Nawin. It was indeed a strange sight: the letter “N” in front of a small box of Russell Stover chocolate candies with the parent company of Kansas City, Missouri, USA on the label. Inside, more than half of the chocolates still remained. He helped himself, almost feeling like an American spreading out relaxingly over the world with Thailand and other countries as his footstool, carefree and gormandizing chocolate down his gullet. He almost felt that nothing bad could ever happen to him again. And then he remembered being six years old standing with another dirty boy in front of the Dunkin Doughnut shop near a mall in Ayutthaya looking through the glass window that was a partition between them and the customers who were inside. Even more, it was a partition between feeling hungry and dirty to the immaculate ones consuming their doughnuts within. He made funny faces and danced in front of the window where a young man and woman sat at a counter looking onto the commotion and air pollution of Bangkok. He pretended to kiss the woman through the glass. She laughed and he kissed her more. Then as the man was putting his doughnut into his mouth, Jatupon opened his own mouth widely as if, through the glass, to rip it out of the man’s teeth with his partially rotten fangs. The couple laughed and the man motioned them inside. They ran in and were given doughnuts. Like then, sweets had an antithesis of meanings for him. They made him feel as one of the elite, carefree and happy and yet at the same time reminded him of the disparity to which he was one of the largest masses—that being the underclass.