Corpus of a Siam Mosquito

by Steven David Justin Sills

He thought about Songkran Festivals. All of his grandparents were deceased early into his boyhood. In his family there was no tradition of each relative taking bowls of water and cleansing the hands of the older family members and this tradition of offering good luck for the New Year, respect, and deference had never really embedded itself into his mind as a moral duty. He had never been Thai. Circumstances had made him into a hominid. He wondered pityingly about the circumstances that had maimed and freed her. He stared at her face with great pain and pathos. Tears weltered in the corners of his eyes. He did not know what to do with this feeling so he buried it and made love to her.

She took him in her mouth. The quicker and deeper she went the more pleasurable it was. Little did he care if she choked on it. When he was ready to ejaculate he pressed her head so that he could penetrate more deeply. His body had its cellular knowledge that a quick thrusting and a deep penetration would be more pleasurably exciting and the excitement and especially the depth of the penis in the vaginal opening would cause the male to ejaculate more semen that had a greater chance of impregnating a female. Such was the primitive making. When his savage frenzy had ended he knew the extent of his own selfishness and was relieved to be exorcized of it. He felt a humane sensitivity descend on him. He knew that of all the selfish and negative energies that influenced his thoughts, they were, for the most part, not him. With the exception of times of sexual frenzy, he was able to find a deep and benign part of his nature and knew it to be the true Nawin, the artist who drew the oppressed and had sensitivity to the pains of others, the one who wanted to enrich Porn and all he knew intimately in truth and beauty.

Perpetually the same, those of leisure yearned each year for the halting of time and, in dissatisfaction gained from comparing themselves to others more youthful, yearned for a return to earlier times of higher pleasures. But it was the laboring classes who continued to labor in insentience without reflection. They cooked their rice and noodles ceaselessly. They clung to their jobs like tiny, sedentary, clinging salamanders to windows during a storm. They found their beings (their minds and the feelings that would be refined into thought within them) lost to the reflexes of the day. Months blew away like empty bags skidding on the pavements. Evanescent and mutable to their ultimate end, their lives passed by blandly in dizzying headaches caused by the sun of the weatherless country during the dry season. When the rainy season set in there was the discomfort of leaking and wind-swept canopies, the lack of customers, and being drenched by the rain; but these issues were minimized by the fact that varied weather made each of the days more memorable. The brothers, transplanted into Bangkok with a livelihood, continued on as if in Ayutthaya. Memory of the uncle’s unfulfilled promise of a dinner had worn away like the memory of their parents or the abandonment of Kumpee.

At first Suthep strutted around in his independence like a dominant rooster but as the months went by the independence underwent the metamorphosis to loneliness and by 1 a.m. of each early morning, an hour or two after Jatupon would leave him, Suthep would often feel the chill of adulthood. One late night/early morning as the smoke of charbroiled fish and the steam of rice, noodles, and pork soup rose up the sweat-profuseness of his face and into his hairnet, he watched a girl giggle and slurp up her noodles with her boyfriend. He imagined all traffic on the streets and sidewalk gone and that there was just the three of them. He imagined those customers leaving unhappily. Then, as they were beginning to walk together, there was a dispute that intensified to the point where he attacked her. He imagined him dragging her by the hair, slapping her down, and denuding her. Suthep imagined himself walking over toward them and watching their canine copulation for a period of minutes. Then an idea possessed him and he started up his motorcycle and circled the couple, eventually chasing off the body that had been forcing itself into her. He imagined himself helping the trembling body of the female dress. He didn’t want to cover her but he did it to comfort her so as to gain her confidence to obtain a new round of banging that would involve himself and would last longer than if he were to force another encounter on her now. Pleasures that had the potential of being perpetual were always the best. He imagined that he learned about her life with contrived sensitivity and with time secured himself as the being whom she yearned for.

Then the happy couple was again a reality and he was standing alone in front of his cart. There they were at the table slurping their noodles joyfully. Adulthood was the maturity to relinquish the rebellion against society for relegating one to his petty station in life bereft of the pleasures he sees around him. Being wise was realizing that most of such pleasures were neither good nor beneficial. Although Suthep was an adult, he was a bitter man and he bit his lip in the thought of all the pleasures that were out there waiting for so many others and not for him. He resented being such a lowly clod. After the couple paid for the meal and left he sat at their empty table and looked out across the cars that veered near a discoth�que until at last he fell asleep. For a moment or two of REM he dreamed of his youngest brother dangling by some friend from an open window of an appliance warehouse only to have his shoe slip off in the friend’s hand and the body unwillingly succumbing to gravity with his force tripping off the alarm. But unlike what really happened two years ago to Jatupon and a teenager once they extricated themselves and arrived in the big city on a bus, he, Suthep, was the friend and when the shoe slipped off he laughed and ran. He woke up, shook off his sleep, and then began washing his dishes in big plastic bowls. He felt a loneliness eat up on him. Each evening it seemed to be exacerbated.

The next evening he was struggling in ambivalence on continuing to work or closing early. Feeling forlorn and lonely, and yet needing to talk to Kazem about a decision he had made, he chose the latter. And when he arrived near Kazem’s cart with a hairnet still on his head Kazem’s countenance was at first chiding.

“You couldn’t have lost your shirt already,” he said.

Suthep took off his shirt, wadded it into a ball, and threw it at Kazem. Kazem wadded it up and threw it back. Soon the three, in hairnets, were Thai boxing and laughing with each other. The few customers they had were ignored. It was dereliction of responsibility. It was a hiatus. It was bantering. It was enjoyment of each other. It was a bit of love followed by the sharing of duties.

On that fine evening of gentility Jatupon was able to leave earlier than usual. While the other two brothers washed dishes, wheeled away the cart to a parking lot, chained it up to a fence, and took supplies they couldn’t lock up into and under the cart back to the apartment, Jatupon went to Sanam Luang. Once there, he walked on the long cobbled oval track; interweaved aimlessly around trees and pedestrians; and watched the wind animate a bag with absolute breath and power. The wild, breathing plastic, reminded him of being—the putative lightning that struck the ocean and caused the crystallization of elements.

Six adroit teenagers playing a game of takraw were in a crescent position like the broken face of the moon. They hit a bamboo ball back and forth with their feet and heads in a motion that depicted continuum. Perhaps they needed to believe in the continuum of action and being (the random balls of matter that they were). Inside the stadium-shaped park were homeless families lying on their thin sheets of rectangular bamboo mats and towels. Above the center of this football field of dust he saw a few prolonged kite flyers and their instruments swishing as mad serpents of the open night skies under gas lamps.