Sometimes he hated all of them—they who had made a funny vulgarity of his name; Kazem, the creator of the nickname, who solved his stress by physically accosting him; Kumpee who always flayed and flouted him at every chance; and Suthep who treated him with the blades of indifference (the worst of all weapons). He vehemently hated them sometimes and yet—
He imagined the mosquito speaking to him. “And yet you’ll gain the antibodies of hard, fortified indifference from the illness of hate. It isn’t so bad. It is a practical emotion that has been demonized as of late by Buddhist and Christian practitioners although thoroughly embraced by the Jewish, Moslem, and Hindu world. I’d think it over carefully before exorcizing myself of it. It is just one more darkly pragmatic aspect of life as needed imperatively as microorganisms are needed to lunch on the deceased.”
“I don’t want dark things. I don’t want to hate them. Tell me what to do so that I won’t hate them.”
“Hmm...You are such an idealist. Well, Suthep couldn’t care less about you except when he cares to sting you with not caring but he is the one who taught you to play football and takraw, and although Kazem violates you repugnantly in painful tactile thrashings much worse than Kumpee’s socks and sneakers ever did to your olfactory nerves he is the one who saved you from drowning and being beaten to a pulp by your father. Also he probably does genuinely care about family despite his bombastic proclamations of now being the eldest brother. He is the one who stifled the sadistic belittling of you that would have pulverized your self-esteem to dust had the father and eldest son been left to inveigh against you incessantly. When you are financially free and independent you can kill off all three of them from the present and remember the children they were. Then, you won’t hate them any longer. Maybe then you will even feel love but you will have to kill them off first.”
If only good things beget good things and bad things beget bad things then, thought Jatupon, there would be divine order. Then, the invisible presence of God or the forces that be would not matter. Dead or bored as God might be, still the laws of the land would have been laid out like that of a deceased founder of a company. The principles of Buddhism would be in place and operative. But such was not the case. Kazem was not a devil and he, Jatupon, was not a saint. He loved having Kazem’s tongue enter his anus prior to his entrance. This “priming up” was a pleasure that he was addicted to have. Wasn’t his resentment of his brother this evening more from the fact that such pleasure had not been given to him throughout the day? Wouldn’t it have been lovely if he had been made into a sexual slave 24 hours a day, totally free from logic? Somehow, he felt that the mosquito would agree on this point.
The politician, judging aptly that a deposit of 20,000 baht would be like asking a pack of dogs to put the chicken in the refrigerator, had one of his aides escort the boys to Chatochok Market which had almost everything for their business (woks, burners, gas canisters, ice coolers, utensils, glass vegetable shelves, carts, oil, noodles, cabbages, bean sprouts, tomatoes, meat, cucumbers, and rice). It was one of the world’s largest outdoor markets and Thais always gloated that everything in the world could be obtained there. The purchases were made in double since the senator believed that they needed more than one joint livelihood and a hungry pack with meager resources forced into the same struggle for sustenance would foster acrimony. He hadn’t exactly thought that they would be jumping onto the same prey viciously. He didn’t really have many thoughts about it. He hadn’t given this issue, or them, much thought apart from how to best unite and part benevolently within the space of a week if not sooner. This was just his assessment of males in general. He saw males in action on a daily basis in their debates on various bills. These were rich men and yet their lust for sinking their teeth into prey was great.
He did care up to a point. He felt that he had aggrieved them by not attending their parents’ funeral. He hadn’t wanted the discomfort that his ex-wife would feel standing beside him again. Being human, he hadn’t wanted it for himself. It would have made him feel uncomfortable and more out of place being there. It hadn’t occurred to him, then, that she wouldn’t attend. Furthermore, from what little he believed in Kazem’s answers to his questions, he felt that he should have protected these three from having their parents’ assets sucked up into some unrevealed bank account. They had been clinging onto the idea that ultimately Kumpee would act the part of the oldest brother. They had watched him go away without accountability and did this with hardly a whimper. The senator could have taken it upon himself to hire an auctioneer and then could have put the money into his own account. He would have given out the money when wisely warranted. He hadn’t acted responsibly and he regretted it.
Jatupon stood by, inert and despondent, as these purchases so abstract and foreign to his hopes were loaded off onto a mover’s truck. Despite his wish to survive being fulfilled, it was the aristocratic life he yearned for. Only leisure was life. A laborer was just movement and reflexes. A laborer did not run barefoot through the weeds and allow the smells to be one with him, transfer the beauty to a complex style on canvas when the beauty passed through his complicated mind, or attempt to understand why the pollen attacked him like a sickness. He wanted someone to grant him the honors of placing him in an orange robe, which he felt he was entitled to have—that special robe not of monks but of the type that surely belonged to aristocrats. He wanted leisure to see the rhapsody of every small movement under the lambency of both sun and moon. He wanted to meditate on coruscating city life as the Buddha of Bangkok. He wanted to be free of the noodles that were winding about him tightly and to grasp the leisure that should be his and no doubt was his in an earlier life. Poverty ravaged the mind in desperate acts—the mind ached in one continual groan for something within or without that might be sold. No appreciation of the present moment could be had in such a state. He wanted to know the splendor of the veins of each distinct leaf towering over him. Still it had been determined by the powers that be that he would float between the businesses of the two brothers who would have their separate livelihoods in different parts of the city.
Still, there was something to be gained in being so lost from memory and he was inured to being forgotten. The baby of the family that he was, he had been pulled out of a cranky woman tired of having children and responsibilities. Nursed and taken care of like any child, still as the years passed he often felt guilty for being his mother’s burden and his attempt at being his mother’s little helper did not engender her appreciation. Forgotten again this time, he would nonetheless be the instrument that fused the two carts into a family business and he could get along with both all right, he supposed. He didn’t think that his brothers were so different than himself: like him, they would work hard and feel themselves, at times, strangled in noodles. Suthep would be seeking an alternative being in video games, snookers, Thai boxing matches, and movement; and Kazem would seek his being through sickening carnal releases on his brother the result of an imagination that could make Jatupon into one rapturous whore or another, and a propensity to always take things apart, beat on them, and put them back together. For Jatupon, his escape came in his ride of feeling in love (tame as it was for new love), comic heroes that pulled him into more noble pursuits, and dreams of an aristocratic life.
There was a garbled mass of half-remembered faces that gnarled Nawin’s thoughts when he woke up one morning. No different than noodle workers toward customers buoying in their brains at the end of the night, he had to let these myriad faces-most of whom he had encountered in high school and at the universities he had attended -to gradually subside into forgetfulness. He sat up in bed and rubbed his forehead. His mind felt like one whose shoes were trapped in the coils of fallen barbed wire. He looked at Porn, this woman with whom he had mentally signed a contract to serve her needs and she his. Her hair billowed against her pillow like feathers. He thought to himself that she, being a prostitute, and he actually establishing a relationship with one, were so different from all other human beings. Maybe they were surviving hominids. They were definitely a divergent species of animal.